MACHINE AND REALITY: CYBERNETICS, AUTOPOIESIS AND PRODUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITY IN FÉLIX GUATTARI

Abstract

This article aims to address the concept of machine and its consequent appropriation in the discussions on subjectivity. It is a theoretical study at the interface among Psychology, Philosophy, Physics and Biology. In this sense, it starts showing that in the modernity, the analogy to the machine was extended to the understanding of the universe as a precise and geometrically predictable functioning clock. And if, until the eighteenth century, life, body and  cosmos were signified by  the emerging science as a mechanical machine (of calculable motion in  its predictability),  in the nineteenth century they also came  to be understood as a thermal machine, with its developments in the thermodynamics physics  and cybernetics. In the late twentieth century, the concept of autopoietic machine gained relevance in the studies of  life and cognition, based on the works of the biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana,  which is  appropriated by Félix Guattari  for  the development of his concept of the production of subjectivity and its problematizations around the subjectivation  processes. Thus, the concept of machine has gone beyond the limitations of a mechanical and thermodynamics reading of reality, to an existential, procedural and inventive approach of the subjectivity.