#felix guattari

If the sciences and technology are to be directed towards more human ends, we evidently require collective forms of administration and control, rather than a blind faith in the technocrats of the State apparatuses; we cannot expect drem to control progress and to avert risks in these domains, which are governed primarily by the principles of a profit economy. Of course, it would be absurd to want to return to the past in order to reconstruct former ways of living. After the data-processing and robotics revolutions, the rapid development of genetic engineering and the globalization of markets, neither human labour nor the natural habitat will ever be what they once were, even just a few decades ago. As Paul Virilio has suggested, the increased speed of transportation and communications and the interdependence of urban centres are equally irreversible. While on the one hand we must make do with this situation, on the other we must acknowledge that it requires a reconstruction of the objectives and the methods of the whole of the social movement under today’s conditions. To symbolize this problematic I need only refer to an experiment once conducted on television by Alain Bombard. He produced two glass tanks, one filled with polluted water - of the sort that one might draw from the port of Marseille - containing a healthy, thriving, almost dancing octopus. The other tank contained pure, unpolluted seawater. Bombard caught the octopus and immersed it in the ‘normal’ water; after a few seconds the animal curled up, sank to the bottorn and died.

Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-systems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think 'transversally’. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by 'degenerate’ images and statements [énoncés]. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he 'redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology. Further proliferation is evident in the savage deterritorialization of the Third World, which simultaneously affects the cultural texture of its populations, its habitat, its immune systems, climate, etc. Child labour is another disaster of social ecology; it has actually become more prevalent now than it was in the nineteenth century! How do we regain control of such an auto-destructive and potentially catasffophic situation? lnternational organizations have only the most tenuous control of these phenomena which call for a fundamental change in attitudes. International solidarity, once the primary concern of trade unions and leftist parties, is now the sole responsibility of humanitarian organizations. Although Marx’s own writings still have great value, Marxist discourse has lost its value. It is up to the protagonists of social liberation to remodel the theoretical references so as to illuminate a possible escape route out of contemporary history, which is more nightmarish than ever. It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity. A stifling cloak of silence has been thrown over the emancipatory struggles of women, and of the new proletariat: the unemployed, the 'marginalized’, immigrants.

-Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, pg 42-44

The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating. Kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum; domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass-media consumption; family and married life are frequently ‘ossified’ by a sort of standardization of behaviour; and neighbourhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression… It is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority - be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic - that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantalization. Otherness [l'altérité] tends to lose all its asperity. Tourism, for example, usually amounts to no more than a journey on the spot, with the same redundancies of images and behaviour.

Political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues. Despite having recently initiated a partial realization of the most obvious dangers that tlreaten the natural environment of our societies, they are generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethico-political articulation - which I call ecosophy - between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions.

-Felix Guattari,The Three Ecologies

People are not yet as pacified and domesticated as IWC would like them to be. As early as 1977, Guattari observed that ‘ever-widening social groups are not content to go on as they always have. An increasing number of people are beginning to reject certain forms of consumerism. To exhortations to acquire more cars, more private houses, more household machines, more ready-made entertainment and, in order to do so, to work harder, join the rat race, wear oneself out before one’s time, they reply, “What’s the point? Who does it help?”’ (1984: 251). These people obviously share a similar sense of alienation from the capitalist consensus, but how can they act collectively to alter their circumstances? 'Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantalizing consensus,’ he proposes in The Three Ecologies, 'it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus.’

Guattari’s finely nuanced, radically dissensual approach to social ecology requires the collective production of unpredictable and untamed 'dissident subjectivities’ rather than a mass movement of like-minded people.

'Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity; construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulations of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respect of their own times - time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences.’ (Guattari and Negri, 1990: 120)

(…)Dissensus is principally a call for the revival of individual competence as a social force, for the development of new, 'egalitarian, decentralized, participatory democracies, orientated towards an environmentally sustainable way of living’ (Carter, 1999: 300).

There is of course a tension at work here between solidarity and dissensus. It requires that a plurality of disparate groups come together in a kind of unified disunity, a pragmatic solidarity without solidity; what one might call, for want of a better word, 'fluidarity’. The common enemy - IWC - has become so ubiquitous, and its deleterious effect on the planet so apparent, that no strata of society is immune from its effects. This is what makes ecology - or ecosophy - such a potentially radical force in the world. We are all of us prey to environmental degradation, we are all stranded on Spaceship Earth.

-Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, from the translators’ introduction to The Three Ecologies by Felix Guattari

One of the most insistent refrains in The Three Ecologies is that we must abandon scientific (or pseudo-scientific) paradigms and return to aesthetic ones. We need to continually reinvent our Iives like an artist. ‘Life,’ as Guattari has said elsewhere, 'is like a performance, one must construct it, work at it, singularize it’ (1989c: 20). It is an ongoing aesthetico-existential process. 'As we … weave and unweave our bodies … from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image’ (Joyce, 1986: 159).

Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, from the translators’ introduction to The Three Ecologies by Felix Guattari