#guattari

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

Guattari is fascinated by the non-human aspect of subjectivity. Singularity is not individuality, although it is about being singular. It operates at a pre-personal, pre-individual level. In The Three Ecologies he compares our interior life or ‘interiority’ to a crossroads where several components of subjectification meet to make up who we think we are. The resingularization of subjectiviry, the liberation of singularities that are repressed by a dominant and dominating mass-media subjectivity, has nothing to do with individuals.

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