Making Difference, Part I

I recently read and reread Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (Continuum 2008, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton). I chose this book specifically to assist me in developing a radically engaged and embedded art practice. Before I can begin to outline such a practice (Part II), I would like to give the following book overview to bring curious people up to speed and to allow me to organize concepts and ideas.

Guattari begins the essay by illustrating a broad range of problems occurring on a global scale, implicating all countries, nations, peoples. These problems include but are not limited to the warming of the climate, the oppression of women, children, and minorities, the deterioration of social life and general human relations, overpopulation and food shortages, the complacency of disempowered people and classes, fundamentalist religious sects, labor struggles, all in the context of exponential techno-scientific and economic growth.

A very bleak outlook indeed! While all the problems above are seemingly unrelated, Guattari presents them as the emergent outcomes of a global capitalism that performs several different actions:

Homogenizing systems of value (material, cultural, social, aesthetic, etc.) into essentially one univocal system of value (money, currency) is to essentially abstract very real and diverse entities such that they can be considered on some field of sameness: How much is that pair of sunglasses? How much does it cost to maintain that wildlife preserve? How many sunglasses is that wildlife worth? The danger with this logic is that it allows one to make very simple evaluations such that an ecosystem can be weighed by cost/profit margins against some other object (shopping mall, highway, housing development, lumber or paper pulp) as well as enabling complex trades dealing in sex, slavery, marriage, etc. The ecosystem, as a monetary value, will always lose, as will cultures, liberal arts, disempowered peoples, bodies, ethics…

Restricting and codifying flows of movement, matter, and energy (essential to life at all levels) into concrete systems inhibits evolution or change. This can be as simple as the flows of waste in the sewer system of a city (not all codifications are bad—in fact, some are necessary) but can also manifest as the oppressive hierarchical structure of the government or nuclear family that inhibits any radical change of policies, parties, or individuals.

Our subjectivities are worked over and made complacent not only by a homogenous mass media steeped in capitalistic and normative propaganda, but also by the specter of Freud still haunting psychology, psychiatry and popular everyday views of the mind and human behavior. This codified concept of the mind is a stabilizing factor in the worst way possible: it is now difficult to imagine subjectivities that could be anything other than a correspondence to Freud’s ‘mythical frame of reference’—the mind is envisioned a normative, disempowered faculty instead of an autonomous, self-exceeding capacity.

It is also the culture of mass consumption that has silenced otherwise diverse social groups and movements. For example, Guattari gives the example of old class antagonisms giving way to passivity by allowing the working classes to feel ‘a vague sense of belonging’ (21), ‘offering them a ‘psuedo-participation’ in the political debate as ‘consumers’ (84). It is mass media ‘serialism’ along with the acceptance of capitalistic values that is propagating a normative standard for living, thinking, consuming, and being across borders. We are speaking of a certain homogenization of culture that is an exceptional outcome of world capitalism. This is not to say we are mindless robots; rather we are just embedded and embodied within our environments.

The way forward and out of this mess, is ‘an ethico-political articulation—which [Guattari calls] ecosophy—between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity)’ (19). One unfamiliar with Guattari’s work with Deleuze will wonder at the odd conjoining of cultural terms with natural ones (mental-ecology, social-ecology). ‘Ecology’ here is not metaphor; he means quite literally that ideas, behaviors, social groups, etc. all have ecologies (flows of matter and energy and the constant negotiations that go along with those processes), just as the outside environments have ecologies. That Guattari doesn’t take the nature/culture distinction for granted is of the upmost importance. It is at once to say that the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ worlds are not opposed (that the interior is generated as a process of folding-in of the exterior) such that an environmental concept is appropriate to apply to a concept of the mind. It is also to say that the distinction between nature and culture is not a given character of reality; it is an outcome of particular human practices. Ecologies are domains of life; and indeed Guattari conceives of life in a very broad sense, beyond the organic/inorganic distinction, perhaps similar to Whitehead who defines it as a universal tendency toward novelty (for Guattari toward difference).

Guattari poses these three ecologies as domains of flows and movement in relation to each other. None of these ecologies are taken as absolute (as they tend to be conceived conventionally; ecology/culture/mind), but are posed as tentative starting points, specific to the cultural paradigm we find ourselves in. These are by no means solutions in themselves to the problems posed above—it is only by exploring each of these areas in relation to each of the others that true ecological problems can begin to be articulated outside of the typical value system of capitalism, and from different reference points.

This is a call to action, but differs from any before in that there’s no unifying principle or view. It is a call to action to produce difference, in as many different ways as possible. Inherent to these processes are the possible lines of flight that will contradict each other, will be destructive, that will crash and burn. This is evolution. There might also be lines of flight that will go far enough such that it’s passengers will no longer be recognized as human. To get out of this mess, we must invent vehicles that will transport us. It is as simple to say that the best solution Guattari is positing is to develop new modes of living and being of the world, to develop new ways of thinking about ourselves in relationship to each other and to the larger world of organic and inorganic life, to develop new systems of value that are diverse and dynamic, not flat and equivalent.