Felix Guattari ( 1930-1992 )

was a French psychotherapist, philosopher, and political militant who was greatly influenced by his lifelong association with the La Borde experimental psychiatric clinic  and its founder Jean Oury. After some three decades of active support for radical Left and anti-colonialist struggles, he eventually joined the ecological movements of the 1980s and formulated his own ecosophical perspective in a 1989 essay "The Three Ecologies". Contrary to the transcendent values that Nature inspires in the deep ecology of Arne Naess, Guattari observes that the ecology of the natural world has already been gravely compromised by human development and must thus be addressed as deeply interrelated with ecologies of the social and psychological. Subsequently, to resist the influence of mass media and the power structures of integrated global capitalism, and to reverse catastrophic environmental degradation and adjust to effects of cultural deterritorialization, he proposes an ethico-aesthetic paradigm of decentralization to preserve and encourage subjectivity with a focus on micro-political efforts that recognize the specific environmental and cultural challenges of local communities ( geographic ) or groups ( social ). These concepts and imperatives were further articulated in his last book Chaosmosis ( 1992 ) and other posthumously published essays and articles.

Excepts from "The Three Ecologies"

By Felix Guattari: New Formations, Number 8, Pages 131-147; Summer 1989

To read the full essay, as it appeared in New Formations, Number 8, Summer 1989:

Go to: banmarchive.org.uk/new-formations/number-8-summer-1989/the-three-ecologies-translated-by-chris-turner-material-word/ 

OPENING  Page 131

   The human subject is not a straightforward matter; Descartes was wrong to suggest it was sufficient merely to think in order to be. On the one hand, there are all kinds of ways of existing that lie outside the realm of consciousness; and, on the other, a thinking which struggles only to gain a hold on itself merely spins ever more crazily. Like a whirling top, it gains no proper purchase on the real territories of existence, as they slide and drift like the tectonic plates that underpin the continents. We should perhaps not speak of subjects, but rather of components of subjectification, each of which works more or less on its own account. Necessarily, this would lead us to re-examine the relation between the individual and subjectivity, and, above all, to distinguish clearly between the two concepts. The individual would appear in his/her actual position, as a 'terminal' for processes involving human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines: a terminal through which, of course, not all the vectors of subjectification necessarily pass. Interiority would appear as a quality produced at the meeting-point of multiple components which are relatively mutually autonomous - in certain cases, openly discordant.

    It is of course still difficult for such arguments to find acceptance, particularly in contexts where there remains a lingering suspicion, if not indeed a prior rejection, of any specific reference to subjectivity. Subjectivity still gets a bad press; it continues even today to be criticized in the name of the primacy of infrastructures, structures, or systems. Generally speaking, those who do take it upon themselves to deal either practically or theoretically with subjectivity use the kid glove approach to the subject; they take endless precautions, making absolutely sure they never stray too far from the pseudo-scientific paradigms they borrow for preference from the hard sciences - from thermodynamics, topology, information and systems theory, linguistics. It is as if there were a scientistic super-ego which demanded that psychical entities be reified, understood only in terms of their extrinsic co-ordinates. Unsurprisingly, then, the human and social sciences have condemned themselves to overlooking the intrinsically developmental, creative, and self-positioning dimensions of processes of subjectification.

   In this context, there is an urgent need for us to free ourselves of scientistic references and metaphors: to forge new paradigms which are instead ethicoaesthetic in inspiration. The best cartographies of the psyche - or, if you will, the best psychoanalyses - are after all surely to be found in the work of Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Artaud, and Beckett, rather than Freud, Jung, or Lacan; conversely, the best aspect of these latters' psychoanalytical works is surely their literary dimension - take Freud's Traumdeutung, for example, which can be read as an exceptional modern novel. 

Page 134

  If today, human relationships with the socius, the psyche, and 'nature' are increasingly deteriorating, then this is attributable not only to objective damage and pollution but to the ignorance and fatalistic passivity with which those issues are confronted by individuals and responsible authorities. The implications of any given negative development may or may not be catastrophic; whatever the case, it tends today to be simply accepted without question. Structuralism, and subsequently postmodernism, have accustomed us to a vision of the world in which human interventions - concrete politics and micropolitics - are no longer relevant. The withering away of social praxis is explained in terms of the death of ideologies, or of some supposed return to universal values. Yet those explanations seem to me highly unsatisfactory. The decisive factor, it seems to me, is the general inflexibility of social and psychological praxes - their failure to adapt - as well as a widespread incapacity to perceive the erroneousness of partitioning off the real into a number of separate fields. It is quite simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate. Indeed, if we continue - as the media would have us do - to refuse squarely to confront the simultaneous degradation of these three areas, we will in effect be acquiescing in a general infantilization of opinion, a destruction and neutralization of democracy. We need to 'kick the habit' of sedative consumption, of television discourse in particular; we need to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses of the three ecologies.

Page 140

  The generalized ecology I am arguing for here has in my view barely begun to be prefigured by environmental ecology in its contemporary form. The ecology I envisage will aim radically to decentre social struggles and assumptions about the psyche. Existing ecological movements certainly have many virtues; but the wider ecological question seems to me too important to be abandoned to the archaizing, folkloristic tendencies which choose determinedly to reject large-scale political involvement. Ecology should abandon its connotative links with images of a small minority of nature lovers or accredited experts; for the ecology I propose here questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalist power formations - formations which, moreover, can by no means be assured of continuing their successes of the last decade. Not only may the present financial and economic crisis lead to substantial upheavals in the social status quo and the media-based imaginary that underpins it; at the same time, neo-liberalist ideology may well be hoisted on its own petard, as it espouses such eminently recuperable notions as flexible working' hours, deregulation, etc.

  I stress once again: the choice is no longer between blind fixation to  the old forms of state-bureaucratic supervision and generalized welfare on the one hand, and despairing and cynical surrender to yuppie ideology on the other. All the indicators suggest that the increased productivity engendered by current technological revolutions will continue to rise exponentially. The question is whether new ecological operators and new enunciative assemblages will succeed in orienting that growth along paths that avoid the absurdity and the impasses of integrated world capitalism.

Page 144

   Any social ecological programme will have to aim therefore to shift capitalist societies out of the era of the mass media and into a post-media age in which the media will be reappropriated by a multitude of subject-groups.This vision of a mass media culture redirected towards the goal of resingularization may well seem far beyond our scope today; yet we should recognize that the current situation of maximal media-induced alienation is in no sense an intrinsic necessity. Media fatalism seems to me to imply a misunderstanding of several factors:

(1) the potential for sudden upsurges of mass awareness;

(2) the possibilities for new transformative assemblages of social struggles - possibilities that arise out of the progressive collapse of Stalinism in its various incarnations;

(3) the. potential use of mass media technology for non-capitalist ends, as a result of declining costs and continuing technological advancement (miniaturization in particular);

(4) the increased production, both on the individual and collective level, of a 'creationist' subjectivity: a subjectivity that arises out of the reconstruction of labour processes - the introduction of continuous training, skill transfer, the search for non-traditional sources of labour, etc. - as early twentieth century systems of industrial production fall into obsolescence.

   In early industrial society, it was the subjectivity of the labouring classes that was smothered and serialized. Under today's international division of labour, it is the Third World that is exposed to production-line methods. With the data-processing revolution, the rise of bio-technologies, accelerated creation, new materials and an ever more intricate 'machinisation' of time, new modalities of subjectivization are emerging; on the one hand, they demand higher levels of intelligence and initiative, whilst on the other, they imply the increased control and monitoring of the domestic life of couples and nuclear families. We face a future, in short, in which working-class subjectivity will be maximally bourgeoisified through a massive reterritorialization of the family in the media and the welfare system.

Pages 145-46 ( Emphasis: L. Vivola )

   My aim here is not to propose a fully constituted model of future society; what I am arguing is simply that we should use our expanded understanding of the whole range of ecological components to set in place new systems of value. A market system which regulates the distribution of financial and social rewards for human social activities on the basis of profit alone, is becoming less and less legitimate. The time has come to take serious account of other value systems: of 'profitability' in the social and aesthetic sense, of the values of desire, etc. Until now, of course, domains of value not governed by capitalist profit have been dominated by the state: viz. the state-fostered appreciation of the national heritage. We have, however, reached a point where new social associations - with charitable foundations, for example - should be drawn upon to expand the financing of a more flexible third sector which is neither private nor public. The third sector will in any case constantly be forced to expand as human labour gives way to machine technology; and the question posed by its expansion is not only that of how to achieve recognition of a universal minimum income - recognized as a right, not a means of reintegrating individuals into the workforce. It begs the question, too, of how to stimulate the individual and collective organization of a developing ecology of resingularization. The search for an existential territory or homeland is not necessarily synonymous with the search for ancestral roots or a native land - though external antagonisms have certainly often led nationalitarian movements (Basque, Corsican, Irish) to turn inward and neglect other molecular revolutions, such as women's liberation, environmental ecology, etc. All sorts of deterritorialized 'nationalities' are conceivable - music or poetry might be two examples. We live now under a capitalist system of valorization in which value is based upon a general equivalent. What makes that system reprehensible is its crushing of all other modes of valorization, which thus find themselves alienated from capitalist hegemony. That hegemony, however, can be challenged, or at least made to incorporate methods of valorization based on existential productions, and  determined neither in terms of abstract labour time, nor of expected capitalist profit. Computerization in particular has unleashed the potential for new forms of 'exchange' of value, new collective negotiations, whose ultimate product will be more individual, more singular, more dissensual forms of social action. Our task - one which encompasses the whole future of research and artistic production - is not only to bring these exchanges into existence; it is to extend notions of collective interest to encompass practices which, in the short term, 'profit' no one, but which are, in the long run, vehicles of processual enrichment.

Page 146-47

  What is required for the future is much more than a mere defence of nature. If the Amazonian 'lung' is to be regenerated, the Sahara desert made fertile again, we need, immediately, to go on the offensive. Even the human creation of new plant and animal species looms unavoidably on the horizon; the urgent task we face is, then, to fashion an ethics appropriate to a scenario that is both terrifying and fascinating, and, more importantly, a politics appropriate to the general destiny of humanity. At a time when the biblical myth of creation is giving way to new fictions of a world in the permanent process of re-creation, we can do no better than listen to Walter Benjamin condemning the reductionism that necessarily accompanies the privileging of information:

When information supplants the old form, story-telling, and when it itself gives way to sensation, this double process reflects an imaginary degradation of experience. Each of these forms is in its own way an offshoot of story-telling, which is one of the oldest forms of story-telling. Story-telling . . . does not aim to convey the pure essence of a thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the story-teller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. ( Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1972 )

  To bring into being worlds other than those of pure abstract information; to engender universes of reference and existential territories in which singularity and finitude are embraced by the multivalent logic of mental ecologies and the social-ecological group Eros principle; to face up to a dizzying confrontation with the cosmos in order to make it in some way liveable; these are, in short, the intertwining paths of the triple ecological vision to which we should now turn all our attention.

CONCLUSION