Abstract
In the midst of a certain zeal for ‘French Theory’ in human geography and the social sciences of late, there has been something of a rush to operationalize Guattari (among others) in a pseudo-methodological manner; something we’re unashamedly guilty of ourselves. It’s easy to see why: journeying between cartography, metamodelisation, tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagramming, Guattari offers a seductive array of concepts and philosophical tools for human geographers. There seems, however, to be a disjuncture between the conceptual import of such terms and their empirical rendering. In this explicitly experimental article, we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how Guattari can inform empiricism without reversion to straightforward application or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we offer a number of speculations on how Guattari’s work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor of well-established geographical methods. Put differently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of Guattari’s philosophy as its most generative vector for human geographic thought and technique.
Introduction
In the midst of a certain zeal for French thought in the social sciences (Cusset, 2008; Elliot and Attridge, 2011) and in human geography (Barnett, 2009, 2012; Elden, 2009), there has been something of a rush to operationalize the work of a limited set of nominally post-structuralist philosophers. This article looks both to extend and to disrupt this tendency, by introducing the work of Felix Guattari, a significant yet understudied thinker whose importance to human geography is potentially far-reaching but still largely neglected. At first blush, Guattari’s import seems to be startlingly clear: journeying between cartography, metamodelisation, tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagramming, Guattari offers a seductive array of concepts and philosophical tools for human geographers. So much, then, for his supposed mania for chemistry (Guattari, 1995); we would sooner argue that Felix Guattari is better caricatured as the archetypal geographer, or at least geophilosopher, than as a bit-part chemist encumbered solely by molecules. Bewildered by the array of these aforementioned concepts, it is small wonder that as human geographers, we are quick to stake a disciplinary claim in this thinker. There is, however, a disjuncture between the conceptual import of such terms and their empirical rendering. In this explicitly experimental article, we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how Guattari can inform geographical thought and technique without reversion to straightforward application or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we offer a number of speculations on how Guattari’s work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor of well-established geographical methods. Put differently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of Guattari’s philosophy as its most generative vector for thought and technique in human geography.
At this stage, it is doubtless easier to advertise what this article does not do. Specifically, it is not an instrumental piece that attempts to engineer specific research techniques wrought out of Guattari’s conceptual toolbox; to do so would not only be disingenuous towards a Guattarian ethos but it would also be to miss the point, namely, that the normative impulse of ‘applicability’ itself is to limit the conceptual–empirical potential of all ideas, not just those pertaining to Guattari. The problem, as we see it, is that human geography has been rather quick to ‘appropriate and apply’ ideas from beyond the discipline, as part of an ongoing cycle of faddishness, which plays into the auditing, and stultifying, logics of, for example, the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence Framework 1 ; logics that Guattari himself would almost certainly abhor, such are their micro-fascist implications for intellectual thought and politics. It is for this reason, then, that we look to the impractical; not as a slowing down of reasoning (Stengers, 2005) but as a speeding up of thought. Rather than link the impractical to a mantra of slowing down, we want to deploy Guattari – and his speed of thought and his jargon machine – to resist systematization and application. 2 To do this, we play the very logic of instrumentalization against itself; taking a putatively ‘new’ thinker, and assemblage of concepts, with which to intervene in and trouble the apparent ease of engaging with theory. As such, we acknowledge Harvey’s (2006: 410) fears of introducing ‘this or that new thinker, theorist or theory into the grand parade of external interlocutors as to what geography might and should be about’, but use this precisely to address concerns about hyper-faddishness.
Nonetheless, we do not wish to abrogate responsibility for what Guattari’s ideas might do for human geography. What, then, is the affirmative push of this article? Split into three parts, the article, likewise, does three things. 3 The first part examines briefly the veritable bombardment of ‘French Theory’ in human geography of late, centring specifically on the contribution of Guattari to the social sciences. As such, the article will offer a critique of recent scholarship that has attempted to use Guattari in a pseudo-methodological manner; one that subsequently denies the schizophrenic energies of his conceptual work. In response, the second part of the article examines the importance of Guattari’s ideas for human geography, by way of three signal motifs of Guattarian thought – ‘existential territories’, ‘metamodelisation’, and ‘cartography’ – through which geographers might re-apprehend notions of disciplinarity, method, and abstraction. This prominent Guattarian triplet is elected here for its obvious geographical investment. 4 The way in which these motifs are explored is deliberately tentative, in part because we are reluctant to operationalize, instrumentalize, and standardize Guattari ourselves, and because we find ourselves agreeing with Thrift’s (2008: 2) contention that ‘too much in the way of clarity should not necessarily be counted as a good thing’. Notwithstanding this, the article aims to speak both to those well versed with Guattari’s idiosyncratic vocabulary and to those geographers who find his work irritable or unfamiliar. The third and final part of the article considers the political and ethical import of what it means to be ‘impractical’ in contrast to accentuating an idea’s ostensible practicality. To be sure, to highlight the impractical is perhaps to engender a dubious dualistic impasse with the practical, but at the same time, it might also foreground the centrality of an experimental and indeed micropolitical ethos in geographical research. In sum, and appropriately enough, the underlying question we pose to human geography is charted by Guattari himself when he asks the following question of the psychoanalytical institution, ‘how do we work for its liberation, that is, for its re-singularisation’ (1995: 135). This question likewise can be reappointed in the context of this discussion, namely, how do we work for the selfsame liberation of Guattari’s philosophy, for its re-singularization in human geography? Put bluntly, how might the impracticality of Guattari’s philosophy be understood as its most generative and productive characteristic?
I: Rush
It is something of a truism to remark that continental philosophy and the more striated assemblage of French Theory have heavily influenced certain parts of human geography, not least in its cultural variants. To be sure, it is increasingly rare not to encounter a text under the broad banner of human geography which is not informed by – or unaware of – some kind of post-structural thought. This is perhaps most evident in cultural geography which, as Cresswell (2012: 98) notes, can be rather insistent on examining ‘an endless series of citations’. Indeed, it is the emergence and proliferation of non-representational theories (NRTs) that have done much to promote but also develop the spatial dimensions of this kind of philosophy (see Anderson and Harrison, 2010; see also Doel, 1999). Whilst not on the same plane of prominence as some – such as Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, or Lyotard – Guattari is steadily emerging as a substantial figure in human geography (Dewsbury, 2000; Katz, 1996; McCormack, 2003, 2005, 2013; Saldanha, 2010). 5 His work is also garnering attention in and across philosophy (Stengers, 2010), sociology (Genosko, 2002), and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie, 2004), all of which plays into what has been described of late as the ‘Guattari Effect’ (see Alliez and Goffey, 2011; Alliez and Querrien, 2008). As such, it is quite difficult to identify a genealogical lineage from which Guattari emerges and similarly problematic to assert obvious disciples and conceptual descendants of his work.
The get-out clause here would be to suggest that there are ‘multiple Guattaris’, three of which can be posited upfront. First, there is Guattari the anti-Freudian psychoanalyst who steadfastly refused the infantalization of his patients by Oedipal markers and cognitive therapy. Second, there is Guattari the micropolitician, the proponent of ethico-aesthetic acts, themselves techniques for disrupting the global obsession with technocratic modes of governance. Third, there is Guattari the agitator, the comrade, the one who paid the bill for Antonio Negri’s exit out of Italy, the disruptor of the disciplines within which he operated. For the sake of brevity, three Guattaris are perhaps enough for now, but it goes without saying that there are infinitely more iterations; indeed the psychoanalyst, the micropolitician and the agitator are anything but discrete variables of Guattari’s character. 6
Why, therefore, the present focus on Guattari in the context of geographic research and geography more broadly? To some extent, this project is one of spotlighting a thinker who has largely been occluded, conceptually and otherwise, by his own partnership with Deleuze. Undoubtedly, the act of spotlighting can quickly turn to fetish and the valorization of a suspect novelty freighted through an individual author, but at the risk of sounding defensive, this article is not a homage to or a hagiography of Guattari. Instead, one of the reasons for focusing on Guattari is because we would wager that the manifold geographies and geographic concepts that are deployed in the likes of A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy are outwardly more Guattarian than they are Deleuzian. That is not to disavow Deleuze’s input – far from it – but it does seem that the geographic impulse beats more fervently in Guattari’s work, from the Molecular Revolution through to Schizoanalytic Cartographies. 7 Moreover, whilst Deleuze (1988) deals elsewhere, theoretically, with the limitations of the notion of ‘method’ as a stilted artifice of enquiry, Guattari through his clinical and militant practices more explicitly experiments with an empirical approach tilting towards the affirmation of technique; itself, as William Connolly (2002) suggests, a less rigid and directional mode of doing research than that of method in which the latter might be construed as an established means to a prefigured end. As such, harnessing Guattari’s practised shift from method to technique might push geographers closer towards research that itself is more sensitive to what Cosgrove describes as the, ‘creative, sometimes anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the world’ (1999: 2).
Strange perhaps that Guattari has hitherto received muted attention from geographers in the midst of an otherwise palpable rush to French Theory in some quarters of cultural geography. In Guattari’s case, the rush is not so much marked by sheer numbers flocking to cite or appropriate his work but by a, ‘quickening’ in the straightforward applicability of his concepts. This quickening is not exclusive to Guattari’s assemblage of thinking, and indeed the rush to theoretical applicability finds echoes in contemporary human geography elsewhere, particularly in cultural geography and specifically in the conceptual tumult of NRT (Thrift, 2008), wherein despite the manifest appeals made by its exponents to hold on to a radical conceptual indeterminacy is still liable to an awkward ‘sedimentation’ or fixation – of ideas, practices and philosophical traditions – particularly by those scholars searching for the misplaced security offered by a seemingly stable ‘theoretical framework’. In other words, much like the rendering of an actor-network approach into actor-network theory (much to the chagrin of Bruno Latour and others in years of late), so too has non-representational theory become 4dangerously close to morphing into ‘Brand NRT’, 8 abused subsequently as a theoretical straw shibboleth in which the rush to provide supposed categorical clarity has yielded, ironically, some bizarre moments of conceptual muddle, not least in the bastardizing of affect into the quite unrelated term, affectual (see Pile, 2010; see also the subsequent critical commentaries: Bondi and Davison, 2011; Curti et al., 2011; Dawney, 2011; Mohammad and Sidaway, 2012).
To be sure, it is not all sledgehammer theorizing and blunt application; on the contrary, the diverse constitution and nature(s) of academic geography have afforded and nurtured a conceptual experimentalism that perhaps the strictures of cognate disciplines would simply not allow. Again, on the flip side of the aforementioned misguided appropriation, non-representational styles of experiment and encounter have generated remarkable space times of research (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Dewsbury, 2012; Lapworth, 2015; McCormack, 2014; Patchett, 2008; Roberts, 2012; Romanillos, 2008; Simpson, 2013). Nonetheless, despite this conceptual variegation, there seems to be a lingering tendency in geography that is dismissive of such theorizing and impracticality, a tendency that conflates and confuses an absence of obvious ideological political motivation in the likes of NRT with a lack of substance. Perhaps this can only be whispered anecdotally, but what has become known as ‘critical geography’ is also ironically, in Anglo-American quarters, astoundingly conservative in its thinking and its concomitant judgements as to what passes the threshold of being radical or critical. Readers subscribed to the online ‘crit-geog’ forum, for example, might have a sense of the sometimes vitriolic vanguard reactionism to which we allude here.
Elsewhere in the social sciences, Guattari’s invocation of ‘mapping’ has, for example, been figured problematically as a mere metaphor (Walkerdine, 2013); this transformation of a vibrant concept into a metaphor – this awkward sleight of hand – then allows its subsequent application as a mode of analysis for whatever matter of concern is at hand, in this case, space. Put differently, this metaphorical rendering inhibits the conceptual potential of Guattari’s sense of mapping and cartography by focusing on the concept’s ‘representational’ effects; as Walkerdine (2013: 763) surmises, ‘cartography can be a means of mapping possible transformations and of supporting them. It can act as an analytic for understanding transformations but also for supporting them into an uncertain future’. Whilst we support this sense that cartography might propagate the virtual, we are not convinced by the idea that Guattari’s cartography can be diagrammed as an ‘analytic’ which in turn can be applied to whatever situation; bluntly, it is perhaps just too convenient, or, just too stubbornly practical.
Not that it is for us to be accusational; we ourselves have been all too content with indulging in what Guattari would call ‘idea thievery’, happily pushing his notions of gentleness, the ethico-aesthetic and micropolitics, all through, among other things, a spell of hitch-hiking around southern England. 9 In other words, we have been complicit in applying Guattari in the context of fieldwork; the question we continue to ask ourselves here is: are we missing the point? To some extent, when reading Guattari, one is confronted with a dilemma; how to negotiate Guattari’s own oscillation between on the one hand, his composition of ruthlessly strict diagrammatic schema and on the other hand, his lackadaisical attitude to the way in which his ideas are ripped, torn and transformed. In the following three speculations into three prominent Guattarian motifs, we attempt to think through the methodological significance of Guattari in a manner that refrains from a mode of application, yet which emphasizes their micropolitical impulse.
II: Speculations
As we outline the three speculative ‘moments’ in this article, we want to hold on to the idea that a concept is ‘only worth the life one invests it with. Its function is less for the purpose of guiding representation and action than of catalyzing the universe of reference that frames a pragmatic field’ (Guattari, 2009a: 192). The expressive resources of Guattari’s conceptual terminology, as Andrew Goffey (2012: xvi) notes, range from the unusual to the untranslatable, from the pathological through the mundane, to the avant-garde and the abstract. The emergence of such a vocabulary ‘flags the taking off of the Guattarian jargon machine’ (2012: xxi). Whilst this vocabulary can be rather abstruse at times (Genosko, 2002), we want to foreground how these terms operate as ‘part of a specific, experimental understanding of theory, in which theory acquires greatest contact with the real through its very artifice’ (Goffey, 2012: xxi).
Existential territories
The first notion we want to put through its paces, in such an understanding of theory, is that of existential territories. Our wager, here, is that existential territories may be a helpful, if impractical, way of apprehending disciplines, and the idea of disciplinarity. Taking as our focus human geography, we want to consider how the discipline is composed around a set of existential refrains – or what Guattari also terms ‘graspings’ – rather than a set of definitions or procedures. We read grasping, which is adopted by Guattari from Whitehead (see Guattari, 2012: 270, note 16), as the tentative establishment of some coherence in chaos (Bains, 2002; Murphie, 2010). Grasping is the process of the coming together of the event, which is less a logical outcome and rather a temporary arrangement. It is this quality of change and recomposition that we think characterizes human geography.
There has been no shortage of reflections on the nature and identity of geography – particularly human geography – ever since it became institutionalized as a discipline (Livingstone, 1992). No doubt, we are not the only ones with undergraduate students (and colleagues) who are perplexed, if not a little jaded, by reflecting on the status of the discipline or any of its sub-disciplines. This is, in part, because such reflections on disciplinarity tend to highlight coherence and unity. Of course, there are good reasons for this – and there are some themes that may well hold, however loosely, geographical enquiry together – especially in terms of funding and recognition as a ‘proper’ discipline. As Andrew Barry et al. (2008: 20–21) observe, ‘A commitment to a discipline is a way of ensuring that certain disciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects, methods and concepts are ruled out’. However, they are quick to note that it would be a mistake to think that this implies any kind of disciplinary homogeneity or closure, ‘disciplines are routinely characterized by internal differences; the existence of a discipline does not always imply the acceptance of an agreed set of problems, objects, practices, theories or methods, or even of a shared language or common institutional structures’ (2008: 26–27). What Guattari offers us as human geographers is a way of rethinking the heterogeneous assemblage of what constitutes the discipline by way of a plurality of existential territories. This offers geographers a way of articulating both how the discipline is as disunified as we often acknowledge it to be and foregrounds how we are invested – ethically, existentially and politically – with particular projects. This is not specific to human geography, but we find it a particularly productive encounter given how geographers have recently returned to reflect on the territory (Elden, 2009, 2013).
Existential territories need not be based on ethnicity, culture or place (Watson, 2012). And the ‘search for an existential Territory doesn’t necessarily involve searching for one’s country of birth or a distant country of origin’ (Guattari, 2008: 42); this is not the ‘essential’ relationship between territory, frontier and sovereignty (Gottmann, 1973). As to what an existential territory actually is, there is no easy way to say this, with Guattari only giving us an ambiguous starting point. Existential territories, Guattari (2012: 40) remarks, ‘can neither be discernibilized nor discursivized as figures represented on a background of co-ordinates of representation’. How do we discern here from Guattari’s own ‘discernibilization’?! Interrobangs aside, an existential territory is composed (and recomposed) by an array of tentative graspings, tendencies which themselves have no plotable trajectory. By way of illustration, an existential territory is a background hum of experience; a way of existentially knowing yourself, without recourse to everyday labels, categories and identities. To paraphrase Massey (2005), imagining territory – and space – as in process, is to insist on the openness of the future. What we find interesting about the notion of existential territories is that there is no emphasis on boundaries. Accordingly, thinking about disciplines in this way encourages us to think about how they are organized around a series of refrains – or disciplinary motifs – rather than the kind of policing work that goes into deciding what falls within the purview of a particular field. It also restates the question of what is geography in a more affirmative, or affective, spirit: what moves us as geographers?
We make two substantive points here. The first is that we want to counter the notion of existential territories to that of egotistical territories. Whilst we all have a particular conceptual territory that we might associate with our own research, all too often there is an anticipatory movement of carving out a particular field of one’s own. This takes many forms, the latest of which is claim staking on blogs and twitter. It is not that we wish to rail against the use of social media. Rather, it is the tendency to present a pithy sound bite, an all-too clear message outlining research, which seems to us to have a pre-emptive deadening effect that forecloses the very distribution of research. There is nothing wrong with the idea of dissemination – except perhaps the word itself – but the apparent ease with which a research project is condensed into a blog post or tweet strikes us as having more to do with individual projects than a discipline’s existential territory. Indeed, if we heed Guattari’s critique of integrated world capitalism (IWC), a quaint name for something altogether more terrifying, we might question how certain research agendas, their practicality and their impact, all capitulate to certain logics of innovation. Therefore, whilst human geography could well be understood as a mutating existential territory, the production of certain desiring trends for turf staking harms the possibility of such a notion of the discipline.
Another disruption to a straightforward application of existential territories to thinking disciplinary stomping grounds is that Guattari often works with ‘doubling couplets’. At first blush, we were drawn to thinking about these couplets as a device to slow down thought, devices which prevent a too easy analytical movement. Yet, as we read further, we found that this process of doubling and redoubling enables one to pick up speed in the middle (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 28). As such, the term ‘push’ might be thought of in two ways here, seemingly helping to push on human geography (one more push for more of the same) and to push over (a gentle nudge rather than a shove). 10
Guattari pairs existential territories with incorporeal universes; the former are ‘singular, idiosyncratic, sensible and finite, the latter are non-dimensioned, non-coordinated, trans-sensible and infinite’ (Pindar and Sutton, 2008: 85, note 15). To put this differently, we might consider how human geography has escaped its past content and internal constraints: how it has renewed itself ‘through the rigorous indiscipline of its effective couplings with processes other than its own’ (Massumi, 2008: 27). That is to say, existential territories are not ‘given as an in-itself, closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself’; precarious and singular, capable of both ‘stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made “habitable”’ (Guattari, 2008: 35).
The second point is that thinking with existential territories also allows us to consider fieldwork differently. Whilst there is no doubting tendencies towards particular conceptual grounds, there is also a kind of pull that marks a commitment – or participation – to a particular field or ‘case’. Indeed, the very notion of fieldwork, or the case study for that matter, becomes less about identifying a specific bounded example but rather more as a series of graspings. As Lauren Berlant (2007) has already argued, the case reveals itself not as a form but as an event that takes shapes; fieldwork is an event that we only ever grasp at. Fieldwork raises questions around a range of topics, but one that rarely features in discussions is one of existence. How do concepts, materials, participants and questions co-produce an existential territory – one which is always recomposing itself? By way of a response, we explore two further Guattarian notions, metamodelisation and cartography, signal motifs for rethinking the way in which human geographers engage with concepts.
Metamodelisation
Throughout much of Guattari’s work, and in particular in his last book, Chaosmosis (Guattari, 1995), he develops the neologism of ‘metamodélisation’. 11 This term can be seen as an integral part of his work on ‘schizoanalysis’, a reaction to, and frustration with what he saw as the shortcomings of much psychoanalysis. It is integral because Guattari was particularly critical of the use of models in psychoanalytic treatment. He craved the ‘freedom of construction of new types of models relating to the analysis of the unconscious’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 299) rather than the proposition of ‘a global alternative to existing methods of analysing the unconscious’ (Guattari, 1996a: 122). Although much could be said about the unconscious, or psychoanalysis more broadly, what we want to acknowledge here is that the imposition of standard models, or orthodox methods, can be oppressive. We draw on Guattari, therefore, to focus attention on the ongoing creation and construction of novel models, which we think could be extended to think about geographical techniques more generally. Indeed, foregrounding the notion of metamodelisation complicates the ways in which we understand, develop and practise geographical techniques.
Guattari understood the term ‘model’ in several ways (see Watson, 2008) but they all share the idea of a model as a repeated pattern. What distinguishes metamodelisation from modelisation is the way that it develops ‘possible openings onto the virtual and onto creative processuality’ (Guattari, 1995: 31). Elsewhere, this is figured as a resistance to ‘modelisations which simplify the complex’ (1995: 61). Instead, Guattari argued that, ‘the more complex the models become, the less risk they run of using systems of reference that crush the sensibility to what happens’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 312). By thinking in terms of metamodelisation, the idea of modelisation becomes untethered from both ‘its representational foundation and its mimetic reproduction’ (Genosko and Murphie, 2008: np).
The invocation of the prefix ‘meta-’ is unfortunate, as it could initially seem to be a model of all models or instead of other models. Instead, following Brian Massumi (2011), we consider meta- in another etymological sense: ‘among’ rather than after. In fact, Guattari says as much, ‘models will only be considered as one among others’ (1996b: 197). Metamodelisation is a way of constructing models from within all other models; it is an immanent modelisation. Guattari is very pragmatic: no model is right but you cannot step out of all modelling either. Metamodelisation draws on other models, and therefore retains the prefix meta-, but this, to reiterate, is a meta- from the middle rather than from above. It draws on aspects and components of models that are useful and discards those that are not needed. 12 This borrowing of parts of models is experimental, bringing together different components for particular situations. Metamodelisation is ‘productive of a new kind of reality; it functions; forces things together’ (Genosko and Murphie, 2008: np).
The suggestion here, then, is that the term could help foster a productive dialogue between those engaged in the process of modelling and those practising a putatively more critical human geography because it highlights how a range of different kind of geographers are ‘trying to articulate alternative processes when they exist’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 132). Whilst there have been few pivotal texts on modelling (Chorley and Haggett, 1967; Macmillan, 1989; Peet and Thrift, 1989), a number of recent articles suggest that there may be a renewal of interest in the practice (Clifford, 2008; Lane, 2011; Lane et al., 2011; O’Sullivan, 2004). Perhaps one of the most interesting developments here has been the suggestion that models are useful when they unsettle rather represent, when they ‘open up new possibilities for investigation and interpretation’ (Lane, 2011: 231). Put differently, it is when models do not add up that they can bring about new ways of thinking and researching.
This treatment of models as both disruptive and generative is taken up in Lane’s participation in a recent project, which was committed to doing flood risk science differently (Lane et al., 2011). The project attempted to counter the predominance of certain sorts of hydrological models and, in particular, the notion that these models are universal technologies, where the model does not change, only the initial conditions. By cultivating different means of practising science, a model was co-produced by the academics and the local residents who participated in the project. Those involved had initially expected to reuse an existing hydrological model to foreground upstream processes but the failure of these earlier modelling efforts meant that the project became concerned with developing a new model. Lane et al. argue that it was ‘not simply a case of translating local knowledge into a series of concepts and assumptions to inform model development’ (2011: 28) but an attempt to challenge the ways in which models are constructed. Crucially, the (co-produced) model was formulated specifically for the place in question. Rather than have a ready-made model that is made to work everywhere, their project suggests that models be developed for particular sites. Lane et al.’s work is useful for thinking modelling in geography, in part as it bridges physical and human concerns. However, we can return to Guattari to further emphasize and extend this commitment to specificity. This is less a preoccupation with continuing debates around the ideographic and nomothetic (Sayer, 2000), but rather an argument that human geographers practise an ethos of modelling when developing their methods or, put differently, that they metamodel their techniques.
How might metamodelisation function in practice, though? And how might we hone practices of metamodelisation? We can follow Guattari when he explains that his perspective involves shifting the human and social sciences from scientific paradigms towards ethico-aesthetic paradigms (Guattari, 1995). Guattari’s ideas emerged from his encounters with an experimental therapeutic space and later came to describe these not just as schizoanalysis, or metamodelisation, but as an ethico-aesthetics. For him, treatment ‘is not a work of art, yet it must proceed from the same sort of creativity’ (Guattari, 2009b: 192). Moreover, Guattari champions aesthetic practises in Chaosmosis, explaining that although art does not have a monopoly on creation, ‘it engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being’ (1995: 106). This, then, is art understood in a very broad sense (as a way or style of life, a care for the self) and not in the narrow sense of a specialized, segmented, impoverished domain in contemporary capitalist society (the ‘art market’). Similarly for human geography, we might think of the ethico-aesthetics of technique. A technique, like a model, should only be used once, because to reuse it would be transform it into a general theoretical (or methodological) schematic. Just as relentless reworking of models helped Guattari ensure that metamodelisation never became a general model (O’Sullivan, 2010), so too we might rework technique so that it never became a method.
The danger with the metamodel, we might note, is that is about starting over again. The metamodel is impractical in that it is always operating at the edge, avant-garde in style and resolutely anti-conservative. If the model always has to be made anew, how are certain aspects conserved? What arises is a certain tension between the need to hold on to something of a model (something that works) and the desire for newness (something that is specific). And, of course, Guattari’s claims that there is no pre-given model – that it must always be reconstructed – are vaguely heroic in their incessant demand for newness. 13 Whilst this chimes with the mantra of ‘speed up!’, a gentle counterpoint may be to consider how geographers might recycle (if perhaps not cherish) and reinvent that which has endured.
Guattari’s mania with models and modelisation is important as it invites geographers to reflect further on constructions. This is something that human geographers are readily familiar with – think of the importance of class, gender, economy or representation, to list just a few examples. We want to use Guattari as a platform for extending current thinking about the construction of method, in particular, and how specific techniques might be developed for particular sites or situations. 14 The conundrum posed by Guattari is that approaches need to be adapted to each singular situation – there is no one-size-fits-all method – and yet we need not necessarily start from scratch. The emphasis, then, is not on how we abandon methods that have served us well over the years but rather on how we revitalize and respecify these very methods through the techniques that we develop. This is in keeping with the ethos of many NRTs (see Thrift, 2004) that understand the world as incomplete and inconsistent, necessitating an approach that is animated by a spirit of affirmative experimentation. We think our contribution can be read in this same sense: it offers a way of thinking how to combat the methodological conservatism that permeates undergraduate – and postgraduate – methods courses without disavowing these methods. Guattari encourages us to reflect on the transition from method to technique and foregrounds the import of specificity.
Cartography
Cartography, or map-making, as the royal science of empire par excellence, might on first appearances seem antithetical to the experimental energies of a Guattarian conceptual ethos. What place for this technology of capture in the excesses, flows and transgressions of geographical research? Again, there resounds a sheer impracticality in the imposition of a Euclidean geometry upon the pressing concerns of contemporary social and political life. As a geographer, the temptation is to use Guattari’s cartography as an orienteering device for fieldwork or for conducting research more generally, thus it can be used dangerously to cleave apart subject from object. Worse still, as we mentioned earlier, cartography can be simmered down to mere metaphor, despite the fact that Guattari alongside Deleuze had previously disavowed the notion of metaphor in their reading of Kafka, preferring instead the processual tenor of term ‘metamorphosis’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). How, then, might we harness a Guattarian cartography that holds back from metaphor? One such technique would be to disrupt the epistemological vector of cartography, to unsettle its vertical accord as a science with which to view the world from above, or with which to determine a narrowed, clinical gaze. In other words, it is to mess with the facile practicality of cartography; to refrain from using cartography as an analytical superimposition upon matters of concern, shifting instead towards mapping with Guattari as a mode of opening-up the virtual, of using cartography to produce conceptual and empirical disorientations. As Guattari (1995: 28) himself suggests, ‘the primary purpose … of cartography is thus not to signify and communicate, but to produce assemblages of enunciation’. Immediately, this appeal to an assemblage of enunciation necessarily recognizes the plurivocal potential of cartography, and indeed the multiple lines of flight, desire and politics that constitute cartographic thinking and practice.
Yet let us not pretend any conceptual novelty is afoot; reflecting upon the well-known dubious imperial and belligerent heritage of cartography, Guattari is not saying anything geographers have not said before – critical cartography is a long established and vibrant school of enquiry (see, inter alia, Crampton, 2010; Crampton and Krygier, 2006; Harley, 1989; Harris and Harrower, 2006; Wood, 1992, 2010); and a more troubling, even nefarious, cartographic reason has been disrupted at painstaking length (see Olsson, 2007). That, to purloin a Latourian turn of phrase, cartography has never been representational, that it has always been caught up in some form of geopolitical enunciation are well-rehearsed tenets of a critical approach to cartography, and Guattari joins those geographers highlighting an ongoing problem with the wider understanding of cartography as a straightforward ontological signifier or an epistemological guarantor (see Boria, 2013; Caquard, 2015; Gerlach, 2014; Kitchin and Dodge, 2007; Kitchin et al., 2013). Beyond the narrower confines of strictly cartographic practice, geographers have also been busy in conjuring the conceptual and empirical tools with which to approach broader matters of critical Geographic Information System (GIS), the geoweb and geovisualisation – all through a sustained engagement with social theory (see, e.g. Leszczynski and Wilson, 2013; Wilson and Graham, 2013 15 ). Guattari might, therefore, come to the assistance of geographers interested in unpicking both the metaphysical properties of maps and geographical visualisations more widely whilst also contributing to the unsettled political debate that rages therein. Specifically, Guattari can take further those geographies that assert cartography’s autonomy from its supposed ontological guarantees of accuracy, precision and distance, thereby undoing its ‘semiotic efficiency’, its heretic labour of pulling apart reality from representation. Admittedly, it is not immediately obvious as to how Guattari’s thought translates in this scenario; the situation is not helped insofar as, despite his predilection for maps and mappings, Guattari never thought to think through his version of cartography alongside cartography! Likewise, in his assessment of a burgeoning IWC in The Three Ecologies, Guattari did not anticipate the growing, global interest in drawing maps; a recent explosion in participatory cartographies (Thrift, 2012), analogue and digital that are opening up novel forms of political articulation, whether they be open-source platforms for hobbyist pastimes as in the case of the wiki-based OpenStreetMap or the agitprop in the form of the Atlas of Radical Cartography (Bhagat and Mogel, 2008). The point here is not to make the claim that a Guattarian sense of cartography democratizes or liberalizes the concept or the practice of mapping; such a claim would be to fall into the trap of a suspect liberal overcoding. Nor is the point here to make sense of maps, something geographers continue to pursue, despite its futility when what matters, as Guattari would suggest, is cartography’s ‘asignifying’ properties. No, the point here is to pivot on the minor register of cartography, on its non-representational geopolitics as a way of sustaining an ethos, not least in geographical fieldwork, that emphasizes speculation over certitude, disorientation over orientation; a speculative form of research that ‘makes no pretence of providing a universal structural foundation’ (Guattari, 1996c: 98).
What Guattari’s cartography could contribute to more substantive terms lies less in cartography itself as it does more towards the design and processes of geographical research writ large through a novel focus, or rather a schizoanalytic take, on semiotics 16 and politics, but again recognizing that Guattari’s thinking here is intended to add to, not to usurp geographical scholarship on such matters. First off, human geographical research with Guattari, might negate the semiotic moment of ‘signification’; the need to matter, the need to project signs of meaning, the need for relevance or the insistence on an auto-propositional logic of ‘my research does this’. In other words, human geographical research with Guattari begins with something of a rejection; ‘rejecting all these modes of pre-established encoding, all these modes of manipulation and remote control, rejecting them in order to construct modes of sensibility, modes of relation with the other, modes of production, modes of creativity’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 24, emphasis added). One might (and perhaps should) read this moment of negation as a blunt resistance towards and/or a dismissal of certain methodological tropes in the social sciences – those ‘pre-established encodings’ of subjects, objects, fields, ethics and positionality; encodings that are simultaneously, dare we say, ‘dialectically’, generated by and generative of insipid market intensities in higher education. With Guattari, a mere rejection on its own terms is, of course, never enough. So what else; what of these other modes of production and creativity? In response, a move is needed away from the aforementioned semiotics of research, and instead a concomitant push to the process of semiotisation is required. Semiotisation is, ‘what happens with perception, with movement in space, with singing, dancing, mimicry, caressing, contact, everything that concerns the body’ (Guattari, 2009a: 279). Semiotisation here is clearly a shift from the static heuristic of a cartographic semiotics of sign and signifier to a processual animation of lines of flight and lines of enquiry, a form of opening up the research and its attendant processes so that matters of concern ‘of all kinds… connect and conjoin very different practices relevant, for example, to the arts, sciences, social struggles, etc’ (Guattari, 2011: 171). The motivation of human geographical research (or human geography’s desiring) then becomes less a semiotic practice of staking signs and signifiers in the service of impact, and instead becomes a process of semiotisation, ‘an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially’ (Massumi, 2009: 6). This is about human geographical research working at both a micropolitical register of affect and a more avowedly macropolitical register of institution, policy and representation to disrupt the staid accord of contemporary social sciences, inventing instead techniques that disorientate. It is about creating research that itself can create a ‘set of vectors whereby the virtual and actual come to meet’ (Holmes, 2009: 73), and whereby what is generated does not matter in a clichéd political framework. Indeed the modes of expression and creativity engendered by human geographical research need not attain some degree of infamy to be felt or sensed, instead what we can accentuate is an inhabitation of the mundane and ineffably prosaic. How to put this plainly? When embarking on a research project, start not with the institutional tyranny of what relevance, what impact, what goal your queries might yield. Instead, begin in the middle by not knowing; by allowing Guattari’s schizo-energies and anti-intuitive cartography to disorientate enquiry, disrupt questions and muddle the field.
Circling back to all things mapping, and divorced from its representational certitude, cartography finds greater critical purchase in the context of research; geometric practicality is replaced by affective, virtual impracticality or as Guattari (2009a: 46) puts it, by, ‘a cartography of affects, on the level of daily relationships’. This goes to further disrupt the classically territorial logic of the field in fieldwork; the field diagrammed as the suspiciously bounded space of matter and events. Instead we are encouraging the field itself to be disruptive. Part of this disruption goes back to one of Guattari’s central motifs in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari, 2012), namely, the chaotic passage from speaking of ‘subjected’ groups to speaking of ‘subject groups’ capable of their own articulation. Cartography, when taken metaphorically, or enforced practically in research, creates a subjected field, and therefore a subjected and arguably stilted fieldwork. Through Guattari, and therefore harnessing affect in particular, geographical research can be less encumbered by the excavation of data as it might be concerned with constructing those modes of sensibility suggested in the process of semiotisation. In sum, cartography does not have to be equated with a technocratic form of geographical research, or more specifically, geographical fieldwork.
Strangely enough, even when cartography is deployed as a conceptual metaphor, authors often ignore or negate the product of cartography, specifically, that of the map; cartography in this case is just pure heuristic. Yet whilst we do not pretend that maps are stable artefacts in of themselves, they are nonetheless continually emergent in the practice of cartography. Maps and cartographies, or maps and mappings, are immanent to one another, much like empiricism and conceptualisation. As such we could conceive of geographic research, like maps, as something akin to Guattari’s ‘aesthetic machines’, or to figure research as a machinic process, not in its automotive, industrial sense but in its incessantly productive momentum. 17 This is to think research an ‘anticipatory machine’, always on the cusp of the actual and virtual; ‘a strange contraption’, as Guattari (1995: 92) muses – a machine of virtuality made up of ‘blocks of mutant percepts and affect, half-object, half-subject, already there in sensation and outside themselves in fields of the possible’. If this sounds all too tentative, then so be it; a Guattarian cartography is less a framework as it is an approach or ethos, a way of deranging the subject/object accord of much of social scientific research, instead accentuating the role of bodies in the folds of experience. This also calls into question the themes of ‘participation’ and to be ‘participant’ in geographic research. Participation is often taken as a byword for inclusiveness in research, and it assumes that participants can be cartographically prefigured, but as Massumi (2002: 231) remarks ‘participation precedes recognition’. A Guattarian cartography recognizes how participation is as much about enrolment into the affective as it might be into a representational rhetoric of the ‘democratic’, or as Woodward et al. (2010: 273) suggest, ‘bodies do not merely find themselves in positions of relative or interlocking distribution, but participate in the production of the fields of force through which they aggregate’. To be sure, there are some fantastic examples of attuning to affective modes of participation and keeping company with Guattari in geographical scholarship, notably in the multiverse works of Derek McCormack (McCormack, 2013) in which the choreographic and the cartographic collide, or singularize, to proffer refrains for speculating, researching and micropolitical space times. As the nod to McCormack’s work suggests, Guattari’s appeal is largely confined to cultural geography and to those geographers working in a non-representational register. Yet as McCormack’s work attests to, the transversal nature of Guattari’s thinking and practice – that it cuts across different concerns and different ecologies – must surely be of utility to a broader spectrum of human geographers.
In brief conclusion to this speculation, we might assert that Guattari’s cartography lends not the practicality of stabilization, resolution and render but constantly provides the impractical conditions of apprehension; the uncertainty of the field, the provisional natures of participation and the affective coordinates of writing. Or, to borrow from JD Dewsbury (2014: 151) we ask for cartography to be made apprehensive, ‘not to be certain, to be apprehended, to arrest, to be arrested, to be caught dumbfounded in the flow … of something else’.
III: Impracticality
Throughout these speculative moments, we have raised a number of questions surrounding the political and ethical urgency of what it means to engage with an impractical philosophy. As we noted in the introduction, to privilege the impractical is perhaps a dangerous move, but in the same manner in which, for example, deterritorialization and re-territorialization run immanent to one another, so too does the impractical with the practical. Recalling Oscar Wilde (2001 [1891]) on what counts as a practical scheme, we might regard the practical to be that which can be undertaken in the present conditions; or rather, the practical as the conditioning of possibilities. A preoccupation with the practical, we contend, is a limit to the vibrant potential of geographical research. We are no doubt not the only geographers to be chided by colleagues with self-assumedly more practical credentials for being ‘too theoretical’ or ‘too abstract’, and thus rendered impractical geographers. Yet the impractical, conversely, not only disrupts the ease at which concepts are applied but also operates in and through the register of the virtual. In short, we are not equating the impractical with the impossible; we are, however, suggesting here an abandonment of the ethic and method of ‘application’. This would entail altering the kinetics of geographical research altogether; harnessing a Guattarian ethos that eschews a ponderous dwelling on the efficacy, viability or projected output of an idea, and which instead demands an acceleration in theorizing and conceptualization.
Guattari’s theoretical edifice is at once tantalizing and impenetrable. His concepts, charming, heroic, curiously scientific; his writing, dense, pacey and crazed; and his love of diagrams … all serve to make Guattari’s work impractical in a very immediate sense. If his words and ideas do not pass the threshold of practicality or practicability, then this is precisely to underline what Ian Buchanan (2013) identifies as the deliberate guarding by Guattari against the reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’. It is also to dismiss the snobbery that exists around the supposed gap between style and substance. Style has substance; it is in itself substantial. Substance too, is stylistic, not least because as Goffey (2012) remarks, the plane of expression and content is inseparable from a characteristic pragmatics of style. Likewise, if as Guattari intones, style is a central component of enunciation, we implore those engaged in geographical research to experiment and play havoc with style. Geography, the craft of earth writing, has never been a singular one, or a stable articulation of planetary affairs. Avoid, then, the ‘phantasmic trap’ (Guattari, 1995) laid by those that would have you believe that style over substance is a triumph of the superficial over the profound. Sometimes the self-declared profound gets lost in the mire of liberal earnestness and the superficial, sadly, is ignored despite its lively detail.
Acknowledging the title we have borrowed, and tweaked, from his erstwhile collaborator, we might riff off the idea that although Guattari is difficult – and some people will not get on with his thought – it is not a question of ‘follow[ing] every proposition, mak[ing] every connection – the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway’ (Hurley, 1988: iii). What we are suggesting, then, chimes with Robert Hurley’s invitation to read Deleuze: to read with a different attitude. Reading Guattari may not be anything like reading poetry but neither does it need to be about extracting and applying a practical idea. Instead, as we have been trying to perform in this piece, there is scope to read Guattari in a way that seeks to amplify the resonances between different domains of thought. The impracticality, such as it is, resides in making these relays, these transversal movements; it inhabits the very difficulty in ‘flashes of understanding’.
By way of a brief summary; three motifs, and three provisional transversal movements. First, we turned to existential territories as way of apprehending the ‘thinking spaces’ of disciplines. What makes a discipline, such as geography, cohere are its refrains, its graspings. Of course, these may well be multiple but it also helps to think about the mutating conceptual and practical agendas that constitute a field of work. Existential territories also offer purchase on how we imagine engagements with the empirical, and most pertinently, encounters that make up fieldwork. As per our earlier comment on style, this requires a moment of abandonment. For example, in undertaking fieldwork, excise those identitarian codes and categories which so viciously inhibit the questions that can (or cannot) be posed. We do not offer a substitute here, as the deliberate negation of identity is itself the affirmative step. Second, we attended to metamodelisation as a way of navigating the tortuous passage between method and technique. Without abandoning the generative constraints of orthodox methods, we harness Guattari’s musings regarding the ongoing construction of models to reflect on the fabrication of relation-specific techniques. We do not offer any particular examples – out of fear of lapsing into a practical utility – but suggest that novelty, for the sake of itself, is not necessarily the end goal. It is, instead, of iterating, of experimenting, with geographical technique. Third, we speculated on the potential of cartography’s impracticality; tracing away from its representational certitude, harnessing instead its ability to chart the virtual. This figures maps and mapping as anticipatory machines or abstractions of anticipation that both complicate the matter of the field and likewise give cause to rethink classic axioms such as positionality and participation. In short, this is to decouple once interesting ideas from feminist geographies away from their deadening bind into cartographic logics; the confessional of the penitent researcher in which they prefigure their relation to fieldwork and events. It helps rethink the logic of participation; not enrolment through spurious democratic enumeration but through a speculative, processual series of attachment–detachments, the very matter of geography.
These three speculative moments all stem from an untethering of Guattari’s ideas from a particular context – whether that be institutional psychoanalysis, militant politics or philosophizing – to reflect on the impracticality of theory in human geography. That is to say: the stop, the start, the confusion, the flash, and the shards; the movement from theory to the empirical and back again.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lily Kong and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive, detailed and patient comments. We are also very grateful to the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol and, in particular, to Merle Patchett, JD Dewsbury, Nina Williams, Andrew Lapworth and Tom Roberts. And to Derek McCormack, thank you for leaving the page intentionally blank.