Guattari,ideology and the ironies of theoretical (im)practice

It is a pleasure to see Félix Guattari’s singularly multifarious oeuvre embraced by geographers, and an honour to receive the opportunity to place this in some context. My contextualization will point at several ironies. The first is that Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis (2015: 131) hugely exaggerate Guattari’s impact on our discipline, within which he would be becoming a ‘substantial figure’. Whilst much of their argument depends on geography’s alleged ‘rush to operationalize’ Guattari, one would be hard pressed to find evidence for such a rush. The exaggeration is unsurprising, however, because it is symptomatic of a pronounced desire in some corners of British cultural geography to establish a rapid series of self-referential theoretical bandwagons (Derrida-Foucault-Latour-Deleuze-Badiou-Meillassoux- … Laruelle?), the latest of which can then be claimed from a self-appointed position of stewardship. A related second irony is that this quick turnover and territorialisation of resounding Parisian names (‘hyper-faddishness’ and ‘turf staking’, as Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 132) themselves call it) is sometimes decried by the same authors who benefit from it.

Now, within a market economy there is nothing unusual about the frenzied celebration of the new and still-unknown. But the third irony here, and what I would like to protest especially, is that the ethical and political impetus behind the ‘French Theory’ brand, as François Cusset (2008) reminds us in the preface to French Theory, was to yield frameworks for dismantling, or at least critiquing, the power dynamics of liberal capitalism. Post-structuralism is incomprehensible outside the intellectual fervent around May 1968, especially Deleuze and Guattari’s bombshell of 1972, Anti-Oedipus (1983). It is not that Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 131) do not know this, and they seem to know Cusset’s argument. Still, we should ask why introducing Guattari at a time of global political febrility occurs without discussing the contemporary relevance of his politics.

Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 133) provocatively claim that Guattari’s ‘philosophy’ is ‘impractical’. Guattari himself would immediately retort that it is Deleuze who is the philosopher, and he the practitioner. All Deleuze and Guattari do throughout their collaborative oeuvre is affirm the fully connective dimension of the concepts they devised, the famous ‘and … and … and …’. Guattari especially was constantly seeking and deepening the possibilities of ‘transversal’ cross-pollination between clinical practice, political militancy, scientific and pedagogical experimentation, art, literature and underground media. This resistance against the repressive simplifications of the public sphere is what he called molecular revolution. Even a cursory look makes clear that changing the world was a veritable obsession. This makes the insistence on impracticality both methodologically perplexing and politically perverse.

At the theoretical level too praxis is as fundamental to Guattari’s thinking as it is to the Marxist tradition from which he hails. Against the formalisms of linguistics and semiotics, of the exhausted orthodoxy in Marxist-Leninism, and of the hyperclarity of Maoism and Lacan, Guattari embraced a joyful interdisciplinarity whilst declaring a heretic allegiance to the empirical sciences and American pragmatism. A Thousand Plateaus, that quintessential book of multiple authorship, hands-on relevance and radical open-endedness, is famously introduced as a cog in the same social and physical assemblages that it theorizes (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 4). Thought intervenes in reality, or it is nothing. Indeed, the minor fourth irony is that Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 133) cite but do not discuss Deleuze’s influential study of Spinoza, subtitled Practical Philosophy (1988). Why would Deleuze call Spinoza’s notoriously abstract post-Cartesian ‘geometrical’ method practical, if not to sympathize with Althusser’s program for renewing ‘theoretical practice’? More pertinently, how does the desire for impracticality avoid landing us back into the musty armchairs which May 1968 pulled us away from? In short, the call for an ‘ethos’ of impracticality is nothing less than an obscurantist tactic of depoliticization on a par with New Age writings, except it’s secular and much smarter.

Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 132) are correct to insist that human geography undermine the hegemonic utilitarian paradigm in which concepts are only valid in their applicability. But though there is need for renewing the critique of instrumentality, to exclude the rich work of the Frankfurt School is another ideologically motivated decision (see for example Schecter, 2010). Critical theory is yet to absorb Deleuze and Guattari’s contributions. The mania for adapting thought to a cybernetic present, the non-negotiable imperative for formulating ‘relevance’ to ‘society’ for funding as well as the unabashedly individualist celebration of the personological dimensions of knowing (How does this book make you feel? What affects does this landscape secrete to me?) reveal more complex regimes of technocratic dominance than what critical theory and Heidegger complain about. Through the affective and monetary profits it affords, the neoliberal ideology of practicability is simultaneously obscuring and individualizing. This means that ideology is not a screen between self and world, but constitutes subjectivity from within.

What Guattari calls machinic enslavement is a matter of technological gadgetry, logistics and the neurotic desire for one’s own oppression (the famous focus of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, barely noted in geography). Thinking itself cannot completely escape ideology. The fifth irony is that Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 141) themselves intuit that intellectuals are only minimally different from the masses when it comes to the machinic slotting of the unconscious – and the entire body – into competitive relations and state institutions (but this minimal difference makes all the difference). One key way the Deleuze-Guattarian approach to repression departs from the traditional concept in Georg Lukács (1971) of ‘false consciousness’ (always in inverted commas) within both bourgeoisie and proletariat is that the latter understands ideology’s reproducibility as predicated not on the distortion of an economic reality prior to representation, but on the fact that reality is already self-distorting, deceptive and immaterial. The concomitant sixth irony of this article is that Guattari provides excellent tools to examine the machinic workings of neoliberal institutions like GIS and the Research Excellence Framework, but they are left unused in favour of being impractical. Such a blanket refusal of politics demonstrates nicely how ideology is seldom simply ignorance or duplicity, but can occur through the very consciousness calling itself innovative and unencumbered.

The article’s impractical acceleration is declared against a ‘mantra’ of slowing down. It is true Guattari’s thinking is extremely mobile and eclectic. It is also true slowing down in order to resist a global system of speeds – think of slow food – is politically dubious. But embracing acceleration in the hope of obtaining deterritorializations beyond a point that capitalism can still reproduce itself is a juvenile Romanticism, tipping over into either anarchism or nihilism. If this line of reasoning has recently been proclaimed under the flag of accelerationism, it is precisely by bypassing every nuance in the poststructuralist engagements with the critique of ideology, political economy and universal history. This is a seduction well known to Marxists. Gerlach and Jellis (2015) seem unaware they are risking the same tendencies towards masculinist and fascist aestheticism which Benjamin Noys (2014) correctly identifies in accelerationism. The desire for deterritorialization has some textual basis in Deleuze and Guattari, but much more so in Baudrillard and Lyotard. From clinical and militant experience, Capitalism and Schizophrenia often argues that deterritorialization quickly turns ‘microfascist’, that is, self-glorifying, destructive and suicidal.

Now, the seventh irony is that despite its accelerationist declaration this article is in fact a slowing-down of Guattari’s spitfire concept creation. No new concepts are introduced, no expansion of human geography’s empirical purview is achieved and no new linkages attempted with real activist, therapeutic, ecological or cartographic struggles. It is unclear where one should look for the ‘experimentation’ promised in the article’s abstract. A modest slice is cut through Guattari’s overflowing oeuvre to condense in fairly straightforward English what is most legible, recognizable, practical to geographers already friendly to Deleuze and Guattari. What the article says it does, then, is not what it does. Explicating a few almost randomly selected Guattarian terms, it does not itself inhabit the speeds of Guattari’s subversion in order to create a ‘re-singularized’ geography by means of its own novel jargon.

I am not arguing for more eclecticism and jargon. For me the late Guattari (2013) aestheticizes politics to the precise extent that he loses his rigor and focus in a maelstrom of verbiage. A relative slowing-down is what should be done in poststructuralist theorizing today, especially in the initial encounter between British human geography and a French author from a very different intellectual and militant background. Guattari’s ecstatic, almost desperately pluriform apparatus does not require mimicking in order to obtain productive effects. When his exuberance is choreographed into a more sober arrangement new readers more can appreciate the stakes and inheritances involved. It is not pedagogy per se that is the impetus of slowing-down, but an ethics, that of sharing the affects of theoretical revolution. But here comes the rub. Even when Guattari’s background is one few geographers are familiar with, instead of sharing the ability to map it, this article has chosen further obfuscation.

One of the article’s merits is that, following from Gerlach’s promising work (2014), it suggests Guattari (2014) can inspire a progressive spatial science. Schizoanalytic cartography would go against the market-friendly positivism map-making is otherwise ensnared in. The simple question I have is why Guattari’s cartography and meta-modelling are not introduced by way of the more familiar critiques of the ideology of maps and the subsequent micropolitics of countermapping and critical GIS (e.g. Harley, 2001; countercartography.com). It is characteristic of most geographical engagements with Deleuze and Guattari that their proximity to the critique of ideology (in the likes of Althusser, Marcuse and more recently Žižek) are implicitly yet utterly denied. It is precisely this proximity that required distantiation. Like the US literary theorists Cusset writes about, British geographers all too often mistake this distantiation of post-structuralism from Marxism for total rejection. This results in a loss not only of theoretical nuance but political relevance. The eighth irony is that in British geography this loss occurs despite, or precisely through, the frequent use of the term ‘politics’ (or ‘micropolitics’), especially in nonrepresentational theory (NRT). Disturbingly for any French intellectual, even the conservative ones, politics becomes synonymous with denying the importance of a revolutionary legacy.

The questions levelled at the critical tradition by poststructuralist thinkers are in British circles usually read to imply that critique is no longer necessary, or even possible. Hence most post-structuralist geographers barely mention capitalism. Leafing through Guattari’s work immediately shows his lasting commitment to reworking Marx’s analysis of money as well as Lenin’s belief in concerted international change. From his Trotskyite youth to his support of Italian communist dissidents, from his meetings with Maoists and then union organizer Lula da Silva in Brazil to the most obtuse formalizations in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013), Guattari was throughout explicitly devoted to critiquing the subjection to capital and the state and to conceiving new revolutionary tactics. Today, given the overwhelming tendencies towards an evangelical humanism on the right and dogged anti-authoritarianism on the left, there is no doubt Guattari would join Alain Badiou (2010) in calling for a retrieval of communism as organizing principle for all revolutionary politics. This is after all exactly what he did with Toni Negri when state communism was collapsing (Guattari and Negri, 1990).

Anti-Oedipus is only one, though surely the most brilliant, explorations of the ever-pregnant space between psychoanalysis and Marxism, the discourses most capable of exposing the knotty logics of ideology and reinventing the arts of revolution. However often Guattari rebukes them, or perhaps precisely because of this, the pioneering, very weird ‘mathemes’ of his erstwhile teacher Jacques Lacan, who introduced topology, algebra and logic into psychoanalytic theory, are indispensable to understand Guattari’s turn towards excessive modelling. Likewise, ‘existential territories’ obviously hark back to the Marxist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had influenced an entire generation. Whilst it is not necessary to heap up influences to appreciate the originality of a particular thinker’s trajectory, leaving out altogether Guattari’s indebtedness to psychoanalysis and existentialism makes his intervention appear as little more than a free-floating bricolage of neologisms and metaphor. Again, the practical nature of Guattari’s theorizing is then flatly denied.

The upshot of the Anglo-American erasure of communism, Lacan and May 1968 from French Theory is that the critique of ideology has become more necessary than ever before. The ninth irony is that Guattari himself would note that today’s social scientists seem uninterested in preventing the circumscription of their agenda by the powers and markets that be. Whilst post-structuralism is largely a continuation by other means of the Kantian critical project, most poststructuralist geography has been little more than a refurbishing of humanistic geography’s vindication of the ordinary and the poetic at the expense of rethinking machinic enslavement and collective struggle. As Althusser (2005) intimated, critical thinking (‘science’) forever struggles to extricate itself from the unconscious work it does in reproducing social formations (‘ideology’ like Marx’s own humanism). Deleuze and Guattari take issue with Althusser’s orthodoxy and structuralist ontology. But in bringing the question of political organization into the spaces of sexuality, art and technology, as well as re-politicizing the more conventional spaces of unions, education, policing and parliamentary representation, they aim to be even more astute than Althusser and Lukács in their analysis and subversion of the significations and subjections that capitalism consists of.

To speak to the well-known friction the article mentions between critical geography and NRT, Guattari is, despite appearances, more comfortable with the former than the latter. He would appreciate the transversal leaps, flamboyant registers and non-human indices of NRT. His work evinces some the same continuous negative self-definition through attacking the rigid and stale methods of the majoritarian social sciences. But although style is important to Deleuze and Guattari, they know how easily it aestheticizes and overshadows politics. As Guattari’s oeuvre is from start to finish the advocacy of the possibility of revolution he would be puzzled by NRT’s refusal to develop any novel framework for researching environmental stress, financialization, xenophobia, UK–US imperialism, peak oil, electronic waste or any other crisis. Worse, NRT’s flirtatious vindication, against an allegedly embittered left, of capitalism’s technological and infrastructural achievements under the banner of a politics of ‘affirmation’ would deeply disturb him.

Fleeing all this petty bourgeois and Eurocentric exuberance – all this humanism – Guattari would soon join the camp of critical geographers, however insipid be their writing style. He would feel immediate affinity with David Harvey’s (2012) hope for more urban uprisings and collectivist experimentation in the wake of the Arab Spring and protest movements. In fact, he would find Harvey’s Lefebvrian take still a little too rosy, localist and Eurocentric – not communist enough. But despite the immense influence of Harvey’s Marxist humanism, critical geography is theoretically and stylistically as diverse as poststructuralist geography. The tenth irony is that Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, like rhizome, deterritorialization, flow, assemblage, affect and earth, have been more constructively developed in critical geography than in NRT (e.g. Bonta and Protevi, 2004; Braun, 2006; Gidwani, 2008; Kamaran, 2012). Deleuze and Guattari have been more faithfully adopted to critique real-world capitalism and biopolitics – to entwine practice and theory – than to taunt the ostensible representationalism of social science peers.

Fidelity to Guattari does not have to be a question of purging geography’s ranks of ‘revisionists’ and ‘opportunists’. Still, it is important to understand how and why any theoretical field divides into contradictions, camps, generations and truces, a basic Althusserian approach continued today in the most sophisticated manner by Badiou (2010). If we compare today’s Anglophone human geography with the Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s and 1970s, it is evident that we need more line drawing and rigour. Instead of a theory mishmash and a train of bandwagons wherein novelty resides only in adding yet another bandwagon with as much jargon as possible, we need more fidelity and disavowal, more attacks and counter-attacks and more confident idiosyncrasy and inauguration. Debate does not have to be ad hominem or nitpicky, as unfortunately (but for good reason) sometimes happens in Marxist and psychoanalytic circles when defending party lines. As Guattari’s interventions exemplified, the debate about concepts only aims at overcoming real-world problems. For this endeavour, a split between post-structuralism and Marxism is of the least interest.

From its beginnings in Europe and Asia, philosophy has been about line-drawing and faithful emendation. Theory operating through collage alone, without careful critique and contextualization, does not take its own societal privilege seriously. From its beginnings in the French Revolution, modern politics and the intellectual enthusiasm for particular mass events have demanded clarity about where one stands. (To start with, on the left or the right? It is seldom apparent in nonrepresentational geography.) If we rest pleased with a self-referential theoretical discourse, we lose track of the very nature of most of theory’s conceptual architectonics, we lose its machinic connectivity. More specifically, it goes against Guattari’s ethos to enjoy the recombining of big names and important-sounding terms by deliberately isolating them from their critical intentions and militant commitments. Theory for the sake of theory is the most pernicious form of ideology.