Abstract
This commentary responds to Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis’ focus upon Felix Guattari’s own work and its ethos of what they call an ‘impractical philosophy’. Pivoting off the intellectual courage present in Gerlach and Jellis’ affirmation of the potentialization of ideas that places experiment before judgment, and uncertainty before certainty, I draw attention to three aspects housed within their overall argument: (1) the shift from a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, that (2) rethinks the status and production of subjectivity, and that ultimately (3) pushes the importance for geography as a discipline to be one that takes care of the world’s mental ecologies as much as it does its physical ones.
The tragic
How can a de-alienated, de-serialized subject be reassembled, a subject I call ‘processual’ because it produces its own existence across processes of singularisation, because it engenders itself as an existential territory to the extent that it constitutes itself as an analytic cartography? This is the sticky problem which I have circled for a couple of decades. (Guattari, 1996: 124–125)
My encounters with Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis have always been existential territories that make me smile, an effect that invites me in to share, as much as it is an admiration for, the passion that comes about from their interest in experiment, cartography and ideas. Guattari was known to exhibit a similar humbling warmth, and having recently met some of his collaborators in the flesh (Barbera Glowczewski and Peter Pal Pelbart 1 ) this embrace and openness of thinking with Guattari is perhaps the ember of such encounters that should resonate longest. That ember is I think at the heart of this article, and it is I think the heart of the point that it contains. The point, however, like much of Guattari’s writing, is uncompromising. And so it should be. It asks us to take responsibility for our way of being or style of life. And this is why.
Guattari’s thought pushes against traditional ways of thinking. It does so to present a different logic of social practice through ‘entirely new and singular conceptual operators’ (Sauvagnargues, 2011: 172). These operators are precisely intensive and affective rather than established and comfortable. This goes further than we might be prepared for. However I do not think we are unaccompanied. Scott Sharpe likewise alerts us to the need to open up to other perspectives, cautioning us forcefully to address the fact that ‘…we are working with only one particular (though no doubt historically dominant) understanding of potential’ and of potential’s ‘relationship to reality’ (2014: 34). Presenting, like Sharpe, another particular understanding, Gerlach and Jellis use the signature spirit of Guattari’s thought to solicit a plurally emergent social science, which is no longer interested in the reductionist principles of identity, the steer of one-way casualty in explanation or any inclination towards a conclusive dialectical synthesis (see Bosteels, 1998: 151). The tragedy is that these traditions of social scientific analysis are so established that to think otherwise is inevitably quite destabilizing. The tragedy is not the destabilization, it is that the challenge of such a destabilizing state is too readily dismissed. The tragedy herein is to cede precedence ‘to the finite, delimited and the co-ordinatable, over the infinite and its virtual references’ (Hynes, 2013: 1931). Is such impractical philosophy like Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies worth the effort? Before answering that, a more general question is what is it that we think that we, as academics, do? In part, we all do engage with challenging texts. Here it is no different. We all do engage with challenging empirical encounters. Here it is no different. We all do engage with a passion, a care, and a love for our subjects and here it is no different. We don’t always show the intellectual courage to present the challenges and difficulties in such an engaging and attentive way. I think Gerlach and Jellis do just that, although we need to position this carefully, for there is ‘no room for heroism’ in Guattari’s work (2011a: 35).
In presenting the necessity of thinking otherwise, ‘impractical philosophy’ is quite stringent in never letting go or slipping back into easy explication. Writing is untethered, neologisms and new concepts shove any easy representation of ideas to the side, leaving ideas to hold their own in the very enunciative processes of the thinking that the writing carries. This should be no surprise; as Maria Hynes puts it, there is a ‘shift from the thinker to the thinking’ here (2013: 1936). In reflecting on writing with Gilles Deleuze, Guattari understood such a process as one that exists less as ‘a question of pooling knowledge than of accumulating our uncertainties’ (2009a: 69). 2 The uncertainty principles of problematization and indetermination are to be powerful forces to grapple with, rather than something that we feel the need to argue out of existence. This is the impracticality of the title, and it is no surprise that with such an ethos the argument is to move away from the quick application of ideas towards ‘an acceleration in theorising and conceptualisation’ (Gerlach & Jellis, 2015: 142). An impractical philosophy is then to be understood as a productive force in its own right, echoing Sharpe’s advocacy of impotentiality: ‘the capacity to not exercise one’s potentiality is internal to the very nature of potentiality’ (Sharpe, 2014: 35).
I wonder, as many other readers might, whether compromise is an appropriate response to the force of academic encounters. Should we distil complexity to the point of clarity in encounters between application (empirical and policy oriented presumably) and theory (abstract and obscure in its complexity to everyday comprehension)? The point is I think that we shouldn’t even try. The ideas of Guattari do indeed push us to let go of our differences of approach, to embrace instead the ephemeral and plural differences that emerge in the singularity of the research encounter itself, whether that be with a book, person, art work or thought. We all bring our prior passions to these singular encounters, and of course our past can prejudice the perception that our perspective makes, actualizing the event in a singular way. Still, the event of the present is having as big an impact as the past prejudice, which is focusing the interpretative perspective as it tries to grapple with the necessary newness of the encounter. Guattari’s impractical methods, if we can call them that, are precisely, then, about challenging our prior unconscious complicity and the interiorisation of repression that is at play (Guattari, 2009a: 70). To overcome this repression is to take risks, to invent with ideas, to be expressive in opening up different angles and, subsequently, different modes of expression. As Guattari said, and as I will pick up later,
analytic impact concerns elements that are situated ‘beyond’ individuals, elements found in the socius as well as in the infra personal elements, modes of sensibility, of apperception of time, of relationships to the cosmos, etc.… and defined by what I term abstract machines. (Guattari, 2009b: 43) We are crushed under the weight of mass media, by images of power, by a manipulation of the imagination in the service of an oppressive social order, by the fabrication, whatever the cost, of a majority consensus, by the cult of security, by processes of intoxication that scare people about everything and nothing, infantilizing them to the point that they no longer ask themselves questions. (Guattari, 2009b: 46)
Pushing forward the implications of Guattari’s provocative characterization, I want in what remains to draw attention to three aspects of Guattari’s work, with the idea of amplifying the underlying ethos and power of Guattari’s thinking, which Gerlach and Jellis’ wonderfully written piece bring to light. Firstly, I emphasize the significance of a shift from a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Secondly, I indicate the importance of Guattari’s attention to the conditions under which the production of subjectivities is maximized. And thirdly, I stress the novelty of his ethological thinking, with its shift from a physical to a mental ecology as the paradigm of concern.
Soft seriousness
From a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm
Guattari asks us ‘not to begrudge’ the ‘plethora of qualifiers, or the meaning-overload of certain expressions, or even the vagueness of their cognitive scope: there is no other way to proceed!’ (1996: 97). Indeed, the gesture of his pen acts in many ways as a retroactive apprehension of the immediate expression of his thinking; it is quick and unfamiliar at times, requiring us to be generous rather than reactive. This is the case with impractical philosophy. As such, these practices of writing (Guattari, Gerlach and Jellis), schizoanalytic metamodelling at work, make a performative argument in themselves, being precisely ‘a way of thinking that bypasses language’ (Watson, 2008). As Samuel Beckett commented on the work of James Joyce, a significant influence and favoured author of Guattari, ‘If you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it’ (Beckett, 1983: 171). Such decadence, Beckett suggests, manifests as a demand for ‘dribbling comprehension’ in the face of a direct expression that does not immediately mean.
It is significant, then, that Gerlach and Jellis’ style works to draw the reader in, only to immediately frustrate any chance of comfort that a thinker or discipline might find in the familiar territory of a cartography. Because, as Guattari insists, cartography is always a potentialization of ideas, a doing that is less a practice and more a singularizing action, a mapping that would appeal less to the mimetic and more to the autopoietic. The map is less an illustrative tool for analysis designed to communicate and signify, and more that helps to produce new subject formations, which are auto-referential in that they have singular manifestations and irreversible durations. The danger here is that this can strain the purpose of a map beyond recognition – but this is where the cartography is meant to be immediately practical. As an object for subsequent use, the map is no longer guaranteed to be practical for anyone else other than its cartographer.
Gerlach and Jellis highlight well the novel contribution that Guattari makes to a cartographic, as opposed to representational, analysis of space, yet I am not entirely at ease with their interpretation that the geographic concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s co-authored work are more Guattarian than Deleuzian. This is not to say that I see the co-authorship of Deleuze and Guattari as ‘co-extensive in an immanent process of production through assemblage’ (Gerlach & Jellis, 2015; quoting Nadaud, 2006: 13). In fact, I think the distinctions between the two authors are really quite interesting and the flow of ideas between them worth mapping. In insisting on the distinctness of these thinkers’ contributions, I express my solidarity with the spirit of Gerlach and Jellis’ argument; namely, to protest against the faddishness that would deem Guattari the new Deleuze. We can of course already see ample development of spatial ideas in Deleuze’s single authored work, such as in the Logic of Sense where an extensive view of space is deployed towards a description of the expressionistic actualization of intensities. Equally, we can gain a sense of the influence of the thinkers upon each other by the intersection of biographical and philosophical events. So, for example, we can intimate the productive effects of Deleuze’s first meeting with Guattari from the changing emphasis in Deleuze’s interpretation of involuntary memory – from the narrating position of the protagonist of A Search for Lost Time, written before their meeting, to the ‘writing machine’ of Proust and Signs, written after. The point is not to produce a definitive attribution of ideas, an endeavor that would better belong to a scientific than an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. These are not representational tracings of lineages (which ideas come from which authorial subject) but cartographic mappings with the potential to open up new lines of production, not only of thought but of subjectivity.
In twosome twominds
The production of subjectivity
In the first of their speculative moments, that of existential territories, Gerlach and Jellis spotlight and problematize geography’s seemingly self-appointed and supposedly ideal position for interdisciplinarity, and thus remind us of Guattari’s caution against the ‘facile intercommunication of the different disciplines’ (2011b: 42). According to Gerlach and Jellis, ‘an existential territory is a background hum of experience; a way of existentially knowing yourself, without recourse to everyday labels, categories, and identities’’ (2015: 136). If we are indeed open to interdisciplinary encounters we might, then, be less quick to egotistically assert our expertise in fieldwork, in map reading, contemporary philosophy, archival adeptness and social scientific methodologies. Indeed, doubt is then in this sense the existential territory that produces the subject of invention in the space of the uncertainty generated in interdisciplinary encounter.
Again, this echoes the shift that Guattari announces from a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm as that which Gerlach and Jellis see as the crucial aspect if we are to maximize the potentials of interdisciplinarity beyond a reassertion of geographic turf staking. Interdisciplinarity, Guattari’s work implies, is not so much an attitude that one chooses to adopt towards the world, but is a space in which new thinking subjects are produced. To suggest, then, that the production of subjectivities is facilitated within spaces of uncertainty is to depart sharply from the Cartesian founding of the scientific attitude on the negativity of doubt. Uncertainty here is precisely not an epistemological lack because there is no doubting subject before the world, only processes of subject production that take place in maximally open existential territories. It is this that interdisciplinarity can do, to the extent that we allow its exercise to unsettle, to put us into the existential territory that is ‘twosome twominds’, rather than recolonize.
Such resistance to the colonization of subjectivity along controlled and predictable lines is, as Gerlach and Jellis astutely note, especially important in light of Guattari’s concerns about the threats he saw in his own time to the productive potentials of existential territories. Reflecting on our present, Gerlach and Jellis target ‘the blogosphere’, social media being a concern of Guattari’s, as a space preaching to a minor set, a list of the already-converted. They worry about the instrumentalism of much contemporary culture and see the promise of new thinking territories being foreclosed by the neoliberal imperatives governing much higher education (promote thyself, generate impact, name thy contribution). I think there is a lot that is true in this, and I share their concern with those instances of ‘capitalist subjectivity’ that seek ‘to gain power by controlling and neutralising the maximum number of existential refrains’ (Guattari, 2000: 45).
This is why Guattari turns to schizophrenia, a turn that certainly does not aim to romaniticize the clinical condition but takes as an inspiration the operational logic of a body that is not settled in one disposition or another. There are social and political implications to this shift. The real novelty of Guattari’s thinking opens up in his later refusal to stay engaged within, and bound by, the existing terms of debate. In this regard his earlier work on molecular revolutions, whilst shifting the terms of debate through the notion of the molecular, still stays within the imaginary established by the idea of revolution. By the end of the 80s we see a classically Deleuzian emphasis in Guattari’s thought on plural processes of individuation over the meaning frame of the individual perspective. Guattari thus shifts from a representational theatre to presentational production as he looks to cite a series of exemplary productions of what he calls the machinic unconscious (cf. Aisthesis, Ranciere, 2013). Yet it is in his later work on ecosophic objects (1990 on) that Guattari’s thought radically opens beyond the terrain of the given. Here his aesthetic concern for a pluralizing attentiveness to cultural and mental ecologies enables a break from the reductionism of political economy (Watson, 2009: 182/184) and an invention of new possibilities for the affirmation of transformation. 3
Ethological thinking
The three ecologies – from physical to mental ecologies
It would be an error to reduce Guattari’s The Three Ecologies to a statement solely and primarily about the physical environment. Guattari’s interviews at this time target his concern for the loss of mental ecologies as well as the care for their production and the subjectivities and values that they instill. As Sauvagnargues points out, ‘following Bateson, Guattari opens thinking onto ecology, freeing the latter of its grumpy and backward looking connotations of the preservation of nature, to open up to a veritable clinical analysis of culture’. (Sauvagnargues, 2011: 173).
Guattari clearly felt that the techno-scientific revolutions of his time, and still of ours, had not been met with a similar revolution in social organization (see Guattari, 2000: 17). He suggested that we need to dwell longer on the fact that capitalism produces more than just commercial goods and services, producing, rather, institutions, systems of perception, behaviours, imaginary representations and submission to hierarchies of organization and their dominant value systems. It is not so much that the techno-scientific is being produced by the organization system of capitalism but that new modes of thinking are being generated in the mutual emergence of flesh and machine.
This is to rearticulate ‘the relationship between the aesthetic and the political’ in such a way as to ‘return forms to the process of their constitution’ (Alliez and Massumi, 2014: 15). We should be alert to the fact that Guattari’s institutional targets are precisely those of social science: social resources (health, education, leisure and the like), mass media as the ‘modelization of individuals’ as much as for communication, and means of transportation that transform territorialities, splintering our spaces of belonging. In thinking different ethologies in response to this malaise, Guattari wants us to be able to hold onto, to map at least for a while, the spontaneous social ecologies that generate new existential territories that replace ‘the former religious and ritualised grindings of the socius’ (2000: 64). Thinking with Guattari requires that we affirm and reinvigorate our experimental care for mental and social ecologies, as much as we assume a care for the state of the physical ecology of our natural environment. The impact of Guattari’s provocation is well captured in the question: How do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos? (Guattari, 2000: 71).
The vertigo of immanence
Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. This is why we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our style of life’. (Deleuze, 1983:1)
Gerlach and Jellis ask us to be receptive and honest in our encounter with their portrait of Guattari, a solicitation to do precisely what one would imagine Pierre-Felix would have wanted: to make new connections with his texts, and therefore his passions, ideas, political concerns and care. It is not a question of filtering the encounter with his texts through our own expectations and comfort zones but of adopting a way of being – an evaluation – adequate to their force. There is a systematic disorganization at play here but never do we lose a sense of the consistency of endeavour in Guattari, nor in the argument that Gerlach and Jellis provide. A reading of Guattari can easily lose some of the conceptual valency of his ideas and considerable work is involved in engaging thoroughly with his texts so as to maximize the impact of their richness. For geography, a greater attunement to the degradation of our incorporeal species would be a timely intervention in the 21st century. And were it to take the risk of entering the unfamiliar existential territories that Gerlach and Jellis rightly identify with Guattari’s work, geography might indeed have an important role to play in the reinvigoration and invention of mental ecologies.