Impracticality and critique in a problematic field

Social science sometimes takes it for granted that bringing ‘theory’ into the fold means running a gauntlet between praxis and application. However, as the conditions that ostensibly ground theory and render it valuable, practicality and applicability can also wind up inflecting and shaping theoretical problems. Challenging this recursive tendency, Guattari’s philosophy creates a procedure – metamodelling – for initiating interactions between theoretical systems without the usual encumbrances of bureaucratic and scientistic protocols. According to Gerlach and Jellis, this not only circumvents “the reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’” (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015: 142), it introduces a theoretical ‘anti-criterion’ for human geography: impracticality.

Of course, many of Guattari’s projects were deeply practical. He was a member of numerous political and anti-psychiatric organizations – for example, the workers’ brigades of the 1960s–1970s and numerous ‘institutional sub-ensemble[s]’ at La Borde clinic (Guattari, 2006: 69–71). Many of these projects revolved around stable practices and, with the obvious exception of their Freudo-Lacanianian facets, Guattari rarely insisted that they be simply abolished. Rather, as his philosophical works argue, social, psychic, political, physical and other ‘molar’ structures operate in tandem with complex ‘molecular’ elements that operate ‘“without guarantee”, charged with a potential for possibilities’ (2013: 64). This molar-molecular system constitutes a ‘problematic field’ of site-specific, dynamic (as opposed to general and reductive) relations. Molar structures negotiate and incorporate molecular contingencies, whilst molecular materials introduce points of destabilization in sedimentary molar systems. Here, practice can no more be theorized in advance than it can serve as theory’s transcendent condition. An energetic defender of both, Guattari recognizes that practice and theory grow and evolve alongside the singular distribution of components that compose the systems they engage.

Mindful of this, Gerlach and Jellis challenge the conviction that a theoretical work’s value must be measured by its translatability into ‘application’. Guattari criticized similar notions within twentieth century ‘institutional therapy, institutional pedagogy, [and] the fight for social emancipation’, all of which grew increasingly ‘overcoded’ by variants of Freudianism and Marxism (Guattari, 1996: 268). The antithesis of problematic approaches, overcoding subsumes disparate systems under a supplemental, overarching relation: in therapeutic practice, for example, the Oedipal triangle overcodes subjectivity and the unconscious; and in politics, the sovereign, the state, or the party overcodes a complex field of social relations. By contrast, Guattari develops ‘an analytical method capable of cutting through all these fields’ without simultaneously reducing them (1996: 268). This ‘transversal’ approach merges varied existential and virtual elements – materials, groups, disciplines, theories, affects, environments – whose resulting ‘contingent topographies’ (2013: 22) require new maps for charting their immanent functions, assemblies and problems. This makes him something of an anti-Frankenstein: rather than obsessing over a ‘whole’ being – the monster – he concentrates on the field of disparate, agglomerating ‘parts’. The latter viewpoint characterizes metamodellization, which “does not establish itself as an overcoding of existing models, but as a procedure of ‘automodellization’ which takes over all or parts of the existing models in order to construct its own cartographies, its own references and therefore its own analytical approach and methodology” (1996: 268–69). Not only does this approach’s suppleness offer more avenues for theory and practice, it also grows its own very different conditions for application.

Consider the experience of ‘wakeful dreaming’ whilst driving. For Guattari, this can involve ‘several systems of consciousness [that] function in parallel’ (2013: 22). Sometimes, for example, certain ‘processes of conscientialization’ – road watching, accelerator pedal pressure, acute steering wheel adjustments – shift to the ‘background’. At other times, interruptive signs – stop lights, screaming passengers – shift those processes back to the ‘forefront’ and ‘re-establish a sequence of hyper-vigilance’ (2013: 22). Seeking to describe the dynamic convergence of these assemblages, metamodellization might bring together, say, elements of phenomenology (2013: 34) – the familiar experience of driving that incorporates the automobile ‘into the bulk of our own body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1958: 166, 304–06) – with cybernetic theory’s ‘machinic enslavement’ (Guattari, 2013: 22) – the reflexive alignment with signs such as stop lights and road signs, lanes and speedometers. Such mixing of disparate perspectives would appear ‘impractical’ or nonsensical to the more figural intuitions of many of Guattari’s contemporaries (Figure 1). However, by jumping the usual critical barriers, metamodellization enables the user to remap these dynamic and multiple coordinates of consciousness.

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Figure 1.

Guattari’s Renault-BMW meets phenomenology’s fiat.

This procedure also offers versatile avenues for generating problems across disciplines. For this reason, human geography’s longstanding openness to assimilating its theoretical ‘outsides’ has always struck me as more than a little Guattarian. This is also why I find it strange that Gerlach and Jellis sometimes regard that openness with anxiety and ressentiment. They regret, for example, the ‘otherwise palpable rush to ‘French Theory’ in some quarters of cultural geography’ and condemn its ‘bizarre moments of conceptual muddle’ – in particular, the ‘straw shibboleth’ varieties of ‘Brand non-representational theory’ (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015: 134). Of course, every field has its stronger and weaker projects – even French theory has its neo-liberalist ‘New Philosophers’, whom Deleuze, usually a model of bourgeois manners, famously denounced as a ‘goon squad’ (Deleuze, 2007: 142) of ‘TV baffoons’ (quoted in Tho and Bianco, 2013: xxxix). But dolorous disciplinary kvetching – surely as common a compulsion as ‘application’ among critical geographers – strikes an odd chord in a work devoted to the impractical. Guattari grants himself considerable leeway to pick up and discard concepts as they suit the experiment – a practice that sometimes leads to exciting discoveries and sometimes makes a metamuddle. Gerlach and Jellis maintain a much harder line in seeking police ‘sledgehammer theorizing’ and ‘misguided appropriation’ (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015: 134). I support the idea of bringing Guattari to human geography, but not if his value can only be rendered through negative dialectics. Why dwell upon perceived shortcomings when there are new theoretical ‘zones of hyper-complexity’ (Guattari, 2013: 137) to explore and the inner-workings of successful theoretical engagements to diagram (both crucial components of metamodellization; see, for example, Guattari, 2006: 69-71; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008)? As widespread university neo-liberalization makes jobs for theorists increasingly scarce and precarious, why form identity parades and name names of those who are tested and somehow found wanting? Why proprietary wagon circling instead of alliance and solidarity?

Guattari’s ‘cartographies of unconscious subjectivity’ (2013: 137) offer pathways for working through these questions. One of the nuances to his engagement with unconscious processes is his contention that a broad variety of assemblages of enunciation can be repeated as oppressive structures within everyday thoughts and practices. In Gerlach and Jellis’s opening critiques, for example, the identification of supposed theoretical transgressions fosters anxious incorporeal transformations that segregate misguided appropriation from ‘remarkable space-times research’ (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015: 134). Here, the authoritarian and proprietarian implications of phrases such as ‘misguided appropriation’ are paramount. On the one hand, the notion parrots ubiquitous statist processes that render individuals recognizable and therefore available to structures of organization, discipline and control: ‘identity is often linked to recognition. When the police ask for someone’s identity card, it’s precisely in order to identify them, to recognize them socially’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 93). On the other hand, it invents and regulates group distinctions regarding who can and cannot access theoretical knowledge: ‘One of the conditions for the maintenance of capitalistic societies is that they should be modelled on a certain axiomatic of subjective segregation’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 107). That is, authoritarian social structures served by identification repeat broader processes of statist subjectivation; and proprietarian social structures served by segregation repeat broader processes of capitalist subjectivation.

The flexibility of these oppressive tendencies means that they can be repeated across a variety of social processes. For example, capitalism frequently avails itself of the ‘collective fantasies of the danger of so-called marginal people’ – racist, sexist and homophobic imaginaries – that do the work of ‘capturing the processes of singularization and immediately framing them in references—affective references, theoretical references introduced by specialists, references of segregatory collective facilities’ (2008: 108). Here, unconscious processes that devalue labor and maintain a fragmented workforce migrate to other relations and, operating immanently to them, delegitimize political positions, force struggles to the margins, and so on. Where this operates within critique’s system of references, stark distinctions emerge as though spontaneously (in the space of a few, simple sentences) between, say, ‘sledgehammer theorists’ and ‘remarkable space-times researchers’. Equally spontaneous is the almost stigmergic tendency at the scene of theoretical production to deploy a ‘thou shalt not’ on behalf of a discipline that seeks to overcode future scholarly trajectories with its distinctions.

Compare this to Guattari’s method, which introduces series of questions as a strategy for forming problematic fields from disparate materials. Forget for a moment what you have been told you can and cannot do, ignore any ridicule about ‘misappropriation’ or ‘bastardization’. Instead, take a moment to move slowly through Guattari’s following questions and consider how these rearrange and illuminate problems within your own work, whatever that may be:

How does one Assemblage relay another Assemblage so as to ‘administer’ a given situation? How does an analytic Assemblage, or one that is alleged such, mask another? How do several Assemblages enter into relation and what is the result? How are the potentialities for the constitution of new Assemblages to be explored in a context that appears totally blocked? How are the relations of production, of proliferation and the micropolitics of these new Assemblages to be ‘aided’ in such a case? (Guattari, 2013: 20)

Whilst the technical language makes an important difference, the structure and arrangement of Guattari’s questions are crucial. Their answers will differ dramatically depending on how the reader distributes them in relation to variables from her or his own research. Doing so is not an exercise in ‘applying’ Guattari. Rather, it is a matter of situating certain elements in immanent relation to series of questions. If this is practical, it is in a way that application fetishists can only pretend to be. It is practice that is immanent to a problematic field: immersed practice. Likewise, its answers are site specific and arise from the field of relations of which they are a part.

In the short space that remains, these relations might be considered in light of an occurrence Guattari witnessed while visiting Brazilian leftists:

I was with a group of friends from the left (or one could even say the far left), in a very warm, friendly environment, and at about midnight a black woman who had been in the audience from the start raised an issue. She said: “The black movement is beginning to organize seriously in Brazil, and I would like to give you some documents.” Later, I realized … that during the 10 or 15 minutes when we were talking the audience dispersed … It is through these tiny things that one realizes what is happening. (2008: 106)

Guattari’s story is a reminder that unconscious ‘subjective processes’ can be as invisible to ‘minor’ politics as they are to molar logics of oppression, all of which can be articulated according to a problematic field of Assemblages. For him, the audience’s departure articulates a ‘total divestment from the black issue … on the unconscious level … even in the minds of those who have perfectly correct political positions in relation to it’ (2008: 106–107). Thus, the ability for an assemblage to shift its potentialities, he suggests, must be grasped in terms of the mechanics of its dynamic psychic, social, political and so on, situatedness. This means, in part, resisting the compulsion to identify and segregate:

The point at which the problematics of the unconscious link up with political problematics lies precisely in the idea that it is not just a question of identifiable or identified subjectivities, but of subjective processes that are not grasped by identities. (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 93).