Friday, 3 August 2018

Ecosophy, Assemblage and the Symbiocene...!

GUATTARI’S ECOSOPHY | Heather G-Spencer

At the start of The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari reminds us of the ‘ecological disequilibrium’ that threatens ‘the continuation of life on the planet’s surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating’.

Guattari catalogues the degradation of the soil, water, and air, the massive economic crises, the increasing gaps between the wealthy and poor, the unfettered racism and sexism, and he argues that we need a new type of theory, a new philosophy, that can help us grapple with all of these overlapping problems.

Guattari writes, ‘political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues . . . only an ethico-political articulation—which I call ecosophy . . . would be likely to clarify these questions’.

Guattari advocates ecosophy as an ‘articulation’ that foregrounds overlapping spheres of reality, and the ways these overlapping spheres can be articulated in new ways toward transformation. He highlights both mentalities and materialities as he advocates for an ecosophy that engages with the material, social, and ideological ‘registers’ of life.

All Our Social Problems are Interdependent

According to Guattari, our social problems are interdependent and spread through multiple registers or fields of existence, so we need a theory capable of engaging with these overlaps and inter-dependencies. He argues that we need to enunciate new assemblages of existence; we need collective assemblages of human-nonhuman that ‘assemble’ to form spaces and modes of being that subvert capitalist trajectories of destruction.

Guattari is calling for a more radical way of understanding and engaging with economics, social development, and environmental damage. His call for more radical change is not new, but he adds something new with his insightful discussion of the interactions, relationality, and also dynamism of the ways that the material, social, and ideological fields interact and shape each other.

Ecosophy, as a term, has not only been used by Guattari. For example, the term ‘ecosophy’ was first coined by Arne Naess.

However, as John Tinnell points out, Naess’s conception of ecosophy is quite different from that put forward by Guattari. Writes Tinnell: ‘At a fundamental level, the mission of Naess’s ecosophy is to expand the sphere of objects with which people identify’.

In other words, for Naess, ecosophy is about a deep personal commitment to and responsibility for the environment. One comes to identify with nature in order to preserve it. For Guattari, ecosophy instead involves a subjectivity instantiated as a process of coming together with other parts of nature (human and nonhuman) that create assemblages of identity, materiality, and practice.

One of the positions that marks Guattari as different from Naess—and from other scholars concerned with sustainability or environmental preservation—is the desire to avoid privileging any one position or stance.

For Guattari, not only is there a push against hierarchy, but there is also a foregrounding of dynamism.

There are times when materiality and the non-human are privileged as shaping powers within the world, but also times when human and global politics are pinpointed as shaping powers. That is to say, Guattari’s ecosophy positions both the human and nonhuman as actants; both have the capacity to act as subjects, objects, and somewhere in-between. Guattari’s ecosophy aims toward instability—instability of identity, of relationships, of connections, of ‘knowns’—in order to create space for something new and, hopefully, less enmeshed within a predatory capitalism that has already colonized many current forms of life.

Guattari argues that all registers of life are interconnected; that the production of material artefacts are connected with social and cultural production; that our world is produced through the interaction of discourse, human practice, and materialities.

In this way, Guattari’s work finds affinity with philosophers like Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Henri Lefebvre, who also examine the connections between culture, practice, and materialities. Ecosophy insists on valuing and examining the material world, technology, artefacts, and the ways that things can both shape and be shaped by humans.

Guattari’s ecosophy advocates for an analysis of the blurred lines between humans and machines, people and their environments. The relationships of human and machine have bearing on the wider natural world and institutional environments in which we live.

Ecosophy takes a broad and dynamic view of nature, humans, materiality, and identity. Ecosophy resists privileging the human, and for this reason, pushes against the work of scholars such as Chet Bowers who views humans as being the primary agents of change. For Guattari, humans are not the only part of the equation, and not the only entities capable of action or subjectivity. 

Ecosophy also resists preference for nature—resists ecocentricity—and this places ecosophy apart from the work of philosophers such as Helen Kopnina who argues for an ecocentric view of activism, education and the world. Guattari is not advocating for environmental activism or ecological sustainability per se, but for a more encompassing change in how we understand and act in our world; a change that would involve more than just personal commitments or government policies aimed at saving the environment.

Ecosophy highlights the non-human, but also highlights the human, the processual, the systematic, the parts, the whole: a holism of multiple shifting flexible wholes, that is always and never simply made up of the whole and its parts.

Guattari’s definition of ecosophy specifically involves a broader understanding of ecology; ecology becomes reframed in reference to relationships with a wider range of processes, machines, people, the biological, the material, the sociological, and the ideological.

Guattari’s notion of ecosophy comes into sharper focus when we reflect on his notion of ‘assemblage’. Ecosophy regards humans, nonhumans, structures, ideologies, practices, and beliefs as ‘parts’ that can form an integrated constellation. For Guattari, ‘assemblage’ is not necessarily meant to participate in discourses linked in with machinery—although Guattari finds benefit in the non-hierarchic nature of machinic assemblages—but for Guattari the idea of assemblage is meant to draw attention to relationality and to the multiplicity of identity, where human and non-human can be synchronously subjects, objects, and somewhere in-between within larger wholes, and where these positionalities can
change, overlap, and interact.

For example, when humans harness the power of wind—through the use of wind turbines—the wind becomes the object and the humans subjects who are using wind power toward particular ends.

However, as a person who lives in an area where tornadoes are common, I can also attest to the fact that humans can become objects at the mercy of the wind. And even that example is not quite right because it participates in binaries where subject positionality is posited against object positionality.

Ecosophy instead subverts old binaries in which one must be identified, and perhaps reified, as either subject or object. The human-nonhuman, the whole-part, the subject-object, the individual-society, the social-material, the discursive-real—all are old binaries that Guattari (2008) rejects in favour of the argument that identity, in all of its forms, is always on the move, and can always break out into something new. The point of ecosophy is to re-think the old stable categories of identity, and so the term ‘assemblage’ is meant to call attention to the dynamism of life and materiality.

Thus, even when Guattari uses terms such as ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, the idea is not to validate a binary, but to call attention to other ‘parts’ of our world that we do not normally consider—as we do not normally consider the nonhuman—in order to then push against the binary relationships in which we traditionally hold humans and nonhumans. Guattari (2008) advocates for a modularity where subjects and objects (and whatever lies in-between) can be named and described, but are never stable, reified, or completely known.

Guattari uses the idea of ‘assemblage’ to move away from such binaries, to promote multiplicity, and to draw attention to immanent context. For example, in The Three Ecologies, he posits the problem of analysing and critiquing the practice of hospital/clinic-based psychotherapy. In order to fully articulate and then change this practice, one must enunciate all of the various parts at play: ‘the institutional context, its constraints, organizations, practices, etc., all those things and relations which normally exist in the background; in short, the group is how one gets at the institution’. Each ‘part’ plays into the assemblage. Each part is dynamic and is never fully stable. Transformation involves new enunciations of assemblage; and more than that, a process of continual enunciation and re-enunciation. Guattari prompts us to ask: What assemblage must be in place for this moment to happen? How can ‘parts’ come to form an assemblage in a different way to enact change? How can we continue to re-enunciate parts in new ways?

Integral to the concepts of both ecosophy and assemblage is the human-non-human connection. While Guattari rejects binaries, he argues for increased focus on the ways that things, locations, spaces, materialities (the nonhuman) are part of assemblages.

Much like Griffith’s work in this issue—which focuses on the need to reflect on and engage with the ‘more than human’—Guattari insists that what he terms the ‘nonhuman’ needs to be highlighted as a powerful ‘part’ of any assemblage.

This is not to suggest that the nonhuman has more force or precedent than the human, but points to the fact that the nonhuman is usually elided in favour of ‘human’ considerations. Guattari continually brings our focus to the nonhuman as a way of reminding us of its equal importance to human processes.

In her own theorizations of Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett argues that Guattari’s focus on the human-nonhuman assemblage allows us to engage better with the ‘force’ of nonhuman parts.

Bennett contends that the ‘nonhuman’ involves ‘the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’.

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