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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