Laboratory life: a reflection, TML

Last week was really busy and I didn’t find time to post about it. So this is a chance for me to recount some of the things I’ve been hearing-saying-thinking-feeling… On Tuesday evening I attended a lecture/workshop organised by a variety of departments at McGill University and the SenseLab:

Ecosophy: Rethinking the Culture Concept with Félix Guattari
Nov. 10, 2009 – 5:30 PM to 6:45 PM
Arts Building, Arts 160 , 853 Sherbrooke Street West

Please join us for a lecture and workshop:
Janell Watson is an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Tech University, and incoming editor of The Minnesota Review.  Professor Watson’s new book, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze, is a much needed guide to the individual writings of Felix Guattari.  Guattari’s own work (such as The Three Ecologies, Molecular Revolution and Chaosmosis), as well as his famous collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?), are becoming increasingly influential particularly in relation to the study of media ecologies and what Guattari termed the ethico-aesthetical paradigm of contemporary art and critical thought.  Professor Watson will present a short talk, which will be immediately followed by a workshop for faculty and students around selections from Guattari’s books Chaosmosis (chapter 1,5 and 7)  and The Three Ecologies (entire text), as well as chapter 3 from Watson’s book entitled “An Energetics of Existence”.

Although it got off to a bad start – it felt like ecosophy was being used as a substitute for culture, and there was a long ‘question’ from the audience (about the abstract versus the concrete) – it picked up steam and there were some  stimulating interventions by Erin Manning and Chris Salter.

The evening finished in giggles as we heard from Brian Massumi about translating A Thousand Plateaus; when he wrote a letter to them to query parts of the text:

Deleuze would say ‘I have no idea, ask Félix’. And he would say ‘Whatever you think!’

After the talk I chatted with Erin and she invited me to attend a few classes that she was taking (normally taught by Brian), both over at l’Université de Montreal (UdM). Although longer classes than I am used to (around three hours or so), they were incredibly interesting, as well as inspiring. In the first class, on Wednesday, Erin wanted to to bring Guattari to life (“remettre en vie Guattari”), to show what an extraordinary thinker he was. Not only was it conceptually rich, but the examples she deployed and the diagrams she would scribble on the board really made me think differently.

The second class, on the Thursday, was a close reading of a few chapters from Whitehead’s (1933) Adventures of Ideas, where he seeks to define many of the concepts that he uses throughout his work. Although his writing is not seductive, Erin argued, it is incredibly precise. It was very useful to read the text together and work through some of the ideas, and we were reminded that we need to put these concepts to work (“il faut faire travailler ces concepts”). The classes were both in ‘Franglais’: predominantly in French (it’s a French-speaking university, after all) but with plenty of switching between the two languages.

After the class I made my way over to the CCA, for the second IRHA public forum:

IRHA Public Forum #2, Novemeber 12, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Interactivity: The City as Performative Space

Alessandra Ponte, University of Montréal
Patrick Harrop, University of Manitoba/Concordia University

New digital technologies increasingly are being deployed by architects, artists and designers in order to transform dead public spaces into new urban zones of performance and play. In effect, the city has become a responsive environment set in motion by pedestrians and new technologies.The second IHRA forum will investigate how concepts of interaction brought on from digital technologies meet concepts of social interaction. At the center of the forum will be artistic and design projects that also suggest new possibilities of interacting in public space.

Patrick Harrop, who collaborates with the lab, presented a paper which explored Gilbert Simondon’s enagement with architecture, through Le Corbusier, whilst Alessandra Ponte turned to a rather different philosopher: Peter Slotterdijk. On the Friday, at the third graduate colloquium of the semester, Patrick was able to discuss the same paper in more detail, with greater lucidity! I’m rather intrigued by Simondon, having not really encountered his work before coming to Concordia, who was trained by both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem and links are increasingly being made between his work, and that of Deleuze.

So the title for this post – Laboratory life – is supposed to be ironic, as I haven’t spent that much time in the TML!

Guattari, F. (2008) The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum

Although Genesko (2002: 1) argues that “…Guattari remains unknown, unless it is through his problematic subsumption as partner of Gilles Deleuze”, his work has undergone a recent revival of sorts. There has been a conference discussing Guattari’s ideas¹, a special issue (called ‘l’effet-guattari’) of the French journal Multitudes which was the partial result of that conference² and there have been books written by Franco Berradi (2008) and Gary Genesko (2009), as well as a new version of the collection of texts and interviews called Chaosophy (2008). Taking this renaissance as a point of departure, this review is primarily of one of the translated texts written by Guattari. The Three Ecologies (TE) was finished in 1989, only appearing in English a decade or so afterwards³. Now, twenty years on, this particular edition includes not only Guattari’s short essay but a comprehensive introduction and a marvellous chapter on his life and work, through his own concept of transversality.

The TE is a deceptively short essay, only 32 pages long, sandwiched between the introduction and an article by Genesko. Guattari seeks to extend the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns and argues that a new ecosophical approach must be found. As much a manifesto for a new way of thinking as a critique of capitalism (or IWC, more on this later), Guattari presents a view of our Earth “on the brink of ecocide” (TE: 2). This ecosophical approach, broadening our views to include the three ecologies, is the only way we will be able to affect any enduring changes in our environment. The three ecologies of the title – natural ecology, the social ecologies of relations and cultures, and the mental ecology of individual subjectivity – are the focus of the essay, in which he discusses the problems of neoliberal capital as a combination of mental dulling, social homogenisation and conformity, and ecological destruction and crisis. There is a need, he argues, to recover intensities through a process of developing heterogeneity and dissensus (see TE: 9), though at the same time constructing a unified social movement against neoliberalism. People need to reclaim their subjectivities and build existential territories of their own.

Guattari’s target of condemnation is what he calls ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ (IWC) – akin to globalisation (see Jones, 2002) – that, through a series of techno-scientific transformations, has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster, causing a so-called disequilibrium of the world natural environment from which the Earth will take many generations to recover, if at all. IWC is “delocalized and deterritorialized to such an extent that it is impossible to locate its sources of power” (TE: 6). Part of Guattari’s thesis is that the expansion in communications technology, and, in particular, the development of world telecommunications, has served to shape a new type of passive subjectivity, saturating the unconscious in conformity with global market forces. IWC therefore poses a direct threat to the environment in ways that are now all too familiar to us: pollution of all forms, extinction and depletion of species with the consequent reduction of biodiversity. As we find ourselves in this nightmarish historical period, Guattari contends that the traditional means of political mobilization and resistance are not merely inappropriate; they are becoming impossible. In their place, we must address and connect our threatened ecologies through a “logic of intensities” whose articulative principle is not rational and scientific but “ethico-aesthetic” (see TE: 45).

There are a few points of conflict, however. It is rather surprising that Guattari speaks of a global environmental crisis; this is the sort of meta-narrative which post-structuralism normally takes issue with (Jones, 2002: 357). Perhaps more problematic is the manner in which Guattari writes of technology. Whilst his psychological and social perspectives remain as radical as ever, Guattari tends to naturalise such phenomena as technological development and population growth. This does not sit comfortably with the radicality of his critique of other taken-for-granted phenomena.

Gary Genesko’s essay ‘The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy’⁴ is excellent, providing a study of Guattari’s scholastic career through his shifting sense of ‘transversality’. Genesko has a long-standing interest (see also: Genesko, 1996; 2002; 2009) and here he provides a wide-ranging, and engagingly written, introduction to Guattari’s work. By examining Guattari’s influences – from Sartre to Freud and Lacan – Genosko situates him in the field of psychoanalytic theory, usefully revitalizing many of Lacan’s and Freud’s ideas by coupling them with Sartre’s existential sociology. “[N]ature cannot be separated from culture” (TE: 29); indeed, Guattari conceives of ecology as a realm encompassing the environmental, the social and the mental. His ecosophical perspective of subjectivity, in large part, is a product of his Lacanian training, his experience as a working psychoanalyst and his attempt to reorient Freudianism towards the future (see TE: 156). Guattari understands subjectivity according to his concept of ‘transversality’, a concept that dates from the mid-1960s and which Guattari developed over his lifetime. This transversalist conception of subjectivity “escapes the individual-social distinction as well as the givenness or preformedness of the subject either as a person or individual; subjectivity is both collective and auto-producing” (TE: 145-146).

Wolf-Meyer (2003) argues that the translators/editors’ notes do not connect Guattari with the larger world of contemporary theory and aesthetics – that they only entrench him further in the insular world of Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarship – but this reader would argue that the notes are always a pleasure to follow-up. There is a great deal of detail and many points of interest, as well as suggestions for further readings (see TE: 79-106). Highlights include the translation of the French word ritournelle (TE: 87n.25), a discussion of Guattari’s reading of Sartre (TE: 84n.10) and his reference to one of Kafka’s characters (TE: 90n.32).

This book is a useful introduction and outline of Félix Guattari’s ideas. The translators/editors, Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton provide an opening which helps to situate the TE within a broader field, both of Guattari’s work and also ecological struggle. Like much of Guattari’s earlier work, without Deleuze, this work has overt political importance. Although the language deployed can at times be rather obscure, his terms ‘ecosophy’ and ‘transversality’ are full of potential. On to Chaosmosis⁵ next…

Berradi, F. (2008) Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. London: Palgrave

Genesko, G. (1996) Guattari Reader. Oxford : Blackwells

Genesko, G. (2002) Félix Guattari: An Abberrant Introduction. London: Continuum

Genesko, G. (2009) Felix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press

Guattari, F. (1995[1992]) Chaosmosis. Sydney: Power Publications

Guattari, F. (2008) Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977. New York: Semiotext(e)

Jones, O. (2002) The three ecologies: Félix Guattari [Book Review]. Journal of Rural Studies, 18(3): 357-358

Wolf-Meyer (2003) Guattari, Felix: The Three Ecologies (2000) [Review]. Reconstruction, 3(1)

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