Deleuze, G. (2007) For Félix. In: Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Here’s a plug for a session I’m co-convening at the next AAG in New York, in February. I really should have posted about this sooner as the deadline for the call for papers deadline is today, 15 September. If you are interested in doing something then please drop me a line.

For Félix: Transversal Geographies

CFP – AAG, 2012; New York, 24th – 28th February

Convenors: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford), Joe Gerlach (University of Oxford)

“I believe I am neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. I’m just pursuing something I started long ago” (Guattari, 2009a: 177)

“Just as an artist borrows from his precursors and contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely” (Guattari, 1995: 12)

Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992) in a familiar self-deprecating gesture declared himself an ‘idea-thief’ (Guattari, 2009a: 23), yet it would be misplaced to regard his theoretical, and practical, work as straightforward appropriation. Instead, Guattari, through his ‘visionary cartography’ (Berardi, 2008), was incessantly productive in the cultivation of transversalising ideas: concepts and folding-points of inflection that segue into thinking, writing, becoming and doing differently. Recent newly constituted editions of his writings (Guattari, 2009a; 2009b; 2011; forthcoming; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008) – primarily though Semiotext(e) – attest to the growing interest and demand for translations of his work. Moreover, Guattari has come to be appreciated across a number of disciplines, not just in philosophy (Holmes, 2009; Stengers, 2010) but also in sociology (Genosko, 2002) and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie, 2004), in what has been described as the ‘Guattari Effect’ (see Alliez and Querrien, 2008; Alliez and Goffey, 2011). However, Guattari has received only muted attention in geography (Katz, 1996; Dewsbury, 2000; McCormack, 2003; 2005; Saldanha, 2010), and his work is often conflated with, or occluded by notorious collaborations. Nonetheless, in this session we hope to encourage a sustained engagement with Guattari’s ideas, exploring how they might resonate with contemporary issues in geography, and, as a result, open up our practices towards alternative ways of making connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics.

Specifically, we welcome papers attending to:

- therapeutic spaces

- eco-logic and ecosophical approaches

- diagramming and the diagrammatic

- schizoanalytic cartographies

- autonomist movements and collective assemblages of enunciation

- modelling and modelisation

- micropolitics; minoritarian and molecular revolutions

- ethico-aesthetics, and the proto-aesthetic

- refrains, ritornellos and habit

Joe Gerlach, Cologne

There’s a great post over at Vernacular Mappings which attempts to ‘conjure’ the micropolitics at play in the recent publication of disOrientation². I think it’s great because Gerlach (2009) really tries to stretch and put at risk, in the Stengersian sense, the notion of micropolitics: neither small-scale nor situated on the ‘left’ or ‘right’ of the political spectrum, micropolitics operates transversally, activating the “affective potential of the interval between feeling and doing” (Himada & Manning, 2009: 5). I would like to quote at length from this paper, found in the recent issue of Inflexions, Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics:

“For some, this may make it sound like a “soft” politics, but it’s quite the opposite. What is usually constituted as the real thing – Politics with a capital P – is far less rigorously inventive, precisely because it operates in the sphere of representation where precomposed bodies are already circulating. The micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already fully formed. All politics is infested with micropolitical tendencies. This is what makes the political an event. In my opinion, much of political theory continues to invest too heavily in the already articulated “capital P” Politics. The reason for this is simple: it is extremely challenging to speak of what has not yet fully taken form. Like the microperception that tweaks the event of perception, the micropolitical is the force of the political event that potentially unmoors it.” (2009: 5).

Micropolitics, or the creation of techniques for collaboration, involve experimentation and an openness to be experimental. Micropolitics then, offers a point of departure for a new kind of politics.

The description of the disOrientation² project is rich and does not seek to reduce the mapping as a simple “case of resistance versus a nebulous hegemony, but instead it seems to offer tactics, or lines of flight for others to generate their own articulations of the university and beyond” (2009: 2, original emphasis). I liked the way in which it related the project to the SenseLab’s concept of a ‘technology of lived abstraction’ (the name for the lab’s new series of books): “an active platform of creative productivity and political movement” (Gerlach, 2009: 4).

The exploration of affect, increasingly well-honed with every iteration it seems, is refreshingly clear. It highlights what I find most interesting and productive about affect, that it does not start with the subject, and while it can be bodily it is not embodied. However, Gerlach does point to some difficulties of engaging with affect. One troubling aspect is his suggestion that we strive to animate affect; this seems to suggest that not only does affect exist a priori but that it is qualitatively different kinds of affect that we are generating by seeking to animate. I wonder if it is possible to write of affect without writing for affect.

Navigating the tension between disOrientation² as a representation and as a technology of lived abstraction is not straightforward. I would be very interested to hear how the 3Cs generated techniques to keep the virtual open, to allow space for the unexpected, to not know everything that is possible, when they were working on this project. Gerlach’s engagement with disOrientation²’s micropolitical articulations are at once exploratory and experimental, yet reach-towards a becoming-with the world. This is neither an idealisation nor a festishization of a concept (micropolitics) that has been put to work in a radically empirical manner. Bravo!

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!

My notes for the reading group with shadow of camera (Sony DSC T-700)

Last week I attended the monthly SenseLab reading group, where we were reading Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. As my copy of the book was still in transit (I fear it’s been lost in the post), I read a .pdf version from my computer screen which wasn’t ideal. There was just a small group of people, ten or so, and we all introduced ourselves as the composition is ever-changing. Erin asked us to try to do it in a way which we might not normally do, which made for an amusing opening to the session. It was interesting to see how the group would switch between French and English for discussion, and for the versions of the book read (plenty of time was spent trying to compare page numbers).

Erin had noticed an interesting parallel with Guattari’s idea of the individual as a terminal, and William James’ notion of the ‘terminus’: not as an end, but a force that activates a beginning. Here is the particular section of the text that we were looking at – it’s a really wonderful passage:

Rather than speak of the ‘subject’, we should perhaps speak of components of subiectfication, each working more or less on its own. This would lead us, necessarily, to re-examine the relation between concepts of the individual and subjectivity, and, above all, to make a clear distinction between the two. Vectors of subjectification do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a ‘terminal’ (TE: 36)

Guattari’s use of another term, gentleness, stood out for me (and others) and I remember circling the word when he used it in both Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies because it contrasts with his rather heroic style of writing:

It seems to me essential to organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices (TE: 51)

It was suggested that gentleness might relate to questions of value (rather than evaluation) and with the techniques of creating an alternate political articulation. One way that the SenseLab is thinking about this is  in terms of generosity and Erin explained that they try to produce generous events. Other issues that we tried to talk/think through included the ‘habitable’, potential (as something which is not necessarily positive), phantasms and react-ability… Plenty to mull over.

]]> http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/montreal/senselab-reading-group/feed/ 0 http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/review/guattari-three-ecologies/ http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/review/guattari-three-ecologies/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:00:46 +0000 Thomas http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/?p=531

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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