Guattari: Philosophy of Ecology

This paper adopts a comparative approach in order to appreciate the distinct contributions of Arne Nass and Felix Guattari to ecosophy and their respective connections to semiotics. The foundational holistic worldview and dynamics ecosophy propounds show numerous connections with semiotics. The primary objective of this paper is to question the nature and value of these connections. Historically, the development of ecosophy was always faced with modelling and communication issues, which constitute an obvious common ground shared with semiotics. As a means (...) to an end, ecosophy settled to develop a thoughtful axiology based on ecological wisdom and promote it bottom-up. Political activism notwithstanding, semiotics also deals with value: sign value and meaning. In this respect, semiotics is inherently axiological, but most often this dimension is effaced or muted. Emphasizing the axiological dimension of semiotics helps understand how dominant significations, habits, and values are established, and enlighten the crucial part it could play in the humanities and beyond by partly coalescing with ecosophy. As the complementarity of both traditions is appreciated, the plausibility of a merger is assessed. Arguably, ecosophy is axiomatized semiotics. From this novel perspective, one can see human communities as dynamically partaking in signifying processes, in a space that is at once an ecosphere, a semiosphere, and a vast political territory. As there is growing evidence that environmental degradation lessens our quality of life and the sustainability of our communities, ecosophy might help reform values and practices. (shrink)

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The magnum opus of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, is not only the most important work of 20th century French philosophy, but also provides an unprecedented opportunity for philosophers and geographers to collaborate. Although neither were professional geographers A Thousand Plateaus constitutes a “geophilosophy,” a neo-materialism, which, in linking the philosophical materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud with contemporary science, avoids the traditional bogeys of materialism: determinism and vitalism. By the same token, as a rigorous and consistent (...) materialism, A Thousand Plateaus provides an escape route from the paralyzing post-modernism that has trapped important contemporary schools of geography and philosophy. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari’s politicized stance–their historical-libidinal materialism–provides a relief from the arid scientism and naive realism to which critics of post- modernism have all too often fallen prey. (shrink)

Rodolphe Gasché’s commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, _What Is Philosophy?,_ homes in on what the two thinkers define as philosophy in distinction from the sciences and the arts and what it is that they understand themselves to have done while doing philosophy. Gasché is concerned with the authors’ claim not only that philosophy is a Greek invention but also that it is, for fundamental reasons, geophilosophical in nature. Gasché also intimates that, rather than a marginal issue of their (...) conception of philosophy, geocentrism is a central dimension of their thinking. Indeed, Gasché argues, if all the principal traits that constitute philosophy according to _What is Philosophy_?—_autochthony, philia,_ and _doxa_—imply in an essential manner a concern with Earth, it follows that what Deleuze and Guattari have been doing while engaging in philosophy has been marked by this concern from the start. (shrink)

The distinction between nature and artifice has been definitive for Western conceptions of the role of humans within their natural environment. But the human must already be separated from nature in order to distinguish between nature and artifice. This separation, in turn, facilitates a classification of knowledge in general, typically cast in terms of a hierarchy of sciences that ascends from the natural sciences to the social (or human) sciences. However, this hierarchy considers nature as a substantial foundation upon which (...) artifice operates and to which it responds. Here I examine three inter-related concepts that, by focusing on events rather than substances, operate beyond the nature–artifice distinction and thereby resist the hierarchical classification of the sciences: Foucault’s concept of technology, the concept of milieu as it crosses over historically from physics to biology and anthropology, and Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the concept of milieu in terms of their concept of machine. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Isabelle Stengers fought against a state-controlled form of science and saw “nomadic science/concepts” as a way to escape from it. The transnational history of the term milieu marks a good opportunity to contribute to another theory of nomadic vocabularies. Traveling from France to Germany, the word milieu came to be identified as a French theory. Milieu was seen as an expression of determinism, of the connection between the rise of the natural sciences and the rise (...) of socialism, and it deterred the majority of German academics. Umwelt was thus coined as an “antimilieu” expression. This article defends a “transnational historical semantic” against the Koselleckian history of concepts and its a priori distinctions between words and concepts. Instead of taking its nature for granted, a transnational historical semantic investigation should analyze the terminological and national status given to the objects of investigation by the term's users. (shrink)

Guattari's ecosophy has implications for many types of pedagogy practiced in the school. While Guattari never explicitly advocated the educational use of ecosophy, I explore in this article how it can be used as a lens to ‘read’ pedagogy in nuanced ways, highlighting oppressive premises and practices. I first discuss Guattari's ecosophy, defining key terms and advocating ecosophy as a philosophy that calls attention to the interactions and ‘parts’ of assemblages of existence—a philosophy radical and encompassing enough to make intelligible (...) the dynamic connections between various fields of existence, trajectories into the new, and trajectories more destructive in nature. I then offer a ‘reading’ of two different pedagogical strategies that have achieved a wide following in the last few decades: direct instruction, and critical pedagogy. Reading these pedagogies through ecosophy allows us to name more fully the troubling assumptions and lacunae to be found within them. (shrink)

In this article, the diagram is used to chart the movement from Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and engagement with structuralism in the 1960s to Deleuze and Guattari's ethico-aesthetic constructivism of the 1970s and 1980s. This is shown to culminate in a biopolitical critique and decoding of philosophy, which is part of the unfolding of a transdisciplinary research programme where art is seen to come ontologically ahead of philosophy.

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In Difference and Repetition, he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II that were co-written with Félix Guattari (1984, 1988) and that they named Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze's philosophical approach is realigned into what I term here as transcendental materialism, and latterly as immanent materialism; that I claim effectively (...) eliminate phenomenology as perceptual input. This essay takes this transformation seriously as a way of understanding educational data, research and practices. The proposition that is central to this paper is that transcendental and immanent materialism give us a means of dealing with educational phenomena without the interference of perception or a stable category of experience, by connecting data with theory and circumventing subjectification. It is argued that this proposition has important consequences for educational research, and the construction of educational arguments that will be illustrated in this essay. Deleuze's debt to French Marxism and in particular to the work of Louis Althusser are also recognised through this writing. (shrink)

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Félix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, (...) religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. (shrink)

Arguably, two of the most important forces affecting contemporary global culture are the growing awareness of ecological crises and the rapid spread of digital media. Félix Guattari's unfinished concept of ecosophy suggests the basis of a theoretical framework for constructing productive syntheses between the ecological and the digital. Moreover, a Guattarian rethinking of the ecological turn in the humanities challenges the philosophical basis of the pedagogy of Nature appreciation that has characterised the eco-humanities landscape since the 1970s. Guattari's ecosophy gestures (...) towards a transversal eco-humanities, which would be rhizomatically rooted in autopoiesis and becoming-other, rather than defined by static allegiance to the ideals of ‘Self-realisation’ postulated by the deep ecology movement. (shrink)

In this paper the authors seek to contribute to a new ontology of an embodied, desiring subject through an exploration of their own subjectivities and of the ways in which subjectivities are produced and transformed through affective attachments to place. Using the method of collective biography and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and territorialization they examine their affective responses and attachments to place: Australia and the Czech Republic. As a point of departure for their analysis, the authors (...) ask: What does it mean to be homesick for a place which is not one’s home? What does it mean to desire a place? What of the other place is inscribed in the body? In asking this, the authors show the extent to which place is a zone of immanence in which a continual play of de- and re-territorialization occurs. (shrink)

This paper is about how the horror of noise has been expressed in the work of some writers, fiction and theory, who have detected a certain alien weirdness lurking in the human voice. I link this to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of ‘becoming-animal’, in which a ‘strange ecology’ is described. ‘We sorcerors’, they say, are drawn to experimental alliances with nature. The ‘sorceror’ is admitted to a multitudinous, teeming space and opened up to the immanent alien. H. P. Lovecraft’s weird (...) fiction frequently deals with alien simulacra of human language and speech. This is speech as human-alien alliance. In Thomas Ligotti’s fiction, too, we find becoming articulated as speech-noise. Apocalypse is imagined as ecstatic choral annihilation in which all souls merge into a great ‘black unity’. For Ligotti, we are the suffering puppets of a Schopenhauerian Will akin to Lovecraft’s ‘blind idiot god’, Azathoth. Nevertheless, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becoming zero’ can be associated with an affirmative thought of noise ontology, a furore which is sounded more from Bataille's 'Mouth' than from Azathoth’s mad musicians. As the head is thrown back in joyful frenzy, the mouth opens, screams ejaculate and rend with nature’s explosive propagation, like a blossoming flower or the racket of an anus. (shrink)

Arne Neass’ Ecosophy and the Stoic attitude towards environmental ethics are often believed to be incompatible primarily because the first is often understood as championing an ecocentric standpoint while the latter espouses an egocentric (as well as an anthropocentric) view. This paper argues that such incompatibility is rooted in a misunderstanding of both Ecosophy and Stoicism. Moreover, the paper argues that a synthesis of both the Ecosophical and Stoic approaches to environmental concerns results in a robust and satisfying attitude toward (...) the environment, namely an enlightened self-interest, which not only guards our fragile environment from abuse, but also provides self-interested reasons and motivations for the protection of our natural surroundings. (shrink)

Modern forms of speculative philosophy continue to creep ‘unsuspectingly’ into our understanding of contemporary media/electronic arts, despite the attempts by Latour, Badiou, or Agamben especially when addressing the zero/one as if a contradictory ‘binary’ rather than as a kind of 'slice’ or an immanent plane of immanence. We argue that by playing with and against Neitzsche, Einstein, Godel, and Deleuze, a rather different story of art, not to mention philosophy, can be told. [From conference programme].

This review article explores the politics of hope and optimism made possible by a re-thinking of touch as a movement towards the not-yet-known, embodied through an engagement with the improvisational character of Argentine tango. Tango discloses the relational and enactive qualities of corporeality, moving us to ask not what bodies are, but rather what can bodies do; what can bodies become? The article engages with the moves to a Spinozist conception of affect developed by Massumi and Deleuze and Guattari, to (...) consider the extent to which touch as affective symbiosis can form the basis of a democracy-yet-to-come. The article asks whether such concepts could and indeed should form the basis of a politics of re-invention, and what might be some of the problems and limitations with aligning affect principally with movement and change. The article situates the discussion within arguments that currently traverse the psychological and biological sciences, and concludes that more cautious reflection on the kinds of ontological turn that are forming the foundation of such processual models is needed. (shrink)

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context of Donna Haraway's recent work When Species Meet (2008), and in particular her rejection of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming animal' in their A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). The exception Haraway takes to Deleuze and Guattari's approach to human-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissures in contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the global crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. (...) Yet there are also points of confluence in their respective positions that provide the potential for a more coherent politics of eco-critique. (shrink)

This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert Smithson and in the philosophical creative process of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Smithson it takes place between Site-Nonsite works and Earthworks . For Deleuze and Guattari it happens in the transition from Difference and Repetition to Anti- Oedipus . Smithson's break marks his abandoning of the institution in favour of an art of direct intervention, the Earthworks confronting one of the (...) most pressing political concerns of his time, the destruction of the earth. Deleuze and Guattari's break happens as they take us from a conceptual mapping of structures to a material machinery of production that allows thought to engage with real political processes. (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina was an elemental and a social event. To understand it, you first have to understand the land, the air, the sun, the river and the sea; you have to understand earth, wind, fire and water; you have to understand geomorphology, meteorology, biology, economics, politics, history. You have to understand how they have come together to form, with the peoples of America, Europe and Africa, the historical patterns of life of Louisiana and New Orleans, the bodies politic of the (...) region, bodies you need to study with political physiology. You have to understand what those bodies could do and what they could withstand, and how they intersected the event of the storm. In this paper, simply for the sake of time and space constraints, I will concentrate on New Orleans; the stories of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or of Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, and Plaquemines Parishes in Louisiana are complex and dramatic as well. (shrink)

In a cluster of books published originally in 1977, the two editions of La Révolution moléculaire, and L’Inconscient machinique, Guattari elaborated a typology of semiotic systems framed in a Peirce-Hjelmslev hybrid conceptual vocabulary. Reading across these three books I want to flesh-out a-signifying semiotics in relation to an infotech strand on the machinic phylum inspired by one of Guattari’s favourite examples of the kind of semiosis put into play by a-signifying signs : credit and/or bank cards. Guattari’s innovation was to (...) develop a-signifying signs in a typology of sign types but with respect to the problem of the relationship between material and semiotic dimensions in the age of planetary computerization and globalization. (shrink)