Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics

Thomas Jellis, Joe Gerlach, John-David Dewsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317293163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines Félix Guattari, the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and radical activist, renowned for an energetic style of thought that cuts across conceptual, political, and institutional spheres.

Increasingly recognised as a key figure in his own right, Guattari's influence in contemporary social theory and the modern social sciences continues to grow. From the ecosophy of hurricanes to the micropolitics of cinema, the book draws together a series of Guattarian motifs which animate the complexity of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most enigmatic thinkers. The book examines techniques and modes of thought that contribute to a liberation of thinking and subjectivity. Divided thematically into three parts – 'cartographies', 'ecologies', and 'micropolitics' – each chapter showcases the singular and pragmatic grounds by which Guattari's signature concepts can be found to be both disruptive to traditional modes of thinking, and generative toward novel forms of ethics, politics and sociality.

This interdisciplinary compendium on Guattari's exciting, experimental, and enigmatic thought will appeal to academics and postgraduates within Social Theory, Human Geography, and Continental Philosophy.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Cartographies

Cartography, that most quintessential of spatial motifs, is not one readily associated with acts of liberation. On the contrary, it is ‘oppression’ to which cartography is welded; analytically, politically, and geographically. Our lives – collective, individualised, resingularised – are simultaneously composed and pulled apart by maps and mappings. Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, as it were, on repeat. Through lines, legends, and coordinates – perhaps to the point of tedium – geographers, philosophers, historians, and cartographers have called into question the power and potential of cartography. From mundane vectors to violent lines of flight, cartography’s capacity for belligerence and recalcitrance is of planetary renown. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) familiar description of geometry’s scalpel-like intensity is both a condemnation of molar intransigence and an ambivalent meditation upon the micropolitical capacities of aberrant lines. Guattari, in particular, was one for drawing all manner of maps and schizoid cartographies. This mapping was not a hobbyist pastime. Guattari was no mere amateur cartographer. La Borde was as much a cartographic institution in a molecular assemblage as it was, and is, a psychiatric clinic set deep in the Loire valley. Guattari, cartographer-in-chief, turned to mapping as a technique for decoupling the unconscious from a Freudian referent-framework of caricatured meaning and desire. Cartography was also a tactic, for Guattari, of simultaneous problem prosing and self-preservation. On this, Genosko (2009: 11) suggests,

Guattari’s fundamental problem was always how to traverse multiple fields in his own life and work. His own auto-modelization across fields of social struggles, institutional commitments, analytic treatments of psychotics in group settings and other patients in private practice, without forgetting writing philosophy and fiction, gave rise to a unique analytic method. One of the hallmarks of this method is the proliferation of diagrams.

What seems remarkable is the ease with which Guattari appropriated a Euclidean geometry and other cartographic forms in the service of mental emancipation – that self-same geometry which sustained precisely the architectures of Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. On this point, cartography for Guattari (2012: 149) is a method of, “re-mooring … social and analytical practices on the side of ethico-aesthetic paradigms”. In harnessing the practice of re-mooring, or refiguring coordinates, the following chapters are an attempt to draw lines alongside Guattari and his schizoanalytic cartography, that is to say, a mode of cartography that inverts the ethics of tracing. As Guattari (2011: 184) explains; “rather than indefinitely tracing off the same complexes or same universal mathemes, [we] will explore and experiment with an unconscious in action”. This would set in train a cartography of and for mental ecologies which is both autopoietic and rhizomatic. These rhizomatic energies enfold not into a representational chart of existence, neither of territory nor the unconscious. Such gridding would be tantamount to the mimetic, and therefore reductive, act of tracing. Instead, such energies capacitate the charging of non-representational cartographies: maps of affect, cartographic gestures of the virtual, and lines of flight bound not to points but to mutant coordinates. In sum, such rhizomatic energies suffuse an ontogenetic schizoanalysis, thus liberating cartography from insincere, almost laughable, ideological memes, ones propagated, in turn, by those who have so little to lose from following maps that chart institutional pathways and tenure tracks to a comforting and comfortable telos. Think differently. Map differently. The liberation of cartography, then, lies not in the desiring toward accuracy, but instead hinges on the uncertain diagramming of disorientation: aberrant deterritorialisations of the unconscious, of geography, of space – of existence.

Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke – speaking, as they insist, always as geographers – open the lid on Guattari’s schizoanalytic cartographies. Here they diagram the schizo not as an avatar of madness nor convenient conceptual foil, but as a continual splitting and splintering; a detethering from rationalities that themselves fold into a tyranny of signification. Pacing, breathlessly, through Guattari’s semiologies whilst holding-hands (furtively) with Hjelmslev, Doel and Clarke grasp at an a-signifying semiotics, a deliberately tentative ungrounding for a geographical schizoanalysis. A geo-philosophy, of sorts. A constellation of unfoldings, enjoinings, mutant coordinates, lines here, there – and occasionally betwixt them all. In short, rather than decrying the ‘schizo’ as an aberrant figure of humanist imaginations, as “a figure of madness or of reason unhinged” (Doel and Clarke this volume: 30), it might be diagrammed instead as, “a creative energy: splitting, differentiating, deviating, mutating, evolving, explicating, implicating, etc.” (ibid). Indeed, the ‘etc.’ might be the defining characteristic of the schizo, its Spinozist-inflected conative drive to more, more, more – or rather, to put it differently, to and, and, and … and … ?

In mapping the unconscious with Guattari, Manola Antonioli pauses to think against the grain – against the grain and granularity of time, territory, and geography itself. It is to move from a colonising cartography to a schizoanalytic cartography. It is a provocation to all – for, after Foucault, we are all cartographers now – to do more with our maps, to conceive of them as works of art, nay political action. Antonioli’s invective castigates, gently, the act of cartographic superimposition in all its forms, psychoanalytic and geo-political. It is, in short, a clear statement of Guattarian intent; that the map exceeds fixation by semiotic tracing. As such, the injunction here is one of a beckoning, a beckon to map and to eschew interpretation, to give rise to a schizoanalytic subjectivity whereby flows of signs intersect with machinic flows. Such a demand seems improbable given cartography’s seductive invite to survey, and thus patronise – territorialise – what is laid out before us in either a map, or along the dreamy royal road to the unconscious. Sigmund Freud, as it were, navigating semi-conscious at the wheel. Yet as Antonioli suggests, in both attuning to, and actively proliferating machinic mutations actualised in cartography, one becomes witness to the deterritorialisation of existential fields – and to the proliferation of existential territories.

Walk, momentarily, with Tom Roberts, on a summer’s evening as thresholds of intensity are crossed in the greening of trees. Do not stop, however, to pause in phenomenological prayer, for as Roberts (this volume: 54–55) argues, “the corporeality of the lived falls drastically short to the extent that it cannot think the incorporeal individuations that traverse and agitate the Territory from within”. Glancing across to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Roberts animates the importance of the incorporeal in Guattari’s materialist diagramming of subjectivity, or rather in his ‘cartographic materialism’. As Roberts admits from the outset, this is no easy task, not least in the task of prising an incorporeal individuation away from the conceit of finite, individuated forms. To that end, Roberts turns to Guattari’s (and Deleuze’s, let us not forget) fabulation of haecceity: a perpetual grasping toward becomings. Haecceity, tacitly or otherwise, draws us in to the speeds and slownesses, the consistencies and inconsistencies of things, themselves never capitulating to straightforward renderings of subject or object. Despite the gentle warmth of that summer’s evening, there are nettles to be grasped (perhaps more firmly than haecceity would ordinarily permit), and Roberts does so in harnessing the manifold difficulty of Guattari’s schizoanalytic cartographies, its four co-constitutive, unfolding domains, and its modulating (modelising) influences on the production of subjectivity. For all of Guattari’s talk of subjectivity, Roberts admits both to a certain frustration toward the lack, otherwise, of ‘subject’ in his work, but also to an admiration of this absence. The stakes, after all, are considerable. Alongside a Guattarian incorporeality there can no longer be an “ethics of self-fashioning” (this volume: 51), a desiring toward the self, self-help, self-medication, no – as it were – cartography of the self.

How a map does its work of deterritorialisation is never given in advance, yielding not to representation, but instead to speculation (however frustrating or portentous this might appear). This speculative mapping is taken up in Christoph Brunner’s examination of the valence of diagrams and diagrammatic practice both in Guattari’s work, and that of cross-border activism in California. Brunner, in recognising Guattari’s mischievous oscillation between the terms metamodelisation and cartography, nonetheless pitches both practices as core motifs of Guattari’s interest in, and activism through, diagrams. Hinging on the artistic-activist work of Teddy Cruz and Estudio Teddy Cruz, the chapter draws attention to the virtual forces generated and perpetuated by diagrams. Here, modelisation is figured not as the tracing of fixed coordinates or assaying of general qualities, but a modulation – or transformation – of affects, complex relations, and unfolding territories. Apposite or otherwise, Teddy Cruz’s timely political interventions into USA-Mexico border politics exceed the asinine rhetoric of either his 2016 US Presidential Candidate namesake (but for two consonants) or the incumbent US President of whom Guattari had ‘figured-out’ his algae-like composition long before he entered the White House (see Guattari, 2008). Here, Cruz invokes not an overcoded tracing of a caravan-like migration, but instead insists on a cartography of transversal border relations, a context-specific diagrammatic urbanism.

Anne Querrien, a close friend of Guattari, having met him in 1965 and bearing witness to his “precocious love of philosophy” (Querrien and Boundas, 2016: 399), offers further testament to his manifold geographical thought. For Guattari, geography was not figured as an obeissance to cardinal directions on the compass, but underscored in large part by networks: of friends, activists, patients, and of course, of molecules. To that end, a Guattarian geography is, as Querrien argues, always at the same time a plural geography. This desiring for plurality in Guattari’s own work – conceptual and clinical – much like all desiring-machines, is part autopoetic. However, as Querrien makes clear in composing a brief history of Guattari’s clinical imbrications, that desire also emanated from and against a post-war consensus in French psychiatry steeped in monolithic techniques of therapy, and indeed bound similarly by monolithic understandings of institutional purpose. Querrien draws attention, therefore, to the scale of the task that befell Guattari, and indeed Jean Oury; one that arguably re-asserted itself long after Guattari’s death during the Sarkozy presidency (2007–2012) and the threat of a return to an industrial complex in psychiatric care. Notwithstanding these considerable macropolitical challenges, Querrien animates Guattari’s work as an unrelenting disruption of the spatiality and cartography of psychoanalysis, such that one can conclude that the geography of institutions is never settled. It would be misguided, however, to assume that this disruption takes the guise only of militant agitation. Here, Querrien insists on a ‘smoothness’ in both thought and technique, a gentleness, even, in working along lines of flight, harnessing all the while a pragmatic micropolitics and a schizoanalytic cartography to ‘get things done’.

“If you cannot work with such abstraction, don’t quote Guattari to bolster your argument” (Dewsbury this volume: 95). Here, JD Dewsbury’s icy invective spotlights a social science increasingly mired in a reterritorialisation of theory and held, simultaneously, in rapt enamourment with readily packaged forms of empiricism. In refrains of lost time, Dewsbury laments a social science impoverished by a lack of connective tissue to the machinic unconscious. Against, and from this lamentation, Dewsbury casts in hope – and in beckoning a ‘cartography of apprehension’ – that social scientists and geographers remain open to the event, and likewise that they grin in the face of deterritorialisation. As Dewsbury (this volume: 88) remarks, “[w]hatever the case of thinking about something else, the event of its happening ‘exists a little bit everywhere’ (Guattari, 2012: 17)”. There is a tinge here, perhaps, of Isabelle Stengers’ (2011: 153) take on Guattari and the need to operate – with simultaneous ease and truculence – in the comfort of gravitational vortices:

for those of us who teach and breath the academic air, reclaiming the machinic freedom of cartography, which Guattari’s operative constructs require, may well mean learning the signature of the black hole that threatens any (academic) relaying, and transforms relayers into sophisticated, spinning babblers: it is the fear of exposing oneself to the accusation of being duped, to compromise oneself with what others may be able to debunk.

A little phrase. A sonata. “Thinking is all this: a taste, a light, a sound, a grin” (Dewsbury this volume: 88). If we can afford to be less infantile, less decadent with cartography (surely we have but no choice?), a time of non-representational gentleness awaits.

References

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi). London: Continuum.

Genosko, G. (2009) Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: Pluto Press.

Guattari, F. (2008) The Three Ecologies (trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton). London: Continuum.

Guattari, F. (2011) The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (trans. T. Adkins). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Guattari, F. (2012) Schizoanalytic Cartographies (trans. A. Goffey). London: Bloomsbury.

Guattari, F. (2016) Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities (trans. A. Goffey). London: Bloomsbury.

Querrien, A. and Boundas, C. (2016) Anne Querrien, La Borde, Guattari and left movements in France, 1965–81: Interviewed by Constantin Boundas. Deleuze Studies, 10(3): 395–416.

Stengers, I. (2011) Relaying a war machine? In: Alliez, E. and Goffey, A. (eds.) The Guattari Effect. London: Continuum. pp. 134–155.

1 Through a net darkly

Spatial expression from glossematics to schizoanalysis

Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke

We return to the swamp of spots.

(Guattari, 2015: 179)

Pressed for words, as is our fate, suffice to say four things by way of contextualisation, as we plunge into the swamp of signs. First, we will be forging a constellation of geo-graphical (earth-writing, earth-inscribing) terms that give spatial expression to what Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze famously called schizoanalysis and geo-philosophy. For we are “speaking always as geographers”, as they say (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 83). For our part, we are not so much interested in the schizo as a conceptual persona or a mental ecology/pathology (we lean towards anti-humanism, after all), but as a figure of splitting and splintering (from the Greek, skhizein, to split), which, incidentally, has a close affinity with the X or χ of deconstruction (the twofold asymmetrical process of reversal and re-inscription chimes with the twofold process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation). Second, and to drive home the point that we have just made about speaking always as geographers, this constellation of fissured and fractured terms takes flight from an impasse bequeathed to us by what has come to be known as structuralism and poststructuralism. After Ferdinand de Saussure, the signifying fraction of the sign (the ‘signifier’, as he famously dubbed it; the portion or splinter that ‘makes sense’, so to speak, by giving expression) was set afloat, and its tendency to drift (to disseminate) could only be temporarily arrested by Saussure through the forcible and arbitrary imposition of chains. Some of these chains sought to anchor the signifier onto something meaningful (the ‘signified’, as Saussure famously dubbed it; the portion or splinter that ‘made sense’, so to speak, by being expressed),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: for better and for worse
• Part I Cartographies
• Part II Ecologies
• Part III Micropolitics
• Index