Increasingly disappointed by Francois Miterrand’s social democratic politics in the first half of the 1980s, and despite his friendship with the former’s minister of culture, Jack Lang, psychiatrist, philosopher, and activist Félix Guattari became a member of the French Green party in 1985. Until his death due to a heart attack in August 1992, Guattari played an indisputable role in environmental discourses in France, working not simply to unify the various existing branches into one, but to establish the green movement as transversal, plurivocal, and dissensual. This emphasis on multiplicity and dissonance was not least directed against essentialist perspectives on nature and against the protectionist right wings of ecologism, who reduce it to the protection of nature, animals, and the homeland (in “search for ancestral roots or a native land”), but also in favor of rethinking the relationship of movement and party yet again. Amidst this engagement for a radical and multiple political ecology at the end of the 1980s, Guattari composed a triple ecological vision which proved to be ahead of its time and is still relevant today: The Three Ecologies. In fact, he had intended for it to be part of his most complex book, Cartographies schizoanalytiques,1 but his editor Paul Virilio convinced him to publish the essay as a stand-alone text. It became a minor publishing success in 1989.
The Three Ecologies is Guattari’s political manifesto at the end of a decade which he himself called the “winter years.”2 His interpretation of these years speaks to our present in many ways. In The Three Ecologies Guattari already issues warnings about intensifications of the phenomena of religious fundamentalism and demands that “spontaneous social ecology works towards the constitution of existential territories which substitute themselves, so far as they can, for the old religious zoning of the socius.”3 Even more in his line of machine thinking, Guattari works out the connection between technological transformations and new modes of subjectivation, and underscores – before his time in this regard as well – possible side effects of the digital revolution: “[u]nemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and neurosis.”4
Beyond psychic problems and personal blows of fate—matters Guattari himself had to deal with during this time—he anticipated a social depression extending far beyond any private sphere, flowing into all pores of the “socius.” The amalgam of radicalpopulist and racist movements taking shape at that time in different European countries (in France, in the form of the Front National around “the one-eye” Jean-Marie Le Pen, in Austria with the Freedom Party and Jörg Haider, in Switzerland with SVP and Christoph Blocher, and later Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands), and authoritarian exacerbations of a restabilizing capitalism between 1968 and 1989 posed a serious problem for the theorist of machinic flows.
In a spooky foreboding of our present times, when the worst populist, narcissistic, and crazy features of Le Pen, Berlusconi, and Haider combine with the technologies of the 21st century, the specter of Donald Trump emerges in the text from the late 1980s, as the cynical actor of speculation, gentrification, and displacement: “men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he 'redevelops' by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.” We do not have to follow the analogy of the homeless as dead fish to understand what Guattari finds at stake here: “Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-systems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think 'transversally.'”5 And we have to understand that there is a connection between environmental and social fallout that haunts us even more today.
From Guattari’s perspective, already the 1980s were characterized by political repression and racism, nationalist schisms, accelerated mass mediatization, and ecological catastrophe—all occurring against the backdrop of, in Guattari’s terms, “integrated world capitalism.” Ten years later this would be called “globalization,” and in reference not least to Guattari’s works I would like to propose the term “machinic capitalism” for it today: This form of capitalism is machinic not only in its comprehensive implementation of algorithmic logics, derivatives, and transformations of “social” media, but also in Guattari’s sense as a vessel for the extension of self-government and machinic subservience. The result is that forms of quasi freely willed, even yearned for, self-subjugation are added to various forms of social subjugation: the desire of being a part, component, or cog in the machines.
Yet, we do not need to smash these machines today, but rather become components of deviant organizing with them: machinic production of desire against these compliant modes of subjectivation. What Guattari envisioned with his multifarious praxis of intervention and involvement in the ecological movements and the emerging Green parties of Europe was definitely not a “single-issue” environmental party in a reductionist sense. If the Greens of the 1980s struggled over the integration of more structurally reactionary components and more radical leftist and environmental activists, they were by no means the watered-down soft-green actors that the parties of the green spectrum today prove themselves to be. For Guattari, it was always about a transversal understanding of ecological development, as well as of ecological catastrophes, which are to be analyzed neither in the isolated terms of their particularities nor as components of a totalizing and unifying perspective that tends toward moralism and paranoia. In the 1980s, this related primarily to the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl, which had far-reaching consequences for Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia as well as for large parts of the northern hemisphere. In 2011, the catastrophe at the Japanese nuclear plant at Fukushima brought nuclear energy politics back to the center of ecological discourses. But more than anything, climate catastrophe has shown how transversally the spectrum of environmental questions must be treated today. In this first sense ecology means a perspective that brings complex assemblages of environments into focus: environments understood less as external to or around the world, but more as transversally-going-through-worlds, as surrounds.6
But it would be shortsighted to limit the significance of Guattari’s text in this narrower sense of ecology to the realm of “pure” environmental politics, without considering the ecological spheres of subjectivity and sociality. Thus, the second of the three ecologies can be characterized as mental ecology, and it aims at the radical transformation of modes of subjectivation. The fundamental problem here is machinic subservience, the increasing “introjection of repressive power by the oppressed,”7 which can only be fought by new forms of unruliness and resingularization. It is Guattari’s professional context that provides us with a trace for better understanding this demand: In the psychiatric clinic La Borde, he was able to examine for almost 40 years how the existential territory (which is, from my conceptual perspective, a subsistential territory) and modes of subjectivation came together when a different approach was taken to madness. In the small castle in the Solonge, as Anne Querrien writes, “2000 sick persons could be cared for with only 120 beds, while normal psychiatric clinics needed 2000 beds and a corresponding budget.”8 La Borde is a laboratory for the soft deterritorialization of the assemblage of subjectivation that Guattari deemed necessary for a mental ecology to emerge in the first place. The autonomous individual never stood at the center of these investigations; rather, it was always the dividual lines that we draw and through which we are drawn, which draw themselves through us. Instead of proceeding from classic notions of the individual psychology of the human psyche, the schizoanalysis of mental ecology emerges precisely beyond definitively assigned totalities, as embodied singularities of animae and their fragmentary connections to territories and environments. And this is the case far beyond the worlds of madness, as is seen, for example, in Guattari’s engagement with Japanese or Brazilian animist subjectivities.9
Third, ecology also relates to the socius, the social machines whose flows sometimes entrain us, but which often also break down. From the microsocial surround in the neighborhood to larger institutional undertakings and translocal social movements, social ecologies can be understood as milieus. These milieus are diffuse terrains, vicinities, buoyant-forceful-flowing ecology, not to be fixed to a certain delimited area. They are not simply the entirety of the lines of connection between human individuals in a certain space, but heterogeneous assemblages of “animal-, vegetable-, Cosmic-, and machinic-becomings” correlative to “the acceleration of the technological and data-processing revolutions.”10 Mechanosphere and animism are not outside of sociality in this understanding of milieus and social ecologies. Rather, they form a complex territory, which is influenced by affections and ethico-aesthetic paradigms.11 The oikos of social ecology no longer corresponds to the household ruled by the patriarch, and its administrative counterpart, the economy coded in equally patriarchal terms, but rather invents itself as an ecology of care. Following feminist readings of social reproduction, this situated care also implies an ethical relationship with animals, things, and machines. Social ecology starts in the relations of the neighborhood, but extends to the attempts—in the movements of critical urbanism, the right to the city, and ever new municipalisms—to work out the close link between living space, architecture, and sociality, to care for the surround, to make the city livable, to allow subsistential territories to emerge.
The three ecologies are not rigidly separated spheres; they are to be thought of as transversal to the interdependencies of ecosystems, subjectivations, and socio-mechanosphere—or, as Guattari puts it, they are three perspectives on the world, which thus can be simultaneously seen through three interchangeable lenses. These ecological practice forms are by no means to be brought under one label, homogenized, unified by whatever kind of transcendence. Guattari’s concept for this is heterogenesis: “Ways should be found to enable the singular, the exceptional, the rare, to coexist with a State structure that is the least burdensome possible.”12
Situating singularity beyond state apparatuses and apparatuses of capture finally brings us to the contemporary reception of Guattari’s works. To this end let us invoke the activistinventive machinist Guattari, who cannot and should not be as easily appropriated as his friends Deleuze and Foucault, whose militant philosophy has been reinterpreted in certain contexts as liberal-relativist, or even as “postmodern,” a term Guattari always rejected.13 Félix Guattari remained inventive insofar as he always connected the social machines and the conceptual machines anew, as institutional analyst, as militant in instituent practice and molecular revolution, as inventor of ecosophy as an “ethico-political articulation… between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity).”14 And in this sense, we should take on the task to be inventive, too. There is something important that traverses Guattari’s three ecologies, embracing the machines, while remaining critical towards accelerationisms and outer-space-colonialisms, something which we can call technecology: “Free the self from the socio-narcissistic inflections of the ‘social media’! Free the data doubles from availability and techno-tracking, the data in general from the disposal in the property of the monopolizing platforms, the codes from the private-oligopolistic appropriation! Keep an eye on ownership in the development of new data economies, because here too: occupation, poor ownership, enjoyment as caring use! Liberate all forms of knowledge, digital and analog, from copyright regimes, keep tinkering with the transversal intellect! Free the modes of subjectivation from machinic subservience! Instead of hate, gloating, envy, socio-narcissism, individualistic demarcation and isolation, you need technecologies that embrace the subtle things, the small gestures, the gentleness of affections in the situation of affect-envelopment. Build temporary zones of tactical withdrawal in local networks, and beyond any localism new techno-milieus, ‘media’, ‘platforms’, fundamentally open and radically inclusive technecological structures and apparatuses! And in the midst of dividual multiplicity and technecological dissemblage, reach for the clouds, occupy the abstract machines, socialize the data space!”15 A fourth ecology, which is at the same time mental, environmental, social, and a transversal machine connecting the three ecologies.
As stated in Guattari’s final text “Vers une nouvelle démocratie écologique,” the new ecosophy must also bring forth “another form of doing politics.”16 For us later generations the task remains to construct new institutings and machines, multiple ecologies that follow Guattari’s ecosophy, go beyond it, and attempt to explode compliance in machinic capitalism.
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