Ecosophic Times and Spaces

The chapter deals with the conceptualization of time and space in Schizoanalytic Cartographies. It first shows how Guattari ecologizes the pair of chronic and aionic time by squaring it within the diagram. It then illustrates this squaring by way of Guattari’s notion of time in his reading of Proust, his idea of the speed of determinability, and the deeply ecological time of kairos as the opportune moment to intervene into and to administer a situation. To conclude this section, it explains Guattari notions of affective and synaptic time. In its second section, the chapter develops, referencing Mandelbrot’s notion of fractal space and Leibniz’ notion of integration, the topological, projective space that is adequate to the space of the world. From within this space, urgent ecological questions can be posed. How to live in this world? How to inhabit its spaces? How to construct spaces that are adequate to the world?

Schizoecologic Cartographies

The chapter first defines the status of the diagram that underlies Schizoanalytic Cartographies as a formal diagram of an informal world. As such, it is itself a figure of the various complementarities that are defined within it. Using foldings of the diagram to organize the text, the chapter subsequently provides an in-depth analysis of the relations between and the superpositions of its four functors: Flows, Phyla, Territories and Universes. Next, it presents the diagram’s inherently ecological parameters. By way of tracing the vectors between its various positions, it defines the diagram as a meta-model of the expressive relation between the world and its creatures. After showing Guattari’s recalibration of the distinction between smooth and striated space, it exemplifies the notion of an expressive ecology in four sections that perform the squaring of concepts (chlorophyll), of the unconscious (Lacan), of aesthetics (Balthus) and of media studies (the analog and digital divide).

Ecogenesis

Drawing on Erwin Schrödingers concept of a-periodic crystals, the chapter considers crystals and crystallization as the ontological basis of Guattari’s schizoecology. After delineating Guattari’s ecologization of Saussurian semiotics, it traces Guattari and Deleuze’s discussion of Lucretius’ clinamen in A Thousand Plateaus. Drawing on Serres’ reading of the clinamen as the moment of the birth of the world, and on his reading of the clinamen in terms of semiotics, it shows how, by way of the joy of multiplicity and of an immanent physics, Lucretius’ muse Venus Anadyome becomes the conceptual figure of Guattari’s schizoecology. Drawing on the definition of consistency as an invariance within a process, the chapter then reads Thomas Nail notion of Lucretius’ fluid ontology in the light of Guattari’s differentiation between flow and aerosol; a differentiation that allows to conceptualize the birth of schizoecology in analogy to the birth of Venus from the spray of the ocean.

Schizoanalytic Ecology

Set against contemporary versions of a dark ecology, the chapter shows the inherent luminism of Guattari’s ecosophy, which it develops from within the complementarity of the differently luminous planes of immanence and of consistency. Drawing on Guattari’s ecologization of the notion of the abstract machine, the chapter turns to architecture as a testing site of the alignment of given world and giving creatures. A reading of Guattari’s writings on architecture shows that a schizoecological architecture should be, like ecology itself, both intensely impersonal and intensely personal, both intensely abstract and concrete. After tracing the conceptual architectures of the La Borde clinic, it develops, against recent theories of an all-encompassing and all-pervading capitalism, the theory of a time- and site-specific capitalism, and, set against against Lacanian paychoanalysis, of a time- and site-specific unconscious. The chapter concludes with a reading of The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis in the light of Schizoanalytic Cartographies.

Introduction: Guattari and Ecology

The chapter argues that of the many Guattaris – the psychoanalyst, the philosopher, the scholar of the arts, the cultural critic, and the activist – the most lasting one will be the ecologist, and it places Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies at the conceptual centre of a schizoecological tryptich that consists of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. It then traces some conceptual origins of and inspirations for what Guattari, borrowing a term from deep ecologist Arne Naess, calls his ecosophy. Other such borrowings come from the works of James E. Lovelock, Ilja Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Lucretius, Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson. By way of Guattari’s notion of the machinic, it then positions Guattari’s work in relation to various forms of constructivism. After delineating his own version of a schizoecologic and machinic constructivism, it shows how this schizoecology informs the schizoanalytic practices at La Borde clinic.

Conclusion: Right Here, Right Now

Drawing on Jan Smuts’ notion of a holism that is not whole, the conclusion argues that Guattari considers any given situation as always already ecological, and as simultaneously scientific, political, philosophical, biological, chemical, and so on. To consider a situation ecologically, therefore, means to consider it according to an overall ecological attitude, and to administer it with the aim of creating a space that allows to actualize viable modes of life. In the terms of Schizoanalytic Cartography, to act ecologically means to square situations in the light of the operation of an excessive, experimental, luminous world that everywhere favours change and newness over stasis. Accordingly, a schizoecologic ethics should be adequate to the world’s given multiplicity, as expresssed by Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative to act in such a way that the number of possibilities of choice increases. For better and worse, Guattari’s schizoecology is always ‘right here, right now.’