GUATTARI’S TRIPLEX DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY

Erick Heroux

Let us begin at the end, to see where we will have been going, and then retrace
our steps to see how we got there, or rather here, with the last words of Félix
Guattari in his final essay:

Ecological disasters, famine, unemployment, the escalation of racism and

xenophobia, haunt like so many threats . . . . [But humanity] passively contributes to
the pollution of water and the air, to the destruction of forests, to the disturbance of
climates, to the disappearance of a multitude of living species, to the impoverishment
of the genetic capital of the biosphere . . . to the suffocation of its cities, and to the
progressive abandonment of cultural values and moral references in the areas of
human solidarity and fraternity . . . .
Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have dissolved in
favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often synonymous with anxiety and
neurosis. It is for this reason that I advocate—under the aegis of a new conjunction of
environmental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology—the invention of new
collective assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school,
the neighborhood, etc. (“Remaking Social Practices” in The Guattari Reader 262-
263).

In sum, these are the three ecologies: nature, society, and psyche. Their interactive
interdependence forms a triplex discourse and material effects, in sickness and in
health. Also, here Guattari firmly turns to face toward the future, toward creative
change, and toward new forms of solidarity. By now this is a common attitude, if
still wistfully emerging and vaguely articulated, about what needs to be done. So
why Guattari now? What does he offer as prospective tools for the unprecedented
challenges of the twenty-first century?
A few weeks after submitting this testament for publication, Guattari suddenly
died in 1992 about three years before the death of his more famous colleague,
Deleuze, in 1995. Then and now, he is widely assumed to be a sort of junior partner
in their collaboration on several books. A side effect of this essay will subvert that
assumption by showing that Guattari was not only a formidably productive theorist
in his own work, and also by noticing that much of the supposedly Deleuzean
lexicon appeared earlier in Guattari’s publications. Most commentary today
erroneously attributes to someone named “Deleuze” these terms, “words that
Guattari invents” as Deleuze himself said (On the Line 88) and even more
generously that there “is not one of these ideas that which did not come from Félix
(black hole, micro-politics, deterritorialization, abstract machines, etc.)”
(Dialogues II 19). Yes, Guattari’s earlier solo articles 2 were replete with terms such
as: deterritorialization, overcoding, machinic assemblages, concrete and abstract
desiring machines, molecular versus molar, transversality, diagrammatic, non-
signifying semiosis, material fluxes, assemblages of enunciation, plane of
consistency, the refrain, and schizoanalysis. In sum, this amounts to most of what
generally gets repeated as “Deleuzean” concepts by commentators. It is telling,
also, that during interviews with the two theorists, Deleuze often defers to Guattari,
who then lets forth a volley of speech that is rapid, critical, fertile,
uncompromising, sprinkled with neologisms and flights of theory that insist on
multiplying the social potentials of desire.1 This is a unique voice that we recognize
from somewhere, déjà vu. Where? Yes, in those notorious two volumes of L'Anti-
Œdipe and Mille plateaux. Moreover, the main evidence of Guattari’s major
contribution in collaborating with Deleuze is in his recently published notebooks
and working drafts in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, which is described by an editorial
blurb as revealing Guattari “as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-
minded ‘conceptor,’ arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in
philosophy and sociopolitical theory today” (Guattari 2006). Likewise, Gary
Genosko’s booklength study gives significant evidence of Guattari’s authorship. 3
While Deleuze was indeed philosophically more erudite and stylistically more
“poetic” than Guattari, nevertheless, the books that most of us speak of as
Deleuzean theory would not be possible without Guattari’s conceptual and radical
contributions. Antonio Negri is a prominent exemplar of a theorist said to have
been influenced by Deleuze, yet it was with Guattari that he cowrote Les nouveaux
espaces de liberté (in the English edition, Communists Like Us). Therefore, while I
have been slow to appreciate Guattari myself, resisting his posthumanist machinic
terminology and impatient abstractions as too bristly, I have gradually come to
appreciate his work as offering us extensive potentials; and for other reasons, not
the least of which is that any person must be extraordinary who survived a training
analysis with Lacan, collaborated with Negri and with Deleuze, and then defined
our era of late capitalist globalization in terms of its ecological degradation a full
decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was not a junior partner, but rather an
inspirational cowriter and a veritable fountain of new ways to do both theory and
praxis. His fairly successful transformation of a 100-bed psychiatric hospital over
several decades is an under appreciated example of that praxis.4
Meanwhile, here my primary aim is to provide a critique of Guattari’s explicit
turn toward ecology vis-à-vis the theoretical biology of Bateson, Maturana, Varela
and of “complexity science” in general, and thence his enlargement of ecology, an
ecology of the postindustrial mass-mediated globe by way of a political economy
and psychology, resulting in something quite different for theory. We have already
suggested where he winds up. The main texts in my discussion will be Guattari’s
booklet, The Three Ecologies, but also his passages on this topic in a later book,
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm and scattered elsewhere in his

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occasional writings. Hence, now that we have reviewed “why Guattari?”, the next
question about the terms in my title should be: “What was ecology?”

Ecology sans Guattari

Ecology, as every school child knows, is an empirical study of the relationships
between organisms and also between organisms and their physical environment.
What fewer people know is that today these relationships are usually measured
(often statistically) in terms of energy exchanges, flows, transformations
throughout a given set of organisms and nonorganic environs. An original view
within ecology defined these relationships in terms of their systemic effects much
like the use of feedback and homeostasis in cybernetics and general systems theory.
Ecologists then thought that ecosystems seek stability, and that biodiversity itself is
a key support of this stability. While the notion of an open system and/or
interlocking ecosystems remains one of the current models, it has been challenged
from within the field by a younger group of ecologists who point out some of the
limitations of this view and the empirical exceptions that the systems view ignores. 5
Today, ecologists place more emphasis on dynamic (in)stability that is not
essentially locked to biodiversity in a direct way.
Whatever the future fate of the systems view, the field of ecology is like every
science—if not riven by then constituted by internal debates and multiple positions
which are only within the field because they address issues made possible by the
even deeper underlying assumptions and selected sets of data that allow these
assertions to make sense, a kind of “positive unconscious” as Foucault called it, the
unspoken rules which form a particular scientific discursivity (xi). In other words,
the field of ecology nevertheless continues to focus on an interactive overview,
showing the interdependence of manifold life-forms where one’s waste becomes
another’s food across complex networks often called food webs, and where a
change in the population of one species will have secondary and tertiary effects on
the population of other interconnected species, often in a nonlinear way.
The earth’s biosphere itself continues to reproduce the physical conditions of
possibility for living organisms, a planet open to the vast input of external energy,
with life driven ultimately by the cyclical dose of solar energy which then gets
converted and passed along and recycled throughout the uncounted inorganic and
organic subsystems at scales that are both microscopic and macroscopic. These
levels are so vast and complex that ecology itself is now carved up into numerous
subspecialties, each of which may take one’s entire career to master, with some
specializations requiring, i.e., more expertise with chemistry but others with
population genetics while others with animal behavior but others with
oceanography and so forth. Ecology is charged with the responsibility to explain
how this all works, and then perhaps to predict when the components that sustain
the conditions of life might no longer work. This focus on relationships and

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interdependent flows rather than on isolated organisms is a kind of (neo)holistic
approach, though without committing itself to any mystical holism, and as such
ecology moved slightly away from the older tendency of biology to analyze into
smaller components and explain by reduction, the tradition that led toward
impressive discoveries in genetics and molecular biology. A subtle tension within
the biological sciences persists today between ecologists and the biologists of the
latter sort, however this should not be exaggerated or taken to mean that they
commonly disagree about the means and ends of science. Both remain committed
to a wide range of shared traditions and, again, merely internal debates. A powerful
example of this is the theory of evolution by natural selection, which while given
over to different combinations of emphasis on relatively specific aspects, continues
to be a shared knowledge that structures the whole field, so that the explanation
provided by “adaptation” gets applied nearly everywhere, only now with many
added qualifications and supplements by all sides.
Much more could be said, but this is the best short description of contemporary
ecology-as-a-science that I can muster here. In sum, I will emphasize that the
discipline is as empirical as the other branches of science, with the attendant use of
quantification, especially statistics; that it also commonly employs computer
simulations to model predictable future outcomes, and that it continues to develop
competing models and to gather new data for analysis. Guattari did not discuss this
field in detail, so therefore he has never been cited by ecologists.

Bateson & Theoretical Ecology

Now would seem to be the moment, therefore, to say that this is too bad for the
field of ecology today. They may likely find themselves arriving at some version of
a Deleuzoguattarian philosophy later this century if they continue to study the
interconnections and flows outward and inward. Already a new subfield is slowly
emerging circa 2008 called “biosemiotics” which has begun to add a semiology of
information, meaning, and signification to the interdisciplinary study of ecology. 6
The biosemioticians, alas, have not yet discovered Guattari, which discovery might
save them a few years of puzzling through the reinvention of non- or a-signifying
semiosis and/or diagrammaticism, and assemblages of enunciation from Guattari’s
toolbox that would seem useful at this stage.
Yet surely, Guattari’s aim was not to contribute to the study of natural
relationships per se, but rather to the study of the human organism using a specific
subset of bio-systems theories that were in themselves already more philosophically
inclined than the discipline of ecology described above would seem to apprehend
within its unspoken rules. He often cites and alludes to two sources: Gregory
Bateson and the more recent cognitive biology of Maturana and Varela
(Autopoiesis and Cognition 1980), which extends and complicates the seminal
work of Bateson with their theory of “autopoesis” or the self-organizing, self-

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producing capacity of living systems such as a simple cell when it obtains
“operational closure” but structural openness.
From the innovative and transdisciplinary works of Bateson, Guattari adopted
the cybernetic view that living systems enact a necessary unity of life-forms and
mind, beyond or beneath any dualist division of reality, and that mind is manifested
at even the simplest levels of life and all the way up to the interactivity of complex
ecosystems. Mind here is not consciousness, but a form of embodied cognition-in-
acting by life forms doing things with “information” or differences. That is,
elementary mentality does not arrive suddenly after the brain, but rather whenever
an organized pattern emerges that begins to make distinctions, e.g., between food
and waste, light and dark, warm and cold, me and not-me, and so forth and begins
to use such distinctions as maintenance or systemic feedback, developing
increasingly complex levels of logical types of information, such as information-
about-information is of a logically higher category. When this becomes an organic
process rather than static logical types, the process depends upon and produces
“orders of recursiveness” (Mind and Nature 222). I might go so far as to compress
Bateson’s much more colorful and elegant observations as to state that once an
organic system obtains orders of recursiveness, then it has the capacity to “learn,” a
behavior generally attributed to mind rather than matter. Mind co-evolves into
brain, and does not suddenly appear after that organ magically appears on the
scene. Mind is a kind of body without organs in Deleuzoguattarian terms, yet it is
produced interactively by organs without a body at the same time.
Furthermore, looking at the larger interactive network between organisms, once
two or more of these recursive systems begin to process differences (a.k.a,
information) interactively in strategic patterns of cooperation/competition, then we
are at the learning process of co-adaption, which Bateson also called co-evolution
(51). Bateson is sometimes hastily misread as suggesting that biology shows us a
Mind guiding Nature, but this is a very poor reading since Bateson explicitly warns
against such transcendence repeatedly. The mind/nature or nature/mind that he did
try to describe is entirely immanent, and it is only coextensive with the material
systemic process that has, Guattari would say, produced it, and Bateson would add,
while simultaneously being produced by it. Already of interest here is that Bateson
does not write of a Subject or intentionality, but rather of complex systems that
treat as information only a “difference that makes a difference” for that system, a
pragmatic process (250). One of his most philosophically passionate summings up
is in an essay titled “Form, Substance, and Difference” where a further step is made
from the way mind is dependent upon the larger contexts, the interconnecting
patterns, and that this complex unit (or assemblage) of the “organism-and-its
environment” is actually what survives in natural selection. Ultimately, Bateson
argues that mind is not something located inside an isolated entity, but rather
“immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem” (“Form, Substance, and

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Difference” 454). But because this interdependent system has co-evolved, because
mind in this sense has been selected, this implies an obligation on our part to attend
to the survival of the whole context, not the isolated individual or species. A vital
consequence of this is summed up in Bateson’s paramount conclusion that has not
yet been fully taken on board:

The identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very
great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical (460).

The traditional vulgar-darwinist view of competing individuals and the survival

of the most successfully adapted species in an indifferent environment is an
enormous error, according to Bateson, a view that actually assists in the ongoing
suicidal destruction of our environment. Bateson’s solution is to think more
comprehensively about the nature of nature, beyond identity and reification, so as
to reconnect to the sources of one’s own mind in the larger material contexts of
interlocking systems in nature. Mind is on the outside, so to speak, if also the
inside/outside binary is already placed under erasure to the degree that the inside
(i.e., your mind) is inseparable from the outside, while the outside always already is
comprised of multiple layers of insides. I might rephrase this after Guattari as the
becoming-mind of the complex networks of bodies-and-their-environment, of
systems inside of systems inside of systems all the way down as far as we can go to
the molecular and even the subatomic, and all the way back up to the planetary and
the cosmos. While each system is distinct, producing its own properties, there is no
possible cut along the continuum of interactive mutuality, or as the theoretical
biologist Varela puts it in his Buddhist terms: “codependent arising” (Embodied
Mind 110).
Guattari assimilated and adapted much of Bateson into his already developing
theory of “desiring machines” and “machinic assemblages” (agencement), which
can most readily be defined as a kind of Batesonian system. From Bateson, he will
recognize the themes of immanence, process, the co-dependence of mind/nature as
enacted in the connecting patterns of systems, the irrelevant lateness of a conscious
subject or an isolated cogito, the way that meaning is only a pragmatic activity for a
particular system of differences, and finally Bateson’s urgent ethical conclusion of
a what was so far an objective description. At this point, we can also more easily
find the connections between those “three ecologies” of mind, society, and natural
environment already insisted upon in many of Bateson’s essays.

Ecologies avec Guattari

Now that we have the gist of this alternative theoretical biology, it should be
both more obvious and more resonant that the lead epigraph for Guattari’s booklet
The Three Ecologies is from Bateson: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as

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there is an ecology of weeds.” The bridge (though not the identity) between a
science and a politics, between epistemology and ethics, between the established
ecology and the Guattarian ecology begins with Bateson’s insight. While science
continually delimits its statements for value-neutrality in the traditional project to
preserve its objectivity from subjective distortions, this approach proves to be too
simplistic and inadequate as a human ecology—both for epistemology and for
ethics. Guattari will thus take ecological theory through Bateson and Varela and
beyond into a social praxis that he also called an “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” (the
subtitle of his book, Chaosmosis). Social practices, personal practices, and
environmental practices are indeed mutually influencing, but more to the urgent
task at hand, Guattari repeatedly insists in several books that scientific knowledge
is not the end point, but only the beginning to assist in the creative activity of
making new ways of life, a social cultivation of new singularities linked to new
solidarities with open, multiple, transversal connectors. Ecological practice needs
empirical sources of knowledge about the natural world, but then this factual
knowledge is not the fundamental ground of all human values, and must enter the
complex social production of new values, becoming part of the larger ecology of
ideas and the emerging autopoetic “assemblies of enunciation” as they move across
the social formation.
This is Guattari’s gambit as the way around our current impasse, a world where
we already have far more ecological knowledge than we do ecological practices,
which are often blocked at the level of national politics and suppressed whenever
they conflict with the profitable interests of corporations. But piecemeal reforms go
nowhere near far enough to solve the planet’s problems; and as soon as we begin to
tamper with one specific problem, sooner or later we find that it is connected to
other problems in other realms, other ecologies, which are then connected to other
problems in turn, endlessly and we find that everything is connected to everything.
A viable alternative to this false dilemma between the unsustainable status quo and
ineffective technical reforms carried out by authorities would seem to be quite
Guattarian: to set loose a “molecular revolution” of micropolitical practices that
make new transversal subjectivities, assemblages, autovalorizing machines of
enunciation, de- and re- territorializations that are flexible, process oriented, and
open to the multiple agencies involved, whether prepersonal, personal, or
metapersonal. In Chaosmosis, he occasionally takes to the soapbox to deliver a
rousing manifesto:

With the fading antagonisms of the Cold War, we enter a period when serious
threats, posed by our productivist society to the human species, appear more
distinctly. Our survival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental
damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity and in the modes of
psychical life, which must literally be reinvented. The refoundation of politics will
have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three

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 ecologies—the environment, the socius and the psyche. We cannot conceive of
solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the
greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of
mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society. We cannot conceive of
international discipline in this domain without solving the problem of hunger and
hyperinflation in the Third World. We cannot conceive of a collective recomposition
of the socius, correlative to a resingularisation of subjectivity, without a new way of
conceiving political and economic democracies that respect cultural differences—
without multiple molecular revolutions. We cannot hope for an amelioration in the
living conditions of the human species without a considerable effort to improve the
feminine condition. The entire division of labor, its modes of valorization and
finalities need to be rethought. Production for the sake of production—the
obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned
economies—leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human
activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the
world in a continuous fashion (20-21).

I have quoted this passage at length because it is a rare moment in Guattari’s texts
when he is willing to concretely list the particular problems, suggest both their
diversity and pervasiveness, and also show the holistic entanglement we are caught
up in, while simultaneously point to the way forward, the “new art of living in
society.” Forming scientific commissions of ecologists to study the problem is
very far from adequate, though of course a small step toward progress. He goes on
to explain the radical break since his ecology “must stop being associated with the
image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in
my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations,
whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue . . . .” (Three Ecologies
52). A ringing echo can be heard of Marx’s famous "Theses on Feuerbach," the
point is change, not interpretation; creation not reiteration; experimentation not
repetition.
But change how and according to whom? Guattari’s theory and praxis never
stopped answering this: At every level, high and low, inside and out, from each
according to their desire to each according to their needs. Rather than Marx’s
gambit for centralization and economic development, Guattari aims for a
decentered, heterogenic, polyphonic transversality at all levels across the three
ecologies. We now know that most people desire to create a healthier psyche,
society, and environment. But they feel trapped. Yet we also know that certain
conditions have led to rapid and dramatic change from below, just like chaotic
flows in thermodynamics will unpredictably bifurcate and generate a new
organized pattern, as for instance happened around the world in 1989 when masses
of people poured into the streets to suddenly end the Soviet Union. Change is a
process of flow from below, from each pre-individual subconscious fragment, each
person, each family, locale, group, classroom, tribe, audience, and so forth all the

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way through international levels, with “transversal” lines crisscrossing each in
multiple networks. In the fifteen or so years since this long quotation was
published, we have indeed witnessed the massive spread of awareness about the
global warming it mentioned, something that took about thirty years but only
hundreds of individuals to communicate to the world. Today as a consequence, we
witness an exploding emergence of multiple responses, groups, solutions,
technologies, dreams, critiques, soul-searching, city planning, international accords,
actions moving in all directions, coming from above and below in various
transversal combinations. If this process could be encouraged rather than
constrained (which is also happening at the same time), then another molecular
revolution vis-à-vis global climate change will have happened, resulting also in
new subjectivities, new agencies, new solidarities.
Other current examples of how these three ecologies can be reconnected in new
“machinic assemblages” are emerging in many zones. The important work of
Vandana Shiva converges with Guattari’s recommendations, though starting from a
very different education and location. Shiva is a particle physicist, ecologist, and
feminist active in India, and she has successfully helped to create new forms of
solidarity among village women and farmers to avoid the devastation of their
communities wrought by transnational agribusiness, genetically modified seed, the
biopiracy of privatizing genetic heritage, and neoliberal economics. While
speaking, writing, and organizing for environmental justice, Shiva continues to
compose uncounted book after book about the interconnections between
biodiversity and “bio-democracy” versus “bio-imperialism” and monoculture—of
both the agricultural and cultural sort.6 Her theory and practice connects ideas and
materials, economics and ecology, global and local, individuals and communities,
scientific knowledge and ethics, forming new assemblages of enunciation that link
up democratic desires and produce new social practices. Guattari imagined a world
of a billion Vandana Shivas, each a unique singularity linking up new solidarities.
How to cultivate the conditions for such a renewing society is the main theme
throughout Guattari’s theoretical work. He does not merely remind us that we have
a serious problem and that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, like all too
many writers have done. Instead he delves into the microlevel sources of change
and the institutional, psychic, and ideological blockages that prevent change.
Readers of this essay collection know that he moved through and beyond Lacanian
psychoanalysis and in postmarxist circles for much of his career. During the last
phase of his career, these too were enfolded and extrapolated into an increasingly
layered theory coming out of the theoretical biology previously introduced. The
complexity of Guattari’s theoretical work is a consequence of his dialogue with
complexity science, and at times this dialogue was literal, as in the case of a formal
discussion with leading scientists, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. 8 Just as he
had already been doing with Lacanism, Marxism, and semiotics, Guattari critically

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worked through and against complexity science, theorizing what he variously
called ecosophy and chaosmosis. Prigogine is one of several founders of the new
science of complexity, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on
thermodynamic flows, showing the emergence of order in physical states far from
equilibrium. Guattari often alludes to Prigogene and his cowriter, Isabelle Stengers.
An essential book by them, one of the most important for both its philosophy of
science and its contribution to a new science, is Order Out of Chaos (1984). This
explains the “new science of complexity” in detail for a general reader, or at least in
its thermodynamics aspect. The book makes a surprising number of enormous
claims for the historical shift to a different science as it argues for the irreversibility
of time, the uncertainty of prediction, a new perspective on entropy, the emergence
of order from chaotic fluctuations, the priority of becoming over being, active
matter, etc. Guattari reappropriated this for his psycho-socio theories, especially the
emphasis on how non-equilibrium dynamic systems in chaotic flux form new self-
organizing processes. He used this to correct the older cybernetic systems view he
had learned from Bateson, a view which tended to emphasize a more static
equilibrium or homeostasis. One can immediately guess that his dislike of Freud’s
deep reliance on biological homeostasis, for instance in the theory of a death drive,
is paralleled in all such conservative tropes that then get reapplied as ideological
containment at the social level. Now the tables were turned, and the new science of
complexity was showing that while stasis is ultimately entropy, that chaos leads to
the emergence of self-organization, that process and becoming are more
fundamental in nature than being.
Does all this borrowing from natural science make Guattari a neo-materialist
who would return psychology and sociology to their evolutionary and physical
ground? Is he a kind of crypto-sociobiologist in the E. O. Wilson camp, providing
deeper foundations for social theory? A closer reading will show that the answer is
no. Just as Lacan pried psychoanalysis away from biology by bringing in
linguistics, the gaze, the imaginary, the symbolic structure, etc., so too did Guattari
for ecology in his own way.9 The hybrid complexity of his theory also owes to his
frequent citations of Bakhtin’s literary theory and Hjelmslev’s linguistics, which
would have to be the topic of another essay. The upshot for now is to see three
ontological modifications that preclude any easy reduction of one domain to
another. First, his three ecologies are not simply the same, nor in a direct causal
chain. Each ecology has its own distinct emergent properties, while other features
do traverse the three. I will come back to this in a bit more detail below. There is
left then no reduction of one to the other, as was the error of Social Darwinism for
instance. Second, which “nature” are we talking about? For Guattari, the nature of
nature is endlessly innovative, productive, dynamic, chaosmic, heterogenic, auto-
poetic, becoming. This does not preclude a neo-materialist psychology (Nietzsche
is a case in point here), but it certainly complicates the traditional attempt to nail

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down human normality on its physical substrate, since in this case it would be
impossible to locate the norm. Third, the environment is selectively shaped by
each organism differently; such that different species interact with a different
“world” in a very materialist way, a rather elaborate point explained by Maturana
and Varela (1980). This too should be clarified once we look next at Guattari’s
three ecologies a bit more closely.
The three domains are interactive yet each operates on its own unique
principles. They also parallel the three horizons found in a quite common
philosophical tradition (in phenomenology, existentialism and gestalt psychology)
that situated our experience of phenomena within three distinct contexts, moving
outward in concentric circles: self (eigenwelt), society (mitwelt), and environment
(umwelt) also translated commonly as “world”. These are not objective universals,
but rather situations that structure conscious experience of an inner world, a social
world of being with others, and the natural world as it appears from one’s position.
Let us see how those three phenomenological horizons are remodeled in Guattari’s
version of a tripartite ecology, since he rejects phenomenology as a method (37).
Still, he did retain some elements of that phenomenology or at least existentialism,
when he notes a few pages later that the three ecologies do have in common that
they are experienced as a “for-itself [pour-soi]” and not as a closed “in-itself [en-
soi]” (53). Despite this common feature, each ecological domain also has a
separate principle of its own, and there may even be “antinomies between the
ecosophical levels” (54).
First, for the psyche, the principle is that it faces the world and selects the
significant environmental factors through “a pre-objectal and pre-personal logic
that Freud has described as being a ‘primary process’” (54). I believe that Guattari
had in mind his previous work on “partial objects” and “partial enunciators” that
are closely related to transitional objects (between self and other, neither/nor but
both/and) in psychoanalysis and the objet petit a in Lacan. But Guattari is now re-
articulating this already subtle psychological point with the cognitive biology of
Varela and Maturana, who argue that every organism “brings forth a world” with
its own unique set of senses and interactions with particular environmental signals,
energies, meanings, while it ignores or cannot perceive some other environmental
signals that are the “world” for a different type of organism. One way to see the
simultaneous links and separations between the psyche and its environment is
through this version of a partial object somewhere in the middle between subject
and object, both/and yet neither/nor. The organism brings forth its own objects,
selected from the buzzing chaos as a difference that makes a difference. Thus these
objects are partly subjective, and specific only to that particular umwelt.
Second, the ecological principle specific to the social domain has to do of
course not just with objects but rather other subjects, always already in
relationships, from parents and family to larger and larger social groups out to the

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mysterious entity called society that seems to demand things from us and to both
meet and frustrate desire. The ecology of society is informed by these entangled
emotional and libidinal investments, yet also including “pragmatic cathexis” (60),
or the practical internalization of social norms and habits. As this psychoanalytic
description suggests, an interlocking overlap with the previous psychic ecology is
everywhere apparent in Guattari’s description of the social domain. He further
divides the socius into two basic types of relational identification. To simplify, I
might serviceably rephrase these as bad (unconsciously) versus good
(autopoetically), if only we understand that Guattari does not take seriously any
such binary oppositions, and that throughout his work there are no guarantees that
any political ontology is inherently always “good”. Readers of Deleuze and
Guattari together inevitably find this caveat, that is, if they make it to the end of
each chapter: deterritorialization is not always the right thing at the right time, and
neither is reterritorialization always wrong; “smooth spaces” are not necessarily
liberatory; lines of flight can be a danger to self and others; the “rhizome” is both
“good and bad”; the “body without organs” can be an “overdose” or also “fascist”
depending on the situation (Deleuze, On the Line 108). The same deconstructive
seeing through logocentrism pertains to Guattari’s struggle to articulate useful
tactics that nevertheless provide no eternal guarantee for every situation. The
section on social ecology then offers a longer discussion about global social
problems: the imposition of a postindustrial selfhood onto undeveloped countries in
monstrously awkward social formations; the failure of mass media to assist in
positive social change, instead feeding the degradation of mind, society, and
environment; the alternative potential for a “post-media age” that would allow
everyone to produce communications, fostering “a multitude of subject-groups
capable of directing [the media’s] resingularization” (61); and the complex
recomposition of the working classes as if they were middle-class
[“embourgeoiser”] given the advent of a new mode of production in information
economies (63); coupled with the off-shoring of factory line Fordist production,
intersecting with an international division of labor; the dangerous probability of a
bifurcation and emergence of a “fascism of the Ayatollahs” and similar reactionary
capturing of social groups through fantasies of the Law, the Father, the Leader.
These topics are more familiar to readers of Hardt and Negri today, but I am
reminded that the date of this booklet was 1989. In winding down his global
ecology, Guattari warns again that his theoretical models are not guarantees: “It
must be stressed that [my] promotion of existential values and the values of desire
will not present itself as a fully-fledged global alternative” (66). Something else
will be at least as crucial, the “long-term shifts” in value systems that undergird
sociocultural systems. Yet these too are long wave results of thousands of smaller
value-systems “percolating” up over the years. The bifurcation and emergence,

12
formerly known as the revolution, always occurred when such microrevolutions
could coalesce into “new poles of valorization” (66).

Now that we have seen the more distinct principles of both the mental and
social domains, finally we arrive at the third, but the specific principle of
environmental ecology tellingly gets the least space in his text, and it gets short
shrift. In a book dedicated to ecologies, this is oddly inexplicable and the principle
here does not seem to follow from his reading of Bateson and Varela, with the vital
exception that he does take up that point about preserving the unit of “organism-
and-its-environment” discussed above. This section does, however, seem to
resemble moreso his engagement with Prigogine’s chaos science of
unpredictability, irreversibility, and the process of dynamic disequilibrium. The
natural principle is that anything can happen and probably will—“the worst
disasters or the most flexible evolutions” (66). Again there are no guarantees. The
upshot for human ecology in this passage could be summed up as restoration
ecology and creative environmental engineering both. Since our technologies have
now seriously interfered with and endangered so many ecosystems, we find
ourselves thrown into a race to then use technology to manage, repair, improve our
environment in order to preserve the human habitat. This is asserted briefly as a
matter of fact over which it is by now too late to argue, as we are in the midst of
one of the greatest mass species extinctions ever recorded in addition to global
climate chaos, something the media has been shy to discuss. Scientists announced
in January 2008 that we have indeed passed into a new geological era that they
named the “Anthropocene Epoch.”10 The new man-made epoch will be measurably
visible to future geologists, a segmentation layer has already been laid down
between this new epoch and the old, departing from the recent 10,000-year-old
Holocene Epoch, or in other words all of written history and then some. Now we
begin to move into the interesting times where natural history and human history
have become so interwoven that geological analysis cannot ultimately separate
them. This is what I mean by being thrown into an inextricably technological
ecology. Since complex systems under bifurcation are irreversible, as shown by the
work of Prigogine, there is no going back. Guattari pushes us ahead, urgently.
Guattari attempts to articulate the three in relationship to each other inseparably
and yet also as autonomous realms given over to their unique modes, never
allowing one to dominate and endanger the others. Thinking through this sort of
both/and approach, Guattari advises us to “learn to think ‘transversally’” (Three
Ecologies 43) and to emphasize an “eco-logic” of creative process, relational
systems, and experimental praxis rather than reductionist analysis. Nevertheless,
the three domains are equally distressed today, and not by coincidence. Especially
after 1989, what he had long before been calling “Integrated World Capitalism”
increasingly dominates and endangers all three domains of psyche, society, and

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natural environment. To that extent, his ecosophy defends these “three ecologies”
against an unsustainable system of exploitation. Articulating their needs and
interests together will not be a return to Marxist totalization with its fundamental
categories of the infrastructure-ideology model. Instead, for Guattari, as with
virtually all of the poststructuralist postmarxists, we are beginning to create new
“ecosophical assemblages of enunciation” that will redirect us away from the
unhealthy “dead-end” of capitalism (53). The only escape is to encourage a praxis
that embraces the three domains yet frees them to mutate and evolve
simultaneously and heterogeneously (68):

 A nascent subjectivity
 A constantly mutating socius
 A natural environment in the process of being reinvented

Guattari concludes that the “reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one

particular domain encourages conquests in other domains--the catalyst for a gradual
reforging and renewal of humanity’s confidence in itself starting at the most
miniscule level” (69). For a long time we were taught to see humanity at war with
nature; and individuals competing against each other for scarce socio-economic
rewards; and the psyche as eternally caught in discontented tension between the
opposing pressures of the superego and the instincts. This new ecology breaks with
all three traditional lessons of inexorable conflict by highlighting the forgotten
lessons: the ways in which the stimulation of creative production in one domain
often enough does support the increased vitality of the other domains. A diseased
psyche destroys its own environment and thus itself, but a healthy psyche cultivates
and renews its own environment, obtaining as gifts the further productivity of the
natural world. Societies of open cooperation multiply the benefits for individuals in
tertiary effects beyond calculation. Guattari’s ecosophy argues for a theory and
praxis that cultivates both mutual interdependence and heterogeneous creativity at
each level simultaneously: “Individuals must become both more united and
increasingly different. The same is true for the resingularization of schools, town
councils, urban planning, etc.” (69).
Perhaps it does not go without saying that I have had to condense and simplify
Guattari’s more extended and complex points. His texts are interesting in their
sudden shifts from abstract neologisms to the more homely examples. While he did
not consider himself to be a writer, and in fact confessed that he had no patience for
writing, still his books and essays are deliberately constructed to offer a new vision
sincerely held and seriously thought through. His style has been dismissed
frequently by the usual impatient reader. Likewise, his ecosophy has yet to be
discussed in any of the major anthologies of Ecocriticism, Green Studies readers,
and such that I have come across--and I collect them. Carolyn Merchant omitted

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him from her 1994 anthology Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory even
though it contains decent sections on critical theory (Adorno, Marcuse et al) and
also from “postmodern science” including Prigogine. Greg Garrard omitted him in
the first booklength overview of the field of ecocriticism (2004). On the other
hand, Guattari was discussed appreciatively by the poststructuralist ecofeminist
Verena Andermatt Conley in a chapter devoted to him in Ecopolitics (91-107),
even though she wishes that he had read more Donna Haraway on the cyborg-as-
feminist, and thereby misses too much that could be read in Guattari’s machinic
assemblages; and she refers not at all to his Chaosmosis. I will mention one other
appreciative reading of his ecosophy in passing, that in an essay for the Research
on Anarchism website titled, “The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism”
in which the author reliably if rapidly summarizes Deleuze and Guattari on the
rhizome and also Guattari’s Three Ecologies and largely defends the implications
of these against the opposing view of the more humanist social ecology of Murray
Bookchin. The essay is sketchy but makes a number of sharp distinctions along the
way and in general argues that Guattari is useful.
Very little has been said about his ecosophy to date, and even less has been
done with it. So, does the study of Guattari repay the effort? Or are other ecologies
of theory better formed and more effective? After all, it has become a
commonplace among the mainstream intelligentsia that this style of theory fails to
pay sufficient returns for the efforts invested. But the same class of readers said the
same thing about a novel titled Ulysses when it was first published. Guattari will
never become a Joyce, but I hope to have shown how his ecosophy comes out of a
study of the most philosophical biology and complexity science available to date,
and how Guattari adumbrated the next step ahead for human ecology from there,
the first and last step with which this essay began: the remaking of social practices
by increasing the disequilibrium of the current deadly organization that is frozen in
a repetition-compulsion of destructive behavior, a new fostering of bifurcations
toward new singularities, new subjective formations of “agencement” and new
transversal interactive networks simultaneously, the very process of autopoetic self-
organization out of dynamic flux.

Endnotes

1. See the interviews with the two in Chaosophy (Guattari 1995) for instances of
Guattari’s input and Deleuze’s reticence.
2. Many of his earlier solo articles are translated in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry
and Politics, trans., Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984). This selects from

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two previous books: Psychoanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La Révolution moléculaire
(1977). But even the dates of those books misrepresent the dates of composition or
deliverance of many of the conference papers and articles collected here. An introduction
by David Cooper notes that items taken from the first book date back to 1955 through 1970,
long before and during the start of his collaboration with Deleuze. Much of the terminology
here shows up later in his collaboration with Deleuze on the two volumes of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia.
3. The leading Guattarist in the anglophone world is Gary Genosko. His booklength
monograph, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, is the first major study of Guattari in
English, and one done so thoroughly, including archival research, that it is a benchmark for
any later effort. If any single book could begin to correct what Genosko calls “the problem
of the reception of Deleuze’s work as a way of erasing Guattari”, then this is it. Here, I do
not intend to turn the tables and claim that Deleuze was the junior partner, and in fact that
would miss the point of their creative co-operation; instead, I intend to counter the odd
erasure of Guattari coupled with the general apotheosis of Deleuze. In order to be for
Deleuze, one need not suppress Guattari; and vice-versa of course.
4. See the almost autobiographical essay in Chaosophy about his psychoanalytic
theory/praxis: “La Borde: A Clinic Like No Other” (Guattari 187-208) and also Genosko’s
description of the La Borde experiences (“The Life and Work of Felix Guattari” 133-139 in
Guattari, Three Ecologies, 2000). This shows clearly how Guattari was more engaged in a
praxis as a theoretical psychoanalyst who wanted to make the closed and disciplinary
institutions in which he worked more open to participation and creativity by the staff and
patients at every level. He worked in and on and through this clinic from 1955 until his
death. “Empowerment” was the cliché during that era, but instead Guattari always spoke of
“desiring”, “molecular revolutions”, “transversal” connections, and “machinic assemblages”
and “singularization”. What impresses me now is how successful Guattari was in
transforming that clinic, which was the same size and of the same sort as a psychiatric
hospital that I worked in as an aide for three years in California during the 1980s. Where I
was left with a frustrating sense of hopelessness, Guattari energetically and brilliantly
intervened in his institution, deftly avoiding the dead end traps of Lacanianism, romantic
anti-psychiatry, Maoism, etc., while deploying his keen analytic skills on the practical
transformation of the institution toward a space of participation, openness, flexibility,
community, and the production of singularities by channeling desire.
5. I was first alerted to this debate about the systems view among contemporary
ecologists by the ecocritic Dana Phillips’ chapter on the historical shifts within the
discipline, “Ecology Then and Now” in his scathing (and too often erroneous) critique of the
emerging field of ecocriticism in the humanities: The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture,
and Literature in America (Oxford University Press, 2003), 42-82.
6. Like every emergent specialization, biosemiotics is both very new yet paradoxically
has a minor prehistory dating back decades. Key figures include Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi
Kull, Guenther Witzany, Marcello Barbieri, and Thomas Sebeok. The field now has an
international organization, a journal, and conference proceedings. See website at
http://www.biosemiotics.org/ The field is interdisciplinary yet would appear for now to be
the biologist’s version of a Deleuzoguattarian resurrection of Gregory Bateson, but minus
the micro-revolution.

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 7. See especially Vandana Shiva’s Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on
Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993) and her recent Earth Democracy: Justice,
Sustainability, and Peace (2005).
8. This round-table dialogue with the scientists is reprinted with the title “Openness” in
the valuable collection of materials about Guattari in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical
Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2. ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001),
774-794.
9. To give credit, I believe that Genosko also made this observation about Lacan’s anti-
biology effect and connected this to Guattari, but for now I cannot locate the exact source.
10. On our recent passage into the new geological epoch, see Robert Roy Britt,
“Humans Force Earth Into New Geologic Epoch” LiveScience 27 Jan 2008, n.p.
www.livescience.com/environment/080127-new-epoch.html. Three separate sources for this
proposal are cited, and several other scientists are quoted. Relevant excerpts include:
"Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and
imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene—currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of
global environmental change—as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization
by international discussion,’ Zalasiewicz's team writes. The paper calls on the International
Commission on Stratigraphy to officially mark the shift . . . . In a separate paper last month
in the journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infertility alone as a reason to dub this
the Anthropocene Age. ‘In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear,
large, and growing,’ Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘A geologist from the far distant future almost
surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts
show up.’" We have deterritorialized and reterritorialized a new segmentation at the
geological level.

Works Cited

Bateson, Gregory. “Form, Substance, and Difference” in Steps to An Ecology of Mind. (New
York: Ballantine, 1972), 448-468.
-----. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. (New York: Bantam Books, 1979).
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructrualist Thought.
(London: Routledge, 1997).
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. “On the Line,” in On the Line, trans. John Johnston, 69-
114. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
-----. Dialogues II. (London: Continuum, 2002).
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004).
Genosko, Gary. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. (London: Continuum, 2002).
-----, ed. Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2.
(London: Routledge, 2001).
Guattari, Félix. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans., Rosemary Sheed.
(Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984).

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-----. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. (London: Athlone Press,
2000).
-----. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic paradigm. trans. Paul Bains and Julian Prefanis.
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).
-----. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvére Lotringer. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995).
-----. The Guattari Reader. ed. Gary Genosko. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
-----. Soft Subversions. ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans., David Sweet and Chet Wiener. . (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1996).
-----. The Anti-Oedipus Papers. ed. Stephane Nadaud. (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006).
Guattari, Felix and Antonio Negri. Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. (Paris: Dominique
Bedou, 1985).
Guattari, Félix and Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. (U of Minnesota P, 1987).
Joff. "The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism". Research on Anarchism website,
n.d., http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article=1761 (2 Sept 2007).
Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition : The Realization of
the Living. (Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980).
Merchant, Carolyn, ed. Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory. (New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1994).
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. (Oxford
University Press, 2003).
Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with
Nature. (New York: Bantam, 1984).
Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology.
(Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers,1993).
-----. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (South End Press, 2005).
Varela, Francisco, Evan T. Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. (MIT Press, 1991).

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