Felix Guattari’s Threefold-Based Ecosophy
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson:
"Moving forward ten years, and shifting away from the Anglosphere, there is a form of foundational threeness in Felix Guattari(1930-1992), a French social theorist somewhat overshadowed by his better-known intellectual collaborator Gilles Deleuze. I don’t know this oeuvre well, but I have read The Three Ecologies, published in French in 1989 just three years before Guattari died.
While Harris largely ignores and neglects subjectivity, Guattari makes it central. In The Three Ecologies Guattari’s enemy is, as it had been throughout his scholarship, capitalist modernity broadly conceived, particularly how it homogenises subjectivity by fostering conformity and delimiting desire. He also targets the kind of environmentalism that thinks it is enough to care about ‘nature’ and leave everything else untouched. Perhaps his signature line from The Three Ecologies is:
- We cannot simply protect nature while allowing capitalism to destroy social relations and subjectivity. A true ecology is threefold: environmental, social, and mental. (The Three Ecologies, 1989)
Guattari sees the world falling apart not merely the destruction of nature, but because of our misplaced ideas and perceptions and due to the breakdown of generative solidarities, and and you can’t blame him. Yet this framing was published in a year of relative optimism when Fukuyama first mooted his ‘end-of-history’ thesis.
It is noteworthy that Guattari opens his long essay by quoting Gregory Bateson:
- There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.
This idea that there is ‘an ecology of mind’ and indeed that there are (at least) three ecologies - mental, social and environmental - is already very clear in Gregory Bateson’s book Steps to An Ecology of Mind(1972). Guattari adds some political bite to Bateson’s epistemology, and places a greater emphasis on the capitalistic production of human subjectivity (something Harris, for instance, ignores) in an effort to create what he calls an ‘ethico-political ecosophy’.
The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet's surface…Political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues…they are generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethico-political articulation which I call ecosophy - between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions.
Guattari appeals to the need for three worlds, and I agree with him.
But of course, these are not quite the same three worlds as Popper or Harris (or indeed Perpsectiva, or Archer and Henriques below). For instance Guattari's emphasis on the interrelationship of ideas, practices, structures, systems, and habits co-arising as ‘assemblages’, and from that perspective the distinction between nature and culture breaks down. Moreover, while the notion of a mental ecology is close to Popper’s World 2, and the environmental ecology is close (in some ways) to World 1, Guattari’s ‘social relations’ is about subjectivity and the ‘existential territories’ that create it; that is a very different register from Popper’s inter-objective world where reason and creativity are given institutional support to prevail and endure. Nonetheless, given their different disciplinary starting points I see a striking degree of overlap."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3