Ecology of Aesthetic Subjectivity

Guattari, Félix. Three Ecologies. London: Athlone, Distributed in the United States by Transaction, 2000. Print.

Following a discussion of worldwide environmental, cultural, physical, and social annihilation proliferated by the IWC, in his book, Three Ecologies from the late 1980s, Guattari clearly states the paradox: “on the one hand, [there exists] the continuous development of new techno-scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and reinstate socially useful activities …and, on the other…, the inability of organized social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work” (31). This statement of the situation, rather than making individuals victims of a system, The Machine, etc., that does not, cannot work, opens the opportunity to refigure subjectivities in terms of singularity whereby the smallest of efforts toward heterogeneity within the quotidian, by individuals and groups, can have large and lasting affects on social, psychological, environmental, and political ecology, with the important stipulation that there is a consistent and ongoing effort toward the changed epistemology of which Bateson speaks.

Guattari stresses that in the new ecology everything, every opinion, every act, every discourse “has to be continually reinvented…otherwise the processes become trapped in a cycle of deathly repetition [repetition mortifère]” (39). Utilizing an approach of dissidence, individuals might gently deterritorialize the moribundity of failing to examine assumptions established and reinforced constantly by the IWC, which leads to a faulty epistemology, namely one that appears to be one’s own idea but that is planted and nurtured by the dominant capitalistic subjectivity. Guattari calls for attention to the singularity because the liberation of the smallest of events from the dominant and accepted paradigms indicating logic, stability, and intelligibility, will allow each person to refigure subjectivities beyond the dominating, homogenous mass-media-generated one husbanded under the current situation.

Further, Guattari emphasizes an aesthetic practice in which those encouraging the involvement with singularity, “those in a position to intervene in individual and collective psychical proceedings” (39), foster constantly variable, transversal engagements extending beyond the “existential Territories to which they are assigned” and opening up new lines of inquiry, possibility for praxis, trajectories of real flight that are not attached to either “assured theoretical principles or to the authority of a group, a school or an academy.” He asserts that artists do this kind of constant refiguring without anchoring themselves in the agency of an academy and have as their goal the failure to “repeat the same painting indefinitely” (40). While one may find plenty of examples from Rubens to Rockwell, Murakami to Laura Owens of painters who do indeed make the same work again and again (likely in response to the larger demands of what the market will bear), those compelled to explore creatively without safety net or assurance of sales as a model for refiguring engagement with their own subjectivities are also abundant (e.g., Carravaggio, Manet, Duchamp, Cage, Marina Abromovic, and Douglas Park).

As in his earlier texts, Guattari makes a strong claim for the elimination of polarizing arguments stemming from dialectical practice, as his model does not require a resolution of opposites (or even problem solving as a goal); it allows that many points of difference, transversal lines of flight, and individual or collective subjectivities may be active and intersecting at one time. This simultaneously functioning morass is adjusting constantly to accommodate “the intrusion of some accidental detail, an event-incident that… makes [a project] drift far from its previous path, however certain it had once appeared to be” (52). While this kind of engagement takes a constant vigilance on the part of every applicant, the excitement and empowerment it engenders when lived consciously is vast and highly promising.