Three Ecologies Review

The Three Ecologies by Félix Guattari

Guattari and his playmate Deleuze are dual handedly responsible for some of the most volcanic wank ever to erupt into print. This would not be nearly so frustrating if their ideas weren’t so bloody good.

This frustration is doubled by their celebration of the possibility of their works being read superficially. “Read our stuff like you’d listen to a CD” say D&G “skip over the boring bits, take only what excites you.” Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in some of the pettiest scholarship ever to have trivialized your local Humanities Department.

“LOL My Phd’s on the becomings-animal of Wolverine and the use of mutation phantasies for constructing a body-without-organs!" "Lulz! Mine’s on the territorial refrains of musical theatre and the possibilities for thinking subjectivity in new ways!”

I’m not suggesting that profundity cannot be unearthed just about anywhere; only that D&G actively promote a style of reading that allows you to sex up your boring hobbies by glibly referencing theories that rightfully should have minced your brain like a depth charge.

Although I’ve never jumped into the comfy seats of their ‘rhizomatic’ gravy train, I’ve still never been able to entirely dismiss Deleuze or Guattari because their ideas really are that fucking good. I just wish and wish they’d stop their officious namedropping, their lame attempts at rhetorical shock tactics, and write with just the barest consideration of lucidity in mind.

The Three Ecologies fulfilled this wild dream of mine. Finally, Guattari is letting me understand him without having to read the same poorly constructed sentence 10x over! What’s more, he’s actually establishing a concrete ethic and laying the foundations for an achievable political structure. And doing it all in under 30 pages. Party hats children! Guattari has learned to speak!

So what’s he saying, exactly?

Essentially, the book is a blueprint for pulling our planet out of its ecological tailspin – not merely through the ‘conservation’ of current levels of biodiversity, but through cultivation of a society that fosters the maximum potential for ecological evolution and human self-overcoming. To achieve this, Guattari claims there is going to have to be a paradigmatic shift in the operation of each of the ‘three ecologies’: human subjectivity; social relations; and the environment (desire, discourse and cosmos). It is not enough to rely upon ‘simplistic conceptions of nature’ (which invariably operate as a vehicle for the tacitly assumed evaluative hierarchies that dicked up our planet in the first place). We must re-structure human nature and subjectivity itself, through the artistic re-fashioning of micro & macro social discourse, thus fueling an aesthetic appreciation for radical diversity/potential that market mechanisms are inadequate to accommodate. In order to act differently towards the planet en masse, we must not only change our thoughts towards it, but also our feelings.

Awesome.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief. In a couple of paragraphs, Guattari affirms all the floppy, left wing assumptions we’ve all uncomfortably held about him and Deleuze. The text is still plagued by plenty of Guattari’s infuriating habits - the worst being his tendency to say something outrageously interesting, and completely unqualified (eg. ‘Capitalism creates a sense of pseudo-eternity’…. Shit that’s fascinating, but HOW exactly G?) – but on the whole, the ideas flow easily. But perhaps a bit too easily.

All the conclusions that Guattari reaches should be extremely familiar ground to any post-structuralist who got scared shitless during ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Ultimately, there was nothing in this book that truly ripped my mind out. It was like having one of those conversations with someone who perfectly expresses every nuance of opinion you hold on an a subject. It’s thrilling at the time, but lacks any sort of afterglow, as you’ve essentially learned nothing. Perhaps these ideas were groundbreaking at the time, as after all, The Three Ecologies was written in 1989. If so, that means Guattari was only writing 15 years into the future… which doesn’t quite get him top grades. I’m a bitch of a marker yeah? A but no +.