Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity; construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulation of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respects of their own times—time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences (Guattari and Negri, 1990: 120, cited in “Translators’ Introduction”, Three Ecologies, p. 14).

Introduction

Holidaying in what used to be a little medieval town on the Costa Brava, trying both to escape the inconsistency of Glasgow’s summer and to find some time for uninterrupted thought, I began to reflect upon the events that characterised the so-called anti-globalization protests at Genoa only a few weeks earlier.1 The English daily media, including the BBC, had concentrated on reporting the violence of a wing of the protestors, focusing on the death of Carlo Giuliani, a 23 year-old history student from Genoa and son of a Rome labour official. Only later did they begin to report and question the State violence and brutal retaliation against the protestors engaged in by the Italian police.2 As with reportage by most Western mass media of the so-called anti-globalization protests, the world politicians and officials were given prime time to freely comment while the ‘voices’ of the protestors, themselves were suppressed or ignored. It is my impression that most British daily media do not seem interested in reporting, analyzing or exploring the underlying issues of the protests: What are the protestors protesting about? Why a string of world-wide protests? Why don’t leaders of the “free” West allow representatives of the protestors a voice at their meetings? Why are there meetings only of the leaders and officials of G8 countries? And so on.3

Significantly, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, fresh from his re-election victory in one of the poorest turnouts of the British electorate since WWII (less than 60% voted), defined his political colours by immediately taking a position against the protestors and their perceived anti-globalization cause. Blair, the leading figure in Third Way politics, theoretically buttressed by the likes of Anthony Giddens, has politically invested himself heavily in arguments for globalization and “free trade” as forces for good within the world.4 Both he and Giddens emphasize that globalization is an inevitable and desirable process, in part, driven by technological improvements in the world’s information and communication infrastructure. Their view, however, does not take enough account of the project of globalization as a politically engineered creation, developed actively by the rich trans-Atlantic democracies through “free trade” agreements (GATT, NAFTA, EU, WTO) and by the world policy quasi-institutions of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade organization (WTO), and to a lesser, extent the OECD. It is a view that does not it take into account either that there are alternative visions to be given of globalization—as, for instance, of progressive world democratization – or that there have been an economic, social and ecological downside to neoliberal globalization. The Third and Fourth Worlds, in particular, have felt the deleterious effects of the so-called “Washington consensus”, promoting “structural adjustment” policies as a condition of World Bank and IMF loans.

While Blair and Giddens attempt to differentiate Third Way politics from the neoliberalism of the Thatcher-Reagan alignment that dominated the decade of the 1980s—in part, through the criterion of a heightened ecological consciousness (see e.g., Giddens, 1998) – it is becoming increasingly clear that, Blair’s second-term administration is committed to many of the principles of reform that distinguished Thatcher’s neoliberalism, including the privatization of public services, especially education and national health.5 Certainly, there is the same commitment to the market both domestically, as a substitute for State intervention, and internationally, making the United Kingdom attractive to the foreign direct investment from multinational corporations.

On reflecting on the so-called anti-globalization protest at Genoa and its predecessors in half a dozen world cities, I was interested by the globalized nature of these protests and their apparent myriad composition. While there may be an umbrella organization working on the day, there is no single world organization or movement; rather, the protests constitute a rainbow coalition of overlapping political interests that cannot be described in terms of a single cause. If anything, it seems, the environmental groups dominate.

I was also struck by the anticipation of some of these events by Félix Guattari6 , the radical psychonalyst, activist and co-author with Gilles Deleuze, of a range of books that helped to give the French Left new orientations during the decade of the 1970s: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Fr. 1972, trans.1984), Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Fr. 1975, trans. 1986), . Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (Fr. 1980, trans. 1988), and, much later, What is Philosophy? (Fr. 1991, trans. 1994).7

While these books written with Deleuze, certainly capture and elaborate the themes I wish to discuss in relation to anti-globalization, it is, in particular, a little book that Guattari (2000) wrote by himself and published first in 1989, called The Three Ecologies, that I want to focus on. In the first part of this paper begins with a discussion of anti-globalization, focusing on the events at Genoa and following media reports; in the second part, I present the main ideas of Guattari, as they appear in The Three Ecologies, to consider them as a framework within which to theorize so-called anti-globalization.8

Anti-Globalization?

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001) writing in The New York Times recognise that the rainbow protests at the Genoa G8 ‘world’ summit are united in the belief “that a fundamentally new global system is being formed” and that “[t]he world can no longer be understood in terms of British, French, Russian or even American imperialism”. They maintain that no longer can national power control or order the present global system and that, while the protests often appear anti-American, they are really directed at the larger power structures.

Yet it seems as if the protests must win the same kind of battles for democracy at the global level that ordinary people – citizens – won at the level of the nation-state, over three hundred years ago. And since those first democratic revolutions, movements of various kinds – civil rights, anti-racism, anti-war, women’s rights, children’s rights, animal rights, environmental protests—have progressively enfranchised ever larger groups of the world’s populations, although not inevitably or without struggle or reversals.9 Hardt and Negri point out the salient fact that “this new order has no democratic institutional mechanisms for representation, as nation-states do: no elections, no public forum for debate.” And they go on to describe the anti-globalization protestors, as a coalition united against the present form of capitalist globalization, but not against the forces or currents of globalization per se. Neither are these protestors isolationalists, separatists, or nationalists. Rather, as Hardt and Negri claim, the protestors want to democratise globalization – to eliminate the growing inequalities between nations and to expand the possibilities for self-determination. Thus, “anti-globalization” is a false description of this movement.10

Against all odds, against the power of supranational forces, people in the street at Genoa—and earlier in a series of locations at Gothenburg, Quebec, Prague and Seattle – still believe in a form of resistance in the name of a better future. They believe, against all propagandizing and media control, in the story of democracy and in the seeds that were sown for emancipation and self-determination over three centuries ago. Hardt and Negri believe that a new species of political activism has been born, reminiscent of the “paradoxical idealism of the 1960s”. Such protest movements are part of democratic society even though they are unlikely to provide the practical blueprint for the future. Yet they create political desires for a better future and, remarkably, unify disparate interests and groups – unionists, ecologists together with priests and Communists – in openness towards defining the future anew in democratic terms.

Hardt and Negri are not the only ones to have asserted a connection between the so-called anti-globalization protestors and those who demonstrated during the 1960s. Todd Gitlin (2001) also clearly considers the present-day movements evident at Genoa as a successor movement to the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s—one that he claims has already engaged more activists over a longer period of time and one he predicts will be longer-lived. Gitlin, similarly, pictures the protestors as “creating a way of life”, although he profiles the protestors as engaging in the debate about the meaning of Europe, seemingly truncating its obvious more global aspects outside Europe. He also questions the anti-globalization label, drawing attention to anti-capitalist revolutionaries, reformists who demand to “Drop the Debt”, and anarchists bent upon violence. The new face of protests, as Newsweek columnists Martha Brant and Barbie Nadeau (2001) point out, is a composite of different types: anarchist and Marxists, “kinder, gentler globalists”, health-issue advocates, environmentalists, consumer advocates. They name the protest groups from violent to nonviolent in the following order: Black Blocs (anarchist and Marxists who wear black masks); those who claim to be non-violent but often provoke retaliation such as Globalize Resistance, Reclaim the Streets, Tute Bianche (Luca Casarini) and Ya Basta!; decidedly nonviolent groups ranging from celebrities to religious leaders, including, AIDS activists, ATTAC (Bernard Cassen and Susan George), CAFOD, Christian Aid, Cobas, Confédération Paysanne (José Bové), various consumer groups, Drop the Debt (Bono), Greenpeace, La Via Campesina, Oxfam, Rainforest Action Network, Roman Catholic Church, War on Want, WWF.

Guattari’S The Three Ecologies

Guattari’s achievement is to link three spheres of ecology – environmental, social and mental – into a set of interrelations he calls ecosophy, a term he coins seemingly unaware of the “deep ecology” movement or the ecosophy of Arnold Naess. He writes:

…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 [the ecological dangers that confront us] (p. 27).

His object of criticism is what he calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that, through a series of techno-scientific transformations, has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster, causing a disequilibrium of the world natural environment from which the Earth will take many generations to recover, if at all. Integrated World Capitalism, as Pindar and Sutton (2000: 6) explain, is “delocalized and deterritorialized to such an extent that it is impossible to locate its sources of power”. IWC is now, above all, a fourth-stage capitalism, no longer oriented to producing primary (agricultural), secondary (manufacturing), or tertiary (services), but now oriented to the production of “signs, syntax, and … subjectivity” (p. 47). Part of Guattari’s thesis is that the expansion in communications technology, and, in particular, the development of world telecommunications, has served to shape a new type of passive subjectivity, saturating the unconscious in conformity with global market forces. IWC, thus, poses a direct threat to the environment in ways that are now all too familiar to us – pollution of all forms, extinction and depletion of species with the consequent reduction of biodiversity etc. Less often are we alerted to the dimension of social ecology and its practical politics. What is not often recognized, if at all, is what Guattari calls mental ecology: both how the structures of human subjectivity to which it refers, like a rare species, is also under treat of extinction and how it underwrites an understanding of environmental and social ecology.

It is in the realm of understanding human subjectivity in ecological terms that Guattari has most to offer. In this recognition of the “ecology of mind” he is strongly influenced by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, especially his Steps Towards the Ecology of Mind (1972).11 Indeed, Guattari (2000: 27) begins with a quotation from Bateson’s essay “Pathologies of Epistemology” from that same collection of essays: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”. The importance of Bateson’s argument, as the translators’ note clarifies (see fn 1, p. 70), is in criticising the dominant “epistemological fallacy” in Western thinking that the unit of survival, in the bio-taxonomy, is the individual, family line, subspecies or species, when the unit of survival is “organism plus environment”. The choice of the wrong unit leads to an epistemological error that propagates itself, multiplying and mutating, as a basic characteristic of the thought-system of which it is a part. The hierarchy of taxa leads to a conception of species against species, Man against Nature – a view that has been reinforced by various ideologies and movements, including Romanticism. By contrast, according to Bateson:

we now see a different hierarchy of units – gene-in-organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits (Bateson, 1972: 484, cited in Guattari, 2000; 70).

Thus, for Guattari we must conceive of ecology as a realm encompassing the environmental, the social and the mental (the complex, environment-social-mental). His ecosophical perspective of subjectivity, in large part, is a product of his Lacanian training, his experience as a working psychoanalyst and his attempt to reorient Freudianism towards the future (see Genosko, 2000: 156). Thus, while The Three Ecologies retains the old Freudian triad (id, ego, superego), it departs from Freud in understanding subjectivity according to his concept of “traversality” – a concept that dates from 1964 and that Guattari developed over his lifetime. Genosko (2000) interprets this conceptual development as a series of shifts “from transversality to ecosophy”, conceptual shifts involving, first, the early theorizations based on “transference”, second, “coefficient of transversality”, third, a “theory of groups” (subject and subjugated groups, utilizing Sartre’s concept of “seriality”), and, eventually to “transversality”. Genosko (2000: 145-6) explains this important concept in the following terms:

Guattari’s transversalist conception of subjectivity escapes the individual-social distinction as well as the givenness or preformedness of the subject either as a person or individual; subjectivity is both collective and auto-producing.

The full exposition of this concept, as Genosko (2000: 146) makes clear, would take us into Guattari’s reception of structuralism, “his rejection of Freudian psychogenetic stages in favour of a polyphonic conception of subjectivity of coexisting levels”, his turn against Lacanism (although his retention of the partial object), his theoretical cooperation with Deleuze, and, above all, his rejection of all forms of scientism.12

While Guattari is against scientism in psychoanalysis, especially those pseudo-scientific programs and models that dress themselves up in concepts borrowed from thermodynamics, topology, linguistics and systems theory (p. 36), and cautious of techno-science, particularly its technocratic approach to industrial pollution, he is not technophobic or anti-technology. For instance, he believes that the Internet holds potential for democratization. In psychoanalysis, he advocates ridding us of all scientific metaphors and forging new paradigms that are ethico-aesthetic, taking inspiration from Goerthe, Proust, Joyce, Artaud and Beckett, who he describes as the “best cartographers of the psyche” (p. 37). He emphasizes a reassessment of psychoanalysis that invokes both ethical and aesthetic paradigms so underline a new sense of “engagement” and the fact that in practical psychiatry everything has to be continually reinvented, like a work in progress.

His understanding of subjectivity departs from the Cartesian-Kantian tradition, to talk of components of subjectivity rather than the subject and to emphasize a distinction between the individual and subjectivity. As he writes:

Vectors of subjectivity do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a “terminal” for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc. Therefore, interiority establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively autonomous to relation to the other, and if need be, in open conflict (p. 36).

References

Bbatson, Gregory (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.

Bobbio, Norberto (1994) The Age of Rights.

Brant, Martha & Nadeau, Barbie (2001) First Blood. Newsweek, July 30, pp. 14-18.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1986) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. Trans. Brain Massumi. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

Genosko, Gary (2000) The Life and work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy”. In: Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton, London & New Brunwick, NJ: The Athlone Press: 106-60.

Gitlin, Todd (2001) Having a Riot. Newsweek, July 23, pp. 48-9

Guattari, Félix (1979) L’Inconscient machinique: essai de schizo-analyse. Fontenay-sous Bois: Éditions Recherches.

Guattari, Félix (1984) Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. London: Penguin.

Guattari, Félix (1986) Les années d’hiver 1980-1985. Paris: Barrault.

Guattari, Félix (1989) Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Éditions Galilée.

Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications.

Guattari, Félix (2000) The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton, London & New Brunwick, NJ: The Athlone Press.

Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio (2001) The New Faces in Genoa Want a Different Future. The New York Times. Reprinted in The International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, July 25, p. 6.

Schwab, Klaus (2001) The World’s New Actors Need a Bigger Stage. Newsweek, July 30, p. 18.

Endnotes

1. My wife and I stayed a couple of weeks at Tossa de Mar at the height of the tourist seasonAs antipodeans, it was our first experience of a European beach holiday. The little Spanish town was previously a fishing village. It incorporates the beautiful medieval-walled Vila Vella and has links back to Roman and, indeed, neolithic, times. Since the 1970s Tossa de Mar has increasingly fallen prey to problems of tourist over-development, with thousands of Spanish, Italian, French, German and British tourists descending upon it for their annual summer holiday. By “over-development” I mean the development of numerous multi-storied hotels, hostels and time-share apartments that ring the foreshore at one end of the bay and, progressively, have been built to in the township itself exploit to panoramic views. These developments, which are built butting up against one another, have created “mini-canyons” with no public areas or plantings, increasingly crowding out the township, the valley, and the vistas. The effects are obvious on the micro-ecosystem, particularly, the pollution of the beach, seawater and coastline. Coincidentally, during our stay Greenpeace issued a statement stating that the ecology of the Costa Brava had reached a critical point under the onslaught of mass tourism (reported in The Times, Saturday, 4 August). Local media, and even local business proprietors, emphasised the same themes of over-crowding and ecological overload. The village was an artist colony during the early 1930s, with frequent visits by the likes of Chagall, Masson, Zügel, Kars, Metzinger, Mompou and many others. I emphasise my environment and the locality (of thought) as it anticipates several Guattarian themes essential to ecosophy, especially deterritorialization.

2. The International Herald Tribune, in a front-page story (Thursday, 9 August) reported that an American student on her way elsewhere stopped over in Genoa to participate in the peaceful demonstrationsShe was among the 92 other peaceful protestors whose headquarters Italian police raided on July 22, 60 of whom were injured, many hospitalized, and some would have died without emergency treatment. Only belatedly have some European ministers and heads of state begun to comment that the Italian police “over-reacted”; other commentators have likened the brutality of the Italian carabinieri to fascist activity. Newsweek reported that the police were singing fascist songs.

3. The moulding and control of subjectivities by the world mass media is a feature of what Guattari (2000: 47) calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), which, as he says: “tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particularly, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc – subjectivity” I am pleased to say that there have been some exceptions to these generalizations about world mass media by the likes of The New York Times and Newsweek, of articles written both by staff writers and academic/intellectuals, as I acknowledge in the text. It is also the case that Newsweek (30 July, p. 13) carried a story by Fareed Zakaria that characterized the protestors as a unitary movement which is fundamentally “anti-technology” and techno-phobic. By contrast, the report by Greg Burke in Newsweek (July 30, pp. 24-5) was very critical of the G8 summit: “Out of sights and smell of the blood and tear gas inside the leaders inside the red zone discussed regional conflicts like the Middel East and Macedonia and failed to bridge their gap in the Kyoto Protocol … Nowhere did they break new ground or produce new ideas for the pressing problems of the world. That paucity of progress … gave new force to the question of whether such meetings should be held at all” (p. 25). Burke quotes the European Commission President Romano Prodi as saying that the summits had grown “extravagant and excessive” and that it was time to “return to an organization which puts priority on people” (ibid.).

4. It is also true to say that Tony Blair was the most outspoken of the G8 leaders in favour of moves to reduce the debt burden facing the world’s poorest countries.

5. Some would argue that the heightened ecological consciousness said to distinguish Third Way politics from neoliberalism, is not evidence in New Labour’s handling of the foot and mouth crisis affecting British farming and rural life. The ecological crisis of food sources in Britain in recent years has reached new heights with, in addition, to the outbreak of foot and mouth, “mad cow” disease, salmonella scares, depletion of fish stocks, contamination of salmon feed etc. These problems are exacerbated by the monopolization of foodstuffs retailing, false advertising, incomplete and misleading acknowledgement of contents in foodstuffs, and poor consumer watchdog standards and enforcement. It is to be noted that New Labour has invested considerable sums in research into genetic foodstuffs.

6. Guattari was born in 1930, joins the youth division of the Paris Communist Party, becomes involved with experimental psychiatry, trains with Lacan in the 1960s, founds the Societé de psychothérapie institutionnelle in 1965, meets Deleuze in 1969, forms a close friendship with Toni Negri in the same period, is active politically both internationally and locally (standing in Paris regional elections), and dies in 1992. See the full chronology, on which this summary is base, provided by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, translators of The Three Ecologies (pp. iIx-xv).

7. This is not meant to imply that the themes I discuss in this essay do not appear in books he wrote by himself. See especially, Guattari’s Molecular Revolution (Fr. 1977, trans. 1984), L’Inconscient machinique: essai de schizo-analyse (1979), Les années d’hiver 1980-1985 (1986), Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989) and Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Fr. 1992, trans. 1995).

8. I was led to this possibility, in part, through the conjunction of events – reading Guattari’s Three Ecologies in the aftermath of Genoa – and, in part, by Pindar and Sutton’s “Translators’ Introduction”. As they suggest: “Guattari’s finely nuanced, radically dissensual approach to social ecology requires the collective production of unpredictable and untamed ‘dissident subjectivities’ rather than a mass movement of like people” (p. 14) and in a footnote they point to the “fit” between Guattari’s characterization of social ecology and the “Carnival Against Capitalism” that took place in London on 18 June, 1999 (see fn 17, p. 19).

9. The Hegelian philosopher of jurisprudence, Norberto Bobbio (1994) in The Age of Rights provides a useful description of these generational rights, although his Hegelian philosophy of history appears to me wrong-headed, especially in light of the reversal of so-called social rights that occurred in the 1980s under the combined forces of the neo-conservative Thatcher-Reagan administrations. There are no real signs that Third Way governments in the West have attempted to restore these social rights. If the second-term Blair government, re-elected in 2001, is anything to go by, the privatization of public services and, thereby, the continued erosion of citizen rights is pursued with a renewed vigor.

10. Klaus Schwab (2001), founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, also points to the “systemic failure” of the present institutions that provide a measure of world governance (UN, IMF, WB, WTO) and embraces the need for global institutions that more effectively and democratically deal with the problems we face. He suggests that the G8 be replaced with the broader Group of 20. Foreign Office Minister in the Blair Government, Peter Hain, like a number of other commentators, criticised the “ruling elite” in Europe talking to itself and becoming remote from ordinary people (reported by David Hughes in the Daily Mail, July 25, p. 2).

11. It is not often noted that Bateson was a part of the “cybernetics group”, including Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, Margaret Mead (his, then, wife) and Kurt Lewin, among others who meet regularly during the 1940s to develop cybernetic epistemology and applications.

12. Genosko (2000: 149) describes him as “a forward looking cartographer of the unconscious, a pragmatist whose formulations centered on assemblages of subjectification, rather than a backward looking scientific interpreter of a restricted topography all of whose roads led back to childhood, or for that matter, to the signifying chain”. In a passage Genosko cites from Guattari, Guattari talks of his rejection of the Conscious-Unconscious dualism and of “An unconscious of flux and abstract machines, more than an unconscious of structure and language” (ibid.).