Ecological Crisis and Processes of Subjectivation by Diego Giordano

Ecological Crisis and Processes of Subjectivation

solution, as it has often been suggested, or whether it is a distinctive feature of the problem itself. We contend that the latter scenario is more persuasive than the former. If this is so, the provisional answer to the question that began this essay should be a counter-intuitive “yes but no”: on the one hand, yes, the homeostatic equilibrium that used to characterize human and non-human environments is deteriorating at a worrisome pace; on the other hand, however, no, because the range of the current crisis extends beyond the simple dichotomy between Man and Nature and implicates facts and values, objects and subjects, living beings and non-living beings that exceed the traditionally conceived scientific borders of Nature. To sum up: the entire categorial apparatus of the Western tradition seems to be called into question by this particular seismic shock we have been used to name ecological crisis. This is the reason why we can easily find, with respect to these issues, odd and seemingly contradictory configurations: for example, governments that have restored (UK), or planned to restore (Italy) nuclear power plants in order to match the objectives set up in 2001 by the Kyoto protocol, the most important anti-global warming agreement. The peculiar complexity of the environmental crisis resides in its inbetweenness, in its tendency to escape established borders, at every level: political borders between nation-states, social borders between classes and ethnic groups, gender borders between males, females and transexuals. Last but not least,

________________________________ Emanuele Leonardi (University of Western Ontario, Canada)

Introduction

oday at the dawn of XXI century, are we witnessing an environmental crisis? Surprisingly enough, this apparently naive question is not simply rhetorical. In fact, despite the talk about global warming, nuclear energy, toxic pollution, ozone layer depletion, peak oil, for example, the current ecological crisis has less to do with the preservation or destruction of the so-called “natural world” than with a crisis of interpretation of this “natural world”, that is to say with its putatively indisputable objective determination. In other words, what is in crisis is not the environment tout court, but rather the human environment: not only because the ultimate reason why ecosystems have lost their balance is to be found in an unprecedented and unsustainable anthropic impact, but also because the way we, as a species, look at nature is a cause – amongst many others, to be sure – of the crisis we are living in. As Alan Weisman (2007) has brilliantly shown, a hypothetical “world without us” could easily and thoughtlessly carry on for billions of years. Speculatively, it may be useful to go even further than Weisman’s hypothesis and wonder whether the very distinction between an homogeneous us and an unquestioned rest is part of the

�� Two examples, opposite to each other from a political standpoint but very similar in maintaining this rigid distinction are Brown (2006; 2008) and Lovelock (1988; 2006).

the ecological crisis cannot be constrained in our usual epistemological frontiers, the most insurmountable one being the conceptualized border between the natural sciences and the social sciences: the cold incontrovertibility of matters of fact on one side, and on the other, the passive acceptance of the volatile and the contestable. Contrary to this tight division of labour, environmental issues tend to be interconnected and multi-dimensional. When they collide with the political field, whose defining feature is decision, they present a twofold complexity: on the one hand, it is widely recognized that our knowledge of ecosystems is limited, that scientists increasingly confront a sort of constitutive uncertainty; on the other, human social systems are very complex too, traversed as they are by a multitude of uneven interconnections. As John Dryzek puts it: “Environmental problems by definition are found at the intersection of ecosystems and human social systems, so one should expect them to be doubly complex” (Dryzek, 1997: 9). How to do justice of this double complexity, from a theoretical point of view? Without claiming to be the a sort of new Taylorian one best way, this paper argues that the specific visual angle provided by the processes of subjectivation may be useful for investigating the composite and heterogeneous stratification which seems to characterize the ecological crisis.

Moreover, we will try to demonstrate how ontological and epistemological concerns about this crisis cannot be separated from their direct political relevance, although it is a good and important practice to distinguish these three features one from the others. In order to do that, the paper is structured as follows: drawing mainly for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977; 1987; 1994), the first section will discuss a non-dualistic account on the Man-Nature relationship; subsequently, through an examination of the seminal works of Bruno Latour (1991; 2004), the second section will problematise the epistemological dimension of the environmental crisis; finally, in the third section, the later reflections advanced by Félix Guattari (1992; 1995; 2000) will allow us, to interrogate the notion of ecosophy and its political and subjective implications. A brief conclusion will outline possible paths for further research. A New Man-nature Relationship Delezue and Guattari

raditionally, at least in the context of Western thought, the environmental crisis has been analysed either from a moral-ontological perspective, mainly focused on the multifarious bonds which link humankind and nature, or from a sociological standpoint, whose goal was � �� For a detailed overview, see Jamison (ed.) (2001) and Zimmerman (ed.) (1998). � �� For a detailed overview, see Spaargaren, Mol and Buttel (eds.) (2000). Relevant examples of this line of thought are Dobson (1990), with his threefold distinction of social actors between old-fashioned conservatism, environmental reformism and radical ecologism, and Eckersley (1992), whose descriptive system is based on the

� For �� a detailed overview of this topic, see Waltner-Toews, Kay, and Lister (eds.) (2008). �� Notoriously, �� Frederick Taylor’s “Scientific Management” claimed to be the one best way of organizing labour processes: apparently, no dispute was allowed on this point (Taylor 1967). 2

to provide a descriptive cartography of the different actors involved in ecological controversies. The lack of communication between the two options had the effect of reducing epistemology to a purely theoretical, abstractly void exercise, and politics to nothing more than the practical procedures of institutional policy making. To call this framework into question we first need to show the state of the ontological debate we just mentioned. To simplify a little, hopefully without distorting, it is possible to isolate three main lines of argumentation: the first is represented by shallow ecology, a humancentered approach according to which the act of preserving the environment finds its sole justification in its possible utility for humans. In other terms, the value of nature is extrinsic, which is to say conferred by a necessarily human gesture (Passmore, 1974). On the other end of the spectrum is deep ecology, a biocentric approach according to which man is nothing more than a knot, amongst many others, of the biospheric net, with no particular privilege to claim. Constantly running the risk of falling into the misanthropic trap, deep ecologists argue for a putatively selfevident intrinsic value of nature, which

humankind should worship as the supreme good (Naess, 1989). Finally, the third option is provided by rational attempts to overcome the opposition between Man and Nature through a focus on their similarities and, in so doing, by paving the way for a hopeful alliance between the two. This approach, called social ecology by Murray Bookchin, contends that nature as well as society presents an intrinsic teleological aspect, namely a nonlinear tendency towards diversity. This non-deterministic differentiation emerges historically through a particular concept of socio-natural development, drawn from Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and defined as participatory evolution. According to Bookchin, both biotic and social evolutions are characterised by an increase of the internal diversity of the eco-communities, but also by an increase in liberty within Nature. This freedom, essentially conceived of as the augmentation of possibilities of choice, makes the Man-Nature alliance a political goal to be pursued through social activism and in no cases a historical necessity (Bookchin, 1982). Despite a definitive incompatibility between their actual outcomes, whose political distance should not be underestimated, these three approaches seem to share a basic assumption, namely an irreducible separation in the Man-Nature relationship. What is at stake here is no longer a matter of pure difference, which would be dynamically

separation between anthropocentric approaches and ecocentric approaches. A different, more refined classification is provided by Dryzek (1997). �� To a certain extent, this statement is an unfair generalization; nonetheless, it reflects a tendency in what has been recently called the field of environmental studies, and is furthermore useful to set up a background upon which it is possible to situate our argument. �� This term, as its “twin”, deep ecology, has been coined by philosopher Arne Naess, advocate of the second approach. See Naess (1973).

�� Obviously, the form of this separation profoundly varies in each case. As a consequence, shallow ecology perceives it as incommunicability; deep ecology conceives of it as absorption; finally, social ecology refers to it as potentially peaceful diversity. 3

and incessantly negotiable, but rather the establishment of an unbridgeable ontological gap between the two poles. Consequently, relations can occur only a posteriori, basically once each term has been declared actually existing regardless of the other; this necessarily subsequent position of relations produces a static and essentialist understanding which is not merely problematic from an intellectual point of view, but also linked to power/ knowledge practices whose material effects tend to oppose social change rather than injecting new force into it. Moreover, the aforementioned double complexity becomes impossible to represent within an ontological framework which banishes from the outset the very concept that describes the reality of the environmental crisis better than any other: the notion of hybrid. Given the static, monolithic foundation that characterizes them, neither shallow, nor deep, nor even social ecology appear to provide a convincing starting point for investigating the subjective dimension of the ecological crisis (which in turn needs to be based on a correlative epistemological account). Although the alternative approach we are going to propose cannot be proclaimed as the only anti-dualistic and dynamic configuration of the Man-Nature relationship,10 we contend that Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, perceiving itself as immediately

political, is the most appropriate for investigating what Giorgio Agamben calls anthropogenesis, namely “the becoming human of the living” (Agamben, 2004: p. 42).11 Understanding the multifarious bonds linking the ever-changing entities that we name man and nature in terms of becoming rather than in terms of being allows the analysis to take into account that third space where, according to postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha, “the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences” (Bhabha, 1994: p. 218). It is important to stress that this third space presents itself as the habitat in which hybrids proliferate, in which entities resist a rigid and unquestionable classification. Although indisputably real, the demarcation line which separates humans from non-humans is nonetheless flexible, non-definitive, impossible to be given once and for all (Descola, 2005). On the contrary, the production of this demarcation line is the problematic outcome of a complex process which involves, in a determined historical configuration, social desires as well as political passions, and which also refers 11 �� It may be useful to report the whole passage: “Ontology, or first philosophy, is not an innocuous academic discipline, but in every sense the fundamental operation in which anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the living being, is realized. From the beginning, metaphysics is taken up in this strategy: it concerns precisely that meta that completes and preserves the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history. This overcoming is not an event that has been completed once and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way, that every time and in each individual decides between the human and the animal, between nature and history, between life and death” (Agamben 2004; 79).

� �� For a theoretical critique of the notion of essentialism see Fuchs (2001). For a classic account on the political dimension of this concept, see Spivak (1987). 10 �� To name just a few compelling options: Merchant (1992), Plumwood (2002), Zimmerman (1994). For a detailed overview, Convey (1997). 4

schizo12 is mentioned as Homo natura: at this stage of desiring-production the “human” shape is still to be configured and the coherent unity of its components still does not know the interface with the “natural”. As a consequence, Man and Nature become synchronic, photographic moments always-already kept in an endless process of becoming which make their provisional borders constitutively negotiable, intrinsically un-concluded. From this perspective, it is of particular importance to underline that both poles of this fluid dichotomy possess agency and that this concept has to be understood independently from its usual positive determinations, such as intentionality, consciousness or cognitive rationality: the agency Deleuze and Guattari refer to is marked by the capability to affect the assemblages of heterogeneous desiringmachines in their constant making and remaking the reality we all live in, which is neither human nor natural. Moreover, this re-conceptualized agency is not perceived as an exclusive feature of organic life:

to the state of scientific and technological development. As Deleuze and Guattari argue: […] We make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life […] Man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other – not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producerproduct. Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. That is why desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives and deals with the schizo as Homo natura (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977; 4-5)

Of course, plants and rocks do not possess a nervous system. But, if nerve connections and cerebral integrations presuppose a brain-force as faculty of feeling coexistent with the tissues, it is reasonable to suppose also a faculty of feeling that coexist with embryonic tissues and that appears in the Species as a collective brain; or with the vegetal tissues in the ‘small species’. Chemical affinities and physical causalities themselves refer to primary forces capable of preserving their long chains by contracting their elements and by making them resonate:

As it is clear, the authors postulate the identity of the realms of human and natural only insofar as those are taken into account starting from the notions of “nature in the form of production” (nature comme production) or “life of man as a species” (vie générique de l’homme). Generic life means, in this context, energetic raw material, organic as well as inorganic, substantially formless and on the point of assuming an intelligible profile. This is the reason why the

12 �� The notion of schizo here has to be conceived in processual terms; it is not, therefore, the actual individual marked by schizophrenia as a pathology. 5

to unity has to be understood, through a movement just apparently paradoxical, as the affirmative showing up of the oneness of the multiple.14 This sort of unique plane of multiplicities does not know the kind of Order or Harmony some deep ecologists propose to ascribe to it; rather, it is the place in which no specific meaning precedes the connections of disparate elements. Here we can fully appreciate the constitutive position attributed to the notion of relation: both terms mobilized by a given dichotomy are conceived as active subjects in the process of their reciprocal composition (and endless rearticulation). In the case of the Man-Nature relationship, the connective link exposes rather than annihilates the difference between the two poles. If so, one should ask what is the peculiar character of this relational understanding of human beings; Deleuze and Guattari answer this question in a somewhat cryptic passage of A Thousand Plateaus, in which they discuss the musical dimension of the Messiaen:

no causality is intelligible without this subjective instance. Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitutes microbrains, or an inorganic life of things. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994; 212-213 – emphasis added)

As we see, from this passage it is possible to draw a vision of nature, in its entirety, as an active power, a true social actor; furthermore, the coupling of disparate elements such as “inorganic life” and “things” implies that also technical objects (which is to say, neither human nor natural entities) play the role of social actors. In other terms, Deleuze and Guattari seem to suggest an ontological postulate according to which a distinctive subjectivism of non-human reality has to be recognized and put to work both at a theoretical and at a practical level. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that the category of non-human vitalism does not necessarily imply a holistic and all-embracing conception of Nature, in which the specific diversity between what is human and what it is not melts into an undifferentiated cosmic feeling of wholeness and communion. In fact, from the authors’ perspective the unity of nature takes always place on the plane of consistency, never on the plane of organization.13 Their reference

Of course, the Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as two planes constantly refer to each other through the endless process of becoming: while the plan of organization is engaged in the effort of building up an order out of a univocal field of multiplicity, the plane of consistency always shows the provisional character of that order through the excess involved in the desiring-production. 14 �� “One can be said only of the multiple and must be said of the multiple; Being is said only of becoming and time; Necessity, only of chance; and the Whole, only of fragments” (Deleuze, 2004; 76).

13 �� It is impossible, in a footnote, to exhaust the richness of Deleuzian ontology, fully embraced by Guattari; in the context of the present reflection, however, it is sufficient to highlight that the plane of consistency is the locus of difference in itself, whereas the plane of organization is the determined space in which difference is given as diverse: “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse” (Deleuze, 2004; 222). The 6

much as human beings. The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing the ethologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems. That is even the opposite of having an advantage; through becomingswoman, -child, -animal, or -molecular, nature opposes its power, and the power of music, to the machines of human beings, the roar of factories and bombers. And it is necessary to reach that point, it is necessary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block with the becomingmusic of sound, for them to confront and embrace each other like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other’s grasp. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; 309 – emphasis added)

its perpetual modifiability. To conclude, let us summarize in three points what Patrick Hayden (Hayden, 1998) has convincingly defined as Deleuze and Guattari’s radical naturalism: 1sociability is present in nature; 2- is not an exclusively human quality; 3- it is possible to create common compositions which are able to respect the diversity of human and non-human beings without reifying this difference into an irremediable separation. Here the attention of the naturalist necessarily shifts away from the current state of ecological conditions to the political task of creating new ways of thinking, feeling, knowing and acting which are propitious to the blossoming of all earthly life.

As it seems clear, “overcoding” is the only privilege human beings can claim; but what exactly does that mean? We contend that, in this context, “overcoding” refers to the undertaking of the difficult path of re-creating an order after having been kept in a becoming which has subtracted itself from the plane of organization; in other words, the privilege of the human resides in its potential capability to re-configure a lost order, however transitorily. The feature of transitoriness or temporariness characteristic of every order is due to the fact that the power of nature, or of music, always exposes its reluctance to be constrained by eternal limits. This is why the authors suggest following the process to its absolute limit, at which point the elements, colliding and gripping each other, become undistinguishable from each other. Otherwise put, the specificity of the human is to be found (and has to be found) in this ability to partially channel

A New Conception of the Environmental Crisis Latour

mongst the authors who have delineated a vision of the ManNature relationship and who have incorporated some of the aforementioned elements is Bruno Latour (recognized as a champion of interdisciplinarity and identified, depending on the context, as a philosopher, sociologist of science, epistemologist, anthropologist, just to name a few). In a famous study originally published in French in 1991 and provocatively titled We Have Never Been Modern, Latour advanced the hypothesis that modernity has been founded upon fallacious binary representations of the two fundamental sources of meaning of our world: on the one hand, the collective, understood as the process of amalgam that literally “collects” human and non-human 7

entities, has been disguised by moderns as the natural-social opposition; and on the other hand, the networks, through which the members of the collective interact in multifarious ways, has been transformed during the modern period into the localglobal separation line, instead of being interrogated about their extension or their degree of connection.

seeking an inexistent purity, the moderns have lost “ontos” itself. Nevertheless, through a paradoxical movement, Latour affirms that it is exactly because of this removal of constitutive mediation, this denial of the centre of the schema that the hybrids can and do proliferate during the modern period: indifferent to abstract representations, these spurious entities have occupied almost entirely the field of social practices. In other terms, the more modernity has thought by means of insoluble contrapositions, the more the actual elements of that contrapositions have become hybridized. These preliminary remarks possibly establish a bridge between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and that of Latour. In fact, Latour’s anti-essentialism can be identified insofar as he argues that Man and Nature, subjects and objects are not immobile substances which confront each other on an eternally fixed stage, but rather lines of flight always-already kept in a becoming, metastable multiplicities whose formal coherency cannot but present itself as transitory. This is the reason why Latour proposes to substitute the term essence with the word habit16 which grounds itself on the notion of perpetual articulations, and in so doing, what is brought to the foreground is the duration

Figure 1 – Latour (1995; 149).15

Figure 1 graphically depicts what Latour calls “Modern Constitution”, which acknowledges and legalizes the two separations (natural-social and localglobal) as if they were matters of fact, untouchable and indisputable. Thus, the modern constitution ineluctably fails to recognize what is produced in the median space in-between the categories (an interesting variant of Bhabha’s third space) as well as the mutable degrees of composition that establish the hybrid entities that Latour calls “quasi-objects” and “societies-nature”. Latour goes as far as calling this constitution an “ontological quartering” (Latour 1993; 123): while

16 �� “If the collective were to be invaded by essences with fixed and indisputable boundaries, natural causalities as well as human interests, no negotiation could be concluded, since one could expect nothing from the propositions but perseverance: they would persist until they wore out their adversary. Everything changes if propositions are presented as having acquired habits. To be sure, habits have the same weight as essences; but, unlike essences, habits can be revised during the proceedings if the game is really worth it” (Latour 2004; 86-87).

15 �� Strikingly, this figure is not present in the Harvester Wheatsheaf edition (in English) published in 1993. Nonetheless, it is showed and discussed in the original French edition (Éditions La Découverte), published in 1991. 8

or reteiration of a given institutional setting. In fact, institutions are the always re-negotiable results of variable processes of composition of humans and nonhumans. In this sense, it is the resilience of institutions that has to be explained rather than what has been historically dominant practice: presupposing the preconstituted stability of institutions as a ground for explaining their mutability as dysfunctions of an original stability or status quo. Nevertheless, we are not witnessing a reductio ad unum whose consequence would be the establishment of a perfect identity between human and non-human entities; in a crucial passage of We Have Never Been Modern, Latour affirms:

weaver of morphisms – isn’t that enough of a definition? The closer the anthropos comes to its distribution, the more human it is. The farther away it moves, the more it takes on multiple forms in which its humanity quickly becomes indiscernible, even if its figures are those of the person, the individual or the self. By seeking to isolate its form from those it churns together, one does not defend humanism, one loses it. (Latour 1993; 137).

Again, the similarities with Deleuze and Guattari are striking.17 What is worth analysing here is the relevance of this conception of the human as “weaver of morphisms” for a new understanding of the ecological crisis, an understanding which is potentially able to go beyond the objectivistic argument (which is perhaps necessary but not sufficient) according to which the crisis in question is exclusively a collapse of eco-systemic balance. In an important book mainly concerned with environmental social movements entitled Politics of Nature, Latour attempts to describe the environmental crisis as an epistemological crisis. According to him, nature is not dying; rather, it is showing us how much our knowledge is inadequate to deal with the contemporary transformations we are witnessing. In other words, nature must not be defended, but on the contrary it must be listened to in order to find possible ways out of the ignorance which surrounds us and

If the human does not possess a stable

form, it is not formless for all that. If, instead of attaching it to one constitutional pole or the other, we move it closer to the middle, it becomes the mediator and even the intersection of the two. The human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the nonhuman. The two expressions “humans” and “nonhumans” are belated results that no longer suffice to designate the other dimension. The scale of value consists not in shifting the definition of the human along the horizontal line that connects the Object pole to the nonmodern world. Reveal its work of mediation, and it will take on human form. Conceal it again, and we shall have to talk about inhumanity, even if it is draping itself in the Bill of Rights. The expression “anthropomorphic” considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, physiomorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A

17 �� An exhaustive list of similarities between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and Latour’s thought would bring us too far from our current interest. However, at the very least, it is important to signal that Latour has analysed at length the matter of the agency of objects, in particular through the concept of actant. See Latour 1986; 1987; 1988. 9

in which we are embedded. In order to justify this apparently peremptory statement, and also to fully deploy its broad implications, Latour proposes to situate alongside the dichotomy NatureSociety (the foundational ground of modernity) a similarly binary conceptual couple, Science-Politics, which can be understood as the epistemological reflex of the ontologically characterized NatureSociety dichotomy. In order to function, Latour argues that the Science-Politics dichotomy must be superimposed onto the Nature-Society binary such that, once this connection is achieved, the multiplicity of elements become ordered and reified according to the following schema: external Nature is accessible to Society exclusively through the mediation of Science which in turn endows Nature with its facticity; it is on the basis of matters of fact that the so-called objective Truths of Science can be extracted. Politics, according to this schema, becomes comprised of a differentiated series of propositions concerning values whose peculiar task is to provide suitable policymaking tools and whose aim, in turn, is to produce Order in a Society which is constantly in need of it. The crucial point, here, becomes to the subjective choice of the best option, amongst many, to be chosen in order to reach the goal of social peace and widespread wellbeing. Evidently, this schema ratifies the most unbridgeable of the separations between natural and social sciences; it produces, moreover, a series of practical and theoretical prohibitions, more or less explicit depending on given circumstances, aimed at maintaining the two spheres in a state of incommunicability. As a further consequence, Nature is perceived as an

ordered whole, whose structure has no relation with Politics other than the fact that the former provides the latter with the external reality upon which to deploy its action. As he did for the conceptual couple Nature-Society, Latour now demystifies the illusory character of the SciencePolitics dichotomy. Rather than belabour it, he proposes to focus on the work of sciences and on a conception of politics as association. According to him, the opposition between external and social reality is not a matter of fact, but, on the contrary, the provisional outcome of a fierce political struggle: â&#x20AC;&#x153;There is seemingly nothing more straightforward than the notion of external reality; there is actually nothing more diabolically politicalâ&#x20AC;? (Latour 2004; 78-79). It is in this context that the environmental social movements become extremely important: although at a philosophical level, behind the pompous rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism or bio-centrism, lies a static and harmonic vision of nature, actual practices have relentlessly put into question the very idea of a natural order. It is precisely in the wake of a practical critique of this notion that a new understanding of the environmental crisis can historically emerge: The historical importance of ecological crises stems not from a new concern with nature, but, on the contrary, from the impossibility of continuing to imagine politics on one side and, on the other, a nature that would serve politics simultaneously as a standard, a foil, a reserve, a resource, and a public dumping ground. Political philosophy abruptly finds itself confronted with the obligation to internalize the environment that it had viewed up to now as another world, a realm 10

on all objects, not just on those on which the label “natural” has been conferred. (Latour 2004; 20)

as distinct as the sublunary physics of the ancient Greeks could be, before Galileo, from the physics of the heavens. (Latour 2004; 58)

What ecological movements highlight in their constant and determined critical reporting about the state of the environment is precisely the impossibility, on the part of the epistemological fund of Science, to deal with these new problems. In fact, the “smooth objects” that Science was used to cope with were definable by four specific features: they possessed a clear and easily identifiable essence; they were separated by the social world upon which they nonetheless deployed their effects; they were configured independently of that social world; and possible sideeffects of their operationalization did not affect on their very definition. What Latour wants to underline is that none of these characteristics can define the “fuzzy objects” of which the ecological crisis are composed: these quasi-objects do not present essences but habits; they emerge at the intersection between the social and the natural world; as a consequence, they cannot claim any sort of reciprocal independence; finally, not only do their side-effects dilate or restrict their borders depending on given circumstances, but they also play a constitutive role in the context of their definitory dispositif (which is to say the contested set of rules and procedures through which a quasiobject is “defined” as belonging to the environmental crisis). From a standpoint provided by ecology, to declare the clinical death of Certainty it is sufficient to note, as it has been often the case,18 that the environmental

Internalizing the environment within the borders of political philosophy implies the recognition that, from an ecological perspective, one of the most nefarious sources of violences and catastrophes is excessive epistemological simplification, namely the attitude to think, choose and act on the basis of narrow presuppositions or inarguable certainties that do not take into account the complexity of the open systems in which living and non-living beings are inscribed. In Latour’s view, Science was based exactly on this kind of reductionism: its objects, its matters of fact, were monotone, flat, foreseeable, risk-averse. Given a certain set of starting conditions, the result was docilely to be deduced: there was no possibility whatsoever to go off the rail (other than by forcing the method, for a long time considered to be an unscientific practice). Contrary to this pale predictability, the ecological crisis is essentially made of uncertainty, powerfully forcing scientists, politicians and activists to come to terms with it: As soon as we begin to turn our attention toward the practice of ecological crises, we notice at once that they are never presented in the form of crises of “nature”. They appear rather as crisis of objectivity, as if the new objects that we produce collectively have not managed to fit in the Procrustean bed of two-house politics, as if the “smooth” objects of tradition were henceforth contrasted with “fuzzy” or tangled objects that the militant movements disperse in their wake. We need this incongruous metaphor to emphasize to what extent the crisis bears

18 �� With regard to uncertainty, a detailed overview and a highly valuable insight are avail11

crisis has given way to endless scientific disputes amongst experts that have made it impossible, in the large majority of cases, to establish a common set of incontrovertible, universally accepted facts. While politicians wait for the certain knowledge on which they can base their policy decisions, environmental social movements realize how difficult it is to manage such unstable entities. In other words, environmental social movements are realizing that the common set of incontrovertible facts cannot be a starting point, but rather must be a collectively shared goal. The slogan “taking care of uncertainty and complexity”, coined by the De-Growth Associations in France and Italy (Bonaiuti 2005; Latouche 2006), are examples of this precise point: politics and epistemology, while being distinct, cannot be separated if a common solution to the environmental crisis is to be found. The common is in no way the universal: whereas the latter is an actual given whose goal would simply need to match its internal development, the former is a virtual potentiality that only a partial (in the sense of “pertaining to or affecting just a part”) social conflict can make actual. The common is in no way opposed to the singular: on the very contrary, it emerges exactly out of a convergent politics of singularities. Herein resides, we argue, the radical novelty represented by the environmental movement. However, it is also here that Latour’s analysis seems to fall short: in a recent study (Latour 2005), Latour points out, following the results of previous works, that politics and epistemology should not be considered identical. At the very end of his analysis, however, he re-

introduces a separation between the two fields which goes far beyond the necessary task of differentiation. As he puts it: We claim that the controversies about what types of stuff make up the social world should not be solved by social scientist, but should be resumed by future participants and that at every moment the ‘package’ making up existing social links should be opened for public scrutiny. This means the two tasks of taking into account [epistemology] and putting into order [politics] have to be kept separate. (Latour 2005; 256-257).

In our opinion, this re-introduction of the notion of separation, and also the unproblematized reference to “public scrutiny” (is the current institutional setting adequate to address politics as associations? It might or it might not, but this unavoidable question remains unanswered),19 do not allow Latour’s reflection to properly recognize the pivotal importance of the processes of subjectivation in the context of contemporary ecological crisis. These processes take place on a twofold, highly ambivalent level: on the one hand, they are massively mobilized by the current capitalistic circuits of accumulation/ valorisation/exploitation; on the other one, they generate unpredictable and destabilizing modes of engagement with knowledge, citizenship and agency, new configurations which pervade and revolutionize simultaneously theory and 19 � For �� example, according to Stiegler (2008) an effective public action of the State is the condition of possibility of a potentially successful environmental politics; at the other end of the spectrum, Žižek (2008) argues for the irreducible opposition between the Common and the State.

able in Pellizzoni (2009). 12

practice (Code 2006). In other words, these processes simultaneously enact the conditions of our subjection and contribute to the formation of new, ideal cohabitations.

Guattari published (in French) in 1992: The ecological crisis can be traced to a more general crisis of the social, political and existential. The problems involves a type of revolution of mentalities whereby they cease investing in a certain kind of development, based on a productivism that has lost all human finality. Thus the issue returns with insistence: how do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetables species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of cosmos? (Guattari 1992; 119-120 emphasis added)

Processes of Subjectivation Guattari

n his later work without Deleuze, Guattari is mainly concerned with the vicissitudes of contemporary subjectivity and above all with the multiple ways by means of which it is constituted, both within the capitalistic regime of truth, based on the putative universality of competition and on the amazing malleability of money, and outside it, namely in the context of the revolutionary creation of the common. From a perspective that is simultaneously aesthetic, political and ethical, Guattari proposes to define these processes of subjectivation as the ongoing emergence of new affective connections opening onto the beyond of an individualized “I”. Assuming this definition as its starting point, this third part of the essay aims at establishing a logical nexus between the ambivalence of the production of subjectivity and the new understanding of the ecological crisis sketched above. We will attempt to demonstrate that the subjective dimension of the environmental crisis, investigated and experienced particularly by ecological social movements, can provide a fruitful theoretical background for further political research in this field. What is meant, however, by subjective dimension of the ecological crisis? The best answer, we contend, is to be found in a key passage of Chaosmosis, a book

A “revolution of mentalities” which is able to support processes of subjectivation whose result might be a new general responsibility: here is the stake of Guattari’s enterprise, one that is clearly analytically committed and politically engaged from its very outset. In order to expose it properly, we will subdivide this section into two parts: in the first we will discuss the notion of Integrated World Capital – IWC (Capitalisme Mondial Intégré – CMI); in the second we will explore the salient features of the notion of Ecosophy (Écosophie). IWC

n 1981, when, Guattari coined the term Integrated World Capital, the large majority of political and economic analysts where concerned with a possible definition of a “similarities-divergences” system with regard to the relation between the Western capitalistic mode 13

of production and the Eastern socialist one. Talking about worldwide markets integration in a context in which Cold War and nuclear terror were main topics appeared curious, at the best. Nonetheless, Guattari recognized the two processes which eventually set up, and are still setting up, the current state of global economy: mondialization and globalization. The first term refers to the increasing exchange of commodities amongst different areas of the planet, the broadening of markets (especially the financial one) and the consequent integration of consumption-related lifestyles. The second term, on the contrary, alludes to the integration of productive cycles: increasing quotas of final products are the result of various global assemblages, of horizontal interconnections amongst different elements of the labour process (design, manufacturing, assemblage and testing, commercialization) which take place in different zones of the world. Thus, the IWC presents itself as highly de-localized and de-territorialized to the extent that it is difficult to certainly individuate its actual head quarters with certainty. Consequently, we might define this phenomenon as a fourth stage of capitalism, one which is no longer oriented towards primary production (agriculture), secondary production (industry) or tertiary production (services), but rather engaged in the production of signs:

refers to the ensemble of economic powers of the planet. (Guattari 1992; 3 – translation is our own)

What does it mean to think capital as a semiotic operator? It means that the labour process is more and more fragmented, extended, de-composed and re-composed through deterritorializations that refer simultaneously to the realms of production and consumption. In this context, the means by which the process of valorisation integrates all the fragments of capitalistic production is no longer (not exclusively, at least) the abstract mechanism of the theory of value-labour time, but directly the concrete operationalization of all social competencies through the networks of an information economy. In other words, the pervasive nature of capital no longer depends only on the abstract overcoding power which manifests itself in the moment of exchange, but also on the technologically mediated integration of the different elements of the labour process: designing, technoscientific aspects, informational data, material activity, etc.20 These considerations, which would deserve a much deeper account, are nevertheless sufficient to highlight the crucial point of our analysis: capitalistic circuits of exploitation/accumulation/ valorisation do not deploy only on subjectivity, which is to say once this latter has been formed and could therefore act on the social field, but also within subjectivity, in the process of its own constitution. Guattari’s remarks on this issue are illuminating:

Capital is not an abstract category, but rather a semiotic operator which serves the interests of determined social formations. Its function is that of assuming the registration, re-balancing, regulation, codification: 1 of power formations typical of the developed industrial societies; 2 of fluxes and force relations which

20 � �� For an overview of the most recent debate on these issues, see Moulier-Boutang (2007). See also Hardt and Negri (2009). 14

the latter. From this perspective, what Latour called “Science” becomes the “the scientist Super-Ego of capital” (Guattari 1991; 21), the normative instance which illicitly appropriates the very definition of Truth and, at the same time, makes it indisputable through the imposition of an excluding function over alternative formulations. It must be said, however, that scientific knowledge is not the only field upon which the excluding games of capitalistic semiotics are exercised: we will also have an aesthetic Super-Ego aimed at the production and preservation of an indefeasible Beauty and, along the same line, a moral Super-Ego dedicated to the construction of an incontrovertible Hall of Justice. To sum up and introduce the next section: according to Guattari, capital imposes its definitions of Truth, Beauty and Justice in order to create subjectivities somehow compatible with its circuits of exploitation/accumulation/valorisation. This imposition, nonetheless, is not a natural necessity, but rather the battlefield the author would like to show in all its violence. In order to win that battle, social movements and minorities in general will need to be properly equipped: the concept of ecosophy is conceived of as nothing more than a weapon to be employed in this conflict.

Power exercise through the semiotics of Integrated World Capital has this peculiarity, that it conjointly develops itself starting from a control of the vertex of social segments and through a subjection of all life-moments of an individual. Although its enunciation is individuated, nothing is less individual than capitalistic subjectivity. The codification of activities, thoughts, human feelings by capital produces an equivalence and a resonance of all particular modes of subjectivation […] A similar operation of subjection, in order to cover the social field as a whole, and also in order to precisely eliminate its most miniscule disparities, cannot be content with an exterior social control. Therefore, the general market of values deployed by capital will capture things at once from the inside and from the outside. It will refer not only to recognizable economic values, but also and in the same way to mental, affective values... (Guattari 1992; 18-19 – translation is our own)

As it is clear from this passage, new semiotic dispositifs largely situated at the level of mass-media and organized at a global scale are mobilized to put into form docile subjectivities characterized by a passive acceptation of the status quo or by an accentuated cultural uniformity. To link this reflection to our previous discussion, we might advance the following hypothesis: capital is posed, in Guattari’s analysis, as one of the founding elements of the plan of organization of contemporary global society. Through the combined effects of the general equivalent (money) and the semiotic devices, capital aims to separate desiring-production from the multiplicity it relentlessly conveys. In so doing, capital ossifies, or at least attempts to ossify, the very process of desire; as a consequence, the former homologizes the results of

Ecosophy

s we have seen, the capitalistic imposition of a compatible subjectivity occurs through an attempt to ossify the desiring-production. In The Three Ecologies, originally published in 1989, Guattari intends to focus on what 15

he calls molecular revolutions, namely the multifarious social oppositions which, resistant to docilely accepting such injunctions, open up the possibility of unprecedented assemblages between breeding-grounds of resistance and a nonossified desiring-production. Guattari groups under the label of eco-logies these revolutionary molecular movements; from an analytical-descriptive standpoint, he subsequently subdivides them into three registers:

First and Third worlds. All the movements actively opposing these phenomena belongs to the category of social ecology. 3 Mental ecology: This refers to both theories and practices concerned with the deterioration of the diversified subjective conditions of singularisation and resingularisation upon which depend the health of individuals and collectives in a given society. In other terms, the problem is represented by the homogenizing norms which the IWC tries to impose at every level of everyday life, be it individual, domestic, conjugal, communitarian, national or ethical. This imposition amounts to what Guattari names “massmediatic infantilisation” (Guattari 1995; p. 133), which is to say a total de-responsabilization of the public opinion.

1 Environmental ecology: This refers to both theories and practices concerned with the deterioration of various natural conditions upon which depend every form of life present on earth. Moreover, all direct and institutional actions aimed at taking care of and enriching those conditions belong to this category. We find in this context many elements of the Latourian insight, especially the remark about the uselessness of “defending nature” (Guattari 1991; 43): in fact, it is argued, the problem is not how to protect/conserve ecological balances but rather how to experiment, by inscribing uncertainty in it, new way of thinking and acting which would be able to support the intrinsic potentialities of those ecological balances. 2 Social ecology: This refers to both theories and practices concerned with the deterioration of multiple social conditions upon which resides the endless confrontation (not necessarily violent) between groups and institutions. There are recurrent and widespread negative social phenomena in the fourth stage of capitalism, such as urban decay, the savage exploitation and violent militarization of territories, the subjection of women and asylum-seekers, the dramatic conditions of those sans-papiers, the sinister growth of religious as well as secular fundamentalisms, disconcerting ethnicand identity-based revanchist policies and the uneven relations between the so-called

Although each single ecology is confronted with a specific problematic area, according to Guattari none of them can be separated from the others. As we said, the distinction possesses an exclusively heuristic value since at the level of real practices the three ecologies are transversally interconnected from a system point of view, which means that a deterioration on one field immediately reverberates on the others whereas, symmetrically, an increase in the degree of freedom and autonomy on one realm positively acts retroactively on the others. It is precisely on the basis of their interconnection that the author recognizes their unifying principle: The principle common to three ecologies is this: each of the existential Territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-itself [en soi], closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself [pour soi] that is precarious, finite, finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis 16

that enables it to be made “habitable” by a human project. It is this praxic openingout which constitutes the essence of the “eco”. It subsumes all existing ways of domesticating existential Territories and is concerned with intimate modes of being, the body, the environment or large contextual ensembles relating to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity. (Guattari 1991; 53. My emphasis)

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. (Guattari 1992; 20-21).

The “praxic opening-out” the author refers to instantly recalls the assumption of, on the part of the logic of “eco”, the complexity of reality and of its relative uncertainty. At stake is not the proposition of a prescriptive set of thinking attitudes which are possibly able to “solve” contradictions or make contraries coincide, but rather the necessity and desirability of new experimental paths, again both theoretical and practical, aimed at autonomously connect the potential singularities that every situation presents. This is the reason why Guattari underlines that the three ecologies have to be put to work through networking, namely by means of a political project whose goal would be to keep them together while attentively guarding their constitutive differences and their lines of flight. As the author himself puts it:

Guattari names ecosophy this ethicalpolitical project aimed at keeping alive the connection between the three ecologies in a single movement of careful re-invention of the environment, of autonomous social change and of creative subjectivation. As it is clear, the task of ecosophy (unifying the three ecologies while taking care of their differences) raises anew the problem encountered in this paper when discussing the composition of the singular and the common: yes, there is a tension at work between disagreement and solidarity. It is seriously difficult to envisage a plurality of disparate social actors coming together while, simultaneously, maintaining their irreducible distinctions; at the same time, let us note that the IWC has become so ubiquitous, and its nefarious effects so manifest, that no class, no rank, no strata can declare its immunity in a fully justifiable way. It may be, no matter how paradoxical it might sound, that the very omnipresence of contemporary capitalism is the very symptom of its pathologically fragile state. After all, is not capital a social relation marked by the necessity to overcome its own limits and by conflicts about how to do that? Whatever outcomes will emerge from those conflicts, it is important, in the economy of our analysis, to stress that the production of

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 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 17

subjectivity is indicated by Guattari as the eminently political battlefield upon which ecological social movements struggle and interact. At stake is nothing less than the collective and individual liberation from the state of subjection conveyed by capitalistic categorical imperatives which prescribe us with pre-determined ways of conceiving of existences, of expressing them and, as a consequence, of creating them.

We should, however, be careful: the “end of nature” to which Žižek refers to does not entail the disappearance of the natural world. What “dies” is the idea that this world and the human world are to be thought as separated once and for all. This nature has come to an end, and it is starting from the recognition of such a state of affairs that a new political responsibility, an ecosophic one, might eventually emerge. If the environment is produced, as Žižek suggests, a political project centred around its “protection” or “conservation” cannot but fall short; on the contrary, the crucial point whether or not it is produced well. The definition of this right way to constitute the environment becomes the urgent task of social movements: as it is clear, at stake is the search for the common, which just as evidently takes the shape of designing of a desirable world. A last question must be answered: assuming this configuration of the ecological crisis, which lines of further research are opened up? Amongst many, we would like to mention two possibilities. The first is represented by a genealogical investigation of the historical process of problematization of the environment. In other words, we need to pose the following question: through which theoretical and practical vicissitudes the environment has become a policy issue, a shared priority in the current global agenda? If our analysis is plausible, the deterioration of the eco-systemic balances cannot answer this question; on the very contrary, it is the problem that has to be solved. This much needed investigation could take two directions: a history of the ecological awareness, which would mainly focus on green movements, organizations and/or

Provisional Conclusion

fter having briefly explored the thoughts of Deleuze, Guattari and Latour, let us try to come back to our initial question to see if something has changed. So, the question was, roughly: are we actually witnessing an environmental crisis? Our answer, now, would be as follows: yes, but it does not exclusively concerns nature. Moreover, the longer we persist in perceiving Man and Nature as separate entities, the further we procrastinate a possibly effective organization of the multitude of elements mobilized by this crisis. As Slavoj Žižek has recently, and convincingly, pointed out: Today, with the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of scientific breakthroughs in bio-genetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus “de-substantialized”, deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called “earth” (Žižek 2008; 435)

parties, and a history of the environmental policy and management, which would show the standpoint of governments and corporations. A second line of enquiry that has recently emerged (Sunder Rajan 2006; Heynen, McCarthy, Prudham, Robbins 2007; Grappi e Turrini 2009), aims to interrogate the multifarious ways through which contemporary capital, which is often referred to as bio-capital, produces value through direct investments in the realm of the living. Here the focus is on biotechnological R&D (especially the well known Human Genome Project) and on GMO’s economic effects both on so-called developed areas and on so-called developing countries. Those studies are highly interesting since their attempt to understand how capitalism is producing neo-liberal environments might potentially have a very relevant impact on the practice of the ecological movements. In fact, although biotechnological research and applications might easily seem impenetrable for non-scientists, these authors ceaselessly point out the conflictual character of its production and the contested nature of its outcome. As Guattari would say, in a struggle every detail is fundamental since subjects have to autonomously move if they want to grow and change:

reforging and renewal of humanity’s confidence in itself starting at the most miniscule level. (Guattari 1991; 69).

* * *

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