Translators' Introduction
HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.
cLov: There's no more nature.
Endgame
In the third plateau of A Thousand Plateaus - given the punning
tide 'The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It
Is?)' - F6lix Guattari and his co-author Gilles Deleuze steal
the character of Professor Challenger from Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and have him deliver a lecture in which he argues that
the Earth is a body without organs.l The Professor Challenger
of A Thousand Plateaus is, of course, a comic amalgam of
Guattari and Deleuze. He is the closest they ever came to a
fictional persona and the fun they had with him is apparent,
but their Professor is nothing like Conan Doyle's.
When he gave the world Professor Challenger, Conan
Doyle was already justly famous for creating Sherlock Holmes.
He wrote his two Challenger collections - early examples of a
new genre that eventually would be called 'science fiction' -
at tlre turn of the last century , The Lost Woild n l9l2 and The
Poison Beh the following year. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, how-
ever, Challenger is almost completely forgotten, although the
stereot)pe he embodied continues to subsist in books, tele-
vision and film. He is rational, scientific man at the dawn of a
new century, confident of his superiority over nature, which
is ably demonstrated in the story to which Guattari and
Deleuze allude: 'When the Earth Screamed'. Challenger had all the arrogance of Sherlock Holmes but none of his charm.
He takes an almost sadistic delight in experimenting on the
natural world and despises his much abused, Watson-like
stooge Edward Malone and anyone else who dares to question
his superior intelligence ('Clearly a typical victim of the
Jehovah
complex,' observes one of his critics). He is a
caricature, of course, but it would not be far-fetched to say
that the twentiet} century was the century of men like
Challenger.
In 'When the Earth Screamed' Challenger argues that the
Earth is an organism, much like a sea-urchin, hard on the
outside but soft inside. Human beings are a fungal growth of
which the planet is completely unaware. Surrounded by
sceptics, he proposes to prove his point by vigorously stimulat-
ing the creature's sensory cortex, that is, driving a shaft into
the centre of the Earth, thereby gaining its attention (for his
experiments are always little more than outlets for his insuffer-
able egotism;. Having, he supposes, proven his superiority
over the rest of a.nimal- and humankind, the Earth is his final
and finest challenge: 'I propose to let the Earth know that
there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who
calls for attention - who, indeed, insists upon attention.'
After a brief lecture to a restless audience, Challenger
presses the 'electric button' that sends an enorrnous iron dart
into 'the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth'. There is
the most horrible yell that ever was heard . . . a howl in
which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of
Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full
minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralysing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence, and floating away
thtoryh the still surnmer air until it went echoing along the
whole south coast and even reached our Frertch neighbours
across the Channel. No sound in history has ever equalled
the cry of the injured Earth.
Much to Challenger's satisfaction, an 'enormous spout of a
vile treacly substance of the consistency of tar' erupts from
the ground to soak the assembled Press, and then the excava-
tion is buried by a SO-foot pyramid of earth.
The story ends with Challenger's transformation from luna-
tic to genius - 'Challenger the super scientist, Challenger the
arch-pioneer, Challenger the first man of all men whom
Mother Earth had been compelled to recognize' - although it
remains unclear what practical benefit the experiment had
other than to gatify his terrifying ego or to demonstrate that
nothing can 'defend Mother Earth from intrusive Challengers'.
ln The Three Ecologies Guattari objects that we have chal-
lenged the Earth enough and are now on the brink ofecocide.
After a century of unparalleled scientific and technological
progress we have made our presence lqrown to lhe planet in
the most dramatic and self-defeating fashion. Had the Earth's
response to man's 'stimulation' been as localized as it is in
Conan Doyle's story - a retaliatory spurt of black tar - we
would be safe; but instead we are faced wit} a very different
kind of 'feedback': a bewilderingly complex array of interre-
lated and unpredictably erratic fluctuations over which we
have little or no control and which remind us that the whole
world is a giant ecosystem with a sensitive biosphere that has
taken 4.5 billion years to evolve. Our Challenger-like contempt for nature has driven
thousands of species to extinction already, insects, other
invertebrates and micro-organisms in the main, although birds
and larger mammals such as the elephant and the tiger are also
at risk, and it is not fanciful to suppose that eventually we
might deprive even ourselves of an ecological niche.3 The
Earth's environment is composed of a multiplicity of such
niches, each of which is a potential home for life forms. (As
Guattari reminds us, the etymology of 'eco' is the Greek word
oiftos, meaning 'home'.) We have upset the delicate symbiosis
between ourselves and nature, with largely unforeseeable
results.
In the oceans, for instance, overfishing, increased pollution,
and rising temperatures as a result of human activity have
resulted in the spread of unknown or unidentified infectious
'agents' that have led to the mass mortality of fish, sea
mammals, tropical corals and sea-water plants. The biodivers-
ity of the oceans is seriously tlrreatened by mysterious patho-
gens - viruses, bacteria, fhngi and other parasites - that wipe
out whole populations. These pathogens are making cross-
species leaps of the sort that the Professor Challenger of ,{
Thousand Plateaus would be better able to explain, and have
exploded the popular belief that dre Earth's oceans are so vast
they would remain relatively immune fiom mankind's influ-
ence. Whereas Nietzsche could still find comfort in the analogy
of the world as a 'sea of forces' that never expends itself,
'eternally flooding back' ('the sea will cast it up again'), we
can have no such faith in our diseased and toxic oceans with
their oil slicls and giant algae blooms visible from space.a
There can be little doubt that around the world increased pollution, global warming, deforestation, desertification and
the loss of biodiversity are anthropogenic, or that the motor
of this generalized impoverishment of the biosphere is
capitalism.
The latter half of the twentieth century was a period of
intense globalization. With the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the dominant mode of economic
interaction and transaction was t}e capitalist system, with its
emphasis on the free market. This ideology of unrestricted
competition has resulted in the widespread plunder of natural
resources, particularly fossil fuels such as oil or coal, but it
isn't just the natural environment that is t}reatened. Poorer
countries are forced to sell their labour extremely cheaply in
order to enter the global marketplace, and have exploited their
natural resources without a thought for sustainability. Mean-
while in the pollution-choked cities of the developed world
the most vulnerable in society are living increasingly insecure
and alienated lives. Globalization has given rise to 'exploitative
practices that perpetuate a quiet violence on low-income
labour and other vulnerable groups such as the poor, women
and children'.s New technological and scientific advances that
could be used to liberate human potential remain instead in
the service of a capitalist drive for profitability. A third of the
world's population continues to suffer from massive poverty
and malnutrition, while at the same time there has been an
increase in global wealth unprecedented in the history of
humankind.
The increasing globalization of all areas of our lives is not
being directed by one particular capitalist organization, party
or country - not even the USA, despite the fact that the model which most of the world is confronted with is the
American Way of Life. Post-industrial capitalism - which
Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism (WC) - is delocal-
ized and deterritorialized to such an extent that it is impossible
to locate the source of its power.6 IWC's most potent weapon
for achieving social control without violence is the mass media.
For instance, everyone nowadays has a television set. Many
people in the Third World will have televisions long before
they have proper irrigation. With the worldwide domination
of capitalism came a parallel expansion in communications
technology. Instant global communication became a reality
leading to the creation of a 'global village': the world as a
single community linked by telecommunications. The mass
media is involved in the creation of demand, so there will
always be a market for capital invesftnent.T A new type of
individual is being shaped and moulded by the unseen pressure
of market forces.
ln The Three Ecologies Guattari argues that we are being
'mentally manipulated thro"gh the production of a collective,
mass-media subjectivity'. That there might be a need for a
mvntal ecologsr is one of the most profound ideas in this short
book. Guattari's contention is that IWC is not only destroying
the natural environment and eroding social relations, but is
also engaged in a far more insidious and invisible 'penetration
of people's attitudes, sensibility and minds' (Guattari and
Negn, 1990: 53). Human subjectivity, in all its uniqueness -
what Guattari calls its 'singularity' - is as endangered as those
rare species that are disappearing from the planet every day. It
is up to us to resist this mass-media homogenization, which is
both desingularizing and infantalizing, and instead invent new ways to achieve the resingularization of existence. It is not
enough to take to the streets and wave placards, an entire
mental ecology is necessary in order not to give IWC our
unconscious assent. But to illustrate how IWC infiltrates and
saturates the unconscious, let us return briefly to its effect on
the environment.
It might have been better for us if the Earth had screamed,
as it did for Professor Challenger. Instead it has gone eerily
silent. Take, for example, the population of songbirds in the
British countryside. In 1972 there were an estimated,7.72
million skylarks in Britain. By 1996 there were only about
3.09 million. In a short space of time almost 60 per cent
had disappeared.s It is very rare to hear a skylark today, as
it is to hear other once common songbirds such as the song
thrush or the blackbird. Their ecological niches or homes -
hedgerows, heaths, ponds, meadows, moors and marshes -
have been eroded by the intensive use of agri-chemicals and
pesticides which have decimated their food supply. Birds sing
to mark out their territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:
312), so it is only to'be expected that the singing has
stopped.
It is a sound that Thomas Hardy, in another century, could
take for granted: 'the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old
evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill
at the same hour, and with t}e selfsame trills, quavers, and
breves . . . for centuries untold' lHardy, 1987:71). Guattari
calls this conjunction of a recognisable melodic formula and a
territory a 'refrain', and 'the simplest examples of refrains
delimiting existential Territories can be found in the ethology
of numerous bird species' (1995a: 15). There are many refrains in our own lives as well, a favourite
song, the advertising jingle that we can't get out of our heads,
even singing to the radio, for radio and television sets create
'sound walls' around us (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 311). In
The Thtee Ecologies Guattari argues that 'Individuals are "cap-
tured" by their environment, by ideas, tastes, models, ways of
being, the images that are constantly injected into them, and
even by the refrains that go round and round in their heads.'
In fact, surrounded by all these different refrains which pass
through us, it is difficult to know where, or rather, who 'we'
are, especially when the most dominant refrains are provided
by IWC's ideological arm, the mass media.
The machinic enslavement of television is a good example.
Do we really use television or does it use us? Are we not in
danger of becoming intrinsic component pieces in a much
larger machine? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 458). As Guat-
tari remarks in Chaosmosis:
When I watch television, I exist at the intersection: (1) of a
perceptual fascination provoked by the screen's luminous
animation which borders on the hypnotic; (2) of a captive
relation with the narrative content of the programme,
associated with a lateral awareness of surrounding events
(water boiling on the stove, a child's cry, the tele-
phone . . .); (3) of a world of phantasms occuping my
daydreams. My feeling of personal identity is t}us pulled in
different directions. How can I maintain a relative sense of
unicit/, despite the diversity of components of subjectifica-
tion that pass tJrrough me? It's a question of the refrain that
fixes me in flont of the screen. (1995a: 16-17) IWC seeks to gain power over us by 'controlling and neuEal-
izing the maximum number of existential refrains', thereby
determining the limits within which we think, feel and live; a
process of 'existential contraction'. We don't get out much;
we tend to think what everyone else thinks, feel the same as
everyone else; a strange passivity haunts our lives.e As market-
driven technologies provide new, ever more effective means
of modifying our subjectivity at deeper and deeper levels, we
are becoming more homogenized. The world is shrinking, and
so are we. 'A vast majority of individuals are placed in a
situation in which their personality is dwindling, their inten-
tions are rapidly losing all consistency, the quality of their
relations with others is dulled' (Guattari, 1989c: 19). For
Guattari, 'consistency' is indissociable from heterogeneity, and
much of The Three Ecologies is concerned with attaining consist-
ency again, becoming heterogeneous, resingularizing ourselves,
affirming our legitimate difference both fiom each other and
fiom a notional 'Self'.
It is a question of making a pragmatic intervention in one's
own life in order to escape from the dominant capitalistic
subjectivity. The objective of t}e new ecological practices that
Guattari outlines is to 'activate isolated and repressed singular-
ities that are turning around on themselves'. It isn't a question
of exchanging one model or way of life for another, but of
'respond[ing] to the event as the potential bearer of new
constellations of Universes of reference' (1995a: 18). The
paradox is this: although these Universes are not pre-estab-
lished reference points or models, with their discovery one
realizes they were always already there, but only a singular
event could activate them. ln Chaosmosis, Guattari uses the example of a patient who is
stuck in a rut, going round and round in circles. One day, on
the spur of the moment, he decides to take up driving again.
As he does so he immediately activates an existentializing
refrain that opens up 'new fields of virtuality' for him. He
renews contact with old friends, drives to familiar spots, and
regains his self-confidence (1995a: l7). This is what Guattari
calls 'a processual exploitation of event-centred "singularities"'
(1995a: 7). It is notable that Guattari seems to have experi-
enced something similar when he learned to drive at the
comparatively late age of 35. His life changed dramatically
when he got his driving licence: 'I became more independent,
which eventually led, among other things, to a divorce'
(1995a: 241; 1989a: 244).
Guattari's favourite - Proustian - example of an existential-
izing refrain is the effect on Swann of the 'little phrase' from
the Vinteuil sonata. This refrain has 'a sort of rc-creative
influence' upon Swann; he is 'like a confirmed invalid in
whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a
new course of treatment, or sometimes an organic change in
himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have brought
about such an improvement in his health that he begins to
envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting
to lead belatedly a wholly different life'.ro An existential
Territory can either become stratified and trapped in 'deathly
repetitions', as in the case of the tele-spectator in front of the
screen watching advertisements, or is capable of being reacti-
vated by a singular event, as in the case of the patient who
takes up driving.
The idea of a singular event in one's life, which may be almost imperceptible but which has enormous repercussions,
is borrowed flom modern physics. It was apparent to the
physicist James Clerk Maxwell as long ago as the nineteent}
century that singular events or points might have a political -
or what Guattari would call micropolitical - application and a
catalyzing power:
the system has a quantity of potential energy, which is
capable of being transformed into motion, but which cannot
begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a
certain configuration, to attain which requires an expenditure
of work, which in certain cases may be infinitessimally small,
and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy
developed in consequence thereof. For example, a rock
loosed by frost and balanced on a singular point of the
mountain-side, the little spark which kindles the great
forest, the little word which sets the world a-fighting, the
little scmple which prevents a man from doing his will, the
little spore which blights all the potatoes, the little gemmule
which makes us philosophers or idiots. Every existence
above a certain rank has its singular points: the higher the
rank, the more of them. At these points, influences wfiose
physical magnitude is too small to be taken account oJ by a
fnite
being, may produce results of the greatest importance. All
great results produced by human endeavour depend on
taking advantage of these singular points when t}ey occur.lt
Guattari is fascinated by the non-human aspect of subjectiv-
ity. Singularity is not individuality, although it is about being
singular. It operates at a pre-personal, pre-individual level. In The Three Ecologies he compares our interior life or 'interiority'
to a crossroads where several components of subjectification
meet to make up who we think we are. The resingularization
of subjectiviry, the liberation of singularities that are repressed
by a dominant and dominating mass-media subjectivity, has
nothing to do with individuals.t2
Nevertheless, an expenditure of work is necessary in order
for us to extend our existential Territories. One of the most
insistent refrains n The Three Ecologies is that we must abandon
scientific (or pseudo-scientific) paradigms and return to aes-
thetic ones. We need to continually reinvent our Iives like an
artist. 'Life,' as Guattari has said elsewhere, 'is like a perform-
ance, one must construct it, work at it, singularize it' (1989c:
20). It is an ongoing aesthetico-existential process. 'As we .
weave and unweave our bodies . . from day to day, their
molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and
unweave his image' (oyce, 1986: 159). ln The Three Ecologies
it is artists who provide us with the most profound insights
into the human condition, not professional scientists or psycho-
analysts. Goethe, Proust,
Joyce,
Artaud and Beckett are all
cited, but there are many others. Biichner, for example, whose
Lenz is a classic study in schizophrenia long before the term
was invented and has been described as 'proof that poetic
utterances can anticipate scientific advances by decades',13 or
Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs diagnosed an entire con-
dition to which he reluctantly gave his name.la
The best artists don't repeat themselves, they start over and
over again from scratch, uncertain with each new attemPt
precisely where their next experiment will take them, but
then suddenly, spontaneously and unaccountably, as the painter Francis Bacon has observed, 'there comes something which
your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing which
you could begin to develop'.ls Life is a work in progress, with
no goal in sight, only the tireless endeavour to explore new
possibilities, to respond to the chance event - the singular
point - that takes us off in a new direction. As Bacon once
remarked, 'l always think of myself not so much as a painter
but as a medium for accident and chance.'15
So, Guattari has extended his definition of ecology beyond
merely environmental concerns to include human subjectivity
itself, but what about social relations? It is all very well for
people to become mental ecologists, to live their lives like a
work of art in a state of pure, creative autoreferentiality , but
the question arises as to how they can then work together,
collectively, in a unified struggle against IWC's damaging
effect on society. Is it not the case that processes of singulari-
zation that actively multiply differences make any mass move-
ment impossible?
People are not yet as pacified and domesticated as IWC
would like them to be. As early as 7977, Guattari observed
that 'ever-widening social groups are not content to go on as
they always have. An increasing number of people are begin-
ning to reject certain forms of consumerism. To exhortations
to acquire more cars, more private houses, more household
machines, more ready-made entertainment and, in order to do
so, to work harder, join the rat race, wear oneself out before
one's time, they reply, "What's the point? Who does it help?"'
(1984: 251). These people obviously share a similar sense of
alienation from the capitalist consensus, but how can they act
collectively to alter their circumstances? 'Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantalizing consensus,' he proposes in
The Three Ecologies, 'it will be a question in the future of
cultivating a dissensus.'
Guattari's finely nuanced, radically dissensual approach to
social ecologsr requires the collective production ofunpredictable
and untamed 'dissident subjectivities' rather than a mass
movement of like-minded people.
Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective
singularity; construct and in a permanent wa)r re-construct
this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in
reference to a directing ideology, but within the articula-
tions of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and
praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of
each of its components, and in absolute respect of their
own times - time for comprehending or refusing to com-
prehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of
identification or of the most exacerbated differences.'
(Guattari and Negri, l99O: 120)
As he makes clear in The Three Ecologies, there will be moments
when eco-activists work together, and ot}er times when they
drift apart again. The important thing is that they do not have
a leader directing their activityJT The Three Ecologies was
written before the Internet had fully developed into the
powerful recruitment tool it is today, but Guattari was not
unaware of the 'proliferation of spontaneous and co-ordinated
groups' using the more rudimentary French Minitel system.rs
It is one instance in which technological advancements may
work for the collective good, leading to globally organized autonomous action and short-lived but effective
"ffi"iry
groups
in which 'the intensity of the minority's feelings can be
revealed to the majority by the minority engaging in civil
disobedience' (Carter, 1999: 258). Dissensus is principally a
call for the revival of individual competence as a social force,
for the development of new, 'egalitarian, decentralized, partic-
ipatory democracies, orientated towards an environmentally
sustainable way of living' (Carter, 1999: 300).
There is of course a tension at work here between solidarity
and dissensus. It requires that a plurality of disparate groups
come together in a kind of unified disunity, a pragmatic
solidarity without solidity; what one might call, for want of a
better word, 'fluidarity'. The common enemy - IWC - has
become so ubiquitous, and its deleterious effect on the planet
so apparent, that no strata of society is immune from its
effects. This is what makes ecology - or ecosophy - such a
potentially radical force in the world. We are all of us prey to
environmental degradation, we are all stranded on Spaceship
Earth.
A capitalism that does not exploit resources - be they
natural or human - is as yet unthinkable. A capitalism that is
symbiotic rather than parasitic may never be possible. As
Gregory Bateson points out, for too long humanity has adopted
'survival of the fittest' as its maxim - and this is taken to its
extreme by free-market competition - whereas if humanity is
to survive it must reconfigure this goal into that of 'survival of
organism plus environment' (Bateson, 7972: 499). At present
the major capitalist countries are also the major polluters of
the Earth. The mass media creates a climate of unquestioning
passivity. The role of television in perpetuating the perception that 'environmental problems' occur in some ill-defined else-
where can only work in IWC's interest.re But even if govern-
ments and industry acted immediately to reduce the global
emission of greenhouse gases, for instance, it would still take
hundreds of years for the Earth's ecological equilibrium to be
restored. Unfortunately, immediate political action is unlikely
when the worst polluting nations continue to insist that
'emissions trading' occurs under free-market principles.
From a cosmic perspective the human race is at the
beginning of the evolutionary process. There is time for life to
spread beyond the Earth throughout the entire Cosmos,
provided the planet's biosphere isn't destroyed. While it is
trapped on Spaceship Earth, and now that it has entered the
nuclear and biotechnological age, our species remains lrrlner-
able. In order for it to survive, the twenty-first century must
be atheist in the best sense: a positive disbelief in God,
concerned only with, and respectful of , tenestrial life. It will
require the development of an immanent, materialist ethics,
coupled with an atleist awareness of finitude, of the mortality
of the species, the planet and the entire universe, and not an
illusory belief in immortality, which is only a misplaced
contempt for life.2o A proper understanding of our terrestrial-
ity and mortality does not imply any restriction of our
horizons. There will always be new ways of life to be invented,
for there are as many different ways of living as there are
people; provided we rediscover our heterogeneity and resist
the insidious normalization of our lives.
As Bateson has argued (1972: 495-505), an ecological
struggle for survival is taking place in the domain of. ideas. The task of every ecological analyst now is to promote ecologically
'good' ideas in the hope that these will prevail, through a
process of natural selection, over ecologically 'bad' ideas that
will prove fatal to the planet. The Three Ecologies is full of
ecologically 'good' ideas. It is a modest proposal that we
should protect not only the Earth and society, but also our
own rare and singular minds from the encroachments of
Integrated World Capitalism.
Guattari has done all he could. The rest is up. to natural
selection.