Concept and Practice of Dissensus in Félix Guattari’s Ecosophy¹

Concepto y práctica del disenso en la ecosofía de Félix Guattari

Conceito e prática do disenso na ecosofia de Félix Guattari

Abstract

An approach to Félix Guattari's Ecosophy is proposed based on the analysis of the logic of dissent. Our hypothesis is as follows: promoting a dissensual practice is vital to eco-ethological knowledge that pursues the resingularization of experience in the context of increasing homogenization operated by Integrated World Capitalism. As Guattari emphasized during his visit to Chile, the object of eco-ethology is not the critique of capitalism but to mobilize its active confrontation. The practice of dissent, in this direction, would make it possible to act against the homogenizing devices of subjectivity at a time when capitalism, after colonizing the world, also colonizes the unconscious. The article deals with the formulation of dissent in Guattari's visit to Chile in 1991, establishing a counterpoint with his analysis in writings of recent years; it then analyses the articulation of dissensual logic in Guattari's ontology. Finally, it explores the function of the logic of dissensus in the configuration of institutions from the perspective of transversality.

Keywords:
Dissent; Ecosophy; Machine; Transversality; Institution

Resumen

Se propone un acercamiento a la ecosofía de Félix Guattari a partir del análisis de la lógica del disenso. La hipótesis es la siguiente: promover una práctica disensual es clave para un saber eco-etológico que persigue la resingularización de la experiencia en el contexto de homogeneización creciente operada por el Capitalismo Mundial Integrado (CMI). Según destaca Guattari en su visita a Chile, el objeto de la ecosofía no es la crítica del capitalismo, sino movilizar su confrontación activa. La práctica del disenso, en esa dirección, haría posible actuar contra los dispositivos homogeneizadores de la subjetividad en una época en que el capitalismo, tras colonizar el mundo, coloniza, también, el inconsciente. El artículo aborda la formulación del disenso en la visita de Guattari a Chile en 1991, estableciendo un contrapunto con su análisis en escritos de los últimos años; luego, se analiza la articulación de lógica disensual en la ontología guattariana. Por último, se indaga, en la función de la lógica del disenso en la configuración de instituciones desde la perspectiva de la transversalidad.

Palabras clave:
Disenso; Ecosofía; Máquina; Transversalidad; Institución

Resumo

Propõe-se uma abordagem da ecosofia de Félix Guattari com base na análise da lógica do dissenso. A hipótese é a seguinte: promover uma prática dissensual é fundamental para um conhecimento ecoetológico que busca a ressingularização da experiência no contexto da crescente homogeneização operada pelo Capitalismo Mundial Integrado (CMI). Como Guattari enfatizou durante sua visita ao Chile, o objetivo da eco-etologia não é a crítica do capitalismo, mas a mobilização de seu confronto ativo. A prática do dissenso, nesse sentido, possibilitaria agir contra os dispositivos homogeneizadores da subjetividade em um momento em que o capitalismo, depois de colonizar o mundo, coloniza também o inconsciente. O artigo trata da formulação do dissenso na visita de Guattari ao Chile em 1991, estabelecendo um contraponto com sua análise nos escritos dos últimos anos; em seguida, analisa a articulação da lógica dissensual na ontologia de Guattari. Por fim, é investigada a função da lógica do dissenso na configuração das instituições sob a perspectiva da transversalidade.

Palavras-chave:
Dissenso; Ecosofía; Máquina; Transversalidade; instituição

Introduction

Towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Félix Guattari redefined ecology based on how its coexisting elements are differentially arranged. Within this framework, the philosopher integrates an aspect that, at first sight, seems external to ecology: dissent. Dissent is proposed as a key to the reading and practice of an expanded ecology that goes beyond the particular interest in “nature,” reaching apparently distant horizons such as aesthetics or institutional organization. In the end, dissent will allow us to bet on a practice of resingularization of experience in a scenario of homogenization and growing depoliticization after the global installation of neoliberalism.

During his visit to Chile in 1991, Guattari was asked about the consensual atmosphere that permeated the reconciliation discourses of the day at a time of the so-called “return to democracy” process. Suspicious, the interviewee warns that it would be necessary to appeal to “dissensus” instead of abandoning oneself to the mass media formula of “consensus”, pointing out that the latter does not favor the cultivation of democracy. To the astonishment of his interviewer, Guattari argues that democracy is about fostering “dissensus” to produce and liberate otherness, considering the current context of Integrated World Capitalism that threatens the consistency of our existential territories by deterritorialization. Likewise, fostering and strengthening dissent can serve as a strategy against the relapse into the “winter years”, a depressive moment that comes after the enthusiasm of seeing the left gain access to power and end up establishing a series of concessions in favor of the neoliberal policies that are installed everywhere.

In this direction, according to Guattari, it is worth asking ourselves: how do we maintain the dissensual dimension of ecology in the logic of habitat? Repeatedly, the psychoanalyst points out that we would have to precisely find that in an ecosophy, or in what he also characterized as an “ecology of the virtual” (Guattari, 2013, p. 61). In what follows, we will approach what will later be called ecosophy, unraveling the implications of the dissensual logic. To do so, we will review the discussion around dissensus in Guattari’s visit to Chile to return to the issue of the elaboration of ecosophy. Then, we will review the problem of dissent from Guattari’s pluralist ontology to finish with the analysis of dissent in the configuration of institutions from the perspective of transversalities.

1. Guattari in Chile: cultivating a dissensual democracy

When Félix Guattari visited Chile in the early 1990s, the country was going through a challenging but fertile moment for its reinvention. After 17 years of civil-military dictatorship and following an extensive process of destruction of the social fabric and reduction of the State to an unprecedented minimum in the world -suffering the effects of extensive privatization of state services that turned large companies into the owners and sovereigns of the country- the so-called process of transition to democracy began.

During his stay in Chile, the schizoanalytic referent shared in different meetings and interviews with groups and organizations. In one of these interviews, entitled “¿Qué se hace con la revolución?” (Guattari, 1998), conducted by Ignacio Íñiguez for Página Abierta magazine, he wonders about the consensual atmosphere that permeated the reconciliation speeches, whose ultimate objective was to avoid any kind of reparation for the crimes committed during the dictatorship and silencing everything done by the military and civilians against the population. Perhaps sensing what the rhetoric of reconciliation conceals, Guattari states that he does not believe a priori in consensus (Guattari, 1998, p. 80) and suggests that, on the contrary, “dissensus” should be encouraged, not allowing oneself to be seduced by the siren songs of “consensus” and the democracy of agreements. Moreover, it would be necessary to work for dissensus instead of contributing to strengthening the center that calls for the abandonment of extreme positions. An example can be seen in the alliances of the Chilean political world, woven by the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, which aspired to recover democracy as a place emptied of political conflict. Pointing out the operative role of conflict, Guattari insists on the importance of producing otherness through dissent since this implies “not only accepting the difference of the other, but also desiring it, working so that this difference is accentuated” (Guattari, 1998, p. 80). This would be part of a coherent policy desirous of difference, which seeks “the singularization of the positions of the other” (Guattari, 1998, p. 80). The desire for consensus, on the contrary, entails a clear sign of “totalitarian risk” by imposing a normality or an order based on the social (family) or the unconscious (neurosis), as it has been done, for example, in psychoanalysis since Freud. Moreover, the interviewee emphasizes and expresses his attraction to certain movements of rupture evident in marginalized groups in Latin America, groups that make their own subjective heterogeneity emerge:

It is necessary to find means to understand that the subjectivity in the favelas, in the populations, the subjectivity of children, or the subjectivity of psychotics is different from the subjectivity of the oligarchies in Rio de Janeiro, in New York, or in Paris. It is necessary to understand the differences, the heterogeneity, the heterogenesis of subjectivities, the desires for singularization that cannot be fitted into notions such as the Oedipus Complex, castration, etc. Then, it is crucial to see how this subjectivity is constructed, and to see on what it is constructed (Guattari, 2023, n/n).

As seen, the last stage of his production is marked by the relation of subjectivity and democracy, of ‘molecular’ desire and ‘molar’ social organization. It is precisely there where the problem of ecosophy functions as a practical knowledge that articulates heterogeneous existential planes. In a text preparing his visit to Chile, Guattari notes: “Ecosophical democracy will not abandon itself to the ease of consensual agreement; on the contrary, it will engage in disensual metamodelization” (Guattari, 1998, p. 177), playing a leading role in the process of resingularization of experience. However, the interest in this relation or connection of heterogeneous orders is not strictly new. The concern for inventing new forms of organization capable of empowering desire is a point that distinguishes from the beginning of his work as a psychoanalyst, health worker, and activist. An echo of his early reflections is the constant reworking of the notion of transversality, present in every moment where the crossing of disparate horizons imposes itself, as it happens in formulating ecosophical pragmatics by articulating different machines.

Ecosophy explicitly seeks to articulate “the whole of scientific, political, environmental, social and mental ecologies” (Guattari, 2013, p. 65), under the conviction that facing the current state of Integrated World Capitalism requires “establishing transversal connections between the political, the ethical and the aesthetic” (Guattari, 2013, p. 66). This ecosophical demand enjoys full actuality, forcing us, in turn, to think of heterogeneity and to repair the appropriate channels for its production. Thus, an inclusive inquiry and practice are required to face the systematic impoverishment of the three ecologies described by Guattari (environmental, social, and mental), the loss of a biodiversity that cannot be understood and confronted only from an environmentalist defense, and the visible deterioration of individual and collective ways of life. Concerning the ethical aspect of this process, the author is emphatic: “From the capitalist chaos must emerge what I call ‘attractors’ of values: diverse, heterogeneous, dissensual values” (Guattari, 1998, p. 167).

As an expansion of the concept of ecology (Guattari, 2020, p. 300) and as an articulating amplification of the three ecologies, ecosophy is presented as a process of metamodeling of the means of production of subjectivity. However, starting from such articulation would necessarily have to do so from “the perspective of an ethical-political choice of diversity, of creative dissent, of responsibility for difference and otherness” (Guattari, 2015, p. 33)². During his stay in Chile, he remarks that this otherness does not refer only to the human world. Thus, the defense of otherness does relate not strictly to the safeguarding of a human otherness but rather to the protection of the recreation of the living and, so, to the preservation of incorporeal species, such as poetry and other “psychic vitamins” that are threatened as some plant species. Hence, it is proposed that “Ecosophy is the defense of all machines, of all species” (Guattari, 1998, p. 44). These incorporeal species, which may disappear, turn out to be, for Guattari, completely indispensable for psychic life and anything but mere “cultural distractions” (Guattari, 2023, n/n). It is to this extent that his defense of them becomes unavoidable.

After making visible the appeal to dissent in the visit to Chile and establishing its place in the formulation of ecosophy, it is now necessary to take a step back and highlight the role of dissent in Guattari’s pluralist ontology anchored in the concept of transversality.

2. The logic of dissensus in Guattari’s pluralist ontology

Against the dominant modes of valuation in the framework of Integrated World Capitalism, Guattari’s pluralist ontology, which promotes a complex access to the eco-logical object, warns about the need to consider “not only the walls of the house” but to involve in each case human practices, that is, in their social and mental articulations. This literal complexity of the eco-logical object imposes a brief detour through the notion of transversality.

Suppose ecosystems are defined by an articulation of flows, heterogeneous among themselves. In that case, the machinic character of the object of ecosophy provides the support to think of the autopoietic union (and not only “auto” poietic, as Guattari will stress in different instances) between “the machines of the ecosystems of material flows and the ecosystems of semiotic flows” (GUATTARI, 2013, p. 72). As is well known, machinism is not reserved only for the living but is implied in analyzing all kinds of systems: technological, social, mental, and so on. To a certain extent, machinism necessarily opens in the universes of meaning and existential territories as a condition of connectivity. The question concerning value, then, is how to prevent one register of valorization from dominating and crushing the others, as it happens in today's economic monolingualism. Likewise, one must ask how the question of valorization can be articulated with existential territories by shifting coordinates of determination open to interlinking between systems. As we shall see, the machinic valence of dissent is forcefully revealed at this point.

A dissensual machine links and connects heterogeneous dimensions, an action that refers to another vital concept coined by Guattari: transversality. The general operation of transversality allows us to understand the institution as a complex of coexistence between heterogeneous levels and dimensions, which aspires to exceed the structure, as an instance that has traditionally been invoked to think of the institutional matrix. In the case of ecological problematics, Guattari intuits that transversal problematization is required across all lines of molecular fractures. Hence, as he says, “eco-logic no longer imposes a 'resolution' of opposites” (Guattari, 2000, p. 52). Transversality is then offered as a non-dialectic or rather a way of accounting for a logic implied in exchanges at all levels, which is tributary to a way of thinking based on new alliances with machines of all kinds. What interests us here is the persistence of the dissensual character -wanting and desiring the difference of the other- in this logic of transversality. We believe that this “polemos”, inscribed in the very heart of the heterogeneity with which Guattari tries to think, is an aspect that we cannot fail to emphasize because that complicates the understanding of transversality in Guattari’s pluralist ontology.

Machines must be traversed to march in the direction of heterogeneity and to ensure that the heterogeneous poles (the maximum of difference) do not cease to remain so. This is an ethical principle, but of an ethics in situ, an ethology. As defined in The Three Ecologies as a “singular production of existence” (Guattari, 2000, p. 50), dissent would have to ensure the non-homogeneity of the various levels of practice to repel all tutelage transcendent to them. As it is said in Chaosmosis, the dissent must combat the “disciplinary boundaries, the solipsistic closure of Universes of value” (Guattari, 1995, p. 117). Hence, to make audible and thinkable the inseparability of nature and culture, “we must learn to think 'transversally' … the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference” (Guattari, 2000, p. 43).

Transversality is key to the gestation of the concept of existential territory, elaborated to think existential singularizations, which mutate, recompose, and articulate with different practical levels. Existential territories can bifurcate following singularities, stratify, or open themselves to processes. Along the way, they produce more or less habitable places. This quantitative, intensive condition of “more and less” slows down or encourages places of production of otherness and difference. Suppose consensuses are formalized as a maximum reduction and lessening of heterogeneity. In that case, the praxis inscribed in ecosophy as “non-contemplative wisdom” (Guattari, 2013, p. 259) will have to take the opposite path, abandoning the temptation to erect universal rules. Indeed, it is a matter of building a habitat without domesticating or conforming in order, without the temptation of establishing a predetermined order for the various existential territories. That would be the sense of dissent we are trying to bring into play. It is a matter, as Guattari argues, “of setting forth the principle antinomies between the ecosophical levels, or, if you prefer, between the three ecological visions, the three discriminating lenses under discussion here” (Guattari, 2000, p. 54). In short, inventive pluralism must be constituted as a dissensual pluralism. This matter forces us to recover the political value of the machine concept and repair the type of institutions that decline from the transversal character of ecosophical thought.

3. Machine, Transversality, and Institutions

Dissensus gives the machine's overtly political character and marks the operational outline of the notion of transversality. Moreover, thinking about the machine will allow us, in our opinion, to account for the general operation of transversality to understand the institution as a complex coexistence between heterogeneous levels and dimensions, which aspires, as we have pointed out, to exceed the structure as an instance that has traditionally been invoked to think the institutional matrix.

At the point of transversality, the machinic becomes functions. This is also a way of capturing Guattari’s enigmatic understanding of an ecosophy that involves, at every moment, an ecology of the virtual. That becoming, in Guattari’s words, “presupposes the virtual, the adjacency that comes from incorporeal universes, universes of reference without being pre-existent” (Guattari, 2013, p. 254). In this context, transversality is not simply contrary to verticality and horizontality but rather complementary, as “it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings” (Guattari, 2015, p. 113). This is key to analyzing the problem of collective agency or, more specifically, of groups and institutions, where the intimate relationship of the molar and the molecular levels can be appreciated once again.

The groups -we would all be groupuscules (Guattari, 2015, p. 362)- would be traversed and determined by different coefficients of transversality (p. 113, 263) that come to indicate the coexistence of registers, with their concomitant degree of openness to the exterior. In this sense, the question of the machine appears “as a ‘differentiator,’ as a causal break, different in kind from the structurally established order of things” (Guattari, 2015, p. 322). Now, par excellence, these coefficients of transversality are shown to be even more capable of opening to an exterior when they mark the finiteness of the groups. Towards the end of the 1980s, such a consideration was linked to the idea of existential territories effected by processes of resingularization, that is, the accommodations and rearrangements of modes of existence. In the framework of the sixties and seventies, this required a “specific analytical praxis” adjacent to “every level of organization of the struggle” (Guattari, 2015, p. 329). This adjacency presupposes a whole idea of propagation of the transgression of fixed orders. Thus, transversality is careful to communicate between dimensions without them depending vertically on a transcendent point of unity or horizontally, depending on a sequence equally indebted to that point of unity.

Despite the conceptual history involved in the practice of institutional analysis -ranging from psychotherapy and institutional pedagogy to a particular sociology that theorizes on its implications- what is certain is that in Guattari, such analysis is the early name of a relationship with politics that is discovered in a micro-logical space. Such discovery makes it necessary to build a relationship with psychoanalysis but to continually dismantle the coordinates in which any psychoanalysis is spoken and thought. When Guattari states in the mid-sixties: “It is the revolutionary vanguard’s failure to understand the unconscious processes that emerge as socio-economic determinisms that has left the working class defenseless in the face of capitalism’s modern mechanisms of alienation” (Guattari, 2015, p. 269), it is not simply to inject psychoanalysis into the diagnosis of new modes of alienation of the workers. It is to sustain the need to produce concepts as tools (Cf. Dosse, 2010, p. 5), to think of an immediate relationship between social structures and the unconscious or, as it will be said a few years later, concepts that allow accounting for the relation of the immanence of the social field to desire.

How do we make the connection between groups proliferate transversally? How do we produce collective statements and not stereotypes? How do we experience our institutions within our own limits instead of reproducing patterns that will end up suffocating the desire that is always at stake? These questions operate as clues to think (and make) institutions as multiplicities that tend towards unification but towards a unification conducted in agreement and not against the desire of its members. In that sense, it is one of the most important stakes for ecosophy to try to liberate the creative and revolting power of desire instead of trying to exclude it, rationalize it, or totalize it.

Within the framework of the Groupe de travail de psychothérapie et de sociothérapie institutionnelles, which began to function in 1960, it is proposed that it is only possible to conduct therapeutic work with inmates of a hospital or clinic if the institution has reflected on its own mode of operation. This reflection must start by specifying a distinction of levels, operations, and types of relationships. This led to the development of the concept of transversality in 1964, born from the need to analyze the institution, not only because it imprints the patterns that direct and distribute groups and their modes of existence but, above all, because the institution is a detour to access desire. A desire that evidently does not consist of something wild or natural but which only shows itself in institutions, as forms of habituating desire, we could say. There are two lines or tendencies that define the groups that will allow us to recognize transversality, “dependent groups” [groupes assujettis] and “subject-groups” [groupes-sujet]. The “dependent groups” are those who experience the institution as a burden but who, to a great extent, do not visualize the relationship of transcendence that exercises a determining function in the activity and in the tasks that give consistency and continuity to the group's life. Being constituted as the effect of a vertical or pyramidal organization that seeks only to ensure self-preservation, the subject-groups are marked by two operations. On the one hand, they try to avoid any irruption, conflict, or invention that could overturn the hierarchical relationship, the order of members and functions. On the other hand, they try to absorb other groups, circulating stereotyped statements split simultaneously from the real and the subjectivity through structuring and constant totalization that reinforces centralism. On the contrary, “subject-groups” would allow us to elaborate another way of approaching the relationship between the group and the institution. This is a relationship in which the group is no longer defined simply by the confirmation of an institution to which it demands but rather by being exposed to the finitude and provisional nature of the task that keeps it attached to the institution and connected to the outside. These groups constantly put into play an enterprise of transversalization that tries to conjure up all hierarchy and centralism, opening themselves to dissent. They do not cease to confront their limits, establishing unions and connections with other groups to form a multiplicity or “rhizome”. For this reason, the subject-groups appear as supporters of desire and, therefore, as a vector of transformation of all institutional creation.

The question that emerges from Guattari’s statements, according to Deleuze, is the following: “How does a group carry its desire, connect it to the desires of other groups and the desires of the masses, produce the appropriate creative utterances and constitute the conditions not of unification, but of multiplication conducive to utterances in revolt?” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 198). The task of any institution would be to seek the means to nurture the connection between groups, to produce collective statements, and to experiment with its limits instead of acting by hierarchizing and reproducing patterns that will end up suffocating desire in pure “stratification”³.

Transversality would be, as opposed to verticality (of the pyramidal structure that links the group to the institution) and horizontality (of the daily relationships that are not limited to verticality), what would allow, on the one hand, to communicate between the different levels of functioning in an institution, and, above all, on the other hand, to make these levels or dimensions produce connections that are not given as expected at a purely vertical or horizontal level of analysis. As we were saying, transversality is not simply contrary to verticality and horizontality; instead, it is complementary, depending on the degree of communication “among different levels and, above all, in different meanings” (Guattari, 2015, p. 113). We would all be traversed and determined by different coefficients of transversality, which come to indicate the coexistence of registers that give their physiognomy to the life of the group without being limited to what can be set out in an organization chart or to the conscious or preconscious relations between different groups or individuals, within the limits of fixed and structured institutional functioning. In fact, Guattari understands this coefficient in the manner of an unconscious that can be gradually enunciated (defining transversality as “the place of the unconscious subject of the group”), which would leave transversality as that which allows, to a greater or lesser degree, the triggering of an analytical process, “giving individuals a real hope of using the group as a mirror” (Guattari, 2015, p. 116).

In short, a transversality concept is a tool for thinking about indexes of institutional transformation since it assumes that the unconscious functions in an instituted way. However, it is not tied definitively to a destiny imposed by previous or pre-given social and political relations. This would make it necessary to think about the idea that the institution is not simply a structure defined by a set of relations (conjunctions, disjunctions, connections) given between parts or terms but that the institution opens and unfolds in its possibility of artificially piercing some subjective holes that can carry out unpublished connections between what we previously qualified as parts of the structure (Cf. Guattari, 2015, pp. 74-75).

A second famous concept, thematically presented in 1969 at the École freudienne, will make it possible to account for a general operation of transversality. This refers to the concept of the machine, already mentioned above. Roughly speaking, the machine is based on the idea of a differentiation in/of structure, conceived by Deleuze in 1968-69 (we must remember that Guattari reviews the two great books by Deleuze of those years: Difference and Repetition, and The Logic of Sense). Suppose the structure is defined by two heterogeneous series (a signifying series and a signified series), whose terms only exist because of the inter-serially maintained relations. In that case, the machine will mark a differentiation produced in the convergence of series (Cf. Deleuze, 1990, p. 109 sq.). The machine allows us to think about the productive process of an unconscious subject (which, as we saw, is institutionally determined, but without necessarily being fixed in said being-such-institution) since that subject is produced as adjacency to the machine. What is called a subject is a residue. While the machine “marks a date, a change, different from a structural representation” (Guattari, 2015, p. 319), the machine makes it possible to think of the subject as a fact supplementary to the structure. Thus, this machine is installed at the center of desire. We recognize then the effort to think about the implication between desire and structure to account for a social field (i.e., an institutional determination) that is not limited to structural fixity but does not, however, disregard it. Thus, let us take a closer look at the elaboration of this concept.

The machine, as we read in “Machine and Structure”, supposes a cut in the signifying chain a “function of detaching a signifier as a representative, as a ‘differentiator,’ as a causal break, different in kind from the structurally established order of things” (Guattari, 2015, p. 322). Hence, the machine would offer the possibility of thinking a way out, “the only possible mode-of univocal representation of the various forms of subjectivity” (Guattari, 2015, p. 322). At that time, Guattari indicates that unconscious desire and the cut to which we have referred seem to mark the irruption of a singular object. “The essence of the machine, as a factor for breaking apart, as the a-topical foundation of that order of the general, is that one cannot ultimately distinguish the unconscious subject of desire from the order of the machine itself” (Guattari, 2015, p. 326). It is, above all, a founding cut of desire, which shows itself elsewhere, in any structural determination, be it economic or historical, and which constitutes an essential element for thinking about the link between desire and revolution and, in the long run, the motor of departure of any revolutionary project, understanding that project here has the sense of operating in the fractures of any institution open to desire:

The revolutionary program, as the machine for institutional subversion, should demonstrate proper subjective potential and, at every stage of the struggle, should make sure that it is fortified against any attempt to “structuralize” that potential. But no such permanent grasp of machine effects upon the structures could really be achieved on the basis of only one “theoretical practice.” It presupposes the development of a specific analytical praxis at every level of organization of the struggle (Guattari, 2015, p. 329).

In brief, machinic institutions, in which the coefficient of transversality is more significant, are those (molar) organizations open to any type of cut and rupture that the functioning of the (molecular) machine of desire implies. Guattari is emphatic in affirming that the molecular and the molar levels are linked and operate jointly, even when a distinction must be established between both registers. The idea of a molecular revolution always in the making -precisely where structural homogeneity would seem to reign- is tributary to this idea. In his aforementioned visit to Chile, the creator of schizoanalysis is emphatic in maintaining that the often-silent outbreak of a molecular revolution will inevitably have an impact on the strategic level to achieve a mutation of desire, even if this revolution is the bearer of coefficients of freedom that are unassimilable for the dominant system and for the libidinal frequency that organizes its institutions. However, these coefficients of freedom cannot bring by themselves the emergence of a society, an economy, and a culture wholly liberated from the constraints of the Integrated World Capitalism. In their words:

[...] this type of transformations depends essentially on the capacity of explicitly revolutionary assemblages to articulate them with struggles of interest, political and social. This is the essential question. In the absence of such an articulation, no mutation of desire, no molecular revolution, no struggle for spaces of freedom will succeed in driving large-scale social and economic transformations. (Guattari, 2020, pp. 61-62).

This is the point at which the problem of the coefficients of transversality of a group or institution connects with the issue of the link between molecular desire and the molar organization of society. Revolutionary desires (which, we could say, are not only not contrary to institutions and groups but a fundamental part of the gestation of a chaosmotic equilibrium that determines their own plasticity) must be articulated with struggles of interest (that is, with collective demands that attempt to correct the inequality of our neoliberal democracies in terms of social rights: environment, housing, pensions, salaries, health, education, etc.). Everything that touches on the basic well-being of communities and their territories is essential to empower desire and to accelerate one's creativity or ecosophical wisdom. In his dialogues in Chile, the accent always falls on this strategic area, the organization that will allow the crystallizing of new modes of social-eco-psychological organization, where creativity (collective), justice (social), and care for the environment are incardinated.

Final remarks

To understand the place of dissensual logic in ecosophy, we review the discussion on dissent in Guattari’s visit to Chile: in a world scenario of undermining existential territories, empowering dissent appears as the basis for understanding that democracy is due to otherness, to the desire for the difference of the other, instead of operating as a kind of erasure of extreme positions. We continue analyzing the formulation of the ecosophical practice developed simultaneously. The synthesis is established in articulating the set of ecologies from an ethical-political choice of a diversity of creative dissent. Later, we review the place of dissent in Guattarian pluralist ontology, highlighting its function in cultivating difference and heterogeneity, critical points for the ethological conception of existential territories that bifurcate following singularities instead of being content with erecting universal rules. Finally, we analyze dissent in the configuration of institutions from the perspective of transversalities. The concepts of machine and transversality were shown, at this point, to be essential elements for a new understanding of the institution, i.e., not as contrary but as an ally in the production of desire. The need to make institutions spaces for dissent rather than spaces for the reproduction of asphyxiating patterns was shown to be a vital element for ecosophical wisdom. By reviewing the distinction established between dependent groups and subject-groups, the existence of coefficients of transversality that cross the social was proposed, which shows that both poles are the extremes of dynamic equilibrium in every institution. At this point, transversality was delineated as an axis of institutional transformation. Finally, the connection of the concept of the machine with the redefinition of the institution raised by Guattari was addressed to show that the disruptive character of desire is not contrary but akin to the strategic field, which ensures the creation of new modes of social organization that allow the enhancement of ecosophical wisdom. The questions that could be raised in this register are as follows. How can we experiment, within our institutions, with alternatives other than stagnating? How do we activate agencies that correspond to the logic of dissensus? At the same time, what institutions could correspond to a minority becoming, even to an animal becoming? What institutions, in short, could be related to the becomings that drag us out of the patterns and the majorities?

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• DOSSE, F. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: intersecting lives. Translated by Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• GUATTARI, F. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
• GUATTARI, F. El devenir de la subjetividad. Santiago: Dolmen, 1998.
• GUATTARI, F. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New Jersey: The Athlone Press, 2000.
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• 1
  This article is part of the Fondecyt Regular Project 1220806: "Agenciamiento de deseo: Emergencia, función y proyecciones del concepto en el sur global".
• 2
  As a Green activist, Guattari is interested and uneasy, in his own words, about the development of an ecology entirely centered on nature. Because this can easily inform a defense of nature that becomes identitarian and conservative, especially by self-interestedly neglecting the defense of what he himself calls "incorporeal species", which is nothing other than the universes of values that drive our practices and modes of existence. There is no opposition between ecologies: "Any apprehension of an environmental problem postulates the development of universes of values and therefore of an ethical-political commitment. It also appeals to the embodiment of a modeling system, in order to sustain such a universe of values, i.e., social practices, field practices, analytical practices when it comes to the production of subjectivity" (Guattari, 2013, p 74). Certainly, for this, we would have to think of an amoral ecology, where the values of a certain defense of the environment cannot prevail -cannot be superimposed or imposed- over other values that seek to defend other contested terrains that, of course, are not dissociable.
• 3
  Indeed, from the joint philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, everything would consist in thinking of institutions as multiplicities tending towards unification, but a unification carried out by a “war machine” to liberate the creative and revolting power of desire, something totally different from what could be done from the “state apparatus”, which would function by exclusion, rationalization, and totalization.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Feb 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  23 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  19 Nov 2023