Machinic ecologies

THOMAS MICAL

IN Félix Guattari’s Machinic Unconscious (1979/2010) there is a treasure box of further theories and tactics to understand and activate the twinning of the dynamic flux of mental ecology and the environmental surrounds, always somehow following from Bateson and feedback loops in the psychic/vegetal. Guattari was prescient in articulating both the creative-artistic axes of production of new subjectivities from this twinning (or mirroring) of mental and environmental ecologies divided since the Enlightenment, but in his Three Ecologies (1989/2014) Guattari also articulated the necessary immediation of the third social ecology. Here desire and production circulate in a dynamic socius, whereas the society of control operates primarily as a smoothing-machine, this only rarely dilated by actions staging the emergence of an alternative social ecology which can be seen as a ‘free-action assemblage’.1

The generative-productive-disruptive potentials of these three ecologies call for actions that trace the diagonal, ‘the transversal’ (original practices cutting obliquely across borders and limit-conditions) which can drive the heuristic search for possible futures within the posthuman world of climate collapse. Today, by extension, we can see extreme theorization of new social ecologies generating provocative futures across a range between Otto Nuerath’s scientific utopia proposed in Half-Earth Socialism (2022) and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018).

In slight echo of Guattari’s Machinic Unconscious, Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) analyses the silences (black holes or vanishing points) of the Anthropocene in forms cultural production as proof that ‘the Anthropocene is the unconscious of the art and literature of our time.’ In the Anthropocene ‘art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness.’ Here we see the negative sublime of nature as exceeding cognitive understanding. This requires a new model of thinking cognition in nature.

Recall Guattari’s precedent is Gregory Bateson who ‘has clearly shown that what he calls the “ecology of ideas” cannot be contained within the domain of the psychology of the individual, but organises itself into systems or “minds”, the boundaries of which no longer coincide with the participant individuals.’ Dynamic interactions of vegetal intelligence, social intelligence, machinic intelligence, posthuman intelligence, and proliferating others circulate through the wild and emerge in many such contem-porary texts, like different flora coiling and uncoiling seen obliquely through the gaps. This is the deployment of an ecology of thought, specifically of rhizomes of thought.

Guattari articulates these rhizomes as transversal and liberative, flowing from the ecology of mind and infiltrating the social ecologies through their dynamic the socius (animated by flows of impulses named desiring-machines) and then reciprocating with the environmental ecology (the bios) from where they originated. He notes ‘under these conditions, a pragmatics of rhizomes will renounce any idea of underlying structure; unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, the machinic unconscious is not a representational unconscious crystallized in codified complexes and repartitioned on a genetic axis; it is to be built like a map…’

In this machinic unconscious the world flows in and out as a type of spontaneous mapping. In the present (Anthropocene) age certainly ‘the map, as the last characteristic of the rhizome, will be detachable, connectable, reversable, and modifiable…’ This means new recombinant transversal intelligences will form through this cognitive-spatial mapping in relation to incomprehensible environmental shifts.

contemporary.

Perhaps we can further absorb this sense of multiple interactive ecologies if we close our eyes and consider just the sound of ecologies – especially in this era of electronic music and resultant ambient/augmented/artificial environments. The sounds of the underlying matter and organisms are like ultrasonic symphonic multiplicities of phase-shifting series, in total a minor echo of the ancient ‘music of the spheres’ encoded in the prior singular clockwork universe mechanics demanded by rationalism, but now operating as soundscapes of indeterminacy across a widening spectrum, a time of sonic wonder. The early industrial machine in the garden metaphor today is more difficult to locate as both machine and garden are increasingly cross-purposed and co-dependent. The growing electro-mechanical terraforming of the earth erupts in one moment as a thunderous soundscape, then again as a droning which masks delicate and discrete liminal living and environmental polyvocal signals from other living and planetary sources.

These strange signals can be also cross-purposed, hybrids of both the audible and muted, signal and noise. Increasingly in the Anthropocene, the instant of coincidence is an instance of recognition of this growing artificial synthetic nature outside reason. This recognition can dilate the duration of time and invite wonder. Wonder has always been the generator of science, preceding sense. The strange signals from other sources can also initiate the rhizomatic search for new forms of liberation, paradoxically through hyper-cognition of the twinning of the indeterminacy of the mental and the indeterminacy of the environmental.

If we back-cast the Anthropocene to the theoretical biology of Bateson, in his complex Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), we can see the prescience of his elaborate demonstration of radical interconnectedness of mind of nature. The indeterminacy of mental processes and environmental processes are in fact dual feedback loops, running in tandem (but not always in tangency), setting up two simultaneous cybernetic loops. Two loops, three ecologies. Following from this visionary precedent, Guattari in Three Ecologies states: ‘… the three ecologies are governed by a different logic to that of ordinary communication between speakers and listeners which has nothing to do with the intelligibility of discursive sets, or the indeterminate interlocking of fields of signification. It is a logic of intensities, of auto-referential existential assemblages engaging in irreversible durations.’

This is the synthetic nature, called the machinic phylum, that undermines and exceeds the rational and oscillates across regions of sense and sensation, following a process ontology grounded in the machinic unconscious.

Being singular and being situated in a single ecology is not enough to know and to survive in the Anthropocene. Ecologies are many, not one; sub-jectivities are many, not one. Guattari’s Three Ecologies responded to the ’70s energy crisis and dawning digital age to unfold a vision of interlocking ecologies operating through the machinic unconscious. The three ecologies (mental ecologies, social ecologies, and environmental ecologies – and today a fourth media ecology) – perpetually pivoting around a creative machinic unconscious for transversal acts, operations are possible forms of protoliberation cascading through divergent forms of expression.

The machinic is, for Guattari, always a simultaneous artistic and political opportunity to reinvent the world at a particular moment of intensity, or moment of encounter, or moment of rupture. To elaborate this machinic unconscious streaming, we can add the recent layer of insights in Hayles’ Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (2017) which maps the natural through the category of cognizers, living and sentient and distinct from the category of non-cognizers. Thinking is plural, cognition involves thinking both actively and passively simultaneously. This layered model of cognition accommodates the unconscious and the artificial/machine, allowing the cognizers to discern and perform creatively in their specific multiple ecological situatedness. This is also what Deleuze and Guattari theorized as the hybrid world of machine and organics as the machinic phylum.

The proliferation of multiple ecologies operates on multiple registers from matter-flow to big data, and this proliferation accelerates the increasing rise of unnatural nature. Unnatural nature is also called appropriately the machinic phylum, being the fusion of electro-mechanical with the organic bios (and climatological). And in the burning operations of the Anthropocene we find the emergence of an unexpected neo-nature. This neo-nature exceeds all hyperobjects as laid out by Tim Horton and overlaps the mechanosphere, the biosphere, the noosphere, and even the erosphere (LMNO) into continuous relays (Virilio), a post humanist ouroboros. Neo-nature coils and uncoils with the shimmering metallic skin of the ouroboros – never as a closed system, always as open systems (with options we have pursued in other writing around the rise of soft machines).

The hypothesis for this transversal examination is simple. The machinic unconscious connects and flows into the machinic phylum (and its multiple ecologies) through a process called machinic heterogenesis. The machinic phylum is an active living post-natural world har-bouring and deploying a widening range of forms of sentience – organic, machinic, invisible, wonderous, un-thinkable.

Deleuze and Guattari shape this construct of the machinic phylum not by identity but through its operations, following a process ontology influenced by cybernetics. In the chapter ‘Nomadology’ of A Thousand Plateaus (1980) they insist ‘… the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed.’ Matter-flow is the hidden nature of nature and the nature of sense.

In this flux of multiple ecologies the streaming real time expressions of consciousness are also plural in their progression, and frequent bifurcations, infinite momentary variations and possibilities, like delicate baroque branches of possibilities (like decision trees in the film Adjustment Bureau). Hayles in Unthought clarifies these instants: ‘The crucial distinguishing characteristics of cognition that separate it from these underlying processes are choice and decision, and thus possibilities for interpretation and meaning.’ Interpretation and meaning flow around these other matter-flows.

The artificial and synthetic Anthropocene environments are an ‘unnatural nature’ woven of Guattari’s multiple ecologies, all looping dynamic and interpolating active agents, attracting and bifurcating meaning as machinic orders and multiple intelligences spreading rhizomatically. One example of creative and transversal operations possible in this plural situatedness is traced in Kinsela, in Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement (2016). It demonstrates the poetics of the mirroring multiplicity of thought and place as an opportunity for new forms of writing site-situated processes, a field developed earlier by theorists such as Jane Rendell, and building on the recent wisdom of Ken Gale’s Madness as Methodology: Bringing Concepts to Life in Contemporary Theorising and Inquiry (2018).

By un-anchoring and un-caging the unconscious from the model of the fixed theatre (or Platonic cave), Guattari’s anti-psychiatry posits subjectivity always as multiple potentials leading to multiple manifestations, multiple selves, extending and diffusing and deforming the false exteriority of nature. The natural are also open systems – asymmetrically mirror-ing the plural stream of consciousness organized through the multiplicity of eco-locations. Deleuze and Guattari identify the multiple connections of these heterogeneous ecologies always as the ‘machinic’ which designates its machinic performance, not its hard materiality. In this way, the social and environmental and media ecologies stream through the machinic unconscious – which is also a substrate or secret discrete dynamic under-canopy for this proliferation of interacting complexities.

The machinic unconscious perpetually spontaneously pushes the heterogenesis of diagrammatic (emergent) subjectivities; the wild flow of impulses and projections; and signals unfolding into a wild exteriority of multiple ecologies. These multiple ecologies transiting through the machinic unconscious. The natural, becoming unnatural, is thus reconsidered/reconfigured also as ‘machinic’ in their bricolage assembly of the hybridized visible and invisible, matter and data, cause and effect – even in cases of nonlinear temporal sequencing.

The machinic unconscious forms new cartographies, forms new temporalities, and can generate new diagrammatic subjectivities. The machinic unconscious is the expansive hidden cognition interlacing vast mechanisms of impulse, forces, and fields pulsing. Traversing different territories nomadically, we note that the interconnectedness of external systems of multiple ecologies exceed the complexity of the internal. These external interdependencies are also pulsing and changing, full of dynamically shifting openings appearing and disappearing. In this way, the mental ecology and the environmental ecology reciprocate through oscillating interfaces harbouring multiple apertures, each a possible circuit between the internal machinic unconscious to the external machinic ecologies.

Guattari’s project curiously tracks the trajectories of subjectivity seeking liberation through diagrammatic representation – diagrams which schematize thought processes and proliferate proto-subjectivity originating in the well of the machinic unconscious. Guattari has influenced many recent theorists to follow this diagrammatic proliferation. Guattari specifies this interchange in Machinic Unconscious that ‘The construction of a schizoanalytic rhizome will not aim at the description of a state of fact, the return to equilibrium of inter-subjective relations, or the explora-tion of the mysteries of an unconscious lurking in the obscure recesses of memory. On the contrary, it will be completely oriented toward an experi-mentation in touch with the real.’

We find ourselves encased in the old utopian dream of the world totally mechanised and automated (Weber’s ‘mechanized petrification’), without fully understanding the micro-politics of the advancing mechanosphere (Mumford, Gideon), where the progressions of modernity involve negation and extraction at the expense of an increasingly distanced (bracketed) nature. The mechanosphere is becoming our planetary exoskeleton (Stiegler) under the enthrallment of a utopian fantasy of pure infrastructure, amplifying the belief that only an infrastructure can save us now. The prior metallurgic desires of Empire now progressed to the energy desires of the present – but this hard infrastructure is also proliferating the mechanosphere at the detriment of the biosphere

This circuiting of metallurgy with energy is curiously located in the archaic myth-image of the forge of Hephaestus, which delivers a smouldering delirium imagery of the indeterminacy of technology as it shapes the molten flow of reality, the forge being the pathological kernel of the Anthropocene locked deep within the machinic unconscious, a concept growing Inception from the unconscious to the drive the sentient state (as in the film Inception).

Following from the writing of philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, we can identify that prior shift from metaphysics to metallurgy originated the technological exoskeleton of the world – as the extensive diffusion of exteriorizedmemory of subjects infiltrating the machinic wild phylum across the skin of the earth. Guattari, in the Machinic Unconscious, identified a zone between this interior and exterior transposition (reciprocating constructed subject-positions with the flux of nature) in the particular case of the ‘ecology of the phantasm’ which is in many ways the spectral nexus of the multiple ecologies. This phantasm hovers between the inner world and the outer world, something like a neuro-image. The phantasm or neuro-image ‘… testifies to how the brain has become our world and how the world has become a brain-city, a brain-world.’ Today increasingly the molten flow of spaces stages the streaming real-time flux of matter and data in overlapping environments.

The flux of the unconscious was formulated from the sciences of the invisible in Romanticism, and the unconscious was then formulated topologically as an archaeology and later a tragic theater (Freud). But 1970s schizoanalysis delivered to us back to the factory model, perversely converging capitalist production with ungovernable secret desires (desiring-machines) looping at the margins of the earlier four forms of alienation (Marx). It is possible that this factory typology, and its cinematic twin, operated as the centre of modernity and the Anthropocene. Like all factories, it is already fated to being exhausted and overwritten by wild nature, enacting the return of the repressed vegetal-natural at the height of hypermodernity. We can then read the ‘becoming-vegetal’ processes identified by Deleuze and Guattari as
also the convergence of the machinic unconscious with so many machinic ecologies, a thought drawing us closer to surrealist automatism and dreamlife and compulsive beauty.

Given more time, these promising rhizomes of thought will bloom into the project of a botanical schizoanalysis. Botanical Schizoanalysis would likely lead us to the discovery that our unconscious is structured like a secret garden, a microcosm of our inner experience mirroring the wild nature we seek to control externally (but can secretly flood with desire). Upon the discovery of the secret garden – the mirror of nature hidden within oneself – we can track this locus of multiple ecologies stretching across bodies and territories and temporalities, leading to unexpected encounters and therefore a-signifying ruptures and then the production of the new.

In the lived machinic phylum, we can envision the rise of all sorts of new soft machines, this being a creative-critical project where all landscapes can intersect, all ecologies can interlace,
and the thinker (as bricoleur, as chimera) can tinker. This tinkering between ecologies, in the infra-ecologies, given the machinic unconscious linking all processes today, can also lead to the proliferation of new subjectivities, the proliferation of even more soft machines (both natural and unnatural), the production of synthetic natures and retro-natural heterogenesis for re-wilding our immersive machinic phylum. With heightened sensitivity and attention to multiple ecologies in flux (mental, social, environmental, media) we can begin tracking the slight traces in plain sight to animate the social by revealing new trajectories of desiring-machines through new territories, in parallel, in shared sentience.

With attention to multiple ecologies, we can initiative the dream of a botanical schizoanalysis. The dream can be a collective dreamwork of the world as gardens-within-gardens, a coiling and uncoiling wild kaleidoscopic noosphere, sentient and sensing what is to come. This botanical schizoanalysis can deliver a lived intensive order as the cultivation
of one’s (inner) secret garden, a secret garden which operates as ethical subjectification of the generative, flowing streaming cascades and hidden cornucopias of concepts artistically spontaneously produced, all emanating from the vast substrate of the Anthropocene Unconscious/Machinic Unconscious.

Here the Machinic Unconscious liberates multiple ecologies as endless possibility, and as Guattari notes, ‘In other words, not simply an unconscious of the specialists of the unconscious, not simply an unconscious crystallized in the past, congealed in an institutionalized discourse, but, on the contrary, an unconscious turned towards the future whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos ...’

References

Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Verso Books, 2019.

Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind. Ballentine, 1972.

Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. Verso Books, 2021.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (translated by Brian Massumi). Semiotext(e), 1986.

Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.

Félix Guattari, ‘The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis’, Semiotext(e) 2010.

N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought. University of Chicago Press, 2017.

John Kinsella, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement. Manchester University Press, 2017.

Simon O’Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation. Palgrave-Macmillan, New York, 2012.

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford University Press, 2012.

Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Verso Books, 2022.

Footnotes:

1. Technological Vitalism: The Machinic Phylum and the Free Action Assemblage. https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/technological-vitalism-the-machinic-phylum-and-the-free-action-assemblage/