Chapter 5 Attention, Equivalence and Existential Territories

Existential territories and psychic ecologies

As is well known, ecology and economy share a root (οἶκος) referring to the home, family or family’s property. This root expresses what becomes a persistent entanglement between ecological theorising and social ideology – from Social Darwinism to neoliberal selfish genes.1 Given the dangers of such conflations, it is tempting to insist they represent only errors, expressions of pseudo-science enabled by a combination of epistemic weakness and opportunistic greed. This compartmentalisation is too simple. While we can certainly bemoan the failures of particular conflations as well as distinguish between levels of nuance in a theoretical position and its reduced or trivialised social expressions (which nonetheless often have real effects in behaviours and choices), these conflations point to questions inherent in the concept of ecology itself. Scientific ideals of dispassionate neutrality notwithstanding, ecological theories must entail, at some level, implications for human life. It is true that these implications rarely translate in manners as simple as popular ideologies would have them, but this alone is not enough to foreclose the question. How we understand the order or logos of the οἶκος necessarily has normative implications.² Though these implications may not be definitive, the entanglement is part of the stakes of ecological thought as such.

Recent decades have seen proliferation in the deployment of ‘ecology’ as a term varying in precision and technicity. Following Deleuze, one source of confusion arising from the proliferation of ecological discourses is lack of distinction between philosophical ecology and scientific ecology. To develop this distinction, it is useful to briefly review the term’s modern origin.

The first modern usage of ecology was by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, who defined it as ‘the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment, including, in the broad sense, all the “conditions of existence.” These are partly organic, partly inorganic in nature’ (Stauffer 1957: 140). The date of Haeckel’s proposal is no accident, coming closely after Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species (1859).3 Indeed, Haeckel’s emphasis on relations is inextricable from evolution as a new theory of change. The coupling is intriguing: Darwin’s theory of evolution drives interest in thinking about external factors and variables shaping evolutionary fitness. Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen for example writes, ‘evolution is the control of development by ecology’ (1973: 488, emphasis added). Theories of evolution are also one of the impetuses for the interest in metaphysics of process that emerge in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ These two themes (change and relations) thus already point to intersections between the science of ecology and process metaphysics. Even while the relevant elements (populations, organisms, genetic material, chemical elements, or other biotic or abiotic factors) vary, ecology is concerned with understanding, mapping or measuring how different components or variables effect and relate to one another. Such relation involves complex loops of causality and dynamic processes.

An intersection or resonance is not of course an equivalence. So, while Haeckel’s definition asserts that ecology considers ‘all’ conditions of existence, scientific practice invariably limits inclusion to conditions deemed suitably relevant. This limitation is most neutrally described as practical following operative procedures of science. Scientific emphasis on precision, unambiguous and preferably quantifiable observation data, and replication of results entails that ecological sciences have to delimit relevant variables in some way. Such restriction is then constitutive of a specialisation, whether in terms of ‘levels’ (organism, population, community, ecosystem) or ‘domains’ (spatial ecology, landscape ecology, physiological ecology, evolutionary ecology, functional ecology, behavioural ecology, and so on).

While this restriction of relevance to enable testability applies to all empirical sciences, ecological sciences present particular difficulties. These follow a constitutive methodological tension: the limitation of variables in practice is balanced by an aspiration towards maximal inclusion in principle.⁵ As science, ecology is defined by this desire towards maximal inclusion of all relevant conditions, but such maximal inclusion as an ideal raises methodological and conceptual challenges. Of particular note are the ‘complexity problem’ and the ‘uniqueness problem’ (Sarkar 2005).⁶ Ecological systems are complex by nature and it appears likely that they exhibit emergent qualities at different scales and are, in other words, more than just the sum of their parts. Moreover, and more pertinently for my concerns here, because of this complexity ecological systems are to some extent unique.7 Sarkar presents these as problems for the scientific practice of ecological sciences, but they also show the extent to which the limitation of relevant conditions is entangled with metaphysical presuppositions that remain largely structured around the ‘bifurcation of nature’.

Given the entrenchment of this bifurcation, the speculative proposals under development here remain extraneous to scientific ecology as currently practised. This makes it all the more imperative to insist on the difference between science and philosophy, a difference that Deleuze frequently explores. For Deleuze, this difference is best summarised in two ways: science is oriented towards the creation of functions as ‘propositions in discursive systems’, whereas philosophy creates concepts (WIP: 117). The practice of science is oriented towards establishing functions that provide a plane of reference linked to predictable states of affair. It freezes continuous flows and instead presents variable states of affairs as discrete or static pictures: ‘science is like a freeze-frame . . . It is a fantastic slowing down . . . a function is a Slow-motion’ (WIP: 118).⁸ The slowing down expresses how scientific propositions isolate particular variable relations as a means of fixing references to be studied.

In this regard science represents an important and powerful approach to understanding reality, but not reality itself. When Deleuze says that reality has an ‘infinite speed of birth and disappearance’, this is from the perspective of metaphysical inclusion encapsulating all levels and scales – from the sub-atomic to the cosmic (WIP: 118). From such a vantage, solidities or appearances are born and disappear, at different scales, constantly. Deleuze also uses ‘chaos’ to refer to this perspective prior to the establishment of a fixed plane of reference or consistent ordering of events, describing it in metaphysical language: ‘it is a void that is not a nothingness . . . containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference’ (WIP: 118). Both science and philosophy engage this virtual chaos, but they do so with different aims and strategies.

In contrast to science’s creation of functions to slow down the chaos by producing fixed planes of reference, a philosophical creation of concepts gives a consistency to the chaos through conceptualising events. Whereas functions require independent variables as elements to establish discrete relations, concepts are defined by an ‘inseparability of variations’ (WIP: 126). The concept therefore is oriented towards continuity, but it is a continuity that expresses itself variously. To use a spatial model, consider the morphology of a sphere as it is twisted, pulled, compressed, elongated, and so on. We might consider paradigmatic philosophical concepts (the Good, the Real, the True, Beauty, Justice) as such constructions that give a coherence or consistency to the chaos of the real, but a coherence that changes forms and manifestations with changing conditions. In this sense, rather than a ‘freeze-frame’, the concept is ‘formed like a consistent particle that goes as fast as thought’ (WIP: 118). This amounts to a different approach:

through concepts, philosophy continually extracts a consistent event from the state of affairs – a smile without the cat, as it were – whereas through functions, science continually actualizes the event in a state of affairs, thing, or body that can be referred to. (WIP: 126)

Of note is Deleuze’s alignment of the concept with events – rather than a thing, the concept is a manner of achieving consistency, a kind of event. It selects from this chaos. ‘The Good’ for example, is not a static form, but a style of event (‘a smile without the cat’). Moreover, concepts have variations, components, internal consistencies that shift over time, that become differently in passing thresholds to produce new variations (WIP: chapter 1).

What are the variations in the concept of ecology? We have seen that its components involve an inseparability of the following variations: (1) how we construe the whole, i.e., what counts or matters for inclusion, (2) how we characterise the specific or singular ‘elements’, (3) the relations between, and (4) how these relations move or change over time. If a scientific practice of ecology agrees with these components in principle, a philosophical conception of ecology that resists presumptions of the bifurcation of nature cannot begin with an enforced distinction between the geophysical and the social or psychic. It must endeavour to respond to Haeckel’s definition regarding all the conditions of existence without presuming this only applies to the physical or the ‘primary qualities’ of the physical. This does not dismiss the need for perspicuous attention to material interactions. It is not an idealist point. The idea is that a philosophical concept of ecology maintains the commitment to maximal inclusion (a commitment already displayed in James’s radical empiricism) while bracketing metaphysical presuppositions. Material effects, properties and actants are certainly to be included, but so are extra-material concepts, ideological infrastructures, social systems, and psychic and affective habits and patterns.

In this regard, Guattari’s 1989 The Three Ecologies proposes three ‘ecological registers’ (material, social and psychic) that follow a dynamic logic of interrelation, represented here by overlapping circles in a Venn diagram:⁹

Experience emerges out of the overlap between all three that Guattari calls an ‘existential territory’ (2008: 23). The metaphysical status of this overlap and territory is not exclusively psychological. The neologism here is purposeful in endeavouring to rethink this overlap prior to the assumption of a discrete human subject that lives it.

The relations (an operative component of any concept of ecology) between these registers are reciprocal and horizontal rather than hierarchical: material environments inform social relations inform psychic habits and desires that act on material environments, and so on. Psychic habits emerge out of social relations as well as partially influence and shape them. None function as independent systems; rather, they are constituted through ongoing processes that produce divergent qualitative expressions. Guattari is thus working against tendencies of first philosophy and architectonics oriented by first principles or primary foundations. In this sense, while Deleuze and Guattari draw deeply on Marx’s analyses of capitalism, they reject the material as the sole exclusive relation that explains all other relations.10 This is not to deny its importance. And it is also to reject the psychic as an opposing exclusive relation that explains all other relations. This is part of the concept of ecology wielded here: there is no single relation or domain that explains all others. And yet, there is also no relation or domain that is merely extraneous or negligible.

Guattari’s work, notwithstanding the notorious idiosyncrasies of his terminology, anticipates central insights in recent work in political ecology (Jane Bennett) and the rising prominence of ‘integral ecology’ following Pope Francis’s second encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015).¹¹ Francis’s fourth chapter Integral Ecology includes numerous claims resonant with Guattari. This is likely to surprise those who remain attached to ideological identities: Guattari, the fiery activist and critic of all forms of ‘repression’, and the Pope, institutional head of what has sometimes been the most repressive political institution in the world, making consistent claims? In addition to their differing contexts, this is an example of the way in which alliances more readily emerge when ideological identity is no longer a presumed or fixed starting point (see Braidotti 2013 and Stengers 2015).

For example, Francis links social dysfunction and environmental devastation as closely connected:

We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, at the same time protecting nature. (2015: 139)12

Like Guattari, the Pope asserts fundamental interconnection between ‘ecology’ as ‘studying the relationship between living organisms and the environment in which they develop’ and the necessity for ‘reflection and debate about the conditions required for life and survival of society’ with regard to ‘certain models of development, production and consumption’ (2015: 102). In all of these cases, an ecology does not presume a fully determinate distinction between nature and culture, between a ‘natural’ environment and a constructed one. Francis observes, ‘Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are a part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it’ (2015: 104). Similarly, Guattari insists that ‘now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture’ (2008: 29).¹³

Guattari presciently alludes to the extent to which the collusion of techno-science, biotechnology and Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) – not to mention destabilisation induced by the intersection of climate change disaster, resource depletion, and displaced peoples as a result of military or climate crisis (all trends that have only intensified since the time of Guattari’s text) – make any sharp distinction between the natural and the cultural a relic.¹⁴ Genetic modification, cloning, projects in insect cyborgs,¹⁵ trace amounts of radiation that have covered the planet since the nuclear age, or the ongoing influence of greenhouse gases on planetary weather systems all demonstrate mutual implication. Conversely, ‘nature’ is a consequential player in human events – think of rising numbers of displaced peoples as a result of climate crises or the potato blight in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland that led to waves of emigration, or more recently the correlation between unprecedented drought in the Syrian countryside and the ensuing civil war and ongoing refugee crisis.¹⁶

This mutual implication is demonstrated in the much-debated naming of the Anthropocene as a new geological era that acknowledges human industrial activity as an unprecedented influence on global climate.17 However, at least as early as Darwin there was recognition that an exclusive distinction between human ‘culture’ and nonhuman nature was strained at best. Darwin’s 1881 study of earthworms reflects that worms, through their physical construction of viable fertile topsoils, are material enablers of sophisticated agriculture and therefore, ‘Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first assume’ (quoted in Bennett 2010: 95). Not only do worms make possible ‘seedlings of all kinds’, but they also help preserve past artefacts of history ‘for an indefinitely long period every object, not liable to decay, which is dropped on the surface of the land, by burying it beneath their castings’ (2010: 96). As Jane Bennett summarises, ‘worms participate in heterogeneous assemblages in which agency has no single locus, no mastermind, but is distributed across a swarm of various and variegated vibrant materialities’ (2010: 96). In such assemblages, the line between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ agents and activities is not easily drawn. Even if we insist on some version of this distinction, the pace and scale of their co-implication are implicated in a loop. We may be able to retroactively make distinctions on a continuum with culture on one side and nature on the other, and these may serve certain pragmatic purposes in some contexts, but the increasing pace of their co-implication problematises any hard and fast metaphysical distinction.

This point has been made from a variety of disciplines and orientations in recent years.¹⁸ Because of its fashionability, it is important to stress its limits. Challenging the metaphysical distinction between culture and nature is emphatically not to deny that there is a more-than-human material world that informs and constrains human possibilities. Though humans participate in nature, the materiality of the real exceeds human control to some degree. To recognise human and nonhuman entanglement is not to deny the possibility of nuanced qualitative distinctions. Pushing on the culture/nature distinction does not deny that there are better and worse forms of material practice for the future of life, its qualitative expressions, diversity, complexity and richness. The idea is rather that insisting on a stark demarcation between culture and nature either encourages a lack of consideration of the relational consequences of such material practices, or, alternatively, reinforces a sense of fatalism, often theologically or religiously inflected.¹⁹

This is not a claim to the ‘end of nature’ as such – rather, it is critique of a concept of nature that reinforces false separations. In this regard, it is interesting to note awareness in comparative philosophy that many Indigenous languages and traditions (often romantically caricatured as the ‘most in touch with nature’) do not conceptually mark this separation (between nature and culture). Thomas Norton-Smith for example notes that ‘there is no analogue of the concept of the natural world . . . in American Indian traditions’ (2010: 83).20 Rather than a hubristic claim of human domination, it is an emphasis on embeddedness in relations that are ontologically prior to categorical distinctions between human and nonhuman, between matter and idea, between individual and social. When such categories are understood as denoting static sets of entities of different kinds, they function as misplaced abstractions in Whitehead’s sense, since all entities are manners of relational processes and events.

A metaphysics of process as explored in the first part of this book is necessary for understanding how patterns or styles transfer across ecological registers (material, psychic, social). Manifestation of these patterns vary, but Guattari observes the transference of pathological patterns while challenging the habit of assuming their ontological source in one register (whether the social, the material or the psychic). How do we understand this transfer? Is Guattari just making an analogy? Or is there something real about the transfer of patterns?

If we presume a substantial or essentialist metaphysics and the bifurcation of nature, Guattari’s observations can only be metaphorical. But Guattari means them to be more than this. Consider the monocultural production of GMO large-scale industrial crops replacing small-scale subsistence farming adapted to local conditions as a material practice that mirrors what Lorraine Code has aptly termed ‘monoculture epistemology’ with its emphasis on validation of a sole model of knowledge production (2006: 8–9). To be sure, this production is motivated by material demands within an industrialised economic system. But it is also an expression of conceptual habits (valorisation of perceived efficiency, for example; lack of attention to qualitative specificity, quantity as a single rubric – how do we make the most food, not the best or most qualitatively rich – and so on) and social and economic structures (profit as the overriding motivation). We hear arguments that this scale of production is the only means necessary to meet demand, but it is also possible to understand that this demand itself is produced by social and psychic habits and patterns.²¹ (The emphasis on degree is important. Humans have to eat; the question is how.)

Guattari’s emphasis on the psychic is in the context of what Bateson has called an ‘ecology of bad ideas’²² – the way that psychic habits and patterns of feeling and attention are reproduced and perpetuated in manners that sustain pernicious material or social practice, even as these material and social practices manifest in rising psychic illness. This is not a unidirectional causal claim. It is not only a matter of psychic habits. But the psychic habits matter – both as expressions of webs of dysfunctions and also as sustainers or producers of those webs: ‘Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by “degenerate” images and statements’ (Guattari 2008: 29/34).

Changes in psychic ecologies alone are not sufficient for transforming ‘mutant algaes’. But the very notion of a change in psychic ecology ‘alone’ is inconsistent with the basic premise of the three ecologies, where psychic ecology is inextricable from material and social. Because of their constitutive relationality, change can never be isolated to only one register. Any change in one has relations to changes in other domains, even if these resist any definitive hierarchical chain of causality.23 If there is at least some relation between an ecology of bad ideas and the behaviours and systems that drive material exploitation, oppression and abuse, the question is how to engender an ecology of good ideas; that is, how to create positive feedback loops between the social, material and psychic rather than negative ones. One could work on such feedback loops from different points of entry. No one entry (the social, the psychic, the material) is sufficient, but all are necessary. Such a project must identify pervasive features of the ecology of bad ideas to think how they can be challenged and transformed. Guattari’s interest in the processes that produce contemporary subjectivity is always oriented by this premise: ‘we need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange’ (2008: 45).

Without further attention to metaphysics this call appears solely idealistic. This is why the frequency of Guattari’s appeals to process is noteworthy. Guattari describes process as ‘oppose[d] to system or to structure [in] striv[ing] to capture existence in the very act of its constitution’ (2008: 30, emphasis added). These appeals include reference to ‘a logic of intensities or eco-logic [that] is concerned . . . with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes’; a characterisation of mental ecologies as ‘primary process[es]’ that are ‘pre-personal’ and ‘pre-objectal’; and references to ‘processes of singularization’ and a ‘processual semiotics’ for considering how media condition the production of subjectivity (Guattari 2008: 30, 36, 40). Each case stresses the extent to which subjectivity is produced through processes that operate at pre-personal levels. This is not an evacuation of agency as such or a strict determinism, but it does understand that subjectivity can never posit itself as fully given independent of the processes that it emerges out of. The full depth of this point is neither developmental nor psychological, it is metaphysical. That is, it links to an understanding of reality as processual, dynamic and potentially creative.

In order to think this intersection between Guattari’s call for transformation and more developed details of a process conception of subjectivity, we have to consider what Guattari calls an ‘existential territory’ (Guattari 2008: 23).24 Guattari pairs this concept with what he calls ‘incorporeal Universes’ (2008: 85). Incorporeal universes function similarly to Whitehead’s eternal objects in providing a conceptual rudder of potentials that become actualised in finite and concrete situations. Where incorporeal universes are ‘non-dimensioned, non-coordinated, trans-sensible, and infinite [in the sense of limitless]’, an existential territory, by contrast, is ‘singular . . . sensible, and finite’ (2008: 85). It is always the unique and particular territory that it is, even as it shares features and processes across its boundaries.

An existential territory emerges in the overlap between the psychic, the social and the material. Each of these are constituted by ontological processes that cross the categorical (fixed and coordinated) references of conventional representations. The existential territory in this sense is not simply a description of one’s lived environment as one perceives it, though it would include this perception as a relevant feature of that territory. Rather the existential territory is the actualisation of a living subjectivity that includes but also exceeds the conscious or phenomenological to include sub-representative affective processes, non-conscious physical processes and relations beyond the cognitive. This means that an existential territory need not be only human, though Guattari’s analysis is primarily concerned with human existential territories. Nor is it reducible exclusively to the spatial or material territory in which one lives, since it also includes constitutive psychic processes as well as social formations, obligations, identities and pressures, all of which can differ radically within the same spatial territory. Think of the complex interplay of tastes, drives, styles, structures, place, history, age and material forces that come together to constitute ‘where’ one lives, the modes of one’s ‘life-style’, and so on.²⁵

As locations of reference, neither social relations, psychic processes nor material and environmental milieus function as independent closed systems; rather, they are sustained through processes contingently liable to divergent qualitative outcomes. Characterising a ‘common principle’ for all three, Guattari writes:

each of the existential territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-itself, closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself that is precarious, finite, finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made habitable by a human project. (2008: 35)

An existential territory is limited by specific conditions and situations, which is why it is finite and singular and liable to breakdown and dissolution, hence its precariousness. But within these limits, different responses are possible – processes can mitigate against chance through an insistence on static repetition, a repetition that tends towards decreasing degrees of novelty, freedom and life, or they can continually reinvent themselves so as to make further novelty, freedoms and life possible. One strategy attempts to preserve perceived identity at the expense of difference or change, the second adapts a more creative strategy. This tension is correlative with Whitehead’s analysis of the two poles of the solutions for the problem of survival.

What Whitehead and Deleuze offer is a more philosophically developed underlying metaphysics that enables Guattari’s applied discussion of human subjectivity. The questions now become: given this metaphysical understanding, how does attention impact existential territories? Can we conceive of, and even develop, practices of attention that are not the foregone results of the four operative ‘semiotic regimes’ for the production of subjectivity: the economic (‘monetary, financial, accounting . . . mechanisms’), the juridical (‘title deeds, legislation, and regulation of all kinds’), the techno-scientific (‘plans, diagrams, programmes, studies, research, etc.’) and ‘semiotics of subjectification, of which some coincide with those already mentioned, but to which we should add . . . those relating to architecture, town planning, public facilities, etc.’ (2008: 32)? What might these look like? One way of thinking stakes of attention when its function is ontologically creative is to diagnose how prevailing axiological logics structure attention. Most notable is the fundamental function of a logic of equivalence to operations of IWC.

The infiltration of equivalence: from exchange to axiology

At the heart of ecology, whether in its scientific function or philosophical concept, is the relation between unity and diversity. In ecological sciences, this manifests in debates over the relationship of diversity and stability. While it is a core intuition of many ecologists that ‘diversity begets stability’, because of ‘the multiplicity of possible definitions of “diversity” and “stability” . . . there are probably no better instances of formalization indeterminacy in any scientific context’ (Sarkar 2005). Indeed, there is no consensus amongst biologists about how to quantify biodiversity, not to mention stability.26 These debates are not only academic, rather how we understand the relationship between diversity and stability has significant normative implications for approaches to conservation. Such practical questions resonate with ecology’s philosophical formulations as well. Is it possible to understand a relational ecosystem without collapsing significant differences into a single rubric, metric or measure?

Guattari observes that ‘ecological disequilibrium’ manifests in ‘progressively deteriorating’ modes of ‘both individual or collective life’ (2008: 19). Such deterioration is demonstrated in rising pathologies at social and psychic levels: ‘oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, neurosis’ (2008: 20) and the ‘propagation of social and mental neoarchaisms’ evident in resurgences of religious or military fundamentalisms (2008: 42). If this might be described as collapse of stability, how we characterise it with regard to diversity is less clear. Guattari shows that fixation on a static logic of identity can generate negative feedback looks that intensify processes of such destabilisations. When diversity or difference is seen as a source of destabilisation, a response is to reject it or shut it down in some way. But this leads to further cycles of isolation and domination.

Another way of approaching this dynamic involves closer thought about how we conceptualise stability. When stability is construed too narrowly as repetition of the same, it will be unable to conceive of difference as an opportunity for evolution of the whole. It is necessary for both diversity and stability to be conceptualised differently. Stability cannot be conflated with predictability, static identity or homogeneity. Diversity cannot be conceptualised through logics of oppositional identity or ‘us v. them’ conflict. As Guattari states ‘Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different’ (2008: 45).

The extent to which such a call appears fatally contradictory reveals how deeply habits of thought are governed by a logic of equivalence intrinsic to the production of predictable subjectivity under capitalism. If Marx understands equivalence as a logical necessity for general exchange, Guattari shows how it morphs from this operational role into a fundamental value that far exceeds exchange in the traditional sense. Equivalence inhibits or reduces the axiological in functioning as the master value to ensure that qualitative difference be put into a single rubric.

Marx identifies equivalence as a logical necessity for establishing a way of exchanging commodities with different ‘use-values’.27 Equivalence arises as a means of translating between quantity and quality, seeking to render the qualitatively variability of use-value into a single quantitative form. As Marx says, ‘every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity . . . the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value’ (1994: 220). This usefulness varies according to context and is historically developed: ‘The discovery of . . . the manifold uses of things is the work of history’ (Marx 1994: 220). But given the variability of uses, purposes and contexts, use-value is not consistent enough to establish regular procedures of exchange. For this reason, Marx contrasts it with ‘exchange-value’ which ‘appears first as the quantitative relation in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind’ (1994: 221). Here the principle of equivalence becomes fundamental. Equivalence becomes the form of value shaped by an operative generality that overrides qualitative difference: ‘The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general’ (Marx 1992: 162, emphasis added).

Marx is interested in this move from the qualitative variability of use-value to equivalence as exchange-value because of how it enables capitalist accumulation and exploitation. One way it does this is by separating the concrete material labour that inheres in qualitatively different commodities and making of them one abstract measure of value – exchange-value, governed by a principle of equivalence. Given historical developments of capitalism since Marx, my interest is less in terms of material practices of labour, and more in terms of the production of constrained subjectivities. That is, equivalence moves from a principle of exchange converting qualitative into quantitative to a powerful norm that infiltrates habits of attention. In this sense, equivalence renders alternative, non-economic forms of value as prima facie incoherent. In so doing, equivalence, as a principle, has effects on the potentials of sensibility. It dulls and impoverishes manners of attention.

For both Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy, this dulling of attention is a crucial aspect of the power of contemporary capitalism to reproduce itself despite increasingly visible negative ecological consequences. It is a matter of capturing alternative forms of value before they can even emerge. Guattari writes: ‘What condemns the capitalist value system is that it is characterized by its general equivalence, which flattens out all other forms of value, alienating them in its hegemony’ (2008: 43). Consider for example Nestlé’s chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmarthe’s insistence that water be given a ‘market value’ so that we are aware that it ‘has a price’ (Sassen 2014: 192), as if this were the only form that value could take. Through the hegemony of equivalence, there is an infiltration of subjectivity such that a capitalist consciousness becomes simply ‘natural common sense’: ‘the capitalist process is as much . . . an enterprise of the production of subjectivity as it is of the production of goods’ (Massumi 2018: 82). This is not to deny the importance of material practices, but it is to observe the way in which capitalism functions by ‘capturing the future’ as Massumi puts it: ‘the capture of the future is the capture of potential, change, becoming’ (2018: 38). Equivalence as form of value ensures that change can only be understood through its manner of producing the same – profit.

This question remains speculative and existential. But it can only be concretised if we come to better realise the powerful effects of equivalence. These effects have become only more entrenched in the transformation to a digitalised economy where ‘data is the new oil’ (Foer 2017: 186). Information, as a quantitative tool, is governed by a principle of equivalence where everything is transparent in form. Everything is data. Or conversely, if there exists some ‘thing’ (feeling, experience, quality, sense?) that cannot be translated into this matrix of equivalence and exchange, it is irrelevant and rendered valueless. Hence the irony of the well-known Mastercard ad campaign with its appeal to the ‘priceless’ that actually reinforces the converse: all values are ultimately financial.28

The principle of general equivalence controls increasing layers of interconnectivity mediated through communicative technology. It is as if the very opposite of Guattari’s call is occurring. In becoming increasingly connected, there is no unity and less difference. Is this a necessary result?²⁹ How does the form of the principle of equivalence impoverish different existential or qualitative possibilities inherent in new technologies? Mark Hansen draws on Whitehead’s metaphysics to argue that twenty-first-century media produces a ‘surplus of sensibility’ through its harvesting of data operative below thresholds of conscious awareness, both in terms of the micro-sensory automatic surveillance and the tracking built into our prosthetic digital technologies.³⁰ Hansen explores how this surplus could give rise to other modes of behaviour, in effect, to other ways of living experience even as the procedures themselves challenge the centrality of the phenomenological subject. Whitehead’s metaphysics, with its emphasis on the ontological primacy of ‘feeling’ offers a way of thinking this combination of a production of sensibility that is not necessarily linked to the subject. The question though has to do with how this production is used. Currently, it is governed by what Hansen calls ‘the narrow instrumentality of capitalist cultural industries’ (2015a: 66). If such a surplus is to succeed in challenging the repetition of this instrumentality, it must evade the form of equivalence. Moreover, while Hansen is right to suggest that the precognitive or sup-perceptual nature of the data-harvesting challenges the primacy of the phenomenological subject and that a Whiteheadean process metaphysics can help to render this coherent, this does not answer the existential question. It is one thing to ‘know’ in a conceptual sense that one’s subjectivity is constrained, encouraged and otherwise shaped by forces that exceed conscious awareness, it is another thing to think how to incorporate this notion into one’s habits of sensibility and attention.

One step towards such incorporation is becoming more aware of the procedures by which one is encouraged to remain blind to these forces. Indeed, any such transformative mode of sensibility and differently attuned sensibilities must reckon with powerful procedures of capture that seek to reincorporate them into the fundamental logic of IWC. This exposes a second, temporal, dimension to the form of equivalence. This temporal dimension is intensified in the context of big data and digital technology where equivalence as a form of value is aligned with predictability. Equivalence is a tool for perpetuating exchange into the future by making behaviour predictable. Equivalence-prediction are two modes of the same logic. When Hansen claims that Internet searches ‘automatically produce surplus value’, he is referring to this temporal function (2015a: 187–9). The value of an individual search is more than just its meaning in the present because it feeds into the algorithmic data-mining on which the search engine depends and becomes data for future prediction. The more repeated terms in a net aggregate, the stronger the probability that they repeat in the future. What you see is what you get.

Data, the new oil, are the mode by which capitalism predicts what you will click on and what you will buy. It is not data as such that are the commodity, but rather data as means to capture attention. Indeed, Hansen poses the problem in terms of the ‘contemporary exploitation of the time of attention by capital’ (2015a: 189). Attention becomes a limited, exploitable, resource, and its capture the newest mode by which capitalism continues. Indeed, this exploitation is all the more pervasive insofar as digital technologies operate at precognitive levels to nudge conscious behaviour without your being aware of it.

What Hansen calls the ‘imperative driving today’s data industries . . . to create closed data loops’ (2015a: 200) is entirely oriented by the logic of equivalence in the interests of prediction. Indeed, equivalence-prediction is the form of closure. It ensures self-fulfilling prophecies by disregarding possibilities that do not already appear in forms that can be assimilated into equivalence. It is no longer just an operation for the exchange of commodities but rather structures the translation of living experience (feeling) into regulated and transferable meaning. Value inflects perceived meaning. The limitation of value to one form is the diminishment of meaning.

When equivalence-prediction is the principle of translation of the lived to the intelligible, it reduces the sensible and qualitative to mere decoration extraneous to the ‘real’ meaning of the material-economic. In this way, in addition to the criterion of profit, equivalence-prediction diminishes or otherwise inoculates the capacity for encountering surprise or the unknown in any robust sense. We still may live the possibility of trivial variation, but equivalence-prediction as dominant form of value enables an assumption that meaning is, at a basic level, fixed. While we may not know what is, we do know that whatever is, its value is already to be found through the rubric of equivalence: ‘there is no longer strictly speaking any confrontation with the other since it is absolutely the same confronting the same’ (Nancy 2015: 22).

This is the second mode by which equivalence-prediction impoverishes attention. On the one hand, there is the capture of attention as resource to enable predictable behaviour. This can be called a passive diminishment insofar as it happens to you. But equivalence-prediction also has an active effect on attention through its diminishment of encounter. When we cannot be surprised, there is no need to pay attention. Even if we don’t know the details, we already know what matters because there is only one form of mattering. This is why homogenising and standardising in the name of efficiency also reinforces increasingly closed loops that deny the need to pay attention to qualitative singularity. If such singularity is even granted as possible, it is by definition value-less, since ‘the value of any value is its equivalence’ (Nancy 2015: 5). When there is only one value that matters, attention atrophies.

Guattari, drawing on his work with Deleuze, an implicit process metaphysics, and his background in psychoanalysis, explores how this logic infiltrates the production of subjectivity such that the subject understands it as self-evident, as part of a more or less freely chosen value system rather than an imposition of control. This is a complicated story which has been told from many angles, perhaps most notably in the Foucaultian terrain of the biopolitical and the disciplinary or by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. It is easy to see how equivalence serves the interests of capital: subjects whose desires and thoughts are predictably similar better serve the needs of a machine whose only criteria for value is profit. In this sense, while Guattari’s claim that a ‘global market destroys specific value systems and puts them on the same plane of equivalence: material assets, cultural assets, wildlife areas, and so on’ (Guattari 2008: 20) is increasingly undeniable, such observation is not in-itself enough, precisely because of the extent to which equivalence is internalised and normalised.

How is this accomplished? We can attribute some of this to the force of collective normativity and social discipline where an entire apparatus of the ‘semiotic of subjectification’ operates according to standardisation, homogenisation and normalisation. Such procedures produce and perpetuate mass subjects with predictably similar desires. To the extent that deviations occur, these are reincorporated into the prevailing logic of prediction and consumption through finding a way to make deviations profitable. Yesterday’s subversive revolutionary is today’s fashion icon. In this sense, there is no subversion of the system that is not assimilated into the logic of equivalence-prediction. Indeed, a certain amount of subversion is even necessary to keep creation of new modes of consumption from stagnating. But just a certain amount and only in certain ways. In this way:

A capitalistic subjectivity is engendered through operators of all types and sizes and is manufactured to protect existence from any intrusion of events that might disturb or disrupt public opinion. It demands that all singularity must be either evaded or crushed in specialist apparatuses and frames of reference. (Guattari 2008: 33, emphasis added)

Given the extent to which IWC can incorporate stylistic difference and make of it a new commodity, the challenge is significant. Singularity here must be intended in an ontologically creative sense, or else it is at risk of faddism alone. This is why Guattari is so concerned to interrogate how IWC operates within subjectivity, observing that it ‘tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising polls, etc. – subjectivity’ (2008: 32). As we have seen, Brian Massumi takes this Guattarian insight to the extreme in claiming that the production of subjectivity is the means by which capitalism captures the future (2018: 82). This is significantly demonstrated in how it functions through financial markets, which in many cases are nearly entirely speculative, dematerialised or liquidified. Here the temporal dimension of equivalence becomes paramount insofar as financial markets are inextricable from prediction. Moreover, though this is denied in the explicit, Massumi observes that financial markets, ‘run more on affect and intensification than on underlying economic “fundamentals”’ (2018: 133).

Fear, confidence, and so on, become drivers of financial speculation. Capitalist power, at the same time that it has become increasingly diffuse in the spatial sites of material production, extends its influence over ‘the whole social, economic, and cultural life of the planet’ especially ‘in ‘intension’, by infiltrating the most unconscious subjective strata’, the affective (Guattari 2008: 33). The power of advertising is only a surface manifestation of this infiltration which extends into the very grain of subjectivity, shaping desires and dreams. ‘The worlds of childhood, love, art’, as unpredictable sources of potential difference, are anaesthetised through a proliferation of conforming narratives, images and ideology ‘hook[ed] up to ideas of race, nation, the professional work-force, competitive sports, a dominating masculinity, mass-media celebrity’ (Guattari 2008: 34). In what Guattari aptly calls ‘the mass media imaginary’ (2008: 35), ‘capitalist subjectivity seeks to gain power by controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains’ (2008: 34). Despite celebration of the freedom of the individual consumer, the actual situation entails increasing homogenisation and commodification of those who ‘think differently’ into icons of consumption.

It is easy to pretend that denunciation of such homogenisation alone is sufficient for escaping these effects. Nothing could be further from the case. First, as Isabelle Stengers observes, ‘However justified, denunciation fabricates a division between those who know and those who are duped by appearances. Worse, the knowledge that it produces has no other effect than to attribute even more power to capitalism’ (2015: 74). This contributes to a sense that the problem is a false consciousness whose antidote would be the uncovering of a real or authentic consciousness purified of the alienating or otherwise corrupting influences of the mass media, advertising, and so on. This fails to understand that subjectivity is always produced through processes that are ongoing and incomplete. It is thus too broad in positing an essential difference between a primary authentic consciousness and a false consciousness. When posited as such a complete entity, consciousness is an overly broad abstraction. A subject is not one consciousness as such, it is a series (Whitehead’s ‘historic route of occasions’) of moments that share enough of a pattern so as to achieve a coherence.

Indeed, part of the function of equivalence is to reify broad abstractions and make of them static things. This would apply to references to capitalism as well. While certainly this names something important and as such is useful in certain contexts, it also can slip into a false reification of what is, in effect, a system constituted through ongoing actions, behaviours and modes of production and exchange. This is not to etherealise the material. Capitalist manners of exchange, systems of production, modes of finance, and so on, are powerfully real and shape actual occasions. But the complexity of these systemic functions, coupled with ideological patterns and habits of attention and behaviour, mean that their dissolution or transformation will be similarly complex and multivalent.

A processual approach to subjectivity, as a metaphysical claim, means that the production of subjectivity is not unique to life under capitalism. There is no originary a priori authentic process of subjectification that capitalism covers over. A processual conception of subjectivity understands the repetition of affective patterns to be constitutive of the emergence of a coherent subject as such. This is the case regardless of the economic or political system within which these patterns manifest. However, this is not to posit an essential separation, quite the contrary. Repetition is at the heart of the emergence of a living subjectivity, and repetition is structured, in part, by societal, cultural and economic forces. In particular, when repetition is structured by operations of equivalence, it is easily enlisted in perpetuating dulling or even compulsive behaviours. It is always a question of quality and consequences. Whitehead’s analysis of societies provides a basic conceptual polarity: in what sense do repetitions feed back into the future? Do they lead to enriched subjectivities, with more intense or broader ‘bandwidths’ of information? Or do they lead to narrower and narrower scopes of awareness (a numbing form of mass hypnosis)?31

It is thus too simple to denounce repetition as such, precisely because any coherent ‘existential territory’ is in part created through ‘autorefer-ential effects’. Such auto-referential effects operate at a number of levels, including: ‘the repetitive symptom, the prayer, the ritual of the “session”, the order-word, the emblem, the refrain, the facialitary crystallization of the celebrity . . . [all of which] initiates the production of a partial subjectivity’ (Guattari 2008: 37). Though Guattari stresses the way that repetition can become pathological, it is very much a question of choosing your symptom – becoming your refrain, if you will, and learning to attune to its own potentials for thresholds for transformation. This cannot be a one-size-fits-all diagnosis in its content. The issue is not to somehow escape procedures of auto-reference as such, but rather to think how differently attuned attention might orient such ‘refrains’ towards alternative qualities and consequences. This is why it is a question of the ‘aethetico-existential affectiveness’ (Guattari 2008: 37, emphasis added) of the repeated forms of auto-reference such that both Massumi and Guattari identify the need for a ‘non-normative ethico-aesthetic’ (Massumi 2018: 95; Guattari 2000: passim) in transforming the habits of attention by which capitalist subjectivity perpetuates itself.

For Guattari, ‘the crucial objective is to grasp the a-signifying points of rupture’ (2008: 37), the places where recognition breaks down, where gaps or disruptions to procedures of equivalence may allow for the emergence of something different or unexpected. Given the extent to which it necessarily challenges the smooth functioning of identity, such a rupture is perilous. What would it mean for attention to produce an existential territory attuned to such disruptions or differences? If Guattari links this to what he calls the ‘principle’ of mental ecology, how is such a principle informed by the metaphysical results of the first half of this text?

Attention as ontological and counter habits

Since subjects emerge through affective or feeling patterns, then in the interest of challenging prevailing attunements easily enlisted by capitalist subjectivity, alternative modes of sensibility must be cultivated. This claim can appear simple, even trite. On the one hand, it is far more easily said than done. On the other hand, appeal to alternative modes of sensibility risk becoming what Murray Bookchin criticises as merely ‘lifestyle anarchy’ if we do not attend in greater depth to how attention functions ontologically and what is really meant by an alternative mode of sensibility.32 Finally, characterising such attunement as ecological requires considering what this means without presuming it automatically maps to conceptions of the environmental. Indeed, part of the promise of an ecological attunement, if also part of its challenge, is its potential emergence in a variety of settings, from the more traditionally ‘natural’ to the heavily constructed or mediated. If certain milieus may be more conducive to the emergence of alternative attunements then others, and if conditions of pervasive violence or trauma pose particular challenges, in principle, understanding attention as ontologically creative can encourage a shift in attunement towards the ecological in any context.

Understanding this potential requires tackling a significant paradox. How can attention be creative when its most pervasive operation is commonly oriented towards the expected, towards the ‘object of recognition’, as Deleuze would say? It also requires further discussion about why such an attunement can be called ecological. Though ‘ecological’ often carries a normative valence, the claim here is thornier – an ecological attunement cannot consistently present definitive prescriptive claims.

This is connected to a basic tension in Guattari’s admonition that ‘Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different’ (Guattari 2008: 45). In response to how a logic of equivalence sees everything through a single lens, the creation of subjectivities that singularly activate an existential territory through values resistant to equivalence is necessary. But at the same time, for such activation to be sustainable, it must forge new forms of alliance or connection. The chief tension is between this need for new forms of connection and creations of ‘singularity’ (Guattari 2008: 33). How does singularity connect? This question is inherently ecological, which is to say relational. Can we conceptualise connection without presuming a single set of values or parameters?

Guattari has this in mind in stating: ‘Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantilizing consensus, it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus’ (Guattari 2008: 33). This point is easily co-opted when dissensus is only a reactionary mode of resisting whatever dominant model is taken as norm.33 Orienting through resistance to the norm alone perpetuates the form of normativity as such. What must be conceptualised instead is the emergence of value in a manner that does not reduce to prescriptive universal judgement. Such emergence is ecological insofar as it does not pre-exist the relations through which it is constituted. How can we think creative emergence in an existential key without falling into a prescriptive logic bound up with single-register planes of dominance? If Guattari calls for ‘reappropriating Universes of value, so that processes of singularization can rediscover their consistency’ (2008: 45), he does not, indeed cannot, substantively describe what such re-appropriation looks like prior to any singularisation in question. Nevertheless, he does make the positive claim that transforming ecological destruction requires reenergising human creative potential: ‘The reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other domains – the catalyst for a gradual reforging and renewal of humanity’s confidence in itself starting at the most miniscule level’ (2008: 45).

Starting at the most miniscule level means beginning with attention in the micro-grain of each moment. But simply urging attention is insufficient if not accompanied by reflection on a series of conceptual tensions inherent in translating metaphysical results into existential habits. The first is the problem of ecological value: how can we think of value as a creation of events that does not antedate the relations in question? Attention is a form of activity that creates value insofar as it is a valuing. And yet, how can we orient attention without some preconceived notion of value – some notion of what should be attended to? The conceptual task inheres in transforming the substantialist components in those concepts: attention and will. Attending is not a passive or accidental predicate affixed to a presumed subject, but rather continuing actions by which subjects are sustained. It is not a question of will so much as one of willingness and awareness. Changes of attention are changes in relation – this is a tautology, provided it is tempered with the understanding that relations are by degrees. Attention makes things and does things – what do ‘you’ want to do?

Where concepts of ‘the’ will presuppose isolated autonomy, willingness understands the conspiratorial nature of attending as unavoidable. This remains a question of degrees. Undoing metaphysical autonomy does not deny choice, on the contrary, it makes choices matter more. But choices of attention are never total or unilateral exercises of full mastery (this is consistent with what cognitive science tells us. Our explanations of why we have chosen what we choose are largely retroactive.). Attending as conspiring requires willingness to relinquish control of the result. Choices always occur within a pervasive paradox – you cannot fully control conditions or outcomes and yet both are still in some sense the result of (‘your’) choice. The key shift though is that choice is not by fiat, it is always a matter of collaboration.

The problem keeps repeating. Metaphysical antinomy becomes ecological antinomy: how to affirm both qualitative singularity and interdependent relatedness? How to think singularity that is not a form of separation? Conversely, how to think connection or relation not governed by equivalence? It is a matter of understanding where to place the stress in what Whitehead calls the ‘ideal opposites’ of ‘permanence and flux’ (PR: 338). Is a singularity that which arrests the flux? Is relation that which generates the dissolution of singularity? Or is it rather the very condition of singularity? Whitehead shifts the frequent scope of these ‘ideal opposites’ by both destabilising those entities typically taken to represent permanence and, at the same time, eternalising the ephemeral. Referring to Michelangelo’s Day and Night, Evening and Dawn statues in the Medici chapel of Florence,34 Whitehead writes

perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity. (PR: 338, emphasis added)³⁵

The timelessness is not implanted onto the work of art as artefact or entity, rather it is the moment of the encounter – the collaboration between attention, colour, light, form, and so on, that engenders such singular moments. In this sense, the inversion is complete – all artefacts are ultimately temporary, what remains is the timelessness of the singular moments. And yet, such moments, which Whitehead does not hesitate to characterise as ‘immortal’, cannot of course be captured or retained in any substantive way because they are ‘perpetually perishing’. We are ‘faced by the paradox’ from which there is no escape. This paradox is not only, or even primarily, a conceptual problem. It is rather a living, which is to say felt, experience. The task for thought is to construct a metaphysics that does not explain away this paradox.

The conceptual antinomy functions as a double bind within which there can be no absolute salvation. And yet, the constraint it enacts, the impossibility of a totalitarian possession of permanence, or, put conversely, the sole realisation of permanence in the ephemeral moment, also makes possible what I call ecological attunement. Such attunement is not advanced as a solution to loss, to the diminishment of life, to ecological calamity. In its humility, such attunement is clearly insufficient to the scale of interlocking systemic crises driving such destruction. And yet, what else could it mean to begin at the most miniscule level? Accordingly, to learn to attend differently, even if insufficient, is nonetheless vitally necessary. The question is not how to achieve permanence construed as refuge from the world’s disarray; rather, it is how to select or emphasise what one wants to preserve or pass on in the ephemeral experience of the moment. Ecological attunement is attuned to this dual sense of permanence and passage – where the stakes of each moment’s attendings are inextricable from creation of the future even as they inevitably, necessarily, fail to inoculate that future against its own peril.

Ecological attunement, as concept, intensifies rather than eradicates three insoluble tensions that equivalence covers over: (1) the creation of novel value or meaning that is retroactively construed as having already been there; (2) the necessity and practical difficulty of multi-scalar attention and (3) the art of choosing ‘refrains’ you inherit. Each of these, in varying degrees, follows a concept of attending as relational and actively creative rather than unidirectional and purely receptive or passive.

Equivalence proposes to predetermine possibilities of value or meaning by controlling the form of all value as such. This denies the possibility of novel value or unanticipated meaning. In this sense, it is incapable of thinking a robust conception of relation where the quality of the relation is creative of new forms of value or meaning. The particular relata in question do not matter since the form of relation is always the same. When attending is instead part of the ontological creation of each actual occasion, even as it passes, then this creation opens to alternative emergences of meaning or value. It is true that there are some limits to these alternatives, but also that these limits are not deducible only from contingencies of experience. In the language of Deleuze or Whitehead, neither the eternal objects nor the virtual are exhausted by what has happened. But this is also why equivalence functions to impoverish reality insofar as it inhibits the potential of novelty.

Dangers remain. Attending risks becoming assimilation if it is oriented by a presumption that purposes are shared. This is a failure of attention because it assimilates rather than collaborates. An ecological attunement involves accepting the necessity of encounters that are not synthesised through a shared sense of purpose or consensus as to their meaning in relation to stable image of the whole. Rather, events of relation and encounter are creative of values later used to characterise their meaning.

Isabelle Stengers has an excellent sense of this problem in her articulation of what she calls an ‘ecology of practices’ that does not fixate on a single universal value as the only viable ordering of a multiplicity. Such an ecology of practices departs from the (mainstream) metaphysical tradition’s dream of ‘“delocalized” concepts, which guarantee the ability to travel anywhere and to be at home wherever one happens to be’ (Stengers 2010: 62). Such universal delocalisation is motivated to escape the need for attention to constraints generated by local conditions. Stengers calls for a different form of delocalisation, one that following Deleuze can be called ‘nomadic’ rather than ‘sedentary’ (DR: 36–7).36 Indeed a universalistic delocalisation brings all places or events to order under one measure. It is in this sense an expansion or incorporation into a pre-existent order. Delocalisation eradicates the possibility of a novel value of the local by ensuring that this value can only be measured according to the pre-existent. By contrast, Stengers is interested in a delocalisation that is horizontal rather than hierarchical. Such a delocalisation would be genuinely relational because it would destabilise any rubric deemed capable of judging before the event of relation. Such a delocalisation in Stengers’s sense

bring[s] into existence the experience of here and there, the experience of a here that, by its very topology, affirms the existence of a there, and affirms it in a way that excludes any nostalgia for the possibility of erasing differences, of creating an all-purpose experience. (2010: 62)

Such delocalisation does not ‘reterritorialize’ (in Deleuze and Guattari’s language) on a permanent absolute determination, but rather intensifies the need for attention by denying the predetermined adequacy of any concept deemed universally sufficient. This destabilising of any assumed universal is motivated by a robust concept of relational encounter where creation is a potential result that does not depend on intention.

Unintentional creation of meanings is crucial for ecological attunement. Stengers proposes concepts of ‘obligation’ and ‘requirement’ as heuristics for making sense of how values emerge out of practices without these practices requiring a global sense of shared purpose.³⁷ She characterises obligation and requirement as constraints, rather than rights, duties or conditions:

Unlike conditions, which are relative to a given existent that needs to be explained, established, or legitimized, constraint provides no explanation, no foundation, no legitimacy. A constraint must be satisfied, but the way that it is satisfied remains, by definition, an open question. A constraint must be taken into account, but it does not tell us how it should be taken into account. (2010: 43)³⁸

As Stengers suggests, ‘every living being may be approached in terms of the questions of the requirements on which not its survival but also its activity depend . . . and every living being brings into existence obligations that qualify what we refer to as its behavior’ (2010: 54). Despite Stengers’s reference to ‘living beings’, these concepts are abstractly flexible enough for thinking processes of relation constitutive of complex ecologies, not just organisms and environments. They can be used to describe the interaction between different species, different materials and different physical vectors as well. In this sense, they are metaphysical concepts that ‘identify a priori neither the user nor the field of use’ (Stengers 2010: 61). The only constant is that their use always brings into view a ‘here’ and a ‘there’. This is their ‘topology’: ‘We require something from something or someone. We are obligated by, or are obligated to [something]’ (2010: 52).

A topological distinction between a here and a there does not pre-exist the operation in question. In contrast to universal delocalisation, activities of requirement/obligation vary in accordance with the particular existential or ontological field in which the events that they constrain occur. They are not simply applied in the same way every time, but rather serve as orienting guides to analysis of the practical, ontological or epistemic encounter in question.39 Stengers writes: ‘They function as operators intended to make perceptible, in the very way they must be reworked to earn their relevance in each practical field, the topological transformations that mark the transition from one field to another’ (2010: 61). The physicist is under a different obligation than the farmer, and yet both proceed in relation to requirements and obligations.

To earn relevance is to induce the event of a satisfied requirement or fulfilled obligation. In this event a value is either affirmed (in the case of ordinary satisfactions) or created (in the case of novel achievements). This achievement does not require that all the constituents of the event share the same understanding of the intentions driving it. It is a peculiarity of an event of novel achievement and the creation of what will then be called a value, that this valuation, is ‘detected as soon as [it is] produced, and . . . found to be already there, always, as soon as [it is] engendered’ (Stengers 2010: 37).⁴⁰ The event of a satisfaction is an actualisation that creates a new value. But in this creation, it is retroactively seen that its potential was always already there.

This is what Guattari describes as an ‘expressive a-signifying rupture’ (2008: 30). Psychotherapeutic work provides an intuitive context for thinking about such ruptures. Therapeutic achievement can be described as growth, but not in the sense of an ordained growth that follows a predictable route. Consider the growth that may occur when a subject struggling with a particular psychic formation is suddenly able to take it apart differently and reconfigure it, such that it no longer bears the same weight as before. Such a rupture is a break from structuring presuppositions, habits or pathological repetitions – it bifurcates a series or pattern into a new direction. It

summons forth a creative repetition that forges incorporeal objects, abstract machines, and Universes of value that make their presence felt as though they had been always ‘already there’, although they are entirely dependent on the existential event that brings them into play. (Guattari 2008: 30–1, emphasis added)

This nonlinear creation of value is manifest in episodes of renewal or ‘quantum leap’ that occur when someone experiences a ‘freeing up’ after a long period of feeling stuck. The problem is evaluated differently on either side of the rupture – its meaning may change or shift, though there is often a consolidation into a new repetition and set of habits, ensuring that narration will retroactively ascribe this new meaning as inchoately already present.41

Because such consolidation is retroactive, it is difficult to conceive of its effects on attention. How can we attend to that which has not yet manifested or emerged? Indeed, while we can conceive of the idea of symbiosis in naming events of achievement in which agents with different needs and desires interact in mutually enriching ways, such an event, by definition, cannot be willed from a single perspective. It does not require agreement upon the purpose of an interaction, nor does it require that both agents describe the meaning of the interaction in the same way. Its value emerges at a different order of complexity excessive to the immediate intention of either agent: ‘The “symbiotic agreement” is an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence, and not the recognition of a more powerful interest before which divergent particular interests would have to bow down’ (Stengers 2010: 35).

How can posing this at the level of thought respond to the imperative for attention? At the least, it emphasises a requisite encounter: approaching a complexity of divergent purposes and actors as both linked in a series of constraints and yet not necessarily teleologically oriented towards an achievement of universal consensus. As we have discussed previously, while some Whitehead commentators read his claim of beauty along such teleological lines, Whitehead’s God remains fundamentally open and in this sense neutral to the qualitative expression that results from the encounters and ‘selections’ of occasions. Similarly, when Deleuze and Guattari declare that ‘the strata are judgments of God’, these judgements are not moral, but rather expressions of the consequences of relations:

To express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth. (ATP: 40–1)

These expressions are thus at once individual, but also always occurrent in a wider context of relational encounter. God’s judgement is akin to the necessities that follow these encounters but do not determine them. It is always ‘if . . . then’, with a degree of openness: ‘the earth, or the body with organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized’ (ATP: 40).

Coding and decoding, encounter and expression are not predetermined by intentional goals; rather, they are the means by which ‘judgments’ emerge. The wasp does not intend to help the orchid propagate, and yet the wasp-orchid relation is productive of a valuation beyond the survival of either. Such ‘reciprocal capture’ or ‘double articulation’ refers to relational processes in which ‘identities that coinvent one another each integrate a reference to the other for their own benefit’ (Stengers 2010: 36, emphasis added).42 The co-invention of identities is not an all-at-once procedure, rather, such a concept of reciprocal capture privileges events or processes of relation over static entities.

It is challenging to consider how to think ecologically without reducing the multiplicity of scales, causalities and temporalities operative. Disparate causalities inform unintentional creation of meanings at widely variant scales.⁴³ But how can we encounter a multi-scalar temporality and spatiality in our habits of attention? Indeed, thinking ecologically means that the here-now is never just here and now. Paradoxically, however, attending to the here-now, in the very grain of its complexity detached from prevailing assumptions through which it is filtered, might, in some cases, enable better awareness of the gaps within equivalence. This is because equivalence operates at the level of Whitehead’s ‘misplaced abstraction’ – it replaces the here-now that is an intersection of multi-valent scales of time and space, with a reduced here-now that is disconnected in its abstraction. An ecological attunement then, paradoxically, understands that practices of attention are always in communication beyond the explicit intention or understanding of the present. They operate at the level of a sensibility that is ontologically excessive to the cognitive or representational. Ecological attunement as concept is as much aspirational asymptotic ideal that one fails to fully reach or realise in the present. But to condemn the concept for failing to achieve such completion is to operate within a different conception of subjectivity than the one offered here. Understanding attending as collaborative or relational means its outcomes remain contingent to circumstances and qualities of encounter excessive to any single perspective. An ecological attunement does not rescue us from this contingency.

Indeed, despite the powerful pull to want to make ecological attunement a determinately normative concept, this temptation threatens to override the emergent structure of valuation. This raises numerous questions that can be phrased using Deleuze and Guattari’s language of the ‘refrain’. Such a ‘refrain’ is both existential and ontological. As the child in the dark sings under their breath to comfort themselves, as ‘radios and television sets are like sound walls [that] mark territories’ (ATP: 311) (an example that might now include the ubiquitous headphones so that everyone is a private territory carrying their own media cloud), the question is not to avoid or deconstruct the ‘refrain’ as such, but rather to choose your refrains wisely. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari understand that the refrain is not merely a subjective process of psychic development – it is an ontological means for achieving sustainable coherence that operates between ‘chaos’ and the Earth. The refrain is constituted as a means by which different scales are put into contact. Consider the blessing of the meal. It can be automatic, rote, even a certification of received dogma, but it can also be a form of communication that acknowledges different scales in relation – the terrestrial (Earth, rain, wind), the cosmic (Sun) and the personal. That is what a refrain can do: ‘Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain’ (ATP: 312).

Choosing the refrains you inherit, or, more precisely, attending to the elements within the refrain that best express this germinal function can keep ecological attunement from collapsing into an ineffective embrace of some facile whole. The refrain ‘involves an activity of selection, elimination, and extraction in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being submerged, to enable them to resist or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve’ (ATP: 311). We are not the creator of refrains, but rather the creations of the refrains we select or endorse. Not all of these are conscious, but the task of attention is seeking to find the manner in which the refrains we inherit best reveal what is already there. Because the refrain ‘always carries earth with it’, how can we attend to this earth potential (ATP:312)?

This question cannot be answered in a single valence. The earth, the forces of the earth and the cosmic forces of chaos, are by no means always harmonious. (We eat and are eaten). Even the most apparently tranquil or ameliorative refrains are always at risk of sedimenting and becoming forces of inattention. How can we tell the difference? How do we choose or select, especially insofar as choice is excessive to intentions? What is being created in our attendings that we are not aware of? It is here that the question of affect and feeling returns, with a double valence. On the one hand, it is precisely in affect or feeling, understood at the level of sensibility (rather than emotion), that we can be closest to germinal processes of the actual occasion. We can, perhaps, sense the direction of this addition to reality. But this sensing is unreliable and divergent in any communicative context.

Notes

1. I do not mean to suggest that Darwin or Richard Dawkins themselves operates with these conflations, but only to observe the way differing ecological theories lend themselves more or less easily to differing social ideologies.

2. It is also too quick to presume one direction of influence – as if the science of ecology can influence popular conceptions of economy, but not vice versa. Worster’s 1977 intellectual history Nature’s Economy explores the influence of bio-economic metaphors in the development of early twentieth century ecological sciences, using a basic disjunction between the ‘arcadian’ and ‘imperial’ traditions. The ‘Arcadian’ emphasises holism and interdependence, whereas the ‘Imperial’ exercises reason and labouring power to establish a relationship of productivity between nature and the human.

3. For this reason, Stauffer argues that Darwin can be seen as the true founder of ecology (Stauffer 1957: 139).

4. Nicholas Rescher frequently makes this point. See Rescher 1996: 14–17, 81.

5. This aspiration raises ontological questions in forcing a judgement over what conditions are real and hence valid for inclusion. But willingness to think ecology as entangled with metaphysics depends on an image of metaphysics that departs from some structuring suppositions of metaphysics as well. Most notably, as its root eco- suggests, ecology is predisposed towards a study of relations between beings or entities rather than a vertical or transcendental study of the relation between beings and Being or Existence and the Existant as in Heidegger or Levinas. Such a predisposition, while germane to the approach I take, is not shared by all metaphysics as such.

6. Sarkar identifies seven different theoretical problems for philosophy of ecology. I am focusing on those relevant to my concerns. Of tangential interest is also the ‘partial observability problem’ which bespeaks the challenge of isolating variables to confirm theories (Sarkar 2005).

7. Sarkar identifies two sources for this problem, the fact that ecological systems are ‘contingent historically’ as well as irreducibly ‘complex’ (Sarkar 2005).

8. Whitehead makes a similar point. See PR: 9–10, FR: 11–27.

9. A central inspiration for this proposal is Gregory Bateson (especially Bateson 2000: 486–96).

10. Though Deleuze states in an interview that both he and Guattari ‘have remained Marxists . . . [insofar as they] do not believe in a political philosophy that would not be centered on an analysis of capitalism and its developments’ (cited in Smith 2012: 161), he clearly does not mean this in any doctrinaire sense.

11. The tradition of social ecology associated with Murray Bookchin is also relevant to Guattari’s efforts to think the relations between social, economic and environmental pathologies. See Bookchin 1998 for a concise introduction.

12. For more on the connection between Whitehead’s process philosophy and the Pope’s integral ecology, see Griffin 2016.

13. Where the Pope and Guattari most significantly diverge is in their approach to psychic dimensions of an integrated ecology. The Pope is beholden to certain theological commitments that significantly constrain his approach. For all his insight in pointing to relations between social and material ecologies, the Pope remains humanist insofar as the human soul is presumed an essential, and exceptional, unity.

14. Guattari does not refer to climate change as such, though his analysis is consistent with its salient feature: the implication of human activities on larger planetary systems. While the science of climate change was in many respects established at the time of Guattari’s text, it was not yet a prominent theme in discourse.

15. While Dolly the Sheep and Oncomouse are passé now, and GMO foods crowd our supermarkets, less well-known are biorobotic cyborg locusts and cockroaches. See De Looper 2015 and Washington University 2016.

16. Debate remains over the connection between climate change and the Syrian Civil War. While it was initially reported that drought induced by climate change was a direct factor in civil unrest leading to the conflict, recent studies have been more cautious about attributing a direct connection. Nevertheless, this caution does not entail the opposite extreme – a claim of no relation between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ whatsoever. See Fischetti 2015; Gleick 2014; Nature Editorial Board 2018.

17. Discussions of the Anthropocene are profuse. For its genealogy, see Crutzen 2002 or Steffen et al. 2011.

18. In sociology, see Latour 1991; in anthropology, see Descola 2013 or Kohn 2013; in comparative philosophy, see Norton-Smith 2010. It is worth noting that Descola, Kohn and Latour are all influenced by process metaphysicians, specifically Deleuze, Whitehead and, in the case of Kohn, Peirce.

19. On this correlation between a sharp nature/culture demarcation and religious fatalisms and fundamentalisms, see Latour 2017: 184–220.

20. For additional conformation of this point, see Atleo 2004; Cordova 2007.

21. For a critical summary of this argument, see ‘The ETC Report’ in Pojman and Pojman 2012: 389–409.

22. ‘There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself’ (Bateson 2000: 484). Bateson refers to the infamous pollution of Lake Erie: ‘… the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider environmental system – . . . if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your [human] thought and experience’ (2000: 484).

23. This appears both in the negative or pathological patterns discussed above, but also entails positive or creative potentials. As Guattari writes, ‘the reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other domains’ (2008: 45).

24. Guattari’s ‘existential territory’ can be read as an existential application of the broader discussion of territorialisation and deterritorialisation in ATP.

25. Thus far, Guattari’s ‘existential territory’ sounds similar to a phenomenological ‘life-world’. In Chapter 6, I show why this is not the case and differentiate the two concepts.

26. For a summary of conceptual and practical challenges in the concept of biodiversity, see Morar et al. 2015.

27. Use-value is the ‘usefulness of a thing’ in the sense of what we can do with it. Importantly, it is linked to ‘the physical body of the commodity itself’. Because it is ‘only realized in use or in consumption’, use-value cannot be accumulated (Marx 1994: 220–1).

28. The first Mastercard advertisement with the ‘priceless’ slogan ran in 1997. See Rajamannar 2017.

29. In this regard, Guattari’s remarks about the possibility of a ‘technological evolution of the media’ used for ‘noncapitalist goals’ in particular through its being ‘reappropriated by a multitude of subject-groups capable of redirecting its singularization’ (2008: 40–1) appear unduly optimistic and naïve. This mirrors early hope for the liberatory functions of the Internet, in particular Stewart Brand. See Foer 2017: 1–32.

30. ‘Surplus of sensibility’ names the ‘recorded behavioral traces’ consistently harvested by our various digital prostheses (Hansen 2015a: 66). The surplus is fed back into predictive loops. It is both lived, insofar as it tracks the choices, and in the cases of physiological monitoring, the life processes of living subjects but it exceeds the intentional consciousness. When a digital device measures heart rate, for example, it produces a new form of sensibility even as this sensibility is founded on the life process of the individual.

31. Guattari’s interest in the production of capitalist subjectivity bears relation to ‘agnotology’ as the study of the production of ignorance. However, where these analyses are epistemic in focusing on how ignorance is produced by a confluence of power and industry, Guattari is more interested in affective dimensions of the production, shaping and controlling of desire. See Proctor and Schiebinger 2008 and Sullivan and Tuana 2007 for two collections in this field.

32. ‘Lifestyle anarchism’ is preoccupied with the ‘ego and its uniqueness’ and for this reason affirms ‘polymorphous concepts of resistance [that are] . . . steadily eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition’ (Bookchin 1997: 164). Bookchin implicitly aligns ‘lifestyle anarchism’ with Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Where social anarchism called upon people to rise in revolution and seek the reconstruction of society, the irate petty bourgeois who populate the subcultural world of lifestyle anarchism call for episodic rebellion and the satisfaction of their “desiring machines”, to use the phraseology of Deleuze and Guattari’ (1997: 165). Bookchin is correct to recognise that an individualistic libertarianism is insufficient for transformation (as Massumi puts it ‘Anarcho-libertarianism is anarcho-capitalism’ (2018: 105)). However, while his characterisation may apply to some nominal Deleuze-inspired readers, he clearly has not considered ‘desiring machines’ in any detail. Appeals to the ‘ego’ as sufficient locus of liberation are emphatically not what Deleuze or Guattari are talking about.

33. If we simply understand dissensus as a rejection of perceived norms, this cannot create connections necessary for forging sustainable transformation. This is what Bookchin is worried about in his critique of ‘lifestyle anarchism’ and his contrasting call for a ‘social anarchism’ (1997: 164–8).

34. The Michelangelo work to which Whitehead refers is more commonly rendered in English: Day and Night, Dusk and Dawn

35. Deleuze’s notion of the work of art as a ‘bloc of sensations’ that is a ‘compound of percepts and affects’ (WIP: 164) is resonant here. Like Whitehead, such a ‘bloc of sensations’ has the possibility of creating eternal moments: ‘even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration’ (WIP: 166). Indeed, for Deleuze, this is the goal of art: ‘to create the finite that restores the infinite’ (WIP: 197).

36. ‘Sedentary’ distribution distributes an already occupied space, divvying it up according to ‘fixed and proportional determinations’. By contrast, ‘nomadic’ distribution refers to a filling of space that is not already possessed. This is the difference between being ‘distributed in space’ (nomadic) and ‘distribut[ing] the space’ (sedentary) (DR: 36).

37. Stengers’s primary concern is scientific practices, but she recognises that ‘the constraints found in requirements and obligations do not in themselves singularize scientific practices any more than they do the practices [referred to] as modern’ (2010: 54). Provided that we understand them with the appropriate measure of abstract flexibility, we can use obligation and requirement as orienting operations in looking at a variety of relations and practices.

38. While obligation and requirement are correlative concepts, this does not mean they are symmetrical (Stengers 2010: 52). Certain events enact large obligations with minimal requirements. Stengers also distinguishes obligation and requirement from ‘rights’ and ‘duties’: ‘requirements and obligations do not function in terms of reciprocity and, as constraints, what they help keep together is not a city of honest men and women but a heterogeneous collective of . . . phenomena whose interpretation is at stake’ (2010: 52).

39. Practical, epistemic and existential do not demarcate exclusive categories, since any event could manifest aspects of all three.

40. Stengers is quoting Guattari’s Chaosmosis (1995) here.

41. Note that such an analogy risks overlooking the degree to which an achievement or event is frequently between what would be commonly thought of as different subjects.

42. See ATP: 502–3; Stengers 2010: 266, n11. This reference can be more or less precise and is not symmetrical. In the case of a predator/prey relation, for example, the prey may employ strategies of evasion specifically tuned to the cognitive capacities of its standard predator, while the predator may have a range of prey options that it does not need to meaningfully disambiguate. Nevertheless, its identity as predator is always in relation to a prey.

43. Stengers refers to a species of bat that does not appear to play any significant role in the ordinary functioning of the Puerto Rican tropical forest that is its home. However, the species plays a highly significant role when the forest is devastated by a hurricane, since it is incapable of flying away and relocating. The ecological function of the bat is negligible on an ordinary temporal scale but appears during periods of crisis.