“Through the continuous development of machinic labour, multiplied by the information revolution, productive forces can make available an increasing amount of time for potential human activity. But to what end? Unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and neurosis?”

— Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies

Let us consider for a moment the “molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire”. Where can resubjectivization take place and under which conditions? What is the existential territory that can be acquired or reacquired?

Guattari writes about the possibilities of rock music for opening up a collective subjectivity. Music does open vistas for the molecular domains, catalyzing some inter-personal and subjective chemistry that momentarily transports us from the numbing undimensionalism of late capitalism.

How late is capitalism now? Pretty damn late. Back in my comfortable armchair, I withdraw and document.

I focus on a durational performance, disembodied, virtual. My avatar is my artwork — not how he looks like but his thoughts, his mental ecology. He could become a digital painter, using Nvidia’s StyleGAN2 trained on Francis Bacon’s paintings. Why not? On the other hand, why say yes either?

As I reify myself as a process in Amazon’s cloud, the potentiality of spawning an image-making AI in the same cloud feels … natural. You can resubjectivize yourself as zeros and ones, if there are enough of them.

***

“It is not only species that are becoming extinct, but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity.”

It’s like gardening working with this mental ecology. Not so much trying to specialize which is akin to growing a big, big tree in your garden. It will then use all the water and shadow all the other plants in your garden. No, gardening is about taking care of a multitude of interests and strains of thought: strains of practice.

Thought-based practice is not a new thing, that was experimented with in the 70s (seems like everything was experimented with in the 70s). But taking an ecological stance to it is pretty new. My avatar’s practice is a queer ecology.

As social ecologies go, my avatar shares a common feature with me: he’s friendly. That’s my forte, my special skill. It goes a long way in gardening your social network. The friendly gesture is an existential refrain at work constituting this territory.

Consolidate and hold: not so much striving for something unexperienced but going with what you have. Fumbling with thoughts and conversing in the metaverse.

“Post-industrial capitalism … tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and … subjectivity.”

In the sci-fi movie Oblivion, the main character Jack Harper’s subjectivity is AI generated, but he does not know that. Also, because of his human origin he sustains a nostalgic bond to times past, to times when Earth was still livable.

But the AI is sucking whatever valuable is remaining on Earth (sea water) and Jack is moving to Titan — the largest moon of Saturn — where the rest of humanity already resides.

However, Jack soon learns things are not as they appear to be.

This late, late capitalism produces oblivion. A ‘chill synthwave mix’ soothes my nerves on youtube. I’m nowhere. Maybe I moved to Titan already and my subjectivity is provided by Google.

I, too, may soon learn things are not as they appear to be. Thus I need the avatar, and the metaverse. It’s a mirage that’s free to reconstitute itself.

***

“One of the key analytic problems confronted by social and mental ecology is the introjection of repressive power by the oppressed.”

As an example, internalized homophobia, taking ownership of toxic elements so as they feel to be one’s own thoughts. In the metaverse someone, a member of the metaverse Coast Guard, calls me a ‘spunk lover’. There is not much joy or generativeness in such social interactions, and I remove my avatar from the situation.

My avatar seems to be uncertain whether to identify as ‘gay’ or as ‘queer’. For gay people, a subculture exists in the metaverse, ready to be — yes — consumed. As everywhere, queer is an open category, vis-à-vis normality, with fuzzy borders and zero pre-fabricated models. It’s as if the ‘gay’ has introjected something from the patriarchy, whereas queer stands by themself.

Being a cis-male in a sexual minority accentuates the sense of patriarchy, because you would be part of it, but you ain’t. The social mirror shimmers and reflects back either ‘normal’ or ‘queer’ and the image never fully resolves. You pass but you don’t belong.

Clearly, Guattari means the oppression of workers and — redundantly — the oppressed by what he calls IWC, Integrated World Capitalism. But psychoanalytically the point applies to many oppressor-oppressed dynamics.

***

“Ways should be found to enable the singular, the exceptional, the rare, to coexist with a State structure that is the least burdensome possible.”

We are all special snowflakes. But how to be singular when your subjectivity has been processed by the uniformity-manufacturing processes of capitalism? When you have inhaled all the toxicity of market logic and the productivity requirements? What is there left that would be exceptional and rare, that would even flicker of originality needed for resubjectivization?

It takes more than acquiring some first-blush single-estate tea from Himalaya. You can’t consume yourself into originality. I had to learn this the hard way.

I think Guattari underestimated something in his book that was published in 1989. He didn’t anticipate the total annihilation of subjectivity that has been enabled by the big corporations in our life: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google. If you ever thought social media is cultivating your special snowflakeness, think again.

The slim State. Can we do without a State altogether? But certainly you need social order, but maybe a new one?

I’m getting back to the “molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire”. 

I think reconstituting the social order needs to happen bottom-up, going from a molecular change into a macro change, a change at ecosystem level. Instead of cultural logics we need an ecological understanding, an aesthetic understanding of life.

We the unemployed, oppressively marginalized, lonely, bored, anxious and neurotic need to shed the capitalist discourse from our cognition altogether and embrace a multiplicity of queer mental ecologies, where the old straight-up normality has been replaced with rainbow colored glitter unicorn smooches.

We need to establish new territories far away from the market uniformity where the solidarity of friendly gestures can re-establish itself, and where we can garden our newly-founded subjectivities.

This time the revolution will take place in the margin.

 

P.S. 

A GCA (Google Content Advisor) contacted me by email:

“We here at Google hope this message finds you well.

Your recent document edited with Google Docs titled “4 3 ecologies” lacks the insight that with neoliberalism, we expect you to produce your subjectivity, you silly thing! 

Please have your rainbow revolution and we hope you will continue to enjoy using Google’s products and services.”