Felix Guattari, Remaking Social Practices

2007-03-03T11:31:00.000-08:00
A few weeks before his sudden death on August 29, 1992, Felix
Guattari sent the following text to Le Monde Diplomatique. With the
additional weight conferred upon it by its author's tragic disappearance,
this ambitious and all-encompassing series of reflection takes on, in 
some sense, the character of a philosophical will or testament.

The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to
us by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing
is any longer of real consequence. We cover our eyes; we forbid ourselves
to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thrusts
far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living
that are still fresh in our minds, and which slaps our future onto an
opaque horizon, heavy with thick clouds and miasmas. We depend all the
more on the reassurance that nothing is assured. The two "superpowers" of
yesterday, for so long buttressed against each other, have been
destabilized by the disintegration of one among them. The countries of the
former USSR and Eastern Europe have been drawn into a drama with no
apparent outcome. The Unitited States, for its part, has not been spared
the violent upheavals of civilization, as we saw in Los Angeles. Third
World countries have not been able to shake off paralysis; Africa, in
particular, finds itself at an atrocious impasse. Ecological disasters,
famine, unemployment, the escalation of racism and xenophobia, hunt, like
so many threats, the end of this millennium. At the same time, science and
technology have evolved with extreme rapidity, supplying man with
virtually all the necessary means to solve his material problems. But
humanity has not seized upon these; it remains stupefied, powerless before
the challenges that confront it. It passively contributes to the pollution
of water and the air, to the destruction of forests, to the disturbance of
climates, to the disappearance of a multitude of living species, to the
impoverishment of the genetic capital of the biosphere, to the destruction
of natural landscapes, to the suffocation of its cities, and to the
progressive abandonment of cultural values and moral references in the
areas of human solidarity and fraternity ... Humanity seems to have lost
its head, or more precisely, its head is no longer functioning with its
body. How can it find a compass by which to reorient itself within a
modernity whose complexity overwhelms it? [continue]
ecosophies

Felix Guattari, Remaking Social Practices
