Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
This is how the instant fuses with the world. It's in this register that the category of poetic performance, the music of John Cage, the ruptures of Zen – it doesn't matter what you call it – are found.
Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (70)GUATTARI's FOURFOLD PROVIDES a conceptual frame within which it is possible to develop an attitude towards the world that can also be found in other places and at other times. As a conceptual crystal, it is suspended into a landscape of many other, comparable conceptual crystals. Into an ecology of other ecologies. Into a landscape of other concepts and philosophies. Other political practices. From within different circumstances, all of these conceptual crystals, many of which are ecological in nature, attempt, like Guattari, to answer the question of how to be adequate to the world. Guattari's references to and borrowings from other theoretical and practical fields enact this conceptual openness. Although schizoecology is an eigentheory, it is everywhere open to its allover conceptual and cultural milieu. Even more, it is meant to be itself part of the world's pachinko evolution. As Guattari notes in Chaosmosis ‘who knows what will be taken up by others, for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead to!’ (126).
To return to an earlier question. If ecology aims at an adequation of the world and its creatures, how to be ecological? In order to administer the world, Guattari asks us to develop, within a multiplicity of actors and agendas, an overall ecological attitude that not only reaches from chemical research to political activism and from artistic practice to economic and political theory, but that reaches into and touches literally every moment of our lives. Although Guattari has very specific ideas about all of the above fields, his lesson does not lie in following these ideas to the letter, but rather according to their spirit. As the world's circumstances are constantly changing, modes of thought as well as modes of life should aim to be adequate to the present moment and to the present world, as well as to the specific position of wherever one is at any given moment.
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