The Crystal World, Crystal Ecology

IN ORDER TO be considered an eigenecology, which is a neologism that echoes the concept of eigentheory, any ecology needs to rest its political and cultural pragmatics on an overarching ontology and epistemology. Although Guattari was perhaps more famous – and sometimes notorious! – for his many political and cultural interventions and for his co-authored texts with Deleuze, his solo writings, first and foremost Schizoanalytic Cartographies, attest to the fact that all of his activist pyrotechnics rely on a very sober and level-headed conceptual architecture: schizoecology as eigenecology.

Quite adequately, the theoretical spine of Guattari's schizoecology – its conceptual eigenvalue, one might say – includes a delineation of the ontological moment of ecogenesis understood as the genesis of living beings from within a fundamental multiplicity. Guattari's delineation of the modes in which living beings are immersed in the larger ecology of the living takes the form of a crystal ontology.

Guattari's idea that the world is infinitely machined and thus infinitely constructed leads inevitably to the question about the specific modes of construction. Guattari calls the most general of these modes crystallization. As he notes in Chaosmosis, every process of individuation is a ‘crystallization of intensity’ (30, emphasis added). Similarly, in reference to the strategy of videoanalysis, he talks of heterogenesis as the creation of ‘crystals of self-organization’ (SC: 184). (At this point, I should note the twofold conceptual register in which Guattari and Deleuze conceptualize intensity. As the measure of different levels of energy, it is an attribute of the actual. As the opposite of actual extensity, however, it denotes the virtual. Within the field of the living, for instance, the extensive, corporeal aspect of a consistency operates as both a carrier medium and as a pick-up machine for energetic perturbations, while its intensive, mental aspect functions as a machine of what I have called pattern production and pattern recognition.)