Ecosophic Times

A Short History of Time

IN ‘PRELIMINARY’, THE fifteen-page introductory chapter to Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari sketches, in very broad strokes and in a style that echoes the sweeping historical narratives woven into A Thousand Plateaus, a panoramic history of the times of Western culture. The chapter, at the end of which Guattari does address, for some five pages, some of the economic and political urgencies we live in today – including references to a ‘postmedia era’ and to ‘the Greens in Germany’ (SC: 13) – is not only about time, however, it is also part of the internal chronologics of Schizoanalytic Cartographies. It marks the moment of the drawing in of breath before that breath is held for 173 pages. Breathe in. After these central pages, the book exhales into seven short case-studies of literature, painting, theatre and architecture. Breathe out.

Differentiating between the stages of European Christianity, Capitalist Deterritorialization and Planetary Computerization, Guattari delineates the different ways in which each stage constructs a period-specific time. As Guattari would note in Chaosmosis, both ‘space and time are thus never neutral receptacles; they must be accomplished, engendered by productions of subjectivity’ (102–3). Both are the products of processes of constructivism and thus open to the future. They are milieus that are invariably administered in ways that have created either good or bad ecologies. In other words, Guattari maintains that the stages are not about taking a natural time that they stress or compress in different ways. Rather, time itself is radically time- and site-specific. Each historical moment constructs its specific time. As Serres notes in Hermes V, ‘space as such, the one and global space, is a philosophical artefact… . time as such, the one and universal time, is also an artefact’ (1994: 68).