Guattari: Impractical Philosophy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

34 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the midst of a certain zeal for ‘French Theory’ in human geography and the social sciences of late, there has been something of a rush to operationalize Guattari (among others) in a pseudo-methodological manner; something we’re unashamedly guilty of ourselves. It’s easy to see why: journeying between cartography, metamodelisation, tracing, transversality, enunciation and diagramming, Guattari offers a seductive array of concepts and philosophical tools for human geographers. There seems, however, to be a disjuncture between the conceptual import of such terms and their empirical rendering. In this explicitly experimental article, we want to open up a series of lines of flight as to how Guattari can inform empiricism without reversion to straightforward application or metaphorical appropriation. In doing so, we offer a number of speculations on how Guattari’s work can be evoked in the crafting of a different tenor of well-established geographical methods. Put differently, we want to accentuate the impracticality of Guattari’s philosophy as its most generative vector for human geographic thought and technique.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)131-148
Number of pages18
JournalDialogues in Human Geography
Volume5
Issue number2
Early online date10 Jul 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2015

Keywords

  • cartography
  • existential territories
  • Guattari
  • impractical
  • metamodelisation

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