Guattari: Impractical philosophy

Journal article

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.

Authors: Gerlach, J; Jellis, T

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Journal: Dialogues in Human Geography
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 131-148
• Publication date: 2015-07-10
• DOI: 10.1177/2043820615587787
• EISSN: 2043-8214
• ISSN: 2043-8206
• Language: English
• Keywords: cartography; Guattari; existential territories; metamodelisation; impractical