Guattari and Planetary Computerisation

Abstract

This essay frames the Anthropocene as ‘the age of planetary computerisation’. It claims that this term bestows Guattari's thinking with a critical ability to both grasp and challenge the present as an age in which the personal computer not only further empowers Integrated World Capitalism, but also appears as a geological force, that is, as one of the main drivers of the ecological devastation that now confronts humanity. At the same time the essay points to what it takes to be an overly optimistic perspective on the subversive potential of machines in Guattari's thinking. It claims that Guattari's machinic ecology can, in the light of the present geophysical destruction empowered by the personal computer, only be salvaged if read as an appeal for a cautious Prometheanism. This reading places Guattari's ecology more in conjunction with a Latourian way of thinking than with the new post-Marxist trend of Accelerationism.