Rhythmic Ecology: Mindscaping the Rhythms of Everyday Life

In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari argues for the importance of, and himself begins to offer, a philosophy and politics that responds to the imbricated entanglements between mental, social, and environmental ecologies (our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the non-human respectively). Guattari offers us problems which we are yet either to think or creatively confront. This thesis is primarily an affirmative response to this work, and is a centralisation in particular of the problematic he raises of our contemporary mental environment (and how it may be transformed). This response is conducted as an experiment in rhythm analysis, and argues that:

I. Contemporary capitalistic milieus are destructive forces in our mental ecology.

II. Our rhythms of everyday life are increasingly imbricated in supporting the ontological security of capitalistic milieus (I take the examples of our contemporary distraction, depression, and debt ecologies).

III. Our rhythms of everyday life (the quotidian interplay of time, desire, and habit) and the mental environment which we co-occupy are sites of revolutionary struggle.

IV. As sites of struggle, we can participate in the invention of new milieus at the level of everyday life (I offer the examples of new networks, forms of care, and modes of exchange.

V. Such participatory invention we can call revolutionary, with this latter term defined in the sense of a constitutively open process.

As such, this thesis concludes that a rhythm analysis of the mental environment offers (I) an immanent ontological account of the production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism; and (II) a critically-oriented and technically-engaged conceptualisation for the transformation of our mental environment.