Digital Ecology - Ecological Interfaces in Félix Guattari's Ecosophy
Abstract
Félix Guattari’s ecosophy advances an ecologized vision of the world tied to Guattari’s machinic and schizoanalytic project. Ecosophy rejects both mythos and logos and instead develops its own an eco-logos linked to Guattari’s tripartite ecological registers (environmental-machinic, social, psychic). This thesis applies ecosophy to contemporary digital technics to understand digital media’s impact on processes of subjectification. Guattari’s radically heterogenous, machinic ecological vision provides an effective framework in which digital media can be articulated as environmentally oriented artefacts machinically connected to other ecological systems. Following Heidegger’s call in The Question Concerning Technology to rethink the meaning of technê, this thesis will similarly argue that digital technology demands new, ecologically oriented, considerations regarding the purpose and meaning of the technical. Rather than thinking of technology anthropologically-instrumentally as ‘means’ taken up by human agents in the process of production, digital media instead require a shift towards ecosophic notions situated on the mechanosphere.