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“All existing theoretical bodies of this type share the shortcoming of being closed to the possibility of creative proliferation.” Félix Guattari (2000:55)

Guattari wrote the above in 1989 when the network society was about to enter a decade of triumphant “creative proliferation.” Network technologies, network logics, the very concept of the network seemed to take over the planet. The network gave passage to new modes of warfare, new modes of Capital, new modes of being, new aesthetics. At the same time the network challenged not only “existing theoretical bodies” but bodies of all kinds - the human body, social bodies, institutional, political and disciplinary bodies. Many important contemporary questions are about remaining open to the creative proliferations of the network after its triumph, even if this is from a desire to approach the network critically. What “type” of “theoretical bodies” will adapt? One useful way to think the network through - and to explore the new pragmatics of the network - is through a reworking of the concept of ecology.

The network—both as an inescapable social event and as concept calls for a substantial reworking of the concept of ecology. Ecology is pluralized. It becomes not only a matter of the environment but of media ecologies, cognitive ecologies, ecologies of perception and affect. Moreover, these ecologies need to be considered singularly, in their interaction with other ecologies, and both at the same time. The pluralization of interactive ecologies necessarily has a political dimension, first recognized in Gregory Bateson’s general ecology of mind which included three “cybernetic or homeostatic systems: the individual human organism, the human society, and the larger ecosystem” (1972:446). In Félix Guattari’s work this becomes the three ecologies of the environment, the social, and human subjectivity. In this, Guattari’s politics is not focussed on changes in systems of references, the way the world is framed, or the way in which “the logic of discursive sets endeavours to completely delimit its objects” (2000:44). Rather, he is concerned with “the logic of intensities, or ecologic, [which] is concerned only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes.” For him, this is indeed politics of process, apposite to the network, in which the task is to “capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization.”

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