Against the Cynicism of Common Sense: Guattari and the Micropolitics of Expression

Abstract

In this chapter I want to highlight how the work of Félix Guattari offers a generative means for thinking speculatively insofar as it challenges us to think outside of the comfortable and predictable style of thinking that we might here term ‘common sense’. For Guattari, the task that thinking must confront is to break with the prevailing modes of “consensus”, that is, “the infantile ‘reassurance’ distilled by dominant subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995: 117). As such, what Guattari’s work suggests is that this challenge to think differently is an eminently ethico-political one. It must necessarily involve a break from the regime of commonly held beliefs that serve to homogenise and standardise, to shore up extant social formations and practices. In fact, as Gerlach and Jellis (2015) have argued, the drama of his work is accentuated in an era in which thought itself is increasingly captured by capitalist semiotisation. What critical thinking must face up to today is a contemporary spirit of cynicism in which thought itself becomes reduced to its market value, overdetermined according to logics of applicability and practicality aligned with the status quo. What I refer to here, in other words, is what Marcus Doel (2009: 1054) calls the ascendency of a form of “miserly thinking” that “enjoins us to conserve, constrain, and sustain”, or what Rosi Braidotti (2019: 471) calls a “retreat into the … protocol of commonsensical reasoning” that is nothing more than “the unfolding of established rules of thought”—damning summations of a zeitgeist characterised by a disempowering cynicism, by sad passions, affective disinvestments, that leave thought tethered to ‘what is’. In this context the very sense of the term ‘speculation’ is a site of contestation: Does speculation mean experimenting in thought towards the production of different possible futures (Savransky et al., 2017)? Or does it mean a more cynical exercise in calculation, prediction, even ‘risk-management’?