Attention, Equivalence and Existential Territories

This chapter draws on Deleuze’s distinction between practices of philosophy and science to articulate a philosophical concept of ecology. Because ecology is constitutively concerned with relations between unity and diversity, it is necessarily entangled with metaphysical questions. The chapter uses Félix Guattari’s framework of the three ecologies (psychic, social, and material) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “existential territories” to connect the metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the book’s first half to the idea of psychic ecology. Drawing on Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter explores how what Marx calls “equivalence” exceeds its initial operation as metric of exchange to also function in the production of predictable patterns of subjectivity. Equivalence as a value tacitly orders and constrains attention in manners that make behaviour predictable, making equivalence-prediction two modes of the same logic perpetuating capitalist subjectivity. This diagnosis opens the possibility of counter habits of attention in the service of contributing to the active creation of different futures.