GANDHI, GUATTARI AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

information, to engender Universes of reference and existential territories where singularity and finitude are taken into consideration by the multivalent logic of mental ecologies and by the group eros principle of social ecology; to dare to confront the vertiginous cosmos so as to make it


Introduction
We are living in the planetary age of the Anthropocene, otherwise known as the age of Man. The Anthropocene signifies that humans have become a geological force. The Anthropocene is characterized by a profound climatic transformation of our planet, leading us to our extinction. This exceptional planetary-scale crisis compels us to question -who is the Anthropos of the Anthropocene? The Anthropos of the Anthropocene is not the entire humanity but a small subset of humans located mainly in the West. 1 Contemporary theorists suggest that the Anthropocene is a To speak of the Anthropocene is to speak of how colonialism's technomilitary subjugation of indigenous people inscribes racism into global environmental change. The Anthropocene is inextricably a racial category as it bears the geological traces of techno-military subjugation of indigenous people by colonial enterprises. The Anthropocene is not merely an object of scientific research. The technoracist arrogance of the Anthropocene needs to be contested through the Gandhian assertion of swaraj, which bears immense political significance in democratizing the anthropocenic technosphere. Gandhian ecophilosophy is based on existential interconnectivity which resists Western humanism's technocratic narrative of progress. Similarly, the Guattarian ecosophy is based on a relational ontology of complex co-implication that resists modernity's biopolitical regimes. Gandhi's striving for swaraj, which means self-governance of people's social, economic and environmental affairs, manifests transversally in the three interactive ecologies of self, society, and nature.

The Anthropocene: A Rupture in the Modern Imaginary
The emergence of the Anthropocene constitutes a radical rupture in the modern imaginary as it calls for the modes of thinking that do not remain confined within the modern worldview. 7 As Dipesh Chakrabarty points out: Yet climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an 'us' pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally call it a "negative universal history. 8 To understand both the continuity of colonial modernity 9 and its discontinuity requires intellectual engagement with various struggles for social justice that questioned political claims of modernity. The concept of colonial modernity delineates that the modernity achieved in the West was achieved through material conditions of colonialism and continues to achieve through its new face of neoliberal globalization.
Colonial modernity is not simply a historical phenomenon but a worldview embodied cognitively. Therefore, self-reflection is necessary to arrive at a decolonized worldview. This self-criticality would help us recognize the deep embeddedness of colonial modernity within our social and political practices in the Indian subcontinent. Through the lens of self-criticality, we can see the privileges and pathologies of late modern capitalism and its debilitating exploitation of mass people in the Global South. It is necessary to reflect on why the mass people of the subcontinent who followed the ethical praxis of decolonization initiated by Gandhi with no privilege and extraordinary perseverance. 8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009). "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35(2), 222. 9 Mishra, Pankaj (2004). An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. Macmillan.
To recover from modernist cognitive prejudices, we need to engage with Gandhi's anti-colonial ideas. The late modernity's patriarchal, racist and destructive capitalism is a great barrier to such intellectual endeavors.
The colonial modernity historically connects us to the political experiments of Gandhi. We need to revisit Gandhi's political experiments if we want to locate ourselves ontologically -along with all our historical interests -in the new epoch of global warming. Because the advent of the Anthropocene disrupts all of the modernist channels of human discourse, undermining their categories and overturning their assumptions. Gandhian ecophilosophy opens the avenue for us to understand this unprecedented condition in which we find ourselves posing historical, political and ethical questions that overflow our modernist assumptions and disciplinary categories.

The Task of Decolonization in the Anthropocene
Gandhi revivified indigenous spiritual tradition by popularizing concepts like ahimsa (non-violence), swaraj (self-rule), and satyagraha (truthforce) to counter Western modernity. In the face of climate catastrophe, we may find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a mirror image of those Indians who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were trapped between the claims of the universalities of modernity and the particularities of traditional forms. Inspired by Gandhi, many of them tried to counter the universal claims of modernity with the particularities of traditional culture, hoping to move beyond modernity with the integrity of their vision. In the Anthropocene, those indigenous voices are making themselves heard after generations of oppression enacted by colonialism. Therefore, Gandhian ideas would help us identify western modernity's prejudices, blind spots, and cognitive arrogance. With the advent of the Anthropocene, we must again question the universal claims of colonial modernity, which is the cause of the Anthropocene. Through this encounter with colonial modernity, we can refashion ourselves by invoking diverse identities of culture, race, gender, nationality and ethnicity. In the face of global warming, we need to envision new forms of global agency and universal politics to counter the global aggression of late modern capitalism.
Through our struggle against late modern capitalism, we can easily relate ourselves with the Indians who confronted modernity in its colonial guises.
Timothy Morton 10 uses the term late modern to signify the persistence of the colonial-modern project. It is an undeniable fact that the condition of the Global South is deeply unjust-still colonial. As western modernity accentuated the Anthropocene, this connection marks the definitive end of the legitimacy of the history of colonial modernity. Therefore, engaging with anticolonial ideas in the Anthropocene is a task of radical ecological imagination. This project of radical ecological imagination can be enacted by engaging with the emancipatory ideas of anticolonial thinkers like Gandhi. Dipesh Chakrabarty's idea of provincializing Europe seeks to decenter European thought from the practice of history focusing on the study of South Asia. 11 Similarly, the Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene needs to be challenged through the political invocation of swaraj. Bruno Latour also points out the relevance of nonmodern ideas to challenge the hegemony of modernity: The antimoderns, like the postmoderns, have accepted their adversaries' playing field. Another field -much broader, much less polemical -has opened up before us: the field of nonmodern worlds. It is the Middle Kingdom, as vast as China and as little known. 12

Swaraj: Towards a Radical Ecological Imagination
Swaraj provides an alternative framework for envisioning society beyond the temporal confines of the Anthropocene. The concept has emerged from the Gandhian restoration of Indian tradition, with significant global resonance. The term swaraj, which means self-rule, emerges from ancient Indian practices of mass decision-making in local assemblies. Though the concept achieved popularity during India's anticolonial struggle against the British Empire, it does not merely mean "national independence." Gandhi suggests that swaraj encompasses individual as well as community autonomy and freedom, integrally coupled with the ethics of responsibility towards others (Gandhi, 1997). 13 It means self-care, self-restraint, and ethically just behaviour guided by spiritual self-rule. While advocating political swaraj as Home Rule in India, Gandhi widened the meaning of the term by referring to its classical usage in the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi's ultimate purpose was to develop a philosophy of nonviolent resistance to western modernity.
Gandhi mainly defined the politics of swaraj in social, ethical, and spiritual terms, which maintained uneasy coexistence with political nationalism. 14 The reason behind such a unique conceptualization of swaraj is what Ashis Nandy calls "psychopathology of colonialism". 15 Nandy also elaborates on Gandhi's focus on the ethical praxis of psychological decolonization. The inner motive of all actions in the individual's self-realization was the key to Gandhi's unique understanding of swaraj: It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. Here there is no idea of sitting still. The Swaraj that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realized it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But such swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself. One drowning man will never save another. Slaves ourselves, it would be a mere pretension to think of freeing others. 16 Gandhi's swaraj was a response to the psychic violence of colonialism perpetuated by a culture of adulthood, historicism, objectivism, and hyper-masculinity.

Guattari's Ecosophical Challenge to the Anthropocenic Imaginary
Nowadays, there is a scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. 17 But even during the 1980s, it was clear to Guattari that we had entered an era of ecological crisis because of the rapid expansion of the 14 Woodcock, George (1971). Mohandas Gandhi. New York: Penguin Books. 15 Nandy, Ashis (2009). The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: OUP, 85. 16 Gandhi,Hind Swaraj and Other Writings,73. 17 Cook, John, et al. (2016). "Consensus on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-caused Global Warming." Environmental Research Letters 11 (4) 1992. In his view, ecosophy is an empowering framework contrary to the capitalist way of life . 19 Guattari's ecosophy integrated the three ecologies Gregory Bateson had already mentioned - 18 Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, Eugene F. (2000). "The Anthropocene." Global Change Newsletter, IGBP 41, 17-18. Retrieved from: http://www.igbp.net /download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf. 19  . Qu'est-ce que l'écosophie? (Nadaud, Stephane, ed). Paris: Lignes & IMEC. environmental, social, and mental ecologies. 20 Bateson, Gregory (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Epistemology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 21 Gare, Arran (2014). "Deep Ecology, the Radical Enlightenment, and Ecological Civilization." The Trumpeter 30 (2), 184-205. 22 Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari explicate the ethical dimension of being human in their theory of more-than-human assemblages, which are open to various forms of micropolitics. 25 Deleuze and Guattari don't denounce 23 Levesque, Simon (2016). "Two Versions of Ecosophy: Arne Naess, Félix Guattari, and their Connection with Semiotics." Sign Systems Study, 44 (4), 512. 24 Roffe, Jon;Stark, Hannah (2015). "Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human." In Roffe, Jon and Stark, Hannah (Eds.). Deleuze and the Non/Human. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-16. 25 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. anthropocentrism simply to indulge in posthuman eclecticism, which is not stable enough for any political or epistemic commitment. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari provide an ontology that explicates the singular dependency of the human species on many layers of material flows that shape the world. They also explain how the human-nonhuman symbiotic relation is being radically altered by capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari's antihumanism is significantly different from recent posthumanist developments like actor-network theory which tends to substitute the critical legacies of humanism with political indifference.
They don't think that the human species is a parasite on the planet.

Instead, they invoke philosophy's ethical question that propounds that
life is collective and political. Guattari derives from Deleuze's work to articulate his ecosophy, which helps us to decolonize the Anthropocene.

Guattari's Vision of Radical Ecological Politics
Guattari's politics explicitly rearticulates communism by focusing on subjectivity and creativity after the collapse of left politics. 26   Anthropocene. It also helps us understand how the Anthropocene 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 33 Lambert, Gregg (2005). "What the Earth Thinks." In Buchanan, Ian; Lambert, Gregg (Eds.). . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 220. 34 Vince, Gaia (2014). Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. London: Chatto & Windus,192. enables both physical and metaphysical desertification in which the relationship between life and nonlife becomes precarious.

Ecosophy and Guattari's Idea of Emancipation
Guattari argues that Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), the next stage of classical capitalism, has changed its focus from exclusively producing goods to producing subjectivities through material and immaterial commodities. In The Three Ecologies, Guattari writes: Post-industrial capitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and -in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc.subjectivity. 35 Guattari further explains: "Integrated World Capitalism pretends to integrate, program, and conduct every inhabitant of the planet. It seeks to direct even their unconscious fantasies via the mass media. A real madness is driving it to promote the homogenization of subjectivity". 36 From Guattari's perspective, ecosophy is a philosophical endeavour to emancipate human relationships both within our own species and within a larger environment. For Guattari, ecosophy is constituted by three domains: environmental, social, and mental. Emancipation is possible by taking into account these three domains of ecological praxis. Thus, Guattari articulates the following goal for ecosophy: It is to be hoped that the development of the three types of ecological praxis outlined here [environmental, social, and mental] will lead to a reframing and a recomposition of the goals of the emancipatory struggles. And let us hope that, in the context of the new "deal" of the relation between capital and human activity, ecologists, feminists, antiracists, etc., will make it an immediate major objective to target the modes of production of subjectivity, that is, of knowledge, culture, sensibility and sociability that come under an incorporeal value system at the root of the new productive assemblages. 37 "Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantilizing consensus", Guattari contends, "it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus and the singular production of existence." 38 New forms of valorization are necessary to resist the homogenesis of capitalistic values that create obstacles to emancipation.
Resingularization follows a process that Guattari   Gandhi and Guattari's political praxis also pave the avenue for situated knowledge 44 produced by collaborating agents and also intra-and inter- 43 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 67. 44 Haraway, Donna (1988). "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575-599.
species intra-action 45 and becoming-with. 46 In the context of the Anthropocene, this political praxis would "redefine the political task par excellence" 47 and lead us beyond the narrow confines of the purely human into an uncanny terrain of new alliances and new possibilities. It is only through such a political praxis -understanding our victimhood in alliance with other species -that we can become capable of collective action and meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.