ABSTRACT
Pierre-Felix Guattari remains something of an enigma. Contrary to his mischievous caricaturing as Mister Anti, Guattari was no grumpy antagonist of disciplinary lines in geography and in the wider social sciences. Guattari clearly affords considerable conceptual verve with which to counter the microfascist tendencies that progressively breach surficial intellectual labour, not least in the semiotic subjugation of theory in favour of a hackneyed empiricism in the social sciences. Guattari’s work, as such, evokes a certain pragmatism that can be held in creative tension with the generative impracticality of his philosophy. ‘Liberation’, as a term, as a vocation, has its detractors. Guattari was, himself, all too wary of the false promise of a liberation towing an entourage of heroic and all-too-eager macropolitical tropes in its wake. Liberation, moreover, is diagrammatic; it multiplies functioning, tentatively sketching toward a futurity – a virtuality – without arriving there completely.
