<<TRANSMATHOME

1.2 Spinozism

The question of language has led to the opening up of the political or socio-cartographic aspect of the field in question, and in the end has led back to the issue of thought.  It is now necessary to start again. That is, it is necessary to return to the original set of ideas in relation to thought, but to go in a different direction. One spiral movement has been completed, but it is now necessary to embark on a ‘circuit’ which passes elsewhere.

The  ideas at stake  are respectively the ideas of that which goes into effect in thought, and of individual and group bodies with their affects . The new direction concerns the first element - the field of that which is encountered and which goes into effect in the form of thought (where this going into effect is an aspect of the functioning of the thinking body, as well as of the functioning of that which has been encountered). What can be said here? It is clear that the terms must be in some sense substantive, and that epistemological concepts will not be helpful here. In fact, the field involved is in effect the field of the zones and aspects of the intensive cosmos, or of Substance, to use Spinoza’s term.[1]  The idea of the intensive cosmos is that of Substance in the Ethics, in that it involves the ideas of zones and aspects, which are effectively the same as modes and attributes. The field of that which  is encountered in thought is that of the zones and attributes of the intensive cosmos, where this field in fact includes  bodies as nexuses of thought, and where the extensive is just one aspect of a domain of connections, emergences, intensification and deintensifications. It is these ideas which are at stake when A Thousand Plateaus refers to ‘Cosmos philosophy’ (TP p.342). Deleuze and Guattari also use other names alongside the name ‘Cosmos’: they refer to the  ‘Mechanosphere’ and the ‘Rhizosphere’ (‘Mechanosphere’ stands on its own as the one-word sentence which concludes the book).

However, the crucial issue lies in the fact that the intensive cosmos is ‘transected’ by attributes or planes - as they are called in  A Thousand Plateaus -  and is simultaneously divided out as a field of zones, bodies, fields, assemblages etc. An example of a ‘plane’ of the Cosmos  is the plane of the affects pertaining to particular bodies. This is the plane of nexuses, and at the same time it is the plane of connections or becomings.   A further example is that of the plane of  expressions or ‘emanations’, where these can take the  form of situations involving animal warning cries, or of emissions of substances into the air (or transmissions of already modulated light from reflective surfaces), or of expression in the densely intricate forms of writing and speech.[2] This plane of expression will here be designated as the plane of language (this is helpful in the context of the thesis, but there is a danger of it being misleading). A third example is that of the attribute which  A Thousand Plateaus names ‘the plane of consistency’. This is the attribute of substance that consists of the field of actual and virtual modes or zones of engagement (immanent, multi-instantiated zones of inter-consistent functioning). It is not yet possible to give a closer account of this second attribute (this will take place in Chapter 3): what is important at this point is the introduction of the idea of planes or attributes of the Cosmos in connection with the question of thought.

The ‘mechanosphere’ is also disparate in the other sense of it being a field of assemblages, fields, and generative linkages (both generative in the sense of emergence, and generative in the sense of the production of regularity). The situation here in relation to the Cosmos is again in many ways the same as that with Spinoza’s substance. The ‘Mechanosphere’ is  also cross-cut or divided out into modes, although here the field of modes is perhaps more typologically differentiated than it is with Spinoza. These modes are the other aspect of what goes into effect in thought. The assemblages can be societies, groups, humans, animals, planets or galaxies. The zones can be populations, phylums, or domains such as landscapes, or distributions (say, a distribution of a metal in a particular body of rock). The generative linkages (or becomings) can be connections in chemical, ecological, geological, or social fields (etc.), or, for instance, between one individual human body and another.

 It can be seen therefore that the field of that which goes into effect in thought is a‘multiplicity’ in the first instance in two distinct ways. Firstly it is divided into aspects or planes, and secondly it is divided into zones (assemblages, fields, becomings). This distinction is an important one, because it is here that the idea of faculties finds its place in the account of thought. This is because the correlate of a plane of the Cosmos is the ‘plan’ or faculty of the group or individual body which is engaged with this plane in thought. The faculty must be understood affectively: it is a faculty-affect – an affect that is pervasive for the bodies involved in terms of its fields of engagement. To take another  instance, there is the attribute of  segmental and dominatory fields in the form of the ‘fixated’ or ‘gravitational’ aspects of fields, notably fields such as territories, solar systems, organisms, and fields of functionings involving tools. The correlate of this plane in the field of the human is the faculty-affect of reason. It is possible to use the term ‘faculty’ in relation to engagement with fields of zones (as with the faculty of engagement with metals on the part of the metallurgist). However engagement with the phylum of metals is not pervasive across fields of engagement in the same way as is the case with, for instance, engagement with the attribute of becomings. For this reason, the term ‘faculty-affect’ will not be used in relation to engagement with phyla of zones (modes), but only in relation to fields of zones where the field is an attribute.

The first departure from the initial set of ideas led to an extension of the idea of affects in connection with communication, and to the idea that there are regulatory or de-intensificatory affects pertaining in part to the socially emplaced  production of language, where these affects would be ‘passions’ in the language of Spinoza. This  second departure has lead to the other pole of the Spinozistic inheritance within A Thousand Plateaus. In particular it has led to the idea of planes or aspects of the Cosmos. This idea, as has been seen, is what takes over in A Thousand Plateaus from the idea of attributes of substance in the Ethics, in a related way to the way in which the idea of the (intensive ) Cosmos  takes over from that of substance. However, it can be seen that there is also a connection with the work of  Kant at this point, in that, as has been shown, the idea of these aspects  is strictly inseparable from the idea  of faculties, in that the densely or fluidly inter-consistent ‘plan’ functionings of group or individual bodies (faculties) make up one side of what is being picked out by the idea of the aspects. There is also another reason to invoke Kant here, namely that this approach could accurately be described as a ‘transcendental materialism’,[3] in contrast to Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’. It is materialist because it involves matters and forces, even though at the same time it is not empirical (delineations of the planes and zones of substance are not scientifically empirical in nature). It is transcendental in part therefore by dint of it being separable in this way from the empirical. However it is also the case that the line of thought is transcendental in a sense that opposes the term to transcendence, in that in each instance the oceanic field of exteriority of the Cosmos is primally progenitive or transcendental in relation to the thinking body, even though it is not transcendent, in that the body is immanent to the Cosmos, or is one of its elements, such that the body is one of the effecting forces of the Cosmos, and is not being effected from a metaphysical exterior. In turn, the final way in which it makes sense to employ this term stems from the fact that Kant’s idea of the transcendental is inseparable from the idea of faculties.

It is now necessary to give further substance to the idea of the zones or  modes (or forces) of the Cosmos, in order both to further the account of thought, and to prevent any potential misunderstanding involved in invoking the idea of transcendental materialism. The other way in which the Cosmos has been laid out as a multiplicity must now be addressed, in what will in fact be a further departure from the central field of ideas.

The main idea or figure here is once more the absolutely singular idea of the Cosmos. However, for exemplificatory and explanatory reasons, what must be placed alongside this is the idea or figure of the Earth - of planet Earth. The Earth is a crucial case of a zone or mode. It is an assemblage - a densely complex field of flows, fields, populations, becomings and component assemblages. This assemblage consists of the fields, bodies flows, and becomings of the atmosphere, the oceans, and of the rocks and minerals; and again, of the fields, bodies, flows and becomings of  chemicals, and of organic bodies and groups of bodies. However, it is necessary to point out that this idea of the Earth is transtemporal, which is to say that the idea includes the past of the planet, or its temporal line or ‘trajectory’. To talk about studying the Earth is at its limit to talk about engaging with this zone across its whole breadth, and along its whole temporal depth. The idea here is not an empirical one, and this is to say that it is the idea of the intensive and transtemporal field involved.

 However, from an explanatory point of view, the ideas of the zones of the planet, along with the overall zone that is the planet, provide an effective background for laying out the idea of the zones which go into effect in thought. It is a question of thinking in terms of the engagements that take place in relation to populations, landscapes, mineral formations, humans, other animals, the atmosphere; and the engagements that take place in relation to human territorial  assemblages, constrictive social formations, and free or fluid (‘nomadic’) multiplicities. Once more, it can be seen that what is at stake here is political, although it is political,  in a way which is keyed to the  intensive, the molecular, and the multiple, and to fields of active and reactive forces, rather than to the outlining of a program for the organising of a society (free human multiplicities precisely do not have a program - this is the crux of the idea of micropolitics). However, to return to the main line of thought, it is apparent that these zones are all forces which must be seen as going into effect upon or within group and individual human  bodies, both at the level of dense neurological transmutations  of the body, and at the expressive level of enactment and verbal/gestural communication. On one side there are the flows, fields and modulations of the planet, and on the other side there is the ‘entering into composition’ with these on the part of the field of flows, fields and modulations of the engaged bodies. This is the idea of thought as joy, in the sense of it being an entering into composition or  becoming (to use the main term employed in A Thousand Plateaus) , a comprehension understood affectively, rather than in terms of a supplementary dimension of interiority. A becoming animal,  a becoming molecular, a becoming music, a becoming with distributions of other humans, a becoming with individuals. The key here is that it is necessary to think of the body in intensive, fluidly molecular terms, in order to initiate the idea of the body entering into composition with other fields (where this entering into composition is both the going into effect of the zones involved, and the  emergent functioning of the body). In other words it is necessary to give the ideas of group and individual human bodies the kind of multiple and intensive depth that was just given to the idea of the planet on which these transmutatively incursive zones are encountered.

Why is it that emphasis is being given to the idea of planet Earth? The answer is simply that it is the most telling starting point for thinking about zones encountered in thought. Beyond the zones of the Earth there are the zones of the Cosmos, and passing through all of these there are the transecting  domains that have been termed planes or aspects, which pertain to the Cosmos, and therefore transect or ‘run through’ the Earth. To quote from A Thousand Plateaus, this is the passage  ‘to the deterritorialized, or deterritorializing, Cosmos’ (TP p.337).  The idea of thought as an entering into composition is conveyable most easily through the instance of the zones of the Cosmos, but as can be seen it is necessary to complete the account by showing that the situation is no different in relation to the widest or ‘absolute’ scale, where the delineation pertains to Substance, the Cosmos.

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