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3.10 Conclusions: Thought and Intensive Cartography

At one level, what has been shown in the course of this thesis is that the issue of thought cannot be limited to a field determined by the ideas of language, concepts and reason. Far from this, it is now apparent  that concepts pertain to the field of language, and that both language and reason are only two of a whole group of different  modes of thought that make up the major faculties of the human. This is the ‘critical’ conclusion of the thesis in relation to the question of thought insofar as this question is posed in terms of concepts. However, at a deeper level what has been set out is a detailed account of four main faculty-affects obtaining in the field of the human, together with the attributes of the Cosmos from which they are inseparable: trans-prehension,  micro-corporeality, reason, and language.  Beyond this, one  further attribute (and faculty-affect) has been delineated: the attribute of meshed, and counterposed haecceities which A Thousand Plateaus determines as ‘the plane of consistency’. The initial statement of this overall account  has therefore been explained and substantiated, in the course of the primary movement of the thesis – a process of intensive cartography, which in its different aspects has been a cosmography, a psychography, and a sociography.

All of the faculty-affects analysed have been shown to have a stratificatory ‘other side’. The process of laying bare these modes of stratification has been the most important ‘critical’ aspect of the thesis – in particular this refers to the critique of language, the critique of faciality, and the critique of reason. The term ‘critique’ here refers to the exposing of entrapped and constrictive modes of engagement or thought, and is a cartographic process of ‘warning off’ or ‘alerting to danger’ which primarily concerns group and individual bodies (and which only involves concepts or ‘categories’ in relation to one domain).

At the level of explication of the ideas of A Thousand Plateaus the process of setting out an account of schizoanalysis (pragmatics, micropolitics etc) has reached its conclusion. Schizoanalysis is the intensive cartography that has been explained and exemplified in the course of the thesis.  It is an overall formation of engagement which involves working fluidly along the lines of the  cosmos or of  ‘eternity’, rather than being fixated on a particular zone or group of zones. And inseparably it is an overall formation of engagement that has the form of a micropolitics of lines of flight from stratification – a micropolitics of  intensifications or free becomings.

 In a way what has taken place in this thesis is that thought has been shown to be inseperable from the field of perception and remembered/imagined perception (thought is affect, and is therefore inseperable from the field of all forms of engagement on the part of all kinds of bodies). Or to put this another way, thought has been shown as what it is: a multiple and immeasurably deeper form of perception. The human body is an immensely vast world of modulatory inter-relations and intensifications, and these involve  processes of connection which on one level are straightforwardly  forms of entering into composition  with engaged zones,  and processes which are enterings into composition, but where the process is primarily a going into heightened effect of what had already been taken up or incorporated as part of the modulatory field. This account relates to both the senses and the faculty-affects. Beyond and bound up with the senses is the faculty-affect of morphography (as has been seen, this is engagement with shapes and distributions), and alongside this are the faculty-affects of trans-prehension, language, reason,  and micro-corporeality. To see the lines of  deterritorialization of a body or of an assemblage is to do something which can rightly be picked out by the term ‘to see’, even though the sight involved is at a deeper level than engagement directly connected with the eyes. Abstraction is a term for a real hyper-perceptual engagement. To grasp stratification in the field of the human, or the nature of the relational field of the solar system – these  are not at the relevant level essentially different from suddenly seeing an animal in front of you that you have never seen before. The field of exteriority of the abstract is therefore as real as that of the concrete (it just runs deeper and wider): a body can be capable of apprehending objects, but it can also be capable of apprehending modes and attributes. A ‘conclusion’ of the thesis is therefore that thought deeper than that of the senses is hyper-perception, and that  confusion and dislocation of thought deeper  than than that of the senses is hyper-perceptual confusion and dislocation.

Perhaps the most important aspects of the thesis are that thought has been differentiated, that the process of the (intensive cartographic) differentiation involved has been displayed, and that this has been placed in the context of an analysis of ‘micropolitics’. Thought is multiple, and in the course of the thesis four of its  forms have been delineated in depth. The cartography involved is of modes of real connection (there is a fundamental exteriority to thought, and it pertains in the strongest sense to bodies) and as such it is simultaneously a cartography of faculty-affects and of attributes of Substance. The map at this level - and at the other levels, which are strictly inseperable - is for journeys in intensity, which is it to say that it is for intensifications of freedom  on the part of  group and individual human bodies.

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