<<TRANSMATHOME

INTRODUCTION

1.
This thesis is about thought, bodies, and strategies of engagement with the world on the part of groups and individuals. At one level it can be described as an example of a kind of  cartography (the nature of this cartography is about to be explained). At another level it can be described as a ‘micropolitics’.

Inextricably (passing from one side of the colon in the title to the other),  this thesis is also about a very difficult and remarkable book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix  Guattari – namely, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus: (the term ‘micropolitics’ is being taken from this book).[1]

The thesis is written alongside this other work, which is to say that is not an interpretation of the book in a conventional sense of the term. Instead, to return to the initial point, it is an account of thought in the worlds and milieus of the human (with particular reference to human group phenomena and to certain fiels of zones recurrently engaged by the human), where this account is very closely connected to the engagement with this area that is found in A Thousand Plateaus. This  means that the thesis does in fact also involve an account of a whole ecology  of ideas in Deleuze and Guattari’s book: the ideas, for instance, - to just name the ideas for the time being - of ‘abstract machines’, of‘the plane of consistency’, of ‘becomings’, of ‘deterritorialization’, ‘micropolitics’, and of ‘stratification’. However, the explication of these ideas is not the main purpose of the thesis: on the contrary, the account of the ideas (or the explicit and implicit deployment of the concepts)  is an aspect of an engagement with thought and the socio-human which only gives an account of the ideas in a process of applying, extending and augmenting them. The fact that the thesis sets out to advance  these ideas  is strictly inseparable from the fact that the thesis is giving an account of them. This is interpretation in the immanent sense, rather than in the delusory, scholarly sense, which relates to an over-coding  that appears to simplify, while in fact being a corrosion and obfuscation of the lines of engagement at stake in whatever writing is involved . There is no immanent interpretation without the re-animating of the lines of engagement (or thought) in question, and to do this is to initiate a new, singular overall zone of engagement, which will transform the field of ideas at the same time as providing an account of them. 

The central (non-explicative) concerns of  the thesis revolve at one level around an account of four main elements of the engagement or thought of the living, human  body, where this body is to be understood as either an individual body or a ‘group body’ (after this, the term used will be ‘group or indididual body’). The nature of these four elements will be set out in the course of the thesis. What can be stated at this stage is that these  are engagement with nodes of transmutative or intensive connections; engagement with micro-corporeality; engagement with expressive/transmissional modulations of fields (language); and engagement with  segmented, and dominatory spaces (reason). The idea of a mode of engagement is inseparable from the idea of engaged  attributes or ‘planes’ of the  world (the attribute  in the case of engagement with segmented, dominatory spaces will be shown to be what A Thousand Plateaus refers to as the ‘plane of organisation’). This leads to the fact that the central concerns of the thesis will inseparably revolve around an account of ‘aspects’ or attributes of the intensive cosmos (World of forces and becomings), with which human bodies are engaged, and of which they are elements. An ‘attribute’ is what A Thousand Plateaus determines as a ‘plane’. It will therefore be apparent that the description of the fields of zones engaged with by the different modes of engagement was in fact simultaneously an account of a group of attributes.

The main concerns of the thesis will also inextricably be centred on an account of subtle, constrictive ‘blocked forms’of the modes of engagement that have just been enumerated. These are types – at the level of the human -  of what A Thousand Plateaus calls  ‘stratification’, and consist of forms of adaptive engagement which intrinsically involve a de-intensification , or ‘becoming-less-active’ of the group or individual bodies involved. Taken in themselves, cases of ‘error’ are in the deepest sense trivial in comparison to the functioning of forms of stratification pertaining to modes of engagement. A mode of stratification is a field of diminution or de-intensification of a field of thought or engagement on the part of a body. The question of the suppression of thought (with the attendant production of errors involved in this) must be seen as taking precedence over the question of ‘going astray’ in practices of manipulation or of the production of utterances. The ‘negative’ here concerns the intricate threads and thresholds of lines of cooling or of becoming-less-active, and only secondarily concerns two other zones: the zone of processes of taking damaging or ineffectual paths in manipulations, movements and utterances, (‘erring’ or ‘error’), and the zone of modes of warning in relation to such moments and processes  of going astray.

There are several other points that need to be made concerning sources and interpretations or connections. For one thing it will perhaps be becoming evident that there is another ‘voice’ at work in this writing – that of Spinoza, and in particular, that of the Spinoza of the the Ethics. The idea of ‘attributes’ and of an intensive Cosmos (which Spinoza names Substance, and God-or-Nature) are both emerging here from an engagement with the Ethics (even though they are both being used in somewhat transformed ways), and this is also true of the ideas of intensification and de-intensification, or (to use terms that will become very important) of intensificatory affects, and affects in the form of passions. All of these ideas will be central to the thesis, along with a further idea: that of bodies on one level consisting of fields of relations of speed and slowness - and of movement and rest - between their elements. The presence of these connections is to be expected given that these ideas are also central to A Thousand Plateaus, but the nature of the account of Spinoza (or of the engagement with Spinoza) is not precisely the same as that found in Deleuze and Guattari’s book, although this is in part to be understood as a question of emphasis. The connections to the astonishing event which the name Spinoza demarcates can only be sketched in this way. What can be said at this stage is that Spinoza is the major connection for the thesis alongside Deleuze and Guattari, but that there are also several other ‘voices’ that are substantially in effect within it, among them those of Nietzsche, Kant, William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf.      

The most prominent element of explanation of A Thousand Plateaus will be an account of what is meant by a process of engagement which Deleuze and Guattari name ‘pragmatics’, but which they also very explicitly give the following chain of names: ‘micropolitics’; ‘schizoanalysis’; ‘nomadology’;  ‘the science of multiplicities’; ‘rhizomatics’; ‘stratoanalysis’. What could bring these terms together? For instance, what brings together the terms  ‘micropolitics’ and ‘schizoanalysis’? 

This last question allows a return to  the issue of what is at stake overall in the thesis  (and going back in this direction will also answer the question). The  account of modes of engagement, attributes and forms of stratification has just been set out, and this was prefaced by the fact that the thesis is an account of thought in the worlds and milieus of the human. But the problem of setting out what is ‘at stake’ in the thesis can  be addressed by figuring the project in terms of it responding to the following questions. ‘What is it to be a body that enters into groups, and is part of the emergence of groups?’. ‘What is it to be a body that dreams?’. What is it to be a body that consists of emotions or affects, or of micro-corporeal fields of motions? (this question cannot help but be a limited  answer and a critique all at once). ‘What is it to be nomadically outside the inter-meshed and transecting assemblages of power of the planet?’. Most widely – ‘What is it to be a body which has emergences of thought or engagement?’, and ‘what is it to be an immanently connected body within the worlds of an intensive cosmos?’. It will be seen firstly that these questions are not the questions of the conventionist institutional worlds of the human domain (what are here being called ‘assemblages of power’, following A Thousand Plateaus). It will also be seen that they are questions which respond directly to the fact that human group and individual bodies are ‘fluid bodies’ consisting of  mutative fields of affects, and of clusters or ‘nexuses’ of connections with the world. The ideas of ‘schizoanalysis’ and of ‘micropolitics’ converge at precisely this point.   

The reason for two of the terms in question being made equivalent has been demonstrated, in the process of setting out the wider issues and problems. The other point that  can be made at this stage is that the idea of schizoanalysis (or micropolitics etc.) is also the idea of intensive cartography, where the term ‘intensive’ relates to the Cosmos of forces, creations, intensifications, and de-intensifications of which the extensive world of topographies is only one aspect.

2.
It is valuable at this stage to provide a literal  ‘overview’ of  A Thousand Plateaus. The book consists of 15 sections, which are named ‘plateaus’, in part because while in some ways they can be seen as freestanding pieces, they in other crucial ways are to be seen as parts of one terrain (a better account of the term ‘plateau – which has a wider sense – will be given later on). Each one is given a name, including the introduction and the conclusion, and the 13 sections in between are also given a date which names the emergence, event or period, with which the section is most closely engaged. The first three parts of the contents section can be quoted to give a sense of the way in which the book works:

1.  Introduction: Rhizome

Root, radicle and rhizome – Issues concerning books – the One and the Multiple – Tree and rhizome – The geographical directions, Orient, Occident and America – The misdeeds of the tree – What is a plateau?

2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?

Neurosis and psychosis – For a theory of multiplicities – Packs – The unconscious and the molecular

3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

Strata – Double articulation (segmentarity) – What constitutes the unity of a stratum – Milieus – The diversity within a stratum: forms and substances, epistrata and parastrata – Content and expression – The diversity among strata – The molar and the molecular – Abstract machine and assemblage: their comparative states – Metastrata

The full list of names is as follows:

1. Introduction: Rhizome
2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?
3.10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)
4. November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics
5. 587 B.C. – A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs
6. November 28, 1947: How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?
7. Year Zero: Faciality
8. 1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’
9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity
10. 1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming Imperceptible..
11. 1837: Of the Refrain
12. 1227:  Treatise on Nomadology: - The War Machine
13. 7000 B.C. Apparatus of Capture
14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated
15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines    

It is acutely difficult to give any sort of summary of A Thousand Plateaus. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in the introduction it is not linear or arborescent, but is ‘rhizomatic’ . However, if the sections are read as they stand, one impressionistic overview  of the book is the following. In the course of the first five sections there is  a marked tendency for the book to engage with issues concerning thought in relation to language, with the fundamental exception being the third plateau, ‘The Geology of Morals’ (for obvious reasons, some of the section titles will have to be given in shortened forms) which engages with the geo-anthropological field of planet Earth, in setting out the ideas of stratification, and of free or intensificatory forms of engagement or emergence. After this the emphasis shifts in the direction of engagement with bodies as fluid fields of connections, which at the limit are fields of connections with the attributes of  the   ‘intensive cosmos’, an emphasis which extends to the tenth plateau,  ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’, at which point the emphasis dissolves into an analysis of forms and aspects of engagement (or becoming, or thought) which is overwhelmingly focussed on the cosmos, rather than on  the body. Beyond this the tendency is for the zones engaged in ‘The Geology of Morals’ to return, but in a new way: the field of analysis of the final sections tends to be ‘fanned out’ across the surface of the planet, where in particular this involves a delineation of specific formations of engagement at the level of the human social ‘landscape’.

Elements from  A Thousand Plateaus will be drawn upon at the points in the thesis where it is valuable to bring them into effect, but even when a process of explication is being initiated there will not be any tendency for the passages involved to come from the start of the book - or even from the start of a chapter – due precisely to the fact that the book is not linear in form, ether as a whole, or in its parts. In relation to the question of thought, the initial ‘contact’ with the book involves the incorporation of elements from plateau 12 (Treatise on Nomadology). Later in the first chapter of the thesis the beginning of the explicit process of explaining the idea of pragmatics (and therefore of schizoanalysis et al)  has recourse to the end of the fourth section , which delineates aspects of this mode, strategy or ‘modus operandi’. If there is any pattern to the process of the ‘take-up’ of elements from A Thousand Plateaus it is a tendency for contacts with the book to concentrate increasingly on the tenth chapter – ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’. One of the reasons for this is that the chapter contains  sections concerning Spinoza in relation to the problem of thought.

 A Thousand Plateaus is consistent,  across its different sections, in its use of an extremely  complex domain of ideas. It is also the case that in many ways it is very easy to ‘connect with’, for an open-minded reader, in that it is always in engagement with extraordinary and clearly important areas, and sets  out many points in ways that are aphoristically lucid. However, neither one of these facts means that it is easy to give an account of the book, or of any part of it. In fact, the difficulties here are so great that it is almost impossible to quote from a section involving major recurring themes without there being terms in the passage which can only be explicated at a later point, rather than immediately. A Thousand Plateaus is the expression in writing of a very dense,  complex field of engagement, and this entails that it has a very high density of singular and anomalous terms and constructions. However, there is not the problem here that there might seem to be, given that the reader must be acknowledged as able make a degree of sense out of elements that are not being immediately explained in detail, and given that important cases where this has happened will be followed up by an explanation at the right point. This is a non-linearity which is directly connected to the non-linearity of A Thousand Plateaus. A question of spiralling returns, where what was virtual (or only minimally in effect) is later actualised, so that the earlier engagement comes to be retrospectively transformed.

A further point about sources is that A Thousand Plateaus is a book which has important ties to other books written together by its two authors, and to books produced by the authors writing on their own. The most important of these is the companion volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, which was co-written eight years earlier (1972). This book will be drawn upon regularly in the thesis, as will two other books written by Deleuze on his own. One of these – Difference and Repetition - was written in the years just before Anti-Oedipus. The other, ‘Essays Critical and Clinical’, is a collection of pieces and extracts written by Deleuze across a period of thirty years.

The overwhelming emphasis, however, will be on  A Thousand Plateaus. In fact given that the thesis is not in any ordinary sense an interpretation of this work, this is capable of giving an odd double impression.  When the thesis is being understood as an interpretation it will seem as if it is too distant from  A Thousand Plateaus, but when it is being understood as an independent work, it will seem as if it is too close. The fact that this is not an interpretative work has already been explained. On the other side of the question, the extent of the ‘border’ between this work and A Thousand Plateaus stems both from the importance of this work in relation to the issues which are at stake, and from the fact that the book has a very complex and meshed field of anomalous concepts, which needs to be drawn upon in detail.

3.
So, the issues are those of thought, bodies and intensive cartography, and the most prominent textual point in the landscape of these questions is A Thousand Plateaus. More than anything else, what is at stake is the issue of thought, which, as has been seen, breaks apart into the twin issues of the forms of engagement of bodies and the attributes of the intensive Cosmos.

But what is thought? Or, to pose the question in a better way: what is the initial account of thought, from which the thesis will start?  In a sense the answer has already been given, by setting out the idea of thought as a field of forms of engagement. However, this idea needs to be taken over a threshold in relation to the nature of the forms of engagement. The initial –and initiating – account for this thesis is that thought is a field of processes of the ‘going into effect’ of zones in relation to group and individual bodies. To state this another way, thought is a field of processes of entering into composition between one body or zone and another body or zone. It can be seen that this is an account that locates thought at the level of the fields of micro-corporeality of bodies, and which understands it in terms of transmutations or emergences of these fields. This is to be expected, given that anything else would locate thought in some dimension beyond or above the body. Secondly, the account concerns connections pertaining to bodies, so that the body comes into focus as  a nexus of engagements, where these engagements can for instance involve  delays before a previously  encountered zone goes into effect, but where it is always a question of processes of ‘going into effect’ and of ‘entering into composition’. With the first point  the idea of ‘subjects’ drops away,  by virtue of the idea of the emergences of micro-corporeal fields; with the second point the idea of ‘subjects and their objects’ drops away by virtue of the idea of bodies as  nexuses of ‘becomings’, or of intensificatory connections.

A further question which could be asked is: what is being critiqued here? Given that Kant is being claimed as one of the ‘voices’ of this thesis, this is an important question. What pathways of engagement are being given warnings in this writing? At a first level, what will be shown in the course of the thesis is that the domain of thought is in no way delimited by reason or by engagement with concepts, but that on the contrary, reason is the name of just one form of engagement, and engagement with concepts is just one aspect of another form of engagement (language). In other words, there is infinitely more to thought than reason and language. However, on a wider and  more  important level, the critique will be in relation to the blocked and de-intensificatory  modes of the four forms of engagement which will be analysed in detail. What is in question here are modes which can be initially  understood in terms of   ‘transcendental illusions’ (as with the idea of ‘subjects’), but which are better understood as fixations within particular domains or ‘bandwidths’  of engagement.

It can be seen that the critical aspect of the thesis is an aspect of the intensive cartography involved (there are commonly taken ‘paths of engagement’ that are de-intensificatory). And it is the idea of intensive cartography that must be emphasised  in concluding the introduction. Intensive cartography = pragmatics = schizoanalysis = micropolitics. At stake are the questions of thought, bodies and  attributes, which is to say that what is at stake is the movement across thresholds  of the engagements of group and individual bodies. However, the summing up of the issues or dynamisms of the thesis can perhaps be done best by repeating the questions from earlier - ‘What is it to be a body that enters into groups, and is part of the emergence of groups?’. ‘What is it to be a body that dreams?’. What is it to be a body that consists of emotions or affects, or of micro-corporeal fields of motions?. ‘What is it to be nomadically outside the inter-meshed and transecting assemblages of power of the planet?’. ‘What is it to be a body which has emergences of thought or engagement?’. ‘What is it to be an immanently connected body within the worlds of an intensive cosmos?'.

<<Back to CONTENTS | Chapter 1.1 Thought, bodies, language>>