Accueil
https://fr.book4you.org/book/10997860/20d0c2
"Deleuze has been proven to be an empiricist, vitalist, philosopher of mathematics, closet Hegelian, phenomenologist, crypto-Jungian, logician, anarchist, communist, elitist, and liberal. In fact he is none of these." (p.1)
"Deleuze’s approach to philosophy is resolutely materialist: “Something in the world forces us to think” (DR139)." (p.2)
"I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus because its geographical thematic is the most pronounced." (p.3)
"This book will affirm that space is real, not the mental category it is for Kant (1999 : 57–62). Contemporary human geography is mostly realist in the epistemological sense and has
abandoned the early-modern views of space as absolute and the same everywhere. Space is quite simply that which lends things their capacities to move and to differ. Space is difference, multiplicity, change, and movement, not some separate formal realm that would frame them. There is no time without space. If critical geography has done much to debunk the still-hegemonic conception of space as static and exterior to process (Massey 2005 ), this book will show that Deleuze provides one of the best philosophical resources for continuing and refining the project of giving a dynamic thickness to space." (p.3)
"Deleuze’s take on politics and ethics is often indistinguishable from his metaphysics." (p.6)
"Deleuze’s entire project can be seen like Heidegger’s as one long answer to the post-Kantian question of how to ground thought. For both, thinking is groundless. To emerge and proceed, thought must affirm itself as groundless and as self-differentiating. Deleuze shares with Heidegger the desire to push thinking into worldliness, hence a keen sense of spatiality. Building on Nietzsche they both call “earth” a realm where life under industrial modernity could be revalorized. But where Heidegger thinks under the sway of a pagan sort of poetics and emphasizes the possibilities of a post-religious sacred in the here and now, Deleuze is more consistently critical and atheist and stays much closer to Nietzsche’s refusal of transcendence and identity. For Deleuze, thinking has to eschew the typically modern need for authenticity and truth. Instead of Heidegger’s return to the efflorescence of everyday life and homeland, Deleuze’s ontology systematically embraces vagrancy, even delinquency. Philosophy for Deleuze requires a universal ungrounding (effondement) propelled by the “discovery of a ground behind every other ground” [...] In his notion of groundlessness Heidegger continues to search for some kind of wholeness and redemption from human finitude. Deleuze instead makes immanence itself infinite. Hence when he speaks of a “vertigo of immanence” [...] we have to imagine a dizziness engendered not by being suspended above a gaping void but by the excessive fullness of what is given with sensation, that is, with living in and through space. Heidegger keeps yearning for the premodern possibility of vertical ascendance, while thinking after Kant should aim to circulate on a horizontal plane of immanence accompanying physical spacetime itself.
Deleuze and Heidegger are both indebted to Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism. Both return to the earthly materialism of the preSocratics. Instead of remaining resentful about the essences outside the cave, thinking should be content examining the supposedly false and inauthentic things around it. [...] The continuous movement of ungrounding, of rejecting transcendence, of exiting the cave and its moralities and determinisms, becomes itself a new kind of ground. The movement of thought away from transcendence is dedicated to producing something new, a new earth." (pp.10-11)
"Even if the ground beneath our feet moves continually while we think it into being, it is a ground nevertheless, not an infinite abyss. Deleuze’s ungrounding is antifoundationalist but not nihilist. Neither is it a return to the naiveté of empiricism or vitalism (I think because I sense, because I live). Championing immanence means that thinking is immanent to its ground. Thinking is not directly determined by the ground, earth, or matter. The earth is present at the beginning as a problematic genetic field that thinking actively and messily deals with. If for the German-Idealist tradition philosophy’s immanence means that thought is intrinsically limited by the groundedness in its own categories and laws (Kant) or absence (Heidegger), for Deleuze thought surfs along spacetime as the realm of infinite plasticity." (p.12)
"Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly cite the geographic history or geohistory of Fernand Braudel ( 1973 ) as an influence." (p.13)
"Elsewhere in Deleuze’s work the earth is not simply the context, soil, or territory from which creativity deterritorializes itself, but deterritorialization itself. It is the all- encompassing Body- without-Organs, all of life before its organization, which Anti-Oedipus theorizes as preceding all economic production and distinguishes from “ground” in the sense of soil." (p.13)
"Concepts work for Deleuze if they jam the circuits of capital and democracy and produce noncapitalist collectivities and environments. [...] Capital deterritorializes peoples and ideas only relatively, that is, only to reterritorialize them onto the profi t motive." (p.16)
"Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre is littered with foldings and flows, striations and strata, sediments and superimpositions, planes and plateaus, volcanoes and crystals, seas and islands, fault lines and cracks." (p.18)
"If the earth is a giant body without organs, a massive machine circulating chaotic intensities without the overall integration of an organism, it necessarily produces “accumulations,
coagulations, sedimentations, foldings” [...] Such spatial organization is both horizontal, along planes and over territories, and vertical, through stratifi cation. Some strata are superfi cial and rapid ; some profound and ultra-slow (what is called “deep” time). The trick is to grasp the hierarchies. In a more complex manner than in the traditional base- superstructure model of Marxism, for Deleuze and Guattari the earth’s economy subtends all forms that live on it, including human knowledge, by continuing to persist out of their complete grasp, as a continuing primordial chaos." (p.18-19)
"If their notion of strata owes more to biology than to geology, Deleuze and Guattari recast the former in the terms of the latter. First, as a layer or conveyor belt, a stratum cannot exist without physically drawing in adjacent flows, which it then occludes. Any stabilization and growth, whether of a monolith, a psyche, a species, or an empire (all strata for Deleuze and Guattari), is a self-propelling and creative folding- in of its surroundings. Second, the earth as such always exceeds its stratifications. “Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation” (ATP502). Strata always leak, fold back on, and start dismantling themselves, but tend to prevent any deeper change." (p.19)
"Stratifications happen by virtue of coding flows (giving them functions and meanings) and territorializing them (giving them a place, very literally, within a system). For example, the fossilfuel industry is a stratum grabbing and selling flows of gas and oil. It is based on shady contracts, petrochemistry, and price mechanisms (coding), as well as aggressive usurpation and distribution and socioeconomic disparities (territorialization). Even inorganic stratifications like crystallization or climate require a kind of encoding in the shape of information, though it does seem Deleuze–Guattari’s concept of code works better for organic and human strata. Fourth, and finally, to humans strata seem like divine judgments, as if they are based on a transcendent and infallible authority (embodied in the elders, priestly caste, invincible mining lobby). An illusion of transcendence holds the entire system together. To the mere mortals living them, strata seem to offer no way out, as if they are black holes." (p.20)
"The geology plateau makes a distinction between three basic megastrata: the physicochemical, the organic, and the anthropomorphic. Conventional enough, what allows this distinction is not a priori essences or even level of complexity but the way content relates to expression. On the physicochemical or inorganic stratum, expression can only be a jump in scale. Particles accumulate and resonate to express a new entity at a bigger scale, as happens in a crystal (ATP57). The organic stratum has a different kind of articulation. In life emergence happens across all scales from amino acids to ecosystems. Expressivity becomes autonomous from the material input (content), enabling all the irreversible chemical processes we think of as life: reproduction, ingestion, energy transport and storage, perception, evolution [...] There is a “threshold of deterritorialization” separating an organism from a crystal: a crystal is constrained by its territory while life is intrinsically mobile (ATP 59–60). Deleuzian materialism has to be wary, however, of vitalism. Biological emergence does not contradict the laws of physics, and “there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the same on all the strata” ( ATP45).
Finally, the human or alloplastic (“molded otherwise”) stratum derives from a redistribution and concentration of the other megastrata. Hands are deterritorialized paws ( ATP61). Typing, they express digital codes that are still more deterritorialized. These codes set in motion an atomic bomb, which then entirely rearranges the organic and inorganic strata from which limbs had evolved. While all mammals and birds exhibit phenotypic and behavioral plasticity it is especially in humans that materialities are deterritorialized so that surroundings are “overcoded,” notably through that most expressive of processes, language. “The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are fully part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in all directions at all the other strata” (ATP63). Capitalism is the megamachine for unprecedented interpenetration of strata, and the Anthropocene or the geological activity of the human species is the most extensive allopasticity of the planet’s life.
Deleuze’s “system of strata” is a unique contribution to thinking the earth without anthropocentrism yet from the vantage point of a species that has irretrievably changed its milieu and life chances. Against theological or theosophical notions of a cosmic evolution reaching its pinnacle in man, Deleuze stresses strata are not stages. No stratum is “higher” or more perfect than another. Astrophysics is not more fundamental than embryology or aesthetics. In concluding, we should not think Deleuze and Guattari seek to vilify stability or naturalize anarchy: “we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency” (ATP70). Though they privilege the liberation of desire away from strata and back into the immanence of the earth, they also point out that intentional destratifi cation usually ends in failure, or worse, fascism and psychosis." (pp.21-22)
"The mechanosphere is the plane, both virtual and actual, on and through which all human systems and their possibilities are organized [...] Assemblages are terrestrial, biological, technical, and desiring, and the mechanosphere does not belong to any one stratum but is necessarily involved in any connecting of strata. It is the immense accumulative repository of possible inter- stratal penetration. The geology plateau ends with “the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere” (ATP74). What characterizes the mechanosphere is the same quasi- infinite nonhierarchical and proliferating connectivity that Deleuze and Guattari associate with rhizomatic plants." (pp.26-27)
"Deleuze and Guattari suggest a return within and beyond vitalism to mechanics, to science without religion, in order to revive materialism without reductionism but also without dialectics. They share with early twentieth- century vitalist philosophies like Bergson’s an appreciation of the crucial roles of ecological interdependence in the evolution and metabolism of the human species. Species and strata are irreducible: ultimately no stratum or species can claim ontological precedence, and the anthropic stratum is temporally and spatially insignifi cant to the rest of the universe. Deleuze rejects the notion of an overarching telos like “noosphere” (from the popular Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), or some all- encompassing One, which would guide the nitty- gritty of biological and mental processes towards it (a tendency in the concept of “biosphere” proposed by
the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky). Life has to be thought as emergent from contingent encounter and creativity at every turn. It cannot be one seamlessly unifi ed force characterized by an ineffable Bergsonian élan vital (life impetus). Life for Deleuze is traversed by its substrata, by entropy, illness, dissipation, the dead and the death drive.
Substituting mechano- for bio- is therefore meant to pull the carpet from under any mystical attempt at totalizing terrestrial life as a separate eternal, foundational, and teleological stratum. For Deleuze life is exactly what forestalls identity and wholeness, what keeps bodies and populations dis- organized, generative, and discordant. Moreover, there is a strong desire for transcendence and centralization intrinsic to the concept of sphere, which Deleuze wants to avoid. But as heir to Kant, Deleuze does not believe that dissolving the anthropic stratum in the rest of space and time makes any ethical sense. Life is fundamentally given over to chance. The human species is not in the least on a linear path to perfection." (pp.27-28)
"If the mechanosphere subsumes all assemblages and strata, how does it differ from the term nature ? Deleuze uses this vaguest of terms rarely, and mostly when discussing others like Spinoza, Rousseau, and Lucretius. [...] The nature concept is an essential product of Europe’s obsession with transcendence, while Deleuze and Guattari’s work continually undermines the dualistic and totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy as found in binaries like nature/culture, natural/artificial, things/words, and body/mind. [...] In modernity, nature accrues all the theological connotations that the critiques of transcendence of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud aim to get rid of. As the contributions of Deleuze to
anti-foundationalist ontology show, he has no need for a concept of nature at all. It is similar with man. Grounding thought in the immanence of the earth has to avoid the reintroduction of a hierophanic operation orienting thought towards the sky. For Deleuze, if humanism including Kant and phenomenology succeeded in emancipating thought from religion, a desire for sacredness continues to exist within it: secularism means bestowing sacrality on man himself and/or his technological prowess (witness the utopian exhilaration around the internet). Paradoxically, wilderness and the supposed natural equilibrium that man has destroyed at the same time also become sacred. GOD= NATURE= MAN . The intrinsic piety of the nature and man concepts derives from the fact that its totalizing gesture first requires centering the thinking subject in privileged relation to a supposed exterior panorama. For Deleuze [...] there is only the continuous self-ungrounding movement of differences. Space and time are multiplicities all the way “down” and “up,” which by virtue of their very movement prevent the coherence of a cosmic finality and unicity." (pp.28-29)
"The overall fidelity of Deleuze and Guattari to the critical and Marxian projects cannot be doubted." (p.30)
" “Plateau” was in use in psychology for describing preorgasmic excitation when [Gregory] Bateson uses it briefly, and lightly, to reinterpret the ways affects like fondness and aggression become organized in Balinese culture [...] Instead of a divided social structure as Marxists might see, Bateson argues that intense “cumulative” or self- reinforcing behavior is carefully controlled through the culturally specific rules of the agents who are engaged in it. In analogy with a thermostat, participants of sexual play, quarrels, or trance dance will ride a wave of intensity, a positive feedback loop, without letting the system collapse. This is a plateau. For Bateson such restraint in excess is fundamental to social formations. There has to be a precariously maintained continuity in time as much as an extensive organization and modeling of bodies. Plateaus are moreover extremely place-specific: sex, games, and violence happen only somewhere.
This interplay of intensity with extension, or time with space, is crucial in Deleuze and Guattari’s redefinition of plateau: “We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (ATP22). A Thousand Plateaus is itself their best example. A conventional book of philosophy consists of chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, letters, and punctuation. Everything is ordered hierarchically along one programmed direction like a tree.
“What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain ?”. A Thousand Plateaus is a rhizome, a network maintaining itself intensively like prairie grass, forming a kind of unity only through the fact there are little “synaptic” spaces gaping within it, across which new connections have to be made continually for the coherence to maintain itself. What takes place in such a book is an in-folding of its outside, of the real world. A Thousand Plateaus consists of almost arbitrarily sequenced plateaus, with their own philosophical foci and weird dates constantly cross-pollinating. A book is something to inhabit, an environment rather than a ladder.
Instead of a beginning and end already contained in the beginning like in the classical novel, there is only a middle (un milieu), or many middles." (p.31)
"The ethical challenge is to gain coherence at the edge of nonsense and chaos." (p.33)
"Deleuze did feel much affinity with Marx, and was working on a book called The Grandeur of Marx when he died." (p.34)
"Most environmentalism does not see the anthropic stratum is itself machinic, while anarchism doesn’t see assemblages cannot be purified of territoriality and orderings from above." (p.38)
"Modes of production are not in fact consecutive stages but interpenetrating and present in all social formations in different mixtures." (p.41)
"Against utopian socialism and Soviet ideology, there can be no question for Deleuze of a final communist stage resolving all contradictions in the capitalist present. There are only many immanent struggles reinforcing molecular possibilities beyond and through capital, state, and community (Gemeinschaft) to which a philosopher creatively responds. Philosophy becomes the quintessential site for inventing the start of another world-history, a different mechanosphere, precisely by lodging itself on the immanence of life and its most mobile vector, capital. Using the spatial ambivalence in the etymology of “utopia” (no-place), and in accordance with Frankfurt critical theory, Deleuze and Guattari write: “it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point.” Inversely, politics is only revolutionary when it leaves all identity and place behind. “Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people”." (p.42)
-Arun Saldanha, Space after Deleuze, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017, 219 pages.
"Deleuze has been proven to be an empiricist, vitalist, philosopher of mathematics, closet Hegelian, phenomenologist, crypto-Jungian, logician, anarchist, communist, elitist, and liberal. In fact he is none of these." (p.1)
"Deleuze’s approach to philosophy is resolutely materialist: “Something in the world forces us to think” (DR139)." (p.2)
"I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus because its geographical thematic is the most pronounced." (p.3)
"This book will affirm that space is real, not the mental category it is for Kant (1999 : 57–62). Contemporary human geography is mostly realist in the epistemological sense and has
abandoned the early-modern views of space as absolute and the same everywhere. Space is quite simply that which lends things their capacities to move and to differ. Space is difference, multiplicity, change, and movement, not some separate formal realm that would frame them. There is no time without space. If critical geography has done much to debunk the still-hegemonic conception of space as static and exterior to process (Massey 2005 ), this book will show that Deleuze provides one of the best philosophical resources for continuing and refining the project of giving a dynamic thickness to space." (p.3)
"Deleuze’s take on politics and ethics is often indistinguishable from his metaphysics." (p.6)
"Deleuze’s entire project can be seen like Heidegger’s as one long answer to the post-Kantian question of how to ground thought. For both, thinking is groundless. To emerge and proceed, thought must affirm itself as groundless and as self-differentiating. Deleuze shares with Heidegger the desire to push thinking into worldliness, hence a keen sense of spatiality. Building on Nietzsche they both call “earth” a realm where life under industrial modernity could be revalorized. But where Heidegger thinks under the sway of a pagan sort of poetics and emphasizes the possibilities of a post-religious sacred in the here and now, Deleuze is more consistently critical and atheist and stays much closer to Nietzsche’s refusal of transcendence and identity. For Deleuze, thinking has to eschew the typically modern need for authenticity and truth. Instead of Heidegger’s return to the efflorescence of everyday life and homeland, Deleuze’s ontology systematically embraces vagrancy, even delinquency. Philosophy for Deleuze requires a universal ungrounding (effondement) propelled by the “discovery of a ground behind every other ground” [...] In his notion of groundlessness Heidegger continues to search for some kind of wholeness and redemption from human finitude. Deleuze instead makes immanence itself infinite. Hence when he speaks of a “vertigo of immanence” [...] we have to imagine a dizziness engendered not by being suspended above a gaping void but by the excessive fullness of what is given with sensation, that is, with living in and through space. Heidegger keeps yearning for the premodern possibility of vertical ascendance, while thinking after Kant should aim to circulate on a horizontal plane of immanence accompanying physical spacetime itself.
Deleuze and Heidegger are both indebted to Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism. Both return to the earthly materialism of the preSocratics. Instead of remaining resentful about the essences outside the cave, thinking should be content examining the supposedly false and inauthentic things around it. [...] The continuous movement of ungrounding, of rejecting transcendence, of exiting the cave and its moralities and determinisms, becomes itself a new kind of ground. The movement of thought away from transcendence is dedicated to producing something new, a new earth." (pp.10-11)
"Even if the ground beneath our feet moves continually while we think it into being, it is a ground nevertheless, not an infinite abyss. Deleuze’s ungrounding is antifoundationalist but not nihilist. Neither is it a return to the naiveté of empiricism or vitalism (I think because I sense, because I live). Championing immanence means that thinking is immanent to its ground. Thinking is not directly determined by the ground, earth, or matter. The earth is present at the beginning as a problematic genetic field that thinking actively and messily deals with. If for the German-Idealist tradition philosophy’s immanence means that thought is intrinsically limited by the groundedness in its own categories and laws (Kant) or absence (Heidegger), for Deleuze thought surfs along spacetime as the realm of infinite plasticity." (p.12)
"Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly cite the geographic history or geohistory of Fernand Braudel ( 1973 ) as an influence." (p.13)
"Elsewhere in Deleuze’s work the earth is not simply the context, soil, or territory from which creativity deterritorializes itself, but deterritorialization itself. It is the all- encompassing Body- without-Organs, all of life before its organization, which Anti-Oedipus theorizes as preceding all economic production and distinguishes from “ground” in the sense of soil." (p.13)
"Concepts work for Deleuze if they jam the circuits of capital and democracy and produce noncapitalist collectivities and environments. [...] Capital deterritorializes peoples and ideas only relatively, that is, only to reterritorialize them onto the profi t motive." (p.16)
"Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre is littered with foldings and flows, striations and strata, sediments and superimpositions, planes and plateaus, volcanoes and crystals, seas and islands, fault lines and cracks." (p.18)
"If the earth is a giant body without organs, a massive machine circulating chaotic intensities without the overall integration of an organism, it necessarily produces “accumulations,
coagulations, sedimentations, foldings” [...] Such spatial organization is both horizontal, along planes and over territories, and vertical, through stratifi cation. Some strata are superfi cial and rapid ; some profound and ultra-slow (what is called “deep” time). The trick is to grasp the hierarchies. In a more complex manner than in the traditional base- superstructure model of Marxism, for Deleuze and Guattari the earth’s economy subtends all forms that live on it, including human knowledge, by continuing to persist out of their complete grasp, as a continuing primordial chaos." (p.18-19)
"If their notion of strata owes more to biology than to geology, Deleuze and Guattari recast the former in the terms of the latter. First, as a layer or conveyor belt, a stratum cannot exist without physically drawing in adjacent flows, which it then occludes. Any stabilization and growth, whether of a monolith, a psyche, a species, or an empire (all strata for Deleuze and Guattari), is a self-propelling and creative folding- in of its surroundings. Second, the earth as such always exceeds its stratifications. “Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation” (ATP502). Strata always leak, fold back on, and start dismantling themselves, but tend to prevent any deeper change." (p.19)
"Stratifications happen by virtue of coding flows (giving them functions and meanings) and territorializing them (giving them a place, very literally, within a system). For example, the fossilfuel industry is a stratum grabbing and selling flows of gas and oil. It is based on shady contracts, petrochemistry, and price mechanisms (coding), as well as aggressive usurpation and distribution and socioeconomic disparities (territorialization). Even inorganic stratifications like crystallization or climate require a kind of encoding in the shape of information, though it does seem Deleuze–Guattari’s concept of code works better for organic and human strata. Fourth, and finally, to humans strata seem like divine judgments, as if they are based on a transcendent and infallible authority (embodied in the elders, priestly caste, invincible mining lobby). An illusion of transcendence holds the entire system together. To the mere mortals living them, strata seem to offer no way out, as if they are black holes." (p.20)
"The geology plateau makes a distinction between three basic megastrata: the physicochemical, the organic, and the anthropomorphic. Conventional enough, what allows this distinction is not a priori essences or even level of complexity but the way content relates to expression. On the physicochemical or inorganic stratum, expression can only be a jump in scale. Particles accumulate and resonate to express a new entity at a bigger scale, as happens in a crystal (ATP57). The organic stratum has a different kind of articulation. In life emergence happens across all scales from amino acids to ecosystems. Expressivity becomes autonomous from the material input (content), enabling all the irreversible chemical processes we think of as life: reproduction, ingestion, energy transport and storage, perception, evolution [...] There is a “threshold of deterritorialization” separating an organism from a crystal: a crystal is constrained by its territory while life is intrinsically mobile (ATP 59–60). Deleuzian materialism has to be wary, however, of vitalism. Biological emergence does not contradict the laws of physics, and “there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the same on all the strata” ( ATP45).
Finally, the human or alloplastic (“molded otherwise”) stratum derives from a redistribution and concentration of the other megastrata. Hands are deterritorialized paws ( ATP61). Typing, they express digital codes that are still more deterritorialized. These codes set in motion an atomic bomb, which then entirely rearranges the organic and inorganic strata from which limbs had evolved. While all mammals and birds exhibit phenotypic and behavioral plasticity it is especially in humans that materialities are deterritorialized so that surroundings are “overcoded,” notably through that most expressive of processes, language. “The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are fully part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in all directions at all the other strata” (ATP63). Capitalism is the megamachine for unprecedented interpenetration of strata, and the Anthropocene or the geological activity of the human species is the most extensive allopasticity of the planet’s life.
Deleuze’s “system of strata” is a unique contribution to thinking the earth without anthropocentrism yet from the vantage point of a species that has irretrievably changed its milieu and life chances. Against theological or theosophical notions of a cosmic evolution reaching its pinnacle in man, Deleuze stresses strata are not stages. No stratum is “higher” or more perfect than another. Astrophysics is not more fundamental than embryology or aesthetics. In concluding, we should not think Deleuze and Guattari seek to vilify stability or naturalize anarchy: “we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency” (ATP70). Though they privilege the liberation of desire away from strata and back into the immanence of the earth, they also point out that intentional destratifi cation usually ends in failure, or worse, fascism and psychosis." (pp.21-22)
"The mechanosphere is the plane, both virtual and actual, on and through which all human systems and their possibilities are organized [...] Assemblages are terrestrial, biological, technical, and desiring, and the mechanosphere does not belong to any one stratum but is necessarily involved in any connecting of strata. It is the immense accumulative repository of possible inter- stratal penetration. The geology plateau ends with “the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere” (ATP74). What characterizes the mechanosphere is the same quasi- infinite nonhierarchical and proliferating connectivity that Deleuze and Guattari associate with rhizomatic plants." (pp.26-27)
"Deleuze and Guattari suggest a return within and beyond vitalism to mechanics, to science without religion, in order to revive materialism without reductionism but also without dialectics. They share with early twentieth- century vitalist philosophies like Bergson’s an appreciation of the crucial roles of ecological interdependence in the evolution and metabolism of the human species. Species and strata are irreducible: ultimately no stratum or species can claim ontological precedence, and the anthropic stratum is temporally and spatially insignifi cant to the rest of the universe. Deleuze rejects the notion of an overarching telos like “noosphere” (from the popular Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), or some all- encompassing One, which would guide the nitty- gritty of biological and mental processes towards it (a tendency in the concept of “biosphere” proposed by
the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky). Life has to be thought as emergent from contingent encounter and creativity at every turn. It cannot be one seamlessly unifi ed force characterized by an ineffable Bergsonian élan vital (life impetus). Life for Deleuze is traversed by its substrata, by entropy, illness, dissipation, the dead and the death drive.
Substituting mechano- for bio- is therefore meant to pull the carpet from under any mystical attempt at totalizing terrestrial life as a separate eternal, foundational, and teleological stratum. For Deleuze life is exactly what forestalls identity and wholeness, what keeps bodies and populations dis- organized, generative, and discordant. Moreover, there is a strong desire for transcendence and centralization intrinsic to the concept of sphere, which Deleuze wants to avoid. But as heir to Kant, Deleuze does not believe that dissolving the anthropic stratum in the rest of space and time makes any ethical sense. Life is fundamentally given over to chance. The human species is not in the least on a linear path to perfection." (pp.27-28)
"If the mechanosphere subsumes all assemblages and strata, how does it differ from the term nature ? Deleuze uses this vaguest of terms rarely, and mostly when discussing others like Spinoza, Rousseau, and Lucretius. [...] The nature concept is an essential product of Europe’s obsession with transcendence, while Deleuze and Guattari’s work continually undermines the dualistic and totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy as found in binaries like nature/culture, natural/artificial, things/words, and body/mind. [...] In modernity, nature accrues all the theological connotations that the critiques of transcendence of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud aim to get rid of. As the contributions of Deleuze to
anti-foundationalist ontology show, he has no need for a concept of nature at all. It is similar with man. Grounding thought in the immanence of the earth has to avoid the reintroduction of a hierophanic operation orienting thought towards the sky. For Deleuze, if humanism including Kant and phenomenology succeeded in emancipating thought from religion, a desire for sacredness continues to exist within it: secularism means bestowing sacrality on man himself and/or his technological prowess (witness the utopian exhilaration around the internet). Paradoxically, wilderness and the supposed natural equilibrium that man has destroyed at the same time also become sacred. GOD= NATURE= MAN . The intrinsic piety of the nature and man concepts derives from the fact that its totalizing gesture first requires centering the thinking subject in privileged relation to a supposed exterior panorama. For Deleuze [...] there is only the continuous self-ungrounding movement of differences. Space and time are multiplicities all the way “down” and “up,” which by virtue of their very movement prevent the coherence of a cosmic finality and unicity." (pp.28-29)
"The overall fidelity of Deleuze and Guattari to the critical and Marxian projects cannot be doubted." (p.30)
" “Plateau” was in use in psychology for describing preorgasmic excitation when [Gregory] Bateson uses it briefly, and lightly, to reinterpret the ways affects like fondness and aggression become organized in Balinese culture [...] Instead of a divided social structure as Marxists might see, Bateson argues that intense “cumulative” or self- reinforcing behavior is carefully controlled through the culturally specific rules of the agents who are engaged in it. In analogy with a thermostat, participants of sexual play, quarrels, or trance dance will ride a wave of intensity, a positive feedback loop, without letting the system collapse. This is a plateau. For Bateson such restraint in excess is fundamental to social formations. There has to be a precariously maintained continuity in time as much as an extensive organization and modeling of bodies. Plateaus are moreover extremely place-specific: sex, games, and violence happen only somewhere.
This interplay of intensity with extension, or time with space, is crucial in Deleuze and Guattari’s redefinition of plateau: “We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (ATP22). A Thousand Plateaus is itself their best example. A conventional book of philosophy consists of chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, letters, and punctuation. Everything is ordered hierarchically along one programmed direction like a tree.
“What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain ?”. A Thousand Plateaus is a rhizome, a network maintaining itself intensively like prairie grass, forming a kind of unity only through the fact there are little “synaptic” spaces gaping within it, across which new connections have to be made continually for the coherence to maintain itself. What takes place in such a book is an in-folding of its outside, of the real world. A Thousand Plateaus consists of almost arbitrarily sequenced plateaus, with their own philosophical foci and weird dates constantly cross-pollinating. A book is something to inhabit, an environment rather than a ladder.
Instead of a beginning and end already contained in the beginning like in the classical novel, there is only a middle (un milieu), or many middles." (p.31)
"The ethical challenge is to gain coherence at the edge of nonsense and chaos." (p.33)
"Deleuze did feel much affinity with Marx, and was working on a book called The Grandeur of Marx when he died." (p.34)
"Most environmentalism does not see the anthropic stratum is itself machinic, while anarchism doesn’t see assemblages cannot be purified of territoriality and orderings from above." (p.38)
"Modes of production are not in fact consecutive stages but interpenetrating and present in all social formations in different mixtures." (p.41)
"Against utopian socialism and Soviet ideology, there can be no question for Deleuze of a final communist stage resolving all contradictions in the capitalist present. There are only many immanent struggles reinforcing molecular possibilities beyond and through capital, state, and community (Gemeinschaft) to which a philosopher creatively responds. Philosophy becomes the quintessential site for inventing the start of another world-history, a different mechanosphere, precisely by lodging itself on the immanence of life and its most mobile vector, capital. Using the spatial ambivalence in the etymology of “utopia” (no-place), and in accordance with Frankfurt critical theory, Deleuze and Guattari write: “it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point.” Inversely, politics is only revolutionary when it leaves all identity and place behind. “Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people”." (p.42)
-Arun Saldanha, Space after Deleuze, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017, 219 pages.
