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A Thousand Plateaus the Sheer Volume and Complexity of Deleuze and Guattari’S a Thousand Plateaus Can Be Daunting page size 234 x 156mm but follows EUP PPC jacket Hires CMYK pdf from Indesign CS6 17mm 3mm Brent Adkins ‘Brent Adkins has provided a great service to scholars, teachers and students with this very clear, precise, and insightful work. I will definitely use it in my courses and have every reason to recommend it to other teachers as well as to professionals looking for an overview of Deleuze and Guattari’s complex and difficult text.’ Deleuze an Deleuze Deleuze anD Professor John Protevi, Louisiana State University A guide to Deleuze and Guattari’s masterwork, Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus The sheer volume and complexity of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus can be daunting. What is an assemblage? What is a rhizome? What is a war D machine? What is a body without organs? What is becoming-animal? Brent Adkins Guattari’s demonstrates that all the questions raised by A Thousand Plateaus are in service A ThousAnd to Deleuze and Guattari’s radical reconstruction of the methods and aims of philosophy itself. To achieve this he argues that the crucial term for understanding A Thousand Plateaus is ‘assemblage’. An assemblage is Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the perennial philosophical question ‘What is a thing?’, and they assert that PlATeAus assemblages are always found on a continuum between stasis and change. Using clear language and numerous examples, each chapter analyzes an individual a 234mm plateau and examines the tendencies toward both stasis and change for each assemblage found there – whether it be social, political, psychological, musical, t biological or linguistic. housan This book will appeal to teachers of the text or anyone wanting to engage with it at a deeper level. Key Features l D Explains all the major terms found in A Thousand Plateaus Plateaus l Each chapter corresponds to a ‘plateau’ for ease of reference l Provides a singular interpretation of the work in terms of assemblages and connects that interpretation with traditional and contemporary debates within philosophy Brent Adkins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Roanoke College. a CritiCal introDuCtion anD GuiDe ISBN 978-0-7486-8646-9 www.euppublishing.com Cover image: Maranta leuconeura © Mary Sue Ittner Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk Brent Adkins 3mm 17mm 2mm 2mm 17mm 3mm 156 mm 156mm 3mm 17mm spine 16 mm Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus A Critical Introduction and Guide BRENT ADKINS © Brent Adkins, 2015 © Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, The Athlone Press, by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun - Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13pt Monotype Baskerville by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8645 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8647 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8646 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8648 3 (epub) The right of Brent Adkins to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: A Perceptual Semiotics 1 1. Rhizome 22 2. 1914: One or Several Wolves? 34 3. 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals 42 4. November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics 65 5. 587 BC–AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs 83 6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs? 96 7. Year Zero: Faciality 108 8. 1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?” 120 9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity 128 10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming- Imperceptible . 141 11. 1837: Of the Refrain 171 12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine 191 13. 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture 218 14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated 231 Conclusion: The Ethics of Becoming 244 Suggestions for Further Reading 251 Bibliography 254 Index 260 Introduction: A Perceptual Semiotics Neither Félix Guattari nor Gilles Deleuze ever shied away from the label “metaphysician.” This is a bold claim, particularly in a time when the “death of metaphysics” has been proclaimed so loudly and for so long, not only by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger but also by Deleuze and Guattari’s contemporary, Jacques Derrida.1 Since Deleuze and Guattari are unabashedly doing metaphysics, the place to begin understanding their work, as well as Deleuze’s single-author works, is with metaphysics. I want to begin by briefly describing the metaphysics that I see at work across Deleuze’s entire corpus, so that I can place A Thousand Plateaus in context. If I were to describe Deleuze’s metaphysics in a single word it would be “continuity.” This, of course, raises numerous questions, chiefly, Continuity of what? We will get to these questions, but first in an effort to clarify what I have in mind by continuity, I would like to contrast it with discontinuity. I think the dominant trend in Western metaphysics has followed from discontinuity. This discontinuity is most clearly and importantly seen in the work of Plato, who is at great pains to show the incommensurable distance between virtue and virtuous acts, between beauty and beautiful things, between the good and particular goods. These pairs cannot be merely different in degree, as if one could define beauty empiri- cally if one looked at enough beautiful things. No, these pairs must be different in kind. There can be no common measure between them. Beauty and beautiful things belong to different orders of being. This distinction between different orders of being becomes codified in philosophy as the distinction between the sensible and 1 Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus intelligible. This is the fundamental metaphysical discontinuity that organizes much of Western thought. Discontinuity, however, raises the issue of relation. If these two realms are ontologically distinct, what is the nature of their relation to one another? The typical answer given, although the details vary widely, is some kind of hylo- morphism. That is, the sensible and the intelligible are related to one another as content and form. Thus, in Plato the ability to rec- ognize any sensible object as beautiful depends on its participation to some degree in the form of beauty. In this case the integrity and universality of beauty itself is maintained, while we can still admit that sensible objects can be more or less beautiful. The problem with the discontinuity of the sensible and the intelligible and its concomitant hylomorphism is that it requires a doctrine of analogy or resemblance between the sensible and the intelligible. For Deleuze and Guattari, the difficulty with any doctrine of analogy is that it fundamentally fails at the task of meta- physics. If, for example, I claim that this statue is beautiful, several related corollaries necessarily arise. First, the statue is not beauti- ful in the same way that beauty is beautiful. (We’ll leave aside for the moment Aristotle’s objection that different beautiful objects are not beautiful in the same way.) Second, as a sensible object it cannot in principle be identical to the intelligible form of beauty, so it must be in some respects not beautiful. Analogy thus entails both affirmation and negation, and it is here that we can see the beginning of what will become negative theology in the Christian tradition.2 The reason, then, that discontinuity (and its attendant hylomorphism and analogy) fails at metaphysics is that it ultimately cannot say what “is” is. The solution to this difficulty for Deleuze is to reject the dis- continuity of the sensible and intelligible and affirm instead their continuity. Not surprisingly this move has entailments that inversely mirror the entailments of discontinuity. Since continuity does not treat the sensible and the intelligible as different in kind it need not resort to a doctrine of analogy to account for their interrelation. The continuity of the sensible and the intelligible instead entails the univocity of being. Being is said everywhere in the same way. Being speaks with “one voice.” Furthermore, continuity rejects hylomor- phism and replaces it with hylozoism. “Hylozoism” is a term coined by Ralph Cudworth in his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) to describe any position that held that matter is alive. Of course, to describe matter as living is to impute to it the power of self-movement or self-organization, a position that can only be seen 2 Introduction: A Perceptual Semiotics as inherently contradictory by those holding to any form of hylo- morphism, which held that matter received its motive force from an external principle. Kant is explicit about the contradictory nature of hylozoism in both the pre-critical Dreams of a Spirit-seer (1766) and the critical Critique of Judgment (1790). For Deleuze and Guattari the affirmation of hylozoism is crucial, because it avoids anchoring life in a transcendent principle and instead seeks purely immanent principles. DELEUZE’S EARLY WORK Deleuze’s affirmation of the continuity of the sensible and intel- ligible manifests itself in different ways across all of his works. The first way it manifests itself is through the choice of subject matter. Deleuze’s earliest books (1953–68) are monographs on individual philosophical and literary figures. Some of the choices seem obvious, especially Proust, Kant, and Nietzsche. Some of the choices, though, seem very strange, especially Sacher-Masoch, Spinoza, and Bergson. There are also what appear to be glaring omissions for a scholar in France after World War 2.
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