The Image of Thought in A Thousand Plateaus

Today I want to both stress and explain the importance

of A Thousand Plateaus by examining the role that the image

of thought plays in it. Indeed, given time, I would

want to argue that the addition of the image of thought

to A Thousand Plateaus is one of the most important

differences between the two volumes of Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, and I would point in support to the careful

review of the concept Deleuze & Guattari provide in

their last collaboration, What is Philosophy?. But my

narrower focus today is A Thousand Plateaus, and in what

follows I want to explain its importance in both the

short term and the long term.

But first a few words about the image of thought

itself. The image of thought informing A Thousand Plateaus

is of course the rhizome, title of the introductory

plateau. There, the rhizome is contrasted with two

arborescent images of thought, tap-roots and radicle-

roots – but these two enemies of multiplicity overlap

later in the book with two forms of social authority,

the frontal face and the averted face of the Despot-

God, and with two kinds of scientific epistemology, the

deterministic and the probabilistic. The relation

between the rhizome and these other two images of

thought is especially significant for the long-term

importance of A Thousand Plateaus, as we will see. The

image of the rhizome itself, meanwhile is derived

primarily from Proust and Kafka – and I take it as no

accident that in between the two volumes of Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, Deleuze publishes the third and definitive

edition of Proust and Signs, and Deleuze & Guattari

together publish their study of Kafka.

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From the very first page, Deleuze & Guattari

characterize Kafka’s work as a “rhizome,” just as A

Thousand Plateaus will be characterized as a rhizome, from

its very first plateau. In the world Kafka depicts,

every room is connected to innumerable other rooms by

means of doors and passageways, many of which are

hidden or subterranean. Any room, it seems, can

connect with any other, depending on circumstances.

Particularly in Kafka's longer novels, the arrangement

of space is like a cross between a bureaucratic

organizational chart showing lines of power or desire

and a blueprint or roadmap showing the actual locations

of buildings and offices within them; more like an

organizational chart, however, the connecting lines can

change at any time, for unknown reasons, as relations

of power and desire themselves change. Likewise, A

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Thousand Plateaus can be characterized as a rhizome, with

innumerable passageways connecting various concepts and

examples beneath the unavoidably linear arrangement of

words forming sentences, sentences forming paragraphs,

and so forth.

If Kafka’s rhizome takes the form of a spatial

multiplicity, Proust’s rhizome is more of a temporal

one. Throughout his signature novel, In Search of Lost Time,

Proust emphasizes the importance of involuntary memory:

images of the past that occur to us involuntarily are

far more important than memories that are recollected

at will. A certain sensation in the present will

suddenly evoke a memory from the past, without there

being any direct or immediately obvious connection

between the two, and without involving any conscious

intention whatsoever. These memories are far richer

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and reveal more about the past than voluntary memory

can, yet they defy conscious mastery. This makes the

project of retrieving lost time a difficult, if not

impossible, task. As the novel unfolds, a vast network

of connections between times past and times present

emerges, over which the narrator tries to exert some

measure of control, or from which at least he will try

to distill some kind of meaning. But the longer

Deleuze works with Guattari, the less he sides with the

narrator or the project of retrieving lost time, and

the more he highlights the writing-machine that

produces the network of “involuntary” temporal

connections to begin with. Whereas Kant had insisted

on adding the subjective “I” to experience, as a

Regulative Idea to provide a stable, coherent ground

for true knowledge and ethical action, Proust leads

Deleuze in the opposite direction, by subtracting the

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subject from experience, and treating the subject as a

by-product or residue of experience itself. From this

perspective, what is paramount in Proust’s work is the

patchwork of temporal relations woven by the narrative

machine, which produces the impression of “a life”—and

the question of whether the narrator can ever take

complete control of that life becomes secondary. Such

a life forms a rhizome that can be characterized as an

open temporal multiplicity; that is to say, it consists

precisely and only of the connections composing the

patchwork. Its possible or projected unification at

the command of – or as a property of – the narrator or

author then appears as a supplementary dimension added

to the patchwork-life, but not necessary for it to

maintain its consistency as “a” life. In any case, it

is the special para-personal consistency of the

Proustian literary machine that Deleuze & Guattari will

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adapt for A Thousand Plateaus: the book will consist of a

patchwork-rhizome of relations among concepts and

plateaus, intentionally not unified by a single line of

argument, authorial voice or disciplinary perspective.

And this leads us directly into the first reason for

the immediate impact and short-term importance of A

Thousand Plateaus: it was an astounding and outstanding

example of what came to be known as “theory”—the

practice, which had already started with structuralism,

of drawing on a range of disparate fields (linguistics,

anthropology, philosophy, economics, and so on) in

order to produce novel research paradigms or strategies

that didn’t belong exclusively to any one of them –

strategies which were then fed back into research

projects in all these disciplines and more. A Thousand

Plateaus simultaneously exemplified, encouraged, and

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enabled this kind of theoretical practice and theory-

informed research—first in the humanities (especially

literary and cultural studies), then the arts

(especially architecture and music), and eventually the

social sciences (especially geography and political

theory).

Indeed, the "rhizomatics" practiced by Deleuze &

Guatttari in A Thousand Plateaus had a special affinity

with cultural studies, a second reason for the force

and immediacy of its impact – in the English-speaking

world, at any rate, where cultural studies was in the

ascendency when the book first appeared. Cultural

studies had developed principally out of intense

dissatisfaction with the disciplinary limitations of

literary studies, history and anthropology, and became

inter-disciplinary (if not anti-disciplinary) as a

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result. More importantly, the animus inspiring

cultural studies was directed largely against the

disciplines’ inability to address pressing social

problems such as unbridled militarism, rampant poverty

in the midst of vast wealth, environmental catastrophe,

unresponsive representative democracy, and so on.

Oriented to problems and problematics rather than

discipline-bound axiomatics, cultural studies would

draw tools from whichever disciplines could be found

useful, in order to address problems that did not arise

within (or were indeed excluded from) the purview of

any one of them; and it would produce “local knowledge”

of immediate use in addressing such problems rather

than contribute to the edifices of purportedly

universal disciplinary knowledge. Its aims and

procedures were therefore very similar to those Deleuze

& Guattari described in A Thousand Plateaus as nomad or

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minor science. And at the limit – a limit Paul

Feyerabend has termed "epistemological anarchism" –

nomad science would proceed, unlike Royal or State

science, with no image of thought whatsoever: as

Deleuze & Guattari say in the Nomadology plateau [377],

nomad science involves

not… another image in opposition to the image

inspired by the State apparatus. It is rather a

force that destroys both the image and its copies,

the model and its reproductions...

State science, by contrast, does operate according to

images of thought, and it is these State images of

thought that I want to map out in order to assess the

long-term importance of A Thousand Plateaus.

In order to move quickly here, I will take it for

granted that the botanical images of rhizome, tap-root

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and radicle-root that appear in the introductory

plateau correlate with the socio-historical trio of

images of the full-frontal face, the averted face, and

the probe-head that appear later in the book – and

furthermore that both of these sets of images map onto

three distinct scientific images of thought, which can

be characterized in terms of classical dynamics, linear

thermodynamics, and non-linear complexity or dynamic

systems theory. Each of these images of thought has a

corresponding primary object or dominant scientific

field: solid-state physics and the problem of

trajectories for classical dynamics; chemistry and the

problem of heat-transfer for linear thermodynamics;

biology and the problem of life for dynamic systems

theory. And they each have a corresponding

"explanatory principle," as well: mechanical

determinacy for classical dynamics, statistical

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probability for thermodynamics, and contingent

emergence or self-organization for dynamic systems

theory.

We are most interested in the third of these scientific

images of thought in relation to the first, despite the

fact that the second and third of these epistemologies

share a significant feature: the irreversibility of

time, which does not pertain in classical dynamics. In

classical dynamics, trajectories run exactly the same

backwards and forwards. In thermo-dynamics, as per its

famous second law (the law of entropy), time runs only

forward, as order decays into disorder in any closed

system. In dynamic systems, too, time runs only

forward, but here order can emerge from disorder, in

open systems with net inputs of energy. Deleuze &

Guattari's most general term for emergent order of this

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kind is "consistency" (although other scholars prefer

"self-organization"), and we will in a moment be

considering two specific forms of consistency, which

Deleuze & Guattari call trans-consistency and intra-

consistency. But the reason I am interested in

comparing this third scientific image of thought with

the first one is that while Kant is widely considered

to have provided the metaphysics corresponding to the

scientific paradigm of his day, I want to suggest that

the long-term importance of Deleuze & Guattari's

collaborative work is to have provided the metaphysics

corresponding to the emergent scientific paradigm of

our day, non-linear complexity. "One must make

metaphysics into the correlate for modern science,"

Deleuze once said, "exactly as modern science is the

correlate of a potential metaphysics." What's more, I

want to suggest that the metaphysics Deleuze & Guattari

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provide us with in fact represents the completion of

the very critical project that Kant initiated but was

unable to complete himself.

I will limit myself to two points of comparison with

Kant (beyond what I've already said about Proust and

the subtraction of the self from the experience of "a

life"):

1) Where Kant sought to determine the a priori

conditions of all possible experience in order to

provide immanent criteria for the critique of

knowledge, Deleuze & Guattari seek to determine the

real genesis of actual experience in order to provide

immanent criteria for the critique of human forms-of-

life. {REPEAT} (This focus on the critique of actual

forms of life is what makes schizoanalysis a

"revolutionary materialist psychiatry," as they put it

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in Anti-Oedipus, and what makes rhizomatics anti-

capitalist.)

2) Second point of comparison: whereas Kant had to

add "regulative ideas" – the ideas of self, world, and

God – to secure his account of the conditions of

possible experience, Deleuze & Guattari reject all

three of these ideas, starting with the self. As we

learn from Proust and Nietzsche, experience is not only

possible without a sovereign self, most experience in

fact by-passes the self altogether. The locus of

actual experience for Deleuze & Guattari is not the

self (and here we see considerable overlap with

Foucault), but rather institutions: machinic

assemblages of bodies correlated with collective

assemblages of enunciation. And so determining the

real genesis of actual experience entails understanding

the genesis of institutions – among the most important

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of which is capitalism, whose emergence Deleuze &

Guattari examine in some detail, in both volumes of

Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

True to complexity theory, they consider capitalism's

emergence to have been entirely contingent, and yet

once it attained a sufficient degree of consistency, it

became a self-replicating abstract machine operating by

axiomatization. Their analysis of the emergence of

capitalism is distinctive on (at least) three counts:

1) Contrary to versions of Marxism that take the

mode of production as determinant, Deleuze & Guattari

insist that the State was required to make production

into a mode in the first place. Only under the

domination of the State does production get separated

out from the warp and woof of social life and become

susceptible to organization as a mode.

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2) The process that Marx – quoting Adam Smith with

considerable irony – referred to as "so-called

primitive accumulation" does not involve someone

gradually saving up enough money to hire other people

to work for him, but rather the transfer of an infinite

debt-relation from the Despot to capital. The Despotic

State and its mode of production were thus a crucial

pre-condition for the emergence of the capitalist mode

of production – an account that explains the primacy of

finance capital over industrial capital and of debt-

relations over exchange-relations arguably better than

classical Marxism does.

3) Following Fernand Braudel, Deleuze & Guattari

assert that extended commercial exchange-relations

self-organize in two forms, which they call trans-

consistency and intra-consistency. Trans-consistency

links towns and markets via trade-routes into

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horizontal networks; it brings about what Deleuze &

Guattari call a "complete but local, town-by-town

integration," in much the same way that birds flock or

fish school. And typically, trans-consistency supports

a plurality of currencies. Intra-consistency, by

contrast, brings exchange-relations under the dominion

of a single power center and a single currency, forming

a "vertical hierarchized aggregate" and bringing about

a global rather than local integration based on the

stratification of territory. The distinction between

these two forms of consistency is significant because

Deleuze & Guattari insist – here again agreeing with

Braudel – that capitalism triumphed through the intra-

consistency of the State-form and not through the

trans-consistency of the town-form [434]. For

capitalism to self-organize and become self-sustaining

in the first place, on this analysis, it needed not

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just a critical mass of liquid wealth transferred from

the Despot through public finance and sovereign debt,

and not just a critical mass of labor-power forced by

law into dependence on the job market by measures such

as the British Enclosure Acts, but also a unified

national market "protected" from competing commercial

enterprise, a uniform currency, a stable national

credit system, and so on – all of which were furnished

by the State in its stratification of territory.

The genetic account of the institution of capitalism

doesn't stop there, however. For the capitalist

machine is not just self-sustaining, it is self-

replicating and self expanding (or auto-catalytic, in

complexity terms). And so it eventually reaches a

tipping-point, which Deleuze & Guattari locate in the

middle of the last century (with the evolution of total

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war into the cold war), where the dominance relation

between State and capital reverses: the container

becomes the contained; the State becomes subordinate to

capital. Due to the relation between war and the

production, destruction, and further production of

weaponry, not only was war no longer "politics by other

means" (as von Clausewitz had put it) but politics and

war – whether hot or cold – had both in effect become

"capital accumulation by other means," had become mere

means for the accumulation of capital, and particularly

for averting capitalism's endemic crises of over-

production. Henceforth, states merely serve as what

Deleuze & Guattari call "models of realization" for the

singular capitalist axiomatic operating world-wide.

What this reversal reveals, in turn, is a tendency for

the intra-consistency that was crucial for capitalism's

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emergence to give way to a new form of trans-

consistency – but now on a much larger scale, with

states in all their diversity assuming the position

once occupied on a smaller scale by towns, and without

the resonating power-center characteristic of intra-

consistency and the State-form of domination. This

shift to a new form of global trans-consistency is the

feature of Deleuze & Guattari's genetic account of

capitalism from which Hardt & Negri derive much of

their analysis of what they call "Empire" – concerning

which two caveats need to be raised. The first applies

almost as much to Deleuze & Guattari as to Hardt &

Negri, and calls into question whether global

capitalism really does lack a power-center: for while

it is true that the kind of territorial stratification

that States perform has not been reproduced on a world-

wide scale, nevertheless bodies like the World Trade

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Organization – founded 15 years after A Thousand Plateaus

appeared, but 6 years before Hardt & Negri wrote Empire

– have indeed attempted to subordinate the space of

international trade to their universal strictures – and

they have largely succeeded in restoring something of

an intra-consistent power-center to global capitalism,

or so it seems to me.

Be that as it may, the second caveat is both more

certain and far more important: Hardt & Negri's

account, unlike Deleuze & Guattari's, is patently

teleological; their linear view of history guarantees

the passage through Empire to the world-wide

empowerment of the multitude. Deleuze & Guattari's

non-linear view of history, by contrast, provides no

such guarantees. An empowered global multitude may

represent one basin of attraction afforded by the

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tendency of global capitalism to replace intra-

consistency with trans-consistency, but there is no

saying how or whether a tipping-point will be reached

that would propel us permanently into that basin nor

not. This is one reason Deleuze & Guattari declare at

the end of Anti-Oedipus that schizoanalysis has no

political program, and why A Thousand Plateaus is, if

anything, even more cautious than that.

And yet they insist at the same time that Capitalism and

Schizophrenia is nothing if not political philosophy – and

it is a political philosophy with clearly revolutionary

pretensions, as noted above. To understand how this

can be so, we return to the issue of Kant's critical

project, and to the sense in which Deleuze & Guattari

can be said to transform and complete it. The key

transformation, as we saw, was the replacement of

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Kant's account of the a priori psychological conditions of

all possible experience with accounts of the real

historical genesis of actual institutions –

institutions such as capitalism. The choice of

institutions as the privileged object of analysis is

significant: unlike law, which acts negatively to limit

and curtail human behavior, institutions for Deleuze

(following Hume) are creative, self-organizing

responses to the Problems of human needs, instincts and

desires. Just as organs and species are the self-

organizing experimental probe-heads by which Life

responds, without guarantee of success, to the Problem

of how to survive and thrive, institutions are the

self-organizing experimental probe-heads by which the

human species responds to the Problem of how to survive

and thrive – also with no guarantee of success. And

just as the contingent consolidation of organs and

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species in the process of evolution prompts further

experimentation with life-forms, the historical

consolidation of always-contingent institutions both

partially satisfies human needs and prompts the

development of new ones.

Given a situation where, as I have suggested, the

institution of global capitalism exhibits dual or

bifurcating tendencies toward trans-consistency and

intra-consistency, the ethical and political challenge

is to experimentally counter-actualize or de-stratify

existing institutions in the hope of prompting change

for the better, for more complete satisfaction and

further development of human needs and capacities. If

you "believe in" the prospects of intra-consistency, so

to speak, you might seek the expansion of human rights

through the International Court of Justice. If you

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"believe in" the prospects of trans-consistency, you

could seek to expand the global commercial network of

fair trade. And unless they could be shown to

interfere with one another in some definitive way,

there would be no reason not to pursue both. But the

point of complexity theory is that there is no

guarantee of success or failure for either path: we

can't know in advance, but we experiment anyway. We

can't go on... with complete confidence, and yet we

must go on... – to paraphrase Beckett.

Not that experimenting without guarantees means acting

blindly: the main reason to provide genetic accounts of

institutional strata in the first place is to map their

virtual lines of flight or de-stratification, and to

identify potential alternative basins of attraction.

And yet genetic accounts don't stipulate a particular

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course of action, either – or even necessarily entail a

preference for one form of consistency over another.

About the choice between trans-consistency and intra-

consistency, precisely, Deleuze & Guattari ask "Who can

say where the greater civil violence resides?" [433].

And as if that question wasn't pointed enough, they end

A Thousand Plateaus very much in the same vein with the

admonition, "Never believe that a smooth space will

suffice to save us" [500]. Political philosophy, in

other words, maps the virtual so as to present credible

choices to us, not to make them for us.

But there is another, equally important sense in which

experimenting without guarantees does not mean acting

blindly, which leads us to Deleuze & Guattari's version

of the position in ethical theory called

"consequentialism" and their counter-part to Kant's a

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priori moral imperatives: for experiments yield results.

The whole point of experimenting is to be in a position

to evaluate the results, and for Deleuze & Guattari,

institutional experiments are ultimately to be

evaluated according to one basic criterion: the extent

to which they enlarge our prospects for freedom of

action and enjoyment. And so the lasting importance of

the thought-experiment that is A Thousand Plateaus, I

conclude, depends on the contributions it prompts us to

make to those prospects. "Thank you."

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