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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