hydrarchist writes"

On Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Antonio
Negri

Translated by Charles
T. Wolfe. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Chimeres 17 (Paris,
Fall 1992). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 18,
Number 2, 1995, in honor of the late Felix Guattari. Hacked from it is printed
form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.

I

It is in Sein und Zeit
that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their
tradition (Enlightenment and Hegelianism), when, as he is commenting on the
Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg,
he pays homage to the latter for "his full understanding of the fundamental
character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge
of the character of being of human Dasein itself." Consequently, Heidegger
continues, "the interest of understanding historicality" is confronted
with the task of an elaboration of the "generic difference between the
ontic and the historical." But he must part ways with Yorck when the
latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality
to mysticism. If, on the other hand, once separated from the ontic, "the
question of historicality shows itself to be an ontological question which
inquires into the constitution of being of historical being", it is once
again towards Dilthey that one must turn, in spite of his confused vitalism.1
Heidegger effects two operations at once. On the one hand, he expels the Geisteswissenschaften
from the position they occupied at the heart of metaphysics, as the inheritors
of the Enlightenment and the outcome of Hegelianism. On the other hand, he
brings to fulfillment the critical labor which had precisely shown its value
in Dilthey's historicism (in spite of the limits that Yorck had pointed out)-acritical
labor which develops the search for the meaning of historicity and allows
one to move from the theory of objectivity to that of expression, from the
acknowledgment of historiography in the context of the critique of cognition
to its definition at the heart of the transcendental schematism. Historicity
is then posited as an ontological dimension and leaves only its ontic residue
for historiography.2



It is interesting to note that here Heidegger breaks (and this pheno-menon
reoocurs often in him) "with ambiguity" the "destinal"
rhythm of his critique of the modern, while he paradoxically draws an "other"
meaning from it-which refers back to that other vision of modernity which,
from Machiavelli to Spinoza and Nietzsche, had understood historicity as absolute
virtuality, and being as the power of Being-there. Machiavelli's virtus dwells
precisely in that dimension. But it is above all in Spinoza's Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus that the meaning of history was viewed as the realization
of a faculty: imagination. Born from the confusion of the first type of cognition,
it is dissolved in a creative manner in the second type, and introduces the
absolute potentiality of the ethical construction of being. It is that drive
of being as the opening of historicity, that absolutely immanent definition
of a meaning of history, that Heidegger took over and set here "with
ambiguity". Nietzsche had grasped without any ambiguity this fundamental
critical point which at once digs the grave of historicisms and demands the
opening of historicity, by making it the heart of a theory of untimely, virtual,
creative being.3 The self-overcoming of time itself is in action here: it
is a relation to history which consists in a redemption, not as worship of
the past but as awareness that only the tension between present and future
is a fabric of the possible, a power of ontological decision. Thus spoke Zarathustra:

[T]o deliver the dead
and recreate every "it was" into a "I willed it thus",
only that could, for me, be called redemption. Will, such is the name of
the liberator and of that which brings joy; that is what I have taught you,
my friends. But learn also this : that the will itself is a prisoner. To
will is to free : but what is the name of that which puts the liberator
himself in irons? "It was", there is the name of the will's gnashing
of teeth and its most solitary affliction. ' Powerless with regard to all
that took place, it contemplates the past full of anger. The will cannot
will backwards : that it cannot break time and the avidity of time, there
is the most secret affliction of the will [...]. That time does not go backwards,
there is what irritates it; "it was", such is the name of the
stone it could not roll.4

It is that "could
roll" which contains all of the meaning of historicity.

But let us return to Dilthey.
It is indeed in his work that the tensions between historical research and
the requirement of a renewal of the questioning of the meaning of historicity
are most fully articulated. It is especially in his work that the labor of
historical understanding seeks to identify its constitutive terrain which,
roughly speaking, he sometimes defines as philosophy of life, comprehensive
psychology, etc. Obsessed with the problem of historical subjectivity, Dilthey,
during the whole of his research, makes the inventory of all of the possible
forms in which historical science can open itself up to historicity, so to

speak. From the positivist positions of his "Inaugural Lesson",
which is extremely critical of the "castrated" character of historical
objectivity, to the sharp consciousness in Erlebnis und Dichtung of
the fact that "history is no way susceptible of constituting the supreme
fulfilled science, capable of accounting for a given set of phenomena from
concomitant causes, even if one were to grant it a maximum degree of scientificity";
from the Kantian work of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften,
held between the affirmation of the self ("the issue henceforth is to
perceive, without letting oneself be by bound by prejudices, the reality of
inner life, and, starting from that reality, to determine what nature and
history are in relation to that inner life") and a conception of the
same self which henceforth is segmented, fractal, and diffused ("the
singular individual is the connection point of a plurality of systems"),
to the construction of historical typologies, as a methodological proposal
of grasping universality and singularity at once; from the return to psychology
in the Ideen which aims at giving a dynamic and productive consistency to
the historical subject, and at discovering therein the power of Erlebnis (as
both vitality and connection, as expression and objective determination),
to the ultimate vitalist positions hi which the psychological core opens itself
up to the expressive function and determines itself in a presence which constitutes
its ethical opening: well, during the whole of this inventory, the Geisteswissenschaften
are always conceived of, whatever the case may be, as crises, and all of the
critical pathways are opened up to the problematic of a historicity which
has not yet been able to define itself. That indecisiveness of Dilthey, that
way of making himself a psychologist or philosopher of life, which always
lifts him beyond any philosophical position he takes, illuminates the intensity
of the ontological fraying-through that he effects, which leads us to the
verge of the discovery of a new meaning of historicity.5

Why is this Diltheyian
procedure so important? Because while he anticipates Heidegger's conclusions,
he also explores entirely other paths, and it is only by refining and letting
the dust settle on these operations that the Heideggerian ontological decision,
the meaning of historicity as virtuality, take on all of their meaning.

"To put our will
to truth into question; to give back its event-like character to discourse;
to remove, lastly, the sovereignty of the signi-fier." When Foucault
announces this program in his "Inaugural Lecture", -he too finds
himself at the limit of the critique of historiography and of the Geisteswissenschaften
in general; he too expresses the opening onto the virtuality of history, which
was constituted as a philosophical awareness between Dilthey and Heidegger.
And Foucault, just like Dilthey, had gone through some extremely ambiguous
phases during the course of his scientific experience. From his early studies
of Ludwig Binswanger to those of Weizsäcker, and then of Kant's "pragmatic
anthropology", Foucault followed, and exhausted, all of the attempts
at the reaffirmation of the self (as opposed to historical objectivity) as
a moral, psychological or biological person.6 When, especially in the mature
works, he finally and definitively confronts the theme of historicity as arrayment7,
the frame is set henceforth - history is production of subjectivity, care
of self to self, an immediate and direct onto-logical expression. Just as
in Dilthey, but more than in Dilthey, the transitional, psychologizing, cultural,
vitalist experimentations of the understanding of the historical real are
transfigured into a new point of view : that of the presence of the world
as the fabric of being, which must be passed through, which is created at
any moment. Just as in Dilthey, the passage is made in Foucault from a theory
of history to a fundamental apperception of historicity - after Heidegger,
that is, after an awareness of it was established by the Nietzschean perspective.
It is on this path, through these successive advances which analogous problems
and discourses conceal, that Dilthey is, so to speak, taken up again and located
at the very place of the invention of historicity, where historical action
becomes the only perspective according to which being may be interpreted.
The end of the Geisteswissenschaften is the renewal of ontology.8

This grandiose project
still did not meet with great success in the history of contemporary thought.
We are witnessing a strange phenomenon : these Geisteswissenschaften,
which could certainly not have survived the long critical process going from
Nietzsche to Heidegger and from Dilthey to Foucault, have not left any corpse
behind. In fact, the critical renewal of research on historicity from the
constitutive point of view and the discovery of the power of being have been,
so to speak, neutralized within new disciplines, new distributions of knowledge,
new concepts of experience and a new philosophical climate which has become
increasingly relativistic and skeptical. A tenuous and superficial vitalism
blocked that other vitalism, turgescent but always tragic, which led from
historiography to being, to open again onto historicity. Once the objectively
"castrated" historiographical point of view was overturned, once
Hegelianism was abandoned with all of its enthusiastic resurgences of brute
effectuality and dialectics in all of its subterfuges, once this vision "from
below" was acquired, which allows the historical subject to determine
ontological arrayments - well, this perspective was once again brought back
to the dimensions and the horizon of relativism and skepticism. The different
hermeneutical schools following each other, which precisely claim to be the
inheritors of Diltheyian and Foucauldian thought, have led us to the delights
of "weak thinking". The meaning of the complexity of processes emanating
from historical subjects has become a pretext to repudiate the ontologically
strong character of their emergence. The movement of constitution denied to
totality was, for that very reason, reduced to precariousness, and the singularities,
reduced to the charms of bare particularity. From the end of historicism,
one thus passed imperceptibly but surely to the determination of the "end
of history." It is the same "castrated" objectivity against
which the critiques of the Geisteswissenschaften were brought, which
reappears now: historicism is once again the winner, but in the guise of an
encyclopedia of knowledge for the use of the media. Historically open being
has become chatting or chatty being. The end of the Geisteswissenschaften
has transformed itself into the triumph of idle speech.

In this new synthesis
of experience and understanding over which the "post-modern" rules,
the channels of perversion of the critical teaching, from Dilthey to Heidegger,
are perfectly perceptible. In the great Gadamer, just as in the small Rorty
and Vattimo, the circular motion of experience and understanding no longer
opens onto historicity, except in the sense of a historical conditioning,
substantially, of a finitude which, far from opening the subjective point
of view to constitutivity, encloses it in event-like dispersion, in a need
of meaning which winds itself around itself, in a pessimistic and totalizing
conception of being, which seeks to justify itself in the religious but can
only find a grounding in the void of mysticism or of democracy. One exalts
in Dilthey the circular movement of experience and understanding without grasping
the rupture in the expression of that circularity; one takes in Heidegger
the critique of the empirical, of the ontic, while one carefully avoids his
perception of the potential grounding of being which alone, already in the
resumption of Yorck and the polemic against his theologism, could allow the
restoration of the Diltheyian point of view of expression and the creativity
of historicity. This, while it is precisely by proceeding with the critique
of the ontic, with the weapons of ontological apperception as the basis of
historical critique, as opening to the fecundity of its experience, as experience
of historicity, that Heidegger shows himself at his best. It is that Heidegger
who consciously takes up the forgotten Nietzsche, and who unconsciously reproduces
the Spinozism of the imagination which is then thrown on the dustpile. History
is ended, the hermeneuticians and the post-moderns whisper, and the historicity
of being, separated from the constitutivity of being, changes into a syrupy
and melancholic pietas. The discovery of historicity is then afflicted with
the disastrous feeling of the end of history and leaves us unarmed, faced
with an epochal limit.9

II

In radical contrast to the present drifting about, the Thousand Plateaus reinvent
the sciences of spirit10 (it being understood that, in the tradition in which
Deleuze and Guattari are located, "Geist" is the brain), by renewing
the point of view of historicity, in its ontological and constitutive dimension.
The Thousand Plateaus preempt the postmodern and the theories of weak hermeneutics:
they anticipate a new theory of expression, a new ontological point of view-an
instrument

which enables them to take on post-modernity, to disclose and dynamite its
structures. Here we find a strong thinking, even when it is applied to the
"weakness" of the everyday. As to its project, the issue is to grasp
the created, from the point of view of creation. This project has nothing
idealist about it: creative force is a material rhizome, at once machine and
spirit, nature and individual, singularity and multiplicity -and the stage
is history, from 10 000 B.C. to today. The modern and the post-modern are
ruminated and digested, and reappear by abundantly helping fertilize a hermeneutics
of the future. In re-reading the Thousand Plateaus ten years later, what is
most impressive is the incredible capacity of anticipation which is expressed
there. The development of computer science and automation, the new phenomena
of media-society and communicative interaction, the new paths followed by
the natural sciences and by scientific technology, in electronics, in biology,
in ecology, etc., are not only considered but already taken into account as
an epistemological horizon, and not just as a mere phenomenological fabric
undergoing an extraordinary acceleration. But the superficiality of the context
in which the dramaturgy of the future takes place is in fact ontological-a
hard and irreducible superficiality which is precisely ontological and not
transcendental, constitutive and not systemic, creative and not liberal.

There are at least four
fundamental themes which I will seek to take up in A Thousand Plateaus.
The first is the theory of expression and arrayments. The second is the theory
of "networks". The third is "nomadology". The fourth is
the ontological theory of the surface. Four points, four dimensions which
integrate the work of constitution of the new sciences of spirit, by defining
the plane on which they may develop, as products of an opening of possibility,
or better still, of the potentiality of being:

A - The theory of expression
and of arrayments is the first philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. The critique
of psycho-analysis in Anti-Oedipus identified that plane of force.
The force of expression is ontological, creative, and structured. This means
that the point of view of singularity is immediately conjugated with a definition
of space in extension, in the Bergsonian image of the opening and structuring
movement. Singularity, whether individual or collective, and the determination
of the relation of actor and event are set into motion. Haecceity, defined
by the early Deleuze as the fundamental problem- atic term of the history
of philosophy, is originarily active and deploys itself according to the dimensions
of movement, through a light-beam of desires or machinic elements. The initial
force is subjective and constructive, it is arrayment. This term signifies
: expression plus organization, or again, organized expression, organized
force, extension, and motion. Being and history are conceived as production
and product of sub active arrangements. The world is constructed and reconstructed
from below. Historicity is given as presence. In that articulation, both a
metaphysical definition of motion, or even a good Bergsonian phenomenology
of space, the liberation of desire in the analytic sense, as universal, open,
and singular potentiality, and lastly an ethical conception of singularity,
in that Spinozian sense which Deleuze likes so much, can be seen to converge.
The general framework seems at first glance to be an animistic, hylozoist,
pre-Socratic one. But vitalism finds itself inverted at the very moment that
it is asserted, for it does not present itself either as an envelope of the
real, or as a conception of the world, nor as a force which is not distinct
from the production of the real, whether natural or historical, but as all
of these elements at once, placed at the service of the production of singularity,
of the emergence of singularity. The contradictions which remain, within the
nevertheless convergent researches of Dilthey, Nietzsche and Heidegger, are
dissolved here. If being is historicity, ontology can be brought back to the
instance of production, to that moment of the originary expression. From there,
expression and production open themselves to the materiality of the modern.
The relation between man and machine which characterizes modernity becomes
the content and form of the subjective arrangement. Machines, the reality
constructed by capitalism, are not phantasms of modernity after which life
can run unscathed - they are, on the contrary, the concrete forms according
to which life organizes itself, the world transforms itself, and the material
connections within which subjectivity is produced. Ordo et connexio rerum
idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum. However, the relation between man
and machine is always a singular event, that is, an event which, seizing hold
of materiality, produces subjectivity. The construction of being as a universal
task thus finds itself considered on the basis of the entire process, or,
if one wishes, as proceeding both from events and from singularities. The
event is the production of bodies, the historical production of the set [ensemble]
of bodies and of their relations. The atomistic cosmogony of Spinoza is reinterpreted
and reformulated here in the light of that vitalism of historicity which the
great moderns have taught us.

The production of bodies
is the reduction of historicity; historicity is the production of bodies.
In a page of A Thousand Plateaus, one finds this fundamental query:
"After all, wouldn't the great book on the body without organs (BwO)
be the Ethics?"11 It is explained that the BwO is the field of absolution
of desire, the plane of consistency proper to historicity. The world's matrix
is zero so long as one does not grasp the process of constitution of subjectivity,
and one does not follow the infinite tension of constitution.12

B - One can follow the
rhythm of constitution by a second approach, which is that of the theory of
"networks". After having established the instance of production
in the force of desire and its machinic process, Deleuze-Guattari move to
the analysis of extension [etendue], of its expansion [extension]
in action and its movement. What characterizes this space is the rhizome.
The rhizome is a force, a phylum which opens onto a horizon of unmasterable
arborescence-and, in this process, singularity singularizes itself more and
more. At the same time, in the wealth of this production of singularities,
the life context presents itself as a set of interrelations-unity and multiplicity,
connections and heterogeneity, ruptures and lines of flight are always inverted
according to a ceaselessly renewed cartography, always forming new systems,
not self-centred but in expansion.13 It is from there that the sciences of
spirit may begin to reorganize themselves, that is, when the rhizomatic tensions
and the machinic arrayments appear as subjective arrangements of enunciation-the
constitutive dynamics then shift from the physics of the rhizome to the regime
of signs which characterizes the science. The surface of the world is organized
according to regimes of signs, without dispersing its machinic consistency,
but, on the contrary, by renewing it in enunciation. A network of the sciences
of spirit therefore exists : there, rhizomatics refers back to schizo-analysis,
and the latter to strato-analysis, and then to pragmatics and micro-politics.
We have already examined the relation between schizo-analysis and rhizomatics
in part A of this section; the issue now is to study its relation to the other
points. First of all, as far as strato-analysis is concerned: science establishes
itself on the systemic horizon constructed by the arborescence of the rhizome,
and discovers its con-flictuality. If the system itself constitutes an arborescence,
the conflict will come out of the orientation of its branches : a conflict
which cannot be taken over, simplified, or reduced within the system, but
which continuously repeats itself, as the rule of the self-constitution of
real networks. The point of view of historicity is not only constitutive,
it is also conflictual : just as in Spinoza, it is war which generates life.
The networks constitute ambiguous openings and arrangements: they open, close,
and open again, while determining conflicts. Each point of the machinic or
enunciative arborescence is reopened sequentially, onto other arborescences,
other networks, above as well as below, according to conflictual modalities.
We are thus completely inserted and immersed in a set of sign-producing systems
which are in permanent mutation: there is the object of concern of the science
of spirit. The epistemological dimension itself is to be found on a horizon
of war. The segmentation of the (expressive) traits of enunciation is continuous.
It is the becoming of the real and of science, it is the result of all of
these processes. Becoming is the innovative result on the magma of expression,
it is in some sense the solution of the war, and thereby the reopening of
conflictual scenes. Rhizomatics refers back to a Hobbesian world-in which,
however, it is not proprietary individuals but (in Spinozist fashion) productive,
desiring singularities, individual or collective, which are the protagonists.
The sciences of spirit are therefore polemological sciences, analyses of the
networks of protagonists who participate in the conflict and constitute themselves
there-they accept, without any reservations, the terrain of Nietzschean questioning.14

C - Pragmatics and micropolitics
constitute themselves in nomadology. This means that the horizon of war is
bounded by pragmatic powers. The historical world, constituted into geology
of action, is drawn forth from a genealogy of morals, in the literal sense
of the term, a tireless, ceaseless one. Produced from conflictual arborescences,
subjectivities are nomads, that is, they are free and dynamic. As one knows,
subjectivities organize themselves through machinic arrayments-as war machines.
War machines represent the molecular fabric of the human universe. Ethics,
politics, and the sciences of spirit become one and the same thing here :
war machines interpret its project, they constitute the human world, by effecting
the discrimination between desire and anti-desire, between freedom and necessity.
And these are once again rhizomes and arborescences-but endowed with meaning.
It is choice in war which determines the meaning of historicity. But what
is meaning, on this completely immanent horizon, on this absolutely non-teleological
scene? It is the expression of desire, it is the enunciation and organization
of desire as event, as discrimination vis a vis any transcendence, as hostility
to any blocking of becoming. Politically, the war machine defines itself as
positivity because it posits itself against the State. Deleuze-Guattari reinvent
the sciences of spirit, while attacking the last vestiges of historicism,
of Hegelianism and of their conception of an objective spirit sublating itself
in the State. Faced with the State, and faced in particular with the State
of mature capitalism, the molecular order spontaneously organizes a molar
apparatus15, it necessarily becomes a counter-power: society against the State,
or better still, much better, the set of desiring subjectivities and their
infinite arborescences, on the nomadic rhythm of their appearances, against
any fixed, centralizing and castrating machine. In reality, it is only from
the pragmatic point of view that one may apprehend and appreciate subjectivity
and the meaning of historicity. The point of view which upholds nomadology
is a genuine "philosophy of praxis". To be nomadic in the order
of fixed and pioducud history means to permanently produce these machinic
arrayments and arrayments of enunciation, which open onto new rhizomatic arborescences,
and which purely and simply constitute the real. Politics thus becomes a setting
into place of micro-arrayments, a construction of molecular networks, which
allow desire to deploy itself, and, by a permanent movement, make it the matter
of pragmatics. Pragmatics in micro-politics, and of micro-politics, is the
only operational point of view of historicity: pragmatics as praxis of desire,
micro-politics as terrain of subjectivity, ceaselessly travelled and to be
travelled indefinitely. This alternation of points of view and this convergence
of constructive determinations are never at rest. The goal of the molar order
is to absorb the force of desire and to reshape the apparatuses towards the
sole end of blocking the pragmatic flux of the molecular: the molar is by
definition the ontological obstacle of the molecular. On the other hand, molecular
flux is elusive, it perpetually seeks to upset the apparatuses of blockage
and open the way to historicity. But what is the revolution? It is making
an event out of this infinite process. The political line of A Thousand
Plateaus is that which brings the molecular apparatus of desires to resist
the molar order, to avoid it, to circumnavigate it, to flee it. The State
cannot be reformed or destroyed : the only possible way of destroying it is
to flee it. A line of flight, organized by the creativity of desire, by the
infinite molecular movement of subjects, by a pragmatics which is reinvented
at every instant. The revolution is the ontological event of refusal and the
actualization of its infinite potentiality.16

D - From this set of considerations
which gave birth to a constitutive vision of the world, of which any subjectivity
and any event have genealogy as their fabric, we can now go back and reexamine
the general ontological framework which the Thousand Plateaus offer to us.
A thousand planes of a same surface. A surface full of crevices, ruptures,
constructions and reconstructions; a territory which is permanently bound
and folded over. Only one direction, only one teleology: the growing abstraction
of relations, which fits the complexity of arborescences, the development
of rhizomes and the expansion of conflicts. An abstraction which is itself
a territory, a new territory, newly covered with folds, various shadows, and
possible alternatives. The power of desire made itself into the surface of
a territory, and the transformation repeats itself indefinitely. This ne\y
territory is always productive, infinitely productive. It is for that reason
that the world is a territory which is always to be territorialized, occupied,
rebuilt, inhabited; a tension which only the intensity of a multiple creative
action can satisfy. In this vision, the relation between machine and enunciation,
between science and ontology, is a global one. Science is constitutive inasmuch
it so as to construct it, it projects it by living it. Science constructs
planes of ontological consistency each time that the set of the functions
of enunciation becomes the object of a pragmatics, or again realizes itself
in the event; in a determination. Subjectivity also presents itself at the
surface, as a fold of the surface. But we know what is presupposed by the
lightness of that strong event, the production of subjectivity: the machinic
arrayment traversing the conflict, the enunciation of the project, the expression
of desire, the realization of the infinite in the event." It is a new
world which is described here. If every philosophy assumes and determines
its own phenomenology, a new phenomenology is strongly asserted here. It is
characterized by the process which brings the world back to production, production
to subjectivity, subjectivity to the power of desire, the power of desire
to the system of enunciation, enunciation to expression. And vice versa. It
is inside the line drawn by the "vice versa", that is, going from
subjective expression towards the surface of the world, towards historicity
in act, that the meaning of the process is revealed (or, again, the only teleology
which absolute immanence can allow itself): the meaning of the process is
that of abstraction. The subject who produces the world, in the enlarged horizontality
of his projections, increasingly fulfills his own achievement. At first glance,
the horizon of the world constructed by Deleuze-Guattari seems to be an animistic
one, but it soon appears that this animism translates the highest abstraction,
the ceaseless process of machinic arrayments and subjectivities rising to
an ever higher abstraction. In this world of caverns, of folds, ruptures and
reconstructions, the human brain tries above all to understand its own transformation,
its own displacement, beyond conflictuality, where the highest abstraction
reigns. But this abstraction is again desire.

III

A Thousand Plateaus
lays out the terrain on which the materialism of the twenty-first century
is redefined. What is Philosophy?16, the pedagogical essay published by Deleuze-Guattari
in 1991, as an appendix to the Thousand Plateaus, enlightens us on this matter.
This synergy of analyses on science, philosophy and art which was tirelessly
deployed in A Thousand Plateaus, with an exuberance worthy of the ontological
matter that was treated, turns here into pedagogic illustration, into a popularization
of the conceptual mechanisms which are at the basis of the process of exposition
of A Thousand Plateaus. In this popularization essay, the methodological,
theoretical and practical functions are cir-cumscribed with the maximum of
clarity. We think that it is possible to identify here (in A Thousand Plateaus
seen through the pedagogical essay) the fundamental elements of the renewal
of historical materialism, in function of the new dimensions of capitalistic
development, namely this plane of maximum abstraction (the "real subsumption"
of society in capital) to which it leads, and on which social struggles today
are reformulated. This, without ever forgetting that in Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy of the sciences of spirit, just as in historical materialism, one
finds the same ethical and political demand for the liberation of human power.
Which, then, is the productive context in which we are moving and from which
historical materialism can and must be renewed, as basis of the sciences of
spirit?

A Thousand Plateaus
gives an explicit answer to this query. Through the extent and the complexity
of the analyses it develops, it sketches out the very plane that Marx tendentiously
identified in the "Fragment on Machines" of the Grundrisse, which
he defined as the society of "General Intellect".19 It is a plane
on which the interaction of man and machine, society and capital, has become
so narrow that the exploitation of material, salaried, and temporally quantifiable
labor becomes obsolete, incapable of determining a valorization, a miserable
basis of exploitation in the face of the new social, intellectual and scientific
forces upon which the production of wealth and the reproduction of society
rest exclusively, henceforth. A Thousand Plateaus records the fulfillment
of the tendency analyzed by Marx, and develops historical materialism within
this new society. It therefore attempts the construction of that new subject
which reveals the power of work, social as well as intellectual and scientific.
A machine-subject, which is also an ethical subject; an intellectual subject,
which is also a body; a desiring subject which is also productive force; a
plural and disseminated subject which however unifies itself in the constitutive
drive of new being. And vice versa, in all directions. What is fundamental
here is the total dislocation of the valorization of production, in the passage
from the sphere of direct material exploitation to that of political domination
(over the social interaction between the development of collective subjectivity
and the intellectual and scientific power of production). In that dislocation,
social inter-activity itself is subjected to the molar contradiction of domination,
it too is exploited; but the antagonism is brought to its highest level, it
acts through a paradoxical implication of the exploited subject. Confronting
the Foucaldian analyses of power,20 Deleuze emphasizes the passage from "disciplinary
society" to the "society of control", the fundamental characteristics
of the contemporary State-form. Today, in that context, which is the one to
which A Thousand Plateaus refers, domination, while remaining permanent,
is as abstract as it is parasitical and empty. Brought to its highest degree,
the antagonism has so to speak emptied itself, the "social commandment"
has become useless. The control over productive society is thus a mystification
from the start: it no longer even has the dignity that the function of organization
took on, which in some sense was co-natural with the figure of the exploiter,
in the disciplinary society and State-form. If such is the case, the productive
labor of the new social subject is revolutionary from the start, always liberating
and innovative. It is on this

basis that historical materialism finds itself renewed, implicitly in the
phenomenology of A Thousand Plateaus, explicitly in the methodology
elaborated in What is Philosophy?

Before anything else,
historical materialism as a science. The text tells us that scientific activity
is formed by "partial observers" who assemble "functions"
on "planes of reference". Can historical materialism be anything
else than that which promotes the "proletarian point of view" and
makes the critique of contradictions into the plane of reference? Anything
else than the displacement of a partial subject within a tendency which materially
translates a reading grid of the real? And in the paradigmatic case, capitalistic
development as the global referent of the set of contradictions which the
movement of abstract labor determines? The plane of reference is again the
world of real subsumption, of the complete submission of society to capital.
Labor is the rhizome which produces the real, which is the passage from the
molecular order to the molar order, in the course of development, which irresistibly
passes through war and which in war defines liberation. The plane of reference
is the Umwelt of social labor and its contradictions.

The place of philosophy
is there-insofar as it is pragmatic, ethical, political. The "partial
observer" of science here becomes the "conceptual character"
of philosophy. Can this conceptual character be anything else than the new
figure of the proletariat, the 'General Intellect' as subversion - that is,
a new figure of the proletariat which is all the more reunited as social and
intellectual power of production, because it is diffuse in space (a Spinozian
"multitude" in the literal sense of the term)? The philosophy of
Deleuze-Guattari mimics the new reality of the modern proletariat, and scans
the figures of its necessary subversion. On one side, then, the conceptual
character duplicates the real, makes it appear in its conflictual dynamism,
and in the fulfillment of its tendentious movement. On the other side, presenting
itself as desire, as unmasterable Utopian production, the proletarian conceptual
character effects a ruthless and permanent rupture of all of the material
references to which it is subjected. The "plane of immanence which philosophy
constructs is a permanent insurrectional project, effected through an absolute
overview of the real, by the radical untimeliness of the contact between molecular
order and molar order, by the actual inactuality of resistance.

Art (for there is also an art of revolutionary thinking) collaborates in this
dynamic of transformation and subversion of the concept, in an essential manner,
by composing the different planes of the imaginary, and always referring them
back to the urgency of praxis.

The didactic scheme of
What is Philosophy? brings to light the phe-nomenologically constructed
threads in the Dionysian Thousand-Plateaus, and in such a lavish manner! What
I mean to say is that the equation of the two works is in no way an identification,
as if the latter were only a chapter of the former. On the contrary, the issue
here is to underscore their differences, which are all to the credit of A
Thousand Plateaus. For the Thousand Plateaus (despite the functional reduction
I have performed in my demonstration) do not only make up an extraordinarily
rich phenomenology of the conceptual character of 'General Intellect'-half
machine, half subject, entirely machine and entirely subject. They also constitute
a revolutionary experiment. The years of desire and of the Erlebnisse of "changing
life" that followed 1968 are gathered up there, through the reexposition
of those extraordinary casuistics that only great revolutionary episodes can
propose. It is said that there is no book which restates 1968: that is false!
That book is A Thousand Plateaus, A Thousand Plateaus is the
historical materialism in act of our epoch, it is the equivalent of Marx's
Class Struggles, in Germany and France. If the text never ends, is never content
with definitive conclusions, it is (just as in the equivalent Marxian thinking)
because they unearth a new subject, whose formation mechanism is not yet completed,
but who has already acquired consistency in the plurality of micro- and macro-experiments
which have been accomplished, ethico-political experiments that in any case
are significant. A Thousand Plateaus is the drive of a collective body,
of a thousand singular bodies. The political as expressed here is that of
the communism of the Spinozian "multitude", that of the devastating
mobility of subjects on the recently constituted world market, it is that
of the most radical democracy (of all subjects, including the insane), directed
like a weapon against the State, the great organizer of the exploitation of
workers, of the disciplinarization of the insane, of the control of the 'General
Intellect'. A Thousand Plateaus explicitly refers to the diffuse and
autonomous social struggles of women, youths, workers, homosexuals, marginals,
immigrants ... within a perspective according to which all walls have already
fallen. This richness of movement makes up the context in which the scientific
point of view and the definitive construction of the concept are henceforth
possible. For this concept is an event, and the system of concepts is the
fracture of the geology of action through a genealogy of event-desire.

The conditions of the
reconstruction (of the Geisteswissenschaften , within the perspective
of a theory of expression and in the context of a historicity which is at
once the very movement of being and the incidence point of the subject, are
thus given. One example may suffice, for that issue: the treatment given to
the history of philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?,
and the methodological hypotheses developed there. The historiographical continuity
of the history of philosophy is dissolved here, as is its ontic teleology
- philosophical historicity is thus treated as historicity tout court, understood
as a singular confrontation between thinking and the actual problematic of
being. History of philosophy itself can only be understood, can only be reconstructed
as event, untimeliness, present 'unactuality'. Philosophy is always a Spinozian
"scholium" of the deployment of the real. The scheme of the sciences
of spirit will therefore always be horizontal, articulated on the event, interdisciplinary,
stratified by the interrelations of its multiple elements. But where is the
past, or that which it produced? In fact the rhizome of the present and of
creativity is opposed to the machinic phylums, which are at once the result
and the residue of the past. But the science of spirit is born where those
machinic phylums are consumed in the determination of a new creation, of a
new event. Material determinations, their accumulations, the opaque depth
of the past constitute a dead whole which only living labor revives, and which
the new machines of subjectivity reinvent. When that does not take place,
the past is dead, it is even our prison. The Thousand Plateaus are the materialist
theory of social labor, understood as the creative event of a thousand subjects
opening themselves up to present reality, on the basis of a machinic conditioning
which that same labor produced, and which only living and actual labor can
once again valorize

If vitalism thus revised,
the theory of expression, and absolute immanentism are the basis of the reconstruction
of the sciences of spirit, what prevents one from going astray into scepticism
or some form of a weak reading of value, on this horizon? Nothing is further
from A Thousand Plateaus than the temptation of absolutizing some element
of the internal process, were it being itself, so as to avoid relativistic
wandering. On the other hand, what allows the sciences of spirit to be reborn,
and the logical and ethical power of materialism to be renewed, is the concept
of surface, ontology open onto historicity, taken as present subjectivity.
Let us look back for a moment: when Heidegger posits the inversion of the
ontic into ontology, of historiography into historicity, as ineluctable, he
at the same time makes this reversal, the logical rupture, the refusal of
destiny, into the only meaning of the existent. The Heideggerian operation
is tantamount to a blockage of life. It pushes the metaphysical procedure
towards anarrival point, to an extreme. Heidegger is Job, who sees God and
remains blinded. In A Thousand Plateaus, on the contrary, to see God,
in Spinozist fashion, is to effect once again the methodological reversal
of the ontic to the ontological, in a new perception of being - of open being
-, not to reassert God, but to exclude him definitively, not to grasp an absolute,
but to consider the construction of being omnino

absoluta; from the work of the singularity at work in human labor. As they
are rhizomatic and centred on the present, the sciences of man may be reconstructed:
the sciences and therefore the planes of reference, philosophy and therefore
the planes of consistency, the sciences of man and therefore the convergence
of these approaches, approximations of the event, ethical charges passing
through ontological machines, subjective arrangements which are more and more
abstract.

There is no other way to consider being than to be it, to make it.

Ten years later, one can
still read A Thousand Plateaus as a perfectly operational phenomenology
of the present; but one must especially see it as the first philosophy of
the post-modern. A philosophy which, sinking its roots into the alternative,
immanentistic, and materialist option of modernity, suggests the bases which
would allow the sciences of spirit to be reconstructed. And because "Geist"
is the brain, and the "brain" has become (as Marx foresaw, to the
rhythm of the crisis of capitalistic, transcendentalist and idealist modernity)
General Intellect, A Thousand Plateaus announces the renaissance of
a historical materialism worthy of our epoch. The latter awaits the revolutionary
event that will verify it.

NOTES

1. M. Heidegger, Sein
und Zeit, 1st division, § 77.



2. A. Negri, Saggi sullo storicismo te.de.sco (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959),
v. I, chaps. 1-3.



3. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophic (Paris: PUF, 1962); Eng. tr. H.
Tomlinson, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983).



4. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Redemption", cit. in
K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1941),
p. 310; Eng. tr. D. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, orig.
1964).



5. R. Aron, La philopsophie critique de l'historie, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1950).



6. A. Negri, Macchina tempo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), p. 70f.



7. ["Agencement" is rendered here by "arrayment" or "arrangement".
The term is important in Deleuze and Guattari's work, particularly the latter's:
see, e.g., Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilee, 1989) and Chaosmose
(Paris: Galilee, 1992) - Tr.]



8. G. Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1987); Eng. tr. S. Hand (Minneapolis:
U. of Minnesota Press, 1988)



9. P. Macherey, "Chroniques d'un dynosaure", Futur Antérieur
no: 9 (Paris, 1992).



10. [The author renders Geisteswissenschaften literally as "sciences
de I'esprit", and has expressed his preference for the broader English
translation "sciences of spirit", rather than "sciences of
mind". The ensuing connotations are part of the content of the essay.
- Tr.]



11. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Mills Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), pp.
190-191; Eng. tr. B. Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota
Press, 1987), p. 153.



12. Ibid., chapter 6.



13. Ibid., chapters 1-2.



14 Ibid., chapters 5, 9-10. V



15. ["Dispositif is rendered here by "apparatus". Cf. G. Deleuze,
"Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif!", in F. Ewald, ed., Michel Foucault
philosophe (Paris: Seuil, 1989), translated as "What is a dispositif?"
by T.J. Armstrong in Michel Foucault, Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992).
- Tr.]



16. Ibid., chapter 12.



17. Ibid., chapters 14-15.



18. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Qu'est-ce-que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit
1991)



19. K. Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Berlin: Dietz
Verlag, 1953); Eng.tr. M. Nicolaus, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973),
and A. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx (South Hadley, Ma.: Bergin & Garvey, 1984;
New York: Autonomedia, 1991)



20. G. Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990); Eng.tr., Interviews 1972-1990
(forthcoming from Columbia University Press), Postscript.

"