Brent Adkins interviewed me about my new book, Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought for Edinburgh University Press. Here is the full text of the interview.
BA: Your earlier work centered on the relation between French Philosophy, especially Deleuze, and German Idealism. In particular, you often focus on Difference & Repetition as a response to German Idealism. How do you see your new work on A Thousand Plateaus as fitting into to your reading of Deleuze and your overall philosophical project?
HSH: Reading A Thousand Plateaus began as a side project for me, but it’s grown to become my longest work to date. I had finished my book on judgement in French philosophy, and wanted to write a book on the ethical implications of the new understanding of sense taken up there – that was going to be my next major work. The Thousand Plateaus book began as an interlude while I gathered myself for that project – ATP was a book I’d never really gotten to grips with – but it became apparent very quickly that doing justice to it was going to involve an immense amount of intellectual labour. All of my books prior to this one were heavily indebted to German idealism. In brief, I argue that much of French philosophy returns to Kantian transcendental themes, but rejects the idea that all determination operates in terms of predication (that we can say what something is purely by listing its properties). For all sorts of interesting questions around time, ambiguity, and meaning, they argue that we need a pre-predicative notion of sense to explain how judgement works. For Difference and Repetition, this opens out onto the logic of multiplicities, with its rich resonances with Kant’s transcendental approach. A Thousand Plateaus also deals with these questions around determination, but it draws from them all sorts of political possibilities that are simply absent in Deleuze’s sole-authored works. There are clear differences between the two books – DR is far more structuralist than ATP, which gives much more play to unbound intensity, and the range of disciplines addressed in ATP is much broader than the philosophical canon we find at the heart of Difference and Repetition. Still, I find a lot of Kant at play in A Thousand Plateaus, particularly in the doctrine of faciality. So Reading A Thousand Plateaus is a continuation of my work to date, but also a broadening out of the scope of my work to include more ethical and political themes.
BA: I have two questions about the subtitle of your new book. First, there are numerous themes that run throughout A Thousand Plateaus, why highlight the nomadic? Second, why nomad thought? It strikes me that one of the innovations of Deleuze’s work, particularly with Guattari, is an experimentalism that describes a different way of living, a different way of occupying space. Or, to put the question another way, what is the relation between thought and action, nomadic or otherwise?
HSH: It’s a good question, and I think the first thing to present in response is, I’m sorry to say, an argument from authority: Deleuze himself uses the term ‘nomad thought’ as a title for a paper given in 1973 which sets out many of the themes of A Thousand Plateaus. He writes that ‘the nomadic adventure begins when [the nomads – and by nomads here, Deleuze is including figures such as Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf] seek to stay in the same place by escaping the codes.’ Nomad thought is here opposed to sedentary thought, the way philosophy (and other disciplines) have traditionally understood the world, as essentially an expression of atemporal structures, where variation is seen simply as noise and a lack of determination. Now, pushing this further, I think we need to see the dichotomy you’ve suggested, between thought on the one hand, and action on the other, as emerging from a particular, sedentary, model of thinking that Deleuze and Guattari associate with state thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, they try to open up two lines beyond our normal conception of thinking. On the one hand, they try to see thought as a part of the world, rather than a representation of it. That’s particularly clear in their account of the rhizome. On the other, the key question of A Thousand Plateaus, politically, is how we understand organisation. In his essay, Deleuze argues we need to ‘find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or State apparatus,’ so here the claim is that real change is not simply to replace one hierarchy with another, but to try to think connectedness in a way that isn’t hierarchical or bureaucratic at all. Thinking as a nomad (and A Thousand Plateaus itself) is really an effort to think systems without relying on hierarchical unity, and they take this new way of thinking itself to be a revolutionary act that brings with it new ways of living unthinkable within a hierarchical, sedentary schema of the world. It’s a way of trying to think form as emergent from a world of process, rather than as something that pre-exists the world of appearance, and is merely actualised in it.
BA: You propose to read A Thousand Plateaus as a philosophical work. What does it mean to read a work philosophically, and what do we gain by doing so?
HSH: Once again, in some ways, this is just to take seriously the claim that Deleuze himself makes, that he is a ‘pure metaphysician’, and that he is interested in systems, albeit, as we’ve just discussed, not the kinds of hierarchical systems he has taken to govern philosophy until now. Deleuze talks about wanting to find the metaphysics that modern science needs with the Thousand Plateaus project, and it is this metaphysics that I am interested in too. That means, for instance, that rather than see thinking as governed by the homunculus, transcendental or otherwise, of the ‘I think’, we need to take seriously the decentred model of the origin of thought as the interaction of a field of neurons that Deleuze and Guattari find in Steven Rose, and today we might see in someone like Luiz Pessoa’s work. Deleuze and Guattari are trying to understand the model of organisation that these accounts implicitly rely on, and how this model informs other domains such as social organisation, evolutionary theory, etc. These are fascinating, and philosophical, questions.
I’d say as well that treating the book as a work of philosophy means I’ve assumed that there is an argument, and that the various passages and distinctions are all doing work to advance that argument, and that the text presents a cogent and consistent position. I know that doesn’t sound radical – it’s a set of claims that having read your own work I think you would agree with – but there is a lot of work on Deleuze and Guattari that assumes a large part of the book is just there to generate affects in the reader, that use terms without explaining them, and that doesn’t look at its connections with other work. In Reading A Thousand Plateaus, I’ve taken as a model my favourite commentaries on German idealists such as Kant and Hegel (and I remain indebted to my doctoral supervisor, Stephen Houlgate, here). While I’m sure I’ve fallen short of these models, I hope that my aspiration here has at least led to a philosophy reading that is nuanced, shows the rigor (however idiosyncratic) of A Thousand Plateaus, and opens it up to those working on resonant problems in other philosophical discourses.
BA: A Thousand Plateaus is famously a warren of disparate, non-philosophical sources, and you did yeoman’s work tracking them down and explicating their importance. What was your most surprising discovery in working through this source material?
HSH: It’s great, isn’t it? All of those elements drawn together into some kind of unity. I don’t think I could single out one source. I loved the work of Anne Querrien, which really shows the power of the kind of political analysis Deleuze and Guattari are developing. Pierre Clastres work on non-state societies was, I’m ashamed to say, new to me. Henri Maldiney’s work on Paul Klee provided a bridge back to the kind of phenomenological aesthetics I found in Merleau-Ponty. Gilles Châtelet’s work on fields versus predicates is incredibly insightful, while there was a wealth of work on the ancient world, including François Châtelet and Jean-Pierre Vernant. As with my work on Difference and Repetition, what’s surprising is just how consistent the text that emerges is once you’ve followed up their allusions to other writings and seen how these work within their own argument.
Less surprising but more personally affecting was rereading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves for the first time since I was in my twenties. It had been recommended to me by a close friend then, and I simply wasn’t ready to encounter it. It’s a profound study of time and personhood, one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. It’s a rare feeling to find a book that goes to the heart of oneself. The epigraph that opens Reading A Thousand Plateaus is taken from it.
BA: With the benefit of working closely with the text and the source material, how has this changed how you think about A Thousand Plateaus and its place in Deleuze’s corpus?
A Thousand Plateaus was written by Deleuze and Guattari, of course. Deleuze himself refers to Deleuze and Guattari as a rhizome, and in my mind, there is a clear difference between Deleuze’s sole-authored works and his work with Guattari. Prior to writing Reading A Thousand Plateaus, I just wasn’t that familiar with the text, but I think Deleuze describes the situation well when he talks about works before ATP as Kantian, and ATP itself as post-Kantian, while resolutely anti-Hegelian. The emphasis on depth and synthesis in Difference and Repetition, even without Kant’s ‘I think’ can be felt strongly, and I suspect that this transcendental moment is why he writes in the conclusion that the thinker is necessarily solitary and solipsistic. A Thousand Plateaus opens this up – the multiplicity for-itself – and here sets out a grand vision of metaphysics, politics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of nature to rival the scope of Hegel’s system itself. In this sense, A Thousand Plateaus is the flowering of the earlier tight metaphysics of Difference and Repetition into something joyfully open to the world in all of its aspects.
Henry Somers-Hall 