This week we read “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals” chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, as a way of providing the first chapter of Cyclonopedia, which we read last week, with some necessary background.
Below is a transcript of my introduction to the chapter.
NB: A slight issue with recording of this session. Voice channel is oddly doubled. My fault no doubt in messing up settings. Apologies!
When Deleuze and Guattari ask “who does the Earth think it is?” they are extending a question first asked by Schelling: “How does the Earth think?”
Schelling was a post-Kantian who inaugurated what he called a Naturphilosophie – a way of thinking the relation between appearances and things as they are without us perceiving them. This is to say that, for Kant, we cannot know things in themselves; we cannot know things outside of experience. What is a table without my experience of the table, i.e. in itself? I cannot say and I cannot know.
This dichotomy between what Kant calls phenomena and noumena suggests that there is an absolute gap between a subject and its object. This, in turn, leads to other post-Cartesian dichotomies, most damagingly perhaps is the distinction between nature and society. Society being the collective agency and experience of humanity as a species and nature being everything else.
But plenty of philosopher prior to Kant have made the case against this position. A few weeks back we read Spinoza, for instance. Spinoza makes the distinction between nature naturing and nature natured. The suggestion here is that we cannot know things in themselves in any capacity because nothing can be removed from its worldly relations and placed in a vacuum. We, as a species, try to do this – we nature nature by putting it in museums, for instance – but we are also nonetheless a part of nature. We can never removed ourselves from the process of nature naturing.
Schelling makes this same point. For him, nature naturing is “productivity”, which is to say that nature is a ceaselessly productive process. When we try to consider the Kantian dualism of things in themselves and appearances, we have to necessarily eject this productivity. We are only considering “products” rather than the process of production itself.
So, when Schelling asks how the Earth thinks, he argues that the Earth thinks in much the same way we do – through processes.
It was Nietzsche who later made good on this argument. If nature thinks how we do, then that inversely means that we think like nature does. And so Nietzsche takes Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and raises him a “geophilosophy”.
Nietzsche’s philosophy was directly influenced by the new advances in biology of his time. Nietzsche was essentially writing when we first came to think about the biological concept of nutrition. The phrase “you are what you eat”, in this sense, was hugely influential on his philosophy, and Nietzsche said this most explicitly. “To choose one’s diet is to plan one’s essence”, he once wrote. But for Nietzsche this wasn’t just some appeal towards wellness and mindfulness. Your diet is a question of history as much as it is a question of your future. He makes the point that Germans probably think the way they do because they eat so many sausages.
This sounds like a silly and glib comment but what Nietzsche is suggesting to here is essentially that thought – more precisely, what we think – is shaped by our relationship to the planet. Cultures aren’t just generic customs and opinions formed through chance. Cultures emerge quite literally from the ground. The nature of the landscape on which we live, the animals that live there, the food that grows there, the weather patterns, the types of rock, etc. etc. All of this has an impact on culture and so, it is in this sense that Nietzsche makes the point that so much of what we understand to be “experience” is devoid of a history. History, in this sense, and indeed archaeology, remains a fledging science because there is so much that it must account for.
It is this idea that leads Nietzsche to write his Geneology of Morality. He suspends the notion of Christianity being the foundation for all moral law and instead turns to the Earth itself, to history proper, to understand a new archaeology of thought. (This is something that Michel Foucault would famously run away with, developing a more rigorous approach to what we might know call sociology.)
Deleuze and Guattari, in this chapter, take all of this philosophical history and combine it together. They even hope to take it one step further. They want to reconsider this Schellingian Naturphilosophie, Nietzschean geophilosophy and this Spinozistic conception of an immanent nature and update it to now, because things are more complicated in the next century than they were for Nietzsche.
It is worth mentioning that, if we’re going to talk about how our relationship to the Earth configures how we think, German philosophy is the perfect example. Take the University of Freiberg, one of the most famous institutions within the history of philosophy, where Heidegger, Arendt, Gadamer, Carnap, Husserl, Hayek and Weber (amongst many others) all taught and/or studied. Freiberg is also home to the world’s oldest university of mining and engineering. For Nietzsche, it would be absolutely no coincidence that a German city is known for its excellence in both philosophy and mining.
In this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are playing with this association absolutely. They are essentially treating mining and philosophy as a kind of double helix, but rather than sequencing this genome – that is, looking at geophilosophy in itself, as an entangled product of philosophy and mining – they are instead considering the productivity of their relation and they are bringing in a lot of other things besides.
This chapter is, in this sense, the perfect demonstration of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by a rhizome – and, again, the fact a rhizome is a kind of geological relation, of nature naturing with geology, is worth noting. Philosophy and mining, as much as they penetrate one another, also penetrate many other things. This includes Conan Doyle’s character Professor Challenger, who appears in many stories that explore the strangeness of geophilosophy through science fiction. Most explicitly, this includes the story The Day The Earth Screamed, in which Challenger drills downs into the Earth’s core but instead of finding a molten centre, he finds a strange sort of brain down there, like the Earth is not a ball of rock flying through space but is actually some sort of sea anemone in space. Challenger also appears in the story The Lost World, in which he and an expedition of people stumble upon a time fault out in the jungle; a plateau that has somehow remained unchanged since prehistoric times.
All of Conan Doyle’s Challenger stories dramatize the geophilosophical questions that Deleuze and Guattari and their predecessors are interested in.
Alongside the geophilosophy and the science fiction, they also drag in semiotics. This is perhaps the most challenging part of this chapter and once which I struggle to get my head around but it is also a part of the chapter that we’ve discussed in a previous session – this thrilling but confusing tendency that a lot of these texts (A Thousand Plateaus but also Cyclonopedia) have of doing what they want to talk about rather than deconstructing it and laying it out flat to pour over. But the reason for doing this is important. As we’ve discussed, it’s an attempt to make a text into a process rather than a product. This is Derrida’s preferred way of working – turning everything into a text; that is, turning everything into a product to be deciphered. But for Deleuze and Guattari, this is to separate out what is the content of a text and what is being expressed. The importance of their post-structural approach to linguistics is that these two things cannot be disentangled. The relation is precisely the point and that relation is productivity. But not just productivity, in the Schellingian sence. Deleuze and Guattari add a new psychoanalytic depth here and instead speak of a kind of “desiring-production”. Productivity, in this sense, is a sort of conscious process that expresses a kind of libidinal content. I want to eat so I produce some lunch. Production is the process but it is informed by a lower level process of desire. And, following on from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, if that’s how we act, it is also how the Earth acts. So if nature naturing is a process of production, then what does nature want? Nature naturing, then, for Deleuze and Guattari, is informed by a second order process: desire desiring.
I don’t really have an end to this introduction. I’m hoping that makes some sense and we can perhaps untangle anything that remains unclear but I’d like to first draw this back to Cyclonopedia.
When we think about a book like Cyclonopedia, this process that Deleuze and Guattari describe is fully realised on the page. These tensions between Gog-Magog and what have you – what are these if not an expression of the Earth’s life and death drives? How has capitalism entangled these processes and monopolised them? Oil, as capital’s blobjective avatar, is, for Negarestani, the lubricant to this process. It is raw unfiltered formless history commodified and fuelling the earth’s death drive. It’s a kind of amorphous unconscious, a kind of brain fluid with its own agency, parasitizing this process. Oil, then, is the blackened side of nature naturing, as sun-powered corpse juice, that seaps out onto the surface and feeds back into that second order process of desire desiring.
It’s this kind of horrifying Lovecraftian capture that gets into everything, from car engines to our very patterns of speech.