What Is 'Nomad Thought' in Deleuze & Guattari? Henry Somers-Hall on 'Reading A Thousand Plateaus'

Acid Horizon

Henry Somers-Hall joins Craig and Adam to discuss his newly published book, Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, which serves as a clarifying remix of Deleuze and Guattari's

Key takeaways

• Henry Somers-Hall describes his book as a philosophical remix that clarifies Deleuze and Guattari's arguments by tracing their connective tissue to thinkers like Pierre Clastres, Michel Serres, and Virginia Woolf.
• The episode argues that thinking suffers from a transcendental illusion, mistakenly conflating the representation of thought with the actual intensive processes that generate it.

Main topics

• Nomad thought versus sedentary state logic
• The problem of judgment and transcendental illusion

Notable quotes

"I don't believe in things. And what he means by that is that what we take to be things are really kind of quasi-stable processes emerging from like an intensive field."

Conclusion

The episode provides a rigorous yet accessible entry point into Deleuze and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Thanks for tuning back into the podcast. This is Craig. The fall season of our course series is in full swing at Asset Horizon Research Commons, and some of our classes have already hit max capacity. For some, we're removing the cap, like Sasha Ravitch's Aesthetics of Ophel, which begins the week this episode drops. There are a couple of classes starting in November, so if you are planning to enroll, head to the show notes and hop into one of the remaining classes. We also have live events coming up in the northeastern U.S. this fall, so visit our events page and find us at Penn State University later this month and back at the Durations Festival in Brooklyn early next month. We have a fantastic interview for you today, so let's get right to it. Speaker 1 (1:03) Welcome to Acid Horizon, the theory podcast. Today, we're thrilled to welcome back a returning champion, Henry Summers Hall. If you remember from our previous discussions, the last of which I believe was about a year ago, and it's just amazing how time flies, Henry was writing a book on Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, entitled Reading A Thousand Plateaus, Adventures in Nomad Thought. That book is finally out from Edinburgh University Press, and I want to thank them for sending us a copy, which I have already annotated to death, even taking it to bed with me on some nights, mechanical pencil in hand. Because Nomad Thought is the namesake of Henry's book and so central to Deleuze and Guattari's project more generally, we'll be taking a close look at the reading of The Nomadology Plateau today. Henry has once again joined us to discuss it as we try to answer the question, what is nomad thought? And given Deleuze and Guattari's experimental approach to philosophy and to writing itself, we ask how we can take the concepts from each of the plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus and make them usable for a variety of purposes, political, ethical, aesthetic, and otherwise. Henry, welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks, Craig. Speaker 2 (2:21) And Speaker 1 (2:22) Adam. Thanks, guys. First of all, Henry, I just got to say, thank you for writing this book. I mean, most everything that you've written and that we've touched on this podcast has been pretty important to developing our personal understanding of Deleuze and Guattari and their relationship to either Marx or Hegel or whoever. But this is probably my favorite and perhaps most usable piece of writing that you've given us since we made contact. when was it, years ago. Last evening, I was with a few friends, scholars who were in town from other places in the world, and they are friends of the podcast. And one of them was paging through the book, and they remarked to me that these concepts are elucidated so clearly that it inspired them. Well, I want to do a class on a thousand plateaus now. They felt confident on that basis. And one of the other things that I like about this text compared to other secondary literature, is that it's almost like a remix album. It's as if you were handed the stems from producers and maybe even some of the cutting room floor material of A Thousand Plateaus, and you were asked to work on it as either a kind of supplement, but in a way, this book, I think, could also be read as a kind of standalone. What was your approach to this book? And was my analogy accurate in any sense? And what exactly did you want? to do with this piece of writing? Speaker 2 (3:49) Yeah, thanks, Craig. I don't know. I mean, like, it's a good question. And when you talk about a remix album, I couldn't help thinking of when Deleuze talks about philosophical buggery. Yes, Speaker 1 (4:00) indeed. Speaker 2 (4:01) You can kind of say, you can imagine Deleuze saying, oh yeah, all of my texts, they're remixes of Bergson. The remixes for those there. Because I think it actually captures really nicely in terms of what Deleuze is doing. The way in which he kind of also says, I never make them say anything that they didn't say themselves, right? And there's that kind of strange tension between those two statements. And like a remix, like captures that really nicely, that in Deleuze. So I really like the analogy. I think it's a really nice analogy for Deleuze. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I suppose, I mean, there are two answers to what I was trying to do. One is the kind of the broader answer. And that's just, I'd finished a big book on judgment in French philosophy. And I just felt like I needed to do something different before I got on with another big project. And I kind of naively thought this would be a very small sort of side project, just working through a thousand plateaus. And it really wasn't. But I think. What my approach has been really is to just understand what Deleuze and Batari are doing in A Thousand Plateaus. And I know that sounds really naive, but what I found, what I really enjoyed about doing the Difference in Repetition book a few years ago was, you know, you can write an article on Deleuze and there are bits that you sort of skip over because... You don't really know what's going on. You kind of know roughly what's happening, but you don't need to know that stuff for the article you're writing so that you skip over it and you move to the next bit. But when you're writing something that's more of a commentary, you find that you have to work through the bits that are really hard, you know, the bits where it's all tangled and try and come up with some sense of what's going on. And I think that's really what I wanted to do with this is like, I kind of wanted to get to the stage where I could give an account of what was happening in any paragraph in A Thousand Plateaus, not necessarily quite a true account, the final account, but just I could kind of say, well, I think these things are what's going on there. And this book was really the sort of the offshoot of that project of trying to understand the text. So I think you're right. It could be read as a standalone book. A remix, I think, I mean, I think it almost sounds a bit too creative for what I was doing, because what I was really trying to do was just be able to say what they're saying in my own idiom. And I think, you know, my idiom, my way of writing still goes back to Warwick, where we did all the continental stuff, but we also had this strong Anglo-American training. So I think it's not an Anglo-American text, but trying to be really clear about what's going on and what the arguments are, focusing on the arguments. Those are things I really wanted to bring out. So, I mean, I suppose when I put it that way, the remix test comes into play, actually. So maybe you're right. Maybe it is a bit like a remix. Yeah, no, I'll take that. I'll take that as a remix. Well, Speaker 1 (7:07) I'll just say one more thing about that. Imagine somebody reading A Thousand Plateaus for the first time. They're going to be overwhelmed, especially take the Nomadology Plateau, for instance. So you have all these figures, Dessart, Clastres, Michel Serre, Anne Quirion, Simone, and these are all figures that come up. And these names could be completely foreign to the first time reader. In the text, as they use those figures and the concepts of those figures, it's a kind of connective tissue. I mean, a lot of their argument rests on big blocks of the theories of the mediators that they're using. But at the same time, I mean, just to extend the remix analogy, it's almost like you're making loops. So you have... the work, the anthropology of Pierre Closser, for example, and that just gets lifted up and put into the spotlight or just like a 30 second loop of that ongoing for a time wherein you bring in some of that work and elaborate it in a way where Deleuze and Guattari, sometimes they just move too fast for us, at least on a first read. Speaker 2 (8:12) Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's right. And I think the idea that it's like they're connective. Do you take an active tissue of the text? Sure. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the way Deleuze writes is he presents these arguments, but like big blocks of the argument are elsewhere. You know, they're just not there in the text he's writing. And I think to be able to see what he means quite often, you just need to like trace the sources and put it into the text. And I think that's really what I've tried to do here. So, and sometimes it's like, And obviously Pierre Clastres and people like that and Michel Serres are really big figures and they have a very obvious important point in the text. But, you know, there are other places like Anne-Claude, Anne-Claude, for instance, where what can be quite a minor reference can suddenly illuminate like a whole section. What does it mean to have this kind of organized body within a state that's not a hierarchical? organization well she kind of just develops these accounts of what that is and they incorporate it into their text in footnotes and so if you bring that in you can start to understand well okay what are the structural characteristics that these groups have to have and it moves away from on the one hand the abstract and on the other like if you read the body without organs plateau it's kind of it's kind of crazy the things you need to do to reach the plane of consistency according to that plateau. I mean, you've got guys injecting ink into their penises in the masochist section, right? And getting all sorts of tattoos with inappropriate phrases all over their body. Whereas, you know, I think elsewhere you can start to see things that you could really work with when you bring these other materials in. And, you know, they're aware of it and maybe they're left in the footnotes because they're not quite as... Speaker 2 (10:10) as the sources that they foreground themselves in. I Speaker 3 (10:14) mean, I forgot one thing earlier, which is when Henry's talking about you coming from this continental edition but with analytic training when it comes to the University of Warwick. And then it does just show there's Speaker 2 (10:24) a Speaker 3 (10:24) real divide between the two different ways that Warwick University has received to learn the guitar. In the actual philosophy department, we're like, what the hell are these guys saying? We're reading a thousand plateaus. We're kind of doing a cartographic map. And then over in the cultural studies department, everyone's reading Anteidopus and trying to figure out which page is the best to use as a Rizla. Like, it really is a strong divide, because I can imagine there's some listeners that'd be like, oh yes, Oric in the 90s and Delers, and they're thinking immediately, like, you're thinking of this sort of, this Landian sort of rave culture. So I just thought it was a really fascinating divide to pick up there. But yeah, when it comes to the approach to the book as well, one of the things I also really appreciate is, again, much in that sort of actual philosophical sensibility of bringing it back to the fact that there is, because it's hard to think of A Thousand Plateaus as a book with an argument sometimes, because it is so encyclopedic and it is so big and you do get lost in it. And sometimes it's hard to have an adventure in this kind of thought to go back to the title of the book, because you can get lost, you can get frustrated with it. It can be like you might skip a track here and there and you can't always find your thread through it. One of the things, sort of the tools I think the book does to sort of keep that is a sort of constancy of certain kinds of refrains. And those refrains are the fundamental problem that you said, Delon and Victoria, are tracing here, which is the problem of judgment. And just, is it okay if we go in, if we can sort of recapitulate what that problem is? Because for me, I found it so helpful thinking about the problem of judgment and the idea of predication, particularly as it comes to the idea of... essentially, the Lurz and Guattari may, in a sense, sometimes collapse. It seems like sometimes they collapse the distinction between essence and appearance into each other, where everything is on the same flat plane. And I've had some discussions with comrades being like, okay, well, how can you have a kind of criticism if there's not sort of a true false distinction here between essence and appearance? But one of the ways in which you bring this back is through saying that fundamentally, one of the... One of the ways you sort of get into A Thousand Plateaus is you take on board this critique from, originally from Deleuze, which is to actually, even if we don't have this kind of traditional Aristotelian distinction or the Kantian distinction between essence and appearance, we nonetheless have illusion. And that illusion is actually how, is actually built into how we use judgments, how we think about propositions. So before we get into the A Thousand Plateaus, I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about the... that stuff about around judgment and transcendental illusion because that's the stuff that really helped me right Speaker 2 (13:03) okay I mean yeah to a certain extent I can I mean it's a different book but yeah but I think the basic claim that you know the basic orientation of my reading is around I suppose the distinction that they make that I really take up is the distinction between the sedentary and the nomadic which goes right the way back to difference repetition as you said it's like a delusional distinction and Speaker 3 (13:27) Like, I mean, it's really simple in a way. Speaker 2 (13:29) It's like you kind of look around you and there's stuff and it's all moving around. We're all people. We're kind of all different, but we're all similar in various ways. And so there are two ways really of trying to trace back the kind of the origin of the structure we find. So we either follow Plato and Plato has this whole account of how there are kind of eternal forms prior to time. that are somehow exemplified in the world of appearances in temporality. And then you get these kind of effects, like the kind of differences that you find between individuals are really accidents. And as Aristotle says, there's a recalcitrance of matter insofar as forms are exemplified. And so we have this notion then of the essential form and then accidental differences where that form fails to instantiate itself properly. So you have all those structures there. And the other approach is rather than take eternity as the kind of the primary ground to see structure