'A Thousand Plateaus' and Philosophy ed. by Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell, and James Williams (review)

The ambition of this study is not simply to give a series of expository or critical commentaries that would guide readers, old and new, through the intricacies and conceptual innovations of Deleuze and Guattari's vast work. Much more interestingly and importantly, it also seeks to interrogate the way in which Mille plateaux is an elaboration of 'a new way of doing philosophy' (p. 5), a work that commits itself to nothing less than a 'reappraisal of the whole style of philosophical enquiry' (p. 8). Bringing together Deleuze and Guattari's foremost anglophone scholars and philosophical interlocutors, the contributions to this volume take one of the work's 'plateaux' as its focus in order to show how each engages a series of specific problems or questions within philosophy, thereby demonstrating Mille plateaux's innovation as an experimental and constructive technique of thought. At their best, the essays of this volume do not restrict themselves to demonstrating the apparent efficacy or descriptive power of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics of multiplicity and its accompanying created concepts. Rather, these concepts are evaluated in terms of the fundamental philosophical questions they address and in this way they are opened out onto the wider domain of philosophy and its history and put into a mobile, productive, or critical relation to it. So, for instance, Ronald Bogue's alignment of geo-philosophy with thought of the Stoics and Cynics, or Henry Somers-Hall's philosophical re-appraisal of smooth and striated space through engagements with, among others, Plato, Descartes, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, demonstrate clearly that Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts still have much potential to illuminate and further develop fundamental philosophical questions. As Jeffrey A. Bell's essay on linguistics also clearly shows, they also have a huge power in relation to fundamental critical re-evaluations of existing non-philosophical disciplines such as Chomskian linguistics. Emma Ingala's piece on the ritornello and John Protevi's chapter on the Body-without-Organs are among the essays in this volume that give useful and sober reminders that Mille plateaux at no point encourages us 'to completely abandon identity and embrace an unrecognisable difference' (p. 203). Rather, as Eugene Holland and Daniel W. Smith admirably demonstrate, concepts such as micropolitics or 'the apparatus of capture' encourage and facilitate more nuanced and careful analysis of events, processes, and structures. More importantly still, the contributions included in this volume do not always restrict themselves to uncritical assimilation of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysical concepts, a tendency that at its worst can lead to a monotonous instrumentalization, or as Simon O'Sullivan puts it, 'the worst kind of scholarly capture' of their thinking (p. 177). Ray Brassier's concluding chapter offers an extremely impressive account of the role played by abstract machines in Deleuze and Guattari's thought and represents a significant critical-philosophical engagement with Mille plateaux's most fundamental assumptions and commitments. Along with many of the essays in this volume, Brassier demonstrates the ongoing relevance and importance of Deleuze and Guattari's at once singular and multiple work.