Commentary on the recently published book by Roberto Garcia Simões.
We suggest that, with inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari in thousand plateaus, this book can be read by any of the different combinations of Scale and Platform, which can be read independently. This is because the book does not have chapters, since chapters also send to the “capital” what comes first, what hierarchizes, subordinates.
The book is not based on dialectics, on the idea of transcendence, of superior unity, of hierarchical evolution of thought that would begin with a well-defined structure and that passing through chapters would end in an apotheosis conclusion; rather, it is a craftsman's work, which leaves along the way the scaffolding of its constructions, some aporias, the marks of the elaboration of writing, the undecidables, as the purpose is not to produce a thesis, but multiple theses and multiple conceptual worlds, multiple entrances, with flashes and sudden illuminations that bring us closer to aphorisms, genealogies or geologies of morals and worlds and Earth.
However, at the outset, I recommend that you first read the Ambulo of the thesis, where there is, as the author writes, “[…] a wandering with some script, written in the throes of the thesis, and that is why the 'pre' is deleted. . It flies through themes, concepts, (mis)encounters that either return in the context of the thesis or outline contours for subsequent assessments of this ambula”.
Readers will have understood that we are facing a new form of book, which seeks, immanently, to glue its content with its form, that is, suddenly we are facing a thought that breaks with hierarchy and representation, as well as It clears the opposition of deep ideas in relation to superficial ideas. It seeks, moreover, to overcome the factitious division between theoretical framework, on the one hand, and empirical study, on the other. That makes writing an event, a creation. The act of writing-thinking-in-process is already a way of problematizing thought and the canonical form of a book – or a thesis. Therefore, an exceptional work for its form of expression and its content.
Roberto Garcia Simões invites us on a journey through scales and platforms and their multiple lines and drifts through territories, spaces and times. More precisely, he interrogates, based on the geoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, swallowed and transformed into an anthropophagic exercise, canonical concepts of geography.
Among other themes, it calls into question hierarchies of and in thought, as well as social hierarchies. In relation to scales, it indicates that the term has an etymology based on the word “ladder”, which refers to verticality, hierarchy, and that, often, with the use of different forms of the concept of scale, even the most critical ones, reiterates if a thought-State, a thought engendered by the image of the thought-State. When it is believed that with “reschedulings”, with “trans(inter)scalarities”, etc., something is being produced that tries to take into account the complexity of the world, the categories of thought thought up by the State, which engender of hierarchies, of transcendence.
But “would there then be a need for 'scaleless'?”, the author asks. He will say “no”; rather, thinking with “a hundred scales” or with a thousand platforms and plateaus, that is, with the multiplicity of non-hierarchical scalar entries, is not, in effect, about reconstructing new oppositions, new dualities.
The book is a contribution, sui generis, for the systematic critique of the dominant pretension in the order of thought of totality, of that which, before constructing its own problematic, already eliminates the possibility of thinking, which pre-structures the form of the universe and the world and which constructs circles, ladders, rulers and rules, imprisoning thought.
Rather, the work seeks – following the example of Deleuze and Guattari, philosophers on whom, among a murmuring crowd of other thinkers, Roberto Garcia Simões relies in his adventure of sailing through calm and turbulent seas – to think of strata and assemblages as “ complexes of lines” in rhizome that trace a plane that has no more dimensions than those that run through it, faces drawn on the beach sand that disappear with the coming and going of the waves. Thus, the multiplicity that these lines traverse is no longer subordinated to the One, constituting multiplicities of masses and no longer of classes, nomadic and non-normal, multiplicities of becoming and no longer ordered relationships.
But there is no process an opposition of tree, hierarchical arborescence, of scale, for example, necessarily with the root, with the rhizome, with the scaleless of chaos, as countless connectors emerge from the trees, underground or aerial filaments that connect them, constituting a variable and multiple web .
Therefore, this book is about outlining a plan of consistency or composition between intensive elements of affections, percepts and concepts rather than a plan of organization and development (form and substance).
The book and the thesis from which it originates are an abstract-concrete war machine composed of unformed matters and non-formal functions that determine singularities, which are the different aspects of the plateaus/platforms that designate a certain state of reflection. This conceptual war machine seeks, through the flows that flow across the surface of the plateaus and platforms in varying intensities, to build a geography of thought and a logic of thought that, from the bottomlessness of thought, interrogates the organization of the universal, the One, the global, of duality, of the transcendence of concepts such as scale, space and territory in extension.
Arriving, provisionally, at a port on the open sea, on this journey in which concepts are characters alongside what is designated as real, Roberto Simões questions himself precisely about T(t)erra and its spaces and territories, suggesting a period in which he calls “Terracene”, in which “the combination of 'A war machine that had no object other than war' and another destructive mesh – a kind of 'destructive machine' on Earth – engendering the Terracene” is haunting. Question: what to do? How to make? Believe in another world? How can we call for a “new earth” that is other than the Terracene or the Capitalocene or the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves? What geoactions?
The author responds, through “desiring production”, and, citing Deleuze and Guattari from thousand plateaus, writes: […] “the world’s worst war machine reconstitutes a smooth space, to surround and enclose the earth. But the land asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and dig their way to a new land.” Or, Simões cites the pair of thinkers in What is philosophy?: “'Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new land', with 'deterritorialization and re-territorialization intersecting in the double becoming'”.
And then, in relation to the “ends” of planet Earth that are announced, with climate change, widespread pollution, the sixth great extinction of species, amid the dominant apocalyptic discourses that, paradoxically, stimulate a kind of desire for destruction and death – which, by the way, would explain the “collective blindness” in the face of disinhibition in the face of the destruction we witness –, Roberto Garcia Simões writes: “Scanning the destructive and deadly lines of escape, the lines or meshes creative escape routes need to be launched through the generation of smooth spaces and times, the rescue and recovery of those destroyed spaces, the defense of peoples who can be allies in the new land and new peoples to come – and, rescuing a slogan by Deleuze and Guattari (2011a, p. 48): 'Be quick, even when standing still!'.
This book is an invigorating adventure. In such hopeless times, it opens gaps, fissures in consensus and is the revelation of thought in action and a unique contribution to thinking and acting far beyond good and evil. It is, alternatively, an anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian thought, a breath of fresh wind!
Cláudio Luiz Zanotelli He is a professor of geography at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).
Reference
Roberto Garcia Simões. Geoanalysis: terracing and deterritorialization and spaces (-, and) times. A hundred scales and a thousand platforms. São Paulo: Dialética, 2024. 460 pages. [https://amzn.to/4668YTc]
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