Learning to think in the Anthropocene : what can Deleuze-Guattari teach us?

Gilles Deleuze's (1925-1995) philosophical work enabled him to examine the history of Western philosophy, art, literature, and cinema, whereby he arrived at a nomadic position in and through which the subject of philosophizing and thinking could be deeply questioned as being power related and/ or sedentary and a new image of thought could be produced other than these factors in thought. In his dual work with Felix Guattari (1930-1992), this intellectual process was extended to attend to the dynamics of capitalism and schizophrenia, and how an image of thought could be produced that was not subject to the dominance of the Western philosophical tradition or capitalism. I have argued elsewhere that Deleuze and Guattari (1988) perform a type of "immanent materialism" (Cole 2013, 2014) in A Thousand Plateaus that mobilizes material ideas on planes of immanence or plateaus to "construct conceptual ecologies around particular inquiries" (Cole and Mirzaei Rafe 2017), here figured through the Anthropocene. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) drew on the ideas of Gregory Bateson (1972) who suggested that all that we call thought is the result of exchanges in information; it is an intellectual affective activity and physical interaction that includes the exchanges of nonhumans as and through ecology. Thus, fully mobilized, the image of thought from A Thousand Plateaus leads to a mode of becoming or action in and through which thinking and learning are fused ecologically; therefore, directionality in learning is not tied to human-only- designated outcomes or to predesigned quantitative goals, but attends to an immanent plane, here figured through the date, June the 13, 1992; when George H. W. Bush claimed at the first Rio Earth Summit that the United States was the preeminent environmental nation in the world. I claim here that this was a watershed moment in world history, in and through which a new mode of global American exceptionalism was born; the USSR and the spread of world communism had been defeated, and the United States was triumphant and becoming progressively more global-imperial-commercial-invasive.