A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus
	Cover of the first edition
Authors	Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari
Original title	Mille plateaux
Translator	Brian Massumi
Country	France
Language	French
Series	Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Subject	Philosophy; schizoanalysis; micropolitics; aesthetics; political economy;
Published	1980 (Les Éditions de Minuit, in French); 1987 (University of Minnesota Press, in English);
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	645 (French edition); 610 (English translation)
ISBN	978-0816614028
Preceded by	Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Followed by	What is Philosophy?

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Mille plateaux) is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.[1]

Summary[edit]

Like the first volume of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus is politically and terminologically provocative and is intended as a work of schizoanalysis,[2] but focuses more on what could be considered systematic, environmental and spatial philosophy, often dealing with the natural world, popular culture, measurements and mathematics. A "plateau", borrowed from ideas in Gregory Bateson's research on Balinese culture, is "a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities"; the chapters in the book are described as plateaus, while their respective dates also signify a level of intensity, where "each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau." Deleuze and Guattari describe the book itself as a rhizome due to how it was written and produced. A Thousand Plateaus has been described as dealing with their ideas of the rhizome, as well as the body without organs, the plane of immanence, abstract machines, becoming, lines of flight, assemblages, smooth and striated space, state apparatuses, faciality, performativity in language, binary branching structures in language, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, arborescence, pragmatics, strata, stratification and destratification, the war machine, the signified, signifier and sign, and coding/recoding.[3]

In the plateaus (chapters) of the book, they discuss psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung, Lacan—who trained Guattari,[4]: x and Melanie Klein), composers (Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen), artists (Klee, Kandinsky, and Pollock), philosophers (Husserl, Foucault, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gilbert Simondon), historians (Ibn Khaldun, Georges Dumézil, and Fernand Braudel), and linguists (Chomsky, Labov, Benveniste, Guillaume, Austin, Hjelmslev, and Voloshinov). Deleuze and Guattari highly favor and criticize these figures, sometimes overlapping or "plugging" their statements, works, research, studies and fragments "into each other".[3]

The book starts with an introduction titled "Rhizome" that explains rhizomatic philosophy (addressing not just the book itself but all books as rhizomes), and ends with a conclusion, "Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines", that fully elaborates on and intertwines all of the major concepts in the book, as well as Anti-Oedipus, with a numbering system representing plateaus. In between are thirteen chapters, each dated non-linearly, sometimes precisely ("November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?"), sometimes less so ("10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)"). In the sixth chapter, "Year Zero: Faciality" (visagéité), the notion of face is discussed as an "overcoding" of body,[4]: 170 but also as being in dialectical tension with landscape (paysagéité). Faciality, the essence of the face, is ultimately a dominating and dangerously compelling trait of bodies, and Deleuze and Guattari remark that the face "is a whole body unto itself: it is like the body of the center of significance to which all of the deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization."[4]: 587

Like Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari evaluate and criticize psychoanalysis: in the first two chapters, they discuss the work of Sigmund Freud, especially referring to the case histories of the Wolf Man and Little Hans. Their schizoanalysis of Freud's cases refuses the Oedipalization they were previously given, and aims to exercise the content of their fantasies instead; "Look at what happened to Little Hans already [...] they kept on breaking his rhizome and blotching his map, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him".[5] In particular, focusing on child psychoanalysis, they remark that "children are Spinozists."[5] Meanwhile, owing to their mode of literary analysis, A Thousand Plateaus also frequently discusses novels. In "1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"", they discuss Henry James' In the Cage (1898) and "The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass" by Pierrette Fleutiaux, but they also evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay The Crack-Up (1945) (which Deleuze previously discussed in The Logic of Sense), because his depression and frustration in the essay is dramatized, and Deleuze's idea of the crack constitutes a narrativized breakdown.[5]: 192–207 The works of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Carlos Castaneda, H. P. Lovecraft, Herman Melville and Chrétien de Troyes are also discussed, often in conjunction with the rhizome, becoming, faciality, and the regimes of signs.[3]

Reception[edit]

A Thousand Plateaus has been considered a major statement of post-structuralism and postmodernism.[6] Mark Poster writes that the work "contains promising elaborations of a postmodern theory of the social and political."[7] Writing in the foreword to his translation, Massumi comments that the work "is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative 'nomad' thought called for in Anti-Oedipus." Massumi contrasts "nomad thought" with the "state philosophy... that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato".[8]

Deleuze critic Eugene Holland suggests that the work complicates the slogans and oppositions developed in its predecessor. Whereas Anti-Oedipus created binaries such as molar/molecular, paranoid/schizophrenic, and deterritorialization/reterritorialization, A Thousand Plateaus shows how such distinctions are operations on the surface of a deeper field with more complicated and multidimensional dynamics. In so doing, the book is less engaged with history than with topics like biology and geology.[9] Massumi writes that A Thousand Plateaus differs drastically in tone, content, and composition from Anti-Oedipus. In his view, the schizoanalysis the authors practice is not so much a study of their "pathological condition", but a "positive process" that involves "inventive connection".[10]

Bill Readings appropriates the term "singularity" from A Thousand Plateaus, "to indicate that there is no longer a subject-position available to function as the site of the conscious synthesis of sense-impressions."[11] The sociologist Nikolas Rose writes that Deleuze and Guattari articulate "the most radical alternative to the conventional image of subjectivity as coherent, enduring, and individualized".[12]

In 1997, the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont asserted that the book contains many passages in which Deleuze and Guattari use "pseudo-scientific language".[13] Writing about this "science wars critique," Daniel Smith and John Protevi contend that "much of their chapter on Deleuze consists of exasperated exclamations of incomprehension."[14] Similarly, in a 2015 interview, British philosopher Roger Scruton characterized A Thousand Plateaus as "[a] huge, totally unreadable tome by somebody who can't write French."[15][16] At the beginning of a short essay on postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard lists examples of what he describes as a desire "to put an end to experimentation", including a displeased reaction to A Thousand Plateaus that he had read in a weekly literary magazine, which said that readers of philosophy "expect [...] to be "gratified with a little sense". Behind this "slackening" desire to constrain language use, Lyotard identifies a "desire for a return to terror."[17]: 71–72, 82

Digital media theorist Janet Murray links the work to the aesthetic of hypertext.[18]

Gaming and electronic literature expert Espen Aarseth draws parallels between Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the rhizome and semiotician Umberto Eco's idea of the net.[19]

Christopher Miller criticizes Deleuze and Guattari's use of "second-hand" anthropological sources without providing the reader with contextualization of the colonialist "mission" that led to their writing. Timothy Laurie says that this claim is inaccurate, but that Deleuze & Guattari should extend that same "rigor" to uncovering the political and economic entanglements which contextualize academic philosophy.[20]: 10

Influence[edit]

A Thousand Plateaus was an influence on the political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire (2000).[21]

The sociologist John Urry sees Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the nomad as having "infected contemporary social thought."[22]

The philosopher Manuel DeLanda, in A New Philosophy of Society (2006), adopts Deleuze's theory of assemblages, taken from A Thousand Plateaus.[23]

References[edit]

^ Massumi, Brian (1987). "Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy". A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. xi.
^ Stivale, Charles J. (1984). "The Literary Element in "Mille Plateaux": The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari". SubStance. Johns Hopkins University Press. 13 (44–45): 20–34. doi:10.2307/3684772. JSTOR 3684772.
^ Jump up to:a b c Melehy, Hassan; Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). "Index". A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 589–610. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.
^ Jump up to:a b c Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.
^ Jump up to:a b c Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.
^ For example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991) devoted a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.
^ Poster, Mark (1990). The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0226675961.
^ Massumi, Brian; Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. xi. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.
^ Holland, Eugene W. (1991). "Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization": From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "A Thousand Plateaus"". SubStance. 20 (3): 55–65. doi:10.2307/3685179. JSTOR 3685179.
^ Massumi, Brian (1993). A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 1–4. ISBN 978-0-262-63143-3.
^ Readings, Bill (1997). The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 115. ISBN 978-0674929531.
^ Rose, Nikolas (1996). Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 170. ISBN 978-0521646079.
^ Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1999). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-312-20407-5.: "Should the reader entertain any further doubts about the ubiquity of pseudo-scientific language in Deleuze and Guattari's work, he or she is invited to consult [...] pages 32-33, 142-143, 211-212, 251-252, 293-295, 361-365, 369-374, 389-390, 461, 469-473, and 482-490 of A Thousand Plateaus."
^ Smith, Daniel; Protevi, John (2018). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Gilles Deleuze (Spring 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
^ Scruton, Roger (10 December 2015). "These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life". Spiked Online. Retrieved 12 January 2018.
^ Scruton, Roger (2015). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury. p. 189. ISBN 978-1-4081-8733-3.
^ Lyotard, Jean-François (1993). "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?". The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Durand, Régis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 71–82. ISBN 978-0-8166-1173-7. "Under the general demand for slackening and appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.
^ Murray, Janet (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: Free Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0684827230.
^ Aarseth, Espen (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0801855795.
^ Laurie, Timothy (2012). "Epistemology as Politics and the Double-Bind of Border Thinking: Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Mignolo". PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies. 9 (2): 1–20. doi:10.5130/portal.v9i2.1826. hdl:10453/44227. Deleuze and Guattari do recognise many of these concerns in their discussions of ethnologists.
^ Hardt, Michael; Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 424. ISBN 978-0674006713.
^ Urry, John (2000). Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. New York: Routledge. p. 27. ISBN 978-0415190893.
^ DeLanda, Manuel (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 120. ISBN 978-0826491695.

External links[edit]

Preview of A Thousand Plateaus available on Google Books
April 10, 2006 article by John Philipps, with an explanation of the incomplete translation of "agencement" by "assemblage" ("One of the earliest attempts to translate Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term agencement appears in the first published translation, by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, of the article "Rhizome." The English term they use, assemblage, is retained in Brian Massumi's later English version, when "Rhizome" appears as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus.")
Faciality: The concept of faciality discussed by Michael Hardt.
Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass: Deleuze and Guattari's study of the story discussed by Ronald Bogue in Deleuze on Literature (2013).
Nomadology discussed by Christopher L. Miller.
The Smooth and the Striated. The penultimate chapter of ATP discussed by Flora Lysen and Patricia Pisters.
"Drawing A Thousand Plateaus" presents a paragraph by paragraph diagrammatic, illustrative interpretation of the text by artist Marc Ngui.

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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Paperback – 1 December 1987
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A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.

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Peter Anderson
19 reviews8 followers

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May 22, 2007
wrote my MA thesis on these fuckers

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the kenosha kid
76 reviews64 followers

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June 22, 2023
I hate this fucking book.
2017-reading 2018-reading 2019-reading
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The Awdude
89 reviews

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April 25, 2011
The most difficult book ever written. EVER. But it’s also liberating as hell. Just sit back and enjoy how strange it makes you feel. And then how ecstatic, confused, angry, etc., all at once. But if you're ever climbing and all of a sudden you realize that you're getting it, like, really getting it, then hang on and stay with it because it will probably change your life when you get to the top. And that feels pretty groovy. Especially when you really have to work for the plateau. It ain’t easy becoming a body without organs. And if you think the reading part pushes you to the limit, just wait till it’s time to sew up the ol’ asshole. The anus machine awaits the stratification of the sewing machine, the needle-and-thread aSSemblage, for the Dogon Egg awaits its de-territorialization! Whether you’re Chasing Freud’s patients alongside a pack of becoming-wolves, or watching poor Dr. Challenger evaporate, or pursuing a line of flight aboard the rhizomatic acid-cloud to Dr. Angrypants’s Masochingdom in the Metallurgy Matrix, ATP will not disappoint. Seriously. Read it. Don’t be afraid.

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Chris
4 reviews18 followers

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September 9, 2008
Tired of seeing everything from the point of view of the individual? Bored of anthropomorphism? This might be the book for you. This book changed the way I think about thinking. Swirls in your pot of boiling water will seem as complex and contingent as hurricanes. The migration of humans will look like the crawling of ants. Most importantly, though, Deleuze and Guattari show everything as a process of strategic movement through territory, whether it be the formation of layers of sediment or nomads trekking through the desert plains. Like a roving spiderweb over the Cartesian grid of your window screen and your city, their thought shows us how to capture new territory while evading capture ourselves. But be wary, because capitalism has been doing just that for longer than we've been alive, and it's much better at it than we are.

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Gary Beauregard Bottomley
1,055 reviews649 followers

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March 9, 2023
There is a method to the madness within this extraordinary book. At first blush it often seems as if it’s a hodgepodge of a mish mash of stray threads at most loosely connected concerning the paradox of existence, but this book never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously within its post-structuralism paradigms therefore allowing the reader to pretend to believe what the authors' are saying is deserving of the reader’s attention.

By pretending to believe what the authors are saying the book starts to make sense when the reader realizes that the book has multiple levels of interpretations: narrative, literal, metaphorical, and absolute rather than analogical. The book often at times reads as if it was a post-modern novel where space and time have been collapsed into a world without past or future but only the now of synchronic contingency.

The authors’ form of post-structuralism is convinced that the truth is out there and knowable and being qua being is directly knowable. They’ll mention that relative and analogical relationships are not enough and that haecceity can get us beyond the vagueness of the essence that Husserl hypothesizes with his hyletics, (defn: The study of matter or raw impressions of an intentional act; the abstraction from the form) as a starting point. Haecceity is a Duns Scotus way for experiencing the world and invokes an appeal to an object’s thisness and thatness distinction and believes being is knowable as being (being qua being) as in contrast from Thomas Aquinas who believes the supreme good is only knowable analogically. These authors think along the same lines as Scotus and try to collapse the being and becoming, or the appearance and reality, form and content, or other such dichotomies into a post-structuralist super-structure.

The authors will say nomads are people of the desert without spaces separated by strata which have no history and thus no culture and therefore are the true warriors and worthy of growth and even a Henry Miller can be a nomad within the city as he walks by himself at night in a world constructed with rhizomes (a word the authors coined with significant philosophical meaning for the text and it gets at the sameness within the one until it’s a multiple, one needs to read the whole book to really get at what they mean). Fascism needs a multiple of the intensity in order to thrive and all of the themes in this book are anti-fascist and anti-Spengler. Oswald Spengler gets quoted once but not from his seminal fascist book, Decline of the West, but from one of his lesser-known works. Spengler believes the opposite from what the first sentence in this paragraph states and from what Deleuze and Guattari are saying within this book as a whole. When in doubt on understanding what the authors are saying, it’s possible to just say think the opposite of what Spengler said.

The authors speak about a Body Without Organs (BWO). It is part of the abstract machine that holds all of our thoughts together and its ‘grey book’ is Spinoza’s Ethics and exemplifies what they mean, according to the authors. It is the One of Spinoza and is the explanation for the One substance that makes up everything in the universe until the rhizome devolves into the multiplicity of the many. Also, not from this book, I would say BWO is partly explained as the abstract machine that is the ‘ontological difference’ between being and becoming, or subjective and objective, and so on. I’d like to note how I discovered this book; I saw a review on Goodreads by someone who was reviewing this book and definitely did not like it because of its difficulty and said something about the BWO and a commentator (one of my Goodread friends, I think) said ‘your full of shit’. Two things, if I see a review for a book and the person says it’s difficult to understand, I know I want to read it, and if someone else says someone else is ‘full of shit’, I know I want to see why they would say that.

The authors are writing a post-structuralist defense and are rejecting relational truths knowable only by analogical and are sneaking in the Haecceity of Duns Scotus and his synchronic contingency (all understanding is of the now, not the past or future except for ultimate Being who sees all at once). The German Mark on November 20, 1923 was made into a German Mark but with a trillion to one ratio and that solved that nation’s travails through the recoding of the code axiomatically thus leading to a beer hall putsch and paving the way for a re-coding of the code such that a multiplicity of power would be manifested into a Hitler and the Nazis. The axioms (a word they use frequently) that float around us, determine us until they don’t.

The authors are right when they say Bergson is right to criticize Einstein’s general theory since it uses stratified space and smooth space gets pushed aside and he needed Riemann space which is not a metric space since time gets convoluted within space with the self-referential transformation. The authors are dealing with literal truths while they are telling their narrative on the nature of being qua being in a post-structural world that they are constructing, all the while they never really take themselves seriously since they ultimately know that means they could never be seriously taken. I cite this example from this book mostly to show how all encompassing this book is at times and how Bergson had a point.

The book makes the point that Norm Chomsky universal grammar is not necessarily wrong but that he just didn’t go far enough. Linguistics is a big part of the book. They’ll also say that psychoanalysis will discover the hidden reasons even when they aren’t there. The author’s preferred psychology, schiozoidanalysis, is a big part of the book. The definite not becoming the indefinite is another large part of the book. Art reflecting the inner difference between nature and the human is a big part. Economics, history, anthropology are all dissected by the authors. This book is equivalent to the first two years of undergraduate study for most students, and then some.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. These authors loved Carlos Castaneda and his fictional mystical book The Teachings of Don Juan. I always thought of him as a fake mystic not worthy of my consideration. I’m tempted to read his first book even though I truly hate any book that encourages psychedelic drug taking for recreational purposes.

Overall, I want to say that this book does have a narrative that ties the book together. It has a literal meaning within its sections that the reader can get without reflection, and it has a metaphorical meaning that the reader has to piece together, and finally, the authors are post-structural and think the truth is out there and being qua being is knowable. This book reads like some of my favorite post-modern fictional books such as Gravity’s Rainbow, Third Policeman, or like Finnigans Wake or The Divine Comedy. There is a meaning within the text but the reader needs to collapse space and time such that they see beyond the narrative, get the literal meaning of the text and see the metaphor all at once and the reader is rewarded with figuring out if the truth is really out there and knowable as Duns Scotus and the authors believe or the truth is knowable by relation, analogy and relativism as Thomas Aquinas would say.

These are the kind of books that makes reading most pleasurable for me. I liked this book so much that I even read all the end notes, and I noticed a lot of what the authors really believed seemed to be hidden within them while it was not always obvious within the main text.

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El
1,355 reviews498 followers

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March 20, 2011
August 9, 2010
We will be reading this for our next bookclub selection (because it follows Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals so well?). Once my boyfriend finds his second copy of this I'll get started. Yes, my boyfriend is the kind of person who owns two copies of this book. Intentionally.

I would also like to mention that I will be reading this at the mercy of the one who decided we should read this (who is not my boyfriend, believe it or not - apparently there are other people like him in the world...). And since this person has chosen this and has previously read this himself, I will be "forced" to read this book out of order. The "schedule" is forthcoming. I am promised that it's only appropriate to read the chapters in a non-linear fashion. My entire face twitched and I might have thrown up a little in my mouth, but hey. You only live once, right?

(I think reading this alongside Infinite Jest might make me the most pretentious person ever. Suh-weet! For the record, this most certainly was not my idea.)

March 20, 2011
(I'm tired.)

This is an incredibly difficult book to rate and review, and that's probably how Deleuze and Guattari would have wanted it anyway. It's also incredibly late and I'm half-asleep so anything I say here is really not going to give this book much credit; though whether or not the book deserves much credit is still to be determined. Our book club meets again next Sunday and chances are my opinion will change after we talk about this for another several hours, just like we have done at each meeting since we started this.

(I hate spending this much time on any book.)

So what I intend to do here is list the chapters in the order our group's moderator decided to have us read the book. Reading the book in order is not necessary, nor is it even recommended. Brian Massumi (translator) writes in his forward,

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

(I hate jumping around in a book.)

Since there's no clear direction on how this book should be read the only thing I could do was surrender my reading habits to the moderator. Dude has taught classes on this book and these authors so he's the best person to come up with a plan for me. I guess. This was our reading plan which I hope may be helpful to someone attempting to read this book for the first time:

Chapter 2 - 1914: One or Several Wolves?
Introduction -Rhizome
Chapter 14 - 1440: The Smooth and the Striated
Chapter 3 - 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does Earth Think It Is?)
Chapter 11 - 1837: Of the Refrain
Chapter 10 - 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
Chapter 6 - November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?
Chapter 9 - 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity
Chapter 12 - 1227: Treatise on Nomadology: - The War Machine
Chapter 13 - 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture
Chapter 7 - Year Zero: Faciality
Chapter 5 - 587 AD: On Several Regimes of Signs
Chapter 4 - November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics
Chapter 8 - 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"
Conclusion

That being said there were a few things that stood out for me and/or I felt the need to write down:

p 358: Even in bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations.

p 371: Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement...

p 376: Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing - to be a thinker?

p 381: Movement is extensive; speed is intensive.

p 400: Affect vs. emotion: Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools.

Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of the subject.

p 438-39: The same could be said for the last love. Proust has shown how a love can be oriented toward its own limit, its own margin: it repeats it's own ending. A new love follows, so that each love is serial, so that there is a series of loves. But once again, "beyond" lies the ultimate, at the point where assemblage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic assemblage - the Work to be written, which is the problem Proust tackles...

p 460: Should we then speak of "voluntary servitude"? This is like the expression "magical captive": its only merit is to underline the apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about which it could be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears as preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more "voluntary" than it is "forced".

p 102-03: Or the way Black Engish and any number of "ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point that New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the minorities.)

Good gravy, there's a lot of ground covered here and I'm not sure there is enough space for all my different thoughts. Am I glad to have read this cover-to-cover? Oy. That's a loaded question.

It's fascinating stuff as in listening to two insane genius mo-fo's is fascinating. The idea is to take a few thoughts from one philosopher, etc., throw those thoughts into a salad mixer, dump it out and there's Deleuze and Guattari. It's still lettuce, right? But not quite the same kind of lettuce that you first put in.

But my point throughout all of this reading is that I'm not sold on the idea that salad mixers need to exist. I don't own one because (ding-ding-ding!) I can mix my own salad. Deleuze and Guattari borrowed ideas from Freud and Marx and some other people, kind of tossed it all around, threw in some totally made-up words to help cement their status as crazy assholes points, and presented it as an entirely new way of thinking.

The thing I wasn't able to really get past - and the thing that almost made my book club partners want to smother me with a rhizomatic pillow - is that I'm not certain any of this was necessary. Deleuze and Guattari clearly were crazy mad geniuses, that's not the issue. But I'm always a little wary of someone that comes along and is all like, "Hey, I have this new way of thinking - listen up!" They're usually the same people who are handing out glasses of grape-flavored Kool-Aid.

Then again, as stated above, there were some moments of complete clarity. Some of what Delusional and Guitar had to say actually resonated with me. Of course then they'd go off in a complete different direction and I'd still be back in the dust just patting myself on the back for actually getting something. Oh, it's not just about a flying vagina, I get it now...

And - perhaps not surprisingly - I have found myself making connections between this stupid book and other stupid books I was reading at the same time. Especially Infinite Jest in which I found this whole passage that was obviously paying homage to D&G. I didn't think it could even be possible, but dude. It was right there in front of my face. And then the whole capitalism thing - gave a little flavor to freaking Atlas Shrugged; not that it mattered though - I mentioned Ayn Rand in our book club meeting and tried to compare the two texts and was met with blank looks and crickets.

Mostly this book pissed me off. Which really just means that I need to read it like fifty more times to really pick up on all the right points. I suck at math and reading this book at times felt like reading one giant word problem. Until tonight I wasn't even certain the word problem would ever actually end. I looked forward to the Conclusion most of all, thinking that conclusions are the time to sort of re-summarize all the main points, or at least the thesis, and maybe it will all come together for me. Silly rabbit! This conclusion wrote the whole damn book over again, but crammed it this time into just a couple of pages. Geniuses!

Way to go, Messieurs Deleuze and Guattari.

I hate you both and you have ruined my life.

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Sir Jack
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February 27, 2008
This is basically a nonreview: like a restless nomad I would read several pages of one section and then find myself completely unable to go on, and then I’d move to the next one. Same for the next chapter and the next.

Right from the beginning I knew I had already read too much of this type of writing to have much patience for it. Here’re the authors justifying the fact that they affixed their names to the books they write:

“Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”

Sigh. How easy it is to date and place such writing: it could only be sixties-spawned poststructuralist theory. The way the book seeks to undermine “structured” or “phallocentric” (of course) thinking is humorlessly rigorous.

There’s one chapter comparing States to “chieftans,” and there is not one mention of any country and hardly any reference to a single specific example (references to “the Orient” don’t count). Such breezy abstractions are the antithesis of Foucault’s fine-grained analyses of actual social structures.

The main philosopher they rail against (and neatly simplify) is Plato, who was writing philosophy 2,400 years ago. Plato is like Satan to these theorists: Everything is his fault.

Like many theorists, the authors are at their worst when they turn their maniacal gaze onto fiction. But they can’t resist, they must say something. Here is a representative sentence concerning literature (they’re talking about Moby Dick and Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer”):

“It is always with the Anomalous that one enters into alliance to become-animal.” [SIC!]

This will sound brisk and simplistic (like most of this review, perhaps), but I really do think that theorists in general just don’t *get* fiction. They have no taste. (See, for a chilling example, anything Frederic Jameson has said about literature.)

I exclude Foucault, an insanely original thinker, from the above critical statements about theorists.

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Maxwell
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February 6, 2019
You’d be forgiven for walking away from Anti-Oedipus thinking that deterritorialization is positive and liberatory force, and the circumscription of reterritorialization, reactionary and oppressive. Anti-Oedipus endorses schizophrenia, immanence and multiplicity while still using binary terms for its lavish metaphysics. This is to some degree inevitable. A Thousand Plateaus begins the process of ungluing these manichean oppositions but doesn’t quite undo the latent hierarchies. A Thousand Plateau’s broadest sense is one that discourages broad sense; micro-revolutions in molecular fields of difference rather than overturning molar aggregates. But even the most decentered register will come up against some hard limits; the only way to see the vampiric reflection of capital is in a black pool of oil.

A Thousand Plateaus is a demimonde of ambiguity and exceptions but D&G’s allegiance to one side of their dualistic coinages is always clear--The arborescent is bad; rhizomatics are good. Stratification is bad; destratification is good. Striated space is bad; smooth space is good. Suddenly, we have a power relationship, a normative claim about the general superiority of one function or entity, even if it’s subtle, complex and multidirectional. This is not a criticism; absolute fidelity to schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, molecular politics or whatever you want to call it would lead to total incoherency. D&G’s terms are always polyphonic and encase an sprawling system of internal difference. But the schism from Hegel and psychoanalysis (especially Lacan) is less dramatic than it is presented, the terms and claims of dialectics and psychoanalysis do, after all, possess identities which are multiple and variegated. Some of Capitalism & Schizophrenia’s pugilistic oppositions seem more operatic than theoretical.

(Before anyone corrects me to say “deterritorialization can be destructive” etc, I have heard this from many avid Deleuzians and I don’t doubt their sincerity--but I don’t believe that most people of a schizoanalytical persuasion think that the unwriting of territories is a bad thing except in certain specialized cases)

A Thousand Plateaus also backtracks some of the more extravagant claims of Anti-Oedipus, stratifying indexes which delimit the acceleration of deterritorializing flows. These ‘black holes’ are fascistic traps which ‘coil inwards’ toward the installation of binaries, hierarchies and the dialectical deletion of new lines of flight. I’ve spoken interminably about acceleration(ism) recently, so all I’ll say is; my deepest sympathies to Nick Land.

I have a certain level of confusion and dismay over the affirmationist vitalism at the morphogenetic heart of D&G. I think to some degree the negative is inscribed onto either the topology of our perception or whatever contours of the real are accessible by that perception. The Capitalism & Schizophrenia books model desire as ‘machinic’ (along with the unconscious, the social body and most other things)--and machines burn fuel and cough tubercular exhaust. They are built with their expiration and obsolescence in mind. Deft and dexterous theoretical maneuvers are prosecuted to try and extirpate dialectical negativity and the death drive but I don’t know that they can be quashed by a patchwork monism. The negative is resilient--and competition & entropy possess an undeniable (even affirmative) presence. How can we get past that Anti-Oedipus is a supremely Oedipal book? Capitalism & Schizophrenia wants to vanquish the choreographed arborescence of their father’s law and rejoin to the oceanic univocity of the maternal monism; or, kill Daddy Hegel and return to Mommy Spinoza.

I want to restate that I don’t think this is a bad thing. Recently I’ve found Deleuze extremely useful for understanding a wide variety problems. But it’ll be a cold day in the climate catastrophe holocene before you get me to substitute Bergson for Freud.

A Thousand Plateaus is somehow more fun to read than Anti-Oedipus despite being immensely more difficult. There are single paragraphs that cascade across multiple pages referencing a remit of inconceivably diverse knowledge. It reads like nonsense at first blush. But when I read these sections back I always I understand a little more, the coiled digits begin to articulate. If you have the patience to reread a paragraph three or four times, the reticent typologies WILL unfurl into ontogenetic dynamisms. The gift that keeps on becoming. On the other hand, there are individual sentences carved with the precision of a jeweller’s hands which can overturn everything you thought you knew prior to reading them, even upon glancing contact. Someone told me that Guattari wrote the Capitalism & Schizophrenia books on drugs and Deleuze edited / refined them on even more drugs. I don’t know if that’s true but I really hope it is.

The concept-salad from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson accretes into molar aggregates which can be picked apart, reconfigured and developed, perhaps indefinitely. I think the popularity of D&G well into the time of my writing this at the end of 2018 (over 50 years since May 1968 which will always be remembered alongside these books) has to do with the insistence upon the contingency of structures and the importance of outlying flows, energies, data, etc which escape the architecture of the structure. These books are a project which invite universal participation.

This isn’t much of a review, just some disorganized thoughts I had while reading A Thousand Plateaus which is a book containing erudition vast beyond my comprehension with each plateau embedded with singularities it could take a lifetime to understand. My complaints may seem quibbling, and in some sense they are, as I’m just thinking aloud while I try to understand the points of dispute in two dominant currents of continental philosophy. This book is stunningly brilliant and probably lapped me several times while I wittered “but the dialectic...”

Oh and it’s actually like 15 plateaus.

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Fede
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December 20, 2020
Sci-Fi(losophy).

I have nothing to add to the scholarly reviews of those enthusiasts praising the impenetrability of this book, thus 1) implicitly bragging about their superhuman intellect; and 2) putting everybody off by making it seem a bunch of unreadable crap.
In fact such enthusiastic apologia for Deleuze and Guattari's work shamefully overlooks the sheer pleasure it gives, if only one allows its paradoxical, grotesque, crazy, and exquisitely literary aspects to surface.

I mean - just relax. You can't take it so seriously, not to the point of mistaking it for yet another philosophy brick - and a relic of the 80s, for that matter.
This is hyperstion, pure and simple and genial and devilishly funny hyperstion. It's neither a test nor a challenge to one's intellect, and therefore mustn't be taken as such. It's a deep book with an optimistic and revolutionary message instead, an invitation to perform the dismantling of a whole system of thought: creative destruction from within. Nothing to do with the sterile intellectualism that has managed to gobble it down, digest it, and finally defecate it.

That's why this stuff has been working for forty years; why we're still willing to pay more than 25€ for a new copy; why we're still imitating it (Nick Land's and Reza Negarestani's works are HEAVILY indebted to the Plateaus, to name but two) and pretending to understand it, in all its inherent madness.

Because this is so insane that, in the end, it even makes sense.
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[foreward-1] Massumi, Brian (1987). "Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy". A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. xi.

[2] Stivale, Charles J. (1984). "The Literary Element in "Mille Plateaux": The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari". SubStance. Johns Hopkins University Press. 13 (44–45): 20–34. doi:10.2307/3684772. JSTOR 3684772.

[Melehy-3] Jump up to:a b c Melehy, Hassan; Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). "Index". A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 589–610. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.

[dg1987-4] Jump up to:a b c Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.

[dg1993-5] Jump up to:a b c Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.

[6] For example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991) devoted a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.

[7] Poster, Mark (1990). The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0226675961.

[8] Massumi, Brian; Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. xi. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.

[Holland1991-9] Holland, Eugene W. (1991). "Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization": From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "A Thousand Plateaus"". SubStance. 20 (3): 55–65. doi:10.2307/3685179. JSTOR 3685179.

[10] Massumi, Brian (1993). A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 1–4. ISBN 978-0-262-63143-3.

[11] Readings, Bill (1997). The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 115. ISBN 978-0674929531.

[12] Rose, Nikolas (1996). Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 170. ISBN 978-0521646079.

[13] Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1999). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-312-20407-5.: "Should the reader entertain any further doubts about the ubiquity of pseudo-scientific language in Deleuze and Guattari's work, he or she is invited to consult [...] pages 32-33, 142-143, 211-212, 251-252, 293-295, 361-365, 369-374, 389-390, 461, 469-473, and 482-490 of A Thousand Plateaus."

[14] Smith, Daniel; Protevi, John (2018). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Gilles Deleuze (Spring 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)

[15] Scruton, Roger (10 December 2015). "These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life". Spiked Online. Retrieved 12 January 2018.

[16] Scruton, Roger (2015). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury. p. 189. ISBN 978-1-4081-8733-3.

[17] Lyotard, Jean-François (1993). "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?". The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Durand, Régis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 71–82. ISBN 978-0-8166-1173-7. "Under the general demand for slackening and appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.

[18] Murray, Janet (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: Free Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0684827230.

[19] Aarseth, Espen (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0801855795.

[20] Laurie, Timothy (2012). "Epistemology as Politics and the Double-Bind of Border Thinking: Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Mignolo". PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies. 9 (2): 1–20. doi:10.5130/portal.v9i2.1826. hdl:10453/44227. Deleuze and Guattari do recognise many of these concerns in their discussions of ethnologists.

[21] Hardt, Michael; Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 424. ISBN 978-0674006713.

[22] Urry, John (2000). Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. New York: Routledge. p. 27. ISBN 978-0415190893.

[23] DeLanda, Manuel (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 120. ISBN 978-0826491695.

2024/02/02