Customer Reviews

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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I'm not particularly erudite, and I'm certainly not a genius. My schooling has left me (for better or worse) without any familiarity with some of the philosophers, artists and writers D&G namecheck as lynchpins of their untimely meditation.

Why, then, would I struggle with this 800-odd page monstrosity of densely-referential Gallic thought? Why am I here recommending that you do it?

Well...because it's worth the long, thorny trudge. You've got to get around some idiosyncratic vocabulary, but that's OK. Because, in fact, *A Thousand Plateaus* presents a credible candidacy for Philosophy for our Time (if you can still believe in that). The concept of the rhizome alone - burrowing, nonhierarchical, endlessly foliating thought - let alone fertile ideas like nomadology or the Body without Organs: once grasped, these are extraordinarily useful figures that can wind up restoring some sense of agency (and subversiveness, and fun) to your intellectual life. They're perfectly suited, especially, to life and work in the age of the deeply rhizomorphic Internet.

Remember, you're smart enough to understand this stuff. (I had to keep reminding myself.) Reading with partners or in groups helps, a lot. There really is a *vast* amount of provocative and useful thought in here. Go for it.

THE LATE French philosopher Gilles Deleuze seemed to provide the answer. "Deleuze talks about the production of space and power relations, and all that appeals very much to architects," says Lynn. According to Lynn, the Deleuze boom started in 1987, with the translation into English of A Thousand Plateaus. Thanks to his singular combination of disdain and reverence for techno-capitalism, Deleuze had an immediate and obvious appeal to today's cyberarchitects. A member of the radical French left, Deleuze viewed the triumph of capitalism as inevitable. In his writing, he is in turn horrified by and admiring of capitalism's raw power and extraordinary fecundity in transforming the world. But capitalism's strength, according to Deleuze, is also its weakness. As it moves toward global dominance, capitalism's inherent instability becomes increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Rather than preaching outright revolution, Deleuze proposes a "micropolitics": the establishment of local zones of freedom that tap the energies of capitalism to create a "war machine" against the "state apparatus."

Anti-Oedipus, the first collaboration by Deleuze and Guattari, is more famous than a Thousand Plateaus, but this is their masterpiece. It takes a while to get used to their strange terms and phrases, and an English-schooled "analytical" philosopher would probably find their work to be nonsense, but D & G work differently. They are creators of concepts, and A Thousand Plateaus is overflowing with them. The book moves from meditations on the face, to nomads, to courtly love, to geology, to, well, a thousand other things . . . you name it. A reader who is willing to be led where they will take him is in for quite a trip.

Philosophically, D & G seem to be proponants of a dynamic, highly charged, pre-conventional world, in which even individual identity is not yet a given. They do not suppose that we can live in this world and function normally, but we can tap into it, so to speak, and thereby harness energy for more creative living in the "normal" world, the world of conventional ideas, personal identities, etc. (and to some extent transform the "normal" world). But to paraphrase their ideas in this way is to lose the excitement they generate as they dive into specific topics--the musical refrain, schizophrenia, rhizomes, laws, and so on and so on--ever coming up with new and surpising interpretations. This book has endless riches for the reader to discover.

I have been reading this book for about 10 years. Every time I look at it I get something new from it. D&G offer the most brilliant analysis of capitalism and modernity that I know of, and I am extremely well read on these subjects. They explain the relationship between not only such negatives as exploitation on the one hand and capitalism or "development" on the other, as Marx did. They also show how capital accumulation is dependent upon such things as sadnness and resentment.

In a way consistent with Marx, D&G celebrate the creative "deterritorialization" (everything that is solid melting into air, in other words) that comes with captalism. Their solution to the devaluation of life (as evidenced by the relationship between capitalism and war, hot or cold, on Communism, drugs, crime or terror) that also characterizes our situation is to push that deterritorialization further (to reject reterritorialization). My one main criticism of them is that this is an inadequate solution. Nobody else has much of an answer either, however.

To read this book it is nice if you are familiar with Nietzsche, Marx and Freud (especially Nietzsche), but almost noone will be familiar with everything they reference. The best advice is to not get bogged down in what you don't "get" right away. Give the book time. It can be worth it. As Massumi, the translator, writes, reading this book can be a lot of fun, but if it doesn't work for you go buy a new CD or something and enjoy that instead. Lastly, this is not a "postmodern" book, despite what some of your professors might tell you. It is staunchly in a Marxist tradition (see some of Guattari's solo work on this) and it is in the lineage of a Nietzschian sort of antinomian philosophy that Deleuze would actually trace back to Spinoza and the Medeival theologian, Duns Scotus.

I don't normally bother reviewing books. However I had to respond to something another reviewer said:

"you can't read this while listening to music, trust me"

Actually you can but I recommend the music of anti-essentialists, Phoenicia's "Brownout" is an excellent soundtrack to the plateau on the refrain. The text of the book is the opsign of time-images, music, or, rather, sound, of deterritorialisation is the sonsign. Fittingly, the releases from Germany's Mille Plateaux label are really good for reading these works.

I can't recommend this book enough but I will give some advice in your approach:

1. Even though this might seem the most intimidating entry to D&G's thought I suggest it anyway. Compared to "Difference and Repetition" or "The Logic of Sense" this is a walk in the park when it comes to penetrating the prose.

2. Don't expect a book of philosophy where an argument is clearly defined and developed. This is nothing like that. It's a work of "nomad thought", just try and follow what's happening *before* you judge it.

3. Come back to it. Regularly. Your appreciation and engagement will deepen as your knowledge of Deleuze's oeuvre deepens. You won't 'get it' at first but you have to enter his work somewhere. Eventually you'll realise this is a challenge to develop new ontologies, you were never meant to get it. You were and are meant to think it in new directions. After all, that's the basic lesson of the return.

4. Read widely. I really recommend Rodowick's 1997 book "Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine". On the surface Rodowick is working with the cinema books but the cinema books themselves are philosophical works developing Bergson. If you grasp Rodowick's less dense (though just as challenging) argument for deterritorialised thought you'll be on your way. Another area: Nietzsche's concepts of return, the will to power and active/reactive force is crucial. Read Deleuze's Nietzsche book.

5. The geology stuff isn't a metaphor, it's an isomorphism. If nothing else read DeLanda's "Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Forms" in the 1999 book "A Deleuzian Century" (edited by Ian Buchanon).

And last but certainly not least, Deleuze & Guattari's work is playful, enjoy the challenges they set you. You'll never see the world the same way again.

Why? Because your critical theory seminar was probably oversimplifying, and you're missing out on a radical piece of performance in book form. Thousand Plateaus is not 400 pages about rhizomes or nomads. That's just the vocabulary. And, I disagree with some of the other reviews here. It's not a torture to read; it's just not talking down to you. It's put together like a large circular sentence. You start somewhere in middle, or maybe at the beginning or end, not sure. You have to play catchup at first, but you will get the hang of it.
If it sounds like the structure of certain recent films (say, by David Lynch, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson) or works of fiction (like by Samuel Delaney, Haruki Murakami, or Thomas Pynchon) or minimal techno, or most museum biennials these days, then good, it should. Thousand Plateaus help to establish a framework for all of those things.
The book tries to establish a system of political, psychological and semiotic descriptions, always as a mode of resistance to all kinds of fascism, and D & G take the conflation of those levels as a given. Not just in the world of theory but also in how you think, and that's why it's written in such a particularly dense way. It tries very hard to be nonoppressive, and generous too, but for lots of people it can be a frustrating adjustment, accustomed as we are to writing that tries to be as flat and simple as possible. This book reads the way it thinks, and these two definitely prefer finesse to simplicity. Once you get into it, you may find that it's the best thing you've read for as long as you can remember. Or, at least that it makes you think in ways you don't while reading other books.
Being brainy continentals, these guys make reference to a store of intellectual history you won't be able to relate to. They namedrop like MCs, and use a highly layered prose that refers to about a dozen things at once. It probably helps if you've heard of Hjelmslev, Bergson, Liebniz and the rest of the counter-canon of Western thought, but don't let it stop you if you haven't.
If you tackle this thick, thorny thing, here's some advice: Don't read this as an assignment, but approach it like a weird painting. Go slowly and enjoy the twists and turns. Read each section twice before proceeding to the next. Enjoy the poetry that D & G employ. Take notes. When you get to the end, go back and reread the first (and maybe second) section.

A Thousand Plateaus is an absolute necessity for any serious reader of contemporary philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari correctly predicted the intensification of the stratification of "civilized society" by 1980; they also presaged the World Wide Web and declared their deep suspicions about any and all massive systems for networking humankind before the web ever existed. Their anarchic call for radical individual autonomy never sounded truer than now. (A noteworthy additional book to seek from their giant bibliography: Pierre Clastres' Society Against the State.)

In their final work together, "What is Philosophy?" Guattari and Deleuze envision philosophy as moving at infinite speeds in a mad creation of concepts. This formula is expressed marvelously in "A Thousand Plateaus". In roughly each "plateau", the authors explore a different opposition, although always in relation to the previous concepts, as well as those that are yet to be fully elaborated. Some of these oppositions include smooth/ Striated, rhizome/ tree, war machine/ State, etc. Each one loosely overlaps with the others, although by no means are they synonymous. However, because a similar formula is used to explore each of these oppositions, this greatly facilitates understanding the book, especially since the authors aren't always the clearest writers. However, because many of the central themes (including the fundamental opposition between creative forces and those forces which attempt to halt creation or bring it under control) are repeated, even if confusing at first, this book eventually starts to make sense. The ideas expressed in it are applicable to countless aspects of society and life (and even inorganic structures), such as the rhizome, which desribes a system in which elements interact horizontally, maintaining their heterogeneity (a prime example of this is the internet). My only complaint about "A Thousand Plateaus" is that the authors, despite their rigorous defining of various concepts, often present examples of these concepts poorly, assuming that the reader has knowledge of the examples, introducing them without preparation and then leaving them behind. For example, in plateau 3, "the geology of morals", i was able to understand the basic "abstract machine" described but unable to understand how the given examples fit into the plateau without resorting to an outside source. Of course, why use Guattari and Deleuze's examples when there are numerous instances of these "abstract machine" all around us?

This is not "hair shirt" philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari investigate the shifts and shimmies we make in time, place, lineage, reference, and sonority. Part of the impact of this text is, aside from its eminent message, its fantastically new strategy for delineating that message. The text makes use of fanciful cascades of language, finding, as material, sources as far-flung as Proust, Virillo, Frank Herbert (Dune), John Cage, Olivier Messaien, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jackson Pollack, et al. Looking BEYOND "analytic" philosophical techniques to find meaning (NOT allegory) in the arts is a MAJOR step, and one that pays dividends for the attentive reader. This is a potentially worldview-altering document, that stands somewhere in between two worlds: it requires the skills of a student of philosophy, but relies on little of the imparted knowledge said student would be expected to possess. Instead, this book, while daunting to a layperson, CAN be digested by anyone with a quick mind, a long attention span, and a sharp curiosity and interest in the multitude of systems and milieu that form our wriggling sphere of existence.

Thank you, mssrs Deleuze and Guattari, this is, for me, a Deleuzian Century.

This book is clever. A productive ontology which integrates evolution into the fabric of philosophy. We are always becoming. And by "we" I mean I or at least the closed set of possibilities I construct as "I". Unfortunately, this work, as with many French "Theorists" of the period (like Foucault), have been misappropriated by lesser minds (such as the translator's own "work") - perhaps "misappropriated" is too Platonic, maybe over applied to allow shallow scholars to esoterically argue reality into cynical relativism obviating all knowledge and discourse. "A Thousand Plateaus" is tongue and cheek - about play as much as seriousness. The Hegelian historical dialectic used against itself. Abstract structures which are neither transcendent nor concrete. Its only a puzzled narrative of what there may be but most importantly what there could be.

A note on Deleuze's "association" with Ayn Rand "followers"; there is nothing in any legitimate scholarship which even suggests such a correlation. His works are productive analyses of the history of philosophy from which he contextualizes his own understanding of the human condition - fully couched in the discourse of philosophy (though not necessarily "traditional"), and his notions of democracy does not lie within the purview of "Objectivist" ideology (all politics are problematic). Unfortunately for conservative ideology, Ayn Rand is "cheap" philosophy (though miles better than contemporary ideologues) written to provide a context from which she could construct her misogynist heroes. Pardon the ad hominem fallacy. Her philosophy is like her fiction - "typing" as Truman Capote so contemptuously stated.