A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Plateaus is required reading for Assange fans and enemies, as well as those who don't give a fig but carry a Master or Visa card or just have a particular bent for Continental theory. According to Deleuze and Guattari Western thought is dominated by a structure of knowledge they call aboresence. This way of knowing is tree-like, vertical, and centralized. For instance, in biology, we have Linnean taxonomies. In chemistry, we have Porphyrian trees. In linguistics we have Chomskyan sentence trees. [...]

wrote my MA thesis on these fuckers

August 9, 2010We 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 p [...]

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 [...]

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 noma [...]

The idea: Society is a vertically organized enterprise. Different concepts are used to attempt to implement a sort of control over others; the control of language, and of grammar itself, could be considered a type of imperialism paraphrase, there's no quicker way to implement a sort of control over a group of people than to ensure that they cannot have a voice within a society without adhering to strictly delineated guideline regarding how to write/how to speak. In response to the vertically ori [...]

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. [...]

Finally, finally, I have finished this book, I was very definitely punching above my weight trying to read this, but overall I have enjoyed it thoroughly, well perhaps not enjoyed the actual reading of it, but this book has provided such a vast resource of ideas for me, I don't regret a single one of the many months that it has taken me to read through this, this is a huge personal achievement for me, now that I have read this I feel like I could read anything.For the most of this book the subje [...]

I've finally finished this difficult, confusing, brilliant book. I've been reading it for years; off and on; a chapter here, a chapter there. (And a warning about that: in the beginning of this book, the authors claim that you can read the book like a record player, reading a chapter here and a chapter there, but that really isn't true. The book rhymes, sure, but it also builds concepts and ideas, starting from some basic premises and building up to some pretty in-depth case studies. It's really [...]

this book has no ending, or beginning for that matterfinitely provocative but nearly impossible to readesupposes familiarity with a vast array of recondite materials, from a number of different disciplines. more than most students could be expected to weed through in a lifetime.

I am torn on this review and rating. On the one-hand I recognize this as one of the quintessential post-modern tomes up there with Lyotard's Postmodern Condition or Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge but on the other hand, the quixotic hubris in this text is almost overbearing. It really depends on how I am looking at the purpose of the writing. If i try to look at it like a true philosophical text with intended insight and description, it falls completely flat. It truly is the inane charti [...]

Any book of philosophy that features a chapter in which a geologist (named Challenger no less) undergoes a metamorphosis while delivering a lecture is pretty good. What takes it to the next level is what Challenger the geologist turns into: a lobster! This book has it all from Deleuze and Guattari: wolf packs, war machines, nomadologies, becomings-animal, rhizomes, the differences between the games of Go and Chess, and plenty of rips on Freud and psychoanalysis. My favorite chapters were the int [...]

I actually have read this book. I have a vague idea of what its about, but I cannot claim to understand all of it. That in no way detracted from sheer reading pleasure.Some of their ideas such as rhizomatic thinking and the body without organs are so beautiful you can stand and stare at them for hours. As for some of the other ideas, i have no clue what they're talking about.They suggest that you read their book like listening to a concert. They also suggest that the book's chapters are plateaus [...]

Fucking wow. I read Deleuze for the first time when my sophomore year of college, and found him impenetrable and obnoxious, but now, after falling in love with some people inspired by Deleuze (Edward Soja, Antonio Negri, etc.), I'm back on the bandwagon. Not only does it provide a phenomenal perspective on the world that will help any student of literature, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, art, etc but also is extremely good at curing internal fascist malaise. Lovely!

The second part of Deleuze and Guattari's two volume mind boggling and yet a playful critique of capitalism is full of insights and useful ideas. They do manage to take the language of critical theory forward from Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. One of the most intersting and useful metaphor is the metaphor of rhizome used instead of hierarchic logic of the metaphor of `tree'. One of the most important philosophical treatise of this `post modern' era.

For some reason no one seems interested in my reality TV series: DIY Philosophy. It's so full of action and suspense I can't understand why no one will pick it up.Epidsode 1: I brew a pot of hazelnut coffee, feed the cats, sit down at my dining room table, place Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus on my lap, pissing off the resident velociraptor who gives me that you're-such-a-loser-when-can-i-eat-you look.Episode 2: I begin reading. I furrow my brow, sip coffee, continue reading. As soon as th [...]

This is my second time reading this book, maybe 15 years later. I see how what others have said about Deleuze (and Guattari) to be true; that they are Kantian phenomenologists, (post-)Marxists, and so on. This book is an art work in that they are able through partial abstraction, subordinate a new set of class/categorizational structure for how we should consider various kinds of relations. They outline only the barest minimum while showing that these kinds of relations are beings in-themselves [...]

I like Deleuze. A lot. I think, insofar as this is meaningful to say, he is right. But I don't know that he is a good writer. He tends to get off task, run off on these giant tangents that are sometimes charming, but, as this VERY LONG book progresses, get increasingly more tedious and less productive. The becoming-woman discussion is a case in point for me. Deleuze spends more time trying to convince us that he has no intention of insulting transvestites and their accomplishments than he does a [...]

Once again, Deleuze and Guattari give me words to outline the processes and flows of my own thought.I am constantly in a process of deterritorialization, attempting to break free of the systems and stagnations.I am a nomad of thought, of the heart, for thinking is being on the way, becoming.All is interconnected in flowing over, through and across.All lines must work out their motion before they can be detangled from the real. This book is an organ on the way to the complete decoding and detraci [...]

This is mind blowing. I don't think I totally understand everything but reading it and imagining what it means is a revelation. It seems to promote a consciousness of the world that is devoid of hierarchy and shatters fundamental categories. I decided to read this intermittently so far I finished chapter 5.

i loved reading this -- it was exciting and confrontational and challenged the primacy of psychoanalysis and all sorts of other 20th century "givens." to say that i READ the book is a lie. i read about 50-100 pages of it (the section dealing with the Body without Organs, a plane of being that we all strive towards) and plan of reading further into it.

Having by now most likely repeatedly revisited every section of _A thousand plateaus_ in numerous editions (french, pt-Portugal, pt-France, spanish, english), I still mark this as "read" with significant trepidation. I did move from an endless loop of rereading it out of order, as someone studies a holy book. You can easily lose two or three years with this. Worth it, ultimately.

Great article that made me want to attempt this author: htmlgiant/random/the-begin

Plateaus is required reading for Assange fans and enemies, as well as those who don't give a fig but carry a Master or Visa card or just have a particular bent for Continental theory. According to Deleuze and Guattari Western thought is dominated by a structure of knowledge they call aboresence. This way of knowing is tree-like, vertical, and centralized. For instance, in biology, we have Linnean taxonomies. In chemistry, we have Porphyrian trees. In linguistics we have Chomskyan sentence trees. [...]

Someone who enjoyed this book a great deal highly recommended also reading "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History" by Manuel De Landa, saying that this book was a more easily digested view of what Deleuze & Guattari are talking about. I never read it, but kept the book in mind.This is probably the most difficult book I ever attempted to read. I read it for a class in grad school, for a degree in Digital Art & New Media. The approach the professor used for this, was that teams of 2 people [...]

I'm not even going to pretend that I understood half of what D & G were trying to get at here, nor am I going to weigh in on whether or not their ideas are rigorous enough to be regarded as good philosophy. There certainly seems to be a system here, of sorts, but it's a system that seems based on an assessment of the conditions that allow for the production of that which cannot be systematized. The authors posit a tension between the conventional and the known (molar strata), and the unconve [...]

It was fun, it just wasn't that rigorous in the end. What I enjoy about the post-structuralists is that their writing is supposed to display implicitly how our language influences what we think, what conclusions or connections we can draw. To this end, the two authors have adopted a very unique, idiosyncratic framework which they then apply to psychology, society, human beings, etc arriving at fresh outlooks on a variety of topics. Again, it was enjoyable precisely because of the sense of play t [...]

So, I have been reading this book for over ten years. I open it to a random section, read a few pages, put it down, come back in a few months. It's a strange and difficult book.During the weekend I read this."The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the [...]

Anyone who has touched this book will probably attest to its strangeness and difficulty. I went through this phase when I was really excited to figure out exactly what the authors had to say. I am not sure I ever got there, but I understood a good bit and then let go of it for a while.Sometimes, with intellectual issues, it seems that the question shouldn't have been asked in the first place, or should have been asked differently. What's cool about this book is that the authors take full control [...]

The rating system doesn't apply here, because for once it's not a book where I can say 'I liked it' or 'I did not like it'. I don't think I ever finished reading all the chapters because beyond dissecting the chapter(s) required for my then-group project, the brainfry was palpable. With this book it's a constant state of becoming, me as a reader who simultaneously had finished and is still reading and eschewing its contents. It made perfect sense and it made no sense, if you get what I mean. I [...]