A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Paperback – December 21, 1987

Author: Visit Amazon's Gilles Deleuze Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0816614024 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – December 21, 1987
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"A rare and remarkable book." —TLS (Tls)
--This text refers to the

Hardcover
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Text: English, French (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Paperback: 632 pages
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (December 21, 1987)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0816614024
ISBN-13: 978-0816614028
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Modern
- #65 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Mental Illness

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.

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.