This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Discipline/Field: Philosophy, Critical Theory
Year: 1980
Main Arguments & Concepts
A Thousand Plateaus is a nonlinear work, with no chapters, only “plateaus,” that can be read in any order. Plateaus are not a beginning or end, represents the “middle” and are the components of a “rhizomes.” The plateaus are tangentially related, and I’ve gathered that it’s basically impossible to gather a central thesis.Rhizome
D&G use the first plateau to describe the “rhizome”, discussing ways to thinking/ understanding /creating like a root system. Rhizomes are non-hierarchical, non-binary, and ahistorical. Rhizomes don’t have beginning and end points. It is a decentralized network. The rhizome opposes the “tree” model of Western thought, where there is central focus, a main trunk.
Wasp & Orchid
The wasp and the orchid example is used to illustrate the rhizome. There is no independent existence -- all beings are networked.
Deterritorialization
Deterritorialization is basically a change from a previous way of thinking, acting. social orders can move out of space. From The Deleuze Dictionary:
“Deterritorialisation is always bound up with correlative processes of reterritorialisation, which does not mean returning to the original territory but rather the ways in which deterritorialized elements recombine and enter into new relations. Reterritorialisation is itself a complex process that takes different forms depending upon the character of the processes of deterritorialization within which it occurs.”
Quotes
“Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome conneces any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple” (21).“We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicy connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus” (22).
Notes
This is perhaps one of the most difficult texts that I have come across, so I am finding useful to read about the book at least as much as I read the book itself. I will add a list of the resources I have been using below.Also, if D & G were working today, they’d be making some mind boggling digital humanities projects.
Saying that, I think it’s important that I am wrapping my head around this book given the rather obvious connection to Scalar and other DH tools / projects.
Related
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or The Aesthetic of Late CapitalismLatour, Reassembling the Social
Marx, Capital
Resources
Parr, Adrian, editor. The Deleuze Dictionary. Columbia University Press, 2005.Smith, Daniel and Protevi, John. "Gilles Deleuze." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#ThoPla
