Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi (Translator)

4.36 · rating details · 1,037 ratings · 95 reviews

A rare and remarkable book. Times Literary SupplementGilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical...more

Paperback, 632 pages

Published December 21st 1987 by University Of Minnesota Press (first published January 1st 1987)

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Sep 01, 2011

James rated it

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 sen...more

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Mar 19, 2011

El rated it

Shelves: cultural-studies-and-other, permanent-collection, pretentious-book-club, cuckoos

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 - apparen...more

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Jul 20, 2008

Charlie rated it

Recommends it for: Anyone who likes a challenge

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 bo...moreFinally, 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 subject matter is suitably sprawling, but there is a fair chunk devoted to the pairs earlier musings on capitalism dissected in anti-Oedipus, having not read that book I feel it would have been useful for what comprises one of the main propositions of the book.

I had felt for a long time reading this book that it is better taken chapter by chapter and seen more as a collection of essays, but the duo manage to very skilfully marry all of the various ideas in the book together in the last chapter, a great deal of the ideas slot in together at this point, and you begin to see the bigger picture of what Deleuze & Guttari are getting at, and it really is quite an awe inspiring vision. That being said I still couldn't really profess to know what an abstract machine was, let alone differentiate between the different types of abstract machine. But I think that it is o.k. to not get this because they seem to be saying that this is the thing that links everything together and is the gel that holds together everything we understand, so ultimately the boys are setting their sights pretty high in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

Overall the main merit of this book is its skill in not treating things that are collectively subjective as being much closer to being objective. If enough people are aware of a phenomena then it is there whether it is objective or otherwise, and should be treated in this manner, adopting this stance Deleuze and Guttari delve into subjects many others feed to tread, and making some surprisingly logical and poignant observations.
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Feb 26, 2008

Scott Gates rated it

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, pu...moreThis 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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Aug 05, 2011

Phil rated it

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 unconventio...more

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Apr 24, 2011

The Awdude rated it

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 b...more

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Oct 05, 2010

Mike rated it

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...more

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Mar 30, 2010

FiveBooks rated it

Shelves: fivebooks-on-radical-political-thou

Lawyer Chibli Mallat has chosen to discuss Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject - Maverick Political Thought, saying that:

"...Sadr was executed, aged 45, by Saddam Hussein in April 1980. He is in my view the greatest Islamic thinker of the 20th century, and he reshaped the whole field of Islamic law away from the monstrous idea of it, held by Eastern and Western ignoramuses alike. ...more

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Mar 24, 2008

Sachin rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: philsophy

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.

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Jun 04, 2007

courtney rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: people smarter than i am

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.

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Nov 21, 2008

Avinash rated it

· review of another edition

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...more

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Aug 31, 2011

Jonfaith rated it

I felt off balance with this one, especially in stark relief to Anti-Oedipus. I'm not suggesting I deftly maneuvered through that one, but the posture remained intact. I largely flailed and screeched during my readinging and kept it such until I read that Alec Empire loves this as well as some squatters in St. Petersburg: I read that second detail Wired magazine. Yeah, I bought a pair of copies of that back in the early months of Clinton's second term. It is strange, I recall so much of that a...more

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May 21, 2007

Peter Anderson rated it

wrote my MA thesis on these fuckers

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Jan 15, 2012

Chris marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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). Subtr

...more

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Aug 10, 2009

Ryan rated it

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...more

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Oct 06, 2010

Christoph rated it

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 ch...moreI 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 charting of ontology (even if not hierarchical ontology) like Husserl's Phenomenology for a significant portion of the text. But whereas Husserl was truly tilting at windmills, Deleuze and Guttari seem to be bullfighting them. On the other hand, if I view this as surrealist prose with as much meaning as a non-sequitur then I can appreciate this book as the most beautifully coherent yet abstract expressionist writing I have ever seen.
The subtitle of the book points to the two main objects of the critical theory developed here: hegemonic economics (capitalism) and hegemonic psychology (psychoanalysis). But neither ever seem to be directly addressed. The book seems to be nothing but a series of tangents vacillating between descriptions of how to use the method, actual methodological analysis associated generally with topics relating to the two objects mentioned above, and then there are the non-sequiturs.
Since one never truly understands the intention of the writing other than to get lost in the hubris of deterritorializing reterritorialized lines of flight back to some strata in some assemblage comprising an abstract machine (I am sorry that statement is the most meaningless concept ever devised), I cannot accept this as an actual method of critical thought. That said, there are conceptions in here that when not trying to be so diagrammatical are ingenious and necessary for conceptualizing our time. The idea of the rhizome and how it could describe contemporary social networks or the stratification of elements within a concept. Also, the discourse on Chomsky's linguistic theory (why is Chomsky such a common punching bag for the post-modernists?) is probably the most compelling. Meanwhile the embedded text aka Nomadology is literally the most farcical foray into meaningless abstract pretension I have endured although the distinction of royal versus normal science is a tangential concept in that section worth investigating (although already done to some degree by TS Kuhn about twenty years before).
That this book can both me overwhelmingly insightful in one breath and crushingly bombastic the next without ever truly revealing whether this is completely meant to be serious, a joke, neither or both, tells me there is something much more to this. But frankly, I do not have the patience to sit through it again to find out. Perhaps, at the least, as reference. (less)

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Jan 05, 2009

Johnjbrantley rated it

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 ta...more

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Sep 29, 2011

Tonia rated it

This is a tough, tough read and crazy. This book just defies explanation. This will be one to revisit many, many times. If you're interested in Glissant, I would recommend reading parts of this book because Glissant uses Deleuze's rhizomatic thought as a founding notion in his Poetics of Relation for his nomadic thinking. Still struggling to get my mind around this books. There is something in here for everyone. Basically each plateau is a variation on one concept.

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Jun 08, 2010

Ashleymatney rated it

· review of another edition

If you can make head-or-tails of this crap then this rating doesn't apply to you. It would probably be best if you read this outside a course with any expectations because if you're trying to figure out how you'll apply this to a paper as you read you'll never get anywhere. It's just strange and nonsensical. Even the most learned literary critic or psychoanalyst would have trouble following this text.

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Sep 06, 2010

Mara marked it as to-read

Shelves: read-part-way-and-abandoned-for-now

This falls in the the category of "extremely dense books that I'm utterly fascinated by and promise I'll read properly someday".

Instead, I went to see a documentary about people (artists, architects, etc... including DJ Spooky) who have been inspired by Deleuze's thinking. It's called Milles Gilles, directed by Ijsbrand van Veelen. It turned out to be pretty dull.

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Sep 08, 2008

Chris rated it

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...more

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Feb 11, 2010

DoctorM rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: critical-theory, favourites

I could begin by saying that every lovely, black-clad Bookish Reclusive Dangerously Younger Train-Wrecky (BRDYTW) co-ed with whom I've been involved over the past twenty years or so has had a copy of "A Thousand Plateaus" on a bedside bookshelf, but this book is far more than a marker for lit-crit girls who prefer Older Lovers. I discovered this book back in the mid-80s, in the first flush of my exposure to critical theory and postmodernist thought, and it is one of the books that I've...more

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Jan 27, 2012

Jacob rated it

How much I "got" from this might be debatable, but it was still an interesting (and occasionally fascinating) read. I imagine the corresponding Massumi text might be useful in clarifying some of the more vaguely worded concepts.

I also have no idea HOW this book was written. I recognized some familiar discussions that can be found in other Deleuze works (Francis Bacon's talk of gothic lines and discussing margins in the ABCs of philosophy video series currently on YouTube)...more

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Jan 31, 2011

Derek rated it

Good stuff, but not as good as the first volume of Anti-Oedipus. The first sections were great, chock full of insightful stuff, but by the 5th or 6th chapter, my attention was waning, and I felt like I was reading Carlos Castaneda or something, like they'd done a bit too many drugs and weren't able to communicate their ideas effectively to sober minds. They get back on track on some of the later chapters, like the Becoming-Animal and Refrain chapters, but when they got back to war machines i str...more

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Dec 02, 2009

Rebekah rated it

Very dense theory that doesn't believe in linear structure. Had some interesting (read: offensive) things to say about being-woman.

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Nov 21, 2007

Matthew rated it

Recommends it for: Patient pedants

Shelves: epistemology

Yes, the book is pedantic. And wandering. And self-indulgent. And it might have more neologisms than all of Heidegger's work combined.

And, no, it's certainly not what 90% of contemporary Anglo-American philosophers call 'philosophy'.

But it is amazing. The essays in this book are fertile (fecund, I guess, if we are to get all Levinasian). While it is far from my normal philosophical agenda, I found many of the essays thought provoking, and even inspiring. But "schizo"...more

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Apr 26, 2011

John Christy rated it

i want to say the other reviewers dont get the book, but in so doing i expose myself as a fraud; so i will not

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Feb 09, 2009

S added it

Sophisticated to the point of incomprehensibility to the average 21 year old American college student.

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Aug 26, 2010

Andrew rated it

Shelves: philosophy

Anti-Oedipus was much better. In 1000 Plateaus there's too much mystagogy at work that never settles on anything (which, granted, is the point...?) I thought it a touch too anarchic.

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Nov 29, 2008

John rated it

Embarrassed to say I've never read this in its entirety before ...

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About Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, crea...moreDeleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, isa study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.
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