Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus Quotes

“We have seen that Deleuze’s metaphysical project can be summed up as the pursuit of continuity in distinction from the dominant trend of Western metaphysics, which actively takes discontinuity to be its starting point.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Furthermore, since intensities are constantly in flux, the concept itself is constantly becoming. In philosophy, a concept will always display two opposed tendencies. One of these tendencies is toward chaos, which would be the inability of a concept to hold its components together. This is the tendency toward change. The other tendency is toward opinion. This is the tendency of a concept to become (re)absorbed in a dominant or traditional way of thinking. The result of this tendency is that the concept is no longer singular but ordinary.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Deleuze doesn’t seek to give a theory for film. He seeks to create concepts out of what film gives him. At the same time, however, insofar as he’s creating concepts, he’s doing philosophy. Philosophy, art, science can all borrow from one another, but the borrowings are necessarily transformed by what each seeks to create.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Philosophy creates concepts. Science creates functions, and art creates sensations. “With its concepts, philosophy brings forth events. Art erects monuments with its sensations. Science constructs states of affairs with its functions.”30 This conception has the advantage that it eliminates the need for these creative processes to compete with one another, while at the same time acknowledging that their boundaries are porous.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Philosophy creates concepts. Science creates functions, and art creates sensations.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“A plateau is a temporary coagulation of intensive processes into a stable state.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Plateaus are Deleuze and Guattari’s way of accounting for the moments of stability within any intensive process, and more importantly the process itself. Thus, every plateau will have three components: 1) The moment of stability under consideration. 2) One pole on an intensive continuum that marks the plateau’s limit in terms of stability. 3) Another pole that marks the limit of change.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“That is, both movement-images and time-images are assemblages, which generate questions related to their capabilities and connections with other images.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“What is crucial about both of these concepts for our purposes here is that Bergson is explicit that neither movement nor duration can be thought as a succession of discrete points. On this point Deleuze quotes Bergson approvingly, “‘The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“The danger of an unrestricted tendency toward change is just as great as that of an unrestricted tendency toward stability”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“The key to the rhizome, and the reason Deleuze and Guattari take it up as a way of thinking about not only books but things in general, is that the rhizome continually creates the new. It is not predictable.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“To think a life is to think the singular, the intensive, the continuous, immanence, without subordinating it to the individual, the discrete point, the extensive, the discontinuous, transcendence.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

“Language is a concrete assemblage that evinces tendencies toward stability. This tendency toward stability in language Deleuze and Guattari call the being major of a language. In order for a language to be major it must have the support of numerous other assemblages, particularly a government powerful enough to declare a language “official” and pass laws with regard to what language a government’s business is to be conducted in. Government-sponsored education bolsters the language’s status by ensuring the teaching of the “proper” rules of grammar. At the same time, however, other forces destabilize a language. Everyday usage, borrowings from other languages, literature, and slang continually disturb the stability of a major language. As a concrete assemblage, a language is the dated, singular zone of stability that is the result of intensive processes with tendencies toward both stasis and change. A Thousand Plateaus is the exploration of assemblages or plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how to create concepts in a way that does not presuppose a metaphysics of discontinuity.”
― Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide