A Thousand Plateaus

Summary

Like the first volume of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus is politically and terminologically provocative and is intended as a work of schizoanalysis, but focuses more on what could be considered systematic, environmental and spatial philosophy, often dealing with the natural world, popular culture, measurements and mathematics. A "plateau", borrowed from ideas in Gregory Bateson's research on Balinese culture, is "a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities"; the chapters in the book are described as plateaus, while their respective dates also signify a level of intensity, where "each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau." Deleuze and Guattari describe the book itself as a rhizome due to how it was written and produced. A Thousand Plateaus has been described as dealing with their ideas of the rhizome, as well as the body without organs, the plane of immanence, abstract machines, becoming, lines of flight, assemblages, smooth and striated space, state apparatuses, faciality, performativity in language, binary branching structures in language, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, arborescence, pragmatics, strata, stratification and destratification, the war machine, the signified, signifier and sign, and coding/recoding.

In the plateaus (chapters) of the book, they discuss psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung, Lacan—who trained Guattari, and Melanie Klein), composers (Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen), artists (Klee, Kandinsky, and Pollock), philosophers (Husserl, Foucault, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gilbert Simondon), historians (Ibn Khaldun, Georges Dumézil, and Fernand Braudel), and linguists (Chomsky, Labov, Benveniste, Guillaume, Austin, Hjelmslev, and Voloshinov). Deleuze and Guattari highly favor and criticize these figures, sometimes overlapping or "plugging" their statements, works, research, studies and fragments "into each other".

The book starts with an introduction titled "Rhizome" that explains rhizomatic philosophy (addressing not just the book itself but all books as rhizomes), and ends with a conclusion, "Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines", that fully elaborates on and intertwines all of the major concepts in the book, as well as Anti-Oedipus, with a numbering system representing plateaus. In between are thirteen chapters, each dated non-linearly, sometimes precisely ("November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?"), sometimes less so ("10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)"). In the sixth chapter, "Year Zero: Faciality" (visagéité), the notion of face is discussed as an "overcoding" of body, but also as being in dialectical tension with landscape (paysagéité). Faciality, the essence of the face, is ultimately a dominating and dangerously compelling trait of bodies, and Deleuze and Guattari remark that the face "is a whole body unto itself: it is like the body of the center of significance to which all of the deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization."

Like Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari evaluate and criticize psychoanalysis: in the first two chapters, they discuss the work of Sigmund Freud, especially referring to the case histories of the Wolf Man and Little Hans. Their schizoanalysis of Freud's cases refuses the Oedipalization they were previously given, and aims to exercise the content of their fantasies instead; "Look at what happened to Little Hans already [...] they kept on breaking his rhizome and blotching his map, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him". In particular, focusing on child psychoanalysis, they remark that "children are Spinozists." Meanwhile, owing to their mode of literary analysis, A Thousand Plateaus also frequently discusses novels. In "1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"", they discuss Henry James' In the Cage (1898) and "The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass" by Pierrette Fleutiaux, but they also evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay The Crack-Up (1945) (which Deleuze previously discussed in The Logic of Sense), because his depression and frustration in the essay is dramatized, and Deleuze's idea of the crack constitutes a narrativized breakdown. The works of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Carlos Castaneda, H. P. Lovecraft, Herman Melville and Chrétien de Troyes are also discussed, often in conjunction with the rhizome, becoming, faciality, and the regimes of signs.