Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

CONTENTS □ vii

 

Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, 

becoming-molecular: zones of proximity—Becoming 

imperceptible—The secret—Majority, minority, minoritarian—The 

minoritarian character and dissymmetry of becoming: double 

becoming—Point and line, memory and becoming—Becoming and 

block—The opposition between punctual systems and multilinear 

systems—Music, painting, and becomings—The refrain—Theorems 

of deterritorialization continued—Becoming versus imitation

 

11.  1837: Of the Refrain 

310 

In the dark, at home, toward the world—Milieus and rhythm—The 

placard and the territory—Expression as style: rhythmic faces, 

melodic landscapes—Bird song—Territoriality, assemblages, and 

interassemblages—The territory and the earth, the Natal—The prob-

lem of consistency—Machinic assemblage and abstract machine— 

Classicism and milieus—Romanticism, the territory, the earth, and 

the people—Modern art and the cosmos—Form and substance, forces 

and material—Music and refrains; the great and the small refrain 

12.  1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine 

351 

The two poles of the State—The irreducibility and exteriority of the 

war machine—The man of war—Minor and major: the minor 

sciences—The body and esprit de corps—Thought, the State, and 

nomadology—First aspect: the war machine and nomad space— 

Second aspect: the war machine and the composition of people, the 

nomad number—Third aspect: the war machine and nomad affects 

—Free action and work—The nature of assemblages: tools and signs, 

arms and jewelry—Metallurgy, itinerancy, and nomadism—The 

machinic phylum and technological lineages—Smooth space, stri-

ated space, holey space—The war machine and war: the complexities 

of the relation 

13.  7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture 

424 

The paleolithic State—Primitive groups, towns, States, and world-

wide organizations—Anticipate, ward off—The meaning of the word 

"last" (marginalism)—Exchange and stock—Capture: landownership 

(rent), fiscal organization (taxation), public works (profit)—The prob-

lem of violence—The forms of the State and the three ages of Law— 

Capitalism and the State—Subjection and enslavement—Issues in 

axiomatics 

14.  1440: The Smooth and the Striated 

474 

The technological model (textile)—The musical model—The mari- 

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viii □ CONTENTS

 

time model—The mathematical model (multiplicities)—The physi-

cal model—The aesthetic model (nomad art)

 

15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines 

501

 

Notes 

517

 

Bibliography (compiled by Brian Massumi) 

579

 

Index 

587

 

List of Illustrations 

611

 

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Translator's Foreword: 

Pleasures of Philosophy

 

Brian Massumi

 

This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub-

sets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to 

approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to 

music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That 

presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can 

be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn 

from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the 

humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would 

listen to a record?

1

 

"Philosophy, nothing but philosophy."

2

 Of a bastard line.

 

The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure 

reason" who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical com-

plicity with the State.

3

 They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that 

... effectively functions in the mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign 

judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike iden-

tity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their 

thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant sig-

nifications, and with the requirements of the established order."

4

 

Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest

 

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  □ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by dur-

ing that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of 

ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. 

I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child 

that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."

5

 Hegel is 

absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.

6

 To Kant he 

dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value 

came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of 

thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their 

opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them 

minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, 

Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret link constituted by the critique 

of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of 

forces and relations, the denunciation of power."

7

 Deleuze's first major 

statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and 

Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with 

contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 

and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society

8

 led 

him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"

9

 still in evidence in 

those works. However, many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they 

elaborated were transfused into a continuing collaboration, of which A 

Thousand Plateaus is the most recent product.

 

Felix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political activ-

ist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental psy-

chiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari himself 

was among Lacan's earliest trainees, and although he never severed his ties 

with Lacan's Freudian School the group therapy practiced at La Borde 

took him in a very different direction. The aim at La Borde was to abolish 

the hierarchy between doctor and patient in favor of an interactive group 

dynamic that would bring the experiences of both to full expression in such 

a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as 

a whole. "The central perspective is... to promote human relations that do 

not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental 

relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic 

alienations of madness or neurosis"

10

 and channel them into revolutionary 

practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group projects dedi-

cated to developing this radical "institutional psychotherapy,"

11

 and later 

entered an uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry move-

ment spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.

12 

As Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry, 

the contractual Oedipal relationship between the analyst and the transfer-

ence-bound analysand became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal

 

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