Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xiii

 

encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the 

circumstances."

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 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of 

circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application 

of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. 

The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad 

thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = noty (I = I 

= not you) with an open equation: ... + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + 

window + ...). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, 

reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, 

it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthe-

sizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hin-

dering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus 

operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is 

negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside 

to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.

 

The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. 

Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is 

confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of 

that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 

space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move 

to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an 

open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself 

in a closed space (hold the fort).

 

A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of 

thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad 

thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called 

it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice 

Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."

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In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and 

"schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network 

strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is 

that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of phi-

losophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philo-

sophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their 

respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.

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 On a strictly 

formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the 

smooth spaces.

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 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more 

inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form 

of philosophy.

 

Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Pla-

teaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you 

cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you

 

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iv D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They 

follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go 

about your daily business.

 

A Thousand Plateaus is conceived as an open system.

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 It does not pre-

tend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of 

it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the mel-

ody of their everyday lives.

 

Each "plateau" is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a 

variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplace-

ment, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors 

are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an 

open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word 

"plateau" comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in 

which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgas-

mic orientation.

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 In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when cir-

cumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not 

automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sus-

tained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can 

be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive 

states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. Each 

section of A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual bricks in such 

a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the 

combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call 

consistency—not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together 

of disparate elements (also known as a "style").

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 A style in this sense, as a 

dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not something lim-

ited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have their styles, 

mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do tools, and technol-

ogies, and historical periods, even—especially—punctual events. Each 

section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has 

existed in other mediums at other times. The date corresponds to the point 

at which that particular dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter, 

the point at which it was freest from interference from other modes and 

rose to its highest degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash, 

because the world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in 

large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die. 

Section 12, for example, the "Treatise on Nomadology," is dated 1227 

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because that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its 

pure form on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.

 

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from 

the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the 

next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a

 

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