A Thousand Plateaus
Authors
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), French philosopher, and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), French psychoanalyst, militant and director of the experimental La Borde clinic.
Publication Details
Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980. English translation by Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 610 pp.
It is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, following Anti-Oedipus (1972).
Structure
The book is composed of fifteen "plateaus," each dated, and the authors state that they may be read in any order except the conclusion. The form is the argument: a book that cannot be read from beginning to end is a book organised as a rhizome rather than as a tree, and the reader assembles a route through it rather than following one.
Each plateau takes a different object — the wolf-man's dream, the refrain, faciality, nomad war machines, the geology of morals, becoming-animal, the smooth and the striated — and develops a concept through it.
Key Concepts
- Rhizome. The opening plateau, and the most borrowed idea in the book. Against the tree — hierarchical, rooted, with a trunk and traceable descent — the rhizome has no centre and no privileged point of entry; any point connects to any other; it may be broken anywhere and re-forms elsewhere; and it proceeds by "lines of flight" rather than by branching. Its six principles are connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography and decalcomania.
- Assemblage (agencement). A provisional arrangement of heterogeneous parts — bodies, tools, statements, institutions — that functions as a unit while it holds. Deleuze and Guattari's stock example is the man-horse-stirrup assemblage, which is a different thing from its components and which changes the shape of feudal society.
- Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The paired movements by which a practice is unmoored from its context and re-anchored elsewhere.
- Smooth and striated space. Striated space is gridded, measured, bounded and traversed by fixed routes — the state's space. Smooth space is open, directional, traversed by nomads without partition — the sea, the desert, the steppe. The two are never pure and are constantly converting into one another. This distinction has been used extensively in architecture and in analyses of networks.
- Body without organs. A body considered as intensity and potential before it is organised into functional parts.
- Becoming. Not imitation or resemblance but entry into a zone of proximity with something else — becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible.
Reception and Misuse
A Thousand Plateaus is the source of most of the vocabulary that circulates as "Deleuzian" in architecture, media theory and design, and it is very frequently cited by people using "rhizome" as a synonym for "network." That usage discards the argument: a rhizome is defined by asignifying rupture and lines of flight, not merely by lacking a hierarchy, and most computer networks are aggressively striated — routed, addressed, logged and centrally administered.
The Sokal–Bricmont critique accused the authors of misusing mathematical vocabulary; defenders reply that the borrowings are avowedly conceptual.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The book supplies a vocabulary for describing decentralised, non-hierarchical, mutable systems that predates the popular internet by a decade — which is both its value and the reason it is so often misapplied to systems that only appear to have those properties. The smooth/striated distinction is the more useful pair for analysing platforms, since it asks how a space is partitioned and by whom, rather than assuming that connectedness implies freedom.
