Biographies[]
Gilles Deleuze[]
Deleuze was born in Paris to a middle-class family in 1925.
At the time of the 1968 student workers revolts in France, Deleuze began to write books in his "own" voice, aiming to replace official philosophy with what he called "bastard" philosophy.
He was educated and taught philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes from 1969 until his retirement in 1987.
Deleuze developed a new philosophy of becoming and exteriority--joining an orphan line of metaphysical thinkers that includes Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Gottfried Leibnez, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson--that his work combines the various other strands of contemporary theory.
In 1995, Deleuze, whose life-long respiratory ailments had developed such that even writing became difficult, died by suicide.
Felix Guattari[]
Guattari was born in the Paris suburb of Colombes in 1930.
Never having earned any official degrees, he worked from the mid-1950s at a psychiatric hospital outside Paris known for innovative practices in group therapy. One of Jacques Lacan's earliest trainees, Guattari quickly took leave of the master.
Guattari's antihierarchical and anarchic tendencies drew him into an alliance with Deleuze. Together they wrote the polemical Anti-Oedipus.
Guattari died of a heart attack in 1992.
from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia[]
Background and Historical Context[]
"Alternately hailed or dismissed in North America as the 'infants terrible' of post-structuralist philosophy and psychoanalysis following the publications of their Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are known for their antiestablishment thinking in many domains. Trained as a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, respectively, Delouse and Guattari critique the patterns of knowledge that govern the disciplines in which they were schooled. In the process, they question the dominance of conceptual stability, organization, and unity as such, Their critique is well summed up in their pun on the word 'General' : knowledge functions like an operation of conquest and mastery, driven by 'generality' as if it were a military 'General.'" (NATC 1368)
Key Words and Terms[]
Aesthetics - a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art
Assemblage - a collection or gathering of things and people. A machine or object made of pieces fitting together.
Authorship - the state or fact of being the writer of a book, article, or document, or the creator of a work of art
Binary Logic - the logic of either/or, in which all values comes in pairs of opposition.
Body Without Organs - A way of thinking of bodily experience as an interconnected system of flows and forces rather than a structure of organs
Line of Flight - looking for pieces from the texts "by means of which writers detach themselves from a mobilizing order" (1370).
Minoritarian - is a neologism for a political structure or process in which a minority segment of the population has a certain degree of primacy in that entity's decision making (1368).
Nomadic - not having a permanent place to be settled; constantly moving from place to place.
Plateau - in the middle, never in the end or in the beginning
Poststructuralism - argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object
Representation - the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else
Rhizome - a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that pulls out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals
Root-Book - "Classical" books that imitate the world. Described by Deleuze an Guattari as being typified by, "the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought" (1376).
Key Quotations[]
"There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object" (1375).
". . . when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work" (1375-1376).
"Thought lags behind nature" (1376).
"The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object" (1377).
"At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world" (1378).
"The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass" (1378).
"Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory" (1378).
"A rhizome is made of plateaus" (1379).
"We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau" (1379).
"For science would go completely mad if left to its own devices" (1381).
"Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make Rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard)" (1382).
"Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon" (1382).
"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and . . . ' This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb 'to be'" (1382).
Discussion[]
The Rhizome[]
Deleuze and Guattari utilize a rhizome as a sort of metaphor to describe the multiplicities of human beings and to describe a position that comes from the middle rather than the tops or bottoms. The plateau serves as ground to emphasis neither the extremes of the one or of the multiple and serves a place of convergence. Like the rhizomes, human beings are an assemblage of lines that intersect and converge into a multiplicity of connections. Deleuze and Guattari suggest a way of movement that relies neither on the past or a beginning, but rather proceeds and picks up speed from the middle as it "sweeps one and the other way, a stream without a beginning" (1382).
Becoming[]
Deleuze and Guattari state that family trees are more realistically family rhizomes, due to the "special relation of women to the man-standard" and that "all becomings...begin with the 'becoming-woman' of man (1369).
Rhizomatic thinking promotes becoming, not being. . . . Yet the rhizomatic process is structured (not organized) by moments of synthesis (1369-1370). "Deleuze and Guattari claim to study subjectivity where it emerges, society where it mutates, and the world where it is re-created" (1370). To accomplish this, it seems they would have to recognize the non-emergent, non-mutated, non-re-created aspects to see the "becoming."
Reception & Critique [this section needs work - passive voice: who is leveling these critiques?][]
Both the authors' prior work and this text have been criticized for asking many questions without providing answers. Many physicists claim that the work over-exaggerates in many of its claims and anthropologists claim that they provide many claims without the evidence to support. It has been regarded as not one of their best works, however it is still important to post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Bibliography[]
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, et al., Viking Penguin, 1977.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philososphy? (1991; translated 1994).
Related Images[]
References[]
-Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.