A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In a way consistent with Marx, DandG celebrate the creative "deterritorialization" (everything that is solid melting into air, in other words) that comes with captalism. Their solution to the devaluation of life (as evidenced by the relationship between capitalism and war, hot or cold, on Communism, drugs, crime or terror) that also characterizes our situation is to push that deterritorialization further (to reject reterritorialization). My one main criticism of them is that this is an inadequate solution. Nobody else has much of an answer either, however.

To read this book it is nice if you are familiar with Nietzsche, Marx and Freud (especially Nietzsche), but almost noone will be familiar with everything they reference. The best advice is to not get bogged down in what you dont "get" right away. Give the book time. It can be worth it. As Massumi the translator says, reading this book can be a lot of fun, but if it doesnt work for you go buy a new CD or something and enjoy that instead. Lastly, this is not a "postmodern" book, despite what some of your professors might tell you. It is staunchly in a Marxist tradition (see some of Guattaris solo work on this) and it is in the lineage of a Nietzschian sort of antinomian philosophy that Deleuze would actually trace back to Spinoza and the Medeival theologian, Duns Scotus.

Its in a word, bizarre, and even makes Habermas much easier to read.

I can see why (taken at face value) most people would consider this to be nonsense. OK maybe God is not a lobster, but you deserve to figure it out for yourself one way or another.

If one confronts the difficulty of talking about anything without imposing some sort of fixed view thats simply personal and limited, they give it a shot here. They back up far beyond the horizon to attempt to give some scope.

Whether they accomplish this is up to you.

I found the book to be very useful in making connections "lines of flight", while also at the same time understanding local hierarchies.

To use consultant jargon, there are lots of "take aways" from this book but it certainly doesnt require that you take anything at face value, consider it more of a way to crowbar some fixed concepts out of the way and consider alternatives.