Mille Plateaus

From Geography

A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, published 8 years after publishing the first volume, Anti-Oedipus. Many topics are covered in this book, including noology and political economy.

The concept of plateaus can be defined as follows: "Each plateau is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, 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 within its own trajectory" (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1980, p. xiv)

Book structure

The book consists of the following chapters, that can be read in any order, apart from the introduction and conclusion: - Rhizome (Introduction) - 1914: One or Several Wolves? - 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?) - November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics - 587 BC-AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs - November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? - Year Zero: Faciality - 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?" - 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity - 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible... - 1837: Of the Refrain - 1227: Treatise on Nomadology; The War Machine - 7000 BC.: Apparatus of the Capture - 1440: The Smooth and the Striated

Each of the sections is dated because at these dates the 'compositions' being described experienced their highest degree of intensity (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1980, p. xv)

Sources

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8264-7694-5.