MP - On Approaching the Text, Part VII


This series of posts has been designed to give you some background
and some insights - from me, from Massumi, and most of all, from Deleuze
- that may be helpful in approaching a text that, no doubt, seems very
much a foreign object (in more ways than one) to many of you. There is
no disputing that it is difficult - for everyone, layperson or
professional academic alike - to approach _A Thousand Plateaus_ for the
first time. The book proceeds counter-intuitively; as much as if not more
than any other texts of post-structuralism they violate the rules and
roles of writing and reading that we have all been acculturated to. The
text moves from the informal to the highly technical and obtuse without
warning, encompassing in its sweep gestures toward what seems an
impossibly large number of other thinkers and texts, moving from
philosophy to literary criticism to linguistics to psychoanalysis to
music to the latest developments in biology and physics. Some passages
remain obscure, both on first pass and after continued meditation. The
text wanders in a way that may cause the reader's mind to wander, making
it very difficult to "consume" very much at a time.
And yet, this is not only the inevitable result of the collaborative
writing of two highly idiosyncratic thinkers, it is also part of the
text's design and its purpose: not to declaim truth, to set forth a
system of beliefs and concepts, as philosophy texts have always been
expected to do, but rather to facilitate the production of concepts and
meanings in the reader. The text, at its best, is what Kafka said that a
book should be: an ax for the frozen sea within us. At the same time,
the book pushes ever outward, toward a confrontation with the
tremendously complex network of "lines" that make up our lives and our
world. It attempts to hunt down and point up the openings in that matrix
where creation, praxis, change is still possible - and leaves it to us to
exploit those openings for the local struggles, whether, as Massumi says,
it be "painting or politics" that are most relevant to us.
By opening up new spaces of thought and affect, by prodding us to
think differently, to feel differently, to experience ourselves - our
very embodiment - differently, confronting the text, in my view, can
yield great rewards.

As I have said before, this book is probably a failure at one level.
It is not yet the "pop philosophy" that Deleuze said that he and Guattari
dreamed of producing. It is too difficult, and still too tied, if oddly,
to academic discourse. It will probably never be directly accessible to
the sixteen year-old cyberpunk kid with blue hair dreaming of revolution
while gyrating to the latest tunes at the local rave or reading the
latest Gibson book while listening to the latest Fugazi tunes on their
Walkman. But it contains many elements that may provide the tools for
the creation of such a "pop philosophy." That task, or whatever we hope
to get out of the book, is ours. . . .

Michael

--
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
mcurrent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -or- @ins.infonet.net -or- @nyx.cs.du.edu
Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142
"AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY
AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------



------------------

Partial thread listing: