Brian Massumi translated _Mille Plateaux_ into English as part of his
doctoral dissertation at Yale. Massumi, now director of the Comparative
Literature Department at McGill University in Montreal, is one of our
finest translators of French post-structuralist texts, and a provocative
commentator on Deleuze and Guattari. His book _A user's guide to
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari_ [1] is
one of the standard texts in this small but growing area of inquiry. His
comments on reading these texts are worth quoting here.
Deleuze recommends that you read _Capitalism and Schizophrenia as
you would listen to a record. You don't approach a record as a
closed book that you have to take or leave. There are always cuts
that leave you cold. So you skip them. Other cuts you may listen
to over and over again. They follow you. You may find yourself
humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ is conceived as an open system. It
does not pretend to have the final word. The authors' hope,
however, is that elements of it will stay with a certain number of
its readers, weaving new notes into the melodies of their everyday
lives.
..................................................................
The reader is invited to follow each section from the plateau that
rises from the smooth space of its composition, and to move at
pleasure from one plateau to the next. But it is just as good to
ignore the heights. You can take a concept that is particularly of
your liking and jump with it to its next appearance. They tend to
cycle back. Some might call this repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari
call it a refrain.
Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism _out_ of the
book and incarnate it into a foreign medium, whether painting or
politics. Deleuze and Guattari delight in stealing from other
disciplines, and they are more than happy to return the favor. . . .
[Deleuze] calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics" because its
goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of
beliefs or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or
you don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a
willing hand evelopes an energy of prying.
The best way of all to approach a book by Deleuze and Guattari is to
read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would
enable you to build your life and those of the people around you
into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its
dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a
fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest
number, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that
promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.
The question is not, Is it true? But does it work? What new thoughts
does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make
possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open
in the body?
[1] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
[2] Ibid. Pp. 7, 8. [Footnotes omitted.]
Michael
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---------------------------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
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