Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part VII Date: Sat, 19 Mar 1994 22:47:55 -0600 (CST) From: "Michael J. Current" <mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net> 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-AT-picard.infonet.net -or- -AT-ins.infonet.net -or- -AT-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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