I've solved it, on my own first reading with no secondary sources or interpretations. The key is in Challenger's description of the folding of the stratum. While my interpretation here is in no way exhaustive, it does appear to be the basis/center for the metaphor, and it is impossible to unsee after you consider it.

[Spoiler alert]

Challenger is describing the mechanics of the book. The stratum are sentences, Parastratum are paragraphs, the plane is the page, and the millue is the chapter. The abstract machine which codes the stratum is the authors. The process of territorialization and deterritorialozation describes sentences stopping and starting, accordingly signifiers vs signified, forms of expression vs content, he is explicitly describing grammatical forms and meaning and the relationship they have to meaning.

what about the double-articulation?

That too, it a references to the way all the sentences consist of explicit meaning but also contain well inference/reference. The double pinch is Challenger's lecture as D+G describing the book. Even in the scene in which the lecture is taking place, the other character who takes offense, he described as a literalist/tracer(contrasted to the topographical/mapper) and is offended by the incoherence of the lecture.

I realized early on the chapter wasn't articulating any philosophical or scientific ontology; it was absurd, logically and physically nonsensical. But in challengers conclusion he details content vs expression, and relates it back to strata, and then it occurred to me... the folding there is way strata which contains content and expression on a plane might be folded, and it is the way a page of the book is folded making the sentences touch each other!

Anyone else figure it out your first time/ever? Have other comments or alternative thoughts? I haven't looked at academic readings of the chapter, perhaps I'll look some up... surely many others picked up on it as well

Is there a reason why such an English rendering has been selected ?

does anybody has a fully working ebook (not pdf) version of a 1k plateaus?

the anonamouse tracker version i got do not have the authors and translator notes

In the introductory plateau on rhizomes, D&G write:

The multiple must be made, not always by adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available - always n-1(the only way one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-1 dimensions.

I was able to understand most of what they were saying in this chapter(and its blowing my mind) but I'm struggling with this and I feel like its an important nuance to grasp since they're talking about their method. Here are some of the (unconvincing)ways I tried to conceptualize n-1:

Do they mean that while writing one must separate/subtract the unique - i.e. the self - from the multiple? If so, how are we to reconcile this position with the property of assemblages to simultaneously act on semiotic, material and social flows? Since these are simultaneous flows are they not resistant to efforts of being subtracted from the multiplicity? Or do they mean that when writing one must subtract the very idea of a higher unity(in arborescent terms the higher unity of the tree trunk)? Do they mean that since we do not have access to the higher plane of consistency where pure ideas reside in abstraction, the only ones available to us are therefore n-1 In closing my basic question really, is, in what way is the number of dimensions one has available n-1? Thanks!

I use Trello to manage pretty much every aspect of my personal and professional life. I just started reading A Thousand Plateaus and I've decided to make a Trello board where I'm going to document my notes and research.

I'm thinking of having a list & notes for references or citations that D&G use that merit further elaboration, favorite passages along with further introspection and thoughts, chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, etc.

I'd love to make this a collaborative experiment in reading & learning and invite anyone who's interested to join the Trello board to take part, either as a passive viewer or as an active participant.

(in the spirit of revitalizing the thread:) What contemporary films/novels/music do you see following Deleuze's vision for the future of art/culture/politics as set out in Mille Plateaux? I do think that Paul Thomas Anderson (especially in his use of soundtracks) is doing something amazing, where Inherent Vice transcends even that aspect of his work (time, paranoia, control, entanglement (synchronicity?)) all presented unbelievably.... The scene where they use the ouija board to find eachother (rather than the weed they're looking for). But mainly time. Anderson holding a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it.

To what extent to we live in a culture fertile with (what Deleuze might call) lines of flight, rhizomes - BwO's, connections, flows? Where do you see it? Who has succeeded in the problem of making a productive body in a capitalist landscape which seems to gleefully prohibit such production (endorsing "humans" over "bodies", if you read the Spinoza chapter..

Bit of a vague post here but I assume some of you might catch my drift.

Final question: Are we more or less impoverished, more or less in implanted in the plane of immanence, than we were in the last years in which Deleuze was writing?

His insight about a false immanence at the end of the two-chapter nomadology project - known respectively as Apparatus of Capture and Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine (along, perhaps, with Pasolini's Salo, is quite the indictment of modern power apparatuses). What do we have to show for the forty or so year interim since those texts/films where made? (Because as far as I can tell, after '68 (esp. in Paris) resistance has been irrevocably tied to commercial capitalism, to the point where one might feel trapped. Paradoxically, the one threat to Empire (as we may call it, revising Deleuze's term about global capitalist apparatus or whatever it was) may be its greatest source of propaganda: the couple form. The disparity between a Vince Vaughn romantic comedy and the real life problems (and solutions) of how to establish the micro-society of the couple-form in a society where -as much a i hate the word - spiritual intimacy is basically non-existence. Think of the blood rituals, the intensity and therefore reality of old social formations, even large ones where men and women would die for each other without blinking an eye (a bond for which the initiatory, liminal experience is responsible for) - clearly, we do not see this in our day to day lives, but the couple form (esp. when paraodied in awful films that come out almost weekly) is fertile because of it. We are not ready as a society to build alternative social bodies on any macro scale, but we may tailor our relationships to be subversive, ferociously unself-conscious, loyal, and holding between their flesh the awareness of the sheer illimitable power of being (the rest may start from there).

time for some word salad, as Guatarri said about writing Thousand Plateaus. Its been a real philosophical problem for me, which I think Deleuze has identified, about the link between the mind and body, or even the link between subjectivities and the organic stratum. Can someone clarify- can one think of the apparatus of the computer and the brain is simply interlocking assemblages from a Deleuzian perspective? What machinic assemblages must be present for intelligibility to happen? Is this the point of Deleuze's writing about desiring machines? Where does this roughly fit in with his concept of becoming-animal?

I've already read 1000 plateaus, would be interested in discussing more

this chapter initially quelled my enthusiasm for this read not because of any complication with the ideas presented but the opposite. I at first found it underwhelming.

a few days ago based on a hunch about what the chapter might be in reference to and in synchronous light of other things I was reading at the time including Josh Rameys absolutely absolutely necessary book on Deleuze, "the hermetic deleuze", which in turn spawned a new tangential direction of reading and research into a whole shelf almost! of some long dormant books in my library (linguistics and semiotics stuff) I have come to realize based largely on its importance to my current general "heading" (I do, after all, tack back and forth quite a bit...) that there are a LOT of extremely interesting ideas packed into this chapter.

In my opinion there are a lot of Deleuzian ideas implied here both in cryptic reference as well as his preoccupation with some of the concepts that really require specific readings outside of ATP to fully understand what is happening here.

First lets look to the time era of the chapter 1440. What was going on then?

the protestant reformation was not yet but many of its seminal pre-cursor events were well under way.

The big thing happening here was the "great schism" or Papal Schism of the church.

The effects of the bubonic plague or black death in the 14th century had a major impact on all of Europe so the impact of that is still resonating within the infrastructural and superstructural spheres.

The hundred years war is winding down. This war while not a direct impact I suppose on the Great Schism, still had many resonant effects on the relationship of church, state and populace. The greatest effect was likely that through a perfected "mercenarial" system, war was professionalized", impersonalized and thus begins its permanent integration into the political and governmental structure of western civilization. It becomes a banal, secularish, ubiquitous institution in other words, separate of both church and state in a sense establishing and announcing its "timeless" presence in the milieu of "progress".

The 15th century is considered the "age of discovery". There were also many refinements and specialization within maritime sphere. Navigation, further innovation and specialization of sailing ships all were having an effect on civilization. Strangely enough the ocean itself remain unchanged.

Other deleuzian specific terms that are important for this chapter I think is the idea of "interiority" identified and somewhat explored in the fantastic Gauchet book "the disenchantment of the world" and Deleuzes views on "intensity" further refined in "proust and signs". The Ramey chapter in "hermetic deleuze" entitled "deleuze and the esoteric sign" would be very helpful here too.

One last thing to think about is the idea of the "geography of linguistics' or the "topology of metaphor" neurolinguistic areas such as "time as space" and the cognition of metaphor discussed in lakoffs "metaphors we live by" (Lakoff and another guy invented the whole cognitive field of "metaphor" which is in itself absolutely fascinating) but the idea here is that language both internally and externally has a "concrescence" aspect that is very real yet very obfuscated. Foucaults views on architecture correlate as well. But the "concrescence of language" relates to neoplatonic, hermetic and alchemical ideas of spiritualized matter. SPiritualized matter and animism have unintended yet potent ecological and political ramifications that are only just now in the past 20-30 years really being explored.

I will come back tonight or tomorrow and flesh out my ideas on this reading.

I've been reading 1000 Plateaus off and on, along with the Holland reading guide. I'm about to begin the fifth plateau "On Several Regimes of Signs", so I was reading though what Holland says about this plateau. I thought that I would share this excerpt with you all, as it appears to me to discuss the spectacle.

The post-signifying semiotic no doubt appears more "modern" than the signifying regime-although we will see later that states today mobilize both regimes, and oscillate between a prevalence of one or the other. Where the signifying regime is characterized by paranoid-interpretive signification, the post-signifying regime is characterized by what Deleuze & Guattari call "passional subjectification." The imperial center no longer holds, the Despot turns away from his people, and so the flight into the desert no longer serves as banishment, but as a line-of-flight or escape toward autonomy, existence under reprieve. Universal deception gives way to mutual betrayal: the Despot or god has betrayed his people by turning away, and the people betray him by ignoring his decrees and fleeing in pursuit of the il' own subjective sovereignty. (The Protestant Reformation can serve as one illustration of this regime-but as one among many, not as a singular historical turning-point.) A new degree of subjective interiority develops, including both individualized consciousness (cogito) and romantic passion, with a kind of narcissistic self-righteousness informing both: "it's me-I'm special." Yet ev en if the Despot has turned away, he has not disappeared entirely, with the result that the regime of power becomes bureaucratie and authoritarian rather than personal and despotic, and the passion in subjectification is typically given over to grievances, wh ether against the authority of power or the fascination of the loved one. The transcendent centralized power of the Despot gives way to an immanent and omni-present form of power operating by normalization and the authority to define the dominant reality (which the distant Despot had neither the need nor the ability to do). Subjectified subjects now obey themselves-they obey norms they themselves have pronounced or subscribed to, instead of obeying the pers on of the Despot-but they end up subscribing to the norms already in effect in the dominant reality promulgated by order-words. "A new form of slavery is invented," Deleuze & Guattari conclude, "namely, being slave to oneself" [130].

Hi /r/! I hope everyone is enjoying the reading, I've been wanting to create a good first post here for some time but it seems like ideas just keep snowballing and I don't really have clear in-/out-points. So instead I'm just going to run with some of the things I've been thinking/reading about over the past couple of weeks. Again, don’t expect particularly clear segues or beginnings or endings; I’m hoping the connections will speak for themselves. Comin' atcha!

First: Time. Ever since Einstein developed his Special Theory of Relativity (STR), it has been practically universally acknowledged by the scientific community that simultaneity is a cosmic illusion and that “time” is entirely relative to an observer. In other words, there is no “now”, in the physical universe. What is experienced by one observer (A) as a single moment (whatever that means), might be experienced by another observer (B), whose frame of reference differs drastically from A’s, as a thousand years or more. The blink of an eye, from one perspective, encompasses the births and deaths of entire galaxies, from another. This is the mind-bending “reality” that appears to be supported by the data and mathematics of relativity theory.

So, what is the picture of our universe that emerges from such a conception? With STR, Einstein proposed that his data supported a conception of the universe in which time exists as wholly given, in a single block, but in a higher dimension to which humans are denied access. If you’ve ever read Slaughterhouse V, you’ll recognize the Tralfamadorians as examples of such five-dimensional beings. To them, existing in the fifth dimension, humans appear as massively elongated, 4-D “worldliness”, wormlike beings with their birth marking their “tail”, and their death marking their “head” (or vice versa, for that matter, since for Tralfamadorians the “flow” of time is all an illusion anyway). The Tralfamadorians, being able to insert themselves into a three-dimensional reality in a manner analogous to the way that humans, say, view 2-D films on a screen, can “view” humans as we view ourselves––as 3-D beings within a flow of 4-D time––but they can view them at any point, from any angle and in either direction. Meaning that “past” and “future” are not absolute for them, as they can view a person’s death first, and then simply retreat and cut back into the human’s worldline near the beginning to view his/her early childhood. Donnie Darko also exhibits elements of this conception with the way that Donnie begins to view his own worldline, and to wonder during a conversation he has with his high school science teacher (played by Noel Wiley) what it would mean to travel in “God’s channel”.

Far from being esoteric or overly imaginative, this scenario of 4-D “block-time” is, in fact, the generally accepted model for explaining the otherwise unbelievable physics of time dilation. It is the only model we are able to sort of think about as a logical/possible outcome of combining motion with the (constant) speed of light. Here’s a video explaining it clearly with the use of some helpful graphics. STR was revolutionary because it proposed this block-time as a physical description of the universe, as an ontological property of time. It said that the future and the past are “real” in the greatest sense of “actually happening concurrently with the present,” which means that, really, there is no present. In fact, there is no “time” at all, at least not in the common sense.

The common sense understanding of time, based on our feeling that time is always and only “now”, is sometimes called “presentism”. This (metaphysical) idea is diametrically opposed to the block-time suggested by STR, which is sometimes called “eternalism”.

Henri Bergson is somewhat infamous for a debate he once had with Einstein on the topic of time. (For those who aren’t familiar, Bergson also ended up having a significant influence on Deleuze, especially with regard to the latter’s important conceptions of univocity, difference and virtuality.) Einstein is pretty much universally regarded as having won the debate, though in truth it was more like a disagreement. Throughout his career, Bergson had systematically criticized what he saw as the unfounded and unexamined metaphysical corruption of time by space. In his opinion, when philosophy or physics tended to refer to time, it tended to do so poorly. A perfect example is Zeno’s paradox of Achilles. Bergson believed that, when you invoke infinitesimals as a solution to the problem of motion, you essentially turn time into space by making it divisible at any point. And by making it divisible at any point you fundamentally change the nature of the thing examined. By making those individual points discrete and non-continuous, so that they are all self-similar, you lose any measure of change––which is to say, you eliminate “time” as it is in itself: pure change, pure difference.

And Bergson believed that STR committed this exact same error. Again, he never disputed the data, only it’s interpretation. Bergson did not believe that the physics of time-dilation could be attributed to an ontological property of “time” understood apart from space, as a measure of change.

The obvious retort is that there is no “time” apart from space, hence the term space-time continuum and why all time is relative to motion and distance. And that’s a technically correct answer, but it does equivocate.

If there is no time apart from space, and if space-time is a relative illusion anyway, then how do we account for change? The only way out would be to claim that things don’t really “change”, but I believe that quantum physics may indicate that they do.

In closing, the disagreement between Einstein and Bergson runs much deeper than a footnote in a physics textbook. In fact, it very much points to the crossroads at which stand all serious attempts to unify physics.

I mean, I don't know how to read it, or how I'm supposed to interpret it, i.e. at face-value/literally, as metaphor, a sacred text, or another way.

I don't even know if they're writing about the world I live in! I assume they are, but it all seems so foreign (maybe because of the terminology, but more likely the concepts) that I don't know how to relate it back to things I know!

I can't seem to schematize 1000 plateaus. Help?

Would be very grateful.

Instead of looking at a book as a container with meanings or signifiers inside it, we see it as “a little cog in much more complicated external machinery.” And we then insert ourselves into that machinery: “it’s like plugging into an electric circuit.” So we see with these images of machines and exteriority what our preparation aims at: not an intellectual search for meaning, but an affective encounter, a turning on. And that turning on doesn’t give us back to ourselves with greater stock of knowledge, but changes us, “depersonalizes” us.

(http://www.protevi.com/john/LearnDR.pdf)

I believe this also rhymes with a lot of the tropes about psychedelics such as DMT, A. muscaris and so forth.

1 and 2

Intro:Rhizome

The very first thing we see is a dissonant scribbled drawing that is related to La Monte Youngs infamous 4’ 33”.

Through a fairly involved google search, longer than usual, I finally find some clues that the drawing is part of “a famous series of works presented at Darmstadt at a course on music and graphics in 1959...”

I was unaware of this series of compositions by Young until deciding to discern what the innocuous yet curious little drawing opening the first chapter might mean. Upon further research apparently there were 5 in the series and they were all silent yet hinged on the performance. Release a butterfly, start a fire etc.

For the piece referenced by the art work on page 1, part of the instructions told the performer to “turn the lights off…and…when the lights are turned back on, the announcer may tell the audience that their activities have been the composition, although this is not necessary at all .” emphasis mine. No reason.

The very first thing we interact with is I suppose the title text and perhaps the info at top right corner of the drawing but most likely the first thing that grabs you, if you are paying attention is the drawing itself. So already we have a clue, a hint and a sign pointing at the impossibility of expressing in full what is being said.

This picture which itself is a meditation on reappropriation- echoes n visual form “deterritorialization and reterritorialization”. But the reference to lamonte youngs “groundbreaking” series of compositions is in a sense “off key” or a sympathetic note invoked or implied by the presence of the art piece.

It is a hieroglyph and icon which will mimic much of the chapter headings “becoming intense/death/animal…” etc. yet here we have already a “multimediality” where in Joycean fashion everything is trying to happen at once. There is an invocation of distorted time since at the writing of this book the art piece on the page was nearly 2 decades old, references music via title yet there are no traditional music notation signs present, here we have a “becoming” much like the “becoming wasp becoming orchid”.

So with the opening implications, we have a nod to multiplicity and invocation of what is not said, Derridas trace, semiotics being referenced in many ways without too much reference or text to steer you one way or the other. In order to even attempt to “know” what is being said here by the presence of the drawing, we must assume many things as well as have foreknowledge of what these things “were”, who made them, where they were made, in what culture, in what political climate, perhaps the sexuality or political alliance of the various individuals whose specters are invoked may be considered as “important” to what, why, where, when and who.

Not merely of the art piece and era referenced by its presence but there is now a further what, why, where, when and who “implied” by D&G choosing to employ it. Why? For what ends? Etc.

This unseeming reference presenced by the drawing, through all the history and biography, reference and particularity it references, is a smeared, silent, creeping evisceration of the hierarchical linear flow of history, who is who, etc.

Already we have within this “flattening”, within this violently making horizontal, an inchoate, yet extremely pregnant, semiotically and referatory attack on verticality and the “arborial”.

For some, those of knowing age during the first pressings and readings of this text, these referents would be nostalgia but for most as well, completely out of the know, if not for due diligence.

It is a casual “slang” reference that goes unnoticed or at best, becomes a spectral intuition.

As if to slap someone in the face, “they” say “we wrote this book together…because its nice to talk like everybody else…” They are telling us, “yes we know you don’t get it, but we are going to make a semblance of an effort to explain it to you anyway...”

Then the author and the subject is invoked to tell us that to “attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters and the exteriority of their relations”. Here we have the referencing of a very important concept for Deleuze and also for D&G in general- exteriority, the outside. This “place” is where all potential comes from according to the arbiters.

It is in a sense a hand wave gesture at "long term memory”,history- the enemy.

There is then a referencing of a slew of banal touchstones that become theurgic locales- important D&G terms: geological movements, articulation, segmentarity, stratas, territorities, lines of flight, deterritorialization, destratification, comparative rates of flow on…

Let us now progress to the second page (the first full page for most) of the first chapter.

PAGE 2

“These lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and ruptures.” Already we are given an important key, paradoxically, in the very beginning of the text that time and the variegated ways it can be perceived is the aggregator of the aforementioned terms and the primal invocation implied by the Bussoti piece. So we are catching faint glimpses of what multiplicity means as if the patience of an inveterate veteran Buddhist monk is required to truly discern the presence of such an ephemeral experience...tbc

OK, I read this chapter a few weeks ago, and I remembered that it annoyed me, but I couldn’t remember precisely why. This morning, I felt like spinning through a second reading, and I remembered why it annoyed me.

My main problem is I like trees. I like the idea of an overarching structure. I don’t see a pattern in life, but I’m hoping eventually some pattern will emerge and be perceived. I like the idea of everything forming some vast unity. I like the idea of One dividing into Two, and then Three, but always being One if you look at it the right way.

Someone compared this book to Tarot cards. The Tarot, the I Ching, the Kabalah (Tree of Life) all have as their virtue that they contain the world in an orderly fashion. They are the classic book as the image of the world. So is Moby Dick. A mini-encyclopedia. Also a bit of a rhizome.

I like the concept of the rhizome too. Reddit is a rhizome. My brain feels like a rhizome. I like short-term memory, a festering, teeming rotting unconscious that is always assimilating and producing new growths, and can never be made sense of. This takes a lot of the pressure off trying to fit everything into some simple coherent structure, and then feeling insane when it doesn’t work. “Forgetting as a process” is a great idea.

What I don’t like are these sentences:

“What a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world.”

“Nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs.”

And the absolute worst quote:

“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths, and rhizomes.”

Quote honestly that quote makes me want to punch the author in the fucking face and I’m not sure why. It’s so self-righteous and I can picture his tone of voice and it really annoys me. I’m interested in my reaction, though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. I might be a bit of a reactionary.

Other annoying quotes:

“Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!”

Sentences like that spur a rebellious spirit within me. They turn me into Johnny Appleseed. I wanna plant some trees. Ironically these quotes I've pulled are some of the most dualistic, tree-like hierarchical aspects of the passage. What I perceive as hypocrisy irritates me, and puts me in the odd position of defending the spirit of the rhizome against their self-righteous tree dualism. It makes me want to worm into their rhizome-mimicking trees, and explode it into a bunch of rhizomes.

Of course in plenty of other places the authors contradict this dualism (I can’t even call them out for hypocrisy, for consistency is a hobgoblin):

“There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots.”

“There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome.”

So yeah. This is interesting. I felt bad for Little Hans when he got stuck in a system without any exits. That sucks.

Also, I have a good way to get rid of ants. Kill the queen. All your blather about how rhizomes don’t have hierarchies will quickly dry up and blow away.

Anyway. I like trees. I like rhizomes too. But I want both. I guess I’m the classic American looking for a synthesis, in search of roots and foundations and all that.

The sorcerers magic milieu by Dan Mellamphy and Nick Land. Mellamphy has written a lot on Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche and some of the other Pomo mainstays.

Becoming Sorcerer by Jane Duke. Sounds like a pseudonym. Invokes chaos magick but is a fantastic premise nonetheless and works with Deleuzes empiricism.

Deleuze and Demons. This one is interesting as well in regards to the unity of the psyche among other things.

Deleuze and Jungs Red Book Mandalas.

I suspect that bot will be along shortly to fix my links.

So what's so special or important about the "occult" in relation to PHILOSOPHY or "intellectual" thinking in general?

Because it allows one the opportunity to weaponize the mundane philosophy of academic Gehenna. With magic and specifically alchemy, one can transform useless academic philosophy into a more rarified form of alloy, forgot a skeleton key which allows one the opportunity to unlock the true meanings and purpose of any mere "philosophy" and transform it into philosophy- the love of wisdom. A valuable and healing form of rare earth which lays all around us, as common as dirt yet not discernable for the vulgar and uninitiated, parroting academic clones. Yes friends, only academocculture holds the true key to the meanings of it all.

Ok I will now tell you the real reason occult and speculative thought stand to impart liberatory means to the earnest and daring seeker: it keeps your mind open. Turns the soul into a conduit and dead language into a fount of perpetual potentia- thus the potential for new, visceral meaning for old tropes of the tower.

The approach of the occult opens to the ultimate unknowability of "everything" while paradoxically placing this primeval, irrational foundation as the fountainhead of preternatural agency of imagination for both the Individual and society.

The occult when understood and applied, functions much like the sine wave in the center of the yin-yang symbol. Working not to keep the bulk white separated from the bulk of the black but to transform and dissolve one into the other (the contra-positive little dots of the other in each one act as transporter machines).

Occult philosophy when applied to ones life is a systematic and incremental invocation of schizophrenia into ones life. It is a conscious and rabid dissolution of the ego bound subject. Deleuze and Guattari here take many of these premises for granted as necessary pre-requisites for a systematic against modern institutional forms, not in their "occult" forms of course since the two seem to be rabid materialists paradoxically. Their being materialists (AND anti-platonist) make their desire to dissolve and efface the subject all the more interesting since the ego is the ultimate arbiter of value and degree zero of experience in the materialist/scientismic world view.

The ideas in this text are not inverted or subversive for reasons of shock or aesthetic. This text is more like the magical diary of a practicing schizophrenic who flows as part of the liquid aggregate of "sympathy" and resonance in the "real" world (the only world) of the sorcerer.

Much like the mythos of shamanic and magical texts and narratives, time is different, space, matter, subjectivity, agency, the socius- all these things become fungible, permeable and liquid becoming extractions, and extractable.

Agency, observation, experience and act become blurred much like they do in synchroncity- the true conduit of magic.

In ATP, I think D&G wish to expose us to the seemingly paranoiac experience of synchroncity and "long time" of their "short term memory" as an inoculation against the experience of the noosphere itself.

If any of this makes sense, see your doctor immediately.

I will post some thoughts and notes I took in this thread tomorrow. I was hoping someone else would start this thing off! To be honest, I'm way under read to be reading this text but I know what I need to read to catch up (that's what I've been doing!) and as an added bonus, I've become somewhat enamored with Deleuze despite the fact that I am a platonist basically. Deleuze I think is worth it though. I've been pulled back into philosophy against my will it seems in an attempt to get an adequate foundation from which to enter into deleuze (and Guattaris) thought. I will say that i think that there is a lot more going on in this text than most strictly "philosophy" thinkers/readers are aware of. This text is pregnant with much forward implication and much "sympathy" as well.

Someone once told me that I should read the book as if it is a rhizome. Pick up what I can, pay no mind to what I can't. It feels like reading the Daodejing, where words have more than one meaning and it's much more about the performance than it is about a specific meaning. Is this right?

Hi! I am currently writing about Deleuze and wanted to ask a question. What deleuzian concept do you believe is a minor one? That there needs to be more academic research/more literature about it? Thank you very much, and sorry for my crappy english.

From Wikipedia.

The first Europeans known to have reached New Zealand were Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and his crew in 1642. In a hostile encounter, four crew members were killed and at least one Māori was hit by canister shot. Europeans did not revisit New Zealand until 1769 when British explorer James Cook mapped almost the entire coastline. Following Cook, New Zealand was visited by numerous European and North American whaling, sealing and trading ships. They traded food, metal tools, weapons and other goods for timber, food, artifacts and water. The introduction of the potato and the musket transformed Māori agriculture and warfare. Potatoes provided a reliable food surplus, which enabled longer and more sustained military campaigns. The resulting inter-tribal Musket Wars encompassed over 600 battles between 1801 and 1840, killing 30,000–40,000 Māori. From the early 19th century, Christian missionaries began to settle New Zealand, eventually converting most of the Māori population. The Māori population declined to around 40 percent of its pre-contact level during the 19th century; introduced diseases were the major factor.

In 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip assumed the position of Governor of the new British colony of New South Wales which according to his commission included New Zealand. The British Government appointed James Busby as British Resident to New Zealand in 1832 following a petition from northern Māori. In 1835, following an announcement of impending French settlement by Charles de Thierry, the nebulous United Tribes of New Zealand sent a Declaration of the Independence to King William IV of the United Kingdom asking for protection. Ongoing unrest, the proposed settlement of New Zealand by the New Zealand Company (which had already sent its first ship of surveyors to buy land from Māori) and the dubious legal standing of the Declaration of Independence prompted the Colonial Office to send Captain William Hobson to claim sovereignty for Great Britain and negotiate a treaty with the Māori. The Treaty of Waitangi was first signed in the Bay of Islands on 6 February 1840. In response to the New Zealand Company's attempts to establish an independent settlement in Wellington and French settlers purchasing land in Akaroa, Hobson declared British sovereignty over all of New Zealand on 21 May 1840, even though copies of the Treaty were still circulating throughout the country for Māori to sign. With the signing of the Treaty and declaration of sovereignty the number of immigrants, particularly from the United Kingdom, began to increase.

New Zealand, still part of the colony of New South Wales, became a separate Colony of New Zealand on 1 July 1841. The colony gained a representative government in 1852 and the first Parliament met in 1854. In 1856 the colony effectively became self-governing, gaining responsibility over all domestic matters other than native policy. (Control over native policy was granted in the mid-1860s.) Following concerns that the South Island might form a separate colony, premier Alfred Domett moved a resolution to transfer the capital from Auckland to a locality near the Cook Strait. Wellington was chosen for its harbour and central location, with parliament officially sitting there for the first time in 1865. As immigrant numbers increased, conflicts over land led to the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s and 1870s, resulting in the loss and confiscation of much Māori land.

In A Thousand Plateaus, one word which jumped out at me from the very beginning was deterritorialization, a word which implies an entire conceptual world and language of thinking about territories and colonization. The above text is an example of the major dynamics behind territoriality (but not deterritorialization).

Territories are bounded entities or organisms defined by a border and a center, which are kind of the same thing/location (teleology). First New Zealand was forested (territorialized as/by forest or perhaps deterritorialized), then the Maori formed territories there—but often first humans are known for their lack of territorial thinking—then the British colonizers efficiently scouted the entire coastline and began sending merchants which traded potatoes and muskets and promptly started the Musket War, killing off many of the natives. At the same time they began sending missionaries, to "convert" natives into using European religion and language. The invasion is full underway already. A shameless colonization of the other.

Sneak in their borders through any means—trickery, economic, evangelical—while smiling and pretending you aren't planning to take the entire land out from under their feet. No one will see it coming—I bet they all did though, which is why the first boat experienced a "hostile encounter."

The listing of laws is a record of the absurd ways in which the state tries to justify its advances and rationalize its aggressive motives. The goverener's commission just happened to include New Zealand, suddenly expanding the concerns of Britain to officially include New Zealand. When the natives are threatened by French colonization, they cave and ask Britain for help, who then decides to declare sovereignty over the land and complete the officialization of the colonization process. The territory suddenly changes colors as it switches hands, being fully invaded by the viral colonizing organism. (The sovereignty declaration occured while another treaty was still being passed out, an example of how all the words of the state are just fluff, smooth talk that doesn't do a very good job of masking the pure self-interest with which the state pursues its colonization of other territories.

But there are still patches of Māori, patches of things which do not fit—microterritories which are not Britain which must be eliminated. "As immigrant numbers increased, conflicts over land led to the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s and 1870s, resulting in the loss and confiscation of much Māori land." Any chance it gets, the hostile organism will advance—and on its end the defending territory will, following the logic of territoriality, defend its borders. (And the purity and convenience of governance from Britain—projecting power across the the ocean and half the world—is also a concern: "Following concerns that the South Island might form a separate colony, premier Alfred Domett moved a resolution to transfer the capital from Auckland to a locality near the Cook Strait.")

This is the logic of ego formation and growth—comprehension (as in prehensile, to grasp completely)—the logic of the growth of logical organizations of parts, arborescent structures in the language of A Thousand Plateaus. Hierarchies, organizations, organisms, logical knowledge and well-ordered knowledge, all processes which strategize and grow via territory assimilation (eating, owning, digesting, consuming, expanding, invading, assimilating, surrounding, infiltrating, interconnecting, economically colonizing, brainwashing, recoding, relabeling, etc.).

In terms of occultism, the force of spatiality, the bend which creates space by defining its boundaries, the drive to expand emptiness into space and into more space by creating a border between it and the other and increasing that border, is precisely Jovian (Jupiter) energy. The force of aggression, that which asserts against and egresses across the borders of another territory, and that which defends a border from such aggressive invasion and colonization (which is exactly the loss of self-definition, a conversion into the other), is precisely Martian (Mars) energy. On the numogram, these are 5::4 Katak energy, the hypermasculine energy (of the Pillar of Severity in Western Kabbalah, which also includes 6 because the pillars cross at the Gt-3/Gt-15 abyss).

Deterritorialization is the removal of all territories—but is this even possible? Because as soon as we define a word "deterritorialized" then that which we have declared free of all categories is suddenly of the category "deterritorialized." Our very thoughts have colonized this Other thing, this not-Us or not-I. Is it possible for a deterritorialization to be anything other than merely a reterritorialization along other lines? Deterritorialization means a radical shift away from—not only actual territories of colonization such as a forest vs. the British Empire (but how real are declared human borders, anyway?)—but from the very experience of seeing and feeling territories, because these are egoic experiences of a territory. The paranoid need to defend boundaries, the need to conserve resources (see the Black Sun in Land's The Thirst for Annihilation), the need to spy on the Other and invade it—these are all aspects of the construct of a territory and its experience (story). When territories cease, there is a cessation of boundaries between things, and so their textures become more apparent, their gradual gradiations of difference (this is D&G's "smooth space"). Moving in that direction and exploring that space(iality) is aesthetics. This is why the concept of deterritorialization is such an effective and powerful virus, itself a deterritorializing force—or is it merely a reterritorializing force, a brainwashing virus to make you doubt yourself and question your boundaries?

The way that D&G describe the rhizomatic structure vs arboreal structures made me think about Jaynes' ideas regarding metaphor and the generation of consciousness. On page 48 of The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,

Let us speak of metaphor. The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things. There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which I shall call the metaphrand and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier. A metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less known metaphrand.

And on page 56:

If we look more carefully at the nature of metaphor (noticing all the while the metaphorical nature of almost everything we are saying), we find (even the verb 'find'!) that it is composed of more than a metaphier and a metaphrand. There are also at the bottom of most complex metaphors various associations or attributes of the metaphier which I am going to call paraphiers. And these paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what I shall call the paraphrands of the metaphrand. Jargon, yes, but absolutely necessary if we are to be crystal clear about our referents.

Some examples will show that the unraveling of metaphor into these four parts is really quite simple, as well as clarifying what otherwise we could not speak about.

Consider the metaphor that the snow blankets the ground. The metaphrand is something about the completeness and even thickness with which the ground is covered by snow. The metaphier is a blanket on a bed. But the pleasing nuances of this metaphor are in the paraphiers of the metaphier, blanket. These are something about warmth, protection, and slumber until some period of awakening. These associations of blanket then automatically become the associations or paraphrands of the original metaphrand the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow until its awakening in spring. All this is packed into the simple use of the world 'blanket' to pertain to the way the snow covers the ground.

Now look at ATP, page 16 (Massumi translation), quoting Rosenstiehl and Petitot:

In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor...the channels of transmission are preestablished

If you think about that in terms of what Jaynes is talking about with language - how each metaphor builds and grows on other perceptions that the metaphier brings to mind - then you can imagine the arborescent worldview as the default, kneejerk, 'mechanical' reactions that Gurdjieff rails against, and is illustrated by this quote from Nietzsche (from The Portable Nietzsche, page 496):

Most of our general feelings - every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympathicus - excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that - for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only - become conscious of it only - when we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them - not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes, are the causes, is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause - even precludes it.

as well as the following from What Do You Say After You Say Hello? by Erich Berne:

How is it that the members of the human race, with all their accumulated wisdom, self-awareness, and desire for truth and self, can permit themselves to remain in such a mechanical situation, with its pathos and self-deception? We are more aware of ourselves than apes are, but not really very much. Scripts are only possible because people don't know what they are doing to themselves and to others. In fact, to know what one is doing is the opposite of being scripted. There are certain aspects of bodily, mental, and social functioning which happen to man in spite of himself, which slip out, as it were, because they are programmed to do so. These heavily influence his destiny through the people around him, while he still retains the illusion of autonomy.

Each object and concept is lazily connected with the first concept that comes to mind, and since concepts often travel in packs, we come to the mental 'end of the road' with little or no conscious thought - or as Nietzsche said, ".. .a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation which...inhibits any investigation into the real cause"

I've made a simple diagram to hopefully better illustrate what I'm trying to get at: http://i.imgur.com/Hkd3c77.png

'hearts' leads to 'blue moons' so quickly and effortlessly that the intervening concepts are almost an afterthought. And unreflected (in fact, unreflectable) conscious contents can be difficult when each one of these mechanical chains is different for each person. Have you already had the thought why my mind chose, as it's first sequence, a sugary cereal jingle? Why not something else? Why not what you thought of initially? If these chains are more emotionally significant than this simple example, it's easy to see how concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' can sneak in. Things become black and white. A hard one-to-one mapping. Objects, concepts, and ultimately the world around us loses its poetry, loses its magic.

A rhizomatic worldview - a magical worldview, where each concept can lead to any number of other concepts, seems to be marked, at least in this example, simply by more conscious energy. Things don't 'go from' 'A' to 'B' mindlessly, upon "channels of transmission [which] are preestablished", they don't 'go from' - one 'goes with' them, and the important thing about them is their middle - the 'line of flight' that makes rhizomes grow and expand. Nothing is skipped over, nothing is ignored, nothing is seen as 'a means to an end', so the rhizome is inherently fuller, thicker, richer with meaning, ready to be expanded at any possible point.

I am going to unpack some term that I think are important in the translators forward (I assume most of us have the Massumi translation?). I just started reading this today and I could already fill several pages based on just few terms alone. For instance Massumi mentions "institutional psychiatry" this doesn't mean the institution of psychiatry sum total, it actually means a Foucauldian programmatic deprogramming of the effects of institutions on the "self". He also mentions Deleuze and Guatttaris hatred of "interiority" this also needs to be unpacked.

Zizeks infamous "buggery" source also is mentioned here as well.

Unpacking the "Deleuzian" meaning of these terms in the translators forward will I think go a long way for the beginners.

So First off I would like to just lay out my cards. I'm a platonist. I'm actually a neoplatonist, an obdurate hermeticist even.

That being said, I came to the woo side of western philosophy via critical theory, Marxism and the structuralist/poststructuralist/anthropology vector.

I am making these remarks for the sake of both inviting critique and general discussion.

I come to most all of my opinions and positions via Anamnesis. I just kind of wake up one day having imbibed endless snippets and fragments, texts out of order and engorged on misprision - to realize I "know" something about this thinker or that philosophy. I then research what I feel has intuitively struck me as the correct reading of x, find out I'm wrong and then proceed to the toolbox, grab some scrap material and begin reworking the inconsistencies in the existing system until they better fit my correct reading. This is my goal with ATP.

:)

So deleuze strikes me as explicitly anti-platonic yet extremely metaphysical. He denies a platonic, astral-realm of pure essence and form while still somehow intimating a polytheisticish/animistic ‘undercurrent’ pervading all phenomena and valuing that undercurrent as more real and primary than our mundane material world and our experience of it.

I would also posit that Deleuze and Guattari working loosely from Laing and Batesons rabid misruling of psychoanalysis, sought to posit a "digital" or perhaps "cinematic" model for psychoanalysis (the first to do so perhaps?), all previous models being based on platonism/hermeneutics (Freud, Jung), the medical/positivist/empiricist model or the mirror model of Lacan whose mirror conception is itself likely a misprision of Kojeves Hegel.

There is also an element of Aristotelian hylomorphism in Deleuzes view of time which informs schizoanalysis. It is the void, each individual moment, commodity, person, utterance, being a void, a kind of swirling vortex of potentia, becoming etc. and the stochastic stutters of time, it's "plateaus" and the glitch like experience of this stochastic stuttering being the individual "frames per second" or digital pixelating approximations of the becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari also sought to bring this stochastic becoming this sense of univocal movement to the common apperception(s) of soul when they claimed that "a schizophrenic out for a walk" is a better model (than a neurotic on a couch) for analysis.

Many I think mistake this statement as grandiosity or hyperbole. It's actually very clever.

This statement was a signal that the two sought to uproot psychoanalysis from its stagnant "proper location" of the analysts office. Possibly a nod to Foucaults bio-power?

Frued studied neurotics in the first modern church of soul, the analysts office. The temple where the pathologies of soul and spirit were rediscovered (through the wailings of pathology no less. No pathology, no soul = modern psychology). Jung studied schizophrenics in the institution as opposed to Freuds affluent neurotics, nonetheless each in their "proper place".

Here we see something that James Hillman has remarked upon as well. The rediscovery of the modern "soul" was an explicitly institutional event.

(In my best good Stalinist)

No. Deleuze would argue, is precisely the opposite.

is ish ish ish ish only when schizophrenic ishwalking aroundt Central Park ordwherever that we experience true being, true insanity of reality wheechees alld there is, I'm sorry.

In similar fashion the idea of a "body without organs" in reference to psychology would be in a sense pre or proto tabula rasa. Where "organs" represent the individual faculties of sight, touch, hearing, smell, cognition.

Deleuze and Guattari argue in I suppose a McCluhan modality here. We have been worked over by something and cinema is the closest metaphor which can encapsulate this. Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, we are not mirroring anything, we are being extruded from a camera lens.

The occult/schizophrenic connection and my interest in this text is that the occult IMO seeks to incrementally invoke a schizophrenic liminality as a necessary stage of producing the philosophers stone.