A Thousand Plateaus

I rather know Deleuze through his book Difference and Repetition, where he states that repetition is a vertical axis. One is determined vertically, meaning that any manifestation is different in its actualisation. In A Thousand Plateaus, the very interpretation of the beginning gives us a certain view on Deleuze and Guattari philosophy. They state it very clearly : “We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” This relation established between the two authors acts as an image, as model for the text problematisation. The two authors are not different entities, but rather the passage between them. If they are no longer subjects, the text itself does no longer have subject, or object. Consequently, the text becomes rather an emanation, a relation of mediation. In this respect he talks about text as a rhizomatic structure. This structure means umpredictability. The rhizomatic text is for Deleuze and Guattary, an antianalogy (it does not have an end or a determinable origin), an antigenealogy (the text does not have a genetic structure, one can not pin down an origin, because the Origin does not belong to our understanding). For example Goethe always saw the text as the origin of something that needs to be found. On the contrary for Deleuze, the book is rather like a fascicular root, it does not have unity, because unity supposes an origin. All we have is fragments. But Deleuze fragments are different. Their fragmentarily structure is cohesive. In that respect the concept of the body without organs would be a more clear image. The body without organs is an intensity. In other words behind the visible body there is an other one, the original one that is invisible. But since that origin of the body can not be grasped, the body becomes a structure of intensities without subject or object. The body without organs is not Lacan’s “corps morcele”, it is rather an absolute dis-centralized body, cohesive in its fragmentation. The concept of plateau explains the text itself and states that the text is a multiplicity that operates through a few principles. On the one hand they talk about the principle of connection. Each text presupposes different coding (political, economical, social etc.) which has an infinite power of reproducibility. According to the principle of heterogeneity, a text is incapable of mixing their elements. The text is not homogenous. Also a text is not the multiple of something, it is only diversity. They do not talk about a unity in diversity, the text remains only diversity. Traditionally speaking, the sens of the subject was in its object, which presupposed a relation, but that relation means defining an origin, or if the origin is always invisible we can no longer talk about a commun ground of the subjects, but rather about a division. These assumptions trace back to Heidegger for whom the text was not an unity, because we don’t have access to it. All we have are fragments of that unity. In Derrida’s view, the fragment presupposes the whole. It is not Deleuze and Guattari’s case. For them the world is an absolute decentralization. The asignified rupture states the idea that we do not function according to various determinations, but rather on correlations. This is a post-Hegelian idea present in Benjamin’s philosophy as well. The plateau is rather an in between. Every plateau can be grasped or departed from different directions. The critic that I bring to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is that the very doctrine that there is no doctrine at all, is already a doctrine. It is also a myth.