- plateau
- ---- by Tamsin LorraineRather than plotting points or fixing an order, Deleuze and Guattari wrote their book, A Thousand Plateaus, as a rhizome composed of 'plateaus'. They claim that the circular form they gave it was 'only for laughs' (D&G 1987: 22). The plateaus are meant to be read in any order and each plateau can be related to any other plateau. Deleuze and Guattari cite Gregory Bateson's use of the word 'plateau' to designate a 'continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities' that does not develop in terms of a point of culmination or an external goal. Plateaus are constituted when the elements of a region (for example, the microsensations of a sexual practice or the microperceptions of a manner of attending) are not subjected to an external plan of organisation. An external plan imposes the selection of some connections rather than others from the virtual relations among the elements that could be actualised, actualising varying capacities to affect and be affected in the process. A plateau emerges when the singularities of an individual or a plane that previously only 'insisted' in a concrete state of affairs are put into play through the actualisation of connections that defy the imposition of external constraints (for example, tantric sexual practices in which orgasm is not the goal or meditative states that deliberately avoid goal-oriented thinking).Deleuze and Guattari deliberately avoided writing A Thousand Plateaus in a style that moves the reader from one argument to the next, until all the arguments can be gathered together into the culminating argument of the book as a whole. Instead they present fifteen plateaus that are meant to instigate productive connections with a world they refuse to represent. Throughout Deleuze's work and his work with Guattari, he and Guattari create philosophical concepts that they do not want to pin down to any one meaning. Instead they let their concepts reverberate, expressing some of the variations in their sense through the shifting contexts in which they are put to use. In A Thousand Plateaus, they characterise such concepts as fragmentary wholes that can resonate in a powerful, open Whole that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane. This plane they call a 'plane of consistency' or 'the plane of immanence of concepts, the planomenon' (D&G 1987: 35).Deleuze and Guattari advocate constructing a Body without Organs (BwO) and 'abstract machines' (with a 'diagrammatic' function D&G 1987: cf. 189-90) that put into play forces that are not constrained by the habitual forms of a personal self or other 'molar' forms of existence. A BwO is a plateau constructed in terms of intensities that reverberate in keeping with a logic immanent to their own unfolding rather than conventional boundaries of self and other. An abstract machine 'places variables of content and expression in continuity' (D&G 1987: 511). It (for example, the Galileo abstract machine) emerges when variables of actions and passions (the telescope, the movement of a pendulum, the desire to understand) are put into continuous variation with incorporeal events of sense (Aristotelian mechanics and cosmology, Copernican heliocentrism), creating effects that reverberate throughout the social field (D&G 1987: cf. 511). There are various ways in which an assemblage's capacity to increase its number of connections into a plane of consistency can be impeded; creative connections can be replaced with blockages, strata, 'black holes', or 'lines of death'. An assemblage that multiplies connections approaches the 'living abstract machine' (D&G 1987: 513).Connectives§ rhizome§ whole
The Deleuze dictionary. Revised Edition Edited by Adrian Parr . 2010.
