A Thousand Plateaus

I’ve had this book since college, when I either bought it for a course or else because I kept hearing people pretentiously refer to it in architecture theory class. I have read extremely little of it, and the parts that I did read were so incomprehensible, at least at the time, that it made me wonder if anyone has ever actually read it or if people just talk about it. The name comes off sounding important but also cool, and the authors’ names likewise seem to have generated by a neural net trained on the notebooks of hipster graduate students. It is so firmly established in my antilibrary that for the past couple years it has served as the capstone of the stack of books holding up my computer monitor:

That way I am constantly reminded of it, but can not actually read it without considerable inconvenience.

But heavy LCD monitor notwithstanding, I am holding out hope that I will eventually come back to it, and this time I’ll actually manage to absorb some of it. Rhizomatic philosophy? Nomadology? Post-structuralism? I just want to know what they are. Then I can know if all the people in my arch theory class were full of shit or not.

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This one actually looks kinda great, and I am in the same place where I’ve heard Deleuze & Guattari referenced a bunch but no idea really what this is about. I think your impressions are right on.

…and I’m gonna make an educated guess that both a) there’s some genuinely interesting important stuff buried in here and b) it’s wrapped in a good amount of theory-speak that is to a certain degree full of shit.

Rhizomes, strata, signification, systems…lots in here that sounds interesting, but even just reading the table of contents, it all seems jammed together with a kind of absurd manic density. Why is that necessary? Maybe I have simply not yet embedded my brain rhizome on a high enough intellectual strata! But also maybe “theorists” are often simply bad at communicating complex ideas in straightforward ways.

Interesting to compare the legibility of this kind of text vs. say a computer science text like SICP that largely feels over my head to a similar degree, but maybe less needlessly obfuscatory? Idk…