Reddit reviews A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Some critical theory is pretty difficult. You might try Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus.

From the amazon.com reviews:
"Why would I struggle with this 800-odd page monstrosity of densely-referential Gallic thought? Why am I here recommending that you do it?

Well...because it's worth the long, thorny trudge. You've got to get around some idiosyncratic vocabulary, but that's OK. Because, in fact, A Thousand Plateaus presents a credible candidacy for Philosophy for our Time (if you can still believe in that). The concept of the rhizome alone - burrowing, nonhierarchical, endlessly foliating thought - let alone fertile ideas like nomadology or the Body without Organs: once grasped, these are extraordinarily useful figures that can wind up restoring some sense of agency (and subversiveness, and fun) to your intellectual life. They're perfectly suited, especially, to life and work in the age of the deeply rhizomorphic Internet."


Considering just structure I'd recommend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, if you can stomach all the endnotes. Other people have recommended Faulkner, so I would point you to this neat new development, that makes his difficult overlapping voices easier to parse.

Oh, and T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland is up in the public domain and there is such depth in this poem. You can find a lot of companions to this piece that will open it up for you, but try it through with virgin eyes at least once.

>I take issue with the notion that these authors have something secret to say, and that uninitiated people "just don't get it."

I also take issue with that notion. There is nothing secret going on. Take Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, for example.

Is this book difficult to read? Yes.

Can this book be criticized? Yes.

Have other researchers found the concepts in this book useful? Yes.

Is this book written in such a way as to purposefully obscure its meaning? Absolutely not.

Could these concepts be explained in a more clear and straightforward prose? Yes, and they have been.

Sure, it's a valid criticism to say, "This writing style is unnecessarily difficult." If we're discussing style, then of course there is plenty of room for criticism.

However, the criticism that all "postmodernists" (which is highly problematic as a blanket term to begin with) abuse scientific concepts is weak. How does one even go about "abusing" a concept?

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia


Warning: I'm trolling you


But actually, there's nothing like 'Capital' by Marx and Engles, since capitalism itself isn't a movement. Socialism is theorized as a progression from Capitalism, and Communism as a progression from Socialism. Industrial Capitalism comes first. It's been theorized this is actually one of the reasons Communism in Russia didn't work out so well--that they hadn't adequately developed their economy through the necessary stages of industrialization.


Edit: removed " and economic evolution"

I mean any end times myth is gonna be pretty socialist. It's all eschatology.

You might like Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus tho

Well I realllly want A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari but there are a few others I can think of