Rating: 
Summary: Works Well with Techno Music!
Review:
This is a highly provocative and fascinating book. Even neutral librarians get confused when classifying it: I once saw it filed under psychiatry! No wonder classical analytical thinking fails to grasp "A Thousands Plateaus", which is often a source of irritation among conventional intellectuals.
"A Thousand Plateaus" provides a radically new language for conceptualizing and criticizing globalization and modern subjectivity. Nomadology and schizoanalysis are proposed as new styles for inquiring our brave new world. To wit, Foucault declared that the 21st century belongs to Deleuze!
Of course that reading commentators provides an easier way to digest Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, my favorite method for immersing into "A Thousand Plateaus" is by plugging loud Techno Trance music on my headphones and reading this book as pure Power Poetry, "harnessing its forces" as Deleuze puts it: a war-machine that undermines monolithic thought, opening up multiple possibilities for the renewed experiencing of reality. (Deleuze and Guattari confessed to have had hallucinations while writing it...).
Book translator Brian Massumi suggests that "A Thousand Plateaus" may be better handled like a musical album: freely, affectivelly and pragmatically. Above all, as Deleuze teaches us: create affect, employ philosophy, do not to cultivate dead concepts, but foster multiple thinking...
Long live the barbarian nomads of reason!
Rating:
Summary: A late play after the fireworks of Difference and Repetition
Review: A funny introduction to Deleuze's work. This is certainly the book to start with. Then go to the Anti-Oedipe, then go to the pre-Difference&Repetition works, after that work on the post-AThousandPlateaus works and end with Difference and Repetition. Take a deep breath. Then try it. Then try again. Then read all works again. And then try to accept Difference and Repetition again. By then you will have acquired a certain Deleuzian insight. But you will also be much older by then. Stop there. Settle down. Make a family. Be anti-deleuzian for a few decades. Kids, dog, house, vacation. Then start all over and finish with Difference and Repetition. Then write your own work. Or do something. Yes, you could also do something. Mille Plateaux is a funny book.
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Summary: Playful and prescient. A classic of contemporary philosophy.
Review: A Thousand Plateaus is an absolute necessity for any serious reader of contemporary philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari correctly predicted the intensification of the stratification of "civilized society" by 1980; they also presaged the World Wide Web and declared their deep
suspicions about any and all massive systems for networking
humankind before the web ever existed. Their anarchic call
for radical individual autonomy never sounded truer than now.
(A noteworthy additional book to seek from their giant
bibliography: Pierre Clastres' Society Against the State.)
Rating:
Summary: The masterpiece of modern French philosophy.
Review: Anti-Oedipus, the first collaboration by Deleuze and Guattari, is more famous than a Thousand Plateaus, but this is their masterpiece. It takes a while to get used to their strange terms and phrases, and an English-schooled "analytical" philosopher would probably find their work to be nonsense, but D & G work differently. They are creators of concepts, and A Thousand Plateaus is overflowing with them. The book moves from meditations on the face, to nomads, to courtly love, to geology, to, well, a thousand other things . . . you name it. A reader who is willing to be led where they will take him is in for quite a trip.Philosophically, D & G seem to be proponants of a dynamic, highly charged, pre-conventional world, in which even individual identity is not yet a given. They do not suppose that we can live in this world and function normally, but we can tap into it, so to speak, and thereby harness energy for more creative living in the "normal" world, the world of conventional ideas, personal identities, etc. (and to some extent transform the "normal" world). But to paraphrase their ideas in this way is to lose the excitement they generate as they dive into specific topics--the musical refrain, schizophrenia, rhizomes, laws, and so on and so on--ever coming up with new and surpising interpretations. This book has endless riches for the reader to discover.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting read
Review: Crunched for time on an English essay, and because ILL'ing the book would have taken too long, I had to buy this book. So I figured I would review it.
While overall it is very interesting, and the style matches the nature of the content (postmodernism discussed in fragmented chps, props to the authors), this book is dense as hell. This book is really helpful if you are studying global politics across post-modernism. I would recommend Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!" if considering this book.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting read
Review: Crunched for time on an English essay, and because ILL'ing the book would have taken too long, I was forced to buy this book. So I figured I would review it. While overall it is very interesting, and the style matches the nature of the content (postmodernism discussed in fragmented chps, props to the authors), this book is dense as hell, often very pretentious; you can't read this while listening to music, trust me.
Rating:
Summary: The War Machine
Review: D & G's penultimate collaboration is among the strongest works in either's impressive oeuvre. Substantially expanding on the 'how' of philosophy that D broaches in the Logic of Sense, this work explodes with the fevered connectivities between textual desiring-machines, and is a testament to the possibility of collaborative brilliance. More accessible and enjoyable than Anti-Oedipus, and more engaging and interesting than What is Philosophy?, A Thousand Plateaus is a writing of the rupture, the true lightning flash at the centre of Deleuzian time.
Rating:
Summary: An Orgy of Concepts
Review: German critical theory declared the death of postmodernism when Jurgen Habermas accused Michel Foucault of committing a 'performative contradiction' by employing rationalist methodology in critiquing rationalist epistemology. So most philosophical critics of postmodernism don't bother to review the work of Deleuze and Guattari (this may also be because it's very difficult and less global in its focus). What nobody realizes is that Deleuze and Guattari slipped through Habermas's fingers. There's no 'rationalist methodology' in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. Just an orgy of concepts. Concepts aren't part of logical train of thought in Deleuze and Guattari; they're more like riffs in a guitar piece. Make that a cut of a wild electronica remix! Based on the critique of modern society laid out in ANTI-OEDIPUS - their critique of the perversions of modern psychoanalysis, economics, political thought - Deleuze and Guattari dive into the pre-conventional world of the unconscious, not so much critiquing their objects of study as making fun of them, parodying them, but also showing us a terrain of thought brilliantly and picturesquely rendered by a rich palette of concepts that oppose the multiple to the one, the random to the calculated, and the arbitrary to the determined. You'll find Deleuze and Guattari linking together Moby-Dick and Marx, Freud and Dali, botany and Kant. Are they serious? Do they really think that trees have caused us pain? Do they really think that a hole is a vagina traveling at the speed of light? Do they really think that Freud was hard of hearing? Probably not. But what a wonderful, wonderful gallery of thoughts, dispositions, and inspirations! This is what I mean when I compare Deleuze and Guattari to an electronica remix. The elements that get wedded to each other are disjointed and random. Every plateau is bizarre. Some of the plateaus are exciting; some of them will inspire you. Some will just seem impenetrable or stupid. Some will love all of them. Some won't get it. Some won't get it but will think the writing is fantastic. Is this literature or philosophy? Maybe that's a bad question. But if you're a thinker with postmodern sentiments, you just might think this is the best book you've ever read.
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Summary: October 17 2004 - a review
Review: I don't normally bother reviewing books. However I had to respond to something another reviewer said:
"you can't read this while listening to music, trust me"
Actually you can but I recommend the music of anti-essentialists, Phoenicia's "Brownout" is an excellent soundtrack to the plateau on the refrain. The text of the book is the opsign of time-images, music, or, rather, sound, of deterritorialisation is the sonsign. Fittingly, the releases from Germany's Mille Plateaux label are really good for reading these works.
I can't recommend this book enough but I will give some advice in your approach:
1. Even though this might seem the most intimidating entry to D&G's thought I suggest it anyway. Compared to "Difference and Repetition" or "The Logic of Sense" this is a walk in the park when it comes to penetrating the prose.
2. Don't expect a book of philosophy where an argument is clearly defined and developed. This is nothing like that. It's a work of "nomad thought", just try and follow what's happening *before* you judge it.
3. Come back to it. Regularly. Your appreciation and engagement will deepen as your knowledge of Deleuze's oeuvre deepens. You won't 'get it' at first but you have to enter his work somewhere. Eventually you'll realise this is a challenge to develop new ontologies, you were never meant to get it. You were and are meant to think it in new directions. After all, that's the basic lesson of the return.
4. Read widely. I really recommend Rodowick's 1997 book "Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine". On the surface Rodowick is working with the cinema books but the cinema books themselves are philosophical works developing Bergson. If you grasp Rodowick's less dense (though just as challenging) argument for deterritorialised thought you'll be on your way. Another area: Nietzsche's concepts of return, the will to power and active/reactive force is crucial. Read Deleuze's Nietzsche book.
5. The geology stuff isn't a metaphor, it's an isomorphism. If nothing else read DeLanda's "Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Forms" in the 1999 book "A Deleuzian Century" (edited by Ian Buchanon).
And last but certainly not least, Deleuze & Guattari's work is playful, enjoy the challenges they set you. You'll never see the world the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: my endless book
Review: I have been reading this book for about 10 years. Evertime I look at it I get something new from it. D&G offer the most brilliant analysis of capitalism and modernity that I know of, and I am extremely well read on these subjects. They explain the relationship between not only such negatives as exploitation on the one hand and capitalism or "development" on the other, as Marx did. They also show how capital accumulation is dependent upon such things as sadnness and resentment. In a way consistent with Marx, D&G celebrate the creative "deterritorialization" (everything that is solid melting into air, in other words) that comes with captalism. Their solution to the devaluation of life (as evidenced by the relationship between capitalism and war, hot or cold, on Communism, drugs, crime or terror) that also characterizes our situation is to push that deterritorialization further (to reject reterritorialization). My one main criticism of them is that this is an inadequate solution. Nobody else has much of an answer either, however. To read this book it is nice if you are familiar with Nietzsche, Marx and Freud (especially Nietzsche), but almost noone will be familiar with everything they reference. The best advice is to not get bogged down in what you don't "get" right away. Give the book time. It can be worth it. As Massumi the translator says, reading this book can be a lot of fun, but if it doesn't work for you go buy a new CD or something and enjoy that instead. Lastly, this is not a "postmodern" book, despite what some of your professors might tell you. It is staunchly in a Marxist tradition (see some of Guattari's solo work on this) and it is in the lineage of a Nietzschian sort of antinomian philosophy that Deleuze would actually trace back to Spinoza and the Medeival theologian, Duns Scotus.
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