Rating: 
Summary: Worth the slog through it, and that's saying a great deal.
Review: I'm not particularly erudite, and I'm certainly not a genius. My schooling has left me (for better or worse) without any familiarity with some of the philosophers, artists and writers D&G namecheck as lynchpins of their untimely meditation.Why, then, 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. Remember, you're smart enough to understand this stuff. (I had to keep reminding myself.) Reading with partners or in groups helps, a lot. There really is a *vast* amount of provocative and useful thought in here. Go for it.
Rating:
Summary: mad creation
Review: In their final work together, "What is Philosophy?" Guattari and Deleuze envision philosophy as moving at infinite speeds in a mad creation of concepts. This formula is expressed marvelously in "A Thousand Plateaus". In roughly each "plateau", the authors explore a different opposition, although always in relation to the previous concepts, as well as those that are yet to be fully elaborated. Some of these oppositions include smooth/ Striated, rhizome/ tree, war machine/ State, etc. Each one loosely overlaps with the others, although by no means are they synonymous. However, because a similar formula is used to explore each of these oppositions, this greatly facilitates understanding the book, especially since the authors aren't always the clearest writers. However, because many of the central themes (including the fundamental opposition between creative forces and those forces which attempt to halt creation or bring it under control) are repeated, even if confusing at first, this book eventually starts to make sense. The ideas expressed in it are applicable to countless aspects of society and life (and even inorganic structures), such as the rhizome, which desribes a system in which elements interact horizontally, maintaining their heterogeneity (a prime example of this is the internet). My only complaint about "A Thousand Plateaus" is that the authors, despite their rigorous defining of various concepts, often present examples of these concepts poorly, assuming that the reader has knowledge of the examples, introducing them without preparation and then leaving them behind. For example, in plateau 3, "the geology of morals", i was able to understand the basic "abstract machine" described but unable to understand how the given examples fit into the plateau without resorting to an outside source. Of course, why use Guattari and Deleuze's examples when there are numerous instances of these "abstract machine" all around us?
Rating:
Summary: mad creation
Review: In their final work together, "What is Philosophy?" Guattari and Deleuze envision philosophy as moving at infinite speeds in a mad creation of concepts. This formula is expressed marvelously in "A Thousand Plateaus". In roughly each "plateau", the authors explore a different opposition, although always in relation to the previous concepts, as well as those that are yet to be fully elaborated. Some of these oppositions include smooth/ Striated, rhizome/ tree, war machine/ State, etc. Each one loosely overlaps with the others, although by no means are they synonymous. However, because a similar formula is used to explore each of these oppositions, this greatly facilitates understanding the book, especially since the authors aren't always the clearest writers. However, because many of the central themes (including the fundamental opposition between creative forces and those forces which attempt to halt creation or bring it under control) are repeated, even if confusing at first, this book eventually starts to make sense. The ideas expressed in it are applicable to countless aspects of society and life (and even inorganic structures), such as the rhizome, which desribes a system in which elements interact horizontally, maintaining their heterogeneity (a prime example of this is the internet). My only complaint about "A Thousand Plateaus" is that the authors, despite their rigorous defining of various concepts, often present examples of these concepts poorly, assuming that the reader has knowledge of the examples, introducing them without preparation and then leaving them behind. For example, in plateau 3, "the geology of morals", i was able to understand the basic "abstract machine" described but unable to understand how the given examples fit into the plateau without resorting to an outside source. Of course, why use Guattari and Deleuze's examples when there are numerous instances of these "abstract machine" all around us?
Rating:
Summary: I loved it for the same reason it exasperated me
Review: It seems as though in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (a title which thrilled me upon discovery) the authors spend an awful time thrashing around in the cage of their hang-ups with language. The section on "graphisms" and incest makes me recall why I love Bergson so much-- whether or not I agree w/his philosopy-- he is talking from the inside of what he wants to get at instead of obsessing over who or what is preventing him from getting there. It seems these guys could try meditation to help with the tyranny of graphisms. There is no-escape when you love your prison more than your freedom, even if your prison happens to be the written word.
Rating: 
Summary: I feel sorry for people who think this is philosophy
Review: The emperor has no clothes! This is nothing but nonsense. Pure, unadulterated nonsense as with most late 20th century "thinkers". Grab a beer, read some Plato or Hume (real philosophers) and get on with life. This stuff is for [gullible people] (and PHD candidates, which is the same thing).
Rating: 
Summary: an architectural view
Review: THE LATE French philosopher Gilles Deleuze seemed to provide the answer. "Deleuze talks about the production of space and power relations, and all that appeals very much to architects," says Lynn. According to Lynn, the Deleuze boom started in 1987, with the translation into English of A Thousand Plateaus. Thanks to his singular combination of disdain and reverence for techno-capitalism, Deleuze had an immediate and obvious appeal to today's cyberarchitects. A member of the radical French left, Deleuze viewed the triumph of capitalism as inevitable. In his writing, he is in turn horrified by and admiring of capitalism's raw power and extraordinary fecundity in transforming the world. But capitalism's strength, according to Deleuze, is also its weakness. As it moves toward global dominance, capitalism's inherent instability becomes increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Rather than preaching outright revolution, Deleuze proposes a "micropolitics": the establishment of local zones of freedom that tap the energies of capitalism to create a "war machine" against the "state apparatus."
Rating:
Summary: Chillingly uprooting
Review: The thousand plateaus of the rhizome/multiplicity point beyond the uebermensch. The question is, do we want that?
Rating:
Summary: crappola
Review: This book was required for a course I took called "Postmodernism". While I do not dispute the intelligence of these authors, I do question their communicability and the success of their "arguments". The task they take on is to destroy the Hegelian dialectic. Do they succeed? If you were to remove their self-absorbed semantics which riddle the text with unexplained vocabulary, sans apology, you would find there is not much really there. My proof is that a respected and intelligent professor could not interpret, rework and teach the same material much less communicate it. It is an exercise in ambiguity.
Rating:
Summary: Prepare to be challenged
Review: This is an amazing book to shake some cobwebs out of your mind,
and a bargain. It's in a word, bizarre, and even makes Habermas much easier to read. I can see why (taken at face value) most people would consider this to be nonsense. OK maybe God is not a lobster, but you deserve to figure it out for yourself one way or another. If one confronts the difficulty of talking about anything without imposing some sort of fixed view that's simply personal and limited, they give it a shot here. They back up far beyond the horizon to attempt to give some scope. Whether they accomplish this is up to you. I found the book to be very useful in making connections "lines of flight", while also at the same time understanding local hierarchies. To use consultant jargon, there are lots of "take aways" from this book but it certainly doesn't require that you take anything at face value, consider it more of a way to crowbar some fixed concepts out of the way and consider alternatives.
Rating:
Summary: Seemingly fabricated from new textiles,
Review: This is not "hair shirt" philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari investigate the shifts and shimmies we make in time, place, lineage, reference, and sonority. Part of the impact of this text is, aside from its eminent message, its fantastically new strategy for delineating that message. The text makes use of fanciful cascades of language, finding, as material, sources as far-flung as Proust, Virillo, Frank Herbert (Dune), John Cage, Olivier Messaien, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jackson Pollack, et al. Looking BEYOND "analytic" philosophical techniques to find meaning (NOT allegory) in the arts is a MAJOR step, and one that pays dividends for the attentive reader. This is a potentially worldview-altering document, that stands somewhere in between two worlds: it requires the skills of a student of philosophy, but relies on little of the imparted knowledge said student would be expected to possess. Instead, this book, while daunting to a layperson, CAN be digested by anyone with a quick mind, a long attention span, and a sharp curiosity and interest in the multitude of systems and milieu that form our wriggling sphere of existence. Thank you, mssrs Deleuze and Guattari, this is, for me, a Deleuzian Century.
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