MPCAD - translator's intro

[Michael Bailey]

I like all the ideas for the next read, and it is somewhat cool
that many of us are thinking in terms of immediately doing another group read.
I for one found that I did more than I would have (especially when hosting)
and learned more from the wealth of postings than a solo read.


I got the English of _Mille Plateaux_
(_Thousand Plateaus_) on interlibrary loan
and if I post on a chapter each day that is probably the only way I
will read it...
Not trying to start a big thing, in fact I will be very brief.



     Translator's Foreword: The Pleasures of Philosophy

Brian Massumi, translator.  http://www.brianmassumi.com/

Thick book, 15 chapters plus the foreword.  Mille Plateaux came out in 1980,
the translation in 1987.
It's a follow-up to Anti-Oedipus and shares the subtitle "Capitalism and
Schizophrenia"  The foreword talks about D&G as a reaction to the tendency
of philosophy to build structures which buttress the
imperialist/patriarchal/authoritarian
state.  Instead of building a philosophical structure, D&G's project
was to construct a toolbox for nomadic thought
(something all the travelers in AtD could use?)

D was a classically trained philosopher challenged by the events of 1968
to rethink the role of intellectuals in society.  Prior to that he had
written works
on Kant, among others, trying to find different perspectives,
and uttered the famous buggery quote...
Also wrote _Difference and Repetition_ - (my personal reaction - philosophy
can make somebody write a whole book about something seemingly simple like that)
- and liked Bergson, Hume, Spinoza, Lucretius and (yuck) Nietzsche...

G was a Lacanian psychiatrist who worked to "abolish the hierarchy
between doctor
and patient in favor of an interactive group dynamic" and had "an
uneasy alliance"
with the worldwide anti-psychiatric community including Laing in England and
Basaglia in Italy.  He worked at this really cool mental hospital in
France called
La Borde http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Borde

Plateaus was how anthropologist Gregory Bateson described a Balinese
sexuality that wasn't obsessively focused on the orgasm. "In D&G, a plateau
is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of
intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax." They suggest that
such a plateau can characterize a style or dynamism which can exist and
be thought and written about...

Therefore the book's sections each deal with such a style or plateau
that the authors have noticed and thought to be interesting.
"Each section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute
 a dynamism that has existed in other mediums at other times"

The other 2 dichotomies I brought away from the foreword - and
will probably be reading more about - are
the tree structure of traditional philosophy versus the rhizome
and "striated" (hierarchical) space versus "smooth" space (where free
movement is possible)
(This sort of speaks to the "narrowing of possibilities" noted in AtD
at the Chicago stockyards)

Finally, Massumi and D&G give the readers permission not to like
everything in the book: "The authors' hope, however, is that elements
of it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the
melody of their everyday lives."

Final sound bite:  the authors "would probably be more inclined to
call philosophy music with content that music a rarefied form of philosophy."