My daily regime is now established. I get up about 8.30 and spend around 2 hours reading a Thousand Plateaus. I normally manage about 15 pages, this is my main achievement for the day. I don't find it difficult to read though I can see how the thinking grows in you and makes difficulties. In the Plateau about sedimentation they refer to a story that I have read by Arthur Conan Doyle. This keeps coming back to me as its about digging so deep that we prick the earth and this is what they are hoping to achieve in their writing- dig so deep they prick the collective mind of thought. In saying mind of thought I flag I am understanding to an extent the assemblage with its back to the Abstract machine that is a body without organs that are all part of the same thing but hold a difference that is temporally located within Bergson's notion of time as subjectivity not something we are within but something we are of (mind becomes both mined as in dug out mind as in mine and mind as in mind the gap- the minor parts of language) . Everything is different but the same thing, all the concepts role together as do the days and this is the point I take a breath. As a problem arises with a strand of a concept they tag on or jump to another concept and then say it's different but the same. There is an ironic strand that flows through the book, at points they cross the philosophers 4th wall and like Lovejoy in the 90s speak directly to the reader or the camera to fill in some gaps in the plot. These are always - we are bit sorry for making you read this stuff but it may be worth it for you to stick with us - they are jolts and little wake ups (are you still there!). I find them strangely absent in the secondary literature apart from Massumi who has adopted their trick to separate the dog from his vomit.
It is funny to look to Deleuze and Guattari to structure my open time, to mark the passing of the days. I cannot imagine many things other than a long personal illness and recuperation that would afford an opportunity for paying such attention. With this move towards a difference of understanding comes a slight smugness, an ability to spot the Deleuze in Glissant the lack of it in Bennet the hook and hold of it. I think many people read it as one side of the Velcro and forget for it to be sticky you need both parts the hook bit and the eye bit. But how to speak of this (New)sense to anybody living a normal life gets more and more difficult. Even though the work is visceral and human and connected to the flow and rhythm of the everyday it is under the skin writing but not a tattoo. As written text it is removed and reified the book and the sandal are both becoming objects.
There are no notes but there is deeper understanding. 1000 plateus is where the plain of consistency is established. For me as someone who lives on the edge of nomadic madness, walks confidently in its shadow, the plain fits quite naturally into a life. I think for most the plain offers an alternative - the points it surfaces as critique are useful for academics who have been schooled to think in certain ways. The book is not a guide or against anything it is pure philosophy in the western tradition - as set out in What is Philosophy this is the production of NEW concepts on the plain of immanence and boy do they do that over and over again.
It is probably the book that has most changed me in the way I think I think and I'm only starting to be able to read it properly. I am a coward Nomad who knows he is only happy when he is traveling, I am also the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. I am legion and we are many.
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