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A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari By Brian Massumi ( The MIT Press )
Release Date: 1992-03-06
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Product Description
A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.
Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University.
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A Necessary Companion to Capitalism and Schizophrenia ( william16849 )
Massumi saunters purposefully through the landscape created by Deleuze and Guattari while simultaneously staying true to the two authors' signature style. If you have read ANTI-OEDIPUS and/or A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, this book is an excellent supplement. Massumi seems to target young scholars or readers who are struggling with Deleuze and Guattari's vocabulary and concepts. Advanced scholars will probably not find anything new or extremely helpful in this book, but students will find it extremely helpful.
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 read this book ( overtherainbow_101 )
Still the best book on Deleuze and Guattari out there. Extremely creative on its own right, but also great for situating Deleuze and Guattari in relation to other currents in intellectual thought (like psychoanalysis, marxism). And it provides a helpful jumping-off point for thinking aspects of Deleuze's thought that often go unmentioned in introductory works on D+G. (I would say "other" introductory works, but calling this work introductory would be wrong.) Highly recommended.
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The Sweetest Anomaly
This is my favourite book so far in my life! I'd read sections of A Thousand Plateaus and heard Massumi speak when I was at university when Deleuze & Guattari were quietly exploding into the collective awareness of the humanities; and neither experience was so enjoyable as reading A User's Guide. This reading provides a kind of ecstacy which I seemed to naturally, appreciate thoroughly but could not now nor ever readily bear for any length of focussed effort, not just of a reading session but, since, once you 'get it' it overtakes the world around you, for a period of my young adulthood. And yet A User's Guide - once you're in sync with it, thoroughly codified by Deleuze & Guattari and the palimpsest of philosophers and cultural figures filtered through their schizoanalytic thought, as it is - is an exquisite pleasure of discipline and flight. It is the sweetest anomaly in my vague and tenuous understanding of power.
Having said that, it's a difficult thrill.
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 Great book, but not about Deleuze and Guattari
Massumi's user's guide is a wonderful little book, but unfortunately is not a book about Deleuze and Guattari. At the outset, one initially thinks that Massumi will be giving a close reading of _A Thousand Plateaus_, but quickly finds that the text is a patchwork pieced together out of Deleuze's various writings. For instance, the first part of Massumi's book, entitled "Force" discusses D&G in the context of the Plateau in ATP entitled the "Geology of Morals", but greatly broadens this discussion by interpreting D&G's appropriation of Hjelmslev's semiotics in the context of the reading of force Deleuze gives in _Nietzsche and Philosophy_. Now, not only does Massumi severely simply D&G's appropriation of Hjelmslev, but he does the same with Deleuze's account of force in Nietzsche. Moreover, in Deleuze's own independent philosophical works and in the context of his work with Guattari, Deleuze never makes use of the concept of force. Now, in and of itself this is not a bad thing and Massumi ends up producing a very useful model of analysis, but it's questionable as to whether such a reading really helps the reader penetrate what D&G are up to in ATP. It seems to me that this sort of strategy is symptomatic of a lot of works on both Deleuze and Deleuze's work with Guattari. No one would deny that the works with Guattari and Deleuze's works "written in his own name" are exceedingly difficult and require a lot of work to unlock, and that as a rule his writings in the history of philosophy are remarkably clear. As a result, there seems to be a refusal to read the independent works on their own terms and a tendency to attempt to reduce them to the historical writings. While I would be the last to claim that the histories are to be ignored, it is nonetheless the case that the use of them ought to center around demonstrating how they converge with the independent works, how Deleuze rethinks their problematics, and where Deleuze diverges from them. It is also likely that much of this textual practice comes from the latent imperative in Deleuze's philosophy to create. This has to do with Deleuze's textual strategy of "getting behind the author and creating a monsterous offspring." As a result, those that write on Deleuze simultaneously experience the necessity of merely doing commentary on what he said in order to show how it belongs to a philosophical tradition and problematic, while nonetheless being forced to remain silent on what he said. What seems to be forgotten are Deleuze's words immediately following his pronouncement of getting behind the author, where he claims that the only rule is that the author himself must be shown to have said it. Moreover, much of the "creating" that goes on in the name of Deleuze and Guattari comes to look like an arbitrary activity based on the will of the author, rather than an expression of the impersonal and necessary that D&G were always quick to emphasize. In other words, sometimes the greatest usefulness in writing about a text consists in getting clear on what that text actually says in its own terms. Massumi's book can be highly illuminating and is a great and exciting read, but is not necessarily the best source for coming to understand Deleuze and Guattari's difficult texts. One would do much better to first read something like Eugine Holland's book if their seeking to get an accurate picture of what's going on in Deleuze and Guattari.
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A postmodern self-help manual
Ten minutes out of the box and I had made my very own desiring machine
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Addiction
