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Comment by gglitch | Hacker News Reader

I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with me.

Edit: also Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s slim and user friendly to a fault, and would be easy to underestimate at first glance, but imho contains great wisdom and beauty.

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I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago.

Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!

I know what you mean. It’s hard to avoid feeling like what appears to be glossolalic nonsense would all be revealed as a majestic tour de force, perfectly comprehensible and life-changing, if you were familiar enough with Marx, Freud, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, Kant, Sartre, and god knows whom else, to put it all together. I’m not, so I can’t prove or disprove the case, which makes it a weird answer to OP’s question; but per above, it remains the case for me that images and terms from that book have never stopped working in my ideation processes since I picked it up.

One thing with Thousand Plateaus is that you don't have to read the book in sequence. You can start with random chapter. That's the only thing I remember from the book.

Perhaps try reading Freud's account of his treatment of the "wolf man" first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pankejeff#Der_Wolfsmann... - then read the chapter "One Or Many Wolves", bearing in mind that it's dripping in sarcasm. That chapter had me laughing out loud.

What's an example of a concept from A Thousand Plateaus that has stuck with you?

Rhizomatic values and actions vs arborescent ones, de- and reterritorialization, the drawing of lines of flight, and nomadic war machines, more than anything else. I’m not sufficiently grounded in Marx or Freud to follow their narratives confidently, so my interpretations are probably overly simplistic; but I think they’d have approved of my taking the words and making them my own.

More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.

> Rhizomatic vs arborescent

Roots vs trees? If these ideas have any merit, surely it should be possible to express them clearly, and without (gratuitous?) invocation of pseudo-scientific terms.

A rhizome isn't just a root, it's an offshoot of a plant with the ability to create an entirely new plant.

You have a point with arborescent, but it is translated from French, and from what I know of French morphology, arborescent could probably sounds to a French person like "treeish" or "tree ADJ", and therefore not quite so formal/illegible.

The joke I tell about A Thousand Plateaus is that on one of the plateaus is good writing. Didn't make it into the book though

What is pseudoscientific about those words? Read the book to see how they are used, and why the selected language is actually sensible in its given context.

Your criticism is like telling a pharmacist not to use the terminology that distinguishes some kinds of drugs from others. It may be true that the blue pill makes your dick hard and the red pill cures your headache, but if you actually want to go into it and address why and how they do these things you need a more focused vocabulary that is clearly defined in its context of use (which G&D do).

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