A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In 1980, French postmodern theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published a collaborative work of seven years called A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in their native French tongue. It was not published in English until 1987, and has since been referenced mildly in relation to hypertext and web related theory by leading communications theorists such as George Landow in Hyper/Text/Theory (1994) (Dominguez, R, Web Collaboration, Electronic Disturbance Theater) . The theory presented in A Thousand Plateaus revolves around rhizomatics, the nomad, and the abstract machine. For the purpose of this article, the focus will be on the rhizomatic action of web 2.0. The nomad will represent the user, and will be referred to in this text as the cyborg: the user has become part man part machine through his interactive existence as a rhizomatic navigator in the realm of web 2.0 inside the abstract machine that ‘constitutes becoming’, represented as HTML language, the internet. However, this aspect of the theory will not be addressed in length, and the focus will remain on the theory of rhizomatics (Deleuze, G, Guattari, F, 1987, 510-514).

~ by existentialchaos on June 7, 2008.