A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
There's enough postmodern nonsense in this book to start a cult. Which, sadly, has happened.
D & G's credibility in the universities has been established by ideologues interested in tickling their fantasies of being Continental philosophers and their zealous quest to make of the raw material of the world a carnival of language games.
Exhibiting almost no understanding (or research) of what rhizomes, plateaus, wolves, or the fundamental laws of nature are, Deleuze and Guattari simply pretend, for hundreds of pages, that they Are Not. Spin in the name of jouissance, religious doctrine in the name of a critique of reason, and frankly ridiculous, nonsensical phrases (A plateau is an animal, a wolf is a "nondecomposable variable distance") pepper this work with sophomoric euphoria.
And the academic humanities crowd bought it hook, line, and sinker.
If you want to drink the Kool-Aid, then that's your path. Worship the god of your language game. But don't offer it up as sound, anymore than declaring that a black labrador retriever is telling you what needs to be done next in a language that only you can understand. Obfuscation is not wisdom. Masturbation is not sex. Intelligent design does not refute random configuration and evolution. Ideology is not scholarship.
The emperors wear no clothes.
