User Profile

“Thus it is not surprising that the distinction we were seeking was not between assemblages and something else but between two limits of any possible assemblage, in other words between the system of strata and the plane of consistency. We should not forget that the strata rigidify and are organized on the plane of consistency, and that the plane of consistency is at work and is constructed in the strata, in both cases piece by piece, blow by blow, operation by operation. (TP 337, emphasis added)”

This is perhaps the most succinct statement in A Thousand Plateaus of the basic thesis of this guide. Deleuze and Guattari do not see their task as one of sorting assemblages into “good” rhizomatic assemblages and “bad” arborescent assemblages. Rhizome and tree, consistency and organization, change and stasis—all of these oppositions are the two opposed limits of any assemblage. Perceptual semiotics consists in seeing the ways in which different assemblages construct and map out this opposition.

— Deleuze and Guattari's a Thousand Plateaus by Brent Adkins

From Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, asking what is “innate” already presupposes too much. In particular, it presupposes an answer to the question of consistency, an arborescent answer. The innate/acquired dichotomy presupposes a rigid boundary between an organism and its environment, rather than supposing that an organism is a “selection of the exterior” and that the environment is a “projection of the interior.”

— Deleuze and Guattari's a Thousand Plateaus by Brent Adkins

Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous case. But now the components are used for organizing a space, not for the momentary determination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extraction, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being submerged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn.

— A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari