the eyes of texas are upon you

My copy of 1000P looks like yours--hundreds of post-its, frustrated marginal comments, dog-eared every four or five pages (because that was about all I could take). But in the long run, working through anything by D&G is worth it; it's mind-expanding, both in terms of worldview and in terms of what scholarship can be. When I read "Rhizome" with Jennifer Slack for a Discourse and Culture seminar at Michigan Tech, she introduced the chapter by telling us that when she was a grad student in one of Larry Grossberg's seminars, she kept trying to write chapter summaries, but couldn't do it. Grossberg laughed at her attempts and told her 1000P isn't the sort of thing you can try to summarize, you just have to read it, over and over again. (I like the "listen to it like a record" notion, though.)

Massumi's book, "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia" (U of Minn Press) is very useful as well (Massumi translated many of the major D&G works into English, including, I think, 1000P)--not light reading in itself, but it's a slightly more straightfoward and offers some triangulation. Deleuze and Parnet's "Dialogues" is also pretty good, hitting many of the same topics, but in a very readable form.

- johndan

Thanks -- I'll have to take a look at both of these soon, especially Dialogues. I had actually thought about picking up Anti-Oedipus next, but that seems like it would be compounding my earlier mistake.

So very tired.

Clay Spinuzzi
clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu

Yeah, AO is about as tough sledding as 1000P, but with (slightly) fewer flashes of brilliance. I wouln't read it unless you're going to dig deeply into D&G (in which case, it's certainly useful, and helps provide some additional context). But the Massumi and Deleuze and Parnet books will probably serve you better. (I'd actually recommend the Massumi first for helping out with 1000P; the Deleuze and Parnet book is great, but it's more of a tangent to Deleuze's thinking) (as if all of this stuff wasn't composed primarily of tangents).

This material, btw, is part of where articulation theory comes from. Hall's work basically tries to extract ideas about rhizomes, tendential force, and moments from D&G, Althusser, Foucault, and Marx. (Which may explain why activity theory, a parallel concept, is easier to get your head around; AT concretizes much of the theory in order to make it a more workable method.)

- johndan