A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari

by Brian Massumi

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Psychology, France

235 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 1992

About the author

Brian Massumi is Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of several books, including What Animals Teach Us about Politics and Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly valuable stepping-stone to actually understanding Deleuze and Guattari. If you get Deleuze on your own, then you're a better person than I am and I owe you a batch of cookies.

[Andrew Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will be reading this book forever. I don't know where I am or what's going on or what I am anymore, but I like it, whatever it is.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"which is more disgusting (or pathetic) it more or to throw a brick threw a courthouse window or to collect and label it? to break out in larvae or to pin an insect?"

it's the unforgettable nature of quotes like that, recalled instantly 10 years after reading it, that make this book such a winner

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure if it was the writing, the concepts, or my own ignorance, but I had a lot of trouble understanding what this book was trying to say. It is supposed to be an easier to digest introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia....but it wasn't for me.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review published in Criticism 35.1 (1993): 131-134.

[Matei Borangic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great guide with lots of deviations but still great explanations.

[Josh Carswell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was under the impression that this was a quite inscrutable, singular work of little benefit to understanding the complexities of Capitalism & Schizophrenia - not at all. The line between citation/explanation of the subject texts and original extrapolation/explanation (or the Deleuze-Guattari/Massumi authorial voices) is for the most part well-defined, and the copious endnotes and index take us away from Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and towards the authors' individual works, and signposts further areas of investigation (Foucault, Prigogine & Stengers, and Negri are amongst the most suggested). Recommended.

[Charming Duck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esto va a ir directo a la bibliografía de mi TFG

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book serves less as an introduction than as a supplement to AO and ATP, and should probably be read after rather than before or alongside. Massumi tackles 3 major themes or concepts. The first section focuses on how force functions through the the movement of Abstract Machines, Expression and Content, and the way that this movement occurs along the virtual/actual of the real. The second section looks at the process of molarisation through the 3 syntheses (connective, disjunctive, conjunctive) to show the movement of becoming and sedimentation through the process of intensity and crossing thresholds. The third section builds upon the first two by looking in depth at processes of becoming as a means of overcoming and escaping molar stratifications. It closes with a look at how this process is corrupted by capitalism which produces a different form of molarization which doesn’t require ideological commitment and is only interested in forcing or controlling what it is that bodies do.

[Riley Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fun read.

Massumi translated A Thousand Plateaus to English. Here he picks up the thread of Deleuze/Guattari, their themes and style.

Anti-Oedipus made me feel like I was going crazy, like I never knew what they were talking about. My favorite part was the lyricism.

Here the language and scope are just as insane, but there are tons of examples and applications. Massumi brings this style of philosophy closer to day-to-day life for me. Ironically he does so using more abstract tools like fractal geometry and nonlinear dynamics.

Best philosophy book I've read in a while!

[CC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massumi is one of the prominent Deleuzian scholars and translators in the US. This is his guide ("deviations", actually) to their ideas. He presents them extremely intelligibly, which, if you've read any of "Anti-Oedipus" or "Thousand Plateaus," can be a feat. There's a lyricism to the writing as well, giving the ideas more flavor and impact than an academic presentation would.

[Gary Norris · Rating 5 out of 5]

playful massumi calls his ideas deviations...ha! well that's a joke in d&g land folks.

great primer.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a companion volume.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

disambiguifies heaps of concepts from d&g, be they ambiguous for neologistic reasons (BwO) or for historical reasons (Bergson's virtual/actual dichotomy as opposed to possible/real or symbolic/real or symbolic/imaginary/real or etc.) or for both reasons (immanence). elaborated in an ordinary if empirical language. actually made me, at points, glad to have an engineering degree; it can be daunting that Massumi has...real physical-scientific knowledge and is putting it to use in philosophy. it has the usual philosophical problem, density, but creates a really powerful system through it all.

[Thomaz Amancio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ter lido Isabelle Stengers antes disso não fez muito bem pro Massumi: suas generalizações e forçações de barra ficam mais evidentes pelo contraste. Ainda assim, é um bom exemplo de uma linha de leitura importante de D&G. E em alguns momentos a abordagem de Massumi resulta em análises muito fortes, inclusive algumas particularmente relevantes para o momento atual.

[booker g · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank god for this thing lmao

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book for its method; the first of the three sections is especially well written/conceived.

The method is very much in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, in that any commentary as repetition is necessarily then a creative act. Hence the word "deviations" in the subtitle. Massumi breaks the book down into three potent sections (Force, Habit, Monstrosity), and then, instead of filling each with quotes and in-text citations of Deleuze and Guattari's works, he fills out his own compact explanations of each of these ideas in the spirit of D&G's work, providing much needed concrete examples, and then attaches endnotes to key parts of his commentary. It is in these endnotes that you find long lists of references to places (and concepts/ideas) in D&G's work where you can follow up on Massumi's own application of some idea. I love this method, it makes for a very clean main text to read, leaving the reader free to drop back whenever they hit an idea they want to follow up on and trace out Massumi's citations. Great, great, great.

The first section is especially well written, full of very useful concrete examples that he continually rehashes. I think we can forgive the less coherent next two sections when we consider that in 1992 when the book was written, virtually no one else in the English speaking academic world was really writing on these guys. It's more groundwork in that sense, though today there still aren't many people reading D&G.

[Alex Delogu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a copy of this second hand, though it has been on my reading list for some time. The book offers some useful background info on the often obscure source of Deleuze and Guattari's thought. I found especially useful the distinction between Actual and Virtual being framed in Quantum Mechanical terms, though I admit to still not understanding either fully. I will certainly return to what has been a useful resource.