"It's become a commonplace these days to talk about the breakdown of systems, the impossibility of constructing a system now that knowledge has become so fragmented ('we're no longer in the nineteenth century...'). There are two problems with this idea: people can't imagine doing any serious work except on very restricted and specific little series; worse still, any broader approach is left to the spurious work of visionaries, with anyone saying whatever comes into their head.
Systems have in fact lost absolutely none of their power. All the groundwork for a theory of so-called open systems is in place in current science and logic, systems based on interactions, rejecting only linear forms of causality, and transforming the notion of time... What Guattari and I call a rhizome is precisely one example of an open system.
A system's a set of concepts. And it's an open system when the concepts relate to circumstances rather than essences. But concepts don't, first of all, turn up ready-made, they don't preexist: you have to invent, create concepts, and this involves just as much creation as you find in art and science. Philosophy's job has always been to create new concepts, with their own necessity.
Because they're not just whatever generalities happen to be in fashion, either. They're singularities, rather, acting on the flows of everyday thought: it's perfectly easy to think without concepts, but as soon as there are concepts, there's genuine philosophy. It's got nothing to do with ideology.
A concept's full of a critical, political force of freedom. It's precisely their power as a system that brings out what's good or bad, what is or isn't new, what is or isn't alive in a group of concepts. Nothing's good in itself, it all depends on careful systematic use. In A Thousand Plateaus we're trying to say you can never guarantee a good outcome.
...People sometimes criticize us for using complicated words 'to be trendy.' That's not just malicious, it's stupid. A concept sometimes needs a new word to express it, sometimes it uses an everyday word that it gives a singular sense.
I think, anyway, that philosophical thinking has never been more important than it is today, because there's a whole system taking shape, not just in politics but in culture and journalism too, that's an insult to all thinking."
"What now seems problematic is the situation in which young philosophers, but also all young writers who're involved in creating something, find themselves. They face the threat of being stifled from the outset. It's become very difficult to do any work, because a whole system of 'acculturation' and anticreativity specific to the developed nations is taking shape. It's far worse than censorship.
Censorship produces a ferment beneath the surface, but reaction seeks to make everything impossible. This sterile phase won't necessarily go on indefinitely. For the moment just about all one can do is to set up networks to counter it. So the question that interests us in A Thousand Plateaus is whether there are any resonances, common ground, with what other writers, musicians, painters, philosophers, and sociologists are doing or trying to do, from which we can all derive greater strength or confidence."
"What we call a 'map,' or sometimes a 'diagram,' is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map). There are of course many different kinds of lines, both in art and in society or a person. Some lines represent something, others are abstract. Some lines have various segments, others don't. Some weave through a space, others go in a certain direction. Some lines, no matter whether or not they're abstract, trace an outline, others don't. The most beautiful ones do.
We think lines are the basic components of things and events. So everything has its geography, its cartography, its diagram. What's interesting in a person are the lines that make them up, or they make up, or take, or create.
Why make lines more fundamental than planes or volumes? We don't, though. There are various spaces correlated with different lines, and vice versa... Different sorts of line involve different configurations of space and volume.
...We can define different kinds of line, but that won't tell us one's good and another bad. We can't assume that lines of flight are necessarily creative, that smooth spaces are always better than segmented or striated ones.
...Cartography can only map out pathways and moves, along with their coefficients of probability and danger. That's what we call 'schizoanalysis,' this analysis of lines, spaces, becomings. It seems at once very similar, and very different, from problems of history."
"What we're interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons, or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of an event. And maybe it's a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects. The title A Thousand Plateaus refers to these individuations that don't individuate persons or things."
"...Each plateau ought to have its own climate, its own tone or timbre. It's a book of concepts. Philosophy has always dealt with concepts, and doing philosophy is trying to invent or create concepts. But there are various ways of looking at concepts. For ages people have used them to determine what something is (its essence). We, though, are interested in the circumstances in which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on? A concept, as we see it, expresses an event rather than an essence. This allows us to introduce elementary novelistic elements into philosophy."