Resisting the "Plateau"

What interested me most in my reading of George Landow’s chapter on Hypertext and Critical Theory was his discussion of Derrida’s conception of the linear text and its impending doom at the hands of an increasingly digitized and computational society. In a certain sense I understand what Landow and Derrida are referring to when they say that a text is linear and that this form has dominated western literature since the advent of print production. However, the idea of the linear text crystallized for me when I considered it in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s term “plateau”. They describe a plateau as a “continuous self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end”. This idea of the plateau is also linked to their idea of the rhizome as the interconnected, random transition points that come together to form a plateau. Considering these concepts in relation to linearity, it would seem that the biggest difference between the old writing (linear) and new writing (digital age) is that the old, linear form was constricted to some sense of finality and the new form is continuous and perhaps even circular.

As a way of investigating Delueze and Guattari’s escape of linearity in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrnia, consider for example this web installation by Marc Ngui in which the artist attempts to depict the first two chapters of the book pictorially. Although the images on Marc’s site are certainly interesting to consider as examples of intertext and hypertext, what is even more intriguing is the artist statement that accompanies the images and what it reveals about resistance to the kind of indetermination that Delueze and Guattari are trying to portray of the in their book. Preceding the list of images it reads: “The drawings were created as a means of understanding the ideas being presented in the book.” It seems to me that in this description of purpose, the artist is attempting to unite a finality or “transcendent signified” with A Thousand Plateaus. Because once a person has “understood the ideas” of the book what is left but to close it up and consider it “finished”? Attempting to “better understand” A Thousand Plateaus by separating it from its initial form would also seem to contradict one of the fundamental aspects of our conception of writing that Derrida refers to in Of Grammatology. Derrida writes: “and thus we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general”. In this way, translating A Thousand Plateaus to pictorial form does not seem to elucidate the hidden or implicit meanings of Deluze and Guattari’s text as much as it serves to create new ones.