LAP ONE: DEFINITIONS

There are pass-words beneath order-words, laps beneath lapses, ‘cat-licks’ beneath Catholics – Joy(ce) beneath shame, or James. The free energy of linguistic production can be seen to emerge, with the help of a Deleuzian logic, beneath the pattern of solidified representation. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ‘schizoanalytic’ assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus provide novel, erring rather than deferring, inroads into James Joyce's linguistic fissions – nomadic wanderings across the plateaus, whether hills or boglands, of writing and reading. The concept of ‘plateau’, borrowed from Gregory Bateson by Deleuze and Guattari, is defined (though again the word should ideally be submitted to criticism and replacement) as being ‘always in the middle’, and, in connection with the way Bateson originally used it, as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’. The explicit philosophy of their book, they claim, resists the ‘order-word’ of a chapter-based structure, to which it prefers a collection of ‘plateaus’: