Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus : Capitalism and schizophrenia, tran. Brian Massumi(Univ of Minnesota Press,1987)
1.Introduction : Rhizome
when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine...(What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literatrue is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. (p.4)
A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. (p.7)
There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimenssions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence...An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multipicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glen Gould seeds up the performances of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate.(p.8)
We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or deseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. (p.11)
The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organ...(p.12)
For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into root and radicles. (p.13)
Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psychoanalysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA(they brarred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they fixated him on Professor Freud.)...Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stir; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.(p.14)
Accounting and brueaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel...We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, form biology to linguistics...Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine.
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" don not assure the connection of neuronss in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia...the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.(p.15)
long-term memory and short-term memory(on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory i arborescent and centralized(imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity......The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity......This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.(p.16)
In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader(General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite automata(a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different state of the unconscious...The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.(p.18)
America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots.This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside...There is a whole American "map" in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East.(주18: In the East, there was the search for a specifically American code and for a recoding with Europe(Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the South, there was the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the plantations during the Civil War(Faulkner Caldwell); from the North came capitalist decoding(Dos Passos, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of a line of flight combining travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of frontiers,the rhizomes...)......in the Orient the Sate does not act follwing a schema of arborescence corresponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and channelizing classes(cf. the aspect of Wittfogel's work that have not been refuted). The despot acts as a river not as a fountainhead, which is still a //point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current arther than sitting under a tree...(p.19-20)
unlike trees or their roots, the rhzome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature...The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added(n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions or rather direction in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle(milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimmensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted(n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well...The rhizome is an antigenealogy(p.21). It is a short-term momory, or antimemory......A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to //designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end..."Some sort of continuing plateau of intinsity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsis value.(p.21-22)
It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that every thing changes. It's not easy to see the grass in things and in words(similarly, Nietzsche said an aphorism had to be "ruminated"; nerver is a plateau separable from the cows that populate it, which are also the clouds in the sky).(p.23)
The nomadism of those who only assemble(agencent). How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author, a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endness tracing of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future...Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus...The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State's pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's relation to an outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome(Kleist and Kafka against Goethe)...Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!(p.24)
Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings......A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of rhizome is the conjunction, "and...and...and..."This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be."...American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with fundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by bo means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed...a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and pick up speed in the middle.(p.25)
