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Sandbox for the article on Rhizome (philosophy)

• A Thousand Plateaus • Anti-Oedipus

Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980) project. They extend the botanical term "rhizome" from bulbs and tubers to describe systems that are "rhizomatic" in their organisation and operation; the rhizome, they argue, "assumes very diverse forms." Six principles characterise a rhizomatic system, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the word: (1) connection, (2) heterogeneity, (3) multiplicity, (4) a-signifying rupture, (5) cartography, and (6) decalcomania.

Deleuze and Guattari's development of this concept forms the introductory chapter (or "plateau") of their A Thousand Plateaus (1980), although an earlier draft was published separately in 1976, following its presentation at a conference a year earlier. In it, they present the rhizome as a way of conceptualising a kind of book. They define the "rhizome-book" by means of a series of contrasts with the "root-book" and the "radicle" or "fascicular system," each of which has a different organisation and operation.

Roots and radicles

The "root-book" describes classical notions of the book: "The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two." This understanding treats the book as a mimetic representation whose image doubles or mirrors the world. The world is understood as a tree and the book as its root-system: the roots form a mirror-image of the structure of the tree, with the ground acting as the line of symmetry that divides the two. Consequently, this "root-tree" image of thought organises a dichotomous system governed by binary logic. It treats the world and the book—or nature and art—as distinct and opposed entities.

The "radicle-system, or fascicular root" describes modern notions of the book: "The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object." Unlike the root-book, the fascicular system is not organised by a central, pivotal "root" from which subsequent elements branch off in an organic unity of the whole and its parts. Instead, it is characterised by a multiplicity of fragments. The multiplicity that this fragmentation produces, however, is only apparent, since a totalising unity subsists elsewhere, "in another, circular or cyclic, dimension." Deleuze and Guattari offer the work of William Burroughs, James Joyce, and Friedrich Nietzsche as examples of this conception of the book. Like the root-book, the fasicular system treats the book dualistically as an image of the world, though in this case a world conceived as chaos: "radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos."

The root-book and the radicle or fascicular book are two systems based on what Deleuze and Guattari call "arborescent" thought. They argue that this way of thinking is inadequate, since it is unable to understand "multiplicities" (insofar as it always posits a "strong principal unity" when it attempts to grasp "the multiple"). They criticise psychoanalysis, linguistics, structuralism, and information science for remaining in thrall to this image of thought.

Principles of a rhizome

In order to explain what they mean by a "rhizome" or a "rhizomatic" system, Deleuze and Guattari enumerate six of its characteristic principles: (1) connection, (2) heterogeneity, (3) multiplicity, (4) a-signifying rupture, (5) cartography, and (6) decalcomania. Some of these principles are grouped together, since they are closely related.

Connection and heterogeneity

In a rhizomatic system, it is possible in principle to connect any one trait to any other in the system. Deleuze and Guattari contrast this principle of connection with arborescent systems, in which lines of communication are limited and elements are fixed in a hierarchial order.

A rhizomatic system contains traits with different natures and which have different origins—they are heterogeneous. In a rhizome, "semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of different status."

"A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive [...]."

Orchid and the wasp.

Multiplicity

Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "rhizome" forms part of their contribution to the theory of "multiplicities." The rhizome is what Deleuze calls an "image of thought" that describes one type of multiplicity—a rhizomatic multiplicity as compared to an arborescent multiplicity.

The arborescent image of thought is "forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity." Arborescent thought relates the multiple to "the One" by means of an abstract opposition between them. The One may be related as "subject or object, natural or spiritual reality." The multiple may be treated "as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come." In contrast, the "rhizome" attempts to conceptualise the multiple without relating it to the One in any way. It describes a system without a totalising unity (from which the One has been "subtracted"—an operation to which Deleuze and Guattari refer with the shorthand "n-1," where "n" describes the number of dimensions of the system).

According to Deleuze and Guattari, their distinction between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic multiplicities is "approximately the same thing" as those found in the work of a number of other thinkers: Bernhard Riemann's discrete and continuous multiplicities; Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell's multiplicities of magnitude or divisibility and multiplicities of distance; Henri Bergson's numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or durational multiplicities; and Elias Canetti's mass or crowd multiplicities and pack multiplicities (from his Crowds and Power). The distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic also corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between "molar" and "molecular," two terms that featured prominently in the first part of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Anti-Oedipus (1972):

On the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold. The elements of this second kind of multiplicity are particles; their relations are distances; their movements are Brownian; their quantities are intensities, differences in intensity.

The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).

Both the tree-root system and the fascicular system mobilise a totalising unity: the root-book posits a "principal unity" (the "One that becomes two"), while the fascicular system has a "secret unity" ("as past or yet to come").

The dualistic binary opposition "image and world"

A "multiplicity" is a conception of "the multiple" that treats it as a substantive.

"There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines."

"A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors."

A-signifying rupture

The distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic systems does not describe two mutually-exclusive types; rather, each is implicated in the other—a rhizome contains "knots of arborescence," just as there are "rhizomatic offshoots in roots." It is important to recognise this mutual immanence in order to understand the fourth principle of the rhizome, the "a-signifying rupture."

Three lines

“ Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesics, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bundles of lines, for each kind is multiple. ”

NB: Relate the three lines to the three modes of perception (solid, liquid, gaseous) in Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Having established that a rhizome is made up of lines—rather than the points and positions of the closed structures that structuralism describes—Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between its arborescent lines of "segmentarity" and its deterritorializing "lines of flight." Rhizome lines oscillate (or vacillate) between the two, forming a third, intermediary type.

Insofar as a rhizome follows lines of rigid segmentarity, it functions as an arborescent system—these lines form structures of signification and attributions of subjectivity, they arise from processes of reterritorialization, and they are organised into what Deleuze and Guattari call "strata." Later in A Thousand Plateaus, they describe these lines at work in Henry James' novella "In the Cage." Its progagonist, a young telegraphist, pursues a relationship with a grocer, her fiancé, in which each is clearly-defined in terms of class, gender, and personal identity:

Not only are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity. The fiancé can say to the young woman, Even though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the molar or rigid segmentarity [...].

The life of the couple—with its binary oppositions and biunivocal relationships—follows an arborescent, molar line of rigid segmentarity. With the arrival of the encoded, secret telegrams of a rich man and woman, however, the young telegraphist begins to follow another line as well—a molecular, rhizomatic one that is "made of silences, allusions, and hasty innuendos inviting interpretation." In contrast to the molar segmentarity of her relationship with her fiancé, she develops an intensive, "passional complicity" with the rich man, in which they entertain relations of "doubles" rather than "couples." These relations are "less localizable" and "concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons." When following this line, "it is hard to tell who is who anymore, or what anything means." This line is made up of fine segmentations, by means of which "telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by quanta that are like so many little segmenations-in-progress grasped at the moment of their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale." Deleuze and Guattari stress that this line "is not in her head, it is not imaginary," internal, or personal—just as real as the molar line, it operates on a different, molecular scale. Rhizomatic lines are "simultaneously present and imperceptible."

• Explain difference between the relative deterritorialization of the rhizome line and the absolute deterritorialization of the line of flight.

Later in the story, Deleuze and Guattari explain, the young telegraphist reaches a line of flight that explodes the two previous segmentary series (the rigid, clear-cut, molar segments of the arborescent line and the fine, supple, molecular segments of the rhizome line). The line of flight is a "line of rupture" that explodes the rhizome and draws a movement of deterritorialization. From the point of view of the signifying "strata," this rupture is a destructive moment that shatters or breaks the meaningful system. This rupture and the line of flight that it initiates are part of the rhizome, however, though they "can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying." The line of flight is "defined by decoding and deterritorialization" In following it, "one has become imperceptible and clandestine in motionless voyage."

The line of flight enables one "to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections."

• surplus value of code • a capture of code "the emission of quanta of deterritorialization"
• supple, molecular segmentarity.

"A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed."

"In short, there is a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there is a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other."

"A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of deterritorialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line."

"Even the schizo's stroll or voyage does not effect great deterritorializations without borrowing from territorial circuits: the tottering walk of Molloy and his bicycle preserves the mother's room as the vestige of a goal; the vacillating spirals of The Unnameable keep the familial tower as an uncertain center where it continues to turn while treading its own underfoot; the infinite series of juxtaposed and unlocalized parks in Watt still contains a reference to Mr. Knott's house, the only one capable of 'pushing the soul out-of-doors,' but also of summoning it back to its place."

A-signifying semiotics

A-signifying signs - Intensities - Diagrammatism

A-signifying semiotics, which Guattari also calls "post-signifying semiotics" and "diagrammatism" (based on his re-working of the "diagram" of Peirce's semiotic classifications),

They arise from an extraction of semiotic fluxes from signifying semiotics. This extraction enables the semiotic fluxes to establish connections with deterritorialized material fluxes. The functioning of these connections between the semiotic and material fluxes is independent of a signifying process. signifying = representation / real intensities and multiplicities.

"Signs and things engage one another independently of the subjective control that agents of individual utterance claim to have over them."

intensities extracted from distinct forms and substances. "the most asignifing of signs" are set to functioning in "the most deterritorialized of particles," combining in an emission of "particles-signs." "to extract and accelerate destratified particles-signs" "all it retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that conjugate." unformed traits

"The diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization sometimes starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of expression; that trait is said to be 'deterritorializing' in relatio to the other precisely because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. The most deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold enabling a conjunction of their respective deterritorializations, a shared acceleration. This is the abstract machine's absolute, positive deterritorialization.

"The diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization: particles-signs.

"An intensive quantum includes difference within itself, contains factors of the E-E' type, ad infinitum, and establishes itself first and foremost between disparate levels, between heterogeneous orders that enter into communication only much later, when extended. Like the metastable system, an intensive quantum is the structure (not yet the synthesis) of heterogeneity."

Involution and becoming

The principle of a-signifying rupture concerns the articulation of the rhizome with several other concepts that Deleuze and Guattari developed: a-signifying signs, becoming, deterritorialization, and the line of flight.

As examples of this principle in operation, they offer the interaction that developed between the wasp and the orchid, or certain domestic cats and the baboon.

In contrast to the arborescent relationships that the concepts of parallel evolution, convergent evolution, and divergent evolution describe, these examples involve what the biologist Rémy Chauvin calls "aparallel evolution"—a rhizomatic interaction between "two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other." Deleuze and Guattari propose the term "involution" to describe this process (with the caveat that it should not be confused with regression towards an undifferentiated state). Involution, in their sense, is a type of "becoming"—a process distinct from "appearing," "being," "equalling," or "producing."

• mimicry involved in Pseudocopulation
• Ophrys

"If we ask the question 'What holds things together?', the clearest, easiest answer seems to be provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized arborescent model."

"it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular components 'hold together.'"

Hello. I'm at work on a philosophy article in which the authors concerned cite a concept by the biologist Rémy Chauvin called "aparallel evolution". This is defined as an interaction involving "two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other" and one example discussed is the mimicry involved in pseudocopulation between certain orchids and wasps. Another is the horizontal gene transfer by a type C virus between the baboon and certain domestic cats. My question is: does the article on coevolution describe the same phenomemon? A related one? I read in the New Scientist earlier this year that "When symbiosis results in such evolutionary change [the example is hummingbirds and the structure of flowers] it is known as symbiogenesis" (#2745, p.33).

"Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which a becoming is the process of desire. This principle of proximity or approximation is entirely particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigorously as possible a zone of proximity or copresence of a particle, the movement into which any particle that enters the zone is drawn."

Cartography and decalcomania

"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 endless tracing of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future."

Growth from the middle

"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 the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and ... and ... and ...' This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb 'to be.'"

Assemblage: subject, object, and representation

In contrast to the root-book and the fascicular system, a rhizome-book does not offer a representative "image of the world," but rather operates as an "assemblage" that connects to it.

They offer the writing of Heinrich von Kleist and the piano playing of Glenn Gould as examples of a "rhizomatic" artistic practice. The book in which Deleuze and Guattari develop their conception of the rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus, is itself a rhizome-book, they suggest: "Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau."

"There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. [...] The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world."

In an analysis—of language, for example—a rhizomatic method would refuse to treat the system under consideration as a closed, homogenous structure. Instead, according to the principle of heterogeneity, it would analyse the language-system "by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers."

The rhizomatic/arborescent distinction

In their presentation of the distinction between the rhizomatic and the arborescent, Deleuze and Guattari are keen to "avoid any Manichaean dualism" between the two. A dualism between the rhizomatic and arborescent (or the molecular and the molar), they argue, "would be no better" than that between the One and the multiple from which their thought tries to escape. There is no binary opposition between a 'good' rhizome and a 'bad' arborescence. Instead, they argue that "trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of arborescence." Each is implicated in the other and the two types are impossible to separate—they operate together as parts of the same "assemblage."

"If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the sae terms or the same relations or the same nature ir even the same type of multiplicity. If they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each other." Reciprocal presupposition.

"It is a question of method." "It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again."

Rhizomatic desire

Relationship to desire: "Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces." Gives as examples of this process of the blockage of a rhizome Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic treatment of Little Hans and Melanie Klein's treatment of Little Richard.

The rhizome "is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality."

See also

• Contextualism
• Heterarchy
• Minority (philosophy)
• Mutualism (biology)
• Perspectivism
• Plane of immanence

Sources

• Buchanan, Mark. 2010. "Another Kind of Evolution." New Scientist 23 Jan (#2744): 34-37.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London and New York: Continuum, 1994. Trans. of Différence et Répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 0826459579.
• ---. 1994. Preface to the English Edition. In Deleuze (1968, xv-xvii).
• ---. 2002. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Trans. David Lapoujade. Ed. Michael Taormina. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents ser. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. ISBN 1584350180.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945.
• Genosko, Gary. 1996. Introduction. In The Guattari Reader. By Félix Guattari. Ed. Gary Genosko. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 1-34. ISBN 0631197087.
• ---, ed. 2001. Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 041518669.
• Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270198.
• ---. 1996. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270309.
• Patton, Paul. 1981. "Notes for a Glossary." I&C 8: 41-48. Rpt. in Genosko (2001, 1089-1096).
• Ryan, Frank. 2010. "I, Virus." New Scientist 30 Jan (#2745): 32-35.
• Stivale, Charles J. 1998. The Two-fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. Critical Perspectives ser. New York: Guilford P. ISBN 1572303263.

External links

• "In the Cage" by Henry James - PDF of the novella