Taking shape; last edited 3/11/22; reached a happy point on rhizome notes. may add more later. need to finish geology.
Here is one of the better reference books on their material. The glossary pages are abundantly useful.
Here is text one of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, AntiOedipus. Text two, A Thousand Plateaus to come.
The first thing I say when discussing the works of Deleuze and Guattari - attractive as they are, inaccessible as they are - is that for them, it is not important to suggest what things necessarily are (it strikes me that this would be to fall back on systems of simple signification//monism=dualism//a=a) but rather what they do. This is the first ontological hurdle we encounter in their work. Deleuze and Guattari's work is multivalent, it is dangerous, it ruptures tradition, boundaries, and sense; free wheeling explorations of psychology, anthropology, linguistics, politics, economics create a plane of immanent exploration. Theirs is a philosophy of pure connection, action, and multiplicity. The rhizome then; opening plateau of their second major work A Thousand Plateaus seems like a smart place to enter.
"The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow the canal..."
The quintessential Deleuzian concept is perhaps the Rhizome. Not to say that it is the most important - everything hinges on Desire for Deleuze and Guattari. But the Rhizome is the one that really seems to excite people. Sitting down to write these notes though, I'm already regretting it - it such a laden concept. There's always about 50 million things to say about any Deleuzian concept, and if you miss but one of those people will come for you. The fact of the matter is: these people are nerds and they don't grasp Deleuze and Guattari properly - anyone who claims they do is lying to you or themselves. Everything I write here should not be taken as any kind of gospel - I KNOW that I do not understand these guys. What I am doing is trying to expand on key concepts and chapters in a way that makes them applicable. Utility is the most important thing for Deleuzian concepts.
So I'll posit here a basic definition of a rhizome. Fundamentally a rhizome, like in botany is a mass of interconnected tissue with no central structure. In a rhizome any point is connected to any other at any point. This is an ideal model of thought for Deleuze and Guattari, who want to liberate production of the real (that is desire) from limiting structure; free connection is privileged by rhizomatic models for there is no possible hierarchy or formal structure possible within a rhizome; only connection. I think it's best to think of The Rhizome as an ethics: a set of practices. Rhizomes are about connective heterogeneity, multiplicity as substantive, and the capacity for regeneration. Anything can 'do' Rhizome' if allowed, but this is also contingent on the rhizome, on the grandest scale, being the interconnectivity of everything: hence n-1.
"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 buts of dimensions, or rather directions 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 dimensions 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)."
Okay, so some classic Deleuzian-Guattarian nonsense. Firstly, let us just note that a key idea of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is to push back against a lot of established Western thought; n-1, in some ways, deals with Kant. Kant's intervention was to add a subjective “I” to experience, providing a stable platform for knowledge, experience, and morality. Deleuze leads us in the opposite direction: it is not so much that, as with Kant, the matter of experience exists paralell to the subject and that it is given form by the addition of a subject; rather if we follow Deleuze: by subtracting the subject from experience, we treat the subject as a by-product or residue of experience itself. If we understand all things as being interconnected at any possible point, then this necessarily means that experience, 'the real', is immanent to the subject and that the subject is immanent to the real. Everything is the same stuff. To conceptualise anything in the rhizomatic mode is to cut something off from a multiplicity (yes, Deleuze does do transcendence, despite protestations). I think this is Deleuze perhaps trying to do something with ontology. For example, a life, a subjective existence, can only be constituted as such by the connections within a rhizomatic multiplicity; a temporal multiplicity. Or something.
The rhizome becomes most applicable though when applied to art and thought. I'll stop the psychobabble and return to something a bit more practical.
"What a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available-- always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). SUBTRACT THE UNIQUE FROM THE MULTIPLICITY TO BE CONSTITUTED; WRITE AT N-1 DIMENSIONS. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome."
What? Okay, more imperceptible nonsense. The reason I started with this strange, mangled, butchered, articulation of the rhizome is because we can get a better understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's project when we understand what the book-rhizome does. I'm going to lean on Eugene W. Holland for this, I'm quoting him from Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism. "Deleuze and Guattari insist, “the book is not a image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world". The rhizome-book enables us to think with the world, rather than thinking about the world". Okay, so thinking with the world constitutes a mode of thought which does not privilege any kind of hierarchy but focuses immanence perhaps?? I think the idea is to place ourselves as part of a system rather than observer or analyst of it. "Thinking about the world, by contrast, introduces the apparatus of representation-signification between us and the world — something Deleuze and Guattari are keen to avoid."
"Written as a rhizome, then, the book does not represent or reproduce the world (as its referent), nor signify the meaning of the world (as its signified), but connects and articulates itself in reciprocal presupposition with the world. Thinking, writing, and reading rhizomatically enables us to “overthrow ontology” [okay sick, I thought we were trying to do ontology] and engage the world in the simplest, zero-degree mode of relation possible, as designated by the logic of “and...and...and...”(thisandthatandthisand...)." Think of this as the principle of infinite and multiple connection. "The challenge for a rhizome-book is to “find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce”; and the aim of such a book - outside articulation or assemblage - is not to represent the world as it is or what it means, but to survey and map its tendencies or becomings, for better and for worse, so as to be able to affirm the former and avert the latter.
Okay - so this kind of gives us an insight into what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to do with their philosophy: they're trying to enact thought in a different way. They try to map connections, assemblages, the molecular coming-together of things, the aglutinations of the molar. They map the countourlines on the body of the earth. When you look upon the plane of the earth through the lens of schizoanalysis, assemblages of heterogenous particles and flows constitute ideas, institutions, happenings across an unfolding plane. The purpose of A Thousand Plateaus is to map this.
Memories of a Moviegoer.
I recall the fine [‘fine’ - okay Deleuze - the film is really quite uninspiring to be honest, it was an average B Movie, which made it a bad B Movie - I don’t think I will rewatch it. Nevertheless, an interesting insight into what Deleuze watched late at night…] film Willard (1972, Daniel Mann). A "B" movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular be- cause the heroes are rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will recount the story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian mother in the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After a violent argument, the mother, who "resembles" a dog, dies. The house is coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He likes the principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence. There is also a white female rat, Ben's companion. Willard spends all his free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death. But he fool- ishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a strong "resemblance" to a rat—but it is only a resemblance. One day when he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedipalized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.
The Tenth Plateau of A Thousand Plateaus; ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’; deals with a multitude of things - mainly an expansion on Deleuze’s conceptions of ‘becoming’, proper treatment of the plane of consistency, heavy exploration of music, and what amounts to a treatise of the molecular. In my own work, this is perhaps one of the richest and most thought-provoking plateaus; the main value being in a conceptual model of posthuman assemblages. The plateau is built around ‘memories’ - of a Moviegoer, a Naturalist, Sorcerer, Spinozist, Molecule, and Bergsonian - each providing an exploration of the constituent ideas of the plateau.
The first three memories: Moviegoer, Naturalist, and Bergsonian, presage the Deleuze’s concept of becoming-animal, providing both inklings of its revolutionary power, as well as dealing with the relationship of people and animals. In true Deleuzian fashion we are to throw out the old standard models genealogy and descent — more on this in the Geology of Morals — and understand the relation of living-assemblages as a product of involution. This will be a key concept in understanding how we create becoming-animals. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Natural History has run on two major lines in order to conceptualise the relationships between animals. Evolutionism, obviously: again, see my notes on the Geology of Morals after this; the two link up well; but before Evolutionism: definitions by way of “genealogy, kinship, descent, and filiation” (234). The problem with this is that: “because natural history is concerned primarily with the sum and value of differences, it can con- ceive of progressions and regressions, continuities and major breaks, but not an evolution in the strict sense, in other words, the possibility of a descent the degrees of modification of which depend on external conditions. Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A and B), not in terms of production (from A to x)” (234).
Natural History conceives of the relationships between animals in two ways: series and structure.
In the case of a series, I say a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series.
This is an analogy of proportion.
In the case of a structure, I say a is to b as c is to d; and each of these relationships realizes after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to gills as the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]
This is an analogy of proportionality.
In the case of series, we have a set of resemblances that lead out in difference from each other; this is an inherently structuralist mindset mirroring the linguistic models of value and difference as seen in Saussure. This requires imaginary relations for Deleuze and Guattari, a filling in of gaps perhaps, imposed meaning. Only this way can we draw assumptions that perhaps the Saiga, the Tapir, the Elephant may share some commonality. In the second, an understanding of functionality is required; we create imagined relations based on the similar functions that molar organs undertake. They don’t seem to like this either, believing that it creates the illusion of a functional unity that groups of organisms progress towards. A kind of biological determinism perhaps. The main problem is that in the characterisation of relationships between animals by series and structure is conceive of nature as “an enormous mimesis”, “either in the form of a chain of beings perpetually imitating one another, progressively and regressively, and tending toward the divine higher term they all imitate by graduated resemblance, as the model for and principle behind the series; or in the form of a mirror Imitation with nothing left to imitate because it itself is the model everything else imitates, this time by ordered difference” (235). In conceptions like this, it strikes me that we are only able to conceptualise animals, plants, organisms, within the parameters of Vorstellung (Schopenhauer) - that is, as dependent on a cognising subject rather than as any indicator of reality.
The Memories of a Bergsonian are constructed to remedy some of this; to convince us of the existence of “very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human” (237). Deleuze and Guattari - or the Bergsonian - immediately start to tell us of vampires and how structuralism is designed in such a way as to deny the existence of any such things for when it “encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation from the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony” (237). The authors feel that while we can always try to explain things such as vampires; becomings that is; through structuralist terms of series and systems, this leaves us no room to try and understand the phenomena, the irreducible dynamisms, that things that we constitute as or by myth can enact on the world. There must be room for a third method. Herein we begin to get a definition of a ‘becoming’. Actually what we’re about to get is a whole host of things that a becoming is not, and the rest is up to us.
A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification.
Cool. Not myths or perceived resemblances.
Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real
Okay, definitely got it. Becomings are definitely real.
But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are.
…Definitely real… but also, the human doesn’t really become an animal. And it’s definitely not imitation or an actual change in being.
… So what is real about becoming?
“What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes”. So this is typical of Deleuze and Guattari: it’s not so much what things are or rather what they do. A becoming is verbal; it is a transitive action - temporal and spatial (they will go deeper into this later in the chapter) - of partnership/inspiration/unity/symbiosis/transformation with another entity instantiated as real only in the moment of its temporospatiality. The constitutive parties are not a becoming rather they manifest becoming. In this way, Deleuze and Guattari are able to say things like:
“Becoming can and should be qualified as be- coming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becom- ing of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first.
They finish up ‘The Memories of a Bergsonian’ by denying that this is an evolution, yet instead allowing that it is, in fact, an evolution between heterogenous things. And this is exactly how they deal with Darwinian evolution in Geology of Morals - I’ll expand on it more there. They propose the term ‘involution’ for evolutions of this nature, seeming to suggest a root from the word ‘involve’. This is an important and useful thing to conceptualise because it accounts for two things that standard linear conceptions of the relationships between organisms do not capture: that “the animal is defined not by characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations that vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu” and that “movement occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by transversal communications between heterogeneous populations”. Essentially, if we just look at the way that genes are passed down, we miss the point, selective pressures: the intermingling of predator, prey, climate, disaster, disease, landscape, so-forth, all create large assemblages of indiscriminate, synchronic, connections. “Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree.”
[I might posit a definition of becoming after we deal with THE SORCERER]
Some revised notes, two diagrams, some choice quotations.
So, like each plateau in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus this one has an overrarching theme; well --- sort of. This is our ontology chapter - but it's also about rocks, geology, the evolution of life on earth, and.. yeah, it's framed as a lecture//academic conference between an Arthur Conan Doyle character and two evolutionary biologists; Georges Cuvier (I don't think it's Frederic Cuvier) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Yeah... it's something.
This being said, as jargon-heavy and inaccessible as this chapter is. I don't think it is necessarily that conceptually difficult with a lot of what it proposes. The concepts are bizarre, but not incomprehensible.
A good way to start is by looking at our classical conceptions of metaphysics in the West.
This diagram is taken from Professor Alexander Galloway's website; linked here. It is an incredibly useful visualisation paired the following explanation.
Out of the genitive an identity appears. This ‘identity’ is in the dative case; or perhaps more accurately lative? “Under the influence of English, which uses the preposition "to" for (among other uses) both indirect objects (give to) and directions of movement (go to), the term "dative" has sometimes been used to describe cases that in other languages would more appropriately be called lative.” - Wikipedia. Equivalent to Heidegger’s Dasein it means “being there” - it means ‘presence’. It is not just of the structure, it is on the structure.
Lastly we have intention, orientation, direction. Analagous to Heidegger’s Entwurf (Projection) - the very experience of being - the identity receives direction. It becomes the arrow, taking the accusative case; a necessary object. It constitutes other objects by way of its own action.
Professor Galloway summarises their relationship well, so I'll quote him here.
"The circle, the dot, and the arrow define what it means for an entity to be given into a world and gain a spot and orientation within it. The entirety matters most. When considered in isolation, each exhibits a specific, absolute condition. The absolute circle conjures all manner of spiritualisms and theologies, from grace and essence to affirmation as such. The absolute datum furnishes the journalism of the world, from empiricism and pragmatism to all the other sciences of description. The absolute orientation produces a multitude of machines, each mobilizing and processing according to its own alignment.
These are the three in absolute isolation. But when taken together, the circle, the dot, and the arrow form something remarkable. They form philosophy. They form the world. They form the human being."
So Deleuze and Guattari hate this. Unfortunately though they feel that they need to account for these old myths of form, content, substance, and expression. Fuck Socrates. Fuck Oedipus. Fuck the Platform. It's time to deoedipalise ontology; let's go fracking.
I won't do a commentary on the entire plateau here. These are my notes - so I'll probably outline some interesting points and terminology before examining the necessary change in metaphysics that these developments entail.