Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

6 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by 

demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive 

totality. Take William Burroughs's cut-up method: the folding of one text 

onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like 

a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under 

consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity contin-

ues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can 

also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern meth-

ods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid 

in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of 

totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, 

dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is 

offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity 

are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly 

angelic and superior unity. Joyce's words, accurately described as having 

"multiple roots," shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, 

only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's 

aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic 

unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as 

much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dual-

ism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural 

reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed 

in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. 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 sup-

plementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, 

but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than 

root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being 

fragmented. At any rate, 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 clever-

ness 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 sub-

tracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write 

at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhi-

zome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. 

Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be 

rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant 

life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in 

their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their func-

 

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INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 7

 

tions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome 

itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all 

directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each 

other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, 

or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct 

feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approxi-

mate characteristics of the rhizome.

 

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhi-

zome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very differ-

ent from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic 

tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichot-

omy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a 

linguistic feature: 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 dif-

fering status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly 

within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break 

between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to 

confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about lan-

guage, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of 

assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the cate-

gorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a 

marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically 

correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a 

verb phrase (first dichotomy. . .). Our criticism of these linguistic models 

is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not 

abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects 

a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collec-

tive assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social 

field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic 

chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sci-

ences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating 

very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, 

gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any lin-

guistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized 

languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a 

homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words, 

"an essentially heterogeneous reality."

1

 There is no mother tongue, only a 

power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. 

Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. 

It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train 

tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.

2

 It is always possible to break a language

 

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