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 approximate
characteristics of the rhizome.
1 and 2. Principles
of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be. This is very different 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 dichotomy.
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 differing status. COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES
OF ENUNCIATION (df: original italicized) function directly within
MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES; it is not impossible to make a radical break
between signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine
itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language,
it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes
of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality,
the categorical 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 collective 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, 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: there is no
language in itself, nor are there any linguistic 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 Weinrich's words, "an essentially
heterogeneous reality." 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. It is always possible
to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking
not fundamentally different from a search for roots. 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 be decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers.
A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.
3. Principle of multiplicity:
it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive,
"multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to the
One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and
world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities
for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object,
or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort
in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity
has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and
dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity
changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in
number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet strings, as a rhizome or
multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer
but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in
other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or
rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that ITS
MULTIPLICITY resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into
the text. Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave.
And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated...The
interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in
myth to the Fates or Norns." An assemblage is precisely this
increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity 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 Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece,
he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical
points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate. The number
is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their
emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity
that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of
the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We
do not have units (unitÉs) of measure, only multiplicities
or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity (unitÉ) 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). The point is that a rhizome
or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available
a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that
is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.
All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy
all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a PLANE OF CONSISTENCY
of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane"
increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities
are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight
or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and
connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid)
is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the
reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively
fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the
multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility
and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single
plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of
dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on
a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet:
lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups,
social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken
chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations,
always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore,
are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted
by the interiority of a substance or subject. The war machine-book
against the State apparatus-book. FLAT MULTIPLICITIES OF N DIMENSIONS
are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by indefinite
articles, or rather by partitives (SOME couchgrass, SOME of a rhizome...).
4. Principle of asignfying
rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or
cutting across a single structure. 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. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according
to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified,
attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which
it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary
lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part
of a rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is
why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary
form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line
of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations
that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier,
attributions that reconstitute a subject -- anything you like, from
Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals
contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couchgrass
is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an active
and temporary selection, which must be renewed.
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes
of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught
up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image,
a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image.
The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the
orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid
by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements,
form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp,
reproducing the image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure,
etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata -- a parallelism
between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates
an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else
entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code,
surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming,
a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each
of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term
and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink
and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization
ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an
exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed
by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated
by anything signifying. Remy Chauvin expresses it will: "the
APARALLEL EVOLUTION of two beings that have absolutely nothing to
do with each other." More generally, evolutionary schemas may
be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under
certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit
itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can
take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species,
but not without bringing with it "genetic information" from
the first host (for example, Benveniste and Todaro's current research
on a type C virus, with its double connection to baboon DNA and the
DNA of certain domestic cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer
follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most
differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the
heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to
another. Once again, there is APARALLEL EVOLUTION, of the baboon and
the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of the other
(a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean the cat "plays"
baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses
cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says,
transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures,
fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous
to those of "the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the
Middle Ages." Transversal communications between different lines
scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or
even submolecular, particle with which we are allied. We evolve and
die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary
diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome
is an anti-genealogy.
The same applies to the book and the world: contrary
to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world.
It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution
of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization
of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the
book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if its
capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies
on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.
The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon
reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates
nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink
on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that
it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its
own line of flight, follows its "aparallel evolution" through
to the end. The wisdom of the plants: even with something else --
with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect
under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.).
"Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us."
Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay
the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most
abstract and tortuous of lines of N dimensions and broken directions.
Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by
delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around
successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new
circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located
outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome,
increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of
flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering
the entire plane of consistency. "Go first to your old plant
and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain
must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the
runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find
the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All
the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later...you
can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse
from each point along the way." Music has always sent out lines
of flight, like so many "transformational multiplicites,"
even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that
is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations
is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.
5 and 6. Principle
of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any
structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic
axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal
unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure
is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate
constituents, while the unity of the product passes into another,
transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not constitute
a departure from the representative model of the tree, or root --
pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example, Chomsky's "tree"
is associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its
own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest
form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure
are above all infinitiely reproducible principles of TRACING. All
of tree logic is logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics
as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself
representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along
a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its
goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective
relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there form
the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It
consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting
axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes
tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.
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 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 organs,
the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency.
It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable
in all ot is dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible
to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any
kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.
It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed
as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most
important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple
entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes
maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway
and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple
entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to
the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing
always involves an alleged "competence." Unlike psychoanalysis,
pyschoanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement
to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous
tracings of the stages on that axis or the consituents of that structure),
schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name
is given to it -- divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural,
hereditary, or syntagmatic...
Excerpt from:
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
By Deleuze & Guattari
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
