Hooray for the rhizome! While I cannot exactly claim I understood Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) referent in “Introduction: Rhizome” (was it language, was it The Book, was it grasses and plants??) I did thoroughly enjoy the idea of the rhizome. I read it as a very empowering, grassroots idea for how to begin to tackle the problems we are so entrenched in today, and specifically the very relevant issues of media consolidation currently being discussed by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission).
D&G lay out the difference between arborescent outcroppings (what they write dominates Western bureaucratic setups and our very thought process) and their preferred rhizomatic schema. Essentially, they boil it down to the difference between forests/trees versus gardens/deserts/oasis. (Yes, it is not this simple, but I think I’m at least grasping part of it here in my over-simplification.) The arborescent is based upon a hierarchical notion involving roots, stratified organization, and clear-cut unifying aspects. The rhizomatic identity is based on the idea of a tangle of lines (NOT points, as D&G so emphatically write) that can be accessed through any locale, that can be cut and pieced back together (via old lines, OR new ones), and that thrives on heterogeneity.
Simply put, I believe the solutions to media catastrophes (and perhaps many other quandaries) could be manifested if we were somehow able to navigate away from the hierarchical fashion of trees and adopt the more diversity-proliferating rhizome plan of attack. Ambitious? Yes. Impossible? Hmmmm. How do we begin to restructure our very conceptions of the world? And more importantly (as perhaps Jameson would argue) HOW in the hell can we reconfigure the (arborescent) cultural logic of late capitalism (a structure built entirely in the context hierarchical multi-national corporations)?????
To return to the idea of rhizomes saving the future of media from tree-lovers (in the D&G sense) like Rupert Murdoch, for those of you who don’t know, the FCC is in the process of debating whether or not they should continue to regulate media ownership. (For example: currently it is not possible to own a print media outlet and a broadcast station like radio or TV in the same region, but the FCC is reconsidering this, which would be horrible for smaller, local media producers as they would be bought up and wiped out by larger companies. Goodbye independent media, hello mainstream conglomerations. Yuck.) Thus, I think a shift to the rhizome would be fantastic. If we could enact media justice (a true re-structuring of the way the media infrastructure is owned—i.e. put in into the hands of the marginalized) and make it more rhizomatic, I think media content would be much more diverse, appropriate to the communities it targets, and much much more expressive of real issues.
Any one have any ideas about how to do this??????
I heard an interesting piece on Democracy Now! today about the FCC dealings (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/01/1344254#transcript)
All that the speakers on the show could come up with in terms of how to put media infrastructure into the hands of minorities and women (and thereby create more of a rhizomatic structure of media-producing ownership models) was to offer tax cuts. Is that what it comes down to? Tax cuts?
I know there's a better solution, I just don't know how to get at it without there being an ENTIRE reversion from trees to grasses on all the levels of our society.
One crucial aspect of rhizomic networks, beyond their structural constitution at any given time, is how their flows and intensities are channelled (or, more importantly, are left un-channelled), which is to say, how the rhizome is able to structurally evolve according to contextual necessity. This is precisely what makes the rhizome a potent concept for grassroots politics: its connections are forged and continually re-forged, de-territorialized and then re-territorialized, not in the interest of Truth, Freedom, or any other Western mythology, but rather political strategy. "Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities!" What they mean here, I think, is that becoming-rhizomatic is not about maintaining multiple static connections, or even affirming multiple truth-claims; instead, the production of rhizomes centers on the cultivation of one's ability to make multiple, ever-changing connections, or to affirm multiple truth-claims. In other words, the power of the rhizome lies in potentiality, not the ephemeral actualities discernable at any singular moment in time.
That being said, I would say that your question can be answered concisely and categorically: tax cuts will not do the trick - precisely because they target connections themselves instead of the capacity to make new connections. Top-down regulation can ensure greater market acess for under-represented groups, which, while guaranteeing certain negative liberties (they won't be instantly gobbled up by mainstream competitors), achieves very little in the way of positive liberty (there is no reason to assume that tax cuts would increase their capability for producing media rhizomes). Real solutions need to focus on the flows and intensities that define the evolution of networks - i.e., as you say above, completely "re-structuring the way the media infrastructure is owned" such that distributions of power are sustainably de-centralized. In other words, we need to find ways to ensure that small-scale publishers resist subsumption by huge media conglomerates right now, but also - far more importantly - to ensure that their ability to forge new connections (between, e.g., like-minded activists around the world and other free-thinking citizens) remains intact. What needs to be defended is thus not necessarily this or that small-scale publisher, so much as the rhizomatic flows that define their positionality within the power-webs of transnational capitalism. We need to make opposition to large media corporations productive instead of simply reactive; much opposition is, after all, hopelessly arborescent.
In this sense, I have hope for the digital production and distribution of intellectual/creative/political/etc. content. While the Internet is not an inherently rhizomatic medium by any stretch (see, for instance, http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/) movements such as net neutrality are helping to safeguard transparency and decentralization in terms of both production and access. And here, especially as the line between production and access blurs to the point of indistinction (blogging, for instance, entails both the production and access of content), legitimately rhizomatic possibilities emerge.
If their is market for a more rhizomic media outlet, then it will be produced. The very reason it has yet to exist may not be because it hasn't been envisioned, or tax cuts haven't been put in place, but because the break is such a stretch from popular culture and thought that the demand isn't there. Great ideas can go by the wayside without a great enough following, just ask the guys who invented beta tapes, or whoever loses the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray battle. The idea of a rhizome plan of industry and culture has its place (the internet), but not in traditional media. The lack of a center or reference point of the rhizome makes it next to impossible to spread on a large scale in every industry. The rhizome is a great idea, especially for literature or artwork, but I seem it being limited in nearly every other aspect of our culture. But, I also am adverse to change in general and appreciate my simple way of life as it is, so take that as my bias in this particular case. But I might also be speaking for the general public when I make that type of comment...
I agree with you that the rhizome may only be able to hold so much power in our culture. The idea of a book as a rhizome is fantastic. I especially enjoyed D&G's passage towards the end: "We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of pleateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateua he was going to tackle." But beyond art, how can the rhizome successfully operate? The internet is a visual example and yet, look at China. The peoples' internet activity is constantly monitored and youtube and wikipedia are blocked sites. There are indeed many similarities between the internet and a rhizome. The internet does operate by a multiplicity principle, but I believe it is far from being nonhierarchical. There will always be people who don't have access to the internet or the server they do have is ridiculously slow. It is impossible for every user to have fair and equal access to the internet. I thouroughly appreciate the concept of a rhizome but how can it truly function in today's society? Tax cuts seem to be the answer for everything these days but they don't produce much progress. How can we ever reach the point where there is no General or central automaton?