If D&G are affirming the rhizome over the root-tree, which, by the end of the intro to Thousand Plateaus it seems they are, I wonder if this is as subversive as they make it out to be. At times it sounds like ‘stick it to power, become rhizome, don’t let yourself get hierarchized.’ Yet, apropos of the ‘is the internet a rhizome?’ thread, it seems to me everything is becoming rhizome anyway – the internet, corporate organization, military organization, guerilla advertising, etc. There’s an interesting section in the introduction to Virilio’s “Speed and Politics” that describes an IDF Paratroop commander who is devotee of D&G’s writings on nomadology and deterritorialization: “In his holster, their richly nuanced theories of emergent antagonisms become tactical technologies for a newly sophisticated apparatus of state violence and rhizomatic repression” (Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation, 21).
D&G’s affirmation of the rhizome at the end of Thousand Plateus became increasingly problematic when I reached this passage in Anti-Oedipus (I read them in reverse): “The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value” (Desiring-Machines 35). In AO, the process of deterritorialization they affirm in TP is associated with the capitalist machine, and the arborescent forces they (sometimes) decry are secondary, running a holding pattern against deterritorialization. Have they passed from a descriptive project in AO to a prescriptive one in TP, is there even such a clear distinction in the individual works? If so, what to make of that shift: subversion, or simply making a virtue out of necessity? I guess this comes down to my question in my first post: are we supposed to choose to become rhizome, or are we, along with the structures amongst which we live, undergoing a larger process of rhizomatization?
Help with becoming-rhizome pt. II
By aha - Posted on November 3rd, 2007
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In AO and in TP there does seem to be this sort of dynamic border-warring between schizoid/rhizomatic and repressive/arborescent energies. In the AO passage you quoted, capitalism 'runs a holding pattern' against schizo-deterritorialization by 'instituting or restoring all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities...States, nations, families' (34); in TP, arborescent culture runs more or less the same holding pattern against rhizo-deterritorialization via long-term memory: 'Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process: it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates...' (16)
I don't think that the dynamism here means that everything is being rhizomatized, or that we don't need to choose to become rhizomes, or that we can just lie back and ride the rhizome wave. In addition to the arborescent/repressive structures that are still in place (and arguably culturally dominant, even now, in the wake of the Internet [!]), rhizomes themselves are susceptible to sudden 'massifications,' sudden formations of root systems or hierarchies: so e.g. even if everything 'looked' rhizomatic, if capitalism had reached its 'limit' and everything had been rhizomatized, if there were no more families or nationalities, just people moving freely throughout packs and territories, arborescent tendencies would still manifest (and obviously vice versa as well). Which is only to say that it takes a conscious effort to move only in lines, to multiply and form Harawayan 'elective affinities' and rhizomorphous relationships, rather than be fixed by arborescent culture at singular filial, racial, social, or national identity-points.
There's a moment later in TP that I think sort of gets at this point, when D+G write that one can say 'I' while still operating on a different, multiplicitied regime, and that one can avoid 'I' stringently and still be operating as a rigid subject.
--Guattari Hero