In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari very often describe their multiplicity of concepts in spatial terms: a recording surface covering a body without organs, points of disjunction forming circles on the body without organs, machines that are adjoined next to the desiring-machine. The rhizome is always in the middle, between things. All these prepositions, off-shoots and parabolic sweeps serve to let the reader work out these concepts in space, a picture of machines in motion, gears inter-locked. I can't recall other authors that we've read that have presented their arguments and concepts so spatially (perhaps Derrida, nominally: the decentered structure). (Of course, space has been a main concern of previous authors--Harvey, Soja, Jameson…more on this a few sentences on.)
Most significantly, D&G's rhizome is presented as a map, pertains to a map (ATP, 12 + 21)--it is conceptualized spatially, a plane of consistency. The only way I can fully comprehend the complex relationships in a rhizome is through the construction of a map. It's striking that the authors' rallying call is for an acentered system and concept dependent on space. Perhaps by calling for the new order of rhizomes, they're calling for a new way that we consider space. Although Jameson also points to the map as a means to return agency to an individual, D&G go much farther. Cognitive mapping doesn't reconceptualize space or require us to reconstruct space; we just place a little thumbtack at our place on the map. The thumbtack signifies a subject. For D&G, one can't/shouldn't place one point on the rhizomic map ("there are no points or positions in a rhizome" [ATP 8])--it is directions in motion, lines in flight. A subject is deterritorialized and reterritorialized, shifting. In this rhizomic space, we can create new planes.
I was wondering while reading these (especially ATP) if it's problematic that the rhizome system must be mapped in order to be comprehended. Perhaps I'm overemphasizing the spatial aspects of the rhizmic map; perhaps it doesn't have to be mapped or comprehended spatially as long as we maintain a comprehension of our deterritorialized status and our complex, shifting relationships…
maps
By oh brother - Posted on 4 November 2007 - 1:53am.
I wouldn't underestimate Jameson's interest in spatial reconceptualization/reconstruction: he routinely suggests that we evolve 'postmodern organs,' ones that would be capable of perceiving the new hyperspaces of postmodern architecture and multinational capital. So to 'cognitively map' really is a radically spatial endeavor then, insofar as doing so 'achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing' (54) that spatiality.
You're still right, though, that there seems to be a fundamental difference between Jameson's map and D+G's map. And I think you're even right about what that difference is, namely that Jameson wants in some way to freeze or arrest a network, to 'trace' spatial and multinational-capital relationships - rather than truly 'map' them (in the strong D+G sense of that word) - and then thumbtack points onto the tracing.
Re the question about whether mapping or spatializing a rhizome is problematic, I don't think that it is, precisely because D+G's map does not, as Jameson's does, freeze the rhizome: in its openness, connectability, and reversibility, 'it is itself a part of the rhizome' (12).
--Guattari Hero
I agree with Guattari Hero that mapping/spatializing a rhizome is not problematic because of its open qualities. I was sometimes utterly confused in the description of the rhizome precisely because of these characteristics. Is there any conscise way to describe/understand it?