Hopefully someone can explain this passage for me:
"China is the weed in the human cabbage patch... The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor..... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Everything falls back into a state of China." (pg 18)
My question is - what is a state of China? And why is China the weed?
state of China
By snaggle - Posted on November 4th, 2007
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Well, right before that, D+G ask, "Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree?" In that light, China might be a good weed. The rhizomic weed that will overtake the tree of hierarchy...Anyways, that quote is from the ever-so-subtle Henry Miller. Right after it, D+G question what historical or ahistorical entity Miller references. Afterwards they vaguely describe China's government as a rhizome. Unfortunately, the weed quote overshadows this.
"It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again" (20).
I read this as sort of the same orientalizing impulse that Foucault indulges in HoS, with that line that was like 'in the East they have an ars erotica practiced by occult sexual ninjas': here, the East did not fall prey to transcendentalism, to the seed-sowing God, to arborescence, but rather achieved immanence, the God of offshoots and replanting, rhizomes (with a non-reproductive, non-genital sexuality to boot).
But that's probably not a generous or charitable reading, and certainly seems to undercut by the ramekins post above mine.
--Guattari Hero
D&G are trying say that the tree has long been the privileged metaphor of the West, whereas the East has a close relation to the garden (tubers, grasses). They go on to list a variety of Eastern practices, from agriculture and animal raising to bureaucracy and religion, and compare them to those of the Western Europe (curiously, America bridges the two). Whereas the West creates geneologies of domestic animals, the East relegates them to the nomadic herds on the steppes, whereas the West cuts down trees to clear fields for these animals, the East cuts tubers to produce gardens (this connection seems a little sloppy to me), whereas the West is obsessed with the soul and transcendence, origin and eschatology, the East believes in a field of immanence and cycles of rebirth. I read their statement on (20) quoted above to be a guard against reading arborescence v. rhizomes as west v. east while still allowing them to show that the west has historically had a peculiar obsession with root-tree models.
-aha
The more generous, charitable reading.
--Guattari Hero
if you take aha's reading and apply it to discussions of agency and the subject. The language here that describes east/west reminded me of Guatarri Hero's post on agency in today's readings which was very helpful.
"Whereas the West is obsessed with the soul and transcendence, origin and eschatology, the East believes in a field of immanence and cycles of rebirth." The West gets off on being able to domesticate, to deforest, to feel in control of their environment, to be at the top of the tree (or, the root of it, I suppose) to exercise individual and collective man-agency over it, whereas the east seems confortable producing environments in which the process has a certain amount of freedom to evolve via whichever way the wind blows, re gardens, steppe herding. Whereas the west seems most interested in dominion, the east seems most interested in space. This seems a lot like the rhizomic/rhizmic consciousness question to me, that agency may not traced back to somewhere along the tree as branch of the soul, but is exercised as the result of several processes that are cultivated by us and the world around us.
Anyway, I hope I'm not dichotomizing too much here, but the agricultural/nature stuff helped me wrap my head around that question.