I'm surprised that no one has posted yet about D+G's segments on rhizomic consciousness. The key slogan ('Write with slogans!') is at 15 in TP: 'Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.'

The idea is basically that 'thought is not arborescent,' that there are not hierarchal, top-down, dichotomous decision-making processes, and that ther is not a 'central agent' who offshoots into 'root' or 'dendrite' systems - rather, the brain is a multiplicity, a probabalistic system, a rhizomic heterogeneity, the constituent parts of which conglomerate around intensities, and territories, until stabilizing in bulbs. What would a probabalistic, or rhizomic, consciousness look like? (Hint: My answer is going to look a lot like Dennett's answer, since he models a similar alternative consciousness [i.e. alternative to the centered subjectivity of Cartesian dualism], at length, in 'Consciousness Explained.') On this model, 'I' don't decide to do or think something so much as millions of cognitive processes do, cognitive processes that seethe over visual and auditory reports, over proprioceptive reports, memories, preverbal and prelingual scraps, urges, intentions, flurries of words or phrases, probability scenarios, etc., until they finally form coalitions around or accumulate or agglomerate on some particular thought, all of it simultaneous and parallel and 'rooted' (read 'tubered') as much in subterranean or subconscious space as it is at the conscious level.

That is, I may think that I have a tree in my head, but in fact it's a field of tallgrass.

The reason I'm surprised that no one latched onto rhizomic consciousness (well, except oh brother, and only briefly) is that we are now in the 'subjectivity' phase of the semester, and a multiplicity-consciousness would certainly seem to have peculiar effects on subject status (D+G open the book, for instance, with the observation that each of them is several, and that together they form a crowd). Does this make anyone worry about agency, or about interpellation, or any other of our favorite postmodern subjectivity categories? Does it not make sense to refer to a rhizome, even a rhizome-consciousness, as agentive? Does it seem hopeful that for an institution to interpellate a consciousness, it has to interpellate mob-consciousness, rhizome-consciousness, and not just one vulnerable centrality? Anything else?

Probably not.

--Guattari Hero