[lbo-talk] Rhizomatic?

Eric Beck rayrena at realtime.net
Fri Nov 11 15:07:52 PST 2005


Zachary Levenson wrote:


>Is anyone familiar with this term? I encountered it in reading
>Hardt and Negri's 'Empire':
>
>"The constitution of a global market organized along a disciplinary
>model is traversed by tensions that open mobility in every
>direction; it is a transversal mobility that is rhizomatic rather
>than arborescent" (253).
>
>I believe it comes from Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus,' but I
>am not clear as to what it entails, i.e., why they select rhizome as
>metaphor rather than any other omni-directional mobility. Any
>theory-heads on list?

To add to what others have said, rhizome (which is the subject of the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, not Anti-Oedipus) is more than a metaphor; it's also a method and a tactic. A method to get beyond, or go around, dialectics and subject-object dualism, in favor of "multiplicities": "It is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, 'multiplicity,' that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or 'return' in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions...."

Rhizome is a tactic in that its myriad (inter)connections allow for an endless number of possibilities for subverting, bypassing, attacking (and of course affirming, embracing, defending) power, ie, capitalism and the state: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines." D&G point out that there are many fortresses and ways to attack. Or as Dennis R. said, You need to make yourself as ubiquitous as the market.

I suppose this is the reason they preferred rhizome over mobilities. But also because a rhizome furrows, it works "underground," and because it can both set down roots and extend shoots, whatever is to its advantage.

Anyway, there's a long excerpt from the rhizome chapter here: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/deleuze.html

Eric



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