nici /rhizome

A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Starts with a rumination on books, as a collection of lines of articulation and segmentry. This is a precursor to the concept of rhizome, the book isn't a linear passage or a branching structure but rather a weave that can be entered or accessed from any opening. It is a plateau, not the edge of a rise or fall, and we start from the center. Writing is the measure of something,

the book is the middle which shows us the tree

At the center is the difference between a tree and a rhizome, the tree is the result of binary logic, a branching always choosing between two possibilities and set paths from any point to another. This is all tied up in unity, the law of the book and the tree as the law of reflection. The one that becomes two, the branching.

Approximate Characteristics of the rhizome:

1 & 2) Principles of commenction and heterogeneity

Any point can be connected to any other and must be, no direct rout but a plethora of ways to get from here to there. There is no rule of unity, no mother tounge.

3)Principle of Multiplicity

The rhizome as more than branching, not a multitude (with One still as its origin) but a multiplicity with no unifing source. Here we have Pupet & Master analogy, and "unity always opperates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered. Rhizome always occupy all of their dimensios.

4) Princile of asignifying rupture

The tangent is always a part of the rhizome, Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection which must be renewed. The wasp and the orchid, rhizome with viruses, viruses as causing a rhizome between us and animals, the book forms a rhizome with the world, deterritorialization and reterritorialization,

5 & 6) Principles of cartography and decalomania

A rhizome has no structure or generative model, no genetic axis or deep structure because that would imply the principle of tracing, of something that comes ready made. Rhizome is a map, as in oriented toward an experimenatation in contact, not a precise overcoding. A map as having many entryways.

Rupture the dualism we've been constructing, the rhizome vs. the tree the map vs. the tracing, put tracing always back onto the map to allow for possible lines of flight. Tracing injects redundancies and propogates them, a map allows for possibilities and productive outgrowths.

Short term vs. long term memory

short term as unstructured, long term as arborescent, they do not address the same thing

• trunk as opposed segment
• the opposition of centered - acentered
• Schizoanalysis treats the unconscious as an acentered system and thus producing instead of assuming a subconscious
• West vs. East == tree vs. weed?
• America and capitalism the great connector that brings west and east into circle?

Imporant! Root & Tree are not in opposition to canal-rhizome ! We are back to the middle...

Back to my reading notes page.

Back to the main reading group schedule.