The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface
extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When
rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst:
potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is
crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one
unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.
1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a
rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very
different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and
proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome
is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every
nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political,
economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs
but also states of things of differing status. COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES
OF ENUNCIATION (df: original italicized) function directly within MACHINIC
ASSEMBLAGES; it is not impossible to make a radical break between signs
and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to
what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is
still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage
and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the categorical
S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker
of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct
sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb
phrase (first dichotomy...). Our criticism of these linguistic models
is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are
not abstract enough, that they do not reach the ABSTRACT MACHINE that
connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements,
to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of
the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between
semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative
to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like
a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also
perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in
itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects,
patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener,
any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language
is, in Weinrich's words, "an essentially heterogeneous reality." There
is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within
a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric,
a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows,
along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.
It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural
elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for
roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not
a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary,
can analyze language only be decentering it onto other dimensions and
other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a
function of impotence.
Cached
Wildcat2030 wildcat on 05 Oct 10"Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the body without organs and the rhizome have been central to the academic discourse that has grown alongside the Internet itself, almost from its inception. But, I will argue, they've been used in the wrong way: firstly, the concepts themselves have been misread, their basic conceptual matrices misunderstood; and secondly, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts have been deployed in an essentially conservative way, looking more to reify and endorse the status quo rather than to challenge it. In this regard I am more troubled by the basically sympathetic applications of Deleuze and Guattari's work which water down the concepts and dilute their critical potency, than I am by the antipathetic responses to their ideas, which simply reject them out of hand. What follows then, which is plainly offered in a corrective spirit, should be understood as being in broad agreement with the notion that Deleuze and Guattari's work is relevant to an analysis of contemporary culture's appropriation of new technology and broad disagreement with the way their work has hitherto been deployed towards that end. "
