The first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is very emblematic of French post-structuralism in that it’s not actually that conceptually complex but is easily confusing to read. Essentially D&G set up their central concept of the Rhizome and then spend the rest of the chapter elaborating it over and over from different angles, using different metaphors. This can become pretty overwhelming if you lose track of their central argument. So uh what’s a rhizome?
The rhizome is the central structural metaphor of ATP’s philosophy, and the book itself. Maybe the best way of describing it is that it’s about liberating the way we think about relationships among things that exist in the world. They discuss traditional either/or, this/that binary relationships as insufficient and oppressive, then discuss the idea of the “tree” structure which is often presented as a solution to the simplicity of the binary.
They point out that the structure of the tree, where things branch off from central trunks or roots, is not truly liberatory because while it presents more, it does not actually do something different. Movement between each point on the tree is still linear, there is still a hierarchy of nodes (to put it into, for example, modern queer theory terms, expanding the gender binary to a gender trinary is not liberation).
As an antidote, D&G propose the idea of the rhizome. Botanically a rhizome is an underground root network that can sprout into multiple plants, similar in nature to mycellium. Here they use it as a metaphor for the idea of an unordered, non-hierarchical system of relationships where instead of being yoked into structures of either/or and superior/inferior, every point connects arbitrarily to every other point.
Think about it like this:
Not actually that complicated, right? And it makes sense, I think. It’s a very classical poststructural metaphysics. The idea that the very structures around knowledge and relation (motivated by capitalism, imperialism, etc.) constrain and repress us by yoking us into logics that limit our potential of becoming. We must explode out of this into something with fluid and shifting potential for continuous amorphous non-ordered relation.
Where it becomes confusing is the extremely systematic way the two work this concept, kind of unusual for this stream of philosophy. You could almost liken it to jazz the way they start from the theme of a rhizome, spin off somewhere to elaborate on some aspect of it, and then return to the core concept. And, as they discuss in this chapter, the book itself is intentionally trying to convey the rhizomatic structure, hence the circularity of themes, the non-linear nature of it, the freewheeling way it moves across concepts, etc.
I’m not gonna go through this whole chapter with a fine comb, that’s for people with more time than me, so here’s some bits and pieces that particularly stood out to me:
- Whiteness, Orientalism, Colonialism: This is very soundly a book written by two white French dudes. For the general detail of their theory there are some truly wild passages where they talk in incredibly broad and classically orientalist terms about “The East” as a site of mysterious, almost mystical rhizomatic potential compared to the west being more “logical” or “structured” or whatever. They also talk about the transformative potential of the American state which truly made me feel like I was losing my mind because it sounded kinda like how Marx discussed America but it’s 1979 now. I truly truly urge anyone interested in this era of French poststructuralism (or 20th century European philosophy in general) to read Habeas Viscus by Alexander Weheliye, which is an extremely good application of black feminist theory about the construction of the human to discuss how a lot of this type of philosophy is extremely reliant on white, imperial understandings of “person” even when it’s framing itself as subversive or critical. One of the most influential theory books on my outlook I’ve read; I really need to give it a reread.
- Lines of Flight: This is a key concept for their understanding of the rhizome. Similar to how Derrida recognizes the deconstructive tension in any binary relationship, lines of flight represent the potential, now matter how small, in all things to change and become multiplicities. This is important because it is vital to understand that everything (and we mean everything, this is a metaphysics remember) has the potential to become rhizomatic, to escape, to become. It is not about the nature of the thing but about how that potential is enacted. “Flight” is translated from a French word that, in addition to escape, can also mean “flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance” which helps add some more context to the term.
- Assemblages: Another key term in the work in general, and one particularly important for understanding the posthuman and metaphysic aspects of the philosophy. An assemblage is simply a way of thinking about things that, instead of imagining it as an essential core with other stuff perhaps built on top, imagines it as a constellation of lines and features, a mirco-rhizome. An important aspect is that assemblages are not themselves self-contained things that just have a multiplicity inside of them. It’s a systemic approach to thinking, essentially - that the interactions between features in the world form assemblages that move together. Interpersonal relationships are assemblages, political movements are assemblages, the wasp and orchid (see below) are assemblages but the interaction between the two is an assemblage as well.
- The Orchid and Wasp Thing: Okay. This is maybe the most famous metaphor in this book. They cite the drakaea orchid and thynnid wasp, wherein the orchid resembles a female wasp, prompting the male wasp to attempt to mate with it, thus spreading its pollen. D&G push against the idea that this is a one-sided manipulation, the orchid tricking the wasp by imitating its mate. Instead they see this as a process of mutual-becoming, the orchid and wasp both becoming something else, meeting in the middle, transforming into a mutual relationship they are both altered by. This is a key example of the mutually transformative relationships they see rhizomes as embodying, as well as their concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which basically entail an order being pulled apart or mutated (de) and then forming into a new order (re).
- Imperfection: D&G make an extremely vital point near the end of the chapter which is that while they’re trying their best, they ultimately don’t have much better of an idea how to write a truly rhizomatic book than anyone else, and they have very few examples of previous works that even come close to embodying the concept. This is very important because the procedural, perhaps unachievable nature of the rhizome is key. As you’ve probably gathered if you’ve come this far, becoming is an important word here and there’s a reason it’s becom_ing_. That is, it’s not about doing specific things to reach a specific point of full-actualization but about always working to remain slippery, to change, to follow and expand your lines of escape. Actualization as a process, not an end point. Whether or not a perfect rhizomaticity is actually achievable is ultimately beside the point.
- Books: Like a lot of post-structuralists, particularly Derrida, D&G are heavily rooted in literary criticism so they have a lot to say about books. You can read about all that but, I like one particular thing they bring up a few times: disavowing the idea of a book as an image of the world in favor of thinking of it as something that is part of an assemblage with the rest of the world. That is, books (and media in general) are not little hermetic pocket universes that mirror the world in miniature but are disconnected from it, but are things that interact with the outside world and are bound up in relations with it. The book is the wasp and the world is the orchid (or vice versa), in other words. This is similar to Derrida’s “there is no outside the text’ but I think the way they discuss it here is a bit more vivid conceptually.
- Language: They spend a truly incredible amount of time deriding Chomsky’s deep grammar, basically arguing that it’s an attempt to impose a tree structure on something that is much more fluid and rhizomatic. I don’t have strong feelings either way on that, but I like this quote about their pragmatics-oriented view on language a lot: “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 Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.”