Rise of the Rhizome

“Introduction: Rhizome” from A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discusses the relationships between objects, specifically focusing on the repeated appearances of linear progression to describe how things come about from something else. Deleuze and Guattari firstly challenge the conventional ideas about a book and what can be gained from reading it. A quote from the passage challengingly states, “Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”(407) This quote claims that the ideas or “organs” upon which the “body” of the book is composed are not truly original, or ideological in nature, but instead take from others in an endless cycle of citations to create literature as we think of it. To oppose this binary way of thinking that one cannot exist without the other and one leads from the other, Guattari and Deleuze propose the idea of the Rhizome. The rhizome is described as “an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture offshoots.” The rhizome is further described as not a means of reproduction, but when it becomes other things that it is more of a continuance of itself, and never does it stop being what it inherently is. Very little can be discerned from the authors besides the fact that they are radical thinkers, who challenge the extremely dominant Western idea of linear progression, i.e. left to right, 1,2,3,4,5, you read books from top to bottom, front to back. It is possible that these men are foreign or raised in a different culture if you make a giant stereotypical leap from their names but besides that, little is revealed about them. Deleuze and Guattari don’t have much at stake when they are arguing their beliefs but with drastically different ideas like theirs, it is important to be concise and say what you want to say correctly, the first time, in order to be taken seriously.

I will be the first to admit that this reading, one of the shortest readings that we have had all semester, was incredibly difficult for me to understand the first time through. I had to reread and even re-reread several passages to understand (I hope) what was being said. My first response to this reading was the Deleuze and Guattari were being controversial and tearing down widely held ideas just for the sake of it. I love to read and the after the first page of ripping my beloved books apart, I was a bit annoyed with the reading. However upon finishing the passage I found that I had to agree, at least partially, with what Deleuze and Guattari were proposing and that creating things to follow a rhizomatous structure could quite possibly be a great knew way to approach things. Already I believe things like links to other sites and parts of webpages function as rhizomes because they just transport you to different parts of the whole, without any mandated linear fashion (for some sites). I do not believe that the idea of a rhizome is so different from the linear thinking Deleuze and Guattari make a strong effort to discredit. Essentially all of the offshoots, roots, and leaves start from one place, the central bulb and grow outward and away. They do not become separate entities and are just a different form of the same central thing but neither do these offshoots and stems come from nothingness. They begin somewhere. I also wanted to touch on the criticism of dichotomy that Deleuze and Guattari make, mainly that even while they attempted to point out the flaws of dichotomy, they could not help but use dichotomies. But on the other hand that fact may just prove their point, that we are only able to describe things in terms of others, as opposites of others in some cases, and that this should not be the case.

Some questions for thought are:
1. Do you think there is something wrong, or flawed about linear thinking?
2. If we were not to describe things by their relation to other things, how would we describe them? Is there a certain point we can get to and then we tread upon the line of defining things in terms of another?
3. Think of and explain a practical use of a rhizome-like structure in your life. What is it? How do you apply this idea?