Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

16 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

gists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on 

the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantita-

tive: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term 

memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or pho-

tograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or 

immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time 

after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multipli-

city. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not 

that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not 

grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term 

Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even 

if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. 

Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the 

instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. 

Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and trans-

lates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat, 

in an "untimely" way, not instantaneously.

 

The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating 

the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we con-

sider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of opposed segment 

for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a 

"link dipole," in contrast to the "unit dipoles" formed by spokes radiating 

from a single center.

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 Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the 

radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplici-

ties. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not 

get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with cen-

ters of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized 

memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives infor-

mation from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along 

preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information 

science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of 

thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre 

Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing "the imagery of 

command trees" (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that 

"accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving 

arborescent structures privileged status.... The arborescent form admits of 

topological explanation.... In a hierarchical system, an individual has only 

one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior.... The channels of 

transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the 

individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place" (signifiance and 

subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has 

reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one—of what we call the radicle

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 17

 

type—because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in 

fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the 

famous friendship theorem: "If any two given individuals in a society have 

precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the 

friend of all the others." (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual 

friend is. Who is "the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, 

the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the 

initial axioms." Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the .pMosopher as 

he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes 

itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I 

know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theo-

rems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the 

radicle solution, the structure of Power.

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To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, 

finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neigh-

bor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals 

are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such 

that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result syn-

chronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states 

replaces topology, and "the graph regulating the circulation of information 

is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.. . . There is no reason for 

the graph to be a tree" (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The 

problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n 

individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is 

to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of 

states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or 

guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a 

central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic 

multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying 

automaton as an "asocial intrusion."

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 Under these conditions, n is in fact 

always  n  - 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition, 

centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode 

of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or 

they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally 

susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but 

not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an exam-

ple again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchi-

cal graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the 

phallus-tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation 

and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it 

bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the uncon-

scious. Psychoanalysis's margin of maneuverability is therefore very

 

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