Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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0 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting 

under a tree; Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and 

Louis's tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it 

proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the 

Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration 

from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a 

quantification of power with immediate "quanta," where each person 

profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the 

reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty 

again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and 

rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; 

capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism 

by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them 

both—all for the worst.

 

At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical 

distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing 

that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierar-

chy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism 

between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no 

blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, 

and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations 

of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are 

anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, 

and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and 

canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a tran-

scendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the sec-

ond operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and 

outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise 

to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of 

a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a 

question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of 

a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up 

again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in 

order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly 

unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can 

only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approxima-

tion; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We 

invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dual-

ism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. 

Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had 

no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic 

formula we all seek—

PLURALISM 

= 

MONISM

—via all the dualisms that are

 

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I

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 21

 

the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever 

rearranging.

 

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees 

or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its 

traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into 

play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome 

is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that 

becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple 

derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not 

of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither 

beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and 

which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions 

having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of con-

sistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). When a mul-

tiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as 

well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a 

set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and 

biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only 

of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the 

line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after 

which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. 

These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the 

arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and 

positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: 

neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as 

tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, 

or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, 

capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, 

unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, con-

structed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, 

modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of 

flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In con-

trast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of 

communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, 

nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an 

organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation 

of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but 

also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural 

and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all 

manner of "becomings."

 

A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhi-

zome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to

 

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