Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

1

2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and prolif-

erations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.

8

 

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not 

amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea 

of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal 

unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more 

like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents, 

while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and 

subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the repre-

sentative model of the tree, or root—pivotal taproot or fascicles (for exam-

ple, Chomsky's "tree" is associated with a base sequence and represents the 

process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the 

oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound struc-

ture are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree 

logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanaly-

sis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized 

into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed 

within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to 

maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious 

that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory 

and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure 

or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates 

and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.

 

The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a 

map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; 

it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map 

from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in 

contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed 

in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between 

fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum 

opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a 

part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimen-

sions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It 

can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an 

individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived 

of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Per-

haps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it 

always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhi-

zome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of 

flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map 

has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes 

back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the trac-

 

---

I

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 13

 

ing always involves an alleged "competence." Unlike psychoanalysis, psy-

choanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a 

genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous trac-

ings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure), 

schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is 

given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, 

or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of 

the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content 

to make ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad 

daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a 

desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst 

totally misconstrues.)

9

 Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a 

genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for 

problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politi-

cally, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.

 

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps 

to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be 

traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and 

sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of 

redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multipli-

city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, 

mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu-

tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver-

gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or 

outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac-

ing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous 

one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing 

reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by 

selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other 

restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always 

creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the 

map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and 

radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities accord-

ing to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has gen-

erated, structurahzed the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing 

something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is 

so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the trac-

ing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, 

incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis 

and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the 

unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies 

(it's not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).

 

---