Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

1

4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psycho-

analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING 

HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he 

began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and 

guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, 

then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents' bed, 

they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). 

Freud explicitly takes Little Hans's cartography into account, but always 

and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what 

Melanie Klein did to Little Richard's geopolitical maps: she developed 

photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the 

axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhi-

zome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after 

every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, 

arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire 

moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercus-

sions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts 

on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

 

That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsym-

metrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots 

or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the 

unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the 

family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.; 

how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family, 

be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother's bed; then 

how Professor Freud's intervention assures a power takeover by the 

signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the 

child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the 

becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses 

must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible 

lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the 

rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership, 

fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground, 

continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny's method: map the 

gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the 

same child, for several different children.

10

 If it is true that it is of the 

essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausi-

ble that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assum-

ing the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any 

Manichaean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take dead 

ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a 

foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse,

 

---

I

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 15

 

rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational 

operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in 

spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself 

directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and 

make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, 

rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of 

deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; 

conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a 

rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses 

implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or 

aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, 

the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic 

element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going. 

Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to 

burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel. 

An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, 

synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging 

the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, 

ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate 

themselves from the "tracing," that is, from the dominant competence of 

the teacher's language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of 

power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky's 

syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhi-

zome.

11

 To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem 

to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but 

put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing 

in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of 

arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Noth-

ing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and 

aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city 

entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility 

connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. 

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified 

matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not assure the connection 

of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role 

of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic 

microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the 

brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a 

whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system"). 

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much 

more a grass than a tree. "The axon and the dendrite twist around each 

other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the 

thorns."

12

 The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiolo-

 

---