Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

18 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, 

always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats 

the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic net-

work of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely differ-

ent state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; 

Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an 

"acentered organization of a society of words." For both statements and 

desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to 

make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the uncon-

scious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is pre-

cisely this production of the unconscious.

 

It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western 

thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theol-

ogy, ontology, all of philosophy . ..: the root-foundation, Grund, racine, 

fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; 

the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced 

by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal 

raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire ani-

mal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the 

steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather 

than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individ-

ual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to 

closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agri-

culture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable 

individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals 

derived from a wide range of "clones." Does not the East, Oceania in par-

ticular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect 

to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the 

basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of tran-

scendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God 

who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths 

(replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).

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 Transcendence: a specif-

ically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is 

different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same 

plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the 

other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also 

from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bod-

ies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or 

the grass. Henry Miller: "China is the weed in the human cabbage patch. 

... The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor.... Of all the imaginary 

existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most sat-

isfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Ser-

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 19

 

mons on the Mount.... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventu-

ally things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred 

to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out.... The weed 

exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, 

among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the 

poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank growth ...: it points a 

moral."

17

 Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an 

imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?

 

America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination 

by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the 

quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy 

(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything 

important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the Ameri-

can rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive 

lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American 

books are different from European books, even when the American sets off 

in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. 

And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and 

the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic 

West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting 

and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West, 

where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put 

its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came 

full circle; its West is the edge of the East.

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 (India is not the intermediary 

between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is 

the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti 

Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow 

the canal...

 

Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)? 

Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees 

and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feu-

dalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the 

State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The 

kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings 

to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy 

to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the 

Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corre-

sponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy 

is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic 

power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and 

channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel's work that have not been 

refuted).

19

 The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a

 

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