Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin 

to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.

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 These are models of 

nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of 

flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State 

apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren't these books still 

"images" of the Crusades? Don't they still retain a unity, in Schwob's case a 

pivotal unity, in Farrachi's an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful 

example, Les portes du paradis, the unity of the funereal count? Is there a 

need for a more profound nomadism than that of the Crusades, a 

nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even move or imitate 

anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble (agencent). How can 

the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, 

rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: 

already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author, 

a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing 

of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and 

future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cul-

tural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering, 

for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in 

nomadism rather than sedentarity, to make a map instead of a tracing. 

RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do 

besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or 

pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science 

would go completely mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics: 

it's not a science, it's a monster slang, it's nomadic. Even in the realm of 

theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic 

framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress 

changing nothing. Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The 

nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. 

History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never 

comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for 

thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence 

of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court 

of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The 

State's pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's 

relation to an outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that 

makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every 

mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).

 

Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhi-

zomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or 

multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the 

point into a line!

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 Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line

 

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INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 25

 

of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just 

ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not 

photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the 

wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man 

river:

 

He don't plant 'tatos

 

Don't plant cotton

 

Them that plants them is soon forgotten

 

But old man river he just keeps rollin' along

 

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between 

things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alli-

ance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of 

the rhizome is the conjunction, "and. . . and.. . and. . ." This conjunction 

carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." Where are you 

going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are 

totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again 

from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false 

conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, ped-

agogical, initiatory, symbolic...). But Kleist, Lenz, and Biichner have 

another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through 

the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

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 Ameri-

can literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic 

direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, 

establish a logic of the 

AND

,

 

overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, 

nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. 

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things 

pick up speed. Between  things does not designate a localizable relation 

going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular 

direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a 

stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up 

speed in the middle.

 

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