Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

4

  D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on 

the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable 

speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, 

and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet 

what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has 

been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assem-

blage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signi-

fying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side 

facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organ-

ism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, 

and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a 

name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a 

book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, 

their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on 

a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the 

units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. There is no differ-

ence between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book 

also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection 

with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We 

will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look 

for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in con-

nection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in 

which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and 

with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists 

only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little 

machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a 

war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract 

machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting 

literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other 

machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in 

order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordi-

nary bureaucratic machine . . . (What if one became animal or plant 

through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first 

through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. 

It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. 

All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines 

of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, 

bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of 

consistency, and in each case the units of measure. Stratometers, 

deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence: Not only do 

these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as 

always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with

 

---

I

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 5

 

signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to 

come.

 

A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the 

world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as 

noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). 

The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific 

to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the 

book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law 

of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division 

between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we 

encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in 

the most "dialectical" way possible, what we have before us is the most clas-

sical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature 

doesn't work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, 

lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous 

one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a tap-

root, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiri-

tual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the 

One that becomes two, then of the two that become four. . . Binary logic is 

the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as "advanced" as lin-

guistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains 

wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical 

trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much 

as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of 

multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must 

assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt pos-

sible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, 

or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the piv-

otal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn't get us very far. 

The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal rela-

tionships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no bet-

ter understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates 

in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relation-

ships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian 

interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and even 

information science.

 

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, 

to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal 

root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite 

multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing 

development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, 

but the root's unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask

 

---