Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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  □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally 

different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical 

about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome 

type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto 

other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon 

itself, except as a function of impotence.

 

3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively 

treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to 

the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. 

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent 

pseudomulti-plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot 

in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort 

in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject 

nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot 

increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws 

of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). 

Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed 

will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which 

form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the 

strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that 

its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the 

text. Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they 

fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... . The 

interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to 

the Fates or Norns."

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 An assemblage is precisely this increase in the 

dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it 

expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, 

such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When 

Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying 

virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the 

whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept 

measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, 

but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the 

dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of 

numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites)  of 

measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of 

unity  {unite)  appears only when there is a power takeover in the 

multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification 

proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set 

of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the 

One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the 

subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to 

that of the system considered (overcoding).

 

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The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be 

overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and 

above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of num-

bers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they 

fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of 

consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane" 

increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities 

are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or 

deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect 

with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of 

all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of 

dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a sup-

plementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of 

flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on 

a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of 

dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane 

of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, his-

torical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. 

Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable 

speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with 

the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to 

the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance 

or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat 

multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. They are 

designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives {some couchgrass, 

some of a rhizome . ..).

 

4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks 

separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be 

broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old 

lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an 

animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been 

destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to 

which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., 

as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There 

is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line 

of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie 

back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichot-

omy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make 

a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will 

reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that 

restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject— 

anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups

 

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