Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of 

intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmina-

tion point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: 

mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this 

bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of inten-

sity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a 

regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and 

actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a 

plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.

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 For example, a 

book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What 

takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with 

one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any 

multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground 

stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this 

book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular 

form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us 

would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines 

here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave 

one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made cir-

cles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be 

related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a 

method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexi-

cal agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can 

substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic pro-

cedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a differ-

ent dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical, 

lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer 

belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves 

dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare 

successes in this.

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 We ourselves were unable to do it. We just used words 

that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = 

STRATOA

NALYSIS 

= 

PRAGMATICS 

= 

MICROPOLITICS

.

 

These words are con-

cepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a 

particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines 

of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we claim for 

our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with 

scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And 

the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective 

assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing 

to the «th power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the 

dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated 

subjects). An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic 

flows,

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 23

 

material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any 

recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). 

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) 

and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the 

author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain 

multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel 

nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, 

we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The 

outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assem-

blage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A 

rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send 

down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting 

to the old procedures. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not 

from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let 

someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade 

of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle."

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Why is this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual 

semiotics. It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down 

on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right 

to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass 

in things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to 

be "ruminated"; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate 

it, which are also the clouds in the sky).

 

History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the 

name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the 

topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history. 

There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the 

Children's Crusades: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so 

many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions. Then there is 

Andrzejewski's book, Les portes du paradis (The gates of paradise), com-

posed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walk-

ing with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the 

confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the 

procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each 

child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthu-

mous pederastic desire of the count of Vendome; all this with circles of con-

vergence. What is important is not whether the flows are "One or 

multiple"—we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enun-

ciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both 

plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more 

recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the Fourth Crusade, La dis-

location, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else

 

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