I got this down off the shelf because it’s relevant to one of the things I’m working on, and because – some 39 years after buying it and reading it for the first time – I feel like I’m finally in a position to understand and make use of it. Follow along with me, as I do a reasonably close reading of it here? It ought to be a fair amount of fun. #nomadology #deleuzeandguattari #deleuze #guattari
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and which is pivotal for their thought: “Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type which centers around organs of power.”
And this is the hazard of breaking “Nomadology” out as its own standalone volume, because here the rhizome/root distinction appears without preamble or explanation. In *this* context, it clarifies nothing, obscuring more than it illuminates. But it’s so important that I’m going to reach back into the bit of “A Thousand Plateaus” that
has been excised here to establish exactly what work they mean for this sentence to do...tomorrow.
For now: notes! Clastre’s “Society Against The State” is here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-clastres-society-against-the-state
You can get a sense for some of the problems that crop up when someone contemporary pursues Service’s linear, reductive model unreflexively here: https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/anthropology-footnoted-jared-diamonds-the-world-until-yesterday
We’ll pick up the question of technologies societies consciously deploy against the emergence of the State tomorrow. See you then!
Picking up where we left off: in their account of the ways in which various human groups throughout history have taken measures to ward off the appearance of the State and its logics, D&G offer up the image of *the pack*, a type of formation they identify both with Meunier’s street children of Bogotá, and with high society. They go on to tell us that such formations instill mechanisms that prevent prestige or social capital from overaccumulating in any one given individual.
And then they say something that is bound to strike readers who have not encountered this passage in its original context — i.e. as a discrete section or “plateau” of the far longer work “A Thousand Plateaus” — somewhat curiously: implicitly laying out a categorization or classification schema for groups, they tell us that packs are “groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type.”
This distinction is explored at some length, in the very introduction to “ATP,” and in D&G’s
signature allusive, looping, accretional style. I’m tempted to omit discussion of it from our reading here, as a matter that’s properly external to the text under consideration, but there’s no need to be that persnickety and rules-lawyery, A, and B if people from outside the worlds of philosophy and theory come to a D&G text, it’s a fair bet they’re coming for discussion of this figure of “the rhizome.” It has, after all, been one of the most broadly generative concepts of the past half-century.
So what’s it all about?
They start from a consideration of the Book as bearer of writing & thought, in both its semantics and its physical manifestation. It’s a somewhat difficult passage — murky, at times discursive, slipping between registers — but for me the core of it lies in the announcement that the Book takes “the Tree or Root as an image,” and that “[b]inary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree.” The Tree cleaves the world into Above and Below and continuously imposes a
sorting operation that allocates things into one or the other.
Lest we despair at the harshly reductionist logic of such a Book, and the Law that it implies, D&G go on to tell us that there is another model for the Book, and therefore for thought: the “radicle-system, or fascicular root”: a bundle, a multiplicity where the unity of the tap-root shatters into a “supplementary dimension.” But they tend to deprecate this figure as something that “does not really break with dualism.”
What is the third figure for thought, the one that finally does offer a decisive break with binaries, with dualism, with hierarchy and the relentless above-or-below, ahead-or-behind sorting operations it gives rise to? This is the rhizome: a *horizontal* growth of the plant, capable of spreading beneath the Earth and sending up new shoots from each or any of its nodes.
They go on to supply us with a series of things other than plants that they regard as strongly rhizomorphic: the wolf pack,
the swarm, the burrows of ants or rodents “in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout.” In fact the rhizome “itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.”
And the important quality of the rhizome — the thing in which its prescience resided, the reason it became the figure par excellence for the internetworked age and the tag for a thousand lame club nights, tryhard zines, etc. —
is the principle of “connection and heterogeneity” D&G ascribed to it: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” There it is: the reason we’re still reading D&G, the thing that made this willfully obscure body of thought so supremely relevant to a world in which, before the decade was out, the collapse of Soviet-style communism would deprive the left of one of its primary models of organization, in which a mass networked medium would emerge just a few years later.
A rhizome, furthermore, “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 even after most of it has been destroyed.”
And now maybe we can begin to see why this figure also suggests the pack, the street gang, the “barbarian” horde or the guerrilla force: in their multiplicity, their resistance to capture or suppression,
their disconcerting ability to “route around failure,” as the engineers and early ideologues of the internet might have it — to disappear from here and pop up again, after some interval, over there. If the State cannot help but organize things as aboves and belows, befores and afters, thises and not thats, the war machine is of the order of the rhizome.
We’ll see where this move takes us tomorrow. (No notes today, other than pointing you at the full ATP itself: https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
A final thought for today, though: is it ironic that this Introduction commits the very sort of ordering that D&G tell us belongs to State thought? Was it succumbing to the same error when, a few days back, I described sketching out “a matrix” to keep track of the various dichotomies they lay out before us – interiority v exteriority, mood v affect, unity v multiplicity, root v rhizome and so on?
My answer is that this is a tension D&G struggle with at every turn, and which intimately informs
the way they chose to structure ATP and the very way in which they define their terms & craft arguments. They’re trying, in other words, to think the rhizome rhizomorphically, and as people of the Book they’re necessarily doing so with only partial and limited success. (If they were fully successful, ATP would have been a hypertext, not any kind of book, and in fact it’s poignant to think of D&G developing the work in a world where collaborative hypertext authoring tools were available to them.)
So, fresh from that detour to fill in the backstory of “the rhizome,” we plunge ever onward.
Recall that we’d begun this second textual division of “Nomadology” with a question — how do groups ward off the logics of the incipient State, either historically or in real time? — and a proposition: that there’s plenty of evidence for the exteriority of the war machine to the State to be found in ethnology, the comparative study of human cultures. And we consider how some of those cultures — street
