Any way but up

The only thing that seemed obvious to me from the reading this week, maybe only because I've read some Galloway, too, is how the Internet fits into a rhizomorphic structure as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Point-to-point systems, like snail mail and auto transportation, integrate none of the “principles of connectivity and heterogeneity” of a rhizome. With mail and auto travel, there is a beginning, an end, and a middle piece--transport--that never seems fast enough. The Internet, as a rhizomatic conglomeration of interlinked pages, seems to have "neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills," (ATP, 23).

D&G's elaboration of the rhizome as being made of "lines" with no points, infinite offshoots (21). They pose the rhizome in contrast to hegemonic, arboreal structure (that lies beneath linguistics, psychoanalysis, and politics itself) which, it is to be presumed, grows upward, not laterally, bears fruit, and provides shade. My question, I guess, is one of dimensionality. Does a rhizome ever "grow up"? When a rhizomatic structure has hierarchical effects, what does this say about the rhizome itself?

A rhizome, as defined by D&G,

• connects any point to any other point


• has traits that are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature


• combines different regimes of signs, even nonsigns


• is reducible neither to the one or the multiple


• is composed not of units but dimensions, directions in motion


• has no beginning, no end, always middle


• constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions, having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out in a plane of consistency and from which one is always subtracted


• is in constant metamorphosis


• is made of lines--but not like those in arborescent structures


• is not the object of reproduction


• is antigenealogical


• is short-term or antimemory


• functions by variation, expansion, capture, conquest, and offshoots

What is at stake in positing a politics based on a "natural" rhizomatic root structure?