A Crowd of Authors, A Cacophony of Meaning

It seems taboo to engage with the beginning of a reading in a critical blog post. It makes it seem like you didn't get to reading the whole of assignment, so you dug into the most forward and superficial element of the equation: the beginning. But I have two reasons for doing just this. The first reason is that the beginning paragraph of "A Thousand Plateaus" is simply to interesting to be left alone. The second reason, is that in my subsequent reading through of Deleuze & Guattari, I was exposed to the concept of the rhizome, and as the text of "A Thousand Plateaus" is most certainly constructed as a rhizome, then the beginning of the introduction is neither a beginning nor an introduction.

From the literacy so embedded in Western Civilization, I began reading "A Thousand Plateaus" on page 3, under the section heading "1. Introduction: Rhizome." Immediately the seeming straight-forwardness of my approach was complicated by an enigmatic illustration included just above the first paragraph of the text. It looked like a piece of music, because it was structured like a piece of music. Because it was titled as a "piano piece" and included a number of clefs and registers to signify certain musical ranges within which a composition might be denoted. By the piece of music was not a piece of music. It was a piece of abstract art, packaged as music. It didn't seem to have any of the order, or compositional elements of music. Though I did not know what the term meant yet, this music was a rhizhome, an object that refuted traditional literacy because it would not parse from right to left, from here to there, along a (genealogical) progression. Instead, this music, swirled into itself, looped back and forth across time, and diverted across ranges and registers. It could not be read as a readable text, it require a new, yet unconcieved literacy. Perhaps a rhizomatic literacy, if something like that could ever be devised (my hunch is no).

The beginning paragraph text of "A Thousand Plateaus" is like the illegible music. It is bounded, boxed and formatted as a reader might expect it, written from left to right, under a section heading that not only articulated it's numerical position within other textual bodies "1." but also included the term "Introduction" as an almost redundant articulation of its primacy. An introduction is an entry-way, but what kind of initiation to a thesis could this be?

"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd" (3). So far, so good. It seems that the authors are talking a bit about themselves, explaining their approaches and previous history together. But then, in the second sentence, the whole thing begins to burst open, "each of us was several" suddenly makes the single-line rational of authorship burst apart. Like the illustration above the text, the idea of a plurality of authors begins to hint at a cacophony of meaning. "Quite a crowd" makes the reader feel uneasy. Traditional literary conventions have always held that a single-voiced author speaks to a single reader, it is one-to-one, from here to there, from me to you. But in "quite a crowd" the whole illusion of the unity of the text, contigenty on the singularity of the voice of the author and the cohesiveness of the argument ruptures, and the singularity of the reader himself becomes under attack.

"We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied" (3). This is still the authors writing (is it?), about themselves (no longer a certain number, an expanding cohort) but already it is also true of the reader(s). When the text fragments along with the concept of a crowd of authors, there is also a rupture in the reader, a multiplication, as intimated by the illustration above the paragraph. Since there is no easy way to read the illustration, one is forced to create new strategies: look here then there, look forwards then backwards, trace a single line. But each of these is unsatisfactory. So the reader begins to imagine a new way to understand the picture, as a cohesive-pluralistic whole, which can only be read by following multiple (all) of the lines simultaneously. And that's how Deleuze & Guattari begin writing, forcing likewise a shift in the reader towards new readings. And there's no certain way to read it yet, because there is no one way to write it.

There's no end, and this wasn't a beginning. It was cloaked like a way in, but it was already the entire argument.