binary be damned!

D + G position the rhizome as an antidote to the dichotomous binary logic that has for so long plagued theories of organization, information, biology, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, &c. A biological entity, a part of a whole, a network in itself, the rhizome serves as a metaphoric tool through which to visualize and represent the possibilities of multiplicity, diffuse connections, and non-totality. As a natural body of incredible complexity, characterized by flowing lines and interconnectivity, the rhizome highlights the hegemonic nature of linguistic and biological classification systems based on dualistic divisions, the singular vs. the multiple, and 1-2-4-8-16-32 patterns of binary division.

 

Authorship, Writing:

D + G understand their own work as fundamentally rhizomatic, reflexively situating “1000 Plateaus” as an interconnective, interdiscursive machine continuously transmitting “intensities” and trading multiplicities with other machines (literary and otherwise). (plateaus 5) Constructed through the assemblage of plateaus, “multiplicit[ies] connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome,” 1000 plateaus is organized along lines of interconnected thoughts, patterns, and observations the organization of which cannot be accomplished in a linear, totalizing structure. (plateaus 22)

 

Occident/Orient:

On page 18, D+G evaluate cultures of the west and east, “occident and orient,” in terms of their embodiment of rhizomatic traits. The West, characterized by the forest, the tree, seed-bearing plants, domestication of animals, is far less rhizomatic that the East, where plants are propagated by asexual cuttings through the fragmentation of individual tubers. Where the West has been entranced by the “specifically European disease” of Transcendence and its recourse to an empirical beyond, the East has tended towards imminence, which I understand as a sort of 
“withinness,” an inclusive folding of the subject into larger discursive and conceptual networks.  This “Occident/Orient” comparison strikes me as interesting for two reasons: it seems very dualistic amidst a project so self-consciously aimed toward exposing the artifice underlying binary logic, and it implies a clean separation of East and West that ignores the increasingly nuanced global connections enabled by new media and the very interconnectivity and interdiscursivity with which D + G are concerned.

 

Finally, I turn to a wonderful print depiction of a rhizome, courtesy of google image search, that helps ground the rhizomatic theory defining the approach and form of 1000 plateaus. The picture depicts  a few dimensions of connective lines within the rhizome. There are many large interconnected tubes in the darker central section of the rhizome, which seems like a sort of hub in which different vertical connections (represented by the thinner dangling roots) are brought into contact with one another and with other lines from different parts of the structure. Each of these large tubes, in turn, is connected outwards towards other structures and vertical roots that the “chopping” of the rhizome in this picture prevents us from visualizing. I very much like thinking about the form of the book in terms of this diagram, understanding the dynamic, shifting qualities of the narrative (if it is, indeed, a narrative as we typically understand them) not as some sort of defect  in logical reasoning but as a critique of the very notions of “logic” and “reason” that have facilitated the continued hegemony of dualistic binary divisions.

* image @ http://www.sevensixfive.net/informatix/index.html