I am not tired of trees.

I, for one, would like to make it clear that the "we" Deleuze & Guattari use when they state that "we're tired of trees" is not inclusive of myself, though perhaps I should not be as self-protective in this instance since it seems that the "we" is the biunivocal Deleuze/Guattari (hereafter D/G). I was reminded of my affection for trees yesterday, when I was climbing one. I had to climb one with stout, lower branches that I and a young girl I was babysitting could reach and then hoist and lever ourselves up to higher, more numerous yet more perilous branches above. Hanging upside down in one tree, while we pretended to be more primal apes, I was unfortunately reminded of D/G. D/G claim that thought is not essentially arborescent, with which I tend to agree, but in the tree I began to think of brachiation, or arboreal locomotion (though we eventually decided against the monkey bars), and the problem of essentialist arguments.

D/G write of the "wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else" (p. 11). The rhizome to D/G is a system of relations, with their preferred metaphor being rhizome-as-map, versus the genealogical tracings required by tree systems. Yet I find that the map, as a 2D plane of representation is troubling in regards to D/G's imperative that we "always follow the rhizome by rupture... make it vary until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions." I find the discursive "breaking away" of these "lines of flight" to be difficult to spatially imagine. D/G ask us to "extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency." Do I then view these lines covering over, a layering or highlighting effect on the map? Do I imagine planes bisecting each other, breaking out of the 2 dimensions inscribed by the map, and constantly overlapping to create a shape in 3 dimensions? The rhizome/grid system I know from experience to be a useful tool for analysis, particularly in relation to projects I have done involving Actor-Network Theory, yet I find these projects problematized by D/G. What objects I choose to privelege as actors, what relationships I imagine and choose to include and how I represent their variables make me wonder: am I a tracer or cartographer?

Networks of texts, with the root-book at its core, makes me think of a tree I might climb as being the D/G root-tree, considering how many texts I have read in this class and others that reference them. This brings me back to monkeys and brachiation. I find it much easier to imagine myself simian, and perhaps here I hang from the D/G tree and not so far off I see the Foucault and the Freud and the Derrida trees, their multiple, incountable branches each representing a book that involves them. And I can swing from this tree to the next, making a rhizome at each point of contact. I find this vision more representative of how I think, not arborescent but inter-arboreal, as I try to draw connections, make a map of what I have read, what I remember, and what makes sense to me. My thoughts may not be essentially arboreal, in their production or relations in the black box that is my neural system, but the thought pattern I perform seems to be. It is this performative aspect, like in Hayles' discussion of the title of her book, that most interests me.