The Synchronic (and other musings)

What is useful about the rhizome model to Deleuze and Guattari is that a rhizome, composed of undifferentiated tissue, can engender at any node a differentiated plant shoot, which is in some sense independent of (and can survive the death of) other shoots along the rhizome, although it is inextricably physically connected with them.

D + G's philosophy is also markedly synchronic; at its most explicit: "A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model" (Plateaus 12). A lot hinges on this, and in thinking it through I've decided I think this works properly with the now-physical/now-conceptual rhizomes: a rhizome may grow in time, but time has nothing fundamental to do with it (other than to form another rhizome, perhaps (Plateaus 11)). At least it provides an easy exit away from mimicry, because mimicry requires an original (ie: an original in time) and a later reproduction. In a synchronic view of the world, even the most "obvious" reproduction cannot be discerned from the original. Technological production complicates this slightly in the same way that writing always did-- for an artwork made in photoshop, is the file the original? a printout? some abstract concept?--- but that aside, it could be, after all, that the Mad Peck "Providence" poster hanging in my room is the original; I made a ton of reproductions because I knew they would sell well; and Mad Peck, Doc Daniels, and the lot liked it so much (but found the posters a bit overpriced) that they hand-drew their own copy.

So looking at it this way, of course "the crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings" (Plateaus 11). But wait. You never find the surroundings shifting to mimic the chameleon. I think we're not supposed to think of them as so distinctly separate, by rhizome logic: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming [...] and operating in the same assemblage" (Plateaus 34). But as much as I buy most of D + G's arguments and examples, there seems to be something else at work here as well. I will note that their distaste for evolutionary trees at first invoked in me similar suspicion. But all animals just points, yes; yes, evolution is in some ways only a matter of thought. The difference between a new organism and a simple mutation even for biologists came down to a question of reproduction. But as yet I still think I would propose that you can call the relationship between the chameleon and the tree rhizomatic while also accepting that the chameleon is changing its colours to mimic those of the tree, perhaps even to mimic the tree. Why this works I have to think through further; my initial impulse was that the chameleon is not only his act of changing colours, but of course insofar as that is his action at the moment, I think D + G might suggest (and I would believe) that it is. I'll continue thinking about it, but I'm just wondering if D + G's view really needs to abolish mimicry outright or whether it is largely an artefact of synchronic logic.

Additional Speculations

"The break of interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity" (Anti-Oedipus 36). D + G are careful through their emphasis on production and becoming to not let this become an originary homogeneity then dispersed; it is a continuity constantly regenerated in time (which again makes irrelevant any real notion of time). The model at work: THIS break, NOW, is cutting this. Cutting what? Indescribable a moment ago, because it simply was, now that it is cut, you see. You can only after the fact say that it was (used to be) continuous. Over and over again.

Last year I became fascinated by something that although indebted in part to Althusserian ideology, I think falls into this logic. I found the notebook I thought it was in but it wasn't there, so I'm going to try to find it for tomorrow. But as much as I can remember, it had to do with belief and the way in which, like D + G's cut continuity, one can only consider something a belief rather than just "knowing" it to be true as soon as something to the contrary is pointed out. But I think there was some point of excess that I cannot at present recall.

One final point, now that we are getting into a few texts written originally in languages not our own I would like to mention the question of translation. Reading the translator's notes at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus was pretty enlightening as to the limits of translation (trait?), but even before that, reading Anti-Oedipus, I had been thinking about something similar. The essay necessarily deals with "lack," the French "manque." In Italian the word for "to lack" or "to miss" is "mancare," obviously of the same root as the French, and although I don't know for certain if this holds true in French, there is some difference in its use compared to English. It works indirectly, so to say "I miss you" is "Mi manchi..." which if you were to translate word-for-word seems like "You miss me." Not sure if we have to take this to extreme depths of analysis, but it made me wonder about the ways differences like that might make a difference in the world logic and possibly more locally in the arguments and support of these kinds of essays, when the subject of the verb is always determined by the missed object (so perhaps the notion of complete absence is in some ways absurd).