What

I find Deleuze and Guattari's writing style to be very interesting and at the same time a little bit off-putting. That being said, there self-affirmed anti-polemical or maybe post-polemical style makes engaging with them very difficult. It's not that they aren't open to asking and engaging in questions. The difficulty is that they don't always answer the questions that I want them to answer. Oftentimes their process engages in a mutation of engagements to a degree to which I don't even know if the questions I'm asking make sense. 

So, I guess the first question for me is what is the status of the rhizome? Is it primarily a description, a rectification of the arborescent illusion? What I mean is, have we always been always-already capable of being and becoming rhizomatic? Or, is the rhizome a prescription, a call to action for anti-arborescent thought. I feel that for Deleuze the answer is doesn't really matter. But, I feel that those questions become important for situating Deleuze in a history of intellectual thought. That is of course unless intellectual thought is rhizomatic in the first place (should be?) and Deleuze fits in everywhere and nowhere. 

The status of ideology is also murky between these two works. Deleuze states explicitly that there is no and never was ideology. If that is the case, why does it make sense for him to talk about an ideology of capitalism. More, to the point if rhizomes have no exteriority, how does a process like capitalism even fit into Deleuze's conception of micropolitics. I think the answer for him is that it wouldn't or it doesn't. There are no first principles, everything starts from the middle, lines of flight and all the rest. Not desiring machines in capital but rather desiring machines and capital. This line of thought is somewhat troubling for me. I don't quite understand how Deleuze and Guattari can break apart Oedipus without starting from the first principal of Oedipus or account for capitalism or the lack-thereof without starting from the first principle of Capital. I guess, a rhizome and some grass sounds like a great idea until we remember that behind abstractions there are real people living real lives and those real lives exist in a context that are situated within a variety of factors (paraphrasing Zizek).

So in that sense I suppose that only one sense of rhizome works for me. It has to be descriptive, a correction of fallacies in thought, in other words an ontology in order to work for me. 

At least comparing a sock to a vagina is alright.