Deleuze's rhizome. The latest philosophical dictionary

1. Introduction: Rhizome

We wrote “Anti-Oedipus” together. And since there are several of us each, a whole crowd gathers. Here we used everything that brought us together - the closest and the most distant. And so that we would not be recognized, we skillfully distributed pseudonyms. So why did we leave our names? Out of habit, just out of habit. In order to, in turn, remain unrecognized. In order to make imperceptible - but not ourselves, but what forces us to act, feel, think. And also because we, like everyone else, want, for example, to say that the sun is rising, although it is clear to anyone that this is nothing more than a figure of speech. In order to reach not the point where they no longer say “I”, but the one where it doesn’t matter whether to say “I” or not say it at all. We are no longer us. Everyone recognizes their own. We have already been helped, inspired, multiplied.

The book has neither an object nor a subject; it is materially woven in different ways from extremely different dates and speeds. To attribute a book to a subject means to lose sight of this work of matter and the external nature of their relationships. This means fabricating “good God” for the sake of geological movements. In a book, as in everything else, there are lines of articulation or segmentation, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. On such lines, comparative flow velocities entail phenomena of relative slowdown, viscosity, or, conversely, rapidity and ruptures. Both lines and measurable speeds - all this constitutes a certain assembly. A book is such an assemblage, and as such it is not assigned to anything. This is plurality, but we do not yet know what such plurality means when it is no longer attributed to anything, that is, when it is elevated to the status of a substantive. The machine assemblage is addressed to strata, making it, undoubtedly, a kind of organism, meaning a whole or a determinacy attributed to the subject; but, no less, it is addressed to a body without organs, constantly destroying the organism, allowing and forcing a-signifying particles, pure intensities, to circulate, and also ascribing to itself subjects to whom it leaves only a name as a trace of intensity. What is a body without the organs of a book? There are several such bodies, everything depends on the nature of the lines under consideration, their own content or density, and on the possibility of their convergence on the “plane of consistency”, which ensures their selection. Here, as elsewhere, it is the units of measurement that are important: [important] quantify the letter. There is no difference between what a book says and the way it is made. This means that the book no longer has an object. A book, as an assemblage, is only itself - in connection with other assemblies and in relation to other bodies without organs. We are not going to ask what the book wants to say - about the signified or the signifier, we are not going to look for what should be understood in the book, but we are going to ask about what it functions with, in conjunction with what it conveys or does not convey intensity , into which multiplicities she embeds and transforms her multiplicity, with which bodies without organs she needs to reduce her body without organs. The book exists only thanks to the external and in the external. So the book itself is a small machine; In what relation - in turn, measurable - does such a machine of literature consist with the machine of war, the machine of love, the machine of revolution, etc., as well as with the abstract machine that sweeps it away? We were reproached for allegedly turning to writers too often. But when we write, we are interested in only one thing - to know what other machine the literary machine can and must be connected to in order to function. Kleist - and a mad war machine, Kafka - and an unheard of bureaucratic machine... (What if we become an animal or a plant thanks to literature - of course, not in the literal sense of the word? Isn’t it thanks to the voice that we turn into an animal?). Literature is a kind of assemblage, it has nothing in common with ideology, there is no ideology, and never has been.

We speak only of the following: about multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentations, about lines of flight and intensities, about machine assemblies and their different types, about bodies without organs and their construction, about their selection, about the plane of consistency, about the units of measurement in each case. Stratometers, deleometers, unity of BWO density, unity of BWO of convergence not only form the qualification of writing, but also always define the latter as a measure of something else. Scripture has nothing to do with designation; rather, Scripture deals with surveying, mapping - even future areas.

The first type of book is a root book. The tree is already an image of the world, and the root is the image of the tree-world. This is a classic book, like a beautiful organic interiority, signifying and subjective (strata of the book). The book imitates the world in the same way that art imitates nature: thanks to the ways that are inherent in it and successfully complete what nature cannot (or can no longer) do. The law of the book is the law of reflection. That One that becomes two. How could the law of the book be present in nature if it governs the very division between the world and the book, nature and art? One becomes two: every time we encounter this formula - whether it was expressed strategically by Mao or understood as the most "dialectical" of all - we find ourselves confronted with the most classic, the most thoughtful, the oldest and tired thought. Nature does not act this way: the roots themselves are tap roots, with very numerous branches - lateral and circular, but not dichotomous. The spirit does not keep up with nature. Even a book - as a natural reality - is pivotal, with its own trunk and crown. But the book as a spiritual reality - in the form of a Tree or Root - does not cease to develop the law of One becoming two, and then two becoming four... Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the tree-root. Even such an “advanced” discipline as linguistics retains - as a basic image - a tree-root, which attaches it to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and the syntagmatic tree, starting from the point S, in order to continue through dichotomy). In other words, such a thought has never comprehended multiplicity - it requires a strong basic unity, assumed in order to achieve two, following the spiritual method. And from the object side, following natural method, we can certainly go directly from One to three, four or five, but always provided that we have a strong basic unity, the unity of the core supporting the secondary roots. But that doesn't make it any easier. Two-way relationships between successive circles only replace the binary logic of dichotomy. There is no more plurality in a taproot than in a dichotomous one. The first acts in the object, the second - in the subject.

Binary logic and bivocal relations still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in Schreber's Freudian interpretation), linguistics and structuralism, even computer science.

The root system or fibrous root is the second figure of the book to which our modernity willingly refers. This time the main root is aborted or almost completely destroyed; a direct and indefinite multitude of secondary roots are grafted onto it and acquire extraordinary development. This time the natural reality appears in the form of the miscarriage of the main root, but, nevertheless, its unity exists as past or future, as possible. And we must ask ourselves whether spiritual and reflective reality does not compensate for this state of affairs, demanding, in turn, an even more all-encompassing secret unity or an even more extensive totality. Take Burroughs' cut-up method: the insertion or bending of one text into another, constituting multiple and even random roots (one might say, cuttings), implies a dimension additional to that of the texts in question. It is in this additional dimension of putting in or folding in that unity continues its spiritual work. It is in this sense that, most decisively, a fragmented work can also be presented as a complete Work or Magnus Opus. Most of the modern methods designed to multiply series or increase multiplicity are quite suitable in one direction, for example linear, while the unity of integrity asserts itself, rather, in another dimension - in the dimension of a circle or cycle. Every time a set finds itself caught in some structure, its growth is compensated by the reduction of the laws of combination. The abortionists of unity in this case are also the creators of angels, doctores angelîci, for they affirm a purely angelic and supreme unity. Joyce's words, known as words with "multiple roots", only destroy the linear unity of a word or even a language when they establish a circular unity of a phrase, text or knowledge. Nietzsche's aphorisms only destroy the linear unity of knowledge when they refer to the circular unity of eternal return, present as the unknown in thought. In other words, the fibrous system does not actually break with dualism, with the complementarity of subject and object, with natural reality and spiritual reality - unity does not cease to contradict and resist the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world has lost its core, the subject can no longer create a dichotomy, but he achieves a higher unity - the unity of ambivalence and overdetermination - in a dimension that is always additional to the dimension of his own object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains an image of the world - a chaosmos-root instead of a cosmos-root. A strange mystification of the book: the more total the book, the more fragmented it is. In any case, the book as an image of the world is such a bland idea. In fact, it is not enough to say: Long live the plural! Although even such an exclamation is quite difficult to squeeze out. No typographical, lexical or even syntactical dexterity is enough for it to be heard. The plural must be created, but without always adding a higher dimension, but on the contrary, through simple moderation, at the level of dimensions that we already have, always n-1 (only in this way is one part of the many, being always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the set that needs to be constituted; write p-1. Such a system could be called a rhizome. The rhizome, as an underground shoot, is completely different from the roots and roots. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. In all other respects, plants with roots or radicles can be rhizomorphic: we're talking about about knowing whether botany, in its specificity, is not entirely rhizomorphic. Even animals are like this in their pack form, rats are rhizomes. Burrows too, with all their functions of living, feeding, moving, deflecting and breaking. The rhizome itself has extremely diverse forms, starting from the external extension, branched in all directions, ending with concretization in bulbs and tubers. Rats are swarming, crawling on each other. In the rhizome there is the best and the worst: potatoes and wheatgrass, weeds. Animal and plant, wheatgrass is crab-grass. We feel that we will not convince anyone if we do not list at least the approximate characteristics of the rhizome.

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of the rhizome can - and should be - connected to any other point. This is quite different from a tree or a root, which fixes a point and an order. The linguistic tree, in the manner of the Chomsky tree, begins at point S and is produced through dichotomy. In a rhizome, on the contrary, each feature does not necessarily refer to a linguistic feature: semiotic links of any nature are combined here with extreme different ways coding - biological, political, economic, etc., bringing into play not only different modes of signs, but also statuses of the state of things. Really, collective assemblages of utterance function directly in machine assemblies, and we cannot establish a radical cut between regimes of signs and their objects. In linguistics, even when we pretend to adhere only to something clear and not presuppose anything about language, we remain within spheres of discourse that also imply special social modes of assemblage and types of power. Chomsky's grammatical correctness, the categorical symbol S that dominates all phrases, are all markers of power before they become syntactic markers: you will compose grammatically correct sentences, you will divide every utterance into nominal and verbal syntagmas (the first dichotomy...). We will not reproach such linguistic models for being too abstract; on the contrary, their disadvantage is that they do not reach abstract car, connecting language with the semantic and pragmatic contents of what is expressed, with the collective assemblages of the utterance, with the entire micropolitics of the social field. The rhizome continually connects semiotic links, organizations of power and circumstances that refer to art, science or social struggle. The semiotic link is like a tuber that compresses extremely various acts- linguistic, as well as perceptual, facial, gestural, cognitive: there is no language in itself, no universality of linguistic activity, but there is a competition of dialects, jargons, slangs and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, just as there is no homogeneous linguistic community. Language, according to Weinreich’s formula, is “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” There is no mother language, but there is a power grab by the language that dominates political diversity. The language is established around a parish, diocese or capital. It creates an onion. It changes through underground branches and streams, along river valleys or railway lines, it moves like oil slicks. In a language we can always carry out internal structural decompositions - and this is not fundamentally different from searching for roots. There is always something genealogical in a tree; this is not a populist method. On the contrary, the rhizome-type method can analyze linguistic activity only by decentering it into other dimensions and modes. Language collapses in on itself again, but only as a kind of powerlessness.

3. The principle of plurality: precisely when the many are truly considered as substantive - multitude, or multiplicity - there is no longer any relationship with the One as a subject or object, as with a natural or spiritual reality, as with an image and a world. Sets are rhizomatic; they expose tree-like pseudosets. There is no unity that would serve as a core in the object or be divided in the subject. There is not even a unity that would be a miscarriage in the object and “return” to the subject. A set has neither a subject nor an object, there are only definitions, quantities, dimensions that can grow only when the set changes its nature (hence, the laws of combinatorics intersect with the set). The threads of a puppet - like rhizomes or sets - refer not to the supposed will of the actor or puppeteer, but to a set of nerve fibers, which in turn forms another puppet, following other dimensions connected to the first: “Let us call the threads or processes that move the puppets - cloth. We could argue that her plurality resides in the personality of the actor who projects this multiplicity into the text. Okay, but the nerve endings in turn form a certain tissue. And they plunge into a gray mass, a grid, to the point of indistinguishability... The game approaches the pure work of a spinner - the work that myths attribute to the Parks and Norns.” An assembly is such an intersection of dimensions in a set that necessarily changes nature to the extent that it increases its connections. There are no points or positions in the rhizome that we find in a structure - a tree or a root. There are only lines. When Glen Gould speeds up the performance of a piece of music, he not only acts like a virtuoso, but turns musical points into lines, forcing the aggregate to multiply. The fact is that number has ceased to be a universal concept that measures elements according to their place in any dimension, in order to become a set itself, changing according to the dimensions in question (the primacy of a region over the set of numbers associated with this region). We do not have units of measure, but only sets of them or their varieties. The concept of unity appears only when the signified seizes power in the plurality or when a certain process corresponding to subjectification is carried out in it - so, either unity is the core, founding a set of two-valued relations between elements or objective points, or One, which is divided, following the law of binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in the womb of an empty dimension, additional to the dimension of the system in question (overcoding). But it is precisely the rhizome, or multiplicity, that does not allow itself to be overcoded; it never has a dimension additional to the number of its lines, that is, to the set of numbers associated with these lines. All these sets are flat, because they fill and occupy all their dimensions - which means we will talk about in terms of consistency sets, even if the dimensions of such a “plan” increase with the number of connections located on it. Sets are determined by the external - an abstract line, a line of flight or deterritorialization, following which they change their nature, connecting with other sets. The consistency plan (lattice) is outer side of all sets. The line of flight simultaneously marks the reality of the number of finite dimensions effectively filled by the multitude; and the impossibility of the appearance of any additional dimension without this set being transformed, following such a line; and also the possibility and necessity of flattening all sets on the same plane of consistency or of externalizing them, whatever their dimensions. The ideal of a book would be to place all things on such a plane of the external, on one single page, on the same beach - lived events, historical definitions, conceivable concepts, individuals, groups and social formations. Kleist invented this type of writing, a disrupted sequence of affects with variable speeds, sedimentations and transformations - and always in connection with the external. Open rings. And his texts also oppose in all respects the classical and romantic book, constituted through the interiority of substance or subject. The book is a war machine against the book - the apparatus of the State. Flat sets in n dimensions are a-signifying and a-subjective. They are designated using indefinite or rather partial articles (something from wheatgrass, something from rhizome...).

4. The principle of the a-signifying gap: against over-signifying cuts that separate structures or cross one structure. A rhizome can be broken or destroyed in some place, but it is renewed, following one or another of its lines, as well as following other lines. It doesn’t all end with ants, for they form an animal rhizome, most of which can be destroyed, but at the same time it does not cease to regenerate itself. Any rhizome includes lines of segmentation according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.; but also the lines of deterritorialization along which it continually slips. Each time a gap is formed in the rhizome when the lines of segmentation explode at the line of flight, but the line of flight is also part of the rhizome. Such lines endlessly refer one to another. This is why we can never surrender to dualism or dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of good or bad. We create a gap, we draw a line of flight, but we always run the risk of finding on it organizations that restratify the totality, formations that return power to the signifier, attributions that restore the subject - everything we want, from Oedipal revivals to fascist calcification. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms that require only crystallization. Yes, wheatgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad can only be the product of active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.

How can the movement of deterritorialization and the processes of reterritorialization not be relative, endlessly branching, captured in each other? The orchid deterritorializes, forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes itself on this image. However, the wasp deterritorializes, itself becoming a part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus; but it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. The wasp and the orchid form a rhizome, being heterogeneous. One could say that the orchid imitates the wasp, whose image it reproduces in a signifying manner (mimesis, mimicry, decoy, etc.). But this is true only at the level of strata - parallelism between two strata, such that the plant organization on one imitates the animal organization on the other. At the same time, we are talking about something completely different - not about imitation, but about the capture of the code, about the surplus value of the code, the increase in valency, the authentic becoming, the becoming-wasp-orchid, the becoming-orchid wasp, and each of these becomings ensures the deterritorialization of one term and a reterritorialization of the other, with both becomings interlocking and replacing, following a circulation of intensities that always pushes the territorialization even further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, but an explosion of two heterogeneous series into a line of flight, composed by a common rhizome, which can no longer be attributed to or subordinated to any signifier. Remy Chauvin said it well: "A-parallel evolution" two creatures that have absolutely nothing in common with each other.” Generally speaking, it is possible that the patterns of evolution were forced to leave the previous model of tree and offspring. Under certain conditions, the virus can bind to germ cells and be transmitted itself as a complex cellular gene; moreover, it could escape, move into a cell of a completely different species and still carry the “genetic information” emanating from the first host (for example, modern studies by Benveniste and Todaro regarding the type C virus in its double connection with baboon DNA and the DNA of some species domestic cats). Schemes of evolution will now be created not according to models of tree-like origin, moving from less differentiated to more differentiated, but following the rhizome, acting immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another. And then there is the wasp-parallel evolution of a baboon and a cat, where the first is clearly not a model of the second, and the second is not a copy of the first (becoming a baboon in a cat would not mean that the cat “made” a baboon). We create a rhizome with our viruses, or rather, our viruses force us to create a rhizome with other animals. As Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or other processes - for example, fusions of cells derived from different types, - all this has results similar to the results of “disgusting types of love, so dear to Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” Transversal communications between differentiated lineages mix up family trees. Always look for the molecular or even sub-molecular particle with which we enter into an alliance. We develop and die from our polymorphic and rhizomatic influenzas more than from hereditary diseases, which themselves have their own heredity. A rhizome is an antigenealogy.

The same is true for a book and the world: a book is not an image of the world, according to ingrained belief. It creates a rhizome with the world, there is a parallel evolution of the book and the world, the book ensures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world reterritorializes the book, which in turn itself deterritorializes in the world (if it is capable of this and if it can). Mimicry is an extremely unfortunate concept, because it is associated with binary logic in order to describe phenomena of a completely different nature. A crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, just as a chameleon does not reproduce colors. environment. The Pink Panther does not imitate anything, does not reproduce anything, she paints the world with her color, pink on pink, this is her becoming-the-world, a way of becoming imperceptible herself, an a-signifying, creating her own gap, her own line of flight, leading her “a-” to the end. parallel evolution." The wisdom of plants: even when they exist in the roots; There is always an external one, where they create a rhizome with something else - with the wind, with an animal, with a person (and also the aspect due to which animals themselves create a rhizome, and people too, etc.). “Intoxication is like the triumphant invasion of a tree into us.” And always follow the rhizome thanks to the break, lengthen, prolong, relay the line of flight, force it to change in order to produce a line even more abstract and sinuous in n dimensions, in broken directions. Couple deterritorialized flows. To follow the plants: we will begin by fixing the limits of the first line according to circles of convergence around successive singularities; then we look - within this line - to see if new circles of convergence are established with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. To write, to create a rhizome, to increase one's territory by deterritorialization, to extend the line of flight to the point where it covers the entire plane of consistency on an abstract machine. “First you go to what you planted and carefully trace the traces of rainfall on the ground. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far. Trace the gullies (zanjitas) from the rain and use them to determine the direction of the flow. Then find the dope that has sprouted farthest from your seedling, and all the dope shoots that have grown between them are yours. Later, when the seeds fall, you can expand your territory by following the rain washes from one plant to another.” Music never ceases to emit its lines of flight, like “multitudes in transformation,” even overturning its own codes that structure and fossilize it; This is why musical form, down to its ruptures and expansions, is comparable to a weed and a rhizome.

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: the rhizome is not responsible for either the structural or the generative model. Any idea of ​​a genetic axis as a deep structure is alien to her. The genetic axis is like an objective core unity on which successive stages are organized; the deep structure is more like a basic sequence that can be decomposed into immediate components, while the unity of the product passes into another dimension, transformable and subjective. Thus, we do not leave the representational model of a tree or root, whether tap or fibrous (for example, a Chomskyan “tree” associated with a basic sequence and representing the process of its generation according to binary logic). Variation on the theme of the most ancient thought. Regarding the genetic axis or deep structure, we say that they already possess in advance infinitely reproducible tracing principles. The entire logic of a tree is the logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics, as in psychoanalysis, the object of such logic is the unconscious, representing itself, crystallized in codified complexes, located on the genetic axis or distributed in a syntagmatic structure. It strives to describe the actual state of affairs, to restore the balance of intersubjective relations, or to explore the unconscious, which is already here, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. The logic of the tree consists in tracing anything that is given to us ready-made, starting with an overcoding structure or supporting axis. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.

Everything else is a rhizome, a map, not a tracing paper. Remove the map, but not the tracing paper. The orchid does not reproduce the wasp's tracing; it makes a map together with the wasp inside the rhizome. If the map is opposed to tracing paper, it is because it is completely turned towards an experiment associated with the real. The map does not reproduce the unconscious, closed in on itself, it constructs it. It promotes the connection of fields, the unblocking of bodies without organs, their maximum opening on the plane of consistency. She herself creates part of the rhizome. The map is open, it is capable of connection in all its dimensions, it is dismantled, reversible, and capable of constant modification. It can be torn, inverted, can be adapted to any installation, can be laid by an individual, a group or social formation. It can be painted on a wall, perceived as a Work of Art, it can be constructed as a political action or as a meditation. This is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome - to always appear in multiples; a burrow in this sense is an animal rhizome, and sometimes it involves a pure distinction between a line of flight as a corridor for movement and strata of stores or habitation (for example, the musk rat). The map has multiple inputs, as opposed to tracing paper, which always refers to “the same.” The map deals with success, while the tracing paper always refers to the so-called “competence”. In contrast to psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic competence that locks every wish and expression onto a genetic axis or over-coding structure and stretches to infinity the monotonous tracings of stages on this axis or components in this structure, schizoanalysis rejects any idea of ​​tracing fatality, whatever the name, whatever we call it endow, - divine, anagogical, historical, economic, structural, hereditary or syntagmatic. (We clearly see that Melanie Klein does not understand the problem of cartography of one of her child patients, little Richard, and is content to pull out ready-made tracing papers - Oedipus, good and bad dad, bad and good mother - while the child is in desperately tries to prolong success, which psychoanalysis absolutely underestimates.) Drives and partial objects are neither stages on the genetic axis nor positions in the deep structure, they are political views on problems, on entrances and exits, on dead ends, politically experienced by the child, that is, with all the strength of his desire.

And yet, are we not restoring a simple dualism, opposing cards and tracing papers as good and bad? Isn't it a special feature of the card that it can be scalped? Isn't it characteristic of the rhizome to cross the roots and sometimes mix with them? Doesn't the map contain excess phenomena already similar to its own tracings? Don’t many have their own strata, where unification and totalization, massification, mimetic mechanisms that mean seizures of power, and subjective appropriations take root? Even lines of flight - are they not going to, under the cover of their probable divergence, reproduce formations that they should destroy or redirect? But the opposite is also true, here the question of method arises: You should always transfer the tracing paper onto the card. And such an operation is not at all symmetrical to the previous operation. For, strictly speaking, it would be inaccurate to say that tracing paper reproduces a map. It is rather like a photograph, like an x-ray, which would begin with the selection or isolation of what the tracing has the intention of reproducing through artificial means, through coloring or other forced procedures. It is what imitates that always creates its own model and attracts it. The tracing paper has already translated the map into an image, it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and roots. It organized, stabilized, neutralized multitudes, following its own axes of signification and subjectification. She generated, structured the rhizome, and tracing paper no longer reproduces anything but itself when it believes that it reproduces something else. That's why she's so dangerous. It injects the excess and distributes it. From the map or rhizome, tracing paper produces only dead ends, barriers, core germs or structuring points. Look at psychoanalysis and at linguistics: the former always pulls out only tracings or photographs of the unconscious, the latter - tracings or photographs of language with all the betrayals that this implies (it is not surprising that psychoanalysis attaches its fate to the fate of linguistics). Look at what was already happening to little Hans in the pure psychoanalysis of the child: they never stopped BREAKING HIS RHIZOME, DIRTYING HIS MAP, smoothing it out for him again, blocking any way out for him until he desired his own fear and guilt, while in him shame and guilt will not take root, Phobia (we protect him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street; we root him in his parents’ bed, plant roots on his own body, block him on Professor Freud). Freud clearly takes into account the cartography of little Hans, but always only in order to superimpose it on a family photograph. And look what Melanie Klein does with little Richard's geopolitical maps: she pulls photographs out of them, she makes tracings; assume a pose and follow an axis, genetic stage, or structural fate; we will break your rhizome. We will allow you to live and talk, provided that any exit is blocked. When the rhizome is clogged, turned into a tree, everything is over, nothing more conveys desire, for it is thanks to the rhizome that desire is always promoted and produced. Each time desire follows the tree, internal fallouts take place, overturning it and leading to death; but the rhizome acts on desire through external and productive impulses.

That's why it's so important to try a different operation, the opposite one, but not symmetrical. Reconnect tracing paper on the map, bring roots or trees to the rhizome. To study the unconscious in the case of little Hans would be to show how he tries to constitute a rhizome with his father's house, as well as with the line of flight of a building, a street, etc.; how these lines become blocked, how a child forces himself to take root in the family, to be photographed like his father, to copy his mother’s bed; and then how Professor Freud's intervention ensures that the signifier seizes power as the subjectification of affects; how a child can escape only under the guise of becoming-animal, perceived as shameful and guilty (becoming-horse of little Hans, a genuine political choice). But it would always be possible to rearrange the dead ends on the map, thus opening them up into possible escape lines. The same applies to the group map - to show at what point in the rhizome the phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership, fascisation, etc. are formed, which lines, nevertheless, survive, even remaining underground, gradually continuing to create the rhizome. Deligny's method: create a map of gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the same child, for several children... If it is true that a map or rhizome has essentially multiple entrances, we will assume that it can be entered by cripples or by road tree-roots, taking into account the necessary precautions (here we again abandon Manichaean dualism). For example, we will often be forced to turn into dead ends, to pass through signifiers of power and subjective attachments, to rely on oedipal, paranoid or worse formations as solidified territorialities that make other transformational operations possible. It is even possible that psychoanalysis serves as a fulcrum, albeit in spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, we will lean directly on the line of flight, which allows us to explode strata, tear apart roots and create new connections. Thus, there are several extremely different assemblages - tracing cards, rhizomes-roots with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. In rhizomes, there are tree or root structures, but the opposite is also true: a tree branch or root segment can begin to blossom into a rhizome. Definitions of places depend here not on theoretical analyzes that presuppose universals, but on pragmatics that compose sets or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the core of a tree, in a root cavity, or in the fork of a branch. Or a kind of microscopic element of a tree-root, a root that begins the production of rhizome. Accounting and bureaucracy operate through cripples - however, they can begin to blossom, shoot out rhizome cuttings, as in Kafka's novel. The intense trait begins to work for itself, hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, the play of images are separated, and the hegemony of the signifier is again called into question. Gestural, facial, playful, etc. semiotics regain their freedom in the child and are freed from “tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language - a microscopic event shakes the balance of local power. Thus, generative trees, built according to Chomsky's syntagmatic model, could open up in all senses and directions and, in turn, form a rhizome. To be rhizomorphic is to produce stems and fibers that appear to be roots, or, better, bind to the latter, penetrating the trunk, risking making them serve in strange new ways. We are tired of the tree. We should no longer trust the trees, their roots, their roots, we have suffered too much from this. The entire tree culture is based on them - from biology to linguistics. On the contrary, nothing is beautiful, not lovely, not political, except for underground shoots and above-ground roots, weeds and rhizomes. Amsterdam is a city that is not at all rooted, a rhizome city with its canals-stems, where utilitarianism is combined with the greatest madness - in its relationship with the commercial war machine.

Thought is not tree-like, the brain is neither branched nor rooted matter. What we incorrectly call “dendrites” do not connect neurons in continuous tissue. The discontinuity of cells, the role of axons, the functioning of synapses, the existence of synaptic micro-clefts, the jumping of each message over these clefts form from the brain a multiplicity that washes - in its plane of consistency or in its glia - the entire uncertain probabilistic system, the uncertain nervous system. Many people have a tree in their head, but the brain itself is more like a kind of grass than a tree. “Axon and dendrite twine around each other like bindweed around a thorny bush, with a synapse on each spine.” The same is true for memory... Neuropathologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (about one minute). This difference is not only quantitative: short-term memory is something like a rhizome, a diagram, while long-term memory is tree-like and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing paper or photograph). Short-term memory does not at all obey the law of contiguity or immediacy in relation to its object; it can be located at some distance, come or return much later, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture and multiplicity. Moreover, the two memories are not distinguished as two temporal modes of perceiving the same thing; it is not the same thing, not the same memory, and not even the same idea grasped by both memories together. The brilliance of short-term Ideas: We write using short-term memory and therefore short-term ideas, even as we read and reread using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it mixes not with the moment, but with the collective, temporal and neural rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society or civilization) copies and translates; but what she translates continues to act in her at a distance, inopportunely, “untimely,” not instantly.

A tree or a root inspires a sad image of thought that never ceases to imitate the plural, starting from the highest unity, center or segment. Indeed, if we consider the branch-root set, then the trunk plays the role segment opposed one of the sub-aggregates, going from bottom to top - such a segment will be a “communication dipole”, in contrast to the “unity dipoles” that form rays propagating from a single center. But connections can multiply themselves, as in the root system; we never go beyond One - Two and only fake sets. Regeneration, reproduction, return, hydra and jellyfish do not allow us to leave here anymore. Tree systems are hierarchical systems that include centers of signification and subjectification, central automata as organized memories. The point is that the corresponding models are such that the element receives its information there only from the highest unity and subjective affects, from in advance established connections. We see this well in current problems of computer science and electronic machines, still preserving the oldest thought in so far as they give power to the memory or central organ. In an excellent article exposing the “replication of pictures of commandment-type trees” (centralized systems or hierarchical structures), Pierre Rosentiel and Jean Petitot note: “To assume the primacy of hierarchical structures is to prefer tree structures.<…>The tree form allows for a topological explanation.<…>In a hierarchical system, an individual allows only one active neighbor, his hierarchical superior.<…>The channels of transmission are established in advance - the arborescence exists before the individual, who is integrated into a precisely given place” (signification and subjectification). The authors note in this regard that even when we believe that we have achieved a set, it is possible that such a set will turn out to be perverted - what we call the root type - for its supposedly non-hierarchical presentation or expression allows in fact only an absolutely hierarchical solution: hence the famous friendship theorem,“if in a society any two individuals have the same common friend, then there is an individual who is friendly to everyone else” (as Rosentiel and Petitot say: who is this common friend? who is the “universal friend of such a community of pairs: master, confessor , doctor? so many ideas strangely removed from the original axioms"; who is this friend of the human race? So, the philosopher is as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity, which is assessed only through his absence or subjectivity, saying: I don’t know anything, I’m nothing?). In this regard, the authors talk about dictatorship theorems. This, indeed, is the principle of tree-roots, or the outcome, the decision of the roots, the structure of Power.

The authors contrast these centered systems with a-centered systems, networks of finite automata, where communication is carried out from one neighbor to some other neighbor, where trunks and channels do not exist in advance, where all individuals are interchangeable and determined only by the state at the moment - so that local operations are coordinated and the global end result is synchronized regardless of the central authority. Transduction of intensity states replaces topology, and “the graph regulating the circulation of information is in some way the opposite of a hierarchical graph... The graph has no reason to be a tree” (we called the map such a graph). The problem of the war machine or Firing Squad: is a general needed for n individuals to simultaneously achieve a state of inspiration! A solution without a General was found for an a-centered set, including a certain number of states and signals of the corresponding speed - from the point of view of the rhizome of war or the logic of guerilla, without tracing, without copying any central order. We even argue that such machinic multiplicities, assemblage or society are rejected as an “asocial stranger”, as a centering, unifying automaton. Since then, N is really always n-1. Rosentiel and Petitot insist that the opposition centered-a-centered is valuable not so much for things as for what it indicates only through the method of calculation it applies to things. Trees can correspond to a rhizome, or, conversely, blossom into a rhizome. And in general, it is true that one and the same thing allows for two methods of calculation or two types of regulation, but in such a way that the state does not particularly change in one or the other case. For example, let us turn once again to psychoanalysis: not only in its theory, but also in the practice of calculation and treatment, it subordinates the unconscious to tree-like structures, hierarchical graphs, repeated memories, centered organs, the phallus, the tree-phallus. In this respect, psychoanalysis cannot change the method - it bases its own dictatorial power on the dictatorial concept of the unconscious. The maneuvering tactics of psychoanalysis are also extremely limited. In psychoanalysis, as in its object, there is always a general or superior (General Freud). On the contrary, considering the unconscious as an a-centered system, that is, as a machine network of finite automata (rhizome), schizoanalysis achieves a completely different state of the unconscious. The same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosentiel and Petito rightly consider the possibility of an “a-centered organization of the community of words.” For utterances, as for desires, it is never a question of reducing the unconscious in order to interpret the latter, in order to force it to mean according to the model of a tree. It's about produce the unconscious and, along with it, new expressed, different desires - the rhizome is such a production of the unconscious itself.

It is curious how the tree began to dominate Western reality and all Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, as well as over epistemology, theology, ontology, over all philosophy... - the foundation-root, Grund, roots and fondations. The West has a privileged relationship with the forest, with deforestation; the fields reclaimed from the forest are sown with seed plants, an object of culture for the offspring of a tree-like species and type; Cattle breeding, in turn, takes place on fallow lands, on the selection of offspring that form the entire tree-like animal as a whole. The East represents a different figure - a relationship, rather, with the steppe and garden (in other cases, with desert and oasis), rather than with forest and field; tuber culture continued through the fragmentation of the individual; exclusion, bracketing of pastoralism, limited to fenced areas or thrown into the steppe of nomads. The West is the agriculture of offspring selected due to a large number of variable individuals; East - gardening of a small number of individuals, referring to a large range of “clones”. Doesn’t everything happen in the East, especially in Oceania, as in the rhizomatic model, which in all respects contrasts itself with the Western model of the tree? Haudricourt even sees here the reason for the opposition between the morality or philosophy of transcendence dear to the West and the philosophy of immanence inherent in the East: a God who sows and mows, as opposed to a God who sticks and digs (sticking versus sowing). Transcendence is a purely European disease. And this is not the same music, the earth here does not have the same music. And this is not the same sexuality at all - seed plants, even reuniting the two sexes, subordinate sexuality to the model of reproduction; the rhizome, on the contrary, is the liberation of sexuality not only in relation to reproduction, but also in relation to the capacity for sexual reproduction or genitality. As for us, the tree has grown in our bodies, it has hardened and stratified even our gender. We have lost the rhizome or grass. Henry Miller: “China is a weed in humanity’s cabbage patch.<…>The weed is the nemesis of human endeavor. Of all the imaginary beings we associate with plants, animals and stars, perhaps the weed leads the wisest life. It is true that grass does not produce flowers, aircraft carriers, or Sermons on the Mount.<…>But in the end, the grass always has the last word. Ultimately, it all comes back to the Chinese state. To what historians usually call the twilight of the Middle Ages. There is only one way out - grass.<…>Grass exists only between the great uncultivated spaces. She fills the voids. It grows between and among other things. The flower is beautiful, cabbage is healthy, poppy is crazy. But the grass is what overflows, that’s the moral lesson.” What kind of China is Miller talking about, old or modern, fictional or something else that would be part of a moving map?

America should have a special place. Of course, it is not free from the dominance of trees and the search for roots. We see this even in literature, in the search for national identity, and even in European ascension or genealogy (Kerouac goes searching for his ancestors again). Nevertheless, everything important that happened or is happening continues thanks to the American rhizome - the beatniks, the underground, the underground, gangs and gangs, consistent lateral rapid growth in direct connection with the external. The difference between the American and European books, even when the American intends to follow the tree structure. The difference is in the concept of the book. "Leaves of Grass" And the directions in America are not the same - namely: in the East a tree-like search is carried out and a return to the old world. But there is also a rhizomatic West - with its Indians without clan and tribe, with its always elusive boundaries, with its unstable and shifting borders. The entire American “map” is in the West, where even trees form a rhizome. America reversed the directions: it placed its East in the West, as if the Earth became round precisely in America; and her West is the very fringe of the East. (It is not India, as Haudricourt believed, that creates the mediator between the West and the East, but it is America that creates the core and mechanism of inversion.) American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist - don’t look for the root, follow the channel... Are there also two types bureaucracy or even three (or even more)? Western bureaucracy - its agrarian, cadastral origins, its roots and fields, trees and their role as borders, the great census of William the Conqueror, feudalism, the policy of the kings of France, aimed at basing the State on property, to redistribute land through wars, litigation and marriages. The kings of France chose the lily because this plant has deep roots that attach to the slopes. Is it the same in the East? Of course, it is too easy to imagine the East as a rhizome and immanence; but the State does not operate according to a tree-scheme corresponding to pre-established, tree-like and rooted classes; this is a canal bureaucracy, for example the famous hydraulic power with “weak property”, where the State gives rise to canalizing and canalized classes (see what was never refuted in Wittfogel’s theses). The despot acts there as a river, and not as a source, which would also be a point, a point-tree or a root; he rather marries the waters than sits under a tree; and the Buddha tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao River and the Tree of Louis. Is America acting as a mediator here again? For it operates simultaneously through extermination, internal liquidation (not only of Indians, but also of farmers, etc.) and through external, consistent rapid growth of immigration. The flow of capital produces a huge channel, determining the amount of power with immediate “quanta”, where everyone in their own way benefits from the flow of money (hence the myth-reality of the poor man becoming a billionaire in order to become poor again): so, in America everything is united - at once a tree and a canal, a root and a rhizome. There is no universal capitalism and capitalism in itself, capitalism is at the crossroads of all types of formations, it is always neo-capitalism by nature, it invents - all the time for the worse - its eastern and western faces and distorts both of them.

At the same time - with all these geographical distributions - we are on the wrong track. A dead end is even worse. If we are talking about demonstrating that rhizomes also have their own despotism, their own hierarchy, and even more rigid, then so much the better, because there is no dualism - no ontological dualism here and there, no axiological dualism of good and bad, no American synthesis or mixtures. In rhizomes, rhizomatic germinations in the roots, there are nodes of tree-like branching. Moreover, there are despotic formations, immanences and canalizations inherent in rhizomes. There are anarchic deformations in the transcendental system of trees, above-ground roots and underground stems. It is important that the tree-root and the rhizome-canal are not opposed as two models - one acts like a transcendental model and tracing, even if it generates its own escapes; the other acts as an immanent process, overturning the model and outlining the map, even as it constitutes its own hierarchies, even as it creates a despotic channel. We are talking neither about this or that place on earth, nor about this or that moment in history, and least of all about this or that category in the mind. We are talking about a pattern that never stops building and deepening, and a process that never stops continuing, breaking and renewing. Different or new dualism? No. The problem with writing is that imprecise expressions are absolutely necessary in order to indicate something accurately. And not at all because we should go side by side, not at all because we could act only with the help of approximations: inaccuracy is not an approximation at all, on the contrary, it is an exact passage of what is being created. We appeal to one dualism in order to reject another.

We use model dualism only to achieve a process that would reject any model. Every time we need cerebral correctors, breaking down dualisms that we did not want to create, but through which we go. To achieve the magic formula that we are all looking for: PLURALISM = MONISM, going through all the dualisms, which are enemies, but absolutely necessary enemies, furniture that we constantly rearrange.

Let us summarize the fundamental characteristics of a rhizome - unlike trees and their roots, a rhizome connects any one point with any other point, and each of its features does not necessarily refer to features of the same nature, it introduces extremely different modes of signs and even states of non-signs. The rhizome does not allow itself to return to either the One or the Many. She is not the One that becomes two, nor even that directly becomes three, four, five, etc. She is not the many deduced from the One, or to which the One is added (n+1). It is not made of units, but of dimensions, or rather of moving directions. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows and overflows. It constitutes linear sets with dimensions, without subject and object - sets that can be laid out on the plane of consistency and from which one is always subtracted (n-1). Such a multitude changes its dimensions only by changing its own nature and subjecting itself to metamorphoses. In contrast to the structure determined by the totality of points and positions, the binary relations between these points and the two-valued relations between positions, the rhizome is made only of lines - of lines of segmentation, stratification as dimensions, and also lines of flight or deterritorialization as its maximum dimension, according to which and following it, multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changing its nature. We will not confuse such lines or outlines with the progeny of the tree type, which are only localizable connections between points and positions. In contrast to a tree, a rhizome is not an object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as a tree-image, nor internal reproduction as a structure-tree. A rhizome is an antigenealogy. This is short-term memory or anti-memory. The rhizome operates through variation, expansion, conquest, capture, injection. In contrast to graphic representation, drawing or photography, in contrast to tracings, the rhizome deals with a map that must be produced, constructed, always dismantled, connected, revised, modified - in multiple inputs and outputs with its own lines of flight. It is the tracing paper that needs to be transferred to the cards, and not vice versa. In contrast to centered (even polycentered) systems with hierarchical communication and pre-established connections, the rhizome is an a-centered, non-hierarchical and non-signifying system - without a General, without an organizational memory or a central automaton, uniquely determined only by the circulation of states. What is to be discussed in the rhizome is its relationship with sexuality, as well as with the animal, the plant, the world, politics, the book, with natural and artificial things - a relationship completely different from the tree-like relationship: all kinds of "becomings".

The plateau is always in the middle - neither at the beginning nor at the end. The rhizome consists of a plateau. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special - a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities that develops, avoiding any orientation towards a climax or an external final goal. Bateson gives the example of the culture of Bali, where mother-child sexual games or quarrels between men go through such a strange, intense stabilization. “The appearance of a continuous plateau of intensity is replaced by an orgasm,” a war, or a point of climax. To relate expressions and actions to external or transcendental ends, instead of judging them on the plane of immanence according to their own value, is a vexing feature of the Western mind. For example, since a book is made up of chapters, it has its own climax points, its own completion points. On the contrary, what happens to a book made of plateaus communicating with each other through microcracks, like in the brain? We call a “plateau” any set that is connected to others through underground stems close to the surface in such a way as to form and spread a rhizome. We write this book as a rhizome. We made it up from the plateau. We gave it a circular shape, but in a way that allowed for a laugh. Every morning we woke up, and each of us asked himself which plateau he was going to tackle, scribbling five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we saw lines like columns of small ants leaving one plateau in order to conquer another. We created circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read from any location and be in connection with any other location. Multiples require a method to create them efficiently; no typographical ingenuity, no lexical trick, no mixing or formation of words, no syntactic daring can replace such a method. In fact, all of them are most often just mimetic procedures designed to dissipate or break the unity held in another dimension for the sake of the book-image. Technonarcissism. Typographical, lexical or syntactical creations are necessary only if they cease to belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, so that they themselves can become one of the dimensions of the multiplicity in question; we know of rare successes in this genre. We couldn't do this ourselves. We just used words that functioned as a plateau for us. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZO-ANALYSIS = STRATO-ANALYSIS = PRAGMATS = MICRO-POLITICS. These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, that is, systems of numbers tied to one or another dimension of sets (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or discontinuity, circles of convergence, etc.). We do not claim the title of science in any way. We are no more familiar with science than with ideology; we know only assemblages. There are only machine assemblages of desire as collective assemblages of utterance. Neither signification, nor subjectification - write with n [dimensions] (every individualized utterance remains captive of dominant significations, any signified desire refers to the subjects over which it dominates). The assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily operates simultaneously in semiotic, material and social flows (independent of the renewal that may be made in the scientific or theoretical body). There is no longer a threefold division between the field of reality, i.e. the world, the field of representation, i.e. the book, and the field of subjectivity, i.e. the author. But the assemblage establishes connections between certain sets taken in each of these orders so that the book has neither a continuation in the next book, nor its object in the world, nor its subject in one or more authors. In short, it seems to us that a letter will never be enough [to broadcast] on behalf of an outsider. The external has no image, no meaning, no subjectivity. The book, as an assembly with the outside, is against the book-image of the world. The rhizome book is no longer dichotomous, rod-shaped, or fibrous. Never create a root, never cultivate it, although it is quite difficult not to fall back into these old procedures. “Things that come to my mind appear to me not because of their root, but because of some point located closer to their middle. Then try to hold them back, try to hold the blade of grass that begins to grow only from the middle of the trunk, by grabbing it.” Why is this so difficult? This is already a question of perceptual semiotics. It is not easy to perceive things from the middle, and not from top to bottom or vice versa, from left to right or vice versa - try it and you will see that everything changes. It is not easy to see the grass in things and words. (In the same way, Nietzsche said that an aphorism should be “chewed”, and the plateau can never be separated from the cows that inhabit it and which are also the clouds of heaven.)

We write history, but we always write from the point of view of settled life and on behalf of the unitary apparatus of the State, at least possible, even when we talk about nomads. What is missing is Nomadology as the opposite of history. However, there are rare and major successes here - for example, regarding the children's crusade: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so many plateaus with variable dimensions. Andrzejewski's book "The Gates of Heaven" is composed of one continuous phrase, a stream of children, a stream of march with the stamping, stretching, haste of the semiotic stream of all children's confessions coming to the old monk at the head of the procession in order to declare themselves, a stream of desire and sexuality, with each child deprived of love and more or less directly driven by the dark posthumous and pederastic desire of the Count of Vendôme, and all this with circles of convergence - what matters is not that the flows form the "One or the Many", we are no longer in them: there is a collective assemblage of utterance, a machine assemblage of desire , one in the other, and ramifications on the colossal external, creating sets in completely different ways. And then, the most recent example: Armand Farrashi's book about the IV Crusade, Dislocation, where phrases part and disperse, collide and coexist, and letters, typography begin to dance as the crusade falls into a frenzy.21 Here are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing . Writing is married to the war machine and lines of flight; it leaves strata, segmentarities, sedentarism, and the apparatus of the State. But why do we need another model? The book - won't it be another “image” of the Crusades? Is there not another preserved unity - as a core unity in the case of Schwob, as an aborted unity in the case of Farrasha, as the unity of the buried Count in the most beautiful case of “The Gates of Heaven”? Is there a need for an even deeper nomadism than the nomadism of the crusades, the nomadism of genuine nomads, or the nomadism of those who no longer even move and who do not imitate anything? They just create an assembly. How does a book discover a sufficient externality with which it could form an assemblage in the heterogeneous, rather than a world requiring reproduction? Being cultural, a book is necessarily a copy - a copy of itself, a copy of a previous book by the same author, a copy of other books, no matter how different they may be, an endless copying here and there of concepts and words, a copy of the present, past or future world. But an anti-cultural book can still be permeated with too heavy a culture - however, it will actively use oblivion, not memory, sub-becoming, not progress in becoming, nomadism, not sedentism, a map, not a tracing paper. RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if people have better things to do than read it, even if the blocks of university culture or pseudoscience remain too burdensome and ponderous. For science would be completely insane if we allowed it to work [non-stop]. Look at mathematics, it is not a science, but an extraordinary jargon, and nomadic one at that. Even, and mainly, in the theoretical field, any unreliable and pragmatic scaffolding is better than tracing concepts - with their notes and achievements that change nothing. An imperceptible gap rather than a signifying note. The nomads invented a war machine against the State apparatus. Never has history included nomadism, never has a book included the external. Throughout its long history, the State has been the model of the book and of thought - the logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of Mind, the tribunal of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The claim of the State is to be an interiorized image of the world order and to root man. But the relationship of the war machine with the outside is not another “model”; it is the assembly that is the reason that the very idea becomes nomadic, that the book is a part for all moving machines, a trunk for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).

Write to n, to p-1, write with slogans: Create a rhizome, not a root, never plant! Don't sow - stick in! Be neither one nor many - be pluralities! Create a line and never a point! Speed ​​turns a point into a line! Be fast even while standing still! Line of chance, line of hip, line of flight. Don't cultivate the General in yourself! No fair ideas, just one idea! (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Map - and no photographs or drawings. Be the Pink Panther so that your love passions become like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. We're talking about the old man river:

Don't plant tattoos
Don't plant cotton
Them that plants them is soon forgotten
But old man river he just keeps rollin along.

The rhizome does not begin and does not end, it is always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo. The tree is continuity, and the rhizome is alliance, only alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, and the rhizome is woven from the conjunctions “and... and... and...”. This conjunction has enough power to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? - these are the most useless questions. To erase, to start again and again from scratch, to look for a beginning or a foundation - all this presupposes a false concept of journey and movement (methodology, pedagogy, initiation, symbolism...). But Kleist, Lenz or Buchner have another way of traveling: such as moving, starting from the middle, in the middle, going in and out - but not starting and not ending. Moreover, it was American - and already English - literature that clearly showed this rhizomatic meaning, was able to move between things, establish the logic of I, turn over ontology, remove the foundation, annul the end and the beginning. She managed to create pragmatism. The point is that the middle is not average at all; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things - indicates not a localized relationship going from one to another and back, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that carries away one and the other, a stream without beginning and end, washing away both its banks and accelerating in the middle.

Nikolai Sednin, "Letter from Grandma"

There are many concepts to explain the intricacy of modern literary texts. Starting from intertextuality and ending with all kinds of deconstructions, simulacra, dialogisms, literary games and a bunch of other simple and difficult words. Using the example of the poststructuralist term “rhizome” and the classical principle of the golden section in fine art, I will try to show how the criticism of postmodernism relates to modern works.

I'll start, perhaps, with the rhizome.

The rhizome is usually compared to the tangled root system of a plant or the World Wide Web. A kind of decentralized, disordered structure. Like a big ball of thread that you can’t untangle because you don’t know which knot to untie first.
The literary analogue of the rhizome is the concept of the Text of Roland Barthes. An idea that, unfortunately, no modern critic can ignore.
Text, according to Roland Barthes, this is an attitude towards a work not as some kind of plot that has a beginning and an end, but as a certain unit that is only part of a whole set of texts and is part of the universal Text. It is as if we were reading the text in the context of all previously written texts.
It would be nice to add about the differences between the Text and the Work.
The work, according to Barthes, is “closed” and “little symbolic” - The text is entirely symbolic and refers to countless meanings. The work is “intentional” and “integrity” - The text is unintentional and can be scattered, crushed and turned upside down.
If we generalize, then it must be said that the rhizome-Text is quite difficult to describe - and even more difficult to imagine. But most of all it looks like a very confusing system. A kind of ball.

Chaim Sokol, "Flying Grass (Rhizome)"

But let’s return to literature to understand what principles of rhizome work in a modern text:
Firstly:
The rhizomatic principle works in the “clinical” postmodern text minor gap- if you break the connection between any elements of the text, the entire structure of the work will not crumble like a house of cards. For example, in William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch, the course of events is not subject to the laws of logic, but to a certain (psychedelic, if you like) spontaneity. You can tear the plot to shreds - and the meaning will not change much. But you are unlikely to be able to do something similar with Tolstoy’s novels.
Secondly:
The principle works plurality. Quote below:
“...an example illustrating<принцип множественности>, is the puppeteer controlling his puppet. French philosophers argue that in fact the movements of the doll are not driven by the desire of the puppeteer, but by the “multiplicity of nerve fibers.” The puppeteer ultimately turns out to be a puppet of this multiplicity.” It’s the same in literature - the author gives many references in the text, but he does not control which of them is more and which is less important, and how they can interact with each other. So it is not always clear - when uttering the expression “freedom, equality, fraternity,” the author is hinting at the French Revolution, the rock group “Alice,” or both.
And thirdly - this is the principle cartography and decalcomania.
The structure of a literary work is not like tracing paper; it is “open, flexible, reversible and susceptible to change.” In a work of literature, images and facts do not multiply, like some kind of fractal structure, but are in a disordered state. The string of examples of this can last a long time - starting from Burroughs and ending with Pelevin and Tatyana Tolstaya.

All three of these points are examples of how the rhizome is realized in a literary text. And the main thing is that this is a typical understanding of the work in postmodernism, and the important thing here is that going beyond the boundaries of the text when analyzing it becomes quite commonplace. The work became like a tangled ball of thread.
But:
Does this rhizomatic understanding reflect the real situation in modern literature?
Take a close look at the photograph at the very beginning of the article - it is an artistic composition with many different images, symbols and references. Quite in the spirit of postmodernism. Here you have a little red riding hood, and seven wolves, and a target behind your back, two New Year trees, traps, and, in addition, a mistletoe over the doorway. And if we take into account the general nature of the work, then there are countless different meanings. And the name of the picture - “letter from grandmother” - only multiplies the number of possible interpretations.
Question: is it possible to apply the term “rhizome” when analyzing this photograph?
From the point of view of how the different symbols in this work relate to each other, the answer is clearly positive. A slight gap, multiplicity - all the principles listed above will work, a ball of thread on the face.
But there is one very important point, which makes the rhizome completely inappropriate when criticizing this photograph. I'm talking about composition.
All objects are strictly in their places according to the laws generally accepted in fine art for the arrangement of figures in space.
Look at the diagram below:

This work, as its author Nikolai Sednin writes, “is built on the principle of an hourglass. The title of the composition [letter from grandmother] contains a key, from which the movement spirals towards the center towards the hand with the basket and is then mirrored by the same spiral. Kapkan completes the movement and turns his gaze to the repetition in the reverse order. Thus, looking at the composition, we mentally turn the clock over and over again, observing this endless movement.” (a reflection of this quote can be seen in the picture above).
As you can see, the composition of the photograph arranges all the symbols in a certain hierarchical sequence. There is a whole plot, and if we exclude even one character, we will lose part of the story.
But how can one prove that this work has a system and the quote above is not an empty interpretation of the author? How does an artist generally understand whether objects on a canvas are arranged well or poorly?
The answer is the golden ratio principle.
Golden ratio- this is something that no competent artist can do without. Geometrically calculated points of increased spectator attention on the canvas so that each object is proportionally correlated with all other objects on the canvas. Everything has its own size and place. And by arranging objects in one or another combination, the author focuses the viewer’s attention on what is important to him. Thus, a competent composition is when you don’t just look at the canvas, but look there, where the artist wants. And even if, at first glance, it seems that the objects are arranged in random order, then this is only self-deception.

Leonardo da Vinci. "Lady with an Ermine", "Madonna Lita", "Gioconda".

Arkhip Kuindzhi."Birch Grove"

Let us now return to our postmodern texts.

Can we say that any novel lacks harmony in the arrangement of events? Isn't the same word "plot" the literary analogue of artistic composition? Without such a “skeleton,” the entire body of literary images will fall apart into a disordered pile of meat.
But what about the good old question that literature and fine art are still different things?
Let's say. But how big is this difference? Perhaps the difference is only in the instruments?
In painting, a competent composition is checked very simply - move away from the painting ten steps and look at it from afar. If all the objects on the canvas look natural, then they are positioned correctly. In literature you can do something similar - try to describe a two-volume novel on two pages, and you will understand how integral its structure is.
Everything has a composition.

But then the question arises: why do we need a rhizome if there is a golden ratio? After all, it is obvious that if critics constantly apply the principle of an insignificant gap, then it is better for authors to abandon their novels and start gluing together literary abstractions - so that the work and its analysis at least somehow coincide with each other.
But no matter how it is. Still, rhizome is a well-developed, established term. And she has one remarkable advantage:
The rhizome does not describe the work itself, but how it looks in the author’s head.
If we could look into the writer’s head, we would see a plot that is really very reminiscent of the root system of a plant - a world without end and beginning, with many constantly changing connections, dynamic, disordered. Those. The advantage of the rhizome is that it allows you to see the text as it was before its creation. A rhizome is an attempt to look into the author's head.
And not only for the author - but at the same time for the viewer. After all, when you truly immerse yourself in a picture, it grows in your mind and, gradually fed by the growing flow of associations, begins to live its own life.
Rhizome - it is a work reflected in the human view of that work.

But, as Tyutchev wrote, “a thought expressed is a lie.”
By putting a thought into words, we determine it. Despite the fact that the plot in the author’s head resembles a complex chaotic system, the essence of writing is precisely to bring order to this chaos when creating a work. Orderliness is an inevitable price to pay for making the text understandable to an outsider. Understandable enough to author's rhizome was able to give birth reader's rhizome. Not a single work of art is complete without this tribute to the word...

When you pay attention to the amount of detail that is depicted in “A Letter from Grandma,” your head is overwhelmed by a whole stream of associations. But if the viewer looks at Sednin’s painting from afar, he will understand that the work is holistic, and all the symbols are ordered into a certain structure.
Harmony inevitably haunts any work of art. And when I think about it, “rhizome” and “golden ratio” inevitably turn for me into two warring camps that can never stop fighting in the world of analysis of works of art.

RHIZOME (French rhizome - rhizome) is a concept of postmodern philosophy that captures a fundamentally non-structural and non-linear way of organizing integrity, leaving open the possibility for immanent autochthonous mobility and, accordingly, the realization of its internal creative potential of self-configuration. The term "R." introduced into philosophy in 1976 by Deleuze and Guattari in their joint work “Rhizome” - in the context of developing the basic principles of the nomadological project of postmodernism, based on a radical rejection of the presumption of a constant gestalt organization of being - see Nomadology. The concept of "R." expresses a fundamental postmodern attitude toward the presumption of destruction of traditional ideas about structure as semantically centered (see Acentrism) and stably defined, being a means of denoting a radical alternative to closed and static linear structures that assume a rigid axial orientation. Such structures are semantically coupled by Deleuze and Guattari with the fundamental for classical European culture metaphor of the “root”, differentiating into the actual “radical” or “rod” (“system-root”), on the one hand, and “fibrous” or “beam-shaped” (“system-root”), on the other. The organizational principles of these systems are conceived in nomadology as different from each other (primarily according to the criterion of the mechanisms of their evolutionary unfolding), but the typological commonality of these structures is their characteristic conjugation with the semantic figure of depth, metaphorically presenting in the context of Western mentality the metaphysical presumption of linear unfolding of processuality (deepening) and meaning (deepening into the problem) - see Root, Metaphysics. In contrast to any types of root organization, R. is interpreted not as a linear "rod" or "root", but as a "tuber" or "bulb" radically different from the roots - as a potential infinity, implicitly containing a "hidden stem".

The fundamental difference is that this stem can develop anywhere and take on any configuration, because R. is absolutely nonlinear: “the world has lost its core” (Deleuze and Guattari). The fundamental property of R., therefore, is its heteronomy while maintaining integrity: it is “a semiotic link like a tuber in which the most diverse types of activity are compressed - linguistic, perceptual, mimetic, gestural, cognitive; language itself, its universality, does not exist , we see only a competition of dialects, dialects, jargons, special languages" - as if "rats squirm one on top of the other" (Deleuze and Guattari). This polymorphism, which distinguishes R. from structure, is ensured by the absence not only of the unity of the semantic center, but also of the centering unity of the code. The logic of the root is the logic of rigid vector-oriented structures, while R. (in the context of the postmodern rejection of logocentrism - see Logocentrism) is modeled as a nonequilibrium integrity (in many ways similar to the nonequilibrium environments studied by synergetics), not characterized by the presence of organizational orders and characterized by permanent creative mobility. The source of transformation in this case is not external infliction, but the immanent instability (non-finality) of R., due to its energetic potential for self-variation: according to Deleuze, R. is “neither stable nor not stable, but rather “metastable”... Endowed potential energy." Thus, it can be argued that rhizomorphic environments have an immanent creative potential for self-organization, and in this regard can be assessed not as cybernetic (subordinate to the commands of the “center”), but as synergetic. An excellent illustration of this can be the programmatic text for postmodernism by E. Ionesco “The Tragedy of Language”: “A strange event happened, and I don’t understand how it happened: the text was transformed before my eyes... Quite simple and clear sentences... by themselves /emphasis mine - M.M./ came into motion: they became corrupted, perverted,” only to become distorted again in the next moment. However, the apparent organizational chaos achieved as a result actually conceals within itself the potential for an infinite number of new organizational transformations, ensuring limitless plurality of R. (see Chaos). According to the nomadological vision of the situation, within the framework of R., in principle, it is impossible to identify any fixed points, because each of them, in its dynamics, actually appears before the observer as a line - the trajectory of its own movement drawn by it, which, in turn, eludes the rigid fixation. Speaking about the rhizomorphic environment, Deleuze and Guattari note that “it consists of heterogeneous themes, different dates and levels” - in an abstract effort, “lines of articulation and division, stratification, territoriality” can be highlighted in it: “any rhizome includes lines of division along which it is stratified, territorialized, organized." These abstract lines would define a kind of statics of R., if in relation to the latter it makes sense to talk about a static state as such. However, the existence of a rhizomorphic environment can only be understood as non-final dynamics, and this dynamics is determined by “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification”: “comparative speeds of currents along these lines give rise to phenomena of relative delay, braking or, conversely, swiftness... All this - lines and comparative speeds - amounts to internal organization “R. is its “agencement.” Thus, not only do the lines of internal division actually turn out to be permanently mobile in relation to R., they also imply a kind of “breaks” as transitions of the rhizome into a state characterized by the absence of rigid and universal stratification. R., in contrast to structure, is not afraid of rupture, but - on the contrary - is constituted in it as in a permanent change in its configuration and, therefore, semantics: according to Deleuze and Guattari, “a rhizome can be torn, broken in some place, rebuild onto another line... Breaks in the rhizome arise whenever segmental lines unexpectedly find themselves on lines of flight... These lines constantly transform into each other. "In a similar way, Deleuze and Guattari consider what in traditional terminology (extremely inadequate in relation to this case) could be designated as the external structure of R. - R. can be interpreted as a fundamentally open environment - not only in the sense of openness to transformation, but also in the sense of its relationship with the outside. According to Deleuze and Guattari, R., in principle, does not and cannot have “neither beginning nor end, only a middle from which it grows and goes beyond its limits” - strictly speaking, in relation to R. it is impossible to clearly differentiate external and internal: “the rhizome develops, varying, expanding, capturing, grasping, penetrating” (Deleuze, Guattari), constituting its internal through the external (see Fold). Thus, the processuality of the existence of a fundamentally astructural R. consists in the permanent generation of new versions of organization (including linear ones), similar in status to those transient macroscopic pictures of self-organization that are the subject of research for synergetics. However, any of these momentarily relevant and situationally significant options for the definiteness of R., in principle, cannot be interpreted as final - a significant aspect of R.’s being is fixed in the principle of “non-selection” (Deleuze and Guattari), which is regulatory in relation to the rhizomorphic organization. Among successively replacing each other virtual structures, not one can be axiologically singled out as the most preferable - autochthonous in the ontological sense or correct in the interpretative sense: “to be rhizomorphic means to generate stems and fibers that seem to be roots /emphasis added - M.M.I or connected to them , penetrating the trunk with the risk of being involved in new strange forms" (Deleuze, Guattari). At any moment in time, any line of R. can be connected (in a fundamentally unpredictable way - see neodeterminism) with any other, forming each time at the moment of this (fundamentally transient, momentarily significant connection) a certain pattern of R. - a kind of temporary “plateau” of it permanently and unpredictably pulsating configuration. In other words, if structure corresponds to the image of the world as Cosmos, then R. corresponds to “chaosmos” (see Chaosmos). Such a pulsation of R., which involves transitions from stratification to escaping from it and from one version of stratification to another, is functionally completely analogous to the pulsating transition of a self-organizing environment from chaotic states to states characterized by the presence of a macrostructure, which is based on the coordination of micro-level elements of the system. Thus, in the nomadological project of postmodernism “we are talking about a model that continues to form and deepen in a process that develops, improves, renews” (Deleuze, Guattari), each time revealing new versions of its being, correlated with each other according to the principle of isonomy: no more so than otherwise. In this regard, if structure is understood by Deleuze and Guattari as a “tracing paper” that “reproduces only itself when it intends to recreate something else,” then R. is compared with a “map” that can and should be read: “we are talking about a model, which continues to take shape." According to Deleuze and Guattari, “this... is one of the most distinctive properties of the rhizome - to always have many exits” (compare with the “dispersion of dominant moves” in Jameson, the “garden of forking paths” in Borges, the network “labyrinth” in Eco and their infinite number of entrances, exits, dead ends and corridors, each of which can intersect with any other - a semiotic model of the world and the world of culture, embodied in the image of a library-labyrinth in “The Name of the Rose” or “space library” by V. Leitch). In this regard, R. is finite, but limitless; “the rhizome does not begin and does not end,” and it “has enough strength to break and eradicate the word “to be” (Deleuze and Guattari), opening up the possibility and freedom of the infinite plurality of its non-ontologizing being (see Being, Ontology). R. is fundamentally plural, and procedurally plural. According to the formulation of Deleuze and Guattari, “the rhizome is neither reducible to the One nor to the plural. It is not the One that is divided into two, then into three, into four, etc. But it is not the plural, which comes from the One and to which the One always joins (n ​​1). It consists not of unities, but of dimensions, or rather of moving lines. [...] It forms multidimensional linear sets /cf., for example, Aeon and Chronos - M.M.I without subject and object, which are concentrated in terms of consistency and from which the One (n-1) is always subtracted. Such a multitude changes its direction with a corresponding change in its nature and itself." In accordance with the above, R. is inevitably constituted as "anti-genealogical", i.e., fundamentally not articulated either from the point of view of its origin or from the point of view of the possibilities of introduction criteria for assessing its processuality as progress or regression. The processuality of R.'s being is fundamentally alternative to the preformist understanding of the "unfolding" of the design (meaning) initially inherent in the object - the "unfolding" that is realized according to the model of the sequential formation of binary oppositions. According to the postmodernist assessment, only for rigidly gestalt systems are characterized by the presence of a genetic (evolutionary) axis as a linear vector of development: “the genetic axis is an objective core unity from which subsequent stages emerge; the deep structure of similarity, rather, of a basic sequence, decomposed into immediate components" (see Metaphysics, Logocentrism). In contrast, "the rhizome is antigenealogical" - it is like "the final unity is realized in something else / namely: fundamentally non-axial, i.e. e. not linear - M.M./ dimension - transformative and subjective." And in the processuality of this transformative dimension, "the rhizome does not obey any structural or generative model. It is alien to the very thought of the genetic axis as a deep structure." In this regard, the nomadological concept of R. is constituted not only in the context of "post-metaphysical thinking", but also sets a new understanding of determinism, free from the idea of ​​external causative influence and focused on the presumption of immanence (see. Post-metaphysical thinking, Neo-determinism). In this context, nomadology sharply criticizes the idea of ​​a strictly defined unfolding of the original concept of a particular object through a binary differentiation of the content of the latter: according to the formulation of Deleuze and Guattari, “in contrast to the structure, which is determined through a set of points and positions, binary relationships between these points and bilateral relations between positions, the rhizome consists exclusively of lines of division, stratification, but also lines of flight or deterritorialization, like a maximum dimension, following which the set is modified, transforming its nature" (see Binarism). According to nomadological attitudes, these designated vectors are fundamentally different from binary vectors of “growth of tree structures”: according to Deleuze and Guattari, “these lines should not be confused with tree-type lines, which represent localizable connections between points and positions. Unlike a tree, a rhizome is not an object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as a tree-root, nor internal reproduction as a structure-tree" (see Tree). Thus, the principles of the implementation of the processuality of being of a rhizomorphic environment can be fixed, according to Deleuze and Guattari , as “principles of connection and heterogeneity,” “principle of multiplicity,” “principle of insignificant discontinuity,” “principles of cartography and decalcomania.” Ideas articulated in the spirit of the nomadological project can be found not only in Deleuze and Guattari, but also in other postmodern authors, which allows us to conclude that the presumptions explicitly expressed in nomadology are fundamental to the philosophy of postmodernism as a whole.A classic example of a rhizomorphic environment in postmodern analysts is also the environment of writing: according to, for example, R. Barthes, the text is a product of writing as a processuality that does not result in this text (see Letter). Postmodernist understanding of writing is fundamentally rhizomorphic (“metaphor... of a text is a network” in R. Barth), and for it there is not and cannot be a natural, correct or only possible not only way, but also language of articulation: “everything has to be unraveled, but there is nothing to decipher, the structure can be traced, stretched (like pulling up a loose loop on a stocking) in all its turns and at all levels, but it is impossible to reach the bottom; the space of writing is given to us for a run, not for a breakthrough; writing constantly generates meaning, but it immediately disappears, there is a systematic release of meaning" (R. Barthes). Similarly, in Derrida's self-assessment, "the focus of the historical and systematic intersection of his ideas" is the "structural impossibility of closing ... the network, fixing its weaving, to outline its boundary, which would not be a meta." (As A. Ronson notes in an interview with Derrida, the problematic-conceptual space of his philosophizing is not only not closed, but also fundamentally non-linear: "I asked where to start, but You locked me in some kind of labyrinth." ) R. as an organizational model finds its concretization in postmodern textual criticism, in particular, in the figure of “construction” in the postmodern concept of artistic creativity, within the framework of which the ideal of an original author’s work is replaced by the ideal of construction as a stereophonic flow of explicit and hidden quotes, each of which refers to different and varied spheres of cultural meanings, each of which is expressed in its own language, requiring a special procedure of “recognition”, and each of which can enter into a relationship of dialogue or parody with any other, forming new quasi-texts and quasi-quotations within the text (see Intertextuality, Design). Constituting the idea of ​​R. as a fundamentally nonlinear type of organization of integrity, postmodernism is far from a one-sided interpretation of being as totally rhizomorphic, believing that it is correct to use both linear and nonlinear interpretative models - according to the parameters of the analyzed environments. Moreover, nomadology asks about the possible interaction of linear (“tree-like”) and nonlinear (“rhizomorphic”) environments with each other: as Deleuze and Guattari write, “in the depths of a tree, in the hollow of a root or in the axil of a branch, a new rhizome can form.” - In this context, the following problems turn out to be relevant: “does the map have the ability to decalculate? Isn’t one of the properties of the rhizome to cross roots, sometimes merge with them? Does multiplicity have layers where unification and totalization, massification, mimetic mechanisms take root , meaningful seizure of power, subjective preferences,” etc. (Deleuze, Guattari). Thus, the concept of “R.”, integrally capturing the ideas formulated in the philosophy of postmodernism about a non-linear and programmatically astructural way of organizing integrity, acquiring the status of a fundamental concept for postmodernism, in the constitution of which the basic function of philosophy as such is manifested - the development of conceptual means for expressing and analyzing those types of systemic organization that are still being assimilated by existing culture (see Postmodernism).

History of Philosophy: Encyclopedia. - Minsk: Book House. A. A. Gritsanov, T. G. Rumyantseva, M. A. Mozheiko. 2002 .

See what “RHIZOME” is in other dictionaries:

- (French rhizome rhizome) the concept of postmodern philosophy, which captures a fundamentally non-structural and non-linear way of organizing integrity, leaving open the possibility for immanent autochthonous mobility and, accordingly, its implementation... History of Philosophy: Encyclopedia

What does a person do who is completely fed up with the meaninglessness of the surrounding simulation space and who is afraid and does not want to completely drown in the virtual? He goes on a journey. That is, he runs away from the simulation “wherever his eyes look” - in the hope that somewhere he will find true reality and meaning.

Postmodernism strongly welcomes this “escape syndrome.” He decisively declares: “Only in flight can any meaning be found. Run, honey, run faster and wherever you want. The main thing is don’t stop and don’t take root.”

IN different forms Many postmodernists wrote about this - Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, etc. But this concept was most fully developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the second volume of their joint work “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (1980), they devoted the introduction “Rhizome” and a large chapter “Treatise on Nomadology” to this concept. Machine of war." And then they developed the concept in a separate book, “Nomadology.”

Nomadology is the science of nomadism. The nomad is the subject of particular admiration and the main character of Deleuze and Guattari. But more on that a little later. Here I would like to emphasize that Deleuze and Guattari claim - unlike Jean-François Lyotard - that integrity, in principle, exists. But this is an integrity that is fundamentally different from the integrity in the worldview and philosophical classics of pre-modernity and modernity.

There, in the past, integrity was based on the metaphysics of being. This metaphysics always addresses the absolute. And it doesn’t matter what this absolute is called. For a religious person, his metaphysics addresses God - omnipresent and all-encompassing. For a materialist, matter becomes absolute - all-encompassing and omnipresent.

I would like to emphasize that when I talk about the absolute, I do not mean the Absolute located on the other side of being. I mean what I just listed. He who relies on religious metaphysics does not doubt his ability to rely on God. He who relies on the metaphysics of materialism does not doubt his ability to rely on matter and its movement (that absoluteness that underlies dialectical materialism).

This ability to rely (not canceled, but only supplemented by philosophical or scientific doubt) gave rise to special structures of being. Structures that grow (in the sense that I have just presented to the reader) from a certain metaphysical root. Grouping (again, in the sense that I just presented to the reader) around a certain center. Stringed on a certain rod.

And all this - growing, grouping, stringing - is subject to the principle of support. It is also a very specific metaphysical nature of being. Metaphysicality as support and support as metaphysicality. This is the specificity of classical integrity and classical meaning.

The basic metaphor of classical philosophy, from which comes the ability to rely and rely, is the Axis of Being, also known as the Axis of the World, also known as the Tree. All classical metaphysics, ontology, epistemology are “saturated” with this metaphor: the Tree of the World, the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and so on. In philosophical (and scientific classics based on it) there is a “genetically determined” development of reality from a metaphysical and ontological center, core, root. The development and understanding of reality goes from the root to the trunk, from the trunk to the branches, from the branches to the twigs, from the twigs to the leaves, etc. And all phenomena and events have reasons. The root is the cause of the trunk, the trunk is the cause of the branch, and so on. And leaves are the consequences of branches and twigs.

Forget all this, say Deleuze and Guattari. In fact, integrity is different. It does not have any stable roots, centers, or cores: "The world has lost its core"- they say. And the new integrity is a “rhizome”.

The rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari present as the only reality and new integrity, is something like a mycelium in which there is no main root and its “tree-like” products. This is a state in which “roots” randomly and unpredictably sprout in any place and direction and disappear just as unpredictably.

Why random and unpredictable? Because, Deleuze and Guattari write, “a rhizome is a nonlinear process, entirely consisting of instantaneous and random “branching” in any direction”. That is, denying any connections leading from causes to effects.

In the rhizome, everything happens on the surface, without affecting any depth. There are no structures in it with their stable centers and connections (remember Derrida’s “decentring”). It contains only random and momentary quasi-structures that arise in any place and at any time. Which either quickly disappear altogether or continuously move along the surface of the rhizome along “lines of flight.”

But the lines of flight in this concept are not at all some kind of “connecting frame” of rhizomorphic reality. Its integrity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, lies in the fact that lines of flight randomly and for a brief moment connect any points of the rhizome. In this sense, the integrity of the rhizome (as opposed to classical structures) is structureless and causeless.

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari do not dare to completely deprive their rhizome world of cause-and-effect logic and meaningfulness. They claim that just as in synergetics (nonlinear dynamics, which we talked about in articles on controlled chaos) there can be zones where events are interconnected by classical causality, the same thing happens in the “rhizomorphic” world. The randomness of transformations of the rhizome sometimes forms similar structures on its surface - “plateaus”, “folds” and so on. And it is precisely on these plateaus and in these folds on the surface of the rhizome world that “pockets of meaningfulness” sometimes arise.

How does a person who has gone on a journey for integrity and meaning feel after such explanations? He feels that he has been grossly deceived. After all, there is no integrity, and meanings, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, appear on the surface of the rhizome only for short moments. And they immediately disappear in the course of further unstoppable running along rhizomic “lines of flight.”

That is, these are not meanings on which you can rely. And not even the islands of meaningfulness, on which, in the end, you can live. These are either temporary tangles of something meaningful... Or some kind of bumps in a swamp... But these are not just bumps - in the end, you can also rely on a bump, at least temporarily. These are pockets of other instability within the usual instability, evenly distributed.

Well, you came across a hotbed of other instability and at first you were happy: it seemed like you managed to find something other than the usual instability, the hatred of which prompted you to wander. But other fragility is not strength, it is still the same fragility. And it is impossible to rely on it.

You soon discover this and begin to move on. But, encountering again something different from ordinary instability, you now ask yourself: “Isn’t this something different from ordinary instability just another, more insidious instability?”

However, if what you encounter is initially under suspicion, then it, absorbing suspicion, itself turns into instability. And when you discover that it is, you are completely disappointed. And either you plunge into instability. Or, wandering in search of the unshakable, you saturate everything you meet with your doubt and suspicion, and thereby make it unsteady.

This is not high theory. This is a description of how the enemy fights with us, what he is betting on. And why does he think that we will not be able to leave the “Zone Ch” imposed on us.

Wanderers can and must get out of it. Their task is to get out themselves and get others out. Therefore, the enemy needs to deal with the wanderer especially harshly.

How to figure it out? The enemy must not only plant suspicion in the soul of the wanderer. The enemy must create and transmit to the wanderer a virus of suspicion that will move when the wanderer meets something immutable - into this very immutable thing. And increase its instability, and therefore suspicion. And guarantee the initial failure of the wanderer’s attempts to rely on something unshakable.

As a result, according to the enemy, the wanderer must capitulate. And along with it, Russia must capitulate, immersed in postmodern instability, that is, in what we call “Zone B.”

The capitulation of the wanderer is the current task of the enemy. The enemy has still not been able to kill the wanderer in the bud. He is amazed by this. But he believes that the wanderer - a little sooner or a little later - will capitulate.

By taking on the task of discussing postmodernism, I knew what I was condemning myself to. Postmodernism is very fluid, subtly underdefined and deliberately complex.

It is impossible to describe it in its language, because then you yourself plunge into its irrevocable instability. Describing it in classical language is also impossible, because postmodernism is based on the fundamental negation of classical language. And you, trying to use classical language, turn out to be simply ridiculous.

In addition, your descriptions should be understandable to people who are very far from the deliberately intricate postmodernist gibberish and do not fully understand that they are immersed precisely in postmodern instability, that a complex and cunning game is being played with them - according to the imposed laws of “escape” in the rhizome world .

How to break through to the consciousness of such people? It seems to me that there is only one possibility. It consists in presenting their current real life situation as a situation of wandering. Moreover, a situation saturated with postmodern insidious seduction.

Wanting to simplify all this, without simplifying it, I invite our “Sutevites” to perceive their own situation as a situation that the enemy wants to turn into nomadological - that is, devoid of goals, meanings and supports - wandering.

There is every reason for this. Having observed the Sutevites for two years, I can offer them a reflexive model. It is precisely these models that, in my opinion, are the main means of overcoming nomadological temptations.

At first, the future “Sutevites”, who lived in the usual precariousness, heard Kurginyan’s call. And, getting out of this instability, they began to go somewhere. At first, perhaps just by reading books. Or carrying out simple promotions and other events.

Step by step they became convinced that someone was also walking next to them. And that these trajectories of micro-travelling are intertwined, and in a rather bizarre way, forming a kind of rope. The feeling of being inside this tourniquet is what marks the transition to the second phase.

In the third phase, the tourniquet turns into a tunnel through which wanderers walk. The tunnel leads out of the unsteady into something else.

But the souls of wanderers still contain their own fragility. She's suspicious and so on. Coming into contact with something else, the wanderer says: “I want to believe that you are not shaky. But I'll check. I have the right to suspect instability here too!” Indeed, he has the right to do so. But as soon as he begins to connect the unshakable with his suspicion of its unsteadiness, the unshakable becomes unshakable.

And it doesn’t matter what this suspicion is called - a “Kremlin project” or something else. The main thing is that the wanderer believes that the world consists of his instability and something immutable in the classical sense of the word, into which he cannot bring his instability. But there is simply no such thing anymore. And therefore, something new, strong and unshakable can only be created, built by the wanderer himself. Built, not given to him as a certainty.

This is the challenge of non-classicality. In the classical world, you can come across something, poke at it and, having discovered something unshakable, calm down and say: “Finally, I found something unshakable! I found my support!

And in the non-classical world you must guess what is immutable in what you encounter. Connect it with that unshakable thing that is in you. And expel the unsteady from what you have encountered and from yourself. And rely on all this newfound unshakability.

The enemy doesn't believe that we can do this. But we have to do it. And precisely in order to do this, we again and again look closely at the postmodern theory of life in the unsteady, the creation of the unsteady, the creation of modifications of the unsteady, and so on.

The book "Rhizome" (1976) jointly written by J. Deleuze and F. Guattari (later in a revised form was included as an introduction to the second volume of the book "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" - "A Thousand Plateaus") presents a model of modern culture that makes it possible evaluate the changes that have occurred since the existence of classical culture. Since ancient times, the tree has been the image of the world, and the root has been the image of the tree-world. The authors base their concept on the example different devices books, offering it as a model illustrating the type of its assembly. The first type of book is a root book. This is a classic book with a core, trunk, and crown. Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the tree-root. The second layer of the book is a spine system, where the main root is almost completely destroyed; many secondary roots are grafted onto it and acquire extraordinary development. They call such a system a rhizome. In contrast to any kind of root organization, the rhizome is interpreted not as a linear rod or root, but as a tuber radically different from the roots as a potential infinity. “Rhizome as an underground shoot (tige) is absolutely different from roots and roots. Bulbs, tubers are rhizomes”; “The rhizome has extremely diverse forms, starting from the external extent, branched in all directions, ending with concretization in bulbs and tubers.” In the animal kingdom, ants form a rhizome; rats swarm, crawling on each other. The fundamental difference between a rhizome is that it can develop anywhere and take on any configuration, because the rhizome is absolutely nonlinear, and, according to the authors’ conclusion, the world has lost its core.

Unlike rhizomorphic culture, the logic of a tree culture is the logic of rigid vector-oriented structures. The embodiment of the woody artistic world is the classic book. This type of book is perfectly organized, the law for this type of book is the law of reflection. The tree paradigm forms the basis of political power. Its traditional guidelines - logos, idea, concept, reason, subject - represent the apparatus of power and thinking. Within the framework of the tree paradigm, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari interpret psychoanalysis: “For example, let us turn once again to psychoanalysis: not only in its theory, but also in the practice of calculation and treatment, it subordinates the unconscious to tree-like structures, hierarchical graphs, repeated memories, centered organs ". There is no future for the tree type of culture; it is becoming obsolete, as J. Deleuze and F. Guattari believe.

The current culture is a root system, or fibrous root. Here the main root is underdeveloped or destroyed almost to the ground: it is on this that a multiplicity and some secondary roots try to take root, which quickly develop. The rhizome is modeled as a nonequilibrium integrity (in many ways similar to the nonequilibrium environments studied by synergetics), not characterized by the presence of organizational orders and characterized by continuous creative mobility. The source of transformation is not the invasion of foreign elements, but the immanent instability caused by its energy potential of variation. If the structure corresponds to the image of the world as Cosmos (harmony, orderliness), then to the rhizome - as chaosmos. If the structure is understood as a tracing paper, then the rhizome is compared to a map that can and should be read, because we are talking about a model that continues to form. A map has many outputs, unlike tracing paper, which always returns to the same thing. The rhizome is, in principle, plural, and procedurally plural; it does not obey any structural or generative model; it always has several exits; the rhizome neither begins nor ends, i.e. it is fundamentally not articulated from the point of view of either its origin or the possibility of introducing criteria for assessing its socio-processuality as progress or regression. In this regard, the nomadological concept of the rhizome provides a new understanding of determinism, free from the idea of ​​external causative influence.

Nomads (nomads) act as a historical prototype and image of the rhizome (rhizome) paradigm. Nomads in this understanding have neither a past nor a future, they only appear and always become, having not a history, but a wide geography. A nomad can be called deterritorialized in the full sense of the word precisely because deterritorialization is carried out not after, as in the case of a migrant, and not through, as in the case of a sedentary resident - it is deterritorialization that creates the connection between the nomad and the land. Nomadism defends that social structure that will allow the very thought to become a nomad. Here we are talking about whether any policy is possible in which the nomad mindset will be realized.

The rhizome as an organizational model finds its concretization in postmodern artistic creativity, within which the ideal of an original author's work is replaced by the ideal of construction as a stereophonic flow of explicit and hidden quotations, each of which refers to different and varied spheres of cultural meanings. This is the second image of the book, and the future lies with it. A book-rhizome will implement a fundamentally different type of connections: all its points will be interconnected, but these connections are not structured, multiple, confused, they are unexpectedly interrupted every now and then. This plurality still needs to be created, but without adding external qualities to it, but, on the contrary, only at the level of those qualities that it already recognizes. Along with the birth of a new type of creativity, a correspondingly new type of reading will arise.

About this type of nonlinear connections, which involves a different way of reading and a different type of organization literary text, W. Eco later wrote repeatedly, comparing it to an encyclopedia, in which there is no linearity of narration and which can be read from any necessary place. This is exactly how hypertexts are created on computer networks, when each user randomly enters his own version, sending it for further expansion by other users. Unlike traditional judgments about art, modern book- not an image of the world; it forms a rhizome with the world, a non-parallel evolution of the book and the world occurs, the book ensures the deterritorialization of the world, and the world contributes to the territorialization of the book.

Comparing the two models, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari compare them with Eastern and Western cultures. The tree has subjugated the entire Western world and Western thinking from botany to biology, anatomy, epistemology, theology, ontology, and all philosophy. The East is a completely different type: it is a tuber culture that develops separately from the individual. Of course, the authors do not reduce the entire East to a rhizome, but states do not carry out their activities here according to a tree-like diagram, and the despot in them is like a stream, not a source. In this context, America appears to the authors as a mediator, because it acts simultaneously through extermination, internal liquidations (not only of Indians, but also farmers, etc.) and with the help of external consistent rapid growth of immigration. America is not free from arboreal domination and the search for roots, however, everything important that happened or is happening continues thanks to the American rhizome - the beatniks, the underground, the subway, gangs and gangs. America, in their opinion, has mixed all directions. As you can see, the concept of rhizome is applicable to analyze the current state of culture and its individual components.

According to the concept of J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, the rhizome is not a frozen phenomenon, it continues to form and deepen, being in the process of becoming. In contrast to the tree, the rhizome is not an object of reproduction, but an antigenealogy, short-term memory or anti-memory. “The rhizome does not begin and does not end, it is always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo". The rhizome operates through variation, expansion, conquest, capture, injection. An essential point of the processuality of the rhizome is the fundamental unpredictability of its future states.