"The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace" [part 1 of 2]
Charles J. Stivale
_Intermezzo_
I commence today where I "logged" onto my own rhizomatic
connections nearly twenty years ago, with some creative license
taken out of necessity for our subject:
"It is transmitting everywhere, at times without let-up, at
other times discontinuously. It displaces, it heats up, it devours.
It eliminates, it copulates. What a mistake to have ever
masculinized this "it"; it is multiply engendered, and engendering.
Everywhere it is machines, and not at all metaphorically: machines
servicing machines, with their couplings and connections. An
organ-machine is plugged into a source-machine, node-to-node, one
emitting a flow, the other cutting it off, yet relaying and emitting
again . . . In this way, we all become _bricoleurs_, each of us with
his and her little machines; an organ-machine sits on my lap, _c,a
chauffe_, for an energy-machine from which it gains strength, _c,a
mange_, and it transmits its bits, always flows and cuts, through
myriad lines. If the President Schreber has sunbeams flowing from
his ass, Vice-President Gore would like little informational
segments popping one by one from his, all under legislative sanction
and surveillance. _Anus solaire, anus informatique_. And rest
assured that _c,a marche_, it works; both the President Schreber and
Vice-President Gore feel something, produce something, and can even
explain the process theoretically. Something is produced: machine
effects, and not metaphors" (Deleuze & Guattari 1977, 1-2 [AO]).
This is, of course, my attempt at once to evoke and to adapt the
opening paragraph of Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_, eighteen
lines of text that compelled me, and still does, to reformulate
notions of interconnectivity, human and now human-computer. This
evocative adaptation also helps me with the peculiar task here and
now of situating a starting point _intermezzo_ within a particular
process of interconnectivity, what Deleuze and Guattari call _une
pense'e `a deux_ (that I translate as a "two-fold thought"), a
process to which Deleuze referred in a provocative statement about
their final collaborative work, _Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_:
"One must speak of the _pense'e `a deux_ as nineteenth-century
psychiatrists spoke of _la folie `a deux_ [a shared madness]. But
that is quite alright" (Maggiori 1991, 19). For one develops an
idea as a "state" within oneself, Deleuze maintains, through
"stutterings, gasps, contractions and expansions, inarticulate
sounds" that are more easily expressed _`a deux_, and like them, I
proceed here having prepared multiple written versions derived from
some originary gasp-like expression, my ideas "function[ing] like an
incrustation or a citation within the [singular and plural]
other's/others' text" and thus producing "a writing of variations"
(_une e'criture de variations_) (Maggiori 1991, 18).
The earliest works of Deleuze and Guattari attest to this folded
interconnectivity: take Deleuze's "Lettre `a un critique se'v`ere"
(translated as "I Have Nothing to Admit"), in which he responds to
Michel Cressole, "I wonder if one of the formal reasons for the
hostility that [_Anti-Oedipus_] provoked isn't precisely that it was
created in a two-fold manner [_`a deux_] . . . [People] tried to
unravel what was indiscernible or to assign to each of us specific
parts. But since, like everyone else, each person is already
several, that created a lot of people" (Deleuze 1977, 113
[S]/Pourparlers 16 [P]). This statement returns at the start of
"Introduction: rhizome" in _A Thousand Plateaux_ -- "The two of us
wrote _Anti-Oedipus_ together. Since each of us was several, there
was already quite a crowd" --, and the methodology that they suggest
is one I follow as well: "Here we have made use of everything that
came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away" (1987,
3 [ATP]).
I chose "rhizomatics of cyberspace" as a topic because the
conjunction of these two terms, and what I understand as their
folded synchronicity, seems to provide the most effective way into
an exploration of both, in all their heterogeneity and multiplicity.
"Cyberspace" would seem to require no explanation as a term
[especially in this event] other than that "consensual
hallucination" (to employ our "conceptual friend," William Gibson's,
precise formula, 1984) through which the human-computer interface is
assembled in its flows, connections and ruptures. However, as
Michael Benedikt insists, this word "gives a name to a new stage, a
new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture
and business under the sign of technology" ( 1991, 1). Nick Land
provides a more exuberant, if overly cautionary, conceptualization
of this new stage, "The terminal social signal blotted out by
technofuck buzz from desiring-machines. So much positive feedback
fast-forward that speed converges with itself on the event horizon
of an artificial time-extinction" (1993, 481-82).
As for the concept of "rhizome," it is, of course, fundamental
in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, as Deleuze emphasizes in a
(1990) "letter-preface" to Jean-Clet Martin's study of his works,
"You understand quite well the essential importance for me that the
notion of multiplicities holds. . . . [and that] 'Rhizome' is the
best word to designate" (Martin 1993, 8). Thus, as in "cyberspace,"
described by Benedikt in Deleuze-Guattarian fashion -- "Its horizons
recede in every direction; it breathes larger, it complexifies, it
embraces and involves" (1991, 2) --, so too "rhizomatics" extend the
multiplicity of socio-cultural and creative dynamics not in binary
terms, but in terms of continuing offshoots, expanding root systems
that travel horizontally and laterally, ever producing affective
relations and all manner of becomings that themselves contribute to
the dynamic multiplicity of creativity. Linking these together, Erik
Davis wonders (on the Deleuze-List): "Where is the immanence of the
net? Where is it produced? Is it only achieved when we ourselves
undergo a becoming-digital (scary thought)? Sometimes it all seems
so reflective to me, so much control over what I say, who I
communicate with, where I go, while all the time the net itself is
totally insane, absolute rhizome, a total 'concept' that draws up
the conceptual plane of immanence into a nest of infinite speeds" (7
April 1994).
Juxtaposing and merging these terms is but one mode of approach
to make their inherent connectivity more immediate and even useful.
Early on, I had considered and even suggested to that organizers
that I proceed here via an on-line link-up to some synchronous Net
site. But even with the best of connections, such an experimentation
would have been, ideally, little more than you peering over my
shoulder, as it were, at some wide-screen terminal display, as I
clicked on a keyboard hoping against hope that "something
rhizomatic" might occur on-line. Indeed, the relationship that I
explore here may well already be so self-evident for this event that
little further elaboration is required. However, here as throughout
my own work on assemblages within particular plateaus, I am guided
by yet another succinct line from Deleuze's response to Cressole:
"One speaks [and writes, I would add] from the depth of what one
does not know, from the depth of one's own _sous-de'veloppement `a
soi_ [under-development to or within oneself]" (S 113; P 16).
However self-evident the rhizomatic hyperconnectivity that I explore
may seem, the conference theme of "Virtual Futures" links quite
directly to this "under-development" as we here and now try to nudge
forward a multiplicity, to assemble it within the unknown depths of
a "virtuality". As Nick Land argues, "machinic desire is the
operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the actual,
revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit" (1993,
474). This theme for an event-scene reaches, then, into an actual
present as well as toward virtual futures and demands that "we" take
account, however incompletely, of this multiplicity that affects us
all "in the middle, between things, interbeing, _intermezzo_" (ATP
25).
For "rhizomatics" might also be understood in relation to this
term that I have just used and which appears, among other places, at
the conclusion of plateau 1 of _A Thousand Plateaus_: "_Between_
things does not designate a localizable relation going from one
thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a
transversal movement that sweeps one _and_ the other away, a stream
without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up
speed in the middle" (ATP 25). This image develops the concept of
"becomings" that, through the "rhizome," implicate novel relations
"to sexuality . . . to the animal, the vegetal, the world,
politics, the book, things natural and artificial" (ATP 21), for
example, the "rhizomatics" of "cyberspace." For the perpendicular
direction is that distinct pull of connectivity (you, me on-line),
interconnectivity (you-and-me, linked on-line, whether synchronously
or asynchronously), and the hyperconnectivity of transversal
connections between sites, data-bases, interlocutors in a
"conjunctive synthesis" (to employ a term from _Anti-Oedipus_),
beyond a simple bi-polar link, sweeping us along in the information
stream.
One thing that has struck me about the opening and closing
paragraphs of "Introduction: rhizome" is the authors' preoccupation
with "the book" (_A Thousand Plateaus_ as well as "le livre" more
generally), and it helps me to ask (and begin to answer) a question
that relates to inter- and hyperconnectivity: how do they
"commence," in this case a book such as _Mille plateaux_, truly
_intermezzo_, in the middle? Besides the obvious answer -- that
_Mille plateaux_ is vol. II of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, and
as such, continues the discussion _intermezzo_ from one volume to
the next --, we can understand the opening of "Rhizome" as joining
other discussions in progress, most notably the _Dialogues_ between
Deleuze and Claire Parnet that mutate into _une pense'e `a deux_ (a
"two-fold thought") similar to what Deleuze & Guattari are at that
moment (in mid-70s) in the process of developing as well. Deleuze
concludes his introductory remarks to _Dialogues_' English edition
by describing quite clearly the "in-between" of the "dialogues":
"What mattered was not the points -- Fe'lix, Claire Parnet, me and
many others, who functioned as temporary, transitory and evanescent
points of subjectivation -- but the collection of bifurcating,
divergent and muddled lines which constituted this book as a
multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them
along without ever going from the one to the other" (1987, ix [D]).
Jumping these remarks transversally to the "opening" (which is but a
continuation) in "Introduction: rhizome," we now focus on paragraphs
that propose a radically new "intertextuality," with the term "text"
understood in the broadest imaginable senses and the "intertextual"
extended quite naturally to the hypertextual connection of
"rhizomatics" to "schizoanalysis" that this opening plateau
constitutes.
_Assemblage_
I dwell on this apparent paradox of "beginning _intermezzo_" as
a way not only to illustrate the "rhizomatic" process generally, but
also to describe my own task as undertaking an active assemblage,
_agencement_, a term about which Deleuze and Guattari are
unequivocal: "We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are
with ideology; all we know are assemblages" (ATP 22). For this
machinic process continues to produce even in this site and consists
of what Deleuze and Guattari themselves note with this query raised
midway through "Introduction: rhizome": "What takes place in a book
composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another
across microfissures, as in a brain?" (ATP 22). Their immediate
response is oblique, transversal, yet another definition of
"plateau" as "any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by
superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a
rhizome" (ATP 22). Erik Davis aligns these jumps with "writing such
a book now, here on the internet. . . . Though we are nestled in a
certain cubby-hole (ah! here it is, etc.), we have not entered into
the special interiority of the book, because the space is already
linked to another outside, already proliferated. If not, it's boring
-- where do I go from here? What, no links? It's a dead end"
(Deleuze-List 22 March 1994).
My own assemblage of voices, lines, and links is but one partial
attempt to contribute to the broader exploration which is this
event-scene, itself a fascinating "hecceity," and the particular
angle that seems most productive is that of the on-line functioning
of contemporary machinic and textual "becomings." The assemblage
of "lines" that I produce and that you hear arise themselves from
the complex rhizomatic operation of other lines responding to each
other, of gleanings both from on-line "strings" and "posts" (notably
to the Deleuze-List) and from off-line writings that I employ as no
less immanent, or pertinent, intersections. These links and lines
serve as what Deleuze calls _intercesseurs_, or "mediators":
"Whether they're real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must
form one's mediators. It's a series: if you don't belong to a
series, even a completely imaginary one, you're lost. I need my
mediators [he continues] to express myself, and they'd never express
themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when
it doesn't appear to be the case. And all the more so when it's
apparent -- Fe'lix Guattari and I are one another's mediators"
(1992, 285 [Z]/P 170-171).
Through the work of mediators as "point-relays" in a series,
this assemblage propels me onward toward other links within
"Introduction: rhizome." The six "principles," as Deleuze and
Guattari grandly call them, are well known for readers of _A
Thousand Plateaus_: connection and heterogeneity, "any point of a
rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (ATP 7);
multiplicity, "puppet strings . . . tied not to the supposed will of
an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which
form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first" (ATP
8); asignifiying rupture, the tendency for lines "broken, shattered
at a given spot . . . [to] start up again on one of its old lines,
or on new lines," deterritorialized or reterritorialized depending
on the level of stratification, on the circulation of intensities
(ATP 9-10); cartography and decalcomania, that is, "a map that must
be produced, constructed" (ATP 29), "oriented toward an
experimentation with the real," "open and connectable in all of its
dimensions," passing through "multiple entryways" and not simply
returning "back 'to the same'," and pertaining to "performance" and
not to some "alleged 'competence'" (ATP 12-13).
The development of computer networking in "cyberspace," i.e.
on-line virtual spaces for research, discussion and interactions
(for example, on bulletin boards, chat-sites, and in Multi-User
Dimensions), fills the _intercesseur_/mediator function and thereby
links cybernetic technology _and_ narrative expression within the
assemblage of "rhizomatics." As Deleuze pointed out, it was through
"the collection of bifurcating, divergent and muddled lines" between
the "points" (Guattari, Claire Parnet and others) that the question,
"what is it to write?," became clearer: "These are lines which would
respond to each other, like the subterranean shoots of a rhizome" (D
x). I find my own "series" wherever they "c[o]me within range," the
closest like the gleanings form academic texts and journals, and the
farthest only keystrokes away, but also translating the "machinic
desire" globally across time-space reduced to pixels and bits and
packets, from Marie (Australia) to Michael (Iowa), onto Erik (New
York) and even to lurking Warwickians. Erik Davis would (and did)
respond: "And how do I feel when I'm reading such a book -- how am
'I' rewritten? I feel like a navigator in a rich fog. I am an
assemblage of partial maps, rules of thumb (this may lead to this,
etc.), the passion of my own vector. As the cliche goes, I surf.
Horizontal, a vector, not 'left or right' -- and up and down is just
the swelling of a [w]ave. I feel up when I get a sense of
overseeing a realm of knowledge --that old view from the holy hill.
But immediately, I'm swamped by a swell, and the peak I was just on
has become a valley, a deep trough of unknowing. I'm terrified; I
move" (Deleuze-List 22 March 1994). Sound familiar?
Although Deleuze and Guattari kept their own names "out of
habit, purely out of habit" when undertaking _A Thousand Plateaus_,
they say that their purpose in this "two-fold thought" was "to make
ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. . . . To reach,
not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is
no longer of any importance whether one says I" (ATP 3). On this
passage from proper name to imperceptibility, Marcus Boon suggests
(on the Deleuze-List), "When I think of what writing is for me, it's
this 'I' that's always moving beyond its own horizon, that won't
even think about the 'it's own'... I guess you might call this a
kind of secret conversation" (10 April 1994). I pick up this
"string" where it "began _intermezzo_" for me, following another
Deleuze event and then several years of intermittent correspondence.
Along a particular series, a name appeared as pixels on my screen as
one "circle of convergence" (ATP 22/x): from a "Mr. J. E.
Broadhurst," first appeared a transmission of calls for a volume on
"Cyberotix" and for a conference on "Virtual Futures." Then,
following my response, came a series of transmissions over several
months from a mutated entity identified as "Ms. J.E. Broadhurst," on
subjects as tantalizing as "More Cyberotix" and as succinct as
"Money!!!" Then, in oblique fashion, via the Deleuze-List, came the
roster of announced conference participants, creating further
interconnectivity to "point-signs" of the assemblage located around
names as exotically familiar as De Landa, Porush, Cadigan, Bey.
Bifurcations here, further becomings: to texts published far and
wide by these nominally identified subjects; to transmission
breakdown (Warwick's mid-March partial system crash) and the
immediacy of voice communication with the mutant J.E.; to the
heightened activity of the Deleuze-List on the "rhizome" string as
well as on related plateaux; and to MUD-discussions generating
uploads and downloads on this and related Net topics.
And then... and then... Comes the echo of revelation from
Deleuze's words to Cressole: "To say something in one's own name"
occurs "not at all at the moment when one considers oneself as a
_moi_, a person, or a subject . . . On the contrary, an individual
acquires a true proper name as a result of the most severe operation
of depersonalization, when the individual opens him/herself to the
multiplicities that traverse him/her from all directions and to the
intensities that filter through one's entire being" (S 113/P 15-16).
This is the site, the time and space, of our "virtual futures," from
the depths (or heights) of this _sous-de'veloppement `a soi_ through
which one quite properly _becomes_, for example, "an aggregate of
loosened singularities, names, first names, fingernails, things,
animals, tiny events: the opposite of a start" (S 113; P 15-16).
Hence, like Deleuze undertaking _Difference and Repetition_ and
_Logic of Sense_, "there is something that I try to jostle, to stir
up within me, to try to write as a flow, and not as a code" as an
appropriate method for assembling, even conjuring our "virtual
futures."
_Into the BwO-Zone_
How? By "ma[king] use of everything that came within range" (ATP
3), by "reading within intensities, in relation to the exterior/
outside, flow against flow, machine with machines" (S 155/P 18-19),
by employing the name as "an instantaneous apprehension of . . . an
intensive multiplicity" (S 113, P 15), thus by reading intensively
as "a loving process" (S 115, P 18). Within cyberspace, whether on
asynchronous Lists, within virtual spaces of various Netsites or in
the creation of hypertextual links, this "loving process" evolves
through what Brenda Laurel calls "our passionate response to VR
[that] mirrors the nature of the medium itself": "By inviting the
body and the senses into our dance with our tools, [VR] has extended
the landscape of interaction to new technologies of pleasure,
emotion, and passion" (1991, 213). N. Katherine Hayles has
speculated on the "seductions of cyberspace," and finds dangers as
well as possibilities therein, recalling the double-edged pursuit of
bifurcations and destratification that Manuel De Landa describes as
being "poised on the edge of chaos" (Davis 1992, 48). "VR," says
Hayles, "invites a hierarchy to be set up between [actual and
virtual objects], the vectors . . . privileging computer construct
over physical body," a process to which "contribute other
technologies of body commodification" (1993a, 182).
The "rhizomatic" connection to Hayles's reflections comes
through her positing VR as "a Body Zone, constructed not only
through economic and geopolitical spaces but also through perceptual
processing and neurological networks" (1993a, 184). This new form of
"embodiment," that Hayles explores elsewhere as "flickering
signifiers" (1992, 164-66; 1993b, 76), mutates in and as a
Body-without-Organs Zone, a BwO-Zone as it were, "endospaces of the
body as well as the cyberspaces of virtual reality" connected, says
Hayles "by more than the technology that unites internal perception
to external computer. They are also articulated together through
their social construction as areas newly available for colonization"
(1993a, 185). Borrowing from Bukatman (1993), Hayles pushes this
"terminal identity" forward, positing "the simultaneous estrangement
of the self from itself and its reconstitution as Other" as a newly
cybernetically diffuse subjectivity that constitutes "a second
mirror stage, the Mirror of the Cyborg" (1993a, 186).
However, she re-writes "Lacanian psycholinguistics as
cyberlinguistics," providing reinscriptions that replace, for
example, the "absence/presence" dyad with randomness/pattern, the
"play of signifiers" and the "floating signifier," respectively with
"random access memory" and "virtual memory," and the categories of
the imaginary and symbolic with the physical and the virtual (1993a,
186-187). Here the "terminal identity" mutates into the BwO-Zone,
as embodied, conscious subject merges with a destabilizing
puppet-object "behind the screen," but that can also "be seen [says
Hayles] as the originary point for sensations." By serving as "a
wedge to destabilize presuppositions about self and Other" (1993a,
187), Hayles argues, this ambiguity and disorientation inherent to
the BwO-Zone can produce a "positive seduction of cyberspace": "The
puppet then stands for the release of spontaneity and alterity
within the feedback loops that connect the subject with the world,
as well as with those aspects of sentience that the self cannot
recognize as originating from within itself. At this point," Hayles
concludes, "the puppet has the potential to become more than a
puppet, representing instead a zone of interaction that opens the
subject to the exhilarating realization of Otherness valued as such"
(1993a, 188).
If I detail Hayles's argument so fully, it is to pursue and
negotiate a "line" absent earlier in this assemblage, the caution
expressed, for example, by Penley and Ross, their "war[iness], on
the one hand, of the disempowering habit of demonizing technology as
a satanic mill of domination, and wear[iness], on the other hand, of
postmodernist celebrations of the technological sublime..." (1991,
xii). Just as Hayles carefully treads this "line" _intermezzo_,
Penley and Ross insist that "technoculture, as we conceive it, is
located as much in the work of everyday fantasy and actions as at
the level of corporate or military decision making" (1991,
xii-xiii). Yet, the BwO-Zone implicates a "long process", according
to Deleuze and Guattari, at once "a dreary parade of sucked-dry,
catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies" and BwO's "full of
gaiety, ecstasy, dance" (ATP 150). If, in working with/through this
Zone of the "rhizomatic" that perplexes/excites/propels us forward,
one happens to deploy a term/concept "inappropriately" or
"unproductively" (whatever those terms might connote), so what? One
works, nonetheless, and moves along that line until/as it connects
with yet another, so many "bifurcations" that move the "rhizome"
forward. Yet, De Landa points out with reference to plateau 6 that,
"As [Deleuze and Guattari] say, the key word here is not wisdom, but
caution. You don't know what happens at bifurcations. You have
absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go
wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near
bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully . . ." (Davis
1992, 48).
However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that even "these impasses
must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to
possible lines of flight" (ATP 14). They continue: "One will often
be forced to take dead ends to work with signifying powers and
subjective affections, to find a foothold in formations that are
Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigidified territorialities that
open the way for other transformational operations" (ATP 14-15).
More recently, in a 1989 _Libe'ration_ interview, they reiterate
that "it is precisely the power of the system that alone can
distinguish what is good or bad, what is new or not, living or not,
in a construction of concepts. Nothing is absolutely good,
everything depends on systematic use, and on discretion. In _Mille
plateaux_ we are trying to say: goodness is never certain (for
example, a _smooth space_ is not sufficient to overcome
stratification and constraints, nor is a _body without organs_
necessarily adequate to overcome organizations)" (P 49). Such is the
double-edged experimentation of the BwO-Zone, "an _a priori_
synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given
mode (but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by
which what is produced on the BwO is already part of that body's
production, is already included in the body, is already on it (but
at the price of an infinity of passages, divisions, and secondary
productions)" (ATP 152). Stagnation, dangers of blockages are always
possible. But "to block, to be blocked, is that not still an
intensity?" Deleuze and Guattari ask, and then continue: "In each
case, we must define what comes to pass and what does not pass, what
causes passage and prevents it" (ATP 152).
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