MP: Ruminations on Rhizomes


The first chapter of MP provides some interesting new parameters for
philosophizing in/about/through the world. I feel a sort of gut
attraction for the metaphor of rhizome over more unitary models, and
I think the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent
multiplicities particularly important. Unitary approaches that present
themselves as heterogeneous are all too common in the academy (I'm
thinking particularly of the petty fascism that vulgar feminism or
multiculturalism becomes in "politically correct" hands), and I welcome
a critique that allows me to distinguish fascist heterogeneity from
a heterogeneity more certainly multiplicitous. All the same, I am
wary of the rhizome. Here's why.

I realize that rhizome is merely metaphor for a more abstract critique
(in some ways, D&G's balancing MP on the rhizome highlights the failure
of metaphor explicitly, such that it's strange that they take a metaphor
like rhizome to refer to a metonymic relationship). Nonetheless, I
have a nagging suspicion that faith in the rhizome is exactly that,
an irrational (schiz?) belief in something that does not exist. From
an appropriately distant perspective, all rhizomatic functions appear
as certainly ordered by root and trunk as more obviously ordered
arborescent ones. Weeds, mules, grass, tubors, from a geo-
environmental perspective, are not metaphorically rhizomatic. From an
appropriately broad perspective, nothing is rhizomatic. This, of course,
is the lesson of chaos mathematics, which finds in complex systems thought
to be disordered not disorder by a complexity derrivative of a simple
function. D&G are correct, depending upon the power to which we set
the microscope: to the naked eye, the ball-bearing looks smooth; put
it under a 50x magnification and it is pitted and irregular; put it
under a 5 million x maginification and it is an ordered sculpture of
atoms and molecules. Beyond that? I dunno.

Now, of course, my anxiety is that in finding un-rhizomatic functions
in the rhizome I may simply be further enacting that unitary-
unifying process that D&G charge Freud (and philosophy and humankind
in general) with. Probably. I think, however, that finding chaos
where authority insists is only order and order where the radical
insists is only chaos may be an appropriate way to apply MP. Let's
see what further pages have to say.

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mseidl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"It's myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation."--Beckett



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