Rhiz of C-space, Addendum


"The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace," Addendum on "flame-wars":

-- Greg Polly responds "I think I'll dissent from CJS's conclusion
about flames and the rhizome. . . . I don't feel convinced that the recent
skirmish here on this net demonstrated that flaming can be subsumed and
included by rhizomatics. It seems to me that, on the contrary, what
happened was a kind of group decision not to enter into the kind of desire
that flaming represents, not to 'bring the General in us out,' as DG say in
'Rhizome,' a decision to stay on the schizo lines and avoid getting pulled
onto the paranoid one. There's a difference [he continues] between saying
that recent events here demonstrated that flaming can be rhizomatic too and
saying that we luckily *avoided* its rhizome-stopping possibilities, a
difference between saying that the rhizome can go on *in* a flame-hole and
saying that we can preserve the ability to jump out of one or even avoid
one before we've entered."

"Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence . . ., schizoanalysis
rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it"
("Rhizome" 13): it appears that Greg makes just such a 'pretraced destiny'
of the rhizomatic process when it comes into the gravitational pull, as it
were, of a flame-hole. Indeed, rhizomes can be obstructed, arborified, and
then "it's all over, no desire stirs" (R 14), but in a flame-war, is
*every* outlet blocked necessarily? I think my *differend* with Greg on
this point is a matter of perspective: whereas he sees the flame-hole
necessarily as a blockage out of which lines cannot emerge short of
group-decisions that enact a resistant, schizzy counter-flame (Go to warp
speed, take us outta here, Scotty!), I see the flame as a kind of "tracing"
that one can plug "back into the map, connect[ing] the roots or trees back
up with the rhizome" (R 14). The rhizome's multi-entry "essence" (R 14)
suggests this: "Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings" and so do
"flame-war," tracings of the paranoid pole, of the rigid position, staking
out the territory, striating the List/discussion time-space; "they can
begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka
novel" (R 15): why would the flame-hole be the exceptional site within
which no stems could emerge? "The coordinates are determined not by
theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing
multiplicities or aggregates of intensity" (R 15). How? "An intensive trait
starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia,
perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging the hegemony
of the signifier" (R 15). Might this "shaking loose," this "challenge" be
the immanent "group decision" to which Greg refers? Perhaps the nub of our
*differend* (which may not be one) lies in ourselves asserting too strictly
a dualism flame-hole/rhizomatic-stem, for "there are knots of arborescence
in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots . . . despotic formations of
immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are
anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aeriel roots,
and subterranean stems" (R 20).

I find myself pressing forward, waking up each morning to move into and
along a plateau, "technonarcissism" as D&G call it, "pop analysis, even if
. . . the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscientificity in it are still
too painful or ponderous" (MP 22-24). Attempting to see things in the
middle, I try to understand, for example, "black holes" in terms of
movements of subjectification and deterritorialization, of passion and
consciousness (cf. MP 133, 167-168): in cyberspace, in MOO-spaces, "The
face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off
of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face
digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it
constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the
camera, the third eye. Or should we say things differently?" (168) Always
in flux, _intermezzo_ ... How about this, further along: "Instead of
opening up the deterritorialized assemblage onto something else, [the
machine] may produce an effect of closure, as if the aggregate had fallen
into and continues to spin in a kind of black hole. . . . The machine then
produces 'individual' group effects spinning in circles," for example, the
effect of capture produced in a flame-war. "The black hole is a machine
effect in assemblages and has a complex relation to other effects. It *may
be necessary* for the release of innovative processes that they first fall
into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with
the release of crossroads behavior. On the other hand, when black holes
resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each others, instead of
opening onto consistency, we see a closure of the assemblage, as though it
were deterritorialized in the void" (MP 333-334, my emphasis).


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