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Concepts in Deleuze and Guattari are never hammered down into a final
form; rather, they are always being developed, always under modification,
always provisional. One can never capture the totality of a concept in its
definition.
• Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any
other point
• It brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign
states
• The rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple
• It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in
motion
• It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from
which it grows and which it overspills
• The rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and
stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or
deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the
1
multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature
• The rhizome is related to a map: detachable, connectable,
reversible, modifiable, with multiple entryways and exits
• The rhizome is an acentred, non-hierarchical system without a
General and without a central automaton - defined solely by
circulation of states
CRITIQUE OF FREUD:
MAJORITARIAN – MINORITARIAN:
RHIZOMATIC SCHIZOANALYSIS
Deleuze and Guattari put on trial and seek to subvert the traditional way
of understanding, which is committed to the division of the world into
systemic, coordinated parts, organizing the strictly defined fixed truth,
knowing subject, and simple representation into hierarchical structures.
The binary logic of the tree model intends to suppress the unstable, plural
nature of things by emphasizing one of its aspects, and pretending that
one feature is capable of summarizing the meaning of the whole.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, this logic is the institutionalization of
the closed system of hierarchical structures. What they propose is a world
of dynamic interconnections instead of the world of stable identities with
internal structures; it is the open model of rhizomatics instead of the
arborescent system.
5
is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end,
but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and
which it overspills. [...] In connection to centered (even
polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of
communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome
is an acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system
without a General and without an organizing memory or
central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of
states.3
1
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 5.
2
Deleuze and Guattari make a clear distinction between mapping and tracing in relation to the rhizomatic and
arborescent models of the world. According to their differentiation, the rhizome is a map, while to root system
involves tracing. “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual, group, or social formation. [...] A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which
always comes back ‘to the same.’ A map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an
alleged ‘competence.’ [...] What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages,
incipient taproots, or points of structuration.” Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 12-13.
3
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 21.
dualism between the two planes of transcendent organization or
immanent consistence … [w]e do not therefore speak of dualism between
two kinds of ‘things’ but of a multiplicity of dimensions, of lines and
directions in the heart of an assemblage.”4 The theme of becoming
enables an approach towards a revised heterogeneous speaking subject5:
it is a subject whose existence is not static but happens as a constant flux,
whose identity is infinite, moving at least in two directions as well as in
relation to the past and the future simultaneously. This subject exists in
the process of constant border redrawal, which thus provides a means for
subverting those boundaries (of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality,
geographical location, etc.) that have been defined by the ideologically
charged discourses. However, it is not an isolated process: since the
subject exists within the interconnections of rhizomatics, each individual
border redrawal is immersed in the endless play of and on different
surfaces, engendering the heterogeneity of the speaking subject(s). As the
interconnectedness of the speaking subjects in the process of becoming is
explained by Brian Massumi, “[b]ecoming bears on a population, even
when it is initiated by a single body: even one body alone is collective in
its conditions of emergence as well as in its future tendency.”6
The practice through which the endless play of and on different surfaces
can be achieved is that of finding the Body without Organs; it happens
through dismantling the self, evading the constraining norms and ideals of
the ‘official’ construction of the speaking subject, and engendering revised
connections in the form of multiplicity. The Body without Organs is the 6
critique of psychoanalysis, which is seen as a rigidly dictatorial, retarding
and inhibiting truth system: “it subjects the unconscious to arborescent
structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs,
the phallus, the phallus-tree. [...] [I]t bases its own dictatorial power upon
a dictatorial conception of the unconscious.”7 According to psychoanalysis,
the truth of the subject can be traced back to its fundamental and fixed
structures that have been set in place during the Oedipal phase, so that
each individual’s variation on the Oedipal configuration is subordinated to
the authoritative model of psychological development. The psychoanalytic
4
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam trans.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 132-133.
5
Concerning the idea of the subject as conceptualized in poststructuralism, Deleuze and Guattari take the radical
stance of the complete abandonment of the idea of subjectivity. They leave behind the isolated and self-judging
selfhood, and replace it by machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation, since “all
individuated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant signification, all signifying desire is associated
with dominated subjects”. (Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 22.) They take a step further the Foucauldian analysis
of the subject and its interrelationship with power and discourse; in their thought subjectivity comes to be seen as
forced upon us as the product of discourses of power/knowledge and the all-pervasive institutions. Instead of
remaining within the framework of power relations, they think of life as desire: desire as flux, force and
difference, desire that disrupts common sense and everyday life. For the concept of desire see: Deleuze and
Guattari, op. cit., 149-166.
Nevertheless, although my intension is to use their theory as the basic critical framework of my analysis, I will
keep the term of the heterogeneous speaking subject, but, as it will be elucidated later, with a content revised
from the perspective of feminist and postcolonialist theories.
6
Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
(Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1992), 102.
7
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 17.
interpretation of the unconscious is the imposition of the psychoanalytic
phantasy on it.8 The alternative offered by Deleuze and Guattari is
schizoanalysis, which regards the unconscious as an acentered system, as
a rhizome, without the intension to interpret it: on the contrary, the “issue
is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different
desires”.9 The unconscious of the schizoanalysis is not a reflection of
something lost or lacking, but the endless play of connections and
impulses, the production of new and different desires, the Body without
Organs.10
8
Their critique of psychoanalysis takes as its target the colonization of the unconscious by the Oedipus complex,
which develops and affirms as set of dualistic oppositions such as the masculine and feminine, subject and
object, presence and lack. Psychoanalytic discourse conceptualizes the Other as “the term in relation to which
objects are recognized, and the concept which opposes and constitutes the subject.” Catherine Driscoll, “The
Woman in Process: Deleuze, Kristeva and Feminism,” in Ian Buchanan & Claire Colebrook eds., Deleuze and
Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 66.
9
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 18.
10
In Rosi Braidotti’s words: “If the unconscious means anything, in fact, it is precisely the guarantee against a
return to the traditional idea that the subject is one, full, self-transparent entity, governed by the laws of rational
discourse.” Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, Elizabeth Guild trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 35-
36.