G.Deleuze&F.Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Paris 1980, p 9-37.
Introduction: the rhizome
(This text did its job as a contribution to the Forum for Sportive Archaeology, a Forum that has been chiefly concerned with the survival of presendentary genes in neolithic man)
In his introduction to Mille Plateaux Deleuze explains the concept of the rhizome, a sort of fungus of whom he admires the growth as a possible alternative model for his practice of thinking and writing to that of the tree, hierarchic and linear. To grow roots he sees as an old procédé, demanding a unity for a starting point. Branches always lead to a stem. In his model-fungus, on the contrary, one always finds oneself in the middle, like a wolf in his gang.
The first chapter 1914-One or several wolfs? Wants to construct a multiplicity to counter the thoughts of Freud as based on a unity. For example, when a patient had a dream about wolves, Freud starts talking of the wolf (as the father etc.). That what is known to the smallest child, was unkown to Freud: wolves live in a gang. You can’t be a wolf, you’re always eight or then wolves, six or seven wolves.
I pick up fragments from the tissue of text that surprised me and may suit your ideas of the mesolithic or non-sedentary gene that survives in us.
We must attempt to perceive things by the middle…what lacks is a Nomadology , the opposite of a history…never history understood nomadisme, never the book understood the outside. In the course of a long history, the State has been the model of the book and of thinking : logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interior of the concept, the republic of spirits, the tribunal of reason, the functionaries of thinking, legislating man and the subject.
(percevoir les choses par le milieu...ce qui manque, c'est une Nomadologie , le contraire d'une histoire...jamais l'histoire n'a compris le nomadisme, jamais le livre n'a compris le dehors. Au cours d'une longue histoire, l'Etat a été le modèle du livre et de la pensée : le logos, le philosophe-roi, la transcendence de l'Idée, l'intériorité du concept, la république des esprits, le tribunal de la raison, les fonctionnaires de la pensée, l'homme législateur et le sujet.)
(p 34-36)
Chapter 7. The Year Zero – Faciality
…
The stick as a deterritorialised branch, the female breast as a deterritorialised milkgland, the lips as a deterritorialised mouth-opening. In this dynamic vision it is accurate to use word-couples as the lips-breast.(p 211) The plastic style of Deleuze is a way of thinking in text and is very revealing for the problematic field between text and image.
Another example of the plastic, spatial language of Deleuze is the use he makes of (the names of) bodyparts as metaphors for philosophical concepts.
In dodging the danger to hold on to a face (de se raccrocher à un visage), he admires the English novel: the point is to leave, not in art, meaning in spirit, but in life, in real life… ‘Don’t make me loose the ability to love’ The anglo-american novelists know how difficult it is to pierce the wall of the signifier…to make of one’s body a shaft of light that moves at an ever-increasing speed… a whole line of writing…
(il s’agit de sortir, non pas en art, c’est à dire en esprit, mais en vie, en vie réelle…’Ne m’ôtez pas la force d’aimer.’ Ils savent aussi, les romanciers anglais américains, comme c’est difficile de percer le mur du signifiant…faire de son corps un rayon de lumière qui se meut à une vitesse toujours plus grande…tout une ligne d’écriture…)
Nomadologists must lift the attention off the subject and prepare the road to the a-signifier (the unmeaning, the unsignificant ?), the a-subjective. (p 210)
From the facialization since Christ, the becoming-face of body and society (as a white wall of signifiers – black hole of libido) one must escaped into ways or forms of becoming-animal.
If the face is a politic, to undone the face also is a politic and one that engages ‘real-becomings’, a whole clandestine becoming. To undo the face equals to pierce the wall of the signifier, to escape the black hole of subjectivity…Search for your black holes and your white walls, know them, know your faces, you won’t be able to undo them otherwise, you won’t be able to trace your ‘lines of escape’ otherwise.
Si le visage est une politique, défaire le visage est une aussi, qui engage les devenirs réels, tout un devenir-clandestin. Défaire le visage, c’est la meme chose que percer le mur du signifiant, sortir du trou noir de la subjectivité… Cherchez vos trous noirs et vos murs blanc, connaissez-les, connaissez vos visages, vous ne les déferez pas autrement, vous ne tracerez pas autrement vos lignes de fuite (p 230).
The plastic unities of language function as nods in the rhizomatic text, they are multi-signifiers, through which the text follows a more free, sculptural discourse, though kept tight and fitting by their materiality, physical origin (face, wall,…). This happens in a similar way as Heidegger’s use of homey words like house, path, poet,…
Chapter 8. 1874 – Three novels, or what happened?
The essence of the novel as a literary genre isn’t too difficult to determine: a novel exists while everything is organised around the question: What happened?
L’essence de la “nouvelle”, comme genre littéraire, n’est pas très difficile à déterminer: il y a nouvelle lorsque tout est organisé autour de la question: “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” (p 235)
The nineteenth-century origin of the novel could be interesting in relation to the discourse of the new.
(See Boris Groys, Über das Neue)
