moth11

this week we watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. rachel picked the movie, because we were having some technical difficulties getting Man With a Movie Camera to work, Caligari is available on youtube, and in any case, she felt that it’s nice to have some cultural context about other movements in cinema occurring around the same time.

“Nomad Thought.” Trans. Jacqueline Wallace. *Semiotext(e), Nietzsche’s Return,* vol. 3, no. 1 (1978), pp. 12–20. Translation of “Pensee nomade.” Also trans. David B. Allison in *The New Nietzsche,* ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 198 5), pp. 142–149.

“Plato and the Simulacrum.” Trans. Rosalind Krauss. *October,* no. 16 (Winter 1983), pp. 45–56. Translation of “Platon et le simulacre.” “The Rise of the Social.” Foreword to Jacques Donzelot, *The Policing of Families.* Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1979, pp. ix-xvii. Translation of “L’ascension du social.”

“The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud.” In *Textual Strategies.* Ed. and trans. Josue Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 277–295. Translation of “Le schizophrene et le mot.” Reprinted in *Literature and Psychoanalysis.* Ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

“Three Group Problems.” Trans. Mark Seem. *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 99–109. Translation of “Trois problemes de groupe.”

*Bergson. M’emoire et vie.* Paris: PUF, 1957. Extracts from Bergson selected by Deleuze.

*David Hume, la vie, son oeuvre.* Paris: PUF, 1952. Extracts from Hume with an introduction by Deleuze and Andre Cresson. *Dialogues.* With Claire Parnet. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. *Difference et Repetition.* Paris: PUF, 1968. *Empirisme et subjectivite.* Paris: PUF, 1953. 3rded., 1980. *Foucault.* Paris: Minuit, 1986.

*Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation. 2* vols. Paris: Ed. de la Difference, 1981.

*Instincts et Institutions.* Paris: Hachette, 1953. Texts selected by Deleuze. *Logique du sens.* Paris: Minuit, 1969.

*Nietzsche.* Paris: PUF, 1965. Extracts from Nietzsche with an introduction by Deleuze. *Nietzsche et la philosophic* Paris: PUF, 1962. 4th ed., 1973. *Un nouvel archiviste.* Illustrations by d’Ipoustiguy. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972. Reprint of “Un nouvel archiviste.” *La philosophie* *critique de Kant.* Paris: PUF, 1963.

*Presentation de Sacher-Masoch.* Paris: Minuit, 1967. Rpt. Paris: 10/18, 1971. Lengthy introduction by Deleuze with the text of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s *La Venus a lafourrure. Proust et les signes.* Paris: PUF, 1964. Augmented 2nd ed., 1970. *Spinoza et le probleme de I’expression.* Paris: Minuit, 1968.

i like caligari, it’s a nice film. my fave detail is the monkey at the fair, i relate to him… a lil guy in a confusing sea of movement.

*Spinoza. Philosophie pratique.* Paris: PUF, 1970. Augmented 2nded. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

*Superpositions.* With Carmelo Bene. Paris: Minuit, 1979. The play, *Richard HI,* by Bene with an essay on Bene by Deleuze entitled “Un manifeste de moins.” I “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un probleme plus general.” *Le Monde,* June 19–20, 1977, p. 16. Reprinted *Recherches, Les Untorelli,* no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 179–184.

Interview from June 5, 1977. P “L’ascension du social.” Postface to Jacques Donzelot, *La police des families.* Paris: Minuit, 1977, pp. 220. “Capitalisme et schizophrenic” *L’Arc, Deleuze,* no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 47–55.

Interview with Catherine Bakis-Clement from March 2, 1972. “La conception de la difference chez Bergson.” *Etudes bergsoniennes,* vol. 4 (1956), pp. 79–112. “Deux regimes de fous.” In *Psychanalyse et Semiotique. Actes du Colloque de Milan, 1974.*

Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 165–186. Presentation by Deleuze with discussion. “Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe.” *Critique,* no. 343 (December 1975), pp. 1207–1227.

Review of Michel Foucault, *Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish).* Modified and reprinted as “Un nouveau cartographe” in *Foucault,* pp. 31–51. “En quoi la philosophie peut servir a des mathematiciens ou meme a des musiciens, meme et surtout quand elle ne parte pas de musique ou de mathematiques,” in *Vincennes, ou le* *d’esir d’apprendre.* Ed. Pierre Merlin. Paris: Alain, Moreau, 1979, pp. 120–121. “Faille et feux locaux. Kostas Axelos.” *Critique* no. 275 (April 1970), pp. 344–351. “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat.” *Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes,* no. 10 (Winter 1984), pp. 41–43. “L’Homme: une existence douteuse.” *Le Nouvel Observateur,* no. 81 (June 1–7, 1966), pp. 32–34. Review of Michel Foucault, *Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things).* I

“Huit ans apres.” *L’Arc, Deleuze,* no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 99–102. Interview with Catherine Clement from 1980.

“Hume.” In *Laphilosophie,* ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 2, pp. 226–239. I “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir.” *L ‘Arc, Deleuze,* no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 3–10. Discussion with Michel Foucault. I Interview. *Liberation.* October 23, 1980, pp. 16–17. I Interview. *Liberation.* October 3, 1983, pp. 30–31. I Interview. *Le Monde.* October 6, 1983, pp. 1,17. I Interview. *L’autrejournal,* no. 8 (October 1985), pp. 12–22.

I Interview. *Liberation.* September 2, 1986, pp. 27–28 and September 3, 1986, p. 38. P “Introduction a ‘La Bete humaine’ de Balzac.” In *Oeuvres Completes d’Emile Zola.* Paris:

Cercle du Livre Precieux, 1967. Vol. 6, pp. 13–21. Modified and reprinted under the title “Zola et la felure” as an appendix to *Logigue du sens.* P Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, *Legaisavoir. Les fragments posthumes (1881–82).* Trans. Pierre Klossowski. Vol. 5 ofOeuvres philosophiques completes. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, pp. i-iv. With Michel Foucault. P Introduction to Johann Malfatti von Monteregio, *Etudes sur la mathese, ou anarchie et hierarchie de la science.* Paris: Ed. du Griffon d’Or, 1946, pp. ix-xxiv. “Klossowski et le corps-langage.” *Critique,* no. 214 (March 1965), pp. 199–219. Modified and reprinted as an appendix to *Logique du sens.* “Lettre a Michel Cressole,” in Michel Cressole, *Deleuze.* Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973, pp. 107–118. Translated as “I Have Nothing to Admit.” “Lucrece et le naturalisme.” *Etudes philosophiques,* series 16, no. 1 (Jan.-March 1961), pp. 19–29. Modified and reprinted under the title “Lucrece et le simulacre” as an appendix to *Logique du sens.*

i wrote this about the film a year and a half ago when i saw it for a film class. the question here is of course if the film is “classical” or “formalist.” here i believe classical means: is the film concerned with telling an external story? whereas formalist means: is the film concerned with analyzing it’s own internal workings?

“Lucrece et le simulacre.” See “Lucrece et le naturalisme.” “Methode de dramatisation.” *Bulletin de la Soci’ete Francaise de Philosophie,* vol. 61, no. 3 (July-September 1967), pp. 89–118. Presentation followed by discussion.

“Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui.” See “Une theorie d’Autrui.” “Mystere d’Ariane.” *Etudes nietzscheennes* (1963).

“Nous croyons au caractere constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche.” *Recherches, Les Untorelli,* no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 149–150. Statement on repression in Italy written by Deleuze and signed by a number of French Intellectuals, September 20, 1977. “Un nouvel archiviste.” *Critique,* no. 274 (March 1970), pp. 195–209. Review of Michel Foucault, *L ‘archeologie du savoir.* Modified and reprinted in *Foucault,* pp. 11–30. *“Pensee nomade.” In Nietzscheaujourd’hui? Vol.* 1. Paris: 10/18, 1973, pp. 159–190. Presentation by Deleuze to the Colloque de Cerisy (1972), with discussion. “Philosophie et minorite.” *Critique,* no. 369 (February 1978), pp. 154–155. “La photographie est deja tiree dans les choses,” *Cahiers du Cinema,* no. 352 (October 1983), pp. 35–40. Interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni. “Platon et le simulacre.” See “Renverser le platonisme.” P Preface to Antonio Negri, *L ‘anomalie sauvage. Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza.* Paris: PUF, 1981, pp. 9–12. P Preface to Guy Hocquenghem. *L’apres-mai desfaunes.* Paris: Grasset, 1974, pp. 7–17. P “Qu’est-ce que c’est, tes ‘machines desirantes’ a toi?” *Les Temps*

*Modernes,* no. 316 (November 1972), pp. 854–856. Introduction to Pierre Benichou, “Saint Jackie, Comedienne et Bourreau.” “A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?” In *La philosophie.* Ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 4, pp. 293–339. (Abridged version of *Histoire de la philosophie.* 8 volumes. Paris: Hachette, 1972–1973.) “Renverser le platonisme (les simulacres),” *RevuedeM’etaphysique et de Morale,* vol. 71, no. 4 (October-December 1967), pp. 426–438. Modified and reprinted under the title “Platon et le simulacre” as an appendix to *Logique du sens.*

“De Sacher Masoch au masochisme.” *Arguments,* vol. 5, no. 21 (Jan.-April 1961), pp. 40–46. P

“Schizologie.” Preface to Louis Wolfson, *Le schizo et les langues.* Paris: Gallimard, 1970, pp. 5–23.

“Le schizophrene et le mot.” *Critique,* no. 255/256 (August-September 1968), pp. 731–746.

“Schizophrenic et societe” in *Encyclopaedia Universalis* (1985), vol. 16, pp. 524–527.

“Sens et valeurs.” *Arguments,* vol. 3, no. 15 (Sept.-Dec. 1959), pp. 20–28. Modified and reprinted in Chapter 1 of *Nietzsche et la philosophie.*

“Spinoza et la methode generate de M. Gueroult.” *Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale,* vol. 74, no. 2 (April-June 1970), pp. 426–437.

I might be misunderstanding the difference between classical and formalist film, but I felt like the frame story of Caligari was precisely what made it a strictly formalist film to me. It’s true that within the plot, the frame story & the twist ending retrocausally affirm the expressionist aesthetics, but if we think of the plot without the frame story, it follows a traditional three act structure: Francis and his friend meet Caligari, his friend is killed, there’s an investigation, Francis discovers the truth, confronts Caligari, and there is a happy ending. The use of the frame story, however, negates this simple plot, leaving it indeterminate. To me, this echoes the way that formalist films use images to disrupt the cinematic illusion, question what you are seeing, and explore philosophical ideas.

“Spinoza et nous.” *Revue de Synthese,* 3rd series, nos. 89–91 (January-September 1978). Reprinted as Chapter 6 of *Spinoza. Philosophie pratique,* 2nd ed.

“Une theorie d’Autrui. Michel Tournier.” *Critique,* no. 241 (June 1967), pp. 503–525. Modified and reprinted under the title “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui” as an appendix to *Logique du sens.* Reprinted as the postface to Tournier, *Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique.* Paris: Gallimard, 1972. P “Trois problemes de groupe.” Preface to Felix Guattari, *Psychanalyse et transversalite.* Paris: Maspero, 1972, pp. i-xi.

“Unite de ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.’” *Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale,* vol. 68, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1963), pp. 427–442.

“Sur la volonte de puissance et l’eternel retour.” In *Nietzsche. Cahiers de Royaumont.* Paris: Minuit, 1967, pp. 275–287.

“Zola et la felure.” See “Introduction a ‘la Bete humaine’ de Balzac.”

*Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics.* Trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin, 1984. A selection of essays from *Psychanalyse et transversalite* and the two versions of *La revolution mol’eculaire,* with a previously unpublished essay, “Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes” (with Eric Alliez), later published in French in Guattari, *Les ann’ees d’hiver.*

“Becoming-Woman.” Trans. Rachel McComas and Stamos Metzidakis. *Semiotext(e), Polysexuality,* vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 86–88. Also translated as “Becoming a Woman” by Rosemary Sheed in Guattari, *Molecular Revolution,* pp. 233–235. Translation of “Devenir femme,” *La revolution mol’eculaire* (both editions).

“Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist.” Trans. Suzanne Fletcher. *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3(1977), pp. 87–98.

“Freudo-Marxism.” *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3(1977), pp. 73–75. Intended for *Le Nouvel Observateur* but never published in French.

“Genet Regained.” Trans. Brian Massumi. *LAICA Journal,* vol. 5, no. 47 (Spring 1987). I Interview with Felix Guattari by Mark Seem. *Diacritics,* vol. 4, no. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 38–41. “Like an Echo of a Collective Melancholy.” Trans. Mark Polizzotti. *Semiotext(e), The German Issue,* vol. 4, no. 2 (1982), pp. 102–110. Translation of “Comme un echo de la melancholie collective,” in *La revolution mol’eculaire* (10/18 edition). I “The New Alliance.” Interview with Sylvere Lotringer. *Impulse,* vol. 10, no. 2 (Winter 1982), pp. 41–44.

My reading of Caligari was about infohazards and hypnosis. Infohazards are when one’s encounter with a piece of information causes a harm. Hypnosis (at least in the fantastical sense) is an infohazard, because the encounter with the hypnotist takes away your agency, and compels a form of action. In my reading, Cesare is essentially a red herring. Really, the hypnosis occurs between the historical mystic Caligari, and present day Dr. Caligari. Encountering the story about the mystic possesses Dr. Caligari, and he becomes obsessed with whether or not hypnosis can be recreated, and it is this obsession which proves (too late) that it can. The twist ending then doubles this structure: even if Francis is insane, if we take him at his word, his obsession starts also upon encountering the infohazard of the “true” story of Dr. Caligari. By uncovering the “truth” of the situation, he becomes hypnotized, and is compelled to act. Finally, in this reading, watching the movie triples this structure. When you watch a film, you are hypnotized by it. It fills your head with ideas, and some of them can get stuck in there, creating new ways of seeing. If, after watching the movie, you are overcome with a sense that the ideas which hypnotize you can shape the world and make it appear to jut at impossible angles, some might call you insane, but to me, the question is not: is it true? but: does it work?

“The Proliferation of Margins.” Trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker. *Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia,* vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 108–111.

“Psychoanalysis and Politics.” Trans. Paul Foss. *Language, Sexuality and Subversion.* Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 125–133. Translation of “Psychanalyse et politique,” first published in *Politique et psychanalyse.* Revised and published in *La revolution moieculaire* under the title “Les luttes du desir et la psychanalyse”; translated in *The Molecular Revolution* as “Psychoanalysis and the Struggles of Desire.”

“Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis.” Trans. Janis Forman. *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 77–85. Extracts from an interview about *Anti-Oedipus* with Arno Munster originally published in the *Frankfurter Rundschau* (January 17,1973). Other portions of this interview were published as “La fin de fetichismes,” *La revolution moieculaire.* Response to questionnaire on the city. Trans. Bruce Benderson. *Zone,* no. 112 (198 5), p. 460. I “Why Italy?” Trans. John Johnston. *Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia,* vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 234–237. Interview, unpublished in French.

*Les ann’ees d’hiver.* Paris: Barrault, 1986. Collected essays 1980–1985.

*L’inconscient moieculaire. Essais deSchizo-analyse.* Paris: Recherches, 1979.

*Les nouveaux espaces de liberie.* With Toni Negri. Followed by Guattari, “Des libertes en

Europe,” and Negri, “Lutte archeoligique.” Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985.

*Psychanalyse et transversalite.* Preface by Gilles Deleuze (“Trois problemes de groupe”).

Paris: Maspero, 1972. Collected essays 1965–1970. *La revolution moieculaire.* Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977. Essays 1971–1977. *La* *revolution moieculaire.* Paris: Union Generate d’Editions (10/18), 1980. Essays 1972–1979.

NOTE: The two collections entitled *La revolution moieculaire* are substantially different. The Recherches edition includes a section on cinema and extensive selections on semiotics that do not appear in the 10/18 version; the 10/18 version deals extensively with the Italian

You can make a case for it being a classical film because it has a coherent plot, but to me, the plot functions more to explore these abstract formalist ideas about the nature of film than to convey an innocuous story.

Autonomia movement. I Interview. *L’Autre Journal,* no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 6–22.

“Masses et minorites a la recherche d’une nouvelle strategie.” *Recherches, Les Untorelli,* no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 113–122. “Semiologies signifiantes et semiologies asignifiantes,” in *Psychanalyse et semiotique. Actes* *du Colloque de Milan, 1974.* Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 151–163.

Fritz Lang, *The Testament of Doctor Mabuse* (bullet-ridden dummie of Dr. Mabuse).

*The Ark of the Covenant with the Column of Fire and the Cloud.* Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, Viollet Collection.

M. Griaule and G. Dieterlan, *The Pale Fox.* Institut d’ethnologie, Musee de l’Homme, Paris (the first Yala of Amma’s egg).

Duccio, *The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew.* Bulloz Collection, New York.

R. F. Outeceault, *Buster Brown, le petit facteur.* Librairie Hachette.

*Wolf-Man, Cerveteri Etruscan Amphora.* Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo by Chuzeville.

-rachel

Paul Klee, *Twittering Machine,* 1922. Water color, pen and ink, I6V4 x 12”. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copyright 19 8 7 by Cosmopress, Geneva.

Chomel, *Dictionnaire economique,* 1732. Entry for “Perdrix” Partridge.

*Crazy in Stripes,* Vermont 1865. From Jonathan Holstein, *American* *Pieced Quilts* (New York: Viking, 1973).

This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior — and then claims that it isn’t a chapter? That presents itself as a network of “plateaus” that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?[1]

The annals of official philosophy are populated by “bureaucrats of pure reason” who speak in “the shadow of the despot” and are in historical complicity with the State.[3] They invent “a properly spiritual… absolute State that … effectively functions in the mind.” Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by “good” sense, of rocklike identity, “universal” truth, and (white male) justice. “Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the requirements of the established order.”[4]

Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest books read like a Who’s Who of philosophical giants. “What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.”[5] Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.[6] To Kant he dedicated an affectionate study of “an enemy.” Yet much of positive value came of Deleuze’s flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a “secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power.”[7] Deleuze’s first major statements written in his own voice, *Difference et repetition* (1968) and *Logique du sens* (1969), cross-fertilized that line of “nomad” thought with contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society[8] led him to disclaim the “ponderous academic apparatus”[9] still in evidence in those works. However, many elements of the “philosophy of difference” they elaborated were transfused into a continuing collaboration, of which *A Thousand Plateaus* is the most recent product.

Felix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political activist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari himself was among Lacan’s earliest trainees, and although he never severed his ties with Lacan’s Freudian School the group therapy practiced at La Borde took him in a very different direction. The aim at La Borde was to abolish the hierarchy between doctor and patient in favor of an interactive group dynamic that would bring the experiences of both to full expression in such a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as a whole. “The central perspective is… to promote human relations that do not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental relations of a metaphysical kind that *bring out* the most radical and basic alienations of madness or neurosis”[10] and channel them into revolutionary practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group projects dedicated to developing this radical “institutional psychotherapy,”[11] and later entered an uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry movement spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.[12] As Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry, the contractual Oedipal relationship between the analyst and the transference-bound analysand became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal bondage of the institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital. He came to occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he had all along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to the events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements that grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement.[13] *Anti-Oedipus* (1972),[14] his first book with Deleuze, gave philosophical weight to his convictions and created one of the intellectual sensations of postwar France with its spirited polemics against State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis, which separately and in various combinations represented the dominant intellectual currents of the time (in spite of the fundamentally anarchist nature of the spontaneous popular uprisings that had shaken the world in 1968). “The most tangible result of *Anti-Oedipus* was that it short-circuited the connection between psychoanalysis and the far left parties,” in which he and Deleuze saw the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of analytic reason.[15]

For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion *(Tel Quel)* or political conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of the Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they simply revive the polemics. *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980), written over a seven-year period, was billed as a sequel to *Anti-Oedipus* and shares its subtitle, *Capitalism and Schizophrenia.* But it constitutes a very different project. It is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative “nomad” thought called for in *Anti-Oedipus.*

“State philosophy” is another word for the representational thinking that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze,[16] it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: *logos,* law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: *x = x = noty.* Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the “spiritual and moral training of the nation,” to be achieved by “deriving everything from an original principle” (truth), by “relating everything to an ideal” (justice), and by “unifying this principle and this ideal in a single Idea” (the State). The end product would be “a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society”[17] — each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. Prussian mind-meld.[18] More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that “properly spiritual absolute State” endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name “phallogocentrism” (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In the introduction to *A Thousand Plateaus,* Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the “arborescent model” of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).

this was a cool film, i don’t have much to say about it outside of it being a fun little time capsule from when films were well, silent dramas like this. The sets and acting were quite pleasant, a fun and quirky difference to most modern acting I see, with over exaggerated movements that fit the setting. Speaking of the setting, it was beautiful, it reminded me, alongside the colors, of the buildings and streets in Dr. Seuss books, everything being slightly tilted and helter skelter. The story in my opinion wasn’t anything too special, but by no means was it dull; despite the confusing ending. I’d rate it as 7/12, not a great score, but still a fun watch if you want to go back in time with some friends.

“Nomad thought” does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. “What interests us are the circumstances.”[19] Because the concept in its unrestrained usage *is* a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, *x <verbatim>=</verbatim> x <verbatim>=</verbatim> not y* (I <verbatim>=</verbatim> I <verbatim>=</verbatim> not you) with an open equation: *… + y + z + a + …(…+* arm + brick + window + …). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.

The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is “striated,” or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the *nomos:* arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the *logos* of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort).

*A Thousand Plateaus* is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it “ethics.” Nietzsche called it the “gay science.” Artaud called it “crowned anarchy.” To Maurice Blanchot, it is the “space of literature.” To Foucault, “outside thought.”[20] In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms “pragmatics” and “schizoanalysis,” and in the introduction describe a rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.[21] On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the smooth spaces.[22] In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy.

Which returns to our opening question. How should *A Thousand Plateaus* be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don’t approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.

*A Thousand Plateaus* is conceived as an open system.[23] It does not pretend to have the final word. The authors’ hope, however, is that elements of it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the melody of their everyday lives.

Each “plateau” is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word “plateau” comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West’s orgasmic orientation.[24] In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. Each section of *A Thousand Plateaus* tries to combine conceptual bricks in such a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call consistency — not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together of disparate elements (also known as a “style”).[25] A style in this sense, as a dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not something limited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have their styles, mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do tools, and technologies, and historical periods, even — especially — punctual events. Each section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has existed in other mediums at other times. The date corresponds to the point at which that particular dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter, the point at which it was freest from interference from other modes and rose to its highest degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash, because the world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die. Section 12, for example, the “Treatise on Nomadology,” is dated 1227 A.. because that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its pure form on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but they are more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze’s own image for a concept is not a brick, but a “tool box.”[26] He calls his kind of philosophy “pragmatics” because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying.

The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?

-recima from weimar republic

The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be “none.” If that happens, it’s not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record.

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling *(sentiment* in Deleuze and Guattari). *L‘affect* (Spinoza’s *affectus)* is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. *L’affection* (Spinoza’s *affectio)* is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies).

DRAW. In *A Thousand Plateaus,* to draw is an act of creation. What is drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight) does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word *tracer* captures this better: It has all the graphic connotations of “to draw” in English, but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. “To trace” (*decalquer),* on the other hand, is to copy something from a model.

FLIGHT/ESCAPE. Both words translate *fuite,* which has a different range of meanings than either of the English terms. *Fuite* covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is *a point de fuite).* It has no relation to flying. MILIEU. In French, *milieu* means “surroundings,” “medium” (as in chemistry), and “middle.” In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, “milieu” should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.

PLANE. The word *plan* designates both a “plane” in the geometrical sense and a “plan.” The authors use it primarily in the first sense. Where both meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of *the, plan d’organisatori)* “plan(e)” has been used in the translation.

POWER. Two words for “power” exist in French, *puissance* and *pouvoir.* In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very different concepts (although the terminological distinction is not consistently observed). *Puissance* refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a “capacity for existence,” “a capacity to affect or be affected,” a capacity to multiply connections that may be realized by a given “body” to varying degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity of a number to be raised to a higher “power.” It is used in the French translation of Nietzsche’s term “will to power.” Like its English counterpart, it has an additional mathematical usage, designating the number of elements in a finite or infinite set. Here, *puissance* pertains to the virtual (the plane of consistency), *pouvoir* to the actual (the plane of organization). The authors *use pouvoir* in a sense very close to Foucault’s, as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential. Both *puissance* and *pouvoir* have been translated here as “power,” since the distinction between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French terms have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in occasional passages where *puissance* is rendered as “potential.”

PROCESS/PROCEEDING. The authors employ two words normally translated as “process.” *Processus* in their usage is the more general of the two, covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an occurrence. *Proces* pertains only to the stratification. In standard French, *proces* also means “trial” (as in the title of the Kafka novel). Deleuze and Guattari exploit this polysemy as a way of emphasizing the role of organizations of social power and regimes of signs in operations constitutive of the subject, or *proces de subjectivation. Proces* is usually (once again, there is slippage in their usage) translated as “proceeding,” despite the occasional awkwardness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both associations: a process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding, or trial. *Processus* is always “process.”

SELF. Both *Moi* and *Soi* have usually been translated as “Self,” with the French in brackets. *Soi* is the self in its broadest sense, but as a neuter third-person pronoun implies an impersonality at the basis of the self. *Moi* is a more restricted concept: the “me” as subject of enunciation for the “I” *(je)* as subject of the statement. It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.

SIGNIFIANCE/INTERPRETANCE. I have followed the increasingly common practice of importing *signifiance* and *interpr’etance* into English without modification. In Deleuze and Guattari these terms refer respectively to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes of language as a “signifying regime of signs.” They are borrowed from Benveniste (“signifying capacity” and “interpretative capacity” are the English translations used in Benveniste’s work).

STATEMENT. *Enonce* (often “utterance”) has been translated here as “statement,” in keeping with the choice of the English translators of Foucault, to whose conception Deleuze and Guattari’s is closest. “Enunciation” is used for *enonciation.*

10 out of 10 mascara brushes, 8 out of 10 crooked houses

TRAIT. The word *trait* has a range of meanings not covered by any single word in English. Literally, it refers to a graphic drawing, and to the act of drawing a line. Abstractly, it is the purely graphic element. Figuratively, it is an identifying mark (a feature, or trait in the English sense), or any act constituting a mark or sign. In linguistics, “distinctive features” *(traits distinctifs* or *traits pertinents)* are the elementary units of language that combine to form a phoneme. *Trait* also refers to a projectile, especially an arrow, and to the act of throwing a projectile. Here, “trait” has been retained in all but narrowly linguistic contexts.

GENDER-BIASED USAGE has been largely eliminated through plural-ization or the use of male and female pronouns. However, where Deleuze and Guattari seem deliberately to be using “man” to designate a socially constructed, patriarchal standard of human behavior applied to both men and women, the masculine generic has been retained.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Ministry of Culture for their generous assistance, without which this translation would not have been possible, and to the authors for their patience in answering my questions. Winnie Berman, Ken Dean, Nannie Doyle, Shoshana Felman, Jim Fleming, Robert Hurley, Fredric Jameson, Sylvere Lotringer, Susan McClary, Giorgio Passerone, Paul Patton, Dana Polan, Mary Quaintance, Michael Ryan, Lianne Sullivan, Susan Yazijian, and Caveh Zahedi provided much-appreciated aid and advice. Glenn Hendler likes to see his name in print.

I consulted the following translations: “Rhizome” (first version), trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, *Ideology and Consciousness,* no. 8 (Spring 1981, pp. 49–71); “Rhizome” (final version), trans. John Johnston in Deleuze and Guattari, *On the Line* (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); “One or Several Wolves?” (first version), trans. Mark Seem, *Semiotext(e)*, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 137–147 (1977); “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs” (first version, abridged), trans. Suzanne Guerlac, *Semiotext(e)* vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 265–270.

Portions of this translation have appeared previously. “Treatise on Nomadology” was published as a separate book entitled *Nomad Machine* (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Extracts from “Becoming-Intense …” appeared under the title “Becoming-Woman” in *Subjects/Objects,* no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 24–32, and from “The Smooth and the Striated” under the title “Nomad Art” *mArtandText,* no. 19(Oct.-Nov. 1985), pp. 16–23.

This book is the companion volume to *Anti-Oedipus* (paperback ed., University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Together they make up *Capitalism and Schizophrenia*.

It is composed not of chapters but of “plateaus.” We will try to explain why later on (and also why the texts are dated). To a certain extent, these plateaus may be read independently of one another, except the conclusion, which should be read at the end.

[[g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-a-thousand-plate-2.png][SYLVANO BUSSOTI]]

The two of us wrote *Anti-Oedipus* together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. 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. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an *assemblage.* A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity — but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a *body without organs,* which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on a “plane of consistency” assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the units of measure are what is essential: *quantify writing.* There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. — and an *abstract machine* that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine … (What if one became animal or plant *through* literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure. *Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence:* Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.

-Avery

A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most “dialectical” way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four… Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn’t get us very far. The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no better understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber’s case), linguistics, structuralism, and even information science.

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, but the root’s unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality. Take William Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers, *doctores angelici,* because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity. Joyce’s words, accurately described as having “multiple roots,” shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche’s aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple *must be made,* not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available — always *n* — 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at *n* — 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. *Collective assemblages of enunciation* function directly within *machinic assemblages;* it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the *abstract machine* that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.”[27] There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.[28] It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.

Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomulti-plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or “return” in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are 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: “Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that *its multiplicity* resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated… . The interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns.”[29] An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units *(unites)* of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity *(unite)* appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding).

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak *of a plane of consistency* of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this “plane” increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. *Flat multiplicities of n dimensions* are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives *(some* couchgrass, *some* of a rhizome…).

Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject — anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata — a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying. Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: “the *aparallel evolution* of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”[30] More generally, evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not without bringing with it “genetic information” from the first host (for example, Benveniste and Todaro’s current research on a type C virus, with its double connection to baboon DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another.[31] Once again, there is *aparallel evolution,* of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat “plays” baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to those of “the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle Ages.”[32] Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.

The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterri-torialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its “aparallel evolution” through to the end. The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else — with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.” Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of *n* dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later… you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.”[33] Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many “transformational multiplicities,” even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.[34]

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents, while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the representative model of the tree, or root — pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example, Chomsky’s “tree” is associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of *tracing.* All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.

The rhizome is altogether different, a *map and not a tracing.* Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. 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. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it — divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content to make ready-made tracings — Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy — while the child makes a desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues.)[35] Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politically, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multiplicity have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attributions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: *the tracing should always be put back on the map.* This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies (it’s not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).

Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psychoanalysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans’s cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what Melanie Klein did to Little Richard’s geopolitical maps: she developed photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or structural destiny — one way or the other, your rhizome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.; how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family, be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother’s bed; then how Professor Freud’s intervention assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership, fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground, continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny’s method: map the gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the same child, for several different children.[36] If it is true that it is of the essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assuming the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any Manichaean dualism). For example, 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. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going. Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel. 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. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the “tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language — a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome.[37] To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. “The axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.”[38] The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.

The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we consider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of *opposed segment* for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a “link dipole,” in contrast to the “unit dipoles” formed by spokes radiating from a single center.[39] Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing “the imagery of command trees” (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that “accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status…. The arborescent form admits of topological explanation…. In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior…. The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place” (signifiance and subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one — of what we call the radicle type — because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the famous *friendship theorem:* “If any two given individuals in a society have precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all the others.” (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual friend is. Who is “the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the initial axioms.” Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the Philosopher as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theorems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the radicle solution, the structure of Power.[40]

To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their *state* at a given moment — such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states replaces topology, and “the graph regulating the circulation of information is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.… There is no reason for the graph to be a tree” (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for *n* individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying automaton as an “asocial intrusion.”[41] Under these conditions, *n* is in fact always *n* — 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition, centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an example again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the phallus-tree — not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s margin of maneuverability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an “acentered organization of a society of words.” For both statements and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to *produce the unconscious,* and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.

It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy…: the root-foundation, *Grund, racine, fondement.* The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of “clones.” Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).[42] Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass. Henry Miller: “China is the weed in the human cabbage patch.

… The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor…. Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Sermons on the Mount…. Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out…. The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. *It grows between,* among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening — but the weed is rank growth …: it points a moral.”[43] Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?

America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American books are different from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. *Leaves of Grass.* And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American “map” in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East.[44] (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal…

Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)? Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feudalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corresponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic power with “weak property,” in which the State engenders channeled and channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel’s work that have not been refuted).[45] The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting under a tree; Buddha’s tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao’s river and Louis’s tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a quantification of power with immediate “quanta,” where each person profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both — all for the worst.

At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek — PLURALISM = — via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.