Rhizome-book
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari uses the rhizome concept as a mental symbol of how knowledge and meaning are, should be and/or can be structured, and of non-hierarchical networks of any kind. In the introduction chapter, entitled “Introduction: Rhizome”, it is contrasted with the state philosophical concept of arborescence, the mental symbol of a tree, representing dualism, binary logic and biunivocal relationships. In doing so the introduction chapter first distinguishes three types of books, defined by their different relationships to the (real) world. Two of these types of books are of the classical episteme: the root-book, and the radicle-system or fascicular root book. The third type is the rhizome, Deleuzes and Guattaris own model for the non-representational book – such as A Thousand Plateaus itself (“We are writing this book as a rhizome” (ATPC 24)).
[edit] The root-book
The tree is the classical image of the world, and the root is the reflection of the tree, its mirror image. The root-book then, “imitates the world … as art imitates nature”. This type of book obeys the law of reflection: “the One that becomes two”. This law is also found in the binary logic of the tree-world itself, in the strictly ordered, vertical, hierarchical, dualistic, dichotomous, re-presentational model of thought – “the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought”, as Deleuze and Guattari deems it. (ATPC 5)
[edit] The radicle-system or fascicular root book
The radicle-system or fascicular root book is more chaotic and fragmented than the ordered cosmos of the root-book. It builds its own root structure stemming from an embryonic seed, rather than representing itself as a mirror image of a tree-world. However, a fascicular book does not escape the dualistic model of thought: “the most fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work” by implying Unity, that is: adding a supplementary dimension to the actual object of the book, where Unity is forced upon it. A quite common method within modern writing and art is constructing circular or cyclic totalities out of seemingly disparate objects, which reproduces dualism between the subjects spiritual dimension and the objects dimension of reality. (ATPC 6-7)
[edit] The rhizome-book
The rhizome-book does not seek to imitate the world (or re-present the arborescent presentation of the world), nor does it strive to establish a supplementary dimension of Unity like the fascicular book. It sets out to reveal connections that the arborescent and the fascicular figures of thought either ignores, fails to recognize or even denounces: “Any point of the rhizome can be connected to anything other” (ATPC 7). The rhizome-book is also an open system, not predictable/deductible as the arborescent or “finished” like the fascicular. It is engaged in “aparallel evolution” (mutualism) with the world. (ATPC 11-12)
Moreover, the rhizome-book consists of plateaus, not chapters: “A book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points”, while a plateau is a multiplicity connected to other multiplicities in a rhizome (ATPC 24) and “is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that s not automatically dissipated in a climax” (Brian Massumi,”Translator’s foreword”, ATPC XIV).
The aim of the rhizome-book then is not to present a transcendent Truth of a spiritual dimension as a radicle system-book, or re-present the image of the world as a root-book, but to produce a knowledge effect in the reader, to “leave afterimages of its dynamism … creating a fabric of hightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. … The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?”
