Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari
On The Line
Tanslated by John Johnson
| The multiple must be
made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the
simplest way, by dint of sobriety… A rhizome as subterranean
stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs
and tubers are rhizomes… Even some animals are, in
their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in
all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion
and breakout… The rhizome includes the best and the
worst: potato and couchgrass. |
On the Line gathers together
two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate
on in A Thousand Plateaus. “Rhizome,” first
presented in person at the “Schizo-Culture” conference
organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University
in 1975, introduced a new kind of thinking, both non-dialectical
and non-hierarchical, that turned out paradoxically to offer
an early template for the understanding of the internet. “Rhizome” substitutes
pragmatic, “crab grass,” free-floating logic
to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.
In “Politics,” superseding the Marxist concept of class,
Deleuze and Guattari envisage the social macrocosm as a series of
lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will
always be unpredictable. It is, they emphasize, the end of the idea
of revolution, but not of the “becoming revolutionary.” Throughout,
the two writers keep dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive
machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers
and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the
creativity and multiplicity of its flows.
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