Introduction:

The project involves looking at some key concepts in Deleuze, as I explained in another
video. Incidentally, I have just remembered that D follows this approach himself with
Spinoza's work, (Deleuze 1988) picking out key terms like attribute or mode. Deleuze puts
them in alphabetical order but I think that can be a bit arbitrary.

The rhizome is perhaps the most famous concept, well-liked by people trying to 'apply'
Deleuze or D&G. Any gardener can think of an example of a rhizome – plants like the Iris,
ginger, certain kinds of bamboo or couch grass have underground roots or stems. When you
pull up a shoot of couch grass sticking up through the soil you uncover a straggly white tough
fibrous stem that wanders off unpredictably under the surface. Sometimes, you find it
connected unexpectedly to another green shoot somewhere else. Lots of apparently
unconnected bits of couch grass are really connected underground.

D&G get a bit defensive about the term in A Thousand Plateaus, (ATP) and say they now
realize the need to convince people with a list of properties. Rather than just reproduce this
list, which is not very helpful at first, I suggest we do something different. Of course, you
don't have to just follow my thinking or agree with me – try the techniques for yourself.

One other difficulty is that the term is used as an introduction to the major philosophical
arguments developed in ATP, and the definitions themselves get a bit lost. I suggest we focus
on those definitions and what is implied by them first, but also note the wider implications.
Of course, this is only one suggestion for an approach and there are others.

I don't want people who are just beginning to get distracted or overwhelmed by the
enormity of the work involved to track down all the implications. First, I have been pretty
selective, inevitably. Second I have divided up the commentary, and you will hear two voices
to indicate the split in focus – the second one is Maggie Harris's.

M Harris

My sections discuss some implications that arise. They need not worry complete beginners
right away, but others might want to think about them as they go along. There is a transcript
available so you can follow some issues up with that if you need to do so.

D Harris

As before, I suggest we think about this while watching some slow video. I was trying out my
amateur steadicam gear and going for a single take on a recent walk. I apologise if anyone
gets seasick with the wobbles or the whippy pans. Ironically, the video features shots of lots
of trees.

First we need to locate where the topic of the rhizome is discussed, and it is fairly easy in this
case. We'll start with A Thousand Plateaus, (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) where nearly all or
perhaps all, the references to the rhizome can be found. It has an index too. If you look up
the term rhizome, you find quite a number of definitions.
Let's start with the specific ones. It's not just plants that are rhizomes. Ant colonies, rat
burrows, the city of Amsterdam, the Freudian Unconscious, liberated sexual activity, musical
forms, aspects of American culture focused both on the cultural underground and the Wild
West, forms of guerilla warfare, the path of a pool of oil as it runs downstream. Even the
book itself, ATP, is a rhizome, D&G tell us (p. 24). Occasionally, other things are called
rhizomes as well, throughout the book. Reading the text around the actual definitions will
help

Optional discussion 1

One thing to note right away is that not all these examples relate to human beings. In
discussions like this, D&G want to talk about things found in nature as well. It would be
limiting to confine what they say to human affairs, although sometimes this is what happens
– concepts like the rhizome are discussed in terms of human activities alone – thinking,
writing, wandering. This is an anthropomorphic reading of Deleuzian work and it is only one
option. More on this in a minute, but for now, the suggestion is that the more general
accounts of the rhizome stress that human activity is connected to lots of other areas. The
'pure' rhizome is infinitely connectable,with each point having the capacity to connect with
any other point in any other system.

End of optional discussion 1.

Back to our definitions:

There are also more challenging general, theoretical or philosophical descriptions and
comments.

The first example isn't too bad:

[A rhizome is] a map and not a tracing...'open and connectable in all of its dimensions (13) D

Incidentally, in the same bit there is a reference to decalcomania – strangely taken to be crucial in
some commentaries, but just another example for me. It refers to a technique to add decoration to
pottery as a kind of applique. I don't know enough about it to see what exactly is rhizomatic about
this technique – maybe it has to respond to minute changes in the surface texture of the pot as well
as to the artistic intentions of the potter?

More abstractly:
The rhizome has no beginning and end. It is a matter of alliance rather than filiation. It proceeds by
the conjunction 'and…and…and'...American literature and some English literature shows this
'rhizomatic direction' (28), following a 'logic of the AND' (27). In other words, such works do not
follow conventional narratives but move from one episode to the next. No examples are specified
here – I thought of James Joyce and Ulysses but he is neither American nor English

More obscurely:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension but ...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 constructed: write at n-1
dimensions...A system of this kind would be called a rhizome' (7).
[The rhizome] is composed of dimensions or 'directions in motion'. It has no beginning or end, only 'a
middle (milieu) from which it grows and over spills' [I often wonder if translating milieu as 'middle'
rather than 'context' is helpful here]. It constructs linear multiplicities with N dimensions. It has no
subject or object. It moves on a plane of consistency 'from which the One [capital O] is always
subtracted (N-1) (24)

Even the simple example we started with gets a bit more complicated as we read on: plants connect
the rhizomes of their roots, with other things, like the wind or animals or human beings. The whole
thing is now described as a rhizome.

In human life, we are told a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles (8) We
are urged always to trace connections like this, always follow rhizomes until we get to the most
abstract and tortuous connections. These lines of flight away from the specific examples will
eventually lead us to a completel;y abstract or 'pure' mechanism or machine operating on the
mysterious plane of consistency (12). It is that pure mechanism, with no specific empirical bits at all
that is being referred to in the obscure stuff just now, referring to multiplicities and N dimensions

It is very tempting to ignore these complications and go with what you know already – the
rhizome as an underground root. Some people have used this simple metaphor to find some
immediate 'applications' to humans and to social life as we saw – the way in which some
people learn, for example, trailing from one task to another, wandering along directed by
their interests and personal motives which operate beneath the surface of their
consciousness. This is only a metaphorical connection, though - -and Deleuze actually
doesn't like metaphors which he sees as the result of lazy thinking, not going into the issues
the actual similarities between plants and animals which we discuss in a minute.:

Insert caption: the metaphor is redundant, since it implies some true primary meaning,
whereas ‘all meaning and identification derive rather from the unstable interplay of figures,
from configurations of sense’.  Deleuze 1995.:188

My suggestion is we do something a bit more ambitious here, to try to work in all the
examples, and then try to see as a first stage how the more general and obscure bits fit in.
We should and we can tangle a little bit at least with the philosophy, using our own common
forms of thinking. I should say that Deleuze has serious objections to the ways in which
ordinary thought processes work, and we'll mention a couple more as we go along.

Optional discussion 2

One way to start might be to return to the issue of what all the examples might have in
common. It seems that Deleuze and Guattari see something in common between human
activities and the activities of animals like ants and rats or even trickles of oil. We could think
in terms used in classical philosophy and ask if there is some underlying essential quality
here – do we share having been created by God as an earlier way of thinking about essences
would suggest? Theologians have amused themselves for centuries with this sort of inquiry
and its implications – does God create everything and if he doesn't who does? Does he
create each individual ant or just the species? Is he there in each patch of oil?
A currently fashionable view would take another option and say the links occur because
there is some cosmic consciousness that connects us all to the natural world, that even
plants have some kind of consciousness of their surroundings. But do trickles of oil? The
actual emphasis is possibly the other way around though. Plant rhizomes develop by
responding to local differences in their environment concerning moisture, temperature,
nutrient contents and so on. Rats and ants might respond to chemical or physical differences
in their environments – texture of the surface, gradient and so on. Trickles of oil also
respond to local gradients and the general effects of gravity. This is not really consciousness,
but more a basic detection of different sorts of intensity – of chemicals or gravitational
forces.
And it is often the case that these differences drive human actions too. We are not conscious
of all of them. We are affected by physical aspects of our environment. Our environment
produces affects. Now the term 'affect' has been colonised by recent psychology to mean
just emotions, but Deleuze sees an affect in an earlier 17th Century way to mean anything
that affects us, usually registered at the bodily level. That produces things in our minds like
emotions and feelings. We respond to chemicals in our bodies and in our environment. We
respond to external forces like gravity by feeling happy if we lose weight, sad if we put it on
and feel gravity tugging us down. We are nervous thinking of the effects of falling from
height, elated at feeling g forces on an accelerating motorcycle – and so on. The best place
to find this view of affects and how they work on bodies is Deleuze's book on Spinoza
(Deleuze 1988) or the online lectures on Spinoza (Deleuze 2007).