Be quick, even when standing still.

                As I began think about the concept of Rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus, I was reminded to three musical artists that chose to write in a similar style as Deleuze and Guattari:  The Blood Brothers, the Refused, and At the Drive-In.  All three of the groups for their seminal albums (Crimes, The Shape of Punk To Come: A Chimerical Bombation in 12 Bursts, and Relationship of Command, respectively) chose to write their own lyrics and music separately as individuals and then come together and write albums that are more than the single person’s thoughts.  They are rhizomes of music, connection points where thousands of plateaus are sent out to many different disciplines of music, art, and literature.  For an example, see below:

(For an interesting read, give the break up announcement for Refused.  It is one of the best break-up notices that I have ever read:  http://www.burningheart.com/refused/refmanifest5.htm)

                Onto Rhizomes – What are they?  How they produce interesting and logical positions within our own academic communities?  How do we root ourselves with them, while simultaneously create new and interesting frontiers in our academic discourses? 

                Rhizomes are the intersection points between two or more arenas of thought that create “plateaus.”  They are the connection points that allow for growth in an area of thought by assimilating with the thoughts of another area of thought.  For instance, originally psychology laid firm claim to the works of Freud and Jung, but over time they have become literary focus points that are heavily relied upon though being less credible in psychology.    Any given rhizome is ever changing and goes though changes in perception every day; we change our view of the connection between the works of Freud and their literary notions constantly.  “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles” (7).  Rhizomes are the pivot points between discourse communities and their ideas, the outside world, and other, more distant arenas of thought.  Rhizomes can also be destroyed, not just changed, “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” (9).  The old idea that there is nothing new under the sun gets a new and frightening connotation.  Even if we are thinking new things they are only rhizomes that have been explored before and will be pushed to another spot on the network, pushed to new lines.  Basically rhizomes “connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play a very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states” (21).  Rhizomes are not trees, they are allowed to connect soil to the tree, trees to other trees, the sky to the tree, veins within the tree, but they are never the tree itself; “The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…” (25). 

                Within “1914: One or Several Wolves” we see that Deleuze and Guattari are seeking a notion that establishes the notion of a misuse of rhizome.  They use Freud’s study of the Wolf-Man to understand when a rhizome can be used poorly.  Without summarizing, Freud’s use of psychoanalysis on this particular patient had gaps in which Deleuze and Guattari choose to explore their validity, and to sometimes point and laugh at the misdiagnosis.  Where “Introduction” is a dense exploration of the term from multiple facets and dimensions, “1914” is meant to explore the validity of their term in a historical and critical context.  To me it stands up, but I have been known to be wrong. 

                In “Conclusion,” we are confronted with dense and heavily coded paragraphs pertaining to the terms in the book.  Rhizome is therein defined once again as a connection point, “the line no longer forms a contour and instead passes between things, between points” (505).  However, a facet is added to the mix: that of lines.  The plane of knowledge is defined in three different and particular lines.  “Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally lines of flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death… (fascism)” (506).  Therefore we have lines that separate us (segmented lines), lines that make thoughts disappear (molecular lines), and lines that end thought (flight lines).  All of these are the effects of the change, creation, or destruction of a rhizome.