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lutz
@lutz
mcc
@mcc asked:

What the fuck is a rhizome. Is it different from an assemblage. Can a rhizome be an assemblage

I'll say this here as a kind of clarification and baseline, so we can return to it later, and because it's one of the first things one must internalize to really get what they're up to: almost everything Deleuze and Guattari talk about with their famous terms is not so much a way of describing actual objects in the world as it is an attempt to describe a mode of thinking about objects in the world.

Okay, so 1), what the fuck is a rhizome? Well in A Thousand Plateaus (ATP) Deleuze & Guattari (D&G) say this:

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.

Great, fantastic! That about explains it, right? Haha, no. Of course not. This is on like page 5 of a 650-page book.

A rhizome is "bulbs or tubers" -- so let's think about a potato. A potato grows beneath the ground, amid the roots of the plant, does not subdivide but rather swells, retaining its consistency even as its boundaries shift and change; the flowering thing you see above the ground grows from it. This is an alternative to a mode D&G call the arborescent, which means tree-like.

Think for a minute how a tree grows: the seed pops open and the radicle (the initial, embryonic root) spears down into the soil, forging a path, taking in nutrients, displacing earth, etc. As it grows, it begins to split and diverge, with more roots spearing downward. At the top, also, trees grow like this: a main trunk, which subdivides into branches, which further subdivide, and so on, moving upward. Crucially, also, this type of plant grows from a seed, typically a thing produced from the top of a plant, while a rhizome grows from another rhizome (you take a cutting from a potato you dig up to start a new potato plant).

There are some very clear contrasts here that we could quickly and easily map onto, say, social organizations, the way we understand human groups and movements, etc. Are they arborescent (ie, based on growth by delineation and subdivision, implicitly usually along a particular path, naturalizing a certain linearity or hierarchy, aiming at the reproduction of a certain type of fruit) or are they rhizomatic (based on growth by expansion and connection, promiscuous in their directionality, decentralized or bottom-up)? D&G's example of a pack of rats being "rhizomatic" here not to say that a big group of rats would not, if studied under proper scientific conditions, evince some sort of social hierarchy among them,1 but the fact that when any given person sees a big pack of rats they probably think to themselves "Look at that swarm of rats!" rather than (as you might when seeing a flock of poultry, for instance) recognize/assume among them sexual difference, territoriality, etc.

The takeaway here is not that rhizomatic = good and arborescent = bad, though they definitely have their tendencies. In fact, D&G are very clear that rhizomes can contain arbors, while an arborescent system may burgeon into a rhizome. Stability of identity is not a thing these guys are big on!!!! The point is that, as in my example of rats vs. poultry, each one provides a basic template for looking at reality and thinking about how it works, of literally imagining "what's going on over there." We often have reflexive ways of thinking about these things and D&G are ultimately interested in proliferating frames of reference in order to avoid calcification of thought.

So, 2), is a rhizome different from an assemblage? Yes, inasmuch as an assemblage is a different term that frames reality in another distinct way, not as variegated branching or as a singular burgeoning, but as the connection of multiplicities--an automobile is an assemblage in that it is a singularly functioning object made up of many smaller functioning parts, and the capitalist market is an assemblage because it is likewise a singularly functioning thing composed of multiple human and nonhuman collectives working (or being worked) to maintain its functioning, just as table salt is the assemblage of particular elemental forms of sodium and chlorine. Whereas rhizome and arbor describe mechanisms of organization and growth, the emphasis with the assemblage is on the connection of multiplicities (ie, the union among disparate parts).

Which brings us to 3), can a rhizome be an assemblage? Sure! It depends on what aspects of the object/phenomenon you're trying to extrude through the conceptual framing. But more to the point, they are by no means equivalent. A very hierarchical assemblage, for example, would not be a good candidate for rhizomatic description, but an assemblage that is more decentralized may evince more rhizomatic possibility when the lens is applied.


  1. D&G would argue that the basic scientific method, which takes as a given the idea that phenomena can be clearly partitioned into singular causes and effects, unitary forces, and so on, is basically arborescent in nature and thus is also dedicated to reproducing itself in the way an apple tree bears apples, so it should be no surprise that when Science looks at a swarm of rats it discovers precisely the things (singularity, delineation, etc) that Science thinks compose the world.


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in reply to @lutz's post:

"The takeaway here is not that rhizomatic = good and arborescent = bad, though they definitely have their tendencies. In fact, D&G are very clear that rhizomes can contain arbors, while an arborescent system may burgeon into a rhizome. Stability of identity is not a thing these guys are big on!!!!"
"the capitalist market is an assemblage because it is likewise a singularly functioning thing composed of multiple human and nonhuman collectives working (or being worked) to maintain its functioning"

OK, that clears up a significant concern I had that Deleuze and Guatarri were using the rhizome, albeit unintentionally, to reproduce the sort of decentralized, everywhere-and-nowhere structure that epitomizes capitalism in general.

Metaphors don't fit! It's what makes them metaphors--two things that aren't the same are compared to each other. If every aspect of the comparison lines up it stops being a metaphor and starts being a comparative description of two things that are somehow also the same thing.