009 · Rhizome
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A Thousand Plateaus 1 wants to model rhizomatic thought, but its own material form, its conceptual dependence on the rhizome, and its need for sequential reading show that anti-hierarchical theory cannot entirely escape the hierarchies through which thought becomes communicable. The book asks us to resist the tree, but it arrives as an object with a front cover, numbered pages, chapter order, syntax, and conceptual priority.
Even refusal, it seems, requires form.
The rhizome is a tool for noticing when hierarchy has disguised itself as nature.2 Its value lies in making order visible. Where order begins, how it repeats, what it excludes, and how easily a theory of escape can become another structure of authority.3
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). Originally published as Mille plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980).↩
Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome as a model of thought based on connection, multiplicity, rupture, and lateral movement. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3–25.↩
This is a formal tension as much as a philosophical one. The book resists arborescent, or tree-like, models of thought, yet depends upon the conventions of the printed book: sequence, typography, pagination, chapter division, and the reader’s movement from one sentence to the next↩