Extract I: The Rhizome [An essay]

This is an extract of an essay I wrote inspired by Guilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980), in which they discuss a range of subjects related to psychoanalysis, language, philosophy, linguistics and semiotics.

Deleuze (philosopher) and Guattari (psychiatrist and political activist) were french intelectuals that wrote a series of works together that became a pillar stone of post-structuralism. In their work they discuss the work of other influential and important authors such as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and even Franz Kafka.

A Thousand Plateaus is written in a non-linear fashion, and the reader is invited to move among plateaux in any order. I felt particularly interested in their discussions about the Rhizome, this piece of writing tries to emulate the nature of the rhizome itself, and it was inspired in the author's style.

There are no hierarchies in the elements that make up the rhizome, there is no unity in it, nor homogeneity. From the fragmentation of a rhizome can emerges numerous lines of segmentation and deterritorialization, that are part of the constitutive nature of it, like the snakey head of Hydra.

The ramifications and diverse bifurcations that integrate the rhizome do not converge in a center, but they intersect incessantly, as in a kind of burrow without limits that extends its indefinite tunnels to new dimensions, beyond coherences and starting points.

Language, a herd of animals, grass, an orchid, they are all rhizomes or, rather, they become rhizomes, because multiplicity is not given but it is made and configured as such in the consciousness of a plurality that goes beyond binary visions.

Rhizomes do not respond to traditional structural models, they do not include tracing but to mapping, they do not have to do with meaning, but with cartography, as said by Deleuze and Guattari. A map has multiple entries through which we can approach the network of correlations that forms a plural experience of reality. Making a rhizome, or making a map, involve constructing out of interconnections (between rhizomes and rhizomes, rhizomes and roots), an open and alterable structure that allows a reflection about the way in which we structure reality.