From: fjackson-AT-diana.cair.du.edu (FLANNON P. JACKSON )
Subject: Re: MP: Ruminations on Rhizomes
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 14:21:10 -0700 (MST)


(stuff deleted)> 
> 
> 
> I realize that rhizome is merely metaphor for a more abstract critique
> (in some ways, D&G's balancing MP on the rhizome highlights the failure
> of metaphor explicitly, such that it's strange that they take a metaphor
> like rhizome to refer to a metonymic relationship).  Nonetheless, I
> have a nagging suspicion that faith in the rhizome is exactly that,
> an irrational (schiz?) belief in something that does not exist.  From
> an appropriately distant perspective, all rhizomatic functions appear
> as certainly ordered by root and trunk as more obviously ordered
> arborescent ones.  Weeds, mules, grass, tubors, from a geo-
> environmental perspective, are not metaphorically rhizomatic.  From an
> appropriately broad perspective, nothing is rhizomatic.  This, of course,
> is the lesson of chaos mathematics, which finds in complex systems thought
> to be disordered not disorder by a complexity derrivative of a simple
> function.  D&G are correct, depending upon the power to which we set
> the microscope: to the naked eye, the ball-bearing looks smooth; put
> it under a 50x magnification and it is pitted and irregular; put it
> under a 5 million x maginification and it is an ordered sculpture of
> atoms and molecules.  Beyond that?  I dunno.
> 
(more stuff deleted)> 
> *************************************
> mseidl-AT-brahms.udel.edu
> "It's myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation."--Beckett
> 
This may seem to be a strange association to begin with in an attempt to 
aproachthe problem of metaphor in D&G, but it also might be appropriate
because of its strangness.  D&G say:  "The crocodile does not reproduce a tree
tree trunk, anymore than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its 
surroundings." (MP p.11)  This struck me as interesting because Foucault also
mentions a crocodile in the context of the relation of metaphors to language.
In The Order of Things Foucault says:  "True writing began when the attempt 
was made to represent, no longer the thing itself, but one of its constituent
elements, or one of the circumstances that habitually attend it, or again
some other thing that it resembles.  These three methods produced three 
techniques:  the curiological writing of the Egyptians -- the crudest of the
three -- which employs 'the principle circumstance of a subject in lieu of 
the whole' (a bow for a battle, a ladder for a siege); then the 'tropal'
hieroglyphics -- somewhat more perfected -- which employ some notable 
circumstance (since God is all-powerful he knows eveything and sees all that
men do: he is therefore represented by an eye); finally, symbolic writing, 
which makes use of more or less concealed resemblances (the rising sun is 
expressed as by the head of a crocodile whose round eyes are level with the 
surface of the water).  We can recognize here the three great figures of 
rhetoric: synecdoche, metonymy, catachresis." (pp.110-111)

It seems to me that the 'failure' of the metaphor in D&G ( if you will, the 
way that the metaphor breaks down), is a failure that goes beyond the level of 
metonymy, that is, even the necessary association of cause and effect is
disrupted, or disruptable. The metaphor works (produces an effect) 
catachretically through the mis-use or mis-appropriation of a sign, trope,
and metaphor.  "There is niether imitation imitation nor resemblance, only
an exploding of two heterogenious series on the line of flight composed by a
common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything
signifying." (MP p.10)

I'm not sure exactly where this goes from here, but it seems like a distinct
that beyond the order of atoms, or at least beyond the narrative of chaos 
theory, lies an asignifying catachresis.

Flannon



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