Date: Tue, 22 Mar 1994 18:06:11 -0500 (EST) From: Erik Davis <erikd-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: Faire rhizome, 1 I saw this subject header and thought: excellent, fairy rhizomes--in all sense of faeries--Celtic, radical and queer. Faeries stick to the ground; they are indistinguishable from the undergrowth; they upset filiation by stealing children; they're liminal; and their dimunitive frames make them the perfect size to practice micro-politics. I suggest one possible avenue to unfold the Rhizome chapter, one close to home (since most of us I assume are writers, net-junkies or at least books addicts): what does it mean to reject books "as an image of the world" and to make the book rhizomatic, no longer a tree-book (the generic book), nor even a "radicle-system" (modernism, or the fragmentation which ends up positing an unknown unity, like N.'s eternal return). What is the book written "as assemblage with the outside"? Just one point, and then I've got to sit down and follow my breath for an hour (hopefully going so far "in" that "I" dissolve and--magic!--unfold into a dazzling Outside, the plenitude of void, whoopee!). We are writing such a book now, here on the internet. Hypertext is such a rhizomatic book. Is this page I'm writing an inside or an outside? It's already outside, out in the open, linked. Or in a hypertext system, each page--space, sign, glyph--is linked to many others. Though we are nestled in a certain cubby-hole (ah! here it is, etc), we have not entered into the special interiority of the book, becuse that space is already linked to another outside, already proliferated. If not, it's boring--where do I go from here? What, no links? It's a dead end. And how do I feel when I'm reading such a book--how am "I" rewritten? I feel like a navigator in a rich fog. I am an assemblage of partial maps, rules of thumb (this may lead to this, etc), the passion of my own vector. As the cliche goes, I surf. Horizontal, a vector, not "left or right"--and up and down is just the swelling of a save. I feel up when I get a sense of overseeing a realm of knowledge--that old view from the holy hill. But immediately I'm swamped by a swell, and the peak I was just on has become a valley, a deep trough of unknowing. I'm terrifed; I move. This is hard. The Internet is hard. Hypertext is frustrating--most of them are bad, unimaginative. Why? "Why is this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, of from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes." (MP, 23) That's what happens with Deleuze, with reading D&G: we don't suddenly "get it"--we just wake up one day and everything changes. We can't go back; our friends and colleagues look at us oddly; we suddenly find compatriots, thosho'v seen everything change by altering their "perceptual semiotics" (psychedelics, anyone?). But it's not a secret, not some key or code; it's ranging everywhere, out in the open, on the outside of domain. [__]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ \ / ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[__] [] Erik Davis (oo) Cernunnos sez (cribbing the Fall): The only [] [] erikd-AT-panix.com __ thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes. [] [__]==================== ww ==============================================[__] ------------------
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