Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 18:16:13 -0500 From: Michael Seidl <mseidl-AT-chopin.udel.edu> Subject: MP: Ruminations on Rhizomes The first chapter of MP provides some interesting new parameters for philosophizing in/about/through the world. I feel a sort of gut attraction for the metaphor of rhizome over more unitary models, and I think the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent multiplicities particularly important. Unitary approaches that present themselves as heterogeneous are all too common in the academy (I'm thinking particularly of the petty fascism that vulgar feminism or multiculturalism becomes in "politically correct" hands), and I welcome a critique that allows me to distinguish fascist heterogeneity from a heterogeneity more certainly multiplicitous. All the same, I am wary of the rhizome. Here's why. 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. Now, of course, my anxiety is that in finding un-rhizomatic functions in the rhizome I may simply be further enacting that unitary- unifying process that D&G charge Freud (and philosophy and humankind in general) with. Probably. I think, however, that finding chaos where authority insists is only order and order where the radical insists is only chaos may be an appropriate way to apply MP. Let's see what further pages have to say. ************************************* mseidl-AT-brahms.udel.edu "It's myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation."--Beckett ------------------
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