Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Although Deleuze and Guattari consistently use the line of flight as a concept along with the distinctions between molecularity and molarity throughout the earlier chapters of the book, plateau 8 on the three novellas is the first time that we see the distinctions being formalized. Earlier in plateau 3 on the geology of morals (I say earlier provisionally as though one must read ATP linearly, which is not true as the authors point out) we began to read about how we are stratified. The relation to the strata and the BwO or plane of consistency becomes a focal point for discussing the two sides of the abstract machine. In many ways, the understanding of this balance is helpful and analogous to understanding the different types of lines and the conditions for their specific segmentarity. We will come back to the abstract machine later so as to streamline our analysis.

The molar line, or rigid segmentarity, is basically defined as a clear-cut or calculated arrangement (Nietzsche’s prophetic mnemotechnics–we shall/must become calculable). Molar aggregates are segmented “to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity” (195). There are no becomings on the rigid line of segmentarity, but that does not mean that it is bad, nor does it mean that other lines are completely separated from the molar due to the immanence of all lines, even in relation to each other.

There is also a molecular line, or a supple line of segmentarity. Molecular and molar are not at all opposed to one another as we will soon clarify. Instead of a well-defined segmentarity, the molecular develops transitory segmentations-in-progress that are defined by quanta of deterritorialization on an intensive scale. In a sense, one begins to make an analogy between the molecular and the molar with the case of light, which can be seen as continuous and concrete in its waves but also quantifiable and discrete as photons. However, I bring in this analogy to discredit it first due to its irrelevance to the subject matter at hand (D+G are referring to macro- and micropolitics with this distinction) but also because the molecular has a more fundamental relation than its simple differentiation from the molar: it in fact presents the tension between the molar line of rigid segmentarity and the abstract line of flight. The abstract line then has nothing to do with the mixing between the molar and the molecular, unless we stipulate that it in fact arises when the molecular extracts itself from the molar in order to mutually destroy both the segmentarity of each one: “this line [the line of flight] no longer tolerates segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the two segmentary series” (197). Molar aggregates, molecular particles or quanta of deterritorialization, destruction of the wall of signifiance and the black hole of subjectification, in other words, absolute deterritorialization. These are the three lines.

Each of these lines explode eventally (and eventually…) in different ways. The first line of rigid segmentarity proceeds through oversignificant breaks determinable by binary choice. The second line is unassignable and proceeds through crackings in the rhizome rather than the splitting of a tree. Lines of flight proceed through rupture or a “clean break.” D+G write:

In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of what happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I am in the process of drawing them…I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self (199).

Break line, crack line, rupture line, the last of all being ambiguous in its nonsegmentarity, for the line of flight can betray itself and veer into abolition. In a sense, these three lines follow different routes of deterritorialization. In the first case, molar breaks of deterritorialization are relative and negative, for they are immediately resubmitted to the binary choices relative to oversignificant breaks. Molecular cracks howeve begin to engender positive deterritorializations, yet the quanta which pertain to it do not attain the status of singularities nor do these deterritorializations transcend their relative status: they do not reach absolute deterritorialization.

Supple segmentarity, then, is only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to the rigid line (205).

Absolute deterritorialization is reserved for the line of flight/line of abolition alone. Generalized disruption of the strata qualified by the crossing of plateaus of intensity which destratify the strata and fell the arborescent models of the dominant order. A tremendous exchange between the diagrammatic consistency of unformed matters and functions (abstract machines) and the machinic vector of concrete machinic assemblages is required in order to tip the abstract machines away from the strata towards the BwO/plane of consistency which generates the line of flight in the first place. These disruptions proceed through waves whose resonance threatens the very possibility of stratification, without which the plane of consistency loses its machinic possibility for crystallizing the possible in actualized forms. The tendency for the line of flight to propagate into abolition is the very practical enterprise subtending Deleuze and Guattari’s incessant cautionary statements. One must not destratify too hastily, i.e. without plan(e)ing or undiagrammatically. The program of the diagram: sobriety (of) the Real (for the problem of drugs being unable to construct a proper field of immanence and their own plane of consistency, see “Memories of a Molecule,” plateau 10, especially pages 282-290. Notice also that in this section the transition to the topic of drugs is a continuation of a discussion of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of the faith’–D+G asking if faith is not its own drug– and that this mirrors plateau 8 which also has a discussion of the knight of faith).

As we mentioned earlier, there is a sort of ambiguity to the molecular line “as if it vacillated between two sides” (D+G’s italics, 202). This is because on the map of the BwO molecular lines are not necessarily better, and in fact their common resonance can create the most brutal regimes of fascism (cf. plateau 9 on micropolitics). On the one side there is the line of flight whose complex nature is composed of singularities, and on the other side is the segmented molar line: “between the two (?), there is a molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other” (D+G’s emphasis, 203). Notice the question mark that appears in the text: just like content and expression or regimes of signs, the molar lines and the molecular lines subtend and crisscross one another while they are themselves multiple, always appearing in bundles rather than in solitary lines. The balance among the lines, mediated by the molecular, constitutes the abstract machine/diagrammatic efficiency of any schizoanalytic cartography:

It is an affair of cartography…Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does (203).

Politics precedes being because there is an abstract machine (which cannot be reduced to spatio-temporal coordinates) that effectuates ontological relationality and the logical propositionality/consistency of a world. Ontology must be diagrammed in a sufficiently and an efficiently deterritorialized fashion depending upon the “optional subjects” that will guarantee the convergence of the various codes and flows animating the abstract consistency of the map. It is precisely because ontology must be mapped that we can say there is a politics that precedes ontology.

D+G leave us with four tasks: recognize the particular character of each line, specify the importance of each, realize the immanence of each, and understand the dangers to each. There is a danger specific to each line just as much as there is a necessity for each. We will see in the analysis of the next chapter the continued importance of linear segmentarity in relation to two different types: binary segmentation and circular segmentation.

Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14.

The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh ‘writing,’ then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word. –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 145.

All methods for the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals…have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.

Linguistic Machinics: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

In their Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, Deleuze and Guattari outline a historically materialist theory of language and society which is essentially based upon their theories of assemblages, multiplicity, abstract machines, and deterritorialization along with many other concepts. The difficulty in fully appreciating the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, is mainly due to an ignorance of Guattari’s solo work L’Inconscient machinique which was published a year before ATP and constitutes a sort of companion volume or workbook for the former. It is now time to fully explore this work while keeping A Thousand Plateaus closely in mind in order to fully understand what Guattari’s critiques and use of linguistic theories really amounts to. In other words, the main focus of this essay (beyond an explication of Guattari’s untranslated work) is to specify how language in its stabilization in power formations comes to dominate our everyday lives and what are the means of transformation that pragmatics proposes in order to conceive and actualize new possibilities of subjectification. To perform such a (broad) task, we will focus here mainly on the concepts that Guattari proposes and how they work together to specify the problem in working toward new solutions that the project of a schizoanalytic pragmatics can offer.

Abstract Machines and Contingent Assemblages

The conceptual framework must be stressed here because it seems that in L’Inconscient machinique Guattari particularly wants to safeguard and legitimate his squatter’s rights on philosophical territory. This is not to say that Guattari’s earlier work lacked philosophical content; rather, it is the presence of a certain self-consciousness that betrays Guattari’s eager intent upon truly being recognized as a philosopher in his own rights. His proposal of a machinic unconscious no doubt brings him immediately within the conceptual camp of psychoanalysis, but his insistence on and novel understanding of an abstract machinics forces him in the same movement to qualify his concept of the abstract machine against Platonic ideas and Aristotelian forms (8). Arguing against a time tied down to an abstract, presupposed universality, Guattari proposes to show how abstract machines are produced by their own production through their developments of existential consistencies in conjunction with the various assemblages that allow the actualization of their machinic expressions/propositions. “Abstract machines do not cling to a single, universal time but to a plane of consistency, trans-spatial and trans-temporal, which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality no longer claims to be given with only one source: it is negotiated starting from quanta of potentiality.[1]” Thus, the relative existence of abstract machines depends both on propositional discursivity as well as energetic discursivity in order to effectuate a consistency.

The abstract machine thus conceptually brings it into the domain of the actual and the virtual along with an emphasis on contingency and historical singularity[2]. This emphasis will be crucial for the success of a pragmatics that entails the analysis of the stability of power formations and the means of breaking out of a consistency which has become too viscous in its stratifications which legitimate themselves as universal (hence Guattari’s drive to create a materialist (Marx-Engels) critique of linguistics with his emphasis on pragmatics[3]). But, at the same time, it is difficult to merely speak of the actual and the virtual without stressing that abstract machines make no distinction between the plane of consistency and the plane of content. They are both turned toward the strata, effectuating deteritorializations and reterritorializaitons while also being turned toward the plane of consistency which effectuates destratifications which conjugate the deterritorializations, but only on condition of the quanta of potentiality which will catalyze the processes by releasing diagrammatic signs-particles which will guarantee the passage between these existential registers[4].

In other words, because abstract machines are responsible for their own convergence of degrees of consistency which allows them a relative coefficient of existence, they both preexist the stratifications and constitute transformational materials or optional subjects which may allow stratifications to consist or not. “Abstract machines mark, all in all, the fact that deterritorialization, in all its forms, ‘precedes’ the existence of the strata and the territories.[5]” They precede them because the strata and territories demand a separation of content and expression, they require that contents have been formed and expressions have substance, while abstract machines work through unformed matters and formless functions. Non-semiologically formed materials or semiological encodings will be able to pretend to universality, but, consequently, are always under the threat of decomposition because of the transversality of their quanta of potentiality, that is, due to their constantly recreated nature which is more or less sustainable given certain consistencies due to the convergence of heterogeneous realities. Their degree of transversality[6] will indicate the success with which they are able to traverse various realities and destratify them for new possibilities. Since abstract machines are opposed to abstract structures[7] which concern reproducing themselves and their homeostatic conditions, deterritorialization will be understood as the unground for assemblages, that is, their historically singular and contingent conditions which ultimately undermine any preestablished coordinates of existence. Ultimately though, Guattari’s understanding of the disequilibrium of the abstract machine allows it at the same time to be a dynamic machine whose contingency is precisely the aspect of its heterogeneous relations that guarantee its consistency:

Universality will no longer have as an obligated reference the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, a divine or scientific law…While conferring on the points of singularity a particular power of crossing stratified fields, signs-particles (carriers of quanta of potentiality) will only equip them for so many universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that incarnate the singularity- abstract machine conjunctions remain susceptible to being demolished in order to open up other potentialities and contingencies. Universalist thought always receives a reverential fear with respect to an established order—religious or natural. Conversely, that of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue setting practices of every nature in relation from the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the reduction of their power (14-15).

We will see later the more functionalist side of abstract machines when they work directly within concrete assemblages (from which they are inseparable, along with the deterritorializing effects they produce within the assemblages in relation to the territories). While turning there, let us try to understand more directly Guattari’s construction of the different pragmatic fields that animate the contingent assemblages and sign regimes beyond the politico-philosophical abuses of claims to universality.[8]

Distinguishing Pragmatic Fields and the Threat of Capitalist Abstraction

Schizoanalytic pragmatics reexamines the relation between assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields under the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field. The principal behind this is a radical tranversalist meta-modelization embodied by the concept of the rhizome or lattice which opposes the binarist model of the tree. Rhizomes are fundamental to understanding Guattari’s cartographies of the unconscious because they make it impossible for linguistic and semiological components to claim hierarchical positions over other modes of encoding. Not only is every unspecified point able to connect to another, but also rhizomes bring into play both modes of signs and regulations of non-signs while remaining collapsible and suitable for constant modification. Rhizomatic mappings of the unconscious make a distinction between semiology and semiotics, the former giving primacy to the laws of language and the latter proposing to study sign-systems independent of linguistics. This division corresponds with the division between pragmatic fields, that between interpretative components and non-interpretative components.

The interpretative components can be distinguished between the analogical (iconic semiology) and the signifying (linguistic semiologies). Each of these components belong to specific assemblages of enunciation, and so we can better define Guattari’s understanding of the interpretative side of the pragmatic[9] as the differentiation among particular modes of subjectification due to the presence of certain components which allow the development of assemblages that correspond with different regimes of signs rendering them subservient to historically singular power formations[10]. Analogical components or icons, for example, relate to territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation while individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalistic subjectivity corresponds to signifying transformations (L’Inconscient machinique, 17). On the other hand, there are two sides to the non-interpretative components, one symbolic, the other diagrammatic. The first is concerned with an “intensive” semiotics (at the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc. while the second involves an a-signifying semiotics “which proceed[s] by a deterritorialization relating jointly to the formalism of content and expression while setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of potentialities working simultaneously in the register of material and semiotic realities)” (18). The distinction between the interpretative and non-interpretative will become clearer later on when we discuss the transformations among these fields and show how they entail different coordinates of efficiency—in other words, Guattari makes a generalization between the two fields due to the different types of redundancies that function in these fields. Redundancies of resonance correspond to semiological components of subjectification and consciousness formation, while machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction correspond to a-signifying diagrammatic components. (For example, in a crystallization of signifying powers, the fields of resonance are submitted to a semiological subjection while the fields of interaction are cybernetically and semiotically enslaved. In other words, libidinal economies and political economies merge in the field of linguistic overcoding through the conjunction of three elements: imperatives of the dominant grammaticality of expression, “ideological” assemblages at the level of content (subjection of redundancies of resonance) and diagrammatic assemblages of enslavement to decoded capitalistic flows at the level of the referent (36).

However, we will not truly be able to understand redundancies until we have dealt with the level of existential coordinates which specify three different types of consistency. There is the molar consistency of the strata with its significations and dominant realities (complete objects, subjects, individuals), but there is also a molecular consistency that expresses the real mechanical incarnation of an assemblage, although on this level it must be stressed that assemblages can neither be distinguished from the fields in which they consist nor the components which allow them to do so. Finally, and above all crucial for the diagrammatic importance of the distinctions made above, the abstract consistency determines the “theoretical” degree of the possibility of the preceding consistencies.

Molar consistencies develop effects of weak resonance (signifying[11] effect, e.g., pure formal translation) and weak interaction (surplus value of stratified codes) because their redundancies are highly stratified and crystallized (46). “What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being grasped from systems of coordinates which authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary to the survival of the assemblages.[12]” The molecular field on the other hand is not as stratified and allows for strong effects of resonance and interaction to take place. This consistency is the one that will be critical for a micro-political engagement with the social field. “This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micro-political stake for schizo-analysis, such as the greater or lesser malleability of the assemblages to be bent to the various powers of subjection and enslavement, – concerning, in other words, all that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious” (47). In other words, there is more freedom for the assemblages here which can empower them to evade subjection and enslavement or can render them powerless in the face of such overcoding. Finally, there is an abstract consistency that never exhausts itself at the level of actualization and always keeps quanta of possible in reserve. These last two consistencies form the field for transformational schizoanalysis.[13] But, beyond these consistencies and the abstract machines that populate and produce the crossings of their singularities, capitalist[14] abstraction is at work proposing to neutralize the potentialities of assemblages and render the entropy of sign-systems too viscous to effectuate truly transversal means of deterritorialization.

To fully engage in the extended complexity of capitalist abstraction it would be necessary to fully account for all the transformations within consciential components and the different creations of black hole effects that correspond with them (this will be one of the positive directions for this paper to continue to plot). To conclude, however, it would first be necessary to sketch the power relations inherent to this capitalist power takeover. To do so, let me quote extensively from L’Inconscient machinique and then draw out the consequences of Guattari’s pragmatic field transformations:

Abstraction is not a “frozen” abstract machine but an active system of neutralization and recuperation of machinic indices and lines of flight. Thus it has always remained bound to key institutions of power. Religious abstractions have long served the grounds for personological, sexual, ethnic or national identity and modulated the signification of the feeling of a membership to a territoriality of reference. All these functions have been captured in relay by a system much more fragmented, much more diversified and at the same time more molecular and more susceptive to devices of power, utility services and mass-media machines, so that today all instances of semiotic production and all systems of value weave a gigantic net composed of points of signifiance from which it is impossible to escape without a radical setting in question of the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation. Religious overcodings were less malleable, more “passive” than the instruments of this capitalistic network. Each system of redundancy is now constantly altered and re-calculated so that the tolerable thresholds of deterritorialization for the established order are precisely determined. Any coding will have to pass and permanently re-pass by the ordering mega-machine of molecular equipment. Any intensity will be forced to give up connections which would be established apart from the “coherence” of abstractions and dominant coordinates. Thus the perspectives open to lines of flight and machinic assemblages will be perfectly delimited: the former will have to be retained on this side of an abstract horizon, and the latter constantly return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. If abstract machines are regularly pinned to the sky of universal abstractions, then assemblages of desire are put to the service of a world order, which is an all too terrestrial fact (52-53).

On the one hand, we have the analogical field (interpretance) which refer to territorial or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation; then there is the signifying field which refers to an individuated assemblage of enunciation; there is the symbolic and a-subjective field which proceeds through desubjectified assemblages of enunciation[15]; finally, there is the “a-subjective diagrammatic transformations whose a-signifying contents deterritorialize not only the assemblages of enunciation but also the machines of expression and semantic formalisms while establishing at the same time a direct connection with intrinsic modes of encoding in the various stratifications of the referent (that which implies a “reference” common to another nature at the most deterritorialized level: that of the machinic plane of consistency)” (58).

Since all assemblages of enunciation are somewhat mixed, we can map the transformations across these fields. For example, moving from the intensive symbolic to the analogical can be understood if we consider that mystic examples, for example, can be reterritorialized on a fascistic assemblage (fascism being understood as the territorial interpretation of redundancies due to a particular membership to a blood or volk—similar to Badiou’s full void or statist operator of the event which claims that only the people directly involved with an event belong). On the other hand, the diagrammatic can be converted into the signifying mode with the recrossing of syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. This forces an a-subjective machinic assemblage to become (re)subjectivized across a field of signifiance (Guattari gives the example of a bad writer entering L’Acadmie française, thus rendering a certain style as a machine of expression which produces definite contours and traits, etc.—one thinks of Hawthorne or Faulkner for American literature with their unbearably long, drawn out and impossible-to-diagram sentences). This type of transformation corresponds to the ways in which a-signifying fields are transformed into signifying fields. There is, however, an opposite direction to this activity. The signifying field can easily turn into intensive symbolic or the diagrammatic. The first is effectuated through a homophonous and polyphonous proliferation which fragments the denotation of morphemes of the referent; the other proceeds through unsettling the semiologically formed substances in order to extract signs-particles from a-signifying chains of expression.

An extended account of Guattari’s schizoanalysis is called for, but clearly this task can only be undertaken once we have begun to ruminate on the vast conceptual apparatuses which are at work in such theoretical enterprises. The next installment of this paper would direct its studies towards a more thorough engagement with systems of redundancies and the transformations of subjectivity which can be effectuated through their modulations.

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101

Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate [it].” (ATP 105) Thus the majority need not be in numerical majority; for majority supposes only the assumption of a “state of power and domination, not the other way around” — the standard measure, when it is assumed to be the standard, thereby becomes major. Minorities, on the other hand, are not determined by constants — they are not systems but subsystems, outsystems — seeds of potential, creative and created, crystals of becoming.

These considerations are deployed together in one of the most significant points in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of linguistics, which is this: that grammar is a system of power primarily, not a prototype but a protocol, directly connected to an economy and a politics more primarily than to a network of syntagms and semantemes. Thus even though grammar cannot be presented as an invariant linguistic substructure, it nevertheless possesses singular structural features — political ones — namely, functioning as the medium of transmitting commands, “order-words.” Thus language is shaped directly by political and economic forces; it is a prerequisite for the individuals’ submission to social laws. “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.” (101)

A language is a war machine bursting with positive lines of flight, inherent lines of free variation. Grammar’s unifying and homogenizing function, far from being the result of purely philosophical or structural considerations, is rather an immediately political phenomena. We are never going to find — and ought to stop looking for — a homogeneous system still unaffected by regulated, immanent, continuous processes of variation: “The unity of language is fundamentally political.” (101) Deleuze and Guattari outline two general treatments of language corresponding to the major/minor distinction. We can (1) attempt to extract constant relations from variables, or we can (2) place the relationships themselves in constant variation. The point here is that certain linguistic categories only make sense when we are doing the first (extracting constants) — for example: speech/language, synchrony/diachrony, distinctive/non-distinctive. Only the second treatment offers a contrast to linearized segmentation and the presence of “constants” — style, prose, the pragmatic function of language — for “their very characteristics give them the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous variation…” (103-104). Minor languages “proliferate shifting effects,” possess a taste for “overload” — they restrict constants, extend variations, deploy continua which sweep away every component. This so-called “poverty” of minor languages, Deleuze and Guatarri write, “is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from above or below instead of positioning oneself within it.” (104)

They emphasize several times that “major” and “minor” do not indicate two languages but rather two usages or functions of language. Language itself is a battleground without clear boundaries, but rather lines of variation, transitional zones, limitrophes. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the notion of a dialect itself is entirely relative, since we would need to know with what major language it relates and exercises its function. Minor languages themselves define dialects, precisely through their own possibility for variation. “Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situations and bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain languages an imperial power over others (for example, the role of American English today)?” Let us consider several clear reasons it would be unthinking to do so. A minor language is not immune to the treatment of language which draws homogeneous systems. Furthermore, it is difficult — especially politically — to see how users of minor language can operate without giving it a constancy and homogeneity making it at least locally major. Yet Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the opposite, and perhaps much more compelling argument: that the more a language acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by the continuous variations which transpose it into a minor language. If American English is dominant, a major language on the global scale, it is also by necessity worked over, intensified, amplified, and transmuted by every minority in the world. Again, the distinction between major and minor is not really between two kinds of language, but two kinds of use of language.

The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Véronique Bergen. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 545-549.
Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/05/07.

The outbreak of new problems reorients the disposition of the transcendental, of its “schematizing” dramatization and of its actual deployments:

Bergsonism:

–problem of the apprehension of the problematic

–invention of the concept of intensive multiplicities, continuous versus discrete, metrical multiplicities set in the work of the method of intuition reshaping the transcendental space of Duration.

Difference and Repetition:

–problems of a “complex repetition,” of a “free difference” subtracted from identity, and from the rise of a “genital thought.”

–reorientation of the transcendental site in accordance with the concept of integration/differenciation–in short, of actualization/virtualization–via the method of dramatization.

Logic of Sense:

–problem of a conquest of surfaces as the rise of events, of sense, of thoughts.

–reorientation of the transcendental source in accordance with the concept of the empty case as univocal Being and with a serial method of structuralist obedience.

Spinoza and the Problem of Expression:

–problem of an anti-Cartesian structure treating the question of the relation between the finite and the infinite, between cause and effect, reorienting the question of true, adequate ideas.

–reorientation of the virtual site in accordance with the concept of expression (in its ontological, epistemological and ethico-political modalities) and the synthetic method by causation.

A Thousand Plateaus:

–problems of a typology of lines, forces and spaces composing the real, of the rise of an “automata” thought, and of a micropolitics of art, science, and philosophy as life.

–invention of concepts of planomenon, smooth and striated spaces, war machine/state apparatus, tree/rhizome, semiotic regimes, ritournelles and crystals of time.

Foucault:

–triple problem of enunciations and visibilities of knowledge, of forces of power and of the aesthetic becoming of the self.

–creation of concepts of a schematizing diagram of forces, of subjectivation as fold of the Outside, the death of man.

Movement-Image and Time-Image:

–problem of the apprehension of time in the cinema, passage of the indirect image from a time subjected to movement to the direct image of time subordinating itself to a becoming aberrant movement.

–creation of a typology of signs and images explicating this reversal of time subjected to movement in an autonomous time.

The Fold:

–problems of the emergence of the new, of the event, of the soul/body relation, of the bond between the expressed and expression.

–creation of concepts of the fold carried to the infinite, of incompossibles and divergent series of the neo-baroque.

What Is Philosophy?

–problem of thought arranging itself to chaos.

–invention of the concept of the triple Chaoide, philosophy, art and science, of their planes, agents and operators.

The following are two entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07.

Pre-individual Singularities

* We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental (LS 103).

** The elaboration of the concept of singularity proceeds from a radicalization of the critical or transcendental interrogation: the individual is not primary in the order of sense, it must be engendered in thought (problematic of individuation); sense is the space of nomadic distribution, it does not exist in the original division of significations (problematic of the production of sense). In effect, although it seems at first glance that ultimate reality is as much language and representation in general, the individual supposes the staging of a convergence of a certain number of singularities, determining a condition of closure under which is defined an identity: that certain predicates are retained implies that others are excluded. In the conditions of representation, the singularities are thus directly predicates, attributable to subjects. But sense is by itself indifferent to predication (“to green” is an event as such, before becoming the possible property of a thing, “being green”); by consequence it communicates by law with every other event, independently of the rule of convergence that appropriates it to an eventual subject. The plane where sense is produced is thus populated with ‘nomadic’ singularities, simultaneously non-attributable and non-hierarchical, and constitutive of pure events (LS, 65-67, 130, 136). These singularities have between them relations of divergence or disjunction, certainly not of convergence since this implies already the principle of exclusion which controls individuality: they only communicate through their difference or their distance, and the free play of sense and its production lies precisely in the course of these multiple distances, or “disjunctive syntheses” (LS, 201-204). The individuals who we are, deriving from this nomadic field of individuation which knows only couplings and disparities, the perfectly impersonal and unconscious transcendental field, do not renew this play of sense without making the test of the mobility of their frontiers (DR., 327,331). On this level, each thing is no longer itself but a singularity which “opens predicates ad infinitum through which it passes, at the same time as it loses its center, i.e. its identity as concept and as self” (LS, 204,344-345).

*** Pre-individual singularities are thus always relative to a multiplicity. We say however that Deleuze hesitates between two possible treatments. Sometimes singularities designate intensive “dimensions” of a multiplicity (LS, 345; AOE, 369 n 28, 381), and by this title should be named “intensities,” “affects,” or even “haecceities”; their repetition corresponds then to the affective map of an agency (MP 248, CC 81), or moreover to the continuous modulation of a material (MP 457-58, 505-509). At other times they are distributed at the level of each dimension, and are redistributed from one dimension to another: such are the remarkable or “brilliant points” of each degree of the Bergsonian cone of memory (B 58, 103-104), “points on the dice” of each throw of nomadic distribution (DR., 228-230; LS 69), etc. It is not certain however that these two treatments do not converge. It will be noticed that Deleuze passes easily from a singularity to many singularities, as if any singularity were already many (LS 67, 345): in fact the singularities that compose a multiplicity “penetrate the ones in the others through an infinity of degrees”, each dimension being like a point of view on all the others, which distributes them all on its level. Such is the law of “sense as pre-individual singularity, intensity which returns to itself through all the others” (LS 347—logic of the disjunctive synthesis). This “complication”, which is only by law, requires to be effectuated: but then there is only redistribution, the creative dice throw as if the “resumption of the singularities the ones in the others” is exerted under the condition of a meeting of distinct “problems” (DR. 259) or heterogeneous series (LS 68). From there a theory of apprenticeship (DR. 32,248), and of what it means “to have an Idea” (DR. 236-258—an extremely difficult text but one whose comprehension is decisive: compare with F (90-97): one is well on the way to what A Thousand Plateaus will explore under the name of “multiplicity of multiplicities” (theory of “becomings”).

Univocity of Being

* In effect, the essence of univocity is not that Being is said in one and the same sense. It is that it is said, in one and the same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities.” (DR 53). “The univocity of Being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a disjunctive synthesis, and they themselves are disjointed and divergent, membra disjuncta. The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice, that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same ’sense’ of everything about which it is said (LS 179).

** Highlighting the medieval thesis of the univocity of being is certainly Deleuze’s most profound contribution to the history of philosophy (SPE, ch. VI and XI; DR, 52-61; LS, 25th series). This thesis, of which the history of philosophy comprises in three stages, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, subverts every ontology, including Heidegger; deployed in its consequences, it devotes its cause to the relevance of the name of being. Its essence is that it carries in itself the affirmation of immanence. 1) Univocity is the immediate synthesis of the multiple: the one says nothing but the multiple, replacing the conception that the latter is subordinated to the one as to a superior and common kind able to include it. This is to say that the one is no longer what differenciates it from differences, internal difference or disjunctive synthesis (Deleuze observes that the single substance of Spinoza still preserves some independence compared to its modes, but “it would be necessary that substance says itself of the modes, and only of the modes”, (DR., 59), an inversion which is carried out only by Nietzsche, in the concept of the Eternal Return; but returning to Spinoza for a second reading, he shows how the theory of bodies tendentially returns to a comprehension altogether other than the single substance by promoting a pure plane of immanence or body without organs: (AOE, 369n28; MP, 190-191, 310; SPP, CH. VI). The word “differenciating”, frequent under Deleuze’s pen, has however the disadvantage of letting one suppose a separated authority, placed in the middle of the world like the interior master of its distributions; however it is clear that it indicates nothing but the edge to edge differences or the multiple and mutant network in their “distances” (the thing, brought back to the originating or “transcendental” plane in the disjunctive synthesis, exists only as a singularity or point of view enveloping an infinity from other points of view). 2) The corollary of this immediate synthesis of the multiple is the spreading out of all things on the same common level of equality: “common” no longer has here the sense of a generic identity, but of a transversal communication without hierarchy between beings that are only different. The measurement (or the hierarchy) also changes sense: it is no longer the external measurement of beings compared to a standard, but an interior measurement with each one in its relation with its own limits (“smallest becomes equal to the largest as soon as it is not separated from what it can do”, DR., 55; –proceeding later in a concept of “minority”, MP, 356, a theory of racism, MP, 218, and a design of childhood, for example DC, 167, “the baby is combat”). This ethics of being-equal and of power results from Spinoza but better still from Nietzsche and his Eternal return (DR. 60 and 376-conclusion). Ultimately, “univocal Being is at the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy” (DR., 55). What sense is there to preserve the concept of utility, only being under the non-inclusive mode of a multiplicity (immanence of the one with the multiple, immediate synthesis of the multiple)? This is how a pluralism which would not be at the same time a monism leads to the explosion of scattered terms, indifferent and transcendent the ones to the others: would the difference, the new, the rupture concern a rough and miraculous sudden appearance (creation ex nihilo–but from where would the power of this nihil come? and what would this “arrival” be?). In this respect, the one of univocity conditions the assertion of the multiple in its irreducibility (QPh, 185). That all comes from the world, even the new, without this being at all drawn from the past, such is the lesson of immanence which is released from the solidarity of the concepts of univocity, disjunctive synthesis and the virtual well understood.

*** The assertion of the univocity of being, of which the constant formula is “ontologically one, formally diverse” (SPE, 56; DR., 53,385; LS, 75), results in the equation “pluralism = monism” (MP, 31). Nothing thus makes it possible to conclude with a primacy of the one. This thesis, supported by Alain Badiou, does not estimate enough, it seems, the enunciation according to which being is that which is said of its differences and not the inverse, unity “is that of the multiple and only is said of the multiple” (NPh, 97). Moreover, the fact that the concept of simulacra applied to being in general is the inevitable consequence of the thesis of univocity at all does not appear us to confirm a primacy of the one. This application of simulacra to being means only that the lexicon of being has ceased being relevant in the universe of the disjunctive synthesis, so that it preserves a fixed and identical horizon. Because when Deleuze announces the inversion of Platonism and the universal one of the rise of the simulacra, that which is simulated is nothing other than identity, the tight delimitation of forms and individualities, by no means the play of inclusive disjunctions or the evolutions which produces the effect of it: “All identities are only simulated” (DR., 1), “the simulacrum makes the Same and the Similar fall under the power of the false (phantasm)” (LS, 303). There is in reality, in Deleuze, only the mobile play of the disjunctive synthesis as the immediate unity of the multiple, or the Eternal return interpreted as “the being of becoming” (DR., 59); not the one withdrawn, because only THE difference is one, which diverges immediately from itself. We were going to say that there is no pole of the withdrawn one in Deleuze; there is a one, but it is death, the pure and naked body without organs, wanted as such. This pole is undoubtedly implied in vitality and desire, but precisely as an ultimate refusal to let the multiple organize or unify itself. That the relation with death is the condition of reality does not mean that death is reality and that becomings are only simulacra (this illusion is underlined many times in A Thousand Plateaus as the inherent risk of desire). It is significant that, among Deleuzian concepts, the simulacra was completely abandoned after Logic of Sense (one hardly finds a trace of it except in the “the Exhausted”: see “Ritournelle”). Two reasons can be advanced: it lent itself to too much equivocation, but especially because it still took part of a negative exposure of” crowned anarchy”, turned towards the critical demonstration of character produced or derived from identity. Vacant, the place is invested by the concept of becomings.

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D+G have reached the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I [This, of course, is preceded by similar assertions about the schizophrenic in Anti-Oedipus]. (3).
A book is an assemblage and a multiplicity:
One side of a machinic assemblage faces the state, which doubtless makes it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? …We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge…Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been (4).
This assertion resonates with what D+G write of earlier in Anti-Oedipus pg. 104—they will write there: “It is not an ideological problem…unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires’ (104).
D+G insists upon ‘Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of convergence. Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come (4-5).

D+G write:
Root-book as image of the world—this is the classical book—the law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two—One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most ‘dialectical’ way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots and taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature (5).
D+G assert that the root-tree system of thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity (5). The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles (5).
Opposed to the root-book, there is the radicle-system, or fascicular root as the second figure of the book (5).
The folding of one text onto another implies a supplementary dimension—this is why the fragmented work can be considered the Magnum Opus [think Nietzsche’s Will to Power and its confused reception as his final, systematic work] (6).
Radicle-chaosmos vs. root-cosmos:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted) (6).
[I find it utterly fascinating that D+G were already asserting the subtraction of the one AND arguing against a facile Maoism in 1980—8 years before Badiou would write Being and Event—no wonder that Badiou refuses to deal with D+G!]
1 and 2. D+G stress principle of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be:

Not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Out criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field…There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, ‘an essentially heterogeneous reality.’ There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity…A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensioins and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence (7-8).
[To start with, this passage reminds me of D+G’s insistence on understanding communication at the level of order-words. Habermas’s dream of an ideal language-situation (one in which rhetoric is precluded on the basis that mutual consensus cannot allow for any sort of external persuasion to prevail (counterthought—Gorgias, who promotes the view that language causes an internal persuasive relation—i.e. language composed of order-words makes others want to do what we want them to, without this being explicit in any way—in fact, this is the place where order-words take on an extremely (post-)Marxist hue in the sense that order-words operate on the level of socio-symbolic interpellation. Althusser’s concept of interpellation as the situation of a subject within a discourse and institutional network also has the second significance as a hailing of the subject. Order-words elicit our response, calling us to create collective assemblages of enunciation. On the other hand, order-words call us to respond, but what forces our enunciation into grammatically authenticated sentences? What is it that makes us respond in this way. Deleuze’s later text “He Stuttered” forces us to see elipses, haults, breaks, gaps and all sorts of abnormal speech phenomena as fundamental to the formation of new ways of speaking—here we have a clue for the formation of new subject languages that have real revolutionary potential. Considering the psychoactive effects of mushrooms, we come to see that there are fractal relations with words and phrases, flows of language that dismantle the grammatical structure that so efficiently communicates a rational thought. But rational thoughts merely filter the truly primary thresholds of intensity that create impulsive thoughts and broken speech acts that, in some way, hold more significance because of their fragmentary nature. The way in which words escape our grasp and are enunciated in the psychedelic process has everything to do with the intensive impulses-to-thought that form spirals of language-inductors that fundamentally converge with intensive concentric coruscations-of-the-body].
3. Principle of multiplicity: the multiple must be treated as a substantive in order to unlink it from the One as subject or object:
A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows…An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections…We do not have units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding) (8).
All multiplicities are flat since they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: thus D+G speak of a plane of consistency even though the dimensions of this plane increase with the number of connections that are made on it—the plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities:
The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of a rhizome…) (9).
4. Principle of asignifying rupture—this is asserted against an oversignifying break—wasp and orchid forming a rhizome of heterogeneous elements:
At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp…the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing deterritorialization ever further…the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other (10).
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania:
In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree…The rhizome is altogether difference, a map and not a tracing…What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious…A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the
tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’ (12).
Here D+G oppose the map to the tracing—hating to repeat myself, this sounds again like Deleuze’s analysis of the circle qua circle—thinking the map in terms of differential coordinates.
However, the tracing should always be put back on the map—for the tracing does not reproduce the map, it translates it into an image and transforms the rhizome into roots and radicles:
It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them (13).
I hear Debord in these lines again—what else is the Spectacle but the tracings that reproduce themselves into a stultifying grid that forces desire into straitjackets—back to Debord later.
Melanie Klein and Freud breaking the rhizome or projecting the map back onto the family photo:
In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the ‘tracing,’ that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome (14-15).
Extending their thoughts on the trees and roots to the brain:
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called ‘dendrites’ do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (‘the uncertain nervous system’) (15).
The difference between short-term and long-term memory is not merely quantitative—short term memory works under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity, and long-term memory tends to be arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph) (16).
Again, to stress their point against the arborescent:
Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories…The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborscent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place (16).
Schizoanalysis treats acentered systems—transduction of intensive states replaces topology—the rhizome is the production of the unconscious, inducing new statements and different desires (17-18).
The God who sows and reaps as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds) (18).
Henry Miller: grass as what grows between things—successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside (19).
No universal capitalism—capitalism at a crossroads of all kinds of formation—always a neocapitalism that invents an eastern and western face, reshaping them for the worst (20).
Root-tree as transcendent model and tracing—canal-rhizome as immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map [Here the emphasis is on an overturning of the regime of the model and the copy, one of Deleuze’s lasting oppositions to Plato—or a radical reinvention of Plato—affirmation of pure simulacra as the decisive overturning of the model/copy].
Rhizome brings into play different regimes of signs and even nonsign states—it is not derived from the One, but instead is subtracted—constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions (21).
Rhizome is not the object of reproduction—it is an antigenealogy—rhizome as short-term memory or antimemory—rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots:
The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of ‘becomings’ (21).
A rhizome is made of plateaus—Gregory Bateson defines a plateau as: “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids an orientation toward a culmination point or external end”—D+G will expand on the concept of a plateau:
any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome…An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotics flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously…There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author) (22-23).
What need to be developed are a perceptual semiotics and a Nomadology (23).
Cultural book and anticultural book—mathematics as a monster slang (24).
Short-term ideas and the interbeing of the rhizome:
American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics (25).