The Way Power Moves (a little open source theory for the morning) by risa
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari use the word for a horizontal root structure to describe power (energy) progressing through time in a binary-displacing way:
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. (…) There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything (…) Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. (9-10)
And the way to keep shaking out of these fascist formations? Maybe by embracing a rhizomatic method. Or by learning to see ourselves sitting somewhere in the middle of the rhizome, and so to value our own and other people’s perspective on the rhizome as it progresses. To orient ourselves among the lines of flight and crystallizing microfascisms we might accept that we need the help of other people’s eyes. This is the function of all culture, all communication is in some sense an outpouring of perspective. And when that code is open-sourced balance and perspective can be more lastingly achieved.
from Risa Dickens’ ongoing masters thesis
September 6th, 2005 at 5:04 am
the passage is wonderful. is this then, in the context of open-source and outpouring, perhaps a model of virtual communicative praxis becoming actualized? bringing in deleuze for didactic purposes, in a sort of political pedagogy of the rhizome, works in ways that are intended and unintended.
the recent visible evidence conference in montreal put the need of needing other peoples eyes into a tangible format. a panel treating documentary practice hached some discussion on the film, “the fourth world war”, a film waging an information war on the virtual and real power of conglomerated global capital. if that’s the basis of the war, the film was an impossibility even four years ago: technologies and circuits of exchange were such that the rapid production and processing of the images and arguments of the film–an assembly of commentaries and concerns from different corners of the globe–could not have occurred. the film stands because the war is being fought with this new technically-mediated kind of media solidarity that fosters exchange and a sense of alignment in relation to sharing stories and affecting a trajectory of travel. the film is no mere container; its a cultural entity itself, a mark of the new kinds of productionsand punctuations possible due to the rhizome, at least if we actively choose to conceptualize it that way.
certainly, there’d be some grave rolling on the part of the most recent favourite master should he know we surreptitiously activate his assembly for application in other contexts. yet, so long as there’s adequate perversion or at least travel into a new domain…but how does one measure that? does it matter?
there’s some beautiful writing in the brian massumi-edited ‘a shock of thought’ that expresses some fold of deleuzian thought and blasts it into a whole other place. the first section is aesthetics 101 via deleuze, an ethic of aesthetics that is political. ‘neo-archaism’, an essay regarding the fatwa and the rushdie affair, invents a kind of deleuzian-inflected discourse and semiotic analysis of the whole massive rhizome of trajectories and lines of flight. its an approach that is both incommensurable with and an affirmation of the larger plane of consistency of deleuze’s thought…
actually, i’m commencing initial investigations into the ‘other’ deleuze, as rendered by alain badiou and s. zizek, who both indulge the radical empiricism of deleuze while tempering his image of thought with degrees of skepticism vis-a-vis its uptake by dogmatic deleuze-heads everywhere. it’s easy to talk the pretty words but difficult to reconcile the inherent contradictions of the philosophy he espoused. the detractors fear the automatic uptake. perhaps they also fear the simple but elegant approach to philosophy deleuze espoused, one prmised on working with it, taking it, using it, not necessarily getting it ever. those here, in critique are enfocing a kind of “getting it” that is part and parcell to their authority, their mediating skills. the deleuze approach nips at their own constitutive heels.
i tread lightly: though these two certainly refrain from correctives, they punch holes, or rather reposition the influence of deleuze in ways that are significant but altogether different, perhaps outside the context of current and most dominant kinds of applications and–paradoxically, in a deleuze context– interpretations about deleuze. who is to say whether even respecting it matters at all. what’s the point of levying the guilty blockage, the “not getting it right”? is this in fact a mask for laziness or a lack of intensity? again, does matter? do we whatit is we’re doing every moment anyway? should we? is manuel de landa’s call for non-linear history even more pressient, where causality and dtable systems are really all quantum bifurcations?
i fear i’ve been mistaking aesthetics for politics in the land of deleuze and i feel i have to work to rectify that…i know i want to choke further on him. i’m caught between the map of reading his work, reading figurings of the thoughts set forth by his philosophy, reading his contemporary interlocutors (his mediators), reading his imitators, reading his detractors…its exhausting but enjoyable.
here’s a nugget of thought from steve shaviro on zizek’s revised version of deleuze:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=229