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Deleuze + Guattari
Rhiz-o-Mat 2000
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In truth, it is not enough to say "Long live the multiple," difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. 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). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-1 dimensions. a system of this kind could be called a rhizome._______________________
The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets._______________________
Of course, the great bodies of a modern state can hardly be thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say, rather, is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine -- in sometimes quite unforeseen forms -- in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology...._______________________
The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things that are round. (a vase, a wheel, a sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed essence, but its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmentations, all of its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous, "lens shaped," "umbelliform," or "indented." ..._______________________
The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.
The prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much more than inspired by him. The prophet is not a priest. The prophet does not know how to talk, God puts words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a new form of semiophagy._______________________
The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction._______________________
Languge is not life; it gives life orders._______________________
Be like the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon._______________________
The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are always relays along a trajectory._______________________
Ideas do not die. Not that they survive simply as archaisms. At a given moment they may reach a scientific stage, and then lose that status or emigrate to other sciences._______________________
History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of history._______________________
There is no primacy of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a singular Abstract and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does not exist independently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions independently of the machine._______________________
We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes._______________________
The face, what a horror._______________________
It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally inhuman, a mostorous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the absolute while keeping it negative.
They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in order to conquer and die._______________________
Nothing is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space._______________________
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated spaces. It is of vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon._______________________
The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my distance; I possess only distances. Don't anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door._______________________
Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of non-human life to be created._______________________
Face my love, you have finally become probe-head....
To be a foreigner, but in one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but through a purification of race. That is when style becomes a language. That is when language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and intensities. That is when language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide, as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language._______________________
One attains this result only by sobriety, creative subtraction.
Continuous variation has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water._______________________
Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite._______________________
A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages._______________________
The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world._______________________
We come to the gradual realization that the BwO [body without organs] is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies._______________________
The enemy is the organism.
It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centalized to the segmentary. Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one supple and primitive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a distinction between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled._______________________
Thus invariance is a characteristic of certain molecules and is not found exclusively on the molar scale._______________________
As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducable to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere._______________________Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than Mitra.
Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down._______________________
The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of a body. It is the body without an image._______________________
Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe._______________________
There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by saying: they're fucking me over again._______________________
The family is at the same time an anus that retains, a voice that resounds, and a mouth that consumes: its very own three sytheses, since it is a matter of connecting desire to the ready-made objects of social production. Go buy madelines in Combray if you really want to feel the vibration._______________________
There is an oscillation between the reactionary paranoiac overcharges and the subterranian, schizophrenic, and revolutionary charges. Moreover, one no longer quite knows how it goes on one side or the other: the two ambiguous poles of delirium, their transformations, the way in which an archaism or folklore in a given set of circumstances can suddenly become charged with a dangerous progressive value. How things turn fascist or revolutionary is the problem of the universal delirium about which everyone is silent, first of all and especially the psychiatrists (they have no idea on the subject--why would they?)._______________________
Abstract machines do not exist only on the plane of consistency, upon which they develop diagrams; they are already present enveloped or "encasted" in the strata in general, or even erected on particular strata upon which they simultaniously organize a form of expression and a form of content._______________________
[T]he signifier is merely the deterritorialized sign itself. The sign made letter. Desire no longer dares to desire, having become a desire of desire, a desire of the despot's desire. The mouth no longer speaks, it drinks the letter. The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer allows itself to be engraved like the earth, but postrates itself before the engravings of the despot, the region beyond the earth, the new full body._______________________
Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs. There we do not have two desires but two parts, two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the machine itself. And yet the problem persists: how can all that function together?_______________________
Better to be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor!_______________________
Free association, rather than opening into polyvocal connections, confines itself to a universal impasse. All the chains of the unconscious are biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier._______________________
Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit--that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate._______________________
At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a couterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content._______________________
Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit, the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring production._______________________
Nietzche says: it is a matter of creating a memory for man; and man, who was constituted by means of an active faculty of forgetting, by means of a repression of biological memory, must create an other memory, one that is collective, a memory of words and no longer a memory of things, a memory of signs and no longer of effects. This organization, which traces its signs directly on the body, constitutes a system of cruelty, a terrible alphabet...._______________________
A magical chain brings together plant life, pieces of organs, a shred of clothing, an image of daddy, formulas and words: we shall not ask what it means, but what kind of machine is assembled in this manner--what kind of flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows._______________________
The organs begin by detaching themselves from the despotic body, the organs of the citizen rise up against the tyrant. Then they will become those of private man, they will become privatized after the model and memory of the disgraced anus, ejected from the social field--the obsessive fear of smelling bad._______________________
For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes signify? The breakdown of codes. The appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other._______________________
The dissolutions are defined by a simple decoding of flows, and they are always compensated by residual forces or transformation of the State. Death is felt rising from within and desire itself becomes the death instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry the seeds of new life. Decoded flows--but who will give a name to this new desire?_______________________
[T]he decoding of flows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the others--to such a degree that the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structure as a field of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called intellectual labor distinct from the manual labor of the worker (the evolution of the technical object)._______________________
In this sense, it is not the machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and clevages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production._______________________
The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs 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._______________________
The territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is pepetual transcoding between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level of a certain decoding._______________________
In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or "dominated" by sound--but why do we assign this apparent privilage to sound?_______________________
[N]o one has ever been able to draw a clear line between baroque and classical. All of baroque lies brewing beneath classicism: the task of the classical artist is God's own, that of organizing chaos; and the artist's only cry is Creation! Creation! The Tree of Creation! An ancient wooden flute organizes chaos, but chaos reigns like the Queen of Night._______________________
The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgement: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund and territory. Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgement; it is like a thought synthesiser functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way one makes sound travel)._______________________
Even in bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather prohibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations._______________________
The war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volitile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of a State._______________________
Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogenious smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by legwork." They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidian space._______________________
There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectoral field across which singularities are scattered like so many "accidents" (problems)._______________________
The town only exists as a function of circulation, and of circuts; it is a remarkable point on the circuts that create it and which it creates.... It is defined by entries and exits.... It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized to enter the network, to sumbit to the polarization...._______________________
Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obsticles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us._______________________