On the Line
Book (italiano):
<P>A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on oneof its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizomethat can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed... There is a rupture in therhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part ofthe rhizome. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary formof the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there still is a dangerthat you will stratify again everything, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups andindividuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couch grass is also arhizome.Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new "ForeignAgents" series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would laterelaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on theblackboard) at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical andnon-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer anearly template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couchgrass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.In"Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as aseries of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always beunpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becomingrevolutionary." Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machineonly meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed fromwithin by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, notalways by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome assubterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes...Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all theirfunction of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and theworst: potato and couch grass.</P>
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