“Nicholas Tampio
is associate professor of political science at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Kantian Courage (2012) and Deleuze’s Political Vision (2015). He is currently working on his third book, on democracy and national education standards.”
“Deleuze began his career writing monographs on philosophers such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza. Guattari was a practising psychoanalyst when he began to work with Deleuze on their first book, Anti-Oedipus (1972). Eight years later, they published its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus. In the past few decades, academics across the world and in various disciplines have adopted its language of rhizomes, plateaus, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, and fields of immanence.”
“Why did they invent such strange philosophical concepts as rhizomes? One reason is to help us appreciate the singularity of each thing as well as each thing’s myriad connections to other things. This vision of an interconnected world of singularities, in turn, can change how we act in the world.”
“According to Deleuze and Guattari, Western thinking and practice has tended to be ‘arborescent’, or tree-like.”
“One quality of trees is that they are born from seeds. Seeds from one tree can impart the same genetic makeup to many other trees. Trees are Platonic insofar as there is one idea and multiple instantiations. ‘Arborescent’ illuminates the Platonic presuppositions that course throughout Western politics, philosophy, science, art and so forth. Platonism reassures us that there is a cosmic order where there is a perfect instantiation of each thing. We often think that there is just one idea of justice or beauty or good health. Common sense of this sort is arborescent.”
“According to Nietzsche, the task of modern philosophy is to overturn Platonism, to stop looking for eternal blueprints of how things should be, and instead value this world of difference and becoming.”
“Taking up this assignment, Deleuze and Guattari propose that we think in terms of ‘rhizomes’. A rhizome is a plant such as a potato, couch grass or bamboo. Rhizomes do not have seeds or trunks; rather, they shoot out stems and reproduce when a part breaks off and grows again, each one slightly different from its predecessor.”
“A Thousand Plateaus helps us see the distinctiveness and connectivity of multiple things that compose reality. ‘A rhizome,’ they wrote, ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’”
“The concept of the rhizome helps us to view our lives as assemblages of words, institutions, songs, medicines, social movements, and countless other things that are related but also distinct.”