Friday, February 22, 2008

Rhizome/Rhizomatic Network: Conflicting Ideologies

This week's reading called for this somewhat lengthy rumination.

Deleuze says that after WWII, society lost its disciplinary and sovereign property. That is, it ceased to enclose people for the specific goal of production as the power structures of the centralized and decentralized networks eroded. What Deleuze implies is the emergence of a distributed social network, a milieu “that propagates through rhythm, not rebirth” (Galloway 34). Sites of enclosure—schools, factories, familes—are in a relationship of crisis to this newly emergent global network, rhizomatic, anti-hierarchical and without a center, because they are in a process of transformation in order to suit it. However, there is a distinction to be made between the true rhizome as it is described by Deleuze and Guattari and what I will refer to as the “rhizomatic network” that society is now embedded in.

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has an anti-memory because it does not rely on an ontological representational model, and so it does not reproduce mimetically. This elicits the pertinent question: what is the agent that differentiates, that propagates differentiation, in the rhizome? Although it stands in opposition to reproduction, it still operates by ceaseless repetition—can repetition (and metonymy) be designated as its paradoxical origin?

While the rhizome has no clear sites of power, can’t these sites appear based on, say, simply the use of language to name and to designate (which stands in opposition to the rhizome’s anti-memory and which is vested in a human subjectivity that operates not on rhizomatic but on representational models)? Language as a “General” (Galloway 34) informant or site of meaning in this sense is counterpoised to the true rhizome. Language penetrates the rhizomatic network, on the other hand. And infiltrating and malevolent kind of power and meaning is bestowed upon the corporation, as Deleuze notes. The rhizomatic network still rests on an ontology (though it’s reformulated from that of the disciplinary and sovereign societies) and on a representational model. The network reproduces mimetically—the school, family, etc. is reformulated to be based on the values of the corporation.

The rhizomatic network seems like what would be an approximation of the true rhizome (because of it dispersion and decenteredness) had language and representation not marked it. Is it even possible to posit that this network, ideologically opposed to the rhizome, will one day become a rhizome? The network is a tightly coiled serpent, rich with meaning. A drastic shift in social consciousness, to say the least, would only begin to uncoil it.

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