Notes From a Thought Experiment: What Is a Rhizome? (ca. 1976)

In 1976, four years after their first work together, Anti-Oedipus (1972), and one year after the publication of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Deleuze and Guattari publish Rhizome: Introduction, which later becomes the introduction to their second volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).1 Again, this work will concern the questions I raised in the Introduction: What kind of image is to be deduced from thought? How can thinking be determined by the image, and where does image first acquire its power over thought—that is, to induce what is called “thinking” to occur within the subject? Following the thesis offered in chapter 1, I would argue that concept of the rhizome represents the literal translation of the Proustian image of thought into modern philosophy, an image of thought that takes the form of a vast and intricate herbal (as Proust says). More importantly, it represents an externalization of the machinic dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, a machine that literally presents us with the following situation: Contemporary philosophy is an assemblage that presupposes a new image of thought on the plane of immanence. However, this relationship is now portrayed as a relatively unlimited number of plateaus that populate this plane and constitute its regions, its moments, its temporary archipelagoes, as in the case of the spider web in Proust, “the huge animal logos whose parts unite in a whole and which are united under the principle of a leading idea,” the idea of rhizome. Here, the plane of immanence (or the world of the idea) appears, not as a whole, but only as a “fragmentary whole” that is populated by a relatively infinite number of other planes or plateaus (relatively infinite because more plateaus can be added later, and there is no absolute number or limit that determines the composition of the whole, somewhat like moments and events that constitute the plane upon which “a life” appears). Therefore, plateaus are the surfaces and volumes, whereas the plane itself is formless; they are concrete assemblages of concepts and signs, and function as configurations of a philosophy machine, “but the plane is an abstract machine of which these plateaus are the working parts.”2 Because this may seem more than a little abstract, at first, in this chapter I will spend some time “unpacking” (as Whiteheadeans would say) all of these principles in order to trace out the new image of thought that Deleuze and Guattari now presuppose.

My first observation would be that, in a certain sense, the axiomatic statements and principles concerning the rhizome might be understood as corollaries to the method given in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, but only in the sense that one of the explicit goals or tasks is to determine the necessary and the contingent attributes of an image of thought. Consequently, the first thing that the concept of a rhizome opposes is the form of the book as a necessary attribute of thinking or philosophy. It is difficult to say exactly when the book became the dominant form of philosophical expression, but it is essentially related to the rise of the novel in literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century (if it does not even constitute its implicit presupposition of the Romantic moment). In the book, the event of thinking was reconstituted as a narrative adventure, with a narrator and different characters. This was a different form than we already saw in Proust, who set out to destroy the form of the novel and who became the most severe critic of the genre for essentially fictionalizing real experience and turning it into a Romance. In the region of philosophy, perhaps we can identify Hegel’s phenomenology as being the greatest philosophical romance, and it represented in its time a revolutionary expression by setting the movement of thought (the subject of Mind or Spirit) within a narrative adventure spanning an entire History that has a definite beginning and end. However, as in the case of Proust, Deleuze and Guattari will argue that this form has become too fictional and even a mythic vehicle of expression. In place of the form of the book, with its interior volume that represents the interiority of the Self, and which has the author as its Individual subject of enunciation, Deleuze and Guattari will oppose the form of the plateau, which is a flat surface without depth or volume, later described as either smooth or striated in distinction.

It is difficult to see, at first, how a plateau could easily represent the interiority of the Self, of a thought seeking to express the interiority of a subject (an author-God, an individual person), and this becomes the first major axiom that separates thought from its earlier image of the book: the interiority of the book has no essential or necessary relationship to the interiority of the empirical subject, but rather is composed of a flat surface in which one side faces (either facing upward or outward) and the other side remains implicit and virtual, and presupposed, facing toward the plane of immanence or “Body without Organs” (as Deleuze and Guattari define it at this point). For example, it is more like what happens in a close-up in film where thinking is implicated by a sign that emerges on the face of the other person; we often do not grasp what the person is thinking, only that he or she is thinking by grasping the nature of the signs that appear to indicate “pensiveness.” This might be a better expression of the reality of thought, in which our knowledge of thinking always comes after the explicit signs of thought, and usually involves the advent of other signs that seek to express what is virtual or implicit on the first level, than the way thinking is represented in a book as the representation of an internal activity that takes place inside the subject who says “I think.” So, first of all, in destroying the book as the natural presupposition of an image of thought, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “a book has neither object nor subject,” and “to attribute a book to a subject is to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements.”3

This destruction of the natural presupposition of the book and the individual subject who appears as its author-God is already further complicated by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari are writing together. This is not so simple as it seems, and cannot merely be reduced to the “two body problem” that has troubled the reception of their theory. Rather, it is the very presence of two “speaking-subjects” that causes the normative rules by which written expression is usually encoded as individual enunciation to go awry. Moreover, because the writing machine they have created together to replace the individual subject of enunciation violates all the normal, hermeneutical protocols of reading, this has also produced in the field of commentary a kind of redoubling of the codes and axioms that constitute the subject of authors—Deleuze and/or Guattari. Therefore, it is from the position of “the reader” that these codes are enforced, in a structural manner, and thus we have witnessed many times that it is the subjects of the reader and hermeneutic interpreter who have returned to re-impose a form of communication that remains implicit in the image of the book—even to the point of judging A Thousand Plateaus as a badly botched or imperfect book! From this fact, in reading Deleuze and Guattari, a kind of collective madness has come to characterize the reception of their work together: Who is speaking now? Whose idea or thought is this? Deleuze’s or Guattari’s? That is, which subject can we (as readers) attribute this particular idea to with our belief in authority? More often than not, by far the worst culprits of this kind of practice have been the specialists and expert readers of Deleuze and Guattari’s work—and particularly academic philosophers!—as well as certain contemporaries like Badiou and Derrida, who have gone so far as to completely ignore Guattari as an eccentric and bizarre presence of madness under the banner of individual authority that is usually accorded only to Deleuze (the pure philosopher).4 What these readers do not seem to understand is that, as in the case of the Proustian narrator, this presence of madness and eccentricity is carefully distributed across the multiple points of enunciation in A Thousand Plateaus as an effect produced by the specific invention of a writing machine according to the vegetal structure of a rhizome, and no longer according to a linguistic structure of individual enunciation.

As Deleuze said earlier in Difference and Repetition, concerning the nature of the subjective presuppositions, the reader should also not be understood as a subject of goodwill and the guarantor of the upright nature of the thinking that appears in a book, but potentially as maleficent being who appears only to impose his or her own ideas on the matter of expression.5 I would even go as far to say that because of the subjective presuppositions of the philosophical reader, Deleuze and Guattari’s great work of philosophy has not yet actually been read by anyone, with the possible exception of its translators! By this, I do not mean to assert that the translator is “a good reader,” as opposed to the hermeneutic critic or Deleuzian specialist, who are “bad readers”; only that the translator can be defined a “faithful reader” in the sense of only constituting a moment internal to the writing machine itself, defined earlier as “the involuntary machine of interpretation.” All extrinsic interpretation, on the other hand, approaches a writing machine from the outside, considering it an integral whole without external relations (i.e., a system of thought); in fact, most voluntary interpretation first approaches a writing machine by disassembling its parts in order to study them, but this only causes a writing machine to break down and no longer function. Nevertheless, this produces an effect that is usually associated with meaning that serves as the primary goal of all successful interpretation.

Deleuze and Guattari had already foreseen this, which is why they introduce their plan of assembling A Thousand Plateaus by immediately calling attention to this fact, by making it explicit and undeniable that “the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us is several, there is already quite a crowd. . . . Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit.”6 Moreover, they immediately go on to confess that they have even developed a secret code and “assigned clever pseudonyms to keep us from being recognized.”7 At this point, the hermeneutic critic and traditional interpreter might become dizzy, because this statement implies that every appearance of another name, every mention of an author who is referred to or cited in their work, functions as a pseudonym of either Deleuze or Guattari, by means of a cipher that they keep to themselves in order to keep things straight for purely pragmatic reasons. One might ask: Who is Kleist, who appears so often like a character in this work and is associated with the concept of the “war machine”? And what about Kafka, who is associated sometimes with the idea of a “revolutionary becoming” and sometimes with “a depressive position in relation to the law”? Of course, we know, every time there is any mention of Proust, it is Deleuze who is speaking. But who then is Nietzsche, especially when the latter is heard to exclaim, “I am all the names in History”? Who then is Schreber? Who then is Artaud? Finally, who is the “wasp,” and who is “the orchid”? It could very well be that each identifies the idea or thought of the other with names that only they would know. This could quickly be turned into the most marvelous game that Lacan once called “hunt the slipper.” Who is speaking? And yet, in the very first passage of this work we are already told that it does not matter, and that they invented this manner of speaking, not in order to reach “the point where one no longer says I”—and in this sense, Deleuze and Guattari do not want to continue the game that was first invented by Beckett—but instead “the point where it is no longer of any importance whether or not one says I.”8

However, this is not exactly true either, because it is not a realistic portrayal of the subjective processes that were involved during the process of collaboration. In fact, the question “Who is speaking?” was frequently a point of contention during the process of writing Anti-Oedipus—even intense ambivalence, paranoia, and jealousy—mostly on the part of Guattari, as the recently published letters and diaries vividly portray. As an example, the following diary entry from June 10, 1972:

The writing machine is getting more complicated. I can get through it all on the condition that it keeps on working beyond me, I’m supported by someone who types, corrects, reads, waits. I will keep giving these texts to Fanny and, at the end of the chain, Gilles. I can tell they don’t mean anything to him. The ideas, sure. But the trace, the continuous-discontinuous text flow that guarantees my continuance, obviously he doesn’t see it like that. Or he does, but he’s not interested. He always has the oeuvre in mind. For him, it’s all just notes, raw material that disappears into the final assemblage. That’s how I feel a bit over-coded by Anti-Oedipus. . . . What I feel like is just fucking around. Publish this diary for example. Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. . . . And I have to make a text out of that mess and it has to hold up: that is my fundamental schizo-analytic project.9

It is clear from this passage that the writing machine that Deleuze and Guattari construct has two aspects (or images) that serve as the conditions of its production, which I call “a body-image” and “a brain-image”: First there is the body-image, defined as a schizo-flow of “the continuous-discontinuous text flow that guarantees my continuance,” because “I write in order not to die” (a “Guattari-image”), and then a brain-image that later organizes every flow into a final assemblage, giving all the various text flows the finality of a common project, or oeuvre (a “Deleuze-image”). But this particular writing machine needs both aspects to function, according to the image of thought each aspect presupposes as a condition for the other to work. The body-image is no less a brain composed of “neurological-vegetative” connections; the brain-image has a body, which organizes these flows into distinct forms and perceptions. What is most crucial to point out about this process is its difference from a normal conception of a writing process presupposed from the perspective of an individual consciousness of an author; in other words, when Deleuze begins to write, he already depends upon the text flows that have been already been produced by Guattari, and not upon the abstract flows of ideas and thoughts floating in his own head. It’s a completely different image of thought. (In fact, would this not be a better image of writing than what is presupposed by extrinsic interpretation?) Therefore, it’s absolutely ridiculous to ascribe the total functioning of the writing machine to one aspect (i.e., a “Deleuze-image”).

Returning now to the general definition of the book as a machine or an assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari will immediately point out that historically there are three kinds of book machines, each of which structures (in the manner of a system) or even produces (in the manner of a machine) three distinctive images of the thought:

1. First, the “root-book, the tree book” (livre-racine), which is “the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority,” that is to say, in which the interiority of the book’s volume is identified with the interiority of mental space and is homogeneous with the interiority of the world.10
2. Second, what they define as “the radical-system, or fascicular root” (le système-radicelle, ou racine faciculée), which can be identified in some ways the postmodern textual metaphors of grafting and weaving of traces of the absolute book together into an infinite process of textuality (Barthes), or into an unlimited, but nevertheless finite, text (Derrida). However, they also argue that this new system produces a “strange mystification” that occurs as a result of this absolute book constituted by fragments of an impossible totalization, because the image of totality negatively subsists in the temporal form of an infinite deferral and delay enacted by the process of rewriting, reweaving, and grafting of all of the fragments and missing parts in a “Total Work or Magnum Opus.” Here, we might perceive an implicit reference to the textual systems of philosophy created by Barthes and Derrida, and in a different sense, the absolute volumes of Mallarmé and Joyce. As they write: “The world has become chaos, but the book remains an image of the world: radicle-chaosmos (chaosmos-radicelle) rather than root-cosmos (cosmos-racine). A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented.”11
3. The third system is the “rhizome proper,” which is made or produced by subtracting this final image or higher dimension of unity or totality: transcendence. As in the system devised by Proust, the spider, the rhizome is partly animal and partly vegetal; it is described as a swarming of rats in a pack form, or as a system of tubular stems in a patch of weeds. What is subtracted is a vertical dimension that allows its form to be grasped from another perspective that is posed as its higher unity. Again, it is a flat surface composed horizontally that remains perfectly abstract in that it is drawn in relation to a plane of immanence that, in turn, it does not seek to represent as an image of the world. It is purely immanent to the plane on which it appears as a plateau or partial region of the plane, like the manner in which weeds appear like patchwork on a meadow.

Concerning this third and final book machine, which is approximate to the image presupposed by A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari immediately say that it is always in danger of becoming too abstract and, thus, of convincing no one. But this is due, not to its own consistency, or lack of reality, but instead to the fact that “too many people still have trees growing in their heads.”12 For this reason, the rest of the introduction makes an effort to provide certain concrete axioms that will define how this system works. In other words, these propositions actually perform how the rhizome as book machine works in the very process of describing its major principles or rules of composition and construction. What is most important, first of all, is to grasp the purpose of the rhizome system. It does not exist in nature, even though it is comparable to certain natural formations such as weeds and mobile bands, packs, swarms, the “Brownian motion” of dust particles in a slant of light, or as Leibniz once said of the monads, “a squirming of fishes”; however, it must be invented and in a certain sense this must be discovered by means of experimenting, by trial and error, like most technological inventions.

Why are things invented in the first place? On one level, it is only to find a solution to a problem, a new way of doing things, to make life easier, to cure or to improve upon a previous technology (e.g., walking is supplemented by the horse, the wheel, later by the flying wing and the spaceship, but also by the telephone and the Internet). But certain new technologies also respond to a kind of social need for liberation, or to escape from a dominant form of organizing collective desires. Deleuze and Guattari invent the rhizome system as such a means of escape: from the previous two book machines that have served to create what they call “a Dark Age in thinking.” As they write later on, “Grass is the only way out. . . . The weed exists only to fill the wastelands left by cultivated areas. It grows between.”13 At first, it is easy to perceive the difference between a tree-book system and a rhizome: the former sinks its roots in the very depths of the earth, which is below the level of perception, closest to an origin deep in the past; it contains or expresses a dimension of verticality that arranges a hierarchy. It resembles Aristotle’s system of philosophy in which metaphysics is located in the upper branches of the tree of knowledge, with physics comprising its subterranean root system. However, it is difficult to grasp the differences with the fascicular-book system (i.e., infinite textuality), since it is only based on the absence of the root, even though the problem is that the memory of the root remains as a kind of ghostly supplement, a phallic cutting that continues to be grafted onto any assemblage and that still determines the unity and identity of any multiplicity. It becomes much more dangerous for this reason, because every multiplicity is made to circulate around a missing unity, an absent meaning, a far more demanding and more “extensive totality.” In this image we might even determine a certain representation of immanence that was revealed by modern philosophy itself, except it constituted this immanence as a great secret or a conspiracy of History, or finally, in the position of “the Real.” Consequently, this plane still functions like a transcendent plane (the Being of beings, the Structure, the Real), even though this plane was no longer located above things, but rather beneath them and before them as the form of their totality, which is nevertheless absent from any given multiplicity.

As opposed to what might be called a phallic organization of the image of thought, Deleuze and Guattari begin by proposing one simple rule: “subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted.” Instead, make a multiplicity using only the number of dimensions one already has available, without needing to add one dimension that is not yet present and functions as a hidden point of unity. Consequently, this relates to the first and second principles of the rhizome, connection and heterogeneity, according to the axiom that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.”14 How will this help? “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”15 This must first be thought in relation to the new image of thought Deleuze and Guattari are proposing for philosophy: everything can be included, every semiotic chain, every statement, every flow. There is no proper territory, and moreover, no proper language. Signs of art can be placed in conjunction with signs of politics or organizations of power (as they do in the case of Kafka); signs emitted from real social struggles can suddenly be made to express philosophical thoughts if they are connected to the right machine. Again, there is no proper philosophical language, no root language or mother tongue, as there was in the case of Heidegger. However, this is also different from saying that “everything is political,” because here the political takes on a static and transcendent value, as if redeeming the purely personal and private matter by giving it the Universal form of a social struggle. This can too easily become a dominant form and an oppressive value, like what happens today in literary criticism under the terms of “political reading,” when only certain identities and contents are qualified as having a political value. However, what is more important to note under the terms of this regime of interpretation is the redundancy of these values or signs (the body, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity) as if the organization of power operates only through these signs and does not also produce new political contents, those that correspond to different social struggles that are not yet “recognized” as political and are fated to remain invisible and unconnected. But that is not how private statements become politicized, or rather, that is not how the organization of power first appears connected to what was formerly a private matter like sexuality or child rearing in a family. In thinking these connections, in analyzing them and linking them together, philosophy can now make the most surprising discoveries (as in the case of Foucault). A discourse on masturbation in the nineteenth century, for example, can suddenly have the most surprising consequences for the philosophy of neoliberalism. What was not connected at first now is seen to be connected in the most surprising manner to other heterogeneous social assemblages like the clinic or the social welfare state, or to a discourse on public hygiene and the differences between classes.

The third principle is the principle of the multiplicity itself. If there is no single language in which everything is coded, only multiple languages and sign regimes, then there is also no supplementary dimension over and above these lines. This is the rule against the notion of “a Structure,” which turns out to be only one code that overcodes everything. For example, when Lacan said, “The Unconscious was structured like a language,” this was often taken as a machine for overcoding everything using a linguistic code. This has often been the complaint against post-structuralism for turning everything into a text, including the reality of social struggle. But Marxism was no different, because it overcoded everything simply by employing a different system of linguistic and semiotic values: base and superstructure, either direct or overdetermined with ideological signs functioning as mediators between the two levels. As Jameson said, totality is not a text, but is mediated by a system of signifying values. In place of an underlying Structure, therefore, Deleuze and Guattari propose a “plane of consistency” that increases with the number of the connections made on it. It is defined as the “outside” of every concrete multiplicity, but it is not determined by a Structure. In fact, as an evolution of the concept of machine first proposed by Guattari in the 1969 essay “Machine et structure,” and of “the literary machine” in Deleuze’s new edition of Proust and Signs the following year, the rhizome represents a decisive break with all notions of Structure and even forecasts the recent turn to the subject of the brain in modern neurology and biology by contemporary philosophy and logic, which is described as an “a-centered and probabilistic system,” as I will return to discuss in the Conclusion.16 As Françoise Dosse observes, from a point very early on Guattari often turned to modern biology, rather than to linguistics, to find more useful language for modeling structures. As he describes in one of the letters to Deleuze in the process of writing Anti-Oedipus:

Cerebral writing is directly grasped from that which, from an exterior perspective, is diagrammatic. It is the organ of machinic affiliation. Thus, cerebral writing is that which can be directly grasped in the body’s systematic machines: perception, motor systems, neuro-vegetative [systems], etc.17

As Deleuze and Guattari write, concerning the ideal book that could be produced from the principles of the rhizome, it would presuppose only a plane of consistency that is relative to the number of connections that could be made on it; to compose the book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, “on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.”18 Of course, what they are describing is the ideal book they are actually trying to compose as A Thousand Plateaus, according to the first and second principles that everything can be connected to everything else at any point, and must be. Here we are reminded again of Proust’s image of the book as a spiderweb in which signs and impressions are incorporated, even though it does not pretend to include all signs, as does a Structure.

Finally, the remaining three principles they discuss follow from the first three and can be understood as inferences or disputations, as in Scholastic method. The principle of a signifying rupture repeats the principles of connection and heterogeneity. What Deleuze and Guattari call the principles of cartography and decalcomania repeats the argument of the notion of a plane of consistency that “is not amenable to any structural or generative model.”19 Instead, the image of thought presupposed by the rhizome system is that of a map and not that of tracing a preexisting structure or genealogical inheritance. Thus, it would oppose the systems proposed by structuralism and psychoanalysis, as well as the philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida, or any system of philosophy that proposes to “trace out” the “History of Metaphysics,” even if the objective of this tracing is to de-center this entire system and open a space for new signifying values to emerge. Ultimately, they argue against this method of tracing that has emerged in the modern period to determine the image of repetition and difference in modern philosophy. They write: “The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicals.”20 Here we can see the precise problem: the book machine as root system and the radical system as infinite textuality always return to extinguish the possible creation of the rhizome. They return again to reproduce hierarchies, or to dissipate the lateral movement of connections in a sterile form of a Structure. This was the problem Deleuze and Guattari already confronted in their critique of psychoanalysis, which tended to reproduce the same unconscious structuration in individuals, producing an incredible redundancy of significations and connections to social subjectivity: this way lies neurosis, that way phobia, and finally, a third directly to psychosis. In short, psychoanalysis prevents the patient from making any map of their own, of creating their own orientation toward reality. This will later become the basis of the emphasis on Kafka, whose literary process is often described as cartographic, making maps of the bureaucratic apparatus that in many ways are more accurate than the psychoanalytic tracings of the unconscious structures because these maps are also directly connected to political realities. After all, what are maps for? This is simple enough to answer: to find one’s direction, to orient movement toward something. A map that appears on a placard in the shopping mall is a good example: first, you seek to find where you are (“YOU ARE HERE”), and only then do you seek to find where you are going. (Of course, sometimes you are looking for the nearest exit.) Literature, in comparison, most often provides such a map, and not a tracing of a Universal structure.

The remaining balance of the introduction to Rhizome is filled with the following sentiment: “We’re tired of trees.”21 In other words, returning to what was referred to above under the tyranny of the “good reader,” they are constantly making the argument that the image of thought they are proposing does not necessarily have to take the form of a tree. “Thought is not arborescent”; although the real problem to be confronted is that, again, “too many people have trees growing in their heads.”22 What follows from this point, therefore, is a literal transcription of the simple rules and axioms just outlined above into the flat surface or volume of the ideal book they are seeking to write together, recalling the above statements that it should be composed on a single plane, on a single page, including all kinds of heterogeneous impressions, signs, and elements drawn from everything around them. These are the instructions for the ideal reader (and not, it seems, for the expert reader or the Deleuze specialist):

We are writing this book as a rhizome. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like a tiny column of ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting from anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it.23

In conclusion, this is certainly a strange method for writing a book of philosophy, but the mention of a method again recalls the situation of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, particularly in reference to waking every morning and continuing a thinking process on a plateau left off the previous day. Only in this case it is not one subject who awakens, and the process is described in terms of a writing process that attempts to connect one plateau to another in a somewhat random fashion. Therefore, in describing this writing machine invented by Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the new image of thought that it presupposes, I have reduced the rules of composition to three from the original six, only for the sake of economy:

1. In constructing any assemblage, subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted, which also serves as the first principle of the rhizome (the rule against transcendence).
2. It is heterogeneous in the nature of its signs (the rule against a single or proper language of philosophy), because the rhizome system can be connected at any point to any other point and, therefore, must be connected in this manner.
3. The rhizome is reducible to “[neither] the One nor the multiple,” which appears now as a false problem, because it presupposes a plane of consistency that is partial and is limited only by its relative outside and current number of connections (the rule against Structure).

The last thing to say about this new image of thought, as well as A Thousand Plateaus, is that if it seems too abstract, this is because there are too many readers today who continue to reinforce an image of thought that blocks or obstructs the connections. Something is usually called abstract only because the concreteness of the terms is missed, the relations between terms are not actualized. Abstractness, as in most abstract art, is usually due to the absence of a form or figure. In abstract painting, for example, it is the subjective disposition of the viewer who looks for the figure and finds that it is missing that is a cause of disorientation and the apprehension of a formlessness. Here the absence concerns an image of thought that is first presupposed by the classical book, which does not seem to appear at the basis of the book in this case, and this immediately provokes the judgment that it is too abstract, or too “postmodern.” Rather, I would argue, it is only the matter of a book that begins by forgetting the image of a book, and by constructing a different image as the basis for its semiotic organization.

In truth, what is called a “plane” or a “plateau” is no more abstract than a book as a presupposition for thinking, any more than the cerebral image of the mind that is presupposed as the place where all thinking takes place—somewhere in the head of the natural thinker. However, both of these traditional images of thought, like the rhizome, are in no way natural and must be constructed by artificial means from the start. The problem is that classical philosophy has always presupposed its own image of thought as natural and universal, and has only reinforced this assertion by claiming that this image corresponds to common sense. However, the problem is the following: the form of immanence remains “outside” this image and gnaws away at it, causing the image of thought presupposed by philosophy to become sterile and in need of constant renewal. Real renewal can occur only through experimentation, and true experiments can often appear abstract and quite bizarre at first.

As I have already implied, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic experiment might be judged today as a failure, given that it was perceived as too abstract and appeared to convince no one, particularly not philosophers themselves. Therefore, as a provisional transition to chapter 3, where I will offer a closer examination of what I call “the second literary machine” in Deleuze and Guattari’s project (i.e., the Kafka experiment, or the burrow), I will conclude with the definition of the rhizome as the method of an anti-method offered by the French philosopher François Zourabichvili:

The rhizome is therefore an anti-method, in which all would seem to be permitted—and in fact it does permit this, for this is its rigor—a rigor whose ascetic character the authors often stress under the heading of “sobriety” to their hasty disciples. . . . Thought gives itself over to experimentation. This decision involves at least three corollaries: 1) to think is not to represent (it does not seek an adequation with a supposedly objective reality, but a real effect that re-launches both life and thought, displacing their stakes, farther and in different directions); 2) there is a real beginning only in the middle [au milieu]—the word “genesis” recovers here its full etymological value of “becoming,” without relation to an origin; 3) if every encounter is “possible,” insofar as there is no reason to disqualify a priori some paths rather than others, encounters are not for all that selected on the basis of experience (certain arrangements and coupling neither produce nor change anything). This last point requires more elaboration. The apparently free play that the method of the rhizome calls for should not be misunderstood, as if it were a matter of blindly practicing any old arrangement in order to arrive at art or philosophy, or as if every difference was fecund a priori, following a doxa commonly held today. Certainly, anyone who hopes to think must consent to a certain degree of blind groping without support, to an “adventure of the involuntary” and despite the appearance or the discourse of our teachers, this tact is the least evenly distributed aptitude, for we suffer from too much consciousness and too much mastery—we hardly ever consent to the rhizome. The vigilance of thought remains no less requisite, but at the very heart of experimentation: besides the rules mentioned above, it consists in discerning the sterile (black holes, impasses) from the fecund (lines of flight). It is here that thought conquers both its necessity and its efficacy, recognizing the signs that force us to think by enveloping what has so far remained unthought. Which is why Deleuze and Guattari can say that the rhizome is a problem of cartography [mapping], which is to say a problem of immanent evaluation.24