MPCAD - Rhizome

[Michael Bailey]

Rhizome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome
but also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)

3 nifty quotes with semi-glosses / one nifty quote without

1) opens up with a few bars of John Cage's "Piano Piece for David Tudor"
which take extreme liberties with the conventions of musical notation.
Perhaps this is the point?
But somebody actually played those warped staves, those note clusters...

and likewise I surmise that MP contains playable philosophy.
That a virtuoso would get better sounds out of it than I will.
That not every virtuoso would even consider playing it (too weird).

2) rhizome - "we get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one
unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome"
 1 and 2 - connection and heterogeneity
  3 multiplicity "there is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object"
(this is sweet: "A multiplicity has neither subject
nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot
increase in numbers without the multiplicity changing in nature....An
assemblage is
precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that
necessarily changes in
nature as it expands its connections")
4 Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks
separating structures or cutting across a single structure.
"Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to
which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.,
as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees....
You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger
that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations
that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject -
anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions."
[I have found that to be true]
5, 6 Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not
amenable to any structural or generative model.
...The rhizome is altogether different, a *map and not a tracing*....
It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages
on bodies without organs....Perhaps one of the most important
characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways;
in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains
a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway and storage
or living strata....Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence
(which confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding
structure, and makes infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that
axis or the constituents of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of
pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it - divine, anagogic, historical,
economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic.

semi-gloss -
the wikipedia article mentions that Jung used the concept
first for something lasting left underground beyond the flourishing/decline
cycle of trees and plants.
My mental picture of "rhizome" starts with thatch, that stuff that grows
in sections of a bad lawn, all rooty and tangled together and the roots
are juicy and white or sometimes dried and brown.  Used to have to rake
that out so blades of grass could grow...always felt bad about weeding
in general,
because weeds are pretty cool...
So I tend to sympathize with the project from the outset
Naturally the partial nerd in me chooses the enumeration of points
to try and "gut" the chapter...

3) "Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up
and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on
desire by external, productive outgrowths.
That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but
nonsymmetrical, operation.  Plug the tracings back into the map,
connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome
....these impasses must always be resituated on the map,
thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight"

-- semi-gloss
That actually makes sense within the context of those
meanings of tree and rhizome just mentioned.
Those "lines of flight" apparently were what Matessich was talking
about in his Pynchon book, eh?

4) "We call a plateau any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by
superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.
We are writing this book as a rhizome.  It is composed of plateaus.  We have
given it a circular form, but only for laughs."