Even my worst one was right on the money

So I've finally started to sit down properly with Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus". I read "Anti-Oedipus" years ago and found it very exciting, but I haven't found or made an opportunity to take "A Thousand Plateaus" off the shelf until now. This summer I suggested a tentative organized panel at ACSP to explore how D&G's ideas could fit into planning, since they've been largely ignored by planners with the notable exception of Jean Hillier and a few others.

So I read the conclusion a few weeks ago and over the last two days read Bassumi's introduction and the first chapter. And I am intrigued yet unconvinced. The text is certainly rich in provocative ideas, but I'm not sure its own ideas hold up or are desirable. Here I will try to identify why. Note, please, that this is a fragmentary and first reading, so I'm sure my thoughts will develop as I go further. In a sense, this can be thought of as one of the response papers I assign my students.

A quick summary of the ideas as I presently understand them is surely useful. In the first chapter, D&G are essentially proposing a "toolkit" of concepts that can counter the power relations inherent in philosophical frameworks that strive to centralize and unify understanding. They describe such unitary philosophies as trees, tap-roots, or root-trees to capture the idea that they have a dominant core of concepts (the trunk) that branch out hierarchically and are used to shape the world by inscribing these ideas into lived experience. In opposition, they advocate for rhizomes, plants like the quaking aspens and bamboo whose root systems grow horizontally in many directions at once and can establish new plants if the original dies or other conditions permit. Concepts that spread like rhizomes do not hierarchically organize experience but rather thrive on their interaction with the physical, biological, and social worlds, multiplying possibilities and interpretations. The apparent ideal philosophical toolkit would assemble "smooth spaces" of ideas folded over and into each other as "lines of flight" emerge from existing unified conceptions.

First, in many ways the ideas don't feel as new as I expected them to. Perhaps this is because I've absorbed them indirectly through other writers and friends. But this perpetual undermining of centrality and unification is rooted in dialectics, as much as D&G detest Hegel and disagree with Marx. Lefebvre's "Autogestion" offers the strategy of exploding through the seams, the contradictions, or existing, centralized institutions. Of course, the idea that there can only be one direction, as implied in Marx and explicit in Hegel, is anathema to D&G, but Lefebvre seems to have a much more open mind about where "The Explosion" will lead.

Second, the rhizome concept seems problematic in two ways. On one hand, rhizomes are supposed to be distinct from root-trees but they repeatedly note that root-trees, too, can be rhizomes. What I think they mean by this is that trees also have horizontal, non-hierarchical relations with other trees, animals, and plants as well as the weather, nutrients, and so on in constituting one part of a broader ecosystem. For instance, squirrels burying nut caches they've collected from trees is a significant portion of the life cycle of many trees and eventually produce forests that constitute their own character are mutually interdependent relations. So, in essence, rhizome seems to be much more about how one perceives the world (and they do say as much when they talk about rhizomes as "perceptual apparatuses") than about particular types of theories. Theories that are used to dominate all experience through their coding are bad in isolation, but perhaps when considered as possible interpretations (or tools of understanding) they are acceptable. On the other hand, a closely related concern is that if they want to put such weight on analogies to nature, why do I get the sense that root-trees will be inherently bad and rhizomes inherently good? Is simply a feeling I get because people misuse their ideas? Or is it their idea? Or are they overlooking the fact that natural ecosystems have provided many mechanisms of survival and propagation that sometimes complement and sometimes compete with each other? If the latter, perhaps we should be searching for other analogies, too? (D&G would probably enthusiastically endorse that project.)

Finally, I'm not sure that their smooth space, their plateaus, are attractive to me. They say that they have drawn the idea of plateaus from Gregory Bateson's analysis of Baliness practices. Since I have a copy of Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", I read the chapter on the practices today. In essence, Bateson contrasts the Western predilection for orgasmic resolutions to increasing tensions (positive or negative) with the Balinese cultural practices that avoid such resolutions, especially in regard to conflict. Essentially, children are raised to experience an increase in tension (through flirtation, for example) that is abandoned before it can be resolved, that is, before there is a violent orgasm to dissolves the pressure. The suggestion, I believe, is that this unsatisfied libidinal desire is then redirected to other activities, particularly music, dance, and other arts. But even these forms, Bateson suggests, express the same pattern of increasing tension and libido that does not find release. This leads to a stable, peaceful society that perhaps reflects D&G's hopes(? ). But to me this stability, this smoothness, this libidinous plateau, appears to emerge from a perpetual suppression and redirection of the libido, of desire. Of course for repressed desires to reappear in artistic expression (as well as sports) is surely a healthy thing in many cases, especially for more destructive desires, as Herbert Marcuse pointed out in "Eros and Civilization". But I rather enjoy orgasmic moments. And I don't want to give them up. As Woody Allen says in "Manhattan", "even my worst one was right on the money".