Deleuze for the Desperate #2 Rhizome

This one encourages thinking about the philosophical implications of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus in a 'key concepts' approach. Some problems in using the term as a simple metaphor are raised.

[grahamwarren]

beautiful use of your time in retirement. Congratulations. Very democratising.

[crimsonking]

I once wrote a 30-page paper on D & G's "Anti-Oedipus" as a philosophy undergraduate student. I entitled it, "A Factory is erected upon the ruins of the ancient theatre: An Exegesis and Critique of Selected Aspects of the Deleuzo-Guattarian felt like a charlatan and an imposter all the way through the process, as you have delineated this particular type of Deleuze "scholar"....however, at the same time, I felt incredibly superior in an elitist way to the rest of my undergraduate collegues.

[oaxacachaka]

Your footage is the perfect thing to watch while contemplating these ideas. It’s just enough distraction to keep from “focusing too hard” on one of the ideas and keeps the awareness fresh and relaxed.

[twanjon]

Incredibly insightful. As someone outside the realms of academia this is by far the most accessible and in depth way of working through the hard bits. Love it!

[hanavandal]

Decalcomania is an art technique where you use foil and paint. You paint something on the foil and then you use that foil to kind of stamp it onto the paper. And then you re-do that a few times. That's why it's related to the Rhizome, I think. You get a series of roschach-test like images. It was a technique popular among surrealists because they wanted to "bring their subconscience to the surface".

[peterwear]

thank you for creating this series, and many years later, I hope this message finds you well. I have been listening to your series off and on while working my way through deleuze.

[lucasmiguel]

Thank you for all the work, Dave. I never thought I was going to get Deleuze but you're helping me quite a lot

[shj]

thank you so much dave! i love the series so much.

[lilybartgremlin]

Thank you for these wonderful videos. I had been reading Anti Oedipus a few months back but ultimately dropped it because I felt like I was totally lost, now I stumbled upon your videos and got motivated to go back into it. Hope you're doing well.

[TockTockTock]

To provide you an example of American literature that makes use of the rhizome, William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury has a somewhat rhizomatic narrative progression, especially in the relationship between the perspectives of the three Compson sons which comprise entirely separate sections of the book. It's not only nonlinear but each section connects at multiple points (in ways that require the reader to take a more active role in interpreting and making these connections due to ambiguity, etc).

Sorry if that's vague. Writing this while on my way to work. Will try to provide more detail as soon as I can.

[luckyyuri]

I'm very curious if you've read about Terrence Deacon's "Incomplete Nature" and his theory that organization/structure (as opposed to a chaotic maximization of entropy) is only possible due to "constraints".

Any cultural system would just dissipate in transmission if it wouldn't have within it some cultural rules/memes that maintain and perpetuate its necessary constraints (sometimes the constraints are explicit, other times are implicit part of that culture). Also a biological organism, by Deacon’s standards, is in a way "less then the sum of it's parts", because every component existing at every level of magnification in that organism (atoms, simple molecules, macro molecules, conduits such as blood/lymph vessels, the structure of the heart, the neural correlates of specific perceptions, etc) is constraining the "action" of other components—the degrees of freedom in a living organism are considerably less than in a dead organism in which chemicals start to more freely react. Similarly, a car engine is able to function only because of constraining relations between the hot high-pressure gasses, the pistons, the cylinders, crankshaft and so on—all these constraints are creating, figuratively speaking, a channel through which the potential energy from the gasoline’s atomic bonds is transformed and funneled until it ends up as spinning rubber. And if one should "loosen the bolts" as it were, slacking the constraints and increasing the freedom, the energy is rendered aimless. If we free the piston from the constraining cylinder, increasing the space of the latter then the piston will jiggle about randomly and purposelessly.

So, both structure and function are intimately related with the concept of constraint—the Eiffel tower sustains itself thanks to hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal that constrain one-another from moving; the car moves up the hill thanks to thousands of pieces of metal that constrain each-other and the flow of energy.

But how did these precise systems of constraints came about in an universe that's in a fundamental disposition of maximizing its entropy? In such an universe things go exactly the other way round, breaking up any constraints as soon as they form. Here, Deacon invents some concepts as "orthograde" - going with the grain of entropy maximization"; and "contragrade" - going against the grain of entropy maximization. Any contragrade process would necessitate energy, doing work to go against and beat the spontaneous orthograde processes. But he identifies in the natural world many orthograde processes which interact in just such a way that they produce countragrade effects at their mutual boundary (the most simple example he gives is that a sugar-water solution is high in entropy, but once the room temperature evaporates the water the cup is left with a lower entropy state of sugar crystals; reducing the cup's entropy was a contragrade process which emerged at the confluence of orthograde processes). Thus paradoxically, the purely spontaneous entropic nature is the same nature generating all these wonderful structures we see in life; and entropic flow is also the one powering those structures.

In my opinion Deacon elaborates the only theory of abiogenesis approachable by individuals who don't have scientific training, such as myself—you can at least pick up the gist of a story in it. I won't go into that but once formed, the nugget of primitive life, which he calls "automaton", is a *bundle of constraints* that self-sustains as long as it has the necessary boundary constraints offered by the environment (for my personal structure and operation the environmental temperature would be such a constraint; and if the environment ever goes to 100 degrees C, my atoms would start interacting madly and obliterating my human structure; this is not permitted by the current temperature constraint i'm in). In these ancient unicellular organisms "possibility, in a sense, became increasingly improbable" due to the compounding of new constraints, as the metabolic apparatus got more complex. Life is in a perpetual blind search to develop and deploy within it the constraints necessary to sustain itself, able to compensate for any absence of outside constraints that are currently necessary (as an example, organisms have evolved the ability to synthesize various necessary molecular parts in order to survive environments where those molecules weren’t present; another example is that organisms developed the ability to maintain temperature by sweating if the outside temperature increases above a certain level where the body’s chemical reactions start running amok). The pattern of a whirlpool is generated by constraints consisting in perturbations/collisions between the water molecules, but if you remove the stone that generated the perturbation it dies. The pattern of a human being is a highly evolved pattern that internalized many of it's necessary constraints and has a memory of those constraints (DNA) which is itself specified as constraints. The bewildering complexity and highly specific architecture of self-sustaining constraints is the thing which makes a human able go in search of "stones" and "better flows of water" to keep itself going.

What thrilled me about his way of explanation is that he wants to trace the emergence of "value" from the basic mechanics of the universe, stating that "values are born in the natural world as constraints by which non-equilibrium states (life) are furthered". Off course he cannot approach/explain the nature of qualia but he brilliantly explains the character of some conscious phenomena in accordance with the character of the neural physical processes (a dumb oversimplification of one of his examples would be that a certain micro pattern of constraints (maintained by way of "memory") could get coupled to incoming energies from the environment (perceptual stimuli), which would give rise to physical strain which would translate into psychological strain—this is why you feel psychological strain when you perceive some pattern that hurt you in the past). "Mind" is constrained/channeled activity that performs work for its own sake, maintaining the system of constraints, and our sophisticated mind today is in the continuation of the work done by the molecular activities of those primitive unicellular organisms. Otherwise, molecules for instance don't do work to keep their existence going, they don't "spend" energy to go against entropy.

Deacon maintains that we see "work" done all around us but we ignore what's making all this work possible. Namely constraints! They have the ability to channel energy into directions that are against spontaneous change, and in a living organism that energy is channeled into maintaining.. its constraints. Life is an emergent type of physical constraints, ones that work together as "systems of constraints that prevent each-others ending".

Also very interesting is the way in which he explains the telos manifested by human beings. This ability to be moved by future possibility is *not* "out of this world" according to Deacon, but very much a thing that emerges inside a completely natural universe following deterministic laws. A universe working in a "thermodynamic regime" (producing entropy) gives birth to a "morphodynamic regime" (where certain processes give rise to "shapes" that naturally fall and interlock in even more ordered shapes), which then in certain conditions lead to the "teleodynamical regime" (term invented by him; where processes give rise to "ends", goals, ideas, values). Ultimately he wants to obliterate any supernatural "outside intervention", explaining the existence of teleodynamics/mind from a natural perspective. Besides scientific implications, the political, cultural and economical significance is immense. Anyway, i couldn't refrain making analogies between the rhizome's structure, flow and transformation, and the complex interaction of constraints.

[SusanShannonFrynx]

Thanks for this series, Dave. Very helpful.

[jeroenschmitz]

Thank you for this series Dave. This video explained the rhizome in a way that finally made something click for me. I am reading deleuze, because I am thinking about how to form connections between subjects that seem to have to connections at first sight. Once I find an overlap between such subjects they almost always become way more fascinating to me. And I would love to be able to understand that proces better.

[mush]

This is lovely and extremely helpful, really appreciate the work you did to make this series

[tyler]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. - Ph.D. candidate in the U.S.A.

[PointZROGaming]

I've started researching Deleuze primarily for his Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 texts for my film & tv course, infamously esoteric and difficult to parse. These videos feel so grounding and comforting for me, as I love his concepts and thinking but I've felt so out of my depth! Huge thank you for the time and work you've put into these videos, taking these wild concepts and ideas and making them much more palatable for the mind.

[-isntthisalotoffun]

Here are a few of the works by American and British writers that Deleuze and Guattari cite as examples of rhizomatic literature: Henry Miller - The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, DH Lawrence - Aaron’s Rod, Jack Kerouac - On the Road, Virginia Woolf - The Waves, Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

[raaron]

I really really appreciate the effort you have put in here! Thank you.

[pquite]

Thank you so much! You really made this so much simpler to understand!

[Ciaudius]

Thank you for making these videos they've been extremely useful