ABSTRACT
A useful analogy in beginning to discuss the dynamics of such work can be drawn awn from the theoretical writing of Deleuze and Guattari, whose critique of Western thought and society in A Thousand Plateaus hinges around their distinction between the dominant, official ‘tree’ culture and the utopian potential of underground rhizomes. Trees, in consisting of central trunks which branch off to subsidiary divisions of root and branch, stand here for social and philosophical hierarchies, systems of binary division. Rhizomes, conversely, are rambling, non-hierarchical networks, composed of ‘lines of flight’ spreading out in all directions usually along a horizontal plane just below ground level. These binary oppositions of tree/rhizome, vertical/horizontal are ultimately untenable, as indeed is that of underground versus official culture: as Deleuze and Guattari are the first to stress, the world is not that simple. And yet there is a strategic, propositional value in this construction, especially in so far as it queries the politico-philosophical obsession with trying to chop down the trees of dominant ideology and/or grow alternative versions, when more promiscuously vital possibilities exist elsewhere. America, in particular, is for Deleuze and Guattari ‘a special case’ in this regard. ‘Arborescent’ social structures imported from Europe might continue to impose a gridlock hold on American macropolitics, but at ground level there is an unusual fluidity of movement, as cultural diversity and a restless urge to self-reinvention generate a million deviant lines of flight, spreading out from the nation’s founding goals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs… Patti Smith sings the Bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:19).
