Exploring Deleuze’s Rhizomes, Organ-less Bodies and Changing Territories

Introduction

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has been described as one of the most influential, and to some — revolutionary figures in 20th-century philosophy. From his various contributions across many disciplines, including art, literary theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and even music, the impacts that he has had on major philosophical schools and movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism cannot be overstated. Although many describe his idea as extremely radical political and obtuse to the point of ill-logic, others would point to their uniqueness of thought where it seems episteme-changing. Deleuze along with his long-time collaborator Felix Guattari have stated that the goal of philosophy is an activity that involves “forming, inventing and fabricating concepts”. Therefore, according to them, the philosopher is meant to “form” and “invent”, “manipulate” and “fabricate”, the pre-existing set notions of philosophy for the goal of a better mapping of the world. That phrase also famously implies that concepts are meant to be created or invented by the thinker, not found in the shapes of forms or products that exist in the world already. In Deleuze’s career, his approach as a thinker is categorized into two forms: the first one being books interpreting other thinkers and authors, such as Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault, and the other being books exploring and creating his own concepts regarding the future direction of philosophy that he believes we should be heading.

Rhizomes
Take the action of a farmer picking up a piece of ginger from their garden, the roots of that piece of ginger is called a rhizome. The significance of a seemingly obscure piece of rhizome seems irrelevant to the potential of a deep concept, yet Deleuze and Guattari used a piece of ginger and formulated one of the major concepts in post-structuralism — rhizomatic thinking.

A rhizome was defined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus as a nonlinear network that “connects any point to any other point”. Take a tree for example.  A tree always has a distinct root and is shaped in a hierarchical structure. At the root of this tree is the origin, and there lays the starting point, in which all other products’ fate would eventually stem from the root and grow into fruits, flowers, branches, leaves, etc. This, what Deleuze and Guattari called arborescence, meant that the tree is used as a paradigmatic representation of knowledge, practice, and ideology in a certain geographical episteme — namely The West. An example of this would be Plato’s Theory of Forms, although a fuzzy idea, it became the foundational concept of the Western interpretation of reality. Similar to the relationship between a root and a fruit, other subsequent ideas following Plato about metaphysics, epistemology or other branches of thought would stem from the root. The root serves as an origin of a coherent system of thought that grows fruits which always carry the shadows of the root.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze characterized rhizomatic thought as a “multiplicity” rather than a “multiple”. Contrary to the ancient binary distinction of whether or not the universe is unitary (One) or plural (Many), Deleuze used the idea of a “multiplicity” as a stem to his point of rhizomatic thinking. Multiplicity was a rhizomatic term for thinking outside of the “one-many” binary, as he puts it in Difference and Repetition (p.182),

“Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system. … ‘Multiplicity’, which replaces the one no less than the multiple, is the true substantive, substance itself. Everything is a multiplicity … Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity… Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity — in other words, difference”.

Therefore, the “multiplicity” is the rhizomatic. Thinking outside of arborescence is akin to thinking outside of an anciently established binary distinction between two complex universally distinguishing ideas  —  one and many. Going back to the visualization of a tree, imagine Deleuze was picking apples on a sunny day at a local French fruit farm, and a farmer accompanying him is giving him suggestions and hints on what apples and how many apples he should pick. They walked past a bright and pure red apple tree, a shiny and crisp green apple tree, and a colourful Gala apple tree, Deleuze did not hesitate to pick from all three trees, and one from each. The farmer, however, questioned his decision to not pick more from the red apple tree, which is his most popular type of apple and it was what all the other visitors came for. In the arborescence view, the red apple is the root. Perhaps that was the type of apple that Plato defined as the “perfect form” of apples in the world and all the other types would be the branches that stem off of the root. Notice how Deleuze did not ignore the original red apple but rather treated all the apples without a hierarchical structure. By not picking a favourite, he displaced the idea of a perfect form and arborescent thinking and made a creative decision of buying from all three apple trees.

In our modern world, an accurate example of a rhizome would be the modern internet. It is vast, interconnected, non-linear, without hierarchical structure, etc. Deleuze elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus that,

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’.”

Imagine the creativity and flexibility the Internet has to offer, whenever anyone searches for anything on a browser, a limitless amount of answers and possibilities is given. The internal and external links on a Wikipedia page exemplify how on the Internet, any page is within a click away from another page. The structure and creativity of the Internet cannot be destroyed since if one website on the Internet shuts down, the Internet itself continues to function because of its rootless nature. This characteristic of the Internet is extremely resembling to Deleuze’s description of the rhizome,

“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed…There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.”

One cannot pin an origin of the Internet purely based on its appearance. Similar to a rhizome ,  the Internet is run on millions of servers from across the globe, with all of them interconnected — constantly connecting and disconnecting. Similar to ants rebuilding their home if a storm strikes, if Wikipedia is shut down tomorrow for whatever reason, humans would rebuild another program and construct a new line of connection within the World Wide Web. 

The Internet, however, is not a perfect rhizome because its rhizomatic capacities are limited by data control, algorithms, and surveillance. The Internet can still have roots in the shape of large data servers in the large cities of large countries. There is also the presence of dominance in the shape of technological companies: Facebook is the root of social media, Google is the root of browsers, and YouTube is the root of video sharing. Those said roots are dominant and are near irreplaceable territory, the risk of those lines of flights breaking may attract more attention and resources and other branches on the Internet Tree. Humans have the ability to create a new Facebook if we are only working with the rhizome (The Internet) itself, but the rhizome is also constrained systematically. The disappearance of Facebook could also mean the disappearance of Instagram, Whatsapp, and other sub-apps under it. It is also likely that governmental pressure would also be imposed since Facebook is the main tool for data collection and information gathering for advertisements and news. The rhizome of The Internet is unfortunately attached to other arborescent structures with arborescent hierarchies.

The idea of the rhizome and a multiplicity can also be applied to gender theory — wrote theorists Linstead and Pullen in a 2006 paper — “gender as rhizome and having a multiplicitous nature”. The same deconstruction on the “one” and the “many” can also be applied to the binary sexes. This understanding of gender gives what originally was a stubborn and “fixed” issue of forms into something that has the freedom of becoming flexible and transformational. Linstead and Pullen wrote,

“We develop this line of thought through the work of Deleuze and Guattari to argue that gender as rhizomatic can be understood as a plane of immanence, intensity and consistency which always and constantly shifts and realigns — a molecular (particle-d) process characterized by making connections and forging alliances like a multi-armed chain of molecules. Theorizing gender as rhizomatic entails a performance of becoming which is brought together momentarily, interrupted constantly, and dispersed consistently.”

Building off of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, gender theorists have used their ideas to theorize gender as a performance. From the revolutionary works of Simone de Beauvoir and her idea of a “becoming gender” — “one is not born, but becomes a woman.”. It is more clear that the labouring tasks the body has to perform every day of which many have underlying gender implications, desires, and manifestations. This fluidity, shift and changing nature, filled with interruptions and dispersions from the actions of one’s body, relates back to the ever-changing, reformulating, and readjusting nature of the rhizome. Similar to how destroying the binary of a “one” and a “many” is by proposing a third option in multiplicity, “The first means of deconstructing the gender binary is to cross it, as it reveals the auspices and tactics of its construction in the process of recognizing and responding to the transgression.”. What awaits us behind this recognition is emancipation that goes beyond the limitations of a binary in something as dear and physically critical as gender. 

Bodies without Organs
In response to the dominant psychoanalytic trends in France in the 1960s led by Jacques Lacan and the remains of Freud, Deleuze and Guattari elaborated on their dissatisfaction with psychoanalysis with schizoanalytic theory and the concept — “Bodies without Organs”. The phrase was first coined by French screenwriter Antonin Artaud who suffered from schizophrenia, in the last paragraphs of To Have Done With the Judgment of God, the ideal for man was,

“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”

What lies at the center of a body without organs is freedom and potential. The unconscious and conscious actions of a schizophrenic or an individual experiencing psychosis show potential forms and expression of the body — which through their pain and supposed abnormality, seeks to be liberated and actualized into their potential. Deleuze and Guattari viewed schizophrenia as a type of freedom where through an unrestricted mind that is free from industrial and systematic influences — becomes as rhizomatic as currently humanly possible, and therefore functions with potential for creative expression.

Anatomically, all bodies have organs, whether that is the body of a human, an animal, or even a plant. The same can be said about countries, schools, prisons and governments where their structure and function are similar to a body with organs and subdivisions. Our bodies function like a machine. Through each of our organs and their respective functions, our body functions together as a whole. It has a nature similar to an assembly line, as the heart pumps blood rapidly while an individual is experiencing something frightening, the blood travels to the brain with oxygen for the brain to send fight or flight signals back throughout the body. Yet in this cycle of sending and receiving, the heart cannot pump blood on its own nor can the brain have thoughts because the body is a machine that needs all of its parts to function properly. If a screw is loose or a nail is missing, the machine would inevitably disintegrate.

In Deleuze’s works, to break down bodies without organs more precisely, we have to understand his concept of desiring-production. In psychoanalysis, and predominantly in the works of Lacan, desire was the Lack — “you want what you do not have”. This Lack was what Lacan thought as the human reason for desire, that behind every want, jealousy, or need, it was the Lack that motivates us to that feeling. Desire was reactive. In this assertion, desire was a condition for action, in other words, you need desire and then you have action. Under Lacan’s and the traditional psychoanalytic view, objects have a “use-value” — a pencil writes, the mouth for eating and drinking, and power for control and influence. Deleuze and Guattari’s response to this perspective was in the example presented in Anti-Oedipus with bricolage. A bricolage as defined in the translator’s notes is “the tinkering about of the bricoleur, or amateur handyman. The art of making do with what’s at hand”. For the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst Guattari who later deflected, a bricolage was a schizophrenic making sense of tools in an attempt to draw a table. The table drawn by a schizophrenic is unorganized and dysfunctional, the surface was not flat, and the legs were not shaped properly and could not stand — so much so that the table might not be a table. This matched the non-clinical definition of schizophrenia by Guattari, “a repeated dissociation of object and use-value”, a person with schizophrenia can redefine the predefined functions of a pencil, a mouth, or power each time they encounter that object through their unparalleled creativity and rhizomatic thought. In Dialogues, Deleuze claimed that we should think of bodies in terms of “what they can do, not what they are”, and Deleuze thought what the latter was was something restrictive,

“It would seem, however, that the flows of energy are still too closely connected, the partial objects are still too organic…Desiring-machines (metaphor for the mechanism of desire) makes us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all.”

In Deleuze and Guattari’s mind — which sums up their philosophy nicely — the body of a human should not be defined as something static or organic, rejecting the past philosopher’s notions of a “coming-to-be” and their demand of a transcendental organic “designer”. Rather the body is in a constant process of “becoming” — similar to gender. Not even just the body, but the uses of everyday objects as there is no reason why our actions should just be motivated by the Lack. If we can find new uses for an object similar to how a schizophrenic finds new forms in a table, our desires can create new concepts and redefine values. 

“The code of delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate.”

Deleuze and Guattari also made a distinction between three kinds of bodies without organs: the empty, the cancerous and the full. The empty BwO is completely de-organ-ized, everything flows into it without tractions, and it is also not productive. The cancerous BwO works just like mitosis where the body is caught in an unending repeated pattern of reproduction. The full BwO is the ideal, where it is productive — constantly organizing and changing.

De/Reterritorialization
This constant organization and change of structure of the body is what Deleuze and Guattari called Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization. The body becomes a territory in which social norms, laws, and the ordering paradigm rule. The body reorganizing process — deterritorialization — is a process of identity-finding. If philosophy’s purpose was for the creation of concepts, then the concept of deterritorialization was for the problem of identity. What am I? How do I belong here?

When David Hume first investigated the problem of identity with a closer and more serious look than past philosophers, he rejected the notion of a soul and thought that to be foolish. According to Hume, we expect the future to be similar to the present or past. That expectation allows us to form memories, and therefore gives us a sense of self. However, unlike the soul, this explanation of identity seems to have more “multiplicity”. Memories are not as intact as the soul and have more flexibility and the possibility of change — the self is no longer a “self”, but rather a “sense of self” — a flow of experience and remembering. We have so many answers to the question of “who are you?”, your name, your occupation, your age, your cultural background, your gender identity, etc. The self becomes a multiplicity that must be brought together under the correct conditions, and only together do identity form. This process is what Deleuze and Guattari would call “territorialization”.

The territory depends on the individuals and parts of it while the people and parts require the territory to keep their identity intact. Imaging moving to a new school, the school might speak another language, there are groups of people and their respective social groups, the teachers have a different teaching style and more or less disciplining — all of this does not suit you and you cannot be yourself in that space — the fragments of your multiplicity do not match up with what the territory has to offer. However, the nomos — customs and habits — of a territory can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized for the formation of new identities and senses of belonging. Deterritorialization is “to undo what has been done” and reterritorialization is “redo what has been undone”. A simple example of this is a student trying to find a seat on the first day of school at the high school or college level. There is no seating plan and some students would gravitate towards the front while others at the back — territorializing their spaces and finding that seat to be home — which deterritorialized the original seats that were used by students from a past semester or from when the seat was last taken by someone else until it is reterritorialized by someone else who sat at that seat later. That seat then becomes the person’s territory that their body has effectively restructured to. The process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is the process of a social movement, destroying the old socius and replacing them with new ones.

In their examination of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari asserted the deterritorializing and reterritorializing processes are at the heart of its ability to function. They wrote,

“The decoding of flows and the deterritorialization of the socius thus constitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism. It continually draws near to its limit, which is a genuinely schizophrenic limit. It tends, with all the strength at its command, to produce the schizo as the subject of the decoded flows on the body without organs — more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian than the proletariat.”

Theorist Cæmeron Crain in his analytical article for The Mantle broke down the idea as follows,

“Capitalism depends on deterritorialization. It disrupts established forms of meaning, uproots people, desubstantializes work and reinscribes it in terms of money. This is perhaps its ultimate reterritorialization: to give everything a monetary value. But even money has become deterritorialized in fluctuating global markets. Finance capitalism makes everything a matter of flows without fixed points of reference. Thus, while [Deleuze and Guattari] often seem to present deterritorialization as offering the hope of some kind of political liberation, we should not miss the claim that the current system operates on this very basis.”

An example of capitalism’s de/reterritorialization is the increasingly blurry lines between work and home. An employee is now expected to answer work-related emails, to on call for support at work, and simply be thinking about work. Learning is not something that is just restricted to the student under the roofs of universities or schools, it is now designated for a life-long process of certificates and honours. This was not the case in the disciplinary stage of Capitalism as outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. However, Deleuze believes through the flow of capital, monetary interests and consumerism, those lines are reterritorialized into something vaguer. When does work stop and rest begin if work is still on your mind, the work Gmail inbox is still open on your browser, and your bosses' text messages are still not silenced? The identity of the employee and the student are being reminded every minute because capital has expanded its territory beyond the cubical or the high school, they deterritorialized the lines and they are not in one place, but rather with us everywhere we go.

The last sentence of the quotation is important to keep in mind. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are not to be taken as tools for emancipation or creativity. It is also a diagnosis of the current state of function and/or of history. Another example of de/reterritorialization would be 1930s Germany, the Nazis deterritorialized the German empire with propaganda by banning and burning books, and reterritorialized Germany with Nazi ideology. Yet, there are positive examples of de/reterritorialization where Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s came to the west leaving their own cultures and language behind. They made up for such disconnection by forging communities and building local businesses despite discriminatory laws — deterritorializing the original community while reterritorializing it with their own language and culture, which we may recognize in the present day as Chinatown.

On the 4th of November 1995, Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping out of his Parisian apartment window, just three years after his longtime collaborator and friend Felix Guattari died of a heart attack. Someone who has suffered respiratory system problems since young, Deleuze’s  symptoms severed and writing became a task of great pain and difficulty. He felt the solution to being overwhelmed was suicide. Deleuze left behind a legacy that continues to influence academia deeply, and he is one of the most cited authors in the humanities. Though his goal in philosophy was the creation of concepts, he also lived his concepts. His writing is obscure, vulgar, and almost incomprehensible as he aimed to write schizophrenically — without logic but following the mind of a schizophrenic — to embody a rhizome. Anti-Oedipus also gave readers the perception as an echo to May 1968 and Deleuze hoped his writing can be used as a weapon for political activism, his wish — although more progress can be achieved — has left a mark on LGBTQ+ rights and cultural criticism. In the 21st century, we still live under Deleuze’s impact, and perhaps even more importantly, Deleuze’s diagnosis of the postmodern world.

Michel Foucault once declared after first encountering Deleuze’s work that “one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian.” Deleuze commented by saying Foucault’s comment was “a joke meant to make people like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.” 

Citations
Deleuze, Gilles, et al. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury, 2019. 

Deleuze, Gilles. “P.182.” Difference and Repetition, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Flammarion, 2000. 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Martin Joughin. “P.88.” Negotiations, 1972-90, Columbia U.P., 1997. 

“On the Nature of Concepts.” Taylor & Francis, tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2012.632976?journalCode=tpar20#:~:text=Deleuze%20and%20Guattari%20define%20philosophy,%2C%20inventing%20and%20fabricating%20concepts%27. 

Aeonmag. “A Creative Multiplicity: The Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon Magazine, 29 Dec. 2022, aeon.co/essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari. 

“Events of May 1968.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., britannica.com/event/events-of-May-1968.

“What Is Becoming of Deleuze?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 Nov. 2015, lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-becoming-of-deleuze/.

Crain, Cæmeron, and By. “What Is a Territory?” The Mantle, themantle.com/philosophy/what-territory.

“Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus.” Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, 28 Mar. 2022, thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/deleuze-and-guattari-anti-oedipus/.

“Desiring-Machine.” Oxford Reference, oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095712965;jsessionid=6D287076C42D08B3E2BC702F0C16ADCA.

“Use Value.” DBpedia, dbpedia.org/page/Use_value.

“Surrealism-Plays.” Artaud: To Have Done With the Judgement of God, surrealism-plays.com/Artaud.html.

Kochetkova, Kate, et al. “7 Amazing Maps of the Internet.” Daily English Global Blogkasperskycom, kaspersky.com/blog/amazing-internet-maps/10441/.

Gender as Multiplicity: Desire, Displacement, Difference and Dispersion. researchgate.net/publication/33041221_Gender_as_multiplicity_Desire_displacement_difference_and_dispersion.

Hartley, David. “Knee-Deep in Novel Drafts: Roots and Rhizomes.” David, 29 July 2019, davidhartleywriter.com/single-post/2019/07/29/knee-deep-in-novel-drafts-roots-and-rhizomes.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “The Philosophical Concept of Rhizome.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 26 Apr. 2017, literariness.org/2017/04/26/the-philosophical-concept-of-rhizome/.