DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

Concepts in Deleuze and Guattari are never hammered down into a final
form; rather, they are always being developed, always under modification,
always provisional. One can never capture the totality of a concept in its
definition.

THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A RHIZOME:

• Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any
other point
• It brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign
states
• The rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple
• It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in
motion
• It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from
which it grows and which it overspills
• The rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and
stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or
deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the
1
multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature
• The rhizome is related to a map: detachable, connectable,
reversible, modifiable, with multiple entryways and exits
• The rhizome is an acentred, non-hierarchical system without a
General and without a central automaton - defined solely by
circulation of states

CRITIQUE OF FREUD:

He treats the unconscious in a reductive way: there will always be a

reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions
of the great scar or supreme hole named castration – the wolves become
substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they
put him
Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has
no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious
Criticism of psychoanalysis: for having used Oedipal enunciation to make
patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and
would finally speak in their own name: whereas: never will the Wolf-Man
speak: because as long as that lasts, Freud calls it neurosis, when it
cracks, it’s psychosis
Burdening, burying the unconscious, the multiplicity in/of the person –
under the dogmatic interpretation of the status quo (i.e. psychoanalysis) –
organizing the body into the norm
BECOMING:

• Becoming is about being something else, changing in time and

space, irrefutably (unquestionably) and irrevocably (irreversibly)
• Becoming involves entering into a filiation with another term where
the parameters of each become fuzzy, where zones of being shift
toward non-molar alliances
• Becoming however, is not an imitation, it is not an identification or
correspondence
• Becoming must, however, take as its aim the non-dominant: THE
‘MAJORITARIAN’: specifically the white, middle aged male:
majoritarian refers to a state of domination

MAJORITARIAN – MINORITARIAN:

• ‘Minoritarian’ immediately suggests certain politics such as feminist,

queer or anti-racist ideology
• When, for example, a ‘feminist’ politic is taken as opposed to the
majoritarian politics of the traditional dominant white male, the
momentary nature of the positions of the majoritarian and
minoritarian, their particular qualities, should be thought. Because
bodies, politics, dominance and oppression transform and alter
through time (history) and space (geography) the majoritarian is not
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a self-evident or a priori position, rather it is the particularity of a
moment, however extended or brief, where a specific form of body is
dominant.
• Feminist politics is, however, a form of MOLECULAR POLITICS – it
makes extended connections and forges alliances like a multi-armed
chain of molecules. It is a group assemblage whose connections are
not pre-determined or predictable but forge based on (often
divergent) need, desire and chance
• Woman, non-white, non-hetero: choose to define their very
subjectivity in a similarly molecular way, as a temporal form of
subjectivity where the body is spatially distributed as a teeming
mass forging many connections (the hetero feminist, the lesbian
feminist, the black feminist are but a few rudimentary examples
• It is far easier to define the traditional white male than ‘woman’ or
‘non-white’ or ‘non-hetero’. Even the syntax of these expressions
points to the majoritarian version of subjectivity – white, hetero –
and the ways through which each subject differs from it. The
majoritarian, in definition, is MOLAR because its parameters are
established and confirmed
• The majoritarian is encouraged not to make new and strange
connections, or exist transformatively in time, but rather fulfil a
certain form of subjectivity fixed in space
• Against the majoritarian molar expression ‘I am’ Deleuze and
Guattari suggest the minoritarian molecular expression ‘I become…’
All becomings must be a becoming-minoritarian because all becomings
repudiate cultural arboreal (tree-like) structures of access and power,
value and value-lessness based on any notion of fixed or complete
subjectivity, preferring the more multi-plateaued model of the rhizome
(root or grass like). In this respect becoming is as much about becoming
non-dominant as it is becoming something else.

BODY WITHOUT ORGANS:

• The Body without Organs is a limit – in particular, it is the limit at

which all the flows which constitute the world flow completely freely,
each into the others, so that no distinctions exist among them any
longer
• The desire of a flow to flow unconstrained, is the BwO – the BwO is
real, since the desire is real, in fact, the BwO just is desire – but it is
abstract, for it is a limit: flows are never free, but always interrupted
• Why “Body-without-Organs”? – the absence of organs means the
lack of organization, or the fact that the BwO is not broken down into
parts distinct from each other

DETERRITORIALIZATION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION:

• Territorialization (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) as the 3

outcome of dynamic relations between physical and/or psychosocial
forces
• This general conception is applied to the specific arena of how
meaning is ascribed to the social relations of human life
• Territories and territorializations may be not only physical but also
psychological and spiritual: philosophy and ideology have historically
reterritorialized land as Homeland or Fatherland – these systems of
thought (what Foucault called “discourses”) possess authority, and
as such may deterritorialize and reterritorialize how we think about
the world and about ourselves
• This analysis can be used to articulate how the forces of the social
impinge on individuals or cultures, from the stratification of class,
gender and ethnicity through to the construction of people – in the
realm of health and health behaviour – as “patients” or “risk-takers”
• And because meanings derive from a conceptual realm independent
of the material world it seeks to represent (Derrida 1978), there are
endless possibilities for de- and re-territorialization: language offers
the potential for humans to interpret the world with infinite variety
• People are the continual subjects of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization as their BwOs are inscribed by the forces of the
social – the BwO is the summation of all these myriad
deterritorializations and reterritorializations: it is in this sense that
we might agree with Foucault’s description of the body as totally
imprinted by (its) history
THE NOMADIC SUBJECT:

• The metaphor of the NOMAD exemplifies ABSOLUTE

DETERRITORIALIZATION
• Nomads may follow customary paths, but the points along the way
possess no intrinsic significance for them – they do not mark out
territory to be distributed among people (as with sedentary
cultures), rather people are distributed in an open space without
borders or enclosures
• Nomad space is smooth, without features, and in that sense the
nomad traverses without movement, the land ceases to be other
than support
• Unlike the migrant, the nomad does not leave land because it has
become hostile: rather she clings to the land because it is
undifferentiated from other spaces she inhabits
• NOMADOLOGY is an alternative approach to understanding the
history of civilisation: traditionally, history has been written from the
point of view of the sedentary (remaining in one area, place – not
migratory), from which has grown all the apparatus of the State,
including ‘state philosophy’
• Nomadology multiplies narratives – creating an uninterrupted flow of
deterritorialization which establishes a line of flight away from
territories, grand designs and monolithic institutions 4
• Nomadism must be thought of not as an outcome but as a process,
as a line of flight which continually resists the sedentary, the single
fixed perspective
• A commitment to deterritorialization and the nomad is intrinsically
political, always on the side of freedom, choice and becoming,
always opposed to power, territory and the fixing of identity

RHIZOMATIC SCHIZOANALYSIS

The subject theories attempting to provide the explanation for the

construction of the speaking subject should be seen as the arborescent
system of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, with its stereotypically ordered
and essentialized differentiations.

Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. [...]

This is as much as to say that this system of thought
has never reached an understanding of multiplicity [...].
The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced
by biunivocal relationships between successive circles.
[...] Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still
 dominate psychoanalysis [...], linguistics, structuralism,
and even information science.1

Deleuze and Guattari put on trial and seek to subvert the traditional way
of understanding, which is committed to the division of the world into
systemic, coordinated parts, organizing the strictly defined fixed truth,
knowing subject, and simple representation into hierarchical structures.
The binary logic of the tree model intends to suppress the unstable, plural
nature of things by emphasizing one of its aspects, and pretending that
one feature is capable of summarizing the meaning of the whole.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, this logic is the institutionalization of
the closed system of hierarchical structures. What they propose is a world
of dynamic interconnections instead of the world of stable identities with
internal structures; it is the open model of rhizomatics instead of the
arborescent system.

The fundamental basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of life as

rhizomatics is complexity. Existence within the world is to be mapped2 in
terms of the endless and multiple involvements of things within an
inexorable but dynamic and transitory relationship, and it is the rhizome,
the model of the heterogeneous that offers a mapping of this kind. As they
summarize it, the rhizome

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is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end,
but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and
which it overspills. [...] In connection to centered (even
polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of
communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome
is an acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system
without a General and without an organizing memory or
central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of
states.3

The principal mode of rhizomatic existence is thus becoming, a dynamic

expansion of the possibilities and potentials of acentred and non-
hierarchical ways of existences, with the intension of bypassing
oppositional dualisms, without the intension to fix truth, subjectivity or
representation into an immovable structure. In becoming “there is no

1
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 5.
2
Deleuze and Guattari make a clear distinction between mapping and tracing in relation to the rhizomatic and
arborescent models of the world. According to their differentiation, the rhizome is a map, while to root system
involves tracing. “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual, group, or social formation. [...] A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which
always comes back ‘to the same.’ A map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an
alleged ‘competence.’ [...] What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages,
incipient taproots, or points of structuration.” Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 12-13.
3
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 21.
dualism between the two planes of transcendent organization or
immanent consistence … [w]e do not therefore speak of dualism between
two kinds of ‘things’ but of a multiplicity of dimensions, of lines and
directions in the heart of an assemblage.”4 The theme of becoming
enables an approach towards a revised heterogeneous speaking subject5:
it is a subject whose existence is not static but happens as a constant flux,
whose identity is infinite, moving at least in two directions as well as in
relation to the past and the future simultaneously. This subject exists in
the process of constant border redrawal, which thus provides a means for
subverting those boundaries (of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality,
geographical location, etc.) that have been defined by the ideologically
charged discourses. However, it is not an isolated process: since the
subject exists within the interconnections of rhizomatics, each individual
border redrawal is immersed in the endless play of and on different
surfaces, engendering the heterogeneity of the speaking subject(s). As the
interconnectedness of the speaking subjects in the process of becoming is
explained by Brian Massumi, “[b]ecoming bears on a population, even
when it is initiated by a single body: even one body alone is collective in
its conditions of emergence as well as in its future tendency.”6

The practice through which the endless play of and on different surfaces
can be achieved is that of finding the Body without Organs; it happens
through dismantling the self, evading the constraining norms and ideals of
the ‘official’ construction of the speaking subject, and engendering revised
connections in the form of multiplicity. The Body without Organs is the 6
critique of psychoanalysis, which is seen as a rigidly dictatorial, retarding
and inhibiting truth system: “it subjects the unconscious to arborescent
structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs,
the phallus, the phallus-tree. [...] [I]t bases its own dictatorial power upon
a dictatorial conception of the unconscious.”7 According to psychoanalysis,
the truth of the subject can be traced back to its fundamental and fixed
structures that have been set in place during the Oedipal phase, so that
each individual’s variation on the Oedipal configuration is subordinated to
the authoritative model of psychological development. The psychoanalytic

4
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam trans.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 132-133.
5
Concerning the idea of the subject as conceptualized in poststructuralism, Deleuze and Guattari take the radical
stance of the complete abandonment of the idea of subjectivity. They leave behind the isolated and self-judging
selfhood, and replace it by machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation, since “all
individuated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant signification, all signifying desire is associated
with dominated subjects”. (Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 22.) They take a step further the Foucauldian analysis
of the subject and its interrelationship with power and discourse; in their thought subjectivity comes to be seen as
forced upon us as the product of discourses of power/knowledge and the all-pervasive institutions. Instead of
remaining within the framework of power relations, they think of life as desire: desire as flux, force and
difference, desire that disrupts common sense and everyday life. For the concept of desire see: Deleuze and
Guattari, op. cit., 149-166.
Nevertheless, although my intension is to use their theory as the basic critical framework of my analysis, I will
keep the term of the heterogeneous speaking subject, but, as it will be elucidated later, with a content revised
from the perspective of feminist and postcolonialist theories.
6
Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
(Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1992), 102.
7
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 17.
interpretation of the unconscious is the imposition of the psychoanalytic
phantasy on it.8 The alternative offered by Deleuze and Guattari is
schizoanalysis, which regards the unconscious as an acentered system, as
a rhizome, without the intension to interpret it: on the contrary, the “issue
is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different
desires”.9 The unconscious of the schizoanalysis is not a reflection of
something lost or lacking, but the endless play of connections and
impulses, the production of new and different desires, the Body without
Organs.10

8
Their critique of psychoanalysis takes as its target the colonization of the unconscious by the Oedipus complex,
which develops and affirms as set of dualistic oppositions such as the masculine and feminine, subject and
object, presence and lack. Psychoanalytic discourse conceptualizes the Other as “the term in relation to which
objects are recognized, and the concept which opposes and constitutes the subject.” Catherine Driscoll, “The
Woman in Process: Deleuze, Kristeva and Feminism,” in Ian Buchanan & Claire Colebrook eds., Deleuze and
Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 66.
9
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., 18.
10
In Rosi Braidotti’s words: “If the unconscious means anything, in fact, it is precisely the guarantee against a
return to the traditional idea that the subject is one, full, self-transparent entity, governed by the laws of rational
discourse.” Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, Elizabeth Guild trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 35-
36.