Introduction: Rhizome
Introduction, paragraph 7
And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... The interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns."3 An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.
Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later... you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.
Strike the pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhizome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.
Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph).
It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism... We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models.
These drawings are part of the Drawing a Thousand Plateaus project, a methodical, visual interpretation of the modern philosophy book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari. The diagrams are created as a means of understanding the ideas being presented in the book.
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