The trouble with rhizomes’ points of entry is that there are so many of them. And the trouble with metaphor is the impossibility of its identical reproduction in another medium. Meta- reproduces and refers to itself ad infinitum, reducing into an abstraction that, in its extensiveness, cannot be thoroughly mapped through a single panoramic gaze. If everything were trees, three-dimensional, maybe then we could grasp a concept and contain it, turn it over, and make tracings that aren’t anemic for their being closed. But it isn’t. Everything is flat, units of meaning are not discrete, everything is contingent, and nothing is proscribed. Better representative of the uncontainable force of desire, in nature, is not the arboreal--not a traceable, terminal branching--but the entangled root-mass of the RHIZOME. It is according to this structure, or anti-structure (a structure that is not pre-determinable, one not constrained by locate-able cause and effect, one able to incorporate unnamable multiplicities and the limitless accretion of all their attendant laws) that Deleuze and Guattari argue we ought to think about in considering the Book, in its relation to the World, as well as about linguistics, politics--in short, everything that experiences/directs planar movements between desires/drives within territories (spatial, and of bodies). There are no binaries, no easy dichotomies that entrench ideology by covering and re-covering the same classical ground. There is only the Rhizome. (Except that D&G have effectively set up a new dialectic in that very move to disestablish them all.)
The ambitiousness of this metaphor lies in the troublesome tension between vehicle and tenor.
I want desperately to be able to discern, to trace, the template of the Rhizome from botany to G&D’s philosophy. But in appropriating the Rhizome, the apparatus itself discurses in rhizomatic fashion; replication isn’t possible. The metaphor adds a porousness, a means of entry, not a crystallizing reduction.
Laura Dern’s character(s) in Inland Empire—Nikki and Sue—slips into rabbit holes of other dimensions, traverses the simultaneity of all potentialities. She is Artaud’s Actress, a body without organs, registering multiple elevations of the psycho- and the somatic, on the perpetual threshold of immanence—but never arriving at transcendence—which, according to G&D, would effectively kill the Rhizome, by marking an end, closing the system. The stratification of texts/stories in IE (Axxon N, the longest-running radio-play in history, the polish-gypsy folk tale as the basis for the original screenplay, never finished, reconstituted as the remake) reconstitute themselves like the orchid and the bee: “interlink[ing] and form[ing] relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (10).
This endless (be)coming. These lines of flight. Do they imply a conscious agency?
What does asexual reproduction have to do with all this?
Simply put, I found a great deal to agree with in this introduction; the metaphor of the creeping rootstalk RE: literature is a very clever one, though I think to my mind it’s all a bit rhetorically overdressed in this reading.
ReplyDeleteA lot of what I enjoyed related a bit to Joyelle’s question last week of similarities / connections / lack there of / etc. between Zurita and Reines; inevitably, at least to me, or rather the opposite of inevitably, immediately, these always strike me as questions to which we always already know the answer—of course there are, one just has to look hard enough, think hard enough, talk long enough, want enough for there to be. I think this is fair of me to think but to take it the step further of ‘well then it’s a silly / pointless question’ misses the real point that it’s not important whether one reader (or a workshop of them) can see connections, as it would seem safe to say that any reasonably ambitious (or even lamely ambitious in many cases) group of artistic / intellectual individuals will certainly find as many connections as minutes spent ruminating on whether they are there or not. So the real point would seem to not be a question of existence but more of the endeavor of looking itself, the discourse that leads to and then comes out of that looking. This has the interesting effect of spawning more complicated questions, such as whether or not any one (or any dozen) of those discourses (on any text or texts, in relation to each other or not) is necessarily worthwhile when judged on its own spawning root—that is to say, is it important that we compare Zurita and Reines more so than if we compared Clifford the Big Red Dog and If You Give A Mouse A Cookie? Theoretically the intellectual, Sisyphean boulder-pushing is what’s really important, does it matter what the boulder is made out of? I got to all of this basically thinking on this metaphor of the rhizome, and any (every? yes every) text as a spawning point, potentially—grow your own, the plant doesn’t care what color pot you place it into, just water it, etc. A broad and diverse landscape of reading in this context then is mainly important it would seem purely for a sense of complication as its own worth, and while all of this thinking feels troublesome in a way I can’t quite identify, it all seems a sound enough assertion…
What I love more so, though, is the reinforcement of my own philosophies, i.e. the multifaceted nature of any text, basically having as many facets as there are readers, and so on. This is to me what defeats any artistic notions of intention, message, persuasion, agenda, (witness one must ask?), sense of responsibility (this very current Rankine / Hoagland nonsense seems apropos here but I’ll not digress fully), and so on. My reading of ‘rhizome’ seems to center on this notion—texts without subjects or objects. It’s not even so much to say that New Criticism / whoever might have it right or wrong, because that line will just never be drawn in any objective way—much like our ‘are there connections between X and Z?’ discoursing, if there’s any intrinsic ‘state of being correct’ to be found I’d probably only accept that it’s in that one asks the question / does the thinking / takes Critical Approach Ab1 at all, the only ‘wrong’ state to be one not generated at all, though if it can be accepted that it’s pretty much okay to just not think about XY or Z, or to ignore books 1 2 and 3, then even that’s really a wash. Do you think Zurita needs external knowledge? If yes, there’s a facet (root spreading)! Do you think no? Another! Do you not care? Another! Zurita who? Another! Facets everywhere, it’s as infinite as any other artistic landscape. I’m sold.
ReplyDeleteThis will always cause interesting problems, specifically related (another recent Joyelle rhizome of discussion) RE: genre, and how it’s an eternally necessary yet eternally problematic idea. Almost no piece of art will ever properly fall completely into a genre (except for genre-fiction, but it’s its own exception it would seem, perhaps?), with most other books (‘good ones’, you know) will resist them to some extent, some brilliantly, some a bit flatly (generally the ones whose genre is, we might suppose, to remind us all of the once-clever notion that genres are breakable). I say eternally necessary because humans seem as hardwired for categorizing as much as as reproducing, so it goes. Mostly we make our best stab at it, and add in genre as its own rhizoming mechanism as we debate which genre should be used in a given case while of course rhizoming off (flying off with intensity, etc.) on how lame genres are for attempting to do…well, basically what we need them to do. The salvation might be that while we’ll never get away from in whatever ways putting books into boxes, we do have much more liberation RE: how much we worry about if a book is in the right box, after all that ‘right’ box is just another facet unique in so many ways to that one reader. Inevitably this just takes up residence in the boulder-pushing, which is probably fine considering we’re all basically here because we love pushing boulders & are really gearing up to drop our own on the world.
when I was little I was obsessed with trees and fractal patterns. I used to justify “thinking time” by filling entire notebooks with fractal patters. I was obsessed with their simultaneous flatness and depth, the way they opened up a page but also a dimension of thought in the repetition of the always expanding and changing pattern. I was also obsessed with trees. I think I have probably always been obsessed with rhizomes but I had never before encountered the term, which makes me feel incredibly lame as someone who’s supposed to be critically engaged, which is necessary now but especially now.
ReplyDeletelately I have been obsessed with the outsides of things like books and dolls and people and I have been wondering about the bodies of objects and their agency and I have been wondering about what it is like to be an object with a body in any particular point in space or time and I wonder if I am such an object and I think that I am not.
one time recently I was at a bar and I tried to explain to several people this idea that we are all many people existing on multiple and intersecting but separate planes of reality and I think a lot of people thought I was ridiculous but I think that perhaps deleuze and guattari would not think I was ridiculous.
it is really hard for me to talk about the rhizome because when I read it I felt like I was reading a transcription of a thought that was already & had always been central to my concept of reality but had never been translated.
it is really hard for me to talk about inland empire because it was terrifying to me in a really tangible way. inland empire went straight to the fearpit of my stomach because it lives inside of the crisis of the unarticulated concept of the rhizome. the crisis has something to do with the collision of bodies & screens & spectral consciousnesses. it has something to do with one’s inability to properly parce out the nature of existing in the world at any given moment.
this is a performative crisis. an actress must be aware of every medium & media that is acting upon or through her. she must be aware of her existence inside of a body. but in inland empire the actress loses track of her body & it’s location in time/space. she has become aware of the holes in her reality as in all realities and as such is constantly in a state of horror. as she moves through these realities the film does too and the medium of film becomes inadequate, to a point, and that’s when it starts to feel Real, as in, traumatic, because there is a sense of Unity, which can only appear when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity of the signifier. we are in the scene where they are filming the scene between the actress and the asian street urchin and there are so many screens involved and after all of the gestures of the preceding effects this dialogue, this text, feels incredibly real because it is flat, we can read it, it is inhabiting everything that it is and has sucked the viewer into it and there is a great trauma.
a book is a rhizome to the world. so an actress, so a performer, so a human is a book which is a rhizome to the world, so a human is a text. so a text is a body. so a language is a consciousness. a weed that exists “only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas” (19). a rhizome is the production of the unconsciousness (18). so reality produces and reproduces itself. so it eats and digests itself and infects itself and multiplies. so it is fruitful multiplies it.
“RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS
ReplyDeleteeven if the people have other things to do besides read it,
even if the blocks of academic culture…are still to painful
or ponderous…”(24)
so we talk in workshop and we talk at bars and we talk in blog posts and poems and we gain access to these points on this rhizome which is a sort of zeitgeist which is a happening that one day someone else might know happened and our texts mingle and infect and expand and there are more points of access because we read more texts or maybe it’s like we devour more bodies we cannibalize and we have other things to do but we read it,
we do.
“Where are you going?
Where are you coming from?
Where are you headed?
These are totally useless questions.” (25)
& we expand, incidentally, from these questions, which are the ones or very similar ones to those joyelle asked us on the first day of class. and since then we’ve read and talked and blogged and written about a lot of things and opened up new points of access by consuming & digesting simultaneously anachronistic and seeming unrelated texts like bataille&artaud&coleridge&keats and zurita&the cow. so I don’t think these questions are at all useless. but perhaps answering them is.
Thanks, all, for a great discussion thus far. I’m especially intrigued by Carina’s point about the “performative crisis” at play in Inland Empire—the way media acts upon the body of the actress and “creates holes in her reality,” which creates a feeling of realness as film becomes insufficient as a medium (for the girl "losing track of her body," as Carina suggests). Here I wonder how the physical wounds (especially the especially intimate and aggressive screwdriver wounds, as well as the marks on Sue’s face as traces of violence) might factor into this crisis (the wounds themselves seem to transmit information or violence—communicating the effects of hypnosis in the case of Billy's wife, etc.—creating rupture in the physical sense, as well as a kind of seeping or perhaps more transmutative quality when Susan’s husband’s shirt is soaked with ketchup at the bbq, etc.). Do the wounds in Inland Empire indicate a kind of bouncing back of this horror—a kind of violent static (certainly Laura Dern’s facial expressions throughout the video register/project terror, and the woman watching the video leaks with vulnerability)—a kind of curse (porousness/punctures in violence—embryo and stabbing—a crowding of corporeal space, at least on one plane here)?
ReplyDeleteThe dialogue operates in such a way as to suggest a shattering, breaking—but “starting up again in old or new lines”—as does media—Susan calls Billy and the phone rings in the rabbits’ apartment, etc.—like the leaping of messages across fissures in the brain, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest (9, 15). For example, too,-- in LD’s death scene, the girl next to her discusses her friend Neko and the hole leaking/linking her intestines to/through her vaginal wall—and this seems unrelated to the dialogue occurring (the man next to her says as much)—but Neko (Nicco?) materializes in the final scene—out of this wound/rupture/fissure?). The needle on the record wounds—or sounds music playing across/(mis)firing the brain’s synapses. Just as the mention of Mad Cow disease in The Cow (a text which operates by accretion) infects and fills the brain with holes, we find ourselves looking through the (cigarette) hole(s) in the fabric of Inland Empire (similarly, I think, when LD tells of the chemicals released into the air in the hometown of someone she used to sleep with as she is talking to the man in the small room at the top of the stairs, I almost want to—but can’t—connect this information with the blurring of movie/”reality,” etc).
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of antimemory or short-term memory as something involving forgetting in its process seems crucial to Inland Empire, as Laura Dern's position cannot be plotted—she is, as Elizabeth notes, “on a perpetual threshold of immanence” (16,21). Sue asks the girls to tell her if they’ve “known her before”; she is trying to place herself. But again, as others have pointed out, space and time work strangely here. The old lady who visits Nikki’s house at the beginning (and end) of IE enables or is created from vibrations in planes, when she tells the (twin) fairy tale(s) about the birth of evil (her house might be unreachable by the street, seems to exist elsewhere). Similarly, the set/sound stage opens up connections (lines of flight?)—the video shooting means that we’re always seeing things in the middle (as well as in construction)—since we can’t be certain where the set ends (furthermore, these passageways are disconnected—making them plateaus within a rhizome—Devon chases Nikki out of time in the alley, Sue’s set house emerges for her, the rabbits hear the men speaking in the hotel, the girls dancing are projected into the set/space (as if) from Nikki’s mind—these movements, ruptures, etc. are perhaps less the passing of time than a kind of nervousness, anxiety).
The reading and movie this week deal with my two favorite ideas, time and identity. Both of these concepts are layered and loaded. But according to our cultural norms they appear linear and in some ways transparent.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of the middle in Rhizome, because isn’t that the only part of time we ever know? I can’t speak to my birth, and most likely won’t be able to speak of my death. I only know of my birth what others tell me, and the same might be true for my death. So the only thing left is everything that is in the middle, and the middle is layered with simultaneous realities, relationships and memories.
We are only the interactions we accumulate. So identity is built and constructed through time. Identity is transitory and interchangeable based on time and social situation. Inland Empire, illustrates the complexity of identity within the various realities or rabbit holes. One thing that stuck me in the film was the cardboard character effect in so many scenes. The film would flip into a scene that seemed really authentic only to hear someone shout cut. I’m not sure what to make of that but found it interesting that as the movie progressed, it seemed that only the Niki character seemed perpetually authentic. And seeing she was the main actor could that be a commentary on how individual identity is experienced?
Is our experience what feels real in the midst of the surreal, because it is the only one we experience? The dialogue of the film was more of people speaking at one another. Conversations for the most part had no real connection to the context of the scene or other speakers. It reminded me of some study/research done on how people involved in conversations listen and respond. It concluded we don’t really listen to other people. We only listen to what others say, so we can speak of what we want and when others are speaking, we are formulating what we want to say rather than listening. There are so many parts of the film that could support this idea, like, the scene when Niki is dying. The one woman took it as an opportunity to talk about her friend who lives in Poloma, the bus situations and the hole in her uterus.
Which brings me back to the idea of identity and stage work. I’ve talked about the idea that we are constantly involved in performances and within these performances we are projecting our identity. Since we are involved in many performances there is never just one us….hence the multiplicity of self. Inland Empire shows this process literally, but also adds that our performances are all being played at the same time.
As Jen said each of these performances are in the middle. But I think it also speaks beyond the middle, in a way, to the Eternal Return, which is referenced in the Rhizome. The Eternal Return is Nietzsche’s idea about time, and that time is always occurring at once, the past, present and future. If we take the Eternal Return and bring it into our own identity, it would mean that within ourselves we are the past, present and future. We hold the collective identities or multiplicities of time. The Rhizome is truly infinite, and it is the infinite that is played out in language. I’m not sure how well it plays out in language because language has to be too linear, but I digress. Something I fear this entire blog post is…
Identity is constructed by experience and experience is connected to memory and memory to time. And all of these things are connected to a collective consciousness of past to future. Hum, think I need to stop now, because I’m getting all up in my head with notions of eternity and there is no singular self within time.
I am publishing this post right after my Theater and Theory class, so I am thinking a lot about Nazis. Near the end of the Intro, D&G write that the rhizome “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, and capture.” The Rhizome, to me at least, embodies the shrill Hitler/poet who screams about “mobile tactics.” Versatility seems to a bulwark of the rhizome, and I think the ability to maintain flexibility is very important to the poet as well. I do not want to get bogged writing about on aesthetic or stuck to one diction: I want it all. I want Polish, Britain, and Russia. Maybe, Napoleon couldn’t capture it: but I sure can. There is no language restricted to me. If I want to use a word, then I will.
ReplyDeleteI feel like D&G wrote this especially for me. The rhizome is endless. It has no family, limits or stable territory. D&G at one point compare the rhizome ethos to Indians. Now when someone says Indians it makes me think of children playing Cowboys and Indians. Of course, the children aren’t actually Cowboys and Indians, just as the rhizome can’t actually be a tree, or an imperialist: that would restrain it. The rhizome has no limits. It is constantly receiving new thoughts and ideas. It’s like the boy who obsessively reads Goosebumps and watches every Nickelodeon show so as not to get left behind. The boy is never content: he always wants more! More books, more TV, more language. There is no beginning or end: there is simply motion. The boy has a lot in common with the rhizome! So does the bratty girl: as Reines writes: “GO GO.” When you want to conquer the world/language, one mustn’t resort to pragmatic speech and compromise. That is psychoanalysis. That is stagnation – inaction. It’s sitting down and “talking” about all that you’ve been through and all that’s happened to you and how you’re mummy/daddy sort of molested you way back when. No! Never mind what’s happened. If you’re thinking about the past you are not assembling, gathering new items and ideas. You’re merely holding on to what you already have. One must march forward. I mean, yeah it’s great that you gassed 3,000 Jews today. But there’s so many more Jews! One doesn’t have time to look back. As O’Hara says in Personism: you just run and let the bodies fall where they may. There’s always more books that need to be read, more movies need to be watched. Who cares what happens to all the humdrum humans: just interact with thoughtfulness! Don’t be snared by individuality! You – single you – are unimportant. How unattractive: someone fussing over a single candy bar compared to someone splashing around in a pile of innumerous sweets. The latter is obviously going to have more to work with. That’s what I want: multitudinous.
Boundaries make me wretch. I practically begged my mummy and daddy to molest me. Not because I was sexually attracted to them, but because it’s an impediment, a restriction: it’s in my way! Before he invaded Poland, Hitler declared that the Nazis methods “will not be compatible with our normal principles.” This is my kind of boy. Normality causes me such woe: it is the working class, it is neolibrialism sexuality, it is respect, tolerance, property rights. We must upend the status quo. We must engender violations. Well, you say, then how does violating not simply become the-thing-to-do? Well, that’s the point: it can’t. The rhizome has no beliefs or values, no object or subject: it merely is. It’s exists in a negative capacity. You can restrict to “violation,” because it will violate the violation. It’s not a Regan Democrat or a Fiscal Conservative: it’s a monster who can eat anything: buildings, people, automobiles, itself. You can’t kill him. Scary movies always have sequels!
ReplyDeleteDistinctions don’t matter to the monster/rhizome/boy/bratty girl/Hitler/poet. It all comes to down to one, incalculable utterance: “It’s mine!” In Inland Empire, I had vexations figuring out if what was happening was happening in the “movie” or in “real-life.” When LD died on the sidewalk, did she die in the “movie” or in “real-life.” But who cares about binaries? They only give you two options. The rhizome can’t be categorized by one or two words: Everything is at its disposal, and like AR, I want everything too!
(IN some kind of CONVERSATION w/ my LATE TO the PARTY post on THE COW)
ReplyDelete-“What time is it?” garners the most laughs on bunny rabbit show with assume to be out of whatever world it is of. Like “Teletubbies” are not of this world.
-Bodies are the unit of time. Like in THE COW. We follow these bodies, these DETERRITORIALIZED bodies through the space of this movie within a movie, as they are the only unit. Real vs. unreal slips away taking with it measurements of the space of occurrences (time) and so the occurrences bleed into each other. Bodies are the only true existence....not even the accessory personalities are stable.
- “The rhizome is altogether different, a map not a tracing.” Just as the body in the COW was only defined through its absence to time is but an outline.
-Characters demeanors are like volleyballs in conversation: in the sitting room in the home of Laura Dern, Dern seems standoffish as if the guest is not welcome but power quickly shifts to crazy polish lady and the way she lifts those eyebrows. Dern reacts to landing a part (as the time shifts as lady says) as to a murder (as aided by the music).
-THE ORIGINAL MOVIE WAS STARTED BUT NEVER FINISHED
-I THOUGHT THIS WAS AN ORIGINAL NOT A COUNTERFEIT
-Not finished because two leads were murdered.
-(SHE understands more than she lets on BUT don’t speak it)
-When we (the audience) doesn’t know where a new character came from neither does the character themselves nor to whom they are introduced. Rhizomatic identity in that it could be coming from any direction with any semblance of connection/ disconnection to anyone or no one.
-ARE THEY FILMING A FUCKING SCENE?
-Was the butler always Polish? Real vs. anti-real butler. Servants/ low end of totem pole in same space on rhizome maybe but definitely always
-The denaturalized space of “the set” becomes timeless…narrative passes wrong….musical cues add moroseness + incite mystery at times when seemingly inappropriate….Reines: “All time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning.”
-Southern accent? who the fuck is her husband again? (+ Freeform film with a meta commitment to scripts…the living is temporal is….)Are the characters or the actors going on the date? “I’ll see you after the shoot” signals an acceptance of the date by the actor and yet that acceptance comes in the demeanor of the character….a conflation of the two…..time is nonexistent, like time traces the outline of a body in THE COW an absence exists between the two as an absence exists in the person (thus the space/time continuum) that is Laura Dern’s character….”My husband will kill you if he finds out….that sounds like a line from our script” followed by a cut and we in the unstable unnamed unknown zone between time & being & bodies.
ReplyDelete-Time then again is RHIZOMATIC- resists dualism which linearity and thereby causality would bestow.
-Husband sees her fucking costar? As they find inside/outside each other’s bodies/light shadows cast over set in a vortex/ they are inside outside the movie as she prattles about the parking space scene they filmed yesterday which is tomorrow
-“SOMEONE IS OVER THERE” (when it occurs) SIGNALS A BREAK (could be falsely linked w/ Freudian id etc) WHEREIN THE PERSON EXISTS SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THEIR MULTIPLICITIES…body loses status as a vessel, becomes itself a hole. Spaces (such as houses) imitate this invagination such that set house becomes actresses’ house. (& thus we see two Laura Derns, one seated, one on the set)
-Deleuze & Guattarri maintain their names “to make (themselves) unrecognizable in turn.” Dern can only defamiliarize from familiar constructs like time by maintaining the character of her character and the character of herself simultaneously. (As she flashbacks?/hallucinates? to the women HE had slept with, the absences/holes of all of these entities collide into a knowingness.) WHEN YOU OPEN YOUR EYES SOMEONE FAMILIAR WILL BE THERE (even if you have not known them before! {time folds unto & out of}).
-PHONOGRAPH SPIN AGAIN signals a different part of the same part of the same place we’ve already never been. (A Milk Debt?)
-D&G: “The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers…because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity.” (MAKE A FUCKIN HOLE_
-I am fishing in a school of fish that all look different same their names GENRE/TIME/NATIONALISM/BODIES/ETC
This is still way too arborescent.
ReplyDeletethis is something like a manifesto I made after digesting the rhizome + inland empire + some rad disability theory I found + neitzche's birth of tragedy + wagner's artwork of the future + some other stuff
ReplyDeleteTHE THEATRE OF LUXURY
Like Trish, I'm drawn and attracted to the idea of the middle as well, for similar reasons, and also because I am forever a proponent of rejecting reading methods that insist on a starting or ending point, as I'm pretty certain that this defeats the purpose of anyone reading a text other than whichever writer full of intention reading over their own work. As I told a class of undergrads last week, 'if you tell me specifically to google something before I read your work, f that, I'm not going to.' A more intuitive reading and writing insists on this constantly growing, shifting thing, insists that we’re always in the middle or on either side of a growing and gnarling infinite set of branches—and validates each branch.
ReplyDeleteLike Carina and Ryan both, this definitely comes back to the idea of the question of comparing texts and doing away with genre and such. I certainly agree that connections will be made if there is an insistence on connections, because we’re all living and writing in the middle of the rhizome. As much as I really am not a fan of Reines, inevitably, I connect to her, and so on. So we’re all in the middle of this conversation as much as Reines and Zurita are; to compare those two is to compare me and Reines is to compare Reines and Hitler and so on. But I’m curious about, like Ryan brings up, what we do when we’ve reached the point at which the answers to those questions don’t matter so much, and we know what it is to ask the question. If such a point exists. I don’t know.
I am intrigued by the rhizome as a means by which not only to think of a poetic landscape at large, one in which every text grows inward and outward and into each other and out of each other, but also by its botanical way of kind of putting everything under a very intertwined umbrella together, forcing us to think of ourselves as in conversation with each other. I think that this is a step toward something that has recently (err, rather, within the past 2 years) been always on my mind—in encountering texts and writers that insist on separating themselves as somehow ‘different’ or ‘better’ than others, a reading through the rhizome seems to resist that in favor of a landscape where branches are branches are branches even if they’re far apart.
Inland Empire – I’ll admit, I didn’t rewatch this, so if my memory is a little tenuous, I’m very sorry (saw it in a film class as an undergrad, where Lynch was basically every day).
This is intensely of-the-rhizome in its looping in and out of realities/times/spaces, in its seemingly endless rabbitholes w/ Laura Dern as the equally slippery traveler through. I find her character fascinatingly generic in her way, and she becomes the object of these rabbitholes, the object of the film’s rhizomeness. In thinking about the film botanically, I am super intrigued (and was the first time around) by the music…typically Lynch-y, but more of a steering force for this one. I found the music very fluid, slipping in and out seamlessly while the film itself kind of continues to cut holes and send us through. The sound of the film becomes sort of like D&G’s branches for me—a linking force, a connective force—here, imposing a connection aurally while we’re getting one intellectually, and it becomes a kind of synesthesia experience for me. <3, also, that “Ghost of Love” is Lynch singing through some kind of a machine.
I am completely feverish at the moment, but this is not an apology; it’s a statement made to make you jealous.
ReplyDeleteFinding a place to start talking about The Rhizome/Inland Empire feels like an almost insurmountable task—or a wall where the best method of crossing is chipping out a tiny hole in the mortar and oozing oneself through. That is, you have to change first before you can move forward. As Jen notes in her very first line, “the trouble with rhizomes’ points of entry is that there are so many of them”. In this case, the introduction (and the film) go beyond mere text (although that feels derogatory, so perhaps “standard” might be another word for it) in an effort to undo reality as we see it—or are forced to see it by the traditional, “linear unity” of word, knowledge, visual perception (i.e., in the form of digital imaging or ink on a page in a virtual reproduction on a screen). Because there are so many points of entry, so many concepts condensed, layered, ever-changing, never-there-in-the-first-place, lurking inside the Rhizome, entry itself becomes almost impossible. Ideas singularly jump out at me while reading it—as individual images in Inland Empire did—and yet what I should be seeing here is a totality (or, excepting that possibility, a multiplicity [those two are not different things, actually]) a circular conveyance of ideas backward, forward, and in unseesable dimensions, constantly changing, “continually dismantling”, unattributable.
All of that is a roundabout way of saying that while I found both the Rhizome and Inland Empire massively intriguing on both a theoretical and base construction level, there remains about them something which (perhaps purposefully) locks me out, so that what I grasp is not the sum of the parts—the rhizome as a whole, the film as a consummate artwork—but the bare edges of both, the parts of the dark sea of nonlinear information that is not affected by undertow; the least dangerous of the concepts presented. I don’t think I can do any better than that in a week, unfortunately. I’m not brave enough to really let myself be drowned by these works because I don’t trust them to ever let me back up (and I don’t think they’d want to be trusted in the first place).
So here’s my faltering attack on a single point of entry. On page six of the introduction, Deleuze and Guattari note that “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object…We will never ask what a book means, as signified and signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it.” As Ryan brought up, the sense here is one of New Criticism in an extreme—purportedly eschewing not only context but meaning itself, the very idea that words stand in for any tangible objects outside (or inside) the mind. This is a kind of criticism or way of life that asks for nothing outside of “intensities” (6), connections to other books/multiplicities/“planes of consistency”, where the construction as a whole “through literature” is not the sum of parts but the mover of those parts, a machine which operates, though never independently, nevertheless free of direct analysis or the possibility of deconstruction and reconstruction into the same machine.
ReplyDeleteSo how do you talk about a book like this, a text or film like this, where what matters is not the construction or the theme but the dualistic/“several” organic blend of content and form (these are two words meaning the exact same thing now) which cannot be discussed separately and therefore cannot really be discussed at all? There is no end or beginning point, no unraveled string that can be used to magically pull the entire structure apparent. There is just the whole, which we can hold in our hands like we could hold rats and burrows and underground stems. I honestly thought I had an answer to this question when I started writing this paragraph but now I realize I don’t because there isn’t really any answer at all. Looking for an answer is the wrong way to go about it anyway.
The words themselves mean nothing. The ultimate message which we will never look for means nothing, whether it exists at all in the first place. So let’s talk about intensities. For me, and it seems for some others reading this work, the intensity seems to be in the piling on, the revealing of more and more entry points into this circular knowledge/language with no hope of ever ultimately entering, the permanent suspense which even quantifying as “permanent” does damage to. Jen’s “endless (be)coming” (and don’t we all know by now that I’m fascinated by that?) There is additional upon addition upon addition (subtraction only of “the one”) to the almost frantic declaration of/expounding upon the metaphor so that the meanings themselves are lost, the rhizome being not an underground stalk or language or method for understanding literature but some Cthulu-esque chimera of them all and everything else too—here the draw, the intensity of the text is itself the desperate construction (and breakdown, in many meanings) of the metaphor of the rhizome—if we do not look for understanding what we are left with is a constant and terrible sense of motion toward an end which will never, ever be reached. The Rhizome might as well be the prime sponsor for Zeno’s race (if only their non-existent ideologies weren’t so different).
And it is this “endless (be)coming” which ultimately makes the text interesting for me. Regardless of wording or of form, The Rhizome makes its argument most effectively for me by doing—by rejecting the traditional, singular analogies of signifier and signified, by disturbing meaning and metaphor so much that it is no longer sought after, by directing the reader not into a linear flow of ideas, knowledge, or language but into a tumultuous burrow, a rat in a pack, a rhizome of intensity packed as tightly as flour ready to ignite.
It already sounds like mad rambling to me and I’m half-unconscious, so I’m going to stop there. It’s going to take me all semester to shift through all this, I think.
I was really confused by the rhizome in a logical way but it seems to make sense to me in an internal intuitive way. I was thinking about the rhizome in relation to the way the way the images in Inland Empire move – the digging through the ground and popping up in the most unexpected places – in the sense that we end up in the strangest places it seems especially with regard to LD – and this folding in of her and her character becoming confused in identity and time. Given the structure of rhizomes and the rhizome there is a sense of the unpredictable – never knowing what the rhizome will breach. This really struck me when trying to track the images in IE. The rabbits – so surreal – seem to come out of nowhere – and their connection to the prostitute and her crying seem amorphous and cryptic – especially the laughter that follows the rabbits’ script. The disconnectedness in trying to trace images/scenes through IE seems particularly root-ball-ish – the containedness of the film almost makes it a root-bound rhizome- one that grew up out of the ground from another but instead of branching kept growing around and into itself. I felt like I was in a tangled mass when I watched Blue Velvet as well – and to a certain extent Twin Peaks – though I think that TP has more of a direct narrative thread than either film.
ReplyDeleteI really like the metaphor of the rhizome though I found D&G’s logic somewhat difficult to follow – though if I am honest – surely reading it over and over it again would help – though from my understanding of plants – this metaphor works really well – though I am not necessarily sure how to relate it – consciously/logically – beyond that – beyond an intuitive understanding. I agree with what they say about the book and assemblage – though at the same time I wondered why “assemblage” and not “collage” when they’re so similar though one deals more with objects – and offer more dimensionality than a flat collage of paper cut-outs, etc. and bodies without organs – are these the sacks that we are? Like the layers of actress, playing an actress and the character that that actress is playing? I guess layering is not quite the right term there – moreso a rhizomatic structure of not-I? I am honestly feeling uncomfortable with my understanding of intro to the rhizome and with grasping IE. Lynch almost always feels at the tips of my fingers but not quite there - and I am feeling the same with D&G.