by Patrick Simpson
Originally published April 19, 2023
It’s been long enough. This blog needs to see the light of day. I’ve sat with this idea for several months now (maybe several years, if I include my previous attempts at making blogs), and I need to make it happen now. For that, I need to explain my purpose. What do I want this blog to be? Or, more importantly, what do I want it to do?
To start: Experiments in the Rhizome is my small attempt to reclaim a vision of the internet that was prevented from reaching its full potential. The early internet was a wildly democratic, anarchic space. The possibilities seemed endless: it was to be a decentralized network for the spread of information on an unprecedented scale.
And at first, this is what the early internet looked like: a decentralized network of websites (emphasis on “site;” these felt like places), some run by universities and governments and other official institutions, some run by 13-year-olds with the right technical know-how. All websites existed on the same plane: hyperlinks (a core structural feature of the internet) allowed “travel” from site to site with virtually no friction. The usual gatekeepers lost much of their power to exclude—there was a remarkably expanded accessibility both to information from institutional authorities and to doing intellectual and creative work outside of them. The Hampster Dance to a personal blog to NASA.gov: radical democracy in action.
Existing within capitalism, however, meant that this radical democracy was always tenuous, and we have seen a radical shift toward centralization and enclosure in the last two decades with the rise of tech and social media monopolies: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and the Big Daddy, Google. If you want to exist on the internet, you have to do it on their terms.
This would not be so much of a problem if these companies were a little less ambitious—if all they did was provide a service for the people (like me) who are completely clueless about computer science and wouldn’t know where to start if they wanted to, for example, upload videos online. YouTube is not the worst offender when it comes to questionable corporate strategy among social media monopolies—how it splits ad revenue with creators is far more equitable than most other platforms (looking at you, TikTok). However, YouTube is still a private corporation with a profit motive, and the site is structured accordingly. It’s not just a platform for videos—it wants to monopolize its users’ time through unprecedentedly sophisticated behavioral manipulation via algorithmic recommendation of videos, which, of course, is what leads to greater profit (through, for example, ad revenue). Surveillance capitalism: the more you watch, the more predictive data YouTube has about you, which gives investors a strong incentive either to sell that data or use it to keep you watching longer (hopefully, exposing you to more ads). Shoshana Zuboff (who invented the term “surveillance capitalism” in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) calls these “behavioral futures markets.” This is old news for anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time online in the past several years.
Experiments in the Rhizome is an attempt to subvert these centralized, capitalist structures; structures that threaten our autonomy as human beings, as Zuboff correctly argues. The blog should grow like a weed, infiltrating the walled gardens of the tech monopolies. It should demonstrate that the way the internet is now is not the only way it can be—that we can return to an internet where you never know where you might end up by following a trail of hyperlinks. I admit I have borrowed nostalgia for the early internet (I barely saw the tail-end of it, being born in 2000) and that this is part of the inspiration for what I’m doing here, but I see this blog primarily as a movement forward, not backward. We need to look to the past to see how the future can be different.
My model for radical decentralization of power and knowledge is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which they explain in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A “rhizome” (a botanical term for a decentralized root structure, like ginger root) is the opposite of an “arborescent” structure (i.e., a tree).
Deleuze and Guattari outline six key characteristics of the rhizome—at least, to the extent that the verb “outline” can be appropriately applied to anything Deleuze and Guattari do in A Thousand Plateaus.
The first and most important characteristic for Experiments in the Rhizome is the principle of connection: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.” The blog will achieve this through hyperlinks. The hyperlink as a structural object poses some specific limitations (for example, it only leads to the next website; you can’t travel backwards unless you use the back arrow), but it will function well enough for our purposes. The point is to connect what is normally not connected. Everything should exist on the same radically flattened plane of immanence.
The second is the principle of heterogeneity. This is related to the principle of connection; it only further emphasizes the point that what is connected in a rhizome is heterogeneous. It’s all about the intensity of difference.
The third is the principle of multiplicity. A rhizome is not merely a network—a network is “multiple,” but the rhizome is “multiplicitous.” This is perhaps the point at which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept most fundamentally departs from the structure of the internet, even in its early days. I still feel as though I don’t have a full grasp of the significance of their distinction between the “multiple” and the “multiplicitous,” but my current understanding is that the multiplicitous exists in multiple dimensions. For example, one might think of literary fiction as a network of interrelated texts, and this would be multiple but not multiplicitous. On the other hand, if one were to connect the plane of that network to other networks on other planes, one would have a multiplicity. One could connect the network of literature to the material plane, the plane of musical improvisation (as in jazz), the plane of the street, the plane of the building. Deleuze and Guattari call these “movements of deterritorialization and destratification.” To connect the network of literature, which can be thought of as a distinct “territory” on a single plane, to dimensions beyond that plane, is to deterritorialize the initial network: it removes the borders of the network and in so doing changes the nature of the territory itself. No longer must we only think of intertextuality: now we have inter-textual-material-music-ality. The endpoint is a single plane of immanence: all things heterogenous, all things connected.
Think about a wasp fertilizing an orchid:
“The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome” (10).
The hyperlink is not the only way to produce a connection, or “line of flight,” to use D&G’s term for a line of “deterritorialization and destratification.” Lines of flight exist everywhere. The hyperlink is merely a tool to strategically make explicit certain lines of flight, especially those that are not normally encouraged (i.e., connections between disparate disciplines; one might form a connection between a poem by Frank O’Hara and a biology journal article with a link). It might be appropriate to call the posts on Experiments in the Rhizome “plateaus,” to borrow the term D&G use in place of “chapters” in A Thousand Plateaus. Each new section of the book is a new “plateau,” or in other words, a new plane of immanence, which is connected to the others through lines of flight. The posts on this blog will be similar.
Each post may be the product of a single author. It may also be the product of multiple authors. These multiple authors may have the same name or not. The only purpose of having single posts separated from one another is coherence and readability. I want people to be able to use this blog, and I don’t see much use in an unreadable mass of text and other media.
D&G say that “no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness” can substitute for the rhizome, calling such false methods “technonarcissism” (2). It seems to me that an overreliance on hyperlinks or any other “syntactical boldness” in the blog structure would be a form of technonarcissism—a technonarcissism that is likely much more literal than what D&G had in mind when A Thousand Plateaus was published in 1980. After all, is this not the fallacy of tech bro ambitions to structure the world according to code? We must be careful not to fall into this trap.
The fourth characteristic of the rhizome is the principle of “asignifying rupture:” “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” (9). Google and Facebook and the rest may seem like insurmountably powerful arborescent structures, but they are always susceptible to the rhizome: a new hyperlink can pop up like a weed at any time. A French garden is difficult to maintain; an English garden can at any time overtake it.
The fifth is the principle of “cartography.” This refers to D&G’s point that the rhizome is a “map and not a tracing.” I wish they had been more clear on this point, because the terminology is needlessly confusing. The idea is simply that the rhizome can only be found in “experimentation with the real;” that is, it cannot be modeled prior to experimentation. As D&G use the terms, a “map” is discovered in experimentation, while a “tracing” attempts to represent something—either the rhizome itself, or another proposed structure. It would be a mistake to posit such an a priori structure: the rhizome “is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.”
The sixth and final principle of “decalcomania” refers to the act of placing the arborescent structures to which the rhizome is opposed onto the rhizome itself. In his commentary on A Thousand Plateaus, Somers-Hall compares this to placing stickers on a wall of drawings; the stickers are “tracings,” but they become a part of the rhizome when they are “stuck” on the plane of the rhizome. “Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them?” (13). We should never be absolutists when it comes to deciding what’s rhizomatic and what’s not. We should be willing to use YouTube and Google and Facebook and the rest; in fact, we must use these arborescent structures, given that all points in the rhizome must be connected. The only change is to use them “rhizomatically,” not “arborescently.”
I find the concept of the rhizome incredibly useful: creatively useful, politically useful, and spiritually useful. I want to talk about all three of these utilities.
Creative thought is rhizomatic. Creativity itself is about forming new convergences: this is what all great art does. Borges spoke of how Kafka’s fiction invented its own predecessors: with the publication of his writings, suddenly the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno and the 9th century Han dynasty prose writer Han Yu were connected through the adjective “Kafkaesque.”
But we need not turn to literary fiction for evidence. Take, for example, the same Han Yu excerpt Borges cites as “Kafkaesque:”
“It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Even the women and children of the common people know that the unicorn is a favorable portent. But this animal does not figure among the domestic animals, it is not easy to find, it does not lend itself to any classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. Under such conditions, we could be in the presence of a unicorn and not know with certainty that it is one. We know that a given animal with a mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what a unicorn is like.”
Creativity is figuring out what a unicorn is like. One constructs a unicorn from the horse and the bull. The horse and the bull do not imply the unicorn a priori; it had to be discovered in “experimentation with the real.”
The rhizome is politically useful in that it demonstrates a radically democratic politics. It is a tool for arriving at “the magic formula we all seek—PLURALISM = MONISM—via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging” (20-21). I believe humans are defined by a dual desire for freedom and unity. We want to be self-directed—to establish ourselves as free, independent agents able to take action upon the world—but we also want to be part of something larger than ourselves: a social collectivity or sense of spiritual unity with the universe. The rhizome resolves this paradox; it maintains heterogeneity while demonstrating its ultimate unity.
Guerilla warfare is rhizomatic. This is why the Vietnam War was a failure for the US military: it could not conceptualize the Viet Cong as a rhizome. It failed to see how the VC didn’t have a beginning or end—that it was always able to “start up again on one of its old lines, or a new line.” An underground cave system growing like ginger root underneath soldiers marching in perfect formation. Experiments in the Rhizome is intended to be something like this.
A small digression: a major tenet of Buddhist doctrine is the idea that all things are interdependent and lack essential or inherent existence as independent objects. Buddhists’ primary target with this deconstructive analysis is the concept of an independently enduring self, which all Buddhist schools emphatically denounce. I have found this doctrine (and specifically its expression in the Madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna, which posits that all things are “empty” of intrinsic existence) not only philosophically sophisticated but immensely helpful in how I lead my life. Once you let go of there being any ultimately existent ontology—once you let go of the idea that you have an intrinsically existent self apart from the mere aggregations of your body, feelings, perceptions, thought, and consciousness (to name the “five skandhas” often used by Buddhists to deconstruct the self)—everything becomes simpler.
The rhizome is spiritually useful in that it provides a compelling model for articulating this interdependence. I am defined only through intensities of difference between myself and the world—lines of flight are always extending out of whatever I consider to be “me.” D&G speak of “becoming” to avoid positing any stable ontology in the rhizome; the orchid does not “represent” the wasp in its imitation of the wasp’s anatomy, but rather engages in a process of “becoming-wasp.” Likewise, the wasp (when fertilizing the orchid and hence becoming a part of its “reproductive apparatus”) engages in a process of “becoming-orchid.” I am not Patrick Simpson, I am a “becoming-Patrick Simpson;” I am also a “becoming-friend” (spending time with my friends, I become like them), a “becoming-internet” (as with this very blog), a “becoming-city” (the streets of Manhattan gridding my life and movement). I am always in flux—my territory is constantly re-territorialized by the world around me.
My purpose in creating this blog is more humble than it may seem. I simply want it to be a tool. It is indeed a radical tool—one mostly unlike anything else I have thus far encountered on the current internet (an exception is Agora, a decentralized social media platform I discovered while researching)—but it should never be understood as anything more than a tool. Though it can (and should) be a home to many works of art, it is not itself a work of art. It is a map, not a tracing.
The blog is also intended to bring the creative energies of my friends and family into one experimental space. I want to connect my ideas to the ideas of the people in my life. I want to see what new convergences there may be. After all, “friends hold all things in common.”
In summary: the purpose of the blog is to be a tool for subverting the arborescent structures which have taken over our lives. Not unrelated to this purpose is the principle of connection; I wish to connect in new and deeper ways with the people in my life, to show them what I’m thinking about and see how they might respond. Experiments in the Rhizome is to be a space for creative experimentation of all forms, guided by the principles of connection and heterogeneity.
So please: make something. Remember that “the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…'” (25). Approach your plateaus like this. “This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions” (25).
“Don’t have just ideas, just have ideas… The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance” (25).