In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, weed is one of the rhizomes, and is on of the best species to change the soil of western thought. As one of the rhizomes, the weed has some basic characteristics of rhizomes: (1) Unlike tree or root, rhizome is a non-central, non-graded and non-signifier system, consisting of crisscross lines, thus formed a n-dimensional and linear diversity which deconstructed the subordinate relationship between one and multiplicity in western thought. (2) Rhizome can not be reduced to one or multiplicity. It is not one which can generate two or directly generate three, four or five. It is not the multiplicity derived from one, nor the one is added to one (n-1). (3) There is no beginning or ending of rhizome, but it has always been in the middle of its growth and spread, just like weed which grow among other things. The weed, which grows wildly and bears no restriction on artificial cultivation, breaks down the central, hierarchical farming methods and fully reflects the basic characteristics of rhizome. The weed is heterogeneous, sprawling, growing aimlessly, wandering around, connecting and communicating with each other, which embodies a variety of forms and reflects the “sense of communication” thought of the symbiosis of all things in China.
The principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike tress or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.
Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigeneaology. It is short term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.
Once a rhizome has been obstructed, aborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.
The wisdom of the plants; even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else–with the wind, an animal,
human beings.
human beings.
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line!
