Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticize psychoanalysis for its reduction of everything to a fundamental Oedipal triangle (Daddy, Mommy, and Me). They say this promotes a conventional and repressive family structure, but, it also channels polymorphous desires into narrowly restrictive ones.
A famous example is Freud’s “Wolfman” case. In the Wolfman’s dream he sees six or seven wolves, Freud reduces all of the wolves to the father. Multiplicity is reduced to unity. Much like Freud’s interpretation of the vagina as lack, nothing, zero, as opposed to the obvious plural lips, its multiplicity.
Desire is not lack! It’s plenitude, exercise, and functioning!
This is where they developed their theory of the rhizomatic underground root structure.
Unlike plants with a single tap root, rhizomes spread in all directions, creating a chaotic network where one point can be connected to every other point. The multiform workings of desire are, that is, as deep rooted and as multidimensional as the roots of couch-grass, which, as all gardeners know, is almost impossible to eradicate. (The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory)
It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position. One begins again through the middle The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree ofknowledge, points of arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things but it grows itself through the middle. This is the English or American problem. Grass has its line of flight and does not take root. We have grass in the head and not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a “particular nervous system” of grass. (Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 1987,Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam, London: Continuum, 39).
I think the same of memory.
The structure of memory, its miasmic soup, its “undifferentiated sensual stew” (as Lily calls it) is an amalgamized entity, without origin, without end, that for every sign that pops into our head another sign follows, without fail, every time, for infinity, ad nauseam. We can’t help it.
For instance, I think of a pen, which makes me think of paper, which makes me think of snow, which makes me think of ice, which makes me think of salt, which makes me think of anchovies, and on, and on, and on.
This was the quite literal bane of Mahood’s existence in The Unnamable.
“I can’t go on. I must go on. I will go on.”
Memories beget memories.
If one memory is severed from the flow of memory, it is likely, that because of the flow, that deleted memory may be reproduced. (This is my official critique of the science behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Its narrative, however, is nearly flawless. Nearly.)
Catherine,
a very interesting Deleuzian application of rhizomatics to memory
Thanks! Your blog looks really interesting as well. I’m going to have to bookmark it, especially if I’m going to learn more about Deleuze.
Similar traversals we see in the Hypermedia of the Web, thru the (free?) association of links and clicks… Infact this whole Rhizome carries in itself the traces of The Art of Memory…
And is Thought posible except ofcourse as a response from Memory, unless it be of a non-linear, rhizomatic thinking that borders on the never-ending drifting aporias of a inquiry taking over the inquirer (and with that evading evading all traces from memory, and thus being Unintelligible & New)?
Totally! The world wide web is absolutely rhizomatic. Maybe, back in the day, when one needed AOL or some other server to get on to the internet one could argue that that was a point of origin, but not anymore.
And no, I agree with you, thought is always a response to memory. A baby is born as a tabula rasa, without innate ideas, but with eyes, with ears, with its feelers out and alert. What you’re saying used to be an argument for God’s existence. Anselm’s “necessary existence”: as long as something’s conceivable, if it could even possibly exist, then it can and does exist somewhere within the universe. In short, a thing has necessary existence if its non-existence is impossible. Which was then later befuddled by Peter Van Inwagen’s “Negmount” theory which semantically switches the word, the concept “God” with the word, the concept “Negmount.”
And this leads to semiotics. I would argue that ALL thoughts are nonlinear (not to say there isn’t order, but probably not as much as The Art of Memory thinks); that it would be impossible to map out exactly how one thought led to the next because so many are happening all at once, some directly consciously, while others more non-thetically, such as you’re always aware of yourself, your existential space in the world, even if it’s not at the forefront of your mind. Our minds are multi-taskers.
And they can’t control what associations pop into them. Signs beget signs. Each time we take in a sensory experience our mind catalogs it and relates it to other similar (or opposite; the associative mind works in mysterious ways) sensory experiences (though now in the shape of memories). And with these sensory experience, with these memories, we can rearrange them and create! Creating is a part of memory because it’s merely reorganizing, restructuring.
But I’m not sure what you meant by unintelligible.
And I’m not sure if I answered your question to your satisfaction. Did I?