Rhizomes!
“…in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself-, capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20
Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this or overcomplicating it, but lately I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessing over Obama’s presidency and his post-presidency public engagement. Between the release of his book, his campaigning for Biden, and his critiques of progressive movements, I spend more time than necessary getting upset over our First Black President. I used to cape for representation politics, most likely that because I was 12 when Obama was elected, it mattered to me. In language that I now regret using, I would exclaim that “not only is he Black, he’s a half-rican (this is how I used to categorize myself as a biracial….I’ve learned since)! I felt inspired by Obama’s response to the murder of Trayvon Martin– the murder being a critical moment in the development of my language around Blackness–and felt hopeful that this country would begin to address racial justice. I was classically disillusioned by the Democrats and representation politics. Now, I’m beginning to make sense of the impact of Obama’s 8-year reign, and it’s quite bleak!
Here is a theoretical run-down that’s probably adding too many words to a very noticeably evil situation; throughout undergrad, I would continue to encounter Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who together wrote a bunch of overly-intellectual and inaccessible critical and political theory. Most prevalent in their writing, a reader will encounter words like rhizomes, apparatus, and immanence repeated throughout a piece cycling through many different definitions. All of school, none of this made sense. For example, here’s a quote: “The rhizome is an anti-genealogy” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11). Now what the hell does that mean? First, let’s start with anti-genealogy; I’m not an authority on this definition seeing as I’m only a nerd with a bachelor’s degree, but the way I make sense of it (via Foucault) is that genealogy deals with the process of things. Therefore, anti-genealogy is anti-process (of things). Can we substitute progress for process? Not necessarily, but I would argue that process necessitates pattern and continuation, that there is an expectation that time consequential, that if “a” occurs in 1492 and “b” occurs in 1865, then “c” will occur in 1964. To begin to analyze time and history anti-genealogically would be to analyze history and time non-linearly. That means that all that is, is. Time and structure and apparatuses are immanent; there is no beginning and no end. This is a rhizome.
I’m sure none of this makes sense without an examination of praxis, so let’s discuss it. Although I will not cite any sources, please trust I have pulled my research from various primary texts of exploration and historical analyses of chattel slavery–this is not an academic journal! I first want to start at the onset of imperialism wherein we see how Europeans examine the various people’s they encountered. In both cases of visiting the Americas and the African continent, the imperialists would use language like “savage” and “cannibal” to name Africans and indigenous people and would attempt to impose their ways of life on the autonomous people. They did this under the guise of paternalism, asserting their dominance over folks in the hope that the Europeans could change the Africans or the indigenous people. If and when they thought their efforts of domestication failed, the imperialists would either enslave or murder, citing that their opposites were better-off enslaved, tortured, or dead.
Many folks can make the valid argument that much has changed since then, that progress has been made. However, that’s analyze the rhizomatic aspect in our current state. Take a look at this quote from Obama’s new book:
“In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. I wanted to somehow save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”
I’m not accusing Obama of being Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson. Rather, using a rhizomatic analyses, I think it is useful to ask questions about evil, impact, and harm. Obama nearly repeated the same actions of Christopher Columbus: he admittedly murdered boys because he found them to unsalvageable savages. Truly, what has changed? And, in an even more interrogative analysis, we might want to ask, have we learned pleasure from killing something in which we see humanity?
I raise these questions because I think it’s a useful place to examine the ways in which we treat each other. If we exist on this nonlinear, rhizomatic plane, how can we flee? Where are our points of escape? Is it in our relationship with body, with friendship, with love? How do we engross our desired and protect it from the harmful plane? Can the plane be changed?
