Page 134 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 125

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

the paranoid, fascistic ego-structures capitalism typically
induces. But as Foucault noted in his introduction, they were
not so much interested in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy
as in the ‘fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday
behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the
very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii).
This fascism of the mind, Deleuze and Guattari believed, is
unamenable to explanation in terms of ideology.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari adopted the term
‘rhizome’ to denote the ‘de-territorialisation’ of desire. Here their
subversive ‘schizo-subjects’ become ‘nomads’, waging guerrilla
warfare against ‘state machines’ and their structures of control.
A Thousand Plateaus attempted to think through the implications
of ‘rhizomatic’ thinking for both the personal and the social.
Moreover, its structure performed the theory and practice it
expounded: a horizontal, non-hierarchical form of writing, it in-
vited the reader to begin anywhere in its 36 chapters (‘plateaus’),
since it proposed no overarching narrative or system. The book
was written in direct opposition to what they saw as the dominant
western mode of thought, which is ‘arborescent’—organised like
a tree structure, based on vertical, hierarchised and systematic
principles linked to foundational roots. Rhizomatic writing, by
contrast, whether in Kafka or Nietszche or in their own work,
is that which opens out into multiple expressions of liberated
desire and against the false constraints of society’s bureaucratised
institutions of repression.
There is a wonderfully anarchistic exuberance to these
writings of the 1970s, with their mockery of psychoanalysis,
Marxism and structuralism. But for all this enthusiasm, it is often
very difficult to take their argument seriously. Why should we
believe that thought is rhizomatic? As Best and Kellner ask
perplexedly: ‘how do Deleuze and Guattari know this? Why is
this claim correct, as opposed to... the structuralist claim that
the mind naturally organizes reality according to binary divi-
sions . . .?’ (Best & Kellner, 1991, p. 106). The answer seems to be
that we are supposed to take it on trust. If the social and natural
worlds are as rhizomatic as Deleuze and Guattari claim, then how
do we explain the near-ubiquity of ‘arborescent’ structures, except

125