The Plateaus of the 'Clash Rhizome'

Chapter 5 Civilization-Culture-Character: the Plateaus of the ‘Clash Rhizome’

A rhizome in botany is a subterrean system of a plant that sends out roots. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy, a rhizome is made of plateaus, those “[…] continuous, self-vibrating region[s] of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, pp. 21–22).” The botanical rhizome is (agri)-cultural while the philosophical rhizome is mainly cultural. But Deleuze and Guattari do not take aim at the botanical rhizome per se. They lament that Western reality and thought had been influenced by the tree-model. That is, the forest, field, and seed-planting which is an (agri)-culture based on a chosen lineage containing many variable individuals. They oppose the Western model of agriculture the Eastern model of horticulture, with its special relation to the steppe, the gar- den, the desert, and the oasis, that is the cultivation of small number of individuals. The implications of both models are also felt in the link to the tran- scendent where the Western ‘God sows and reaps,’ the Eastern God(s) replants and unearths. The metaphor of the East provides Deleuze with the ‘rhizomatic model’ they want to use to challenge the ‘Western model of the tree’ (See, ibid. p. 18). Deleuze’s and Guattari’s representation of Eastern (horti)-culture and philosophy is consistent with Almond’s characterization of his so-called New Ori- entalists (See Almond 2007). The main difference being that Deleuze and Guat- tari did not mean the Muslim world in a sense (see the references to the oasis for example). They instead lump together different geographies under the label of the East. Their rhizomatic model draws a dichotomy between the centered, static, ordered on the one hand, and the fluid, non-centered and un- hierarchized on the other hand. Deleuze and Guattari exhibit here the spirit of “European self-critique which partly springs from a concerted, selective, at times not wholly convincing sympathy with the Islamic world [read here: East- ern other] (Almond, 2007, p. 1).” As he further noted, the resort to the non- European other as “a means of obtaining some kind of critical distance from one’s own society will become a familiar gesture, if expressed in a number of different ways (ibid., p. 2).” This was a common feature of so-called ‘post- modern’ thought which generally distrusts any kind of center, truth or reality (ibid., p. 2).

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This is also the background against which one should make sense of De- leuze’s and Guattari’s concept of a rhizome. Their idiom of rhizomes does not only apply to plants with actual roots or radicles. It also applies to “some ani- mals in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, p. 6).” Rhizomes assume diverse forms “from ramified surface extension in all direc- tions to concretion into bulbs and tubers (ibid., p. 7).” Rhizomes function according to principles. Their point can and must be connected to anything outside themselves. They can connect semiotic chains to different biological, political, economic regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status or circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles (ibid., p. 7). Further, a rhizome may be ruptured at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines or on new lines. I propose that the “rhizome” idiom can be applied to make sense of the discourses of clash of civilizations/cultures on the meta-sense. The clash rhizome is a meta-discourse that appears on different plateaus or levels: the international, national, and indeed personal or individual. The different levels are in- terconnected and the meta-discourse can be ruptured at any of these points. There is no hierarchy between these plateaus. The ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis (prominent in the discussion on international relations) percolates down into national forums and cultural policy discussions. In the discourses of clash of civilization, the rhizome is used to connect race to cultures. Later develop- ments have seen this rhizome being ruptured (through inter-civilizational dia- logue initiatives, epistemic challenges within academia, or the ermegence of competing discourses) and resurrected following terrorist attacks, mass migra- tion movements (to Western countries), and the rise of the Far Right in various Western countries. The clash rhizome may thus be broken or crushed at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. Follow- ing the principle of multiplicity, the clash rhizome has “only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (ibid., p. 8).” The rhizome has no deeper structure or genetic axis, is open, connectable in all its dimensions (ibid., p. 12). In the first subsection of this chapter, I locate the eruption of the clash rhizome in the demise of Cold-War international order following the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The clash rhizome is simulta- neously a rupture as well as a continuation of the logic of the bipolar world order of the Cold War. It is a rupture since it replaces the old contesting pro- tagonists. In the clash rhizome, the ideologies of the Cold War are replaced with more intangible, fluid, porous, and rhizomatic concepts such as civilizations/cultures. It is nonetheless a continuation of a worldview that sees the international terrain as fundamentally anarchical, marked by a struggle for the