bumbling amateurs

[Charles Gavette]

It is much easier to speak from within academia itself, whereby one has at
least some priveledge via documentation. For an academic to speak of
equality of the right to speak seems funny. Michel de Certeau has already
written on the right to speak and I suggest it as part of a sane syllabus.
The right to speak carries along with it, a scission: "We will let you go on
national t.v., but you only have 15 minutes." This scission is by way of
hierarchy and presupposition, whereby the credibility of the speaker is
reinforced by a certificate of merit signed by the founding
fathers(formulations that restore power to the signifier). This is the
arborescent model (roots, off-shoots, branches) as opposed to the rhizome (a
rhizome may be broken, shattered at any given spot, but it will start up
again on one of its old lines, or on new lines). This is very different from
the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order(The World Tree in
mythology). The rhizome is perhaps a strange "mystification of science and a
de-mystification of magic." A discourse all the more total for being
fragmented, and free to form undocumented connections. It is not just
another departure, it is a nomadic line of flight of thought, quite
amateurish, happily proceeding with its empiricism. It makes maps, whereas
the tree model is a logic of tracing and reproduction. The map has to do
with performance, wheras the tracing always involves an alleged
"competence." Thought itself is not arborescent, and the brain is not rooted
or ramified matter. The brain is much more a grass than a tree. The leaps
each message makes across the fissures in between neuronal axons makes the
brain a multiplicity, a whole uncertain, probablistic system.
  Opposed to the "centered" systems is one in which communication can run
from any neighbor to the other, and does not need to be overcoded, never has
available a supplementary dimension over and above its own number of lines,
in other words, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those
lines. This is a plane of consistency. Can this tracing be put back onto the
map? Even if it can, it is damn sure not a symmetrical operation. It is a
more asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. This is what makes the tracing
so dangerous: the imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. So,
the tracing even placed back onto a map will only succeed in transforming a
rhizome(the amateur, the empiricist) back into some organized form, even
when it thinks it is reproducing something new. It is only reproducing
itself. It injects redundancies and propagates them. More point of
structuration, making the prison exist not just as an institution anymore,
but making the prison everywhere. The prison is now everywhere.
 And maybe the weed leads the most satisfactory existence of all. No, this
is whyacademia and the amateur cannot (and should not) integrate. This is
why there will always be opposition to the arborescent prison model The
rhizome is an antigenealogy. Rather than localisable linkages between points
and positions, the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest,
capture, offshoots....a grass growing and greening from the middle.




_______________________________________________________
Get your free, private email at http://mail.excite.com/