Outsideness?
Theses on Rhizomatics in the Wake of Cybernetics
The rhizome has become both the logic behind empire and that which seeks to escape it. It has of course always been the base metaphysics of our world, the base behind all systems grounding relations, but was always countered by the apparatus.
The apparatus still obscures the rhizome by introducing biopolitical norms, stratified social codings, etc all of which mediate relationships between subjectivities, yet now it takes the rhizome as the strategy of its operations.
This marriage between rhizome and apparatus is the grounding behind the cybernetic hypothesis, which finally lets go of the liberal reliance on the separation of both subjectivities from subjectivities and subjectivities from sovereignty (sovereignty has become immanent to the “social”). The liberal order is still upheld as a myth within the word of law, which has become nothing more than an arbitrary line which can be freely crossed by empire whenever it pleases.
Law has become only the apparatus empire retreats in order to justify its own transgressions against that very same apparatus (empire goes beyond and above the law in order to uphold the “law”). Empire crosses this line (the separation between liberal civil society and the state) in order to manage a state of crisis, which is the grounding ontology of our times.
The rhizome is no longer implicitly subversive as both a mode of thought or connection as it is no longer an inherently insurrectionary discourse. Being “in the middle,” which is the grounding axiom of the rhizome, only has meaning within a given milieu (this milieu can be simply a milieu however it can be, and is transforming towards, a milieu as apparatus).
Ontology itself is of course rhizomatics, as a given singularity never has a notion of place without grounding by a given milieu, however it does not form a rhizome as an object or rather multiplicity itself (Ontology is rhizomatic but not a rhizome). A rhizome is the complete deterritorialization of the notion of place within a given milieu, leaving a complete freedom of movement within a now smoothed out space.
The rhizome that now grounds the political apparatus is a coded rhizome, there is complete freedom of connection yet each connection is mediated by a transcendent signification of the connection. This coding of relations is what grounds the dual forms of spectacle and biopower (derived from Debord and Foucault respectively).
Spectacle is grounded by a separation of subjectivities from direct connection with others via signification and the separation of subjectivity and its own signification (alienation). Biopower is grounded via the creation of norms out of this arbitrary signification, these norms creating the reproduction of the social which reinforces the spectacle, creating a feedback loop.
The norm and the control it produces is immanent only in an abstract sense, in the rhizome that constitutes contemporary cybernetics (the norm as concept is clearly transcendental yet through power becomes immanent to affect in the form of inclination and action). Immanence to the code is pure contradiction, yet is the defining characteristic of our times (this immanence has the dual effect of allowing direct confrontation with the norm and direct control via the norm).
The affect of control is the invasion of the norm into the real, where our relation to the norm becomes no longer one of feedback and reproduction but one of war. It is in this sense that a rhizome of affect and abstraction can be distinguished. The rhizome of abstraction can form connections with affects (forming a rhizome that escapes this dualism) only via a becoming-affect that enters into this state of war.
This can be done only through a Spinozism that necessarily recognizes all abstraction as both stratifications of affect and unique affects in themselves. An abstraction is always viewed within a given context of affect (a given situation), making the instance of recognizing affect as abstraction an affect itself (thus no clear binary between authentic affect and alienated representation can be made).
Biopower’s feedback loop obscures the original direct rhizomatics of connection (the rhizomatics of affect), collapsing the very logic of authenticity and outsideness that grounded the Situationist project. The death of the rhizome as a means of subversion directly coincides with the birth of “hyperreality,” a state of spectacle which obscures the very possibility of direct connection or even that direct connection ever existed.
Within the rise of “hyperreality” the impulse to embrace the signified rhizome as the new arena of contestation (Baudrillard’s fatal strategy) arises as a storm of locusts descends upon a forest. To attack the resulting code rather than signification itself is to take our current codified cybernetics to their limits, to extend domination to the point where the states of liberation and domination have no distinction.
The traditional conception of the outside no longer has any real meaning, as power no longer has distinct zones of interiority and exteriority (thus its symbolic immanence). One can certainly be outside different apparatuses and the identities they produce, but that always means one is just within a different yet connected apparatus.
Though Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the molar and the minor (the apparatus versus the assemblage), this is not enough to reach a true outside. The minor has both become a key area of dominance through abstract immanence and holds its own contingency with the molar.
The minor is defined by its unique capacity to become. This is contrasted to the molar which through its stratification remains sedentary and stuck. In this sense all societal “progression” is always at the level of the minor which becomes differentiated in representation at the level of the molar.
The minor is micro-political, but it is not a synonym for the micro. The minor is instead an insurrectionary discourse, which produces both its contingency and capacity to become. What we call the minor is the field in wich territorialities such as woman, queer, mad, etc reside (the other).
These are “minorities,” not necessarily the literal sense, but in the sense that they are always a designated other within the socius (they have no “people” to make reference to Kafka). The insurrectionary discourse reconstructs a genealogy of the minor in order to assign them certain radical capacities. Radicality does not mean they have some unique potentiality for liberatory action, but rather that they have a certain intensity that cannot be recuperated.
Each minor figure has their own molar formations as they often mark out their own explicit territories with their own culture and codings of interaction. It is only in this sense that these figures become recuperated into the socius (a becoming-molar is not coherent, yet is perhaps the only apt description).
This is not to condemn these minor territorialities, though in its excess it produces the same social repression just within an othered territory, as to mark out a territory is in many senses synonymous with survival (to reach the body without organs is to be robbed of its contingency and in many senses its capacity). However, it is this very contingency that makes it unable to reach any proper outsideness.
The insurrectionary discourse resists at the level of discourse itself, it is always within the representation of lived forms. An insurrectionary discourse is indeed rhizomatic, yet rhizomatics are no longer unique or intensive (especially at the abstract level).
Outsideness must emphasize the lived form of the minor outside both its contingency and molar territoriality. This is not to deny the importance of contingency, however contingency must become a matter of insurrectionary strategy rather than the ontology of the form (one must use one’s role in the socius’ reproduction as a strategic point of refusal, but to reduce ones existence to that role in reproduction is to reduce one’s potentiality).
Instead any outsideness must not start with representation (it must be outside representation after all), and instead look at the thing as a thing, the representation of such only being a name that designates what cannot be represented (Stirner’s unique). The Spinozist we don’t know what the body can do must become the basis of a proper nomadism, one that actively resists the eugenic logic Spinoza sadly reinforces.
If the minor figure in its discourse-form does not produce an outside in itself (it can however be argued that through its strategic deployment it can produce a fold which moves towards the outside), the lived form must be emphasized. As such we must move towards everyday life and affect as the realm of contestation.
This too cannot produce an outsideness in itself, as that is to assume sovereignty as an apparatus remains purely transcendent and does not hold a becoming-immanent towards the socius. Instead this produces the realization of civil war as a fact of social ontology, where forms-of-life interact without any molar stratification, producing bonds of friendship or opposition.
What we might call the anti-representational forms (the unique, affect, singularity, intensity, Newman’s use of the Lacanian real, etc) are outsides in the sense that they escape representation, however the becoming-immanent of transcendent forms means one simply can’t defer to it for an outside. It is the basis of any insurrectionary subjectivity, however to ignore the state of civil-war is to ignore the primary task of radical politics.
Does the form-of-life produce an outside? Perhaps, but only if a form-of-life embodies both refusal and intensity. It must produce what Debord calls a situation, where the code of capitalist society is refused and the moment becomes connotated by lived intensity. In the situation a singularity of pure potentiality is realized, as out of pure lived intensity the processes of recuperation become impossible (it is in this sense and this sense only we can talk of vital strategies). From here we can move to what Vaneigem called the revolution of everyday life.
Tiqqun perhaps utilizes this approach best in Introduction to Civil War. They write: “If we manage to bring everything THEY exile to the
confused language of bare life back home to the terrain of forms-of-life, we can invert biopolitics into a politics of radical singularity.” By emphasizing the singularity we resist the cybernetic rhizomatics that now constitutes sovereignty. It refuses to become planar, it remains fractal-eque.
The fractal is the model that must be used for contemporary contestation. Singularities become flattened out in the plane of immanence, which produces a common means of communication between forms of life. However through doing this we cannot negate within immanence (negation is only at the transcendent relative negation of Hegel in the eyes of the plane) and as such we cannot effectively wage war. The plane of immanence as such presupposes form, a fundamental flatness. We must create a revolutionary metaphysics of the jagged.
The plane of consistency, where a means of non-representational communication and commonness become axiomatic, thus becomes freely formable on one’s own terms. Rhizomatics thus becomes no longer a perpetual middleness where one is always in a network of connections, but instead becomes a strategic choice made from the outside. Our own affective rhizomes become territories of resistance where we can both live in common and produce intensive singularities (the communes of Call attempt something similar, but denies the actual logistics of constructing communes as outsides in a state of cybernetic capitalism. The commune-form is manifested only in the resulting communization, not in the outsides and planes of consistency directing contestation).
The outside reached by the situation and its resulting insurrectionary milieu cannot be represented here or even imagined except in its literal lived experience. Our current task is not to give a detailed metaphysical account of this outside (which is of course antithetical to the outside’s purely immanent non-philosophical nature), but rather to refer to it as a goal that grounds both the contestation of and future beyond the current state of things (communism). Our current task is not to move through the socius through the fold (though this can be done as a matter of strategy in the sense of contingency and the insurrectionary discourse), but a mad dash towards exit.