Rhizomatic-Nomadic Internet Use
Deleuze and Guattari talk about Hypertext
This approximate coincident emergence in English of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model and Gibson’s cyberspace metaphor in 1983/1984 means that these years may well serve as an important marker in the history of ideas about the rhizomatic nature of cyberspace. Before this moment the concept of cyberspace did not exist and rhizomes were probably exclusively the purview of botanists.
A Thousand Plateaus contrasts rhizomatic thinking with arbolic thinking. Arbolic thought is said to be linear, hierarchic, sedentary, and full of segmentation and striation.
Rhizomes create smooth space, and cut across boundaries imposed by vertical lines of hierarchicies and order. Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being.
Connections here to Escobar’s Pluriverse and Relational Ontologies.
Rhizomes build links between pre-existing gaps between nodes that are separated by categories and order of segmented thinking.
“any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7)
The four principles laid out are;
- Connection
- Heterogeniety
- Multiplicity
- Asignifying rupture
- Cartography
- Decalcomania
wtf is “Asignifying”?
Guattari’s asignifying semiotics appears a powerful conceptual tool for exploring the role of information technologies in the reproduction of capitalist power relations. - Claudio Celis Bueano
Wow that looks cool too. Anyway back to Wray…
“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 9)
“Rupture” here being the nature of any part of a Rhizome to become it’s own whole – when cut away from the main network it becomes simply a new, smaller network.
wtf if “Decalcomania”??
“A technique for generating images by applying paint to one surface, which is then pressed against another surface to transfer the design.” - National Galleries of Scotland
Thanks Scotland!
Wray talks about Maps and Tracings – tracings I think in the sense of a charcoal tracing, a reproduction and simplification of a single thing as opposed to the maps abillity to abstract and relate a thing to the body.
Nomadology, on the other hand, is an aspect of operating in open systems.
The deterritorialized spaces of cyberspace are smooth nomadic-rhizomatic zones
Are there many “deterritorialized spaces of cyberspace” left remaining?
Some gesturing towards metallurgy and the war machine which I don’t totally understand but makes me think about Deveraux’s writings on steppe nomands and their relationship to made items.
Landow’s Hyper/Text/Theory (1994) contains several chapters that apply Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model to hypertext theory. One is Rosenberg’s “Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy.” The other is Moulthrop’s “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture.”
This seems interesting.
The top-down bureaucratic organization of the university is striated space, while the bottom-up lateral organization of graduate student union organizers is smooth space
Smooth and striated become a gradient that structures pass along, slipping from one end to the other. There is value in the smooth space, and a map to be made. But the striated space is how we impose harmony upon the chaos.
In the fifth chapter of this anthology, “Citadels, Rhizomes, and String Figures,” Martin (1996) introduces Hayle’s work on “complex systems, or chaos thinking” (p. 102) and relates it to Deleuze and Guattari, in particular their treatment of the rhizome.
Martin seems interseting.
Okay that was just the literature review! Some good stuff in there worth reading.
The paragraphs that follow discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic-nomadic nature of anti-State and anti-capitalist resistance on the Internet and in cyberspace
Wray is focusing on how the internet can resitst capital and the state in the model of the Zapatistas. He is suggesting that the internet can be a force against panoptic surveillence by the state and capital, whic is somewhat ironic 25 years later. The internet seems to have entirely folded in on itself in this sense to become the main tool for enabling this panoptic control.
For this reason the case of global pro-Zapatista resistant Internet use is captivating and worthy of further examination.
Wray notes that the internet, like all new commuication technologies, has potential use for counter-cultural organizing. Which, like, yes. That turned out to be correct. The pro-Zapatista stuff didn’t like, win out though, as we’ve seen this tool effectively used for far-right facist and theocratic organizing, as well as grass-roots reactionary campaigns against the project of liberation. So thats cool and fun.
An original sender can not know where or when the resistant message stops travelling, stops being copied and redistributed, stops being translated.
Woah, creepy-pasta is rhizomatic resistance. What a weird fucking thing we have done with the internet.
An overabundance of email filling an opponent’s inbox with thousands of unwanted messages can cause the ISP server to crash. When such spamming of email reaches these proportions an email bomb is said to have been deployed.
An electronic pulse system can be established that sends repeated requests for entry to a single web site asking that particular site to respond and load itself upon the resistant actors’ net browser. Software designers have developed code that automates this repeated pressing the net browser’s “reload” button. Acting in concert with other resistant actors in a distributed system such actions can cause an overflow of reload requests that prevents others from accessing the targeted site.
Wray identifies an early form of DDoS attack for political ends, something that was perfected at grass roots level with the low-orbit ion cannon of Anonymous, and since (probaly) formalized into more sophisticated botnets of state actors.
Until recently the primary use of the Internet by the global pro-Zapatista movement has been as a communication tool.
Wow I really need to sit down and lean more about the Zapatistas.
Beta actions of electronic civil disobedience occurred early in 1998. Information about the Acteal Massacre, and announcements of Mexican consulate and embassy protests, was transmitted rapidly over the Net.
Inerseting to think of the Arab Spring in this context, along with the 2020 uprisings.
I guess the Zapatista’s invented the DDoS attack in 1998! Okay!
we notice that smooth spaces are rhizomatic, nomadic, anarchic, etc., while striated spaces are arbolic, sedentary, hierarchical, etc. These spaces, both smooth and striated, coexist. Together, they form a smooth/striated dyad. Sometimes smooth space is reterritorialized and converted into striated space. Other times striated space is deterritorialized and converted into smooth space.
The Internet began as mostly smooth space. But over time, the State and capital have begun to reterritorialize the smooth space of the Internet. The panoptic forces of State and capitalist control are slowly, but surely, converting the Internet into striated space. The State’s primary mechanisms of striation are the imposition of law and increased surveillance. Capital’s primary mechanisms of striation are commodification of information, advertising, and colonization of Internet infrastructures.
lol well yeah that happened.
As Deleuze and Guattari point out or admonish: make a map and not a tracing. Resistant actors will need to map out new territory and terrain, staying a few steps ahead of the forces of the State and capital. The Panopticon sees all, but only in territory it knows. Resistant actors will need to create new territory and act while the panoptic forces of State and capital play catch up.
I think in hindsight that this happened, and continues to happen. Gibson himself noted that the pace of moving beyond the known territories and their subsequence ingestion into the system of capital has only increased over time, till it’s reached its curren fever pitch, with spaces of cultural resistance being born and abandonded in a manner of days or hours.