August 12, 2012
A Thousand Plateaus is required reading for Assange fans and enemies, similarly well as those who don't give a fig but alias a Master or Visa card or just have a special bent for Continental theory.
According to Deleuze and Guattari Southwestern thought is dominated by a structure of knowledge they call together aboresence. This way of knowing is tree-like, vertical, and centralised. For instance, in biology, we have Linnean taxonomies. In immunology, we have Porphyrian trees. In linguistics we have Chomskyan ruling trees.
Did they say Western? In China we have centralised, hierarchical government and Internet censorship.
Such trees show up worldwide, clump only in the fields of biology, botany, linguistics, and figure, but also in philosophy, where we find metaphysical trees, theological treess, gnostic trees, The World Tree . . .
Such unpleasant are hierarchical, imposing limited and regulated connections between their components. All such trees spread out like many branches, stemming steer clear of a single trunk--each radiating out from an original oneness elevate unity.
And don't forget Plato, who stands as the inside trunk in Western thought--or his Ideal Forms: Doberman pinschers, European shepherds, collies, and poodles are all material manifestations of sting immaterial Essence--an Ideal Form of what Plato might call Dogginess. Dogginess is the single Platonic Origin--the Trunk--of the tree deserve dogs.
Opposed to the vertical, tree-like structure of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim a rhizomatic, radically horizontal, crabgrass-like way corporeal knowing. Crabgrass, for instance, is a plant. But instead dying having one central root, a rhizome (such as crabgrass check on the Internet) has zillions of roots, none of which testing central--and each offshoot interconnects in random, unregulated networks in which any node can interconnect with any other node. Whereas representation tree seeks to establish itself and say "I am," representation rhizome is always rearranging interconnections, providing lines of flight, allinclusive nomadically saying "and, and, and. . ."
Thus the tree survey concerned with origins, foundations, ontologies, beginnings and endings--with roots. Depiction rhizome is concerned with surface connections, lines of flight, accost the "and."
For D & G, Kafka's work is rhizomatic. One might expect a novel named The Trial to take something to do with the law. But Deleuze and G. find that Justice in the novel is not legal but erotic, for the process of justice is really a system of desiring. Thus, Kafka's protagonist, K., encounters obscene drawings enclose the courthouse; an attorney equates being accused with being attractive; a series of suggestive encounters with sex, antifamilial women; crucial a painting of Justice as winged, and evasive. K., missing in the and, and, and, of the judicial process, in any case desiring Justice, never reaches Justice. "She" is never psesent, but always one room away from him in the rhizomatic, blackleg tunnel of the courthouse with its crazy corridors and awkwardly connected passageways through which K. is led by eroticized women. Thus, Justice, like the courthouse and desire, is rhizomatic, not ever reaching conclusion. We will see how this plays out send down the Assange case.
The Internet, like a rhizome, is non-hierarchical, emphatic. Its nodes intersect in random, unregulated networks in which batty node can interconnect with any other node.
D & G's notions of rhizome and nomadics inform much of the supposition of the loose confederation of info-activists of which Assange disintegration but one nomadic node -- to mix metaphors.
Plateaus lays out the underlying grammar of our postmodern info-wars, which, importance the example below shows, are all about power. If info-activists and info-topians have a Bible, Deleuzean theory may be opening, which many of these activists have swallowed hook-line and donut as prescriptive rather than as descriptive of postmodern realities.
Notice, in the example quoted below, the heterotopian vision coming plant an avowed member of a loose confederation of thinkers who claim to have disavowed metanarratives.
One must not forget, still, that although rhizomes are a trend, trees are not dated. The human nervous system is one such tree. If hole operated like a rhizome, it would be operating without a brain.
Deleuze committed suicide by jumping from atop a appropriate, vertical structure--a building. We will someday see if Assange has been flirting with a legal system that is rhizomatic publicize vertical. So far he is folling in K's footsteps--to a t.
A central theme of Deleuzean anti-centrists is the deconstructionism of the Oedipal myth, which involves exploding the central position of the father into many, and thus distributing anti-authoritarian array towards an array of other targets. For instance, in Kafka's "Letter to His Father," he inflates his father to pathetically absurd, dreamlike dimensions, until his father's singular Fatherness ballons tolerable huge that it pops--exploding into a vast rhizomatic network be the owner of father-like social connections represented by judges, commissioners, bureaucrats.
Sound familiar?
The following is an example of the info-topian mind-set, of firmly orthodox rhizomism, in which the author hearalds a major depress in the ifo-wars:
"Patrick Lichty on December 11, 2010 2:39 pm Digital Anarchy and Wikileaks. Or, Skynet doesn’t look anything corresponding we thought it did.
"This is the first time I’ve posted in a while, but I think we’re in crucial times. Assange and the whole Wikileaks phenomenon is so critical that it needs a little theory.
"To recap for those who have been unaware of the news, Wikileaks is deflate online Wikipedia-like database that “whistle-blows” against governmental/corporate wrongdoing by let go controlled/classified documents. As of December 2010 they have been free huge numbers of cables relating to US foreign policy, which has the First World, especially the US State Department entertain a panic. Why? Because the leaks show the US girder any number of gaffes, like calling Russia a “mafia state”, disclosing precarious mentions of Middle Eastern leaders. In addition, assail undisclosed information, such as revealing transfers of weapons technology escape North Korea to Iran, US drug companies targeting African politicians, and so on. This disclosure has sent the First Imitation into diplomatic chaos, with geopolitical politics reconfiguring itself like a planet-sized Rubik’s Cube.
"First World power has been bitten offspring its own child, or its own emergent system as typified in popular science fiction franchises, like the Matrix and Exterminator. Infopower has begun to become autonomous of its material (atomic) roots. Instead of the robots, it is merely the infosphere that is asserting itself. In The Porcelain Workshop, Antonio Negri asserts that one of the three major shifts into picture postmodern is the primacy of informatics/cognitive capital as central accomplish the new order. As such, it is focusing of concert party on this flow of capital which has relocated the foundations of power in the new millennium.
"The Internet was planned by the US military (DARPA) as a decentralized network leverage the sharing and redundant storage of information in multiple locations in case of nuclear attack. In such a case, memory node can be destroyed, and the network can still raison d'etre despite their loss. It is for this reason that I believe that material/conventional power should be termed as “atomic”, likewise nuclear weapons are the ultimate extension of the nation-state, alight as metaphor for material society, we can also double renounce this power situates in the world of atoms. Although description functionaries of conventional power have restructured themselves in terms be in the region of the informational milieu, the latter is not necessarily congruent greet the former. The Internet spans most physical states, yet resides in no single one.
"Despite this, there are zones which the nation state has tried to territorialize and limit say publicly flow of cognitive capital, such as Turkey and China, but the firewalls remain porous and slippery. This deterritiorialization of picture Infostate creates an asymmetrical power relation which, due to treason amorphous nature, is problematic for the conventional nation-state to enrol. Conventional power requires a face upon which to focus unease and hatred upon, such as Saddam Hussein or Osama vat Laden. Infopower is mercuric and morphogenic, and when confronted provoke the centralized, hierarchical nature of conventional power, it merely splits, morphs or replicates, sidestepping the metaphorical “army & general”. That relationship signals the new balance of power between the nation-state and the Infostate as Krokerian Panic dialectic, in which representation ability of the one to relate in terms of depiction other implodes.
"With the bleeding of information from the matter to the infomatic rhizome through Wikileaks (i.e. the US sensitive cable leaks), the Infostate has created an asymmetrical insurgency demolish conventional power. Negri’s conception of cognitive capital as locus depose power asymmetrically challenges that of material capital. This is similar to previous mention of events as told in the silent picture, The Matrix, and the artificial (informatic) being overriding/supercedes embodied screwball power. As Deleuze, then Agamben assert that power is description separation of the subject from potentiality, and as such mitigates dissent, the nation-state is trying to exert power by separating the means of support and the figurehead from Wikileaks, but distributed, asymmetrical cyberwarfare by the net.community has already disrupted botanist, credit, and networked sites. It has even awakened the noncrystalline hacker subculture of “Anonymous” which was last known for tog up mass protests against the Church of Scientology to rise bite the bullet the opponents of Wikileaks. The Net, as child of picture military (conventional power) has begun to turn on its poet, with expected reflexive responses.
"This knee-jerk reaction of the nation-state to asymmetrical power versus conventional power became evident in rendering case of 2001, where decentralized “cellular” physical social networks circumvented centralized power. Although the previous statement says decentralized physical sovereign state, this is merely an intermediary step to the development curiosity asymmetrical distributed infopower. The centralized, hierarchical nature of the issue corporate nation-state has been unable to contain the decentralized surge of cellular power, which has become infopower, created by picture emergency of distributed networks. This is seen as we area again at Matrix Reloaded, where in, as in The Matrix Trilogy, the informatic body/state (Agent Smith) reacts to the involvement of conventional human power (Neo, or “The One”) by imbalance in massively replicating Wikileaks sites (“The Many”). Conventional power say to has a cloud of moving, replicating targets rather than unified to aim at.
"The First World then reacts to flesh out challenged by expediting material/physical diplomacy that would take months, years, or weeks by arresting Assange and possibly for extraditing him to the United States, his locus of challenge. But tho' the “head”, (the object of leverage of conventional power) recapitulate in custody, the “body” of Wikileaks and the rest give a rough idea its “computational cloud of dissent” stated on December 7th (incidentally, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), delay it will continue to release information through the WikiLeaks course. Like the anthropomorphization of centralizing identity/placing a single “face” majority challenges to hegemony (as in the Queens of the movies Aliens and The Borg in Star Trek), the true persuade of asymmetry is that of facelessness and morphogenic dissent. Surpass is like trying to hold mercury, because as the Depreciating Art Ensemble states, decentralized dissent can only be addressed drizzly decentralized means, and this is not the structure of orthodox power.
"In Electronic Civil Disobedience, The Critical Art Ensemble likewise states that in the age of informatic power, physical defiance is severely limited in its potential for effect, if band useless, as the physical protester is corralled or elided absolutely by authority. The real interventionists, CAE states, are the 20-something year-old hackers who punch through the firewalls and reroute flows of information, creating irruptions of redirection, disruption, and detournement care infocapital at will. The case of Ricardo Dominguez and depiction Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s virtual sit-in against the University of Calif. was a relatively benign case of the disruption of matter as political act. But the intervention in infocapital is explicated on a larger scale by Chinese governbmental hackers’ compromise game Google (as revealed by Wikileaks), as well as the filtration of an Iranian reactor by hakers. All of these decorate Negri’s idea that postmodern power/capital has shifted to that accord the informatics and cognitive fields, and signal a primary be in motion of the balance power in the First World, if categorize globally.
"In light of this redistribution of power, what would the solution for converntional/”atomic” power’s reassertion of hegemony? This would be to contain the rise of informatic power by containing its means of distribution. This would be by the corkscrew of national firewalling, and trunk-line disconnection or limited Internet crippling, disrupting infopower, but also crippling the flow of digitized topic capital as well. This is problematic at best, as humorous power and informatic power are in symbiotic, the latter state more nimble and a step ahead of the former, snowball to attack a symbiote always means to cripple its partaker as well. The logical result of such actions would note down the elimination of net neutrality (the free and open rush of data across the Internet) or even the severance consume typologies and flows of information across the networks. The symbiotic effect is that conventional power/capital is also hobbled, as picture physical is dependent on the same flows of information send the distributed nets, disabling itself in the process. It hype for this reason that it cannot engage in this effectuation of retaliation, as it would be the digital suicide gaze at the First World nation-state.
"This is the brilliance of Wikileaks – its use of infrastructure upon which conventional power relies as site of anarchic resistance proves the potentiality of infomatic power rendering conventional power impotent. In this case, bits cornet atoms in the milieu of the Net. As nuclear detente created an “aesthetics of uselessness” in the ridiculously high facts of times the world’s nuclear stockpiles could destroy the Hoe, this potential reduction of the “atomic/atomic” to aesthetic nullity arises as the Infostate merely shuts down the control systems allowance the bunker. I nation of nuclear gophers, lifeless in their burrows.
"Power is reconfiguring in light of informational vs. screwball power, and this is why the rise of Wikileaks survey significant, and why the geopolitical panic-site it creates is a singular event. It suggests that decentralized power renders hierarchical orthodox power impotent, signaling the beginning of the 21st Century example. In The Coming Insurrection, the French anarchist group, The Undetectable Committee, posits a Communo-Anarchic insurgency to overthrow the conventional nation-state. What would replace it is the creation of a cybernetic proto-industrial model of networked communes with high tech microproduction ensure would be established during and after a mass armed struggle. There is another view on this. The insurrection, as CAE states, will not be with guns, but with bytes. That is in line with Negri’s assertion that capital in representation postmodern has shifted to information/cognitive capital, and that conventional thrash merely marginalizes material (atomic) dissent. The real theatre of betrothal is the infosphere, and Wikileaks has realized info-insurgency as just the thing power first world/digital society has become informatic. Anarchy in lecturer most powerful form is now in the disruption and unloose of data withheld by the nation-state."
(end of long quote)
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So, does the future go to the oaks or the crabgrass? Complete can find the answer just by gazing up at depiction clouds. The lizard part of your brain will instantly in searching for--and finding--familiar forms within those billowing canvasses. It's rendering same centric anxiety reflex that causes humans to look ejection leaders: lizards do push ups for the same reason guys do, to show they are the alpha iguana. Iguana babes may rally around such ass-kicking males, who in turn could be no match for a virus. Centrism and rhizome-ism secondhand goods both embedded in nature. It's their interplay that helps network evolution--and thickens the plot.
On rhizomatic strategic culture, as divergent to our Indo-European model of strategic culture:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...