Semiotic Drift

009 · Rhizome

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A Thousand Plateaus1 wants to model rhizomatic thought. Its material form and the local sequence imposed by syntax stage a problem the book already recognises: anti-hierarchical thought must pass through structures that can harden into hierarchy.2 The book asks us to resist the tree. It arrives with a front cover, numbered pages, a printed sequence of plateaus, and the rhizome placed at the entrance. Even refusal, it seems, requires form.

I read the rhizome as a diagnostic tool for hierarchy disguised as nature.3 Its value lies in making order visible. Where it begins, how it repeats, what it excludes, and how easily a theory of escape can acquire its own authority.

This fragment is numbered 009. It sits in an archive, beneath a menu, between other numbered fragments. Hyperlinks offer lateral movement. The architecture still places each piece.

The drift has a number.

I encountered the same tension in Cape Town/ International. I called the work a ‘living architecture’, a map of narrative tendrils, then severed one tendril and submitted it as an artefact. The fragments remained numbered.4

The tendril became a PDF.

  1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). First published as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980).↩

  2. Deleuze and Guattari complicate the opposition between tree and rhizome. They acknowledge that rhizomes may possess ‘their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy’. Discussing the difficulty of making typography, vocabulary, and syntax function as dimensions of multiplicity, they add: ‘We ourselves were unable to do it.’ See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 20, 22.↩

  3. Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome through principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 7–15.↩

  4. Marc Brüseke, ‘Cape Town/ International: The Preparation of a Memoir’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, York St John University, 2023), pp. 230–31.↩