Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour

Deleuze and Guattari - Rhizome and One or Several Wolves

Apr 5, 2025
A lively dive into Deleuze and Guattari's first two plateaus, exploring rhizomes, multiplicities, and how they challenge tree-like hierarchies. They trace language, memes, viruses, and assemblages as rhizomatic flows. Discussion moves to the unconscious as crowd, the Wolfman case, and how proper names act as events and intensity fields.
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INSIGHT

Multiplicity Beats The One

  • Deleuze and Guattari stress heterogeneous multiplicities over unified, hierarchical ones.
  • Intensities change kind as connections increase, so quantity cannot reduce qualitative difference.
INSIGHT

Rhizome Over Tree

  • The rhizome principle requires any point to connect to any other, resisting hierarchical tree structures.
  • Rhizomes model non-Euclidean topologies and oppose reductive genealogies like Oedipus.
ANECDOTE

Meme As Oedipal Tracing

  • Taylor illustrates Oedipal reduction with a meme example slotting Elon Musk into a domino template.
  • Cooper agrees memes function as tracings that simplify and propagate ideas quickly.
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