Here at The Philosophy of Hegel we’re lingering on the concept of “life” before we move on through the Phenomenology of Spirit, because once we leave life behind there’s no going back; Hegel will establish a fixed notion of “self” based on his concept of “recognition” and all life will become, in an important sense, a reflection of self. For example, biological life, being part of “nature,” will be defined by its otherness from self, making the self something supernatural; we’ll have a lot to say in later posts about the nature of the human soul.
Deleuze and Guattari compare the “arboreal” with the “rhizomatic”; you can be like a tree or you can be grass instead. Western culture is dominated by trees, whose fruit depends upon the branches of the tree, which in turn rely on the tree trunk with its sturdy roots; the tree is a symbol of a culture’s acceptance of and love for hierarchies, ranking everything and everyone in order of necessity and importance and what comes first.
Trees have long memories, but Deleuze and Guattari argue that short term memory is what’s essential to creativity. If you’re like grass, you can shoot off in this direction, then this, never thinking too far ahead because there is no need to. Henry Miller once said that the cornerstone of living well is thinking only of the present moment and the one following, and no further than that. But this is impossible to do as long as you hold on to your desire to keep your long term arboreal memories.
So it’s not just trees but also human selves that have long term memories. This is how a self holds together, by remembering who they are. But a self has to be built, and for this creativity is required. And so the rhizomatic process of “Now what?” “And then?” is required if a self is to come into being at all.
If you don’t create yourself then someone else will do it for you. You’ll have a sense of who you are but not of how you came into being. All the hard work has been done for you; by your parents, by your culture, by the state. This is really where we find ourselves before we start reading the Phenomenology: we have a lot of notions about the self and other selves and society at large but you read this book to see how such a picture of the world could have been built in the first place.
A big difference between Hegel, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, is that Hegel thinks it’s well and good that our selves are ready-built for us, while Deleuze and Guattari think we need something new. Only a few, strange people called “philosophers” will want to dive deeper and explore other possibilities. And Hegel’s gambit is that even once you’ve looked deeper you’ll realise that everything was alright how it was in the first place. You can leave it all to God. For Hegel, religion is true because it reflects this notion that all is basically right with the world. But Deleuze and Guattari say that God is just a possible thought that has “crystallised” into something fixed, and now we can’t seem to shake it off. And we’re going to have to shake it off if another world is going to be possible.
For Deleuze and Guattari, a big problem with Western culture is that it is too focused on “transcendent ends” and not enough on what has “intrinsic value.” For example, you develop a theory and then try to make sure it will stand up against every possible criticism. It’s not the immediate value of the idea that’s important so much as whether it will stand up forever. Thought wants to be a totality. But Deleuze and Guattari have a different way of looking at theory: a theoretical system should be “pragmatic and precarious,” responding directly to the moment, living for the moment, and sure to be left behind eventually when the world moves on.
Why then study a philosopher like Hegel, whose ideas must, by now, be outdated? Not to prove him right, but to find new ideas within his work, new shoots that will grow into new possibilities and directions.
(I’ve been reading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi.)