Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

but also on all sorts of heterogeneous elements such as mythological sedi-

mentations, technical equipment, the communicative modalities of the

community, and so forth.

When they define the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari describe it in

this way:

The principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots,

the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are

not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play

very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. (A Thousand

Plateaus, 21)

Social evolution depends precisely on assemblages of heterogeneous ele-

ments that we believe to be able to identify by defining a stratum of being,

but that instead are sucked in by the stratographic superposition that is

becoming. As theory and practice, politics simplify and crystallize the

complexity of the process. Political reason believes that what determines

the historical process are strategies of intention, structuring forms of will,

militant or military deployments, states, apparatuses, conscious choices,

consensus. And yet, based on these things, one cannot explain many

significant events, the rupture from which new series of phenomena are

born or the movements that upset the consolidated institutional struc-

tures. In reality, strategies (and particularly, political strategies) function as

adaptive reactions to automatisms in the technical realm, in finance, in

techno-communication, in mythology, and in the social psyche.

Social changes do not depend on the will to change or on the clash of

different wills, but on the insertion of elements that were not included, or

even foreseen, within the process. An imaginary obsession, a refrain that is

diffused, a new technological mechanism, arriving from a marginal or

foreign stratum with respect to the political sphere, can all completely

modify the existing social assemblage, following lines on which the will

can no longer act except marginally as each of the a-signifying traits enter

into complex processes. Who would have thought that a marginal practice

like digital networking would finally transform the global economy? Who

would have thought that at the end of the modern era, archaic religions

would become the decisive factor in the international political system?

*****

Deleuze and Guattari do not establish any hierarchy or any evolution-

ary direction that would bring us, for instance, from matter to mind or

from multiplicity to unity, nor do they create taxonomies capable of

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