original scientific article	UDC 130.2:159.93
received: 2007-12-20
A RHIZOME AS A MAP OF A RUPTURE OF THE CARTESIAN DUALISM
Katja CERGOLJ EDWARDS
USA-22301 Alexandria, VA, 306 Commonwealth Ave., Apt. 1 e-mail: katjace@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the potentiality of organizing the immediate reality of lived experience of modern individual through a construct of Deleuze' and Guattari's rhizome. This practice, claimed in this essay, negates the traditional construction of knowledge, based on Cartesian perspectivalism, and offers nomadic identities of postcolonial world prospective of active, performative construction of personal bricolages.
Key words: postcolonialism, dualism, identity, cartesian, perspective, rhizome, re-presentation, multiplicity,
nomadism, performativity
IL RIZOMA QUALE MAPPA DELLA ROTTURA DEL DUALISMO CARTESIANO
SINTESI
ll presente lavoro esplora il potenziale organizzativo della realta immediata dell'esperienza vissuta da parte dell'individuo moderno attraverso il concetto di rizoma, introdotto da Deleuze e Guattari. La pratica qui analizzata nega la costruzione tradizionale del sapere che si basa sulla prospettiva di Cartesio e offre alle identita nomadi del mondo post-coloniale l'opportunita di elaborare dei bricolage attivi performativi e personali.
Parole chiave: post-colonialismo, dualismo, identita, cartesiano, prospettiva, rizoma, rappresentazione, molteplicita,
nomadismo, performativita
Katja CERGOL) EDWARDS: A RHIZOME AS A MAP OF A RUPTURE OF THE CARTESIAN DUALISM, 185-192
This essay is drawing from a post-colonial perspective, which will serve here to determine the background, or better still, the foundation of the thinking, which it actually professes itself - the thinking of and within the beyond. In this way, it is an illustration and an understanding of visual art beyond postmodernism, based on the thinking of the post-colonial critic, Homi Bhabha. He draws on the contemporary necessity for overcoming dualisms, which spring from notions of The Other. Postcolonial theory stresses the modern diaspora, people of minorities, displaced individuals, who are in constant flux of identity negotiations. They create spaces of limi-nality, of hybridity, which are existences of the borderlines of everyday conditions. These spaces and situations are, according to Bhabha, and I do agree with him, not necessarily an undesirable state of being. As such, the state of being is applied as a characteristic of the postmodern condition as a whole, applicable to every individual. Bhabha urges us to use the postcolonial theory for an analysis and a reevaluation of contemporary condition. Which is, of course, what we could do. However, the question that arises here is, does the postcolonial theory as such truly go beyond" Does it really introduce that cutting edge, where our understanding of temporality would change so drastically, to where we would start thinking, and more importantly, creating - writing for example - in the form that would go beyond" Lets ask this differently. If we pull the rug of postcolonialism from under the feet of these nomads of today, the people of diaspora, who are trapped in the liminality, do we still catch them as such" Do they, or better still, do we retain our identities without the postcolonial migratory constructs of new emerging groupations" We need to find a way of thinking of the postcolonial condition, spaces and individuals, outside of the postcolonial discourse. In other words, we need to go beyond the postcolonial discourse.
We have been conditioned to think within the constructs of a dualism. Since the 17th century, when Rene Descartes offered a view of the individual as a dualism of subject and object, we have been entrapped within the interpretation of the world on the basis of dualities. Descartes is, in the opinions of still many to this date, the founding father of the modern visual paradigm named after him, the Cartesian philosophy. Cartesian perspectivalism, as his theory also became to be known, characterized the dominant scopic regime of the modern era. Descartes was primarily a visual philosopher, who deployed the perspective of the camera obscura to draw on the world. He thoroughly investigated vision in his book from 1637, Discourse on Method, more precisely in one of the three scientific treatises of the book, called La Dioptrique, usually translated as Optics. Descartes shows in the Discourse on Method that our perceptions, the perceptual images, do not need to resemble what they represent. He attacks the at the time prevalent Ar-
istotelian idea, which relies on the authenticity of our perceptual images of the world and their ability to resemble the objects perceived (Gaukroger, 1998). Descartes informs us in The Treatise on Light, a part of the Optics:
"For although everyone is commonly convinced that the ideas that we have in our thought are commonly like the objects from which they proceed, I know of no compelling argument for this. Quite the contrary, I know of many observations which cast doubt upon it" (Descartes, 1998, 3).
According to Cartesian perspectivalism, we rely on representations which are in the mind. That implies also that Descartes left us with a doctrine which teaches us to study our ideas with a firm mental gaze. Through his researches of reflection, which became the foundation of his metaphysics, Descartes launches the idea of the self-certainty of the thinking subject, which resides in his famous 'cogito me cogitare'. He can thus be not only contributed with providing us with a philosophical justification for the modern epistemological habit of "seeing" ideas in the mind, but also with founding the speculative tradition of identitarian reflexivity, in which the subject is certain of himself through his mirror image.
Descartes was thoroughly convinced that "all the management of our lives depends on the senses", and that the one "of the sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest of them" (Descartes, 1953, 65). He devoted his treaty La Dioptrique to demonstrating how vision can be understood on the basis of deductively following the previously existent ideas inherent in our mind. Such deductive reasoning of innate ideas offered Descartes an assurance of the correctness of understanding, which in his opinion, had to be present in order for us to make any sense out of senses. He engaged in dissecting the bodies of animals at the local butcher's shop in order to understand the anatomy of bodies. He cut through the eye of a cow to be able to comprehend the level beyond the physical apparatus of the eye's lenses, namely the one of human visual consciousness. He famously concluded that "it is the mind which senses, not the body" (Descartes, 1953, 87).
Let's pause for a moment and think, why are we discussing this old noble man from the 17th century and his excursions to the butcher's shop" Descartes obviously understood the sight in the mind as being dependant on the contemplation of images which resemble the objects they refer to, and we've mentioned this already. But he also included other signs and words, which in no way resemble the things they signify and for that reason demand even more active participation of the mind. He allowed for these images, for all of them for that matter, therefore, to not depict the object in every respect, but just in few ways. To support this argument, he appealed to the perspectival art, which produces the experience of correct vision by avoiding perfect resemblance. If it is
Katja CERGOL) EDWARDS: A RHIZOME AS A MAP OF A RUPTURE OF THE CARTESIAN DUALISM, 185-192
not a perfect resemblance, then it is not a presentation. What it is, in actuality, is a re-presentation. Circles represented by ovals, squares represented by diamonds, etc. Descartes therefore introduces us to the idea of reading, interpreting, and translating signs that are not the perfect reproductions of external reality (Jay, 1994). For many contemporary commentators, this puts Descartes at the up-front of the critique of the resemblance theory of knowledge in favor of one that introduces signs. One can say, thus, that images in the mind are, according to Descartes, perceptual judgments, and not mere simulacra. Perceptual judgments, which are contingent on language to be read correctly (Jay, 1994). Languages construct discourses, through which concepts are unveiled as representations of binarism. If the concept does not exist within a language, then one needs to appropriate it by means of translation, which is essentially an inscription of conditions of the one to the concepts of the other.
Descartes's method incorporated the method of a touch, which has no longer anything to do with an objectivity of his method, utilized in his study of science and presented in Method. Descartes introduced a subjective image, transmitted through a directness of senses. This division of an understanding of nature, namely onto a subjective and objective approach, intrigued Descartes for all his life. Even though his concepts and approaches had been met with an attitude of disapprovals, they became influential as a basis for a modern scientific methodology (Descartes, 2004). The division of subjective and objective perspective, binary relationship between mind and body, subject and object, in other words, the Cartesian dualism, which was especially influential by validating the disembodied eye, as opposed to the incarnate eye. This means that the enormous influence that the Cartesian philosophy has had on modern epis-temology is primarily based on spectatorship. In the terms of the psychologist James Gibson that meant that the affairs of the world have been reduced from the visual world, where experience, based on the inclusion of other senses besides vision, is one of the 'depth shapes', to the visual field, one of 'projected shapes' by means of sense of vision detached from other senses. Consequently, the body acquired in the visual field the position of objecthood (Jay, 1994).
The omnipotent role of the Cartesian perspective influenced the Enlightenment, and held an exquisite paramount position of shedding light on the development of knowledge until it met its strongest opposition in its history, which started eroding its throne. The tradition of this opposition has stemmed from France and has been known as anti-ocularcentric, since it has gone against the basis of the cartesianism - it's stressing of the importance of vision for reasoned mind or, put differently, it's visual tradition of observation. The objection to the cartesian apprehension of the world has became
more and more influential with the break of the 20th century, when the individuals' and societies' search for meaning was no longer possible within frames of a simple dualism, allowing for concepts on a basis of conjunctions of 'either' and 'or'. The reality of the modern era resisted such framing in more ways than one: philosophy responded with phenomenology, visual arts criticized through avant-garde forms, and literature by professing to the verbal over visual inspirations.
This essay examines a dualism of social, identities-forming, constructions. The 20th century was marked by two world wars, an incredible economic expansion of one part of the world, namely the western, a commodi-fication of the life of an individual in this part of the world, and as a result, massive waves of immigrants. This classification of people has never ceased to exist due to the possible lowering of the numbers of dislocated people, it has just been changing name; from economic immigrants, to war refugees, to seasonal workers, to political émigrés, asylum seekers, exile people, boat people, dislocated, diaspora, brain drain, exchange students, citizens of the world, nomads, etc. The world is on the go. And it is not an exaggeration anymore to say that the hegemony of the world order has shifted from the settled, established and domestic dynamics of culture, to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and, of great importance as supported by Edward Said, whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domain, between forms, between homes, and between languages (Said, 1994). This argument automatically raises a reservation of whether we can negotiate these arenas of in-between with a cartesian approach - 'either' - 'or' mentioned earlier. Do we accept constructs of knowledge on the basis of a linear model with two ends, opposing each other, but at the same time constituting each other" Or better still, do we accept any kind of constructs of knowledge anymore, period"!
When Ayhan Kaya, a lecturer at the Istanbul Bilgi University who has specialized in the construction and articulation of modern diasporic identities, talks about the process of identity formation of the Turkish hip-hop youth in Berlin, he states that these cultural participants have to constantly negotiate between past and future, between 'roots' and 'routes', local and global, home and diaspora. By engaging in the continuous process of constructing communities, they employ the conjunction 'and...and...and...', as opposed to cartesian 'either' -'or'. For example, 'German and Turkish and global and...'. The dualism has been annulled. As an illustration of Kaya's argument, I give you two lines from a poem, titled 'Doppelmann':
"I carry two worlds within me but neither one whole they're constantly bleeding the border runs right through my tongue" (Kaya, 2002).
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The diasporic subject in this poem is experiencing a constant tension between homelessness/rootlessness and diasporic home, which can give rise to a double or even multiple identity. The space he has found himself in is therefore a separate space in itself, where he, along with other modern migrants, dwells. This space is a hybrid space, a third space in Homi Bhabha's terms, or - in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - a rhizo-matic space (Kaya, 2002).
We are now playing the record Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, which is essentially a continuation of their joint venture Anti-Oedipus. Why call it a record, when it is actually a book" Well, firstly, many commentators of Deleuze and Guattari have persistently been arguing that the Thousand Plateaus is not a book at all; it incorporates a style that is extremely at odds with academic writing, especially the one utilized by art theory, inasmuch as its characteristic method is affirmation and creation rather than negation and critique (O'Sullivan, 2006). Brian Massumi, who translated the work into English and wrote his Foreword to it, suggested that we take it as a record - you approach it not as a closed book, but rather as an assembly of autonomous cuts. You can buy a record for just one song and listen to that one over and over, you can play it from start to end, dislike it and never pick it up again, or you perhaps listen to the first song, then you skip to the fourth, back to the first one, you play it twice, and then you go to the last one. And while we are at it, let's make a tape for a friend, shall we" Our authors wouldn't mind; as a matter of fact, they make it openly known that they too, while constructing their own plateaus, had borrowed from others, and encourage us to do the same. While doing that, you notice that there is a common thread to the record, something repeating in all songs. Deleuze and Guattari call that, appropriately, a refrain (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
The main reason to play this record within this essay is because its main objective is to act against representation. It is a pragmatic work and far distant from being a purely scholarly text, which we would rake for meaning and would therefore try to position it within the very field of representation (O'Sullivan, 2006). Deleuze and Guattari believe that the systems of representation and the knowledge they produce are tree- or root-like structures. They considered Binary logic as the spiritual reality of the root-tree. They explained themselves on the example of a book. Any book that is dedicated to a subject overlooks the exteriority of their relationship, namely the relationship between the book and the subject, and the working of the matter. The classical book, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the root-book. This book imitates the world, as art imitates nature, and that is by procedures or law of reflections, when One becomes Two. It is here that the authors ask the crucial question:
"How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between the world and book, nature and art?" (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, 5).
This is how the formula of One Becomes Two dictates even the most 'dialectical' way of thinking and has been fueling, in their words, "the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought." Deleuze and Guattari are convinced that nature doesn't work that way and that thoughts were therefore falling behind nature. In their opinion, thought has never reached an understanding of the multiplicity, only the level of the bi-univocal relationship between successive circles, which they presented with, again in biological terms, an example of pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. Another root worth noticing was a fascicular root, which was an illustration of a radicle-system of thought, which either absorbs the multiplicity of the secondary roots or it splits apart and onto the numerous subordinate roots. One needs to be aware, though, that such roots still present a unity just so that it can be subsequently again broken onto the subject and object; the fascicular system, therefore, doesn't really break with cartesian dualism, with the complementarity between subject and object. They show that on the example of Nietzsche's aphorisms, which seem to shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to awaken the cyclic unity of the eternal return, which holds position of the non-known in thought (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987). Here is a sample:
"Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge; it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing" (Nietzsche, 1996, 578).
Deleuze and Guattari comment on the world of today by stating that it has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer be dichotomized, instead, it assumes a higher unity. It is a set of circumstances marked by ambivalence and overdetermination. In such a world of chaos, the multiplicity that Deleuze and Guattari are after is not simply uttered and therefore created; the multiple has to be made! The way we create it is not by always adding yet another dimension, but by an even more simple undertaking, drawing on the dimensions that are already available. Not summing them up, however, but always constituting it by subtracting the unique from the multiplicity, n-1. Deleuze and Guattari call upon us to write at n-1 dimension and the system we would create would be called a rhizome (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
Rhizome is in biology a bulb- or a tuber - like structure and is completely different from roots and radicles. It is organized more like grass than a tree, resembling the arrangements of the brain, which acted as an inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze, 1995). As such, a rhizome connects any point to any other point, and is therefore very hard to eradicate. Especially so,
Katja CERGOL) EDWARDS: A RHIZOME AS A MAP OF A RUPTURE OF THE CARTESIAN DUALISM, 185-192
because a feature of one point is not necessary linked through the same nature to the other point. A rhizome is an open system, which brings into play very different regimes of signs. A rhizome is made only of lines, as opposed to a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points, and biunivocal relationships between the positions. The lines of a rhizome are lines of segmentarity and stratifications as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deter-ritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. A rhizome cannot be an object of reproduction. It is dissimilar to the graphic arts, drawing or photography, since a rhizome does not pertain to tracing, but to a production and construction of a map with multiple entries and exits. Also, a map of a rhizome can always be detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable. This system as a map, or a rhizome, is acentered, nonhi-erarchical, and nonsignifying system. A rhizome is made of plateaus, which are continuous, self-vibrating regions of intensities, without any culmination point or external end. And plateaus are always in the middle, in-between. Right where our migrant of diaspora dwells. Plateaus are any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems. Rhizomes establish connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and also circumstances corresponding to the arts, sciences, and social struggle (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
Deleuze and Guattari illustratively offer us some examples of rhizomes, besides their own book - the record, which are primarily taken from nature: rhizomes are potatoes, couch grass, but also animals' burrows, and rats, when they swarm over each other. I consider the following model of a rhizome especially compelling, particularly when considering the multiplicity, which has neither subject or object; Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate the law of combinations, which are increasing in number as and only when the multiplicity changes in nature, through an example of puppet strings. They, as a rhizomatic system, are not tied to the will of a puppeteer, but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in another dimension, connected to the first (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
As described above, a rhizome is an image of thought, which spreads out beneath the image of a tree (Deleuze, 1995). The tree-root thought needs to therefore be complimented by a rhizome and not substituted. In such a way, the dualism's characteristics for structures is substituted by multiplicity. Returning once again to the analogy of the book - the tripartite division between a field of reality - represented by the world, a field of representation - which is the book, and a field of subjectivity - that being the author, is extinct. In the place of this tripartide division, we look now at an assemblage, which rests on the multiplicities, which in turn
are again the constituencies of the above-mentioned tripartition. )ust like the multiplicities of strings on the side of the puppet AND the puppeteer. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari say, we don't ask what a book means, as signified or signifier, we don' look at the book for something to understand in it. What we do do, though, is ask what a book functions with, in connections with what other it does or does not transmit intensities, which are plateaus and therefore parts of rhizome, etc. A book therefore can exist only through the outside and on the outside. For Deleuze and Guattari, literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. All we talk about when applying rhizomatic flights of thought are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, intensities, the units of measure. And the units of measure are essential. In this case the unit is quantify writing. There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore, a book also has no object. Again, when opposing the representation, then we find that the writing, too, has nothing to do with signifying. Rather, recalling rhizomes as maps, writing is a flight of surveying and mapping. Writing also shouldn't only stop or end with the past or present, since maps have no end, but should engage with realms that are yet to come (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
Book as an assemblage, then a rhizome-book, and not a dichotomous, pivotal or fascicular, root-like book. Deleuze and Guattari believe that since the understanding of the non-existence of tripartide division has been establish, it is safe to urge us to not write in any other way but from an inside. They state that it is impossible for one to write sufficiently in the name of an outside; the outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. They appeal to us to not send down roots, or plant them, however difficult that might be (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
They don't claim that the change is an easy one; they acknowledge, in their words, that "many people have a tree growing in their heads." If we remember from the above, though, what the inspiration was for these two authors, it was a brain, which is more grass- than treelike. In order to be rhizomorphous, applicable to the world of chaotic circumstances, we need to be willing to stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. "We are tired of trees", Deleuze and Guattari say at one point (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
Referring back to our old, noble man from the 17th century who liked to slice eyes up, his thought divided the world; we have been separating ourselves as subjects from the object world. We are used to thinking in binaries and that is well illustrated by looking at concepts that we have been dealing with: content vs. form, depth vs. surface, essence and appearance, soul - body, author - book, signifier - signified, speech - writing, unconscious - conscious, reality - ideology, etc. We have
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tried ourselves at critiquing these binarism, and we've arrived at post-structuralism, which is definitely a success from a certain perspective. However, post-structuralism is often based only on a reversal of binaries or erasure (the deferral) of the privileged/superior term. All post-structuralism is a critique of the privileged position of the origins and ultimately a critique of representation. It might be a project of important thought, which 'reveals' the exclusions and marginalization; it is however, just a reading of other theories (O'Sullivan, 2006). Applying the rhizome mode of thinking to the concepts of academic thoughts, Deleuze and Guattari do not claim that their plateaus are any new concept or theory. Specifically, they say:
"Nowhere do we claim for our concepts the title of a science" (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, 22).
They do however, along the concept of a rhizomatic idea of the world, suggest an addition to History, and I want to stress this, because it shows the importance and applicability of post-colonial concepts. They theorize that traditional history is written from what they call a sedentary point of view, meaning that it is an inactive and static concept, even when the topic is nomads. The addition they refer to therefore is what they call a No-madology, being an opposite of history. They point out several examples, which all have common characteristics, namely that these are narratives of multiplicities, but that there is always a collective assemblage of enunciation, an assemblage of desire, one inside the other and plugged into an outside, which is a multiplicity in any case. Deleuze and Guattari call such narrating rhi-zomatic or nomadic, narrating which abandons the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity... That is writing or narrating as nomadism of those who only assemble. This is not a break with traditions, it is an imperceptible rupture (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987). Referring back to the researches of Ayhan Kaya, his Turkish Berliners hip-hop contemporary minstrels, as he also marks them, are active bricoleurs; they are adept at performing large numbers of tasks at the same time, utilizing any material that is at hand, and thus constructing bricolages. As juxtaposed to the concept of engineer, who does not subordinate his tasks to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project, our nomads of today are hence quick and efficient at objecting and counteracting against the essen-tialist terms of cartesianistic-like culture (Kaya, 2002).
Another example of the nomadic bricolages is Chi-cano art of rasquachismo, which also makes do with whatever materials are at the disposal of the Hispanic minority in the U.S. when constructing their local world of cultural expressions. It is making the most out of the least. This is an act not of tracing, since it is not a representation; the rasquachismo doesn't represent anything, there hasn't been anything before it, it happened out of possibilities, out of multiplicities of an everyday of the
migrants. It is an active creation of a map of their terrain - setting out the coordination points for worlds-in-progress, for subjectivities-to-come (O'Sullivan, 2006). Deleuze and Guattari do not try to make a binary opposition between mapping and tracing. They explain that it is a question of method: "The tracing should always be put back on the map." The rhizome map is made to get things done, to move us onwards, and it is thus a notion of pragmatics. From a diaspora point of view, the pragmatism is the only solution, nothing would happen before an active mapping of your terrain is done. This is a creative project of endless connectivity and becoming. Art project, therefore, as a rhizome, is a creative project, too, as redundant as that might sound, but stressing not the re-presentational aspect of art, but rather an affirmative and productive one - a creative project that parallels the work of its objects.
Let's listen to Deleuze and Guattari one last time:
"This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deteritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensity segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight." (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, 189).
This is a plan; this is a program for an expanded notion of art practice AND for living our lives as an art practice. It is not a program for escapism, rather it is a call for attention to be focused on the actual, if only to unlock the potential becomings, the virtualities within every moment. It is here that the in-between nature of art practice becomes important. Art, the avant-garde art, is always situated between the actual and the virtual... As such, it cannot be representational, it can, however, be constructive of a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality (Deleuze, 1995).
Understanding art practice rhizomatically, that is - as a constant connectivity of multiplicities, activated by the in-between realm, entails looking at it for its "performative aspect" - namely, what it does and what it makes us do. In this way, art is a practice that operates to open up other possible worlds; it is a space of production of situations, of rituals, those practices that allow us to access states beyond the everyday and beyond habitual subjectivity. It might not even stop at the production of different subjectivities; it might go beyond, invoking actions and practices in the world (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987).
Unfortunately, this is not a place to go deeper into this aspect, but perhaps just as an additional rhizomatic excursion - the tracing of the evolving of modern art can, too, be perceived through the performative aspect of creative activity within in-between two arts, between painting and sculpture, between sculpture and archi-
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tecture, between theater and dance, between performance and social projects, even. The performativity is a refrain of it, just like the multiplicity is a refrain of Thousand Plateaus, and it points to the unity of arts. Art as a connectivity of these in-between fields and practices has recently become known as 'relational aesthetics'. The experience of art as such is no longer one of transporta-
tion, a vehicle into an unknown or unimaginable realm, but rather it is an experience of connectivity. In reality it means that it is a practice connecting different semiotic regimes with different organizations of power as well as connecting practitioners and producers of art with spectators and beholders (O'Sullivan, 2006).
RIZOM KOT ZEMLJEVID RAZLOMA KARTEZIJANSKEGA DUALIZMA
Katja CERGOLJ EDWARDS
USA-22301 Alexandria, VA, 306 Commonwealth Ave., Apt. 1 e-mail: katjace@gmail.com
POVZETEK
Oblikovanje percepcije in posameznikovega znanja v zahodnem svetu v večjem delu temelji na dualistično zasnovanih konstruktih. Vir tako oblikovanega sveta je kartezijanska perspektiva, poimenovana po filozofu Descartesu, ki je dominantno zaznamovala moderni skopični režim. Kartezijanska perspektiva temelji na načelu, da je celotna organizacija našega zaznavanja vezana na naša čutila in da je najpomembnejši človeški čut ravno vid. Po Descartu lahko trdimo, da je naše razumevanje sveta odvisno od podob v umu ter da so to perceptualne presoje, ki so odvisne od pravilnega branja sveta oziroma razumevanja jezika. Tako lahko govorimo o razlikovanju med subjektivno in objektivno perspektivo, dualističnim odnosom med umom in telesom, subjektom in objektom, z drugimi besedami, kartezijansko dualnostjo. Nasprotovanje kartezijanskemu razumevanju sveta je postalo vedno bolj vplivno ob prelomu 20. stoletja, ko je posameznikovo iskanje življenskih pomenov želelo prekoračiti ustaljene okvire enostavnih dualističnih struktur kartezijanske perspektive, označene z 'ali-ali'. Pričujoči esej poudarja razumevanje sveta mi-granta, posameznika diaspore, ki ga označujejo prostori liminalnosti, neprestane težnje po prenovljenem oblikovanju identitete v hibridnem prostoru kontinuiranega dodajanja, torej konstrukta 'in-in-in-...'. Tak prostor sta Gilles Deleuze in Felix Guattari v svojem delu Thousand Plateaus (Tisoč nivojev) označila kot rizomatski prostor. Po njunem mnenju je potrebno našo zavest oblikovati na podlagi multiplicitete, ki se upira dualističnemu sistemu, značilnem za reprezentativno oblikovanje pomenov. Rizom, za katerega je multipliciteta značilna, je sistem povzet po biološki strukturi gomolja. Tak sistem je vedno enkraten, neponovljiv in zatorej ne more biti predmet reprodukcije. Je acentričen, nehirearhičen in neoznačevalski. Rizom je sestavljen iz platojev, ki so neskončni in so vedno v sredini, sredinski, vmesni. Prav to pa je ta prostor liminalnosti, ki ga nomadsko naseljuje tudi posameznik-migrant. Deleuze in Guattari med drugim v skladu s svojo idejo rizomatskega razumevanja sveta predlagata tudi nekakšen dodatek k zgodovini, imenovan Nomadologija. Takšna naracija je kolektivna zbirka individualno poudarjenih pomenov in se odraža kot brikolaž posameznikovih zgodb. Rizom kot brikolaž je aktivno oblikovanje konceptov in je zato pragmatičen pojem. Umetnost kot prostor oblikovanja in prezentacije idej, označena s karakteristikami rizoma, je torej nereprezentativna, saj jo moramo razumeti kot stalno povezovanje multiplicitet, s čimer odpira in predstavlja še neodkrita področja našega bivanja in razumevanja. Takšen pogled na umetnost nas osredotoči na njen performa-tivni aspekt. Umetnost tako postane prostor produkcije situacij, ritualov in tistih praks, ki nam omogočajo doseganje stanj in subjektivnosti izven običajev in norm vsakdanjika.
Ključne besede: postkolonializm, dualizem, identiteta, kartezijanski, perspektiva, rizom, reprezentacija,
multipliciteta, nomadstvo, performativnost
Katja CERGOLJ EDWARDS: A RHIZOME AS A MAP OF A RUPTURE OF THE CARTESIAN DUALISM, 185-192
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