Tapering off

When Deleuze and Guattari say "n-1" 1 is not what it seems (?). Or maybe n is not.

The confusion arises from the mathematical terminological loan.

The old book: the tap root, the "Old Dream of Symmetry." One splits into two, or more. Always the one defined by and defining the second (the constitutive other?).

The not-as-old book: the modern book. Truncated, grafted. One grafted with multiple (castrated and supplemented? supplementing?). Chaos that yet transcends into a higher unity.

The rhizome. n-1. 1 is not a number, it is unity. Not arithmetic or set theory, but group theory. 1 is the identity. The rhizome, n-1, is radical. It goes to the root. The specular repetition of the subject--his creation of the object through the mirror--is overridden.  Unorganisch, without organs.  But too, the truncated chaos of modernism, the transcendental return of the unit(y) cannot be either.  1 is minus, excised--or maybe not included.  n might not even be a variable.  n is the number of dimensions we have, and don't create the unit(y).  Multiplicity as not progeny.

Language is still the problem.  A rhizome.  Unity imposes itself.  The ant colony is still the ant colony.  Is phallologocentrism a pathology?

If we can successfully read rhizomes this way, they become a strategic metaphor for subverting phallocentrism--the privileging of the engendered subject, which draws upon for validation the constitution of the other.  To define the subject, there must be an other.  The old book, the root that replicates itself, becoming two (or too many), but generated always by the one (but a one of which we cannot conceive without its self-reproduction).

But rhizomes re-fill this position.  They become the subject.  D+G have to create the rhizome by theorizing the not-rhizome.  A tracing (a tree) is taken from the map, and we can re-constitute the map by taking the tracing back to it.  One metaphor needs the other, is supplemented by it.  Always a rhizome.

there is no significance to the change in spacing, other than the reflection of the distance between ideas: blogger is formatting automatically.

I'm increasingly convinced that it is irresponsible to use sitars in rock music.