Andreas Eller Horburgstrae 93

Introduction to Literaure and Culture Studies II Ridvan Askin

07888 56867 a.eller@stud.unibas.ch Semester 2nd

2 Semesters of English

The Application of Deuleuze's and Guattari's 6 Principles of the Rhizome to Wikipedia

Critical paper

1429 Words

Date of completion: 11.6.2011

Table of Contents 2

Introduction

1. The Rhizome: 6 principles applied to Wikipedia

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction 3

Reading the the first part of Gilles Deleuze's and Flix Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus" called "1. Introduction: Rhizome" you might start of being confused by the expression "Rhizome", since some people might know that it actually derives from botanic and describes how for example grass or tubers grow respectively behave in the ground. As you will notice whilst reading this paper Deuleuze and Guattari would get angry if you introduced Rhizomes as type of root, due to the fact that a major part of "Introduction: Rhizome" is about the distinction between roots, trees and rhizomes. Of course the two men were not primarily interested in botanics but rather in how they could apply the rhizomatic system to literature or even the world. The result was a whole new philosophical concept which is caught nicely in one of the last passages of the text:

" Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. ()"(24-25)

An Explanation would now not be useful, since there is a massive amount of background information for almost every word. Neither will everything be discussed due to the broadness of this topic. Nevertheless, also without wide explanations

4 you get the main idea of the philosophy. This paper's aim is to have a closer look at Deuleuze's and Guattari's 6 principles of a Rhizome and see if they are applicable to a popular medium called Wikipedia. Also will the application off the principles depict wether Wikipedia has rhizomatic features or not.

1. The Rhizome: 6 principles applied to Wikipedia

The 6 principles are how the two men define the rhizome. Deuleuze and Guattari (21) define the rhizome like the rhizomatic growth of grass. In a Plane it connects every point to any other. Concerning "points" the Deuleuze's and Guattari's text is confusing in some way. They say that the Rhizome has no points but just lines. Nevertheless they write: "the rhizome connects every point to any other point," (21). Different from the tree or root system with its hierarchy and so with a definite number of possibilities, the rhizome has an infinite number of possible connections (Infinite due to the 3rd principle: multiplicity (8-9)). Applied to Wikipedia it works mostly. You just have to think of all the hyperlinks and cross references which immediately pop in to your eye when you read an article. Though it needs to be said

that of course not every article is linked to every other article so this principle is not completely fulfilled. The 2nd principle (7), the principle of heterogeneity says that the the plateaus the rhizome consists of don't have to be of linguistic nature but can be drawn from every other registers. Wikipedia is concerned with almost every topic or register possible so the second principle works very well, too.

5 As already mentioned the third of the 6 principles deals with multiplicity, a very difficult expression. You can even say that "multiplicity" is the main key word Deuleuze and Guattari write about. They emphasize that multiplicity has nothing to do with the word "multiple". Since the rhizome is something that consistently grows, also the connections and dimensions increase in number. On Wikipedia its the same case. The medium is constantly growing: Whereas in 2005 the English Wikipedia had about 500,000 online articles it had 3,5 million articles in January 2011 (Wikipedia 2011). There's no better proof for Wikipedia's multiplicity than the mentioned numbers. The 4th principle which is almost as hard to understand as the third needs a repeated reading to be understood. It's the principle of asignifying rupture. In this part of the text (9-11) Deuleuze and Guattari mention different examples: The relationship between a type C virus, cats and baboons, the orchid and the wasp and between the "Pink Panther" and the world. The key term in this passage is

deterritorialization. It's easiest to explain the term using the orchid and wasp

example. The orchid imitates the wasp's colors to make it fly on the orchid. This way the orchid is able to reproduce, whilst the wasp is deterritorialized. The wasp drops the seed somewhere so the orchid is reteritorialized. The orchid increases its territory by deterritorialization. Applied to Wikipedia this would mean that it spreads when people take articles and use them somewhere else,i.e. not on the Wikipedia domain. This, exactly, is the case of Wikipedia: Students and pupils use articles from Wikipedia for their presentations or papers. Deuleuze's and Guattari's 5th principle of the rhizome is that it is "not

6 amenable to any structural or generative model." (12) The rhizome is forever changing and changeable. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia which is constantly enlarged by everyone who writes articles on it. Furthermore everyone (signed in to Wikipedia) can change, comment, rate, correct or confirm the correctness of an article. The rhizomaticness of Wikipedia is mainly based on the fact that its always chaining, that there are always new links and lines made. The principle of cartography, the 6th principle, deals with the realization of the rhizome as a map. Other than a tracing a map has no preestablished center which it is formed around. And so is the rhizome; it is acentric and not even polycentric (Deleuze & Guattari, 21). To emphasize the rhizomatic features of Wikipedia it is useful to quickly focus on the structure of other websites. Common sites are built like a tree: There is a homepage comparable to the "S" in Chomsky's model of the grammatical tree. The homepage hierarchically stands over the whole rest of the

"website-tree". Either if only 2 "branches" follow or you can access multiple sites from the homepage the only active neighbor of a site is its "hierarchical superior" (Deuleuze & Guattari, 16). "Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways" (12). This also supports the idea of Wikipedia as a Rhizome. You can not only enter Wikipedia via its homepage, but through every single article you find anywhere on the Internet (e.g. google). If you laid out Wikipedia on a huge plane you would get something that looks like a map with infinite connections. The thing is you would constantly have to expand the plane due to Wikipedia's or the Rhizome's characteristics.

7 Conclusion

So is Wikipedia rhizomatic? A clear "yes" is not possible since, the system of a rhizome is only theoretically possible. Nevertheless its rather rhizomatic than not. As Deuleuze and Guattari themselves say "There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots" (20). It's like ying and yang. Treelike structures can be found in rhizomes and so in wikipedia. For Example 2 main access point to Wikipedia are Google and Wikipedia's homepage. People would say that these are two centers of Wikipedia which isn't true. They hierarchically aren't superior to other sites of Wikipedia and its articles. Also Deuleuze and Guattari say, that the rhizome has no long term memory: "()short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is

arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph)." (16) Whereas Wikipedia saves everything, what is written, corrected, deleted or confirmed, still not supporting the thought that Wikipedia might be arborescent. A Rhizome has either beginning nor end. But Wikipedia has the day when it went on the Internet. See, in every feature of the rhizome there's also a part which says, Wikipedia can't be a Rhizome, but at least you can say there is hardly anything which comes so close to the utopian dream of a 100% functioning rhizome.

7 Works Cited

-Deuleuze, Gilles & Flix Guattari. (Translation: B. Massumi) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

-Wikipedia 2011. Web. 10 June 2011. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistik#Wikistats>

Erklrung betr. Regeln zur Sicherung wissenschaftlicher Redlichkeit

Hiermit besttige ich, dass ich vertraut bin mit den von der PhilosophischHistorischen Fakultt der Universitt Basel herausgegebenen Regeln zur Sicherung wissenschaftlicher Redlichkeit und diese gewissenhaft befolgt habe.

Vorname & Name: Andreas Eller Titel der schriftlichen Arbeit: The Application of Deuleuze's and Guattari's 6

Principles of the Rhizome to Wikipedia Datum: 11.6.2011 Unterschrift: Andreas Eller