On the Line by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new 'Foreign Agents' series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on the blackboard) at the 'Schizo-Culture' conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, 'Rhizome' introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. 'Rhizome' substitutes pragmatic, 'couch grass,' free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree. In 'Politics,' superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the 'becoming revolutionary.' Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass. This 1983 Semiotext(e) Paperback is in good condition. Minor foxing to the edges of pages; cover rubbed.

ISBN: 9780936756011 SKU: 1552491 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.