Coleman and Ringrose (2013:105) point out that Deleuze and Guattari “stretch language and its possibilities by intentionally using words to connote something other than what we ordinarily take them to mean as a way to interrupt and rupture our ways of thinking“.
This was revealed to me at the recent Deleuze & Guattari & Africa conference held at the University of Cape Town. I gave a presentation on my blogging experience. Afterwards someone in the audience approached me and pointed out that I had missed the “a” in describing the 4th rhizomatic principle; my slide read "signifying rupture" rather than "asignfying rupture". I recall deleting the "a" in haste thinking that it was insignificant - an error, now corrected.
This feedback was valuable to me. The prefix indicates an exclusion - a moving away from. It illustrates how a rupture breaks away from the usual to enable other connections to be created. This collegial questioning was an event, a part of my becoming, a moment of deterritorialization, a line of flight. It was perhaps a molecular encounter that destabilized the whole, a singularity that influences me and is now driving my new response.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987:9) describe this rhizomatic principle as “a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight”. They explain that these lines of flight are part of the rhizomes and will always be connected. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9).
I see a link to the changing relationality apparent in Barad’s “agential cuts”. There is a “cutting together-apart” of matter when it is “diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented effects of iterative reconfigurings of spacetimemattering” (2014:158). The entanglement with shifting boundaries entails an on-going dynamic relationship, moving away from that which is rigidly segmented and coded. Barad highlights how important it is to recognise what is excluded with each agential cut. She explains that "exclusions constitute an open space of agency; they are the changing conditions of possibility of changing possibilities" (Barad 2007:179).
While exploring the internet I found a useful analogy by Julie Kees (2007), a legal librarian in Alabama, USA. She associates the principle of an asignifying rupture with domestic violence issues which do not fit neatly into the confines of the closed legal system. The reality of domestic violence contradicts established meanings creating a space which Kees (2007) claims “is the aletheia from which domestic violence is speaking itself into cultural and legal placement”.
Similarly, I wonder whether mistreatment of women in Obstetrics introduces contradictions and ambiguities that fall outside the ambit of established medical practice. New connections need to be found - perhaps aided through interdisciplinary explorations. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the value of integrating Science, Philosophy, and Art.
The image above was created on my iPad using the Paper App.
Barad, K. 2014. Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax, 20:3, 168-187.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Coleman. R & Ringrose, C. 2013. Introduction: Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kees, J. G. 2007. Mapping Domestic Violence in the Rhizome: Asignifying Ruptures in Anglo-American Law. The fifth international conference on new directions in the humanities. http://h07.cgpublisher.com/proposals/380/index_html
