When D+G write that long-term memory '(family, race, society, or civilization [TP, 16])' is an arborescent tracing-over of the rhizome of short-term memory relations, and suggest that we 'forget' these 'artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities' (AO, 34), I find myself wondering whether this rhizomic, 'subversive' forgetfulness is a reformulation of 'the death of history.' (For what it's worth, I also find myself wondering this when D+G call for Nomadology, 'the opposite of history' [TP, 23].) There have been a lot of heart-boners on the blog for the 'life-affirming' message or 'soul-stirring' rhetoric of D+G's writing on the rhizome, and I feel as though it might be productive to step back and take the cold shower of Benhabibian fem-skepticism:
'The more difficult question suggested by the strong thesis of the "death of history" appears to me to be different: even while we dispense with grand narratives, how can we rethink the relationship between politics and historical memory? Is it possible for struggling groups not to interpret history in light of a moral-political imperative, the imperative of the future interest in emancipation?' (Benhabib, 23)
It's true that the casualty of the death of history in Benhabib's passage is historical metanarratives or macro-historical teloi, but it seems as if Benhabib would find equally problematic those casualties of the rhizomic injunction to one-minute memory, namely 'long-term' relational categories like race or family or gender or nationality. Which is to say, it seems as if Benhabib would find it equally difficult to imagine an emancipatory political project that could obtain to any group that wasn't rigidly and endurably and singularly a group, e.g. for 'female' ''Iranian' 'mothers' who unstably reterritorialized as orchids and wasps. In Benhabian terms, to make historical progress on the historical stage, historical players must remain historical players.
I can think of at least two possible responses to this:
1) Rhizomes are about reconnectability and the potential for changing, emergent connections, including, maybe, filial or racial ones. So long as long-term relational identities are neutered of their arborescent, fixative potential, i.e. so long as filial or racial or national relations don't threaten to trace the rhizome or fix a member at a single identity-point and prevent her from being reterritorialized by orchids and wasps, those long-term relational identities can be peaceably maintained within a rhizome.
2) Rhizome-rhetoric is its own emancipatory politics, and once single Iranian mothers are rhizomatized they won't need macro-historical teloi or long-term relatonal identities - they'll be rhizomes!
I feel as though by posing the question in the way that I have I've denied rhizomes some crucial flexibility, or underestimated or misunderstood their 'grassroots' political efficacy. That said, this does seem like a genuinely Benhabibian worry (though I also feel as though I might have been a poor devil's advocate for Benhabib, so maybe it isn't).
--Guattari Hero
Because I'm on a cyborg trip at the moment:
"1) Rhizomes are about reconnectability and the potential for changing, emergent connections, including, maybe, filial or racial ones. So long as long-term relational identities are neutered of their arborescent, fixative potential, i.e. so long as filial or racial or national relations don't threaten to trace the rhizome or fix a member at a single identity-point and prevent her from being reterritorialized by orchids and wasps, those long-term relational identities can be peaceably maintained within a rhizome."
strikes me as a way in which rhizomes and cyborgs serve a parallel political function: as ways to characterize the self so that this self is not beholden to labels/arborescent histories that do identity violence. These characterizations nod to connections as constituting the self and emancipating it from tracings. To the extent that the self can be constituted, or course, which is: not very.
I think cyborgs and rhizomes present ways to re-characterize long term memories of race/family/gender/nationality by stripping them of their power to dominate identity, but not negating or ignoring them--more like neutering, to use your phrase. Such presences might be thought of as part of the eternal "middle", as grist for the rhizomatic grass roots political mill, as arborescent remains from which rhizomes can be excavated (more vocab borrowing, from 3NT's post this time).
So: I think postulated response #1 re Benhabibian anxiety is right on target.
I had a rather different concern about long- and short-term memory and history in D&G. That is, I had trouble resolving this call for short-term memory with AO's description of the schizophrenic's relationship with history. Let's consider the section in The Subject and Enjoyment that discusses the becomings of the Nietzsche-as-subject, passing through a series of states, identifying these zones of intensity "with the names of history": "No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way" (AO, 21). All of universal history in one fell swoop. History doesn't appear to be dead in this celibate machine, or in the subject of the machine--the subject identifies its states with history (through a historical figure).
But the schizophrenic in Jameson works entirely within short-term memory, unable to make links in the signification chain. Can these two conceptions of schizophrenics' relationships to history be resolved (and should they be)? perhaps experiencing history through zones of intensity, state by state, is similar to living within short-term memory--identifying with 'history' while in motion. You identify a state with history and then move on and on--the history felt, that person that you were, has no long-term staying power. Also, identifying with "the names of history" seems quite different from retaining a comprehensive historical memory. (And of course, the typical end-of-blog-post reservations: do D&G wish for us to experience history the way that Nietzsche-as-subject did?)
By the way, why did D&G name the celibate machine the celibate machine?
I went through the section on The Subject and Enjoyment (especially pages 20-21) pretty confused as well, but reading this thread and going back helps to make a little more sense of it. While I still can't claim to offer a well-argued and thought out answer to why the Celibate machine is celibate, I wonder if it doesn't have to do with a way of exploring methods of intense desire and pleasure outside of the traditional framework of sexuality. Here are my thoughts on D&G's discussion of Nietzsche-as-subject's experience of history. I don't read this section as necessarily a suggestion for historical thinking in the rhizomatic world but it's very possible that I missed the point. I read it as an explanation for a particular experience of history that helped (or was supposed to help) to make sense of the celibate machine and zones of intensity ideas. This bizarre, subject-eroding, way of experiencing history seemed, while showing signs of rhizomatic and not arboreal thinking, nevertheless to be too centered on a single body without organs, a single subject experiencing and losing itself in a historical continuum of "names", for me to really feel comfortable offering it as an example of rhizomatic history. My impression is that if there is a way to think and live rhizomatically, then it probably isn't possible to have an experience of history that is as basically unitary as this example. It seems that if one lived a life of flows and de-oedipalized desires, a view of history, if one is actually applicable (I'm still not sure what I think they would say about it), would necessarily have to acknowledge life experience as a loss of unitary subject into a fabric of multiplicitous agency, not into a space of historical facts. It's possible that I'm just too thick to pull the former out of this passage, but it strikes me as not being quite the same.