Smash the Fascism of the Potato!
(SA/2025)
I.
It took quite an effort on my part as a dendrophile to stop thinking (figuratively and politically) in a classical arborescent manner. That is to say, to stop thinking in what Deleuze and Guattari characterise as the "oldest, and weariest" [a] manner; deep-rooted and developing in accord with binary logic and a unitary principle of generation.
For a long time, I resisted adopting a rhizomatic model of thought. That is to say, one which is absolutely different from the above and takes a wide diversity of forms; one which doesn't plot fixed points, but shoots lines of flight and ceaselessly establishes a multiplicity of connections; one which evolves at a subterranean level and never allows itself to be overcoded [b].
Eventually, however, I came to understand that although many people "have a tree growing in their heads" [15] and pride themselves on their long-term memory, the brain itself is "much more a grass than a tree" [15] and that short-term memory - which "includes forgetting as a process" [16] - is the one that operates within Torpedo the Ark, producing a fragmented and discontinuous form of pop analysis and pink pantherism.
Ultimately, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, arboresent systems with their hierarchical structures, centres of significance and subjectification, and organised long-term memories result in a sad form of writing and thinking, weighed down by the spirit of gravity - and who wants that, other than those idealists who continue to sit in the shade of Plato's tree.
II.
Someone who was never persuaded by Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatics, however, was Alain Badiou; a philosopher with a penchant for mathematics and Maoism, whose name is very rarely mentioned on this blog and who I essentially think of negatively, even if he was one of the founders of the faculty of philosophy at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) [c].
Unlike his more postmodern colleagues, Badiou continued to believe in ideals of Universalism, Truth, and the revolutionary promise of Communism. Thus, no surprises that he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors whose philosophical works he
considered decadent deviations from the pure model of scientific Marxism advanced by his mentor Louis Althusser.
Badieu seemed to have a particular dislike for Gilles Deleuze [d] and his collaborator Félix Guattari, scornfully dismissing them as theoreticians of desire whose work on capitalism and schizophrenia was little more than anti-dialectical moralism. At best, said Badiou, their analysis in Anti-Oedipus (1972) merely affirms "the disaffected and self-serving politics of petit bourgeois youth; at
worst, they are the 'hateful adversaries of all organized revolutionary
politics'" [e].
As for their thinking on the rhizome in a short text of this title published in 1976 which later served (in revised form) as the introduction to Mille Plateaux (1980) ... Well, that really triggered Badiou and in a review ludicrously entitled 'The Fascism of the Potato' [f] he describes Deleuze and Guattari as cunning monkeys and crooks who head a troupe of anti-Marxists and take their readers to be morons.
Like Alan D. Schrift, I can't help wondering if Badiou was later embarrassed by the tone of his polemic:
"For there is at bottom a philosophical issue at work here, namely, whether one must follow the Marxist dialectical principle that 'One divides into two' or whether one should reject this dialectical binarism and offer in place of the One a multiplicity." [g]
Further, "revelations about Mao and Maoism in the years since this review was written make Badiou's unquestioning affirmation of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution problematic, to say the least" [h].
Push comes to shove: better the rhizomatic fascism of the potato than the arborescent idealism of a Maoist ...
Notes
[a] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 5. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.
It might be noted that an arborescent manner of thinking isn't just peculiar to dendrophiles; as Deleuze and Guattari point out, "the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botony to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy ..." [18].
[b] I have attempted to summarise the principal characteristics of a rhizome, something which Deleuze and Guattari also do, insisting that, unlike trees
or their roots, "the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and
its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature [...]
The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. [...] It
has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (mileau) from
which it grows and which it overspills. [...] The rhizome operates by
variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots" [21].
However, it's important to note that D&G are not attempting to establish opposing models that exist within a binary system. Thus, there are "knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic
offshoots in roots" [20] and they strategically posit what appears to be a new dualism only in order to challenge all such thinking.
[c] After the events of May '68, Paris VIII (Vincennes) was created to be a kind of bastion of countercultural thought. A committee, that included Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, set out to model Vincennes after MIT and Michel Foucault was appointed head of a philosophy department that included Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Miller, and, later, Gilles Deleuze.
[d] According to Eugene Wolters, Deleuze was constantly terrorised by Alain Badiou
and his gang of Maoist supporters and labelled by them an enemy of the people. Not only did they monitor the political content of his lectures, but they sometimes actively disrupted his classes.
See the post entitled '13 Things You Didn’t Know
About Deleuze and Guattari - Part III' (dated 2 July, 2013) on Wolters' Critical-Theory blog: click here. Wolters has based his post on a study by François Dosse entitled Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (Columbia University Press, 2010).
[e] Alan D. Schrift, review of Alain Badiou's The Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and trans. Bruno Bosteels (Verso, 2012), in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (8 January 2013): click here.
[f] Badiou's 'The Fascism of the Potato' first appeared in French as 'Le fascisme de la pomme de terre' in La Situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (François Maspero, 1977), pp. 42-52. Badiou signed the text under the pseudonym Georges Peyrol. The Engish translation by Bruno Bosteels can be found in The Adventure of French Philosophy ... Part II, chapter 11 (pp. 191-201).
Whilst admitting that the frenzied polycentrism of Deleuze and Guattari is preferable to bourgeois liberalism, their refusal to acknowledge the importance of class struggle and the need for political unity and solidarity was not to his liking. Ultimately, he finds their thinking painfully false and too literary or aestheticised and he doesn't give a shit about the Pink Panther.
[g] Alan D. Schrift, review of Alain Badiou's The Adventure of French Philosophy ... op. cit.
[h] Ibid.
