Post-Human, All too Non-Human: Implications of the Cyber-Rhizome
Abstract
Never necessarily in this order, and always recursively: This serves as an attempt to recover Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalysis and their concept of the rhizome as methodologies through which to better understand cyber-relations; to identify the spatial and temporal configurations of cyber-space which facilitate such relations; and to map the manner in which the cyber-subject is constituted in this manner. To this end, it would be productive to map (spatialise) and recall (temporalise) the rhizomatic performance of cyber-space: a mapping of folds and multiplicities, always-already a shifting middle term; and, contingently, a recollection of an always-becoming, a becoming-n-1 system. Likewise, and reflexively, schizoanalysis demonstrates how such a rhizomatic body de-codes the cyber-subject (by its very endless virtuality), liberating it into ‘nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients.’1 Such a paper would aim to further map how such cyber-subjects come to form relations within the larger rhizome schematic, and the potential this carries. All this being said, it would be imperative to contrast the methodologies of Deleuze and Guattari against other theories and methods related to cyber-space and cyber-relations - as the rhizome seed invites. The concept of the ‘cyber’ cannot be properly treated within the parameters of tree-like, binary logic. By its very performance, cyber-space and cyber-relations are rhizome seeds, spreading, mutating, shifting. Never necessarily in this order, and always recursively.
Publication Title
At the Interface: Probing the Boundaries
Recommended Citation
Sundvall, S. (2012). Post-Human, All too Non-Human: Implications of the Cyber-Rhizome. At the Interface: Probing the Boundaries, 83, 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208536_003
