How quiet we have been. How difficult it has been to put pencil to paper or fingers to keys, unless writing fiction or poetry. The project that precedes this is, perhaps, utter folly. Perhaps there are gems in it. But we are convinced that there is far more work to do to outline an anti-political framework and to even to ground the impetus for such a move. Perhaps Walter Benjamin may give us more to work with. With this in mind, we hope to return to these works. However, presently, we turn to an unorthodox move. A move that we hope may further elucidate our current concerns with political theory and practice.

Recently reading a blog that attempted to give new categories for punk genres (paranoid vs dilemmatic) which could be drawn upon political discourse and practice, I felt up to commenting upon this discussion.

Perhaps these categories help us to understand political discourse, but it still feels grimy like Hegelian theodicical hypostatization. Political discourse has been reduced, with representation, either to the paranoid certainty of zealots or of the dilemmatic pragmatist that struggles to make 2 points be 1.

Having read our A Thousand Plateaus we can see the points of resonance with arborescent and fascicular models of thought. The paranoid certainty never escapes perverted Cartesian solipsism for an inch; the one truth of my beliefs is the only way. The paranoid is that of the arborescent, as the one taproot stands as truth and small contingencies may be brought out from it–but only so far. The dilemmatic reeks of the fascicular model: two taproots that pose as a multiplicity, while still searching for one truth. The methodology of contemporary democracy tells us that one group must win and all must follow and so the dilemmatic oscillates between the two, trying to make it one. Or in American political discourse, the Republicans have a reign then Democrats and the dilemmatic tries to pull them together and contrast them to create the one truth of the Moderate that borrows from both oscillitory points of limit.

But all of this is still herd morality and passivity. No matter the discourse, occidental practice of politics is obsessed with punishment, force, and its own bad conscience. Moreover, it is obsessed with creating sketches from particulars that will then be held up as the basis for judging all particulars (this is hypostatization; the way that a play by Sophocles ensured that all of psychological experience is merely the one truth of Oedipus. But how many other stories have been written? Even DH Lawrence shows us something that is outside of mere Oedipal representation when writing about mothers and sons.).

Winnemucca, when writing of the Piutes, gives us a different ethic–one that refuses the vengeance of the occidental Absolute Morality that is imposed.

Within the second chapter of her text, Life Among the Piutes , we are presented an image of the loose social power that forms the tribes of the Piutes. Judeo-Christian practice is indicted as she lays out how there was no need to set laws in stone to enforce the love of family or members. The small tribes also resist republican forms of democracy by having a chief, but inviting all to discuss as a sort of congress while even particular individuals are discussed rather than creating impersonal sketchings that will be fit to particulars.

Although parts of the social mechanism of Winnemucca’s description seems backwards or touched by passivity and herd morality, the rhizomatic difference seems to burst forth as she points out the handling of dissent or “bad.” Rather than punishing or seeking retribution out of a sense of superiority, the Piutes merely look away or remove themselves from situations and actions that do not please them. How this calls to mind Nietzsche! The teacher of the eternal return that hopes to merely look away, rather than negate. Dionysus is that creative-destructive drive that seeks to critique while not falling into hypostatization. Nietzsche was ever driven to critique and diagnose, but always seemed the activity of affirmation.

What may we learn from Winnemucca? Perhaps little, as those conditions and relations are easy to cultivate in small tribes but much more difficult to foster with larger and larger assemblages. However, the difference is striking and serves to illuminate the fact that there is something other than State organization–other than paranoid or dilemmatic assemblages of power and the socius. Even though there is a mechanism for social production among the Piutes, this nomadic assemblage resists the organization of paranoid and dilemmatic forms in favor of the rhizome. This is to say, there is something outside of the two dimensional space of the contemporary nation-state. Life is not teleologically pre-ordained but has other virtualities and possibilities.

Well, perhaps one asks, how do we realize such an idealized rhizome in these large mechanisms? How does one go about avoiding paranoia and dilemma? How do we avoid the trap of clunky and pre-fabricated categories and get to haeccity? And how do we avoid reducing the modes of others to dichotomies of you/me or bad/good? How can we try to disjoint the way in which, so often, when we say “you” we are really projecting “I”?

This is the problem of Primo Levi: the shame of being human. We must take this up and better sink our teeth in.