Untitled - witz cultural

60HYPERTEXT 3.0 purpose, these structures serve admirably." Unfortunately, these valuable"organizational tools end up becoming the only methods of understanding,"and limit instead of enhance or liberate our thought. "ln contrast, Deleuze andGuattari propose the rhizome as a usefirl model for analysing structures-thepotato, the strawberry plant, with their thickenings and shifting connections,with their network-like structure instead of a tree-like one" ("Tree/Rhizome").This fundamental network structure explains whythe rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple ... lt has neither beginningnor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills... When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changesin nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis . .. The rhizome is an antigenealogy.It is a short-termemory,antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion,conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography,unliketracings, the rhizome pertains to a mapthat must be produced, constructed,a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multipleentrylvays and exits and its own lines offlight . . . In contrast to centered (even polycentric)systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablishedpaths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifring system without aCeneral and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely bya circulation ofstates. (21)As we explore hlpertext in the following pages, we shall repeatedly encounterthe very qualities and characteristics Deleuze and Guattari here specify: likethe rhizome, hypertext, which has "has multiple entryways and exits," embodiessomething closer to anarchy than to hierarchy, and it "connects anypoint to any other point," often joining fundamentally different kinds of informationand often violating what we understand to be both discrete printtexts and discrete genres and modes.Any reader of hypertext who has experienced the way our own activitieswithin the networked text produce multiple versions and approaches to asingle lexia will see the parallel to hypertext in Deleuze and Guattarik pointthat "multiplicities are rhizomatic, and erpose arborescent pseudomultiplicitiesfor what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or todivide in the subject" (8). Therefore, like hypertext considered in its most generalsense, "arhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model.It is a stranger to any idea ofgenetic axis or deep structure" (12). As Deleuzeand Guattari explain, a rhizome is "a map and not a tracing. Make a map, nota tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms amap with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the trac-