Deleuzian Dandelions

“The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.  When rats swarm over each other.  The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.  Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.  We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.”  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Here, the beginning of a rather long passage from Deleuze on the characteristics of a rhizome.  His notion of becoming as a rhizomatic process sneaks its way into almost all of my classes at some point.  The idea is that with a rhizome, a weed, it’s difficult to pin down an origins or a progression.  It is both multiple and singular, it’s a weed and a tuber, simultaneously.  It travels and circulates.  If you  interrupt the chain at one point it will just pop up again somewhere else.

I wonder if Deleuze had any experience with dandelions.

My first experience with Deleuze occurred in my anthropology class last spring.  I loved the idea of the rhizome.  I wanted to become the weed.  Hardy, elusive, the weed is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  How can I be a rhizomatic scholar, I wondered.

My first experience with dandelions occurred when I was a child.  I never understood why people would want to kill dandelions.  I took personal offense when they were referred to as weeds.  I found them to be beautiful.  I picked them all the time.  Brought them home and put them in water.  They have a stunning yellow blosom.  When you pick them they bleed milk.  Dandelions were beautiful and poetic to me…..

….until yesterday when I started gardening.

  Pulling up dandelions is a bitch because of that huge root.  Using my fairly mean looking trowel I went to town on the dandelions in my plant bed out front.  I dove the trowel into the ground, wiggling it back and forth, waiting for that tell-tale pop when the root has been dislodged.  The dandelions require me to get up on my knees for more leverage.  The first one I pulled freaked me out.  Here’s this root like two, three time the diameter of the plant on the surface.  On the ground they look innocent enough.  In fact, while searching for this image I found pages and pages of tastefully photographed fields of dandelions.  It’s what it hides under the skirt of its green leaves that makes dandelions the bane of the gardener.  Dandelions are agressive weeds.  They are all over my backyard and every week or so they regenerate when those beautiful yellow blossoms seed and blow all over the place.

That root, though, is grotesque.  One aspect I think that is seldom explored regarding Deleuze’s rhizome is its capacity for evil.  He says the “rhizome includes the best and the worst.”  The dandelion has both, but no one wants to see the “worst” the grotesqueness of the plant.  Deleuze invites us, really, to explore the rhizome’s grotesqueness:  “when rats swarm over each other.”  That’s an extremely powerful image and I doubt he meant for it to be glossed over in the reading.  The images he conjures are all entities that exist and thrive below.  Neither rats nor roots (nor potatoes for that matter) dwell on the surface.  They thrive in the bowels of things, in the ground, in sewers.  What does it mean that the rhizome is not a surface dwelling agent?  Or rather, that its life force exists underground, its home so to speak.  Its circuitry is necessarily then always already hidden, covered, invisible on the face of the thing.

Unfortunately for my dandelions as well as the pesky crabgrass inhabiting my front plant beds, they aren’t a part of the rhizomatic picture of plants I want to see in my yard.