The Rhizome of Life

The following is a guest post from Matthew John Paul Tan. Matthew is a Lecturer in Theology and Philosophy at Campion College Australia. Currently he is a Visiting Professor in Catholic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Centre for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago.

Matthew is also the editor of the theological blog “the Divine Wedgie” (divinewedgie.Blogspot.com). His book Justice, Unity & the Hidden Christ: The Theopolitics of the Social Justice Approach to Ecumenism in Vatican II will be published by Pickwick Publications in 2014.

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The Rhizome of Life

This piece will reconcile what many Christians regard as two irreconcilable elements, a more integral Christian public life, and a situation of cultural, social and indeed moral pluralism. The work suggests ways in which the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome can contribute to resolving this seeming dichotomy, showing the plural nature of our confession and the Christocentrism that is necessary to fully live life in a pluralistic context.

Attempts to revive a more robust confessional Christianity in public life have hit many snags in recent years, and obstacles usually orbit around divisions over particular issues, allegiances to particular political parties or allegiances to particular forms of devotion and worship. In an age of hyperpluralism, one such division that has occurred is coming up with the proper Christian response to such a pluralism. Some Christians champion an outright rejection of anything smacking of pluralism and rallying around a properly Christian civilisation, in which only distinctly Christian practices, institutions and communities are allowed to publicly manifest themselves, while non-Christian counterparts are either expelled or suppressed. Such advocates often fetishise particular (mostly institutional) elements as the non-negotiables of distinctly Christian practice, deviation from which is equated to a less than sincerely Christian confession. Other Christians, seeing the risk of granting universal normativity to particular institutional arrangements, fully embrace pluralism as an end in itself, eschewing supposed pretensions to distinctiveness or holism. These advocates risk diluting Christian expression and are not averse to seeing it disappear into the array of cultural formations. What exponents of both these opinions might overlook is that in spite of their divisions, they are nonetheless united by a common assumption, which is that there is a single and stable category called Christianity, whose content is expressible in the same manner, regardless of cultural vocabulary, time and context. Both seem to ignore the witness of living ecclesial communities around the world, and the nuances that inhabit each and every one of them, even as they attempt to keep a distinct Christian witness alive. The question then arises: how to conceive of a lived Christian confession with a distinct identity when there is at the same time an absence of a stable Christian genera?

The answer to this turns on looking at the experience of lived life, what may be regarded as a “vitalist” approach, in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze. Gilles Deleuze directed his vitalist philosophy to the concept of identity as a lived reality. In A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Felix Guattari, Deleuze use two botanical categories to signify two different kinds of politics, a conservative arboreal or “tree-like” politics and a seemingly more radical rhizomic alternative, where networks of connections, with differing logics, directions and levels of complexity, become possible at any time within a whole array of points within the rhizome.[1] Building on this concept in other works, this Deleuzean line of argument, championed by political philosophers such as William Connolly, called for a movement away from the arboreal manner with which many liberal-democratic societies treat the challenge of plurality.  Under the appearance of affirming plurality, Deleuze suggested that liberal societies ensured harmony within this plurality by funneling all its constituents through a single criterion of belonging, in the same way that myriad nutrients brought from the array of roots of a tree eventually are funneled through a single trunk. The elements of such a criterion could include any number of imperatives, such as the liberal imperative to be reasonable, to respect the separation of Church and state, or to allow the maximum freedom of choice for fellow citizens.

The problem identified by this Deleuzian critique is that this process of capturing constituents into a single filtration system end up reducing each constituent to something less than its lived reality suggests. Indeed since there is always a “vitality of the self that exceeds all political orderings,” demands for a conformity to a particular institutional order may end up suppressing altogether a constituent’s ability to properly live out his or her own life.[2] Connolly goes further to expose as myth, the notion of a cohesive, unitary identity with the phrase “difference requires identity, and identity requires difference.”[3] For the identity of any constituent that is deemed a delineated whole is really the convergence of a whole array of other constituencies that at certain contingent moments come and coalesce together, and work in tension with one another as alter-identities.[4]

Moreover, the idea of communal identities living alongside alter-identities would also apply to at the level of the individual. Connolly asserts that we are not the enclosed, unitary individuals we presume ourselves to be. Rather, our individual make up is one of a constant being “other and mov[ing] towards the other,”[5] and in so doing we become constituted by an array of different constituencies as with every action, we pass through the flux of ever-changing cultural formations. Our identities are thus tapestries that are woven together by the flux of constituencies within a lived history. These identities can be given the affirmations they demand in a truly pluralistic context, a demand that is met not by the tree, but the rhizome.

Christians may find this same realisation reflected also as a lived ecclesial reality in the ancient church, but with one distinct difference. Like the Deleuzian rhizome, the patristic writers from Origen to Maximus the Confessor to Augustine affirmed multiplicity as a fundamental reality in the make-up of what it means to be human. Unlike the Deleuzians, however, the patristic writers spoke of multiplicity not as a cause celebre, but as the unfortunate result of sin. The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac noted in his Catholicism that “the Fathers preferred to envisage the very constitution of the individuals considered as so many cores of natural opposition,”[6] in the same way as “Adam…originally one…has fallen and breaking up as it were, he has filled the whole earth with the pieces.”[7] In light of this, Christians should not be surprised at the multiplicitous nature of identity, for it is as stained by sin, and thus as multiple, as any era that came before it. The only difference is that postmodernity, unlike modernity, affirms such multiplicity as an ontological reality. However, it is also noteworthy that unlike postmodernity, the Fathers sought to redeem this multiplicity and restore a unity between God and creation lost by the first Adam.

Some may argue that an insistence of a Christian logocentrism (where unity is the goal) will regard rhizomic forms of life (where multiplicity is the cause celebre) as something to be ignored, if not eliminated. This would be true were it not for the Fathers’ drawing our attention to the mode of life that such logocentrism brings us. Writing in the tradition of the Fathers, St. Bonaventure saw the logos as the underpinning principle within each and every creature in the entire cosmos, for it is through the logos that each creature was made. The logos is not the singularity to be diluted by the multiplicity of creaturely forms. Rather, each life form is the mouthpiece through which the infinite plurality of ideas within the logos is expressed. The singularity which is logos is also diffused and constituted within plurality. And as Colossians reminds us, the Second Adam remains united even as it is expressed in each lifeform.[8]

Thus, the identity of the logos appears to assume rhizomic dimensions, but we must also consider the express nomenclature that the Fathers—and Bonaventure—chose to describe the logos, namely the “Tree of Life,” a reference to the wood of the cross on which the logos was nailed, and through which unity with God is restored.[9] The question arises: does this express patristic label negate the implicit rhizomic label championed by this piece? Not so, for the Second Adam does not abandon the multiplicity of the rhizomic in favour of the unity of the arboreal as the logos was made Man. Rather, the Second Adam is the true rhizome, which sees no contradiction with its arboreal opposite. Bonaventure repeatedly spoke of the logos as the centre through which seeming opposites come to coincide without their losing their characteristics as opposites. Bonaventure takes seriously the scriptural notion of Christ as both the beginning and end of all things.[10] In his writings on the Trinity, Bonaventure refers to the logos as the coincidence of both the generator (the Father) and the generated (Spirit). In a similar manner, the logos brings together the unity of the arboreal as well as multiplicity of the rhizome. Indeed, this is concretised in an interesting scriptural image of the logos found in John 15:5, where Christ regards himself as the “vine” to whom “the branches” are grafted. In this image we see at once the convergence of the tree and rhizome, for the vine forms a centre out of which myriad branches snake out and find their own direction and connections at various levels in the vineyard of life. In addition, the scriptural image suggests the possibilities of different constituencies – branches – can become united with the vine without either losing its vitality or freedom.

Outside the ostensible mysticism of Scripture and the Patristic writing, it is instructive to note how the concept of the logos as the coincidence of one and many is reflected in more concrete forms, such as the Church’s architectural and liturgical heritage. Denis McNamara noted in his How to Read Churches[11] that this apparently unitive symbol of a distinctly Christian confession is nonetheless the convergence of a “network of symbols” from the confessing community, the non-confessing cultures surrounding it and the differing times in which it is situated. A church does not make a unitive, unadulterated Christian architectural statement but, like the Pantheon, is an amalgam of Christian and pagan architectural inflections. Some are even an amalgam of amalgams, and as a single complex, like Barcelona’s Sagra Familia, incorporates different architectural correlates as its construction spans the centuries. Different constituencies come together to constitute the identity of the Church as a site of Christian assembly. In spite of the plurality of influence, they are nonetheless directed towards a common end, namely the worship of the one Lord.

This may strike one as an arboreal statement, but that is counter-balanced with the liturgical functions of the Church. For the architectural statement is the preface of a liturgical, Eucharistic statement. The Eucharist is a corrective to any pretensions to arboreality because the focal point of the liturgy is that same Lord, Jesus Christ. Indeed, the architectural endpoint is enfleshed in the Eucharistic Body of Christ. Nevertheless, this single body of the Eucharistic Christ is one that is multiplied in the fracture of the Eucharistic Bread and distributed among the faithful. Even as this multiplication of the Eucharist takes place, the many are not mere fragments of the one. Rather each fragment still the whole Eucharistic Body of the single Lord, and the Eucharistic vine thus coheres with each and every newly engrafted branch.[12] In so doing, the Eucharistic Lord redeems the notion of multiple cores of opposition, but itself forms a core that is at the same time in every locale, with no borders around which oppositions form. The logos as the true rhizome thus fulfils Alain of Lille’s notion of God as the “infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

To conclude, the diversity of the multiple may be the fruit of sin, but that does not equate salvation with the elimination of multiplicity for some illusionary unity. Such unity is the work of Christ alone, and as the above has hopefully demonstrated, even Christ chose to achieve such a unity by working within the framework of multiplicity. The Deleuzean rhizome alerts us to the inevitability of multiplicity at work at both the communal and the individual. However, it is Christ as the vine that makes that multiplicity fruitful by simultaneously working the single source of fruitfulness – the fecund logos – into the fibres of every particularity that has been and ever will be.