Another Attractor

Briefly, this fourth attractor can be characterised as the acceptance of the process of `schziophrenia' (here not meant in the clinical sense of mental-illness). Deleuze and Guatarri's explication of `schizoanalysis' in `Anti Oedipus makes it a break into the `unstable equilibrium' (plateau) of continuing self-invention

While a lot of their theory is difficult to read, it also has a playful and wicked sense about it; Deleuze himself describes his early program of historical assessment;

"What got me through that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching the author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would none the less be monstrous." ( from `Negotiations')

In the current context, one of their most important elaborations is that of the `rhizome', which coincides almost exactly with my conception of the network. The rhizome is a `molecular' joining effect which stands opposed to the arboreal hierarchy which has dominated thought for so long, and, aside from being very fashionable in academic circles (particularly amongst the architectural, media and writing communities who seize it for it's practical bent) achieves a degree of embodiment in the distributed networks of the computing world, of which the internet is one.

immaculate conception?

However, to see the rhizome as merely a articulatory metaphor for analysing the structure of the internet is superficial. It also extends beyond social or technical models and directly into issues of identity   So we can meaningfully look at the relationship between the strange attractors; one of identity creation, the other of `virtuality', which necessarily leads us on to a further examination of the nature of the computer as a prosthesis, and some political implications. In this construction we are led to the concept of `becoming virtual' and it's contrary motion `becoming real'.