On the Solar Tree & the Lunar Rhizome
The score of Piece Four for David Tudor by Sylvano Bussotti serves as a prefatory image to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. In essence, it’s a perfect image to “start off” the work (though there is really no beginning nor end) as Bussotti’s score could be seen as a microcosm of the work as a whole.
It functions so well as a prefatory image to this work because it merges the seen and the unseen; the known and the unknown. The existing framework of the piano score is key to the image’s success. Even someone who does not play the piano can understand that this is a creation birthed from the existing framework of a music score, since the graphic essence of a sheet of music is universally understood, even just as a graphic artifact.
Why should we care about this?
The ideas within Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus challenge traditional ways of understanding and organizing knowledge. They question linear, hierarchical structures that have dominated Western thought, suggesting these are too limiting to capture the complexity of reality. Bussoti’s diagram too is clearly challenging the existing framework and structure of music notation. He is quite literally breaking through the boundaries of the language of music in order to convey the music he really wills to produce, which is beyond the scope that ordinary musical notation can capture. According to Deleuze, a great writer always acts like a foreigner in the language in which they express themselves. Even if it’s their native tongue, they do not mix another language with their own; they must carve out another foreign language within their own. What does this mean? A great artist doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel; perhaps simply reframing the wheel in a new context. In Bussotti’s case, he is using the language of music and carving out his own space within it.
To dig into Bussotti’s diagram further, we should discuss two key ideas in A Thousand Plateaus: Deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization refers to the process of breaking away from or undermining traditional, often rigid, social, cultural, or intellectual boundaries. It involves the unraveling or deconstructing of established structures and relationships, leading to a fluidity and openness that inevitably challenges conventional norms and classifications. This process enables new connections, meanings, and identities to emerge, often in unexpected or non-linear ways.
Reterritorialization is the process that follows deterritorialization. It involves the formation of new structures, boundaries, and meanings as a response or adaptation to the disintegration caused by deterritorialization. This reconfiguration doesn't necessarily mean a return to previous states or structures; rather, it signifies the creation of new territories, systems of thought, or social relations that are influenced by the disruption of the old ones. The interplay of these two processes reflects the dynamic nature of social and cultural systems, where change is constant, and stability is often temporary. The concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization emphasize the fluidity of meaning and identity in a constantly shifting world, highlighting the transformative potential of disruption and change.
As Bussotti deterritorilizes the piano score, he is taking the entire language of music and subverting it’s existing structure to create something new. It is the past and present collapsing to create a new, future thing. The idea is immediately understood as a breaking of structure, which is required to understand this work of art. It is merging the concept, the visual and the audible into a single form.
A Thousand Plateaus also discusses the distinction between arborescent (derives from the french “arbre”, meaning tree) and rhizomatic structures, which extends to thought processes and how we perceive and interact with the world. The arborescent model is hierarchical and linear, with roots and branches, suggesting a clear origin and direction. In contrast, the rhizomatic model, exemplified by bulbs and tubers, lacks a clear beginning or end and doesn’t follow a linear path. This structure is more akin to a network, where any point can connect to any other. The visual, linear mode of perception is contrasted with a more holistic, simultaneous mode, which could be more in tune with the interconnectedness and complexity of the modern world.
In a very McLuhan thought process, we must be careful about the senses we are using when analyzing these concepts. Analyzing and comparing a Rhizome is inherently non-visual. Sight and light are linear and focused. Our eyes scan the environment in a linear way, by focusing on single points at a time. This focusing from point to point creates a linear timeline and framework through which to see the world. If you're engaging with a physical rhizome through sight, you're naturally scanning it, engaging with each segment, section, or bulb at a single time. This is how the medium of eyes experience the world. If you're engaging with a rhizome (concept) through sound, it would be circular, all encompassing, happening in simultaneity. The ears do not close like eyes do. The ears are open, and they hear sounds all at once concurrently. This is how the medium of the ears experience the world.
Often people will use images of roots when speaking of Rhizomes. Though an image of roots may appear rhizomatic - a chaotic system of intertwining “lines” - they are in fact very different and inherently arborecent. Roots grow radially from the trunk, from the thick to the thin in a outward, linear direction. They are thus inherently hierarchical. Roots are light. Rhizomes are sound and vibration.
Roots are Solar. Rhizomes are Lunar.
Paradoxically, to discount arborescent frameworks is not inline with the open framework Deleuze and Guattari are trying to express. The point is not to say arborescent modes of thought are bad - this would be to move back into a dichotomous framework they are critiquing. The point is to simply open up our minds to new ways of thinking and perceiving the world.
Interestingly, we now know that these two systems interact outside of the world of concepts in a quite literal way. In common perception, fungi are often visualized as mushrooms emerging from the earth. However, these mushrooms are actually the reproductive structures of the fungal entity, analogous to fruit in plants. The predominant portion of a fungus resides underground, entwined with the roots of trees, forming an extensive mycelial network. Mycelium, consisting of minute filaments, either encase or penetrate the roots of trees. In every cubic inch of mycelium, there exist eight miles of intricately folded fine filaments - these strings are the primordial network of our earthly cosmos. This collective structure (which is literally a rhizome), is known as a mycorrhizal network, and serves as a conduit connecting individual plants, thereby facilitating the exchange of water, nitrogen, carbon, and various minerals. This process is a key function for keeping forrest ecosystems alive. Smaller trees do not have the capacity to grow through photosynthesis in shaded woods. The forrest ecosystem relies on the exchange of nutrients facilitated by the rhizomatic network to exchange water and nutrients from the tall to the small, from the healthy to the sick.
Recent studies have also shown that this network responds to sound and vibration, and is actually integral to their growth. Folklore from around the world (Europe, North America, Japan, and Russia) has long observed that lightning strikes mushrooms more often than other adjacent organisms of the forrest. This jolt of electricity actually aids the growth of the mushroom bodies. Paul Stamets, a mycologist, holds that the more frequent strikes of mushrooms could be due to the low-frequency rolls of thunder which occur just prior. These sounds and vibrations awaken the mushrooms and network below, which in turn aids the entire forrest ecosystem.
“Nature is always listening via mycelium. Mycelium is like strings on a violin, strings on a piano, strings on a guitar — these are filaments that are sensitive to vibrations.”
- Paul Stamets
Through this research we can also see another quite literal connection to this unseen subterranean web. The medium of the mushroom is sound; and thus we can uncover more about the nature of the mushroom by understanding more about how the ears perceive the world.
Through this mystical web, another exchange occurs. The mycelium network keeps about 30% of the sugar from the trees photosynthesis process; a process the mycorrhizal network is not able to do on their own. The sugars fuel the fungi, which allows them to continue pulling nutrients and minerals from the soil and gives it back to the trees.
This is a reproduction of a actual diagram of a fungal network which shows the connection between older, “mother” trees to saplings through a mycelium network. Source.
The tree grows linearly and upward with a will to move toward the light. From the very beginning of the tree establishing it’s foundation in the earth, the fungi network is hidden below the surface. As the tree grows upward, it embodies the idea of identity and singularity of being. The fungi grows simultaneously, but horizontally. The tree establishes hierarchies, from the trunk to the branches to the twigs, which is required to move toward the light and produce the food it needs to survive. The fungi, however, grows hidden below the surface, radially in all directions: outward and horizontally. They embody the concepts of light and sound, solar and lunar respectively.
In Bussotti’s score, the background structure of the diagram is the music staff. The staff in his music, especially the upper and lower portions, is the notation that is unchanged, widely seen and understood, which embodies the concept of the tree. A hierarchy of information regarding the language of music is established: the music notation structure is what allows anyone around the world who has been initiated to delve deeper into it’s thought. The rhizome is the wildly new and unseen: the music itself which scribbles and jumps, collapsing together as a mesh and then breaking off into lines of flight. Each individual person is required to tap into their subconscious to read and perform the music, since there is no existing framework to perceive it. This is the hidden, creative principle which the lunar thought process perfectly embodies.
The score thus works with the solar and lunar energies together; without the staff, the diagram is a scribble on a page. Without the music notation, there is no art. The genius of the work is that it merges the seen and the unseen: the conjunction of solar and lunar thought to create something new: a true embodiment of the alchemical process of conjunction.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this, you might like Monarch Meds #1: Psycho & the Coniunctio
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Links Related to the Article:
National Forrests - Underground Mycorrhizal Network