Ideogrammic & Linear Writing

While from the immediate viewing it always appears decentralized, the true character of a rhizome or a map is never as clearly horizontal as one may often wish. The map can be entered or left at any point by the viewer, but internally its relationships are nothing of the sort. The channels of growing crabgrass arrange themselves into hierarchies of time, with the first seed still being primary temporally, in relations of relative position, with some sections being granted more importance due to core or fringe status, and in relations of variation due to environmental stressors. The reader in this position fulfills a unique function, as can be seen in the map more clearly. The reader enters or leaves at any given location, while the map remains not only static, but its content being exact opposite of such non-hierarchical organization. Not that the city would be arranged in orders of vertical trees, despite the best attempts of many over the years, but that the map is arranged at the very least by this contents organizing themselves into relations, which are hierarchical, in various ways, in nature.

That arrangements are hierarchical in all cases is only a partial truth, as it keeps to obfuscated what’s being referred to with “hierarchy”. The hierarchy of an arrangement is always one of matching between the parties involved, with the relation being a complete whole where the parties compose the difference to each other. In a city, the hierarchies are not those of god-like coercion, but of codependence, as the leftist revolutionary is oft to point out, the wealthy cores and manored suburbs need the industrial ghettos and wastelands as their basis of production, while the reverse is also true, with the very infrastructure of the bottom being structures of control descending from the top. So-called hierarchy appears in this way, where the pieces arrange themselves into a whole (the economics of the city) in a way where the two form each other via their relation, not in spite of it.

That this discussion has centered the reader is vital. Within is an inherent tension between linear and ideogrammic forms of writing, with the latter now emerging as a force of creation within the former. While the rhizome itself could never come into being without internal hierarchical flows and relations, the rhizome from afar, emerges as an ideogram. The rhizome, as its known in proper jargon, comes into being as a readable entity via the mapping of linear communication so that the relations can be viewed as complete wholes, from afar as in the map. In this way, all acts of linear communication produce ideograms. At the same time, the rhizomatic scheme is incomplete, as it does not allow, as the ideogrammic method does, the realization of this very relations which produce it. The radicals of a Chinese character arrange themselves into an order which is perceived (entered into) all at once (at any point) but which, through their positioning, have linear lines of communication that produce the overall meaning of the ideogram.