What is Rhizome? Why Rhizome?
RHIZOME in botany
Rhizome, from Ancient Greek: rhizome "mass of roots", is a modified subterranean stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant.
RHIZOME as a concept
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri use the terms “rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points to data representation and interpretation. A rhizome works with planar and trans-species connections. In the book A Thousand Plateaus the authors introduce some principles of rhizome:
1 and 2: Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.
3. Principle of multiplicity: "it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity", that it ceases to have any relationship to the One as subject or object." , " The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding.
4. Principle of asignifying rupture: "against he oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines." , " always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with wich we are allied." , "its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight...", " always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows.
5 and 6. " A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or gerative model. It is a stranger to any ideal of genetic axis or deep structure."; " It is our view that genetic axis and profund structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing.", " Its goal ( The tracing's) is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start..."; " Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways"; " It (the tracing) has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient toproots, or points of structuration.". " Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called the "dendrites" do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existences, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message takes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system").
The name "rhizome yoga" is due partially to its process of creation. A process that doesn't happen only vertically (tradition transmitted from master to disciple, for exemple), but also horizontally through connections by resonances.
A yoga understood as a destabilizing practice of the individual's references of the self. A practice that cracks the image we have of ourselves and consequently the image we have of the world that surrounds us. Through these cracks we can sense the taste of our unlimited nature.
This same unlimited nature can be sensed through encounters (with people, art, situations and etc) that contain the power of making us overflow ourselves, dive into a field where we cannot recognize ourselves anymore, a field where the limits fall and we discover ourselves as the place where things happen, habitat of sensations and intensities.
Through these encounters, the yoga overwhelms its territory, it invades, as it is also permeated and deterritorialized.
Exactly like the Being, the yoga expands as its apparent form is dissolved, as it stops being called yoga to be called life.
ANA BERGAMASCHI is a passionate yoga teacher, butoh dancer and above all someone who keeps on studying, thinking and experimenting these subjects in relation with life. She started her path on yoga when she was 17 and she has been teaching since 2010.
She studied Classic Hatha Yoga with Pedro Kupfer (Portugal) and after that she took part in numerous different classes and workshops. With great interest in philosophy, she studied the Advaita Vedanta Philosophy but now is studying and researching the Tantric Shivaism of Kashmir.
She practices the Feldenkrais Method since 2008 and now is studying at MBS Academy to become a Feldenkrais practitioner.
The yoga classes have a touch of all her background and were profoundly influenced by certain Masters who crossed her life directly or through their work: Pedro Kupfer (Hatha Yoga), Toshi Tanaka (Seitai Ho), José Maria Carvalho (butoh, feldenkrais, aikido), Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze (philosophie), Eric Baret (Shivaism of Kashmir), Walt Whitman, Clarice Lispector and Fernando Pessoa (poetry).