INTRODUCTION

Not all communication scholars recognize the validity and applicability of postmodern theories to
the field of communications. However, an increasing number of these scholars who have actually
examined the literature of postmodernism have seen that some of these theories are indeed useful,
particularly to understandings of computer mediated communication (Bogard 1996; De Landa
1991; Kellner 1995; Poster 1990; Poster 1995; Turkle 1995; and Ulmer 1994). Most postmodern
theories in question are represented by the ideas of - or have roots in the work of - largely French
theorists who came of age immediately before, during, or after the tumultuous period of the late
1960s, including Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Guattari, Lacan, Lyotard, and Virilio.
This paper concentrates on two of the above mentioned French theorists, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, and the ideas found in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus (1987). A number of
contemporary theorists who are focused on computer mediated communication, particularly
hypertext theorists but a range of others, have specifically drawn on A Thousand Plateaus in their
own work (Critical Art Ensemble 1994; Critical Art Ensemble 1996; Hamman 1996; Joyce 1995;
Landow 1994; Landow 1997; Lemos 1996; Martin 1996; Moulthrop 1994; Murray 1997;
Rosenberg 1994; and Snyder 1997). Two ideas found in A Thousand Plateaus that appear repeatedly
in this literature deal with the rhizome and the nomad.
Following a brief examination of A Thousand Plateaus, this paper explores the literature of
postmodern communication theory and cyberspace theory, where a curious lack of Deleuze and
Guattari is found. The next sections concentrate on the literature that clearly addresses ideas about
rhizomatics and nomadology. Following the literature review a section on rhizomatic-nomadic
resistant Internet use develops further ideas about the practice of electronic resistance in cyberspace,
makes some linkages to the rhizome and nomad models as presented by Deleuze and Guattari, and
ends with thoughts on the dyadic interplay between rhizomatic resistance and panoptic control.
A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
A Thousand Plateaus was written over the course of seven years (Massumi 1992). It was first
published in France in 1980 and an English version did not appear until 1987. The first chapter of A
Thousand Plateaus, Rhizome, did appear in the first section of a 1983 Semiotexte edition called
On The Line. Interestingly, at least from the point of view of this paper, this emergence of
Rhizome in the English language occurred around the same time that Gibsons Neuromancer
(1984) was published. This approximate coincident emergence in English of Deleuze and Guattaris
rhizome model and Gibsons cyberspace metaphor in 1983/1984 means that these years may well
serve as an important marker in the history of ideas about the rhizomatic nature of cyberspace.
Before this moment the concept of cyberspace did not exist and rhizomes were probably exclusively
the purview of botanists. But the linkage between Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome model and other
notions like nomadology with cyberspace and computer networks did not noticeably occur until at
least the later 1980s, when the English version of A Thousand Plateaus was published in full, or
perhaps not until the early 1990s when the term cyberspace gained more popular usage. In an
interview published shortly after his death, Deleuze commented that A Thousand Plateaus was the
best book he had written, alone or with Guattari. It remains a book whose time has not yet come, its
conceptual riches largely unexploited. (Patton 1996, 2) It is difficult to identify what is central to A
Thousand Plateaus. In fact, suggesting centrality is probably anathema to the entire project. As
Massumi points out in the introduction to the work, A Thousand Plateaus is recursive; it is meant
to be read as one would sample a record. Place the needle on any groove and listen. Turn the book
to any chapter and read. The work is quite unlike most others and is a model for a different way of
thinking and being. A Thousand Plateaus provides an example of such an open system. It does not
advocate an intellectual anarchism in which the only rule would be the avoidance of any rule. It
deploys variable, local rules in order to construct a bewildering array of concepts such as
assemblage, deterritorialization, order-word, faciality, ritornello, nomadism, and different kinds of

becoming. (Patton 1996, 1,2)

But even so, as has already been suggested, there are ideas and terms from A Thousand Plateaus
that we see appear again and again in subsequent literature. If this literature is to be our guide, then
we can safely conclude that of the multiplicity of terms, ideas, concepts, and constructs, that
rhizome and nomad are clearly two that stand out. As noted, expression and description of the
rhizome model is found explicitly in the first chapter. Although, being a recursive work, the book
itself is a rhizomatic structure and elements of the rhizome model can be found interspersed
throughout as well as disguised in other language. The twelfth chapter of this fifteen chapter
volume, Treatise on Nomadology, expresses and describes the nomad, nomadics, and
nomadology. It seems better to say expresses and describes because the word define is too static
of a term for Deleuze and Guattari whose world is full of change, flux, and mobility.
A Thousand Plateaus contrasts rhizomatic thinking with arbolic thinking. (See Table A). A
Thousand Plateaus is organized around the distinction between 'arborescent' and 'rhizomatic'. The
'arborescent' model of thought designates the epistemology that informs all of Western thought,
from botany to information sciences to theology. . . . (Best and Douglas 1991, 98) Arbolic thought
is said to be linear, hierarchic, sedentary, and full of segmentation and striation. Arbolic thought is
State philosophy. It is the force behind the major sciences. Arbolic thought is represented by the
tree-like structure of genealogy, branches that continue to subdivide into smaller and lesser
categories. Arbolic thought is vertical and stiff. Rhizomatic thought is non-linear, anarchic, and
nomadic. Deleuze's thought is radically horizontal. (Lechte 1994, 102) Rhizomes create smooth
space, and cut across boundaries imposed by vertical lines of hierarchicies and order. Rhizomatic
thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking,
acting, and being. Rhizomatic thinking deterrorializes arbolic striated spaces and ways of being.
Rhizomes are networks. Rhizomes cut across borders. Rhizomes build links between pre-existing
gaps between nodes that are separated by categories and order of segmented thinking. A rhizome
ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and
circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7)
Table A.
Deleuze and Guattaris Rhizomatic Versus Arbolic
Rhizomatic

Arbolic

Non-linear

Linear

Anarchic

Hierarchic

Nomadic

Sedentary

Smooth

Striated

Deterritorialized

Territorialized

Multiplicitous

Unitary and binary

Minor science

Major science

Heterogeneity

Homogeneity

The first chapter, Rhizome, presents a series of rhizomatics principles. The first two are the
principles of connection and heterogeneity which say that any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7) The ideal or perfect network is such
a system of maximal connection between points. In a later section, we will see how Hamman (1996)
effectively used these principles in describing the Internet. (See subsection on Rhizomatics in The

Literature). The third is the principle of multiplicity. A rhizomatic system is comprised of a

multiplicity of lines and connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those
found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 8) Multiplicity
celebrates the many and plurality in contradistinction to unitary, binary, and totalizing models of
Western thought. Rhizomatics extirpate roots and foundations, to thwart unities and break
dichotomies, and to spread out roots and branches, thereby pluralizing and disseminating, producing
differences and multiplicities, making new connections. Rhizomatics affirms the principles
excluded from Western thought and reinterprets reality as dynamic, heterogenous, and nondichotomous. (Best and Douglas 1991, 99)
The fourth is the principle of asignifying rupture. This principle states that: 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.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 9) In a rhizomatic network movements and flows can be re-routed
around disruptions. Further, the severed section will regenerate itself and continue to grow, forming
new lines and pathways. The fifth and sixth principles are of cartography and decalcomania: a
rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12)
Here, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between maps and tracings. They state that a rhizome is a
map and not a tracing. (p. 12) A tracing is genetic; it evolves and reproduces from earlier forms. It
is arborescent. All tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. (p. 12) While maps are open
systems. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, to any kind of mounting,
reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. (p. 12) The tracing replicates existing
striated structures. All codification, all the dead religions are tracings. The map is oriented to
experimentation and adaption. We see this phenomena in networked systems. Constant invention.
Networks expand and contract, emerge and recede. Maps have multiple entryways as cyberspace
has multiple ports of entry.
Apart from rhizomatics, nomadology and nomadic thought emerge from A Thousand Plateaus as
an important idea. It should be already clear that the rhizome pathways and lines of flight are
structures through which nomadic movement takes place. But the two terms, rhizome and nomad,
are interlinked in other ways. Rhizomatics is a form of 'nomadic thought' opposed to the 'State
thought' that tries to discipline rhizomatic movement both in theory (e.g. totalizing forms of
philosophy) and practice (e.g. police and bureaucratic organizations). Universalist state thought is
exercized through 'state machines' and nomad thought combats them through its own 'war machines'
such as rhizomatics. (Best and Douglas 1991, 102) Deleuze and Guattari consider nomadic thought
to be the minor science or minor language that constantly becomes colonized by major science, the
arbolic State. These State side philosophers and scientists operate in closed systems, while
nomadology functions in open ones. Nomadic thought rejects above all the ideal of philosophy as a
closed system. For this reason, throughout his work Deleuze remains resolutely opposed to one
systematic thinker: 'What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics.' (Patton 1996, 3) Closed
systems are segmented spaces, compartmentalized, and separated into categories, classifications,
types, and genres. The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air
against earth. State space is 'striated,' or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a
horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and
identifiable points. Nomad space is 'smooth,' or open-ended. (Massumi 1992, 6) Nomads, the early
pre-modern wanderers and warriors, are treated extensively in the chapter Treatise on
Nomadology: - The War Machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 351-423) Primarily this entire
chapter examines the nomad as perpetrator of the war machine that exists outside of the State
apparatus. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State
apparatus and distinct from the military institution). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 380) Here, again,
we find articulation of the smooth spaces of nomadology versus the striated spaces of the State. It is
within these smooth spaces, these rhizomatic zones, that the nomad operates, ascending and
descending, emerging and receding. The nomad is up against the striated State with its rigid

formations of battle. Today, resistant Internet warriors operate in similar terrain. The
deterritorialized spaces of cyberspace are smooth nomadic-rhizomatic zones. Deleuze and Guattari
spend pages dealing with the metallurgical adeptness of the early nomad. Metallurgy in itself
constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism. (p. 403) This tinkering with metal
continues for todays postmodern nomads. The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of
which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of the content. (p. 415) Today the content is the
metal of the computer, the wires, the telephone lines. Todays nomads tinker and invent ways of
operating the war machine against the State apparatus on the Net.

THE LITERATURE
Deleuze and Guattari in Postmodern Communication Theory
Poster's The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (1990) is among the first
systematic treatments of postmodernism and its application to new communication and information
technology. This work was published at the end of a decade in which postmodern theory gained
more currency and at the beginning of a decade in which the use of new communication and
information technology would grow rapidly. In The Mode of Information Poster devotes a chapter
each to the ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard. Curiously missing, though, is a
chapter on Deleuze and Guattari. One possible explanation is that while Posters book was being
written, in the late 1980s, few people were using Deleuze and Guattaris ideas as explanatory
models for new communication and information technology. But The Mode of Information does
not entirely ignore Deleuze and Guattari.
The bulk of Poster's references to Deleuze and Guattari are in the chapter Lyotard and Computer
Science. Yet when Poster mentions Deleuze and Guattari, he mainly does so in connection with
other French postmodernists who he actually labels poststructuralists, (pp. 131) in relation to May
1968 and the influence that period had on a rethinking of earlier political ideas, (p. 131) and as
influential on Laclau and Mouffe, in particular their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics. (pp. 133, 140) On several pages Poster specifically mentions A
Thousand Plateaus but says little worth noting (pp. 133, 135, 136, 137). Only in one instance does
Poster offer a short synthesis of A Thousand Plateaus: They speak of strata, assemblages,
territorializations, lines of flight, abstract machines, a congerie of terms that disrupts the function of
concepts of control, a field through discursive articulation. Their categories cut through the normal
lines of comprehension, the binary logic that governs modern social theory to present a picture of
reality from the perspective of a sort of primitive life force. (pp. 135-136) The only other work
specifically noted is Anti-Oedipus, (p. 135) which, in passing, is compared to A Thousand
Plateaus.
In The Mode of Information specific reference to rhizomatics and nomadology is scant. (pp. 15,
132) The term rhizomatic only appears once, reveals little about its meaning, and expresses little
about the potential of the rhizome model for aspects of new information technologies. Posters
reference to the rhizome appears to mock Deleuze and Guattari: In the perspective of Deleuze and
Guattari, we are being changed from arborial beings, rooted in time and space, to rhizomatic
nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe, and even
beyond it through communication satellites, without necessarily moving our bodies at all. ( p. 15).
The only mention of nomadism is Deleuze and Guattari's celebration of nomadism and how this
has earned them the label of irresponsible anarchism. (p. 132) Nevertheless, despite Posters
shortcomings in his treatment generally of Deleuze and Guattari and specifically of A Thousand
Plateaus, rhizomatics, and nomadology, he does give Deleuze and Guattari credit, along with
Foucault, Laclau, and Mouffe, as being among those French postmodernists who have not turned
their backs on politics and who have been responsible for developing the tendency toward a
postmodern political theory that concerns the multiplication of the sites of power and resistance.

(p. 140-141)
Another book appearing early in this decade that takes a postmodern approach to new information
technology is De Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991). This work presents a
robotic history of computer-based technology and focuses particularly on the symbiotic
relationships between computers and the military. In addition to noting the contributions of
Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio, in a few instances De Landa refers to the contributions of
Deleuze and Guattari to his overall project. (pp. 6, 19-20, 29-30, 236-237) Nearly all these
references center on the machinic phylum a term borrowed from A Thousand Plateaus.
According to De Landa, Deleuze and Guattari see that the machinic phylum of the planet is
divided into many phyla, the different 'phylogenetic linkages' corresponding to different
technologies. (p. 19) De Landa uses the term machinic phylum to refer both to processes of selforganization in general and to the particular assemblages in which the power of these processes may
be integrated. In one sense, the term refers to any population (of atoms, molecules, cells, insects)
whose global dynamics are governed by singularities (bifurcations and attractors); in another sense,
it refers to the integration of a collection of elements into an assemblage that is more than the sum
of its parts, that is, one that displays global properties not possessed by its individual components.
(p. 20) Since De Landa's book deals with the computerized warfare technologies of the State, one
might expect a treatment of The Treatise on Nomadology, a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus.
But De Landa's work is not focused so much on resistance as it is on describing and explaining the
convergence of computerized machines and warfare technology.
Although Kellner's Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern
and the Postmodern (1995) has three chapters devoted to theory (pp. 15-122) and specific sections
with titles like A postmodern cultural studies?, (p. 43) Identity in postmodern theory, (p. 233)
Situating the postmodern, (p. 255) and Madonna between the modern and the postmodern, (p.
285) there are only a few references to Deleuze and Guattari in this entire work (pp. 89, 234, 236,
319). One explanation might be that the media Kellner examines includes primarily television and
film, and perhaps Deleuze and Guattari's ideas have more resonance with the Internet. Kellner
recognizes the contribution of Deleuze and Guattari, along with Foucault, to a critique of the notion
of ideology. (p. 89) He contrasts Deleuze and Guattari against Baudrillard with respect to their role
in shaping a more political postmodernist perspective. (p. 319) Finally, Kellner briefly summarizes
Deleuze and Guattari's central ideas as being a celebration of schizoid, nomadic dispersions of
desire and subjectivity, valorizing precisely the breaking up and dispersion of the subject of
modernity.
Poster's The Second Media Age (1995) is a continuation of his The Mode of Information (1990) in
that it is a treatment of new information technologies from a postmodern perspective. But the
Second Media Age has even less references to Deleuze and Guattari than The Mode of
Information. This is odd given that by the time this newer book was published in 1995, Deleuze
and Guattari's ideas had clearly been appropriated by theorists writing about the Internet and about
hypertext. In one case in the Second Media Age, Poster merely groups Deleuze and Guattari with
Haraway as among those who are rethinking the relation of humans to machines. (p. 19) In
another case he groups Deleuze and Guattari with Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucault as having
developed theoretical strategies that make an effort to move outside the parameters and constraints
of the Cartesian/Enlightenment position. (p. 47) Only in one instance does Poster refer to Deleuze
and Guattari's rhizomatic model. It is in a discussion of how capitalist production has shifted from
the centralized factory to dispersed, mobile, and decentered forms. (p. 29) Given that Poster is a
scholar explicitly interested in understanding new information technology through a postmodern
frame, it is strange that Deleuze and Guattari's ideas are lacking. The lack of Deleuze and Guattari
in The Mode of Information is perhaps understandable. But by 1995, when the Second Media Age
was published, there were already a number of journal articles and books available that drew a
connection between ideas in A Thousand Plateaus with areas that seem to concern Poster.
Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) mentions even less about

Deleuze and Guattari. Like Poster, Turkle's book is an exploration of new information technology in this case the Internet - through postmodern perspectives. There are frequent references to
Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Haraway, Jameson, Lacan, Landow, Levi-Strauss, and Lyotard.
Postmodernism is discussed in the introduction and in nearly every chapter. But Deleuze and
Guattari are only mentioned twice, once in the text and once in a footnote. The reference in the text
simply groups Deleuze and Guattari with a host of other French intellectuals who influenced Turkle
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (p. 15) The footnote states that Deleuzes and Guattari proposed
more radical views that described the self as a multiplicity of desiring machines. (p. 272n) While
Life on the Screen is clearly an important theoretical book about the Internet, it sheds no light on
Deleuze and Guattari and their understandings of rhizomatics and nomadology.
Bogard's The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (1996) is another
book written from a postmodern perspective that examines aspects of new information technology,
in particular the phenomena of simulation, simulacra, and surveillance. Bogard draws on
Baudrillard, De Certeau, Foucault, Haraway, and Virilio. But in relation to these other thinkers,
Deleuze and Guattari are not well represented. However, Bogard does refer briefly to a range of
Deleuze's work including The Logic of Sense (p. 10, p. 190n11), Cinema 2: The Time Image (p.
14, p. 113), Foucault (p. 29), and Anti-Oedipus. (p. 187n16) Yet he only mentions A Thousand
Plateaus in a footnote. (p. 187n15) In the second chapter there is a passage concerned with
rhizomatic linkages that is presented in relation to biomachinic assemblages and machinic
language. This is extracted from Anti-Oedipus, not A Thousand Plateaus: All biomachinic
assemblages are series of breaks and flow (shifts in activity, motion, energy, speed), and the
surveillance-simulation assemblage is no exception. The machinic language I use here (assemblage,
apparatuses) doesn't, however, refer to mechanism in the classical sense of external causes and
effects, but is more akin to the complex, rhizomatic linkages that Deleuze and Guattari describe in
Anti-Oedipus as 'desiring machines' (1977: 1ff.). (pp. 42-43)
Deleuze and Guattari in Cyberspace Theory
Markley's Virtual Reality and Their Discontents (1996a) is an anthology of critical perspectives on
the subject of cyberspace. Several chapters contain explicit influence from Deleuze and Guattari.
The third chapter, Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace also
by Markley (1996b) applies Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machines, from Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, to cyberspace and capitalism. Markley calls cyberspace the ultimate
capitalist fantasy because it promises to exploit our own desires as the inexhaustible material of
consumption. (p. 74) Markley claims that the dream of cyberspace is the dream of infinite
production. (p. 74) It is within Brandes (1996) chapter in the anthology, however, The Business
of Cyperpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson, where there is greater
reference to A Thousand Plateaus, particularly the idea of machinic enslavement and it relation to
cybernetic capitalism. By machinic enslavement Brande means the advent of cybernetic machines
and increased automation. Brande also claims that Gibsons matrix in Neuromancer (1984)
anticipated a new and open-ended domain of production, circulation, and consumption. (p. 101)
And he borrows A Thousand Plateaus term, reterritorialization, to further discuss the way in
which capitalism is being constituted in cyberspace. But despite these insights, there is no mention
of rhizomatics and nomadology in Virtual Reality and Their Discontents.
Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1996) has only
two references to Deleuze and Guattari, neither of which are very useful. The first reference merely
groups Deleuze and Guattari with Virilio and De Landa. (p. 18) The second reference is a footnote
that mentions specific works by these authors. (p. 186) Strate, Jacobson, and Gibson's
Communication and Cyberspace. Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment (1996)
contains no mention of Deleuze and Guattaris joint efforts and only two insignificant references to
Deleuze. This seems strange given that this book contains 23 chapters of current writing on
cyberspace.

Jones' Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (1997) makes no reference to
Deleuze, and reference to Guattari on only one page. In the chapter on Civil Society, Political
Economy, and the Internet, Breslow (1997) discusses ideas from Guattari and Negri's (1991)
Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance and Guattari's (1995)
Chaosmosis: An Enthico-Aesthetic Paradigm in relation to building political alliances on the
Internet. Jones questions whether there can be true solidarity or political alliances in cyberspace,
stating that the Net's lack of spatiality, it's lack of density and its ability to maintain distance
between people would appear to be counterproductive to solidarity. (p. 254)
Johnson's Interface Culture. How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and
Communicate (1997) only mentions Deleuze in the context of describing Turkle's notion of the
windowed imagination because for Turkle the window is a way of thinking in multiplicities, as
all good postmodernists are supposed to do. (p. 83) Kroker and Kroker's Digital Delirium (1997)
contains basically no reference to Deleuze and Guattari. One chapter, Transmitting Architecture.
The Transphysical City, by Novak, cites in a footnote Deleuze's Cinema1: The Movement Image
and Cinema2: The Time Image. (p. 271) In Porter's Internet Culture (1997), another anthology,
Deleuze and Guattari appear in Stratton's chapter Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture in
which Deleuze and Guattaris terms deterritorialize and reterritorialize are again discussed in
relation to cyberspacial capitalism.
Rhizomatics
Landow's Hyper/Text/Theory (1994) contains several chapters that apply Deleuze and Guattari's
rhizome model to hypertext theory. One is Rosenbergs Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and
Complicity in Art and Pedagogy. The other is Moulthrops Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext
and the Dreams of a New Culture. Rosenberg (1994) draws on A Thousand Plateaus to contrast
arbolic/striated structures against rhizomatic/smooth structures: Logic is hierarchical; nonlinear
association is smooth. Here we may wish to resort to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between
striated, arboreal structures and smooth, rhizomatic structures, suggesting, as Johndan JohnsonEilola, my colleague on the RHIZOME Project claims, that linear, hierarchical structures in
hypertext are logocentric, smooth, nonlinear structures are nomadic. (p. 277) But Rosenberg
doesn't stop at this comparison; he also notices the political nature of Deleuze and Guattari's
critique, first stating that I would like to shift to a system of tropes, operant in the writings of
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in order to make the problematic tropics of liberation and
complicity in hypertext more visible. (p. 272) He then explains: I am speaking specifically of the
micropolitical field of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari locate between the 'zone of
indiscernibility,' which represents the ways in which the mind and body of a subject may be
'dominated' (Haraway's term) or determined by systems of cultural signification that remain
invisible to that subject, and the 'zone of impotence,' where the subject unconstrained by those
systems, can thrive in a space where the three forms of creative resistance to determination, or
'becoming' (intense, animal, imperceptible), may emerge. (p. 272) In several other instances
Rosenberg discusses hypertext theory in terms of resistance to domination, (p. 272) representing
domination and resistance, (p. 275) and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a war machine and of
the nomad and rhizome as articulated tactics of resistance to domination. . . (p. 288)
In the other chapter, Moulthrop (1994) calls A Thousand Plateaus an incunabular hypertext (p.
300) suggesting that the book itself is a hypertext document albeit in print form. This is presumably
because Deleuze and Guattari themselves, as well as Massumi in the introduction, state that A
Thousand Plateaus can be entered at any point and in any order. But besides putting forth A
Thousand Plateaus as an incunabular hypertext or proto-hypertext document, Moulthrop also
states that A Thousand Plateaus has been a major influence on social theories and polemics that
have a strong bearing on the cultural integration of new media. (p. 301) Moulthrop goes even
further by making a dramatic claim that Deleuze and Guattari's work is perhaps the most radical
reinterpretation of Western culture attempted in the second half of this century. Geopolitics,

psychoanalysis, neurobiology, sexuality, mathematics, linguistics, semiotics, and philosophy all fall
within the purview of their encyclopedic project. (p. 301) Moulthrop's use of A Thousand
Plateaus is not limited to the rhizome model. Moulthrop recognizes the intermingling terms that
can be used to signify much the same phenomena. The terms nomadism or nomadology,
deterritorialization, lines of flight, smooth and striated spaces, double articulations, war machines,
refrains, and rhizomes for Moulthrop are co-resonating tropes. (p. 301) With this co-resonance in
mind, Moulthrop takes note of Bey's interpretation and application of nomadology: In a less
oblique homage, the anarcho-theorist Hakim Bey invokes nomadology to justify his 'temporary
autonomous zone,' a site of resistance designed for an era in which the State is omnipresent and allpowerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies. (p. 302) Borrowing ideas from
A Thousand Plateaus' chapter on The Smooth and the Striated Moulthrop's piece includes a
section called Smooth and Striated Writing Spaces in which striated space is defined as the
domain of routine, specification, sequence, and causality. Phenomenologically, it consists of the
world of perception as processed by the coordinate grid or some other geometric structure into a set
of specified identities. Socially, striated space manifests itself in hierarchical and rule-intensive
cultures, like the military, the corporation, and the university. (p. 302) While smooth space, on the
other hand, is defined dyanamically, in terms of transformation instead of essence. Thus, one's
momentary location is less important than one's continuing movement or line of flight; this space is
by definition a structure for what does not yet exist. Smooth social structures include ad hoc or
populist political movements, cooperatives, communes, and some small businesses, subcultures,
fandoms, and undergrounds. (p. 303) The top-down bureaucratic organization of the university is
striated space, while the bottom-up lateral organization of graduate student union organizers is
smooth space. Moulthrop wonders whether we can take the case of hypertext existing as a smooth,
rhizomatic, space a few steps further by envisioning the nomadic structure of hypertext as a model
for a larger social text, one deserving of modification. Does hypertext represent a smooth space for
discourse and, beyond that, for textually mediated social relations? After all, interactive media
exhibit the same phenomenological structure as cinema and video. Hypertexts are composed of
nodes and links, local coherences and linearities broken across the gap or synapse of transition, a
space which the receiver must somehow fill with meaning. In describing the rhizome as a model for
discourse, Deleuze and Guattari invoke the principle of asignifying rupture, a fundamental
tendency toward unpredictability and discontinuity. (p. 303) Finally, Moulthrop admonishes us not
to view the dyad of smooth/striated as if it were a dialectic, but rather as if it were a continuum in
which smooth and striated space 'exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being
translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a
smooth space'. (p. 316)
Aronowitz, Martinsons, and Mensers anthology Technoscience and Cyberculture (1996) contains
several chapters with references to Deleuze and Guattari and specifically to the rhizome. Menser
and Aronowitz's (1996) first chapter On Cultural Studies, Science, and Technology discusses, as
others have, Deleuze and Guattari's ideas in connection with Haraway and De Landa. (p. 13) For
scholarly works that employ a rhizomatic method Menser and Aronowitz suggest looking at
Deleuze and Guattari's Cartography, along with Haraway's Situated Knowledge, and Wood's
Anarchitecture. (p. 17) In a footnote we see a thread of thought traced from The Electronic
Disturbance: In The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia, 1994) it is argued that the
once subversive and anti-hierarchical models of the rhizomatic-nomadic have been most effectively
appropriated by the highest reaches of international corporate power. (p. 26n14) Finally, in
something less related, Menser and Aronowitz refer to A Thousand Plateaus for a discussion of the
Chinese and Mongols as examples of a cultural and historical account of how non-Western
cultures have utilized technologies for empire building and hegemony. . . (p. 27)
In the fifth chapter of this anthology, Citadels, Rhizomes, and String Figures, Martin (1996)
introduces Hayle's work on complex systems, or chaos thinking (p. 102) and relates it to Deleuze
and Guattari, in particular their treatment of the rhizome. Martin quotes several descriptions of the

rhizome from the introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. (p. 103) She follows with
reference to Haraway's understanding of discontinuous, fractured, and non-linear relationships
between science and the rest of culture. . . (p. 103). Then she asks an unexpected methods question
as to whether it were possible to conduct an enthographic study of discontinuous, non-linear, and
fractured ways. . . (p. 104) Finally, in a footnote, Martin provides us with yet another interpretation
of the rhizome model, in this instance as it is applied to linguistics and quotes directly from A
Thousand Plateaus rhizomes establishing connections between semiotic chains. (p. 108)
In Menser's chapter Becoming - Heterarch: On Technocultural Theory, Minor Science, and the
Production of Space, there are extensive references to Deleuze and Guattari (pp. 294-299, 301,
304-306, 308, 310), primarily to A Thousand Plateaus and a lesser degree to The Logic of Sense.
This chapter applies Deleuze and Guattari's striated/smooth dyad to architecture and the production
of space: Through an appropriation of the work of Deleuze and his collaborations with Guattari,
we construct a political-critical ontology designed to make possible a theoretical and material
production of space. This is our politics. (p. 294) Menser makes the argument that architecture is
dependent upon 'major' science's organization of labor and materials, which in turn requires the
state's production of 'striated spaces'. (p. 294) Menser adds: The state is a massive, dense, and
stratified structure: in other words, it forms vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the
horizontal lines in a dimension of depth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 433), which bind and
regulates bodies by pulling them into and/or pushing them through or out of educational
institutions, regulatory agencies, infrastructural systems, and networks. (p. 298) Menser invokes
the rhizome model, or more precisely mentions a rhizomatic body without organs, (p. 301) when
describing Lebbeus Woods' anarchitectureor anarchist architecture. He suggests employing
Deleuze and Guattari's cartography, pragmatics, rhizomatics, and schizoanalysis in analyzing and
developing theories about such anarchitectures or freespaces (p. 306). Bey's temporary
autonomous zone (TAZ) is an example of such an anarchitecture.
Hamman (1996) in Rhizome@Internet. Using the Internet as an example of Deleuze and Guattari's
'Rhizome' applies Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic principles to the Internet and concludes that
the Internet is a rhizome. Hamman examines the rhizomatics principles as outlined in the first
introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus - connnection, heterogeneity, multiplicity,
asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania - and operationalizes these concepts by
providing concrete examples from the Internet. Hamman states that the Internet is very close to
what Deleuze and Guattari describe above as a rhizomatic system. Rhizomatic systems, according
to Deleuze and Guattari, are 'finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any
neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not pre-exist, and all individuals are
interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment - such that the local operations are
coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without central agency' (D & G, 17).
Regarding Deleuze and Guattari's first two rhizomatic principles of connnection and heterogeneity,
Hamman says that: It has been demonstrated here that any point on the Internet, that is any
computer, may connect with any other point. Of the third rhizomatic principle of multiplicity,
Hamman writes: The computer user's 'multiplicity of nerve fibers' controls the computer's
connections - it is not the keyboard or the hands on it that does this. There is even a further
multiplicity present when using the Internet and that is the multiplicity of light pixels on the
computer screen. Another part of this third principle of rhizomes is that there are no points or
positions, just lines in a rhizome. The fourth rhizomatic principle of asignifying rupture, or that it
can be shattered at any spot which would cause it to start again on either an old or new line is
demonstrated by stating that: The Internet, or more correctly the computers on it, can route
information around trouble spots. On the fifth principle, that the rhizome is not amenable to any
structural or generative model, Hamman says: It is the nonhierarchical structure and dispersed
nature of the Internet, as well as the seemingly uncontrollable frontier spirit of Internet users, that
help the Internet to live up to this principle of the rhizome. Finally the last principle is that the
rhizome is a map and not a tracing, and that the map has multiple entryways. Hamman again sees a

clear correlation with the Internet and states: It has been mentioned earlier that there are many
routes, or links, amongst computers on the Internet. These links are sometimes well established
while at other times new routes and linkages take place. There are multiple entryways in the sense
that, once on the Internet, I can choose whichever Internet site or home page I wish as my
entryway. . . . Thus a user on the Internet creates maps by linking pages and moving as a nomad,
that is browsing purposefully, instead of tracing over old lines. There are also, like in the rhizome,
multiple entryways onto and within the Internet. Hamman concludes by stating all of the
principles of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome are present in the Internet. This has been demonstrated
by comparing characteristics of the Internet to the principles of the rhizome. This paper is itself
more of a map than a tracing as Deleuze and Guattari distinguish them from each other.
Shields (1996) anthology Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies
contains several chapters with specific reference to the rhizome. In the introduction Shields makes a
similar argument of the Internet as rhizome, but without going into the specifics of examining the
six rhizomatic principles. After Deleuze and Guattari (1976), the Internet appears as a rhizomatic
desiring-machine which frees up and allows desire to be set in motion. Its rhizomatic quality stems
from the acentred web of interconnections in which any point of control can be so easily bypassed
that such concepts are displaced and outmoded. (p. 9) In the second chapter, The Labyrinth of
Minitel, Lemos (1996) discusses France's Minitel system as a type of hypertextual labyrinth. He
describes the Minitel cyberspace with reference to Bey's TAZ and Deleuze and Guattari's A
Thousand Plateaus. The Minitel cyberspace has become almost a 'temporary autonomous zone'
(Bey 199) - a virtual space which is 'self-organizing' (Morin 1986), a sort of plateau, a 'rhizome'
where the interconnections and multiplicities even change the nature of the media such that it
metamorphoses into a medium of contact (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: chs. 1 and 2). On this
plateau, users are virtual nomads, phantoms who circulate in the structures of the labyrinth. (p. 46)
In the fifth chapter, A Geography of the Eye: The Technologies of Virtual Reality, Hillis (1996),
in a footnote, refers to Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machines, and machinic assemblages in
connection to the rhizome. Hillis warns not to take the rhizome-as-metaphor too far, and suggests
that the use of metaphor and analogy is a form of representation that Deleuze and Guattari would be
against. Though rhizomes are an ideal metaphor for the content/form of modern IT and telematics,
rhizomes-as-metaphor reproduces the power representation Deleuze and Guattari seek to
undermine. I argue that although representative forms are essential to communication, their
excessive use is worth resisting and that VR's current developmental trajectory manifests many
aspects of such excess. (p. 96)
Landow's Hypertext 2.0 (1997) in a section called Hypertext as Rhizome (pp. 38-42) makes
numerous references to Deleuze and Guattari and to the rhizome model. This section begins with a
reiteration that A Thousand Plateaus in its discussion of rhizomes, plateaus, and nomadic
thought may be viewed as a proto-type hypertext document (p. 38) and that, moreover, hypertext
may be the first approximation if not their complete answer or fulfillment (p. 39) of the rhizome
model. Deleuze and Guattari's explanation of a plateau accurately describes the way both
individual lexias and clusters of them participate in a web. (p. 39) In quoting directly from a
description of rhizome in the introductory chapter to A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 22), Landow comments that such a description perfectly matches the way clusters of
subwebs organize themselves in large networked hypertext environments, such as the World Wide
Web. (Landow 1997, 39) Echoing Hamman's analysis of the Internet using Deleuze and Guattari's
rhizomatic principles, Landow also suggests that hypertext mirrors the rhizomatic principle of
having multiple entryways. Like the rhizome, hypertext, which has 'multiple entryways and exits,'
embodies something closer to anarchy than to hierarchy, and it 'connects any point to any other
point,' often joining fundamentally different kinds of information and often violating what we
understand to be both discrete print texts and discrete genres and modes. (p. 41) Again supporting
similar ideas to those of Hamman, Landow sees other principles of the rhizome, as outlined in the
introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, at play in hypertext. Therefore, like hypertext

considered in its most general sense, 'a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative
model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure (12)'. As Deleuze and Guattari
explain, a rhizome is 'a map and not a tracing. Make a map not a tracing. The orchid does not
reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes
the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the
real' (12). Maps and hypertexts both, in other words, relate directly to performance, to interaction.
(p. 41) In moving from the rhizome concept to that of the nomad, and the notion of nomadic
thinking, Landow also ties in Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the smooth and the striated. That
Landow discusses rhizomes, nomads, and the smooth/striated dyad in the same breath - well, at
least the same page - is an indication that he sees these terms and ideas as being closely interwoven.
Finally, as others seem to have done, Landow warns us to not take the rhizome, plateau, or nomadic
thought metaphor too far. Landow reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari were against reification and
putting any one particular idea, concept, term, or lexica on a pedestal.
Snyder's Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (1997) mentions the relationship between Deleuze
and Guattari's rhizome model and hypertextuality several times. In a section called Hypertext and
Literary Theory Snyder discusses the rhizome in connection with linguistic structure in a passage
that draws on ideas from Moulthrop. The coming changes in textuality allow us to create a
different kind of linguistic structure, one that corresponds more closely to Deleuze and Guattari's
'rhizome,' an organic growth that is all adventitious middle, not a deterministic chain of beginnings
and ends (Moulthrop, 1991c:254). (p. 42) Snyder also discusses the linguistic realisation of
Deleuze and Guattari's 'rhizomatic' form in relation to the idea of deterritorialised writing and in
connection to Balestri's softcopy and Joyce's constructive hypertext. (p. 52) Snyder quotes
Landow stating that the decentred self is an obvious corollary to the network paradigm. (p. 67)
Nomadology
Although the rhizome and the nomad are inseparable in the sense that the rhizome is the path that
the nomad follows, it is nevertheless useful to isolate, for a moment, ideas about nomadology that
have been applied the Internet and cyberspace. This section will look at the works of Hakim Bey
and the Critical Art Ensemble. If there were there more apparent works concentrating on these
applications of nomadology they would be included. Perhaps they exist, but it seems there are less
interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari written from more radical perspectives. The use of Deleuze
and Guattari's rhizome model to discuss hypertext theory is a safer application than the use of their
nomad model to discuss how capital's increased dispersion, mobility, and electronic form requires
new electronic tactics for disruption of that flow.
In his T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1991)
Bey draws largely from A Thousand Plateaus chapter The Treatise on Nomadology and the War
Machine. In the sense that a TAZ is temporary, it is also mobile and nomadic. Bey's definition of
the TAZ shows a disappearing and reappearing force that moves in a rhizomatic nomadic manner.
The TAZ is like an uprising, which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation
which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form
elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. (p. 101) Bey expands on the guerilla analogy
and offers another description of the TAZ that has a clear reference to Deleuze and Guattaris
nomadic war machine. The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away.
Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it's only data in the Web. . . The 'nomadic war machine'
conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. (p. 102) Bey places
converging thoughts about nomadism under the rubric psychic nomadism. (p. 106) He draws on
Deleuze and Guattari, but also from Lyotard's book Driftworks, and various authors in the 'Oasis'
issue of Semiotext(e) and brings these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light
of the coming-into-being of the TAZ. (p. 106) Bey describes psychic nomadism's tactical qualities
along with Deleuze and Guattari's sensibilities about the war machine. These nomads practice the
razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black

tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, 'liberated'
bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars. (p. 107) Finally,
Bey discusses these nomads in terms of the Internet and cyberspace. His poetry foreshadows ideas
that appear in CAEs The Electronic Disturbance and later in Electronic Civil Disobedience. With
the words cyberspace and hallucination used interchangeably, we can see Gibson (1984) being
combined with Deleuze and Guattari. These nomads chart their course by strange stars, which
might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the
land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net
with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logisitics - and finally, over all, the 1:1 map
of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by
unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises. (p.
107-108)
The Critical Art Ensemble's The Electronic Disturbance (1994) has incorporated ideas about
nomadic dynamics (p. 11), horticultural-nomadic society (p. 14), nomadic power (p. 15), nomadic
elite (p. 17, 23), and nomadic flow. (p. 23) While there is no explicit reference to Deleuze and
Guattari or A Thousand Plateaus Treatise on Nomadology and the War Machine, there is an
implicit connection. The Electronic Disturbance clearly picks up where TAZ left off in its
treatment of nomads in cyberspace. The second chapter on Nomadic Power and Cultural
Resistance is where the most explication of nomadic power takes place. The main thrust of the
argument concerns itself with where power is located. Power is described as being fluid, mobile,
dispersed, and nomadic: The location of power - and the site of resistance - rest in an ambiguous
zone without borders. How could it be otherwise, when the traces of power flow in transition
between nomadic dynamics and sedentary structures - between hyperspeed and hyperinteria? (p.
11) A corollary of this is that any resistance to power must take this fluidity, mobility, dispersion,
and nomadism into consideration; effective resistance must mirror these attributes. CAE says that
contemporary resistance, in opposition to nomadic power, must resort to similar nomadic tactics of
what was once called the wandering horde. With no fixed cities or territories, this wandering
horde could never really be located. Consequently, they could never be put on the defensive and
conquered. They maintained their autonomy through movement. (p. 14) CAE argues that earlier
sedentary forms of capital are being replaced by capital constituted in the electronic form. To be
more precise, they see cyberspace as the new space where capital will reinvent itself. Again we see
this notion of nomadism, mobility, and diffusion. CAE points out that for quite some time capital, or
the nomadic elite, has been difficult to find, noting that even in the 1950s C. W. Mills was
wondering where elites were located. CAE says that with the flight of capital into cyberspacial
realms that it is even now more difficult to see. As the contemporary elite moves from centralized
urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace, Mill's dilemma becomes increasingly
aggravated. How can a subject be critically assessed that cannot be located, examined, or even
seen? (p. 17) CAE argues that capital having constituting itself in a new electronic form in
cyberspace means that opposition movements have to invent new strategies and tactics that counter
this new nomadic power of capital, that certain old ways - such as street demonstrations - need to be
modified to meet the new conditions. Elite power, having rid itself of its national and urban bases
to wander in absence on the electronic pathways, can no longer be disrupted by strategies predicated
upon the contestation of sedentary forces. The architectural monuments of power are hollow and
empty, and function now only as bunkers for the complicit and those who acquiesce. (p. 23)
Finally, CAE makes a radical statement of how to develop a nomadic resistance in cyberspace. In
this closing quote from The Electronic Disturbance we can see a move from the poetic and artist
rendition of Bey's nomad in cyberspace to a more concrete methodology about which tactics might
prove useful. Nomadic power must be resisted in cyberspace rather than in physical space. A small
but coordinated group of hackers could introduce electronic viruses, worms, and bombs into the
data banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly bringing the destructive force of inertia
into the nomadic realm. Prolonged inertia equals the collapse of nomadic authority on a global
level. Such a strategy does not require action in numerous geographic areas. . . (p. 25)

CAE's Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1996) continues to develop the
ideas it introduced in The Electronic Disturbance by offering a preliminary outline concerning
rational strategy (antilogos) and tactical possibilities for nomadic resistance. (p. 3) Most of their
theory about nomadic power and resistance is discussed in their first chapter Electronic Civil
Disobedience. This second work by CAE focuses less on an explanation of nomadic power and
more on the tactics of nomadic resistance. They initiate their discussion by reiterating a claim made
in The Electronic Disturbance about a shift in the form of power from the sedentary to the fluid and
the resultant difficulty in locating power today. One essential characteristic that sets late capitalism
apart from other political and economic forces is its mode of representing power: What was once a
sedentary concrete mass has now become a nomadic electronic flow. Before computerized
information management, the heart of institutional command and control was easy to locate. (p. 7)
Again, they reiterate the corollary that if power and capital have been re-constituted into a more
liquid form, then resistance must change its techniques. Previously traditional civil disobedience
tactics such as sit-ins or blockades made sense. But since these tactics were devised to combat
sedentary power they are having less and less efficacy. Even though the monuments of power still
stand, visibly present in stable location, the agency that maintains power is neither visible nor
stable. . . . Blocking the entrances to a building, or some other resistant action in physical space, can
prevent reoccupation (the flow of personnel), but this is of little consequence so long as
information-capital continues to flow. (p. 9) CAE reinforces an argument made in The Electronic
Disturbance that the site of this new non-sedentary liquid form of capital and power exists now in
cyberspace. Capital rarely takes a hard form; like power, it exists as an abstraction. An abstract
form will probably be found in an abstract place, or to be more specific, in cyberspace. (p. 12)
Finally, CAE suggests that the source for knowledge on how to engage in electronic civil
disobedience will come from resistant or dissident members of the technocratic class. (p. 29)
RHIZOMATIC-NOMADIC RESISTANT INTERNET USE
The Theory
In this paper resistance refers to organized opposition to the forces of the State and capital. Such
resistance takes on many forms in many contexts. This particular focus is on resistant uses of the
Internet. The paragraphs that follow discuss Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomatic-nomadic nature of
anti-State and anti-capitalist resistance on the Internet and in cyberspace. Such rhizomatic-nomadic
resistance is first discussed in the abstract. Then, the specific case of global pro-Zapatista resistant
Internet use will be explained. Finally, resistance can not be discussed without mentioning control.
The very forces against which resistance is directed the State and capital exhibit control over
would be resistant actors. Resistant Internet use emerges from a dialectic or better yet, dyadic
interplay between the forces of rhizomatic-nomadic anti-State and anti-capitalist resistance against
panoptic State and capitalist control. Panoptic is Foucaults term for the unseen overseer, the
surveillance State that monitors and controls from above. (Foucault 1977)
Resistant Internet use follows a lineage of earlier forms of resistant media application. All types of
mediated communication technology print, telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television - have at
times been instruments for collective acts of resistance. Resistant media use in moments of
revolutionary social upheaval ranges from the application of the printing press in the 1525 German
Peasant War to the use of the fax machine in the 1989 Chinese student movement. Today, scholars
are beginning to examine the relationships between computer-mediated communication and
political change and in particular the role of CMC within extraparliamentarian movements
struggling for self-determination and autonomy. Before continuing with a delineation of primary
types of resistant Internet use it is worth noting its international dimensions. Unlike most early
types of mediated resistance, the Internet enables the spatial parameters of resistance to be
international, intercontinental, and global. While resistant Internet use functions at all spatial levels,
it is the global dimension that offers the greatest amount of intrigue and possibilty. For this reason

the case of global pro-Zapatista resistant Internet use is captivating and worthy of further
examination.
It appears there are two major kinds of resistant Internet use, rhetorical and technical. Rhetorical
resistant use centers on the content of Internet communication. Technical resistant use centers on the
form of Internet communication. Content based resistant Internet use focuses more on the Internet
as a communication media, as a tool to exchange text, images, and sound. The two primary means
of resistant Internet communication are through the use of email, using mail software like Eudora,
and through the World Wide Web, using browser software like Netscape Communicator 4.0. In both
instances it is the email or web site message content that is of a resistant nature. Being of a resistant
nature means that the message content texts contribute to the creation, circulation, and continuation
of resistance to the State and capital. The messages can be sent among resistant actors or they can
be sent from resistant actors to opponents. Resistant messages sent among resistant actors can
consist of a variety of types including: personal notes, ongoing dialogue, reports, news, proposals
for action, announcements of demonstrations, distribution of analyses. Such messages can be sent
from one person to another (one-to-one), from one person to a Cc: list (one-to-few), from one
person to one listserv or a multiple of listservs (one-to-many). Resistant messages sent from
resistant actors to opponents (many-to-one; many-to-few) normally take the shape of protest
messages as in denunciatory letters. The sending of numerous individual messages from resistant
actors to opponents falls under the category of content based resistant Internet use until such time as
there is an overload of incoming messages to an opponents server. At this point, the resistant use
becomes form based, meaning that it acts upon the Internet infrastructure.
A resistant email message travelling through the Internet follows non-linear rhizomatic-nomadic
pathways. The rhizomatic-nomadic resistant email message moves from one person to another
individually, as part of a larger Cc: list, or via a listserv. This message is then copied and
redistributed. This process continues to reproduce itself. An original sender can not know where or
when the resistant message stops travelling, stops being copied and redistributed, stops being
translated. Rhizomatic-nomadic messages with higher degrees of resonance will be dispersed in
greater densities. News of paramilitary forces gunning down indigenous women and children in
church and proposals to take action against this will travel far.
Resistant texts, images, and sounds on web sites are often linked hypertextually with similar sites. A
reader, a user, an audience member of a resistant web site can connect easily to another such site
and in this way can rhizomatically and nomadically travel through a territory of cyberspace that has
been occupied by a series of interconnected resistant web sites. Given the multitude of possible
pathways leading a resistant user from one web site to another, the resistant actor in this case can be
said to wander or in the more common sense, to browse, nomadically through the particular
resistant territory.
Form based resistant Internet use focuses more on the Internet infrastructure as a site for resistant
acts. Sites for such resistant Internet acts include (1) the pathways leading toward, (2) the
entranceways to, and (3) the interior of an opponents computer system. The pathways leading
toward and the entranceways to an opponents email or web site can be overloaded, clogged, and
finally blocked to create an electronic disturbance for an opponent. Resistant actors trespass upon
the interior of an opponents system in order to destroy, remove, or corrupt data. Of these three
forms, the third is the most difficult and requires the advanced skills of computer programmers.
Email based resistant acts, as noted, move beyond email use for the transmission of resistant
political messages. An overabundance of email filling an opponents inbox with thousands of
unwanted messages can cause the ISP server to crash. When such spamming of email reaches these
proportions an email bomb is said to have been deployed.
Web site based resistant acts can occur at the entranceways to the site. In the same way that massive
email sent to an email address blocks those paths and entrances, a massive assault on the
entranceways to a web site can cause blockage. An electronic pulse system can be established that

sends repeated requests for entry to a single web site asking that particular site to respond and load
itself upon the resistant actors net browser. Software designers have developed code that automates
this repeated pressing the net browsers reload button. Acting in concert with other resistant
actors in a distributed system such actions can cause an overflow of reload requests that prevents
others from accessing the targeted site.
Moving beyond merely acting at the entranceways, web sites can be disrupted in their interior. One
possibility is to actually change the content of an opponents web site, removing, adding or
changing images and text. This is analogous to billboard alteration or other print-based types of
cultural jamming. Yet another possibility is to launch a corrupted intelligent into a web site and to
slowly disrupt the site. These acts, when resistance moves from the pathways and entrances to the
interior generally become more and more sophisticated and require more computer expertise.
Such form based resistant Internet use acting upon the infrastructure is nomadic in that the resistant
actors themselves are a force dispersed in cyberspace without any definite center. Without
commanding officers, central authority and a chain of command, the organizational structure of
resistant Internet actors resembles that of a nomadic army. Any resistant actor can issue a call for
action. Any resistant actor can make suggestions and put out requests that particular web sites or
email addresses be targeted on a given date and time. This resistant call, this suggestion, this
message is distributed rhizomatically over the Internet and follows a nomadic course. It continues to
be copied and redistributed through Cc: lists, listservs, and newsgroups until it no longer resonates.
The resistant message itself is a nomad travelling through a rhizomatic networked structure. The
resistant actors themselves are nomads acting against targeted sites.
Of the two primary types of resistant Internet use, rhetorical content based resistance and technical
form based resistance, the latter infrastructural form based type resembles more what the Critical
Art Ensemble have termed electronic civil disobedience. Their description of electronic civil
disobedience borrows the notion of trespass and blockade from the more traditional non-electronic
civil disobedience historically practiced by an array of social movements. CAEs Electronic Civil
Disobedience shows current computer-based civil disobedience as part of a continuum connected to
these earlier social movements.
The strategy and tactics of ECD should not be a mystery to any activists. They are the same
as traditional CD. ECD is a nonviolent activity by its very nature, since the oppositional
forces never physically confront one another. As in CD, the primary tactics in ECD are
trespass and blocking. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by
the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in
unethical or criminal actions. Blocking information conduits is analogous to blocking
physical locations; however, electronic blockages can cause financial stress that physical
blockage cannot, and it can be used beyond the local level. ECD is CD reinvigorated. What
CD once was, ECD is now. (CAE 1996, 18)
The Practice: Starting January 1, 1994
Besides examining hypothetical ideas in these theoretical works like Electronic Civil Disobedience,
we can actually see that incipient electronic civil disobedience has begun. One site for discovering
such practice is within the global pro-Zapatista movement that has come into being since the
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.
The Zapatistas, immediately entered the global stage just after January 1, 1994, when their
communiques signed by Subcommandante Marcos were distributed globally through the Net.
Quickly, through pre-existing and newly formed listservs, newsgroups, and Cc: lists, news, reports,
analyses, announcements about demonstrations, and calls for intercontinental gatherings spread
throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. We began to hear the Zapatistas use
the terms intercontinental "networks of struggle" and "networks of resistance." This new media, the

Internet, became a vital means for the transmission of information from inside the conflict zone in
Chiapas to other points of resistance in Mexico and to points beyond Mexico's physical borders.
With each passing year, since 1994, the level of computer sophistication has increased. What began
as mere transmission of EZLN communiques and other information via email became also a
network of hypertext linked web sites. This rapid widespread dispersal of these communiques and
other information, and the subsequent establishment of intercontinental networks of solidarity and
resistance, accounts for part of the reason why the Zapatistas survive.
This movement of information through these various cyber-nets of resistance can be said to have
occurred rhizomatically, moving horizontally, non-linearly, and underground. Rather than operating
through a central command structure in which information filters down from the top in a vertical
and linear manner - the model of radio and television broadcasting - information about the
Zapatistas on the Net has moved laterally from node to node.
Until recently the primary use of the Internet by the global pro-Zapatista movement has been as a
communication tool. However, in recent times, particularly since the Acteal Massacre in Chiapas at
the end of 1997 in which 45 indigenous people were killed, the Internet has increasingly been seen
as not only a site or a channel for communication, but also as a site for direct action and electronic
civil disobedience.
Beta actions of electronic civil disobedience occurred early in 1998. Information about the Acteal
Massacre, and announcements of Mexican consulate and embassy protests, was transmitted rapidly
over the Net. The largest response was in the form of physical street protest, drawing crowds of
between 5,000 and 10,000 in places like Spain and Italy. But there were also calls for actions in
cyberspace. On the low end of cyber-activism people sent large amounts of email protest to selected
email targets of the Mexican government. But in January, the Anonymous Digital Coalition issued a
plan, promulgated far and wide via this rhizomatic system of distribution, for virtual sit-ins on five
web sites of Mexico City financial corporations. They issued information about the time zones so
people could act together when it was 10:00 a.m. in Mexico City. They instructed people to use
their Internet browsers to repeatedly reload the web sites of these financial institutions. The idea
was that repeated reloading of the web sites would block those web sites from so called legitimate
use.
Based on this theory of simultaneous and collective, yet decentered, electronic action against a
targeted web site, the group that became the Electronic Disturbance Theater automated the process
of manually and repeatedly striking the reload key. On April 10, FloodNet Tactical Version 1.0 was
showcased during a dress rehearsal action of Electronic Civil Disobedience against Mexican
President Zedillo's web site. As a Java applet reload function, the first test of FloodNet sent an
automated reload request every seven seconds to Zedillo's page. Reports from participants and
observations confirmed that the more than 8,000 participants in this first FloodNet action
intermittently blocked access to the Zedillo site on that day. The next site for electronic action was
the Clinton White House web site on May 10. A similar FloodNet device was deployed. Instead of
reload requests being sent every 7 seconds that figure was cut to about every 3.
To protest the increased deportation of international human rights observers and to again
demonstrate the ability of people physically outside Mexico's geographic borders to act against an
agency of the Mexican government, the Electronic Disturbance Theater chose Mexico's Secretaria
de Gobernacion for its June 10 ECD action. This governmental department oversees Mexico's
immigration service and is directly responsible for the deportation of international observers.
Gobernacion also oversees Mexico's federal public security forces that have been working in
conjunction with the military against Zapatista communities in Chiapas. As on April 10 and May
10, ECD on June 10 against the Gobernacion web site used a version of FloodNet. But this time,
something curious happened. The Mexican government struck back. The Mexican Government or
programmers hired by the government developed a countermeasure against Flood Net. The
Electronic Disturbance Theater believes a Java Script was placed in the Secretaria de Gobernacion's

web site that was designed to activate whenever FloodNet was directed toward it. Upon activation,
the Gobernacion site would open window after window on the FloodNet users browser. If the
FloodNet user remained connected long enough, their browser, whether it be Netscape or Explorer,
could crash. FloodNet software designers have addressed this problem by urging users to turn Java
Script off on their browsers before engaging in FloodNet.
In its short lived history, the Electronic Disturbance Theater has demonstrated the capability to take
action against portions of a political opponent's Internet infrastructure. While at the same it has
shown that its actions are of such a scale that they warrant state reaction and intervention, at least on
the part of the Mexican government. It seems likely that the Electronic Disturbance Theater will
continue to grow and move beyond tactics such as FloodNet. Possibly, tactical devices like
FloodNet will just be one potential tool out of an array of electronic machines and software devices
that cyber activists and artists will have access to and know how to use. It seems that the Electronic
Disturbance Theater is likely to become only one small group among a multiplicity of small groups,
nodes, or cells, that push forward the ways and means for global electronic resistance. The group is
already active at the international level. This September's Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria,
an annual festival celebrating the juncture of arts and technology, will focus on Infowar and has
already accepted the groups SWARM proposal. A swarm would be an array of FloodNet-like
devices, arising, acting, and dispersing simultaneously against an array of cyberspacial political
targets. This is much like the way a nomadic army, or a guerrilla force, arises, acts, and then
disperses. This group, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, through its promotion of ECD tactics vis
a vis the global pro-Zapatista movement, has been pushing the envelope and is challenging the
notion that the Internet should be safeguarded solely as a site for communication; it has been
demonstrating that the Net should be a site for direct action as well.
The Rhizomatic/Panoptic Dyad
Within the work of Deleuze and Guattari and within some of the literature that attempts to describe
and explain it, we sometimes see mention of the terms smooth space and striated space. In referring
back to the section on A Thousand Plateaus at the beginning of this paper and to Table A, we
notice that smooth spaces are rhizomatic, nomadic, anarchic, etc., while striated spaces are arbolic,
sedentary, hierarchical, etc. These spaces, both smooth and striated, coexist. Together, they form a
smooth/striated dyad. Sometimes smooth space is reterritorialized and converted into striated space.
Other times striated space is deterritorialized and converted into smooth space.
The Internet began as mostly smooth space. But over time, the State and capital have begun to
reterritorialize the smooth space of the Internet. The panoptic forces of State and capitalist control
are slowly, but surely, converting the Internet into striated space. The States primary mechanisms
of striation are the imposition of law and increased surveillance. Capitals primary mechanisms of
striation are commodification of information, advertising, and colonization of Internet
infrastructures.
Resistant forces on the Internet, those engaged in resistant Internet use like the electronic civil
disobedience acts described above, are operating within the remaining uncolonized,
deterritorialized, smooth spaces that still exist in cyberspace. So far, it is unclear as to precisely
which laws the Electronic Disturbance Theater are violating, or if they are violating any laws at all.
In this sense, the group is still operating out in front of the State, in smooth, yet to be controlled,
spaces. And so far, the forces of capital have yet to devise means of eliminating anti-capitalist actors
through expanded ownership and ultimate control of Internet backbones and architectures.
Despite the forces of the State and capital being clearly present, in general the global pro-Zapatista
movement has been able to move information about the Zapatistas freely all over the world. But as
the forces of control realize the power that the forces of resistance have gained by taking advantage
of these smooth spaces on the Net, there will be a move on their part to impede the flow. This, in
reality, has already started to occur, at least at the level of rhetoric and policy. State-side theorists of

information warfare have already framed acts like electronic civil disobedience as forms of cyberterrorism. Undoubtedly, these types of rhetorical and ideological device will be used to impose
more restrictions on the use of the Net for the above mentioned purposes.
But for now, the rhizomatic-nomadic resistant Internet actors have enough smooth space available
to them to continue plotting and planning new acts. Eventually some of the spaces within which
current resistance operates will become striated, segmented, restricted, and controlled. Resitant
Internet use will need to evolve and reinvent itself. As Deleuze and Guattari point out or admonish:
make a map and not a tracing. Resistant actors will need to map out new territory and terrain,
staying a few steps ahead of the forces of the State and capital. The Panopticon sees all, but only in
territory it knows. Resistant actors will need to create new territory and act while the panoptic
forces of State and capital play catch up.
CONCLUSIONS
For a variety of reasons, ranging from sheer ignorance to an almost religious adherence to
modernism and Enlightenment thinking, most communications scholars do not pay very much
attention to the ideas of postmodernist thinkers. Even among some of these scholars who do indeed
incorporate postmodern thinking into their work, who write about new communication and
information technology from postmodern perspectives, there is a lack of Deleuze and Guattaris
ideas. Perhaps most curiously missing are references to Deleuze and Guattari in the writings of
Mark Poster, someone who clearly has been influenced by other French postmodernists like
Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. Even so, we do see at least some of Deleuze and
Guattaris ideas appear in certain work that falls under the rubric of communications studies.
Cncerning the applicability of Deleuze and Guattari to the Internet or cyberspace in a general way,
there have been some contributions. As Hamman has indicated, the Internet is a rhizome. As
Moulthrop has pointed out, A Thousand Plateaus is an incunabular hypertext. As others have
mentioned there are nomadic and rhizomatic qualities to cyberspace. But specifically concerning
the application of Deleuze and Guattaris ideas to resistant Internet use, there apparently are few
theorists outside the work of the Critical Art Ensemble, who have begun to address this subject
matter. Part of this can be accounted for by the fact that resistant Internet use is a relatively new
phenomena, but another explanation is that frankly the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari are not
transparent enough for most communications scholars, at least in the United States, who seem to
have a bias against recursive and non-linear thinkers. Also, many U.S. communication scholars
have little concern for resistant uses of communication media. Those who do may mostly be in the
realm of political economy, an area that is often antagonistic toward postmodernism. Some
communication scholars who do write about resistance, think that an alternate reading of a
television program is considered resistant. So perhaps the word resistance has been watered down
and diluted.
This paper does not stand on solid ground within the core of communications studies. It hinges on
the edge, both in terms of the theory it chooses to look at and in terms of the subject matter. As with
any attempt to bring ideas together in a new way, this paper can potentially be shot full of holes by
an opponent or critic. But, as a starting point, there seems to be a good case for using Deleuze and
Guattaris ideas as part of a lens needed for taking a closer look at the way the Internet operates. As
noted at the beginning of this paper, ideas about rhizomatics and nomadology are just two of many
ideas presented in A Thousand Plateaus, which is indeed an encyclopedic work. It seems there is
enough evidence to indicate that A Thousand Plateaus deserves the attention of any communication
scholar who is serious about the Internet and particularly those who are approaching the Internet
from a radical point-of-view.
In many ways, this paper is more about what other writers and thinkers have said about A Thousand
Plateaus or works that are derived from ideas in A Thousand Plateaus, than it is a direct reading
and interpretation of the work itself. Perhaps this is a mistake. It has value in that now we can

position various scholars in relation to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Now we can conclude
rather definitively that Deleuze and Guattari are quite marginalized within communication studies
and that references to their work appear among writers who may not even be considered within the
field. But maybe it would have been more useful to ignore the work that either said nothing or only
made passing references to Deleuze and Guattari, and instead concentrate more on the original work
or other works that Deleuze and Guattari have written together or separately.
This seems like a call for another project: a more in-depth analysis of A Thousand Plateaus and a
wider reading of the collective work of Deleuze and Guattari. Someone needs to write The
relevance of Deleuze and Guattari to communication studies. This paper does not accomplish that
task, but it does point the way to that destination.
Finally, while linkages between the section on the literature review and the section on resistant
Internet use are more implicit than explicit, surely the reader can see there is solid groundwork for
further application of the rhizomatic-nomadic model to resistance in cyberspace.
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