Representation

"Deleuze and Guattari, in their discussion of the rhizome, make a distinction between a map and a tracing. The trace is described in terms strikingly similar to Bergson's model of "cinematographic thought": The trace is "like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce."[12] The strength of the map, by contrast, is that it never operates by means of resemblance. While a map functions always in relation to something beyond itself, it engages in those relations as a tool-box, a set of potentialities that are never predetermined and that can in turn effect changes upon the images and objects they come up against: What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification....A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same."[13]

The function of the map described here, I would argue, suggests a vehicle for thinking outside representation, a modality not dissimilar from that of Bergson's intuition. Like the flow of images that Bergson designates as the real, the map interacts with configurations of elements that defy binaristic classification (subject/object, spectator/text, etc.).

With reference to the rhizomatic potential of literature, Deleuze and Guattari write:

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each ofthese orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.... The book as
assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world.[14] "

From Amy Herzog's Images of Thought and Acts of
Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the
Question of Cinema