Post-Rhizome Thinking: Farmers Beyond Deleuze-Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari's famous celebration of the rhizome, after borrowing the concept from science, has made the studies and intellectual projects conducted by Nepali farmers and agriculture-related groups more scientific/science-centric: in Nepal we have much scientific research into chemical pesticides, the mechanics of irrigation techniques etc. In post-rhizome thinking however, there is the need for farmers to understand a crucial logical inversion regarding their work-environment: the farmers need to understand that the soil on which they plant their crop is not the nourishing element to that crop, rather, the soil is nothing but the fragmentation of the roots of the crops they plant; the soil is the remnants of the death of the crops they plant and have planted.

With this post-rhizome logic, the Nepali farmer may be able to position the crop's root as origin of soil, and present the landowner with the argument that it is the farmer's crop, and the farmer's toil that crop represents, which composes and creates arable soil. This logic will make the landowner face the fact that his soil is dependent on the crops planted on it, that the value of his land depends on the fragmentation of the roots of the farmer's crop.

Thus the farmers' groups can engage in studying the history of the soil of their arable lands, in order to then evaluate whether that soil has been enriched and nourished ever since planting by farmers began on it. They need to see whether the introduction of human planting on the soil had made the soil even more receptive for plantings in the future, and whether human planting caused the increase of the monetary value of the soil over time. These are not properly technical-or-scientific studies, but rather historical studies of the soil on which farmers plant, with an inclusion of scientific-agricultural methods of soil investigation inside a farmer's social change agenda.  

Entertaining Climate-Change Summer Movies And The Post-Climate-Change Age

We see on news channels quite long broadcasts of climate change conferences. Perhaps in the summer we are most anxious about global warming and need some sort of entertainment as a small distraction, either a creative conference or a summer action-adventure movie. Also, the climate-change conferences' participants devise ways to make the conference's message of “Care For The Earth” more entertaining, in the hope that the message will be memorized in the viewer's memory. Then there is the production of big movies on the environment, and watching them we may say that climate change will be a dominant issue, precisely because saving the earth will be so last minute and desperate that we will almost see an “action-adventure” movie in real life with a cast of climate-change enthusiasts.

What must be done in order to ensure a happy ending to our climate-change action adventure is a careful evaluation of the “heroes” of the climate-change movement: to see whether they are strong enough, brave enough, when the climate-change issue really comes to focus. That the climate-change movement will be so “last minute” means that there will be heroes involved in the movement rather than calmer street protests. The climate-change heroes must be identified soon, and celebrated as heroes and not just as participants in a mass movement.

It is hard to accept that the climate-change hero will certainly be effective, because there is no human-like “enemy” or “nemesis” in the climate-change movement of the future, rather nature itself will occupy the position of nemesis, which means nature itself will have to be attacked and destroyed completely, like the adventurous emptying out of the sea if the sea-levels get too high all of a sudden and leads to desperation. This means there is no turning back to the past, to pristine nature, to the way things were, in the climate-change movement; the world will not look/revert back to what it once was in the post-climate-change age.

The Nepali Pastor: Becoming-Animal To Save Stray Dogs' Lives

Ongoing knowledge-building projects makes the flock docile and disciplined; the flock's inclusion in incomplete projects makes it happy; incomplete knowledge-building turns a group of people into a flock of animals. So it is the madman, who has an endless drive to produce more and more knowledge, whose knowledge is always incomplete, who is the pastor of the flock, because the flock disciplines itself before him/her because he/she includes that flock in ongoing knowledge-building projects.

The madman is driven precisely by the desire to be a pastor of the animals, such as, in the Nepali case, the stray dogs. He/she begins in his/her ambition to be pastor by sleeping among these animals, in their territories and wastelands and not his/her own, and by the end he/she has developed a core group of stray animals which are his flock, which look to him/her for the management and protection of their territories; he/she has finally “become-animal” to use the Deleuze-Guattari term; he/she has become a stray dog, and therefore gains their trust.

The pastor begins as the madman and ends with becoming-animal. The lack of discipline among Nepali people shows that Nepali people lack pastoral power today; pastoral power has moved in Nepal from the management of people to the management of stray animals. The movement towards becoming-animal does not discount pastoral power in today's age when knowledge-building matters, rather, the pastor's knowledge may be used for improving the lives of stray animals.

It is by Nepalis' respect for pastoral power that any governmental project of killing stray dogs will be stopped, and these stray dogs can instead be seen as included within pastoral power's projects and hence in a very pure way seeking their own earthly territories, as the pastor has taught them to do just as he/she taught people before.

Atomic War, The Nobel-Prize Winning Poet And The Power Of The Rhyme Scheme

The recent Nobel Prize awarded to a poet-musician was significant. This Nobel winner will visit world-leaders as a result of his win, where he may be asked to sing a song. What the world-leader leaves with from the musician-poet's powerful performance is the power of the rhyme, not just in songs, but rhyming also in the narrative of real life events, in that, the world leader as a result of the rhymes of the musician-poet will feel the allure of rhyming, the way rhyming makes certain events significant in songs and in history, and he will want to “create a rhyme” himself by repeating historic events, such as, in a serious example, dropping the atom bomb once again in the same place where it had been dropped the previous time.

The dropping of the atom bombs is perhaps the most significant event in history which is without a rhyme, a repetition. The burden of making history “catchy” falls on the hands of world-leaders, and hence they are well aware of this incomplete or “unattractive” narrative with such a noticeable absence of a rhyme. There is a “drive-to-rhyme” as strong in the poetic world-leader as there is in the rhyming poet-musician. Perhaps the awarding of a significant rhyming poet-musician shows that the pressure or even the compulsion to rhyme by dropping another set of atom bombs is now higher than ever before. We know that we inevitably have to rhyme when we subscribe to a certain "way/style of telling" of the narrative of the world: we have to rhyme when we reach the end of the line in this kind of narration of events. 

Hence in the coming days the Japanese people and the anti-atomic bomb movements may not be all that happy that a rhyming musician-poet has won the recent Nobel Prize. They may try to obstruct this musician-poet from visiting world-leaders for performances. But in the end, other marginalized or lesser-known artists, such as hip-hop/rap artists, who also use rhyme schemes, may in turn be discouraged to produce such art, and thereafter even discouraged from signing up to anti-atomic bomb movements. 

When there will come the moment for a rhyming atom bomb drop is in fact not that difficult to predict, even though it may be more difficult these days given the use of more unconventional rhyme schemes in songs and in societal events. Nepal however can feel safe from atom bombs as long as the use of atom bombs is governed by a rhyme scheme/structure in the narrative of world-history.  

The Role Of Nepali Hill-Stations In The Chinese Housing Boom

The air pollution in China, once it gets to the point of becoming thick smog, has a convenient function: to hide a portion of the tall apartment towers from the pedestrians who are in the mood to problematize China, or hiding the tower's tops from a western economist interested in understanding the status of housing development and purchasing patterns there. Hence the towers look much smaller, making the housing development look properly managed, and whether the tops of these towers are inhabited or not becomes harder to know.

Meanwhile the Chinese tourist travels to Nepal to enjoy the morning mist and fog in Nepali hill-stations, and see the morning mist and fog as equivalent to the smog in the cities where they have purchased their homes. With this comparison between natural mist and harmful smog, the level of discontent with the environment is reduced, and a potential protest against the environment avoided. The environmental beauty in one place helps to reduce anger with environmental degradation in another, and sadly the polluted environment remains uncleaned because the clean environments don't serve as 'role-models' to be learned from but only offset the discontent felt at pollution elsewhere.

The first signs of western and suburban housing booms are the clues of oversupply in the housing market. Whether there is oversupply or not can be established by flying over the suburbs and observing if there seems to be too many houses in a certain place. The western economist may get a hunch or feeling that there are more houses than necessary in that place. Yet the pleasure felt at the picturesque, clean and uninhabited suburbs to the eye of the western economist may soften his/her judgment on the oversupply or boom of suburban houses. The western economist's reporting on the oversupply and/or boom in beautiful suburbs may not be very harsh because the beauty has had an impact on him/her.

On the other hand, there will be much more of a problem in China where the housing boom is not as picturesque as the suburbs, and instead may look hostile. The Chinese economist will never be in the mood to give a less harsh report on the housing market if he/she encounters smog when looking at the apartment towers. One way to lessen the Chinese economist's anger at the housing market is to have him/her travel to Nepal's hill-stations and see the morning mist/fog, so that he/she may then evoke this positive image of natural fog when he/she sees a scene of the smog from atop the uninhabited apartment tower in a Chinese city.

The US Presidential Debates As Officially Creating A New Battlefront

The media has looked at the debate between the leading two US presidential candidates as strictly between those two people, whereas it is entirely crucial to know that in the debate stage like at no other point, the two debaters represent their respective Democratic and Republican parties. It is the parties that debate through these candidates; the parties' battle against one another being deeper established than the battle between the two specific candidates they have sent forward to the debate platform, and the debate platform being only one front in the multi-fronted battle between the two parties.

The presidential debates do not represent the meeting point between two parties where their issues with one another may finally be resolved, rather, the debates' moderators or creators enable the two candidates to battle it out for the very first time: they won't come to peace in the debates, but rather come to an understanding that key talking points have been given the opportunity to thrive, so that a “rich and civilized battle” can be undertaken between them, given their shared interest in these talking points but opposing stances. There is the recognition by both parties that the media has brought together the people with the most points of interest in common to debate, opening a new and very active battlefront in a longer and deeper battle. 

It seems that the media likes organizing debates more than dialogues, given that so many debates take place in the media and on camera, and given that most heads-of-state undertake dialogue behind-closed-doors and the media doesn't complain. Most debates aren't decisive, but rather point out or introduce two people to one another who are most suited to argue at length, and disagree, so that the debate is a front which always produces a stalemate but which enables the two parties' members to recognize, sometimes even for the first time, a “debating mate" within an opposing party with whom the battle can be prolonged.

Curiously, if there are certain debates or battles which have too many parties involved, and it is not possible to fit all the representatives of all the parties in a single screen-shot, then it is likely that that debate will never take place. Such a large-scale debate was tried by the media in the debate between presidential hopefuls of the Republican party, but it seems not to have been attempted elsewhere where too many parties are involved. But since debates are more likely to originate new fronts of battle rather than bring a peaceful completion to a conflict, the deprivation of the opportunity to find a “debating mate” may not be a bad thing. 

The US Presidential Debates As Officially Creating A New Battlefront

The media has looked at the debate between the leading two US presidential candidates as strictly between those two people, whereas it is entirely crucial to know that in the debate stage like at no other point, the two debaters represent their respective Democratic and Republican parties. It is the parties that debate through these candidates; the parties' battle against one another being deeper established than the battle between the two specific candidates they have sent forward to the debate platform, and the debate platform being only one front in the multi-fronted battle between the two parties.

The presidential debates do not represent the meeting point between two parties where their issues with one another may finally be resolved, rather, the debates' moderators or creators enable the two candidates to battle it out for the very first time: they won't come to peace in the debates, but rather come to an understanding that key talking points has been given the opportunity to thrive, so that a “rich and civilized battle” can be undertaken between them, given their shared interest in these talking points but opposing stances. There is the recognition by both parties that the media has brought together the people with the most points of interest in common to debate, opening a new battlefront in a longer and deeper battle. 

It seems that the media likes organizing debates more than dialogues, given that so many debates take place in the media and on camera, and given that most heads-of-state undertake dialogue behind-closed-doors and the media doesn't complain. Most debates aren't decisive, but rather point out or introduce two people to one another who are most suited to argue at length, and disagree, so that the debate is a front which always produces a stalemate but which enables the two parties' members to recognize, sometimes even for the first time, a “debating mate" within an opposing party with whom the battle can be prolonged.

Curiously, if there are certain debates or battles which have too many parties involved, and it is not possible to fit all the representatives of all the parties in a single screen-shot, then it is likely that that debate will never take place. Such a large-scale debate was tried by the media in the debate between presidential hopefuls of the Republican party, but it seems not to have been attempted elsewhere where too many parties are involved. But since debates are more likely to originate new fronts of battle rather than bring a peaceful completion to a conflict, the deprivation of the opportunity to find a “debating mate” may not be a bad thing.