Lines of Return: Paash, Deleuze, and the Politics of Grass

Avtaar Singh Sandhu, better known as Paash, memorializes the continuum of resistance and its way of spurting back in his poem titled “Ghaas” (Grass). This irrepressible return is also theorized through “Rhizomes” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the book A Thousand Plateaus. The poem and the theory converge not in content, but in structure—both describe forms that resist capture.

Routes Rather than Roots
Rhizome in botany is a continuously growing horizontal stem which puts out lateral shoots and also adventitious roots at intervals. The definition in philosophy isn’t too far off, only that it is more nuanced and elaborated. Rhizome resists linearity, hierarchy and origin; it is a model of multiplicity and ruptured connections. It is important to note in the beginning that many things could be a rhizome or be rhizomatic—the text elucidates examples such as the city Amsterdam, animals like rats and ants, or writers such as Kafka. The scope of something being or performing as a rhizome is vast and creative based on how it functions. For the relevance of this article, however, we expand on the definition of rhizomes and extend it to the dimension of activism through Paash’s poem “Ghaas”.

A rhizome is to be understood against arborescent structures (resembling a tree in growth or appearance). The logic of the tree is binary, in which it takes odds against the values of truth and falsity only—the criteria of which, it defines itself. The tree is a metaphor for state thinking which abolishes flows of thought, desire, and people. In the translator’s foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi notes that “the annals of official philosophy are populated by 'bureaucrats of pure reason' who speak in 'the shadow of the despot' and are in historical complicity with the State.” He continues: “Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by 'good' sense, of rocklike identity, 'universal' truth, and (white male) justice.” (Massumi, xi). Deleuze himself critiques such structures by asserting that this is “not a method of the people.” A tree always pursues to capture or destroy a rhizome. Paash focuses on this violence of seizure and destruction by forces of state machinery, institutional control and state repression as he writes,

"Throw bombs even if it's on the university, Turn the hostel into a heap of rubble, Burn down our huts if you must."  (my translation)

"Bring down Bhanga, Wipe Sangrur off the map, Grind Ludhiana district into dust." (my translation)

“We’re tired of trees…They’ve made us suffer so much” (Deleuze and Guattari 15). Arborescent systems are forever pretending to reflect complexity and are hierarchical with centers of significance and subjectification, which means that they are central nodes through which power fixes meaning and identity, shaping how we think, who we can be, and how we relate to the world.

A rhizome however, is an anti-genealogy, meaning it has no end or beginning, it is always in the middle of things; it exists as an interbeing. “The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and..” (D&G 25). Now the rhizome isn’t to be wrongly apprehended as an anarchy devoid of laws, it has component traits. There are lines of segmentarity defined by strategy, territory, organization etc. and also lines of deterritorialization in which is exhibits constant rupture and fleeing. Segmentary lines explode into lines of flight. These lines tie back to one another but not in the imagination of a vertical composition, these are instead horizontal. An easy way to understand this to imagine how specific Wikipedia hyperlinks could lead you to the most random pages altogether, even when you would imagine no correlation (see here: a short video of the same). This condition of being in the ‘middle’ is not an average position, it is on the contrary a place where things pick up speed, refusing the idea of pre-traced destiny. It experiences an aparallel evolution.

Paash’s poem offers a vernacular alternative to this abstract theory. Paash’s poetics of crushed-but-returning grass radicalises D&G’s rhizome by rooting it in the specific violence of postcolonial state repression and also organized terrorist militia. His is not a poem of mere resilience but a persistent, insurgent life. Not glorious like the tree or a permanent building, it is but stubborn, repetitive and dispersed. The poem begins and ends with almost similar lines, only that the rhetorical emphasis on the character of grass is more emboldened in the end. It begins with,

“I am grass
I will grow back over everything you’ve done”

While it ends with,

"I am grass, I will do my work.
I will grow over everything you have done."

There is a direct analogy I draw from A Thousand Plateaus where it says, “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 9)

The poem and theory emphasize a non-linear temporality, wherein radical forms reappear not from memory, but from the structure of the world itself; wherever there is pressure, there is potential for rupture. Forms of activism in such vein aren’t only natural, like growing grass but also naturally necessitated. These are dispersive, scattered and persistent like we see today from decentralized movements to anonymous digital dissent. The rhizome and the poem tell us futures can be made from edifices—again, and again, and again.

Works Cited: Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Massumi, Brian. “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, x–xv. University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Author

Bhavana Bhaskar (Blog Head)

BA Philosophy (hons), Third Year

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