rhizomatics

Deluze and Guattari lay out a pluralistic framework of being and thought called Rhizomatics (in contrast to Hierarchy/Arborescence). It shares many qualities with zen.

Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and wake within them. This should be read without pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptuals. Five-o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place!

Between the two [multiplicities: becoming-red-fur and becoming-wolf,] there is a threshold and fiber, symbioses of or passage between heterogeneities. That is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogial constituencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together and form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into another given multiplicity, or even if the heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning multiplicity susceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass. Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back ot the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for eample, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation, self destruction, Ahab, Ahab...? The risks are ever present, but it is always possible to have the good fortune of avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether hte line is consistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities will effectively function in a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether multiplicities are effectively transformed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as simple as x starts playing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to childhood? Is it a way of dying, in a sort of sonorous abolition? Is it a new borderlne, an active line that ill bring other becomings entirely different from becomings or rebecoming a pianist that will have a transformation of all the preceding assemblages to which x was a prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact with the Devil? Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meanig: make a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.

Deluze and Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus