“In biology, stolons (from Latin stolō "branch") are horizontal connections between organisms. They may be part of the organism, or of its skeleton; typically, animal stolons are external skeletons.” [replication by mitosis]
“Stolons are shoots that bend to the ground or that grow horizontally above the ground and produce roots and shoots at the nodes. The term, "stolons" is often used in describing the botany of lawn grasses. In contrast to stolons, rhizomes dwell underground.”
“Rhizomes are used as storage structures for nutrients.”
I think I pretty much “get” deleuseguatarian rhizomes (or if you prefer, plateaus). The advantages (and disadvantages) of smaller roughly equivalent nodes as structure compared to a “tree” top-down hierarchy are clear to this veteran of congregational polity. (Unitarians are independent congregations who collaborate through an association -- which constantly tries to impose uniformity and hierarchy, all the time protesting that it is not.) This leads me to consider what the connections among the groups might be like.
Between 1982 and 1985 I WAS the connection among the Unitarian fellowships of Montana which normally, because of distance, had little or no connection to each other or even to the district or national and international offices. The four groups that I served, as well as the two I did not, were all ostensibly of the same faith group (though sharing freedom of religion beliefs is rather different than being Catholic) but slightly different in practice, so that a person used to one group would be slightly off-kilter in any of the others. Economics and ecology were at the heart of those differences.
Two groups were university-based, so their members-per-population were higher, but one was “the” liberal arts university and the other began life as the “cow college”. Missoula considered itself highly sophisticated in its sequestered valley. Bozeman was frankly athletic in its own much higher valley. Helena was the state capital with many bureaucrats looking for a personal community base. Great Falls was both agricultural (grain and beef) and military, which didn’t always mesh. The railroad and smelter had left by the time I was there, but I doubt that they brought in many members anyway.
The UUA was underwriting this circuit-riding experiment and their premise was that by connecting and nourishing these small groups, I could make them “grow.” In the end their goals were the same as Louis Hill and Paris Gibson, who wanted enough tax-paying and crop-shipping people out there to support a railroad and a town of merchants and banks. That is, the UUA wanted me to promote the interests of the UUA, which were dues income and prestige. This wasn’t ideological so much as just practical. It certainly wasn’t ever expressed frankly to either the congregations or myself. The experiment lasted three years, which both fulfilled and exhausted me, and was probably blocked for a while afterwards by the depression of those years which keeps popping up in comparisons with the most recent couple of years.
The connectors (“stolons” in botanical terms) I used were myself and my message, which I repeated four times, twice a Sunday; the newsletter I put out once a month; and statewide events. It took me some months at the beginning to develop what kind of variation on the denominational message (formal principles) would work in Montana for all four groups. It took the whole three years of our grant to get down past the decorations to the heart of the matter: friendship community among a group of real people with affinities as well as status in the larger community. I’m not sure they recognized the second part themselves. They did understand the community part and the three year plan helped that aspect very much. But as a person who rejects “status” in most social contexts, I was not helpful except that I was very low cost and attuned to the local. Status is expensive.
My experience with rhizomatous community is strong. Probably the earliest was family, and then next a neighborhood friendship group among women who started meeting for games and dessert when one of the sons committed suicide by hanging in a public park. He was our paperboy. The women meant to support the mother through her grief and had enough momentum to last until most of them had moved away.
The most glamorous example of rhizomes was repertory theatre, partly in the academic scene of Northwestern University and partly as summer theatre at Eaglesmere, PA. The “stolon” that connected the two was Alvina Krause, a famous acting coach. I was only a costumer but it drove the idealism deeply into me and associated it once-and-for-all with the idea that there are no small parts, only small actors.
The example that dominated our family was my father’s job as a field man for an ag wholesale co-op. Like my circuit-riding gig, his task was to be the “stolon” among the many small ag co-ops of the Pacific Northwest. Some grew into major organizations, like Tillamook Cheese and Gresham Berry Growers. The wholesale co-op itself gradually became much more of a corporation and the bitterness of that also accompanies me in my thoughts, since the focus shifted from the original purpose to cash profit -- not growth in depth and meaning. Marketing.
Today I live in a village which operates as a cooperative except that no one wants to do the work of maintenance because it takes time and puts a target on one’s back. In a way my blog acts as a stolon, because I attend the town council meetings, take notes, and comment on this blog. The worst enemy of rhizomes, in my political understanding, is being secret. I want them daylighted, which is where I part company with revolution. I want evolution in response to situation. So part of the duty of the “stolon” is to carry “nutrients” (information and response) back to the rhizome. Still, I am against the violation of privacy and know that “uprooting” families and businesses can destroy them.
My last romantic example of rhizomatous organization is the Blackfeet tribe in its position as a sovereign entity. Beginning as “gens” or loose collections of people -- family and territory based -- they have evolved into a tribe conceived and defined by outsiders who want to impose a “tree-shaped” corporation model and who have some success in creating an oligarchy. Fascinating to watch, painful to be in.
Such metaphors are only useful if they are abandoned when they don’t fit, but this rhizome idea is strong and necessary help in resisting the flattening and harrowing by the media, underwritten by corporation/government collusion.
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