Genealogy, rhizome, self. Stuttering movements from star to star, island-hopping between isolated statements. An impossibly dense field of thoughts, lives, meanings, and things. Navigational equipment doesn’t work in a space that flows. All we can hope for is skilled improvisation, a kind of strategy that is light on its feet and doesn’t hesitate when the water is a bit deep or the ice slightly too slippery. You can’t fall down a mountain, but you can surely skip, leap, dance, and slide. The journey’s continuity does not consist in its resemblance to a predetermined route, but in the sheer stubbornness of the traveler.
Of course there is a systematicity to starfields, a relationship between this cluster here and that cluster there. Or, perhaps more appropriately, there are many systematicities, many rationalities within the chaos. We can choose to follow, trace, write, or connect the zigzagging lines that constitute these connections, or we can choose to draw our own, to move transversally or diagonally rather than in a straight line or with a predictable curve.
This haphazard, careful, strategic movement is not outside of anything—we are still within the starfield, still in our familiar spaceship, still working with (mostly) old tools in a (mostly) old space—but it is something new. It resists old systematicities, it subverts old hierarchies, it causes something unexpected to emerge. It is a new path, a new genealogy, a new rhizome, a new rationality, a new self. It is thought.
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