Rhizomatic values and actions vs arborescent ones, de- and reterritorialization, the drawing of lines of flight, and nomadic war machines, more than anything else. I’m not sufficiently grounded in Marx or Freud to follow their narratives confidently, so my interpretations are probably overly simplistic; but I think they’d have approved of my taking the words and making them my own.
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.
Roots vs trees? If these ideas have any merit, surely it should be possible to express them clearly, and without (gratuitous?) invocation of pseudo-scientific terms.
What is pseudoscientific about those words? Read the book to see how they are used, and why the selected language is actually sensible in its given context.
Your criticism is like telling a pharmacist not to use the terminology that distinguishes some kinds of drugs from others. It may be true that the blue pill makes your dick hard and the red pill cures your headache, but if you actually want to go into it and address why and how they do these things you need a more focused vocabulary that is clearly defined in its context of use (which G&D do).
A rhizome isn't just a root, it's an offshoot of a plant with the ability to create an entirely new plant.
You have a point with arborescent, but it is translated from French, and from what I know of French morphology, arborescent could probably sounds to a French person like "treeish" or "tree ADJ", and therefore not quite so formal/illegible.
The joke I tell about A Thousand Plateaus is that on one of the plateaus is good writing. Didn't make it into the book though
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.