Deleuze/Guattari and the Ada Tree
Mark Halsey
It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy ... the root foundation, Grund ... The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation ... Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, 18
The highest generalities of life ... point beyond species and genus, but point beyond them in the direction of the individual and pre-individual singularities rather than towards an impersonal abstraction ... It is not the individual which is an illusion in relation to the genus of the species, but the species which is an illusion. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 249-50.
[1] Philosophically, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are opposed to trees. Specifically, they position themselves against arborescent thought—thought, which like a tree, judges the world from one fixed point (roots, Descartean rationality), or requires that thinking proceed in only one direction (scientifically, dialectically). In place of foundations and immutable bodies, Deleuze and Guattari advocate a rhizomatic approach to philosophy, and, to what amounts to the same thing, to life. As they write, 'There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8). Critically, they charge that, 'Many people have a tree growing in their heads' (15). In a sense, the challenge issued by Deleuze and Guattari is to kill this tree, or, as Nietzsche might put it, to draw the curtain on the twilight of (our) idols. 'The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious' (18).
[2] Metaphorically, then, the tree has been incredibly productive in the work of Deleuze and Guattari—bringing into clearer focus the image of thought, and the dangers (more truly, impossibility) of stasis, of rigidity, of identity, of molarity. In this essay, I also want to talk about trees—specifically a tree, called the Ada Tree. In fact, I want to use Deleuze's and Guattari's work to produce this tree as something other than a tree—to write a brief rhizomatics of the Ada Tree. My aim in doing this is to dislodge the meanings traditionally associated with terms such as nature, conservation, and sustainability—in short, to indicate something of the damage done when nature is produced as a series of discrete and knowable bodies as opposed to an immanent force.
Setting the scene
[3] In order to produce the Ada Tree as a multiplicity, I need first to write it as a molarity—at least, I need, for the sake of orientation into the event, to rely on traditional narrative structure to describe the "where, what, when and how" of this tree. Very briefly, the Ada Tree is located in the Yarra State Forest of the Great Dividing Range about 80 kilometres due east of Melbourne (the capital city of the state of Victoria, Australia). The tree is an example of the eucalypt species known as mountain ash (eucalyptus regnans) which are renowned both for their size and, more recently, their rarity. They are the tallest flowering plant on earth and are generally accepted to have once grown taller than the redwood forests located on the west coast of the US (specifically, California and Oregon). Prior to its top being destroyed by wind or lightning, the Ada Tree was estimated to be around 120 metres (400 feet) in height. At such a height, it would have been the world's tallest known tree—exceeding the very recently discovered coast redwood (sequoia sempervirens) named Helparion estimated to be around 114 metres or 380 feet tall (Preston, 2007: 282). [1] Today, the Ada Tree stands at a comparatively "short" 76 metres (253 feet). This height can be contrasted against that believed to be the tallest living mountain ash located in Tasmania's Florentine Valley. Known as the Mount Tree, it has been measured at just short of 97 metres (320 feet). [2]
[4] Unlike its counterparts in the US (where redwoods are aged up to 3000 years), the Ada Tree is thought to have germinated around 1727—making it a "mere" 280 years old. Still, at the time the Ada Tree was a seedling, the "discovery" of Australia by Captain James Cook would not occur for another 60 years (Indigenous persons had, however, lived in this land for some 40,000 years). In a world replete with industrial intrusions, it is somewhat astonishing that the Ada Tree remained secreted from public knowledge until 1986 when two brothers, prospecting for gems, stumbled upon it (Griffiths, 2001: 22). With a girth of just over 15 metres at breast height, and weighing more than 220 tonnes, the Ada Tree is, in mass terms, one of the largest trees, and, by default, one of the largest living terrestrial organisms in Australia (see Figure 1). [3] In 1997, the Ada Tree was given legislated protection within the Ada Tall Trees Reserve [4]. As will become clear in the remainder of the discussion, this reserve (its shape, its size, and the factors giving rise to it) is a good example of a space under political and industrial siege—a space which on first encounter appears to have all the hallmarks of wildness, but in fact is constituted (and threatened) by forces of the opposing kind.
Figure 1. The Ada Tree. Photo by Kate Dorsey.
[5] One can reach the Ada Tree via the towns of Noojee, Warburton or Powelltown. The latter is a very small community (population around 200) stretching for a short distance along the southern edge of the Yarra River. The biggest and most unmistakable aspect of the town is the timber mill with its vast stacks of neatly sawn timber and unsawn hardwood logs. On weekends, the yard is vacant and quiet—a stark contrast to its week day industrial activity. The Powelltown mill is like something from a bygone era—large machinery and old corrugated iron sheds and buildings are set against the more majestic forests occurring immediately opposite the site. The presence of the mill itself is a testimony to the power of the timber industry in the area. In the three decades to 2005, the number of sawmills across Victoria decreased by 70 percent leaving just 75 mills suited to processing native (ie eucalypt based) timber (Victorian Association of Forest Industries (VAFI), 2006: 4).
[6] Powelltown is still populated by mill and forestry workers. Indeed, it is one of the oldest timber mills in Victoria. In the 1920s and 30s the Powelltown mill was reputed to have put enough timber on the train to nearby Yarra Junction for it to claim that 'more timber passed through it than any other place in the world except Seattle in the United States' (Griffiths, 2001: 86). Eighty years ago, the mill was producing around 30,000 tonnes of timber annually. Today, the Powelltown mill produces substantially less than this, with the sawn timber production for the entire Dandenong Forest Management Area—the administrative unit enveloping Powelltown and the nearby Ada Tree—being around 31,000 tonnes (Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2006: 5). This is around eight percent of the annual sustainable sawlog yield for Victoria which, for 2004/05, was set at just under 540,000 tonnes (VAFI, 2006: 11). The number of people directly employed across Victoria in the 'native timber processing industry' is estimated at just under 2000 (30). A total of 10,000 people (including builders, etc.) are thought to be indirectly employed by the industry (30).
[7] One cannot divorce the Ada Tree from the uses and abuses sustained by its immediate and distant surrounds. Certainly, there has long been a fascination with very big trees in Victoria—to the point where the tallest tree on Earth ever officially recorded was measured and then felled in order that it be more closely studied and admired (see Griffiths, 2001: 19). In the US, thousands of people annually venture to the two largest of the giant sequoias known as General Sherman and General Grant (see Pakenham, 2002: 46-49). But to understand the meanings of such behaviour—this variety of paying homage—one needs to look not to the trees themselves but to the connections they forge or were once part of. It is not just the size of such trees which produces the range of affections in those who venture to them. It is, rather, their perceived singularity. What I want to do in the remainder of this discussion is put Deleuze and Guattari to work on, around, within and beyond the Ada Tree. I want to do this in order to generate a clearer sense of both the stated pleasures and unremarked dangers (social, political, ecological) attending the preservation or earmarking of big trees as fundamentally unique, and by logical extension, of greater value than smaller, other "less worthy" trees or terrains. In essence then, I want to write the Ada Tree as a multiplicity—to render it in terms of its ambiguities and potentials in place of its coagulations and precise dimensions.
Detour
[8] Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 249, emphasis in original) write that a multiplicity,
is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors.
This changes everything. One cannot, under this scenario, talk about a tree (delimited thing), or a tree (a certain quantum). Just as the "human" body does not cease at its epidermis, a tree does not "finish" at its outer layer (bark). The Ada Tree is not reducible to the discrete body given by its name—in fact, the name does violence to the innumerable ways in which this tree is many bodies not one (carbon sink, faunal and entomological refuge, water producer). It is tempting to say that the Ada Tree has many bodies because there are many different machines (political, legal, cultural, aesthetic, historical, technical) all situating and enunciating it as part of such and such a unit (special protection zone, geographic representation unit), or having such and such a value (site of botanical significance, site for environmental education). And indeed there is a degree of truth here. But it is not the full story. More accurately, it is not the story Deleuze's and Guattari's works point toward. Instead, the Ada Tree is a multiplicity prior to and in spite of the administrative and social intrusions which try to usurp or represent its dimensions. The Ada Tree is the visible and lexical product of the will to striation—the determination to fill the world with 'linear and solid things' (signs, walkways, giant trees), to plot the Earth in terms of the lines between definitive points (from city to countryside, to carpark, to walking trail, to the boardwalk at the base of the tree), and in doing this, to render nature knowable, predictable, and by extension, controllable (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 361 and 480).
[9] I have written elsewhere of the relationship between smooth and striated space, and how these concepts facilitate an understanding of what it is we do when we package, preserve and (re)present nature (Halsey, 2007). But I want to revisit these concepts here as a means of coaxing the molecular (the line which receives its force, and which creates only through the acategorical) from the molar (the line captured by the image of thought, and which demands we put down roots and cling doggedly to all manner of divisions, segmentations and closures). In talking about the striated and the smooth, I want to try to erase the Ada Tree (as a molarity—an organism of a particular height, weight and age) in order to force a reconceptualisation of such concepts as "ecological significance" and "ecological sustainability". My argument, as counter-intuitive and heretical as it may sound, is that the Ada Tree is as much a monstrosity as it is a unique or remarkable specimen of eucalyptus regnans. By this I mean to say that the reverence for the Ada Tree is borne out of and inextricably tied to both the past and ongoing violence perpetrated upon eucalypt forests more generally. There is, in short, an inverse and highly problematic relationship between the aesthetic, ecological, and even "spiritual" value ascribed to the Ada Tree, as against the rate and type of destruction occurring to the forests (ecological communities) in close and distant proximity to it. It is in this sense that the fascination with the Ada Tree (indeed with big trees generally) stems from quite monstrous, even dangerous "origins" and events. The Ada Tree is a body whose presence is made possible by the absence of countless other trees. To stand before the Ada Tree, then, is to witness something magnificent and abhorrent.
(Re)membering Ada
[10] I first visited the Ada Tree in mid 2006. As impressive as the tree was (is) in terms of its size and age, these have not constituted the enduring memory of the journey. Rather, what I remember most is the question posed by my three year old daughter who, whilst standing next to the Ada Tree, turned to me and queried, 'What's that noise? It sounds like thunder.' I had heard it too but had not wanted to draw attention to it. In truth, I'd wanted to pretend it didn't exist—particularly not in this place. It seemed so contrary and so violent, especially when juxtaposed against the lushness, the stillness, and the quietness of the cool-temperate rainforest we had just walked through in order to reach the Ada Tree. 'That's the sound of a tree falling to the ground', I said. 'Oh', said my daughter. And I knew what was to follow. 'Why did the tree fall to the ground?' I was tempted to say that it was because the tree was very old and that eventually all trees fall over and then new trees grow in their place—that the space left by the fallen tree allows light into the forest floor, and this allows little seedlings to compete with each other and start a new bit of forest. And I was going to say that the fallen tree isn't really dead, that it in fact goes on to play a really important part because it provides shelter for animals and nutriment for the soil, and so forth. But I didn't say any of this—not at that moment. Instead, what I said was this. 'Well, can you here that noise? It sounds like a motorbike, but it's not a motorbike. That's the sound of a chainsaw'. I waited for her inquisitiveness to kick in. 'What's a chainsaw and why is it making that noise?' she asked. Many responses ran through my mind, but I simply said, 'A chainsaw is something people use to cut down trees. And the "thunder" you heard was the sound of a tree hitting the floor of the forest'. 'Hmm', she pondered. 'Why do people cut down trees?' I then told her as simply and directly as I could that trees are used to build houses and to make paper and that some people earn their living by cutting down trees. 'Oh' she said, 'You mean the trees help people to make a home'. Perfect. 'Yes', I said, pondering the vast complex and unremarked terrain which resided beneath our brief exchange.
[11] What I did not say, of course, was that the 'people who cut down trees' have taken away around 95 percent (66 million hectares) of the eucalypt forest estimated to exist at the time of European settlement in Australia (1788) (Halsey, 1997). I also did not say that only the smallest proportion of wood from these forests is used for essential building purposes and that the vast majority of timber is in fact made into tomato stakes, forklift pallets, and copy paper. Nor did I tell her that the so-called defective logs—the crooked one's with hollows for animals and birds to live in—are actually one of the worst sources of fibre for paper (both in terms of their lignin content and in terms of the dioxins needed to break down the lignin in the paper manufacturing process), and that a much better alternative would be to grow and harvest flax, sugar cane, or low THC hemp (Halsey, 1997). And I also did not tell her that people continue to fell the eucalypt forests of Australia at the rate of around 70,000 hectares per year and that around the majority of such logging occurs in high conservation value and old-growth or negligibly disturbed forest. And nor did I mention that clearfelling—the preferred method of "harvesting" Australian forests—removes 99 percent of trees from a given area and that there are serious impacts associated with this activity (in terms of hydrological flows, eco-fragmentation and eco-simplification) (Halsey, 1997).
[12] In travelling to the Ada Tree, I had wanted to buy into the idea of the "wild" forest. And to an extent I had done this right up until the point of hearing the tremendously loud thud of a mountain ash colliding with the forest floor. Prior to this interruption (which was experienced not simply as an audible event so much as a bodily kind of trauma), it was just possible to negotiate the forest as a smooth space. Quoting Boulez, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 362) observe that smooth space 'is occupied without being counted'. More specifically, smooth space consists of 'the point ... between two lines' (480), it is 'nonmetric', 'qualitative', 'acentred', 'rhizomatic', 'flat', 'directional', aligned with 'packs', concerned with 'distance', and characterised by 'frequencies' (484). Apart from having to watch my footing—and assist my small children through the mud and debris—my subjectivity for a time was very much acentred. In fact, walking to the Ada Tree involved the proliferation of a thousand tiny haecceities. 'Smooth space is filled by events and haecceities, far more than by formed or perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception' (479, emphasis in original). The smell of the earth on the forest floor, the call of various bird species, the unmistakable sound of a single raindrop resonating against a branch or leaf just before it would have hit the ground, the brief encounter of a breeze that seemed to have come from nowhere in an otherwise perfectly sheltered gully, the colours and textures of the moss covering rocks in velvet fashion, the sound of water trickling nearby. All of these events carried my subjectivity along a molecular line, and, as such, helped to momentarily suspend the binary divisions between culture and nature, here and there, self and other. But the chainsaw—when engaged as the primary means for meeting the specifications of coupe plans and wood utilisation plans (for extracting pulp and timber from forested terrains)—signals the end of smooth space. It is literally a machine of axiomisation. It expunges the world of pre-formed things, the world of haecceities, the world composed only of rhythms and of bodies without organs, and in its place substitutes the certainties of Royal science and the (il)logics of capital. More than this, the chainsaw (and its unique gift, clearfell logging), transforms geological time into post-industrial time. It is the concrete and brutal means by which ecosystems may be captured (even mocked) on account of their slowness (their "inability" to escape the march of progress). [5]
[13] All of this forces the body without organs to recoil—it presents as a smack in the face to immanence. The sound of the chainsaw brought with it an entirely different sense of what it meant (or could mean) to journey to the Ada Tree. I could no longer sustain the illusion of being in a smooth space. And in a sense, this is quite appropriate since I was walking a line (path) that had been walked by thousands of others before me. And I was in fact walking between two points—the point where one steps out of one's vehicle and the point where one arrives at the Ada Tree. Certainly, the path was narrow, winding, damp, and at times obstructed by fallen debris. It had, in other words, a degree of precariousness. But this precariousness was overshadowed by the certainty about where the path led and how far one needed to go in order to reach the destination. Smooth space, to clarify, is immune to arrivals. It is a space characterised by experimentation and limitless movement or journeying. Smooth space has no concern for the position of knowable bodies or the distance separating discretely marked things. And it is this last aspect that makes the journey to the Ada Tree an ultimately striated practice. Being on the path, being on the molar line of the tourist walk, reduced (at least, from my perspective) the value of the experience to a single point. One could not help but calculate and recalculate the distance between one's current location and the desired destination ('When will we get there?' is the refrain of striated space). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 493) explain the matter in the following way,
The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step...Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never "in front of," any more than one is "in" (one is "on"...)
To put it conversely, in striated space one is always in front of or behind the action—some place else other than where one is "expected" to be. On this count, I was always moving toward or away from the Ada Tree. This particular tree was the centrifugal and privileged point. But it could just as easily have been the gnarled myrtle beech tree to the left of the path, over there, just beyond the stream, next to the decaying stump of a eucalypt felled decades ago by axe. Or it could have been the lichen on the rock 20 minutes in to the walk, under the tree fern, next to the spider web, just past the second big fallen log. But it was neither of these. It was the Ada Tree. This puts the lie to the conservation reserve being a smooth space—a place of wildness, a place where subjects and objects are yet to find their footing. 'What defines smooth space ... is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity' (488).
[14] Like all reserves, like all national parks, the Ada Tree reserve is, as much as I tried (and continue to try) to resist the idea, a contrived space—a space where the striations are not so different to those encountered (or endured) in the city.
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilise smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior", over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativise movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 385-86).
Elsewhere, I have discussed in detail the way in which the State folds ecology into its generalised will to striation (Halsey, 2006). My point in the current context, though, is that spaces which appear to have resisted the State (so-called conservation zones) are in fact borne of it. National parks (conservation reserves and the like) are the remnants the State cedes in order to have greater control of the terrains beyond and abutting such areas. Indeed, more than this, they are places made in the image of the State—whose dimensions and uses are given by the State for the State. 'States are made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 385). The logic of late capitalism—even and especially the capitalism devoted to "ecological sustainability", "ecological integrity", and "ecological diversity"—produces, at best, a particular kind of ecological value. In short, the State does all it can to subdue wildness. And primarily, wildness is subdued by giving it a place, by ascribing it boundaries, by giving it dimensions (see Hermer, 2002). This is the sense in which the Ada Tree is a monstrosity. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that the "zone" in which the Ada Tree is permitted to stand, is a monstrous space. 'It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space...' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 493). This puts the matter perfectly. The State cannot afford to look too closely at "nature". To do so would require one to admit, as Deleuze (1990: 261) so forcefully and beautifully argues, that life (earth) is characterised by a 'deep disparity'.
Concluding remark
[15] What holds the earth together is difference not resemblance. 'The problem of classification was clearly always a problem of ordering differences. However, plant and animal classifications show that we can order differences only so long as we are provided with a multiple network of continuity of resemblance' (Deleuze, 1994: 247). Resemblance is the expression of the image of thought—of being ill-prepared to negotiate the way forward in a world where, quite plainly, there can be no foundational or immutable division between the ecologically expendable and the ecologically unique, or between forest types (wet, dry, damp) and forest species (eucalyptus regnans, eucalyptus obliqua, eucalyptus nitens). The division of nature into similar units and universals invokes the concept of the mass, and, by default, the idea of abundance (an excess of nature). In one of his most important passages, Deleuze (251-52) writes:
We invoke a field of individuation or individuating difference as the condition of the organisation and determination of species. However, this field of individuation is posited only formally and in general: it seems to be 'the same' for a given species, and to vary in intensity from one species to another. It seems, therefore, to depend upon the species and the determination of species, and to refer us once more to differences borne by the individual, not to individual differences. In order for this difficulty to disappear, the individuating difference must not only be conceived within a field of individuation in general, but must itself be conceived as an individual difference. The form of the field must be necessarily and in itself filled with individual differences.
It is this 'field of individuation' which makes the monstrous juxtaposition of industrial zones and conservation zones possible. Here, the State clings to the belief that this field is indeed, as Deleuze says, identical for all species. And it is this belief in turn that permits the idea of nature as endless copy (mimesis). Complete with its types and numbers of species, rates of reproduction and replenishment, thresholds of resilience and tipping points, the field of individuation sets in train the "science" of representation. Where copies abound—where nature as mimetic force is the order of the day—it no longer matters if a particular part of this field is "lost" (to the workings of the chainsaw), for it can always be found. And the place in which late capitalism returns to find "nature" is in its "representative" system of parks and gardens. With this field of individuation, the violence of carving out a place for wildness within discrete and ecologically significant units, begins.
The primary—and one might say, critical—consequence of constructing a field of individuation (equivalent in many ways to the plane of organisation) is that it enables [the State] to classify the world according to the distribution and repetition of so-called like groups rather than, as would seem preferable, in terms of the differences borne by individuals (Halsey, 2006: 238).
The Ada Tree is very much a testimony to the ways in which various machines (political, legal, social, scientific) have recast the deep disparity of the world in terms of its similarities and resemblances (as constituted by masses, classes, and species). As an event, the Ada Tree speaks of the consequences of withdrawing from the close visioning of the world. Only by surveying from a distance (by shutting out the possibility of a '"close-range" vision' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 492)) is one able to see similarities in, or, worse, copies of, this or that terrain. The State—and its preoccupation with establishing an outside (chaos, wildness) and an inside (order, civilisation)—does all that it can to avoid the intermingling of the two. This is another way of saying that the State cannot afford to encounter singularities, or, more accurately, that when it does, it must rewrite singularity in molarised terms – in ways recognisable to the bodies who venture to them, and thus in ways which attest to the careful and sustained displacement of a close visioning of Earth. It is not, therefore, a matter of revering or resenting the Ada Tree. It is not a matter of caring about or killing the Ada Tree. It is a matter of killing representation—killing the divisions between nature and culture, between tree and forest, residing in our heads.
Notes
[1] The world's tallest known tree, Helparion, was located on 25 August 2006 in Redwood National Park, California, by, appropriately, Michael Taylor, dedicated bushwalker and tall tree adventurer (Preston, 2007: 282).
[2] The tallest mountain ash in Victoria is believed to be a tree known as Amabilis (91 metres or 298 feet tall) located about 70km north east of Melbourne on the Hume Plateau (Preston, 2007: 265)
[3] There are, as mentioned, taller trees both on the Australian mainland and in the island state of Tasmania. However, the Ada Tree exceeds the very tallest trees in terms of weight and girth. Until accidentally destroyed by a "controlled" regeneration burn conducted by Tasmanian forestry personnel in 2003, the largest living tree in Australia was a mountain ash known as El Grande weighing around 400 tonnes, and possessing a girth at breast height of almost 19 metres (International Society of Arboriculture Australia Chapter, «http://isaac.org.au/info/bigtrees.htm», Accessed 2 November 2007.
[4] The size of this reserve is a mere 14.5 hectares and essentially provides a buffer zone of 50 metres either side of Island Creek (which the walking trail to the Ada Tree follows). Additional "protection" is provided around the Ada Tree itself to a 100 metre radius. For a map of the dimensions see the schedule attached to National Parks (Amendment) Act 1997, Act No. 7/1997.
[5] 'Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 486).
Works Cited
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