Adrian Switzer, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science & Philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). Dr. Switzer specializes in Modern and Contemporary Continental Philosophy and has written on such figures as Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida.
Rhizomes Ascending – mixed media piece (pencil, pen, colored pencil, colored marker), 2022
I am interested in qualitative state-changes as Deleuze and Guattari discern them in mass quantities of events, actions, experiences, etc. – a change some philosophies describe as “epiphenomenalism”; with Deleuze and Guattari this might better be termed “epimaterialism,” or “surrealism” to recall the early-20th Century art movement. Though horizontal in their structure and force, rhizomes en masse undergo qualitative change – a qualitative state-change pictured in Rhizomes Ascending as a building up and emergence from a page of text. The pink-red color of the deterritorial spaces between rhizomes is sensational – expressing in color the intensity of multiple rhizomatic interactions.