So many lines together, so many layers to the embodied self; the temptation is to speak as One, but we must focus on affiliation, for we exceed our parts.

The rhizome’s third principle, multiplicity, demands that we hold layers and lines together and separately, distinct and yet communal.

This move is similar to a critical multiculturalism, only at the self-register. That is, how do we deal with the difference within? The move toward the One is a narrative of inclusion, the type that seeks to contain difference in order to make it legible, identifiable, and thus acceptable to a normative readership—in this case, ourselves. I would argue, however, that in our radical alterity we are at times unknowable to ourselves—and that it is within this incommensurability and unknowability that we find fruitful places to resist. But it is one thing to include all our voices, to hear lesbian or queer or feminist or woman. It is quite something else to undertake the systemic analyses that complicate our understanding of how each of these registers experiences the world differently—both rhetorically and materially. Who are we to speak for ourselves?