Rhizome (philosophy)

A rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing a nonlinear network. It appears in the work of French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, who used the term in their book A Thousand Plateaus to refer to networks that establish "connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles" with no apparent order or coherency. A rhizome is purely a network of multiplicities that are not arborescent (tree-like, or hierarchical, e.g. the idea of hypertext in literary theory)^[1] with properties similar to lattices.^[2] Deleuze referred to it as extending from his concept of an "image of thought" that he had previously discussed in Difference and Repetition.

^ Klei, Alice van der (2002). "Repeating the Rhizome". SubStance. 31 (1): 48–55. doi:10.2307/3685805. JSTOR 3685805. Retrieved 2022-03-19. Rhizomatic reading leaps—those leaps between and within texts—are a figure often used to explain hypertext. ... [a] redistributed 'knowledge network' ... If the reader/browser does not understand the content of what he is reading, but is merely organizing it intuitively around criteria based on collective and rhizomatic 'interests,' then the object of research itself becomes a rhizome (growing in one direction due to interest, then drifting off due to lack of interest, all the time growing in multiplicity because of other interests, yet needing a certain stability and stockpiling of information).
^ Guattari, Félix (2011) [1979]. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Translated by Adkins, Taylor. Semiotext(e). p. 171. ISBN 978-1-58435-088-0. [T]he modes of semiotization of an analytic pragmatics will not rely on trees, but on rhizomes (or lattices).

[1] Klei, Alice van der (2002). "Repeating the Rhizome". SubStance. 31 (1): 48–55. doi:10.2307/3685805. JSTOR 3685805. Retrieved 2022-03-19. Rhizomatic reading leaps—those leaps between and within texts—are a figure often used to explain hypertext. ... [a] redistributed 'knowledge network' ... If the reader/browser does not understand the content of what he is reading, but is merely organizing it intuitively around criteria based on collective and rhizomatic 'interests,' then the object of research itself becomes a rhizome (growing in one direction due to interest, then drifting off due to lack of interest, all the time growing in multiplicity because of other interests, yet needing a certain stability and stockpiling of information).

[2] Guattari, Félix (2011) [1979]. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Translated by Adkins, Taylor. Semiotext(e). p. 171. ISBN 978-1-58435-088-0. [T]he modes of semiotization of an analytic pragmatics will not rely on trees, but on rhizomes (or lattices).

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