rhizome

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma). As philosophical metaphor, used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

1. A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.

   “All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome.”

2. A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.

   “The corpus of Kafka's writing, they argue, is ‘a rhizome, a burrow’ (K 7)—an uncentered and meandering growth like crab grass, a complex, aleatory network of pathways like a rabbit warren. A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams.”

   “Critical theorists have often drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome when discussing the potential of the Internet. While the Internet may structurally appear as a rhizome, its day-to-day usage by millions via search engines precludes experiencing the random interconnectedness and potential democratizing function.”