Rhizome — A concept of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for a non-hierarchical model of thought and organization made of multiple connections, opposed to the tree. The word comes from the Greek rhízōma (“root,” “mass of roots”) and in botany names the underground, horizontal stem of plants such as ginger and grass, which spreads from any point without a central axis. It was presented in the “Introduction: Rhizome” of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (after Anti-Oedipus, 1972); the text had earlier been published separately in 1976. The authors list principles: connection and heterogeneity (any point can connect to any other), multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania (the rhizome is a map, not a tracing). Against “arborescent thought,” with its root, trunk, and branches, in which order comes from the one and from a hierarchy (which the authors find in Western logic, in psychoanalysis, and, in an example they discuss, in linguistics based on tree structures), the rhizome is acentered, with neither beginning nor end, always “in the middle.” It is tied to the Deleuzian themes of immanence and difference (see Deleuze: difference, repetition, rhizome, and immanence). The concept has been used in cultural studies, education, and digital networks, at times metaphorically and loosely. Criticisms: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in Fashionable Nonsense (1997), fault the imprecise use of scientific notions by French authors, among them Deleuze and Guattari; others find the rhizomatic vocabulary analytically imprecise or hard to apply to processes that actually require hierarchies. See also dialectic.
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