rhizome

Definitions

1. A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.
2. A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.

Equivalents

Examples

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

“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.”

CEFR level