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Rhizome

Related: Gilles Deleuze - A Thousand Plateaus (1980) - Félix Guattari - hypertext - interconnectedness - node - ontology

Articles: A Postive Ontology - Towards a Holistic Ontology - Rhizomatic writing

Contrast: dichotomy - dualism - tree knowledge

In botany, a rhizome is a horizontal, usually underground stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Also called a creeping rootstalk or rootstock. Many plants have rhizomes that serve to spread the plant by vegetative reproduction. Examples are asparagus and lily of the valley. [Aug 2006]

In philosophy, rhizome was coined by Deleuze and Guattari to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge, which worked with dualist categories and binary choices. Jahsonic.com has been constructed as a rhizome. [Aug 2006]

Definition

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari coined "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome [Dec 2004]

Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who coined "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.

  • A rhizome doesn't begin and doesn't end, but is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo." -- from Rhizome by Deleuze & Guattari
  • "A rhizome as no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The trees is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and...and...and..." This conjunction carries enough forces to shake and uproot the verb "to be." (...) Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginnig or end that undermines its bank and picks up speed in the middle."Rhizome" in Mille plateaux.
  • Rhizome is a figurative term used by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism ad Schizophrenia to describe non-hierarchical networks of all kinds. "A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers ... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 6- 7) --via http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2531

    Six Principles

    The six principles of the rhizome as listed by Deleuze and Guattari are as follows:
    1. Connection
    2. Heterogeneity
    3. Multiplicity
    4. Asignifying rupture
    5. Cartography
    6. Decalcomania

    The Rhizome and Music

    In music, 'rhizomatic' equates with the Eno/dub idea of a democracy of sounds, a dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (usually privileging the voice or lead guitar). Instead, says Achim, there's a "synthesisation of heterogeneous sounds and material through a kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their heterogeneity". Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos-theorems of Can and early 70s Miles Davis (the 'nobody solos, everybody solos' principle), rhizomatic music today takes the form of DJ cut 'n' mix (at its rare, daring best), avant garde HipHop and post-rock. And the output of Mille Plateaux [the label], of course. -- Simon Reynolds

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