Rhizome/Arborescent

Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of the rhizome in the opening chapter of A Thousand Plateaus as a means to explain a complex “event-structure” that never refers back to a unity or a singular essence. The rhizome is the binding concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s edifice as well as the binding concept of A Thousand Plateaus, a book which they describe as rhizomatic as an exemplification of their political philosophy. Books, they argue, can be classified into three types: the root-book (classical), the “fascicular root” book (modern) and the rhizome book (their experiment). The first book they describe as the “image of the world-tree,” the oldest way of thinking of a book that “imitates the world,” a “natural reality,” which established binary logic as “the spiritual reality of the root-tree” (2004, p. 5). The second type, the modern book, is one which cuts up objective reality but maintains the unity of the subject who writes it (its author): “The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotimize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or over determination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object” (p. 7). Meanwhile, a “rhizome” book is “not an image of the world [classical]. It forms a rhizome with the world …” (p. 12).