rhizome

In Rhizome, the introductory plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari invite us into a philosophy that breaks with traditional thought. No more trees. No more hierarchies. No more roots that define the One beneath the Many. Instead, we have rhizomes: networks, multiplicities, surfaces without depth. A mushroom patch. Crabgrass. Mycelium. These are the metaphors.

The point is not biology. The point is orientation. A tree is a picture of thought that starts from a trunk, organizes upward, and returns everything to an origin. A rhizome is a picture of thought that starts in the middle. It does not ask for a first principle. It does not demand a single explanation. It allows connection to do the work that foundations usually do.

A rhizome is a map, not a tracing. It has no center, no beginning or end, only a middle from which it grows and overspills. In the rhizome, any point can connect to any other. It is not governed by linear order. It multiplies by linking.

“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”

Deleuze & Guattari

This is why the rhizome matters for the themes of this site. It is not a claim about what reality ultimately is. It is a proposal about how reality becomes thinkable and livable without being reduced to a single root. In the language of Configurations of Appearance, it is a different way a world can organize itself.

In This Is It I describe what appears. In Mindsets I describe how appearance can stabilize into formats of experience. In Origins I ask about conditions rather than causes. The rhizome belongs in that movement. It refuses the comfort of a privileged standpoint. It distrusts the idea that coherence requires a center.

That does not mean rhizomatic thinking is chaos. It can be highly structured. But its structure is lateral: clusters, loops, cross-links, intensities. It is the difference between a chain of command and a living ecology. Between a curriculum and a conversation. Between a doctrine and a set of practical ways to proceed.

This is also where rhizome quietly touches Hierarchism. The tree model supports authority by design: a top, a root, a trunk, a correct path. The rhizome does not abolish power, but it makes power visible as one force among others. It shows that what presents itself as necessity is often only a stabilized habit.

Deleuze and Guattari call the book a call to experimentation. Philosophy not as system, but as motion. Not as explanation, but as encounter. A rhizome does not explain; it connects. It short-circuits the dogmas of meaning. It spreads.

This resonates with what I call Darkness. Not darkness as negativity, but darkness as looseness of ground. The openness of what resists capture. Where non-duality is not a state to be achieved, but the absence of final states altogether. No origin. No arrival. Just a weaving of appearances that cannot be totalized.

The rhizome undermines the idea that we are progressing toward a final truth or a pure experience. There is no trunk to return to. No root system to uncover. There are only connections that work for a while, and then stop working, and then re-form elsewhere.

“The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by the conjunction 'and... and... and...'”

Deleuze & Guattari

That “and” is not decoration. It is a method. It prevents closure. It keeps thought from collapsing into One. It allows the possibility that different descriptions can coexist without needing a referee.

The rhizome speaks to our time because many of our inherited trees are failing: political trees, religious trees, scientific trees, personal trees. As certainties dissolve, we are forced into a new kind of navigation. Not as cartographers of reality, but as improvisers. Feeling our way, making temporary connections, letting go of maps that no longer fit.

There is a practical invitation here too. To live like a rhizome. Not trying to become someone once and for all, not trying to arrive at a final explanation, but learning to move through shifting terrains of meaning. A life that is not a ladder, but a field.

This is not a lesson. It is a pointer. A line of flight. A question mark that grows like wild grass.