rhizome

 

• rhizoma

From rhiz- +‎ -ome. As philosophical metaphor, used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɹaɪzoʊm/

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rhizome (plural rhizomes)

1. (botany) A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.

   Synonyms: race, rootstalk

   • 1868, George Bacon Wood, A Treatise on Therapeutics, and Pharmacology, Or Materia Medica, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Company, page 432:

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

2. (philosophy, critical theory) A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.
   • 1989, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 107:

     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.

   • 2008, A. Hess, “Reconsidering the Rhizome”, in Amanda Spink, Michael Zimmer, editors, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 35:

     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.

• rhizomatic
• rhizomatous

• licorice
• mycorrhiza

•   rhizome on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
•   rhizome (philosophy) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

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rhizome m (plural rhizomes)

1. (botany) rhizome

• “rhizome”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.