Rhizome in Philosophy and in This Project
*last updated on January 28, 2026
Image credit: Matt Bluemink
The term “rhizome” comes to English through New Latin rhizoma, from Ancient Greek rhizōma, meaning a “mass of roots.” In botany, a rhizome is a modified subterranean stem that typically grows horizontally and can send out both roots and upward shoots from its nodes. In other words, it is stem-like in how it propagates and branches, but root-like in where it grows and how it spreads.
Rhizomes are a useful image because they do not develop like a single trunk with subordinate branches. They spread, thicken, break, re-route, and reappear. Common examples include ginger, turmeric, bamboo, and lotus, which many people recognize precisely because a small piece can generate an expanding network.
Poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari borrow “rhizome” as a philosophical concept in A Thousand Plateaus (English translation 1987). They use it as an alternative to “tree-thinking”: models of knowledge and explanation that depend on a single origin, stable hierarchy, and clear lines of derivation. Their most quoted shorthand definition emphasizes motion, position, and nonfinality: a rhizome “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing.” They pair this with a claim about connectability: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”
They also outline several “approximate characteristics” of rhizomes. The core idea is not that everything is equally connected to everything else, but that connections are not governed by a single organizing trunk. Links can form across different kinds of things—ideas, images, memories, texts, emotions, events—rather than remaining within one category. What matters is not “the One” that organizes the many, but the many as many: an evolving field rather than a unified essence. A rhizome can also survive disruption; if it is broken, it does not necessarily die, and it can restart along older lines or new ones. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari contrast mapping with tracing: a rhizome is made through exploratory mapping and experimentation rather than by copying a pre-given structure or reproducing an ideal model. This is one reason they often speak in terms of maps, networks, and assemblages rather than foundations and deductions.
In Deleuze’s work, an “image of thought” can be understood as the set of often unspoken assumptions that shape what thinking is supposed to look like—what counts as a good argument, what counts as clarity, and what kinds of connections appear legitimate. In this context, “tree” and “rhizome” are not merely illustrative metaphors. They function as competing models of thought and knowledge. A tree model tends to privilege origin and hierarchy: ideas are expected to trace back to a root, develop through ordered branches, and fit within a stable structure. It rewards linear progression and hierarchical organization (“this idea derives from that root”). A rhizome model points in a different direction. It emphasizes thought as movement: crossing between domains, forming connections that are not dictated by rank, returning to earlier nodes, and generating new pathways without requiring a single organizing trunk. It treats thinking as something closer to how people often actually proceed: through association, return, contradiction, side paths, sudden re-framings, and connections that become visible only in retrospect.
Deleuze and Guattari also describe their book (A Thousand Plateaus) as composed of “plateaus”—self-contained regions of inquiry that do not function as steps in a single linear argument. A plateau, in their usage, is “always in the middle,” and they add that “each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau.” Read this way, the plateau becomes a practical counterpart to the rhizome as an image of thought: it implies a structure with multiple points of entry, where meaning emerges through connections rather than through a privileged beginning. A hypertext page can be understood in a similar way—not as a rung on a ladder, but as one node among many that can be entered directly and connected outward through links.
The World Wide Web is sometimes described as rhizome-like because it allows many entry points and many possible pathways between nodes, rather than a single mandated route. Hypertext makes this metaphor concrete: instead of requiring a reader to proceed in one fixed order, a hypertext can be built as a field of linked pages that can be entered from different directions and explored through multiple trails. At the same time, the web as a whole is not purely nonhierarchical. Search engines, platform design, algorithms, and social networks create strong “centers of gravity” by concentrating attention and shaping what is easy to find. For this reason, it is more precise to say that the web does not guarantee rhizomatic structure. What it offers is an environment in which rhizomatic writing becomes possible: a writer can design a text that supports nonlinear navigation, multiple points of entry, and pathways that are not subordinated to a single organizing trunk.
A hypertext can embody Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome idea in a practical, not merely symbolic, way. It can support multiple entry points, so that reading does not depend on beginning at a single “start” and proceeding step by step. It can be built around connectability, so that pages are not simply chapters arranged under a master argument, but nodes that link across themes, return to earlier ideas, and connect concepts that do not belong to the same category. It can also allow revision and regrowth: links can be added, removed, or redirected, pages can be expanded or rewritten, and the structure can evolve without collapsing, with new connections reshaping how earlier parts are read. Finally, it can align with the logic of plateaus, treating individual pages as self-contained regions of inquiry that can be read in different sequences and related to one another without a privileged order. In that sense, each page can function as both a destination and a launching point—one node among many that can be entered directly and connected outward.
In one sentence, the fit can be stated plainly: this project is rhizomatic because it is designed to be navigated as a map of connected inquiries, not consumed as a single linear argument with a privileged start and finish.
In philosophy, the rhizome is not only a botanical metaphor but an alternative model for thinking and organizing knowledge. When a hypertext is designed around multiple entry points, connectability, and the capacity for regrowth, it can approximate this rhizomatic “image of thought” in form as well as in content. In that sense, the structure of a hypertext is not simply a stylistic choice; it can be a way of aligning the architecture of a text with a philosophical idea about how understanding can be formed and navigated.
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