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Originally Posted by m1rr0r dash

....sorry, wasn't trying to be snide with that image.... just posting the literal definition while i deleted all the semiotics and general goofiness from this deleuze quote.... it took a while....



The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. ... We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.

3. Principle of multiplicity: ... Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. ... There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. ... The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.

4. Principle of asignfying rupture: ... A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.

yes but

WHAT IS IT?

 

what i'll venture to say without using the term as a part of the definition is that a rhizome is an epistemological model meant to supersede the discrete objects of aristotelian logic (and newtonian mechanics?) by which we ordinarily operate. in a way it's sort of an heraclitean model.

in other words, look at the world as this shit in constant flux where instead of objects you have temporary "blocks" that are forming/reforming/reconnecting from all kinds of directions & flowing out of/into others. then give it a pompous french name & write obscurely about it.

alternatively you could read this wankery:

http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/enslog.../smn_lct08.htm

where the fucka writes:
Yet as Baudrillard states in Simulation and Simulacra it is "the cartographer's mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory," (Baudrillard, 1994, p.2) with all of my intention as a transdisciplanary "cartographer."

see this is what i hate; that idea of the map & the territory is from a story by borges. but borges is so much more fun-- and you can understand him! but read that and tell me-- at the end, do you know wtf is the rhizome? la la lala.