Rhizomes and Root-Trees
As philosophers and psychoanalysts, Deleuze and Guattari took issue with the canonical, bounded individual à la Kant and the ‘normal’ vs. abnormal psyche à la Freud As anarchists, they sought to find a way to live life in a rhizomatic way = liberated from hierarchical narrative structures such as those inherent in classical philosophy and psychoanalysis.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari drew on the horticultural metaphors of rhizome and root-tree to understand social organization and experience.
The tree, with its crown above and roots below serving the crown, is a metaphor for the hierarchies baked into society. The trunk connecting the crown with the roots is the narrative structure, or ‘strata,’ that fix those hierarchies into place and create the stratification of social relations.
The weed root, or rhizome, on the other hand, has no hierarchy, no above or below, but spreads horizontally underground. At times, rhizomes coalesce into bulbs or nodes, but then loosen up and spread freely again. The rhizome proliferates promiscuously, randomly, without shame along a horizontal plane of connections. As a social metaphor, it represents an egalitarian structure as opposed to the stratification and reification of the root-tree or arborescent system.
The tree, with its crown above and roots below serving the crown, is a metaphor for the hierarchies baked into society. The trunk connecting the crown with the roots is the narrative structure, or ‘strata,’ that fix those hierarchies into place and create the stratification of social relations.
The weed root, or rhizome, on the other hand, has no hierarchy, no above or below, but spreads horizontally underground. At times, rhizomes coalesce into bulbs or nodes, but then loosen up and spread freely again. The rhizome proliferates promiscuously, randomly, without shame along a horizontal plane of connections. As a social metaphor, it represents an egalitarian structure as opposed to the stratification and reification of the root-tree or arborescent system.
Writing that “the tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhrizome is the conjunction, ‘and...and...and,” Deleuze and Guattari championed the rhizome as a system in which everything has equal value and an equal right to space.
As they quipped about themselves: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” = an acknowledgment that lived experience is not crafted like a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel. The individual does not exist as a linear, coherent, neatly organized, well-bounded and well-socialized subject, but in fact is made up of multiplicities, contradictions, fragments, cross-references and inter-subjectivities, languid networks and plateaus of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari elaborated on these ideas with a series of other terms and metaphors, among them:
= radicule, vs. rhizome and root-tree
= deterritorialization and reterritorialization
= lines of flight and the war machine
= assemblages and plateaus