In the postmodern world, however, Deleuze
and Guattari argue, the grand narrative
of arborescence falls apart. They offer
instead the rhizome or fungus, which is
an organism of interconnected living
fibers that has no central point, no
origin, and no particular form or unity
or structure. A rhizome does not start
from anywhere or end anywhere; it grows
from everywhere, and is the same at
any point. As such, a rhizome has no
center, which makes it difficult to
uproot or destroy; you might think of
a mold or fungus, which can reproduce from
any cell. Postmodern culture resembles this
rhizome more than the tree, according to
Deleuze and Guattari. An example of this
might be the internet, the World Wide Web,
which has a rhizomatic structure. It has
no point of origin, no central locus, nothing
that controls or shapes or organizes it: the
web simply grows. You can take out any
link or any website (even any web browser)
without damaging or changing the internet—it
continues to exist without path or pattern.
An illustration of rhizome in opposition to arborescence from a 2006
exhibition of works inspired by A Thousand Plateaus at the
Doris McCarthy Gallery. The red structure in the image is a tree, which
presupposes a linear ordering over its elements that emanates from the
root. The green structure in the image is a rhizome, which ceaselessly
establishes connections across branches in the tree, without regard for
the predefined order.
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