Rhizome

Quick meaning: Rhizome is a noun meaning (botany) A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.

Meaning

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

More Meanings

1. (philosophy, critical theory) A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.

Example Sentences

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

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.

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.

Word Forms

• rhizomes
• rhizoma

Synonyms for rhizome

Depending on context, synonyms include race, rootstalk, rootstock.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include rootstalk, rootstock, stolon, sympodial, horizontal, rhizoma.

Related Dictionary Tools