---
date: '2025-03-25'
description: connections across different kinds of things, with multiple entryways and a changing organization
id: Rhizome
modified: 2026-09-16 09:03:08 GMT-04:00
tags:
  - pattern
title: Rhizome
created: '2025-03-25'
published: '2025-03-25'
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slug: thoughts/Rhizome
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---
[[thoughts/Giles Deleuze|Gilles Deleuze]] and Félix Guattari develop the rhizome in _A Thousand Plateaus_, part of [[thoughts/Giles Deleuze#Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Capitalism and Schizophrenia]]. It describes connections that can cross between different kinds of things without following a single hierarchy. The arrangement has multiple entryways and can change as new connections form.[^source]

Their orchid and wasp example makes this concrete. The orchid attracts the wasp; the wasp transports its pollen. Their connection crosses the plant–animal division through what they do together. A classification that places them on separate branches leaves out this interaction.

A rhizome can still contain hierarchies. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly include organized segments and tree-like structures within it. Those arrangements can acquire new connections or be reorganized. Describing a rhizome as free of _all_ structure loses this part of the account: the existing organization matters because it shapes where connections develop and where they are blocked.

[^source]: Deleuze and Guattari, [_A Thousand Plateaus_](https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf), translated by Brian Massumi (1987), “Introduction: Rhizome,” pp. 7–21. See p. 10 for the orchid and wasp, pp. 9 and 15 for organization within rhizomes, and p. 20 for hierarchies.