> Is anyone familiar with this term? I encountered it in reading Hardt
> and Negri's 'Empire':
>
> "The constitution of a global market organized along a disciplinary
> model is traversed by tensions that open mobility in every direction;
> it is a transversal mobility that is rhizomatic rather than
> arborescent" (253).
>
> I believe it comes from Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus,' but I
> am not clear as to what it entails, i.e., why they select rhizome as
> metaphor rather than any other omni-directional mobility. Any
> theory-heads on list?
The tree is an old symbol in philosophy. The classical use is that by Porphyrius, a commentator of Aristotle in antiquity, and is called the _arbor_Porphyriana_. It is a tree-like structure, or diagram, of all that exists, and the categories that we use to describe the world, respectively. Descartes famously had his doubts about what we can know about the structure of reality, but he still used the tree comparison to classify the sciences (that's the letter to Picot, if anyone is interested).
Thinkers who want to take modernity further than that are inclined to reject the tree even if it is a tree-in-the-mind. Or better, they subvert it -- and when you subvert a tree, you find the rhizomes.
(The reference is "Rhizome", the first chapter of _A_Thousand_Plateaus_, by Deleuze and Guattari.)
((A note on the difficulty of that text is in order, I think. There is much philosophy on the pop level in that book, but there is also a lot of philosophy on the pro level. This is of course because the authors reject the confinements of either category, but the effect is unsettling for both publics. Those who know Hjelmslev tend to neglect _Dune_, and vice versa. Guides exist, some made from trees, others nested in rhizomes.))
cheers AN