Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-02
Deleuze & Guattari: the rhizome as an open circuit
I Digging under the single root
For centuries the West loved the tree: an axial trunk, hierarchical branches, a deep root that legitimises verticality. In 1980, A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari blew that fetish up with a subversive botanical image: the rhizome.
The rhizome presumes no centre and no divine tip; it spreads horizontally, forks, snaps, resprouts beyond the fire. Deleuze will say: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be”. Guattari will add that its logic is that of pure multiplicity, with no original and no copy.
Reading the network through this lens reveals the obvious:
- the phone box went obsolete when the line stopped radiating from a central “switch”;
- the pyramid company trembles when the autonomous “squad” delivers in a sprint what the hierarchical committee cooks for a year;
- the metaverse (still unfinished) is conceived as a soft topology where one plot does not hold up the next: it jumps, links, glitches.
II Six rhizomatic principles in the age of fibre
-
Connection & heterogeneity
Any node can link to any other, with no visa. Today that means public APIs, interoperability and free licences: remix culture devouring copyright like termites in old wood. -
Multiplicity
The rhizome does not divide into units of one; it propagates in open dimensions. A software fork makes a hundred divergent branches with no need for the “father”. -
Asignifying rupture
Cut the rhizome and it resumes its spread somewhere else. States that block Telegram discover VPNs like aerial roots emerging through the cracks. -
Cartography & decalcomania
There is no prior model; to map is to travel. Crypto-cities, game worlds, Discord art collectives: maps drawn as you walk. -
Antigenealogy
The rhizome refuses founding mythologies. The meme does not ask after its author: it spreads, mutates, disowns its origin. -
A-signify, a-semioticise
The production of meaning is lateral; images and sounds drip temporary meanings. On TikTok a piece of choreography gets politicised, eroticised, parodied — all within 24 h.
III Rhizome and acceleration: voltage compatibility
Nick Land looks at the rhizome and sees motorways where capital could run with no traffic lights: P2P networks that leap past regulation, choke the tree-nation and lubricate the agility of AI.
Accelerationism of the left also embraces the rhizome, but in order to hack it: if everything connects, redistributing data and machines can socialise the surplus.
The rhizome takes no side; it is an ontological infrastructure. Whoever runs through its tunnels decides.
IV Manual of applied rhizomatisation
- Projects: design your systems with no single point of failure. Every node must replicate the basic functions.
- Politics: favour pacts that allow fast exits ; a charter city before a centralist state.
- Art: release your work into the memetic drift; authorship degrades but persistence grows.
- Economy: favour the liquidity of micro-transactions over the great financial tower; stablecoins, not the bank's monarchical reserve.
V Paradoxes and limits
- A desire for a root – Rhizomatic communities often cry out for “facilitators”, “mods”, “core devs”: proto-trees? Chaos asks for an alpha node so it can sleep.
- Toxic scalability – Spam is the cancerous version of the rhizome: it connects everything to everything with no filter.
- Diffuse responsibility – When everyone is a node, nobody is accountable; a DeFi scam dissolves into the P2P fog.
- Corporate capture – Big Tech pampers the rhizomatic rhetoric while housing its core in hyper-guarded data centres: a camouflaged root.
VI Coda: rhizome, circuit and lightning
“Making a rhizome is not celebrating disorder but cultivating a furtive, lateral order that shuns the monolith.”
In 2025, every time you push a public repo , stream live or set up a home AI server, you embody the rhizomatic ethic. You weave cables without asking the tree's permission. The forest of states and corporations may try to graft its old roots on, but the rhizome has already learned to fork — like fungi devouring the ruins.
Deleuze and Guattari gave us no technical manual but a spatial consciousness: think in networks before kings. If accelerationism is combustion, the rhizome is the circuit that stops the explosion ending in a tyrannical funnel. All that is left is to keep the tunnels open, even when the smoke of speed clouds our sight.