The Rhizome and the Tree

Imagine if you typed an Internet address into a web browser and instead of receiving the site, you were served two other sites first that were higher up in the hierarchy of pages (based upon market share or economic advantage, rather arbitrarily). For instance, if you typed altavista.com you would get google.com. You would retype the address or URL, and next would receive, yahoo.com , which would then ask you to retype the address to serve you altavista.com. While still useful (eventually you get to where you want), a hierarchical model of knowledge systems just won't do for computer networks.

This system needs a rhizome, a model adapted from plant biology to speak of the concept of networks, in the information age. A rhizome is a non hierarchical, anti-genealogical structure or relationship that models a culture's entire system of knowledge. It models our way of thinking, and is local to a position in space that can access any other position in the rhizome or network. While it also has appeared in other ages of communication, the rhizome has been specifically theorized in literary and philosophical communities by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their readers since the 1970s, and the concept serves as a model of internet organization if not communication.

So how are the parts of a rhizome differentiated? That’s just it, they are not reducible to one or to a multiple. In process, the rhizome breaks down the above scenario of hierarchy, of getting google.com when we type altavista.com. In process, the rhizome is a breaking down of "the multiple" too, because when an agent uses the internet, with his or her position, what he or she chooses, is locally and individually known by them. He or she has an embodied history that does not make him or her a singular entity, but he or she experiences websites as a series of events each that he or she has enacted.

The rhizome is difficult to pin down, in terms of units. Not just one, or employed multiply, it cannot be employed in standard units of measurement and be quantified. For instance, with the science of fractals, it is not uncommon to measure a shoreline that is dynamic rather than static. The science of fractals "measures" this phenomenon in terms of the points that the shore touches, but also in terms of a system for its movement. When we attempt to measure the rhizome, we always measure a dynamic system.

The rhizome is short-term memory, rather than a genealogy. We can use a web page repeatedly, as if it has no-history. Even though web pages continually evolve and we see traces of the old in the new, they erase the old and erect the new, with new technologies. The notion of short term memory also speaks of the way we abbreviate larger wholes through language. For instance, when we type an Internet address, we may be going to a links page. We cannot remember the extent and quality of information, we simply use the address to access the larger whole. We use our short-term memory to get us to larger databases of knowledge.

And finally, the rhizome is engaged in a process or is a process of circulation. The theorist, Michel Serres bridges the older systems of knowledge in the 18th century with the network, by reducing the model of knowledge to a question: “What is the reservoir? What is the circulation?". In asking this we see that knowledge, since the modern period, has been organized according to storage of information--in books or containers for the specimens of natural science--and then, like the way in which we include an algorithm of the fractal’s movement in its measurement, how agents transport these texts or stored information to spread knowledge. The rhizome is a web of a variety of circulation contents or methods, a dynamic model of the network where nature, science, and technology are constructed similarly and represent how we know, how we use information in the modern and post-modern periods of our knowledge society.