Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Rhizome,” the introductory plateau to A Thousand Plateaus, constitutes one of the defining manifestos of post-structuralist philosophy, radically overturning hierarchical models of thought through the concept of the rhizome. Opposing the “arborescent” logic of Western metaphysics—structured through roots, origins, binaries, and genealogical descent—the authors propose a non-hierarchical ontology grounded in multiplicity, connectivity, and continual transformation. Early in the text, they reject the notion of the book as a unified object authored by a stable subject, insisting instead that “a book has neither object nor subject” but exists as an assemblage composed of heterogeneous speeds, materials, and relations. The rhizome thereby becomes both an epistemological model and a political strategy: unlike the tree, which reproduces order through centralised structure, the rhizome connects “any point to any other point,” generating decentralised networks of relation, movement, and becoming. Particularly influential is the discussion on pages 1604–1605, where Deleuze and Guattari contrast root-books and fascicular systems with rhizomatic multiplicities that operate through lines of flight, deterritorialisation, and anti-genealogical expansion. Rather than interpreting reality through representation or signification, they argue that writing should function cartographically—“mapping” rather than tracing pre-existing structures. The rhizome is therefore defined not by stable identities but by flows, intensities, ruptures, and transversal connections linking human, animal, vegetal, political, and machinic domains simultaneously. Equally significant is their concept of the Body without Organs, introduced as a field of intensities resisting fixed organisation and subjectification. On pages 1606–1608, the authors further elaborate a politics of nomadology, contrasting the mobility of nomadic war machines with the sedentary logic of the State apparatus and institutional thought. Their famous injunctions—“Make rhizomes, not roots!” and “Don’t sow, grow offshoots!”—encapsulate a philosophy committed to experimentation, proliferation, and non-linear becoming. Ultimately, “Rhizome” transforms philosophy itself into an open-ended practice of constructing connections across heterogeneous domains, dissolving the boundaries between ontology, politics, literature, and life into an ever-expanding field of multiplicities.
URBANISM MEETS ART