What is a Rhizome?

If linear, projective, future backwards approaches to creativity will not give rise to novel outcomes (see Psychological Creativity) – what is an effective alternative way to engage with creative processes?

For this, we need new guiding metaphors. If the reductive and essentialist metaphors of classical individualistic creativity – the tree, onion, pyramid, and iceberg all lead us astray, where can we turn? A very helpful contrast to the tree with its convergent roots is the Rhizomatic root with its transversal spread.

Rhizomes are also rooting processes, but they do not converge on a single plant stem or tree trunk – rather, they can infinitely diverge, wander, and multiply. Rhizomic plants have no center, no single source, nor final form:

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The examples are vast: corn, dandelions, bulbs, tubers, mushrooms, and some trees (such as aspen) are all rhizomatous. And to this, we should, following Deleuze and Guattari, add: rats, wolf packs, and even their burrows.

Here we have a new image/metaphor of creative processes – as an open-ended, relational, and ever-changing creative process, which can be understood as:

1. Radically heterogeneous (what is connected is not of the same type)
2. Radically connective (“Any point in a rhizome can be connected to anything other…”)
3. Radically multiplicitous (irreducible to identity)
4. Asignifying (the novel connections exceed knowing)

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See also: Transversal, Transversal Thickets, Thickets, Trees