rhizome

1. (botany) A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.Examples: "All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome."Synonyms: race, rootstalk

2. (philosophy, critical theory) A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.Examples: "The corpus of Kafka's writing, they argue, is ‘a rhizome, a burrow’ (K 7)—an uncentered and meandering growth like crab grass, a complex, aleatory network of pathways like a rabbit warren. A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams."; "Critical theorists have often drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome when discussing the potential of the Internet. While the Internet may structurally appear as a rhizome, its day-to-day usage by millions via search engines precludes experiencing the random interconnectedness and potential democratizing function."