The philosopher Giles Deleuze believed that philosophy wasn’t about truth-seeking, but instead an art wherein the artist’s creations were concepts. With his partner in concept creation, Felix Guattari, they wrote A Thousand Plateaus, a sweeping book rife in concept-making. My favorite one is their discussion of “the image of thought”. Among other things, they said the image of thought is “rhizomatic”. “Rhizome” is a term that’s borrowed from botany, it describes the ostensibly random but nevertheless connected pattern that roots take. Despite the random and uncontrollable nature of our thinking, everything is connected.
In Rhizome, you’ll find a cross-section of my own rhizome as I wade through the chaos of my own existence and all of the identities that I wear through it. this is where I’ll try to make those connections explicit. Rhizome is connection seeking, not truth seeking. It’s sense seeking, not order seeking. It’s language as trowel.
I try to use Rhizome as a confluence of any writing of any weight I do (i.e., longer than the two sentence snarky Letterboxd review) anywhere else on the Internet, so some of what you’ll find here will be cross-posted from their origin.
