Mapping/Connecting Hypertexts and Rhizomes

In Landow and Deleuze and Guattari’s works, the concept of ideas connecting or “rooting” to other ideas is prominent. With Landow we discuss hypertext theory and the process of how an active reader explores a text. We learn about the different things that go in to a text and how readers choose what parts they want to center around and how this ultimately makes for readers experiencing a text differently; “All hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation or experience” (38). Deleuze and Guattari bring in a different concept when they discuss the term “rhizome.” Their discussion of the term rhizome goes a little deeper in to how a reader explores a text. We learn that a rhizome connects any point to any other point.

When it comes to hypertext, Derrida “Describes extent hypertext systems in which the active reader in the process of exploring a text, probing it, can call in to play dictionaries with morphological analyzers that connect individual words to cognates, derivations, and opposites (33). Landow wants us as readers to look at and read texts in a non-linear way. Meaning, rather than us reading something word for word or sequential, he wants us to open out minds to new entryways in texts. Landow says, “Hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice. Rather the voice is always that distilled from the combined experience of the momentary focus, the lexia one presently reads, and the continually forming narrative of one’s reading path” (36). If we look at texts as though they are an entryway, we are constantly being brought to new places and opening new doors for knowledge.

This pertains to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as well. As I stated above, a rhizome connects and point to any other point. If we look at a rhizome as a map, we tend to understand the term better. In Landow’s text, he says that readers are constantly forming the narrative of their own reading paths. This relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of looking at a rhizome as a map. They state that, “A rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing” (12). What they mean is that, “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, and susceptible to constant modification” (12). Sense we can do so many things to a rhizome, and sense it can also be modified, that makes it more open for ideas to essentially grow.

Hypertext is essentially a map as well; “Hypertext has multiple entryways and exits and it connects any point to any other point, often joining fundamentally different kinds of information and often violating what we understood to be both discrete print texts and discrete genres and modes” (40). The beauty of both hypertexts and rhizomes is the fact that they both have multiple entryways and exits. Readers can enter where they want, investigate or experience for a little while, and then finally they can exit whenever they want; “One can employ to orient oneself and then decide where to go next” (37). With the rhizome, you rarely come back to the same thing. Deleuze and Guattari state that, sense a rhizome always has multiple entryways just as the map does, it is nothing like a tracing because a tracing “Always comes back to the same” (12).

The most interesting way to try to understand the concept of a rhizome not always coming back to the same thing was through the thought of a tree or plant, or as Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “the root-book.” Deleuze, Guattari, and Landow all refer to books and literature and how a book’s textuality makes for different experiences for different readers, but Deleuze and Guattari use the term “assemblage” to describe any form of literature. While analyzing the book, they came up with the assemblage of “the root-book.” This is a thought that is associated with a tree. They use the thought of the tree to contrast against the rhizome because they don’t think that the concept of a tree explains the idea of multiplicity enough. They argue that a tree’s branches have all grown from a single trunk. The rhizome does not have one specific source from which it develops from; “The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else (11). The rhizome does not have a beginning, end or exact center, it just has many different points of which all can be entered or exited through.

Our class blog acts as an example of both a hypertext and a rhizome in my opinion. When you think about it, we all contribute ideas that grow from many sources. We all go through the readings, decide what our center of focus (investigation or experience) will be and then we share our ideas with each other. Commenting on other classmates posts and other classmates commenting on mine have made me think in to new ideas about the readings I had never thought about before. When there is a link on someone’s post or an image, that leads us somewhere new when we click on it, essentially opening new portholes to new knowledge. Anyway, maybe a weird theory, but that is what I thought about most of the time when I was analyzing both of these readings. 

-Dina Kratzer