rhizoma

Noun

rhizome (plural rhizomes)

1. A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.
   • All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome.1868, George Bacon Wood, A Treatise on Therapeutics, and Pharmacology, Or Materia Medica, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Company, page 432

   Synonyms:

   race, rootstalk

2. (critical theory) A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.
   • 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...1989, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 107