The shadow of the rhizome: A challenge to academic thinking 

For decades, academic thinking has embraced the rhizome as a model for everything from resistance movements to digital networks.  

The theory, articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, serves as a beacon for those seeking non-hierarchical, decentralised, and dynamic modes of thought and organisation.  

The rhizome is a plant that is simultaneously a root. Think of ginger and bamboo growing unpredictably, resisting central control, and redefining what it means to be connected. In a world governed by rigid structures and entrenched hierarchical power that protects an elite few, the subterranean rhizome seemed like something anarchic, earthy and fertile. 

But since October 7, 2023, I have come to realise rhizomatic thought has a long, deep, dark shadow. 

I was once a devotee of the rhizome. I wrote about its power to disrupt patriarchal epistemologies, to contest the monocultural narratives imposed by nation-states, and to foster multiplicities in art, politics and identity. Like many in the academic and activist circles I moved in, I embraced the rhizome as a model of emancipation, particularly from human-centric dominion over nature. I was congratulated and even funded for doing so.  

But that belief began to unravel in the darkest days of Jewish history since the Holocaust. In the echoes of the chants of "where’s/gas/fuck the Jews"; in the infinite screams of survivors; while the blood still soaked into the ground on the kibbutzes; and as I witnessed my now ex-friends, draping themselves in the uniform of Jewish rape and murder enablement – the keffiyeh – the rhizome fantasy started to crack.  

But it was really the tunnels, specifically, that really struck me as giving off the stench of rotten rhizome. 

I had marched (I now believe erroneously) in solidarity with pro-Palestinian movements in the past but I hadn’t made the connection between the rhizome and Palestinianism before. My intellectual focus with regard to the rhizome had been on ecological activism and underground post-secular spirit plant movements.  

It was the construct of the untethered, disembodied mind that I wanted to be decolonised from, and the rhizome seemed like an excellent role model in its groundedness.  

However, it became impossible to ignore that the vast, intricate subterranean networks Hamas had built over years in Gaza, largely funded by the West, bore an uncanny resemblance to the metaphors I had once used with so much hope. 

Non-linear, decentralised, hidden from the gaze of its nearest neighbours and indeed, the world. These terrorist networks functioned in a way like rhizomes. They connected multiple nodes, sprouted offshoots, resisted aerial surveillance. However, they were not used to liberate, but to abduct, to murder, to rape, to torture, to strangle the tiny necks of infants, to hide weapons and to ambush and terrorise.  

Some of the same traits that had made the rhizome so intellectually and politically seductive — its invisibility, its unpredictability, its resistance to hierarchy — now stood implicated in a horror I could neither ignore nor explain away with wise murmurs and smirks at conferences.  

Deleuze and Guattari were no terrorists. They did not advocate violence or genocide. Their rhizome was a philosophical and conceptual tool; an alternative to the upwardly mobile and ever-transcendent "tree-structure" of Western thought. But sometimes ideas have afterlives. They escape the authors. They mutate. They provoke. And sometimes, they haunt. Maybe Deleuze saw this when he leapt from a Paris apartment to his death in 1995? 

I am haunted by how rhizome's shadow lies especially in its ambivalence toward visibility and accountability. In being everywhere and nowhere, in refusing the vertical in favour of the horizontal, it can also disavow responsibility.

When applied to political action, the rhizome enables formations that are difficult to trace, target or dismantle. It privileges chaos over clarity, proliferation over accountability. In the abstract, this is thrilling and for some, even sexy. In the concrete, it has come to enable and deflect from the truly abject. 

I don’t imagine for an instant that Deleuze and Guattari intended on the horror of October 7 and its sequelae’s violence. Rather, it is my contention that their theories can be loaned to a bizarre blend of authoritarianism and ideological permissiveness.  

Rhizomatic thought can obscure the boundary between resistance and cruelty, between subversion and sadism. It can give cover, symbolically, if not practically, to those who move in shadows and claim righteousness while targeting infants, women, people with disability, elders. 

This is the shadow I can no longer ignore. 

In woke academic circles, raising this comparison is anathema. It risks being read as a betrayal of the progressive intellectual tradition, or worse, as a defence of militarism. But intellectual integrity requires us to follow implications, not allegiance. If a theory we once championed is being mirrored in acts of brutal violence, we must interrogate that reflection, not recoil from it. To critique the rhizome's shadow is not to abandon all it has offered, but to recognise its limits and its proneness to ideological slippage. 

There is a deeper irony here. The rhizome was meant to be anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian. Deleuze and Guattari wrote in the shadow of World War II, responding to systems that sought to dominate through verticality and unity. The rhizome was their answer: diversity, multiplicity, becoming. But the very qualities that resist fascism can, in other contexts, shelter its twin. Masked woke authoritarians and their enablement of masked Hamas terrorists: a faceless crowd that moves underground, can be as wrongfully violent as the tyrant on the throne. 

The rhizome is rotten. It moves in all directions. It justifies everything and nothing. Its so-called power lies in its refusal to be pinned down. But in that refusal also lies its failure. 

In the weeks following the October 7 attack, for a project about spirit plants, I revisited A Thousand Plateaus with a heavy heart. I found beauty still in its language, insight still in its provocations. But I also saw, for the first time, the seductive danger of ideas that revel in disruption without responsibility.  

Such ideas are not anarchic at all, they are nihilistic. In the aftermath of the October 7 horror, I saw how theory can drift into rotten, maggoty darkness. Not because it intends harm, but because in its utopian slumber, this kind of theory refuses to imagine the full extent of its own consequences. 

This is not a call to abandon Deleuze and Guattari. It is a call to complete them. To reframe the rhizome not just as a metaphor of resistance, but as a structure whose moral potential depends entirely on who builds it, and why. A rhizome can fertilise a garden or a grave. It can be anti-life or loving of life.  

The rhizome, I once believed, would save us from the rigidity of unchecked and vile abuses of power. I had no idea it could be used in its service, in the most horrific and unspeakably violent way.    

Academic thought needs to consider the impact of its actualised metaphors.