Rhizome Concept
I will address the question of power more extensively later on in my essay, but I want to use it vaguely to introduce the concept of a rhizome and how it is the concept around which this essay is structured. Traditionally, an author may utilize one theorist and one real life example to display what power is and how it is held by different actors. For example, In Anna's page on social power, she uses Philip Zimbardo's work called the Stanford Prison Experiment to show that when people are given the environment to take power, naturally they are going to take it and abuse it. While this approach is highly effective in displaying one manifestation of power, it doesn’t nearly encompass the question in its entirety. Using a rhizomorphic approach allows us to lift the limitations normally assigned to questions such as this. In its philosophical usage, a rhizome is, "composed of plateaus [...] Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau"(Deleuze and Guattari 22). While there are building blocks that are assembled to create a rhizome, there is no official start and end. Deleuze says that, "to be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses" (15). For our purposes, "the stems and filaments" are the theorists and examples that I will propose in answering the central questions. They are not "roots", which are more singular and static. Rather, stems and filaments of rhizomes represent a certain level of "multiplicity" that Deleuze describes as "very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status" (7). The same "multiplicity" of ideologies and social forces are present at the intersection points where these central questions are asked. Now that the image of the rhizome has been introduced as the structure through which this papers constructed, we will begin to scratch the surface of the various paths that proliferate from the questions at hand.
As portrayed in the image, power branches out in many ways, with no overriding direction or predestined path.
