Some (Hopefully) Illustrative Illustrations

I thought it might be useful to examine hypertext, rhizome and maybe a few other concepts with some analogies. They will not be perfect, but I am hoping that this will clarify a few things about the concepts we have been discussing.

I will start with Rhizome, which I believe Sarah has already addressed in her post “Hypertext and Temporality.” The concept of a rhizome, as I have proposed in earlier texts isn’t really anything that is realizable in the four-dimensional world we live in. Nothing will ever truly serve the purpose, however I think I may have a way to think about it that might help clarify its implications.

Think of the only “natural” Rhizome as the Universe. Everything everywhere, essentially. All of our knowledge, information, energy, matter, physics, all of it are contained within the Universe. Let’s assume for a moment that people just appear places for the purposes of this demonstration. So you could appear anywhere in the entire Universe, or leave from anywhere (assuming this is possible, we will say that it is). Now, say you were to enter the Universe on Mars. Just within the space you inhabit are trillions upon trillions of bits of information, “nodes.” Take a single rock. This might represent a node. You could figure out how it was formed, what happened to it, whatever. It represents a unit of information, or “plateau.”

For purposes of simplicity, let us assume that you can travel through space and time at will. Assuming you could travel to any point in all of time and space, you suddenly have the ability to learn anything that exists within the Universe in any order. You could learn about the physics of the sun one minute and the properties of the wheel the next. You could learn about life on some strange planet and then life on Earth. To illustrate the concept of “centrality” think of yourself for a moment as a being that just popped into existence in the middle of space. You first visit Rock1 which is inhabited by small, four-legged creatures with spines. Next you visit Earth. Which of the two constitutes your center? You have discovered your standard of life on a different planet first, which means your presuppositions about how life works are not Earth-based.

This is all very space-like for which I apologize, but if you can bear with me, I will next move to something more familiar. A Rhizome constitutes all the information available. Let’s say that our “Rhizome” is a blank page with equally distanced black dots running in even rows. A hypertext is a bounded partition of a rhizome. For example, a hypertext might be a square in the center of the page. Within the hypertext are points that any observer is free to follow in whatever order, however, they are unable to identify any point outside the square without leaving it. This is really where hypertext differs. A Rhizome has no organizing principle outside of the observer, it is simply all available information. A hypertext is a bounded set of information. This means that there are two organizing principles: where the reader has been before within the Rhizome and what information has been bounded within the hypertext.