ABSTRACT
When Deleuze and Guattari complained in their typically facetious yet deadly serious style that they were “tired of trees,” the reason for their discontent was not exactly ecological or dendrological (Plateaus 17). What they were tired of was the persistent recourse of Western epistemology to arborescent systems of classification, which compulsively try to tidy up, divide and subdivide the apparent mess of human existence into rigorously hierarchical tree diagrams: family trees, trees of life, trees of the knowledge of good and evil, linguistic trees. It is time, Deleuze and Guattari asserted with iconoclastic fervour, to uproot the tree from Western thinking and supplant it with a rhizome—a freeform taxonomic system characterised by the usual postmodern buzzwords of fragmentation, hybridity and mutability.
