As Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Amy Kimme Hea note, rhizomatic ways of thinking are known for their multiplicity and connectivity; rhizomes are not predictable, but neither are they arbitrary (423). Were we to revisit Deleuze and Guattari, we might also remember that the rhizome emerges from what they term schizoanalysis, or a mode of operating that works toward complexity and differentiation. In particular, they draw their theory of rhizomatics largely from the work of Fernand Deligny. In the 1960s and 70s, Deligny hosted a series of encampments in the woods of southern France. There, he and his colleagues lived in community with autistic people. During this time period, autism was still an emerging classification, thought by many to be a subtype of childhood schizophrenia. A concerted move against psychoanalytic approaches to neurodivergence, Deligny’s residency sought to respect the potentialities of autistic people through a specific attention to motion as a “mode of relation” (Hilton). Where psychoanalysis sought to unify diffuse libidinal drives and remediate wayward psyches, Deligny's methods privileged the unruly and unfixed. In a series of intricate drawings, Deligny and his collaborators mapped the movement patterns of the autistic campers under their charge and then used these maps—what he termed lignes d’erre (variously translated as wander lines and lines of drift)—as a means of thinking both between and beyond “the word” (Manning 191). Importantly, these wander lines revealed habit and errancy as their own kinds of invention, pathways that both embraced and resisted the framings of description. In other words, these wander lines were rhizomatic, forming the basis of rhizome theory as we now know it.

Rhizomes, to summon Johnson-Eilola and Hea, are notable for their “connections, heterogeneity, multiplicity, [and] asignifying rupture” (423). And rhizomes, they note, have come to function as one among many master tropes that govern how we, and digital rhetoric, think about hypertext. This trope is so recurrent that it is impossible to pinpoint one exemplar text; indeed, even I routinely call upon this trope in my own work. Rhizomatics, and its attendant concepts of nonlinearity and multiplicity, often serve as the exigence for our field, methods, and pedagogies. Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton describe this fixation as the “new recursivity,” which they suggest “names the process by which composers circle back through the progression of composites to assess … themes, tone, and narrative direction” (44). But that there exists a direction centered on narrative in many regards defies the wander lines that Deligny compassed us toward. Rather than imagining schematics between or beyond the discursive, the new recursivity imagines shiny, subterranean networks free from disabled pathways. It does not matter that disability is where we begin; we embrace a theory divorced from pathology because we want nothing to do with pathological people.

These stories of elision echo stories that we have heard before. In this I am thinking of Angela Haas’s “Wampum as Hypertext,” in which Haas offers a counterstory to Western narratives of hypertext. Noting that American Indians developed hypertextual apparatus centuries before westerners claimed and “discovered” it, Haas illustrates the rhizomaticity of wampum by drawing our attention to their associative morphology, their recording of memories, stories, and ceremonies through a corporeal digitality that enables interaction between hands and beads (pp. 78–80). In this regard, Haas asserts that “that the ‘history’ of hypertext is a Western frontier story, a narrative that most often begins with the exploration of the land of Xanadu and the Memex and eventually leads to the trailblazing of the World Wide Web” (82). In other words, how we practice and know the rhizome is a practice and knowing of erasure, colonization, and distortion.

And so, not only do Western, nondisabled narratives erase the rhizome’s decolonial and disabled wander lines; such narratives also sacrifice the very richness, errancy, and complexity that the rhizome waves toward. In this vein, Diana George, Dan Lawson, and Tim Lockridge examine the recursive beliefs that Fulwiler and Middleton discuss, arguing further that nonlinearity is a hypertextual myth: despite our insistence that webtexts are radically decentered and rhizomatic, most webtexts wave toward readerly engagements that are experienced as anything but. Even this text, with its many intrusions, has a certain coherence to it, one imposed by the institutional forces that demand a certain broad legibility of an academic text: I am making assumptions about you, my readers. How do I make shit matter? As in, how does shit materialize, and how do I make it materialize? (From an ass, literally and metaphorically?) Where does shit begin, and where does it—and the many sensory its that follow an originating it—travel? Where is my describing undermining my compulsion? My main impulse is to describe, is to claim that digital rhetoric scholars have latched onto rhizomatics—or, theories that valorize nonlinear and associative ways of thinking—but have often elided the very matters that make it neuroqueer, unsettled, and perverse. I am one of these scholar-operators here, attempting to live with my fear of lies and shit and house-burning on a screen that might or might not be accessed via screen reader, tablet, smart phone, corner bar, library, Alberta, cubicle, airplane, fancy bus with free wifi, hammock, doctor's office, Xanadu. That I can articulate this is telling: You might be traversing this compulsion-scape via diverging hypertextual nodes, but you are still arriving here. At a certain point, your movement is stopping, is landing, is ending.

And yet, at the same time, this telling, this webtext, verbily rhizomes. This webtext is not merely the words and flashing GIFs on the page, but the compulsions that ticced us here. Topos, Deligny shows us, is more dis/orienting than comprehension. Land, and vectors, and lostness, and relations to/with/around/under dirt and the Electric Light Orchestra: these lines drift us toward what is “common,” toward a mode of acting that need not take wordstuff as its center. Gestures and stumbles rhizome us.

In other (non)words, my brain’s visual flashes of me being caught in a lie bear the same primacy as the (non)telling of the lie unto itself. OCD is and is not something one can say into being. I might say OCD into being when I count to 47; I might say OCD into being when I say that I have OCD; I might say OCD into being when I talk with my therapist about psychotropic medication. OCD might be said into being via DSM bullets, ICD blurbs, patient intake forms and charts, parent blogs about skin picking and ticcing and melt downs. There is certainly something to be said about saying, but obsessions and tics—or any experience of neurodivergence—can act and relate and trace without saying. As Wendy Chun notes, "Networks are odd entities: they are both technical projections and naturally occurring phenomena.... Indeed, they compromise the distinction between the constructed and the natural, the theoretical and empirical" (pp. 46–47). NEURAL IMAGE OF STOVE. PATHWAY TO AND FROM STOVE. FIRE. STOVE. HOUSE. STOVE. FEET-PATH TRACES-GO. MANURE.