system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do I feel like Deleuze's "rhizome" is stating a very obvious observation?

Maybe I'm just not understanding everything, but I can't help but feel that Deleuze's ideas are pretty simple, but dressed up in a forest of dense, arcane language. He objects to the dominant conception across the history of Western philosophy ("arborescence"), symbolized as a central tree trunk, sprouting leaves and twigs. This conception of knowledge is hierarchical, dualistic, ordered in a predictable pattern. In contrast to this, Deleuze talks of the idea of the "rhizome"-- a conception of multiplicity, decentralization, interconnection.

Basically, in everyday language, Deleuze is saying the world is more complex than traditional, Western binary or hierarchical modes of representation. But what is so profound about this idea?  Stripped of all the jargon, he's just saying "shit is complex.   Meaning is diverse, interlinked, overlapping, fluid." It just feels like Deleuze is using some very dense language to describe something that actually isn't that insightful.
gpt
The "rhizome" seems obvious to you because you don't seem to get what exactly Deleuze is talking about. The rhizome isn't a "conception of knowledge," it's a way in which things can be organized. Note how the first examples given of rhizomes in the introduction to *A Thousand Plateaus* are all material things: books, tubers, rat burrows, etc. Deleuze isn't just saying that shit is complex, he's arguing that traditional ways of thinking see arborescence as the only way of organizing things when in reality, there're also entirely different, decentralized, and multiplicitous ways of organizing things which can already be seen in the world around us. This may seem a little more obvious to us now since things like the internet are (arguably) rhizomatic, but imagining a completely interconnected organization of things without any beginning or central foundation was far more radical in the 70-80s when Deleuze was writing. Even so, the applications of the rhizome to war, biology, history, economics, etc. that D & G undertake in *A Thousand Plateaus* are still anything but common sense. Hope this helps!