The network features prominently in discussions about contemporary society and digital technology. In this research we examine the putative sources of this authority. Inevitably, a consideration of networks brings us into contact with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. On the one hand their characterisation of the rhizome seems to be an extension and vindication of the applicability of the network. On the other hand their anti-metaphysical philosophy diminishes the authority of the network as providing a global account of the contemporary condition. We touch on how both the network and the rhizome feature in the classical legacies of Plato, the Stoics, concepts of the dialectic, contemporary graph
theory and theories of complex systems.

Richard Coyne