The prose is dense and schizophrenic. The essay consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition. Deleuze’s metaphor applies even to the very text in which it comes into being. The text bypasses the static act of description: an enactment is at hand. Or, by the essay’s own distinction, Rhizome is a mapping rather than a tracing. Deleuze writes, “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious” (12).