Opening Maps and Rhizomes

Alejandro Litovsky

September 22, 2008

As we work to develop the ‘Pathways to Scale’ framework to help social innovators mainstream their ideas and business models, we are wide open to sources of new ideas and ways of looking at the world. Indeed, being ‘open’ has triggered a peculiar chain of events.

We are developing a 5-stage model that goes by the acronym ‘OPENS‘. with the goal of opening doors, possibilities, and new markets to innovators seeking to solve social and environmental problems. It was therefore intriguing to come by an exhibition of contemporary Latin American photography called ‘Opening Maps’ (Mapas Abiertos).

The exhibition is an authentic journey through Latin American identity, its political and social struggles seen through the subjectivity of the artists and their cameras (picture below, credit: Tatiana Parcero). The intensity of the themes evoked Eduardo Galeano’s classic book ‘The Open Veins of Latin America‘, which describes five centuries of Latin America’s exploitation; a history that forms the basis of today’s political, social and economic injustice.

One of our central concerns is the process by which innovators influence incumbents, who usually have little incentives to address the market failures in the status quo. So these parallels with the opening of routes, maps, and veins felt therefore part of a larger, single narrative.

This single narrative around the ‘opening’ social transformation seems to move freely across organizations, regions, and social classes. It suggests a connectivity of political projects, led by (apparently) disconnected groups of individuals — leaders, artists, thinkers, managers, and the ordinary people that attend exhibitions, read manifestos, and join revolutions.

The work of modern philosophers Charles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is useful to understand this phenomenon. In their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia‘ they have borrowed the botanical concept of “Rhizomes” to refer to the way knowledge (including ethics) spreads in society.

A rhizome is a root-like, subterranean plant stem. It is commonly horizontal in its position, and can be thought of as the network-like roots of grass, which shoot and spread sideways. Deleuze and Guattari similarly referred to “rhizomatic networks” as narratives expanding virally throughout society’s disciplines, semiotics, power structures and bodies of knowledge.

The rhizome metaphor is a powerful one, especially for those working to improve the connectivity between actors in order to accelerate social change. The work ahead, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, should be focused on establishing “connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.” Spread the word.