"A midway solution between the tree and the rhizome was the one proposed by the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment. Trying to transform the tree into a map, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and of d'Alembert, made in fact the rhizome thinkable. In respect to its hierarchical structure, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia was not necessarily different from a tree. What does make it distinct is, in the first place, the hypothetical nature of the tree: it does not reproduce a presumed structure of the world, but presents itself as the most economic solution with which to confront and resolve a particular problem of the reunification of knowledge. In the second place, the encyclopedist knows that the tree organizes, yet impoverishes, its content, and he hopes to determine as precisely as he can the intermediary paths between the various nodes of the tree so that little by little it is transformed into a geographical chart or a map."
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Umberto Eco,
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