Rhizo-Rhetoric and the Problems of Unity and Multiplicity #rhizo14

Let's assume, then, that writing a work of some kind—I'll stop short of calling it a book—about Rhizo14 calls for a different kind of rhetoric, a rhizo-rhetoric. What would such a rhizo-rhetoric look like? That's a great question for me, and I'm hoping that the Rhizo14 community will help articulate some answers to the question, but I still want to create some pockets of resonance and sound some musical riffs that may echo for us as we work through this composition.

I want to explore deeper the problem of unity and multiplicity that I touched on in my last post. Traditional rhetoric assumes a single individual as the center of the rhetorical act: the creator of new knowledge and the effective communicator of that knowledge, both mediated through the skillful use of language to create, capture, and communicate knowledge. I want to suggest that the study of and creation of new knowledge about an entity such as Rhizo14 demands a rhizomatic view of the individual scholar and knowledge as multiplicities and not individual, unitary individuals. I think I can find support for this in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1988), Michel Serres' book Genesis (1995), and Byron Hawk's A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (2007). I'll be pulling ideas from all of these thinkers, and while I'll try to distinguish one from the others, it might get messy. Multiplicity always resists such reductionism.

Multiplicity is the third of six "approximate characteristics of the rhizome" (7) listed by D&G. As I understand it, multiplicity has profound implications for rhetoric: for its concepts of author, knowledge, content, document format, and readers, but I'm focusing on the author here. What does multiplicity mean for the Rhizo14 ethnography? First, it means that we are neither individuals nor a collective, as both imply a unity of either the one or the many, a single person or a single group designated by names and counted by numbers—for instance: Clarissa or the twelve-member Rhizo14 ethnography group (I've no idea how many are in the group, but that number isn't accidental). As Serres says in Genesis, we want unified concepts, either the individual or the herd that we can name and count, and we don't like multiplicities. We are confused and find mysterious those things that we can designate only with indefinite articles: some fog or grass, some love or hate. Those things are hard to think with and too often relegated to poetics and ignored by rhetorics and logics. We want a definite list of names for authorship of our document. We want to know who is inside and who outside, who are the authors and who are the readers. We want to attribute and quote, designate and footnote. We want to place blame and give praise. We don't want some people who wrote some stuff about some of the things that happened sometime somewhere:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)

Rather, we want only (Please note the diminutive only here. It is important.) specific people, preferably experts, who analyze the event, reduce it to its essential, salient facts and narrative thereby creating specific, usable knowledge and then arrange the dissected carcass of Rhizo14 in a clean, well-lighted document that interested readers can follow, thus transferring knowledge from the authors to the readers. I point out the diminutive only because I am not saying that I do not want this kind of writing. To say this would be to trash much of the scientific literature of the past three millennia, and that would be a travesty. I do want this kind of writing, but I also want more. The trouble is that traditional rhetoric gives me ONLY the above kind of writing. I want that kind and more. I want to expand my rhetorical reality. I want to expand beyond the single author, whether individual or group, analyzing a single event to compose a single document for a single audience.

I want an indeterminate authorship, a multiplicity, many unnamed, so that we can speak explicitly only of some of the writers of the Rhizo14 ethnography. I want to invite all to participate in the writing of this document, in the continued writing of this document, to invite marginalia, edits, amendments, disagreements, links, comments, new chapters, images, poems, stories, dreams, games, jokes, and more. Wikipedia has proven to my satisfaction that this kind of authorship can produce profound documents. We can choose to make authors anonymous or we can have a place to list all names, even of those who only read. I'm not sure that it matters. As D&G say: "To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied."

We must get away from a rhetoric that posits the analytical processes of the individual, discrete mind as the source of knowledge-making and language as the only platform for knowledge-making and expression. Rhizo-rhetoric demands more: We cannot reduce knowledge-making to a function of the single, rational mind. As Frank D'Angelo notes in his A Theory of Rhetoric (1975), rhetoric must include "the imagination, creativity, free association, fantasy, play, dreams, the unconscious, nonintellectual sensing, the stream-of-consciousness, and the self. … This new emphasis on writing which is relatively free of control and direction may be termed the new romanticism. It holds that not all our mental processes are rational" (159). D'Angelo gets it right, in so far as he can take it, but he is still positing a single, unitary consciousness. D&G and Serres are suggesting that we must expand our view of knowledge beyond any unit to include the multiple. Both the individual and its herd are multiplicities that extend beyond the limits of the sometimes useful fiction of the single unit.

I do not want to rid us of the useful fiction of the individual or group author. I just don't want to limit us to that unit. I want to explore the rhizomatic author, the multiplicity. And I want this because I don't think any single author can capture the rhizomatic nature of Rhizo14 or produce a document that invites readers to participate in and understand Rhizo14. I'm looking for a multiplicity, a cacophony of voices, a gaggle of purposes, a flock of tones, a clutch of points of view.

I fear that many will think I am eliminating the individual, either as single unit or group unit, and melding the individual into the amorphous whole, but I reject this either/or thinking. A multiplicity is something else, a third thing that includes both the single unit and the group unit and all the other stuff that is left out of those two reductions. A multiplicity includes all the in-between stuff, the nameless and uncountable stuff, and I want a rhetoric that helps me include that. I'm sure I cannot do it by myself. But—and here's a good point—I do have to do what I can do by myself. What does this mean?

I've illustrated this concept before, but it is worth repeating here. A multiplicity does not mean that I do not have the ability to emerge as an individual with describable characteristics that can be distinguished from other individuals. Rather, it means that I have the potential to emerge as a wide range of individuals depending upon my interactions with different contexts. Let's see how this works: consider the period, the bit of punctuation, at the end of this sentence. <— there it is. And if we pull this period out of its context to define it, to reduce it to its essential meaning: "the point or character (.) used to mark the end of a declarative sentence, indicate an abbreviation, etc.; full stop", then we reduce the period to almost meaningless. It becomes a silly, little dot. Here it is:

.

All by itself, the period is useless and meaningless, as all of us are, but as a part of a multiplicity such as this blog post, the period takes on real power, real agency, BUT only so long as it remains itself, only so long as it maintains its internal integrity, what we conventionally call its individuality, and allows other marks to remain themselves. The period cannot sag into a comma, nor can it lift itself up into an i. It must remain a . It must do period-things amongst the behaviors of the other grammatical and graphical marks. And all those other marks must do what they do. We writers in a multiplicity, then, must do what we do. We must know and maintain our integrity, and we must allow others to know and maintain their integrity. At its heart, then, a multiplicity is founded on an ethical stance: we must be true to ourselves, and we must make room for others to be true to themselves and then we must cultivate those connections that encourage the greatest growth for all of us.

I'm looking for a rhetoric that allows for this kind of authorship, among other things. I'm looking for a rhizo-rhetoric. Okay, that's enough. I'm traveling this week, and I've run out of time before I ever got to what I wanted to say about Byron Hawk's book. Next time.

Flexible Disciplines, Flexible Boundaries, and Making Meaning

I think I have a bit more to say about boundaries, especially in terms of the boundaries that distinguish the academic disciplines. I've been arguing that the boundaries between, say, history and physics are nowhere near as rigid and as static as academic purists might insist, but neither are the boundaries between history and physics imaginary, capricious, and unnecessary as academic anarchists might insist. (I recognize that I am creating extremes with my contrast of purists and anarchists and that most educationists lie somewhere between or even outside these two extremes, but it helps me to see my point.) Boundaries are both necessary for human activity and knowledge and temporary.

I rely here on a few articles by South African complexity scholar Paul Cilliers and by Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, and my argument, I think, makes a basic assumption: that education and educational structures are complex systems tending to the chaotic, rather than complicated systems tending to the simple. I believe this is so despite the enormous energy expended in wrenching education into a simple system. Education ain't simple. It probably isn't even complicated. It's complex, at best. To my mind, then, the biggest problem with academic disciplines is that we try to move them into the simple and/or complicated domains of the Cynefin Framework where their boundaries are fixed, explicit, and easily taught, with clear canons of content and methodologies. In the simple or even complicated domains, it's easy to distinguish the historian from the physicist. In the complex domain, disciplinary and canonical boundaries are much more problematic, though no less useful, even necessary. Paul Cilliers helps me understand this.

In several critiques (Knowledge, Complexity, and Understanding (2000), Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005), and Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2007), for instance), Cilliers argues that knowledge is best understood as an emergent property "constituted within a complex system of interactions". This view of knowledge avoids both extremes of the purist and the anarchist, or as Cilliers more accurately calls them: the fundamentalist and the relativist. As Cilliers says:

An understanding of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions would, on the one hand, deny that knowledge can be seen as atomised ‘facts’ that have objective meaning. Knowledge comes to be in a dynamic network of interactions, a network that does not have distinctive borders. On the other hand, this perspective would also deny that knowledge is something purely subjective, mainly because one cannot conceive of the subject as something prior to the ‘network of knowledge’, but rather as something constituted within that network. The argument from complexity thus wants to move beyond the objective/subjective dichotomy. (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 608)

Knowledge, then, is not representational, "linked to the sign which represents it", but relational, "the result of a dynamic interaction between all the meaningful components in the system … itself a complex process" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 85). This presents an immediate problem, however, given the open nature of complex systems. If complete knowledge must account for an infinite number of interactions across the open boundaries of complex systems, then how do we ever attain actionable knowledge, given that we have a limited amount of time? Because we, as knowledge makers, are ourselves contextualized, and each context limits the number of system components presented for knowledge making. In other words, though a single rose is ultimately connected through its complex interactions to the entire rest of the Universe, the meaning of the rose is constrained when I cut it from my own garden and present it to my wife on Valentine's Day, which provides a bounded context within which meaning can emerge. The boundaries make the emergence of a particular meaning possible.

Of course, the meaning is no more absolute than the boundaries that enable it. In the relatively straightforward example above, the meaning of the rose will be slightly different, perhaps radically different, for me than for my wife as we bring our different contexts to the event, but it will be similar enough that we can at least speak meaningfully with each other—though we should be mindful that the very stuff of most romantic comedies involves the different meanings drawn by men and women from even so well-bounded and commonly shared an event as Valentine's Day. Boundaries in complex systems are not permanent or rigid, though they can persist in recognizable contours for long times.

So to directly address my concerns with Marion Brady's dismissal of disciplinary boundaries, I think he slightly overstates his case. We cannot dispense with boundaries in complex systems such as academic disciplines if we want to create meaning, or knowledge. Likewise, we cannot calcify our boundaries without destroying knowledge. As Cilliers says it:

One can, and often should, emphasise the interrelatedness of systems. Often the boundaries of systems are constructions we impose in order to reduce the complexity. This can lead to oversimplifications, to reductive descriptions of the system. However, if boundaries become too vague, we end up with a kind of holism which does not allow much to be said. … We need limits in order to say something. (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 88)

Perhaps, though, Brady's discontent with disciplinary boundaries comes from the usual interpretation of boundaries as "something that separates one thing from another" (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 611). In this view of boundaries, one cannot be both an historian and a physicist at the same time. History and physics are separate things, and one cannot be in both places at once. Of course, complexity and quantum theories ignore this kind of classical logic. Cilliers makes some suggestions about how we might think differently about boundaries, ways that make sense within complex systems.

First, "we should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us to see the boundary as something enabling, rather than as confining" (p. 611). From this view, our skins, those well-known and most familiar boundaries, don't separate us from the rest of the world; rather, they enable our interaction with the world by helping to maintain our own integrity as a persisting complex system and providing somewhat stable and recognizable contours that the rest of the world can engage and through which energy and information may be exchanged. Likewise, disciplinary boundaries need not separate historians from physicists, but they should enable useful, valuable interaction between historians and physicists, shifting and stretching as different issues supply different contexts of meaning, again enabling a mutually valuable exchange of energy and information.

Next, we should rethink our physical images about the place of a boundary. We must replace our visual metaphors which force us to think of complex systems "as something contiguous in space." Complex social systems, Cilliers notes, are not necessarily contiguous; thus, "parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations." This is certainly the case with history as an academic discipline, which is not a spatially contiguous physical system. This implies that a historian likely belongs to many different complex systems (families, churches, political parties, etc) and "that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs." So where's the boundary? It's always provisional, determined by the context referenced at any given time for any given event. Furthermore, Cilliers notes that any node in a system is "never far away from the boundary. If the components of the system are richly interconnected, there will always be a short route from any component to the 'outside' of the system. … the boundary is folded in, or perhaps, the system consists of boundaries only. Everything is always interacting and interfacing with others and with the environment; the notions of 'inside' and 'outside' are never simple and uncontested" (p. 611).

So maybe that can address Brady's concerns with disciplinary boundaries. At least somewhat.

cMOOCs & Temporary, Emergent Boundaries

In my last post, I quoted Marion Brady's observations about the transdisciplinary nature of thought and learning, what he calls Theory R: "Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I think I understand Brady's point about and his disdain for the "artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I am entranced with transdisciplinarity and agree with the need to transcend boundaries that are too often impediments to learning and research, but I think Brady overstates the case, ignoring the necessity of boundaries for knowledge and action.

I recently came across Kurt A. Richardson's 2001 article On the Status of Natural Boundaries: A Complex Systems Perspective which helps me clarify my thinking on this issue. Richardson uses complexity theory to guide him through the dilemma of reductionism on one hand, in which boundaries are clear, discrete, and persistent, and holism on the other hand, in which boundaries disappear altogether as everything merges into the Universe or God.

Richardson begins by making a very useful distinction between complex and complicated systems. He states that he is concerned with complex systems, which he defines neatly:

A complex system is comprised of a large number of non-linearly interacting non-decomposable elements. The interactivity must be such that the system cannot be reducible to two or more distinct systems, and must be sufficient (where the determination of sufficient is problematic) to allow the system to display the behaviours characteristic of such systems. (p. 230)

He then clarifies the difference between these complex systems and the often similar looking complicated systems:

The principle difference between a complicated system and a complex system is not the presence of large numbers of entities and nonlinear interactions. The key difference is the nature of the overall connectivity, particularly the existence of feedback mechanisms. Despite the existence [of] nonlinearity complicated systems do not self-organise into new structures. They do not display a wide range of qualitatively different behaviours. The extent and nature of the nonlinear interactivity is what differentiates between a complicated and complex system. The division between these two categories at a compositional level is very blurred however. It is problematic to know from compositional information whether a system is complicated or complex without having information about its behaviour. Complicated and complex systems, then, can only safely be differentiated from each other by observing their respective behaviours.

A complicated system, then, is like a modern jet fighter: large numbers of entities with a myriad of interactions, including some nonlinear interactions, among its parts; however, the jet fighter is incapable of evolving, or self-organizing into new structures.

This distinction between complicated and complex systems helps me to understand the traditional classroom and the value of cMOOCs. A traditional school is a complicated system composed of large numbers of entities and interactions. Some classes are complicated systems, say those with students exceeding Dunbar's Number, but most are simple systems composed of a fixed number of entities (1 teacher and 25 students) and a few, mostly linear interactions: curriculum + instruction —> student learning. In such simple/complicated systems, boundaries are fixed, clear, and enforced. The subsystems (teacher, students, curriculum, lessons, texts, etc) are rigidly differentiated and the interactions among them are stable, predictable, and enforceable. The boundaries are in place and real, and any blurring of a boundary is considered a failure by purists or as a daring experiment in free learning by rebels. Either way, the reality of the boundary is reinforced. Violating a boundary confirms the boundary just as much as enforcing the boundary.

cMOOCs, unlike traditional classrooms and xMOOCs, are intentionally complex systems. cMOOCs and xMOOCs are differentiated by their respective behaviors. Like xMOOCs and some traditional classes, cMOOCs have large numbers of entities with a myriad of interactions, but unlike those complicated systems, cMOOCs can and do self-organize into different and new structures. They evolve through nonlinear interactions, feedback loops, non-local causalities, dialogic tensions, and a range of other behaviors characteristic of complex systems, and new structures of people and ideas emerge that could not have been anticipated by the designers of the MOOC. These complex interactions unfold across blog posts, tweets, Youtube videos, Flickr posts, and coffee cups, and new patterns of people and ideas emerge out of the interactions. Boundaries in cMOOCs, as in other complex systems, are different than the boundaries in simple and complicated systems.

Complex systems, then, are difficult to evaluate. Simple/complicated systems, with their fixed entities and interactions, have a strict linear progression which leads to a predictable, and usually measurable, outcome (if a teacher does A + B + C, then the student must learn D, which we can measure on a test and repeat A + B + C until the student learns D). However, as Richardson points out, complex systems "display many possible qualitatively different behavioural regimes (the nature and variety of which evolve), as well as exhibiting emergence, i.e. the emergence of macroscopic system structures and behaviours that are not at all obvious from their microscopic make-up … The order parameters that best describe the current behaviour of a complex system are not fixed, they evolve qualitatively as well as quantitatively." Factor in the butterfly effect (systemic sensitivity to initial conditions), and it's easy to see how difficult it becomes to predict the outcomes of any given cMOOC. This inability to predict outcomes changes the nature of evaluation. If we do not have a fixed, predictable outcome, then how do we measure the efficacy of the instruction?

Well, I seem to be slipping away from my original point about boundaries, but only a bit. A fixed, predictable outcome is a kind of boundary. It is an endpoint, a destination. In a traditional class or xMOOC, that boundary is discrete. A cMOOC does not have an endpoint or destination. Rather, it is more like another complex system, thunderstorms. Like thunderstorms, cMOOCs build in intensity, form their new structures (not random, but not totally predictable either), expend their energy, and subside, though they can continue to echo long after the thunder has stopped. So here's Richardson's main point about the distinction between complicated and complex systems: "the boundaries describing subsystems in a complicated system are prescribed and fixed whereas the boundaries delimiting subsystems in a complex system are emergent and temporary."

Anyone who has been in a cMOOC can see this fluidity of boundary, for instance, in deciding who is a student in the MOOC and who isn't. If you define student as someone who is actively participating in the MOOC, then that shifts wildly from week to week as people engage, disengage, get distracted, re-engage. And who's the teacher? That can be slippery as well. You can easily measure and quantify enrollment in a traditional class. Measuring a cMOOC is more like measuring a thunderstorm. Just when is a cloud part of the thunderstorm, and when isn't it? That can be hard to quantify or even qualify. The boundary keeps shifting as the thunderstorm, or cMOOC, evolves in its phase space. Come to think of it, developing procedures for defining the phase space of a cMOOC might be a fine start to evaluating them, but it's beyond my abilities.

So what does Richardson say about boundaries in complex systems? In short: "The only real absolute boundaries in a complex system are those that define the basic constituents and their interrelationships. All other boundaries are emergent and temporary. In order to relate these arguments to the real world it is assumed in addition that the universe is a complex system, i.e. the one and only well-defined system." He's having his cake and eating it, too, which is entirely permissible. The only complex system with absolute boundaries is the Universe itself. All other boundaries—in other words, everything else that we know about, including superstrings—are emergent and temporary. Now, curiously enough, this includes both traditional classrooms and xMOOCs as well as cMOOCs; the difference is that cMOOCs recognize and encourage emergent and temporary boundaries and structures, while xMOOCs and traditional classrooms pretend that their boundaries and structures are permanent and in some way blessed or sanctioned.

Okay, then, let's assume for the sake of argument that boundaries really are emergent and temporary. Does that mean that anything goes, that we can create boundaries where we wish as we wish, as the constructivists would have?

Richardson says no. He insists that we do not need to resort either to a constructivism that insists that "all boundaries are created in our minds and as such do not correlate with objective reality at all" or to a naive realism that insists that our ideas "perfectly map to their espoused objects." We can map reality, and those maps are based on the interactions of two complex systems, which implies a complex interaction: natural reality and conceptual reality. As Richardson says of the relationship between the natural and conceptual:

Rather than having a fixed relationship with natural boundaries, or having no relationship at all, conceptual boundaries do have a complex and changing relationship to reality. Sometimes this link might be so tenuous as to be unusable. Sometimes this link is so strong as to give us the impression that we might actually have absolute Truth to hand.

As Richardson says, "In the field of complexity there is evidence that, though there may be no real boundaries, there are resilient and relatively stable emergent structures." Mapping the world, then in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's cartography, is problematic, but it is not impossible. Boundaries both conceptual and natural make that mapping possible, even necessary. They also make it temporary and emergent.

MOOCs, Transdisciplinarity, and Thinking Big

In his 2004 Phi Beta Kappan essay entitled Thinking Big: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Everything, self-described contrarian educator Marion Brady writes that "the main task of educating is to help students make more sense of the world, themselves, and others" (p. 277). He attacks the current state of knowledge as represented in the plethora of academic subjects and disciplines and insists that such a fragmented approach to knowledge will, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, "be the undoing of the society." He quotes Fuller again in a marvelous 1980s complaint to American educators: "What you fellows in the universities do is make all the bright students into experts in something. That has some usefulness, but the trouble is it leaves the ones with mediocre minds and the dunderheads to become generalists who must serve as college presidents . . . and presidents of the United States." I truly wish I had said that, but … well, he was Buckminster Fuller.

Brady then identifies the basic theory of education that underlies the fragmented, disciplinary approach to knowledge:

The present curriculum, made up as it is of separate, specialized studies, exerts considerable pressure on teachers to make major use of what could be called “Theory T.” Theory T dominates American education. … T stands for “transfer.” Those who accept Theory T believe that knowledge is located in teachers’ heads, textbooks, reference materials, and on the Internet and that the instructional challenge is to transfer it from these locations into the empty space in students’ heads. The degree of success of the transfer process can be measured with relative ease, which helps explain its broad appeal. … Evaluating performance is simple enough to allow student responses to be scored by a machine. (pp. 279, 280)

 He then contrasts Theory T with what he calls Theory R:

Theory R assumes not that students’ heads are empty but that they are full. The primary instructional challenge, then, is not to transfer new knowledge but to help students reorganize existing knowledge to make it more useful, consistent, or true and to supplement it with insights and skills that will help explain more fully what they already know.… Students in Theory R classrooms must be active processors of information. Theory T emphasizes recall; Theory R requires students to engage in every known thought process. … Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines.

Brady gives here a neat precursor to Connectivism, I think. First, he emphasizes that each student already possesses all the neuronal networks needed for making connections, perceiving relationships, and synthesizing ideas. We teachers do not transfer anything into the imagined empty memory slots of student brains; rather, we present them with a, hopefully, coherent and engaging series of artifacts and experiences to which they may connect, perceive relationships, and synthesize ideas, or not. All too often what they connect to, perceive relationships among, and synthesize are ideas that we never taught, or didn't know we were teaching. And each student makes these connections and patterns within an ecosystem (their own life stories) that we teachers know little to nothing about, and that ecosystem, that context, provides almost all of the meaning for whatever new connections and patterns the student is weaving. This reminds me much of Paul Cilliers' definition of knowledge as "information that is situated historically and contextually by a knowing subject" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely in Capra, Juarrero, Sotolongo, and van Uden's Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South, 2007, p. 85). In other words, while information may exist apart from our students as data, it does not become knowledge until the student situates that information within a context that includes themselves and that necessarily informs the information in ways we teachers cannot predict or control.

But what most impressed me about Brady's article was his observation that this process of making connections (mapping, as Deleuze and Guattari say) "sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." It seems to me that Connectivism and MOOCs are wonderful vehicles for transdisciplinarity, which transcends the "boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I know that the MOOCs I have joined have had a marvelous, transdisciplinary reach in content and participants. Though I have had some of the most engaging and rewarding conversations of my professional life, as far as I know, I have actually had no conversation with another writing teacher, aside from one colleague who shared an office with me and a few MOOCs. Almost all of my conversations have been with scholars and practitioners outside my discipline, which makes my engagement in the MOOCs most transdisciplinary.

I think I will explore this a bit more in the next few posts.

The Unconscious Reality

The second slippery aspect of the question do we know all of Reality refers to how we conceive knowledge. If knowledge is something conscious and mostly intellectual, then I don't think we can know all of Reality, or even much of Reality. In other words, we have experiences of the Real that we are not conscious of and can hardly represent in any language. We engage and know many things with our minds and bodies long before we become conscious of them, if we ever become conscious. For instance, if you breathe in an unhealthy swarm of influenza virus, your immune system will know it and begin mobilizing a defense long before you are conscious of the infection. Or ask a gifted soccer player how he knows where the ball will be two touches before it arrives, and he likely cannot tell you, but he knows to be at that spot on the pitch anyway. Intimations of things long before we are conscious of them are a common experience in life.

We all know this, but we educators often behave as if we don't. We assume that, and behave as if, knowledge is strictly referential, based solely on our representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formulations, to use Nicolescu's list. Knowledge is something we can put on the test next Tuesday. It isn't (you'll get a much better discussion of the issues with representational views of knowledge from Stephen Downes' blog Half an Hour). Knowledge extends beyond conscious knowledge.

But is this extended view of knowledge useful to education? I think it is extremely useful for those who envision education as a complex process of traversing networks—not as a walk to be taken (traced), but as a walking (mapping). I'm playing here with ideas that I've gleaned from Morin and Deleuze and Guattari.  Morin's concept of interdisciplinary research suggests that the path to knowledge is not followed, it is forged. He amplifies this idea with a line I've often quoted in this blog: we must learn to define from the inside out, not from the outside in. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that engagement of the rhizome, the Real, is a process of mapping structures and pathways, not tracing given structures and pathways. To my mind, these ideas position the Knower at the center of the zone of engagement as a knowmad who chooses to engage some aspect of the rhizome. Or not.

This tack positions me with the knowmad and suggests questions about what prompts a knowmad to engage or disengage some aspect of the rhizome. This reverses the usual pedagogical question of how to motivate students, as if motivation is a trigger we can pull, a response we can stimulate. I'm not sure it is. What then prompts a student to engage a teacher, a given curriculum, and a class? Where does this come from? And is there anything a teacher can do to facilitate that engagement?

Let's ask from the knowmad's point of view: why would a twenty-year-old studying to be a physical therapist want to engage a sixty-year-old in a course about writing? Why would they want to avoid such an engagement? In his book The Art of Changing the Brain (2002), James Zull says that most students unconsciously decide within the first 30 seconds of entering a class whether or not they will like it. Or like me. I probably know within the first 30 seconds whether or not I will like a particular class. These largely emotional engagements with the Real set the parameters of the Reality of the class, and they are difficult to change, in large part because we never quite make them conscious, or explicit. We just have a feeling that some classes work and some don't. However, some very heavy, precise neurological sensing and cognitive processing has gone on underneath the conscious surface to cause this particular Reality to emerge in the zone of engagement I and my students call Composition 1. Peering into the collective unconscious of the class to determine why a class is not working is more work than most of us care to take on, but it is extremely important for the success of the class.

There are plenty more questions to ask from the view of the knowmad: does this twenty-year-old have any sense of where I want to take them in the class? And do they want to go there? Do they have any hope of success? Any desire for success? Does this connect in any way with the path they are already on, or is this a side-trek they had just as soon avoid? And mostly: do they really want to connect to this sixty-year-old, short, white guy with his corny jokes told in a slightly southern accent?

The willingness to engage always comes from the knowmad themselves. The knowmad must see some path worth traversing, because mapping the rhizome is hard work. And it is the rare knowmad, especially young knowmads, who know why they want to engage or not. Much of our willingness to engage or not with a particular aspect of the rhizome, the Real, is decided prior to or completely outside of consciousness. As educators, we overlook this unconscious aspect of reality at our peril.

Knowledge and the Hidden Real

In Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002), Nicolescu speaks of the core human crisis that transdisciplinarity tries to address:

The unprecedented increase of knowledge in our era raises the challenging question of how to adapt our mentality to being. The challenge is enormous, because the influence of the Western-type civilization around the globe is so pervasive that its collapse would be even more devastating than the destruction we suffered in the two world wars. (40)

The comment "adapt our mentality to being" immediately raises a question for me: must epistemology adapt to ontology? This seems to be the normal way of it. After all, we can change our minds, right? At least much more easily than we can change reality. Therefore, our minds should fit to reality, not the other way around. Our minds can be in error, after all, while the Real cannot be, right? Isn't one of the big goals of education to adapt the mind to the Real?

I'm not so sure, and I'm not sure that is what Nicolescu means to say. Rather, the issue may be more nuanced than simply saying that epistemology must adapt to ontology. Let's try to tease this out.

Nicolescu makes a distinction between the Real and Reality. In his book Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice (2008), Nicolescu writes:

One has to distinguish between the words "Real" and "Reality." Real designates that which is, whereas Reality is connected to resistance in our human experience. The "Real" is, by definition, veiled for ever, while the "Reality" is accessible to our knowledge. (4)

I am somewhat uneasy with this distinction, but I don't know just why, so for this discussion, I'm willing to concede the point. The Real, then, is that which is, independent of our knowing, and Reality is that which we know. The Real is, by definition, hidden forever. By definition? Who defined the Real that way? Perhaps quantum physicists, which Nicolescu is.

Just this past week, I listened to a lecture entitled The World as a Hologram (2011 Nov 04) by Leonard Susskind of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, in which he discusses the indestructability of information and the nature of black holes. In this lecture, Susskind defines entropy as hidden information (18:38), and he says that the unseen Universe is 1000 times larger than the seen Universe (52:40). Most of the Real, then, is hidden to us, literally. It is flowing down into black holes from which no light returns, thus no information, and out beyond our seeable horizon. In another Big Ideas lecture entitled The Universe from Beginning to End (2010 Jun 18), astronomer Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University says (41:20) that of the Universe we can explore, only 4% is composed of normal, everyday atomic stuff that we can see (both with our natural eyes and our instruments), 24% is dark matter, and 72% is dark energy. We know almost nothing about dark matter and dark energy, except that dark energy is the stuff responsible for creating our expanding Universe. Schmidt notes (50:10) that eventually the Universe will expand out beyond the horizon of what we can see, as the expansion pushes galaxies apart faster than the speed of light. For us, then, most of the Universe will simply disappear in a few hundred million years.

So most of the Real is hidden, within the internal horizons of black holes, beyond the external horizons of an expanding universe, within dark matter and dark energy, and within the tangled strings of quanta. At the moment, we cannot know the Real, not even with our magnificent telescopes, microscopes, and particle colliders. The overwhelming majority of the Real is hidden from us.

Of course, most people are not at all concerned with black holes and expanding universes, and perhaps rightly so. Still, educators are in the business of making and sharing knowledge, and this idea that most information is hidden must be sobering (I'm using information here in its popular sense, which is different than physicists such as Susskind and Nicolescu use it).

It is also a delightful thought. As I have noted before, there is more in this World to know than we will ever be able to know. And given that we are in an increasingly expanding Universe, no matter how far we push the horizons of our knowledge, the Universe is pushing farther and faster yet. So if you think learning is a lifelong journey, it just became much more. It's a journey for a species, for a planet, for a galaxy. We may as well enjoy the journey, given that we'll never get there. Perhaps there will be an end, but there is no destination.

PS - Just after I pressed the publish button for this post, I read an essay entitled Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely by South African philosopher Paul Cilliers (thanks to Jenny Mackness' blog for connecting me to his work), and I want to add some of his insights. What initially captured my attention about Cilliers' essay is his own exploration of the relationship between epistemology and ontology. If I understand him, then in a nutshell, he argues that because complex systems are open systems with more interactions, both inside and outside the system, then our knowledge of the system must involve a reduction. As he says, "If an infinite number of interactions have to be considered, the production of meaning will be indefinitely postponed. … It would not be possible to have any real meaning if the number of relationships is not limited" (85, 86). Fortunately, Cilliers explains, knowledge is "constituted within a specific context where some components are included and others not" (86). This context, then, restricts for the moment the almost infinite meanings that any complex system can have at the moment, leaving us with a few reasonable options that make sense within the context.

Of course, we humans manage often enough to misunderstand the contexts of events and thus to botch the meaning. This slippage and mismatch between context and event is the source of much TV comedy. Still, Cilliers' point helps me understand that, even within the part of the Universe that we can see and engage (never mind the stuff that has slipped down the black holes), we cannot know the Real, which includes all possible connections within and without a complex system. The number of connections is very large—for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's infinite—and we cannot deal with that much information at one time. To create knowledge, we must reduce the amount of information, and we try to do that in a way that works within a given context. But this means that much remains hidden, not just because it is physically beyond us (down black holes and beyond the horizon), but also because we cannot hold all the details and make sense of them.

Rewiring Our Feelings

James E. Zull's book The Art of Changing the Brain makes a very useful connection between emotions and learning. Traditional education and scholarship has worked hard to minimize emotions within the Academy, and if Zull is correct, then this is most unfortunate. Our brains are wired for emotions, and teaching and learning suffer when we ignore or minimized emotions both in teachers and students. Humans cannot help but respond positively to things that enable pleasure and control and respond negatively to those things that enable pain and loss of control. Learning involves emotions. As Zull says, "Not only is knowing a feeling, getting to knowing [italics in original] is a feeling" (73).

Our feelings determine our attitudes about a teacher, a class, a subject, and those feelings are fixed by the brain before we are even aware of them. Zull explains how sensory impressions bypass our conscious brain and go straight to the amygdala, where they are assessed for threats. For anything that threatens pain or loss of control, the amygdala throws us into fight or flight mode, immediately and without question. The resulting feelings are very difficult to change through the conscious mind. If we don't like a class, teacher, or subject, then we just won't like it.

The problem is that the brain is a battleground for competing attention centers, and reason does not compete so well with emotion. It is hard to attend to a lesson when the amygdala senses loss of control or painful experiences ahead. We teachers can help a student's brain focus its attention through pleasure and movement, connection with people, awareness of the relevance of the material to the brain's identity, a sense of control, and other techniques. People can respond when, first, they are not distracted by threats of failure, pain, and loss of control, and second, when they sense relevance, control, joy, and play in what they are asked to do.

This suggests to me that my classes should begin with some task high in sensory input and something that students can almost certainly achieve, will want to achieve, and will enjoy achieving. I've been starting my writing classes by having students send text messages to someone outside of class, telling them what they are doing. The replies are often humorous, and the task is delightfully unexpected by the students. It demonstrates that they already know how to use writing as a tool for communicating with others. Now, they just have to learn how to use writing in a different, more academic context. I should be able to think of other opening tasks. Any suggestions?

The Nodes and Edges of Connectivism

I've just finished reading Scott Weingart's Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II, in which Mr. Weingart tries to correct the misuse of networks by humanities scholars. He provides a basic and quite clear explanation of what networks are and what they are not, how current technology can analyze networks, and what technology can say about networks, and most importantly, what it cannot say about networks.

Along the way, he provides the DNA for networks, and this reminds me of how fractal and complex networks are, with networks nested within networks and interacting across multiple scales. If networking is part of the DNA of connectivism, then what is the DNA of networking? Weingart gives me a few handles to work with.

He starts his discussion by defining networks in a typical fashion: networks "stand for any complex, interlocking system. Stuff and relationships [emphasis in the original]." He calls the stuff nodes and the relationships edges, in keeping with common terminology. A network, then, is a collection of nodes that are in some way related along recognizable edges. Stuff and relationships, or nodes and edges, are part of the DNA of networks. This is simple and intuitive enough, and Weingart makes this definition directly applicable to connectivism when he notes that

generally, network studies are made under the assumption that neither the stuff nor the relationships are the whole story on their own. If you’re studying something with networks, odds are you’re doing so because you think the objects of your study are interdependent rather than independent. Representing information as a network implicitly suggests not only that connections matter, but that they are required to understand whatever’s going on.

Starting with these basic concepts, then, I immediately think that there isn't any information – or any other thing, for that matter – that cannot be represented as a network. Indeed, I agree with Weingart "not only that connections matter, but that they are required to understand whatever's going on." I think this is Downes' point when he says on his blog, "At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks."

Both the Universe and our knowledge of it are network phenomena. Actually, I already object to that statement as it seems to suggest that our knowledge is something apart from the Universe. It isn't. Our knowledge is somehow an active node in the universal network, connected along multiple edges, just as natural an emergent phenomenon as rocks are.

I don't know that either Weingart or Downes would completely agree with the statement that everything is a network phenomenon, but it makes sense to me. I can usefully model everything as a network – this very post, for instance.

This post is a multiscale network: nodes joined by edges to form the nodes joined by other edges at other scales. As nodes, letters network to form morphemes, which network to form words, which network to form sentences, which network to form paragraphs, which network to form posts, which network to form blogs, which network to form conversations, and so on. And this covers just the syntactical view of the network. We can then look at the semantic networks in which subject, verbs, objects, and other nodes network together to create concepts, which network together to create arguments and explanations, which network together to create a belief system, which network with other belief systems to create a conversation, and so on.

It is quite useful to me, then, to think of this post as a network structure, and whatever knowledge emerges herein "is distributed across a network of connections" that shifts in scale from letters and morphemes to conversations about networks, education, and knowledge. This knowledge emerges for me as I write – adding, rearranging, deleting, and shifting words and sentences about – and for you as you read – scanning for patterns of meaning using the syntactical cues I've left behind. I hope that the pattern of knowledge that emerges for you as you read this post is reasonably similar to the pattern of knowledge that is emerging for me as I write this post. If the two patterns are reasonably self-similar (and I'm not exactly sure how we can ever establish that for certain), then I will believe that I have communicated my message to you, that I have somehow transferred knowledge from me to you, even though we both know that nothing was transferred.

But there is no guarantee. Every speaker, writer, or actor is aware that an audience can perceive very different patterns in the same configuration of words, sentences, and paragraphs. My father – an old-fashioned, hellfire-and-brimstone preacher – frequently remarked that most of his congregation heard sermons that he never preached. The message they heard depended more on their own sense of guilt and sinfulness than on his choice and arrangement of words.

Once this post is published, then, it becomes a node in a network of people (you and I) who each engage the overall network of writer, reader, and text from different vantages. It should be no surprise, therefore, that knowledge emerges in different ways for each of us, sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically.

If nothing else then, the complex, multi-scale, network nature of writing helps me understand and explain why even a simple piece of writing such as one of my brilliantly clear and concise writing assignments can receive such divergent interpretations, with almost every student doing something different. If knowledge was a discrete, transferrable thing, then I could give all my students the same thing, but because knowledge is an emergent pattern scattered across a network of words, I can hope only for a reasonably similar pattern blossoming in the minds of my students. Sometimes the magic happens. Sometimes it doesn't.

#change11 Rhizomatic Knowing

I woke up this Sunday morning thinking about rhizomatic knowing, but the house is full of guests and the coffee is already on, so I don't have long to write.

I want to flash on something that Bon Stewart calls a helicopter view of reality and that I refer to as a God view (Deconstruction: I'm the child of a Pentecostal minister, schooled on the church pew since birth, so God is almost always somewhere in any discussion I have), because this assumed position or vantage point has much to say about what we think we know.

As you may have noticed, I like working with metaphors, or images, as a gateway into thought, so let's play. Envision your life as a plate of spaghetti, and yourself as one noodle in that plate, with a history (a long and happy one, we hope) twisting and intertwining with all the other noodles in your life. Got the image? Ok, find your noodle, the noodle that will represent your life, and for the sake of the game, place your noodle somewhere in the middle of the spaghetti mess.

If you are like most of us, you are almost certainly viewing the plate of spaghetti and your own life from outside, from up above, from a helicopter view, or a God view. From this view, you can see the whole plate of spaghetti, even the table it sits on, and your noodle from start (birth) to finish (death), and you can meticulously identify each twist and turn and convolution in the string of your life, and you can point to, name, and quantify each point of contact with all the other noodles on your plate. You can determine which other noodles (or meatballs, but let's not push this metaphor too far) had significant, lasting impacts on your life. You can make assessments about why things turned out as they did. From this view, you can see and trace causes and effects. This is very useful.

It is also a fiction. You are not God, you don't even have a helicopter. I think this is one of the main points Deleuze and Guattari are trying to make. Giving yourself Godview is a fiction—a sometimes useful fiction, but always a fiction.

To envision what you can actually see in your plate of spaghetti, you have to float down from your privileged vantage point on High and take your place along one point on your noodle. That point is conveniently called Now. Okay, from this point, look about yourself at the plate of spaghetti. It should look very different, Now and Here. You peer back down the length of your noodle, and it twists and turns like a goat path into the past. You can no longer see your birth. You can't see the noodles that impacted you then, though you are reasonably sure your mother was there and likely your father, at least for one brief and shining moment. You look forward along the length of your noodle into the future. Hmm … now you can see even less as your noodle takes a sharp veer into tomorrow. So you look about at the various other noodles (people, events, sounds, colors, countries) intersecting with you at Now, and all those noodles have their own obscure trajectories, a few of which you have some memory, but most of which are just obscure. This is your real, actual view of life. This is what Deleuze and Guattari want to remind you of: that life is a complicated mess of interwoven noodles, a rhizome.

I use the term complicated just here on purpose: complicated suggests to me the intricate arrangement of  many parts. But let's take the plate of spaghetti one iteration beyond by making it not only complicated but complex. Take all those static noodles in the plate of spaghetti and put them in motion so that they become a roiling mass of worms or snakes. Or if you find that image too distasteful, then turn each noodle into an electric arc, a streaming asteroid, a flaming, flashing star, whatever dynamic image works for you, but just put the whole plate in motion so that each once static noodle begins to make its way through the mass of other noodles, being acted upon and in turn acting upon others. Think about the effects of electromagnetic forces that operate powerfully over short distances (physical, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic distances) and the gravitational forces that operate over all distances so that your one noodle or arc is pushed and pulled—certainly by the noodles closest to you (family, colleagues, friends, favorite philosophies, etc.) but ultimately by every other noodle in the spaghetti mass. Now, extend your plate of spaghetti out in all directions to encompass all of the Universe and all of history because all of that has exerted some gravitational influence on you in the Here and Now. And because you are likely a teacher, complexify your plate of spaghetti by adding it to the thirty other plates of spaghetti from your students, and then look at me squarely and tell me that you really understand all of this roiling, arcing, flashing, dynamic mess/mass.

Well, I don't think you do. I'm positive that I don't. Rather, we build our fictions through abstractions, focuses, reductions, bulbs, agglomerations, tubers, shoots, and so forth, that help us filter the swelter of reality into something that makes sense, into something that is manageable. It's the best we can do, but—and this is another strong point from Deleuze and Guattari—this fiction-making process is always an exercise of power. We create these fictional systems for ourselves and for others. We have to, but it is always an exercise of power however well intentioned: an attempt to wrangle reality, the rhizome, into a more manageable shape, often into our own image. This fascist tendency (D&G's term) is always there, and the rhizome always eventually flows around it. The Greek gods, kings and kingdoms, democracy, algebra, the Free Market, English, Spanish, Impressionistic painting, behaviorism, constructivism, connectivism, and rhizomatic learning have all been more or less useful fictions at one time or another. Deleuze and Guattari do not argue that we should avoid this fiction-making. Rather, they argue that we should never forget that these things are fictions. They are more or less useful ways of engaging reality—the Rhizome—but they never capture reality. They never really give us the total control over ourselves, others, and the World that we seek.

To my mind, this is a profound spiritual truth expressed in totally secular terms. And you can quite reasonably ask, so what? Well, that's another post … or ten. But people are stirring. Time to go.

Knowledge Nonetheless

I take issue with how Castells defines knowledge in his book The Rise of the Network Society. To be fair to Castells, his book is not about epistemology, and he says up front that defining knowledge is problematic even for those who focus on the topic. Still, he gives a definition:

I have no compelling reason to improve on Daniel Bell's … own definition of knowledge: "Knowledge: a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. Thus, I distinguish knowledge from news and entertainment." (17)

If I'm reading Castells correctly, then for him, knowledge is based totally on a formal subset of language: a set of organized statements that is grounded in reason or experimental result and that is transmittable or communicable. As I said in my posts about James Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality, I am uncomfortable with limiting knowledge to language, especially in Bell's case, to a mere subset of language. I think that all sentient beings can learn about their environments, and the things they learn are knowledge and the things they can learn are knowable, even if those knowledges are not expressed, or even not expressible, in language.

I'll give a quick example from my own experience. I have coached youth soccer teams for fifteen years, and I have tried to teach many children to kick a soccer ball. Very little of what I said—or transmitted to these players through a set of organized statements—about kicking a soccer ball did any good. Rather, I was most successful when I allowed them ample opportunity to kick the soccer ball. Through the trial and error of repeated attempts, most of them learned how to kick a soccer ball. I could say of a player that she knew how to kick a ball, or that he did not know how to kick a ball. This was real knowledge, but hardly communicated through a set of organized statements, hardly even expressible through a set of organized, reasoned statements—knowledge nonetheless.

A Coin Toss and Epistemology

On the drive to work this morning, I was thinking about the World Cup Final and lamenting that it ended in a most unsatisfying penalty kick shootout—not unsatisfying because the US lost, though I did want them to win, but unsatisfying because the shootout seems so random, more like a coin toss than a competitive decision. And in my mind (I was driving alone), I said, "A shootout is like a toss of the coin, it's like a coin toss." Or that's what I meant to say. What I actually said in the safe confines of my own brain was: "A shootout is like a toss of the coin, it's like a toin coss."

Of course, I made a common speech error in which I swapped the initial phonemes of two words. Most everyone has done something like this at some time, and some of us do it more often than others, but usually we simply chuckle or blush, correct ourselves, and move on with the conversation. However, I was conversing with myself this morning, and when I noticed what I'd done in my mind, I was reminded of the conversation I've been having about epistemology these past few weeks with Dave Cormier, David Wiley, Stephen Downes, and others. The conversation started when Wiley posted some observations about the value of MOOCs, and then George Siemens, Cormier, Downes, and others responded to Wiley's observations. The conversation was for me a wonderful chance to clarify my own thinking about knowledge and learning, and some of the ideas from that conversation help me clarify my phonetic shuffle this morning.

Why did I say toin coss rather than coin toss? Where did the non-words toin coss come from? I have not learned these near-words, so it makes no sense to say that they were stored in my brain in either short-term or long-term memory waiting for the right occasion to present themselves for use. The point is, until I used them this morning, these phonetic structures didn't exist, at least not for me. However, they are clearly related to two authentic phonetic structures—coin and toss—that did exist for me. I had just used those real words in the preceding sentence. But then I wonder if the real-words coin and toss also existed prior to my using them this morning, and I think that this may be an important question.

I could say—and perhaps most people would say—that the real-words existed in my mind because I have learned them, used them before, and know them; thus, they must be stored somewhere in the brain's memory that my mind can access when it needs that word. The image of a filing cabinet or a computer hard drive seems like a good image for this way of thinking about the brain, but this fails to explain the near-words. They clearly weren't stored in my neural filing cabinet. I could explain the near-words by saying, "Well, my brain just misread the words the second go-round, as brains are wont to do, and produced the near-words." But I think there is a more satisfying explanation that relies much more on the notion of complex, dynamic networks.

Neither the real-words nor the near-words existed in my brain in some storage system before I used them this morning. Rather, my mind created all of them on-the-fly as it helped me find the meaning I was searching for. In the very instance that I sought to express an idea about the value of penalty kick shootouts, a network of neurons and clusters of neurons in different regions of my brain began firing, assembling almost instantaneously phonemes, words, word clusters, sentences, and clusters of sentences. The brain uses both inherited and learned sets of rules to structure this network of neurons and the mind uses mostly learned set of rules to structure the physical network into phonemes and words and sentences and they do it so quickly and, usually, so reliably that I don't notice it. I'm too busy thinking my thoughts to notice how those thoughts emerge—at least, until I make a mistake. Then I notice.

So what have I learned from my mistakes this morning? First, knowledge is not some static thing stored in the brain. Even something that we might commonly think of as irreducible and as stable as a word is assembled, on-the-fly, as a network structure. It's likely also that the brain does not store or preserve even that network structure representing any given word. Rather, each word dynamically emerges each time I use it from and within a network of sounds and other sounds and words and sentences using a different neuronal substrate, depending on the total state of my mind and body and social situation, so that how I say the word coin this time is slightly, perhaps greatly, different from the way I said it last time or the way I may say it in the future. The coin I type here just now is different from the coin I thought this morning in the car.

Of course, the two instances of coin are also the same. Or perhaps it's better to say that they are receptive to definition from the center out so that they possess a core that keeps them recognizable from instance to instance of use. This core is the definition that we might find in the dictionary, and it is absolutely necessary for the word coin to be useful to us humans, but the definition is also just about the least we can say about the word coin. A definition artificially isolates an entity from its environment. It reduces a coin to one thing totally separate and distinct from all other things. This is a useful fiction, and we can learn things about coin this way that we might not see any other way, but the real value of coin usually arises when we embed coin in a conversation, an ecosystem, and the meaning begins to resonate across, through, and within other network structures.

I also see that I have separated brain and mind. That wasn't my intention when I started this post; however, in trying to say one thing, I have inadvertently said another thing. That often happens to me, and it is what editing is for: to correct your mis-statements or un-intended statements. However, I'm going to let this one stand, mainly because I don't know how to correct it. I know that lots of people want to make mind and brain synonymous, to reduce mind to a physical function of neuronal structures and processes. I'm not ready to say that just yet. I do believe that mind absolutely depends upon brain, but I'm not at all certain that it doesn't also depend on the body, on society, on speech, writing, and television, or on the spirit as well. That's another post.

Changes in the Ecosystem

I've finished reading James Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985, and perhaps the thing that most impresses me about the book is how totally unaware it is of the Internet. Of course, Berlin was writing a decade before the advent of the World Wide Web, the sum total of the Internet for most people, so he could hardly have included the Internet without more prescience than most people possess. I am not making a critique of Berlin; rather, I am noting how informed my own thinking is with all things Internet – so much so that when I read an entire book on rhetoric and find no mention of blogs, wikis, Twitter, or even email, then I am somewhat taken aback. I feel that something is missing.

I was most acutely aware of this lack when Berlin was discussing his preferred flavor of rhetoric: the social-epistemic. Berlin situates social-epistemic rhetoric within the broader framework of transactional rhetoric, which is one of his three broad categories of Twentieth Century rhetoric, the other two being objective and subjective. Briefly, the three are distinguished by how they treat epistemology, or where they place meaning. Objective theories place meaning in the external world of things and objects or things written about, subjective theories place meaning in the inner world of subjects or the writer's own mind, and transactional theories place meaning in the interactions among the subject (writer), the object (the world), and the writer's discourse community. For the objective and subjective rhetorics, then, meaning has a particular place in either the external world or in the internal mind and it has a fixed and unique shape and identity. For the transactional rhetorics, meaning has no particular place or  fixed shape but exists in the dynamic interactions of writer, readers, and world. Berlin says it this way:

Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object, audience, and language—operating simultaneously. The three major forms of transactional rhetoric in the twentieth-century writing class have been the classical, the cognitive, and the epistemic. (15)

Berlin favors the social-epistemic rhetoric, which he distinguishes from classical and cognitive varieties in two ways:

1. "Epistemic rhetoric posits a transaction that involves all elements of the rhetorical situation: interlocutor, audience, material reality, and language" (16), and
2. this transaction always includes language, for "there is never a division between experience and language. … All experiences … are grounded in language, and language determines their content and structure. … Rhetoric thus becomes implicated in all human behavior" (16).

I find an easy fit in Berlin's notions that knowledge is a pattern that emerges from the interactions among an interlocutor, a discourse community, and reality (I do not believe that reality is limited to the material or that language is necessary for knowledge, but more of that later and elsewhere), but I'm bothered by the absence of any firm notion of networks and networking, chaos, uncertainty, ecosystems, complexity, and rhizomatic thinking in general. Of course, Berlin's ideas do not preclude those concepts, but they don't include them either. This suggests to me that much has changed in the twenty-five years since Berlin's book.  Well, then—we have some room to work in.