#MeToo: The Post-Humanity of Rhizo-Rhetoric

So is #MeToo expanding rhetoric beyond the humanist focus on the individual to the posthumanist inclusion of the human/nonhuman swarm and ecosystem? I think so.

But let me point out that this expansion does not dismiss the individual and her unique experience. Each individual experience has its own meaning, and our traditional rhetoric gives us a rich set of tools for reading that experience. I am exploring the idea, however, that a different constellation of meaning emerges at the hyper-text scale of #MeToo, and that I, at least, don't have the set of tools required for reading that text. Somewhere George Siemens said that "literacy is the ability to engage in the dominant discourses of the current age." #MeToo is one of the dominant discourses of the current age, and I think I'm missing a big part of it. I suppose that makes me illiterate, so there is plenty of room here for me to learn. Cool.

Byron Hawk claims that Deleuze captures this shift in rhetoric from the simple individual human to the complex posthuman swarm in his concept of expressionism, which Hawk opposes to expressivism. According to Hawk, expressivism "is centered on the individual body" and leads to a social-epistemic rhetoric that "is centered on a dialectic among distinct, pre-existing elements in the world" (158). This rhetorical focus on human individuals in dialectical opposition to each other leads to a rhetoric that operates "from an opposition between human intention as active and material context as static and passive, thus privileging human action" (158). Expressivism rather unconsciously assumes traditional rhetorical elements and arrangements: humans engaging other humans through texts for the purposes of persuading, informing, and entertaining. Humans are the only actors on stage, and everything else is inert scenery and prop, interesting mostly as a backdrop to human agency. Much of the discussion about #MeToo has assumed this arrangement and focused on political and social positions assumed by various people, winners and losers in the discussion, and probable outcomes and consequences for people.

Hawk says that Deleuze undermines this focus by "seeing any body, organic or inorganic, not as a whole but as a constellation of parts that participate in multiple systems" (158). From this point of view, a text "can be only the expression of a world, of an entire system, of life, not just one element or function within it" (158).

#MeToo, then, is the expression of the world, of an entire system, not just one element within it. I cannot think of #MeToo as a collection of individual tweets, a bag of marbles. Yes, I can look at the bag of marbles and, for instance, divide them into big ones and littles ones, or red, green, and blue ones. I have the rhetorical and analytical skills to do that, and I will generate some useful knowledge that way, but if I exclusively focus on #MeToo at that scale, then I miss the larger and, for me, the more important text. #MeToo is the world struggling to understand how it organizes and interacts with itself, especially in terms of the relationships between women and men.

This larger text is problematic for other readers as well. In her article for The New Yorker entitled "The Rising Pressure of the #MeToo Backlash", Jia Tolentino explores the tendency of people (men and women both) to flatten #MeToo into a single, simple text with a single, simple message which they can then position themselves for or against, just as the traditional rhetorical strategies have taught them to do. Tolentino complains that this strategy undermines the real power of #MeToo:

This is an unprecedented moment of flux on an impossibly complicated topic; this movement is not even three months old yet. The fact of a hashtag flattens these stories, makes them seem unified, but they are profoundly individual. If we stop looking for straightforward collective agreement, we might find we need it less than we think.

I, too, must stop looking for straightforward collective agreement. I really don't need it. Instead, I'm trying to see #MeToo as a fractal: a swarm of self-similar and coherent pieces but not identical pieces. #MeToo has a swarm message that we want to reduce to a simple, political slogan, and in many ways, it doesn't matter if the slogan supports or opposes #MeToo. While they have utility in narrow applications, all slogans undermine and distract us from the swarm message.

But we so much want attractive slogans delivered by attractive voices. An Ozy story "Aly Raisman Is the #MeToo Hero that American Sports Needed" by Nick Fouriezos follows the typical rhetorical strategy of reducing the 156 witnesses in the trial against women's gymnastic physician Larry Nassar to one attractive voice: Aly Raisman. This is traditional Western journalism based on traditional rhetoric that gives us a single, identifiable voice to deliver a single message that we can agree with, disagree with, or ignore. Fouriezos' strategy is quite obvious. He characterizes the testimonies of 156 witnesses (a swarm) as "a public bloodletting only made possible by the decision from Judge Rosemarie Aquilina to give every victim the voice they had been denied." His treatment of Aly Raisman, however, is largely positive. Her voice is clear, courageous, and convincing. And her voice is clear, courageous, and convincing—make no doubt—but so are the stories of the other 155 athletes. Fouriezos mostly misses that swarm text, as do his readers. I want this larger, swarm text, this hyper-text.

Or let's call it a rhizo-text to match rhizo-rhetoric. Let's see if rhizo-text works.

To approach this larger rhizo-text, Hawk uses Heidegger's discussion of tool to reconceptualize technê, especially as handicraft, or craft or art, in rhetoric. For Hawk, technê is not something that a human does to a text through the use of various tools (pens, paper, typewriters, word processors, Twitter, etc); rather, technê is poiesis, "the arising of something from itself, … a bringing forth" (176). Technê is a constellation of agents that includes humans but does not privilege humans. Hawk says:

Technê as handicraft or as rhetoric and poetics is set in the context of physis: nature, the ecology as a whole, including humans, is the ground and thus highest form of technê, which is simply one aspect of co-responsibility. This recognition is a key to moving beyond instrumentality and humanism. Heidegger asks, “Does this revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man or decisively through man” (["Question Concerning Technology"] 24). A human does not create by itself. It enters into a situation, and the new form taken by that constellation plays out its own potentiality. (176)

So I begin to see #MeToo rhetorically as millions of agents (in this case, overwhelmingly women and Twitter) entering into a new situation arising from their own interactions. The text written by this new constellation—this #MeToo—is playing out its own potentiality, which arises from its own DNA, its own experiences, knowledges, skills, and trajectories, and equally from the ecosystem within which it finds itself.

It's easy for those of us who engage #MeToo to credit only the humans who are writing it, but we miss much if we do not also credit Twitter and other social media. #MeToo could not have emerged at all and it would not be emerging as it is without nonhuman agency. #MeToo, then, is a posthuman document, as Hawk explains using the work of N. Katherine Hayles':

Hayles characterizes posthumanism as locating thought and action in the complexity of distributed cognitive environments. … For Hayles, “modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because moderns are smarter, . . . but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work” (How We Became Posthuman 289). Posthumanism does not usurp the human, then, but situates it in the development of distributed cognitive environments. Hayles writes, “No longer is human will seen as the source from which emanates mastery necessary to dominate and control the environment. Rather, the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with—in Bateson’s phrase, becomes a metaphor for—the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which ‘thinking’ is done by both human and nonhuman actors” (290). (176, 177)

This reorganizes our conception of rhetorical voice as the expression of a single human or group of humans exercising her or their will upon a text and thereby upon another group of humans. That view, though at times useful, is too limiting. Rhizo-texts are written rhizomatically and must be read rhizomatically. Deleuze and Guattari address this very issue in the first paragraph of the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. 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. (3)

They are trying to explain here that the two of them are a swarm and must be read as a swarm, and they make clear that their swarm includes not just other people but other things, non-humans. They proliferate and run like oil on pavement, or seeds in a stream, like rhizomes.

And here is a point I must address: a single writer is a swarm, just as a million writers are. In this #MeToo series of posts, I've been contrasting the million voices of rhizo-rhetoric to the single voice of traditional rhetoric. This is misleading. A single voice is also a swarm, but it's easy to see how traditional rhetoric could create a fictional unity of that voice.

So even if this unified voice is a fiction, what's wrong with that? In some senses, nothing is wrong with it. It is, if nothing else, convenient. As D&G wryly note, they use their own names—unifying, signifying labels—"purely out of habit … because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking." And yet, everything is wrong with it. These signifying labels, these fictional singularities, "prevent recognition [and] render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think." Thus, the Fouriezos article gives us a unified voice in Aly Raisman, but it prevents recognition of and renders imperceptible the 155 other voices. It gives us a text rather than the rhizo-text. It gives us the human rather than the post-human.

Let me end this post where I began it by noting that I am not denigrating the human or humanistic rhetoric. This is the tradition I was trained in and have practiced for most of my life. The humanistic tradition has its profound insights, its utilities, its affordances, and its limitations. All my posts in this blog have been generated from that rhetorical perspective and can be read from that perspective. So I am not denigrating; rather, I am expanding. In part, I am expanding because texts such as #MeToo force me to confront their rhizomatic nature while traditional articles, essays, poems, and posts do not—even though their rhizomatic nature is present. I see a thousand plateaus before me, and I want to walk there awhile.

Cognition Is a Rhizome

Comments on my last post spoke against applying the rhizome to higher education. I've thought about the objections, but making the rhizome practical still makes sense to me, and really, this blog is all about me trying to make sense of things. Still, the comments gave me pause enough to wonder if others have tried to tease out the practical implications of the rhizome for their own disciplines, so I did a bit of research and found lots of attempts, including this fine article called RHIZOMATIC SYSTEMS & THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENCE (On Slime Mold, Robots and Deleuze & Guattari) (03 May 2005) by Garnet Hertz, who attempts to apply the rhizome to the fields of artificial intelligence, artificial life, information/computer science, and robotics. I think Mr. Hertz provides some interesting ways to proceed, so I will.

Hertz notes that the rhizome has influenced numerous fields of study, but in this article he is interested in the efforts "to construct intelligence apart from a biological substrate" (2), a broad scientific effort which to date has relied mostly on arborescent modes of thought, those tree systems that D&G use in A Thousand Plateaus to contrast with rhizomes. Hertz describes this mode of thought as:

a system that is hierarchical, centered around a core belief, reductivistic, increasingly specialized, non-cyclical, linear, and ripe with segmentation and striation. Similar to a tree-like description of biological evolution or genealogy, arborescent systems start from a central origin and continue to evolve by branching into successively specialized generations. Vertical in nature, the arbolic is ordered, structured and “scientific”: it has a distinct train of thought, a clear inheritance, an order. (1)

This kind of thought and approach has not proven so effective in helping scientists create artificial intelligence. They still cannot create a device, for instance, that can amble across a crowded room without creating chaos, something a cockroach with vastly less computing power than IBM's Deep Blue can accomplish. Why? Because Deep Blue is mostly tracing known pathways, while the cockroach is mapping reality in its infinite variations. And as Hertz notes: "The real world is such a complicated [I prefer the term complex here] system that it is almost impossible to not leave something out while creating an abstraction of it" (8). Yes, Deep Blue can beat anyone at chess, but only because it has enough computing power to cycle through all available possible scenarios and moves, all tracings, very quickly. Deep Blue still couldn't get across an elementary school classroom. Children and cockroaches can—usually.

It may take all the computing power in the universe to enable an arborescent system to walk across a room. Rhizome to the rescue. According to Hertz, rhizomatic systems are:

non-linear, horizontal, nomadic, deterritorialized and heterogeneous. The rhizome cuts across and between the order of vertical space, connecting multiple points simultaneously in a network of nodes. Connected to each other at arbitrary points, the rhizomatic system is more concerned with the multiplicitous interlinking of concept, action and being. Although it lacks a central dogma of a trunk/brain, it is a horizontal, bottom-up system that produces an emergent system of metabehavior that is strong, robust, and intelligent... in the non-standard sense of the word. Within nature, rhizomatic systems like ants or grassy weeds eventually win … If intelligence could exist without a central brain, the rhizome would be it. (1, 2)

You don't need enormous computing power to walk across the room—you just need rhizomatic thought. You need a few simple strategies that map quickly and well as reality emerges around you. Being able to trace all known paths, even very quickly, is almost no help at all; rather, you must be able to map new paths as they emerge. Think birds in a flock, or players on the futbol pitch. Linear, arborescent thought is almost useless here. Fortunately, our brains are rhizomes. As D&G point out: "Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree" (15, ATP).

Hertz insists that "Individual organisms collect together into a swarm of particles that, despite having absolutely no centralized brain, is capable of complex tasks" (4), and offers as proof Toshiyuki Nakagaki's successful efforts in 2000 to teach slime mold to find the shortest path through a maze. "Without any standard cognitive powers, the swarm of slime emerged into a clever mass capable [of] solving the navigational puzzle without a leader, brain, command center, map or plan" (4). It seems likely that our own brains could likewise be described as "a swarm of particles" [neurons] … "without a leader, … command center, map or plan". Hertz could have offered as proof our own brains. There is no homunculus in our brains orchestrating all our mental activity; rather, the brain is a self-organizing swarm, ceasely mapping reality and its own internal resonances, mostly in unconscious ways out of which our conscious knowledge emerges. As I've quoted in this blog before, Olaf Sporns demonstrates that "cognition is a network phenomenon". Cognition is a rhizome.

And rhizomatic cognition trumps arborescent cognition when it comes to mapping and coping with the emergent real. A recent article "Reservoir Computing Properties of Neural Dynamics in Prefrontal Cortex” by Pierre Enel, Emmanuel Procyk, René Quilodran, and Peter Ford Dominey in PLOS Computational Biology (June 10 2016) demonstrates that primates, including humans, can learn and cope with novel situations that cannot be anticipated (programmed) by nature. A review of the technical article in Neuroscience News.com says:

This study shows that this seemingly miraculous pre-adaptation comes from connections between neurons that form recurrent loops where inputs can rebound and mix in the network, like waves in a pond, thus called “reservoir” computing. This mix of the inputs allows a potentially universal representation of combinations of the inputs that can then be used to learn the right behaviour for a new situation.

If you have ever watched waves in a pond, then you have watched the rhizome. Arborescent thought cannot map waves in a pond. Or rather, arborescent thought maps waves in a pond the same way a stick figure maps a person. You get the idea, but you would never confuse a stick figure for a person. At least, I hope not. However, you do confuse the map in your mind for the person. We do that all the time. That rhizomatic map seems so full-bodied and multi-dimensional. Of course, the map still isn't the person, but let's save that issue for another post.

So what does this mean for education? First, it does not mean that we should abandon arborescent thought, which has formed the basis of much of Western education and society for at least the last few centuries. Arborescent thought has driven our philosophy, industry, education, and politics, and it has yielded great benefits. Most of us of will never know starvation or homelessness because of arborescent thought. Society has benefitted much from the ability to create and harness machines and processes that trace programmed paths with great precision, speed, and reliability. For instance, I like the linear, arborescent process that makes it possible for me to push a key on my keyboard and the letter z pops up on the screen. Thanks be to the tree.

Arborescent thought can work very well and to great benefit in the simple and complicated domains where explicit, known paths can be traced to given goals. Much of education—to make a point, let's call it training—can be structured this way. Do A and then B, and always get C. Every student should do A and then B, and every student should get C. Those who arrive at C in the allotted amount of time and through their own efforts pass. Those who don't fail and must repeat. This is very much like the industrial form of education that Sir Ken Robinson has so famously attacked, but while arborescent, industrial education has many faults that are becoming increasingly obvious, it does have a kind of efficiency and efficacy. Modern societies are nearly universally literate, if literacy is measured at a fairly low level. This is real, measurable progress when compared to 300 years ago. If we want more, however, then arborescent education is not enough. If we want creative, engaged, resourceful students, and not just barely literate students, then we have to climb down out of the tree of knowledge and step onto the open, grassy plains of the savannah. We can keep the tree for a landmark, for a resting place, but we have to move beyond the arborescent and into the rhizomatic.

We do not have to settle for either one or the other. We can have both: arborescent and rhizomatic. The main point for me, and what I get from reading D&G, is that we should not rely solely on arborescent knowledge, learning, and thought. We must also, even mostly, rely on the rhizome. The ancient Jewish writers told us this centuries ago: pursued alone or above all else, the Tree of Knowledge leads away from the Garden, away from Eden. The dualism of the arborescent separates us from the rhizome. It replaces the right brain with the left, the master with the emissary, to use Iain McGilchrist's terms. From our perch at the top of the Tree of Knowledge, we can see the vast, open plains of grass, and we can be deceived into thinking that we can remain apart from it and master it. The grassy rhizome knows better.

Framing the Rhizome, #rhizo16

I have been writing in this blog about Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome since 2009 and over the past two years with some rhizo scholars in Dave Cormier's MOOCs. Several times I have tried to apply the rhizome to higher education in general and to my discipline, writing and rhetoric, in particular. I think this may be a fine time to try that again as a number of scholars have gathered online for #rhizo16, but that class has been postponed. So what I propose is an exploration of the six characteristics of the rhizome in terms of higher education with a special emphasis on each of our various disciplines.

My good rhizo friend Simon Ensor recently posted a link to a short video entitled Three Minute Theory: What is the Rhizome?, which I think is worth embedding here even though I take issue with a few statements that I will get to in later posts.



As they frame their discussion of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari say wryly, "We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome," and the rest of their essay explores six characteristics of that which is difficult to describe:

1. principles of connection and
2. heterogeneity,
3. principle of multiplicity,
4. principle of asignifying rupture,
5. principles of cartography and
6. decalcomania.

D&G bundle the first and last two characteristics together, which should not be ignored, but I start with their framing, such as it is and as if anyone could frame a rhizome. There's a Zen task for you: go frame a rhizome.

Actually, frame is the wrong term—I should use intensity. For me, the most conspicuous intensity in their writing the rhizome is writing itself. Writing and language, in its various forms and expressions, especially the book, resonate with great intensity in "Introduction: Rhizome". As they are restructuring the hierarchies of Western philosophy, D&G are also rewriting Western rhetoric. I suspect this is not an accident; rather, restructuring requires rewriting because the structures that we use to arrange our lives are bound closely to and are co-evolutionary with our language. They are co-emergent—not the same thing, but one is not possible—at least not as it is—without the other. The culture we have constructed depends on our language, which in turn depends on our culture. And like any rhizome, we cannot extricate one bit from the other. For thousands of years, we have been quite adept at writing the hierarchical, tree structures we have lived by. If we are to write the rhizome, then we must write differently—a different language for a different structure. I suspect this writing differently is one of the reasons most people find D&G so difficult to read.

D&G start by disassembling the three pillars of Western rhetoric: the author, the subject matter, and the reader. They smash the author and subject matter in the first paragraph:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. 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. (A Thousand Plateaus 3)

Since the Greeks began laying the groundwork of Western rhetoric some three thousand years ago, a coherent author and a coherent subject matter have been assumed core principles of effective rhetorical practice. It's still taught in college writing classes today: a clear, coherent voice with a thesis, a point to make about some single topic. This makes sense to us. D&G don't make sense. So who wrote this, D or G? Neither, not even both, but more—a rhizome, a swarm. So to whom do we send the check? assign the blame? award the credit? No one, even though we do anyway "because it's nice to talk like everybody else". What are we talking about? "Everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away". Well, okay … but I'm a coherent reader with a coherent set of beliefs, and I don't know who is talking or what they are talking about.

If you are coherent, you probably won't understand D&G, or worse, you will misunderstand them—mainly because you will insist on making them coherent. If you want to read the rhizome, then you as reader must be as smashed as the authors and topic. You must assume a clever pseudonym—your own name will work—to make yourself unrecognizable in turn and to render imperceptible what makes you act, feel, and think—even to yourself.

Now look over the edge. It's a long way down. Or maybe it's just inches. Distance is such a slippery concept in the rhizome. Jump.

Of course, the rhizome is not the point of "Introduction: Rhizome". It can never be the point. To write the rhizome, the writer, the reader, and the shared topic must all be acentered. Though not mentioned directly in the first paragraph as the authors and topic are, the reader is still there and all three are being acentered—author and topic by inflection, readers by innuendo. Most readers do not respond well to dissolution and loss of identity. Most everything in society points us away from dissolution. We want, need, and demand a clear, self-actualized identity, and we resist attempts to dissolve that identity. We do not want to reach the point where one no longer says I or even the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We do not want to lose ourselves. We have a huge investment here, and this could be worse than the Crash of '29.

And anyway, D&G say/s, "We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own." Isn't this a contradiction? No, not in the rhizome.

When the writer and subject are acentered, then they can assume no position, or can assume any position, right? If you've read D&G, then you see where this is going: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (7).

The rhizome is not the point or the subject here. Actually, there is something of a problem with the term subject. Is subject the writer or the topic? Or both. D&G write about the subject:

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. (3)

Here, subject clearly means the author. Or does it? I don't know if French subject/suget carries this ambiguity, but when we English writing teachers speak of the subject we are referring to the topic of a piece of writing. Perhaps D&G were playing with this ambiguity when they say a few paragraphs later: "There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object" (4). Or no subject. It also has no author, or subject. It also has no reader. Well, any point can connect to any other point in a rhizome and must.

Well, this lands us in a difficult place, especially if we want to make sense of the rhizome for higher education, or any education. And D&G note that we have worked hard over the millennia to avoid this place. We have rather studiously avoided writing the rhizome, the voice in the whirlwind, the acentered voice of God and the cosmic microwave background radiation. That way lies insanity and enlightenment—usually indistinguishable. The stars must have patterns, logical patterns about sensible stories that explain things.

So we have written sensible books with roots, D&G say:

A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. (5)

We have abstracted the world to create a better image, an image that we can control and use, and we thereby split the world in two. We did God better. God created one world, we created two. And we made ourselves "the beneficent God to explain geological movements" (3). Language was the technology that allowed us to become as gods. It is what separated us from our creation. One view, one position, one author, one topic, one reader.

The second type of book is more intricate, but no less damaging:

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, but the root's unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality. (5, 6)

With the radicle-system, we become inclusive and are fascinated with the sophistication of all those tendrils floating this way and that. We forget that they all return to the root, that we still demand unity. Michel Serres says it best, I think, in his book Genesis (1995):

We are fascinated by the unit; only a unity seems rational to us. We scorn the senses, because their information reaches us in bursts. We scorn the groupings of the world, and we scorn those of our bodies. For us they seem to enjoy a bit of the status of Being only when they are subsumed beneath a unity. Disaggregation and aggregation, as such, and without contradiction, are repugnant to us. Multiplicity, according to Leibniz, is only a semi-being. A cartload of bricks isn't a house. Unity dazzles on at least two counts: by its sum and by its division. That herd must be singular in its totality and it must also be made up of a given number of sheep or buffalo. We want a principle, a system, an integration, and we want elements, atoms, numbers. We want them, and we make them. A single God, and identifiable individuals. The aggre­gate as such is not a well-formed object; it seems irrational to us. The arithmetic of whole numbers remains a secret foundation of our understanding; we're all Pythagorians. We think only in monadologies. (2, 3)

We don't like this semi-being. We want a coherent individual who is a member of a coherent group. We want a unity. We want a unified discipline that we can teach to students we can identify, but as Serres wryly notes, "Nevertheless, we are as little sure of the one as of the multiple" (3). We want the one root or the radicle, but the world keeps presenting us with something else: the rhizome, the cosmic background radiation, the noise, God. Damn.

So here's what I'm proposing: let's frame the rhizome within higher education. What are the implications for our very classes, our curricula, if we take this acentering seriously?

And let me say that I don't think D&G mind us framing the rhizome at all. The rhizome includes tubers and bulbs. It's expected. It's how we make sense of things—we frame it. The issue for D&G, I think, certainly the issue for me, is when we think our frame is all that there is—that the frame is the Truth. It isn't. It's just a frame, a device to help us see better. But we make a big mistake if we forget that the rhizome stretches far beyond and "whistles far and wee".

Deleuze, Serres, and the Desires of Prepositions

What I propose here is a travelog, the flow and emergence of an idea. I want to ride the Chattooga River of my blog posts over the past year, and along the way, I want to map the desires of prepositions and determine what the desires of these little words have to do with the ways we conduct higher education. The Chattooga starts as a small stream in the mountains of North Carolina, but it quickly becomes a raging, uncontrollable river as it snakes and twists its way between Georgia and South Carolina. Along this boundary between the two states, the Chattooga has some of the most challenging and dangerous rapids in the United States, but soon in flows into the Tugaloo River and becomes more calm. By the time the Tugaloo flows into the Savannah River, the Chattooga has become a placid and respectable. This narrative structure may work for me, or it may not. Let's see.

Like the Chattooga, my ride begins in the headwaters, on a mountain, with a trickle, a spring that bubbles up from somewhere deep. This particular stream broke the rocks one year ago at the Southern Humanities Conference at the end of January, 2014, and with the MOOC Rhizomatic Learning: The Community Is the Curriculum (Rhizo14), that ran through February and into early March, when I contributed to a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) about Rhizo14 started by Sarah Honeychurch and Maha Bali. MOOCs were on my mind, and I did not yet know that I had not finished either SHC or Rhizo14, but had just begun the flow of ideas that they spun me into.

My thinking started innocently enough, as I wrote a couple of posts about who was in Rhizo14 and who wasn't. Boundaries are a tricky issue online, and the Rhizo14 group was questioning who belonged in, who belonged out, and how we could tell the difference. I thought I brought some clarity to the idea of boundaries, and my thoughts were tight and tidy.

As is often the case, however, the quiet trickle of a meditative mountain stream leads to a precipitous fall. Falls are beautiful unless you are in them, and then they can be scary. In April, I suffered a great fall, a sudden realization that I did not understand the nature of connectivist-style MOOCs, those massive open online courses that I had been engaging since 2010 and was trying to describe in the Rhizo14 autoethnography. I was walking one balmy, South Florida evening, thinking about Rhizo14, when all my thoughts fell suddenly away. The ground collapsed beneath me, and I had the unshakeable conviction that I had no idea what I was doing or talking about. This seems overly dramatic, I know, but that's how it felt as I described in my April 23 post A Rhizomatic Snow Crash. I had to find a new way to think, because my current thinking was not getting it done.

I started with noise, a concept I had gleaned from Michel Serres' book Genesis (1995). After all, genesis is a fine place to start, in the beginning with the swarm, with the chaos, with the undifferentiated whole. I was determined to go way back, to start again, for as Serres says, "Background noise is the first object of metaphysics, the noise of the crowd is the first object of anthropology. The background noise made by the crowd is the first object of history. Before lan­guage, before even the word, the noise." I can report truthfully that my head was very noisy.

My first realization was that there is no position outside the noise, no objective stance away that says the noise is over there apart from me, and I can assess it and judge it from over here apart from over there. If you've ever run a wild river such as the Chattooga, then you understand noise. On the Chattooga, you are always inside the noise, part of the noise. The noise flows through and around you. There is no transcending the noise of the river, nor is the noise transcendent. The noise is always immanent. Actually, transcendent as something beyond and immanent as something inherent mean nothing in the noise. The noise simply is, and you are simply in it, differentiated more or less at different times, but never distanced. Your own noise is included in the noise but not inclusive of it.

And this was my second realization: if I am to define what cMOOCs are, then I must define from the inside out, not from the customary outside in. This is a tip I had picked up from Edgar Morin's book On Complexity (2008), but my ride over the falls made it obvious to me and helped me understand it, from the inside. There are things you can learn in the swirl, tug, and fall of the river that you just can't learn standing on the banks.

Early in May, in a post entitle Experience and the Ludic in Rhizomatic Education, I hit the ludic rapids that often emerge just below the falls. The rapids introduced the concept of play, very active play, and not merely play as the fun behavior of children, though it certainly includes that, but play as mapping and performance as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their chapter "Rhizome" in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and play as the basis of much of culture as Huizinga insists in his book Homo Ludens (1970). Play, or performance, is all about mapping new pathways in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. And it all starts from inside the great noise. When you are riding the Chattooga, you are in the noise and in contact with the real, and you realize that play is both exhilarating and deadly serious. You can drown here.

I was happy for the play. I might not actually get anywhere, but it could be a fun trip. And as I was riding the rapids, I was connecting to other Rhizo14 alumni, specifically Maha Bali of Egypt, Shyam Sharma of Nepal, Simon Ensor of France, Clarissa Bazerra of Brazil, and Frances Bell of England in posts such as Sliding Out through Rhizo14. My play space was enlarging. My raft was getting bigger, and it was filled with interesting playmates. The noise was a rich and fecund field out of which voices arose, faded, and emerged again, yelling excitedly as the raft twisted, rocked, and threatened to flip.

At the end of May, I realized that my wild river of ideas had begun in a trickle of tears even before Rhizo14 in my January presentation to the Southern Humanities Conference in Richmond, VA. I wrote a post Emergence and Crying in Public about crying as I presented an emotional paper and tender thoughts flowed through me and down my face. It seems the springs of the Chattooga really do originate deep in the heart of the mountain in waters flowing all the way from the last ice age and before. As it happened, Linnéa Franits of Utica College was on that same panel with me, and she shared with me her own account of crying in public in her article "Mothers as Storytellers" in the Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio book Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge (2011), a collection of—get this—autoethnographies. Okay … so flows start way back long before you are aware of them, and when you grab a flow, other flows start converging. Flows want to connect. It's how flowing rivers and flowing ideas work. Trajectories of different flows synchronize and respond to each other. Most curious.

I desired to keep riding this flow to learn where it might go, but I had not used the term desire yet. That was to come.

In early June and still in the rapids, Ronald L shared with me Nicholas C. Burbules' article The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy (2000), which explores and challenges "the claims made on behalf of dialogue as an inherently liberatory pedagogy". In my post, Turbulence and Dialog in Rhizo14, I said:

Dialogue is an open-ended engagement in that zone between order and chaos, and while we want the dialogue to end in order (a meaningful consensus), chaos is always at hand and possible. Dialogue, then, is dynamically poised between promise and terror, meaning and nonsense, consensus and strife, resolution and dissolution. Dialogue is turbulent, and while consensus is possible, it is not always probable. And it is not necessarily desirable.

If you want to understand that dialogic tension that drives most of reality, ride the Chattooga River. You are dynamically poised between promise and terror, sense and nonsense, resolution and dissolution. That's exactly where I was in my thinking. Eyes wide and holding on. And my raft was getting bigger, accommodating more mates. And notice the title of my June post: Turbulence in Rhizo14. As I look back on it, I can't help but think that I was already writing this post, but perhaps that is just an illusion of narrative.

In July, I joined CLMOOC, mostly because of my Rhizo14 colleague Kevin Hodgson. In response to one of the CLMOOC prompts and a chance mention, I critiqued Pierre Dillenbourg’s introductory chapter "What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’?" in his 1999 book Collaborative-learning to see if he could provide me with an analytical approach to MOOCs. I devoted three long posts trying to make his methods work for me, but I couldn't do it, and my raft was stuck on a rock for much of the month of July. This is a dangerous place to be in rapidly moving current, as you risk capsizing trying to re-enter the stream.

Fortunately, I made it back into the stream by the end of the month with the post Who's Writing the Rhizo14 Ethnography. I re-read the Rhizo14 CAE and saw that not much new had happened with it. Others seemed to be as stuck in the rocks as I was.

A couple of days later in an August post entitled Educational Research: At the Heart of Things, I connected the Rhizo14 CAE with complexity studies after reading an article by Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara entitled Complexity as a theory of education (2008). This proved to be a major stream feeding into my own, and as usually happens when streams join together, they swell into a wider, deeper, and more stable river. The rapids were receding, and I was starting to make progress toward the desires of prepositions. Complexity studies carry the flows of many disciplines, and although it is by no means a well-defined discipline, it brings many useful concepts such as emergence. This would be most helpful.

Then, in the first week of September, half a year after Rhizo14, I announced in a post called Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing that I would approach the Rhizo14 CAE through a study of its prepositions. That I should use prepositions seems so obvious to me now, but at the time, it was not. I really had no idea how to proceed, but I had an intuition based on Serres' "argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions." To my mind, "prepositions are the connective, connecting tissue that connects this to that in a pattern that works and makes sense." If I could follow the prepositions in the CAE, then I was certain that they would tell me something I might not otherwise learn.

This was the approach to complexity that I needed, and with this decision, my river run settled into its longer, slower phase as the water calmed. At last, I thought I knew what I was doing, and I could get on with the business of doing rather than just surviving. Now I merely had to learn how to follow prepositions and note where they might lead.

In a post called bluntly enough Coding Prepositions in the Rhizo14 Autoethnography, I started by coding prepositions in the CAE, taking about as simple an approach as is imaginable: I used the Google spreadsheet from Maha Bali to list all the prepositions in the CAE, listed the dictionary definitions as the categories for each definition, and matched a definition/category to each preposition. This wasn't such a bad way to begin as, one, it was somewhat similar to the coding my Rhizo14 colleagues were doing, and two, it forced me into some fairly close reading of the CAE, but the category approach had a couple of problems that became obvious almost immediately.

First, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. I had 652 instances of the preposition of in a 23,717 word document. A spreadsheet was simply inadequate for handling this kind of big data. I needed a better tool.

Then, my category choices were very problematic. At times, a given instance of a preposition might fit several categories. I thought about just assigning several categories, but that felt messy, and I didn't want to do it. At other times, some prepositions didn't seem to fit any of the dictionary definitions that I had gotten from my MacBook's online dictionary. I thought about using a better dictionary with more definitions—say, the Oxford English Dictionary, but I was quickly souring on the idea of discrete categories. It seemed wrong, and I was a bit lost and somewhat afraid that my river was about to spread out into a trackless swamp.

By mid-September, my thinking had taken two fortunate turns which appear in the post A Tale of Two Sentences: Rhizo14 Auto-ethnography. First, I decided to analyze two sentences rather than all of them. While I often attack reductionism as the preferred, blessed approach to all issues, I still recognize that it has its utility: it allowed me to focus on a manageable sub-scale (two sentences) with the promise of extrapolating my findings to the larger scale of the CAE. Then, I decided to use Voyant Tools, a suite of text analysis tools by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. I would have to learn to use the tools as I was trying to apply them to the CAE, but it was clear that the spreadsheet was hopeless. These two shifts led to my first real sense of what prepositions do in conversation:

This captures for me a basic function of prepositions: to start in the center and to extend outward in space, time, and relational structures. This is defining from the inside out. This is defining in terms of relationships rather than in terms of identifiable qualities of the thing itself. This approach to prepositions in particular and to sentence structure in general implies that meaning is not an identifiable quality of a word but is an emergent property of how words relate to other words.

I can see now, though I still couldn't see in mid-September, that I was flowing into the desires of prepositions. For me now, the journey seems inevitable at this point, but I still had some paddling to do.

During the entire trip from the mountain stream, over the falls, through the rapids, and into the deep river, I was reading and talking to my Rhizo14 cohort. Some of the reading and conversations I have mentioned, much of it I haven't. Most all of it had to do with complexity, with some articles about prepositions thrown in. This reading was, of course, dredging the river for me, making it deeper. A deep river loses its turbulences, but it gains something in tides and currents—slower forces, but just as strong—in the long run, stronger.

In the second week of October, I wrote A Background for Studying Prepositions in Rhizo14 Auto-Ethnography, seemingly a bit late in the trip for a background, but I think I sensed that I was on the verge of some new ideas for me, and I needed to sort through some things, or maybe just take a deep breath before paddling on. I say for me because I really don't think many people have truly original ideas—maybe just a handful per society per century, but this doesn't matter really, and I take it as no diminution of my own discoveries here. For me, they were new, and that's really good news. Anyone can have new ideas, even children. In fact, I suspect that children have more new ideas than anyone, and that's why they learn so much so fast. Of course, we educators knock that shit out of their heads with our rote, regimented curricula, but most children do start off quite well.

I returned to meditating on Serres and Latour and made a big decision: I would try to define from the inside out. I would try to avoid applying a given theory and problem to Rhizo14 CAE and instead let the theory and problem arise from it. Rather than applying connectivism, say, to the CAE, I would try to meditate on the arcs of the prepositions and let patterns emerge as they might. Most importantly, I would not dismiss those arcs that made no pattern that I could see. I would have faith that the pattern is there somewhere and that Rhizo14 is intelligible. Forgetting your theoretical training is, of course, impossible to do, but as Derrida says, perhaps tongue in cheek, if we do only the possible, we don't do much. I make no claim to having actually accomplished it, but it set me on the path to righteousness and got me much further down the river. It allowed some new stuff to emerge.

Later in October, I met with Simon Ensor, Frances Bell, and Terry Elliot online, and the issue of Gamergate caught my attention, so I wrote a post Left/Write and the Desires of Prepositions that re-awakened my interest in Iain McGilchrist's ideas about the different world views of the left and right brain, and for the first time I wrote about the "desires of prepositions". I realized that, although both left and right brain connect to the world for different reasons—the left to manipulate and possess, the right to relate—they both desperately want to connect, regardless of their different reasons. The desire for connection comes first. And one of those little light bulbs turned on to reveal prepositions doing the same thing. Prepositions find their entire purpose in connecting. Well, yeah. It was such an obvious thing, that I'm a bit embarrassed that I hadn't seen it sooner, but there it is late in October.

On October 30, Maha Bali and I started writing a Google Doc called Writing the Unreadable Untext. We had such fun that we invited some of our Rhizo14 buddies to join in the mayhem, and we all discovered our swarm voice over the next several days. The swarm voice was all about connecting, swarming about each other, bringing in this and that. The Unreadable Untext is a map, "an experimentation in contact with the real", and not a tracing or an analysis. It is a performance, not a competent tracing with elucidations from point A to point B, pulling out of the noise of the swarm a logic that is clearly there, but that the swarm ignores and flows around. As we wrote the Untext, we were susceptible to constant modification, reworked. Our aim was performance, not competence. It was all very Deleuzional.

Not until the middle of November in a post called Rise of the iSwarm: A First Global Look at the Rhizo14 Auto-ethnography did I connect the swarm idea with prepositions. Prepositions create swarms. I didn't know that, but there it was. I could see it in the numbers and patterns I generated with the Voyant tools. I slipped into a strong current, confident that this was going somewhere.

By mid-December, I had mapped one of the less frequently occurring prepositions into (33 occurrences), and the resulting image was so very pleasing to me. It settled into my heart and head like an old, dear friend that I had just met for the first time.

Prepositions are really all about connecting things into a swarm. How satisfying.

Of course, this is only a static snapshot of the swarm, and I do not yet have the tools that will create a more dynamic image or movie, but imagine looking at a swarm of locusts out on the plains. Now imagine that you can identify 33 of those locusts and that you can track them through their own small-scale swarm and through the large-scale swarm. That's what I have in mind, and I'm convinced that I can do it, though I haven't yet. In fact, I believe Voyant Tools can handle this if I just learn how to rig it.

Early in January, I tackled the problem of polysemy in prepositions. It seems that most everyone has recognized that prepositions can mean any number of things, but not many seem to know what to make of that. Meaning as a characteristic of a word itself and independent of a context seems an unshakeable tenet of faith. But the abstract of a 2008 presentation by Dagmara Dowbor entitled "The case of over revisited: Results from a corpus-linguistic analysis and further proposals" provided me with a more complex understanding of meaning as something that is always context-dependent. At least in the case of prepositions, meaning is not context-independent. I tied this in my mind to some earlier articles I had read by Paul Cilliers that discussed how meaning in general is always context-dependent, and I realized just how unsatisfactory the dictionary's list of often disconnected meanings for a single preposition really is. Prepositions don't really mean much until they are in a sentence coupling this to that. It is the coupling that meaning emerges from. (Ending an English sentence with a preposition is a major faux pas, but I'm convinced that it's because it brings too much attention to a little word that most grammarians want to bury in the middle of the sentence. This may not be factual, but it seems true.)

A few days later, I reworked this insight, trying to connect it to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire by showing that the meaning of a preposition is immanent rather than transcendent. I don't know that this use of immanent and transcendent will stand examination, but what I meant is that the meaning of a preposition is inherent in the coupling marked by the preposition. It is not dependent on some appeal to something beyond the coupling. I don't know that this was the correct way to connect prepositions to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire, but it's what I had at hand, and I explored it. A better connection can likely be made through D&G's concept of mapping, but that's for later.

This brought me finally to the post The Desires of Prepositions written just 10 days ago, when I finally made a stab at defining what I meant by the desires of prepositions. As I understand Deleuze and Guattari, they see desires as the complex flows of drives through reality, the flows that couple different things to produce new things. The opening paragraph of Anti-Oedipus (1977) says best what desire is:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (8)

Prepositions, then, are desiring machines. They are the couplings that connect words together into a flow of information that flows into us, through us, and out of us, coupling ideas to ideas, ideas to us, and us to others. We desire to know, to connect, to couple with ideas and people and this wonderful world, and that coupling produces all the new things that the Universe appears to be so fond of.

It occurs to me now—just two days before I deliver this talk to the SHC and publish it on my blog—that I could have traced the prepositions in my blog posts as I am tracing them in the CAE, and that way, my presentation could have embodied my presentation. I like that, but old habits die hard, and this narrative occurred to me first.

So what did I learn about the ways that we teach and learn in higher education? Perhaps the biggest lesson is that desire for connection flows through all of us. I hear regular complaints that college students are apathetic and don't want to learn. This isn't true.  Everyone wants to connect to new things and to learn, as is obvious to anyone who has ever visited a kindergarten class. Kids will wallow with anyone, with anything, or with any idea to produce something new. Anyone who can create a castle out of a cardboard box has no problems with creativity. For the most part, kids are all about connecting. (This, of course, has dire implications during cold and flu season as kids spread diseases easily, but the easy spread of germs just illustrates the ease of connectivity among kids).

My second insight is that we educators mostly mishandle the desires to connect and learn, the flows, that our students already have. While all students want to learn new things, they may not immediately want to learn our things. Because we have only a short time to cover our material, to trace the flow of our information, we disregard the flows of energy and information that the student is already in. We ignore their trajectories. It's worse than ignoring, we are willfully ignorant of their trajectories, assuming that the only value in our class is the trajectory of our own information. We make too little attempt to coordinate and connect student trajectories to our trajectories. Regardless of our subject matter, all of us have a few students who show up ready to jump into the flow of our information, but too many students don't show up ready, and we make too little attempt, especially given the constraints of traditional classroom structures, to identify their trajectories and fit them to our trajectories.

Or better yet, to fit our trajectory to their trajectories. Why not? I teach college writing in a professional school with not a single English major. Most of my students think of Composition I and II as required hoops to jump through, at best, or damned obstructions to their professional goals, at worst. If I can't show them how good written communications complements their professional trajectories, then I have lost them. I have to start with them where they are and try to flow with them and help them flow with me.

We also mishandle student desires to learn by truncating our own desires to learn. Too many teachers quit learning in their classrooms. They choke off and turn back upon itself the natural desire to connect to ideas and to people. They see the flow in the classroom as one way—from themselves to the student—and they don't see themselves joining that flow. This kind of flow is devoid of all desire, and why should we expect our students to want travel such a dry, rocky stream? It is passionless, with no excitement.

Then, what have I learned from tracking prepositions? First, I have come to appreciate how complex and multidimensional writing is. Prepositions couple the flow of one idea to another to create new ideas. Like a flock of birds or a swarm of bees, prepositions orchestrate the flow of ideas in a text. This has always been so, but static print concealed this dynamic flow of ideas through text. Modern technology has made this flow of desire more apparent. The Untext written by the Rhizo14 cohort was a visceral demonstration of the iSwarm voice and the swarm of ideas that flow through a text as a swarm of writers desire to connect to each other and to new ideas. Just today, I participated in a #MOOCMOOC Twitter chat. The swarm of ideas and the emergent iSwarm voice was obvious, graphically displayed for all to see. We have traditionally thought of English text as linear, but it is linear in the way DNA is linear. It is an expression of a genetic flow, and it's the unpacking and expression of that flow that creates meaning. We need new reading and writing skills and strategies to handle flowing text.

I've also learned that prepositions are both makers and markers of coupling. They join and those joints are trackable. This gives me a new strategy for engaging texts, a strategy that I intend to employ much in the coming months. I do not yet know if others have used this strategy, but I hope so. I'd like to see how they track prepositions, or some other part of speech, to unpack a text.

Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing

I never expected to be writing about prepositions, but it's the approach I've decided to take with the Rhizo14 auto-ethnography, so I want to sketch what I think I'm doing and why and how I'm doing it. This is a preliminary sketch, so expect abrupt turns of the page and new, emergent directions. In rhizomatic terms, expect lots of deterritorializations and reterritorializations. If you've ever heard the ruffle and rush of a covey of quail scattering in the cold, steel-blue dawn, then you're ready.

I became interested in the rhizomatic potential of prepositions after reading the conversation between Bruno Latour and Michel Serres in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), in which Serres talks about his "'philosophy of prepositions'--an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions." It was an intriguing concept, but I didn't have a concrete way to engage it until the auto-ethnography emerged. A group of us decided to independently code the entries in the auto-ethnography, and then compare our codings. I jumped at the chance to work the prepositions, and I assumed that most of the other coders would base their coding systems on substantives and verbs as "the linguistic key to understanding human interactions." I had an intuition that prepositions, and prepositional-like elements, might be the linguistic engines that power the rhizome in language. What do I mean by that?

For me, rhizomes are first about connections: making connections, dropping connections, arranging connections into patterns. At its deepest level, the rhizome itself is all possible and potential connections (and even the impossible connections, in a kind of indiscriminate heterogenous coupling and tripling and clustering)—in Serres' terms, it's noise—but humans inevitably select, reduce, and map, bringing a few nodes into relief from the swelter of possible nodes and constructing patterns out of those nodes. Those patterns are what we mean by meaning. Language is one of the core tools we use to map our worlds and to create patterns—both helpful and harmful, rational and whimsical—and prepositional-like elements are the hooks, angels, hermes, and messenger particles that connect the actors (nouns) and actions (verbs) of our thought and arrange them. An early metaphor that emerged for me was prepositions as stage directors, positioning actors on the stage, giving directions about which way to move in relation to other actors, props, audience, and the stage itself, and ramping up the next scene. They are very busy, and they have to know everything. Yup—those little, largely ignored prepositions. Prepositions are the connective, connecting tissue that connects this to that in a pattern that works and makes sense. It's a really big job.

And connections beget connections. There is something here to do with desire, the energetic working of the rhizome through things. Prepositions are little desiring machines, to use Deleuze and Guattari, and they desire to connect, to break connections and to reconnect (to deterritorialize and reterritorialize down lines of flight), to emerge, dissolve, and reemerge. They are promiscuous at all levels: phrase, sentence, paragraph, section. This promiscuity works in my reading as I work to code the auto-ethnography (I think it's time to rehabilitate the term promiscuous, not to eliminate the sexual but to expand its field beyond the merely sexual). I have become the intersection of several documents that resonate with my thoughts about the role of prepositions in writing (notice how things appear when you look? they were in the noise all along. looking made them emerge). Simon Ensor sent me an article about ecological psychology on Wikipedia. Terry Elliot wrote a post GOODBYE, CLASSROOM. HELLO, CONNECTION JUKEBOX. that claims we are all "a magnificent and unique filter for the world. Your neurons fire in ways that no one else does or can. If you are attuned to that and share that, you will be adding signal and not noise to the world." Then, two people mentioned their attention shifting from nouns to verbs, Frances Bell in a comment on Maha Bali's wonderful post Network vs community – cc #rhizo14 autoethnog and Aaron Davis's post PLN, a Verb or a Noun?. Is everyone thinking about parts of speech? Finally, just now, tonight as I am struggling with what to say in this post, Simon Ensor writes in his post Spacetimecontinuum …:

I notice how connections suddenly come alive, dormant for indeterminate time they suddenly fire and images, words, ideas flow out.

This appears to be learning.

I start to review the tags that I throw unthinkingly on my blog posts, there is no getting around those key words -

COMMUNITY, CONNECTION, LEARNING. 

I virtually never write, I never write what I think, imagine, or foresee I am going to write. I am written.

In more prosaic terms: how do prepositions drive the emergence of a sentence into meaning? How do they both coalesce (inward) the potential energy of nouns and verbs into coherent structures AND vibrate (outward) with enough heat to trigger the emergence of larger structures of meaning that flesh out our ideas? This is a very subtle trick, and I'd like to know more about it. Along the way, I think I will learn more about the rhizome and how it can lead to community and away from community. We'll see.

So I'm starting to read about prepositions, and I'm finding a fairly deep if not extensive body of work about them (or on them? which preposition do you prefer here: about or on? it makes a difference. you be the director and make the call). Of course, I'm having to learn a new vocabulary, pulled mostly from cognitive linguistics, where I'm bumping into George Lakoff again, and one of my first new words is polysemy (many possible meanings for a given word). It seems that prepositions just won't take a definition and stick to it. This is driving some really bright and otherwise normal scholars nuts, including Mr. Lakoff, as they search for boxes big enough to put a tiny preposition in. It's similar to what quantum physicists went through when they first started realizing that electrons just can't be pinned down to one place and one speed. Elementary particles such as electrons are frenetic, jittery, smudged, probabilistic entities that most likely exist here but could also be someplace across the universe. Messenger particles, hermes, angels. Prepositions, too, are frenetic. They most likely mean this, but they could mean something else as well. They could mean multiple things at the same time. They violate Aristotle's principle of the excluded third. How messed up is that?

Old-fashioned grammarians hate this kind of imprecision and waffling, but it's perfect if you want to explore the rhizome, as I do. This is very much like elementary particles: it's the frenetic jitteriness and vibrations of those tiny strings that make them imprecise (not reducible to a single, well-defined point) and that generates the energy that fuels the universe. Likewise, prepositions have a frenetic energy that fuels language such as this blog post.

Prepositions are easy to overlook. I first went through the auto ethnographic entries by Maha Bali and Sarah Honeychurch merely to identify all the prepositions they used. As I was going back through to code each preposition, I found more—not the weird ones, but the common ones: on, of, in, and the like. Easy to overlook, but we lose much when we do.

I don't want to suggest any disparagement of nouns and verbs, but prepositions have caught my attention for the moment. I want to see where they take me. So far, it's been a fun ride.

Practical View of the Rhizome for #rhizo14

I've joined Dave Cormier's MOOC Rhizomatic Learning - The community is the curriculum (#rhizo14), and I want to respond to his challenge for Week 1 to provide an immediately accessible idea of what the rhizome is. This is quite a challenge because I'm not sure that the rhizome as a metaphor is so easily accessible for many people, in large part because it ignores so much of what we in Western culture take to be fundamentally true about the world. We might be able to paraphrase Nils Bohr's comment about quantum theory by saying, "Anyone who is not shocked by the rhizome has not understood it." Still, Bohr made that comment some time ago, and much about quantum theory and the rhizome (I see them as aspects of the same intellectual train of thought) has crept into popular consciousness. Anyway, I suspect that most of the people in Rhizo14 are already somewhat receptive to complexity thinking, or they wouldn't be in a MOOC such as this.

The rhizome as a metaphor for how the world structures itself comes from the 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Because it is a metaphor, its meaning is more figurative than literal. For many reasons, I find it useful to contrast the rhizome as a metaphor for the universe to the Enlightenment metaphor that the universe is a clock. Of course, the universe is literally neither clock nor rhizome, but starting with either of those images will lead you to very different ideas about how the universe works. It will change your world view. The rhizome has certainly changed mine and continues to do so as I work deeper into it.

In general, Western culture has been shifting from the clock/mechanical metaphor to the rhizome/organic metaphor for understanding the world. For Descartes, Newton, Locke, and those others, the universe was a large mechanical device made up of distinct parts, moving and interacting in precise, measurable ways. Life was complicated (many parts, many interactions), but ultimately understandable and describable. To understand any system, all you had to do was break it down to its smallest parts and interactions (analyze it), and then put it back together. As Morin has noted in his book On Complexity (2002), this mechanistic/reductionist approach to the world and knowledge has been wildly successful, leading to the rich, technologically advanced, modern societies that we all now enjoy.

But it wasn't perfect. The insights of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others have shown the limitations of the mechanical clock metaphor. Most importantly, the clock metaphor leaves out Life, which turns out to be really important to most people. We've noticed, for instance, that when you analyze a frog—breaking it down into its many parts and tracing the interactions—you learn lots of useful things, but you also lose something: Life. The frog is dead, and you can't put it back together as you could a clock. This is a big problem, and not just for the frog. We need a new metaphor for the universe that includes Life. The old clock metaphor is killing us, literally and figuratively. The rhizome is a really good organic metaphor for the universe and how it works, though you can find others that may work just as well.

So for me, the rhizome is a useful metaphor that is part of the shift in thought from the complicated (mechanical clock) to the complex (organic rhizome) that has been going on for the past century.

Unfortunately, most of our thinking and almost all of our institutions are still based on the clock metaphor. As Sir Ken Robinson shows so well in his RSA video, we still mostly construct schools on the archetypal mechanical model: the factory. Life does not work well in a clock model. In fact, it hates it. No one wants to be "a cog in something turning" (as Joni Mitchell sang), so we had Woodstock and quantum physics and relativity. The transition is still underway.

Even more unfortunately, this transition has not been orderly. It has proceeded rhizomatically rather than mechanically, with lines of flight going this way and that, connecting hippies with quantum physicists with soccer moms. My mechanical retelling of the story here leaves out all the interesting, rich, nuanced life of the tale, but I suspect that all of us know some part of it. Fortunately, a century or so into the shift, we can begin to see some of the broad arcs a little more clearly than even Deleuze and Guattari could see, but it can still be a disturbing view. It's why so many still have trouble shifting from the traditional, sequential, mechanical course of study to a new-fangled, networked, organic MOOC. All the old, familiar structures are gone, and the new structures are seldom obvious. This is almost always disturbing, unless you're one of those who like jumping out into the void without a parachute. Most of us don't, fortunately.

I came to the rhizome through building electronic networks for colleges and school systems, an approach that I share with Manuel Lima, a network design engineer at Microsoft, who in the RSA video below, provides an excellent and well-illustrated introduction to rhizomatic thinking—the kind of thinking you have to have if you want to understand how to make the Internet work. The video is also cool because of its mention of the rhizome and Deleuze and Guattari, if only in drawings.

I think Lima understands the rhizome, and he touches on a number of themes that you will find in complexity studies, especially how we are shifting from a tree structure of knowledge to a rhizomatic structure. (Note the problems with giving metaphors a too literal interpretation: both trees and rhizomes are organic, complex, living entities, but the tree is often used metaphorically to represent a rigid, hierarchical, mechanical view of life and knowledge. Avoid being too literal with any of these metaphors). The complicated view of knowledge breaks everything up into disciplines, while the rhizomatic view reunifies knowledge in an over-arching transdisciplinarity.

And note at the end of the video that Lima comes very close to saying that the rhizome is a universal structure that echoes from the micro scale to the macro scale, from neurons in a mouse brain to galaxies in a region of space. Thus, the rhizome is about as absolute a concept or structure as you can get a post-structuralist to commit to. I do not know if the rhizome will hold up for very long as a metaphor for reality, but I am convinced that it greatly expands the narrow, reductionist clock metaphor and can correct some of the imbalances, faults, and limitations of that metaphor. The rhizome gives us more places to go and more ways to get there than ever before. We can continue to construct and run schools on the model of factories, but we should not be surprised when the students and the knowledge, and even some of the teachers, squirt out the side doors (deterritorialize in lines of flight) and head naked for the hills, connecting to all those oh-so-interesting things outside the curriculum.

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.

Why Rhizomatic Learning? Pt. 3 #etmooc

So does the rhizome bring anything to connectivism that it doesn't already have? I don't really know, but I do know that the rhizome helps me think about connectivism in ways that I otherwise find difficult. I also find rhizomatic thinking familiar and evocative for a teacher of writing and literature. To my mind, the rhizome is a metaphor, not a model. A model is created to represent something else, often eliminating much detail and changing the scale to focus on some salient aspects of interest to the model creator and to make handling easier. The rhizome does not model the educational process (or any other process) in this way. Rather, the rhizome is more a metaphor that evokes the way reality works by comparing it, in some points but not all, to the way a rhizome works. The rhizome is evocative rather than descriptive, and it is in no way prescriptive. Evocation works well for me, but the more explicit minded may find the rhizome irrelevant and distracting.

One cannot take the rhizome as metaphor too literally, then. For instance, some have complained that rhizomes are a multiplication of the same plant over and over, and they find little appeal in this kind of mindless repetition, especially when applied to learning. These people are taking the metaphor too literally. The rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari is not a homogeneous botanical system; rather, heterogeneity is one of the six characteristics of their rhizome. As they say, "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (7). Homogeneity, then, is not one of the points at which Deleuze and Guattari's compare rhizomes to reality. A metaphor invites one to explore all connections between the two things compared, but not all connections will prove useful or enlightening. Love is a rose, but not in all aspects.

If I understand the rhizome correctly, then, it is a metaphor of reality similar to the Enlightenment metaphor of the clock. Just as Galileo, Newton, and Descartes gave us the image of a clock to help us envision how the way too big Universe works, Deleuze and Guattari give us the image of a rhizome to help us make the shift from a mechanistic universe to an organic universe and to the math, science, and technology that make sense of that much expanded, different universe. Both the clock and the rhizome, then, are conceptual metaphors or frames, as Lakoff calls them, that describe reality in terms of either a piece of machinery or a plant; however, reality is neither a clock nor a rhizome. Still, I want to say that Deleuze and Guattari's marvelously twisted rhizomatic prose is about as close as one can get to the quantum, relativistic universe without way more math than I have. The rhizome is a wonderful metaphor in almost natural language for the complex systems that physics has almost completely accepted but still largely describes in mathematical terms—terms that I don't understand.

This may be one of the most important contributions that the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari makes to connectivism: it emphasizes the shift from a mechanistic, reductionist reality to an organic, relativistic, quantum reality and it captures in natural language something like this new reality. In his definitions of connectivism, George Siemens talks about complexity and chaos theories, but his language does not capture complexity and chaos the way Deleuze and Guattari do. Of course, Siemens has a different audience and different objectives than did Deleuze and Guattari. Still, there are things you can come to understand only by jumping in over your head, and as Mark Twain wisely observed, "If you a hold a cat by the tail you learn things that you cannot learn any other way." Reading Deleuze and Guattari is like holding two cats by the tail. Most people are willing to forgo that joy, but I have found it an endless source of enlightenment.

My friend Dave Cormier makes a most important contribution here by connecting rhizomatic thinking to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, which posits five contexts for thinking and decision making, particularly in organizations: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. In his post Seeing rhizomatic learning and MOOCs through the lens of the Cynefin framework, Cormier says that both MOOCs and rhizomatic thinking and teaching match best with the complex domain. As Cormier says:

That description of how to act in a MOOC sounds just about right as a description of rhizomatic learning. The knowledge lives in the community, you engage with it by probing into the community, sensing the response and then adjust. Just like the rhizome. It is a learning approach that is full of uncertainty… not least for the educator. But its one that allows for the development of the literacies that will allow us to sharpen our ability to participate in complex decision making. Dealing with the uncertainty is what the learning is all about.

This, then, is a second important contribution of rhizomatic learning to connectivism: a focus on complexity. Rhizomatic thinking enriches the connectivist conversation, and it has allowed me to say things that I could not say otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari have given me language to speak of complexity.

The rhizome also helps me understand why I share Cormier's discomfort with learning in the simple domain. Cormier says:

I think most of what i criticize or, at least, what concerns me about education is the movement between the complicated and simple domains. Our bureaucracies encourage simple domain learning, things that can be tracked and analyzed. Research goals seem to attempt to take things from complicated domains and shove them down into the simple one. Our world is increasingly one where complex decisions need to be made… and thats the kind of education i’m interested in being involved in.

Most of education seems calculated to force all knowledge into the simple domain, with one source for truth and one answer on the test. Sophisticated instructors and some graduate programs allow for the complicated domain where "the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge" (Wikipedia). Traditional education, by and large, eschews the complex domain, where "the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance." Our traditional testing regimes demand clear answers and outcomes, and complexity refuses to play that game. Thus, our curricula try to make reality as simple as possible throughout most of K-16 education, only grudgingly admitting the complicated and almost totally denying the complex. The problem here is that most of reality is complex or chaotic. As near as I can tell, the truly simple is extremely rare in Reality and the merely complicated is almost as rare. Everything else is complex and chaotic (about 99.999% by my calculations). If 99% of education is forced into the simple and complicated domains and 99% of life is complex/chaotic, then it appears that we have a mismatch between what we are teaching and what we need to learn. Rhizomatic learning can help address this mismatch.

Boundaries and the Holographic Principle

I've been thinking of boundaries as included middles, or zones of engagement, which transcend the separation of entities into discrete units required by the classical logic of the excluded middle—A is A, A is not non-A, and there is no entity T which is both A and non-A. The logic of the included middle demonstrates that T exists, and quantum physics and complexity theory say that T not only exists but is a fundamental feature of Reality. If you want to know how things work, then you must wrap your head around T, the included middle.

In my previous posts, I suggested that to my mind, Edgar Morin has provided us with several characteristics of boundaries as zones of engagement, or included middles, rather than lines of separation. The first two are the dialogic principle and circular causality. The third characteristic that I explore in terms of Frost's Mending Wall is the holographic principle, which Morin defines in The Reform of Thought (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008):

In a system, in a complex world, not only is a part found in the whole (for example, we human beings are in the cosmos), but the whole is found in the part. Not only is the individual in the society but the society is within us since birth; it inculcated us with language, culture, its prohibitions, its norms. (26, 27)

I was fortunate to recently read a new book by Neal Shubin called The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People (2013), in which Mr. Shubin, a University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, demonstrates repeatedly how the patterns of the Universe—its energy, matter, and information—from the Big Bang to now are echoed within each of us, as well as within rocks, plants, and planets. The patterns for the human ear, for instance, were worked out some 350 million years ago in a fish called Panderichthys. The energy, material, and informational patterns of the Universe are echoed within each entity. As the fractal images of Mandelbrot have so beautifully shown us, self-similar patterns repeat and echo at each level of Reailty.

The most cursory exploration of the term holographic principle demonstrates that it has a rather specific meaning in quantum physics, which I do not have the skill or knowledge to discuss, but again, I think that Frost's poem Mending Wall can give the non-scientific among us a way to approach the idea and work with it usefully.

First, the poem paints for us the relationship between two men, the narrator and his neighbor, based in large part on the dialogic tension between their two points of view about walls: "something there is that doesn't love a wall", on the one hand, and "good fences make good neighbors", on the other. This dialogic tension, or pattern, echoes the patterns between electrons and nuclei or planets and stars. The dialogic relationship at each level is, of course, not identical, but I think it is self-similar. This pattern of an interactive tension between antagonistic entities is the stuff of life, certainly of human relationships (This tension does not necessarily suggest violence. Love has its own tensions, but that's another post.). It is this tension between Life and Death, Order and Chaos that allows for the development of the Reality. Like his predecessor William Blake, Frost is able to "see a world in a grain of sand" (Auguries of Innocence), or in a wall.

This echoing of patterns within and without and across different levels of reality suggests to me another way to think about Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, which tries to capture the propagation of patterns throughout a system, or a rhizome. Something there is within each of us that recognizes patterns in the other and that echoes those patterns, that responds to the patterns of the Universe. If you yawn, I will yawn—it can be that ordinary. Note that the narrator responds to and echoes the patterns of his neighbor, for despite his dislike of walls, he is the one who calls to his neighbor to arrange their mending game. He responds to the pattern of the game and plays his part as well as the neighbor does.

Moreover, the narrator echoes the New England stubbornness of his neighbor. In the poem, we see the relationship between the two men only from the narrator's point of view. He views his neighbor as a primitive "old-stone savage armed" who "will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." Clearly the narrator believes his neighbor to be stubbornly unenlightened, but can't we easily imagine the neighbor viewing the narrator in about the same light—or darkness: a fellow who keeps repeating the same old saw, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." The neighbor might be wondering—as the narrator does—why his neighbor can't see beyond his own narrow prejudices. The two men echo each other, and therein lies their game. Each holds within himself the pattern of the other. Together, they contain the patterns of the Universe, turning the wall between them into a zone of engagement, an included middle. I think.