Rhizomatic Thought, #etmooc

I came across a video and a couple of quotes today that illuminated and expanded for me some ideas I've been discussing in #etmooc about rhizomatic learning.

Brian Rose shared the NASA video Fiery Looping Rain on the Sun:



This kind of inspirational video leads to comments (270+ when I looked last, 4:00 pm EDT, Fri, Feb 22). For instance, Jeremy Ellwood quoted Neil Degrasse Tyson's view about feeling small in the light of such enormous power:

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

Then Brian Rose quoted Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who spoke about looking back at the Earth from the Moon:

"You develop an instant global conciousness, people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

These comments make explicit why I like the rhizome: it allows me to think over and beyond networks based on simple connectivity. The rhizome is networks+, connectivity on steroids.

More accurately, the rhizome is connectivity across multi-scale networks, across what Basarab Nicolescu calls different levels of reality. This connectivity—not just within a network but across sub-networks and super-networks—is important for my rhizomatic thinking as it helps me grasp and visualize the extent of rhizomatic structures, or assemblages to use Deleuze and Guattari's term (I suspect they wanted to avoid the more rigid, mechanistic overtones of the term structures). D&G speak of asignifying ruptures within a rhizome, in which our naming, labeling, and definition of a thing suffers a rupture, a line of flight, that unnames the thing as it moves from one scale of network to another scale, from one level of reality to another. Asignifying ruptures, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and the logic of the included middle all seem abstract and obtuse concepts until you hear an Edgar Mitchell say it so plainly: "From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty." When you view the political arguments which seem so important here on Earth from a different level of reality, from the Moon, then you see that that the contradictions fade away, and the arguments become completely asignified, meaningless, void, not even a play-ground squabble. These concepts, then, help me understand one of the heuristics available to rhizomatic thinking: that whatever we are learning must be viewed from more than one level of reality, from more than one scale of the network. When we view things in this complex, rhizomatic manner, then contradictions often fade in lines of flight into the included middle.

Then, the comment by Neil Degrasse Tyson captures a second heuristic of rhizomatic thinking, what Edgar Morin calls the holographic principle. The patterns of the Universe echo in my cellular structures. We are composed of star dust, and we are the dust of the stars. I am not speaking poetically here, nor am I alluding to Joni Mitchell (though Woodstock remains one of my favorite songs, especially the version by Mathew's Southern Comfort). I am being literal. The patterns of energy and information exchange that work in the stars also work in me. The information in my DNA and cells come from the stars and feed back into it. I fancifully think that if the entire Universe were to blink out, leaving only me floating alone, then any reasonably intelligent, technologically adept species from another universe that found me could use the data in my cellular structures to pretty much recreate a universe that works more or less like this one (okay, that last part isn't literal, but it might be the start of a good science fiction story). This echoing of information throughout a network and across network scales echoes the fifth principle of the rhizome: decalcomania. As connectivism says, learning has much to do with embodying and recognizing patterns. Yes, "the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars."

Boundaries and the System

A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together  in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual parts. The whole entity, then, is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, consciousness is not a property of individual neurons, but it emerges when enough neurons self-organize into a functioning human brain within a functioning eco-system. As near as I can tell, systems appear to be all-inclusive—the ultimate vacation resorts. I cannot think of anything that is not both itself a system and a part of another system. Even strings on the micro-scale and the Universe on the macro-scale may be systems within systems. If string theorists are correct, then our Universe is just one system within a system of Universes. Maybe strings themselves are systems. After all, we once thought atoms were the smallest things possible, and we've moved way beyond that idea. We will likely move again.

This concept of system quite likely includes the other concepts that I've considered in my exploration of boundaries: the included middle, the dialogic, circular causality, and the holographic principle. Or perhaps I'm being drawn to the realization that all of these concepts suggest and implicate the others. Each of them, in true transdisciplinary fashion, is difficult to think about alone. Rather, they make more sense when seen as a whole. They represent the nature of boundaries as

• the included middles that join rather than separate but without merging, 
• the dialogics that juxtapose and hold in a creative, dynamic dance distinct entities, becoming the fertile zone where new things emerge and enrich both entities,
• the circular causalities that enable the flow of energy, matter, and information between the distinct entities, again enriching and sustaining both,
• the holographic principles that encode the whole within the part, like stem cells able to self-reproduce the entity, and finally,
• the systems that nestle systems within systems within systems.

Really. Can we understand any of this if we don't see that the part is within the system is within the part and that this is irreducibly loopy? Can we understand Mending Wall if we don't see that the narrator and the neighbor are a self-forming, self-organizing system, joined and at the same time distinguished at an included middle that expresses their dynamic dance and creates the zone in which they both assert their independence and their dependence, their individuality and their kinship, defining their independence in terms of their dependence and vice versa, and that echoes the patterns of molecules, societies, and stars.

Well, at any rate, I think that's what Mending Wall means to me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Robert Frost, and the question is somewhat irrelevant to my discussion which hasn't been about Frost but about boundaries. Still, I feel just strong enough to believe that, if he were here, I might persuade him.

Boundaries and the Dialogic

The included middle of Lupasco and Nicolescu gives me a convenient handle for understanding Edgar Morin's concept of the dialogic, which I first encountered in his book On Complexity but which is also discussed in his Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (1999) and in his article The Reform of Thought, Transdisciplinarity, and the Reform of the University (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008).

Dialogic is a form of thinking and talking that allows us to juxtapose antagonistic points of view without seeking to resolve them in a reductionist, Hegelian dialectic that simply moves "beyond contradictions through synthesis" (Reform of Thought, 26). As Morin explains it, dialogic "allows us to connect ideas within ourselves that are thrown back on each other" and allows us to contemplate "the necessary and complementary presence of antagonistic process or instances." Morin gives the profound examples of Life and Death, which are as antagonistic as is possible and yet which are both bound up with the other. Indeed, Reality unfolds as the constant engagement and interaction of Life with Death, and the one does not make sense without the other, and yet they are still antagonistic. Order and Disorder are similar antagonistic concepts, which complexity theory shows us are absolutely bound with each other and define each other. Life itself is a function of the engagement and interplay of Order and Disorder. Too much Order freezes and fixes a living thing—kills it—and too much Disorder leads to chaos—and again, death. Life exists in that fertile included middle that is the zone of engagement between Order and Disorder.

The dialogic, then, captures for me the interplay and engagement between the narrator and the neighbor in Mending Wall. The narrator begins the poem with a bold, bald assertion of his point of view: something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor counters with an equally bold, bald, and contradictory statement: good fences make good neighbors. It is, as Frost says, "a kind of outdoor game." Frost is giving us a thesis and antithesis, and in our reductionist manner of thinking, we might reasonably expect a synthesis. I don't think there is one. There is only the dialogic between not wanting a wall and wanting a wall.

The dialogic in this poem juxtaposes two antagonistic positions and does not resolve them. We might think this a failure, but I don't think so. Rather, the resulting tension of the unresolved antagonism is the very source of the engagement between the narrator and his neighbor. It is the game between them, and this game, this engagement, joins them. Without the opposition, there is no game. Without the game, their is very little life. There is no diversity, no possibility of the exchanges of energy and information that make so rich our physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual lives. The dialogic recognizes and formalizes the dynamic, complex, and antagonistic engagements at the heart of all our games.

Because of our reductionist habits of mind, we see this juxtaposition of antagonistic sides as necessarily leading to the destruction of one side by the other through intellectual, emotional, or physical power or to the destruction of both sides in a synthesis, but Frost, Morin, Lupasco, and Nicolescu suggest a third way: "a way of reconnecting ideas without denying their opposition" (Reform of Thought, 26).