RhizoRhetoric: 1 Multiplicity

I'm working with a #rhizo15 group to revise a document we've submitted for publication in a scholarly journal. The document tries to map the swarm writing that emerged from the Rhizo14/15 MOOCs, and I think our problems are two-fold:

1. We find it difficult to demonstrate and discuss open swarm writing within the narrow boundaries of a traditional scholarly study, and
2. We find it difficult to connect readers with a traditional research agenda to the concept of swarm writing.

One sympathetic reviewer suggests that we focus more on swarm writing, and I want to explore some ideas in the next couple of posts. One of the personal problems I have in revising this particular document is that my own thinking about swarm writing has developed much since we first wrote this document, and I find myself wanting to add new material to the document rather than merely editing the existing material. I'll try the new material here first rather than in the document to see how it wears.

I'm starting with an article about complexity from Paul Cilliers entitled "What we can learn from a theory of complexity" first published Mar 31, 2000, in Emergence: Complexity and Organization. I'm drawn to this particular article from the many I've read by Cilliers because, paradoxically, of its simple list of some relevant characteristics of complex systems. I consider swarm writing a function of a complex system, and I think these seven characteristics will help our article address the problems we have with discussing swarm writing in a traditional scholarly context.

Cilliers begins his article by listing seven characteristics of complex systems:

1. Complex systems consist of a large number of elements that in themselves can be simple.
2. The elements interact dynamically by exchanging energy or information. These interactions are rich. Even if specific elements only interact with a few others, the effects of these interactions are propagated throughout the system. The interactions are nonlinear.
3. There are many direct and indirect feedback loops.
4. Complex systems are open systems—they exchange energy or information with their environment—and operate at conditions far from equilibrium.
5. Complex systems have memory, not located at a specific place, but distributed throughout the system. Any complex system thus has a history, and the history is of cardinal importance to the behavior of the system.
6. The behavior of the system is determined by the nature of the interactions, not by what is contained within the components. Since the interactions are rich, dynamic, fed back, and, above all, nonlinear, the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from an inspection of its components. The notion of “emergence” is used to describe this aspect. The presence of emergent properties does not provide an argument against causality, only against deterministic forms of prediction.
7. Complex systems are adaptive. They can (re)organize their internal structure without the intervention of an external agent.

I want to write seven posts applying each characteristic to swarm writing to see if this can help me illuminate swarm writing for those who see it as little more than standard writing in a Google Doc.

Cilliers' first characteristic involves a multiplicity of interacting parts, as I see it: "Complex systems consist of a large number of elements that in themselves can be simple." This first characteristic drives to the heart of what makes swarm writing different from the long tradition of Western rhetoric: swarm writing undermines the idea of a single, or at least unified, authorial voice usually declaiming on a single, unified topic. This also pinpoints the issues the #rhizo15 swarm is having with our document: we struggle to create a single, unified voice addressing a single, unified topic to meet the demands of traditional scholarship. In other words, we are trying to describe an open, dynamic process in a closed, rigid scholarly document.

So let me restate Cilliers in terms of swarm writing:

Swarm writing consists of a large number of actors (human and non-human) that in themselves can be simpler.

Note my changes. First, I say actors rather than elements to reflect my belief that everything in a complex system has agency. I could have used the term agent, but we use actor network theory (ANT) in our document, so I'm using actor. Also in keeping with ANT, I'm including all actors: pens, pencils, paper, Google Docs, smartphones and tablets, global communication networks, college educations, and Becky, Maha, and AK—most all the actors that play in our writing swarm, human and non-human.

Also note that I change simple to simpler to reflect my belief that most everything is complex. Consider the elements of our swarm that I list above. Perhaps a pencil is simpler than a human, less complex. Still, I see a pencil as a complex system. If you take the ANT approach to understanding a pencil, then you quickly see how the simple pencil becomes complex. A finished pencil emerges at the end of incredibly rich and complex mining, manufacturing, and marketing systems that interact with countless other actors, and then that one pencil takes a path through the world that can be incredibly rich, even unique among all pencils. For me, then, simplicity is a relative state, not an absolute characteristic.

I also should add here that while it is easy to see a million people tweeting #MeToo as swarm writing, I also think that a single person writing—me writing this current post, for instance—is swarm writing. I, too, am a swarm—no doubt a less complex swarm than my #rhizo15 swarm or the #MeToo swarm, but a swarm none the less.

Still, the way Cilliers phrases this first characteristic lays the groundwork for his later comments about emergence. As a large number of elements or actors begin to swarm together, a more complex actor can emerge: the complex system, or a writing swarm, or a novel, a nation state, a galaxy. This emergent actor is usually more complex than its constituent actors and can function at another scale.

But much needs to happen before a collection of people and their tools become a writing swarm. That's what the next characteristics and posts are about.

#change11: Multiplicity and the Composition Classroom

Well, my musings on rhizomatic education are taking a very practical turn. I have returned to fulltime teaching at long last. My last fulltime teaching gig was at Reinhardt College in 1977. Wow.

I'm also getting back to writing. Since my last post, I have retired from the State of Georgia educational system, left Albany State University (not incidentally), packed my home of 25 years and moved to south Florida, spent Christmas in the Bahamas, and started a new teaching job with South University. I just didn't find the time to write, as I was too fragmented—perhaps, too multiple.

Anyway, I have new footing from which to consider the practical implications of rhizomatic education: my own classrooms. I talked earlier of the first two characteristics of the rhizome: connectivity and heterogeneity. These characteristics lead—quite directly to my mind—to the third characteristic listed by Deleuze and Guattari: multiplicity.

Another reason for balking is that I don't think that I yet understand what DnG mean by multiplicity, or a better way to say this is that the concept still has resonances that I'm not feeling. Still, a lack of understanding should be no reason for not writing—at least, for not writing in ones blog. Writing is where my understanding, such as it is, emerges.

It would be easy to start the discussion of multiplicity in my classrooms with the simple observation that my students are a multiplicity. There are about 80 of them spread rather unevenly across four different classes. Therefore, my students are multiple, more than one. I could aim for some unity by saying, however, that they are all students in one of my classes. This is a conventional way of categorizing reality, and most people will understand this, and yet it is the very concept that Deleuze and Guattari are working against. My statement: these 80 people are the multiple students in my classes is my use of language to categorize, summarize, and unify a multiplicity so that I can make sense of them, and probably so that I can exercise some authority over them. It's the bit of fascism in me that DnG insist is at work everywhere: "Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize" (10). But what am I to do? Deny that these 80 students are my students? What does that accomplish?

DnG suggest a different tack when they note that our significations and measurements of the rhizome, even with the big categories such as Good and Evil, are temporary, provisional markers: "Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed" (10). I must make these measurements and significations about the collection of 80 people because I am a meaning-creating, pattern-recognizing organism. I am, for example, the creature that looks at the night sky with its countless multiplicity of lights and sees scorpions, bears, scales, and warriors. Or at least that's what I saw 3,000 years ago when I stood on Mount Olympus in ancient Greece. Today, when I stand on Mount Palomar in California, I see quasars, galaxies, and star nurseries. But it's the same meaning-creating, pattern-recognizing activity, and both the mythic and scientific understandings—those different ways of naming and measuring—are "products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed."

Selections from what, we might ask. From the multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari might answer. And what is the multiplicity? That from which we select and from which we form those patterns that give meaning/s to our lives.

But—and for me this is the big Sunday School lesson—our selections are never, ever the totality or the finality of the multiplicity. Our selections are always active and temporary, and when they cease to be active and temporary, then they become points of dogma about which we crystallize into little fascist camps. So the multiplicity is that grand ground of being from which all emerges? I can't quite get a handle on that idea, but that is precisely the point: I can't get a handle on the multiplicity. It's always bigger than my handles.

Of course, we humans don't like that. We like formulas—God Is Love and E=MC2 come to mind—that capture the multiplicity, make sense of it for us, and put it under our control, but as DnG point out with their concept of asignifying ruptures, the multiplicity laughs at our attempts to control it.

This makes sense to us somewhat if we think of the multiplicity as St. Paul's God or Einstein's Universe, but multiplicity is more local than that. Each of my 80 students is also a multiplicity. Not only did they emerge from the multiplicity—both for themselves and for me—but they are, in fact, a multiplicity within themselves and within me. The multiplicity, then, works at all scales, both the macro and the micro. A single cell in each of their bodies is a multiplicity (as Wordsworth observed 200 years ago: To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears). All of reality, at any point on any scale that we attempt to engage it, is the multiplicity—not part of the multiplicity or an aspect of the multiplicity or an emergence from the multiplicity, but the multiplicity itself. We touch the multiplicity when we touch anything.

The practical lesson for me in all this is that there is far more to know about each of my students than I can  ever hope to know, and my measurements of them through my pronouncements, names, and grades are active and temporary. Even these classes that I have invented under the auspices and within the structures of my sponsoring university are each an active and temporary selection. Each has utility, allowing us to gather, coordinate, and perhaps collaborate, but each is provisional.

The class, the syllabus, the collection of people. These are all temporary anchors that allow us to play the same game for a time, but as any boatsman will tell you: anchors are always provisional, tenuous, very useful to have and very useful to let go. A boat that seeks a permanent anchor is useless and probably a great danger to the sailors aboard.

Well, I really would like some help here with the concept of multiplicity. Those of you with a better philosophical reading than I have could chime in here, especially with a clarification of Bergson's concept of multiplicity, which Deleuze apparently used. Thanks.

Critical Thinking and Blind Intelligence

I have real concerns about the ability of traditional, Western critical thinking heuristics to be sufficient for negotiating the rhizome, any rhizome.

My primary issue is that all of the CT heuristics that I've found in my research are limited to one mind: mine or yours, but not to both. Critical thinking seems to be a function of the solitary mind as it contemplates and analyzes the separate universe. Most of the scholars I've read so far tacitly assume that critical thinking is a set of operations performed by a discrete subject, the Knower, upon discrete objects, the Known, buying into what Edgar Morin calls the "paradigm of simplification." Morin says that Descartes created this paradigm by "disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of" (On Complexity, 3). This paradigm of simple thought has "dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century" and "has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection" (3); yet, according to Morin, it has led us to a blind intelligence that "destroys unities and totalities" … that "isolates all objects from their environment" … and that "cannot conceive of the inseparable link between the observer and the observed" (4). Simple thought has created a pathology of knowing that is taking a "cruel toll on human phenomena" (5), and as Morin concludes about this "mutilating, one-dimensional vision:"

The inability to conceive of the complexity of anthroposocial reality, both in its micro dimension (the individual being), and in its macro dimension (the planetary collectivity of humanity), has led us to infinite tragedies. … Political strategy requires complex knowing, because strategy plays itself out by working with and against uncertainty, chance, the multiple play of interactions and retroactions (feedback loops). (5)

I like little metaphors when I'm trying to think through an idea, and to my mind, this mode of thought is akin to dissecting a frog, a live frog. If I am skillful enough with my scalpel—my analytical reason—I can neatly divide the frog into its constituent parts, reducing it to a collection of discrete, identifiable, and classifiable parts that will, in fact, help me understand the way the parts fit together and function in frogs, but along the way, of course, I've killed the frog, and I have no skill in putting it back together. This putting back together is not a trivial issue (certainly not for the frog). Moreover, the clean, hierarchical, explicit order that I imposed upon the frog's parts is not only useless for trying to reassemble the spaghetti-mess harmony that had been the living frog, but the hierarchical structure appears to work against reassembly.

This reminds me that for Deleuze & Guattari hierarchical thinking is a type of overcoding of reality that attempts to force all the relevant points of an object into neat little rows, each point occupying one, and only one, neat little place. As D& G note: "A rhizome or multiplicity [such as a frog, or a universe] never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines" (9). I see critical thinking as an overcoding, in this sense, as blind intelligence. Intelligence, yes. Blind, yes. Therefore, of limited use for approaching rhizomatic reality.

Trends in Education: Multiplicity

A second key trend in education can be described by the third and fourth characteristics of rhizomatic structures as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus:

• multiplicity
• asignifying ruptures

In this post I will use the single term multiplicity to speak of both characteristics, except when I want to speak of asignifying ruptures by themselves. 

Multiplicity is a complex concept that we might approach first from the ideas of connectivity and heterogeneity. Every point in a rhizome can and must connect to everything else; thus, we cannot understand any single point, except in a most abstract and academic way, without considering and accounting for all its connections. This brings us directly to holistic, environmental, systemic, relativistic, organic, fractal, chaotic thinking, and is in direct tension with the kind of rigidly reasonable individualism that has dominated much of Western thought and almost all of American thought for the past two centuries. In terms of multiplicity, then, any thing is best thought of as an assemblage of multiple assemblages—both near and far, now and then and yet to be, in and out, up and down—themselves assemblages of multiple assemblages. Thus, at whatever level or scale we consider any thing, we see assemblages of assemblages within assemblages, all interconnected in a fluidly orderly fashion, like a beautiful fractal image.

Orderly brings us to a key second feature of multiplicity: any multiplicity is self-organized. This is self-evident from a modern scientific point of view. If we consider the Universe—the uber-Rhizome—we see that most everything in it has self-organized. The initial spray of light coalesced into hydrogen and other atomic structures, which then organized into stars, then into planets, then into … well, us and eventually into this class at edfutures.com. We ourselves start with a couple of cells and then self-organize into an infant within another rhizomatic structure, or multiplicity, that we call mother. A star has its own light and gravity and self-organization, but that light and gravity extends throughout the universe, and to understand that star, we must consider both its own light, gravity, and self-organization and its relation to all the other lights, gravities, and organization. Any rhizomatic structure, then, contains all the facts and all the mystery possible, and to understand it, we can neither limit ourselves just to the facts or just to the mystery, but must consider the star in all its multiplicities. Clearly, we'll never completely understand any single star, or any single flower or person, and I take great comfort and joy in that. The Universe and everything in it is an infinite multiplicity.

A third point, also self-evident, is that rhizomatic structures are dynamic. They don't self-organize into static entities. They morph, they shift, they merge and sheer, they reorganize. They are susceptible to asignifying ruptures, those exchanges with and sheers into other rhizomatic structures that can so rearrange the rhizome that it appears to lose its significance and signification for us. It becomes asignified, no longer matching the language we've used to signify it. We try to capture rhizomes in language, establishing signs that point this way and that, walling in this space or that, but then the rhizomes shift and the signs point the wrong way. As Robert Frost so plainly says: something there is that doesn't love a wall.

And signification brings us to the final point for this post: our languages for signifying a rhizomatic structure are themselves multiplicities, giving us multiple ways to speak of and to signify any thing, each language with its own value and utility and each language interacting with and engaging the thing differently than another language will. We can start measuring anywhere in the rhizome, on any scale, using any language. Any measure will be more or less useful than others, more or less skillful, more or less salient, more or less common. No measure will be absolutely right or wrong.

To my mind, a multiplicity is easily envisioned in Blaise Agüera y Arcas' wonderful demonstration of Microsoft's new Photosynth technology. Basically, Photosynth is provides the technology to collect images, say of the Eiffel Tower, from around the Net, aggregate those images, and produce one, far more complete, multi-dimensional image that is far richer and more informative than any single image. Thus, the multiplicity produces an image that far exceeds the sum of all the parts.



So what is the point for education? That no student, no teacher, no subject is reducible to a single term. All statements about any student are provisional. "This is John, an exemplary A student, and this is Mary, a problematic F student" are both provisional, and do not say all that can be said or measured about either John or Mary or about ourselves for measuring and saying such things. That to teach any thing, we must define that thing, but our definitions are always provisional, always subject to change, usually sooner rather than later. That crowd sourcing in the style of Photosynth will produce a far richer image of reality than any single teacher or textbook can produce. 

The Multiplicity of the Classroom

The third principle of the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is multiplicity. I'm still struggling with this concept, but I am forming a clearer image of what it means for me and my classes.

Each person in a class, students and teacher, is a rhizome, a multiplicity, and as such, they are not reducible to a single term such as student or teacher, though that reduction may have some temporary utility as a convenient shorthand. Deleuze and Guattari note this convenience in their witty opening to ATP: "Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. … 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. … We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied" (ATP, 3). Isn't that clever? A name serves not to reveal us to others but to hide us, "to render imperceptible … what makes us act, feel, and think."

How does a name do that? By reducing the multiplicity of any person to a single point, a label, a name that deceives us into the belief that we know that person if we know their name. All names, even numbers, are expedient fictions, a shorthand that allows us to quickly navigate the world, but we must always be watchful, sensitive to the multiplicity clustered about the pinpoint of each name. "The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement" (ATP, 8). When we say that this is John, an A student, and this is Mary, an F student, then we have reduced complex multiplicities to a few features in a very narrow context.

Neither is course content reducible to a few bullet points on a PowerPoint. Like people, knowledge is a multiplicity, connected to all else, and any boundary between this knowledge and that is, at best, an expedient fiction. As teachers, we must be most sensitive to the connections between knowledge and our students, recognizing that each connection is likely different, a multiplicity of connections. Each student is an assemblage of unique intellectual, emotional, social, sexual, religious, economic rhizomes that interconnects and interplays with the course content rhizome in its own unique way, and then that resulting assemblage interconnects more or less with all the other class assemblages, including the teacher's, to create a unique class assemblage that makes this ENG 1101 course different from any of my other ENG 1101 courses now, past, or future.

This reminds me of Shunryu Suzuki's wry comment in his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." I don't believe that Suzuki is attacking expertise; rather, he is noting that expertise often depends on the facility of the expert to reduce the complexities of a situation to a few options for quick resolution or clarification. Expertise, then, may permit the expert to move quickly into and out of a situation, but it also blinds the expert to the swirl of multiplicity around the situation.

I don't know if reductionism is necessary for negotiating reality, but I'm sure it is a convenient habitual practice. The problem is that we forget that it is a fiction, a powerplay to gain physical, intellectual, political, social, religious, aesthetic control over reality, but it is not reality. Students are not students. They are so much more. Both teachers and students must be sensitive to the multiplicity of each other, even as we construct the fictions, the mantras, the formulas that help us through daily life.

This makes me think of the available spectrum of light. We see only a narrow bit of the total spectrum, but it is foolish of us to think that there is nothing else to see. What would we see of the world if we could process the total spectrum? Reductionists foolishly limit the rhizome just to what they can see; however, the rhizome, any rhizome, is infinitely rich, able to elevate and challenge our minds. The available light spectrum is, of course, sufficient to go to the grocery store or to take a test, but the spectrum is wide, even wider than we suspect. What could we see at wavelength -1?

We territorialize the rhizome, perhaps we must, but we must always be ready to follow the deterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari note: "It is not enough to say, 'Long live the multiple.' … The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome" (ATP, 6).

Reductionism always leads to impotence, to the dryzome of the thing being reduced. Reduction of a frog to its constituent parts with a scalpel always kills the frog. Reduction of the frog with language conceals fifty million years of evolution, ecosystems, and your own education. As Wordsworth noted in his great Ode: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." As Pirsig noted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses." All rhizomes proliferate, they wallow in promiscuity, assemble, collapse only to reassemble again. "When rats swarm over each other" (ATP, 7).

All students, all teachers, all systems of knowledge are bounded infinities, are assemblages of rhizomes. In classes, they are legion, infinity compounded infinitely. Writing teachers, then, must accept that any forms are provisional, expedient fictions to perform specific tasks within specific contexts. They are not eternal. The perceptive teacher must be open to the interplay of even the most formalized of structures with students. We must be able to follow the rhizome, "the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which [rhizomes] change in nature and connect with other multiplicities" (ATP, 9). That's where all the fun is.

BRB. LOL.