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".

The Desires of Prepositions

I've been using the phrase desires of prepositions without explaining what I mean. Partly I did this because I've had to work my head around the idea. It started with an intuition and some amusement over the juxtaposition of two terms that are usually not used together in the same conversation, much less the same sentence or phrase. (Aside: I just googled "desires of prepositions" with the quotes, and Google returned only 8 hits. Seven of them were mine, and only 1 from another source, a 09/21/2009 post entitled HERO�NO HONOR, EH? Weenie Yellow Polka� by Judge Bean on conspiracycafe.net. At least I have company.) Though I'm confident that I will continue to enlarge the idea in my own head and writing, I think I'm clear enough now to clarify what I mean by desires of prepositions and to connect it to the conversation about Rhizo14.

I think that my last several posts explain how I'm using the term preposition and how I picked up on the importance of prepositions from comments Michel Serres made to Bruno Latour in their book Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995). My online dictionary defines a preposition as:

a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause, as in “the man on the platform,” “she arrived after dinner,” “what did you do it for?”

(By the way, I'm pleased to see an online dictionary ending a sentence with a preposition. Gratifying that.)

Prepositions, then, govern and connect mostly substantives to other elements within a sentence. As I've said elsewhere, prepositions are the stage directors of sentences, positioning the actors, pacing the action, and in general, structuring and making sense of the scene/sentence. Prepositions make clear to the reader (audience) the trajectories of the elements in a sentence (the actors and actions on the stage). I like this stage metaphor (though a movie screen would work as well, I think), for it animates sentences which we seem to think static, frozen in a line of text on a printed page. And this is what prepositions do within the sentence: they couple this with that, putting everything into motion. Actually, other sentence elements such as conjunctions, punctuation marks, spacing, the position and proximity of syntax also couple things and mark those relationships for the reader/audience, but for now, I'm limiting my discussion to prepositions. I'll discuss all connective grammatical elements later.

For me, the big idea is that prepositions form and flavor the connections within a sentence. They are a big part of the structure that informs a sentence and makes it mean something, and they both create that structure and mark that structure for us to hear/see/read. Prepositions do much of the hard work of forming patterns and marking those patterns. I believe that pattern making, pattern marking, and pattern recognition is the heart of making meaning, of creating and using knowledge, and thus, of education. Prepositions choreograph the movement of actors and actions on the stage. Without them we have little pattern and little meaning, just a collection of actors sitting in a heap or wandering aimlessly on stage. Consider the first sentence that I used from Maha's contribution to the collaborative autoethnography (CAE):

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking about this since #rhizo14 started and writing about it throughout on my blog, fb, twitter, I am having a lot of difficulty writing here.

If we remove the connections created by the prepositions, then we reduce the sentence to a near empty stage:

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking and writing, I am having a lot writing here.

If we remove all the connector elements, including punctuation and spacing, we are left with almost nothing:

Iamhavingalot

Even reduced to the basic subject/verb/direct object as in this string of letters, we can see that some hint of connectivity remains as the verb connects the subject and direct object and all three elements appear in standard English order. However, without structuring elements such as prepositions, language is near meaningless. While we usually focus on the substantives and verbals to determine the meaning of a sentence, it is the little words—the prepositions, conjunctions, punctuation, spaces, syntax, and so forth—that do much of the heavy work of meaning creation.

I am not diminishing the importance of substantives and verbals here; rather, I am elevating the importance of the little words, specifically the prepositions. We have a cultural habit of focusing on the big words, the substantives and verbals, the actors and actions. This habit extends to language experts who more often than not define the little words in terms of their relationships to the big words. For instance, in Maha's sentence, the word throughout would most likely be called an adverb because it is modifying the verb writing even though the word is often used as a preposition. The little words are defined by the big words they modify rather than by what they do: connect things, couple. To my mind, throughout is coupling just as about and on are, and all three should be defined in their own right and not in terms of their relationship to the big words.

What do connector words do? They map the flow of a sentence out into a meaningful structure. In the sentence above, Maha has something, but she spins that notion out, enriches it, starting her sentence by noting her amused chagrin at her situation, then setting up a contrast with her previous ability to think and write about Rhizo14 in her online spaces, which provides much setting for her scene and several props, and finally rounds out her thoughts by adding that she's having difficulty with writing in the CAE. To my mind's eye, the sentence unpacks itself, in large part through the prepositions, much as a dandelion stretches out into the air.  Maha's sentence takes a handful of dust, debris, and concepts, and sets them spinning about themselves in a little constellation that creates meaning—not out of nothing, but meaning that did not exist before Maha mapped her concepts in this particular dance.

I take the concept of mapping from Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), where they distinguish it from tracing, and this mapping segues nicely into desire, another concept from Deleuze and Guattari, especially in their book Anti-Oedipus (1977). Think about the forces that push and pull the dandelion as it stretches into its own space within its own ecosystem, or the forces that push and pull Maha's words into its own shape within its own conversational space. The dandelion desires to connect to the earth, water, sunlight, other plants, and all of those things desire to connect to the dandelion. Following the lead of Deleuze and Guattari, that is what I mean by desire: the forces that push and pull everything to connect and create new structures, new meaning. I'll try to unpack this, mostly for me.

Desire is commonly understood in human terms as a drive for something that we do not have. In other words, it is defined by lack, by something that is apart from us, or transcendent, not something that is part of us, or immanent. Deleuze and Guattari reverse this understanding. In their book Deleuze and Geophilosophy (2004), Mark Bonta and John Protevi note that desire is "not subjective hankering after what you do not have"; rather, desire "is the material process of connection, registration and enjoyment of flows of matter and energy coursing through bodies in networks of production in all registers, be they geologic, organic, or social" (76). I would add that these flows include organization and information in addition to matter and energy, as Edgar Morin points out in his analysis of complexity in his book On Complexity.

According to Bonta and Protevi, Deleuzian desire takes two main forms:

1. paranoid (fascist), which "forms whole subjects who cling to their identities in a social production network that must not change and that reinforces the rigid (tribal or imperial) coding and channeling of flows" (76), and 
2. schizophrenic (revolutionary), which "rides the [uncoded flows of] energies released by capitalism and takes them far beyond the pathetic reterritorializations on family and private property maintained by psychoanalysis and the capitalist State" (76).

I think that McGilchrist's book The Master and the Emissary gives us another, more flexible way to characterize connections with his left-brain/right-brain analysis. We connect either to manipulate (left-brain) or to relate (right-brain); though these are extreme ends of a sliding scale. Few connections are totally left-brain or right-brain, but it helps us to clarify the distinctions between them if we push them to extremes which seldom occur. I think I will post something about this later, but not now.

The problem with desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that priests (religious, psychoanalytic, economic, and state) manage desire by defining it in transcendent terms: lack (you desire only what you don't have), pleasure (you desire only what makes you feel good), and jouissance (you really only want transcendent pure pleasure, which you can never have or have only in Heaven). Desire, then, is traditionally defined in terms of lack by those who want to control it. Deleuze and Guattari define desire in terms of immanent drives that flow through us, connecting us to others and to larger socio-political structures. And this is a key property of desire: they are not our own; rather, they flow through us. Deleuze and Guattari say that our desires are already part and parcel of the socio-political systems that we are part of. I insist that desires are part and parcel of all reality. They are the flows of energy, matter, organization, and information that flesh us out, unpack our DNA, and seek to connect us to other unpacking entities and their flows of energy, matter, organization, and information.

Of course, I am extending desire beyond the socio-political to include pretty much everything. For me, desire is that tendency or affinity of things to connect to other things, to couple, and to create new things. Quarks desire quarks and create atoms. Atoms desire atoms and create molecules. People desire people and create societies. This is far different from how desire is usually used. Under the influence of Freud and Marx, we have pretty much defined desire in terms of sex and money, and the physical sciences have abandoned the term as too anthropomorphic. Deleuze and Guattari limited their discussion of desire to the human realms of society and politics, largely in response to Freud and Marx and to the socio-political upheavals of the 1960s, I think. Desire works nicely in this context, and I may come to regret trying to extend desire beyond the merely human, but I'm willing to fail. The idea attracts me, so I'll do it, but I recognize that when I speak of atoms desiring atoms, most people will prefer talking about the probabilistic tendencies of atoms to bond with certain other atoms that they randomly encounter. No problem. My concept of desire includes those couplings as well; though, I don't care much for leaving it all to random chance. To my mind, if there were only two quarks in all the universe, they would desire and find each other, coupling to create one lonely particle. That may be the saddest, shortest story I've ever told, but I believe it.

These couplings are important, given that everything in the universe exists because of them. The couplings produce everything, and this production is important to Deleuze and Guattari who posit desiring machines as the point of coupling and production, or to my mind, the point of creation. The key to keep in mind is that they are not speaking metaphorically. Nor am I. D&G start Anti-Oedipus:

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. This is not a metaphor. As I've already said, prepositions really don't mean much by themselves. They attain meaning in the connection, in the coupling that they perform. This is when their meaning emerges. Prepositions mark the point at which the flow of desire passes from this to that, here to there, connecting and coupling, leading to the production of something new. Something given flows in (all those linguistic, informational and organizational as well as energy and material flows) and something transformed flows out. This is how the rhizome grows, moves, deterritorializes and reterritorializes, and prepositions provide us with an explicit marker of the flow of desire through our conversations. It is a production machine, which means that it both makes the connection and marks the connection.

Consider again Maha's sentence above:

Funny enough, even though I have been thinking about this since #rhizo14 started and writing about it throughout on my blog, fb, twitter, I am having a lot of difficulty writing here.

The prepositions couple Rhizo14 to her thinking and writing, which are both coupled to her blog, Facebook, and Twitter and coupled to the duration of Rhizo14, and finally she herself is coupled to difficulty. This is a great amount of coupling in so short a sentence, and it opens up a rich stage on which Maha plays out her story. The prepositions take the nouns and verbs of Maha's thought and orchestrate a beautiful scene within a clear setting with spatial, virtual, and temporal dimensions that combines and redirects different trajectories into transformed trajectories that can feed into the trajectories of whoever reads her sentence. Of course, the trajectories of my sentences here can then flow back (feedback) into Maha's sentences. Likewise, Maha's entire sentence is a desiring machine that couples with the other sentences in her paragraph, which couples with the other paragraphs, which couples with the other autoethnographies, and so on. Flow feeds on flow, desire on desire, and this coupling produces … well, everything. This is the rhizome unfolding, and I would be silly to think that I, or even the iSwarm, control all these flows. We nudge and twist our thoughts within a field of thoughts, but they are alive and resist our nudging, twisting in sometimes unexpected ways. Like just now. I really did not plan to write that last sentence. Or the next one. Or this one. On and on. I touch the flow here and there and it responds, but I don't really control it. Nor it me. We dance.

In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus, Mark Seem highlights a central question and insight of the book: "What is the function of desire, Anti-Oedipus asks, if not one of making connections?" (xxii). Prepositions make connections, and thus make and mark the flow of desire, and this is their function.

This gives me a very helpful way of thinking about Rhizo14. What desires, what flows of drives and affinities, led people to connect to each other last February, 2014? What desiring machines enabled these couplings? What flows kept people in Rhizo14? What flows turned people away from Rhizo14? Did other, more demanding desiring machines couple them with other, more engaging flows? How?

And then I have to ask how well do the autoethnographies map to what actually happened? If I follow the couplings in the AEs, will I learn something about the couplings in Rhizo14? Do people really know what drives aided or failed them in coupling to Rhizo14? I know, for instance, that I am largely unaware of the epic wars waged by my immune system along the waterways and landscapes of my own body. What other drives am I missing? Deleuze and Guattari insist that most of our drives and desires operate quite aside from our consciousness, pushing and pulling us in directions that we only mark and rationalize after the fact.

Okay, so this is what I mean by the desires of prepositions. It makes sense to me, but help me push it around. Test it.

The Question of Power and Technology in Online Spaces

Since the official end of Rhizo14, I've been spending much of my time grading papers and reading the precipitate from the cMOOC thunderstorm. The #rhizo14 garden is growing, meandering, carving new channels for itself—yes, mixing metaphors with wild abandon, and it is amazing to watch this happen. I live in south Florida, and in the hot afternoons, I can look westward toward the Everglades to see the huge white clouds boil up from the fecund rhizome of sawgrass, black water, and alligator to explode into the blue sky. Rhizo14 is exploding like that. What fun to watch, and even more fun to be part of.

Others see the explosion, too. Today I came across a New York Times editorial by David Brooks, The Leaderless Doctrine, which struck me as a fairly accurate description of the kind of shift that I see in cMOOCs and other online events. In his editorial, Brooks describes "a remarkable shift in how Americans see the world and their own country’s role in the world. For the first time in half a century, a majority of Americans say that the U.S. should be less engaged in world affairs." Brooks references a recent PewResearchCenter study which shows that this attitude is not traditional isolationism, at least not among Millennials, who actually want the U.S. to become more integrated with the world. Rather, the Millennials have lost faith in the power of big organizations to meaningfully address the world's issues: "Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world." Millennials have replaced faith in big government and big military with an "enormous confidence in personalized peer-to-peer efforts to promote democracy, human rights and development." Or to promote education, I might add. Brooks then suggests that a new liberal order is emerging in the U.S. that "is not a single system organized and defended by American military strength; it’s a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet."

It sounds like one, gigantic MOOC to me, and it changes the rules of the game. Brooks adds that for the interconnected Millennials (I would use the term rhizomatic Millennials here) "the real power in the world is not military or political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their consent. In an age of global markets and global media, the power of the state and the [military] tank, it is thought, can pale before the power of the swarms of individuals."

I don't think David Brooks is happy about this shift, but he is too much of a realist, I suppose, to insist that it isn't happening or that it isn't important. I think Brooks fears that this shift in how the Millennials envision and construct power will be a game changer. I hope it will be a game changer. I'm betting on it.

And this brings me to my real topic: power on the Internet, power in open and striated spaces, to use the terms of Deleuze and Guattari and Sîan Bayne (thanks to Frances Bell for this reference). The topic of power came up several times in Rhizo14, and I don't think I had a very good handle on it. I'm left wondering if there is something about online spaces that changes power: reduces it or enhances it, redistributes it. I suppose ultimately I want to know if we are ready to handle online power, if in fact there is any power to handle, and if the technology changes the mix.

In his editorial, Brooks seems to assume that power is an unavoidable element of human interactions, certainly geopolitical interactions, and I think I agree with him, mostly because I define humans as complex systems that must interact with enclosed and enclosing systems. We humans must exchange matter, energy, information, and organization with our enclosing systems (physical, social, economic, religious, governmental, etc.) just as our livers must exchange matter, energy, information, and organization within our own bodies. We don't have to exchange everything that we like to exchange, but we do have to exchange many things (air, water, bacteria, and food, come immediately to mind). I suppose we don't actually have to exchange language and culture, but if we didn't, then we would not be human in any sense applicable to my conversation here, so I'll ignore that rare case.

These exchanges involve us in power relationships, and I don't see how to avoid that. If I am to eat (exchange matter and energy with my ecosystem), then I must exert power (or my mother exerted that power on my behalf) to procure and eat food. The act of living engages me in a circular relationship within my surround: I take from it, and it takes from me. To exist at all, I need to develop and exercise the power necessary to exchange food that sustains me and to avoid food that can harm me. This is not trivial; rather, it is profound—far more significant for a happy life than anything I teach in my writing and literature classes. It is the most important learning.

So for me, all education is imbricated with power. Basically, we learn what to put in our mouths, what not to, and when, where, how, and why. It starts at birth, if not before, and it continues until we die, and it always involves learning to develop and to manage our own powers and to interact elegantly and productively with the power of others. Power, then, is relational (a concept I probably picked up from Frances Bell) even if we are thinking of our own, internal powers. It's easy to think of relations with other people and things, but we like to think of ourselves as a single entity, a unit or individual; however, to my mind, we are just one more complex system: a network of subsystems that share an arc of identity, a sense of shared experience, and tend to work together—though I think we are all aware of times when our minds/bodies seem to work against us, revealing the seams in the whole. (Damn, that's a long sentence. If I were grading this, I'd suggest a rewrite.)

Still, when we use the term power, especially in conversations about human relationships, perhaps most of us share Frances Bell's negative sense of the word. In her post Dimensions of power, knowledge and rhizomatic thinking, Bell writes, "My first thought when I hear the word power is of an individual exerting power over another – getting them to do something or stop doing something (possibly by raising a physical or verbal fist)." But if I think of power as the ability to stop or to cause changes in my ecosystem, then power is everywhere and in every relationship, and my task is to use this power as best I can.

Of course, the devil is in the definition of as best I can. For some, that might mean pushing as many other kids out of the sandbox as possible. For others, that might mean sucking up to, or ignoring, or hugging as many kids as possible. The point is: we have an incredible range of relations with others, all of which embody some distribution of and exercise of power. This power is unavoidable. If your mate walks into the room and refuses to speak to you or look you in the eye, you better be aware that some power play is on. A hug is as much an expression of power as a hit, and they are both relational.

So if power is integral to relationships, are relationships changed by technology? I think that's the question I'm trying to address. Okay, now that I have a question, I can start writing. Tomorrow.

Encouraging Autonomy in "#rhizo14

I've guests today, so this post will, out of courtesy to them, be too long, not having the time to make it shorter.

Dave Cormier has challenged the Rhizo14 MOOC to think about how to enforce independence in learners, and I have followed the lead of Frances Bell, Jenny Mackness, and others to amend Dave's terminology to something like encouraging autonomy. This could be viewed as mere rhetorical play, but I think there is some real thought behind it.

To my mind, one of the most potent strategies for encouraging autonomy is creating space. This is the strategy that the connectivist MOOCs such as Rhizo14 employ most often. Creating space is not something taught in most educational programs where detailed lesson plans seem to hold sway. Space is counter-intuitive for most teachers to employ, and it is damned near impossible to explain to students who do not intuitively see it.

For example, when I coached soccer, the most difficult concept to teach players was space—the empty part of the pitch where the ball and the other players are not, where nothing, no-thing, is happening.

The poorer players can not see it. For them, the game is elsewhere. All the potential and power is with the players and the ball, and that potential and power is the game. For them, the space is nothing, silence and emptiness, vacancy, accidental, impotent, irrelevant at best and frightening at worst, and therefore they cannot and will not see it. Such players can be highly skilfull, but they are creative only by accident. For them, everything is a potential expression of power, dependent on the arrangement, trajectories, and capabilities of the players and the ball distributed about them, already committed to a certain direction, with no possibilities beyond more or less skillful, competent execution in the face of a given configuration.

On the other hand, the best players, the creative players, see the space, and they intuitively know that all the possibilities of the game are in the space where the ball isn’t, the space that the other players are not just ignoring, but are unaware of. They know that the crowded part of the field is already committed to some direction, some orchestrated dance (some curriculum), unlike the space which is the point of most opportunity, as one of my soccer mentors John Dattilo says. The space holds all the possibilities, and the creative players (not always the most skillful) see it, and they take the game in new directions, literally. They embrace the chaos that the other players studiously avoid, focussed as they are on competent execution, or what Deleuze and Guattari call tracing. The creative players are willing to map the chaos of open space.

The best, most creative players play into the space. Of course, as soon as they do, they begin to limit the space, defining it, giving it shape as they, the ball, and other players move into the space. The game then emerges in this now restricted part of the field. Players take on specific roles more or less well, execute certain tasks more or less skillfully, and like magic, the game emerges in what had been just moments before space. To use Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the game deterritorializes in one part of the field only to reterritorialize in another part. The creative players can see this happening before it happens and they embrace it. The poorer players can't or won't see it, and they avoid it. They think the game is only where the ball is now.

Of course, the game is in the crowd where the ball is, but the game is also in the open spaces. The best players play a rhizomatic game, squirting into the open spaces to move the game along. And this is some of the magic of rhizomatic soccer and rhizomatic education: when a space becomes more closed and defined as the game/lesson moves into it, new spaces open elsewhere on the field. The field is never empty of spaces, it is only ever empty of players who can play into those spaces, making for very predictable, scripted, boring games, much like lessons in a traditional curriculum.

Connectivist MOOCs are really good at creating space within which learning can emerge, just as good soccer matches create space within which game can emerge. And note that creating space through a rhizomatic, community as curriculum approach does not mean that a teacher cannot supply some beginning ingredients. All soccer matches are held on a prescribed field with absolute boundaries that have meaning and that are even more absolute than the strictest curriculum. The game must have a ball, certain numbers of participants, and a few rules, but even within this rather narrow field, a rhizomatic approach focuses as much on the open spaces as on the rules and boundary lines. Traditional education focuses only on the rules and boundary lines. Teacher education focuses too much, I think, on the rules and boundary lines. After all, it's really difficult to teach and test empty space.

Rhizomatic education, then, like a fine soccer match, starts within a capacious, but bounded field, and then emerges as players/students identify and exploit the almost infinite possibilities of open-ended spaces, enjoying the tensions between the closed, defined spaces where the ball is currently (what we know) and the open-ended, undefined spaces where the ball can go (what we don't know). On the other hand, traditional education is like a soccer match in which every move is scripted and monitored by the teacher and the final score is determined, focused solely on what we already know. Only the most pathological enjoy games in which the outcome is fixed.

Of course, open spaces can be intimidating for most soccer players and many students. A skillful coach/teacher will introduce the concept of space/the unknown in a small area with fewer players. To teach space in soccer, I start with 2 players with the ball versus 1 defender in a ten-yard square. The open space is easier to see and the chances for success are very high. Likewise, I start my writing classes with small assignments with a high chance for success, but that emphasize the space beyond the class. For instance, I often have students text a friend about what they are doing in class.

Well, I'm being rude to my guests, but this was on my mind, so …

A More Practical View of the Rhizome for #rhizo14

Well, I intended to write a practical view of the rhizome in my last post, but I basically ended up giving my take on the place of the rhizome metaphor in the general development of Western thought over the past few centuries. That seems too general and abstract to be practical, so I want to try again in this post to make the rhizome—as I understand it—concrete. To help keep me grounded, I'll latch onto a specific discussion that Dave has started in this first week: learning as cheating.

I glanced through lots of the comments on the #rhizo14 site and on Google+, but I'm mostly responding to the discussion between Dave Cormier and Jenny Mackness. It seems to me that Dave uses the intentionally flagrant concept of cheating to get us to rethink our assumptions about education. As he says in his unhangout response to Jenny's blog post Rhizomatic Learning and Ethics, "I'm trying to make the assumptions we have about learning a problem." He's done that.

But I would say it slightly differently. Dave doesn't need to make our assumptions about education a problem—they are already a problem. As I suggested in my last post, most of our assumptions about education and almost all the working assumptions of our educational institutions are grounded in and shaped by the reductionist, mechanical view of reality that we inherited from the Enlightenment. It does not surprise me, then, that our concepts of cheating will vary depending on our context for defining it. If we view cheating in the framework of the social contract of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, then cheating means one thing. If we view cheating in the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, then it means something else. For me, cheating in a clockwork universe is not the same as cheating in a rhizomatic universe—though I insist that cheating is a useful concept in both. How they differ will help me explain something practical about the rhizome—I hope.

I'll start with a common definition of the word cheat:

1. act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, esp. in a game or examination, "she always cheats at cards"; deceive or trick. "he had cheated her out of everything she had" synonyms: swindle, defraud, deceive, trick, scam, dupe, hoodwink, double-cross, gull; informal be sexually unfaithful. "his wife was cheating on him" synonyms: commit adultery, be unfaithful, stray; 
2. avoid (something undesirable) by luck or skill. "she cheated death in a spectacular crash" synonyms: avoid, escape, evade, elude; archaic help (time) pass. "the tuneless rhyme with which the warder cheats the time"

I want to explore cheating as a boundary issue to show that the mechanistic view of boundaries is quite different from the rhizomatic view. First, let's note that cheating is a human activity—rocks and animals don't cheat. Even when animals play games—and they frequently do—we usually don't say that they cheat. Similarly, we would not likely say that a mare cheated on her stud. Animals may trick, deceive, hoodwink, and steal from each other, but it doesn't carry the same stain of cheating as it does with us, so in this discussion, I'm talking about human behavior across human boundaries.

The mechanistic view of classical liberalism assumes that humans are discrete individuals with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson. Classical liberalism defines humans as unique, independent, discrete individuals, it defines clear boundaries separating individuals, and it defines the acceptable and unacceptable exchanges across those boundaries. It can do this, in part, because it sees society as a large mechanism, with clearly defined parts that interact in clearly defined ways. Violations of those definitions of parts or interactions are sanctioned legally, while adherence to those definitions are reinforced in myriad ways. One can change the role one plays (move up or down in the organization), but one is still expected to play the role correctly. One must accept the boundaries between themselves and others and make proper exchanges across those boundaries, just as the parts in a clock do.

This is nice for clocks, and we wanted it to work for schools. We defined parts/roles: student, teacher, administrator, counselor, etc. We defined knowledge: curricula, subjects, disciplines, etc. We defined learning times: school day, periods, terms, etc. We defined learning spaces: classrooms, labs, etc. But we always defined in a certain way: from the outside in, or as Dave Cormier says we defined by locking things up in little boxes, with clear boundaries. This is how definition works in a mechanistic worldview: clearly defined entities within clearly defined boundaries making appropriate exchanges with other clearly defined entities across those boundaries.

If schools were really clocks, then this would work wonderfully, and cheating would be a clear concept. If I as a student look on your test paper, then I am violating a clear boundary to unfairly steal your knowledge, or at least your answer. Such cheating is policed and punished. Only the teacher can look on the students' test papers. We were all born and raised with some subset of this kind of thinking. It makes sense to us, and we don't like it when our cherished boundaries are violated or moved or upset—at least, I don't.

But schools are not clocks. They are messy rhizomes, and in a complex rhizome, boundaries are not such clear and obvious entities. I've written a fair amount in this blog about boundaries, so I won't repeat all that, but suffice it to say that for modern science, boundaries are not at all a clear issue. For instance, in the traditional view, I should be clearly defined by my body, yet modern science says that my body is about 90% bacteria which I apparently share widely with others, even others of different species, and they share with me. I regularly exchange the energy and information that constitutes my body with my eco-system. My boundaries are fluid, interpenetrating me and others (human and non-human alike), and it is becoming increasingly difficult to say just where my body, much less the more nebulous my self, begins or ends.

Cilliers says that we can create boundaries because we are always working within a context, but then he notes that when the context changes, the boundaries change. This lands us directly into the problem of relativistic, situational ethics that fundamentalists hate so much. We have no absolute knowledge, but we do have knowledge.

So what is cheating in the rhizome? I would tell you if I knew, but I don't. The problem with rhizomatic/complexity thinking is that we are still figuring it out. We do not yet have—at least, I don't have—all the concepts and language we need to talk about ethics in the rhizome. I have faith that ethics makes sense in the rhizome, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be the ethics that work in a clock.

Still, I think we have some pointers. First, we define differently in the rhizome: from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I can see this clearly in terms of DNA. If we define from the outside in, then our DNA (color of skin, height, IQ, etc.) is the endpoint and it defines or limits who we are. A mechanistic definition locks us in a tight little box bounded by our DNA. If, on the other hand, we define from the inside, then our DNA (color of skin, height, IQ, etc.) is the beginning point of who we are. A rhizomatic definition opens us to an ecosystem in which our DNA can unfold, finding its own space and limits. It's kind of like a game of cards: you don't have to be defined by the cards that you are dealt (something that you have no choice about); rather, you can be defined by how you play the cards you are dealt (something that you DO have a choice about). Of course, it's likely that you are defined a bit by both your DNA and how it unpacks itself.

Of course, we recognize in this shift in how we define people echoes of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, self-actualization, and lots of other social movements of the past 50 years, including the MOOC movement. MOOCs open the learning space so that students (that's you and me) can define ourselves from the inside out rather than having the school or teacher (that's Dave Cormier) define us from the outside in. I'm being unfair to Dave. He's trying valiantly NOT to define us, but rather to challenge us to define ourselves—to become our own curriculum.

A second pointer toward ethical behavior in the rhizome has to do with rethinking boundaries. Boundaries are not rigid lines that separate and limit, as the mechanistic world view suggests; rather, boundaries are flexible zones of engagement. We cannot insulate ourselves from others and our environment; we can only engage skillfully, intelligently, and honestly. We can join a MOOC and then connect to people, exchanging ideas, exploring the conversation, propagating knowledge.

Of course, we hear in this echoes of all those organic concepts that have arced through society over the past 50 years. Indeed, most of what has been noteworthy and newsworthy over the past century—even the fundamentalist, reactionary backlash—has been this monumental shift in human consciousness from a mechanistic mode of thinking to complexity thinking, from the clock to the rhizome. For myself, I enjoy being part of something this big. All of us in this #rhizo14 MOOC are exploring this shift, and Dave kicked it all off with cheating. Nice rhetorical move, that.

Well, was that any more practical? I can't tell from the inside. But it's a beautiful day here in south Florida, so I'm going outside. You come, too.

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 massive rhizome, #etmooc

To my mind, one of the most positive and encouraging aspects of connectivist MOOCs is the way they change the roles of teacher and student and, thus, the relationship between the two. cMOOCs embody what we mean when we glibly say that teachers should become the guide on the side, curators of information and knowledge, or guides to the context of information and not the content. There must be a number of reasons for this turn in cMOOCs, but two things impress me just now: transfer of information and local causality.

Traditional pedagogical practice has been grounded in the notion of education as a transfer of information: that a teacher, by transferring information, causes learning in students and that this is appropriate. I have argued against this teacher-centric, information-transfer concept of education in numerous other posts, agreeing with those such as Stephen Downes who insist that education is not a process of transferring information from the teacher's mind to the students' minds. There is no transfer of information, no nugget that leaves the teacher's mind to lodge itself in the students' minds. At best, speaking of a transfer of information from teacher to student is a fiction, a stubborn anachronism, a common and convenient manner of misspeaking similar to saying the sun rises, when we know that the Sun is not rising but the Earth is turning, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand Plateaus (6). Downes gives a much more thorough explanation of why this concept of information transer is wrong, and you should follow the link above to read all about it.

However, my reading of Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002) is revealing to me another problematic assumption underlying traditional education: local causality, which is closely related to the notion of information transfer, by the way. Traditionally, we assume that if a student learns something, then that learning must surely have been caused by someone or something in close proximity, most likely the teacher, but perhaps a book or even an online lesson. This is far too narrow a view of causality that excludes some of the best learning that takes place in a cMOOC.

Early in Manifesto, Nicolescu says that to comprehend the quantum world, we must expand our concept of reality to accommodate quantum weirdness. This means in part that we must expand our concept of causality beyond the merely local to the global. Nicolescu says it better:

Quantum non-separability casts no doubt on causality itself but only on one of its forms: local causality. It does not cast doubt on scientific objectivity, but only on one of its forms: classical objectivity, which is based on the belief that there can be no connection present other than the local. The existence of nonlocal correlations enlarges the field of truth, of Reality. Quantum non-separability tells us that in this world, at least at a certain level, there is a coherence, a unity of laws that insure the evolution of the totality of natural systems. (12)

I want to explore the notion that cMOOCs allow for the existence of nonlocal correlations that enlarge the field of education, but first, keep in mind that this is an exploration—I really don't know where this will go—and I am not denying local causality. Rather, I'm following Nicolescu's example and trying to expand the field of education.

One of the true instructional values of MOOCs lies in their enormous size, which provides an effect similar to that of the enormous number of neurons in the human brain. Our individual neurons share much in common with those of mice, so that the electro-chemical processes are quite similar. This means that the local causality in our brains is pretty much like the local causality in a mouse's brain: stimulus comes in, neuron fires, other neurons fire in response, and eventually the mouse or human makes some response to the stimulus. Local causality explains this rather complicated, but not complex, chain of events. This sequence is merely complicated because, given the time and equipment, we can trace the entire event from stimulus through to response, thus accounting for the response. And by the way, this complicated chain of events appears to explain much about how much of the world works, about why our leg jumps when a hammer strikes our knee or our mouth salivates when we see a cookie. We can quite reliably say that the hammer strike causes our leg to jump. However, these merely complicated chains of causes and effects do not appear sufficient to account for consciousness. They may be necessary, but they are not sufficient.

As I understand it, that humans have a different level of consciousness than mice arises, in part, from a critical number of neurons (I don't know the critical number, if there is just one) which allows for more complex interactions with the external world, more complex patterns and interactions within the internal processes and patterns, and for the evolution of the totality of [the] natural system. It seems to me, more neurons afford a greater pull from the system which enlarges the simple stimulus-response mechanism to a different, more complex level of reality: consciousness. When we have enough neurons working in sufficiently complex patterns, then consciousness emerges. It is pulled, or globally caused, by the overall system itself. Local causality (the push of neurons firing) is not sufficient to explain consciousness. We need a global cause (the pull of a global structure) to make consciousness work, to make it emerge.

Likewise, thousands of students working together can globally cause us learn in ways that a single teacher cannot locally cause.

I think we intuitively know this to be true, but our classical science is not geared to address it. Classical science, as Nicolescu says, relies almost totally on local causality. And as both Nicolescu and Morin have noted, classical science has been wildly successful for the past few centuries. It is a very difficult paradigm to challenge—just as the paradigms developed by Aristotle and Ptolemy were difficult to challenge. Eventually, though reality gets in the way, and as Nicolescu says, whatever our religious or philosophical convictions, we must "bow to experimental evidence and theoretical self-consistency" (16). Quantum mechanics demands more than local causality to account for the entities and events we now observe in our particle accelerators. Just as local causality is too narrow to account for the structures and properties of the Univers, it is too narrow to account for education. We need to incorporate global causality, and cMOOCs do just that, I think.

cMOOCs are not alone or even first in recognizing and utilizing global causality. Rousseau had problems with the mechanistic universe of Newton and Descartes, and then Jung had his notion of the collective unconscious, but if Nicolescu is correct, then quantum physics has made the expansion beyond local causality unavoidable. The concept of global causality seems to me to be everywhere. I recently listened to a Big Ideas lecture from psychologist Marc Fournier entitled Domination and Depression, in which Prof. Fournier demonstrated to my satisfaction that people will assume a role and place within a group that is a function of the group (global causality) rather than any given individual (local causality). When we like this kind of group causality, we call it a supportive community, and when we don't like it, we call it peer pressure. Either way, the cause of one's place in a community is a function of global causality rather than merely local causality.

Even more relevant, my ETMOOC friend Christina Hendricks has just posted about the effects of the pull (global causality) on an individual when they open themselves to a large community. She speaks of the effects on her own behavior, and she quotes David Wiley who describes some of the effects of making his own courses more open to a larger community:

• He required that all students’ written work must be made public on the course blog. One result of this was that Stephen Downes–a prominent Canadian researcher, blogger, cMOOC facilitator, and editor the popular newsletter OLDaily (online learning daily)–had read some of the work and highlighted a few posts, sending them out to thousands of his followers in the OLDaily newsletter. Wiley noted that the following week, much of the students’ writing got longer, better, and more thoughtful. Such improvement came much better this way than just encouraging students to write more carefully and address issues more deeply through the instructor’s comments.

• He wrote up a script for a fake sitcom (situation comedy) tv show, to show differing viewpoints on opening up “learning objects” (what are now called open educational resources, I think). He put this up on a course wiki, and some of the graduate students in the course started writing in new characters in order to give even more perspectives. They hadn’t asked or said they were going to do it, but just did. This was, he stated in the talk, a great way to get students involved in creating learning materials for the course itself.

The student writing became better not simply because of local causes from the teacher, but also because of global causes from the wider group (Stephen Downes in this case, who seems to be a general purpose, global cause of things). The graduate students expanded the sitcom with new characters, even though they were not locally caused to do so by the instructor. Rather, they were responding to the pull of the group, a global cause. I should note that Christina sees both a positive and negative side to this global influence: an entity within the group can be encouraged to excel creatively or it can be forced into conformity. I, however, am not sure that these opposing functions are problematic. I think our brains have both creative and conformative global tendencies, and it is the dialogical tension between these two contradictory impulses that makes the brain a functioning unity. I don't see these two different impulses as a problem, but as a source of the dynamism required for a useful and productive mind. It's the tension between conformity and creativity that makes a brain work, even though sometimes we all are too conformist or too creative and disruptive for a given situation.

cMOOCs are much more open to this global causality, and the people who like cMOOCs the most appear to be responding to this global causality. They like it. I like it. It is by far the most rewarding aspect of all the cMOOCs that I have taken.

I do not yet know enough about global causality and the logic of the included middle. Paul Ghils has suggested that I read Howard Kainz's Paradox, Dialectic and system.a Contemporary reconstruction of Hegelian problematic. I intend to do so, and maybe then, I will be more articulate and clear. In the meantime, I will continue playing in cMOOCs. I like the lunar pull of global causality.

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.

Why Rhizomatic Learning, Pt. 2 #etmooc

In my last post, I said that networking is the lens through which I see most everything, or at least I try. I confess that I still have some old habits of mind, mostly that I'm unaware of, but when brought to mind, I do try to address them. I quoted Olaf Sporns comments that science is increasingly using the networking metaphor to guide both its subject matter and its research. I want to comment on a couple of points he made, and I quote:

Increasingly, science is concerned with the structure, behavior, and evolution of complex systems such as cells, brains, ecosystems, societies, or the global economy. To understand these systems, we require not only knowledge of elementary system components but also knowledge of the ways in which these components interact and the emergent properties of their interactions. (1)

Note first that he although he started with the term networks, mid-stream he switches to complex systems, the same term that Edgar Morin uses. In my reading, these terms have often been used interchangeably, and I will likely do so in my own discussion, unless I find some reason to distinguish between them.

Second, Sporns captures neatly the distinction between the reductionist, mechanistic clockwork type of science with its focus on "knowledge of elementary system components" and the evolutionary, organic networking type of science with its focus on "knowledge of the ways in which these components interact and the emergent properties of their interactions." This shift in metaphors, or paradigms if you prefer, is extremely important for me.

Although Sporns and I do not share similar disciplines—he studies and teaches neuroscience and I study and teach writing and literature—his work has a critical, core benefit for me: Sporns insists and demonstrates through exhaustive research that cognition is a network phenomenon. I accept his argument, as I have not found a better, more detailed, more precise description of how the brain works. I was pleased, then, to read James Zull's educational book The Art of Changing the Brain (2002) which applies the networking paradigm to learning and draws out some implications for teaching and pedagogy. Networking, of course, is at the heart of Connectivism. Throughout his writings, Stephen Downes makes a number of statements that express knowledge and learning as network phenomena. For instance, in the 2011 post What Networks Have In Common, Downes says, "the state we call 'knowledge' is produced in (complex) entities as a consequence of the connections between and interactions among the parts of that entity." I could no doubt find even more pointed pronouncements in Downes' writing, but this is sufficient. In his online book Knowing Knowledge (2006), George Siemens says, "Knowing and learning are today defined by connections ... connectivism is the assertion that learning is primarily a network-forming process" (15).

For me, then, learning is the ability of an entity to recognize, build, and traverse networks. Moreover, the tools entities use to recognize, build, and traverse networks are themselves networks, and knowledge is an emergent property of the interactions among and across those networks of neurons, sensory organs, sound waves, light waves/particles, classrooms, social groups, languages, the Universe … as far out or in as you wish to take it.

Anyone who has read Downes and Siemens will see that nothing I say here is new. Those fellows have already said it, and in general, I agree with them (details are always problematic, but that doesn't concern me here). Learning is networking across multi-scale networks, and that has huge implications for the way we teach, but is learning rhizomatic? Perhaps a better way to ask this question is what does the concept of the rhizome as developed in Deleuze and Guattari's book A Thousand Plateaus bring to connectivism that it doesn't already have? This is similar to a question I have heard Siemens ask of Cormier in some of our previous MOOCs, and it merits an investigation, if not an answer. I'll try to do that. Tomorrow.

Why Rhizomatic Learning? #etmooc

Okay, so I enjoyed the conversation about rhizomatic education over at Christina Hendricks' blog, You're the Teacher. In the conversation, I'm definitely championing rhizomatic, connectivist education, but why? I've been writing about this for a couple of years now, but can I state my point of view succinctly and reasonably clearly? Well, I can try.

Learning is a network phenomenon.

That's rather succinct, and owes deep apologies to neuroscientist Olaf Sporns, but I can say it with a bit more texture: learning is a function of our complex interactions across multi-scale physical, cognitive, technological, and social networks. For me, this is the DNA of a connectivist and rhizomatic view of learning, and everything else I say about learning will follow from this core idea. At least, I hope so.

But can I defend my claim that learning is a network phenomenon? I think so, but in some ways, starting points always carry with them assumptions that one either accepts or doesn't, and they carry assumptions that the believer is quite often unaware of. I think my use of networks falls into this category. However, I can point to some reasons why I use the concept.

Networks provide me a most useful model of how the Universe/Reality/Everything works, including learning. Of course, as soon as I say that, I am reminded of George E. P. Box's famous dictum that "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" (Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, 1987). I am convinced that, despite how right network thinking feels to me, eventually people will come to see the faults with the network metaphor just as we are coming to see the faults with the mechanistic clockwork metaphor that we inherited from Galileo, Newton, and Descartes. As Edgar Morin has pointed out in his book On Complexity (2008), the mechanistic, clockwork model of reality and the science and technology built upon it has been spectacularly successful, but over the past century, cracks have begun to appear as we have come to see more of Reality, especially at the macro and micro levels. As we peer into our scopes, bits of reality emerge that no longer fit the clockwork model. Reality is stubborn, so we change our model. But slowly, sometimes too slowly.

The model that appears to be replacing the mechanistic clockwork model is networking. Of course, not everyone uses that term. Edgar Morin speaks of systems, especially complex systems. In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2005), Randall Collins defines the core sociological unit not an individual but the situation, a dynamic nexus of intersecting vectors which to my mind requires a network structure. James Lovelock calls it Gaia, the movies call it The Matrix. All of these sources have valid reasons for using the term that they do, but to my mind, networking (and here I'm using the verbal form intentionally to capture the complex dynamics in my concept) is the most convenient and natural-feeling term. I spent many years of my professional life building campus networks and connecting students, faculty, and staff to the Internet, so it just works for me; however, I also frequently use the term rhizomatics or rhizomics to play off Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus, 1988), a more free-form, complex, dynamic, and inclusive form of networking that reveals some properties that I find particularly useful and fun.

So the networking model in all its various iterations and apellations appears to be the emerging model of how things work. I like Olaf Sporns' comments about this in his book Networks of the Brain (2011), so I'll end this post with a long quote that has a decidedly scientific bias that I think will inform our thinking in the humanities:

Over the last decade, the study of complex networks has dramatically expanded across diverse scientific fields, ranging from the social sciences to physics and biology. This expansion reflects modern trends and currents that have changed the way scientific questions are formulated and research is carried out. Increasingly, science is concerned with the structure, behavior, and evolution of complex systems such as cells, brains, ecosystems, societies, or the global economy. To understand these systems, we require not only knowledge of elementary system components but also knowledge of the ways in which these components interact and the emergent properties of their interactions. (1)