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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

The Need for a Rhizomatic Rhetoric #rhizo14

I fully intended to write another post about power, and I will, but not today. My thoughts have been redirected by a marvelous Twitter chat some of the Rhizo14 group held this past Thursday. As a result of that chat, we are perhaps about to consciously write a rhizomatic document that explores the Rhizo14 MOOC.

Here's the set-up as I understand it: a group of Rhizo14 participants want to write something about the MOOC, and they are trying to discover what they will write, how they will write, where, and so forth. They started an auto-ethnography project on Google Docs to collect personal accounts of participation in the MOOC, and then they gathered in Twitter chats and on Facebook to discuss how to proceed. I decided to check in to see what was happening. I'm glad that I did. Somewhere in the chat I asked what a rhizomatic book might look like, and the idea resonated with others. I asked because it seemed that we were engaged in rhizomatic writing anyway, and I wanted to make that conscious, explicit. I hope we follow through as it will give all of us, but me in particular, a chance to explore a new way to write, a new way to think about scholarship. As we are all scholars, this could be rich.

My question, then, is what rhetoric informs this kind of writing? Is this different? Does the technology change how we conduct scholarship and write our findings? I want to suggest that this type of scholarship and writing requires a new rhetoric—it requires a rhizo-rhetoric.

I will take a clue from Clarissa Bezerra here and suggest that you listen to some music. My choice is The Beatles' Revolution 9. It will make sense, I think.



Well, rhizo-rhetoric has a nice roll of the tongue and is perhaps pleasing to the ear, but does it mean anything? Can it help us compose a useful, intelligent, elegant document in some fashion that is useful to others? This is basically my definition of rhetoric: the skillful use of language to connect to the world, to ourselves, and to others. So does rhetoric change when we write as a group using modern information technology? And what kind of document should emerge from such a rhetoric? Well, I hope to find out, but I want to start with some ideas that may speed our learning. I find more things when I'm looking for something, even if I'm looking for the wrong something. What, then, might we expect of a rhizo-rhetoric? I want to suggest a few things.

First, let's start with Deleuze and Guattari, the originators of this rhizome metaphor for how the world is structured and for how language might map that world in useful ways. As we might imagine, language and writing, or rhetoric, is a major consideration of Introduction: Rhizome, the opening chapter to their book A Thousand Plateaus. The very first paragraph introduces a most interesting problem for rhetoric: the writer. Deleuze and Guattari say:

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.

As near as I can tell, Deleuze and Guattari begin by attacking, among other things, the very core of traditional rhetoric and scholarship: the subjective, discrete knower, the observer who stands aside from the object observed and knows it, defines it, from the outside, and then writes and talks about it. D&G don't waste time. This attack, if successful, undermines everything. It demands a new rhetoric, possibly a rhizo-rhetoric. We'll see.

The first point of change is obvious: multiple writers. This Rhizo14 ethnography will involve many writers making use "of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away." Just off the top of my head, and in alphabetical error: Maha Bali from Egypt, Frances Bell from UK, Clarissa Bezerra from Brazil, Dave Cormier from Canada, Simon Ensor from France, Keith Hamon from USA, Sarah Honeychurch from Scotland, Lenandlar Singh from Guayana, Vanessa Vaille from USA, and more who do not pop into my mind just now. Clearly, traditional rhetoric is inadequate to address the voice, the tone, the style, the point of view, the purposes, the persona of such a diverse assemblage.

But as they often are, D&G are more subtle than an assemblage of individuals—they make each individual an assemblage of identities. They state that each of them constitutes a larger assemblage: "Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." And they are working hard toward the point where the individual becomes irrelevant, "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." Maha Bali, then, is not just part of the assemblage, she is herself an assemblage. As am I.

A Dream Story
I had a dream last night. I was attending, perhaps crashing, a retirement banquet given in honor of one of my past creative writing professors. I entered a quite narrow banquet hall with high ceilings and one table stretching into the distance in either direction. The hall had a faintly Spanish or monastic feel, with adobe walls and large tile floors. People I did not know, but presumably ex-students such as myself, were already seated, eating and talking. I may have been late, but I was not anxious—just noting that I knew no one in my immediate area. Suddenly, my professor entered from the main entrance opposite me, and quite as suddenly, in dreamtime, he was seated a few seats down on my right, so I moved to greet him. He recognized me immediately with genuine joy and complimented me in a loud voice so that all in the vicinity turned and looked at me. I beamed. We spoke in learned voices about learned things, as all about us listened, and I became as much the center of focus as he was. I basked shamelessly in adoration, but as we spoke, I became uncomfortable. I was thinking that he looked too young for such an old fellow as he should be by now, and I wondered if he'd had a face-lift. Gradually as he spoke, I became more troubled. Then a very old fellow entered the hall and sat opposite me. I recognized him as the real professor. I spoke to him, but he did not recognize me at all. I awoke to come type it all down.

I tell you this dream story not for self-analysis, though some not-so-flattering interpretations come immediately to mind, but to ask you who composed this dream. The glib answer, of course, is I composed it, but as I look at the story now, I see many me's. There is the me (me1) who observed the dream, remembered it, and wrote it down here. At least, I think that is just one me, the me that I most often consciously identify with, but it could be two different me's—not sure. Anyway, there is also the me (me2) who performed in the dream and whom me1 watched. Then, there is the me (me3) who presented the dream. I do not know me3 at all, but I am assuming that me3 also composed the evening's entertainment as well as presented it. I've no rhetoric to explain how or why me3 thought it necessary to play a very rude joke on me2, who was blind to the whole thing until the denouement, and to teach a cruel lesson about the sins of self-aggrandizement to me1, who was just as blind until the end, and who didn't really understand much of the dream until he was a awake, which suggests that this could indicate yet another me, say me1.2). Like D&G, I am quite a crowd.

I suspect most of us are familiar with these different aspects of ourselves over which we spread a fiction of unity, coherence, and continuity. If we join the assemblages that each of us is with the assemblage of our groups, then we are left with quite a cluster, and it takes a thicker veneer to unify the multiple. We need a rhetoric that addresses this multiplicity, this swarm, this cacophony of voices, this interweaving of purposes and points of view. Such a rhetoric will help us make the observations and collect and interpret the data we need to make sense of what happens when such an assemblage writes.

I started a new paragraph, but from the opening sentence, I could tell that it would be long enough to warrant a new post, so I'll stop here with my first question about rhizo-rhetoric clearer in my head. Anyway, it's the end of the term, and I have documents to grade (yes, I have to put a grade on them, so I try to do it well).

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.

Coda and #rhizo14

Well, didn't we have a party! I really enjoyed Rhizo14, and I thank everyone who joined in, especially the lurkers, who play a much unheralded role in the community as curriculum. I think they are the ones I most want to talk about.

Rhizo14 had such a wonderful wealth of marvelous conversations that I could not track them all. As Dave Cormier said in our unhangout yesterday, he will likely spend the next year hiking his way through the conversation, picking up the trail of things that he passed too quickly during the ride (a term I will steal from Clarissa). Like many others that I've read, I was greatly challenged and enriched by the conversations; yet, through it all, I felt some tension that I couldn't quite surface, but now that I'm a little quieter, I think it had to do with lurkers, those who join a MOOC but aren't vocal. If the statistics about MOOCs are correct, then roughly 80% of people fall into this category, reinforcing the overworked and generally misapplied 80/20 rule. I want to tease this out a bit.

For me, the tension surfaced first as issues with power and causality. Early in Rhizo14, a bit of controversy emerged about comments that appeared to exclude some in the MOOC. The controversy seemed to crystallize into an academics vs. non-academics argument and became something of a power struggle over who could legitimately be in what learning space. I didn't engage that conversation, but it created some tension for me as I wondered why such a boundary would emerge in what I took to be a fairly open learning space with room for all, but as I say, I did not engage the conversation closely enough to gain any clarity.

Then in a comment on one of my posts about the role of space in education, Scott Johnson made a comment about his struggles with the concept of potential in space:

The idea of a potential residing in space is very compelling and also hard to match with my notion of causality as an overarching power determining everything. Maybe we seek to send students in a productive path through a fertile field and need to back away and watch? What was caused by us and what emerged as a result of the students' balancing their path in an unfamiliar setting is hard to know.

 I was keenly struck by his comment that potential residing in space is "hard to match with my notion of causality as an overarching power determining everything", and a wheel turned just a bit. I began to wonder if our view of causality is what prevents us from seeing the community as curriculum. I think it's worth exploring.

As I can see it, the tension I felt is linked to our ingrained habit of thinking of causality as exclusively local. In other words, everything (an effect) is caused by something else (a cause) that is local, or nearby in space and time. The corollary of this definition is that nothing happens that is not caused by another local event. Things that have no local cause are relegated to magic and, thus, to unreality by our classically oriented scientific minds. For us, a body floating on the stage (an effect) must be supported by some wires somewhere (local cause).

In his book Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002), Basarab Nicolescu says that modern complexity theory has "expanded the field of reality" by showing that local causality is not the only kind of causality, and he notes both global causalities and circular causalities. I have to expand my field of reality with these additional causalities to make sense of something like Rhizo14 where the community is the curriculum. Expanding my field of reality also helps me see the value of the 80% lurking in the shadows of the group.

As near as I can understand it, global causality refers to the pull of a larger ecosystem on a system. I sometimes think of local causality as a push, as when one billiard ball pushes into another ball and causes it to move. Global causality, then, is a pull, and I see this kind of causality in groups all the time. Studies show that if we put a group of students together for some task and leave them alone, the group will begin immediately to self-organize itself, rank ordering and grouping various students. This self-organization does not have to be locally caused by a teacher. The group will just do it almost as if by magic, but it is magic only if we lock ourselves into the push of local causality. If we open ourselves to the pull of global causality, then we see how any system (a group of students, a human body, a business organization, or a galaxy) will self-organize itself as the whole system pulls itself into functioning sub-systems, depending on the local pushes of the parts and the global pulls of the whole. The jostling of all the parts into useful arrangements can only be partially explained by local causality alone. We need global causality to expand the explanation. The mechanisms for this push and pull (local and global causalities) vary from system to system, but the dynamic interaction appears to hold across all systems, from the inanimate to the animate.

Unfortunately, 400 years of Newtonian physics and Cartesian science has focused us almost exclusively on local causality, relegating global causality to the mystical and magical. The only language we have for global causality is poetic, religious, and metaphoric. Fortunately, complexity theory is providing us with verifiable concepts such as emergence which are just beginning to help us say with more precision and confidence just what we mean by the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Complexity theory, which I use to encompass all the disparate ideas from relativity and quantum mechanics to information theory and post-structuralism, is expanding the field of reality and the vocabulary with which to map that expanded field.

Circular causality is another aspect of complexity thinking that expands the field of reality and helps me make sense of Rhizo14. In local causality, cause-effect interactions are regular and repeatable. A billiard ball strikes another ball in the same way if the locations, speeds, and trajectories are the same, and neither ball is essentially changed by the interaction. This is not the case in living systems, and probably not in the case of the billiard balls. When living systems push against each other, they change each other, and those changes are fed back into the subsequent interactions, or pushes, changing them essentially. As I interact with the Rhizo14 community, I am changed and Rhizo14 is changed, and those changes are fed back into our interactions so that the trajectory of our interactions cannot be explained solely by the pushes (local causality) but must include the nonlinear feedback of circular causality. Again, I have to expand my field of reality beyond local causality to understand what is happening in Rhizo14.

Local causality causes us to focus on the push of individuals in any group, so in something like Rhizo14, we tend to think that everything depends on, or is caused by, the few most active individuals (usually, that's whoever is talking the loudest and the most). Using the 80/20 rule, we focus on the 20% and ignore the 80%, just like in business, where we heavily compensate the 20% and barely compensate the 80%. Even in a group with a name like The Community as Curriculum, with community in its name, we habitually focus on the few. This is a mistake, I think. The few cannot make a community without the many. We privilege the few at the expense of the many. I continue to do it, even though I intellectually know better. As a soccer coach, I KNOW that the whole field of players is the most important feature of the game, but as a spectator, I still tend to follow, to privilege, the player with the ball. The player with the ball makes no sense without the other players on the field. Imagine the other players suddenly absent, and what are you left with? Some guy running and dribbling the ball around the field. Time to go home.

I think I can say my tension now: I still tend to privilege the individual, especially the loud, active, powerful individual, over the community. I still privilege local causality at the expense of global and circular causalities. I still unreasonably restrict my field of reality. For instance, I still want to say that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and to privilege him with money and fame when I KNOW that it really took all of Apple and the rest of the electronics industry to do it. I want to say that Dave Cormier made Rhizo14 happen, when I know it was the community that did it, including the 80% who lurked. To really make sense of Rhizo14, I have to expand my field of reality to include the whole community and to find ways to privilege all parts of the community.

This sounds as if I want to minimize a Steve Jobs or Dave Cormier, but that is not the case at all. They, too, must be included in the field of reality, but I cannot understand the iPhone or Rhizo14 if I limit my vision to local causality, looking simply to those two causes to explain the effects. They are both necessary causes, but not sufficient. Likewise, the other active voices in Rhizo14, mine included, are necessary but insufficient causes. If I want to understand Rhizo14, I have to explore the global and circular causes (and likely other kinds of causes) that help illuminate a complex system. Focusing on local causes is easier, but including all causes provides a better picture, and that's what I want.

Intermezzo and #rhizo14

In her post Questions about rhizomatic learning, Jenny Mackness ponders the arrangement of space in Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. She quotes D and G: "Nomad space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other" and "A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo." She then notes the difficulty envisioning such a space, saying that her "past experience has suggested that there are always boundaries that we come up against". I share her difficulty, and I think that it's the boundaries that cause the problem for both of us and for most others.

I start with boundaries as Paul Cilliers uses them in his article Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2007), where he argues that knowledge is not representational but relational: "a result of the dynamic interaction between all the meaningful components in the system" (85). This leads to a problem because any system, even the most trivial garden slug, has an approximately infinite number of dynamic relations that could be considered at any one time. We use context and boundaries to limit the number of considerations that we must make at any given time in order to form some useful understanding of whatever bit of reality we happen to be engaging, the garden slug for instance. We must limit and differentiate. As Cilliers says, "For meaning or knowledge to exist at all, there have to be limits" (87), or boundaries.

We learn these boundaries from parturition, when we are first separated from the mother and relationship and dynamic interaction become unavoidable. Perhaps we develop some sense of boundaries earlier, but I really have no expertise or even much idea about that. I am certain, however, that one of the first tasks after birth is for babies to differentiate themselves from their mothers. That may be the biggest bit of learning we ever do, and I suspect that everything else we learn follows from that first striation in the rhizome. After we form me and you, we form here/there, up/down, wet/dry, hungry/full, and all the rest. We start slicing and dicing our world, the rhizome, and we form our boundaries within the context of our social groups: mother/child dyad, family, clan, and larger.

These differentiations are always an act of power, and we learn to use our own idiosyncratic powers as well as the power of our groups to form our world. We do it so often and so automatically, that it comes to feel natural, and we are often shocked when we learn that others don't see the same things that we see, don't have the same meaning about the Eiffel Tower as we do.

The point that I think Deleuze and Guattari and others such as Serres are making is that reality is not striated naturally. All of the boundaries and structures that we trace onto the rhizome to make it meaningful and useable are acts of power, individual and group. We say, "up" or "down", and the rhizome says, "Whatever." The rhizome is "always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo", and up and down really depend totally on our point of view and the way we have sliced and diced things. Moreover, something in the rhizome resists our marking and differentiating, or is indifferent to our meaning-making, and flees our naming and knowing through lines of flight, deterritorializing here and reterritorializing in the most unexpected places, as when a grape deterritorializes in Argentina only to reterritorialize in me as a nice Merlot. We make the mistake of thinking that our naming and knowing, our differentializations, are permanent markers on reality. The rhizome teaches us otherwise.

This is, of course, very eastern in its feel—not quite buddhist, but damn near it. It is also very much a part of complexity theory. From what I read, modern physics says that everything in the Universe is interconnected to everything else (gravity, for instance, extends totally across the Universe), and the boundaries we make between this and that are mostly a matter of convention and convenience, not a matter of absolute truth. New laws and new boundaries are constantly emerging, which means that our knowledge should be constantly emerging, should be constantly renewed. This pleases me greatly, as I will never run out of things to learn, even if I should prove to be eternal as the fundamentalists insist. Can you imagine an eternity with nothing new to learn? God spare us.

Space, Possibility, and #rhizo14

In her post Questions about rhizomatic learning, Jenny Mackness notes that I "have written that ‘the space holds all the possibilities’, which has made [her] wonder what possibilities the structure holds." This play with the tensions between open and structured spaces is a conversation I picked up from Michel Serres' book Genesis, his meditations about how form, or structure, emerges from chaos, open spaces. I find Serres' writing incredibly rich and exciting, using precisely the sort of rhizomatic approach to language that I was trying to talk about in my previous post. Serres makes great use of both metaphor and model, being well schooled in both classical literature and mathematics. Thus, he has no problem mixing religious imagery and metaphor on one hand with mathematically precise, rational models on the other. I cannot overlook that his book shares the title of the first book of Judeo/Christian scripture: Genesis.

Anyway, the new idea for me was that space is not empty or silent; rather, space is chaos, in the best sense of that term. Space is the open places where no forms, no boundaries, no things yet exist, but where anything can emerge, anything is possible. Why? Because space is filled with what Serres calls noise, the roiling sea foam out of which every-thing emerges: rocks, people, stars, ideas—not necessarily in that order. This is consistent with my understanding of the current thinking in physics.

This is a big deal for me, because it makes space less threatening and more promising, though just slightly, and it helps me to visualize (I need to visualize in order to understand) what happens when I move into unknown, chaotic, all-possible space. First, every-thing is already there and possible, but only some-things emerge, or differentiate themselves from the background noise, as I engage. The noise is always there, always, and the noise contains all possibilities, to use Serres' terms. But as soon as I engage the space, boundaries form and things begin to emerge, effectively closing down many possibilities as these emerging things and ideas begin to define the once-open space in relationship to me. The space begins to close about me. This is neither good nor bad. This is just what happens as I engage the space, especially in the company of others. Possibilities, then, become potentialities in Serres' terms, and power emerges within the relationships of the emerging things.

To reference the soccer analogy again, within the open space of the soccer pitch, almost any-thing can emerge, or happen. However, once the ball is played into that space and players engage the space, most of the possibilities that could have happened are eliminated. Now, the game closes, defines, that once open space, and potentialities along with power emerge. The location, trajectory, and pace of the ball and the arrangement, trajectories, and skills of the various players define the open space, closing off most of what had been possible in that space, and the potential takes over from the possible.

Now, there is something of the pedantic here as common usage does not distinguish much between possible and potential, and probably Serres could have swapped the words without harming his meaning, but I find the distinction enlightening and helpful. Consider this post that I am writing and you are reading. A question opened this space for me—as Dave Cormier's questions have opened spaces in #rhizo14—and the possible things that I could have said in reply to Jenny's questions were not infinite, but they were greater than I could imagine, so effectively infinite. However, as soon as I started thinking about the space beyond her question, and especially as I began to write words into that space, I closed off lots of the things I might possibly have said. In the act of writing about the question at hand, I engaged the space and began defining it, moving from very large possible to a more restricted potential. I introduce Serres here but not other thinkers (Paul Cilliers comes to mind) that I could have used. I use a soccer analogy here but not the rhizome analogy, which could work nicely as well. I close off the conversation of necessity. It's the only way I know to make sense.

We do this sort of thing all the time. We must do it to make sense of the world and to share it with others. In his introduction to the Week 5 unhangout of Rhizo14, Dave says that we have to start reassembling the spaces that we've been exploring in the first 4 weeks. This reassembling suggests the meaning-making that I'm trying to talk about.

So does structure have possibility? Well, yes, of course, but to use the terms as I've been using them here, space has possibility and structure has potential—still some room for randomness, but not as much as with space. Most of the time, we do not ever engage absolute space or noise. Such an encounter can usually be spoken of only in mystical terms—I think of Saul's encounter on the road to Damascus when he became St. Paul—rather, we engage the more open spaces beyond our current place—for instance, the open part of the soccer pitch beyond where the ball is now, or the space that lies behind an interesting question about whether or not books are making us stupid. Even though there is space behind the ball or the question, it isn't totally unbounded space. The soccer pitch has sidelines, and the question about books has Rhizo14.

The problem with traditional education is that it makes almost no room for space. Every step in a lesson is absolutely choreographed and paced to a fixed destination. Imagine if a soccer coach (teacher) stopped the game each time a ball was played into space to position the ball and the players and to instruct the players on exactly what to do next. Nobody would want to play or watch that game. On the other hand, imagine if there were no field boundaries, no rules, any number of balls, any number of players, and no goals. Nobody would want to play or watch that game, either. Good education, like a good game, requires some boundary, but not too much. It's why I have swapped American football for soccer: football has too much boundary, too many rules, that lead to too many interruptions of the game (and thus to too many commercials).

Good education, like a good game, also requires the constant tension between the open and the closed. In other words, it requires movement of mind and body. We push out into the open for 4 weeks, and then we pull back into the closed for a week or two.

This translates into some specific, concrete ideas about what happens in my classrooms. First, the spaces that I hope to lead my students into have to be open for my students, even if they are no longer open for me. I'm more excited about their learning if I am learning with them, but for some of the most basic classes, the space is very familiar to me. Of course, this can make me a jaded, disengaged professor if I'm not careful, but the one mistake that I cannot make is stopping my students' exploration of a new space, which is still quite open for them, by giving them the right answer. I have to remember that nothing stops exploration and learning quicker than the right answer. As soon as I give the right answer (at least, right in terms of the class), then my students stop exploring and stop learning. As long as I'm talking, my students are not learning. That's an exaggeration, of course, but it makes my point.

Then, I have to remember that students can enter a new space ONLY from the space where they already are. Sometimes the student's current space is nowhere near the space I want to take him. I have to be sensitive to this—in other words, I have to learn where my students are, which is almost impossible to do if I'm talking or lecturing. Students need to anchor first from where they are, then find some new points of reference in the new space, and finally triangulate those new anchors with the old anchors.

Well, I could go on, but I'm reaching the boundaries of my sense of how long my blog post should be, effectively closing down the possibilities of saying more. I hope I've introduced enough potential into the conversation, the game, without totally limiting how others can engage the space. I wish my high school math teacher had allowed more space in his lectures about trigonometry. I might have made a fine mathematician.

Jenny, Rhizomatic Learners, and #rhizo14

I've been conversing with Jenny Mackness for a few years now and have always found our conversations instructive and enjoyable, but never more so than now. As part of our engagement with Rhizo14, she wrote a post (Questions about rhizomatic learning) asking me a few questions about rhizomatic learning and thought. I will try to answer as best I can in this post, but you really owe it to yourself to read her post first. It exemplifies what a rhizomatic post can be: exploration from an individual perspective that is informed by years of study and honest engagement with emerging learning spaces. It's the kind of post I try to write, and I'll try to emulate Jenny here.

I'll take her questions in order that I find them as a simple, convenient organizing strategy. We'll see if that works.

She first asks about how "to distinguish a ‘rhizomatic learner’ from other learners". This suggests to me an attempt to fit rhizomatic learner into a theoretical framework, which I have resisted doing as I consider the rhizome a metaphor rather than a theoretical concept such as the constructivist learner. This may sound like a dodge of the question, but I don't think so. I tried to address this issue in a comment on Cath Ellis' post Model one: maps, but I didn't do so well there. To my mind, a theory is a conceptual model of something; thus, constructivism or connectivism are conceptual models, or theories, of learning, and the concepts within those models are supposed to trace accurately and reliably the processes of learning. We build models to help us get a handle on larger things, such as Cath Ellis' map of the London Underground. For me, a map is a model that helps me conceptualize and navigate the too large and confusing London Underground. The model, then, has limited value in itself; rather, its value follows from how accurately and handily it traces the salient, relevant points of the original.

The rhizomatic learner, on the other hand, is for me a metaphor which expands our understanding of one thing (the process of learning) in the light of another thing (a botanical rhizome). The metaphor learning is a rhizome is similar, then, to the metaphor love is a rose. Love is a rose is an expansive way of comparing what we know in a tactile, visceral way about roses to the emotion love, which can be somewhat more abstract. The rose provides some insight into what love can be like, but no one would say that the rose is a model of love, or that understanding a rose helps us manage our love life with any more precision, finesse, or success. Also, the rose does not depend on love for its value. It has value in itself, regardless of the light it sheds on love.

Moreover, we usually don't feel the same sense of conflict with metaphors that we feel with models. In one of her poems, Margaret Atwood says that love is like a fish-hook in the eye, giving us another metaphor for love. While we can all see a different perspective on love highlighted by this metaphor, we don't see the metaphors in conflict or competition. They both say something more or less useful about love, but only the most left-brained, fundamentalist, reductionist critic would say, "Okay, which is it? Is love a rose or a fish-hook, because it can't be both." This either/or thinking is more typical of models: we are fond of arguing that education is either constructivist or connectivist, for instance, but not both. I don't want to reduce the rhizome metaphor to either of these models. I want rhizomatic learning to remain a metaphor that pushes me outward to explore new ways that I might conduct my classes—I don't want it to become a model for how my class ought to be.

But I have to keep in mind that metaphors are not in conflict, as models tend to be. Thus, I'm quite comfortable with other metaphors than the rhizome. For instance, Jenny Mackness and her colleagues have developed a wonderful metaphor they call emergent learning, and in an article that I published this past year in Cosmopolis, I explored the metaphor of the quantum hive. There are other metaphors, and I see none of these metaphors as in competition or conflict; rather, they are all gateways into the spaces that we don't quite understand yet, the spaces that we are not quite yet able to model. These are the spaces that we are still mapping as nomads/knowmads, but I'm confident that someday we will be able to model them, and when we have them mapped and known, the knowmads will move on to the other open spaces that will open up. I'm confident, then, that knowledge will never become stale and boring. I find that very comforting.

In another of Jenny's posts, she mentions Iain MacGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, in which MacGilchrist provides a detailed examination of the differences between the worldview of the right brain (the master) and the left brain (the emissary), the resulting worldview of the whole brain, and the consequences for human culture. As Jenny notes:

Whilst the title of McGilchrist’s book suggests a polarisation between the left and right brain – this is not the case. He is at pains to point out that we need both hemispheres of the brain – but the thrust of his book is that we have become over dependent on the left hemisphere, the hemisphere of abstraction, to the detriment of the right hemisphere, the hemisphere of embodied learning.

This pretty much captures what I understand of MacGilchrist's argument, and for me, metaphor is a tool of the right brain: the hemisphere of embodied learning, while model is a tool of the left brain, the hemisphere of abstraction. Metaphor helps me to expand my boundaries beyond what I know to those open spaces that are still unknown to me, while model helps me to consolidate what I have learned: to corral the open spaces and make sense of them. I need both, but like MacGilchrist, I think that our current culture privileges the model-making left brain to the disenfranchisement of the metaphor-making right brain, and this is to the detriment of us all. On her blog, Jenny features a quote attributed to Albert Einstein which captures this great loss: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society which honours the servant and has forgotten the gift." While some claim that this particular quote is apocryphal, it still captures the spirit of Einstein's other statements about the value of creative intuition in relation to rationality. It captures MacGilchrist's take on the split brain, and it captures my thinking on metaphor vs. model. I personally tend to value metaphor over model, but I need both. One without the other leads to a skewed world view and to intolerable people: soupy, syrupy airheads on the one hand, and anal-retentive pricks on the other. I'm trying for some balance, recognizing that I could easily slide into the airhead end of the spectrum.

Rhizo14, of course, is focusing on the metaphor-building, intuitive, expansive, open-ended aspect of learning. It should, and I have no problem with this. However, I recognize that this can appear to suggest that rhizomatic learning is all there is to learning. I don't think this is so, and I don't think Dave Cormier thinks it is so. In education as in life, we need all the tools we can master to build good minds and good lives. We need both metaphor and model, we need the right brain and the left brain. We also need to know when to use the one, or the other, or both together.

So to finally address Jenny's question about how to distinguish rhizomatic learners from other learners: I think I can distinguish them from those learners who want only to trace a given path to a given right answer. I cannot distinguish rhizomatic learners from emergent learners or learners in the quantum hive, and I'm not sure that I want to, just yet.

Well, that's question one. I guess I'll have to tackle the other ones later, as I've papers to grade before Monday. But again, thanks to Jenny for pushing me in a righteous direction, and I hope I made sense.