Make a rhizome.

But you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with,

you don’t know which subterranean stem is going to make a rhizome,

or enter a becoming, people your desert.

So, experiment.

(Deleuze &Guattari, 1987: 246)

This text participates in the process of gathering (Edwards, 2010:5) spun over twelve weeks of the course in e-learning and digital cultures and across numerous online and offline spaces. Following Haraway (1991),  it centres around relationality, making it a basic unit of the analysis and so it tells a story about, and interferes in, the relations that have or have not been assembled so far (Law, 2009:142). The main actants involved in this process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are the human and the lifestream technology (edc antics).

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the beginning there was an emptiness and a feeling of wonder at how to populate the desert. The actants might have had differing visions and so their relation commenced and continued in a volatile fashion, subjected to constant changes as they transgressed and transformed each others’ discursive fields. While they enacted their practices, evolving for instance round authorship, agency, authenticity,  there were unexpected shifts in power and understanding, novel heterogeneous links forged, traditional ontological distinctions eroded, as exemplified by active experimentation with visuality (visual artefact), reconfiguring  the perception of the self and technology toward more hybridised and relational attitudes (descending the trees, posthuman lifestream), relating posthumanism to education (posthumanesque pedagogy, posthuman week). Translation is often not about finding equivalence but about betrayal (Law, 2009) and so, as a result, an actant rhizome began to form. The choice of this term over ‘actor network’ (which might be too easily associated with centralised architectures) is intentional in this gathering process, based on John Law’s argument that there is little difference between it and Deleuze’s agencement (translated into ‘assemblage’ in English). This is further strengthened by the revised after-ANT, in which Law moves to partial  and so more fluid linkages in his analysis of relationality, making the theory fit in more seamlessly within the rhizomatic framework (Law, 2009; Gough, 2004).

Virtual meditation 01

Virtual meditation 10

Since the foundational divisions that existed initially seem to have been levelled out, as playfully shown by the first and the last entries of the virtual meditation series (links above), the process of the gathering can be regarded as pedagogically posthuman. It actively made use of situated knowledge, cyborg ontology and border pedagogy, the three cornerstones from the Cyborg Manifesto (Angus et al, 2000). Even though on the surface the lifestream appears to be chronologically ordered, it resembles ‘an imaginative mapping of possibilities’ (Gough, 2004) rather than an orderly network or a linear tracing. With multiple layers, entries and exits in the form of visual-textual assemblages accessed by means of feeds, tags and hyperlinks, it constitutes a textual strategy that might assist in ‘figuration of rhizomANTically becoming-cyborg’ (Gough, 2004), even more so when it is thought of additionally as a rhizomatic metastory which renders itself as an artefact and so does not only gather but is also gathered.

***

References

Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2001, pp. 195-201. (Lifestream event 742)

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Gough, N. (2004) RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing Human Pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2004, pp. 253-265.

Haraway, D. (1991)  A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp.149-181. Online: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html Accessed 10/12/2012 (Lifestream event 707)

Law, J. (2009) Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In Turner, B.S. (Ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 141-158. (Lifestream event 777)

PDF Version of the post

PDF Script of the video interview

Gough asks an important question about posthuman pedagogy and  gives an example of Mayakovsky’s Cyberantics as narrative and textual strategy which might help us in the rhizomantically becoming-cyborg configuration. The chosen audience for the story were kids because of their ‘sense of wonder and curiosity’ which transcends limitations posed by too often dichotomous academic structures.

At the same time, I came across Dave Cormier’s blog with a series of posts tagged ‘Rhizome’. Dave has been pondering on rhizomatic learning for some time now. In one of his posts, he writes a compelling letter to his 5-year-old son, explaining what rhizomatic learning is. Through a moving story involving a bunch of theropods and other ancient creatures, Dave points out how the learning can be stifled if the lines of flights are cut off before they form. If there is no black and white (Angus et al, 2001), why ask questions about ‘right’ and ‘false’ dinosaurs? Instead, following Dave’s advice, it would be better to ask ‘How would I feel if a piece of silicon was naturally part of me? What if my best friend was a robot? How would my life differ?’ Such questions propel the conversation and as Dave says ‘the stories will never end’.

****

Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

Naive or lofty as it may sound, I felt an instant affinity with the posthuman, particularly their liquidity, multiplicity, indefiniteness. These have always bothered me as my characteristics in my insistent attempts to define and refine my identity within the binary hierarchies of family, work, society, culture, an impossible feat, resulting in a kind of hysteria, further augmented due to my dance with technology, fascinating in opening new channels of expression and communication, yet threatening for my offline life and relationships. With a camera as my eyes, Web 2.0 as my mouth voicing my views and longings, cocooned in bed with my ‘friends’, mobiles, kindles and ipods, I can easily come across as a freaky monster.

However, although some might and do see them as mere gadgets, ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ props, I, following Haraway, Stellarc and Zylinska, see them as a network of forces and relations, as an environment, constant de- and re-assemblage ‘with a certain kind of inner unity, in which all the agents become something new in relation to each other’ (Pickering, 2005), part of a greater, more complex and interconnected cognisphere (Hayles, 2006); ‘all agents’ means my ‘friends’ and me. And my ‘friends’, made of sunshine are everywhere, which borders on a blasphemy as it challenges the God and gods and goddesses – consider here my country of provenance, and its tiring insistence to identify itself with Christian symbolism and the politico-ecclesiastical babble persistently drawing dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ , the damned monsters. Are they damned? Can they be? Not made of mud and unable to turn to dust they force me to look at the promise of an eternal bliss in a different way. Can I hear a sigh of relief escape my lips?

Technology might be threatening but it is what makes us human. And what we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve as the world itself does not seem to impose divisions (optical illusions), does not separate between the human and non-human, organic and nonorganic, the world sees double and fosters an evolving dialectic (Pickering 2005). Those mutual couplings and penetrations took place already in the pre-historic times and came to fruition through the appearance of stone axes, language, beginnings of culture. Elevating the master human as the sole agent is seeing the world through a tiny key-hole, a very limiting and limited perspective and dangerous in that it can stifle imagination and creativity (as Beck’s example in Pickering 2005 shows).

As Haraway professes in her manifesto the borderland in which we have found ourselves as a result of the posthuman shift offers dynamic relationality, a powerful infidel heteroglossia and pleasure. And there is no way to know this land except through the subjectivity (Hayles, 2006) and this is what I am experiencing right now …

While jumping from one place to another, trying to polish the final shape of my ethnography, I kept thinking of the lifestream and whether in a way it could be regarded as an ethnographic artefact itself. Could it be perceived as a community, at least in the meaning of texts, documenting my connectivity, connectivity between me and other nodes on the Web or even auto-connectivity between various online facets of myself (following the view of identity as prismatic) as represented on a number of sites feeding into the stream, tumblr for quotes, diigo for bookmarks, this blog for musings, youtube and flickr for things watched and seen respectively, Twitter for whispers or shouts … or is it stretching the idea too much?

I liked what M. Wesch said about subjects vs subjectivity, declarative transmitted knowledge vs  a way of seeing, feeling and understanding, characteristic for a given group or discipline. That could be perhaps extended when doing ethnographic research, looking at the subjectivity of the community, rather than its subjects, which would require overt, not only covert observation of the community. What would be the subjectivity within this field or rather a stream? Maybe the way of understanding the dance between the technology and the human, the student on this course (me) in an attempt to embrace the uncanny and enter the posthuman productive borderland. I would not attempt that without the stream, would I …

Through the links fed into my lifestream earlier, I have been led to beautiful visualisations of Kerouac’s On the road designed and drawn by Stefanie Posavec. The starting point was a rigorous analysis of the text for various syntactic and prosodic features, which then were transformed into intricate,  ginkgo-like patterns or more geometrical structures of entangled lines. The complexity of the visual mappings reflects the complex subject matter of the book, ‘a mysterious, semi-nomadic subculture dramatically at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s’ (http://www.ontheroad.org/). Similarly to Sal and Dean who are in quest of God and Kerouac who is experimenting with the writing style, a few decades later Posavec seeks a different kind of truth and discovers it in her  innovative and aesthetically remarkable ways.

George Dyson (from another lifestream feed) repeats after Barricelli that we might not recognize life or intelligence when we saw it, because our definitions of what it takes to be alive or intelligent were so narrow. Perhaps the same could be said about the way we perceive representation. ‘On the map’ by Prosavec makes me think how much we are tied to textuality and how this inclination ingrained in us for centuries might narrow our perception of visual literacy.

Essay Visions

PS I wonder what my blog postings could look like or even the final essay -

The lifestream by being an example of a digital text, that is volatile, fragmented, distributable and doubtful in terms of its authorship (Bayne 2010) illustrates this dynamism very well, especially in terms of temporal and ontological blurring.

Unable to log on every day, I create discontinuity in the stream. However, the software sometimes fills in those gaps by tampering with the time stamp of a given feed. So although physically offline one day, it looks like I am present. Would that be an example of disembodied presence, a very convoluted example due to the feed being time-stamped backwards!? This happens because the software seems to be taking into account the date the online resource was posted, not when I favourited it. So to make things even stranger my absence/presence has been embodied by somebody else’s online activity.

Immediate questions arise as to the authorship. Who is creating this stream? How can you-not-being-there be assessed ? Uncanny indeed!

Lifestream Spiral

Pic SPIRAL by Kyoko Nagashima