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

Is it possible to create a space where these two species of knowledge can meet and mingle? (Pedersen, 2010: 241).

I found this question to be crucial when considering educability of the posthuman. What Pedersen meant in her article was the boundary work between animal and education studies but it could be extended to whole disciplines in the way Pickering (2005) did in his essay where he suggested that natural and social sciences transcend each other by forming assemblages with ‘inner unity’ and around ‘evolving dialectic’. I think that a similar project can be undertaken in regard to different subjectivities, namely writers/editors and readers, as exemplified by the Liquid Reader Project from the University of London, my nomination for a posthuman(-esque) pedagogy task. Even though it does not lead explicitly to human/machinic hybridisation, the project, inspired by  Gary Hall’s and Clare Birchall’s Liquid Book Project aspires to explore liquidity, promote boundary work, foster open access and technological innovation and so questions the human project understood as ‘one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ – typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students’ (from the project description).

The blurb from the dedicated website spells out exactly the origin and the rationale of the project.

[This project] engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ – a customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.

According to the project description, the aim is to decentre the author by making everybody an editor/author, which can be seen as an attempt to liquidise the boundaries between the two subjectivities, thus enabling them to meet and mingle, producing various entanglements.

There is a wealth of additional questions and issues raised alongside, for example in regard to the process of remixing, repurposing,  limitability of the ‘book’ , attribution, citation and intellectual property.

There are two accompanying tasks here.

My analysis of a term into a root word and a modifier can be easily traced back to a syntactic tree structure where the noun forms a head and the adjective takes the subjugated position of a specifier. With Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar forming part of my background, I can’t help seeing the language in forms of aborescent structures, maybe rich the complexity of layers but with dichotomous relationships as an underlying organising principle. I can see movements mapped our but always with clear ports of departure and clear destinations, all of them subject to rules of government and power. Yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this representation of the linguistic reality is not abstract enough …

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If the language is  indeed closely related to culture, then my linguistic musings on the nature of ‘digital culture’ are devoid of substance. If ‘digital culture’ is analysed from the rhizome perspective, the relationship between the two can be seen in a surprisingly different light.

Disassembling ...

Like in the famous example of a wasp and an orchid as a visualisation of the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the culture deterritorialises by becoming detached, disembodied and dis-embedded from its temporal and spatial contexts (Hand, 2008) as it flows into the capillaries of the Web as information. The ubiquity allows the digital to reterritorialise – ‘the project of everware is nothing less than the colonisation of everyday life by technology’ (Greenfield, 2006 in Hand, 2008) (although the term ‘colonisation’ reintroduces the notions of power). However, simultaneously, it is deterritorialised as it becomes part of the ubiquitous culture (by being infiltrated and taken over, to use Hand’s ‘power’ discourse) and then it reterritorialises the culture by transporting its artefacts.

The result is an emergence of new concepts and convergence of thereof with existing objects and practices, producing novel understandings (Hand, 2008). In the process of aggregation, repurposing, mashing-up and creative recombination, new cultural artefacts are released into the circulation (Off Book Visual Culture Online or Life in a Day)

This way the notion of imitation can be excluded as the claim that digital culture is a form of culture (either superior in utopian terms of inferior, disruptive in dystopic terms) does not hold truth any more as there are no universals, no dualisms. Rather  fragments of code characteristic for one and the other are captured and mutually exchanged allowing the digital and the culture to become the other, a becoming-digital of the culture and a becoming-culture of the digital. The boundaries are blurred in the most fantastic post-human fashion (think also of the flattened relationship between the symbol and the signified as described by Kristeva and further illustrated  by Bayne, 2008 in her example of how the avatar – the digital- often becomes what it signifies, that is the identity of the user). If so, there can be no clear answer whether digital cultures bring a promise or a threat, a utopian or a dystopic future as they are not subject to a cause-and-effect representation but a much more complex multiplicity, a machinic assemblage, surprisingly a relief for a person brought up on Chomskyan trees.

... and reassembling!