Posts Tagged ‘rhizome’
Riding the lines of flight – Lifelong learning as a rhizome requires rhizomatic research
Thinking about the future of educational research requires a conceptual resource that is itself both imaginative and multiple and at the same time articulates a world with those self-same characteristics. This is provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Discussion of the future of research is located in a context of lifelong learning in the contemporary moment of ubiquitous electronic communication. I argue that the research process, contrary to the model of science, can be better understood as rhizomatic rather than arborescent and powered by desire rather than objectivity. Lifelong learning is a rhizome and requires a rhizomatic approach and sensibility on the part of the researcher. The hyper-connectivity of the Internet reinforces this development influencing the way research is carried out and the way its knowledge outcomes are distributed and used – a research without hierarchy and authority.
Rhizome Yourself: Experiencing Deleuze and Guattari from Theory to Practice
The leitmotif of this paper is the act of bridging gaps between the conceptual, methodological and experiential. Foremost it is an attempt to fuse aspects of the abstract philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with anthropological understandings of Global Assemblages through incorporation of theory into everyday life.
Here, we describe our journey exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual Rhizome. It was an experiment, undertaken in order to bring new ideas to bear on our current and future ethnographic research relating to bioethics, clinical trials and the complexities of international science collaborations in Sri Lanka. In working to bridge a perceived gap between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and our familiar anthropological canon, we made real the abstract rhizomatic thinking they describe, through interaction with a physical rhizome, or plant root.
Rizoma – Co-construyendo un hábitat humano: El amor como mutación del lenguaje
¿Cómo son las cosas? ¿Cómo es el mundo? El mundo viene de adentro. Lo construimos todos los días a través de la pegajosidad biológica que nos da forma. Eso que llamamos realidad es lo que sucede cuando conversamos y coordinamos consensualmente nuestras conductas. Realidad, es un enunciado que habla de los mundos que llevamos adentro. Si podemos compartir esta premisa que nos ha enseñado Humberto Maturana, también podemos decir que el mundo será, en gran parte, aquello que podamos imaginar y comunicar tan seductoramente que haga vibrar el sistema social en donde vivimos. El mundo es una posibilidad … del lenguaje. En nuestro rizoma tratamos una posibilidad entre muchas otras. La mutación del amor, en nuestro caso, como emoción fundamentalmente humana, muta y lo hace dentro de una nueva conciencia gestada en sincronía con la simbiosis de las complejidades del enmarañamiento de los sistemas vivos en el neotrópico.
Deleuze-Guattari and the Ada Tree
Philosophically, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are opposed to trees. Specifically, they position themselves against arborescent thought—thought, which like a tree, judges the world from one fixed point (roots, Descartean rationality), or requires that thinking proceed in only one direction (scientifically, dialectically). In place of foundations and immutable bodies, Deleuze and Guattari advocate a rhizomatic approach to philosophy, and, to what amounts to the same thing, to life. As they write, ‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines‘. Critically, they charge that, ‘Many people have a tree growing in their heads‘. In a sense, the challenge issued by Deleuze and Guattari is to kill this tree, or, as Nietzsche might put it, to draw the curtain on the twilight of (our) idols. ‘The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious’.
Metaphorically, then, the tree has been incredibly productive in the work of Deleuze and Guattari—bringing into clearer focus the image of thought, and the dangers (more truly, impossibility) of stasis, of rigidity, of identity, of molarity. In this essay, I also want to talk about trees—specifically a tree, called the Ada Tree. In fact, I want to use Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work to produce this tree as something other than a tree—to write a brief rhizomatics of the Ada Tree. My aim in doing this is to dislodge the meanings traditionally associated with terms such as nature, conservation, and sustainability—in short, to indicate something of the damage done when nature is produced as a series of discrete and knowable bodies as opposed to an immanent force.
Rhizome, Ecology, Geophilosophy
How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism? Do these authors not abstract concepts from earth- and life-sciences and assemble a geophilosophy with which to construe a new earth? Does A Thousand Plateaus not expressly evolve what Gregory Bateson calls an “ecology of mind“? Let us, then, examine those plateaus—the “rhizome” plateau, “the geology of morals” plateau, “the becoming-intense, becoming-animal” plateau, and “the refrain” plateau”—that draw most explicitly upon ecology, biology, zoology, ethology, geography, geology, meteorology, and chaos and complexity theory, and that compose an ontology and politics for enhancing creative terrestrial life. Let us unearth the ecological wisdom of their plan/e of composition by putting it to the test in pressing case studies. Do Deleuze and Guattari not give us multiple outlines for ecological experimentation in their collaborative “rhizome-books,” as well as independent proposals for eco-critical and clinical transvaluation such as Guattari’s green manifesto, Three Ecologies, and Deleuze’s philosophical assemblage of a “radical naturalism“?
Micropolitics of media culture: reading the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari
This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (“in transition”) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given
The Tree Model and the Rhizome Model
That’s the tree model, as opposed to the rhizome model.
DJ : What do you mean by that?
DL: The tree model is hierarchical, … Rhizomes are different. Rhizomes are thickened stems that grow horizontally under the surface of the soil. The rhizome is the model of grassroots movements.
Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics – The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze
The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the nature of ontology in contemporary political science, with the belief that such a move can be of great benefit to understanding changes in our era of globalization and terrorism. This is accomplished by examining the ontologies of both social constructivism and critical realism in order to show their reliance upon illegitimate presuppositions, and then developing a novel ontological position on the basis of these criticisms.
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of assemblages – and his ontology, more generally – are examined as particularly powerful ways to conceptualize the complexity, dynamism and differences that are inherent to the political world. This is brought out concretely in a study of recent academic work on contentious politics in order to show the centrality of conflict and difference to politics, and to show the power of a reconceptualization of ontology.
Normalizing Foucault? – A Rhizomatic Approach to Plateaus in Anglophone Educational Research
In a recent analysis of anglophone scholarship, Baker and Heyning considered both where and when Foucault’s name was made to live and also analyzed the kinds of work such naming has performed, i.e., the substantive claims made in the name of or through Foucault. In regard to where and when, the most marked uptake of Foucault occurred in the second half of the 1990s in the humanities and social sciences, with the field of philosophy indexing the earliest discussions of his work.
Three predominant uses of Foucault in education appeared:
- historicization and philosophizing projects with relativization emphases (a more “problematizing” Foucault).
- denaturalization projects without overt historical emphases and with diversity emphases (a more “sociological” Foucault).
- critical reconstruction projects with solution emphases (a more “administrative” Foucault).
This paper takes off from Baker and Heyning’s survey of anglophone uses of Foucault by examining substantive examples of such recombinatorial approaches to Foucault and the plateaus they serve. It will suggest that specific responses to Foucault’s work at the turn of the twenty‐first century are sustained in part by historical propensities in the field to a) scientize and template theoretical frameworks, b) normalize‐govern particular approaches as standardized methodology amid swirling and recombinatorial tendencies, and c) carve out moralistic dualisms around their utility.
Rhizovocality
In this conceptual paper, the author offers a rethinking of the concept of voice in qualitative research informed by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories. Using Deleuze & Guattari’s figuration of the rhizome, the irruptions of voice in feminist and postfoundational qualitative research are mapped to invent a concept of voice, rhizovocality, that signifies voice as excessive and transgressive yet interconnected. This mapping begins with early feminist emancipatory research that assumed an authentic, silent woman’s voice in need of liberation. Then, the author moves into dilemmas of power that emerged from critiques of problematic representations of voice within feminist research. The third section of the paper is a postcolonial feminist response to imperial uses of voice in feminist research, and the final part is a feminist deconstructive critique of voice in qualitative research. The article concludes with an argument for rhizovocality as a conceptual, deconstructive tool for working the limits of voice in qualitative research.
