Rhizomatic Dynamics

A very good presentation, well worth watching the full slide show

In the pre-in­dus­trial age, no­mads were peo­ple that moved with their liveli­hood (usu­ally an­i­mal herd­ing) in­stead of set­tling at a sin­gle lo­ca­tion. In­dus­tri­al­iza­tion forced the set­tle­ment of many no­madic peo­ples… …but, some­thing new is emerg­ing in the 21st cen­tury: Know­mads. A know­mad is what I term a no­madic knowl­edge worker -that is, a cre­ative, imag­i­na­tive, and in­no­v­a­tive per­son who can work with al­most any­body, any­time, and any­where. In­dus­trial so­ci­ety is giv­ing way to knowl­edge and in­no­va­tion work.

Although the loss of certainty in the age of postmodernism is questioning knowledge production in general, the emerging discourse of lifelong learning demands a different theory of adult learning in particular. This article aims to offer a conceptual tool for describing learning in adulthood in terms of postmodern and lifelong learning conditions. It approaches the problem from the images of learning and learner that adult education scholarship has produced and identifies that adult learning theory attempts to signify foundational certainty by using binary-trapped adjectives. The author argues that insofar as we continue with the adjective-plus-learning theory, we cannot escape binary thought. The author proposes a new concept, rhizoactivity, to navigate multiplicity of learning in a postmodern world. Anticipated benefits of employing rhizoactivity in understanding learning are discussed in terms of postmodern and lifelong learning conditions.

"VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, a new anthology edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen from MIT Press, takes stock of the voice's various transformations in the arts in the wake of the technological innovations of the digital age, and the ways in which artists anticipated these changes. One might expect musings on Barthes, man vs. machine, hauntology, linguistics or body politics, and those are all here; but there is also a refreshing and suitably wide-ranging cross-section of pop cultural examples and namechecks (Wolfman Jack, Portishead, Winnie the Pooh, BioShock, Meshuggah). Beyond its interdisciplinary parameters, the more theory-oriented papers are counterbalanced by an experimental essay (Theresa M. Senft's "Four Rooms", which juxtaposes phone sex, cancer care tapes, a voice recognition program, and Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room"), a poem (Mark Amerika's "Professor VJ's Big Blog Mashup"), and a meditation (Michael Taussig's "Humming"). The multiplicity of forms and inclusion of writerly as well as scholarly voices create an appropriately reflexive resonance."

The paper highlights the importance of ontological assumptions to the management of knowledge and the development of knowledge management systems. It juxtaposes the ontology of "being" based on the work of Heidegger , and the ontology of "becoming" based on Deleuze and Guattari' s discussion of rhizomatic activity. The relevance of these ideas to knowledge management, information systems, and organisational activities in general is illustrated and a tentative framework based on rhizomatics is developed and discussed.

People in authority make stupid decisions because the people who know more than they do are their subordinates, and the only people who can hold them accountable know even less than they do.

In this brief essay, I share some experiences of writing 'to find something out' by focusing on a process that I have deployed in three narrative experiments inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's  figuration of the rhizome-a process that I characterize as rhizosemiotic play. My 'reports' of these experiments are available elsewhere, and my intention here is simply to demonstrate some textual strategies that I use in performing such experiments, with particular reference to the generativity of intertextual readings of selected fictions in catalyzing them.

In this brief essay, I share some experiences of writing 'to find something out' by focusing on a process that I have deployed in three narrative experiments inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's figuration of the rhizome-a process that I characterize as rhizosemiotic play. My 'reports' of these experiments are available elsewhere, and my intention here is simply to demonstrate some textual strategies that I use in performing such experiments, with particular reference to the generativity of intertextual readings of selected fictions in catalyzing them.

A discussion on Deleuze and politics with topics covered including: Deleuze's relationship to Marxism and capitalism; the political valency of the concept of deterritorialisation; the implications of Deleuzian thought for theorisations of collectivity and identity; its implications for thinking about revolution, universality and the party form; the problems of desire and the decision; issues of ecology and the implications of vitalism for them; problems of political strategy and organisation; the legacy of the invasion of Iraq.

This article surveys and evaluates the broad field of Deleuzian political theory with particular reference to its novel implications for anglophone cultural theory. It opens by discussing Mengue's and Hallward's recent critical studies of Deleuze and the wider problem of evaluating the normative and descriptive function of key Deleuzian concepts. It goes on to consider the specificity of Deleuzian approaches to the key notion of 'essentialism' with reference to a comparison between the ideas of Manuel Delanda and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, before moving into a consideration of recent appropriations of Deleuzian philosophy for the theorisation of gender and race.

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"?

What is difficult to remember is that the tree and the rhizome are not necessarily opposed to one another; the first acts like a transcendent tracing and model while the second draws a map through an immanent process that overturns the model. But the smooth space of the rhizome is always under constant threat of hierarchization and stratification while the tree can proliferate into a-centered systems given changes in local conditions, thresholds of intensity, coefficients of transversality, etc. Hence both the tree and the rhizome face the strata and the body without organs.

This paper applies Deleuze and Guattari's concept to analyze the growth of the global trade in English-language books, as this development is indicative of how a rhizomic model of globalization captures the nonlinear path growth sometimes seems to follow. Moreover, the paper examines how the development of a global book trade, and by extension globalization, can best be understood in terms of a rhizome. Finally, the paper considers the implications that a rhizomic model of globalization and the late nineteenth-century book trade has for our understanding of globalization both past and present.

This thesis explores the process of learning theoretically through a rhizomatic process applied to collaborative learning. A rhizome constantly changes, is flexible and spontaneous. The destination of the path is the process of networking. The Rhizomatic Theory provides a model to develop a learning space that constructs a collaborative knowledge-based community. Therefore the qualities of the Rhizomatic spaces become the root force supporting the collaborative prototypical learning spaces that offer direction towards creating a networked globalized student ecology.

This wonderful, highly readable book breaks new ground in revealing commonalities between Gilles Deleuze's nomadic method of inquiry and the pragmatic method of John Dewey. It should be of great interest to both philosophers and educators. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, author of Happiness And Education. . . few have placed the thinking of Dewey into effective dialogue with other forms of philosophy. This is particularly the case regarding contemporary European philosophy. Inna Semetsky's exciting new book bridges this gap for the first time by putting the brilliant poststructuralist work of Gilles Deleuze into critical and creative dialogue with that of Dewey. . The publication of this work announces the appearance of a remarkable line of thinking that scholars around the world will soon come to appreciate.

"In an interview published shortly after his death, Deleuze commented that A Thousand Plateaus was the best book he had written, alone or with Guattari. It remains a book whose time has not yet come, its conceptual riches largely unexploited." "A Thousand Plateaus provides an example of such an open system. It does not advocate an intellectual anarchism in which the only rule would be the avoidance of any rule. It deploys variable, local rules in order to construct a bewildering array of concepts such as assemblage, deterritorialization, order-word, faciality, ritornello, nomadism, and different kinds of becoming."

L'auteur met en couvre une approche pédagogique s'appuyant sur les notions de réseau et de rhizome, dans le but de contrer le problème d'Isolement dans le milieu scolaire. Pour déployer cette pédagogie il parcourt une généalogie allant du filet de pêche jusqu'au cyberespace de Pierre Lévy, en passant par la pensée saint-simonienne. Puis, il examine la diversité de son appropriation a travers la théorie de Illich, les expériences éducatives en France durant les années 70-80 et l'approche américaine. Il revisite le concept de rhizome tel qu'énoncé par Deleuze et Guattari dans une perspective pédagogique. Par la suite, il présente la Façon dont celui-ci fut adapté en éducation par des chercheurs québécois, Ce parcours lui permet d'établir les fondements d'une pédagogie rhizomatique où l'éducateur et l'élève sont 'des marcheurs-pédagogues. Propulsés par la circulation du désir, ils tissent des connexions hétérogènes et brisent ainsi leur isolement.

The first principle of rhizome is that individual nodes-whether that is family units or communities of varying sizes-must be minimally self-sufficient. "Minimally self-sufficient" means the ability to consistently and reliably provide for anything so important that you would be willing to subject yourself to the terms of the hierarchal system in order to get it: food, shelter, heat, medical care, entertainment, etc. It doesn't mean zero trade, asceticism, or "isolationism," but rather the ability to engage in trade and interaction with the broader system when, and only when, it is advantageous to do so. The corollary here is that a minimally self-sufficient system should also produce some surplus that can be exchanged-but only to the extent that is found to be advantageous. A minimally self sufficient family may produce enough of its own food to get by if need be, its own heat and shelter, and enough of some surplus-let's say olive oil-to exchange for additional, quality-of-life-enhancing consumables as it finds advantageous. This principle of minimal self-sufficiency empowers the individual family or community, while allowing the continuation of trade, value-added exchange, and full interaction with the outside world.

The goal of this post is to outline a concrete framework for establishing a new economy based on rhizome structure that provides negative feedback against encroaching hierarchy, that ensures environmental sustainability, and that maximizes its compatibility with human ontogeny. I will first outline my approach to the problem, then look at one historical example-how the lattice network of Tuscan hill towns created a topology that addressed its unique circumstances, then analyze the optimal theoretical topology of a modern rhizome economy, and finally discuss some real-world concerns for the conscious design and establishment of a new hamlet economy.

"Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the body without organs and the rhizome have been central to the academic discourse that has grown alongside the Internet itself, almost from its inception. But, I will argue, they've been used in the wrong way: firstly, the concepts themselves have been misread, their basic conceptual matrices misunderstood; and secondly, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts have been deployed in an essentially conservative way, looking more to reify and endorse the status quo rather than to challenge it. In this regard I am more troubled by the basically sympathetic applications of Deleuze and Guattari's work which water down the concepts and dilute their critical potency, than I am by the antipathetic responses to their ideas, which simply reject them out of hand. What follows then, which is plainly offered in a corrective spirit, should be understood as being in broad agreement with the notion that Deleuze and Guattari's work is relevant to an analysis of contemporary culture's appropriation of new technology and broad disagreement with the way their work has hitherto been deployed towards that end. "