assignment, you should also provide a detailed description of how the assignment will be graded

We believe that The Untext is an accurate expression of rhizomatic learning as we experienced it in #rhizo14, and we invite readers to look through it, in all its chaotic messiness, multimedia-ness, and important marginalia.

It was the process of coming together to think and work and make beauty and chaos. It is our way of engaging in exhilarating learning and research. For us, this is scholarship.

We had no definitive answers. We became distracted.

a number of questions

do you also sense the energy and engagement and collegiality and even fun underneath it all? We hope you can, because that is what keeps us going.

First, most MOOC research has not brought the connectivist experience to life for readers who have not experienced the rhizomatic swarm of open, online, connected learning.

you can put the handprints of 30 children in your pocket and you can read The Untext at one sitting without having to spend six weeks in the MOOC.

The Untext demonstrates that writing is a function of complex, multiscale networking as words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, marginalia, links, and images flow through and around one another to create new ideas. This has always been so, but precious, static print concealed this dynamic flow of ideas. Modern technology has made this flow of desire more apparent.

About the Authors

We suspect that this kind of writing has always been possible, but modern technology makes it likely and so easy.

There is no authority and no position in a swarm, at least no position with political, rhetorical, and power implications.

especially the marginalia

Next time, Hybrid Pedagogy or some other radical, digital journal will perhaps be able to accept The Untext as it emerged without this bridge, this frame of an article that leaves too much out. Soon.

‘built upon the not-so-controversial ideathat how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it.’

is reading with love.

So you will never get to the bottom of a concept like multiplicity, you will never beable to figure out what it really means, nor, if you become the least bit Deleuzian,will you want to

Annabelle, 16

Once I made internet friends, making friends in real life became much easier,

It’s how I met my closest friends when I felt isolated from people who shared my interests.

Steven Wheeler’s presentation below reviews related ideas contextualizing the modern learning climate. The gist? Rapid technology change has produced critical new pathways for both formal and informal learning.

Rhizomatic Learning Is A Metaphor For How We Learn

Its insistent question is ‘how does it work?’

In this paper the author provides an overview of a rhizomatic methodology using illustrations from her doctoral thesis, where she used Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)

The “dark” side of Rhizo14 related to many of the gaps in MOOC research that have been noted by other researchers and referenced in the review of literature. Rhizo14 participants for whom the experience was less than positive felt isolated. They felt unable to make meaningful connections despite in some cases being experienced “MOOCers.” One viewed the emphasis on community as an unnecessary pressure, which led to artificial effects, exclusion and limited learning. Another viewed the community as “ disjointed networks of pre-established subgroups. ” Another described the community as having a “ dark edge .” These participants felt that there was a lack of appropriate facilitation, and that there were inappropriate exhibitions of power and politics in the course. Some felt that the course was based on weak philosophical foundations and that the rhizome is an empty signifier. Some questioned the lack of content in the course and felt that it lacked depth and theoretical discussion. For these participants the rhizome is “ A pernicious, pervasive weed, rooted in a lot of dirt and “SH***””; “ . . .a ‘thug’ and can be very badly behaved”; “Part of one big family/ plant—joined at the hip”; “Clones of the “same damn plan t.” One respondent wrote “I knew before that the arborescent paradigm was a problem. The rhizome is a contrasting alternative, but I learned in the course that this alternative has a lot of connotations with ugly and weed-like characteristics which are not necessary for every complex or even chaotic network” (survey respondent)

Durability after foundations

This study displays all the ingredients of actor network theory 1990. There is semiotic relationality (it’s a network whose elements defi ne and shape one another), heterogeneity (there are different kinds of actors, human and otherwise), and mate- riality (stuff is there aplenty, not just “the social”). There is an insistence on process and its precariousness (all elements need to play their part moment by moment or it all comes unstuck). There is attention to power as an effect (it is a function of network confi guration and in particular the creation of immutable mobiles), to space and to scale (how it is that networks extend themselves and translate distant actors). New for actor network theory, there is an interest in large-scale political history. And, crucially, it is a study of how the Portuguese network worked: how it held together; how it shaped its components; how it made a center and peripher- ies; in short, of how differences were generated in a semiotic relational logi

t can also be understood as an empirical version of Gilles Deleuze’s nomadic philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1988).

All of which were the effects of a set of materially heterogeneous relations

actor network theory can also be understood as an empirical version of poststructuralism.

materially heterogeneous relations analyzed with semiotic tools; a sym- metrical indifference to the truth or otherwise of what it is looking at; concern with the productivity of practice; an interest in circulation; and the predisposition to exemplary case studies

t is obvious to most engineers that systems are made not simply of technical bits and pieces but also include peopl

A tiny handful of these suggestions subsequently get trans- muted into the much harder statements about nature that circulate in scientifi c papers (“the fi gures in the table show . . .

it is better to talk of “material semiotics” rather than “actor network theory.”

A paradigm can be understood, they said, as a culture .

Second, the actor network approach is not a theory. Theories usually try to explain why something happens, but actor network theory is descriptive rather than foundational in explanatory terms, which means that it is a disappointment for those seeking strong accounts

Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located.

The new skills include: Play The capacity to experiment with the surroundings as a form of problem solving. Performance The ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. Simulation The ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. Appropriation The ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. Multitasking The ability to scan the environment and shift focus onto salient details. Distributed cognition The ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities. Collective intelligence The ability to pool knowledge and com - pare notes with others toward a common goal. Judgment The ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources. Transmedia navigation The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. Networking The ability to search for, synthesize, and dissemi - nate information. Negotiation The ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Intersecting Lives Francois Dosse; Translated by Deborah Glassman

‘tool kit’,

trippy slogans

a chaotic bricolage of anthropology, fractal geometry, music theory, psychoanalysis, literature, art history, physics and military history

(‘We’re tired of trees,’ they wrote. ‘They’ve made us suffer too much.’)

their true adversary was not so much capitalism as ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.

(Deleuze serenely put his hat back on, and walked out.)

Were they really celebrating madness as a revolutionary force?

Desire, they admit, is not always good

capitalism encourages a kind of generalised schizophrenia, a shatteringly intense fracturing of subjectivity.

more like a sprawling work of experimental fiction, a futurist epic

Freud’s big mistake, they agreed, was to see desire as something rooted in lack, as an attempt to fantasise a missing object (the mother’s breast, for example).

adventurously interpretative monographs he called ‘portraits’ and later likened to ‘buggery’:

he was adored by his students, not so much a professor as a ‘spiritual guide’.

Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto Gilles’, and felt ‘overcoded’ by the ‘perfection that he brought to the most unlikely book’. What he really wanted to do was ‘say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow.’

In recent years, Dosse notes, there has been a tendency to ‘de-Guattarise’ the collaboration and to canonise Deleuze at Guattari’s expense, but Deleuze always insisted on the centrality of his friend’s contribution.

everything is in the middle and nowhere simultaneously

Content is a shifty word. It can mean different things to different people."

content can be the human element that enables students to see themselves in their learning and to imagine their own possibilities

the specific content you use is less important than whether it can be useful

content is political.

"The holes are vital to the whole. "

We've been filling this space with content, but how it connects and how it all moves us through our learning paths and root systems, is not content but the result of the content and the curriculum moving in orchestra

for me the content emerges in the conversation itself

Content is how we conjure and trigger our stories, in ourselves, and each other.

You have caused me to spend a good few hours thinking about all this... and it's probably done me and my students some good!

the transfer of knowledge from one to another

find those conversations and resources that keep me engaged

Rhizoanalysis, or rhizomatic cartography, has few precedents in literacy studies (see, however, Alvermann, 2000; Hagood, 2004; Kamberelis, 2004).

have settled on a multicolumn format that includes image–sketches based upon digital video frames (see Appendix).

This article has emerged from an extended amount of individual and group reviews of different data sets with a focus upon understanding embodied literacy activity in students’ classroom performances

like this sketch

know more at precisely the same moment that you understand less.

while not yet being able to meaningfully connect it to things you already know.

The inability to connect a new piece of information with the world as we already know it--this is a classic problem of the unlearning that is required for deeper learning

knowledge while losing understanding

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004 [1980]: 2

“sub- jects” and their “positions” and not offering a rich enough account of the spaces performed by individ- uals, their bodies, their material practices, and the discourses on which they draw (Gregson & Rose, 2000; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000).

Butler (1990, 1993) disrupted dominant no- tions of gender and sexuality by arguing for a nonessentialist perspective on the construction of identity. Identity is something that is acted, repeat- edly, with the body and other forms of discourse, rather than something that “is.”

that are more or less destabilizing or stabilizing. Deleuze and Guattari described the four aspects of the more abstract assemblage, including content, ex- pression, (re)territorialization , and deterritorializa- tion, as an abstract “machine” with two axes, which we have represented in our rhizomatic interpretation (Figure 2).

stability) is secondary to that of deterritorialization. In their view the overriding ten- dency of the world is toward deterritorialization (Patton, 2000).

The notion of deterritorialization

related to the thought of the machine or as- semblage; a machine has no “home or ground,” no organizing center or subjectivity other than what it does.

he expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, sepa- rate or combine them, delimit them in a different way

described the re- lation of language and bodies (e.g., human bodies, bodies of knowledge) as one of force and interven- tion: “it is a speech act” (p. 86). Language acts to move, combine, and accelerate bodies, just as the ele- ments of language itself are in motion:

anguage has been understood as somehow “serving” content by representing it, point- ing toward it, or corresponding with it.

Second, language has been (ill) conceived as entirely separate from content, from the “machinic assem- blage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermin- gling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze &

For example, in literacy studies, we might ask how “reading,” as an assemblage, may have been organized in an entirely different way, with different configurations of social bodies, human bodies, and textual materials

ndless circuits; these connections among bodies draw off pleasure. Social machines or assemblages organize “partial” investments (e.g., the infant’s pleasure at the mother’s breast) into larger assem- blages—organized institutions such as “motherhood” or “the family” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 82).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are empirically committed to considering how the bits of social life are connected and thus form assemblages.

Lines of flight (also called “lines of deterritorialization”) are leaks, escapes, or departures from the territories drawn by dominant systems of signification.

Every rhizome contains (oversignifying) lines of segmentari- ty, according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, and signified. Lines of segmentarity (also called “customary” or “molar” lines, Deleuze & Guattari, p. 203), produce stasis, rules of organiza- tion, and center–periphery relations (Kamberelis, 2004).

onnection and heterogeneity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which, in the case of literacy performances, offer us a means of thinking about the nature of movement and alignment within the flow of bodies, texts, ta

n ap- proach to the active potentials of performances to create something new and unpredictable.

different expres- sions of relations shaped by lines of desire, multiplic- ity, and creation

the unexpected—the surpris- es produced in multimodal and multispatial relation- ships.

spective on the immanence of social life, the world of objects, persons, and language are on the same plane—all are signs that interact and form new rela- tions.

uperimposition of points of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation.

world of differ- ence....

he associates nonrepresentation, including rhizomatic relations, with difference and becoming

performance has no organizing center, frame, single meaning, or static pivot, but rather evolves and splin- ters in multiple directions

Rhizoanalysis transforms our focus on the interaction as a stable “text” to be “read” and in- terprets it as a constantly moving configuration that is ripe with potential for divergent movements.

What effects (and affective intensities ) are being produced through the relations of these images

hizoanalysis sees everyday life as “chiefly concerned with the on-going creation of effects”

This mode of thought may be described as moving from identifying what is present or contained within an interaction to analyzing the interaction as a process of producing difference .

We read Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as a cri- tique of representational logic and related approaches that dominate literacy studies.

We draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as a means of mapping or “animating” (Slack, 2003; Stivale, 1998) our data.

Deleuze names four cri- teria of representation: identity, resemblance, analo- gy, and opposition

From within this position, we recognize the contradictions inherent to our present project because we use verbal and visual representations, and reductive ones at that, to argue for the inadequacy of representa- tion itself.

esearch representa- tions only partially and inadequately capture the vi- brant life and dynamism of performances.

rich means of understanding social inter- action as emergent, dynamic, and dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981; Goffman, 1981; Hanks, 1992; Scollon & Scollon),

A second key interpretive problem we have been concerned with involves different prac- tices of identity.

stance, in the segment above, Terrayel and his part- ners have used linguistic text but also cartoon-like images to represent their interpretations of The Jungle (e.g., feet and a finger in a jar). Terrayel and the oth- ers point to these

A conventional reading of the perfor- mance might analyze how meanings are contained, in- dexed, and related by different bits of the interaction

Gosh. Spending more of my time stopping and actively experiencing sunrises and sunsets might just be considered a subversive act. A complicated shorthand for how to live.

Concepts A Critical Approach

pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and

Leibniz

metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science

Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts

Badiou declared Deleuze an “enemy of the people” and penned several anti-Deleuze articles. Under the psuedonym “Georges Peyol”, Badiou penned “The Fascism of the Potato,” because if I know anything about resisting fascism, it usually involves declaring enemies of the people and creating a cult of personality around yourself.

All the leftists in Paris came with completely bogus projects. Felix supported them blindly. We bought a camera for one person, a motorcycle for another…we gave money to someone who came to us saying, ‘I need five thousand francs for an abortion tomorrow.’ ‘Send the money back to us when you can, ok, here you go.’ And they never came back.

love was capitalistic.

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

History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express them selves, but so do rocks and even riv- ers, every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the molar, a nd sometimes not; this is because con- tent and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and some- times along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of redundancy that are already like traci ngs of its own? Does not a multipli- city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu- tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver- gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac- ing should always be put back on the map.

We are no more familiar with scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages.

No signifiance, no subjectification: writing to the «th power (all individuated e nunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all signifying de sire is associated with dominated subjects). An assemblage, in its mult iplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, I NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 23 material flows, and social flows si multaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book ) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage estab lishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders

Even though there is a real dis tinction between them, content and expression are relative te rms ("first" and "second" articulation should also be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and expression are two variables of a functi on of stratification. They not only

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.

During the 1950s, Guattari was a strict Lacanian. Even his friends would call him “Lacan” as a joke. In 1964, Lacan chose Guattari as a lieutenant at the newly created Freudian School of Paris. Guattari was sure that Lacan anoint him as a “preferred partner”

Grossly irressponsible? Maybe, but it kind of worked in treating the patient.

The work was mostly coordinated through letters the two exchanged. Guattari would send notes and scribbles to Deleuze, who would compile the thoughts into what finally became “Anti-Oedipus.”

(“And the meek shall inherit the earth.”)

paraphrases their points using their own vocabularies. At the same time, Deleuze never provides an interpretation of the thinkers he is discussing; he is uninterested in hermeneutics, uninterested in teasing out ambiguities and contradictions, uninterested in deconstructing prior thinkers or in determining ways in which they might be entrenched in metaphysics. All this is in accord with Deleuze’s own philosophy: his focus is on invention, on the New, on the

“creation of concepts.”

do not bother trying to comprehend or understand the text.

Do not be duped into thinking that you can win a battle against the powers that be – they are the powers that be because they took action, because they created something.

Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. (A Thousand Plateaus 4-5)

A Deleuzian aesthetic is predicated, at least in part, on change, movement, transformation, repositioning, shifting, flowing, mutating, multiplying, generating, and, of course, magic.

Rhizome rather than root, molecular rather than molar, dynamic rather than static

Action will always prevail. Reaction will always fail.

reflect

illustrating complexity

I am attempting to illustrate a passage of time

You will not be reading what I wrote

limits of static text

You are clearly fictional.

Sian Bayne's article entitled Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces

Nomad space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other.

Look

I am a mapping story.

My point here, is that I am not here without you.

I am not entirely sure.