“So, let the raucous sleigh bells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don’t stand underneath when they fly by.”

Seasons Greetings! MooCow

Been thinking: if the Occupy movement is rhizomatic, in that it has popped up in many locations based on people learning about what’s happening in other locations (ie. it is self-replicating [at the moment]), then the connections being made by people within a single location (ie. Occupy Toronto) and the information shared between those people, according to the model I’m presenting above, represent the formation of networks and a process of networked learning.

All that to say — to answer my question above — that yes, rhizomes can contain networks too.

Perhaps rhizomes and networks represent two different types of learning.

Rhizome learning results in replication of concepts whereas networked learning represents production of concepts.

In an organization, the head honcho’s views/talking points will tend to be replicated by the underlings — i’ll say ‘rhizomatically’ — so you’ll see the same views/points articulated from different mouths at different levels down the hierarchy.

At the same time, in the same organization, people at different levels will connect, communicate and learn from one another’s perspectives in the larger organizational network — and this will result in the production of new views in each one of the people connecting (a combination of their pre-existing views plus the new information they’ve received).

So things like propaganda or peer pressure will function on rhizomatic learning, whereas things like open source communities or collective decisionmaking will function on networked learning.

That’s not to say that the two are mutually exclusive or that it’s even possible to strip one away from the other.

In terms of relationships between the two, I’ll use the following analogy: if the ecosystem is a network, then the potato plant is a rhizome within that network.

So I’m proposing that networks can contain rhizomes. The question I’m asking myself now is: can rhizomes contain networks?

Maybe it’s a question of scale.

You speak of ‘entities’. As best i can tell from the way you describe and entity, you think of them as fully formed things that can be pointed to and the recombined with other things. You see them as having defined attributes that ‘activate’ on recombination. This position is, i think, Platonic. I read these as forms/ideals that are essential to their being an entity.

I don’t think these ‘entities’ exist in this way. (no, i’m not saying that the world is full of mush) I think what you refer to are blackboxes (thanks Latour) that hid power structures and support existing ways of looking at things. It’s the tidiness that I see in your version of networks.

The rhizomatic metaphor could easily be a metaphor for the SHAPE of actual knowledge. I’m not sure… that’s a big part of the thinking that i need to do coming out of this week. I’m definitely not saying it CAN’T be… rather… i’m not sure.

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Need more time to think about it.

Whatever our backgrounds, its in the human nature to learn. Open it up and people will seek.

Debs

[from a caravan in a field in Lancashire, UK)