The Anotropic Rhizome
Anotropy is a term proposed by George Vassiliou as more suitable to refer to the concept of negentropy by avoiding the double negative: “anotropy over negentropy to focus on promoting functioning over arresting dysfunctioning, constantly seeking openness in organization and organization in openness.” (Polemi-Todoulou, 2018, p. 2) Anotropy is a compound word in Greek and it means upwards (Ano-) moving (-tropi). A living system is conceptualized as “negentropic (anotropic) information-processing, problem-solving, decision-making and boundary-structuring, the latter involving self-regulating, self-describing, self-dissolving of boundaries.” (Vassiliou & Vassiliou, 1985, p. 85). Anotropy in our personal, scholar, and social lives, is our unique opportunity to cope with the modern world challenges and navigate successfully in the Anthropocene and Robotocene eras (Brailas, 2019). In this way, we create the opportunity for a personally meaningful life that serves autonomy through and for Interdependence (Vassiliou & Vassiliou, 1982), “a life based on self-leading, self-regulating processes and personal choice, alongside skills of actualizing difference and cooperation with others” (Polychroni, 2016, p. 194).
Communicating the Rhizome and Virtual Research Expositions
The map is not the territory, and a research article is not the research. The present article was (re)presented in a non-traditional format as a virtual exposition. Expositions are events that aim to problematize rather than represent (Schwab, 2019). The affordances of the representation media put specific restrictions and limits on how something can be (re)presented. Exposition of practice as research in a virtual research exposition is meant as the performing of practice in order to move from practice to epistemic claims (Schwab & Borgdorff, 2014). Complex research and practice projects are better (re)presented, and even better performed, through non-linear media.
Education as a dance between design and emergence
In living systems, both forms (tree and rhizome) co-exist.
Hierarchical (designed) or Rhizomatic (emergent) Learning, what's the best?
Education is a balanced recipe of the two, an eloquent dance: designed enough to allow for emergence.
“There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 20)
Designed enough to allow for Emergence
The course is designed in such a way to allow for Emergence; the course is designed to support a living rhizome that is always becoming.
While the participating blogs seem to be hierarchically organized and interconnected through a central hub site, maintained by the central authority, in its operation, the system develops in a rhizomatic way by establishing and multiplying autonomous peer communication channels. The central hub, as a manifestation of the ‘pattern that connects’, do not induce a hierarchical and authoritarian organization on the information flow. In contrast, Monday Notes demonstrate how the information that is constantly communicated among the participants through their reflective practice can be integrated into a meaningful collective narrative, one of the many alternatives that can emerge out of the always in the becoming community’s learning rhizome. As an organizational form, the hierarchical tree structure is ubiquitous in nature and becomes a life-promoting factor when in its operation becomes an organic part of a broader rhizome.
“To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 17)
It is possible to adopt a linear way initially, to understand the blockage, the dysfunctional part. Then to proceed with a line of flight, to make a rupture of the linear, and to facilitate the transformation into a rhizome. 'There is a crack in everything and that’s how life gets in'.
Allowing for surprises
The aim is to catalyze the development of complex enough learning systems allowing for emergence. Systems with their own "inner dynamics, with which we can interact, but which we can never exhaustively know, which can always surprise us." (Pickering, 2010, p. 381)
Reciprocal determination
"We act in the world, and the world acts on us, to and fro, in a dynamic process I call the ‘dance of agency’, in which all the partners are unpredictably and emergently transformed. This is how scientists genuinely find out about the world. There is nothing mysterious about this. It is just how things go in science and, indeed, everywhere else." (Pickering, 2017, p. 136)
in Greek
Ενώ τα ιστολόγια των συμμετεχοντων φαίνεται να συνδέονται ιεραρχικά με ένα κεντρικό ιστολόγιο και τον εκπαιδευτή, στη δράση του το σύστημα αναπτύσσεται ριζωματικά, πολλαπλασιάζοντας τα οριζόντια κανάλια επικοινωνίας και τις διασυνδέσεις. Το κεντρικό ιστολόγιο και τα Monday notes ως the pattern that connects, δεν πραγματοποιούν μια ιεραρχική και δεσπόζουσα οργάνωση της πληροφορίας, αλλά επιδεικνύουν πως οι πληροφορίες που επικοινωνούνται ακατάπαυστα οριζοντίως, καθέτως και διαγωνίως, μπορούν και απαρτιώνονται σε μια ριζωματική ολότητα από τις πολλαπλές που μπορούν να ενυπάρχουν και να ξεπηδήσουν στο ρίζωμα της εν τω γίγνεσθαι μαθησιακής κοινότητας. Σαν μορφή οργάνωσης, η ιεραρχική δενδροειδής δομή υπάρχει παντού στη φύση, και γίνεται συστατικό που προάγει τη ζωή, όταν στην απαρτίωσή της γίνεται οργανικό μέρος ενός ευρύτερου ριζώματος.
Στη δική μου δουλειά, όπως και στο διαδίκτυο, υπάρχει κεντρική βούληση. Είναι κάτι ενδιάμεσο στο ρίζωμα και στην ιεραρχία. Είναι μια ιεραρχία που επιτρέπει τη βλάστηση ριζωμάτων, μια ιεραρχία που και η ίδια εντάσσεται μέσα σε άλλα ριζώματα (διαφορετικά, όχι ιεραρχικά ανώτερα) και στα ριζώματα που καταλύει.