Chocolate (… and rhizome)
Gough, N. (2004). RhizomANTically becoming-cyborg: performing posthuman pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol 36, no 3, 253-265
I just read this paper (twice now) and it has the same effect on me as dark chocolate: I can only eat it in small quantities, it taste very pure, like an indulging substance and it will probably keep me awake tonight….
I had already lifted a quote by Noel Gouch, in last week’s reading of Pederson’s article. It struck me this quote would make a good definition that I personally would associate with art.
However, I realise now that something is missing from the Penderson article. The full quote, from Gouch’s original papers, should be:
‘Now, the idea of rhizomANTically becoming-cyborg signifies my desire to imagine teaching and learning as material-semiotic assemblages of sociotechnical relations embedded in and performed by shifting connections and interactions among a variety of organic, ‘natural’ and textual materials’
In the paper, Gouch connects Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway and Bruno Latour as a ‘rhizomANTic’ theory for learning and teaching.
The paper reflects my attempt at developing the ‘Love Sick’ story.
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(what is also weirdly connected here is the ‘ant bashing game’ my cat was fascinated with, ANT referring here to the Actor Network theory of Bruno Latour (and others) )
The description of ‘cyberantics’ as a metafiction started me thinking about your ponderings on ‘nonsedentarist aesthetics’ in similar terms. Meta-aesthetics of digitality?
Gough says that “becoming-cyborg is not a matter of reducing the gap between the cyborg concept and the material cyborg body (which would be a mode of transcendent posthumanism) but, rather, affirms the perpetual immanence of the gap…” (p.255)
I quite like the affirmation of the gap as a starting point – and his claim that we need “imagined and invented maps of connections that experiment with the real rather than provide only tracings of it” (p.262).
‘the imagined and invented maps of connection that experiment with the real rather than provide only tracings of it’
that’s the way I see my story ‘Love Sick’. I was also taken by the difference between Deleuze’s trace (hence the lines, or tiny columns of ants) and how Haraway considers maps, the multiple entryways (which I would prefer)
I also see it as an ‘assemblage’ though that word has an undertone of it being physically manipulated, and I also want to consider the in-between stages. Maybe it is more the act, the becoming which continues online…. (does this make sense or is this a ramble, excuse the pun… Actually might be better to use ‘ramble’ than the word drift!)
to round it all off, I came across this too…
http://www.twohundredandsixteencolors.com/ants/
ps – you mean you did the ant bashing video before discovering Gough’s paper? that is BRILLIANT.
Indeed, I thought it was utterly thrilling…
I had only read the Penderson paper with a reference to Gough, last week, and it was the only bit that stood out for me from that paper (with all respect to the rest of the discussion that was covered) – but the paper does not mention the rhizom-ant-ics…so, for me, this kind of ‘nails it’….