Brian Massumi, translator and commentator of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, observes how readers (and writers) have licence to be creative with their thinking as they place importance on the creation of the new.
“The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?” (Massumi, 1987, p. xi)
Although discourses condition us through our desire, Deleuze and Guattari prompt us to think not of what desire is but how it functions and who it benefits. “What is to be gained from turning desire on its head, to think not what desire is but ‘how it works’, ‘who it works for’ and what it does?” (Mazzei, 2011, p. 658). These performative questions are the heart of this analysis in that this research is not concerned with cause and effect, rather agency is theorised as lines of flight which make new subject positions possible.
According to MacNaughton (2004) rhizomatic logic brings new questions and issues forth about what we can say about what causes us. It offers a productive alternative for exploring complexities, uncertainties and change. Rhizomatic logic moves beyond the linearity and stability that produce universal truths of the social world, towards a lateral, local logic that produces shifting and
multiple truths. A rhizomatic approach to research is a relatively new approach. In their groundbreaking studies both Alvermann (2000) and Hagood (2002) used the concept of the rhizome as an analytical tool. Hagood (2002) suggested that looking at her data “within the rhizome” and “creating rhizomatic
drawings” (p. 158) made the destabilisation of identities and alternative
perspectives on her data more apparent. In her doctoral thesis, Leafgren (2007) conceptualised moments of disobedience within two kindergarten classrooms as rhizomatic resistance to power. Leafgren observed that:
“…children’s living, breathing disobedience—their ‘resistance to domination’— implies a rhizomatic, deterritorializing interaction with,
within and without the enclosed and partitioned structures of the classroom space and interactions, and, therefore, manifests a nomadic penchant for resisting the restrictive techniques of power as described by Foucault” (Leafgren, 2007, p. 100).
In keeping with Deleuzian immanence, in the following section I discuss a rhizoanalysis as an analytical approach to data then outline how I specifically use rhizo-textual analysis (Honan, 2004) to map the students’ discourse moves. 4.7.1 Rhizoanalysis
Deleuze and Parnet point out that there is a “multiplicity of dimensions, of lines and directions in the heart of an assemblage” (p. 100). It is not merely a
coincidence of parts in a particular space and time as new properties and capacities emerge through interactions, connections and the ongoing processes of assembling
(Gannon, Gottschall and Camden Pratt, 2013). As relations of exteriority,
assemblages are “never simply open to a free flow of energy or desire, but cut through with relations of power” (Ringrose, 2011, p. 602).
Rhizoanalysis can enable researchers to examine how this power is constituted through relations when subjects take lines of flight to new discursive positions. Leander and Rowe (2006), writing in a literacy context, argue that rhizoanalysis permits an understanding of performances in ways “that more fully engage their affective intensities, the relationships they build, and the ways in which they create unpredictable movements of texts and identities” (p. 432). Tamboukou (2008) considers that the concept of lines of flight support a view of ‘self’ as “a threshold, a door, a becoming between multiplicities, an effect of a dance between power and desire” (p. 361). Honan (2007) uses a rhizomatic process to frame identity as new lines of flight. She employs Deleuzian rhizomatics to disrupt the linear and layered thinking about subject positioning that is so dominant in modernist approaches to identity. These alternative subject positions, which are constantly evolving, can be “pleasurable contradictions.”
Remove the straight lines – remove the layers – and what remains is a map of possible pathways. At any one moment, through any discursive moment, the ground shifts, the path alters, the ‘plane of immanence and univocality’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 294) forms and unforms, and
it is in this process of becoming that one deals pleasurably with contradictions. (Honan, 2007, p. 535)
Rhizoanalyses differ from case studies in that a case is defined by parameters and can be described as a “bounded system” (Stake, 1995, p. 2). Plateaus in this rhizoanalysis are mapped (Appendices 3-5) through a non-linear process of cartography (Deleuze & Guattari (1987). These plateaus are rhizomatic, representing middles that have neither a beginning nor an end. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) write that the rhizome “is comprised not of units but of
dimensions or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills” (p. 21). The tree image which is used to describe cause and effect can be seen as a section of a rhizome that has solidified and has lost its fluidity. Edwards (2010) observes how through challenging arboreal metaphors, Deleuze and Guattari challenge the centrality of the verb ‘to be’ as the way in which the world is represented. Citing Deleuze and Guattari, Edwards illustrates how the concept of rhizomatic connectedness can come to the fore through challenging the notion of the tree in cause and effect thinking.
“The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and.’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, p. 25). It is important to bear in mind the play of words here, as in French ‘is’ (est) and ‘and’ (et) are pronounced in the same way…The conjunctive ‘and’ here becomes integral to rhizomatic approaches which
metaphorically shake the tree of knowledge. (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 98) (Edwards, 2010, p. 152)
Rhizoanalysis facilitates a shift away from research which focuses on
identifying what is present in an interaction toward analysing the interactions within a context as a process of “producing difference” (Leander & Rowe, 2006, p. 434, italics in original). Hansfield (2007) takes up this notion, observing how rhizoanalysis serves not to clarify, but to complicate through illustrating how practice produces difference, rather than how difference produces practice (Handsfield, 2007). Honan and Sellers (2006) produce
difference by following lines of flight to make connections between disparate thoughts, ideas, pieces of data and discursive moments. From these
assemblages they formed plateaus which merged, connected, and crossed over each other (Honan & Sellers, 2006). Building on Alvermann’s influential work, Honan (2010a) describes how each discourse interweaves and interconnects with others forming a discursive web or map. She sees discursive linkages as “lumpy nodes that can appear within a rhizomatic root system, or like the couplings that connect varied systems of pipes in underground water systems and it is these linkages that can explain the plausibility of seemingly
contradictory discourses” (p. 182). Agency can be conceptualised as the lines of flight within and across discourses (Davies, 2004). For this reason I have
selected an approach that looks for
…middles, rather than beginnings and endings, [that make] it possible to decenter key linkages and find new ones, not by combining old ones in new ways, but by remaining open to the proliferation of ruptures and discontinuities that in turn create other linkages. (Alvermann, 2000, p. 118)
Rhizoanalysis can address the claims made by critics, mentioned previously, that poststructuralism does not offer any practical action to address the power structures that perpetuate social injustices. Wallin (2010) suggests that “we are today forging a romance with the rhizome” through conceptualising it as a vehicle of liberation or an image of “processural renewal” (p. 83). He cautions that our domestication of the rhizome, to theorise curricula and the arts, can reduce it to an education cliché. Thus, he cautions that the radical potential of the rhizome for thinking an ontology of difference can be lost (Wallin, 2010). Like Deleuze and Guattari, Honan and Sellers (2006) consider that difference is important and remind us of the impossibility and undesirability of prescribing a set of methods to be used in research.
This research utilises rhizomatic imagery but not without some degree of caution. Mazzei and McCoy (2010) warn against the easy capture of glib metaphors. They maintain that the challenge is not merely to ‘use’ select
flight, smooth and striated spaces) and to illustrate these metaphors with examples from data, but to think with Deleuzian concepts in ways that might produce previously unthought-of questions, practices, and knowledge. Wallin (2010) contends that conceptualising the rhizome as a model or metaphor undermines its connective potential. Likewise, Sellers & Gough (2010) deliberately distance themselves from those who ‘use’ Deleuze by
appropriating metaphors that were never intended as metaphors, preferring to work towards generating discourse practices that challenge such a deployment of complexity-reducing Deleuzian figurations.
I take up Mazzei and McCoy’s (2010) challenge to use Deleuze to attempt thinking with the vocabularies to provide new descriptions and encourage different understandings. Mazzei and McCoy content that “such use of Deleuze attempts a thinking with the vocabularies that provide new means of description and that encourage different understandings or engagements that confront the very image of thought that guides us” (p. 504).
4.7.2 Rhizo-textual analysis
My methodological approach in this research draws from Honan’s (2004) process which she terms rhizo-textual analysis. A rhizo-textual approach depends on understanding that discourses operate within texts in rhizomatic ways – that is they have no beginning and no end, are not linear, or separate (Honan, 2004). Thinking rhizomatically allows for a discursive data analysis in which discourses are treated as intersecting and overlapping, rather than linear or operating on planes (Honan, 2007; Honan, 2010b). Furthermore, Sellers and Honan (2007) write that “rhizo-textual analysis involves mapping these
discursive lines, following pathways, identifying the intersections and
connections, finding the moments where the assemblages of discourses merge to make plausible and reason(able) sense to the reader...” (p. 147).
Honan and Sellers (2006) consider that, through mapping discursive journeys in a text, the moments of convergence which allow contradictory and conflicting discourses can be illuminated. These authors contend that this constructive and transformative approach to discourse analysis focuses on the possibilities produced through re-construction. Grellier (2013) also highlights the generative
nature of this form of mapping and its potential for drawing the reader into the rhizome. “Rhizomatic mapping involves depicting a number of points that elaborate, shape and disrupt each other, encouraging readers to draw their own interconnecting routes or separating chasms between them” (Grellier, 2013, p. 83).
Writing for an early childhood audience, Sellers and Honan (2007) present their thoughts on developing Deleuzian methods for educational research. These include:
• An approach to writing that is partial and tentative, that transgresses generic boundaries, and allows the inclusion of the researchers’ voice(s). • Understanding that discourses operate within a text in rhizomatic ways,
that they are not linear, or separate; any text includes a myriad of discursive systems, which are connected to and across each other. A rhizomatic discourse analysis follows the lines of flight that connect these different systems in order to provide accounts of (e)merging (mis)readings.
• Data collected for educational research, while appearing to be disparate, can be analysed rhizomatically to find connections between writing, artworks and video, for example. This kind of analysis allows (e)merging readings of connections between and across and within various data. (Sellers & Honan, 2007, p. 145-146)
4.7.3 Assemblage Analysis – Cartographies
The classroom worlds, discourses and identities presented in this thesis were selected on the basis of their potential to trouble the familiar and to
deterritorialize the taken for granted. To undertake rhizo-textual analysis, I constructed cartographies (Appendices 3-5). To begin with I broke the classroom episode, the student and teacher interviews and the lead teacher meeting transcripts into discourses which I colour coded. I then placed the transcript of the classroom episode out on the floor to map as an assemblage of discourses. These discourses comprised the middle of the rhizome. Around each classroom episode I laid the cut up coloured texts of the student and teacher interviews to see where I could draw links with these other discursive texts. By
cutting up and placing the interview data alongside the episode, I created rhizomatic links. Through juxtaposing these accounts, I mapped lines of flight within and across the discourses in the classroom episode texts. These
diagrammatic assemblages became the three rhizomatic cartographies that underpinned my analysis. Using the cartographies I could see how the data addressed my research questions:
• How did students and teachers move themselves from one set of culturally and socially structured subjectivities to another;
• how did agency look, sound and feel in the discursive space of these
classrooms; and
• how did students discursively engage as authoritative, active
participants, authoring and directing their own behaviour in social activity within the classrooms?
As I generated the cartographies and afterwards during the process of analysis I employed the following questions as rhizoanalysis tools:
• What are the discourses in play? • What lines of flight can I see?
• How do discourses merge, intersect, overlap or separate? • What contradictions am I noticing in the data?
This section has foregrounded the application of Deleuze to data analysis. I next turn to the background and context of the study to introduce the school, the participants, my relationship with them, and give an account of the ethical basis of this research.