this is, in my eyes, an important issue or concept that has had impact on different scientific disciplines since it was introduced in the seventies, but somehow dropped out of approaches of the social sciences that are now seen as relevant (except for literature, arts and still some media-theories perhaps).
In the first lesson we were talking about hypertext and different levels (plateaus?) of communication that reminded me a lot of the idea of a rhizomatic - potentially growing into different directions, with an infinite number of possible interconnections - concept replacing the hierarchical classic model of a tree of knowledge which is supposed to trace everything down to one single point.
A rhizomatic structure might apply to a whole set of different fields of interest. For example the internet itself or certain areas within; social and/or scientific interaction; brain structures. Especially concerning the latter of course, questions about the self can be dicussed better in respect of the problems that occur when we try to talk about wo/man as the basic category of the social. Labels like "individual", "subject" etc. have been deconstructed but scarcely replaced by more adequate "objects". Identity as a (formerly) major issue of anthropological research and discourse transports a bunch of misconceptions that point to the one impclication of the self: that the contesting aspects of will, desire, ratio etc. are organised and thus subordinated under a somehow coherent single me or I.
This is of course rather a needfull construction of juridical need to attach guilt and responsability to than an adequate object of scientific interest.
Second and last emphasis shall be put on the question of what has been called "the social" for so long. Media interaction as a social praxis of people who have access to let's say computers/internet is in a lot of ways rhizomatic. It is a wild occupancy of the means of communications that drives forces of order crazy. Eventhough enormous efforts are put into economical, administrational and governmental projects of control.
To make it short: the obviously political range of thought connected to this concept "rhizom" might be one reason for the rare appearance in works of social research and theory. But I cannot doubt the attractivity of such an approach in order to understand and desribe accurately what is going on in the field of media.
1 comment:
at one level you are talking about a classification problem - and phenotype classification in zoology and botany is where the word taxonomy earned its spurs. however, taxonomies don't work.. essential attributes as defining categories of things in the world just don't work.. nature always surprises us. not really surprising when you think about it.... there have been some attempts to attack this problem through prototype theory and linguistic classification - most notably the area of cognitive linguistics - but all these approaches take a rather narrow view of classification problems.
the most promising approach (in my opinion) is by treating the human as the point of reference, i.e. to understand how and why we think the way we do, and using this try to understand what impact it has on our cognitive constructs - and by the way, that determines how we classify
going to have a think about this today, maybe some more feedback later
M
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