I’m late to this conversation, but it is important, and I want to participate. I’ve just joined the Mendeley group, and I’ll add references soon. Like Dave, I want very much to operationalize in my classrooms the enigmatic concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, and I’m so pleased that Dave has put this together.

But just now, I want to address the issue of definition that has emerged in this conversation, as definition is relevant to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. e finds the lack of definition troubling, but I think s/he is troubled because s/he is looking for one kind of definition only: that which reduces a concept to its essential characteristics. This kind of definition draws on the reductionist, essentialist habits of mind that have informed western thought for the past several centuries, and that—it really should be noted—have fueled the scientific and technological successes of these centuries. These successes have been so brilliant that we have largely come to regard any other kinds of thought as babble and hocus-pocus.

However, as Nicolescu notes in his book A Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002), the poverty of a strict reductionism is becoming apparent, and paradoxically, that poverty is best revealed by the very science that gave us reductionism in the first place: physics, which in its classical, reductionist era sought a Theory of Everything (TOE). In other words, classical, reductionist physics wanted to define the entire Universe as the regular, inviolable interactions of three elements and four fundamental forces. One can immediately see the seductive appeal of such a definition. If we could reduce the entire universe to a few elements and forces, then imagine the power we would have. But as relativity, quantum theory, chaos and complexity theories have demonstrated, such a reductionism is at best hopelessly naive and at worst dangerous and destructive.

The problem is that our techniques for defining are mired in reductionist, essentialist frameworks. We in the Academy can hardly imagine, and we certainly cannot speak, in any other manner. This is one of the very issues that I think Deleuze and Guattari were addressing. How do we speak intelligently about a world that is not so amenable to classical, reductionist definition? How do we speak intelligently and understandably about a rhizome, about a world that is not static, and thus amenable to reductionist definitions, but dynamic: forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction?

I have some sympathy for e’s point of view. It is so much easier, it promises so much power and control, and it avoids the hard work of recursively mapping the shifting ground. Unfortunately, while it has some really fine successes, it doesn’t get us very far in addressing the big issues that all this classical science and technology have left is with. It leaves us with a distorted and impoverished view of reality.

I should add some thoughts about complex, as opposed to reductionist, definition, and follow-up on Scott Johnson’s excellent comments above, but that will lengthen an already too long comment. Still, I have some ideas about how the Cynefin framework can help us think about definitions, and I’ll try to add that soon to my own writing space.

Thanks again to Dave for an always lively and engaging conversation.