Abstract
This article deploys the concept of rhizoanalysis in order to disrupt, to think, and to do qualitative research differently. Rhizoanalysis is a concept created out of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome. The article explores what rhizoanalysis can do, how it functions, and what it produces in relation to research on literacies, in particular multiple literacies theory (MLT). The article is a rhizome having multiple entries: concept creation, rhizoanalysis the concept, an introduction to MLT followed by a detailed presentation of a rhizoanalytic study on conceptualizing writing systems in multilingual children. The article exits with an intermezzo and a potential becoming of rhizoanalysis as an approach to qualitative inquiry.
Keywords
The writings of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, have brought a significant shift to conceptualizing and theorizing qualitative research. One domain where this shift has had an impact concerns methodological approaches to research on literacies. How one does research is an exploration into “doing” Deleuze (Daignault & Masny, 2011). What might doing literacies research within a Deleuzian perspective entail? The question creates a potential of what is yet to become. Becoming is a rhizomatic process. A rhizome has horizontal shoots that take off in unpredictable directions. It has no beginning, no end. It spills out in the middle. For Deleuze, a rhizome functions to disrupt and to create change/becoming. In this article, the rhizome disrupts (deterritorializes) methodology and literacy in order to reconceptualize them, rhizoanalysis and multiple literacies respectively, thus opening up potentialities for thinking differently about qualitative research. A focus on multiple literacies provides a lens with which to deploy rhizoanalysis.
This article is a rhizome. In it, there are different entries and as each entry is explored, the sense that emerges from these entries will take readers in unpredictable (no pre-given) directions.
Accordingly, the article begins with an invitation for readers to plug in, that is, plugging in to concepts that may be familiar and unfamiliar to readers. The first entry provides brief descriptions of concepts: rhizome, deterritorialization, becoming, difference, actual–virtual interaction and immanence. These concepts are embedded in transcendental empiricism. Created by Deleuze (1994), transcendental empiricism was vital to his perspective on life as becoming and to the place of experience in life. Experience is not grounded in the individual. Experience refers to the virtual thought of an experience. Key concepts that characterize transcendental empiricism include: anti-representation, interpretosis, decentered subject, and immanence. Each concept will be explored.
The second entry focuses on disrupting methodology and configuring it differently in terms of rhizoanalysis. There are different ways to rhizoanalyze (Alvermann, 2001; Dufresne, 2002; Eakle, 2007; Leander & Rowe, 2006; Waterhouse, 2011). Most of these have been reviewed in Masny & Waterhouse (2011). In this article, there is another construction of rhizoanalysis that confronts and ruptures the qualitative research process and creates new concepts in relation to data provided on in the next entry.
The third entry provides an introduction to multiple literacies theory (MLT; Masny, 2006, 2009b, 2010, 2011), a theoretical and practical framework that functions to disrupt and provides potentialities for change while reading, reading the world and self. MLT is an open system which allows for disruptions to the system. Disruptions bring on transformation, becoming. Accordingly, MLT is theory and practice that focuses on change/becoming. Moreover, MLT is not an application of a Deleuzean–Guattarian framework. While, for instance, MLT involves the concept of becoming, it is taken up differently according to what sense of becoming emerges in relation to the context (place and time) in which becoming happens. MLT functions to disrupt (deterritorialize) and create different concepts related to literacies. The importance of concept creation is that it creates a path for thinking differently (Colebrook, 2002a).
The introduction to MLT is followed by an illustration of a rhizoanalysis linked to a vignette (data) selected from a study on multilingual children learning writing systems. It is a detailed example of how a particular rhizoanalysis is conducted. It demonstrates the potentiality of rhizoanalysis in qualitative research.
The article exits with an intermezzo, the contribution of rhizoanalysis to qualitative inquiry and literacies research. Rhizoanalysis is the creation of a concept and plays a significant role in rupturing notions of methodology and multiple literacies research. Rhizoanalysis reminds us of the power of the rhizome in effectuating becoming. Finally, a remarkable effect of rhizoanalysis is to “have done with judgment” (Deleuze, 1997b).
Entry: Concept Creation
Deleuze (1995) wrote that there are two ways to read (a book):
. . . you either see it as a book looking for something inside and start looking for what it signifies…And you annotate and interpret and question. The other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing works, you try another book. . . . something comes through or it doesn’t. There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It is like plugging into a circuit. (pp. 7-9).
Deleuze opted for the second reading. St.Pierre (2004) encouraged plugging in, “to give up the pretense of signifying and making meaning in the old way” (p. 283). Reading, that is, plugging in, takes away the anxiety about getting it [meaning, interpretation] right. This article invites readers to plug in to concepts created with rhizoanalysis.
Deleuze and Guattari proposed that concepts are created in response to problems in life. MLT and rhizoanalysis are alternate ways to conceptualize literacy and methodology. Therefore, this entry explores different concepts vital to rhizoanalysis and MLT: becoming, deterritorialization, difference, actual–virtual, and immanence.
Once a concept is created it is a territory. Take the example of literacy, the ability to read, write and process information (UNESCO, 2008). Literacy is a concept, a bounded stable territory. Deterritorialization undoes a territory, only to configure a different territory (reterritorialization). Literacy becomes unstable in order to create a different concept, multiple literacies. Moreover, in the undoing of a territory, deterritorialization implies a process of becoming (transformation). Becoming takes place in continuous virtual–actual interaction through difference. In this interaction, becoming is in the virtual. It is pre-personal and not pre-given. Once virtual becoming is assigned a presence in time and space it is actualized. Difference is the effect of the constant interaction between the virtual and the actual as Dufresne (2006) states. The virtual becomes actualized only to become virtual again. What it once was could be no longer. It is different. It is difference that allows for creation and invention to occur continuously. As we shall see later, Hello Kitty, a participant in the research study is effected through continuous investment in literacies creating, inventing, and transforming to become literate, to become Other through difference.
How does literacy deterritorialize? In this particular example, literacy is the ability to read, write, and process information. It is often referred to as school-based literacy that has eclipsed literacies in other contexts (such as in the home and community). School-based literacy is valued by institutions while MLT affirms that all literacies should be legitimate.
Entry: Rhizoanalysis. How Does it Function? What Does it Produce?
For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), concepts are constantly created through deterritorialization and in this context methodology is no exception. Methodology is deterritorialized and reterritorialized: rhizoanalysis. Research is an event, that is, “something that allows time to take off on a new path” (Colebrook, 2002a, p. 57). Research is an assemblage. Therefore, MLT is part of the research assemblage that connects with rhizoanalysis within the research assemblage. An important note is that while this article focuses on rhizoanalysis, it is not simply an analytical tool. Rhizoanalysis is governed by transcendental empiricism. Accordingly, a rhizome is neither metaphor nor figuration. 1
Deleuze’s renunciation of metaphor flows from some of the most fundamental commitments upheld throughout his philosophy: his rejection of the representational image of thought, his pragmatism, and his long-standing interest in the mobility of philosophical concepts (Patton, 2010, p. 21).
What is a rhizome? The following quotes are taken from A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987):
Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes (6) . . . Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be . . . A rhizome continuously establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles: (7). There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. 2
. . . A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. . . . There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. (9) The rhizome is a map and not a tracing. . . . The map is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. . . . The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions. . . Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways. (12)
“Data is not read in the traditional way as evidence, but rather as nonrepresentational, transgressive “ (St Pierre, 1997, p. 174). Rhizoanalysis is a way to work with transgressive data (“ . . . emotional data, dream data, sensual data, and response data that are out-of-category and not usually accounted for in qualitative research methodology” St Pierre, 1997, p. 175). Based on the concept of the rhizome, a bloc of data has no beginning, no ending. A researcher enters in the middle. A rhizomatic approach to data grew out of what St. Pierre (1997) refers to as troubling the signifier data. Coming out of posthumanist and non-Cartesian space, St. Pierre is suspicious of language that in “the real world has produced structures that are brutal to many people” (p. 185). For example, in bullying, language communicates normative structures that categorize individuals and can bring hardships as individuals find themselves struggling with these categories be it at work, in school, or at home. While poststructuralist and humanist discourses share the same words, they are conceptually different (Lather, 2004). From a Deleuzian perspective, St Pierre (2011) offers an alternative to conceptualizations of coding data in what she calls “conventional humanist qualitative research.” Her encounter with the received view of research methodology (data, method, member check, peer debriefing) disrupts the concept of methodology thinking that there is no beginning and no ending to her project. Rhizoanalysis is an assemblage (participants, researchers, research assistants, research settings, etc.) that disrupts or deterritorializes in situ. Each time the composition of the assemblage differs. It is difference that allows for creation and invention to occur continuously (Masny, 2006).
Regarding the subject, most research studies within modernity are based on the assumption of the autonomous thinking subject. 3 The grounding of language, thought, and representation originates with a rational human being who is often referred to as the centered subject in a world that can be subjectively constructed. Deleuze (1994) moves away from the foundation of the subject who thinks and represents. Rather, it is the subject who is the product of events in life. An event, according to Deleuze (1990), refers to life that produces deterritorializations, moments that create ruptures and differences that allows for creation to take off along various unpredicted directions, a rhizome to be described in the next section. As a result, such reversal about the subject forces a change in discourse structure and conceptualization about the subject. The humanist Cartesian subject is decentered (St.Pierre, 2004). The subject is not in subject position actively controlling. The subject becomes an effect of events in life. The mind, one mode of becoming, is a site that connects and transforms the individual, thereby becoming Other. In other words, the individual is part of an assemblage (agencement) “unexpected, disparate and productive connections that create new ways of thinking and living” (Colebrook, 2002b, p. 76). While the individual is an assemblage (genetic, social, language), the individual is part of an assemblage. In the example of a research study, an assemblage can be constituted by teachers, classmates, researcher, computers, classroom, and more. The subject is in the assemblage no more, no less important than the other elements in the assemblage. The elements in the assemblage construct relationships to each other once they come together in the actual. There is no a priori or pre-given relationship among the elements in the assemblage.
Moreover, rhizoanalysis eschews interpretation. To seek interpretation would be asking what something means. This is a foundationalist and transcendent form of meaning that is there to be interpreted. Rhizoanalysis operates within transcendental empiricism in which sense expresses not what a text means or is, but rather its virtual potential to become. Sense is an event and “the event is sense itself” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 20). Sense has virtual and actual components. Language for instance is the “virtual dimension of sense because language is more than its actual element” (Colebrook, 2002a, p. 20). Virtual sense becomes actualized, just as the event is actualized, an “instantaneous production intrinsic to interactions between various kinds of forces” (i.e., assemblage; Stagoll, 2005, p. 87). This product (i.e., sense-event) is not a state of affairs, but a transformation, a becoming.
Transcendental empiricism conceived by Deleuze was a response to his perspective on life as becoming and to the place of experience in life. Experience is not an event ascribed to the autonomous thinking subject. Experience is not grounded in the individual. Experience is conceived in terms of the virtual thought of . . . an experience. Here is an example. You are walking down the corridor at work. The reading of the smell of coffee has disrupted. What could happen next? The clock on the wall says it is 4 o’clock: a visual and printed reading. There is a rhizomatic rupture; whatever has been going on has been disrupted/deterritorialized. The rupture brings on the virtual thought of a break, a going home or potentially the thought of a next vacation. Where the smell of coffee could lead is unpredictable. Transcendental empiricism is not interested in the autonomous thinking subject that grounds experience through explanation. In transcendental empiricism, the subject is decentered in that the subject becomes part of an assemblage. The reading that goes on is the result of relationality within an assemblage in the actual. Moreover, representation limits experience to the world as we know it, not as a world that could be. Representation also considers that there is an object present but that it also has another meaning. An example is looking for meaning in a relationship between two characters in a short story (what does this relationship represent? Fear? Harmony?). Looking for meaning in a short story is also seeking interpretation. Representation and interpretation are closely linked and have dominated Western thought. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to interpretation as an illness, interpretosis. Instead, they favor the rhizome and pragmatic experimentation in which sense emerges through the power of affect.
In sum, a rhizome becomes a map to analyze and report data. Data analysis is governed by Deleuzian transcendental empiricism, positing a role for a decentered subject and anti-representation. Sense emerges, a result of an assemblage reading, reading the world and self.
ENTRY: What is MLT? How Does it Function? What Does it Produce?
MLT, developed by Masny (2006, 2009b, 2011) is a construct, an assemblage. Literacies consist of words, gestures, sounds, that is, human, animal, and vegetal ways of relating to the world: ways of becoming with the world. They are texts, broadly speaking (for example, mating rituals, music, visual arts, physics, mathematics, digital remixes). Literacies can be taken up as visual, oral, written, tactile, olfactory, and in multimodal digital. They produce different vegetal and animal mutations, 4 speakers, writers, artists, and digital avatars. Literacies are actualized according to a particular context in time and in space in which they operate. Given the nomadic tendencies of literacies; they are not wed to a context, but are taken up in unpredictable ways. MLT refers to reading, reading the world and self that create potentialities for transforming life. Accordingly, MLT is interested in how literacies function and how they change bodies (human, animal, vegetal), communities and societies.
In terms of concept creation, reading, according to Deleuze (1990), is asking how a text works and what it does or produces. MLT has conceptually created reading as (a) intensive and (b) immanent. (a) To read intensively is to read disruptively and to deterritorialize. (b) To read immanently refers to the virtual thought of . . . in reading and it is from investment in reading that a reader is formed. Refer to the example of coffee presented earlier. It was the smell of coffee that disrupted and brought on the virtual thought of a vacation, a coffee break, and so forth. Immanence 5 is set off at the moment a disruption happens. What happens cannot be predicted.
Reading, reading the world and self are intricately intertwined but distinct. Reading the world is the point at which expression and the world meet and sense actualizes in situ. Reading self happens when the different aspects in the assemblage encounter each other in reading the world. In the process, the encounters deterritorialize and the assemblage is reterritorialized differently. Take the earlier example of coffee when a particular assemblage in which reading self and reading the world (the smell of coffee, the clock, the time of day, place, the work environment) happens at that particular moment, the assemblage deterritorializes and creates a different reading. There is a reterritorialization of reading self and the world that flows through the assemblage and the assemblage reconfigures. It is not a return to what was. It is a different assemblage. The assemblage is transformed and in this process the reading of self, that is, the relationship between the components in the assemblage is different.
MLT and the Toolbox
MLT is theory and practice (Masny, 2012). From a practical perspective, MLT is the ability to do, to practice. MLT asks how literacies function and what they produce. From a theoretical perspective, in asking these questions, MLT is interested in concept creation, deterritorialization, experimentation, and how difference that comes about through experimentation transforms the assemblage. In the coffee example, reading, reading the world and self with the assemblage is happening. In practice, MLT operates to explore what literacies are doing and what they are producing. From investment in reading the world and self, the assemblage transforms. In theory and simultaneously with practice, MLT seeks deterritorialization because it is a moment of experimentation. The disruption of the coffee smell brings on a virtual thought of . . . unpredicted change/becoming, potential action. The toolbox constituted of concept creation, deterritorialization, creativity, and experimentation are just some of the tools and are not pre-given. In summary, MLT, theory and practice, continually transforms through concepts in order to respond to problems posed in the world disrupted by literacies operating by way of immanent processes of becoming through reading, reading the world and self. Reading forms a rhizome with the world and self. Reading assures the deterritorialization of the world and self and the world effects a reterritorialization of literacies.
ENTRY: What are Vignettes? How Do They Function? What Do They Produce?
Research is an event comprised of virtual assemblages that actualize as signifying assemblages (theoretical framework, conceptual framework, rhizoanalysis, and exiting in the middle). The following study focuses on conceptualizations of writing systems in multilingual children attending a French-language school in a French minority context in Canada. However, while the study contains an “empirical” component, it is not an empirical study in a conventional way. Rather, the data deterritorialize and reterritorialize. They are vignettes. They are all part of an assemblage, no more no less important than the other parts of the assemblage that come together in the process of sense emerging with MLT theory and practice.
It is not a matter of going through the whole data set to identify excerpts according to themes or codings. There are none. Codes imply that they are pre-given or constructed and then applied /identified with various pieces of data. Alternately, a researcher reads the data and determines which codes are foregrounded. Nevertheless, codes classify and fix data.
In the case of vignettes, it is important to understand the process involved in the selection of vignettes and how they are written up, how vignettes- becoming- map actualize. Vignettes happen in class, in the daycare center and in the home. Vignettes are part of an assemblage (vignettes, researcher, research assistant, participants, etc.) and the study itself is part of a larger assemblage of a research event. In this particular context, a research assemblage could be composed of a transcribed vignette, a research assistant, a computer and then read and reread by a researcher. How are vignettes selected? Intense affective passages in bold (see vignette below) disrupt as connections happen in the mind of the researcher and thought is produced. The vignette foregrounded for analysis is based on its power to affect the assemblage and be affected by the assemblage. Vignettes rupture, deterritorialize, and take off in unpredictable rhizomatic ways and create concepts. It is a process in which there is an investment in reading, reading the world and self. Instead of considering interpretation and what a text means, the questions are what vignettes do and how they function. The analysis “is reported” in indirect discourse, that is, the subject is decentered and so interpretation by the subject is abandoned. Concepts are created and introduced through questions and indirect questions for there is no one way to look at vignettes. The data in the words of St.Pierre (1997) become transgressive. The bold parts in the vignette affected and disrupted the research assemblage. The combination of disruption and affect or reading intensively and immanently is a rhizomatic process that creates a line of deterritorialization and becoming. What transpires is, that is, an ability of the vignette and affect to bring forth the virtual thought of . . . what could happen in an analysis. It is a process in which there is investment in reading, reading the world and self.
The vignette that follows involves one of the five children who participated in a 2-year longitudinal qualitative study exploring conceptualizations of different writing systems in multilingual children. The five girl-participants aged 5 to 7 years were filmed in class (language arts, mathematics, science, and social sciences) at home (meals, homework, reading, recreational time), and where applicable, in the day care center (library, computer, games). Each filmed session was followed by an interview. In addition, each child was filmed participating in a mini-lesson in which she gave a lesson on how to write in the home language (Spanish, Mandarin, Afar, and English). Each of these activities happened twice during the school year.
Seven-year-old Hello Kitty (self-selected pseudonym) has two sisters. The children attend French language school. Her father is a unilingual Anglophone. At home, the family speaks English when the father is in the conversation. Otherwise, the mother speaks exclusively French to them.
Vignette—Hello Kitty
In this vignette Hello Kitty, fluent in French and English, and the researcher are discussing video footage of a mini lesson on languages and writing systems that the child taught the day before. The discussion is in French.
Let’s look at what you’ve written in French, I love you ( Je t’aime). And here in English you wrote, I love you. You told me that there was a difference regarding the sounds and what else?
Like it is.
And here it is what? . . .
I l o v e y o u.
OK let’s move over to the table and see what you have written in French and English.
I do not know how to write in English
Ok, it is not necessary. We can look at what you have already written.
What did you write?
Je t’aime and I love you.
You told me that it was different at the sound level and also in writing. Is I love you a sentence?
Yes.
Ok. Earlier while you were explaining to me about what you wrote you talked about words. What are words? Can you show me
That is a word.
What is a word?
And then?
you
And that is?
A word.
A word. Can you do the same thing in French?
t’aime, it’s a word. Yes but you circled two different things.
I not know.
Then how do you know that this is a word?
How do you know that t’aime is a word.
I don’t know.
Hello Kitty’s mini lesson.
Hello Kitty says that there is a difference between French and English; in addition to sounding differently, they are written differently. She offers the example of “Je t’aime” in French and its English translation “I love you.” There is an assemblage of bodies in this event: Hello Kitty, the researcher, French language, English language, words, sentences, the father.
How are language territories actualizing (example: t’aime is a word)? Earlier in the interview, Hello Kitty says she does not know many words in English. She recognizes that there are possible differences and resemblances in using French and English. Hello Kitty’s school, where French is the language of instruction, maintains a “French only” language policy, that is, French is mandated as the sole language of communication throughout the school (except for emergency purposes). The school territorializes its boundaries in terms of what language is to be used in school. Hello Kitty openly admits that in school she does not and cannot use English and quietly told me that she prefers to say that she does not know much English. How is this response produced in terms of reading, reading the world and self in the French minority context where Hello Kitty lives and goes to school?
Next, how might the assemblages happening in the mini lesson deterritorialize and reterritorialize languages (French and English) differently? Data are analyzed purposefully with questions. In the analysis, there is no explanation/interpretation of data.
Actually, there is no longer any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpretation, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant silence. . . . In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind’s fundamental neurosis. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 114).
Scheurich (1997) remains unsatisfied and apprehensive that “what was once raw, polyvocal, and above all, different (Other) becomes through the research/theory process cooked, unified, and above all, the Same” (p. 86). Scheurich’s response: “simply present raw data and leave the researcher ―stunned into silence—literally, into silence” (p. 90). In rhizoanalysis in this article, the tool of analysis is (in)direct question and in line with MLT, a reading of data that is intensive and immanent. With regard to the vignette, what remains to be seen is the tensions between institutional spaces that compartmentalize and territorialize writing systems and the spaces of becoming Other that disrupt, create ruptures and moments of deterritorialization. How does the tension in such spaces impact an assemblage in reading, reading the world and self?
Hello Kitty goes on to express the concept of a sentence (e.g., Je t’aime.) which has a capital letter and a period. She tells us that this sentence structure is the same in French and English. At the level of a word however, she identifies “I love” and “t’aime” as individual words. Where does such an understanding of words come from? Her father taught her. How does this particular assemblage produce a de/reterritorialization of the concept, “word? In MLT terms, the assemblage, through reading, reading the world and self intensively and immanently, deterritorializes the concept of word and reterritorializes differently. What affects are flowing as sense emerges with a different way of thinking about a word, “I love,” “t’aime?” Has t’aime disrupted and been disrupted and become a word instead of a verb and object pronoun? The importance of this approach to data is also about the process of conceptualization about language happening. How does this reconceptualization of word contribute to becoming, becoming-literate? For one, it could impact the conceptualization of a word, a sentence. How does the father, as part of an assemblage, contribute to the becoming-literate of Hello Kitty? Posing these questions implies a move away from interpretation toward an openness to the potential and immanent responses that such questions bring.
Vignette Assemblage
The vignette presented is an assemblage in itself while at the same time part of a broader assemblage. The connectivity within and across assemblages constitutes a rhizome. While there is movement that territorialize language and literacies, at the same time there is movement that disrupts, and de/reterritorialized literacies differently. The research process can map out these forces. For instance, while Hello Kitty’s vignette deals with perceiving differences between writing systems and the parents’ role in that process, these are not themes; the modus operandi of a rhizoanalysis is different. What is at work are the rhizomatic connections happening between “data” pieces produced by immanence, the virtual thought of. . . happening in the mind of the researcher as the research assemblage unfolds and enfolds. It is a process of connectivity to another vignette in a rhizoanalytic event.
Moreover, in bilingual and multilingual settings in this study, tensions happen within and around systems (which systems, their use, and in what context). Language systems are stable and unstable as systems flow from territorial spaces onto spaces of deterritorialization (becoming). When deterritorialization happens, systems become unstable only to reterritorialize onto a stable system. The instability of systems through deterritorialization creates a potential opening for thinking systems differently. In addition, MLT theory and practice connects spaces with reading and reading the world that produces a reading of self (the assemblage) in relation to multilingual children becoming-literate in minority language contexts. These continual processes of disruption and seeking stabilization are a central feature of MLT theory and practice and describe becoming Other. Literacies happen in complex ways that overlap and interweave—across languages (French, and others), across modes (written, visual, oral, tactile), across contexts (home, school, community), across disciplines (language, science, math, art), and across geographies (Canada, and countries of origin in the case of immigrant families). This study emphasizes that writing is creative and involves inventing in ways that reveal interesting and remarkable conceptualizations around writing systems and how they might work.
Intermezzo
This brings us to becoming/lines of flight in relation to rhizoanalysis and literacies research.
Rhizoanalysis
First, Mazzei (2010) raises concerns about exploring methodology differently by “reinscribing old methodology with a new language” (p. 521). Mazzei calls for a pedagogy of the concept (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) that rejects “a tracing that superimposes an outline of the map on top of old methodology”( Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). To think data differently is in her words: “to embrace uncomfortableness that comes with loss of certainty, transparency, and fixed images” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Rhizoanalysis affords this openness with instability, lines of flight and their rhizomatic connections. There is uncertainty but how could creativity unfold without ruptures happening. In short, rhizoanalysis proposes to deterritorialize methodologies, and in relation to transcendental empiricism, abandon the given and invent different ways of thinking about research through immanence, that is the virtual thought of what might happen when thinking data differently. Moreover, rhizoanalysis is an antidote to interpretosis and alleviates Scheurich’s wariness of the “resourcefulness of the Same to reappear with new masks that only seem to be Other” (1997, p. 90).
Second, it is important to reiterate that rhizoanalysis is a research event that “ask[s] new kinds of questions” (Leander & Rowe, 2006, p. 435) and “spark [s] thinking in new directions” ( p. 434). It is precisely this “asking of new kinds of questions. . . [that] spark[s] thinking in new directions” (p. 434) which encapsulates the epistemological significance for qualitative research. The rhizome provides an alternative to the “tree of knowledge,” the already known. It is a challenge to think nomadically after decades and centuries of Cartesian logic and transcendent empiricism. A nomadic thinking is important to qualitative research because it is a game-changer: transforming life.
Third, rhizoanalysis focuses on what it produces and how it functions as a way to conceptualize research-as-event. It opens potentialities to thinking beyond what is already known or assumed. This is how Baugh (2005) describes Deleuzean experimentation: “When we experiment―we do not know what the result will be and have no preconceptions concerning what it should be” (p. 91). Rhizoanalysis in qualitative research highlights experimentation including novel connections and concept creation, affect, assemblage, power (stabile, and disruptive), and space (territorial and transformative).
Literacies Research
First, the forces of MLT theory and practice lies in what it does and how it functions, in its power to affect and be affected while reading, reading the world and self. Ontologically, MLT provides openings for thinking to happen in becoming. Concept creation and reading, reading the world and self are separate concepts yet they are intertwined. In asking what MLT does and how it functions is to “plug into” production, experimentation, mutation and creation.
Conceptualizations of writing systems and literacies with children are not always what adults expect or what adults may infer from the productions of texts. For each child, the way multiple literacies happen and the experience of more than one writing system is different (2009a). The way each child transforms is different.
Second, in rhizoanalytic literacies research, MLT’s concept of reading to be disruptive and immanent becomes a lens to analyze vignettes, to disrupt ways of thinking about literacies, to deterritorialize assemblages and open up experience and create different assemblages each time. As mentioned earlier, vignettes are selected on the power to affect and be affected in an assemblage. The power to intervene is linked to affect and the affective connections happening in the assemblage which the children, parents, and teachers are part of. To palpate 6 data as opposed to understand data and the knowledge gained is a rhizoanalytic approach in qualitative research that can be challenging, messy, ambiguous, and difficult. MLT relates to what doing research produces: deterritorialization of representation and subjectivity. Ontologically, rupturing representation as a construction of reality within transcendent empiricism involves creating lines of flight in which reality is immanent, rhizomatic, and unpredictable. In terms of literacy research this ontological shift transforms the goals of research from describing what is to opening new (unknowable a priori) potentialities for literacies, processes in becoming.
Third, to have done with judgment. Rhizoanalysis is a response to Deleuze’s ongoing efforts “To have done with judgement to bring into existence and not to judge” (Deleuze, 1997b, p. 135). This is an immanent and creative event in relation to literacies research. To have done with judgment implies looking at literacies differently which involves a constant disruptive reading of literacy in terms of representation and literacy tied to Cartesian subjectivity. In the vignette, the power of the institution that defines what a word is is disrupted and conceptualized differently. To conceptualize perhaps is to resist and in so doing create different ways of thinking that moves away from analytical findings that in the interpretations become judgmental. Rhizoanalysis in literacies research becomes:
a move towards a place were research is not judged in relation to an external set of criteria, rather research is assessed immanently according to its creative, affective powers. What does research produce? What hitherto unthought-of lines of flight does it open? What does it make possible to think? (Waterhouse, 2011, p. 142).
What is remarkable and interesting in rhizoanalysis and literacies research is to ask what different ways of living consist of in relation to reading, reading the world and self (MLT) and what new problems are effectuated.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Monica Waterhouse for her valuable comments on this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author declared the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The Hello Kitty vignette is part of a study on conceptualizations of writing systems in multilingual children, a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Heritage Canada.