“All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction … The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree” Deleuze and Guattari (1987).
Trees are such a familiar metaphor used in many disciplines. One of my research participants compared student learning to a seed that gets nurtured to grow into a healthy plant, possibly a tree. However Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest an expanded theoretical approach in which we ought to theorize beyond trees and tracings - rather rhizomes and mappings through which we can explore more possibilities. A tree symbolizes a fixed and static genealogy where our “being” and position matter, and a tracing is reproductive rather than productive or generative.
In the dynamic flow of this research, I am shifting and becoming rather than being. There is fluidity in the process. Recently I was asked where I stand in terms of my ontological position? In considering Barad’s (2007) material-discursive interconnections, I wonder if I can truly name a position. I’m moving along unpredictable lines, working through a dynamic diffractive approach that is putting me in an in-between space in time/with time where I am becoming through the unfolding, infolding and refolding of emerging data. Rather than sitting on a branch, or connected to the trunk I am exploring different routes, creating new ones as layers of data are explored, as meanings fold and unfold through each other. In this mangle of entanglement, I am “part of the mix” (Greene 2013:751).
As I map my way through the emergence of newness, I become sensitive to forces and flows that move me away from tracings over given, structured concepts and categories - away from places where points are plotted with a fixed order (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). In the image above I have tried to capture this flow and movement in which I am immersed. The array of colours and swirls highlight the forces that have shifted me out of the tree. I used You Doodle on the iPad then added a layer with Adobe Ideas.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of
matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Greene, J. C. 2013. On rhizomes, lines of flight, mangles, and other assemblages, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, 749-758.
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