Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2004 �� 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Ltd.
RhizomANTically Oxford, UKPublishing, E PAT Educational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia 36 3 Original Article RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing posthuman pedagogies Noel Gough Becoming-Cyborg: Performing posthuman pedagogies N ��������� G ������������ Deakin University Make a rhizome. But you don���t know what you can make a rhizome with, you don���t know which subterranean stem is going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment. ���Gilles Deleuze & F��lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), p. 246 So I shall. This paper is a narrative experiment inspired by Deleuze and Guattari���s (1987) figuration of the rhizome. It is a textual assemblage of popular and academic 1 representations of cyborgs that I hope might question, provoke and challenge some of the dominant discourses and assumptions of curriculum, teaching and learning. Emboldened by Deleuze���s penchant for inventing new terms for his figurations, 2 I have coined the term ���rhizomANTic��� (sometimes ���rhizomantic���) to name a methodol- ogical disposition that connects Deleuze���s rhizomatics, ANT (actor-network theory), and Donna Haraway���s (1997) ���invented category of semANTics, diffractions ��� (p. 16, my caps.). 3 Diffraction is ���an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world��� (p. 16), which Haraway (1994) also represents by the activity of making a ���cat���s cradle������a metaphor that imagines the performance of sociotechnical relations as a less orderly and less functionalist activity than the word ���network��� often conveys. As my reference to Haraway���s work suggests, my engagement with ANT leans towards those aspects of the theory that John Law (1999) characterises as ���after-ANT���. In an annotated bibliography on Law���s ANT Resource Home Page, he refers to Haraway���s (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan��_Meets_OncoMouse��� as ���the best-known example of the different and partially related radical feminist technoscience alternative to actor-network theory. The ���after-ANT��� studies in this resource in many cases owe as much or more to Haraway as to ANT itself���. 4 I also use the term rhizomantic because much of this essay is about ants. Writing Cyborgs Writing rhizomantic as ���rhizomANTic��� symbolically foregrounds my suspicion that ANT cannot wholly be accommodated by rhizomatics���it fits, but it sits a little awkwardly and uncomfortably. The extent of this fit (which improves as ANT segues into ���after ANT���) can be demonstrated by comparing Haraway���s and actor- network theorists��� approaches to writing cyborgs with each other and with Deleuze and Guattari���s (1987) approach to writing A Thousand Plateaus :

254 Noel Gough �� 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but not for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten lines there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. (p. 22) Haraway (1985) writes cyborgs that chart the movements of some of those hallucinated columns of ants���maps of partial and dynamic connections between the material products of military-industrial cybernetics (and their violent and masculinised projections in popular media) and imagined possibilities for a feminist, anti-racist, multicultural and non-violent technoscience. Haraway���s cyborgs exemplify Deleuze and Guattari���s (1987) characterisation of the rhizome as a ���map��� rather than a ���tracing���: What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real ��� The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions ��� It can be ��� conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or a meditation ��� [and] has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always come back ���to the same���. (pp. 12���13) Haraway���s cyborgs are ���an experimentation in contact with the real������heterogeneous and multiple, but also historically located. Haraway (2000) emphasises that the term cyborg, as she uses it, ���does not refer to all kinds of artifactual, machinic relationships with human beings ��� I am very concerned that the term ���cyborg��� be used specifically to refer to those kinds of entities that became historically possible around World War II and just after��� (p. 128). Actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour (1988a) initially traced machinic relationships with human beings in terms of ���mixing humans and nonhumans together���. To the best of my knowledge, Latour did not use the term ���cyborg���, 5 but his insistence on the agency of non-human ���actants��� is helpful in reading and writing cyborgs as hybrid sociotechnical entities. Key works in ANT, such as Latour���s (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society , demonstrate a method more like Deleuze and Guattari���s notion of ���tracing��� than Haraway���s imaginative mappings of possibilities. ANT as a method of tracing is particularly evident in The Pasteurization of France , Latour���s (1988b) semiotic analysis of the network of arrangements and strategic mobilisations of different actors and entities that produced Pasteur as its spokesperson���as an effect , rather than as a primary agent or individual genius. These earlier versions of ANT repre- sent networks in ways that centre on their functions and imply arborescent systems rather than rhizomatic messiness. Latour���s more recent works move towards a more rhizomatic sensibility, an urge to implicate as well as to replicate, as he demon- strates in Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Latour, 1996), a multi-vocal account of a failed transport technology in which he gives voice to a range of actors, including the technology itself, who debate the translations and negotiations that led to its