Response to Barbara Chancellor. Rhizomania: Five Provocations on a Concept
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 23) Akin to the vertiginous growth potentials of the weed, the concept of the rhizome has begun to proliferate throughout the fields of educational philosophy, curriculum theorizing, and arts-based research.Constituting an image that shares fidelity with both complexity and post-structural theorizing, the rhizome has been deployed as a foil against transcendence and essentialism, the Western metaphysical tradition of logocentrism, and the structural immutability of the modernist subject.In its deployment within the field of arts-based research, the rhizome has been mobilized as a metaphor for the complex subjectivity of the artist, the act of transformational creativity, and as an image of hybridic space peripheral to State control.In each of these configurations, the rhizome is deployed as an image of liberation and freedom, dynamically warding against the sedimentation of life into taxonomic orders and moribund habits of representational thought.Insofar as it is conceptualized as a vehicle of liberation or an image of processural renewal, it is not hyperbole to suggest that we are today forging a romance with the rhizome.The aforementioned tactics are undoubtedly significant to the particular problems of contemporary education and in general, one finds it relatively easy to sympathize with the image of the rhizome as a conceptual tool for relaunching thought from under the legacy of representation, that is, the predilection to tether difference to an image of what already is.Yet, the deployment of rhizomatics in much contemporary curriculum and arts-based theorizing concomitantly marks a co-optation of the concept that
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.048 | 0.075 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".