Burnett, 'Scholar's Rhizome: Networked Communication Issues', Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture v1n02 (April 20, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/aejvc/aejvc-v1n02-burnett-scholars The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1068-5723 April 20, 1993 Volume 1 Issue 2 BURNETT V1N2 The Scholar's Rhizome: Networked Communication Issues Kathleen Burnett School of Communication, Information & Library Studies Rutgers University kburnett@gandalf.rutgers.edu Abstract Scholarly communication will undergo enormous infrastructural change as electronic communication becomes the dominant mode of information. Its power will derive from its flexibility and variability; from its ability to incorporate, transmute and transcend any traditional mode of discourse or analytical structure. Although many scholars agree that electronic networks will provide the primary medium for distribution of scholarly research in the future,there are still many barriers which inhibit their full exploitation. Psychological, legal, and legitimacy issues loom large in the eyes of the scholar/networker; many technical issues still must be resolved before the current modest-but-growing community of electronic scholars can become a global village of the sort envisioned by Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan 1964). But perhaps the most important challenge of all is the identification, recognition, and acceptance of a "common ground" for future scholarship. If the notion of an absolute hierarchy or single system for organizing what we know--or, more importantly, that which we may want to know someday--is antithetical to electronic milieu--if a multitude of individual arrays of knowledge is more important at this stage of the mode of information than a single organized system, where will scholarship find its common ground? This article examines the writings of Stevan Harnad, Mark Poster and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as starting points for the development of a theory of networked scholarship. Introduction Although many scholars agree that electronic networks will play a significant role in scholarly communication, and perhaps, more importantly, will provide the primary medium for distribution of scholarly research in the future, there are still many barriers which inhibit their full exploitation. Psychological, legal, and legitimacy issues loom large in the eyes of the scholar /networker; many technical issues still must be resolved before the current modest-but-growing community of electronic scholars can become a global village of the sort envisioned by Marshall McLuhan (1964). Historical metaphors--such as pioneers exploring the wilderness, settlers and homesteaders of the Old West, and Forty-niners scrambling to make their fortune in the gold mines --have been employed in both print and electronic forums to describe the contemporary role of the scholar/networker. These unexamined attempts to find analogies in the past which will help us to stride more confidently into the future--while comforting --are potentially misleading. The settlers of the Old West undoubtedly found comfort in the knowledge that their forbears had once crossed vast distances on the Mayflower, but beyond comfort, there was little in the specifics of that earlier voyage that would help a homesteader weather seasons of depredation and starvation. The ground had shifted. The issues were not the same. The voyager and the homesteader both faced relocation and hardship,the specifics of their respective trials and tribulations were as distinct as the surfaces they traversed. The scholar/networker of today explores a different kind of terrain than that travelled by our pioneer ancestors. The ground is invisible, the distance immeasurable, the route untraceable. Some would even argue that our position is not so unlike that of the pre-Columbian sailor who, despite the repeated reassurances of science, nonetheless embarked on each voyage with his heart in his mouth fearing that this would be the last--that the myth of the edge of the world would win out over that of a sphere suspended in space. Yes, there are orders of magnitudes more individuals navigating the Internet than sailed the pre-Columbian oceans, each seemingly at his or her own helm, and yes, the more adventurous have "travelled" to nearly every conceivable corner of the earth, though there are areas--including much of Africa and South America--which remain completely inaccessible. But despite numbers, diversity and dispersion, the committed scholar/networker must place his faith in the inevitability of a "new world" for which there is nothing but theoretical evidence and futuristic prediction, while his more timid compatriots reside comfortably in the secure and tangible world of print-on- paper. The growing discussion of the mechanics of evaluation and measurement of scholarly output in an electronic environment suggests that the evolution from print to electronic scholarship requires a re-examination of the nature of scholarship itself. As we reconsider the tools which organize and measure scholarly output, we reconfigure the ground of scholarship. Treating the effects of this "retooling" as superficial will only widen the fissure between the traditional modes of scholarship and the new electronic scholarship. While it may appear to that modest-but-growing cluster of privileged scholars who have watched and shaped the development of networked communication that acceptance of the simple transference from print-on-paper to electronic-print has come slow and hard within the scholarly community, current indications are that acceptance is indeed inevitable. Stevan Harnad (1990) has quite effectively advocated the concept of "scholarly skywriting"--essentially a pre-formal mode of scholarly communication, which he describes as "a phase transition in the evolution of knowledge, one in which we break free from the earthbound inertia that has encumbered human inquiry until now, soaring at last to the skyborn speeds to which our minds were organically destined"--as a paradigm for network scholarship (1991, p. 48). Meanwhile, more formal and traditional modes of publication have begun to migrate from print to electronic format. Currently, there are thirty-six electronic journals in print, of which twenty-seven are peer reviewed. The first two months of 1993 saw an increase of thirty-three per cent in electronic journal titles. Cross-fertilization is beginning to occur as well, with five journals appearing in dual electronic/hardcopy formats (Strangelove, 1993). The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) announced in July 1992 that it will issue annual compilations of the _Public Access Computer Systems Review_, an electronic journal which commenced publication as an electronic-only journal in 1990. Interestingly, this move was met by a barrage of criticism, begun by David Tyckoson, when announced on PACS-L, the Bitnet listserv discussion group which distributes the electronic version (Tyckoson, 1992a). Walt Crawford a member of the _Review_ editorial board and one of the moving forces behind the annual print compilations, countered the criticism with clearly reasoned arguments in favor of expanding the readership-base and increasing the status given to electronic publication through the provision of paper compilations which could be more easily stored and accessed in library collections (Crawford, 1992). Contrary to the fears expressed by some members of the electronic community, this kind of retrospective print publication should not undermine the vigor of the fledgling electronic journal enterprise, rather strengthen its respectability. Meanwhile, discussion of issues regarding the bibliographic control of electronic journals has begun to appear in respected print professional journals such as _Serials Review_ and _Serials Librarianship_ in addition to engendering the electronic newsletter _Serials Pricing Issues_. While Tyckoson (1992b) argues that this state of affairs signals a growth from the "pioneering" to the "settling" stage of the Internet, I would argue that, at least as regards scholarly communication, the trails are still extremely rough and the maps, sketchy. Yes, we are beginning to see the appearance of journals which emulate characteristics--such as peer review--of respected print publications, in addition to the wholesale migration of some print journals to electronic form, virtually unaltered. It is possible to take the view that this state-of- affairs is indicative of the approach of a "settlement" in which a clone of the refereed print journal will exercise autocratic rule. The deliberate avoidance of a straight print-to-electronic translation formula by many electronic refereed journals, however, indicates that the situation is unlikely to play out that simply. Many of the editors of refereed electronic journals have shown an interest in experimenting in areas where the new medium may allow new options or require new solutions. _Post Modern Culture_ has set up a listserv discussion group PMC-TALK to provide for ongoing, non-refereed dialog related to the journal's formal contents. _Psycoloquy_ actively solicits commentary on each of its refereed "target" articles. The editorial board of _EJVC_ was in the midst of an e-conference regarding the shape of the future journal, including such important issues as format, style, frequency, access and indexing at the time this article was being written, one of the results of which was the establishment of a subsidiary publication, the _EJVC Monitor_ which will carry the more informal, non-refereed elements related to the topics of interest to the journal's readership. Perhaps an even more significant indication of the "unsettled" state of affairs is the _University Policy on Publication in Scholarly Journals_, a second draft of a proposed policy on copyright, prepared by the Triangle Research Universities in June 1992 (Triangle Research Libraries Network, 1992). The policy is inclusive in its coverage, but clearly derives its impetus from the increasing importance of the electronic journal as a mode of scholarly communication. The _Fourth Revolution_ or _Mode of Information_ "While the study of the temporal and spatial distanciation of communication is important to the concept of the mode of information the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. For the issue of communicational efficiency_ does not raise the basic question of the _configuration_ of information exchange, or what I call the wrapping of language." (Poster, 1990, p. 8) Geographically, the networked milieu consists entirely of points of departure and arrival, and of the constantly fluctuating paths of communication which momentarily connect them. Unlike the physical world, the networked milieu has no landscape, no panorama of landmarks against which these paths can be traced or measured. In such an environment, addressing temporal and spatial distanciation as issues of efficiency is to miss the point, since the speed, scale, and interactivity of the physical infrastructure renders geographic and temporal boundaries insignificant. In Euclidean geometry, a line can be drawn between any two points on a surface. Each line is composed of adjacent points which stand in constant relation to one another. A person, a package, a message traverses physical space in an orderly, linear, and intact fashion. Travel in virtual space differs from geometric and, by extension, geographic space. Both the package and the route are dispersed. In the packet-switching world of the Internet, a single message is unbundled into many packets, each of which makes its own path to the destination point, where the packets are reassembled. A message exists as an integral whole only at its departure and arrival points; in between it exists as several disconnected parcels which carry instructions for reconstruction. A second message sent from and to the same points will take still different routes from the first. Since the virtual world has no landscape and no landmarks other than points of departure and arrival, it is impossible to retrace a given route. Navigation in the constantly shifting environment of virtual space, coupled with the lack of a referencing structure, may be accompanied by a high degree of vertigo and disorientation, and an unwillingness to trust in the solidity and appropriateness of the medium for both the storage and transfer of information. While the path of most current networked communication can be described as geographic point to geographic point(s)--human to human(s), or human to specified computer, or specified computer to human--other more complex patterns can be expected to emerge, some employing tools already in use or development, including patterns for which either the origin or arrival point or both, may in fact exist only in virtual space. Temporal referencing represents one approach to managing spatial disorientation. Several scholars have already published work in this vein, curiously demonstrating a consistent tendency to divide the history of information transfer into four segments-- Poster (1990) suggests four forms of symbolic exchange, Harnad (1990), four revolutions--as though to acknowledge the signs of an approaching apocalypse. Playing on Marx's mode of production, Poster proposes the "mode of information" as a unit of analysis. His delineation of this mode suggests "that history may be periodized by variations in the structure in this case of symbolic exchange, but also that the current culture gives a certain fetishistic importance to 'information.' "Every age employs forms of symbolic exchange which contain internal and external structures, means and relations of signification. Stages in the mode of information may be tentatively designated as follows: face-to-face, orally mediated exchange; written exchanges mediated by print; and electronically mediated exchange." (Poster 1990, p. 6) Temporal referencing includes two characteristics which problematize its application to the networked milieu. The first these, linearity, Poster neutralizes fairly effectively. Despite his largely historical presentation, Poster maintains that the stages in the mode of information are "not 'real,'not 'found' in the documents of each epoch, but imposed by the theory as a necessary step in the process of attaining knowledge. In this sense the stages are not sequential but coterminous in the present" (Poster, 1990, p. 6). Nonetheless, Poster's account is self-consciously mimetic of a linear analytic tradition. While many scholars trace this tradition only as far as Marshall McLuhan (1962), it is unquestionably much older. It can be found in a well-developed form in Walter Benjamin (1936) and, in a somewhat rawer state, in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1922). More recently, it has supported a largely segregated analysis of internal information structures at the expense of analysis of either external structures--except as points of difference--or means and relations of signification within the coterminous information panorama. The limitations of such an analytic structure are evinced in the current instance where a single "stage"--electronically mediated exchange--subsumes, through incorporation, historically segregated transference media. [1] While Poster's fourth stage in the mode of information is already well advanced, having its inception in the earliest uses of computers for purposes other than number-crunching, Harnad's claims for our current condition are more modest. He asserts that "we are on the threshold of a fourth" revolution in the history of human thought. "The first took place hundreds of thousands of years ago when language first emerged in hominid evolution and the members of our species became inclined ... to trade amongst themselves in propositions that had truth value .... The second cognitive revolution was the advent of writing, tens of thousands of years ago. Spoken language had already allowed the oral codification of thought; written language now made it possible to preserve the code independent of any speaker/hearer. It became, if you like, an implementation-independent code .... The third revolution took place in our own millennium. With the invention of moveable type and the printing press, the laborious hand-copying of texts became obsolete, and both the tempo and the scope of the written word increased enormously .... The fourth cognitive revolution ... is just about to take place with the advent of 'electronic skywriting.'" (Harnad, 1991, p. 40) Unlike Harnad, who clearly privileges the fourth revolution, Poster is careful not to privilege any one stage in the mode of information. He argues that any given stage represents "an unavoidable context of discursive totalization" which incorporates or interacts with all previously introduced stages, not the "ontological realization of a process of development" (Poster, 1990,, p. 7). Harnad (1991), on the other hand, does not recognize the problematics of temporal linearity. His delineation undeniably falls into the trap of ontological realization--even to the extent of asserting a causal relationship between some revolutions and alterations in human brain chemistry.[2] On the other hand, Harnad is much more effective in dealing with the second problematic of temporal referencing--granularity. Harnad de-problematizes granularity through a subtle and necessary distinction between transference media and cognitive form. This distinction accounts for the difference in the origin point of Harnad's and Poster's respective "fourths". Harnad implies that changes in transference media precede changes in cognitive form, thus, while the introduction of computers for purposes other than number-crunching provided the medium which eventually allowed the process of "scholarly skywriting" it is the latter which marks the beginning of the revolution. Poster cannot make such a move since to do so would be to acknowledge ontological realization. Instead, he chooses an extremely coarse granularity which unfortunately undermines his attempt to escape that very linearity. For example, we might project that written communication will develop as follows over the next decade: Phase 1: print-on-paper to electronic-print (ASCII) Phase 2: electronic-print to marked-up-electronic-print (SGML?) Phase 3: marked-up-electronic-print to hypertext Phase 4: hypertext to interactive/collaborative/writing Each of these phases has or will have its emergence within the temporal context of Poster's fourth stage, yet the article appearing in an ASCII-based electronic journal is likely to have much more in common cognitively with the documents of Poster's third stage than with an ongoing, interactive, collaborative hypertext. The stages in the mode of information are too generalized to be useful in theory building. On the other hand, phase four above might be seen as a cognate for Harnad's fourth revolution, in which case phases one through three are necessarily products of the third revolution. Although the medium to support the fourth revolution exists by the onset of phase one and forms the contextual structure of all four phases, the cognitive forms present in phases one through three are simply further refinements of those engendered by the third revolution. Thus, while Harnad's history of human thought consists of precisely the same number of units of analysis as Poster's, the granularity is much finer. These sincere and sophisticated attempts serve only to point out the extent to which temporal referencing is foredoomed to failure as an antidote to spatial distanciation in an environment which has not yet constructed itself, much less its history. Organization and Evaluation of Scholarly Communication The concept of an absolute hierarchy of knowledge is maintainable only in a milieu where information is a fixed commodity--where the individual information exchange unit is relatively permanent and the environment comparably stable. In milieus such as electronic internetworking--where mutability and acceleration appear to be primary characteristics of information exchange--the individual unit is permeable and the environment fluid and pliant. Even if the highly improbable were to occur, and a single organizational system could be found which met the myriad of needs and expectations of an increasingly divers user population, the milieu in which that organizational system would have to operate would render it at best highly inefficient, at worst inoperable. But, if the notion of an absolute hierarchy or single system for organizing what we know--or, more importantly, that which we may want to know someday--is antithetical to the milieu itself--if a multitude of individual arrays of knowledge is more important at this stage of the mode of information (or to put it less judgmentally, is to be more predominant) than a single organized system, where will scholarship find its common ground? All electronically mediated exchange participates in hypertext, though the degree of participation varies enormously. Some electronically mediated exchange is only implicitly "hypertextual", that is, it is hypertextual to the degree that it is virtual--that it consists of a series of switches or codes (binary or otherwise) which are, in and of themselves, unreadable (and, therefore, nontextual), and which contain "pointers" to their reconstruction as meaningful exchanges. The switches or codes are "nodes" which are "linked" to a "textual" form which, at any given moment, may exist only "hypertextually." Other times, the relationship is explicit, as it is in the hypertexts authored by Michael Joyce and J. David Bolter, or in projects such as Brown University's _Intermedia_ or Bellcore's _SuperBook_. Whether the implementation is explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, computer mediated communication is paradigmatically different from other information milieus precisely because it participates in the organizing principle of hypertext. This principle is "rhizomorphic" in its characteristics. From a bird's-eye perspective structures which participate in hypertext appear to be alinear, non-hierarchical, and bulbous; in their architecture and patterns of growth, they have more in common with botanical forms than the information transfer structures of the past. Rhizomorphic structures, as described by Deleuze & Guattari (1987), are particularly attuned to "surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4-5). They go on to outline the approximate characteristics of the rhizome as: 1 and 2: principles of connection and heterogenuity; 3. principle of multiplicity; 4. principle of a signifying rupture; and 5 and 6: principles of cartography and decalcomania. "A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether .... Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers .... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 6-7) The rhizomorphic structure of the Internet interacts with the content of the communication and information stored, transferred, accessed, and disseminated through its aegis. Therefore, the future of scholarly communication may rest on our ability to comprehend the principles of the rhizome. Principles of connection and heterogeneity The principles of connection and heterogeneity state that "any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). The rhizomorphic characteristics of networked scholarship can be delineated at two levels of structure: physical and contextual. The physical infrastructure can be identified with the tangle of telecommunications and computational hardware and software which underlies the virtual connectivity of geographically dispersed nodes or sites. Three variables distinguish this physical structure from that of print scholarship: 1. speed, 2. scale, and 3. interactivity (Harnad, 1992). The current network infrastructure will deliver a textual rendering of a complex communication over great distances at a speed that even the telegraph cannot match. While its geographic coverage is never likely to be as universal as that of the telephone, the capacity to carry textual communications provides an added value which is undesirable in pure telephony. Transit of "virtual texts" via electronic networks is more cost-efficient than the transit of physical texts (such as books and journals) via land, air, or sea corridors. Because of the unparalleled speed and extensive scale of current networked systems, a much higher level of interactivity characterizes networked scholarship than does that of current print scholarship. The contextual structure consists of the associational links or connections including not only the "messages" that the physical structure carries, but the structure of those messages and the linkages (both explicit and implicit) of one to another. A rhizome is very different from a tree structure, where the order is fixed by a hierarchy of relationships. A rhizome is the only structure which can effectively sustain connections between different media without giving hegemony to language. Relational and flatfile database structures may support access to images, sounds, and animation,rrently are able to doe to do so only through linguistic tagging. Research in pattern recognition and other areas may someday produce non-linguistic methods of accessing items in relational or flatfile databases, but these will be useful only in those contexts where either: 1. the scholar wishes to o obtain information from a pre-define knowledge set; or, 2. the relational or flatfile databases co- exist as sub-structures of a more complex hypertextual environment. Traditional hierarchical database structures are even more problematic in their support of nonverbal expression. Meaningful formation of hierarchies across media boundaries can only be accomplished through the use of language, since hierarchy is itself a creation of language, language is the only universal tool available within an hierarchical structure. While rhizomorphic structures can be generated by language as a semiotic tool and many of the linkages in a given structure may be linguistic, language is not the only tool which can generate rhizomes. A rhizomorphic structure sustains heterogeneous connection through associational linking which is not media-dependent. Cognitive jumps, which must be mechanically forced in an hierarchy, are intuitively sustained in a rhizome. "A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7) There is no systemic hierarchy of connection, although hierarchical "islands" may be sustained within a rhizome. The perception of connectivity is individually initiated, though the pre-existence of particular connections may foster community through the perception of the presence of commonality in the overall structure. At its most political, connectivity is a democratizing principle. It functions as a structure of individuation since at any given moment the "center" of any rhizomorphic structure is the individual's position in relation to that structure. Distinctions between author and reader, constituent and politician, even intermediary and end-searcher disintegrate as the reader participates in authorship, constituent in polis, and end-searcher in the search itself. This raises exciting and disturbing possibilities for scholarship. The conventions of linearity and hierarchy have been integral to traditional modes of scholarship. While the sequential narrative of traditional scholarship can be supported, and will most likely persist as one of many modes of discourse in the rhizome, readers' tolerance for sustained "moments" of this mode is likely to deteriorate. Certainly, the assurance of operating within the parameters of a single mode of discourse so predominant as to appear "correct" will be lost. This places an enormous burden on the scholar as a creative being. Creative scholars will be effective communicators, and it will be their messages which will stand out in the tangle of the rhizome. As a creation of language, hierarchy must persist--sometimes explicitly, and even more often, implicitly--in any milieu in which language is present. Authority, the principle instrument of hierarchy, on the other hand, will be difficult to sustain in all of its guises in the network milieu. Financial and political authority will be continue to be distributed, probably to an even greater degree than is currently the case, since the financial burden is too much for any one institution, agency or government to bear alone. The "author"-ity of authorship will transform as the lines between readers and authors blur. Principle of Multiplicity "A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature .... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8) Scholarly communication will come to support non-hierarchical thinking and cognitive jumping as the diversity of multifarious modes of information come to be valued. The rhizome presupposes not only that multiple points of access are preferable to a single point, but by extension, that multiple structures are preferable to a single structure. The principle of multiplicity is reflected in rhizomorphic information structures in the coterminous presence of varying modes of access to a single structure, on the one hand, and of varying structures on the other, and must be operable in multimedia networks in order to support multiple points and forms of access, not only across space and time, but also coterminously and simultaneously. Scholar/networkers can support the acculturation of this principle by providing models which demonstrate the potential of multiple access. Electronic journals can be made accessible through a variety of means rather than a single mode of access. The print subscription model should be supplemented with FTP (file transfer protocol) accessibility, and support for various information retrieval tools such as Gopher, WAIS, WWW, Archie and Veronica should be built in. Articles should be searchable alone and in groups, by title and full-text. The principle of multiplicity also operates on the micro-level of the individual text. As individual readers make their way through the rhizome, they construct new texts through linking and annotating existing texts. Linkages will cross notions of authorship and texts. A reader may, for example, take this paragraph of the current text and link it to a paragraph of a text by Stevan Harnad and another by Stuart Moulthrop. The resulting conglomerate text will place this paragraph in a new context which may alter its meaning entirely. The process resembles that of the Dada collage, but the results will be neither art nor anti-art, rather a kind of meta-scholarship that is a concretion of the process of learning. Scholar/networkers can encourage this process through collaborative authorship and the explicit encouragement of the textual transformation process. Principle of a Signifying Rupture The process of traditional scholarship might be described as the reiterative process of establishing, disrupting, revising, and re-establishing canons. The project of feminist literary criticism might be viewed in this light, for example. The introduction of non-canonical texts and authors into the male- dominated literary canon disrupted the foundations of that canon altogether. New principles for canonicity had to be devised. The new canon is of necessity subject to further disruption and revision as other excluded groups or points-of-view seek inclusion. Since the rhizomorphic structure does not rely on hierarchy, or indeed, any given theory of relationship at all, it cannot be affected by the characterization of a new relationship previously alien to it, and therefore, it can neither be disrupted by that relationship nor lend hegemony to any given canon. The potential for any relationship exists within the rhizome, if only as a disconnected island. The job of the scholar thus becomes one of linking the unlinked, of disrupting the established in order to unmask new relationships. Principles of Cartography and Decalcomania Each individual's path of connection through the rhizome is as valid as any other. New paths can be grafted on to the old, providing fresh alternatives. A map is necessary in order to orient the author/reader/traveller within the context of the rhizome as a whole. Unlike hierarchical systems, rhizomorphic structures are dynamic and interactive. Hierarchical systems are typically represented as static structures unaltered and unalterable by the progress of any traveller. Travellers may pinpoint their location on the static map of the system, thus facilitating linear travel from one point to another within the hierarchy. A rhizomorphic structure requires a different kind of map since it is constantly altered and transformed by the progress of each traveller, and because it is the stand-point of that traveller which creates the rhizomorphic structure of any given moment. The rhizomorphic map must not only represent a dynamic, interactive, and transformational milieu, it must also take into account the cognitive and affective psychology of the traveller in relation to his or her geographic and temporal surroundings. "What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification." (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 12) This latter decalcomanic process operates as though the map were perpetually shifting as the traveller moved from one quadrant to the next. Some of that territory is charted--it is well mapped out in terms that the traveller understands, and connected to familiar territory or nodes, and some is uncharted-- either because it consists of unlinked nodes that exist within the rhizome much as an undiscovered island might exist in the sea, disconnected from the lines of transfer and communication linking other land areas; or as an unidentified planet in space, with the potential for discovery and even exploration, but as yet just a glimmer in the sky--or because it is linked in ways that are meaningless to the traveller in his present context or given his current state of mind. The traveller must be able to zoom in on zones of interest, jump to new territories using previously established links or by establishing new links of his own, retrace an earlier path, or create new islands or nodes and transportation routes or links to connect them to his previous path or the islands or nodes charted by others. The principles of cartography and decalcomania are perhaps the most important of the principles of the rhizome to the design of multimedia networks. No structure which is bound by time and space is capable of accurately representing a network. Networks are in a state of constant, self-organizing growth and change; they must be infinitely flexible; they must respond to and transfer a wide range of signals instantaneously; and they must support instantaneous passage across vast distances. Traditional forms of diagrammatic and architectural rendition can only represent the network as it is frozen in space and time. In other words, it is possible to represent the physical dimension of a network--the interactive linking of computers--and perhaps even the social dimension--the facilitation of human-computer and computer mediated human-human communication--at any given moment, but it is neither possible (using traditional tracing techniques) to represent these dimensions in motion and across time, nor to represent the cognitive and affective activity which they support and which defines them. In a milieu where the point-of-view must shift seamlessly and instantaneously as the user moves through a "landscape" which is constantly reconstructing itself, genuinely dynamical forms of abstract representation, such as simulations, self-generating models, and virtual realities, must replace static representations. "The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states." (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 21) Conclusions Scholarly communication will undergo enormous infrastructural change as electronic communication becomes the dominant mode of information. Its power will derive from its flexibility and variability; from its ability to incorporate, transmute and transcend any traditional mode of discourse or analytical structure. The maps and tracings we make now are crucial, because they provide us with the signposts and inroads to understanding and locate the perspective from which we will view the future enterprise of scholarship. If our representations and organizational systems are static and definitional, the milieu will stagnate into a static seat of power. If they are dynamical and associational, the milieu will grow and flourish in as many different ways as there are individuals in contact with it. The rhizome is as individual as the individual in contact with it. It is that individual's perception, that individual's map, that individual's understanding. It is also, and at the same time, a completely different something--another individual's perception, another individual's map, another individual's understanding. The rhizome is a state of being, reflective always of the present, a plateau in a region made up entirely of plateaus--"a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any culmination point or external end" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 22). Yet, even the earliest manifestations of the Internet indicate its unfathomable power in creating boundary-spanning communities. The rhizome provides no over-arching structure for common understanding, rather it is a network of interaction. Without structure, where will we find a common-ground for scholarship if not in interaction? ____________ Notes 1. I have commented on Poster's periodization in other contexts, where I have focussed on its historicity, and particularly on the coarseness of the delineation. 2. The difference between Poster's and Harnad's attitudes regarding temporal linearity underscore differences in the structures and methodologies of their respective disciplines. Within the theoretical infrastructure which informs this article (but not my own field of information science), ontological realization clearly problematizes the tendency to view time as a linear concept and, therefore, history as a succession of causally related events. Scientific method, however, presupposes that causal relationships not only exist, but can be isolated and measured. While within the bounds of scientific discourse, the assertion causal relationships is completely rational, the blurring of discourse boundaries Harnad elsewhere expresses as positive effect of networked scholarship (Harnad 1992), at the very least complicate such assertions. ____________ Works Cited Bailey, C. & Rooks, D. eds. (1991). "Symposium on the Role of Network-Based Electronic Resources in Scholarly Communication and Research." _The Public-Access Computer Systems Review_. 2. 4-60. Benjamin, W. (1936). _Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie._ Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Crawford, W. (1992). "Re: PACS Review annual print editions." Item 6344 in the_Public-Access Computer Systems Forum (PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET)._ Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harnad, S. (1990). "Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry," _Psychological Science_. 1. 342-344. Harnad, S. (1991). "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Knowledge." _The Public-Access Computer Systems Review_. 2. 39-53. Harnad, S. (1992). "Interactive Publication: Extending the American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing." _Serials Review_. 18. 58-61. McLuhan, M. (1964). _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_. New York: McGraw-Hill. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1922). "Produktion--Reproduktion." _De Stijl_. 5. 98-99. Poster, M. (1990). _The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social cago: University of Chicago Press. Strangelove, M. (1993) _Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters_. Edition 3.1, forthcoming. Triangle Research Libraries Network (1992)."University Policy Regarding Faculty Publication in Scholarly Journals." _Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_. 46. Tyckoson, D. (1992a). "What's Going on Here?" Item 6331 in the _Public-Access Computer Systems Forum (PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET)_. Tyckoson, D. (1992b). 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