Rhizomes, braid, or mobius strip?

Addressing new media means creating new paradigms and reacting to existing paradigms. Janet Murray asserts that new media “braids” together engineering and humanistic perspectives to create an altogether new space fraught with anxieties and potentialities. Part of Murray’s definition of new media references Deleuze and Guattani’s metaphor of a rhizome (see p. 8-9) as a way to understand new media structures—hmmm, I would say architecture, but I might need a plant metaphor. I recalled seeing D & G’s rhizome concept in an article I recently read in PMLA by Ed Folsom, creator of the online Walt Whitman archive. In that article, Folsom considers archives as rhizomatic as he considers databases as a genre.

All this talk of branching roots and subterranean structures makes me think of questions raised in today’s readings, not just in Murray but in Manovich and Wysocki as well, though to a lesser degree there.

1. Does a new paradigm for understanding (digital) information more accurately reflect actual experience and human thought?

2. Does a rhizomatic structure preclude hierarchies in arrangement of ideas or categories?

3. How does shifting to rhizomatic paradigm disrupt linear narrative? How does this, in turn, change our understanding of research and of history? Do these things become non-linear or less linear? Is there ultimately some sort of disruption of chronology or new understanding of time happening here? (Okay, I’m going far here, but Manovich crosses into this area and sounds like he’s saying none of this is altogether new.)

4. Are these "braids" or rhizome infinite? Do new media structures allow us to represent knowledge as infinite?

All of these questions and the readings themselves keep circling the same questions about defining new media and how to situate it in terms of modernism and postmodernism, in particular. Manovich, for instance, looks at how we understand new media information as having an appearance of unity and a sum of its parts at the same time. Time, again.

I do have one problem with Manovich. He comes up with the idea of new media as metamedia and as the “encoding of the modernist avant-garde.” I see how he comes to a “new” avant-garde (and therefore to postmodernism), but Manovich doesn’t address one aspect of the avant-garde (of the 20s) that I do see as germane to new media—the idea of the role of the artist. (Murray dug into this a bit.) As I recall, the role of the artist in the avant-garde of the 20s created a space for the artist that was a break from society, with the artist in an adversarial relationship with those who don’t understand his/her art.

I don’t think that applies so much to new media, but it does leave me with a final question (and the desire to contradict myself)—Is the “new media artist” allowed more participation in society (even in democratic ideals) than the traditional avant-garde (whoa, the oxymoron) artist?

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