Rhizomes

I was reading the following article, which discusses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor--one of the topics in our readings this week:

Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007): 1571-1612. 41 pp.

Folsom adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s “preferred image of the rhizome” as a metaphor for online database because of the lack of centrality and endless potential of rhizomorphic growth (1573). The rhizomatic structure of database, according to Folsom, allows unexpected and previously impossible connections for the researcher, often because texts can be experienced in juxtaposition that would have heretofore been less likely for a researcher to experience. I’ll call it “rhizomorphic knowledge structuring,” which I see as encouraging serendipity (idea—performativity and research methods?)

Folsom refers to Manovich’s The Language of New Media, in which Manovich considers database as a genre. (I read the Manovich chapter and respond later.) Folsom is especially interested in how Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. (I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed?)

The idea of the ideal is at play, the notion that archives are somehow open to infinite authorship; a site can be added to or can link to a massive (perhaps endless) web of information. I know, this is utopian rhetoric, for which Folsom gets criticized . . . I’m going to go with the idea that while choices made by scholars in what “gets” represented speak volumes about institutional or cultural power, the reader might have power never before possible—again, within certain constraints, which I know presents a paradox.

The article leads me to consider how genre itself operates as a container. What are the borders of genre? Consider Lakoff and Johnson’s ontological metphors…