Review of Technology, Culture, and Socioeconomics:

A rhizoanalysis of educational discourses by Patricia O’Riley

Reviewer: Warren Sellers
Deakin University, Australia

Rhizoanalysis. If this term is unfamiliar, don’t resist it; it concerns an important and
accessible concept. A common metaphor for analysis is that of a tree: a central stem, roots at
one end, and branches at the other, and by tracing the branches and/or digging at the roots, the
analyst gets to the heart of the matter. The tree metaphor has served modernist science for
several centuries. However, postmodernist inquiries of analysis suggest that there are
problems with seeing the wood for the forests. Alongside the development of increasingly
complicated information/communication/knowledge regimes and technologies, specific
understandings are being recognised as chaotically and complexly involved in ways that are
resisting structural analysis. Poststructuralist interpretative metaphors are needed. Rhizome is
such a metaphor, as its chaotic and complex form is poststructurally appropriate and
generative. Rhizome is to a tree, as the Internet is to a letter. The chaotically complex
networkings of stems interconnecting the upshoots of some grasses are rhizomes (Fig 1) –
nodal networkings that echo the hyper-connectivity of the Internet (Fig 2) – whereas a tree,
like a letter, is a relatively simple linear connection between two poles (Fig 3).

Figure 1. Rhizome

Figure 2. Burch/Cheswick map of the Internet,1999.

(http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/isp-ss.gif)

Figure 3. Tree

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 29

In the context of knowledge/knowing discourse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987)
explain that ‘[t]he rhizome is a map and not a tracing… The map is open and connectable in
all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification… The
map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves alleged “competence”’
(pp.12-13). And, Pat O’Riley (2003) writes that ‘Deterritorializing the terrain of technology
discourses in education is not a simple task… How is it possible to open technology
discourses to different stories, the unsaid, the unthought, the ineffable?… Where might I
begin to map an elsewhere and otherwise without relying on grids, isobars, fronts and lows?’
(p. 17).

After reading O’Riley, I pondered on how I could write about a book that disrupts the
arboreal metaphor of writing and reading, towards writing~reading1, a text describing itself as
‘a series of stutterings, a series of plateaux, of resonances and vibrations, oscillations, to
encourage more complex, contingent, and indeterminate theories and practices’ (p.19).

Then another writing~reading stimulated me: Lixin Luo’s (2003) ‘Letter to my sister about
Doll’s 4R’s’. The title of the paper contextualises its contents; it’s an English translation of a
‘letter’, written in Chinese, to a sister explaining how personal experiences of William Doll’s
teachings about postmodern perspectives on curriculum have important implications for a
niece’s learning and teaching.

Luo’s ‘letter’ (a fragment is reproduced above) generated, for me, a sense of the paradoxical
interactivity of complex and simple – a notion referred to as ‘complicity and simplexity’
(Cohen and Stewart, 1994) – involved in personally transforming Doll’s (1993) curriculum
concepts from English into Chinese and back into English in ways that generatively expand
understandings of the concepts.

What I read with-in O’Riley is a similar, personal complex-simple recursive interactivity with
concepts, for exploring otherness in technology. O’Riley and Luo understand the importance
of generatively personal intercommunications, conversations for appreciating meanings in
temporal spaces such as ‘zones of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978), or, as Luo
(2003) puts it ‘the peaches you can pick by jumping’ (p.3), and O’Riley writes ‘I load up my
canoe, take a long breath of the cool mountain air, and begin paddling to the next plateaux’ (p.
158).

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 30

Let me put O’Riley’s writings into context with my own readings. This work embodies the
considerations of Arnold Pacey’s (1999) Meaning in Technology, the foresight of Marshal
McLuhan’s (1967) The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man and the critique of Neil
Postman’s (1993) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. However, this is a
differently gendered voice conveying radically different notions about what Bruno Latour
(2004) calls ‘matters of concern’. For example, O’Riley cautions readers: ‘This book is not an
enclosed storytelling or an elaborate system of textual defense moving toward a gripping
conclusion: rather it is a radical (actually rhizomatic) writing journey mixing and juxta-posing
styles, genres, theories, and practices – always in a state of “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987)’ (p. 20). For me, this suggests picturing2 intertextuality.

Figure 4. Order and chaos M. C. Escher,

1950. © 2004 The M.C. Escher Company –
The Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by
permission. www.mcescher.com

O’Riley’s ‘opening’ paragraph (reproduced above right) conveys a critical sense of the
paradoxical problematics, of gender, sex and technology that McLuhan’s The Mechanical
Bride alluded to, and that J. G Ballard’s (1985) Crash fictionalised. I choose to illustrate my
reading~writing of the epigraph and paragraph by superimposing M.C Escher’s (1950)
lithograph Order and chaos (Fig 4).

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 31

And, to put you in touch with the continuum of O’Riley’s intertextuality, here’s her
‘penultimate’ paragraph:

In this, I say-hear resonancing of a notion that Noel Gough and I are calling
postlogographic.3 Postlogographic concerns ways for exploring conceiving ideas beyond the
conventions of structuralist signs. That is, for example, reading the text reproduced above as
picturing words for thinking generatively towards other ideas, in a manner resonating with
poetry – similar to a notion that Max van Manen referred to as ‘poetizing activity’, interpreted
as an aesthetic rendering of experience (quoted in Pinar et al, 1995, p. 406). A helpful hint is
to regard the ‘Preamble’ in the context of making a ‘toolbox’ – with all the manual
mechanical manoeuvres that demands – and contextualise the ‘map’ as you would experience
a landscape – with the rigour, release, and relaxation that presents. Move beyond making the
words a means to an end; explore the pages as paths for generative experiences, which I
picture thus:

Figure 4. C(ura)&me

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 32

O’Riley’s own ‘poetizing activity’ introduces the reader to ‘coyote’ and her/his aboriginal
readings~writings conversations concerning ‘trickster discourse’.

Lest O’Riley’s work is beginning to seem too esoteric, I hasten to add that there is also much
to satisfy a more pragmatic reader. The middle chapters – plateaux – discuss the siting of
technology education, it’s shifting shape, and the emergence of ‘Virtual(ly) Ed Tech’.
Although these exhibit a more teleological stance, they also turn the standpoints towards a
critique of progressive, First World, technification of technology education – siting, an inter-
ruption of technology education’s constructs – shapeshifting, and an exploring of spaces,
places and peoples – virtual(ly). I’m thinking of the latter more as vertuality, and here is a
mapping of my many turnings, journeying through-over-in O’Riley’s plateaux:

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 33

Mesa Morphing Methodology

‘CPI’ Capitalist Patriarchal

Methodology of Methodological Ideology
difference positionings

Shapeshifting Tech Ed Siting Tech Ed

Intermezzo-interculture Historical roots and imbrication of discourses

Rhizo-dance-disruptive
Global/corporate/military technocapitalist
Move (off The Western Map)

Virtual(ly) Ed Tech
Re: Mapping

Theoretical space
Theoretical Real virtual
geography Converge-digress-interpose
Rhizomatics Posthumans and cyborgs abound
Nomadics
Trickster discourse
Narrative chance
Chance operations
Poethics
A Dataplay

Performative space
Rhizoanalysis of virtual ed,
a mi jeté – be still, or dervish

Joining landscape and Epistemologies

Folding back towards previous plateaux synth-ana-(l)ysis, and imaginings of potentialities

Figure 5. Plateaux mapping – O’Riley’s chapter headings are reproduced in the clouds resting over my
writing~reading upon each plateau.

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Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 34

Figure 6. Currere-ing

But this picturing (Fig. 6), more and less, is my writing~reading for this review…

Notes
1
The expression writing~reading is used throughout to show that writing and reading are inextricably
intertwined, hence the use of the tilde symbol, which indicates complementary alternation.
2
This notion of ‘picturing’ for interpreting, which I discuss elsewhere (Sellers, 2003), also draws on W. J. T.
Mitchell’s (1995) Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation.
3
Bill Green (Charles Sturt University) used this expression in a presentation titled Space and Equity in
Education held at Deakin University on 13 November 2003. He characterised ‘post-logographic research’ as
‘moving beyond words and numbers’ and ‘new forms of visual research and spatial analysis’. Our use of the
term is further elaborated in Gough and Sellers (2004).

References
Ballard, J. G. (1985), Crash, Triad/Panther Books, London.
Cohen, Jack and Ian Stewart. (1994), The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a
Complex World, Viking, London & New York.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Athlone Press, London.
Doll, William E., Jr. (1993), A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum, Teachers College
Press, New York & London.
Gough, Noel, & Sellers, Warren. (2004, 6-9 July). Re/de/signing the world: poststructuralism,
deconstruction and ‘reality’ in outdoor environmental education research. Paper presented
at the Connections and Disconnections: Examining the reality and rhetoric. International
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 3 (1) 2006 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci
Warren Sellers: Review of Technology Culture, and Socioeconomics 35

Outdoor Education Research Conference, La Trobe University Bendigo, Victoria,

Australia. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/oent/OE_conference_2004/papers/gough2.pdf
Latour, Bruno. (2004), ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of
concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30, pp. 225-247
Luo, Lixin. (2004), Letter to my sister about Doll’s 4 R’s. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
1 (1) http://www.deakin.edu.au/tci.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1967), The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
O’Riley, Patricia A. (2003). Technology, Culture, and Socioeconomics: A Rhizoanalysis of
Educational Discourses. New York: Peter Lang. viii + 175 pp. ISBN 0-8024-5793-0.
Pacey, Arnold. (1999), Meaning in Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Pinar, William F., William Reynolds, Patrick Slattery and Peter Taubman. (Eds.) (1995),
Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary
Curriculum Discourses, Peter Lang, New York.
Postman, Neil. (1993), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books,
New York.
Sellers, Warren. (2003), Picturing currere: envisioning-experiences within learning, Paper
presented at the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australian Association of Curriculum
Studies, Adelaide, South Australia, 28-30 September 2003.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978), in M Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman (Eds.),
Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Reviewer
Warren Sellers is a doctoral candidate at Deakin University who resides in Aotearoa-New
Zealand. Correspondence to: w.sellers@paradise.net.nz

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