Rhizomatic research

05/01/09

Knowledge is often conceived of as crystalline, a perfectly formed and inherently replicable formula, a truth. However I’d argue that another metaphor, that of the rhizome, is more productive and better suited to design research’s focus on the unknown, yet imminent future. I’m thinking particularly of it’s ability to cope with the natural selection of ideas, their real success through growth rather than the idealised positives of crystalline truth. These aren’t essential structures but productive explorations. This is a means of examining the points of intersection, the points natural selection has deemed worthy, without limitations on time. It is this freedom from time that matches it to future research. New lines are equally worthy of attention, for who knows which outcrops may one day be important growths. The Deleuzian metaphor is powerful for precisely these reasons, it is productive for the archaeology of both large and small phenomena, because it does not impose a hierarchy upon them.

What does tuberous research look like? Is it simply more respectful to limited data to propose that we cannot know what it means but can say where we think it might lead? Does this tendency to lines of flight make rhizomatic research inherently better suited to innovation? Better suited to research of the future? Better suited to research which involves the agency of the researcher and/or their clients? This interest in instances and the delineation of the past which informs them makes what of the present? A fleeting point between past and future in which we can take a stab at understanding how what is past may create what is future? This is definitely not crystalline, not a perfectly formed frozen moment, but rather a play with evolving time.

Fieldwork then is all of these things: the discovery of an instance, a line of flight in Deleuzian terms; the archaeology of that specific instance; and the attempt to craft an image of the future along that trajectory. Certainty is the arrival of momentum on the scene, either already present through the aggregation of existing lines of flight, or through the concerted agency of an interested party.

This model appeals to me precisely because of it’s ability to render the future both with and without the presence of agency and with or without the presence of evolutionary ‘luck’. Crystalline knowledge disputes both, opting for the far more problematic, if superficially attractive, concept of truth.