Hi Jeffrey,

I’m a fan of Zizek — and am thinking about your argument above, which I understand to be that Zizek’s thinking/communication style represents ‘rhizomatic’ thinking.

While that may be true — he brings together ideas/information from several domains to make his arguments — I wonder if his ‘learning’ about each of those domains wasn’t in fact done in a focused and domain-specific manner and then ‘networked’ together (to reference the George/Dave debate) to then be presented in its full rhizomatic glory.

As you can tell, I’m still trying to tease apart/make the connections between the network and/vs. the rhizome as models/structures.

I’m starting to see rhizomes as structures growing within and across networks — in the same vein as the concept of ‘transversal’ presented by Nancy White in her web presentation — which I saw as a recording (ie. after the fact) and within which I saw your comments/interactions — and which in a weird way I still feel connected to as though I had been there. Makes me wonder about the ‘rhizomatic’ nature of technologies that allow us to ‘be there’ even though we weren’t there in real space/time.

Of course I may be completely off on my understanding of the concept of ‘rhizome’ — in which case all of the above may be disregarded.

In any case, I appreciated your link to Zizek in the MOOC — and wanted to respond with this link to a discussion between Zizek and Julian Assange being facilitated by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/7/5/watch_full_video_of_wikileaks_julian_assange_philosopher_slavoj_iek_with_amy_goodman