From Arborescence to Rhizome: West (Finally) Meets East at the Intersection of the Buddhist and Deleuzian Subject

• In Event: Multiplicities of Multiplicities: Exploring Deleuze and Guattari Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper explores the resonance between the Deleuzian subject (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and the Buddhist notion of interbeing or nonself (Hahn, 1999). The subject, notions of subjectivity, the terrain of self following Derrida’s (1991) assertion, in the West is much contested. While in the East, the notion of the subject is neither contested nor bound by grounding metaphors–the subject is liberated, fluid, dynamic, blissfully folding and unfolding in relationship with all things. Instigating the shift from the arborescence of Enlightenment thinking, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) usher in a Western era of thinking East; that is to say emanating from their conception of rhizomatics, lines of flight, bodies without organs (BwO), and assemblages are the Buddhistic onto-epistemological philosophical foundations of interbeing, interconnectedness, insubstantiality, and immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Hahn, 1999; O’Sullivan, 2014).

Through philosophical inquiry and the dialogical enmeshing of the Buddhist and Deleuzian subject, I agitate the discursive and cosmological constraints of the Western subject. Further, in an attempt to “turn reality on its head” (Waldron, 2003, p. 146), I argue the shattering of the traditional Western subject through Buddhist and Deleuzian philosophical concepts necessitates a new becoming, a new onto-epistemological understanding–namely, a re-conceptualization of the subject-West within education. I aver the milieu of education provides the most fertile ground for a new becoming given its permeability, flux, chaos, and complexity “and ability to improve in the midst of [the] turmoil that we now find ourselves in” (Slattery, 2013, p. 273).

With the intention of thinking our way out of the eco-socio-cultural mess that we now find ourselves in, I inquire: What are the resonances between the Buddhist and the Deleuzian subject? How might we utilize this new understanding to re-imagine the subject-West? How can the employment of the enmeshed onto-epistemological Buddhist-Deleuzian subject catalyze an educational intersubjective becoming?

In agreement with Deleuze and Guattari [DG] (1987), Waldron (2003) outlines Buddhist perspectives of the subject, which hold that we

are ever-changing conglomerates of processes (skandha) [“molecular” ( p. 34) and “rhizomatic” (p. 23)] formed in self-organizing patterns that are ever open [“assemblages” (p. 156)], like all organic processes, to change, growth and decay based upon the natural functions of assimilation, interpenetration and dissolution [“BwO” (p. 4)]. (Waldron, 2003, p. 147)

However, instead of recognizing the subject as a rhizomatic entanglement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Barad, 2007) the West evangelizes the subject as fixed, “unitary, autonomous entit[ies], independent and isolated from the dynamically changing and contingent world” (Waldron, 2003, p. 146). This entangled subject de-centers the human, turns Descartes Cogito on its head and recognizes the “impermanence–interpenetration–insubstantiality” of being (O’Sullivan, 2014, p. 258; Barad; 2007; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013).

I contend the re-conceptualization of the subject-West as rhizomatic, fluid, dynamic, ever-changing, and deeply interconnected with all in the known universe liberates us. Even more importantly, I argue, this re-conceptualization of the subject has the potential to alleviate our current eco-socio-cultural suffering in praxis; to revolutionize our becoming and silence the Western illusion of material and discursive dichotomies.

Author

• David Wayne Robinson-Morris, Louisiana State University