D & G and Connectivism

I was curious about how deep I would dive into the ideas of Deleuze & Guattari, in particular after the discussion started by cathellis13. And after a few pages I realized that it won’t be too deep. Just as Wenger says he did not want to enter the community of practice of the wine connoisseurs who know what “purple in the nose” means, I do not really want to know in detail what the “purulence of the nose” (p. 285) has to do with the philosophical subtleties I am not trained in.

But on a more superficial level, some interesting stuff caught my eyes which aligns well with my understanding of both Connectivism and McGilchrist’s book about the Making of the Western World.

For me, the core of Connectivism is that nodes have long been overrated over ties (or items over relationships). So when the Wikipedia article on Deleuze speaks about

“an inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity […] To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference.”

I think this quite compatible:

‘Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as “is it true?” or “what is it?”, Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: “what does it do?” or “how does it work?”‘ (ibid.)

means for me, ask about the connections rather than the nodes.

Similarly, my take-home from McGilchrist is that the West has too much relied upon one of two basic modes of brain operation: the one that is focused on isolated, fixed, static, abstracted, decontextualized items to be grasped, collapsed and wrapped into nested boxes, while the other one caters to the interconnections, relationships and contexts.
The hierarchy of nested boxes or nested subgoals can be thought of as a tree (of course, an upside-down tree, but this is common in any filesystem explorer). So when D & G say

“It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy” (p. 18)

this is again quite compatible.

Is this comparison too simple, is there a fallacy? I would love to learn from other course participants if it makes sense to them.