My Google+ comment on Keith Hamon’s post http://idst-2215.blogspot.de/2014/09/prepositions-as-rhizomatic-heart-of.html referenced by https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/prepositions-and-the-funnel/, and his response
Matthias Melcher – 2014-09-07 01:20:52+0200 – Updated: 2014-09-07 01:20:52+0200
I find your idea about the prepositions very fascinating. My field is very far away from language and literature, but I still want to share my thoughts about this with you.1. Since you mentioned your foreign readers, let me first tell you:
Yes, prepositions are handled very very differently in German, and so they are a prominent cause for errors (“for leading to errors”?).
Very often, they connect two substantives directly, not just nouns with verbs. (This would make your point even more compelling that they are the tissue!)
And furthermore, the adverbs you mentioned today (or “adverb particles” as described in Swan, Michael, Practical English Usage, section 20) are much different because the “phrasal verbs” (covered in Swan’s subsection 2) take different shape in different conjugation forms. In infinitive, present and past participle, as well as in some subordinate clause positions, they are tied together with the verb (e.g. eintauchen = dip in), but in other cases, they appear separated as in English (Maha tauchte ein = Maha dipped in).
2. As for the promiscuous usage of prepositions that you mentioned, I think it is useful to distinguish two major kinds of phrases: Some parts of a sentence are intended to paint a picture for the listener, and to SHOW to him/her what I find remarkable, worth sharing, and to help them to imagine this new scene or idea as vividly as possible. Many other parts of the sentence, by contrast, just serve to relate to previous knowledge shared by both of us, i.e. to REFERENCE known referents.
This difference may be described by the theme – rheme progression (theme sets the common background by referring, and rheme depicts the salient event or more general entity). But I think, in the context of arborescent vs. rhizomatic relationships, the difference aligns with much more:
Referring to known ideas often involves hierarchical relationships: some part belongs to a major whole, or a time period lies within a larger one, or referring requires iterative instances of other referrals, i.e. nested ideas. Such hierarchical, tree-like connections don’t really deserve to be perceived as something more interesting than just nodes, because each node in the graph can be identified with the “edge” leading to it. As far as I have understood, this is just arborescent.
Genuine network connections, however, or rhizomatic relationships, cannot be identified with the nodes, and their perception requires a fuller picture. And it is this picture which can be seen as the stage where your “stage directors [are] positioning actors”, where the spatial positions (literally or metaphorically) take on this great importance.
In terms of McGilchrist’s characterization of the operational modes of the brain hemispheres, this latter rich picture clearly aligns with the right hemisphere mode, and his great archetype description is the scene of an animal that has to detect a predator as a salient, new element against a backdrop of a familiar environment. By contrast, his description of the right hemisphere mode of operation (a bird focussing on a grain among grit), a known fixed entity, aligns with the idea of the collapsed, nested, wrapped and stored knowledge of a known referent.
So, the “theme” parts of a sentence could be roughly compared with the nested references to KNOWN entities processed mainly by left-hemisphere mode of operation: arborescent. And the “rheme” parts, the salient, new, rich picture to be painted, would be the one that is more right-brained, networked, rhizomatic.
Does that make sense?
Matthias
Prepositions as the Rhizomatic Heart of Writing
x28's new Blog 
Keith Hamon – 2014-09-07 05:06:02+0200 – Updated: 2014-09-07 05:06:38+0200
It does make sense, Matthias.
Thanks so much for your wonderful and insightful comments. I really like your use of McGilchrist’s ideas from The Master and the Emissary, which I read last year and have since been looking for a way to use in my own thoughts. I think you have found it for me. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that prepositions work out of both sides of the brain—on one hand to focus our attention on the known (the theme), to bring it into high relief, and then on the other hand to connect the known to the rheme, to the ecosystem, the rest of the stage. If so, then this strikes me as a wonderful dialogic tension between reductionist focus and expansionist wholism, an image that appeals to me immensely.
This will take me much more thought, and I encourage you to help me think about it. I was just reading some of your posts about connectivism and links to Downes’ ideas about connections between nodes. Something about the way he talks about those connections seems too mechanical to me: signals traveling back and forth at different strengths between nodes. This is too much like connecting tinker toys, and Wiley points out that Downes fails to define these entities that are connected. Downes treatment lacks the circular and global causalities that I am coming to favor over local causality, and which I think is implied in your comments about prepositions. I believe that the “entities” Downes simply assumes emerge out of their connections. An entity—for instance, a human heart—emerges from the inside push of molecular connections and the outside pull of a co-evolving body. Jump up a scale to the human body as the entity, and it’s the same principle: inside push, outside pull, as the body emerges into and as part of its ecosystem—first, the womb and then the world. I don’t think there is “entity” without connections, and I think prepositions are the rhizomatic engines of desire that enable the emergence of entities within a sentence. Prepositions push and pull as the sentence seeks to fill out the space afforded it by the paragraph, which pushes and pulls to fill out the space afforded by the blog post, or email.
Thanks so much for writing. This is thrilling, and I am grateful.