Networky

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Introduction: Rhizome

Bruno Latour: Networks, Societies, Spheres

I was going to write about the two articles for which I’m not leading the discussion tonight, but after reading them, I’ve decided to focus on the two that were least comprehensible to me.  I hope that by framing them in terms of something else I’m reading, I’ll begin to make some sense out of them.

For the last two weeks I’ve been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and, perhaps because it’s very fresh in my mind,  both Latour and Deleuze/Guattari brought up concepts that made me think of the story of Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, she died of cancer and her cancerous cells, called HeLa, were harvested and proved to be intensely valuable to cell culturists and other researchers. The book includes a narrative about Henrietta and her family, woven together with science and ethics and deception and profit.

I can’t pretend I understood much of what Deleuze and Guattari were writing about. I do, however, understand rhizomes to a certain extent. Kudzu comes to mind or, more positively (in the U.S. South anyway), iris and ginger. Plants whose reproductive structure travels and spreads and can be divided to create new plants. Some, like kudzu, become invasive because there is no single reproductive organ and, as D & G note, “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (9). While a root system can be traced, a rhizomic system splits and grows and travels.

The HeLa cells did just that. Most cells split a finite number of times and die off, but HeLa cells, being cancerous, became immortal and were divided into test tubes and shipped all over the world for research purposes. Over time, they changed or were altered but continued to grow. They also were particularly agile and managed to contaminate other cell cultures. This particular system was not linear but multiplicitous. While there is a particular entry point, an original cell culture, it has long since been subsumed into a mass of growth and divergent research.

Similarly, Latour discusses the meanings of networks and the idea that nothing is self-contained, that something “looks contained within itself with well-delineated edges and limits; then something happens, a strike, an accident, a catastrophe, and suddenly you discover swarms of entities that seem to have been there all along but were not visible before and that appear in retrospect necessary for its sustenance” (797). Latour views a network as, in part, “the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist” (799).

Skloot recognized that HeLa consisted of many “unexpected beings,” and brought all of them together in a single narrative. She details the activity system of the cells and their ability to reproduce endlessly which allows them to interact with the system of biological science which contains numerous systems of research and discourse. Peripherally, but not unimportantly, there is Henrietta Lacks the person and the family she left behind when her body died. Since her cancer cells remained alive, however, the family eventually found out about their existence and began to interact unhappily with the science community again. With the story, the actor-network becomes apparent. Henrietta Lacks was first reduced to her parts/cells/attributes, then, as information became known about her and her family and her doctors, she began to grow again until she (the person) was part of an entire network of research, family and discourse. All of the parts are interdependent and, with information, the voids between all of the seemingly disparate parts are starting to shrink.

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

Catherine Schryer and Philippa Spoel: “Genre Theory, Health-Care Discourse, and Professional Identity Formation”

Schryer and Spoel introduce the terms ‘regulated’ and ‘regularized’ to our lexicon. Since regulated resources are the ones that are explicitly learned, recognized and/or required, I’ve been thinking of them as the formal, traditional genres, the ones that are defined so that they fit into categories. The regularized resources seem more closely related to Rhetorical Genre Studies because they are learned in context (situated cognition) and arise from tacit understanding rather than explicit direction. What I thought was particularly interesting is that Schryer and Spoel use these terms to refer to different uses of the same resource.

Like Carol Berkenkotter, they discuss the influence certain genres have on the formation of a professional identity. Berkenkotter focuses more on the way a manual influences the diagnostic vocabulary of a profession by serving almost as a translation tool. Schryer and Spoel look at two different resources and examine the influence they have on the professional behavior of doctors and midwives.

The case presentations Schryer discusses are formal tools medical students use to relate case histories to their faculty mentors. The structure and order of a case presentation is specific, but during the course of their presentations, students are guided in their use of language and even in the emphasis given to certain aspects of the presentation. Over time, students learn a professional language and move from seeing “any form of uncertainty as a personal deficit” to using “modal auxiliaries, such as can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would and adverbs, such as perhaps, maybe, and likely [that] ‘safely introduce levels of assuredness into the case presentation’” (264).

When I worked for a whitewater rafting company, part of what I learned and later taught was how to use degrees of promise. The absolutes came with definite language and had to do with the ordering of events: first you’ll do this, then this, than that. Anything that was possible, however unlikely, had to be tempered with an allowance for risk and usually had to do with assuaging fear or discussing the possibility of injury or death.  The words “you won’t get hurt” coming from anyone’s mouth was an invitation for every senior employee within earshot to descend and perform damage control. While the use of language was explicit in some manuals and in the release forms, the comfortable use of it came with time and indoctrination.

Spoel’s research had more to do with the ways the emerging healthcare community of midwives used the regulated genre of a policy binder to establish their position within the established medical profession. The midwives’ practice of informed choice is a communicative means of placing the decision-making power in the hands of the patient. However, the policy binder “stresses the midwife’s responsibility to other health professionals (not to the woman) so that they can together ‘plan’ the woman’s care”. 

Furthermore, since informed choice “appears within the [College of Midwives of Ontario]’s regulations as a diverse and inconsistently articulated practice”, there are challenges to knowing how to interpret the policies. Because some of the regulated policy is open to interpretation, midwives have an opportunity to regularize the genre of the policy manual through discussion of “the definition of information and decision making and the place of advice and explicit influence in the caregiving relationship” (269).