There are several examples of the
usual approach, which I think is flawed (I
will explain why later). You pick some
concepts, show how you can use them to support
your views, make a big thing about how
inspired you were (no-one likes calm and
serious analysts --they are probably male
aspergics). Try these....
St
Pierre (2004) and others have coped with
Deleuzian material by adopting a selective and
pragmatic approach to the works, seemingly
sanctioned by Deleuze himself. St Pierre
quotes him saying that ‘If [the book] doesn’t
work, if nothing comes through, you try
another book’. As always with Deleuze, there
are ambiguities though, and this could be read
as lofty indifference to criticism: in the
same section (Deleuze, 1995: 8) the ‘harsh
critic’ being addressed in this remark is
specifically accused of showing ressentiment,
for example, and largely dismissed.
The ambiguities in reading
Deleuze haunt any attempt to operate, say, by
finding direct quotations in Deleuzian work in
support of conventional positions. For
example, we can read that: ‘once again we turn
to children (for creative unconventional
thinking)’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 284),
and ‘[there is a] grotesque image of culture
that we find in examinations and government
referenda as well as the newspaper
competitions…Be yourselves -- it being understood
that this self must be that of others’
(Deleuze 2004: 197). However, before we can
align Deleuze with conventional child-centred
approaches, we also read that ‘Works under the
influence of drugs, madness, or work by
children’ tend to be interesting but
‘extraordinarily flaky , unable to preserve
themselves’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 165)
and ‘it is hardly acceptable…to
run together a child’s nursery rhymes, poetic
experimentations, and experiences of madness…[and]
justify the grotesque trinity of child, poet,
and madmen’ (Deleuze, 1990: 82-83).
In another example, Deleuze’s
lecture on Spinoza (Deleuze, nd) talks about
‘automatic’ learning, where people encounter
experiences which force them to develop more
and more embracing and shared notions, and
this certainly can look like an endorsement of
community education. In
another passage, however, ‘Spinoza employs the term
“automaton”: we are, he says, spiritual
automata, that is to say it is less we who
have the ideas than [that] the ideas...are
affirmed in us’ (Deleuze n.d., no page
numbers). In a piece discussing the effects of
cinema especially, Deleuze (2000) implies even
that some automatic direct connection with
brain circuitry is central to learning. Almost
in an opposite direction, Deleuze sees
learning to swim as a deeply philosophical
matter where we must ‘conjugate the
distinctive points of our bodies with the
singular points of the objective Idea in order
to form a problematic field’ (Deleuze, 2004:
205).
Actual attempts to put Deleuze to
work immediately include those of
Sellers and Gough (2010: 591) who seem
to have experienced something like an infusion
of grace and who write lyrically about how
they were inspired, permitted to philosophise,
and produce ‘interactive and intertextual and
picturing performances on art and science
...hypertextual picturing of writing/reading
for reviewing...demonstrating continuities
with/in/among Deleuzian concepts...thought
experiments...and comparable imaginative
practices’. It is very difficult to summarize
the free-floating stuff which ensues,
interspersed with drawings, photographs,
emails between the two of them and sketches
from Sellers’s childhood notebooks, indicating
how ‘The few times I have felt at ease
have been in situations of my own devising,
albeit often stimulated by a teacher’ (2010:
605). I include long quotes instead so you can
not only see but feel the effect.
They begin by saying we should
not just grab particular concepts from
Deleuzian work and use them as metaphors. No
names are given, but they might include some
of the pieces summarized below.Instead:
In this essay we
inter-picture-and-text-ually extemporise our
genealogical and generative work with Deleuzean
conceptual creations (accompanied by what we
call ‘exhibits’) with a view to moving readers
beyond merely using select metaphors presented
by Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. nomadism, rhizome,
lines of flight, smooth and striated spaces). We
deliberately distance ourselves from those who
‘use’ Deleuze by appropriating metaphors that
were never intended as metaphors, preferring to
work towards generating discourses∼practices
that challenge such a deployment of complexity-reducing
Deleuzean figurations (2010 :590)
Incidentally, the tilde
(~) is used to join words ‘to signal
a conjoining of co-implicated notions in what
we think of as complicity, i.e.
thinking that is complicit with writing and
simultaneously vice versa. Complicit in this
sense is not so much “wrongful” as not
“rightfully”‘ (2010: 610)So now
you know.
Nevertheless, Deleuzian
terminology can be used critically, and,
actually rather metaphorically after all. They
cite an article which
refers to the insight that a
paradigm shift draws attention to distinctions
between two positions, whereas a discursive move
emerges from a desire to bring different
thinking to a tradition of thought. In Deleuzian
terms the former striates, the latter smooths.
We have also experienced this recently in our
institution’s committees and working parties
where we waste time engaged in cross-talk –
situations in which our colleagues are so busy
working on what their point is and what to say
next (striating) that they never get to listen
to what else is being said (smoothing)....’
(2010: 591).
So we have ‘smooth’ and
‘striated’ used – as metaphors? The usual list
of additional concepts appear as well:
Concepts such as assemblage,
deterritorialisation, lines of flight,
nomadology and rhizome/rhizomatics provided
further ways to imagine spatial relationships
and to conceive ourselves and other objectsmoving
in space. For example, I found Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987, 23) distinction between the
‘sedentary point of view’ that characterises
much western philosophy, history and science,
and a ‘nomadic subjectivity’ that allows thought
to move across conventional categories and move
against ‘settled’ concepts and theories, to be a
clear incitement to ‘push propositions and
suppositions beyond their limits’. These
concepts invite us to see the ordinary
extra-ordinarily and to see-think-write-picture
differently. (2010: 598)
Sellers goes on,
inevitably and in a way which characterises the
genre, to reveal some personal therapeutic
implications as well.
Rhizo-imaginary is my signalling
of amove
to discourse that is beyond present language, or
a situation wherein I am lost for words. This is
a state that is somewhere between being
‘tongue-tied’ and ‘stuttering’, where mind is
knowing, but words are not working. It is a
state often resolved by turning to pictures
and/or sounds, especially abstractions. For many
years I was embarrassed when this situation
arose; I now take notice of it and work towards
revealing it, sometimes with overt silence (I
suddenly cease talking), sometimes with
discussion (I attempt to explain what I am
feeling). What I have come to understand of this
state is that it is not deficit – it is
generative. It is not a lack on my part but a
realisation of emergent new thinking. The thrust
of this essay, which concerns authentic
deployment of Deleuzo-Guattarian workings in
educational philosophy, attempts to discuss how
we have engaged in our deployment and why we
consider it authentic. In so doing we
seek not only to affirm using Deleuze and
Guattari for our purposes but also to
demonstrate how this is generatively affective
for our work. (2010: 592).
You will have spotted
that the strikethrough of the word ‘authentic’
is a Derridavian technique to indicate the use
of a term that is to be discussed. Sellers and
Gough ‘place “authentic” sous rature
[under erasure] to indicate its use in a sense
that draws on aspects of “genuine” and “honest”
but without determining or fixing those in any
way whatsoever. We compare it to an agreement
sealed with a handshake and eye contact. Both
parties know and understand their agreement’
(2010: 610).
The approach has worldwide significance though:
We recognise writing together as
an approach to immanent emergent meaning-making:
releasing rhizomes flush with matters of
expression affecting the micropolitical through,
‘pragmatically intervening at the smallest
levels in order to ensure that the dominant
kinds of subjectivity produced by Integrated
World Capitalism do not win out’ (Gosenko 2009,
25).. In a Deleuzo-Guattarian spirit of
co-authoring, we perform an assemblage of
empathetic responses to thinking (differently)
(2010: 609)
You have probably seen
enough to be able to decide if this sort of
thing helps or not, so let’s consider some other
‘applications’...
Gale
(2010) says that Deleuze taught him that
formal institutional territories in current UK
educational organisations can be de- and
re-territorialized. Teachers resisting
educational organisations can become nomadic,
occupying ‘spaces that are always shifting
between the smooth and the striated’ (2010:
304). Deleuzian concepts are a resource to
resist dominating neoliberal definitions and
policies operating with rigid schemes of work,
rigid assessment criteria, and evidence-based
practice. The Deleuzian discussion of
(Bergsonian) creative evolution should help
participants recognise that concepts are not
fixed, that teaching and learning is complex
and transgressive, innovative and multiple:
this is clearly destabilising as far as
conventional systems are concerned. ‘Teaching
in this sense would be a lived practice of
constant becoming, based upon risk taking and
disidentification, offering disruption,
challenges to the habitual, and invitations
into the unknown...opening up and allowing the
senses to be alert to all that is new, this
nomadic freeing of the self’(Gale 2010: 307).
Concepts like the ‘fold’, the
‘nomad’ and the ‘rhizome’ were ‘immediately
useful and helped me try to think outside both
the overcoded qualitative research process and
the notions of the subject I had studied’,
reports St Pierre (2004: 288). Her students
enjoyed taking up selected Deleuzian concepts,
in this case ‘multiplicity, bodies–without–organs,
faciality and insomnia in
response to their own problems’ (2004: 284,
original emphasis). I must say I have found
the last two to be particularly obscure
myself. American educational policy had wanted
to introduce randomised controlled trials as
the only method for research, and new concepts
were required to resist, including those that
particularly challenged positivism. Resistance
to Government policy had begun and will
continue, and Deleuze can help us to ‘imagine
a time to come in which the struggle may
change’ (St Pierre, 2004: 293). When teaching
these concepts: ‘I have certainly seen my own
students in all areas of education produce
simply thrilling lines of flight in response
to concepts like the rhizome, nomad, bodies
without organs, and so forth’ (St Pierre,
2004: 293).These are excellent students,
especially if they have worked with the
original writing.
Encountering Deleuze’s critique
of the humanist subject produced a different
personal reaction though: it provided St
Pierre with ‘the most difficult task of my
life’ in rethinking her position (2004: 288).
She seems to have coped by working through the
notion of an assemblage ‘This Deleuzian
assemblage made sense to me. I got it,
or, rather, I plugged it (however one makes
sense of it)
into my own musings about subjectivity and it
worked’ (St Pierre 2004: 289).This
could be a classic example of conventional
‘recognition’, however, a procedure explicitly
ruled out in Deleuzian philosophy as we shall
see.At
least St Pierre recognises the problem—Gale
and Sellers and Gough seem to be operating
cheerfully with a conventional notion of the
creative subject repressed by external
authority [more on Deleuze’scritique
of the subject below].
Hodgson and Standish (2009) have
analysed similar responses in an earlier
enthusiasm for different French
poststructuralist writers, especially
Foucault, among UK educationalists, and they
identify an underlying ‘social justice’ agenda
as an important part of grasping theoretical
positions. According to this view, a
generalised poststructuralism was used to deny
or avoid grand metanarratives and the
possibility of universal truths; knowledge was
therefore subjective, and ‘socially
constructed’, given authority by power
relations (Hodgson & Standish 2009: 320).However,
there is ‘a reluctance to let go of the stable
human subject’ (2009: 314), which has the
effect of missing parts of poststructuralist
interrogation of the very construction of
subjectivity, even in less obviously
authoritarian power/knowledge regimes.To
discuss the full poststructuralist critique
would seem abstract and irrelevant to the
specialism of Education. As a result, even
‘empowering’ practice runs the risk of
constructing its own subject positions for
students, including addressing them only as
members of, spokespersons for, or even enemies
of the oppressed. Hodgson and Standish think
that reading Deleuze will avoid some of these
tendencies, on the grounds that Deleuzian
concepts are too uncompromising to be
incorporated. However, this would not apply if
Deleuze himself were being read, initially and
pragmatically, as a constructed spokesperson
for an ‘empowering’ subject position as well.
Semetsky does face, head on, the
critique of the conventional humanist subject
in Deleuzian work. Semetsky (2006: 12) sees
this as a liberating reading of the processes
of subjectivation, escaping the ideological
effects of the conventional American notions
of ‘selfhood’ and promising a liberating
‘becoming-other’.This
view would certainly seem to be congruent with
Guattari’s work
in group psychotherapy, aiming to re-establish
adequate links with ‘alterity’. This has
implications for conventional pedagogy, he
argues, although he sees the links operating
in non-subjective terms, through ‘material
energetic and semiotic Fluxes; concrete and
abstract machinic Phylums; virtual Universes
of value; finite existential Territories’
(Guattari, 1995: 124). It is not clear whether
Semetsky would accept the challenging
possibility of becoming not just another human
being but becoming-animal as well: discussing
the famous Freudian case study of Little Hans,
for example, Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 284)
suggest there might be ‘as yet unknown
assemblage that would be neither Hans’ nor the
horse’s but that of the becoming–horse for
Hans’.
Semetsky (2009) particularly
focuses on the processes of overcoming the
‘paradox of learning’, which involves students
managing new ideas by either tracing material
to what they know already, or simply rejecting
anything too challenging and outside their
experience. She cites Deleuze and Guattari
(1994) in arguing that it is not just concepts
that are required in learning, but ‘percepts’
and ‘affects’ as well, and goes on to argue
that Dewey would agree on the need to engage
the arts and the emotions in generating these
necessary additions. However, she notes that
there are objective dimensions too.Deleuze
and Guattari (1994: 164) themselves say that
‘Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings
whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds
any lived. They could be said to exist in the
absence of man [sic] because man, as he is
caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words,
is himself a compound of percepts and
affects’. This passage could mean that
Deleuze’s objective dimension is not just the
conventional social reality, external culture,
and social others, that individual actors
encounter when they learn, but something that
exceeds even that – the virtual, that which
constitutes all that is empirical or actual,
including social reality and the human
subject.
Curiously, Semetsky does not
consider one major area of discussion in
Deleuzian work – cinema as pedagogy [but we
consider it later]. Tomlinson and Galatea in
their translators’ introduction to Deleuze
(1989: xiv) argue that ‘cinema...[above
all]... gives conceptual construction new
dimensions, those of the percept and affect...
This is ... a kind of provoked becoming of
thought’. Semetsky’s omission could arise
because studies of cinema and of educational
systems are conventionally separated, even
opposed, in the academic field. Perhaps
studies of cinema would also look ‘irrelevant’
to an educationalist? [I discuss some issues
below].
Semetsky (2006: 39) draws a
number of other parallels between Deleuze on
learning and the traditions of American
pragmatism. Peirce is certainly referenced
explicitly in Deleuze’s work on the cinema
(for example in the Glossary, Deleuze, 1989:
335) and Semetsky develops strong similarities
between them. She concludes that ‘Imagination
functions so as to create a vision of
realities “that cannot be exhibited under
existing conditions of sense-perception”
[quoting Dewey]......instead they constitute
Peirce’s and Deleuze’s...virtual realities’.
Semetsky sees Deleuzian becoming
as the equally popular term ‘autopoiesis’, and
lines of flight become Deweyan ways to break
with conceptual and social habits.She
says that Deleuze argued that the conventional
master-pupil relationship needs to be replaced
by encouraging more creative exploration from
pupils (Semetsky, 2006: 76), although this
arises specifically in the context of a
particular revolution in thinking in
mathematics (Deleuze, 2004: chapter 4), and is
probably confined to researchers in that
field.
Finally, Semetsky suggests that
‘the binary opposition between content and
expression becomes blurred, leading to the
emergence of a new property: a highly
expressive, passionate language...At the
ontological level, this indicates, for
Deleuze, the univocity of Being’ (Semetsky,
2006: 60).
This last example is particularly
relevant in showing the difficulties again,
because ‘the univocity of Being’ is at the
centre of a possibly quite different reading
of Deleuze. The educational theorists we have
discussed, like many others discussed by
Badiou (2000), see Deleuze as a promoter of
multiplicities of desires, an opponent of
totalitarianism, and an advocate of creativity
in a wide range of fields, but, for Badiou,
underneath this position is consecration of
the One, a single voice, ‘“a single clamor of
Being for all beings”’ (Badiou, 2000: 11,
quoting Difference and Repetition).
Desire aims at attaining this One, not at the
autonomy of the individual. In particular, ‘automatic’
learning, clearly implying the idea of a
universal machinery, selects individuals and
makes them choose.Deleuze
is really arguing that we must make thought
exist through us, by renouncing subjective
needs, not developing them, allowing ourselves
to be 'constrained to the world's play'
(Badiou, 2000: 12). This is an aristocratic
conception, for Badiou, requiring actual
individuals to become dominated by the
virtual, 'And individuals are not equally
capable of this' (2000: 13). [Incidentally,
Badiou has given a number of lectures, like this one,
available on You Tube, explaining how you can
develop an ontology without invoking any
underlying One as the origin of everything).
There is no intention to declare
one reading ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’:
Semetsky and Badiou are equally impressive
Deleuzian scholars who often quote the same
arguments but interpret them differently. The
problem is always to decide if specific
applications are selective reductions of
Deleuzian thought to conventional thinking
after all, as the only way to make it apply to
existing practice. If so, this might suggest
that other constraints, commitments and
possibilities are informing these readings,
not purely technical considerations. There
could be an important element, revealed in
Hodgson’s and Standish’s work, reflecting the
dominance of the ideological and practical
components in teacher training, which reject
extensive philosophising, and perhaps the
discussion of pedagogy beyond that which goes
on in schools, as irrelevant and abstract
‘theory’.There may be national intellectual
contexts, so that British theorists might
pursue links with Foucault and
poststructuralism, while American ones see
parallels with Dewey and Peirce. We might
expect to find micropolitical commitments as
well in all the authors we have cited.Open
discussion of those ‘preconceptual’
commitments could be useful as the tasks of
translation or application are attempted.
A remarkably scholarly
account is found in Olsson's attempt
to understand progressive practice in
Swedish preschools in the terms provided by
Deleuze and Guattari too. This is a
wide ranging study, citing a number of texts
by our heroes, including some still in
French which she has translated
herself. One of these is some work by
Mozère, who apparently collaborated with
Deleuze and Guattari and developed her own
ideas about progressive primary education
[some of which is in English]. There
is no doubt that most of the full
implications of Deleuzian philosophy have
been recognized in this piece, in the
discussions of ontology in the Epilogue, and
in various sections about subjectivity
especially. There are also hints of
the earlier poststructuralist problematic,
however, and a reliance on the argument
about pragmatic approaches, ‘what
one can do with this particular theory in
relation to this particular practice’
(122).
She knows that other ways of
treating the material were possible, and
these are discussed in the footnotes. However,
this study has been about
pedagogy not philosophy as such, and since
all scientific theories are based on
suppositions and choices, the point was to
develop some of the choices made in this
study rather than criticizing or comparing
it.‘The concepts have been
used only exactly as much as was
needed in relation to the empirical
material’ (124).
The problem has been to decide 'how
to work with movement and
experimentation in subjectivity and
learning in early childhood
education practice and research'
(179). The
study was aimed at
formulating a problem rather than arising
out a solution, and Deleuze and Guattari
themselves say that it is not just a
matter of truth and falsity, but also
whether work is interesting
remarkable or important.
Olsson knows that there is a danger of
superficiality, and she pleads lack of
time and resources to provide anything
more. However, Deleuzian philosophy is
surely far in excess of anything that might
be required to justify or defend
experimental pedagogy in Swedish preschools.
Olsson works with concepts
like ‘desire, micro politics and the
event’ (101), the singularity as
'essentially preindividual, non personal and
aconceptual' (115), assemblages of desire, desiring machines, collective assemblages of
enunciation, 'a-lives,
virtuality, crystal time and becoming' (189) .
She cites the usual stuff on de- and
reterritorialization, lines of flight and
rhizomes, but also cites the discussion in Logic
of Sense
on the implication of nonsense with sense-making
(so we should see kids' fantasies not just as
nonsense stories but as sense making --OK if you
equate Lewis Carroll and Artaud with preschool
kids' stories). As the last in the list of
concepts indicates, she also cites at
least some bits of Difference and Repetition
and Cinema 2. She talks of 'relational
fields',which may be Deleuzian, and planes of
immanence
The pragmatic issue really
arises, in my view, in that Olsson needs to
successfully manage and negotiate various
aspects of teacher politics. Preschool
teachers evidently feel under some pressure
to acquire postgraduate qualifications, and
this is clearly an interest in the Swedish
research schools she mentions, especially
the one in Stockholm of which the features
are particularly important
writer—Dahlberg—who has also produced the
series in which this book appears.
Dahlberg appears to be mostly keen on
Foucault, in his expanded politics phase,
the one that gained so much attention in the
UK and America as well according to Hodgson
and Standish as we saw. This can take
quite a paranoid turn, insisting that even
preschool kids are being dominated by
various regimes of subjecification and
control: 'intense governing of the learning
child', as the blurb on the back of this
book indicates. To satisfy that
audience, Olsson clearly has to go along
with the paranoia and also the claim to
expertise that it involves.
Annoyingly, a text I did not know before
seems to support this reading of Deleuze as
an extended politics merchant himself, in a
dialogue he had with Foucault in Desert
Islands. There are, however,
other claims to expertise engaged as well,
not least the teachers who already work in
preschools. Olsson has a difficult
task here. On the one hand, she can
fully support their existing progressive
pedagogy, against any possible attempts to
replace it with standardised pedagogy based
on child development and quantifiable means
of evaluation and measurement. I don't know
if that is or was a real threat in Sweden:
it might just be that preschool teachers
encountered that approach when they were
training, and they might have to deal with
it in various inservice courses as
well?. Deleuze can easily be made into
an ally here.
However, Deleuze is a formidable theorist,
and they tend to get a bad press with
teachers as well, and be suspected of either
imposing theories or challenging practical
expertise. Olsson is quite careful at
times to argue that she is denying that role
for theory and research as well, that she
sees critique as based on a dubious
transcendental premise involving a reflexive
subject, and that she thinks Deleuze says we
should work with various kinds of
practice. Indeed, theory itself is
only a kind of practice [although I'm not
sure if this refers to scientific theories
rather than philosophy]: in any event,
seeing Deleuze as critical of existing
practices is bound to be almost inevitable,
and Olsson has to perform some strange
maneuvers. She eases up on the critique of
conventional thinking,partly by taking a
pragmatic line again as if the ends were
what counted after all. She insists
that Deleuzian philosophy is not that
strange after all—kids are already doing
things like becoming and living with
emerging subjectivities. Less
explicitly, there is a hint that preschool
teachers are also somehow natural
Deleuzians—Olsson cites Deleuze saying that
it is possible to be a natural
Spinozist. The danger with this
position of course is that it does tend to
make the difficult scholastic labour to
penetrate Deleuzian concepts and arguments
largely irrelevant, if practice already
reveals the essentials. I must say
this is my own opinion at the end of the
day, and, as with Semetsky, it would be
quite easy to support progressive preschool
practice without citing Deleuze and Guattari
at all, but by relying on the usual kinds of
progressive theory. Olsson would face
demands from her other audiences here, of
course—she has to deliver proper academic
knowledge in order to gain her doctorate,
and she also has to show that she is aware
of the flaws in the earlier work.
The problems are apparent in her discussion
of projects that Swedish preschool kids
undertake ( and I quote from my notes on
Olsson):
Example The
project had focused on the heart and its
rhythm, and the kids used drawings to show
each other their ideas.Teachers
provided stethoscopes, paper and pen.Kids
ran round and discovered their hearts beating
faster.They
tried to illustrate changes in rhythm.Teacher
documents and then they discuss what they
think has happened.Two
girls used numbers to measure rhythms [larger
numbers mean faster rhythms rather than
anything actually metric], other girls draw
dots [of different sizes or density?].Kids
are fascinated by hearing their hearts and
also by the ‘mathematical logic of the rhythm
and the possibility to illustrate this in
different ways’ (65).They
also swap ideas although they don’t speak to
each other -- communication ‘beyond the spoken
word’ then (66).Teachers discussed their documentation
before suggesting any ways forward.They
had been selective in their observations
according to what they ‘found most
interesting’, but this upset some of the
children, and they lose interest.This
shows that what kids find of interest is not
the same as what teachers do.Teachers
rethink
and organize a discussion with the original
illustrations and all observations, and this
does lead to an agreement on what to do
next—work outside.This
time ‘The
children are intensely engaged in the activity
and they find many different sounds that they
can start illustrating by drawing’ (67).This
time they try new borrowed techniques.Teachers
‘are fascinated and curious about the flow of
ideas, strategies and activities that are
exchanged’, although this is hard to observe
[and document?].They ask if kids want to continue, this
time working in pairs to make sounds with
their mouths that they can then illustrate and
playback as a charade—the kids do so
immediately, and ‘this creates an intense
atmosphere in the room with a lot of activity
and laughter, followed by many other related
activities over a period of time’ (69) [with
lots of photos and illustrations].
Olsson
describes this as ‘delicate negotiation…wandering
back and forward…continuous
exchanging’, an example of a line of
flight.These are favoured in certain
conditions—for example when children are
no longer seen as individuals according to
psychological theory.There
is cooperative work for example in
swapping the strategies.Teachers
and kids meet around a problem.The
problem is constructed.The
emphasis is on relational fields and flow
rather than rigid lines.The
interests of kids ‘are treated like
contagious trends and they do not reside
in each individual.This
is exactly where lines of flight are born’
(71).
I just don't know if Deleuzian notions like
lines of flight are needed here. The whole
thing reads like a bit of a talk-up --
everyone is intensely engaged and all that.
Olsson has simply 'recognized' the events in
Deleuzian terms, surely, and for partisan
reasons?
In the second project, five kids worked with an OHP
[making shadows with themselves and with various
objects projected on to a sheet. Kids could go
behind the sheet]. It started looking at photos,
but the teachers decided, after observation,
that light and shadow seem to be of more
interest. Teachers are also taking a course at
the Stockholm Institute of Education, and
discussing it. Their worry was that they wanted
to move the children on, but not intervene
excessively—they decided not to intervene but to
do more observation. Eventually, one kid moved
an object on the OHP, and another kid noticed
the effect of doing this. The whole group got
excited, began dancing and shouting "The Ghost,
the Ghost!" (136). Apparently, the expression on
children's faces showed this was a matter of
some intensity: whenever the ghost appeared 'The
entire group was up and running, dancing and
screaming: "The Ghost, the Ghost!" [Actually the
picture shows one child of the three apparently
not very moved at all, 137]. The first, teachers
imagined that ghosts were scary, and thought
about pursuing that line, but again decided to
wait and discussed the photographs of the
children—a possibility was that the ghost was
'ritual for celebrating when they have
discovered something new, or when they stand in
front of something that they do not understand
but that interests them and excites them' (138),
and this was supported by further observations.
The kids developed an interest in comparing
shadows of different sizes, and then turned to
dressing up in costumes to make shadow effects
and then make stories. They use the OHP
throughout the year. Their behaviour became
ritualized—they put costumes on first. They
negotiated with each other and 'brought each
other in all the time'. Teachers observed and
gave the documents back to the children for
discussion, including displaying it—kids talked
about the pictures and sometimes reenacted what
they were doing.
Olsson says this shows that desire was turned on
its head. It was not a lack, but something that
emerged with teachers' help. Children's
questions and problems were 'considered as
possible productions of new realities and new
ways of thinking, talking and acting' (142).
They were not to be tamed. They revealed intense
etc. experimentation involving everybody. The
project was intended to 'hook up' with
children's desires. Desire is then discussed
further—it is usually seen as a lack, something
that we want to acquire, often treated as a
fantasy which is then coded in Freudian
psychoanalysis. The notion of lack is also
apparent in some practices in early childhood
education, especially those based on
developmental psychology, where desire is
replaced by a vocabulary of needs. However these
needs are also constructions, and also 'repress
and tame' desire (143). Desire is only used to
motivate children to achieve predetermined
goals. This makes children look needy and in
need of redirection. Instead, we can see
hear a form of desiring
production suitable for academic and pedagogical
institutions, a form of modulation of the
dominant processes (which is really only what
educational institutions can do -- Olsson draws
on Massumi's politics here).
So -- talk up of banalities or analysis based on
essential concepts found in D&G? You decide,
O Reader...
OK –let's turn to Deleuze and
Guattari ourselves?
The most immediate problem is
that there is a massive disconnect between the
raw D&G and the accounts described
above. Some of it is explained by
context -- I would love to see what St
Pierre’s students actually did. Were they
still pursuing lines of flight when the
deadline loomed for assignments? Did they
really relish reading Deleuze and Guattari
(see below),or were they playing a game,
trying to echo professorial talk? Here are
some examples of what they might have read,
drawn from my online notes on AntiOedipus (D&G
1984), and Thousand
Plateaus (D&G 2004) [Please note
the dates of the English editions are misleading
as a guide to the actual time of writing.]
The rhizome -- 'The multiple must be
made, not by always adding a higher dimension
but ...with the number of dimensions one already
has available -- always n-1 ( the only way the
one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted).
Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be
constructed: write at n-1 dimensions...A system
of this kind would be called a rhizome' (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 7).
Becoming --becoming
and multiplicity are the same thing. A
multiplicity is defined not by its elements,
nor by a center of unification or
comprehension. It is defined by the number of
dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it
cannot lose or gain a dimension without
changing its nature [So no essentialism?].
Since its variations and dimensions are
immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing
to say that each multiplicity is already
composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis,
and that a multiplicity is continually
transforming itself into a string of other
multiplicities, according to its thresholds
and doors. For example, the Wolf-Man’s pack of
wolves also becomes a swarm of bees, and a
field of anuses, and a collection of small
holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of
contagion): all these heterogeneous elements
compose “the" multiplicity of symbiosis and
becoming. If we imagined the position of a
fascinated Self, it was because the
multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching
to the breaking point, is the continuation of
another multiplicity that works it and strains
it from the inside. In fact, the self is only
a threshold, a door, a becoming between two
multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined
by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but
there is a string of borderlines, a continuous
line of borderlines (fiber) following which
the multiplicity changes. And at each
threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber
stretches from a human to an animal, from a
human or an animal to molecules, from
molecules to particles, and so on to the
imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe
fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines
constitutes a line of flight or of
deterritorialization. It is evident that the
Anomalous, the Outsider, has several
functions: not only does it border each
multiplicity, of which it determines the
temporary or local stability (with the highest
number of dimensions possible under the
circumstances), not only is it the
precondition for the alliance necessary to
becoming, but it also carries the
transformations of becoming or crossings of
multiplicities always farther down the line
of flight. Moby—Dick is the White Wall
bordering the pack; he is also the demonic
Term of the Alliance; finally, he is the
terrible Fishing Line with nothing on the
other end, the line that crosses the wall and
drags the captain . . . where? Into the void .
. . (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 275)
The human subject – ‘Even linguistics is
not immune from the same prejudice, inasmuch as
it is inseparable from a personology; according
to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite
article and the pronoun, the third-person
pronoun also lacks the determination of
subjectivity that is proper to the first two
persons and is supposedly the necessary
condition for all enunciation. We believe on the
contrary that the third person indefinite, HE,
THEY, implies no indetermination from this point
of view it ties the statement to a collective
assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather
than to a subject of the enunciation. Blanchot
is correct in saying that ONE and HE-0ne is
dying, he is unhappy—in no Way take the place of
a subject, but instead do away with any subject
in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type
that carries or brings out the event insofar as
it is unformed and incapable of being
effectuated by persons ("something happens to
them that they can only get a grip on again by
letting go of their ability to say I"). The HE
does not represent a subject but rather makes a
diagram of an assemblage. It does not overcode
statements, it does not transcend them as do the
first two persons; on the contrary, it prevents
them from falling under the tyranny of
subjective or signifying constellations, under
the regime of empty redundancies. The contents
of the chains of expression it articulates are
those that can be assembled for a maximum number
of occurrences and becomings. "They arrive like
fate Where do they come from, how
have they pushed this far . . .?" He or one,
indefinite article, proper name, infinitive
verb: A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK NAMED WOLF
TO LOOK AT HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID,
THEY ARRIVE HUNS. [sic –original caps]
Classified ads, telegraphic machines on the
plane of consistency (once again, We are
reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and
the rules for translation suggested by the best
commentators) (TP 292)
Faciality – ‘The
move from the body-head system to the face
system has nothing to do with an evolution or
genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological
positions. Nor with integrations of
part-objects, or structural or structuring
systems. Nor can there be any appeal to a
preexisting subject, or one brought into
existence, except by this machine specific to
faciality. In the literature of the face,
Sartre’s text on the look and Lacan’s on the
mirror make the error of appealing to a form of
subjectivity or humanity reflected in a
phenomenological field or split in a structural
field. The gaze is that secondary in relation to
the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of
faciality. The mirror is that secondary in
relation to the white wall of faciality. Neither
will we speak of a genetic axis, or the
integration of part-objects. Any approach based
on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is
thought that what is fastest is primary, or even
serves as a foundation or springboard for what
comes next. An approach based on part-objects is
even Worse; it is the approach of a demented
experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes
everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew
things randomly back together again. You can
make any list of part-objects you want: hand,
breast, mouth, eyes . . . It’s still
Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not
fundamentally organs without bodies, or the
fragmented body; it is the body without organs,
animated by various intensive movements that
determine the nature and emplacement of the
organs in question and make that body an
organism, or even a system of strata of which
the organism is only a part. It becomes apparent
that the slowest of movements, or the last to
occur or arrive, is not the least intense. And
the fastest may already have converged with it,
connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a
non- synchronic development of strata that have
different speeds and lack a sequence of stages
but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question
of the body is not one of part-objects but of
differential speeds. (2004: 190).
Smooth and striated
space -- We have on numerous occasions
encountered all kinds of differences between two
types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric;
extensive and qualitative; centered and
acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numerical
and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses
and of packs; of magnitude and of distance; of
breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth.
Not only is that which peoples a smooth space a
multiplicity that changes in nature when it
divides-—such as tribes in the desert:
constantly modified distances, packs that are
always undergoing metamorphosis— but smooth
space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a
multiplicity of this type, nonmetric, acentered,
directional, etc. Now it might be thought that
the Number would belong exclusively to the other
multiplicities, that it would accord them the
scientific status nonmetric multiplicities lack.
But this is only partially true. it is true that
the number is the correlate of the metric:
magnitudes can striate space only by reference
to numbers, and conversely, numbers are used to
express increasingly complex relations between
magnitudes, thus giving rise to ideal spaces
reinforcing the striation and making it
coextensive with all of matter. There is
therefore a correlation within metric
multiplicities between geometry and arithmetic,
geometry and algebra, which is constitutive of
major science (the most profound authors in this
respect are those who have seen that the number,
even in its simplest forms, is exclusively
cardinal in character, and the unit exclusively
divisible)."It could be said on the other hand
that nonmetric multiplicities or the
multiplicities of smooth space pertain only to a
minor geometry that is purely operative and
qualitative, in which calculation is necessarily
very limited, and the local operations of which
are not even capable of a general
translatability or a homogeneous system of
location (2004: 534—5).
Abstract machines
– ‘But if abstract machines know nothing of form
and substance, what happens to the other
determination of strata, or even of
assemblages—content and expression? 1n a certain
sense, it could be said that this distinction is
also irrelevant to the abstract machine, [3]
precisely because it no longer has the forms and
substances the distinction requires. The plane
of consistency is a plane of continuous
variation; each abstract machine can be
considered a "plateau" of variation that
places variables of content and expression in
continuity. Content and expression thus attain
their highest level of relativity, becoming
"functives of one and the same function" or
materials of a single matter [see 4, "November
20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics” note 2
1—Trans.]. But in another sense, it could be
said [4 ]that the distinction subsists, and is
even recreated, on the level of and traits:
there are traits of content (unformed matters or
intensities) [and 5] traits of expression
(nonformal functions or tensors). Here, the dis
tinction has become entirely displaced, or even
a different distinction, since it now concerns
cutting edges of deterritorialization. Absolute
deterritorialization implies a
“deterritorializing element" and a
"deterritorialized element” one of which in each
case is allocated to expression, the other to
content, or vice versa, but always in such a way
as to convey a relative distinction between the
two. Thus both content and expression are
necessarily affected by continuous variation,
but it still assigns them two dissymmetrical
roles as elements of a single becoming, or as
quanta of a single flow. That is why it is
impossible to define a continuous variation that
would not take in both the content and the
expression, rendering them indiscernible, while
simultaneously proceeding by one or the other,
determining the two mobile and relative poles of
that which has become indiscernible. For this
reason, one must define both traits or
intensities of content [1,2] and traits or
tensors of expression (indefinite article,
proper name, 4,10 infinitive, and date),
which take turns leading one another across the
plane of consistency. Unformed matter, the
phylum, is not dead, brute homogeneous matter
but a matter-movement bearing singularities or
haecceities.’ (2004: 562—3) NB the numbers in
the text which I have put in square brackets are
set off in the left margin in the original –
dunno why)
Body without organs
—‘The body without organs is like the cosmic
egg, the giant molecule swarming with worms,
bacilli, Lilliputian figures, animalcules, and
homunculi, with their organization and their
machines, minute strings, ropes, teeth,
fingernails, levers and pulleys, catapults: thus
in Schreber the millions of spermatazoids in the
sunbeams, or the souls that lead a brief
existence as little men on his body. Artaud
says: this world of microbes, which is nothing
more than coagulated nothingness. The two sides
of the body without organs are, therefore, the
side on which the mass phenomenon and the
paranoiac investment corresponding to it are
organized on a microscopic scale, and the other
side on which, on a submicroscopic scale, the
molecular phenomena and their schizophrenic
investment are arranged. It is on the body
without organs, as a pivot, as a frontier
between the molar and the molecular, that the
paranoia-schizophrenia division is made. Are we
to believe, then, that social investments are
secondary projections, as if a large two-headed
schizonoiac, father of the primitive horde, were
at the base of the socius in general? We have
seen that this is not at all the case. The
socius is not a projection of the body without
organs; rather, the body without organs is the
limit of the socius, its tangent of
deterritorialization, the ultimate residue of a
deterritorialized socius. The socius—the earth,
the body of the despot, capital-money—are
clothed full bodies, just as the body without
organs is a naked full body; but the latter
exists at the limit, at the end, not at the
origin. And doubtless the body without organs
haunts all forms of socius. But in this very
sense, if social investments can be said to be
paranoiac or schizophrenic, it is to the extent
that they have paranoia and schizophrenia as
ultimate products under the determinate
conditions of capitalism. (Deleuze and Guattari
1984: 281).
Desiring machines
– ‘Here are the desiring-machines, with their
three parts: the working parts, the immobile
motor, the adjacent part; their three forms of
energy: Libido, Numen, and Voluptas; and their
three syntheses: ie connective syntheses of
partial objects and flows, the disjunctive
syntheses of singularities and chains, and the
conjunctive syntheses of intensities and
becomings. The schizoanalyst is not an
interpreter, even less a theater director; he is
a mechanic, a micromechanic. There are no
excavations to be undertaken, no
archaeology, no statues in the unconscious:
there are only stones to be sucked, a la
Beckett, and other machinic elements belonging
to deterritorialized constellations. The task of
schizoanalysis is that of learning what a
subject’s desiring-machines are, how they work,
with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in
the machine, what constituent misfires, with
what flows, what chains, and what
becomings in each case. Moreover, this positive
task cannot be separated from indispensable
destructions, the destruction of the molar
aggregates, the structures and representations
that prevent the machine from functioning. lt is
not easy to rediscover the molecules-even the
giant molecule——their paths, their zones of
presence, and their own syntheses, amid the
large accumulations that fill the preconscious,
and that delegate their representatives in the
unconscious itself, thereby immobilizing the
machines, silencing them, trapping them,
sabotaging them, cornering them, holding them
fast. In the unconscious it is not the lines
of pressure that matter, but on the contrary
the lines of escape. The unconscious does
not apply pressure to consciousness; rather
consciousness applies pressure and
strait-jackets the unconscious, to prevent its
escape. As to the unconscious, it is like the
Platonic opposite whose opposite draws near: it
flees or it perishes. What we have tried to show
from the outset is how the unconscious
productions and formations were not merely
repelled by an agency of psychic repression that
would enter into compromises with them, but
actually covered over by antiformations that
disfigure the unconscious in itself, and impose
on it causations, comprehensions, and
expressions that no longer have anything to do
with its real functioning: thus all the statues,
the Oedipal images, the phantasmal mises en
scène, the Symbolic of castration,the
effusion of the death instinct, the perverse
reterritorializations’. (1984: 338—9).
And in a tribute to Olsson and her hard work,
try this fromLogic
of Sense:
Events as effects combine past and present,
active and passive, all of which are located
elsewhere as causes.The relation between events can only be
quasi-causes.Stoics saw dialectical analysis as
explorations of these combinations, once they had
been expressed in propositions—dialectics as
conjugation.Language also enables us to go beyond
events into the possible or becoming.The
relation between propositions and specifics is
itself still paradoxical—‘Chryssipus taught “If
you say something it passes through your lips, so
if you say “chariot”, a chariot passes through
your lips’ (8).It is deliberate nonsense in the Anglo
American sense, or humorous
play on the surface, as opposed to an ironic
exploration of depths and heights.Lewis
Carroll did something similar in Alice....Events
are only known in the context of the problem they
are determining, and we need a language to
describe events in general in their field, and how
they are realized.Paradox can be seen as a particular problem
related to singular points, but again some empty
square or ‘aleatory point’ must be involved,
enabling events to communicate in an unusual way.Paradox
therefore illustrates the relation of events: it
is ‘the Unique event, in which all events
communicate and are distributed’ (56).Paradox
alludes to this ‘singular being’, corresponding to
‘the question as such’ (57).
I am not saying that
this sort of stuff does not make sense: it does,
eventually, after a lot of patient scholarly
labour which took me months and months. God
knows how busy students might cope. Olsson is a
great hero to get as far as she did. I think
Deleuze and Guattari ought to be condemned for
making it all so difficult just so they could
experiment with style.
References:
Badiou, A. (2000). Deleuze
The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. (on line notes
by me here)
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations.
New York: Columbia University Press.(see my
notes here)
Deluze, G. (2004) Desert
Islands and Other Texts 1953--74. New York
: Semiotext(e)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari,
F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone
Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari,
F. (2004). A
Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum. (
some notes
here)
Gale, K.(2010).
An Inquiry In To The Ethical Nature of a
Deleuzian Creative Educational Practice. Qualitative
Inquiry,
16, no. 5, 303 –08. doi: 10.1177/1077800409358869
Hodgson, N.and
P. Standish. (2009). Uses and misuses of
poststructuralism in educational research. International
Journal
of Research and Method in Education 32,
no. 3: 309—26.
Sellers, W. and Gough, N. (2010). Sharing
outsider thinking: thinking (differently) with
Deleuze in educational philosophy and
curriculum inquiry. International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
23, no. 5, 589—614. doi:
10.1080/09518398.2010.500631
Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze,
Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers.
Semetsky, I. (2009).
Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education:
Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning. The
European Legacy, 14 (4), 443-56. doi: 10.1080/10848770902999534
St Pierre, E. (2004). Deleuzian Concepts for
Education: The subject undone. Educational
Philosophy and Theory,
36, no.3, 283-96. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00068.x