Proper education
for Deleuze and Guattari – swimming, watching
films and becoming animals
Dave Harris 2013
It would be reasonable
to think that cultural revolutionaries would
support challenges to the traditional approaches
in education as well. There are some bits in the
works that seem to offer support for progressive
child-centred education, but these are ambiguous
as we have seen
Gale (2010 ) says
Deleuze and Guattari (2004) talk about how
children can extricate themselves from the
teacher’s language.They
actually say: 'In the case of the child,
gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic
systems regain their freedom and extricate
themselves from the “tracing,” that is from the
dominant competence of the teacher's language—a
microscopic event upsets the local balance of
power' (2004: 16)
The quotation actually
arises after a discussion of a famous case in
Freud—Little Hans.In fact, Little Hans, and the equally
unfortunate Little Richard (one of Klein’s
patients) are the only children discussed or
cited in the whole of the book – or indeed in
any the books I have read so far. Deleuze and
Guattari seem to be making quite astounding
generalizations based on these two.
The sad case of
Little Hans
Freud did not normally attempt to psychoanalyse
children, because they obviously could not
understand what was going on in adult terms and
so could not take part in the ‘talking cure’,
but he did take on a case involving a
child—Little Hans.Hans’s dad was the one who discussed the
case with Freud.So the first thing we have to remember is
that this is a secondhand case, with secondhand
data, mediated through a parent: sometimes,
Deleuze and Guattari write so confidently about
him, as if they knew the lad!
According to his dad,
Hans presented with a number of anxieties, like
a fear of going outside.That
could be traced to an incident where he saw a
horse urinating in the street, and horses became
more and more prominent in the story.Freud
and the parent obviously zeroed in on some of
their favourite themes.Did
the horse represent Hans’ father, for example,
because the lad had said that one thing about
horses was they had dark things around their
mouths, just like his father’s facial hair. Hans
clearly was disturbed about his emerging
sexuality and, like all respectable Viennese
kids at the time, had been threatened by his
mother that his ‘widdler’ would be cut off if he
played with it -- maybe seeing the horse’s
widdler reminded him? Hans
expressed anxiety about horses falling down in
the street, kicking and struggling and making a
fuss, and Freud immediately suspected that the
lad had witnessed a primal scene, with his
father having vigorous sex with his mother—but
the father denied that was even a possibility
(but then they always do). Hans also had an
anxious episode recalling visiting his cousins
to see their newborn addition to the family.They
had travelled the last part of the journey in a
horse drawn cart.
So what was it about horses?
Freud eventually
decided that the most probable cause of the
anxiety was not the horse itself but the closed
wagons that were being drawn by horses in and
out of a transport depot that the lad could see
from his window.The closed wagons represented the
mysterious wombs of women—dark compartments out
of which something is removed.To cut
a long story short [!], the lad was getting
anxious that his virile moustachioed father and
his adorable mysterious mother were planning a
new addition to the family.The
father was able eventually to talk all this
through and the lad ceased to display anxiety
–his dad tells us.
For Deleuze and
Guattari (1984, 2004), this whole story is an
appalling example of how Freudian theory
represses the creativity of children, or rather
a child. ‘They kept BREAKING HIS
RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it
straight for him, blocking his every way out,
until he began to desire his own shame and
guilt…They
had barred him from the rhizomes of the
building, then from the rhizomes of the street,
they fixated him on Professor Freud ‘(Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 15, original capitalisation).
Right from the start, the lad’s imaginative
creations were being reduced to Freudian
categories.It all just had to lead up to the
familiar oedipal scene, fear and anxiety of his
father preventing sexual activity, albeit
through his mother’s dreadful threats, fear of
adult sexuality and anxiety about the
consequences it produces.
What would
D&G have done with little Hans
instead?They
would have encouraged him to philosophize.This
is put in a slightly misleading way at
first—they would encourage Hans to become horse.Guattari
(probably), anxious to reintroduce social class
to Freud’s analyses, also suggests that they
would have allowed him to explore social
relations with the working class kids playing
around depot—naturally, rhizomatically. This sounds OK --
education through play -- but what does
rhizomatically mean? It is
not clear if Hans is going to follow rhizomes on
his own or whether his parents have to start up
the rhizome for him. Maybe his teachers should?
Here is a project for English primary schools –
get kids to construct and then pursue rhizomes.
What is a rhizome
exactly? That’s easy [I jest, of course] . First
we ‘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).You
can see what this might mean if you go back to
look at the file
on Deleuze's rejection of conventional thinking
and find the stuff on singularities and
multiplicities and how they are connected.
DeLanda (2002) reminds us that the way to go
from the usual geometries to the more abstract
topological kinds is to 'subtract dimensions',
moving from actual triangles,for example,
to more conceptual and more general
conceptualizations.
After we have got that, we simply have to
remember that 'the rhizome connects any point to
any other point…[It]…is reducible neither to the One and/or
the multiple…It is composed not of units but of
dimensions…It constitutes linear multiplicities
[my emphasis] with n dimensions having
neither subject nor object, which can be laid
out on a plane of consistency and from which the
One is always subtracted…The
rhizome is an antigenealogy…The
rhizome operates by variation, expansion,
conquest, capture, offshoots.Unlike
the graphic arts, drawing, or photography,
unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map
that must be produced…a map
that is always detachable, connectable,
irreversible, modifiable and has multiple
entryways and exits and its own lines of flight…The
rhizome is an acentred, and non hierarchical,
non signifying system without a General and
without an organizing memory or central
automaton, defined solely by a circulation of
states' (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 23 ). Got
it? Now write that up as a series of
lesson plans, and don't forget the
objectives/outcomes/targets or whatever they
call them these days.
Where do you actually
wander to, when you drift nomadically round your
rhizome? Overall
’the only escape route left to the child is a
becoming-animal [but this is] perceived as
shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of
Little Hans, truly a political option)’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 16).
Now any drama teachers
among you might be thrilled and encouraged by
this sort of remark, and would be planning to
allow a modern Hans to draw a horse, make a
puppet of a horse, dress up as a horse, canter
around the playground neighing like a horse,
enter school races with everyone dressed as a
horse, go and see lots of horses on neighbouring
(neigh-bouring) farms, because we don’t have too
many horses on the streets any more, and so on.You
would cheerfully interpret the rhizomatic path
that must be followed as just a flexible normal
one, depending on resources, staffing, and the
kid itself, even though there is FAR more to it
than that as you can see --its n
dimensions for a start. The snag is
that Deleuze and Guattari do not understand
‘becoming-horse’ as involving any of these
activities. Things
like horses are a ‘list of affects’ [for Hans]
–
eyes blinkered,
a
dark band round its mouth, drumming with its
feet etc. all have
an affectual significance (they impact on Hans
and make him want to do things, feel things or
think things). So becoming horse means not
playing at horse, not developing an analogy
with a horse, not empathising with a horse but
rather:
whether
Little Hans can endow his own elements with
the relations of movement and rest, the
affects, that would make it become horse,
forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet
unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’
nor the horse’s but that of the becoming–horse
for Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which
the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might
show something else, his feet, his legs, his
peepee maker, whatever? And in what way would
that ameliorate Hans’ problem, to what extent
would it open a way out that had been
previously blocked?...and when Hoffmanstahl,
[whoever he is], contemplates
a dying rat and ‘becomes a rat’ ... this is
not an analogy, or a product of the
imagination, but a composition of speeds and
affects on the plane of consistency; a
plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram [see
the earlier file],
a problem, a question-machine’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 284-5)
And later, discussing
so-called feral children:
Of
course, it is not a question of a real
production, as if the child "really" became an
animal; nor is it a question of a resemblance,
as if the child imitated animals that really
raised it; nor is it a question of a symbolic
metaphor, as if the autistic child that was
abandoned or lost merely became the "analogue"
of an animal. Scherer and Hocquenghem [whoever
they might be] are right to expose this false
reasoning, which is based on a culturalism or
moralism upholding the irreducibility of the
human order: Because the child has not been
transformed into an animal, it must only have
a metaphorical relation to it, induced
by the child’s illness or rejection. For their
own part, they appeal to an objective zone of
indetermination or uncertainty, ”something
shared or indiscernible” a proximity "that
makes it impossible to say where the
boundary between the human and animal lies”,
not only in the case of autistic children, but
for all children; it is as though, independent
of the evolution carrying them toward
adulthood, there were room in the child for
other becomings, "other contemporaneous
possibilities" that are not regressions but
creative involutions bearing witness to an
inhumanity immediately experienced in the
body as such”, unnatural nuptials
“outside the programmed body”. (2004: 301—2,
original emphases)
Keep
reading (well, skimming)...no-one will ask
questions afterwards...
An
example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your
organism enter into composition with something
else in such a way that the particles emitted
from the aggregate thus composed will be
canine as a function of the relation of
movement and rest, or of molecular proximity,
into which they enter. Clearly, this something
else can be quite varied, and be more or less
directly related to the animal in question: it
can be the animal’s natural food (dirt and
worms), or its exterior relations with other
animals (you can become-dog with cats, or
become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus
or prosthesis to which a person subjects the
animal (muzzle and reindeer, etc.), or
something that does not even have a
localizable relation to the animal in
question. For this last case, we have seen how
Slepian [?] bases his attempt to become-dog on
the idea of tying shoes to his hands using his
mouth-muzzle. Philippe Gavi [?] cites the
performances of Lolito [?], an eater of
bottles, earthenware, porcelains, iron, and
even bicycles, who declares:“I
consider myself half-animal, half-man. More
animal than man. I love animals, dogs
especially, I feel a bond with them. My teeth
have adapted; in fact, when I don’t eat glass
or iron, my jaw aches like a young dog’s that
craves to chew a bone.” If we interpret the
word "like" as a metaphor, or propose a
structural analogy of relations (man-iron :
dog-bone), we understand nothing of becoming.
The word ”like" is one of those words that
change drastically in meaning and
function when they are used in connection with
haecceities, when they are made into
expressions of becomings instead of signified
states or signifying relations. A dog may
exercise its jaw on iron, but when it does it
is using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito
eats iron it is totally different: he makes
his jaw enter into composition with the iron
in such a way that he himself becomes the jaw
of a molecular dog (2004: 303).
My gloss on all this
stuff
What we are discussing
here is what I described earlier as establishing
the relationship between singularities and
multiplicities. Hans must come to see himself as
a singularity or haecceity, not an individual
child in the bourgeois sense, but the product of
a number of forces acting upon him and emanating
from a multiplicity.Then
he must come to see a horse as a singularity
too.Both
are actualizations of the same multiplicity –
let’s stick with commonsense a bit and call it a
mammalian multiplicity, a diagram or combination
of forces and factors that condense out into
producing all the different but various mammals.Becoming
is a process of tracing the lines back to the
multiplicity, and then reversing the path into
another actualization. The lines are rhizomatic
– linear, endlessly interconnected, acentred and
all that.
Shifting metaphors, actualizations are
like islands in the ocean, plateaux [geddit?
There might be a thousand of them!] on top of a
whole subterranean mountain range that all
connects up underneath on the ocean floor.Becoming
is a matter of tracing those structures, diving
off your island, following the mountain range
down and then tracing it up again as it produces
another island.Between the two islands is the zone of
proximity. Getting
to that zone (also called a zone of
indiscerniblity) is the aim of philosophy, since
we can form concepts there, and also a personal
ambition for Deleuze and Guattari, apparently. Of
course, this is too limited and simple—we have
to think of islands or plateaux being produced
by a number of other factors on a number of
possible planes of consistency.
Incidentally, I said in
my notes of on Deleuze and Guattari (2004) that
I have heard of this sort of becoming
before—Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman
(written in 1940) where mysterious Irish
constables develop extraordinary resemblances to
their personal bicycles over time: some get
angular and upright, some like leaning up
against walls etc. What happens is that they
exchange their spare and less well-attached
electrons ('corpuscles' for Deleuze) with their
bicycle saddles as they ride them (the saddle is
a 'zone of proximity'?), and converge more and
more as they use their bikes. Their bikes,
similarly, take on some of the characteristics
of their riders -- they get lazy or slow or
whatever. Becoming bicycle! The
Wikipedia entry for O'Brien notes that the
mysterious police station also contains 'a box
from which anything you desire can be produced'
-- a Deleuzian abstract machine if ever I
saw one.
Anyway, Little Hans has
to become a philosopher, but, even more daunting
for the poor little sod, he has to become a
Deleuzian philosopher!I must
say I think this is every bit as cruel as
forcing the poor little devil into Freudian
categories.Here, he is a not a specimen on Dr
Freud’s table, but a ventriloquist’s dummy, with
the hands of Deleuze and Guattari up his back.
What a fate is in store for the lad – he is
going to have to read Difference
and Repetition. Primary teachers would do
best to get him started with a classical French
education.
On learning to swim
Other examples of Deleuze actually saying what
learning is, occur in Deleuze (2004). Swimming,
for example, involves a rather complex
learning process involving adjusting to the
movements and rhythms of the sea. In Deleuzian,
this becomes urging us to
‘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). This
sentence is preceded by this: ‘To learn is to
enter into the universal of the relations which
constitute the Idea, and into the corresponding
singularities’(2004: 204).The
example is Leibniz’s understanding of the sea as
a kind of system of relations between
particulars and singularities incarnated in the
movements of waves, but no doubt you spotted
that.
Time for PE teachers to rejoice and feel wanted!I do
not know if they still attempt to justify
learning to develop physical activity for the
body as a kind of applied mathematics—you know
the kind of thing, where catching a ball is
interpreted as making complex calculations of
trajectories based on an implicit understanding
of differential and integral calculus?Deleuze
seems to be in the same camp here.Of
course, we cannot take this too literally:
dolphins are superb swimmers, so does that mean
they are also superb philosophers with a deep
grasp of Leibniz?Is there a difference between the way in
which human beings explicitly understand the
world in terms of formalizations like
mathematics or not?Deleuze (and
Delanda) seem so keen to develop an all purpose
explanation of reality, that they acknowledge,
but only barely, the massive difference between
human beings and everything else, the
development of language and consciousness.Deleuze
in particular has a really silly way of denying
human specificity by arguing that even inanimate
objects ‘express’ themselves, and it would be
easy to miss the gigantic generality behind that
notion—roughly, inanimate objects simply appear
in a particular form: to imply that that is
somehow the same thing as human beings writing,
reading and calculating is pretty misleading.
No doubt, even Deleuze would argue that you need
some kind of human thinking to really follow up
the mathematical implications of learning to
swim.You
have to swim like a mathematician or a
philosopher in order to see these all important
relations between multiplicities and
singularities again. I swam quite a bit
in my youth and never got to Leibniz! We
get closer to this idea by looking at more
famous quotations from
Difference and Repetition.
For example, Deleuze tells us that proper
learning involves not just performing an action
when you see the representation (see the sea,
swim in it), but seeing the relation between a
sign and response, not repetition of the same,
but ‘an encounter with the Other’ (2004: 25). For him, signs
are necessarily heterogeneous, in terms of their
relation to the object that bears them, their
internal characteristics which refer to an idea,
and to their reception, since a response does
not resemble the sign. That is why you have to
really think about what signs might mean at
first and throughout, even though we are not
always aware of this sort of interpretation.
‘That is why it is so difficult to say how
someone learns: there is an innate or acquired
practical familiarity with signs ’ 2004: (25-6).
Again, this is not celebrating 'innate'
knowledge of the kind gained in 'communities of
practice' or anything -- it is a difficulty in
the way of developing proper philosophical
learning.
This is why we don’t learn by simply being told
to do something, but by doing things with
someone, and learning how to deal with
heterogeneous signs rather than simple gestures
to be imitated -- not in a community of people
who all think the same, but in a heterogeneous
group.Learning
is not just sensory motor, so it is not like
learning the movements of a skilled tailor.Combining
[or matching] points of your body with
those of an external environment involves the
Other, something different, a difference
which has to be preserved, even though
activities might be repeated.‘To
learn is indeed to constitute the space of an
encounter with signs, in which the distinctive
points renew themselves in each other, and
repetition takes shape while disguising itself’
(2004: 26).
It is the encounter with the Other that is
repeated in proper learning, although normal
people do not see it that way, of course. Signs
allude to powers behind words, gestures,
characters, and objects like waves, and to
repetition as real movement not abstract
movements as in representation.
Bogue, in an excellent discussion which also
discusses cinema (in Semetsky 2008), points out
that this extends to reading great literature as
well.Indeed,
he says, this notion of encountering and
learning to read signs emerges as a major theme
in Proust, according to Deleuze’s book on
Proust.So,
at this point, let’s hear it for teachers of
literature (as long as they are suitably
philosophical, of course)! Get primary kids
started on Proust!
What is required is ‘an essential apprenticeship
or process of learning’. ‘Learning is the
appropriate name for the subjective acts carried
out when one is confronted with the objecticity
of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge
designates only the generality of concepts or
the calm possession of a rule enabling
solutions’ (2004:204). Incidentally, I
think 'Idea',with a capital 'I' means a
(mental or linguistic) image of the
multplicity - -Deleuze also says it is the
same as a concept. You can only go so
far in maths by learning formulae. Surface
learning is not as permanent as deep learning.
Neither is developed just by play, unmotivated
‘doing’, but by a good deal of philosophizing
while you do.
Even advanced mathematicians can be fooled into
thinking their tried and tested formulae work
every time. To précis Deleuze on this,
mathematical solutions really show us only some
aspects of problems, and problems express [! see
above] themselves in a limited way in the
mathematical domain.Generalizing,
we can say that each problem is duplicated in a
particular symbolic field, like mathematics, but
also appears in physical, biological, psychical
and sociological fields, as originating from the
same multiplicity. In one particular
development, associated with the mathematician
Abel (me neither) this led to a revolution in
thinking about problems and solutions.Other
mathematicians got to the same idea, partly by
specifying ‘adjunct fields’, which seems to be
an ingenious idea to develop possible
substitutions for particular fields, developing
a whole range of partial solutions or linked
groups of solutions: to mathematicians, this
shows how problems are more general than the
usual solutions indicate, indeed, that problems
'condition' solutions (2004: 228). Apparently,
it also showed that the usual solutions only
worked for particular groups of manifestations
of the problem, and here were reciprocal as well
as complete determinations.I am
no mathematician, but even I could see that this
breaks the conventional circle between solutions
and problems. The approach also breaks the
master-pupil relation, where pupils had to
discover solutions in terms defined by masters
who provided the necessary examples, conditions
and ‘adjunctions’: instead it points to unknown
elements of the problem as objective parts of
it, which need to be investigated collectively.
It is worth quoting the context since the last
sentence alone has been taken as some sort of
licence for a general pupil-based,
problem-solving approach to everything and by
all pupils (for example by Semetsky 2006: 76). It is
clear that Deleuze takes ‘problems’ and
solving them to be pretty advanced issues,
arising here in higher mathematics, and more
generally after a great deal of philosophizing.
Going for solutions involves the conventional
thinking that is to be rejected as we saw.
We are far from the ‘stage-managed discovery’ of
routine problems in schools, where pupils have
to guess what teacher is thinking. At the same
time, it raises an intriguing possibility for
pedagogy -- genuine,complex problems can
genuinely be investigated collectively, if only
teachers will relinquish control and stop
setting problems to which they already know the
answers. I even have a little experience of
trying this myself when teaching sociology of
leisure --when discussing football fans'
experiences, for example, the students really
were in a better position to explore issues than
I was. I soon got my own back when asking them
for their views on figurational analyses, though
-- the silly sods could only try to guess what I
was thinking there, as usual!
Watching films
So far, we have marshalled Deleuze to make
powerful arguments for the inclusion of
philosophical swimming, philosophical studies of
literature and philosophical studies of
mathematics.These are to be pursued instead of
efforts to attain mere knowledge, in the form of
pursuing conventional solutions using
conventional approaches.There
is one more recommendation probably destined to
finally raise the hackles of traditionalists
more than anything: Deleuze says we can learn an
awful lot from watching films. What we learn for
Deleuze is to philosophize, of course, but in a
powerfully motivating way. Cinema alone can provide viewers
with a striking combination of images in both
senses of the word – pictures and intuitions;
‘it is neither figurative nor abstract’
(Deleuze 1989: 156).Images
make us feel as well as see and hear, and
‘produce [in visual forms] material from the
outside which becomes unthinkable [in the
usual ways]’ (Deleuze 1989: 178).
The background might
need sketching in again.Deleuze
has produced two large and extremely detailed
books on cinema (inevitably, I have some online
notes on them -- see references below ). By the way, the
dates of publication in English make it seem
that Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before he
wrote Cinema 1! The
approach is quite different from the usual ones
found in British Media studies.I
won’t dwell on this, but Deleuze’s argument is
that the usual approach involves structural
linguistics, studies of signs and how they link
with other signs, and how they connect
together in codes and narratives and so on.Deleuze’s
critique is really quite simple—these approaches
deal with static images and their ability to
signify and connect.The
main point about cinema, of course, is that it
uses moving images. For the first time,
we can explore movement philosophically.
As a result, we need to think about
understanding cinema as offering quite different
sorts of signs, and Deleuze proposes his own
categorization, based on the work of the
American theorist CS Peirce. Deleuze also suggests that cinema
addresses the unconscious primarily, another
reason for thinking that cinema presents signs
which work outside of normal language and
offer a ‘pre-verbal intelligible content (pure
semiotics) whilst semiology of a linguistic
inspiration abolishes the image and tends to
dispense with the sign’ (Deleuze 1992: ix).
This is not the place
to get technical, but the argument here is that
cinema has also developed quite new ways of
showing us how to think about reality.We can
see this even in early cinema, where the camera
was able to show things that no human eyes could
perceive—slow motion, time lapse, unusual shots
like crane shots and close ups and, later, deep
field shots.The great auteurs of early cinema were
already making films that offered a kind of
philosophy, in other words.Deleuze
singles out for particular praise Orson Welles,
and films like Citizen Kane.I have
a more detailed summary of his comments in the
online notes, but briefly, Welles shows an
interesting conception of time in the film, one
that is like the work of Bergson (a philosopher
much admired by Deleuze).For
Welles, time consists of a series of layers, all
equally real, but all focused differently by the
particular characters who are required to give
their memories of Kane. Deleuze also admires the
deep focus shots which illustrate context better
than ever before (see clips below) .
For more modern cinema, defined, roughly, as
developing in Europe post War, even more
conventions were abandoned.We
have got used to these conventions, where we see
a character in his childhood, follow him through
the usual journeys through school and work where
he meets pretty stock characters, and see him at
the end of his life: all the dialogue is neatly
tailored and audible, the scenes are familiar,
the camera just follows the characters and so
on.Everything
is pretty recognisable, including the emotional
subtext, and if anything is unclear, we can rely
on one of the characters explaining it to us,
sometimes in the guise of explaining it to
another character.Everything changes in experimental
cinema. Modern cinema develops ‘a camera
consciousness which would no longer be defined
by the [familiar human] movements it is able
to follow, but by the mental connections it is
able to enter into…Questioning,
responding,
objecting, provoking…Hypothesising,
experimenting’ (Deleuze 1989: 23).
Again, we have to be brief, but there is
particular admiration for French avant-garde
film.At
first blush, these look completely disruptive,
lacking proper narratives and replacing them
with scenes or episodes; abandoning conventional
sound and replacing it with a soundtrack that
might include readers off screen quoting from
famous texts, music, or disruptive noises. You can
see a short clip of one of my favourites here
(Godard’s Six Fois Deux, 1976 ) .
Bogue also recommends Ici et
Ailleurs (1976) ( see references) .
Deleuze argues that these images and sounds have
broken with the idea of conventional links
altogether.
I am not sure what your
reaction was if you looked at this, but when I
have shown this sort of thing to students, their
reaction has been bafflement, rejection,
boredom. The reactions
could be predicted from Bourdieu’s findings
that visual material produced from an ‘pure’
aesthetic, when exposed to persons sharing a
‘popular ‘one, produces ‘confusion, sometimes
almost a sort of panic mingled with revolt…
[The works are] seen as a sort of aggression,
an affront to common sense and sensible
people.’ (Bourdieu 1986: 33). I've
tried to explain to my students that the idea is
that we should rethink our conventional
assumptions, and try to work out for ourselves
how these 'irrational cuts' between images or
between images and sound might be seen as a
critique of conventional cinema (roughly, that
conventional cinema simply reproduces common
sense or ideology, and gets us to confirm it).For
Deleuze, there is a further challenge—how might
these fractured representations be linked
differently?This is where cinema has a pedagogic
function for Deleuze—it criticizes convention
and invites further critical and radical
thought.This
is easiest perhaps in cinema inspired by marxism
as in the Godard clip which I have linked to
above: we get to see how capitalism dominates
our entire lives, and how we might start to
think this as a way of reconnecting isolated
experiences occurring at work in homes, when we
shop, and so on.
In short, we are back to our familiar
discovery—the point is to philosophize, and,
indeed, to philosophize along with Bergson and
Deleuze.Deleuze
is quite optimistic in thinking that cinema will
force us to think: ‘It is as if cinema were
telling us: with me... you can’t escape the
shock which arouses the thinker in you’
(1989: 157).Here,
he is surely taking his own experiences as
universal ones.I am sure that he came out of modern
cinema thinking something like 'How interesting!Citizen
Kane is clearly an illustration of
Bergson’s image of duration as a cone!'.I am
equally sure that lots of other people came out
thinking something like 'What a shame!That
nice little lad playing with the sledge turned
into that awful tyrannical monster, corrupted by
wealth and power, when all he wanted to do was
get back to that game with his sledge!Still,
that just goes to show—maybe I am right to enjoy
myself rather than attempting to become a
capitalist'.
We return to Bourdieu to get sociological
about this. Avant-gardism
in France in the 1970s and 80s involved a
clear rejection of the ‘popular aesthetic’
(which values emotional involvement, immediate
participation, and connections with everyday
life), but did not share all the
characteristics of the conventional ‘pure’ or
‘high’ version (which values emotional
distance and a technical interest in form
rather than content). Instead:
taste for the avant-garde defined
itself in a quasi-negative way, as the sum of
the refusals of all socially recognised
tastes, refusal of the middle of the road
taste…and
especially…[that of] the petty bourgeoisie. [And
even] the teachers’ ‘pedantic taste’, which
though opposed to bourgeois taste is, in the
eyes of the artists merely a variant of it,
disdained for its heavy, pettifogging,
passive, sterile didacticism, it’s ‘spirit of
seriousness’ and most of all for its prudence
and backwardness (Bourdieu
1986: 294).
These anti-bourgeois aspects
appealed even to some in the dominated
classes, and the anti-didactic sentiments
especially might possibly explain some of the
appeal of Deleuze’s written style to some
modern educational radicals.
While we are here,
Deleuze also flirts with an idea that was once
fashionable in education—brains can be tapped
into directly to encourage a kind of
neurological learning. Lots of people saw cinema
as offering a particularly powerful form of
persuasion.The audience sat there in the dark,
focusing on the bright dominating screen, they
were not able to talk to their fellows, they
developed a kind of trance-like stance towards
what they were seeing and hearing. Incidentally,
this does not apply to watching television, but
there are some truly weak books suggesting we
can just apply film theory to the TV audience.The
Deleuzian version suggests that images on the
screens are somehow connected directly to our
brains, bypassing conscious thought and
language. Deleuze thinks that cinema
affects us particularly powerfully and
machinically, ‘communicating vibrations to the
cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral
system directly’ (Deleuze 1989: 156). He is very
keen on this notion of 'vibrations' as
mysterious forces linking things together.
Deleuze invites further controversy by
insisting brains are stratified: ‘Bad cinema
always travels through circuits created by the
lower brain: violence and sexuality in what is
represented – a mix of gratuitous cruelty and
organized ineptitude’ (Deleuze 2000: 366).
It
is a rather undeveloped argument, to put it
mildly, and clearly invites the elitist view
that philosophers' brains are somehow better
than those of ordinary people.
Anyway, a final tip for those wishing to apply
Deleuze to education - lay in a stock of French
avant-garde films, but make sure your students
are locked in to watch them. Weed out the ones
with too much 'lower brain' (after an MRI scan?)
and let them watch The Only Way is Essex instead.
References
Bourdieu, P. 1986. Distinction: A social
critique of the judgement of taste.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ( no notes
yet -- I'm working on it). Delanda,
M.(2002) Intensive
Science and Virtual Philosophy,
London: Continuum
(notes
here)
Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2 --
the time-image, London: The Athlone Press.
(online notes here)
Deleuze, G. ( 1992) Cinema
1: The Movement Image, London: The Athlone
Press.(online notes here)
Deleuze, G.(2000)
‘The Brain Is The Screen: An Interview with
Gilles Deleuze’, in Flaxman, G. (ed).The Brain
is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of
Cinema, London: University of Minnesota
Press: 365--76. (online notes here)
Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze,
Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers. (no notes)
Semetsky, I. (ed.) (2008). Nomadic
Education. Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and
Guattari, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. ( no
notes)
Films
Citizen Kane. Directed by
Orson Welles. USA, Clips
available showing deep focus techniques
.1941