Notes on
Zembylas, M. (2007) 'Risks and pleasures:
a Deleuzeo-Guattarian pedagogy of desire in
education'. British Educational
Research Journal 33 (3): 331-347.
Dave Harris
A pedagogy of desire will release the creative
forces of desire and help students become
'subjects who subvert normalized representations
and significations and find access to a radical
self'(331) [becoming a subject? An
underlying radical self?]
Joy is immanent to desire, say our heroes, a deep
joy that distributes pleasures. Few
pedagogues would deny that desire prompts teaching
and learning. Pedagogies always involve
seduction or coercion, meaning that desire is
present and invisible. Risks are involved as
well as pleasures, within the normal boundaries.
Desire produces and seduces imaginations, and
clearly can become a productive force. Is
not just the old form of desire, that needs to be
repressed. We now know that affect is not
the opposite of reason, and that desire pervades
pedagogical relations. Most of this work is
drawn from Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
[of course]. We can learn a lot, especially
if we abandon the notion that lack is central to
desire and the subject. Seeing desire as
immanent helps us see affects as not just feelings
but 'immanent becomings' (332), occupying a entire
landscape of becoming, where 'surfaces and flows
of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring
ontology'. This means that a pedagogy of
desire can be a transformative practice. [So
Deleuze and Guattari are being used to ground
transformative practice in the usual way].
Pedagogy is to be defined broadly as a whole
'relational encounter'. These encounters
offer risks and pleasures. A pedagogy of
desire should release pleasure and the power of
desire, leading to subversive subjects and radical
selves as above. In this way, affect becomes
a productive political force creating new
assemblages of bodies.
All pedagogical relations are embedded in desire,
but not the 'lay understanding of desire as
corporeal only' or as about sex. It invites
exploration with both pleasures and risks.
Risks include situations where teachers and
students seduce each other and 'capture each
other's desire' (333), where desire leads to
persuasion as a form of power. But there is
always resistance, and desire to learn does not
always mean desiring just what the other person
offers: we can desire something omitted by
education altogether, or we can limit desires by
sticking to 'cherished beliefs'. However,
desire does disturb normality and can challenge
events or boundaries, and in the process expose
their fragility. Feminists in particular
have worked to reclaim this notion of desire
breaking with psychoanalysis or the usual forms of
eroticization. Feminists like Grosz in
particular, see that discourses of desire and
identity are supported by power relations.
[Yet this is ordinary contingent desire].
This is useful for deconstructing more repressive
psychoanalytic and pedagogical models based on
lack or longing. Desire as relational is 'an
affirmation of one's everyday practices and
relationships'[the old phantasy that every day
life is revolutionary as in Dialogues? It
depends whose every day practices we are
considering?]. We need to reclaim it as
legitimate in the classroom even though we will
have 'to affirm the duplicity of pedagogical
desire' as involving risk and uncertainty as well
as pleasure [defined as the ability to subvert
existing notions]. Other writers have seen desire
as inviting students to become more complex and to
address the improbable. There might even
be 'a praxis of desire as a positive source
of transformation'.
Deleuze and Guattari describe desire as a praxis
or a power of becoming and this might lead to a
pedagogy of desire, extending actual pedagogical
relations, interrogating assumptions, creating new
'landscapes of possibility for political
resistance and transformation' by breaking with
'repressive discourses' [voluntarism and idealism
again. We will achieve the same results
without pedagogy as Deleuze and Guattari achieved
after years of philosophical study and political
commitment?].
Lacan stressed the importance of the symbolic
order in the emergence of the self, with its
inevitable otherness, loss or absence as we enter
a language. Desire becomes a drive for
completeness, but only through the existing social
and linguistic structures. Even phantasy is
'bound up in the play of language' (335) [relies
on some rather simplistic commentaries
here]. Deleuze and Guattari go beyond Lacan
to conceive of desire not as a drive or a
lack. They criticize conventional notions of
desire in particular by saying that desire can
only produce objects in '"psychic reality"',
denying the materiality of desire. There
analysis is 'socio - political', since desire
produces reality as well as phantasy: it produces
the real [the quotations also imply that subjects
are constructions, dissolved by considering desire
adequately]. Desire is productive autonomous
and affirmative that shapes the social. This
also 'resists social meanings and ideology' (336)
which rejects the Marxist notion that desire
belongs to ideology. Desire flows and 'is
always becoming'[it is becoming or it drives it? ]
This means we can analyze social institutions in
terms of 'networks of power and circuits of
desire'[so we've only added desire to the usual
post structuralist account]. Social
institutions repress desire and colonize it, and
productive desire is necessarily 'at odds' with
these realities. Micro politics of desire
arises when 'individuals overcome repressive
subjectivities' and want 'to become desiring
"nomads" in a constant process of becoming and
transformation', an assemblage of relations
of movement and rest, traversed by passions and
desires. The assemblage includes capacities
to affect and be affected, which drives the
capacity to act, to 'create new modes of
subjectivation that escaped the forms of fixed
identity'. People produce their own
existence rather than discover it.
There are desiring machines [at last], 'anything
in which there is a flow… that either leaves
or enters a structure'. Machines produce,
'as a process of continuous becoming', and a
collection of various machines constitute our
bodies. Desire 'ought to be left alone to
realize itself ', say Best and Kellner. The
body without organs refers to 'any organized
structure'(337), and, like desiring machines
'denote two different states of the same thing;
that is, they are aspects of the production system
which controls flows'[bit of a gloss here!].
Some feminists like the idea, including Grosz [who
can seem a bit more critical than this —see her,
Braidotti and Ahmed and other contributions and
debates here and here].
Desire can be seen as a series of practices that
produce, including making machines. It is an
act of creation. The BWO is useful for
reconceiving the female body in nondualist terms,
and sees the body as 'the site of free flowing
desire and creativity close single quote.
Schizophrenic subjects resist categorization and
essentialism for Braidotti.
Affect and desire a conceived in terms of
'movements relations and encounters'[drawing on
the work on Spinoza], and this produces 'lines of
resistance by making an assemblage of bodies upon
which desire is experienced'. This clearly
shows the political implications. Freedom is
a power to become active and engage in 'selecting
one's relations with others' [highly dubious and
elitist -- fair representation of Deleuze's own
practice, but not Guattari's? We should make
school voluntary? ]. Desire breaks
confinement in particular bodies and this will
'constitute the potentiality of the subject to
resist'[back to conventional subjects, and
presumably conventional forms of resistance as
well]. The point would be to 'constitute new
assemblages of bodies, risks and pleasures'.
[A summary of the position rounds this off with
slightly better terminology - affect is opposed to
feeling, we are looking at events not things or
persons, fields of immanence are defined by
'intensity, multiplicity and flux'. This
will of course introduce immediately the problem
of 'applying' these philosophical terms. We can
anticipate -- it will be used critically. As
usual, Kantian critique will be allowed to slide
into Hegelian critique, to use Buber's terms --
philosophy will be used to show that current
conceptualizations are inadequate and ignore the
terms of their own emergence, but this will then
be turned only against opposing positions ].
Desire is the plane of immanence for pedagogy [but
then] 'without desire, there is no pedagogy'
(338). Desire produces pedagogy, so pedagogy
is productive. A pedagogy of desire should
be about 'the relation between subject and objects
and artefacts' [aimed at the philosophical
clarification of virtual reality?]. It is
not personal but 'an ontological and
epistemological process of becoming'. Desire
does produce 'a surface of learning and teaching
events'. Desire possesses transformative
power.
It would help us see that pedagogy is not based on
lack, and nor are the guided pursuit of
enlightenment by critical pedagogy, aimed at
exposing the arbitrary. [This has been his
position up to now though?]. There are
larger forces of production at work, and desire as
lack is historically specific, an instance.
All pedagogies [reify] 'unless the process of
becoming is really valued'[voluntarism
again]. Deleuze and Guattari go beyond
Foucault here, not just showing that knowledge is
inextricably linked to power, and the pedagogy is
necessarily selective, but to try and explain this
by referring to 'forces and intensities'.
The intent is not to deconstruct, but to recognise
the effects of these forces and intensities and
develop knowledge of them, to produce
[philosophers] 'radical subjects who deploy
pleasures and take risks'.
Tension between pleasure and risk in pedagogy is
parent in current educational discourses about
knowledge and teachers and students, as in the
'discourses on emotion management and emotional
intelligence' (339) [I wondered when we would get
to them]. These divide the rational and the
emotional, reproduce power hierarchies and
stereotypes. Emotions are simply seen as
disruptive and external, and they contaminate
judgment and reason. They lead to breakdown
of the self, so they require effective emotion
management to control the risks. The concept
of emotional intelligence is used to develop a new
morality based on the measurement of new skills
and efficiency to deal with affect [or
emotions?]. This is increasingly seen as
something to do with brains. It is clearly
an application of the disciplinary technology of
schooling. This is what lies behind popular
calls to develop emotional literacy skills.
A proper pedagogy of desire would have a
completely different 'ontological and ethical
basis', aimed at understanding knowledge and
desire and their proper connection. Desire
would be seen as a productive force, producing
creative imaginative agents. Naturally,
'dialogue and criticality are vital' (340).
Desire is always movement and becoming. This
will help us resist the forces of commodification
as in emotion management, and oppose
instrumentalism in favour of 'joy, pleasure,
happiness and transgression' aiming to produce
'visionaries, not bureaucrats' [this bloke
Pignatelli does a lot of work here].
It would help us contest voyeurism and posturing
found in psychoanalytic pedagogies. We would
have to respond to the desires of others in ' a
new ethical and political discourse', without
being rigid, and while recognizing the complexity
of the terrain of desire. We need to develop
'the cultivation of ethics through
aesthetics'[presumably, the ethics of joy
again]. We would not be interested in a set
of best teaching practices or appropriate
skills. 'Such a pedagogy neither privileges
the individual nor ignores it' [Deleuze heavily
criticized the notion, of course]. It would
provide us with different strategies to analyse
and work through power relations, no longer 'in a
dialectic context' but by exploring various
social, aesthetic and political manifestations and
connections to others. Certain risks will be
unavoidable, and we should respond so as 'not to
repress them, but wonder' (341) in what directions
they lead, whether desires really are my own, what
new assemblages of bodies and pleasures might be
possible, how we might connect and synthesise
'functions with other bodies and artefacts'.
[Or we could just decide we wanted to be perfect
and lovable nice people, without risking our
salaries as educational professional, of course]
Current educational discourses and practices
produce strange requirements like the need for
'teachers to love students in new and precise
ways' that will still be manageable and produce
predictable learning outcomes. These are
really still authoritarian, however, 'because they
destroy desire and passion'. Radical
possibilities are raised by understanding pedagogy
instead as 'a radical and erotic field of bodies,
utterances, spaces and texts'. The pedagogy
of desire would provide for this. However,
generally pedagogy has ignored the body or seen it
as the source of problematic behaviours like
sexual ones. Instead we need to recognize
the body as an agent producing other bodies which
can transform themselves. We're talking here
about 'the expressive aspects of learning'.
One dancer explains that desire for a ballet is
connected to eros and the teacher's body, so that
pedagogy 'was able to create an erotic encounter
between herself and the teacher' (342). A
suitable curriculum would help students develop
'sensory intimacy with their world' [O'Loughlin
does a lot of work here] to express desires and
emotions of selves and others.
Teachers will engage in enactment. They will
not understand themselves as having a mission to
promote resistance or to pursue some particular
psychoanalytic stance. Too often this leads
to self congratulation or self righteousness [Ellsworth
is cited here, and Giroux is named. Britzman is
one of those criticized for privileging a
particular psychoanalytic approach which
emphasizes the unconscious and the symbolic
order]. Instead, there is a need to rehearse
and enact erotic attitudes, mobilize the desire to
teach and learn, allow 'eros, passion and
knowledge' to converge, remembering that eros
relates to the 'general overflowing passionate
desire that motivates us'. Teachers should
engage, in ways that include 'the mutual pleasure
of the gaze', and develop a more ambiguous and
complex relationship with students, subverting the
usual fixed roles of teacher and student.
A pedagogy of desire does not offer a utopian
vision of the future, but recommends actual
enactment. One example from his own teaching
involves inviting students to 'leave the familiar
stories of learned habits, beliefs and thoughts so
that we can begin together to analyze how a
selective vision and emotional/bodily attention
constitute particular subjectivities'(343), to
restore the role of emotion and bodily movements
[I bet they love it]. Once we see that
conventional relations are not 'absolutely
determining', we can provide ourselves with new
spaces to reconstitute our relations, including
the creation of new nurturing and inspiring
pedagogies. We cannot prescribe anything
here, because we know that 'even radical
trajectories often become systematised'.
Specific forms need to be constructed in each
case, to avoid providing 'another normalising
discourse' instead of opting for the new and the
inspirational. Students will soon see the
potentials, once they experience the pleasures.
Certain practices might still be identified.
Learning to love critical questions is one;
sharing 'the force of wondering in learning';
providing multiple opportunities 'to enact
passionate and embodied forms of teaching and
learning'. These are already used in
critical pedagogy, but we need to reconceptualize
them and understand motivations differently.
This will require effort and perseverance.
Experience suggests that there are many political
implications, requiring constant negotiation of
resistances and habit - many people are simply
'comfortable with current pedagogical
practices'[no doubt as a form of
misrecognition]. We must not adopt fixed
postures but open spaces.
The theory of desire in Deleuze and Guattari 'is
less restrictive than that of other pedagogies
'[what a lame conclusion!]. They stressed
active flow, a becoming, and the body, they
suggest practices that involve connections and the
productivity of desire, which, luckily 'creative
teachers or students have in abundance'[and the
rest of you conservatives and comfort seekers can
fuck off]. They point to something that has
not come yet, their vision of a full becoming
involving animals and plants and indiscernbility,
reconfiguring our singular points to embrace the
unknown. Education should nurture this
productive desire to produce new kinds of
difference, and new desires. This is endless
and challenging. Deleuze and Guattari can
inspire us. They can ground political
analysis away from what is merely oppositional, or
the basis of a rival claim for domination.
We need to step outside traditional assumptions
'and strive to create landscapes of becoming'
(345), not just deconstructing assumptions, but
exploring risk and pleasure, 'learning to modify
and be modified by the world'.
A note admires Laclau and Mouffe on the
articulation of subjectivity in discourses, which
means that subjectivity is always contested.
They also have a similar political project to
D&G in rejecting essentialism.
References include:
Best, S and Kellner, D (1991) Postmodern
theory: critical interrogations. New
York: Guilford Press.
O'Loughin, M (1998) 'Paying attention to bodies in
education: theoretical resources and practical
suggestions'. Educational Philosophy and
Theory 30: 275-297
Pignatelli, F (1999) 'Education and the subject of
desire'. Review of
Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 20:
337-352.
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