Bon mots for bad thoughts

Abstract

This article questions how the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has been received and connected to the field of curriculum theory. In an effort to reconnect Deleuze-thought to its political force, this essay commences a series of arguments pertaining to the ways in which the revolutionary thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have been reterritorialized in all-too-conservative ways. Recommencing a connection to the political activism and radical psychoanalysis of Guattari, this essay aims to create a renewed image of Deleuze-thought for curriculum workers and arts-based theorists invested in rethinking the problems of representation to which much educational thought remains fundamentally committed.

Keywords:

• curriculum theory
• arts-based research
• Deleuzian philosophy
• Guattarian psychoanalysis

Notes

1. Conjoined to the mobilization of the rhizome as an image of complication and plurality persists a more insidious fidelity to the logic of neo-liberalism. That is, the potential of the rhizome to desediment and send territories into flight bears marked similarity to the deterritorializing powers of neo-liberalism, the machinery of which functions precisely by decoding and capturing social flows.

2. In Deleuzeguattarian terms, the rhizome becomes a way of thinking a decentered multiplicity without a centre of emanation or point of representational reference. In this way, the rhizome becomes a productive way of thinking about the composition of packs, swarms and fuzzy machined collectives. The schizo-subjectivity composed by Deleuze and Guattari renders the contemporary conflation of the rhizome with modes of autobiographical research dubious. Insofar as autobiography is preoccupied with the interpretation and representation of the subject, it counteracts the anti-hermeneutic, non-genealogical and asignifying impulses of rhizomatic thought.

3. As it is conceptualized in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the rhizome is not simply an image of liberation. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize the rhizome in a manner that is already populated by potentials for stratification. While heterodox elements might very well be connected ‘rhizomatically’, as in the case of minoritarian groups assembling in collective protest, this does not mean that they will not reconstitute their enunciation upon some microfascism or tyrannical image of life. In Deleuzeguattarian terms, the rhizome is populated by lines of flight (deterritorialization) as well as lines of ‘territorialization’ by which flows become halted, ordered, and attributed. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘there exists tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome’ (p. 15). Neither the rhizome (the potential for things to deterritorialize and enter into new assemblages) or the root-tree (the stratification of things into orders, taxonomies, or structures) is primary.

4. In some curriculum circles, hybridic thought conserves the idea of originary elements prior to mixing and further, the ostensibly uncontaminated status of these generative sources. It is in this vein that hybridic thought only minimally deviates from arborescent schemas and dialectical thinking, remaining wed to structural points of origin rather than facilitating a transversal exchange between such points.

5. In response to critic Michael Cressole (Deleuze, 1977), Deleuze comments specifically on Foucault's intent to raise the ire of the philosophical community.

6. Deleuze uses the term perplexion to signify the virtual state of ideas, hence bypassing the connotation of hesitation associated with the term ‘problem’.

7. As Guattari articulates, ‘Logical operations are phyiscal operations too’ (cited in Buchanan, 1999, p. 6).

8. A Deleuze and Parnet (2007) detail, schools fall easily into arborescence through the production of manifestos, excommunications, official representatives, and bosses.

9. This important formulation was coined by Guattari in the late 1960s as a reformulation of the generic term ‘globalization’ and its obfuscation of emerging transnational economics specific to that period.

10. Overturning the institutionally alienated individual and the asymmetrical teacher student dyad, Oury would recuperate Freinet's use of a school journal (a collective correspondence within and between schools), a local printery (owned by students for the collective production and dissemination of texts), and an emphasis on cooperative council (the refining-machine of group organization led by the students themselves).

11. Freinet's first school, opened in 1935, was not organized around lessons, but rather, the mediating forces of the school printery and cooperative council.