Towards socially just pedagogies: Deleuzoguattarian critical disability studies

Abstract

Socially just pedagogies call for sensitivity to politics and culture. In this paper I will uncover some key challenges in relation to working pedagogically with disabled people through the exploration of a critical disability studies perspective. First, I will unpack some of the assumptions that underpin educational understandings of ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’, suggesting that we need to engage more willingly with politicized and socially constructed ideas in relation to these phenomena. Second, I will raise questions about the current aims of pedagogy in relation to the market and the autonomous learner. In light of the market—and the subject it produces—I will argue that ‘disability and ‘impairment’ demand critical researchers to think more creatively about setting the conditions for experimenting with socially just pedagogies. Third, with this experimentation in mind, I will draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to think of socially just pedagogies in terms of rhizomes (n – 1); productive models of desire and planes of immanence. These concepts construct pedagogies as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’—opening up resistant spaces and potential territories of social justice—all of them uncertain.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their feedback. I have also really appreciated the opportunity to share and debate D&G with a number of colleagues, including Ann Marie Bathmaker, Phil Bayliss, David Hyatt, Jennifer Lavia, Rebecca Lawthom, Sandra Joy Kemp, Griet Roets, Jon Scaife, Margrit Shildrick and Melanie Walker. Thanks also to participants at the University of Sheffield, School of Education, ‘Pedagogies, Policies and Professionalism’ seminar series in which a version of this paper was presented.

Notes

1. In Britain, ‘statementing’ is the phrase used to describe the process where a Local Education Authority (LEA) conducts a statutory assessment of a child's special educational needs (SEN) with the intention of making and maintaining a statement of SEN. Many children statemented with SEN have their needs met in mainstream schools, with specialist interventions, or attend segregated special schools.

2. As far back as 1976, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation proposed the following definitions: ‘impairment’, lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb organism or mechanism of the body; and ‘disability’, the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from mainstream social activities (UPIAS, 1976, pp. 3–4).

3. Whilst beyond the scope of this paper, a critique of the global market and its relationship with disabled learners is clearly important. Mok (2003) notes that some observers view the global economy as being dominated by uncontrollable global forces in which nation states are structurally constrained and therefore the capacity of modern states eventually declines. Alternatively, other scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which modern states tactically make use of the globalization discourse to justify their own political agendas or legitimise their inaction (Mok, 2003, p. 201). The recent expansion of the Indian private healthcare system to British ‘health tourists’ clearly reflects one such response (BBC News 24, 8 May 2006).

4. Similar visions of personhood have been articulated in recent British educational and social policy. As Billington (2006) notes, the present government's ‘Every Child Matters: Change for Children’ programme is a new approach to the well‐being of children and young people from birth to age 19. The government's aim is for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, to have the support they need to: be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; and make a positive contribution and achieve economic well‐being. The latter aim again illuminates the child as entrepreneur.

5. Disabled students create conditions for rethinking socially just pedagogies, though this should not be a surprise; ‘Theory seldom springs forth from nothing but is more often produced in response to problems of everyday living’ (St Pierre, 2004, p. 293).

6. In a devastating attack on North American educational research, St Pierre (2004, p. 286) has argued: ‘We are in desperate need of new concepts, Deleuzian or otherwise, in this new educational environment that privileges a single positivist research model with its transcendent rationality and objectivity … we seem to be in a time warp, when the overcoding machine of state science … once again controls education’.

7. Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on experimentation and metaphor has led Massumi (1992, p. 8) ‐ the translator of A Thousand Plateaus ‐ to ask: ‘Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body’.

8. Gregoriou (2004, p. 234) proclaims: ‘the tragic paradox is that the rhizome has found a hospitable niche in pedagogical discourse only as a metaphor for de‐centred and non‐hierarchical systems of organisation’ (added emphases).

9. ‘The multiple must be made not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available ‐ always n – 1. … A system of this kind could be called a rhizome’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004, p. 7).

10. In relation to nursing and social care, Holmes (2002, p. 80) has argued that: ‘the challenge is to oppose the processes of technicization and to help generate alternatives that are meaningful and theoretically grounded, and can assist the nurse to survive and resist the subtle, institutionally approved but dehumanizing forces they and their patients face each day. It is a strategy which seeks to protect and extend the place of communicative action in nursing, and thereby contribute to quality care and its valuing throughout the profession’.

11. For Gregoriou (2004, p. 245), in considering the rhizome as n – 1, Deleuze and Guattari are encouraging us to subtract the grand unifying element from any state of affairs. Only then can we give up on the false analogies, oppositions, and comparisons inspired by a philosophy of identity. When we subtract the single unifying element, like god, science or man, the complexities of the situation become clear. No more transcendence. ‘n – 1 thinkers’ (instead of n as compared to 1) can occupy the middle ground where accidents happen and events occur, without overcoding them with the sainted sign of the same.

12. This notion of the ‘exploding disabled body’ is currently being explored in the doctoral work of Andrew Dick, School of Education, University of Sheffield (http://www.shef.ac.uk/applieddisabilitystudies/).

13. One of the ways in which desire is discussed in A Thousand Plateaus is in relation to Bateson's analysis of Balinese culture, where desire is considered in terms of ongoing, productive intensities – that never climax – but form together to create plateaus. ‘A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self‐vibrating region of intensities, whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004, p. 21). And ‘In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connective routes could exist’ (Massumi's translation, cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004, p. xiv). For a useful application of these ideas, see http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue2/Josko.html.

14. ‘It's a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons or subjects’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 26, cited in St Pierre, 2004, p. 290).

15. Gabel (2002, p. 178) asks that the definition of pedagogy be broadened to ‘a way of being, or … living with or parenting children’. This, she contends, involves the dual task of deconstruction (constantly doubting parenting and teaching) and social transformation (the abolishment of marginalization).

16. In one of their more coherent sentences of A Thousand Plateaus and in answer to the question ‘How do you make yourself a Body without Organs’, they reply: ‘At any rate, you have one (or several). … At any rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 166).

17. Shildrick and Price (2005/06) observe that ‘Deleuze and Guattari promote dis‐organ‐isation and offer a virtual model of “desiring production” (1984), the take up of which is limited neither to those who already fulfil certain corporeal criteria, nor who conform to the modernist scenario of autonomous action. It is not the agency of a self embodied in a complete and integrated organic unity that is the driving force, but the flows of energy that bring together part objects—both living material and machinic—to create surprising new assemblages. In place of the limits that the ideal of independence imposes, the emphasis is on connectivity, and linkage’.

18. A Deleuzoguattarian approach is often termed ‘geophilosophy’; rather than providing a history, they conceptualize philosophy in spatial terms (Allan, 2004; Peters, 2004).

19. This links to the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of appropriation (Goodley, 2006) and the necessity for lodging on available strata (Markula, 2006).