Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo‐Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of a pedagogy of desire from a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective. A pedagogy of desire can be theorised in ways that mobilise creative, transgressive and pleasurable forces within teaching and learning environments. It also enables a new view on affect in education as a landscape of becoming in which forces, surfaces and flows of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring ontology. This marks an attempt to reclaim the notion of desire away from a purely negative, repressive or libidinal framework. The claim of pedagogy of desire is that through the mobilisation and release of desiring production, teachers and students make available to themselves the powerful flows of desire, thereby turning themselves into subjects who subvert normalised representations and significations and find access to a radical self. Some strategies and practical implications are offered to suggest how this approach to pedagogy may function in educational contexts.

Notes

1. There are positions, however, which attempt to draw together insights from different theoretical practices that are often regarded as inherently antithetical to one another, such as post‐structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. An example of this attempt is the ‘post‐Marxist’ critique of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1990) as well as the work of Butler ([1990] 1999, 1993). Particularly, in Laclau and Mouffe's view, discourse constitutes all social relations, and subjectivity is theorised as the product of diverse subject positions. This means that subjectivity is articulated within a range of discourses (even contradictory ones). This takes place precisely because the constitution of subjectivity is always negotiated and contested. Desire, for example, is never fixed, never simply unconscious because boundaries change within particular historical contexts. Despite the differences between Deleuze and Guattari's ideas and those of Laclau and Mouffe, there are some similarities in the political dimensions of the projects articulated by these thinkers, e.g. the rejection of any essentialism that presupposes any a priori connection between subjectivity, power and desire, and the idea that the conditions of possibility need to be drawn within a historical dynamic. Drawing on these theoretical developments it is possible to develop a more complex and sophisticated account of desire in pedagogy—in political terms—than critical or psychoanalytic pedagogical approaches have so far provided (see below).