Becoming-topologies of education: deformations, networks and the database effect

Abstract

This article uses topological approaches to suggest that education is becoming-topological. Analyses presented in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society are used to demonstrate the utility of topology for education. In particular, the article explains education's topological character through examining the global convergence of education policy, testing and the discursive ranking of systems, schools and individuals in the promise of reforming education through the proliferation of regimes of testing at local and global levels that constitute a new form of governance through data. In this conceptualisation of global education policy changes in the form and nature of testing combine with it the emergence of global policy network to change the nature of the local (national, regional, school and classroom) forces that operate through the ‘system’. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary effects, but in a different way. This new–old disciplinarity, or ‘database effect’, is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.

Keywords:

• topology
• education policy
• networks
• testing
• database effect
• Deleuze and Guattari

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Sam Sellar and Andrew Murphie for their helpful feedback and suggestions on early drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. In this analysis, we use the terms local and global to distinguish the local–national coupling and the global–national coupling as the national (understood as those centralised educational and political assemblages that typify the modern nation state) is imbricated in both architectures of power.

2. We follow Deleuze and Guattari in refusing to see this analysis as representation. Thus elements cannot be represented, once and for, as ‘this element with this nature’. Furthermore, elements are relational, which means that it is exteriorities and interiorities that give them their character.

3. Deformation is not being used in a way that intends some original form. We follow Deleuze and Guattari in believing that everything is conceived in the middle. Deformation, in our use, simply suggests a change from a particular (previous) form.

4. Not to recognise the relational nature of space-time is to conceive of objects as existing in, rather than as collectively constituting, space-time. This is a contemporary manifestation of Leibniz's ‘vision of a world in which everything lives not in space but immersed in a network of relationships. These relationships define space, and not the reverse’ (Smolin, 2013, p. xxiii).

5. It must be stressed that hierarchisation is not the terminal effect of topologies as topologies can function in multiple dimensions, and hierarchies are three-dimensional shapes. We do not want to limit the usefulness of topological analyses to three dimensions. Rather, hierarchisation is an effect of what comes after the intersection of discursivity with the quantified data. The numbers must be interpreted, organised and communicated by those with authority so as to tell a story, and this, like most education stories, is configured around binarised language.

6. In topological terms, what we are seeing is a mesh network being reterritorialised as a star network, while this star topology projects (and misrepresents) itself as part of a tree network, in which the local policy-making centre defers to some global policy-making centre. Testing is a potential mesh network because it produces globally applicable tests that produce globally applicable data that can be synthesised and communicated to any point in the assessment topology. Actual communication between the elements is not locally promoted, so a mesh topological effect, in which all elements of the topology communicate with all other elements, is not produced. Indeed, the discourse of connection to all elements is all that is required. It is enough that the topology promises to deliver data that provide the quality of visibility from all observational points (parent, teacher, principal and policy-maker in any country) that a mesh produces. Not only has this mesh not yet actualised, however, its qualities cannot be expressed while they are enfolded by a local discursive (disciplinary) topology. The consequences of every point communicating with every other point in a global education topology are not those that a local discursive topology can entertain.