Sharing outsider thinking: thinking (differently) with Deleuze in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry

Abstract

This essay performs a number of our collaborative responses to thinking (differently) with Deleuze in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry. Deleuze and Guattari have inspired each of us in distinctive ways. Single‐authored products include a series of narrative experiments or ‘rhizosemiotic play’ in writing educational philosophy and theory, and a doctoral thesis enacting processes of ‘rhizo‐imaginary’ ‘picturing’ towards immanent and emergent curriculum theorising. We have also collaborated in producing some co‐authored works, which has motivated us to persevere with exploring further potentials for thinking∼writing together. By exploring our genealogical and generative work with Deleuzean conceptual creations in mind, we seek to move readers beyond Deleuzo‐Guattarian select metaphors (e.g. nomadism, rhizome, lines of flight, smooth and striated spaces). However, we distance ourselves from the types of ‘use’ of Deleuze that merely appropriate metaphors that were never intended as metaphors. Rather, we prefer thinking with Deleuze to produce previously unthought questions, practices and knowledge. We intend these performances to give a sense of not only the generativity that Deleuzo‐Guattarian reading∼thinking has opened to us but also the affirmation such performances bestow for thinking (differently) in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• education
• curriculum
• thinking

Notes

1. We use the ∼ (tilde) to signal a conjoining of co‐implicated notions in what we think of as complicity, i.e. thinking that is complicit with writing and simultaneously vice versa. Complicit in this sense is not so much ‘wrongful’ as not ‘rightfully’.

2. Art brut is a movement associated with Jean Dubuffet and others, also referred to as ‘outsider art’, that references the art of non‐professionals working outside accepted aesthetic conventions, often art made by psychiatric patients, prisoners and children.

3. Following Donna Haraway (1994, 63), I (Gough) emphasise that: ‘for me, the most interesting optical metaphor is not reflection and its variants in doctrines of representation. Critical theory is not finally about reflexivity, except as a means to defuse the bombs of the established disorder and its self‐invisible subjects and categories. My favorite optical metaphor is diffraction – the noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere’.

4. We place authentic sous rature to indicate its use in a sense that draws on aspects of ‘genuine’ and ‘honest’ but without determining or fixing those in any way whatsoever. We compare it to an agreement sealed with a handshake and eye contact. Both parties know and understand their agreement.

5. Donna Haraway (1989) explains how a more embracing (and more ambiguous) term, ‘SF’, displaced ‘science fiction’. In the late 1960s science fiction anthologist and critic Judith Merrill idiosyncratically began using the signifier SF to designate a complex emerging narrative field in which the boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy became highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically. Her designation, SF, came to be widely adopted as critics, readers, writers, fans and publishers struggled to comprehend an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of ‘sf’ phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation (5).

6. References to ‘the zone’ as a psychological space in which one’s performance seems supernormal are also common in the literature of sport and physical adventure. For example, In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (Murphy and White 1995), documents numerous ‘moments of illumination, out‐of‐body experiences, altered perceptions of time and space, exceptional feats of strength and endurance, [and] states of ecstasy’ (1) that have been reported by athletes and adventurers when they are enjoying a ‘peak performance’ (ix). The ‘zones’ of sport and SF coincide in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams.

7. I would add scientific complexity to Stoicheff’s formulation.