CONCEPTUAL FRAMING FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH THROUGH DELEUZE & GUATTARIDavid R ColeWestern Sydney University

“Thou shalt not answer questionnairesOr quizzes upon World Affairs,

Nor with complianceTake any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commitA social science”

– W.H. Auden (1946)

TENSIONS IN CONCEPTUAL RESEARCH

• Where do Deleuze & Guattari sit in relation to quant & qual research?• Where/how do concepts fit into a research programme?• How/why should we use concepts?• What issues do concepts in educational research solve/raise?• Are concepts generic, or is there a specific Deleuze-Guattari conceptual

field that can be usefully deployed?• How can we make sense of the different ways in which concepts are

understood in the work of Deleuze/Guattari?

CONVENTIONAL EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHFollows a sequenceAnswers a questionHas definite steps to find an answer/solutionIs written up in a certain manner (academically/normatively pre-defined) Mechanical-technical-reproducibleConcepts are integrated into the whole

THE LABYRINTH

A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

WHY DELEUZE & GUATTARI?• A break from the past – for a ‘people yet to come’• Non-reductive/non-normative/post-positivist (emergent-coded-reciprocating)• Allows for/encourages methodological arrangements depending on context and

requirements• Pushes research to the ‘nth’ degree• Always posing further questions• The concepts that may be evolved from a context/particular study are unknown/open …• Political-social-cultural-ethical (immanent)• Have an array of previously evolved concepts for deployment; e.g. assemblage, BwO,

desiring-machines, plane of immanence• The use of these concepts depends on the study undertaken (toolkit) …• Are Deleuze/Guattari primarily non-conventional?

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY (DELEUZE & GUATTARI,

1994) ?• What is a concept?• Introduce the pedagogy of the concept…• Relates concept creation to the history of (western) philosophy, e.g., Descartes’ Cogito (see figure

for mapping of concept)• A concept is way to bring different aspects of a problem together to admit and recognise the

components of the problem• Philosophy, science and the arts are conceptual• Concept creation attests to a mode of constructivism• Concepts have definite attributes; e.g. Descartes’ cogito, and survivethrough use/applicability• Concepts are not propositional or grammatical …

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? II• Conceptual personae• Do concepts create/involve identity/thinking deeply with a particular

context/time?• Are concepts primarily given/made by philosophers?• What is the relationship between nature and concepts?• The plane of immanence and concepts• How are concepts organised?• What is the politics of concepts?• geophilosophy

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? III• percepts, affect, and concepts• Function and concepts. Do concepts depend on how they are used or vice

versa?• What are the relationships between philosophy, science, logic, and art• Where do concepts fit into these activities?• Why are some concepts important and others fade and are forgotten?

(evidence/applicability, take up?)• How do we resist the present, that is constituted by commercial

professional training – through the pedagogy of the concept • What is meant by the pedagogy of the concept?

A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988)

• RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS. These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence , etc.) (p. 22)

• Resist the academic habit of ‘staticism’ ‘the authority of the reference’…

POLITICS OF THE SELF: 1000PS (II)

• “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (foreword, xiii)

• “State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity.” (foreword, xi)

• “More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.” (foreword, xii)

Q: IS THERE ANY CONSISTENCY IN/OF THE CONCEPT?

STENGERS ON WHITEHEAD• “The question of what is an object

and thus what is an abstraction must belong, if nature is not allowed to bifurcate, to nature and not to knowledge only” (Stengers, 2011, p. 96)

• “The passage [of nature] is neutral, the point of view does not belong to you, except that you occupy it, but it is much more accurately described as what keeps you busy rather than what you own” (Stengers, 2011, p. 82).

WHY WHITEHEAD?• Reality as a disconnected set of

material objects and/or knowledge of these objects makes no sense

• Panpsychism: mind in matter, matter in mind …

• Prehension: more than memory …• Education is rhythmic, and to be

constructed in situ depending upon available conditions/resources

• [Events]–[flows]–[quanta] • Feelings …• The fallacy of misplaced concreteness

‘CREATION OF WILD AND FREE CONCEPTS’

• A return to metaphysics?• “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought

has done its best, the wonder remains.” (Whitehead, 1934, p. 46). • “Instead of fixing attention on the bodily digestion of vegetable food,

[human experience] catches the gleam of the sunlight as it falls on the foliage. It nurtures poetry. Men are the children of the universe, with foolish enterprises and irrational hopes.” (Whitehead, 1934, p. 30).

EXAMPLE 1: MLT (MASNY & COLE, 2007)

EXAMPLE 2: EDUCATIONAL LIFE-FORMS (COLE, 2011A)

EXAMPLE 3: 2-ROLE MODEL OF AFFECT (COLE, 2011B)

EXAMPLE 3: IMMANENT MATERIALISM (COLE, 2012)

• … the over-whelming message of immanent materialism is to question capitalist modes of production, not through critique and transcendence, but by activating forms of nomadism, that burrow through sedentary overlays of capitalist codes and subjectivation immanently. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) call this process rhizomatics (pp. 3-26) in the introduction to 1000 Plateaus, and rhizomes are characterised as subterranean connections and a form of politics. This politics is fully applicable to educational practice …

EXAMPLE 4: EDUCATIONAL NOMADOLOGY (COLE, 2014)

A nomadic line of flight .

1 Guattari-Freinet machinic object2 breakthrough/breakdown/breakout3 self-immolating line of flight – contra machinic répétition mortifère

EXAMPLE 5: SUPER DIMENSIONS IN GLOBALISATION AND EDUCATION (COLE & WOODROW,

2016)• On one side of the equation, is the superdiversity as explored by Vertovec

in the 2000s in the UK, and which has been recently taken up by globalised educational researchers, especially in terms of linguistic and literacy research. Superdiversity points to the ‘diversity in diversity’, and the ways in which the current globalised situation puts continual pressure on stable identity construction and the analysis of ethnicity, race, nationhood, migration status, and other social markers. On the other side of the equation is the supercomplexity of the current globalised situation. Theoretical frames seem inadequate almost as quickly as they are prepared, presented and articulated, due to the rapidly changing conditions …

EXAMPLE 6: DELEUZIAN CRITICAL-THINKING –PRACTICE

(COLE, 2015)

• Understanding the 8 postulates and how they relate to the image of thought - away from phenomenology and into the subsequent mode of non-representative philosophising and metaphysics.

• The image of thought is not only applicable to the dogmatic thought of the philosophers, but can also be used to initiate an expanded mode of questioning as a practice.

• Transference of the techniques of the production of the new image of thought into pedagogy. This opens up questions with respect to knowledge, power, collectivity and relationality. Guattari (2013) was especially concerned with this aspect of the new image of thought through the practise of cartography.

IS THERE A ‘SUFFICIENCY’ TO CONCEPT CREATION?

• How much is too much/too many concepts?• How often and why should we be creating new concepts through our

research?• How do we know if we have evolved a useful new concept?• Does every research project necessitate new concepts?• What if the audience reading our work do not understand out concepts?• How do concepts work in the educational context?• Do we want our concepts to be taken up/understood by

teachers/researchers/administrators/other Deleuzians not interested in education?

CONCEPTS & ‘EDU’-TERMINOLOGY

• What are the common educational framing concepts of our time?• Neoliberalism –capitalism …• Pedagogic efficiency (corporate identities)• Standards• Rankings• Debt• Online learning• The human subject and its learnings … non-human/post-human/anti-human?• Pre-school, school, university, lifelong learning …• Does the ubiquitous nature of educational provision help/hinder the creation of new concepts?• What is relationship between education and democracy? Education and capitalism, e.g.

Pearson Inc. …

CONCEPTS AND CURRICULUM• Transversal• What is knowledge?• Currere (what does the curriculum feel like?)• How is the curriculum enacted in situ?• What are the underlying beliefs in/of the curriculum? • Does the curriculum model used transmit (western/colonial/European/elitist)values &

notions of society?• Does the curriculum merely serve the ruling techno-capitalist elite?• How does the curriculum relate to nature/the natural?• What are the messages in/of community embedded in the curriculum? • Can the curriculum be questioned? Is there an alternative curriculum that we should adopt

(Deleuze-Guattarian)?

CONCEPTS AND PEDAGOGY• How/for what purposes is knowledge transmitted?• Who/what/is anyone behind the model and concept of pedagogy that we use?• Pedagogy or didacticism?• To what extent is pedagogy reciprocating?• Do we learn from our students/from nature/from the unconscious?• Does pedagogy include experimentation with the learning process? How?• What constitutes evidence for good/new pedagogy?• To what extent does good teaching depend on the subjective inclinations of

the teacher?• Could teaching become Deleuzian?

TEACHER EDUCATION AND CONCEPTS

• The production of new teachers?• How are their subjectivities molded?• Do we (primarily) report to government about what we deem to be the best ways to

create new teachers?• What is the nature of our evidence for our claims about good/bad teachers?• Can we still speak in these (evaluative) terms with applied Deleuze/Guattari concepts?• What is classroom management?• Is there a place for Deleuze/Guattari in teacher education?• What would the effects be of the application of Deleuze/Guattari concepts to teacher

education?• Should we educate for the teachers of the future?

• Thank you• David.cole@westernsydney.edu.au

• https://uws.academia.edu/DavidRCole

REFERENCES• Auden, WH (1946) ‘Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times’. Harvard: Harvard University imprints. • Cole, DR (2011a) Educational Lifeforms: Deleuzian Teaching and Learning Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publilshers.• Cole, DR (2011b) The actions of affect in Deleuze - Others using language and the language that we make …

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Volume 43, Issue 6, August 549-561• Cole, DR (2012) Matter in Motion: The Educational Materialism of Gilles Deleuze, Educational Philosophy and

Theory, Volume 44, Number S1, May, 3-17• Cole, DR (2014) Inter-collapse … Educational Nomadology for a Future Generation, Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and

Education: For a People-Yet-to-Come, Bloomsbury, Matthew Carlin and Jason Wallin (eds), New York & London, 77-95• Cole, DR (2015) What is the image of thought? Notes on a Deleuzian critical-thinking-practice’, Keynote address at

the Schizoanalytic Applications Research Collective (SARC): ‘Philosophy, Nonlinearity and the Migrations of Thought’ University of Wollongong

• Cole, DR & Woodrow, C (Eds) (2016) Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education, Springer • Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia & Capitalism, B. Massumi, trans. London: The

Athlone Press. • Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994) What is Philosophy? H. Tomlinson & G Burchill, trans. London: Verso.• Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies, A. Goffey, trans. London: Bloomsbury.• Masny, D & Cole, DR (2007) Applying Multiple Literacies Theory in Canadian and Australian contexts [ppt].

University of Sydney. • Stengers, I (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts, M. Chase, trans. Harvard: Harvard

University Press.• Whitehead, AN (1934) Modes of Thought. New York: Capricorn press.