An Inquiry in to the Ethical Nature of a Deleuzian Creative Educational Practice
Qualitative Inquiry 16(5) 303
Ken Gale1
Abstract In introducing the work of Deleuze and Guattari Massumi says, “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Therefore, in taking the Deleuzian view that concepts have no subjects or objects other than themselves and that the creation of concepts are acts, this article is conceived as a nomadic inquiry into the possible ethical, affective, and political aspects of the events with which these acts are associated. The article is informed by the author’s own collaborative and performative research practices, and the inquiry is sited within the context of his teaching and learning practices in postgraduate education and professional development in higher education in the United Kingdom at the present time. In short, the article explores the ethical implications and sensitivities of the use of creative practices of conceptualization within educational settings of this kind. Keywords Deleuze, creative, ethics, collaboration, performative
This is my domain of practice. It is within this domain that I teach, where I try to help others to learn and in which I carry out my research. It is where I am trying to understand what it means for me to do educational research. It is where I am trying to understand educational research as it can be seen to apply to the praxis of teaching and learning. It is where I encourage others, my colleagues, and my students, to experience teaching and learning. It is where we listen to what we say about teaching and learning. It is also where I think and feel I learn about learning.
We should linger for a long while on rhythms: it is nothing other than the time of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into a scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall, passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time: it bends time to give it to time, and it is in this way that it folds and unfolds a “self.” (Nancy, 2007, p. 17) I have become increasingly interested in how I go about the construction of personal subjectivity within the limits and possibilities of the discourses and cultural practices that are available to me. This article is informed by my own collaborative and performative research practices, and the inquiry that I have carried out is sited within the context of my teaching and learning practices in postgraduate education and professional development at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. Specifically, the article is designed to represent some of the explorations that I have carried out into the ethical implications and sensitivities of the use of Deleuzian creative practices of conceptualization that are informed by and that continually influence my always changing professional identity and practice style:
Therefore, my domain of practice is a territory in which subjectivities emerge: Covered? Uncovered? Discovered? Recovered? This enables me to give my practice as a teacher and a researcher spatial and temporal reference points. I am situated with others in these territories, these classrooms, studios 1
University of Plymouth, UK
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and workshops; this is where we do what we do. We are not simply doing this now but, more contentiously, we begin to characterize and constitute the now within which we carry out these performative and collaborative practices as teachers, learners, and researchers. By doing this we become able to subjectively situate ourselves, our practice styles, and our relationships to others. My reflexivity tells me that meaning emerges from this. I have knowledge of what I do by virtue of the meaning that I give to what I do. In this I am aware that I have influence and that others have influence upon me. I have been a teacher for more than 30 years, and it is only in recent years that I am beginning to sense a freeing of self from the Cartesian duality of the mind and the body and to begin to think, feel, and value my work as an embodied lived experience. I am curious, elated, and concerned about this. While I will talk mainly about my self as it is situated with my immediate peers, teachers and learners, and colleagues and researchers, I also want to draw upon conversations I have and have had with others and which influence what I will talk about here. The following quotations are some of the constituents of these conversations: bell hooks quotes Paulo Freire as saying,
supersensible realm again, to find our anchorage in something objective and enduring, transcending cacophony and heteroglossia, as well as the stranger in our midst. (Greene, 1995, p. 187) And finally, listening in on another of bell hooks’ conversations, I have always been drawn by this quotation she provides from Terry Eagleton: Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist upon posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long since forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently. (Eagleton in hooks, 1994, p. 59)
Maxine Greene reminded us many years ago of the “observers,” of the neoliberal threat to education:
From Deleuze I have learned that the supposedly formal and institutional territories of teaching and learning are not fixed, stable, and unchanging but that they are spaces of flux, viral contagion, and transmutation. These territories are conceptualized and gain meaning from the ways in which they are territorialized, reterritorialized, deterritorialized, territorialized, reterritorialized. From Deleuze I have begun to see these teaching and learning environments, as territories that are populated, inhabitated, and given meaning by the constantly shifting becoming of nomads, following lines of flight, engaged in nomadic inquiry. These territories then are represented by Deleuze as spaces that are always shifting between the smooth and the striated (Deleuze & Guattari,1987) as spaces that are opening up, that are etched by movement, that reconfigure, that are claimed and become independent, in a constantly shifting frisson of energetic life. Foucault (2002a) described the emergence of the differentiated heterotopia of Other spaces where discursive practices, through repetition and consolidation attempt to establish rational, idealized utopia but are always challenged and disrupted by paying active, reflexive attention to diversity, contradiction, and complexity. In her description of smooth space, Davies also provides us with a vivid exposition of the Deleuzian figure of haecceity that, as she asserts, is central to it:
When such observers look around and hear the contesting voices, the clashing interpretations, they perceive what strikes them as a slippage, a shaking of the foundations. The language of community seems to be fundamentally in danger. They erect walls of cultural literacy and plan “excellence networks,” they deliver calls . . . to turn the eyes of our minds to a
Smooth space—the space that escapes the over-coded striations of territorialised space . . . enables an immersion in the present moment, in time and in place, that often eludes us in the press of normative expectations, of habitual thoughts and practices, and of submission to the dominant, often clichéd codes that make up the existing order. (2009, in press)
I like to live, to live my life intensely. I am the type of person who loves his life passionately. Of course, someday, I will die, but I have the impression that when I die, I will die intensely as well. I will die experimenting with myself intensely. For this reason I am going to die with an immense longing for life, since this is the way I have been living. (Freire in hooks, 1994, p. 58) Later in the book, she herself says: I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend— to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location a location for healing. (hooks, 1994, p. 58)
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Gale Within these ever-shifting spaces I am coming to conceptualize my self and my students as nomads. From Deleuze I have learned that these ceaselessly changing territories and processes of territorialization can be described as creative spaces involving processes of conceptualization, creating concepts that are always new. Therefore, as Deleuze asserts, “Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 5). This talk of creativity is not about a pedagogic existence in which concepts are allowed to rest on the dusty shelves of the academy, becoming fixed and congealed; rather, it involves creating them as part of a continuous process of nomadic inquiry and narrative expression. It is in these dynamic, volatile, and potentially transgressive spaces that the extensivity of the defined subjectivities of teacher and student, manager and researcher, and so on comes to be troubled by and through the recognition of the multiple, molecular, and interconnected world of intensities which become the habitus of these spaces. With an apposite reference to the often unrecognized complexities of teaching and learning Deleuze and Guattari talk of how an intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the “tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language— a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power. (1987, p. 15) By recognizing, asserting, and opening the intensive nature of the space in which teaching and learning can take place, the pedagogical activity of, say, creating concepts, becomes an affective, embodied, and performative one. The continuing collaborative and reflexive engagement with this can be seen to involve and promote learning. In this respect I am with Pelias (2007) when he suggests that performative writing writes against its own containment, but I would further suggest that all pedagogical acts, such as talking, listening, questioning, and so on can also act against their own containment and, therefore, involve learning. Butler claims that the performative is also iterative in that it embodies actions that instantiate our identities; in making this claim, she argues that we are at a “crossroads of cultural and political discursive forces” where there is no subject prior to its constructions; it is always the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute the “we” cannot be summarily
refused, but neither can they be followed in strict obedience. (1993, p. 124) Thus, for example, when Deleuze sees a concept as an event he is alluding to its interconnected nature that frees it from its purely cognitive or intellectual comprehension and relocates it within multiple affective, ethical, and performative dimensions. The Deleuzian figure of becoming is central to these considerations because it not only talks of the constantly creative evolution of the conceptual world but also of the world of subjectivity with which Butler engages in the passage above. Therefore, from this point of view, the subjectivity of teachers and learners is set within a Deleuzian “machinic assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that is inseparable from and integral with teaching and learning. The cognitive, the psychomotor, and the affective “domains of learning” found within the highly influential behavioral taxonomies (Bloom, 1964) that provide the basis for the learning outcomes and evidence-based practices of much of policy-informed curriculum today; the separation of the socalled “academic” and the “pastoral”; the isolation of “special needs”; and so on, all run counter to such a view. Based upon Cartesian mind–body dualism, such structuralist approaches seem crude and inappropriate within the complexity of the contemporary world of teaching and learning and yet the kind of tolerance of ambiguity that Lyotard called for when he premised the postmodern condition upon an “incredulity to metanarratives” remains as elusive and absent as when he first proposed it. Lyotard’s prescience is to be found in the following passage when he claimed that the “narrative function” is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable. (1984, p. xxiv) However, if we acknowledge the Deleuzian world of concept, affect, and percept being explored in this article, it seems possible to consider that such “language combinations,” perhaps what Deleuze might refer to as assemblages or haecceities, may not be “necessarily communicable” but perhaps contingently so. The smooth space of teaching and learning that is opened up by such an approach could allow for the emergence of those multiple, changing, and contingent forms of communication that embrace the performative, the affective, the intuitive, and the evaluative in fragile, tenuous, and temporarily homologous and corresponding
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forms of knowing. Again with Lyotard: “Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy” (p. xxv). In Deleuze (1993) the important figures of the “fold” and “becoming” talk of processes of creating concepts in ways which are fluid, opening and closing, folding and unfolding, never fixed, and always being reflexive about those representations that are integral to creative processes. In a pedagogical sense, these processes of conceptualization can draw upon the intensive world of the performative, the affective, and the perceptual and foreground embodied agency over the biodeterminism of structure. In these processes they can also take the teacher and the learner into the praxis of contextualization, where the nascent, forming idea is applied, considered, perhaps even tested, within the frames of reference of other areas of lived experience. From Deleuze I have learned that these conceptualizations can be seen to exist within a “logic of sense” (2004) where the concept, the affect, and the percept cohabit and contribute to forms of nomadic inquiry where, in a continuous process of creative evolution, sense is made, in terms of becoming-teacher, becoming-learner, becoming researcher, becoming, and so on. I see such an approach as forming the basis of a radical pedagogy in which the teacher and the learner co-respond, co-laborate and co-construct the territories of teaching and learning that they inhabit. I see this radical pedagogy as encapsulating not simply the construction of traditional forms of knowledge but also one that allows an emerging sense of personal agency. Here encounters between feeling, value, and thought can, on the one hand, encourage the world of the familiar to become strange, to exist in what Deleuze refers to as “smooth space” and, on the other, to open up spaces where one’s own particular “angle of repose” (Richardson, 2000) can provide the basis for new and differentiated lines of inquiry and consideration, rather than requiring adaptation or refraction within media of structured repetition, to exist in what Deleuze refers to as “striated space.” As I envisage this differentiated, contested, and constantly transmuting space where I work with others to nurture, develop, and facilitate movements away from the habitual repetitions of traditional forms of pedagogy, I also concern myself with the ethical implications and affective sensitivities of the use of creative practices of this kind within my educational practice as a whole. Therefore, I resist being drawn into the neoliberal web that spins notions of “rights” and “responsibilities” that are not necessarily mine or those of my students. I resist the pressures to conform to the demands of rigid schemes of work and prescribed behavioral learning outcomes that are linked to specified assessment criteria, neither of which are mine. I resist living in a world of evidence-based practice that can provide justification and data for the
new three “R’s”—“recruitment,” “retention,” and “results”—which work to inscribe the emerging enterprise culture of higher education today. I try to promote in the spaces between the agonistic and the voluptuous, a coming together of and exchanges between accepted structural or “public” configurations of policy, knowledge, and meaning with numerous and potentially differentiated individual values, interpretations, feelings, and nascent ideas. I wish to open up, in this world, of what Derrida (1976) might refer to as “radical undecidability,” a curiosity toward and a disruption of accepted meanings and practices. This is not because of any necessary weaknesses or fractures within those meanings and practices but because of the contingent opportunities for learning that such curiosities and disruptions might potentially afford. In moving away from the traditional and established binary world of pedagogy in which teachers teach and learners learn, teachers talk and students listen, and the teacher is cast as the “expert” and the student is cast as the “novice,” I am aware that I make myself vulnerable, and, in so doing, I also contribute to the vulnerability of the learners with whom I have contact. In my teaching and learning I am moving toward nurturing a Deleuzian process of creative evolution involving participants in practices of conceptualization and encouraging the recognition that concepts are events that are not fixed and established and that they continue unchanged through time. In engaging in embodied teaching and learning practices that involve complexity, transgression, serendipity, innovation, multiplicity, and connection I am aware that I am introducing a radical pedagogy that will open up and destabilize the established and foundational systems of the closed and the already known. Many questions emerge from the assertion of such a practice style: What form will my teaching take? What will I do? What will the students do? In response to this I think of different activities and tasks. I think of Paolo Freire (1996) putting into practice his pedagogy of the oppressed. I imagine him and his colleagues working in the Brazilian villages, setting up his “culture circles”; I see his little drawings; and I hear the dialogue taking place as his “students” study the drawings and begin to think critically about the “natural” and the “cultural,” first of all as represented in the drawings, and then in the subordinated organization of their own daily lives. I see them learning to read and to write in a short space of time
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Gale but also I see them learning to think critically about their situation and becoming conscious of the oppressive nature of their lives I think of Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon (2006), using collective biography in pedagogical ways and encouraging their workshop participants to use memory, narrative inquiry, and collective storytelling, both as a means of living in and with moments of being and of nurturing a movement toward, or openness to, new possibilities of seeing and being. I think of Bronwyn and Susanne encouraging them further in telling, listening, questioning, writing, reading, and rewriting their stories until a shift, a mo(ve)ment takes place. I think of Ron Pelias (2007) offering a simple inducement to his students as they think about and feel their way into their performative studies: consider the performative as an adjective, see the performative as functioning in the subjunctive “as if,” always holding itself up for us to consider. I hear Ron invoking his students to take up residence in a performative world where there is always a practice of possibilizing, involving an encouragement to consider that there might be more, something new just around the corner. In encouraging his students to call upon the body as a site of knowledge I think of Ron alerting students to their performative selves, calling upon them to pay attention to their bodies and to write their bodies into their practices and always prompting them to ask themselves of their actions the powerfully reflexive question: “What work does it do?” I frequently use this question with my students, and it is a question that works on so many levels and in so many dimensions: It can be a question of critique, of reflection, of reflexivity, of attention, of sensuality, of inquiry, and much and many more. What is being proposed here, therefore, are ethically and aesthetically sensitive practices that attempt to nurture ethos rather than limit themselves to techne. In such practices, knowledge is not simply accepted, relied upon, and uncritically applied; rather, it is continually and reflexively tested, in the formation of a professional identity and practice style that is based upon dynamic criticism. Exploratory lines of flight, nomadic forms of inquiry, and professional identities that flex and respond to change are embodied in approaches of this kind. Teaching in this sense would be a lived practice of constant becoming, based upon risk taking and disidentification, offering disruption, challenges to the habitual, and invitations into the unknown. So, I ask: What does the institution expect of me? What does the student expect of me? What do my colleagues expect of me? What do I expect of myself? How can we begin to live with the shared embodied experiences of constructing, unfolding, and engaging reflexively in a world of this kind?
How will this world form? Will it gain legitimacy? Will others value its effects? Will others value its affects? How do I carry out my practices in the light of the practices of others? How do I carry out my practices with the well-being of students in my heart and mind? By drawing others into this radical pedagogy and encouraging other teachers and learners to work to dissolve the binaries cited above, I realize that I am making a decision to place their ethical, political, emotional, and other dispositions on the line. The dialectical world of heteroglossia that Bakhtin (1981) imagined is both rich and fertile but fraught with apprehension and challenge. With Braidotti I am aware that “the nomad is only passing through; s/he makes necessarily situated connections that can help him/her to survive, but s/he never takes on fully the limits of one . . . fixed identity” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 33). In these wanderings and wonderings I realize that I am engaging myself and my learners in an aesthetics, a poetics in which I am deeply attentive to the interaction of selves and in the continually changing creation of a world in which messages are spoken and unspoken, heard and unheard, where thought, feeling, and value share a fragile and continually transforming coexistence. This Deleuzian form of nomadic inquiry envisages a creative exploration through various territories, digressing and diversifying, moving out of the mainstream to examine and perhaps absorb the incidentals of differentiation. “Let’s go down here,” “I wonder what’s over there,” “Shall we look, shall we go and see? I am aware that my practices have destabilizing effects; in actively working to create a world of teaching and learning that does not want to be separated out or pinned down in reified or objective forms, I am claiming with Mair that “the unknown has to remain in active relationship with the known, and the knower has to reside in both the unknown and what he knows” (Mair, 1989, p. 63). Therefore, in proposing teaching and learning practices that involve a living aesthetics of presence that is not stifled by the traditional anesthetics of the lecture, the seminar, and the tutorial, I am encouraging an embodied entry into these living spaces as we are, when we are. Such an approach acknowledges the multilayered extensivity of selves as moving through various contexts and the intensity of space influencing the ease of flow in and through the space. Foucault’s notion of an ethical “self” formation suggests a process whereby this aesthetics of presence constitutes a resistance to normative discourses, encouraging reflexivity and a challenge to the dominating representations that exist
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in these cultural settings. This aesthetics of presence is constitutive of an existence on the threshold, continually positing entry into space that is alert to the liminality of that space; each assertion, expression, and mode is part of an engagement with the interconnected multiplicity of Self and Other that makes this aesthetics of presence a unique response and, in turn, a unique event. As a teacher and a researcher, I am with St. Pierre when she says: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 405). This “getting free of oneself” (Foucault, 2002b) seems to be an ethical and aesthetic imperative in the Deleuzian world of becoming that I have been talking about here. Its conceptual, affective, and ethical constitution seems to be premised upon a deconstruction of the self, and its aesthetic force lies in the need to be opening up and allowing the senses to be alert to all that is new in this nomadic freeing of the self. As a teacher and a researcher, I draw from Madison and work to recognize the performative and enunciative actions of teaching and learning practices as forms of “dangerous ethnography.” In doing so I have a commitment to “adapting the philosophy of a utopian performative (which) means that danger is not simply a threat to life but a praxis toward a better life and future that moves from “as is” to “what if.” (2009, p. 195) But . . . As I walk into these workshops, these classrooms, these teaching and learning spaces, with my books and my papers under my arm, my palms sweaty, my heart beating fast, my eyes darting around the room, my ears are alert to every conversation, my hesitant smiles, I hear my own voice as it greets those who are gathered there, and my mind races; a 1,000 questions populate my psyche . . . “Can I do this?” “Can they do this?” “Will it be OK?” Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author declared no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
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Bio Ken Gale is a lecturer in education in the School of Secondary and Further Education within the Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. His main teaching and
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Gale research interests can broadly be contextualized within the philosophy of education. More specifically, he is interested in the spaces of inquiry that open up when the work of poststructural theorists, in particular Deleuze, but also Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Irigaray, and others is used in relation to, and in conjunction with, certain forms of qualitative inquiry. His collaborative and
performative teaching and research practices connect with narrative and autoethnographic forms of inquiry, and he works to apply these to theory–practice or conceptual–contextual relations as a means of exploring and inquiring into a number of areas of interest, including subjectivity, friendship, gender, teaching and learning, and professional identity and practice style.
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