Deleuze, Education and Becoming

Deleuze, Education and Becoming

EDUCATIONAL FUTURES: RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE Series Editors Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA J. Freeman-Moir, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Editorial board Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison Miriam David, Department of Education Keele University Cushla Kapitzke, The University of Queensland Elizabeth Kelly, DePaul University Simon Marginson, Monash University Mark Olssen, University of Surrey Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Linda Smith, University of Auckland Susan Robertson, University of Bristol Arun Kumar Tripathi, University of Technology, Dresden

Scope There are some signs that there are some very powerful forces at work reshaping advanced liberal societies – our normative orientations, our subjectivities and our institutions. These forces have been encapsulated in handy slogans such as “postmodernity”, “globalisation”, “reflexive modernisation”, “postindustialisation”, “postmodernisation” and the like. Many of these developments focus on the importance of changes to the organisation of knowledge, the development of new forms of communication, and the centrality of knowledge institutions to an emerging info-capitalism. Often these epithets are conceptualised in metaphors such as the “information society”, “learning society” or the “knowledge economy” and often work as official policy metanarratives to both prescribe and describe futures. Today the traditional liberal ideal of education is undergoing radical change. In short, as the knowledge functions have become even more important economically, external pressures and forces have seriously impinged upon its structural protections and traditional freedoms. Increasingly, the emphasis in reforming educational institutions has fallen upon two main issues: the resourcing of research and teaching, with a demand from central government to reduce unit costs while accommodating further expansion of the system, on the one hand; and changes in the nature of governance and enhanced accountability, on the other. In the attempt to re-position and structurally adjust their national economies to take advantage of the main global trends, governments around the world have begun to reprioritise the importance of education, and especially higher education, as an “industry” of the future. There is an emerging understanding of the way in which education is now central to economic (post)modernization and the key to competing successfully within the global economy. This understanding has emerged from the shifts that are purportedly taking place in the production and consumption of knowledge which are impacting on traditional knowledge institutions like universities. This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods, including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual policies and examples.

Deleuze, Education and Becoming

Inna Semetsky Monash University, Australia

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Paperback ISBN Hardback ISBN

90-8790-017-1 90-8790-018-X

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Printed on acid-free paper

Cover picture: "Becoming-nature", photo taken at Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia.

All Rights Reserved Š 2006 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Adown the mottled slopes of night With smile that lit the dark, Ran a little lane of light That none but I could mark John Dewey, “My Road�

To my parents.

CONTENTS

Foreword Noel Gough

ix

Acknowledgements

xvii

Introduction

xix

Chapter 1

Becoming – Other

1

Chapter 2

Becoming – Sign

27

Chapter 3

Becoming – Language

53

Chapter 4

Becoming – Rhizome

71

Chapter 5

Becoming – Nomad

91

Chapter 6

Becoming – Child

105

Notes

125

References

127

Index

133

vii

FOREWORD NOEL GOUGH, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

Besides rank-and-file Introductions there are the upper echelons such as Forewords and Prefaces, nor are even ordinary Introductions all alike, for an Introduction to one’s own book is one thing, and that to somebody else’s quite another (Stanislaw Lem, 1985, pp. 1-2).

I have quoted Stanislaw Lem here because he reminds us that a Foreword is a particular species of a minor literary genus/genre (the Introduction) and that it is a text tacitly privileged by its status as a preamble to, and/or endorsement of, somebody else’s textual labor. It is partly because I want to disavow this privilege that I have borrowed Mark Halsey’s (2006) tactic of using the strikethrough – you are reading a Foreword, not a Foreword – to signal that even this humble text exceeds any preconceived meanings associated with the term. This tactic borrows in turn from Jacques Derrida’s approach to reading deconstructed signifiers as if their meanings were clear and undeconstructable, but with the understanding that this is only a strategy, because all words are always already sous rature (under erasure). Or, to put it in terms that you are likely to recognize if you are familiar with Gilles Deleuze’s writings (and will certainly recognize after you have read this book), the omnipresence of erasure and cuts works as a machine of deterritorialization.

As you might have gathered by now, I am deeply suspicious of Forewords. In their conventional form they introduce the text that follows and/or the author – much like a chair of a conference plenary session introduces a speaker – but they rarely add any substantial value to the book’s subject matter. From a publisher’s perspective, a Foreword’s primary purpose is to boost book sales – a means of validating the book’s existence and of introducing someone who might not be wellknown via an expert or someone that the book’s presumed readership will recognize more readily than the actual author. If representatives of Sense Publishers had invited me to write a Foreword to this book, I would have advised them that they could be wrong on both counts.

But I am writing this Foreword because the author, Inna Semetsky, asked me to do so, and I can assure readers that I did not accept her request just because I was too polite or too vain to refuse (I can unequivocally rule out politeness, but I cannot rule out vanity: writing a Foreword keeps the writer’s name in circulation, which is especially useful if there has been a significant time lag between his/her previous and forthcoming publications – which in my case is closer to the truth than I would prefer).

In fact, I did seriously (albeit briefly) consider declining Inna’s invitation on three grounds. Firstly, as will become obvious to readers of Deleuze, Education, and Becoming, Inna most certainly does not need my patronage (or anyone else’s) ix

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to validate or legitimate her fine scholarship. Secondly, I knew that any reader looking for a succinct and erudite summary judgment of the virtues and significance of this text would already have access to three of these in the prepublication endorsements provided by Ron Bogue, Jim Garrison, and Nel Noddings; I wholeheartedly agree with their judgments, and thus feared that anything I could add might be seen to be redundant (or, worse, that I might be seen as escalating a bidding war using the currency of superlatives to determine the value of Inna’s work in the market of academic esteem). Thirdly, it seemed to me that a Foreword could be seen as being incommensurate with Deleuzean thought.

One of the characteristics of a rhizome – arguably the best-known of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual creations – is that it has no beginnings or ends but is wholly constituted by middles and muddles. Beginnings and ends, introductions and conclusions, forewords and afterwords, imply a linear movement, whereas working in the middle of things is about coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

Eventually, enlightened self-interest led me to accept Inna’s invitation, because I was confident that writing a Foreword could only be a generative learning experience. I share Laurel Richardson’s (2001) conviction that: Writing is a method of discovery, a way of finding out about yourself and your world. When we view writing as a method, we experience ‘language-inuse,’ how we ‘word the world’ into existence… And then we ‘reword’ the world, erase the computer screen, check the thesaurus, move a paragraph, again and again. This ‘worded world’ never accurately, precisely, completely captures the studied world, yet we persist in trying. Writing as a method of inquiry honors and encourages the trying, recognizing it as emblematic of the significance of language (p. 35; author’s emphasis).

Thus, like Richardson (2001), “I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it” (p. 35). I suspect that Inna writes like that too, because her essays invariably invoke for me a powerful sense of being in the presence of emergence – of becoming conscious of new conceptualizations and configurations that offer new pathways for thought and action. In the remainder of this Foreword I will attempt to share something of what I have learned by writing it.

How does one write a Foreword? When puzzling over a course of action, I often follow Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1984) example: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ … Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things” (p.

216). Less than six years ago, the name “Inna Semetsky” was unknown to me, so how have we now found ourselves in a shared story, a shared mythology?

Inna and I began to correspond as a direct result of François Tochon copying an email meant for me alone to 13 other people. François is Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the driving forces of the Semiotics Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Early in November 2000, François and I discussed – very tentatively – the possibility of me editing a special issue of the International x

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Journal of Applied Semiotics on the theme of “Images, Maps and Semiotics”, which had been the focus of two linked symposia at the 2000 Meeting of AERA in which Inna and I had each presented papers (although we were in different symposia and did not attend each other’s sessions due to conflicting commitments).

François inadvertently copied to all presenters in these symposia a message intended only to inform me of their email addresses. And so (merci beaucoup Francois!) I received my first email from Inna – a rhizomatic shoot popping up in my inbox: I got an email from François Tochon advising to get in touch with you. I am not quite sure though what is it you are looking for… I used to live and work in Melbourne (12 years) and try to visit every year for various reasons, usually if it coincides with a good conference. Last time it was August [2000], INPE [International Network of Philosophers of Education] in Sydney, excellent meeting. If you plan a conference in 2001 on education/philosophy/semiotics, would appreciate if you kindly let me know.

I am at Teachers College Columbia [University], New York, finishing a PhD dissertation in philosophy of education under Nel Noddings.

Nearly a year passed before I received another email from Inna. In October 2001 she wrote: We spoke through emails some time last year with regard to the Semiotics SIG at AERA… I would like to ask you a question if I may. I defended my PhD at Columbia University … in August. … Anyway with events in New York I feel like going back, and I wonder if there exist any faculty or research positions at Deakin University [where I was then director of a research centre].

Our correspondence subsequently became more frequent, and during her next visit to Melbourne I invited Inna to present a research seminar based on her awardwinning essay, “The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool” 1 , which was very well received by all who attended. I was sufficiently impressed by Inna’s innovative applications of poststructuralist philosophy in general – and of Deleuze’s approaches in particular – to share her work with a wider network of poststructuralist scholars who I hold in high esteem. Thus, for example, I sent her seminar paper to Elizabeth [Bettie] Adams St. Pierre, a friend and colleague whose work on Deleuze and education I regard as second to none (a view that Inna clearly shares; see Chapter 5: Becoming-nomad of this volume). Bettie responded: Hi, Inna. Noel Gough put me on to your work, in particular, to your paper, ‘The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool’. Just wanted to let you know that I think it’s great. You use Deleuze marvellously. Hope we can hook up sometime at a conference! Best regards, Bettie.

And so our rhizomatic interconnections proliferated productively through reciprocal invitations to one another to participate or collaborate in each other’s scholarly activities and collegial networks by, for example, publishing in special xi

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issues of journals that one or the other of us was guest editing, serving on doctoral committees, organising symposia at conferences, etc.

But let me pause here (in the middle/muddle) to reflect briefly on the textual/rhetorical strategies I have deployed in the last few paragraphs. I anticipate that some readers will fear that, despite my initial debunking of the idea of Forewords, I have now enacted some of their most stereotypical attributes, such as shameless name-dropping, and reminiscing about how the author of The Foreword knows (or knows of) the author of The Book. I also suspect that if any academically straight-laced philosophers are reading this they will dismiss my recounting of personal anecdotes about how Inna and I met as “mere” gossip.

I am more than happy to defend gossip and, thus, to defend the name-dropping and personal reminiscences that are among its characteristic tropes. I have long been impressed by Madeleine Grumet’s (1983) argument that gossip is an alternative discourse system that has generative possibilities for educational inquiry. Sharing its etymology with the Middle English godsybbe (godparent), the word “gossip” came to mean women friends invited to be present at a birth and, later, to refer to the kind of news and anecdotes they exchanged on such occasions.

This older sense of gossip, the kind of talk that accompanied women’s work as they ushered in new life, is characterised by intimacy, candor and trust – a far cry from contemporary associations of gossip with talk that is trivial, idle, snide or parochial. Grumet’s understanding of gossip clearly shares some of the qualities that Michel Foucault (1980) attributes to genealogy as a practice that focuses on “local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges” (p. 83). I also see gossip (or at least some examples of it) as an assemblage of speech acts that produce what Alicia Youngblood Jackson (2003) terms “rhizovocality”, a concept that signifies voice as “excessive and transgressive yet interconnected” (p. 693).

Jackson describes rhizovocality as follows: Rhizo, a prefix I borrow from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) image of the rhizome, captures the heterogeneity of vocality in a spatial figuration, accentuating its connection to other things through its very diversity.

Vocality, in music theory, emphasizes the performative dimension of voice, its expressive power, its tensions of dissonant counterpoint, and its variations on thematic connections; it challenges our attention and demands deep concentration if we are to hear its nuances. Rhizovocality, as my combined, invented signifier, offers a vision of performative utterances that consist of unfolding and irrupting threads (p. 707).

I see the interfolded qualities of gossip, genealogy and rhizovocality in the “variations on thematic connections” that Inna produces in this text. The liturgy of becoming that recurs and reverberates throughout recalls for me Grumet’s (1983) sense of gossip as “the dark discourse of the mystery of birth” which “brings the private truth, the dark secret, into the forms of our public world” (p. 127), bringing new life to (for example) the conceptual personae of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey in Inna’s book. Jackson’s reference to music theory in explaining the etymology of “rhizovocality” is also pertinent to Deleuze, Education, and xii

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Becoming because Inna can be understood to be both composing and performing an “orchestration” of Deleuze’s philosophy. Her approach reminds me of Claude Debussy’s orchestrations of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. Despite their seemingly gentle ambience, Satie’s piano pieces are complex and irregular, with their shifts of rhythms and keys deliberately flouting many conventions of classical and contemporary music. Inspired by contemporary impressionist painters, Debussy enhanced their beauty and elegance by expanding their tonal palette – a strategy not dissimilar to Inna’s expansion of Deleuze’s thought into frames drawn from American pragmatism so as to produce a “harmonious dissonance” among them.

From my standpoint as an environmental educator, one of the great attractions of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is that they make no arbitrary distinctions between culture and nature: humans are coextensive with all other objects and subjects of a complex, dynamic, autopoietic system. It is thus perhaps worth noting that the ways in which Inna’s and my stories have become intertwined provides a very simple (some might even see it as trivial) illustration of the new convergences between what were once seen as disparate disciplines, such as the philosophies of literature, art, and science. For example, the unpredictable (yet deterministic) amplification of low-energy fluctuations, popularly known as the “butterfly effect” (a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may set off a tornado in Texas), is now an explanatory commonplace in thinking about complex systems, as in climatology and weather forecasting. This principle is also a commonplace of fictional narrative and, in this respect, theories of complex systems correspond with the worldview of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and every other novelist and dramatist for whom, as David Porush (1991) puts it, “small accidents send the hearts of mortals and their fates wheeling out of their appointed Newtonian orbits into grand twists of fate and destiny” (p. 381).

Although writing a Foreword for Inna’s book is hardly a “grand twist of fate”, it is nonetheless a precious learning experience determined by the unpredictable consequences of amplifying an effect of a “small accident”. Such a view of human experience cannot be accommodated by the simplifying discourses of modernist science – Newton’s “world machine” – and nor can the butterfly effect in global climatic phenomena. But both can be understood in terms of Deleuze’s “machinic assemblages” – organic, self-organising, desiring, and always becoming machines (see especially Chapter 1: Becoming-other and Chapter 3: Becoming-language, of this volume). An irony of this new convergence of literature and science is that Newton’s reductionist “world machine” is still represented as a common sense view of reality in many educational discourses (you need look no further than a junior secondary school science textbook), yet the common and sensible (that is, irreducibly complex and unpredictable) events of everyday life and the global biosphere cannot be represented (without severe distortion) by Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s world, in which reactions are reversible and interactions reduced to a few simple algorithms, now looks less like “science” than a crude science fiction – a minimalist abstraction from a thought experiment not unlike Edwin Abbott’s nineteenth century novel Flatland. Indeed, Newtonian mechanics is at its most plausible in such fictional worlds – for example, the formula xiii

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determining force by reference to mass and acceleration F=ma (cf. Chapter 4: Becoming-rhizome) is best demonstrated in frictionless space, and where on earth – or anywhere – does one find that? By contrast, the worlds described by Deleuzean machinic assemblages and complexity theorising are recognizably sensible – worlds in which “nature” and “reality” are, as it were, speaking the same language as the great mimetic artists.

It seems appropriate to conclude a Foreword on a perverse note. In a booklength manuscript of over 130 pages and 70,000 words I expect that most readers will find some passages with which they will want to take issue with the author or even to disagree with her. Although there are many parts of Inna’s text that I still puzzle over, I see these as incitements and provocations to further inquiry, not contrary positions, but there is one statement with which I firmly disagree and, because it is on page 1 of Chapter 1: Becoming-other, I cannot ignore it here. Inna writes: “The complexity of Deleuze’s intellectual practice is beyond imagination.

The language of expression in Deleuze’s thought, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works, is even more complex”. Leaving aside the difficulty of interpreting the second sentence in the light of the first (what can possibly be “even more complex” than “complexity… beyond imagination”?), I would argue that Inna Semetsky demonstrates repeatedly and convincingly throughout this book that Deleuze’s intellectual practice is most accessible to those who put their imaginations to work – that imagination is precisely what we need to put Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy into practice in education. Their goal is to create concepts through which we – philosophers and other practitioners in education – can imagine new pathways for thought and action. As Todd May (2003) writes: These concepts do not ask of us our epistemic consent; indeed they ask nothing of us. Rather, they are offerings, offerings of ways to think, and ultimately to act, in a world that oppresses us with its identities. If they work – and for Deleuze, the ultimate criterion for the success of a concept is that it works – it will not be because we believe in them but because they move us in the direction of possibilities that had before been beyond our ken (p. 151).

So I do not believe Inna Semetsky when she writes that Deleuze’s thought is beyond imagination because, over and over again in this wonder-full book, she supplements Deleuze’s offerings with gifts of her own, which together move us towards new possibilities for imaginative thought and ethical action.

REFERENCES Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (Colin Gordon Ed. and Trans.). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Grumet, M. R. (1983). Response to Reid and Wankowski. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 5(2), 124127.

Halsey, M. (2006). Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jackson, A. Y. (2003). Rhizovocality. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(5), 693-710.

Lem, S. (1985). Imaginary Magnitude (Marc E. Heine, Trans.). London: Secker & Warburg.

xiv

FOREWORD MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

May, T. (2003). When is a Deleuzean becoming? Continental Philosophy Review, 36(2), 139-153.

Porush, D. (1991). Prigogine, chaos and contemporary SF. Science Fiction Studies, 18(3), 367-386.

Richardson, L. (2001). Getting personal: writing-stories. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(1), 33-38.

xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank with all my heart Nel Noddings who supported my idea for the book since the day of its conception. I am immensely grateful to Jim Garrison and Ronald Bogue whose scholarship provided much-needed inspiration. Thanks are due to Noel Gough for his much appreciated colleagueship. I also thank the Faculty of Education in Monash University, Australia, for awarding me a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship that provided time for preparing the manuscript.

I am grateful to Michael Peters and Peter de Liefde for their continuous advice and presence throughout the preparation process.

Special thanks are due to Proof This in Melbourne, Australia for their wonderful editorial assistance.

Finally, I thank my sons David and Eugene for understanding and respecting their mum’s work.

I acknowledge with gratitude the following publishing sources for the original material distributed throughout the chapters in this book and appreciate their permission to modify and reprint those excerpts.

Not by breadth alone: imagining a self-organised classroom, Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education. Vol. 2 No. 1, 19-36 (2005). University of Alberta, Canada. Web site: http://www.complexityandeducation.ualberta.ca/complicity2/complicity2_toc.htm Learning by abduction: A geometrical interpretation. Semiotica, 157(1-4), pp. 199-212 (2005). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Peirce’s semiotics, subdoxastic aboutness, and the paradox of inquiry. Educational Philosophy and Theory, special issue Peirce and Education, 37(2), pp. 227-238 (2005). UK: Blackwell Publishers.

From design to self-organization, or a proper structure for a proper function. Axiomathes: An International Journal in Ontology and Cognitive Systems, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 575-597 (2005).

Springer Science.

The role of intuition in thinking and learning: Deleuze and the pragmatic legacy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(4), pp. 433-454 (2004). UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Becoming-language/becoming-other: Whence ethics? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), pp.

313-325 (2004). UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Philosophy of education as a process-philosophy: Eros and communication. Concrescence: The Australasian Journal of Process Thought (2003). Web site: http://www.alfred.north.whitehead.com/AJPT/ajpt_papers/04_contents.htm Deleuze’s New Image of Thought, or Dewey Revisited, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35 (1), pp.

17-28 (2003). UK: Blackwell Publishers.

The Problematics of Human Subjectivity: Gilles Deleuze and the Deweyan Legacy. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22 (2/3), pp. 211-225 (2003). Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Educating semiotic consciousness: Intuition as pragmatic method. International Journal of Applied Semiotics, 3(2), 105-114 (2002). Wisconsin: Atwood Publishing.

Learning from experience: Dewey, Deleuze, and ‘becoming-child’. In H. Alexander (Ed.), Spirituality and ethics in education: Philosophical, theological and radical perspectives (pp. 54-64) (2003).

Sussex Academic Press.

xvii

INTRODUCTION

In 1899 an American scholar was invited to read a series of lectures in Europe.

This event, having coincided with the beginning of the twentieth century, marked an important, even turning, point in the history of American philosophy (Boisvert, 1998) leading to the recognition of pragmatism beyond the borders of the former colony. A century later, in the new millennium, the pendulum swings. My book purposes to cross borders in the opposite direction so as to introduce the as yet underrated name of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), the poststructuralist French philosopher, to educational philosophers in the English-speaking countries by establishing his position as pragmatic in the best American tradition. The figure of John Dewey will be used as a Deleuzean counterpart, my book attempting neither to compare nor contrast the two philosophers, nor to delimit its focus by having chosen to pick up some of the postmodern trends lurking in the foreground of the modern epoch. Rather the whole project is based on the idea of juxtaposing – following Bernstein’s (1995) model – two thought processes so as to be able to construct a common, shared plane between the two.

Richard Bernstein (1971, 1983, 1995) addressed the intersections of continental and pragmatic philosophical thought both from substantive and methodological perspectives. He specifically acknowledged the importance and value, for both traditions, of the so-called experimental knowing that he considered to be essentially a practical art leading to results that are cumulative and not defined strictly by adherence to a preconceived theoretical judgment. My book, which started just as a thought-experiment and has culminated in the following chapters hereafter, is based on an approach advocated by Bernstein and described as the new constellation (1995). The constellation metaphor, rather than reducing the thoughts of both Dewey and Deleuze to a single common denominator, helps me in addressing instead the seemingly “shared assumptions, commitments and insights” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 2) in their respective philosophies.

The style used by this book is derived from the cartographic method that complements a narrow path of strict analytical reasoning with a broader format of diverse and spacious forms of mapping, employed in contemporary cultural studies. The very spatiality of a geographical metaphor, incidentally, is prominent in the process-oriented metaphysics of both Dewey (Hickman, 1998; Rescher, 1996, 1998) and Deleuze (Deleuze, 1990; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). I should mention in passing that Felix Guattari, who was not only a leading theoretician but also a social activist and a practising psychoanalyst in an experimental clinic in France, has collaborated with Deleuze on several works including their latest project, What is Philosophy?. Both theoretically and practically, such a collaboration represents a new approach to knowledge as shared and situated, and brings philosophy “proper” into closer contact with sociocultural issues and practical concerns.

The book fulfils the following important objectives: It revives the relevance of pragmatism across time, space, and cultures and establishes Deleuze’s philosophy xix

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as pragmatic as regards knowledge economy; It enriches contemporary education with the pedagogy of the concept grounded in Deleuze’s unorthodox epistemology and ethics; It develops a dynamic model of reasoning informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s a-signifying semiotics; It considers the role of experience and culture in knowledge structures and suggests a theory of the subject as regards the dynamical process of identity formation in education.

By introducing several novel concepts in their philosophical, ethical, social and aesthetic dimensions as they arise in Deleuze’s works and his collaborative projects with Guattari, I will first establish Deleuze’s philosophical position as pragmatic and compatible with the rich legacy left by American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. I will address Dewey’s volume of work and read a number of excerpts through the lens of Deleuzean conceptualizations. If in this process Deweyan thought itself undergoes changes and reorganization, it only confirms, as Jim Garrison (1995) has indicated, that Dewey himself, in accord with his philosophical project, would welcome the reconstruction of his own ideas so as “to better respond to the vicissitudes of new times and contexts” (Garrison, 1995, p. 1).

Finally, following the emergent interconnections between the two thinkers, I will explore Deleuze’s philosophy for the purpose of considering its potential implications for education. The latter will address both theoretical and practical questions, drawing from available educational research, as well as critically examining such concepts as abductive inference, complexity of meaning-making, and specialization. I will conclude by affirming Deleuze’s place in contemporary Deweyan scholarship and, as a follow-up to this premise, inviting discussion within the community of philosophers of education. Considering the influence of Deleuze’s body of work in other areas, such as cultural studies or social and political philosophy, bringing his concepts into educational discourse fills the as yet largely unexplored gap in the field. This book intends to close this gap.

The presentation in a mode of mapping does not assume this map’s representing the proverbial territory as given in the strict sense. Deleuze used the French word tracer to indicate the subtlety of what it means to draw a map. The verb to draw, for Deleuze, means to create and not to copy precisely because, as his translator Brian Massumi points out, “what is drawn … does not preexist the act of drawing.

The French word tracer captures it better: it has all the graphic connotations of “to draw” in English but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road” (Massumi [Deleuze and Guattari], 1987, p. xvi).

The structure of the book is multi-folded. At the outset, by introducing several Deleuzean concepts, and specifically his concept of becoming, I address the problematics of language and individuation, or production of subjectivity, which, as Deleuze posited, is to be considered collective and populated by both the psychic and the social dimensions. Critically examining selected excerpts from the works by such figures as Charles Taylor (1991) and Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1996), I situate Deleuze’s conceptualizations in the larger context of social philosophy. The poststructuralist reading problematizes such notions as individualism, freedom, and choice by addressing the ambivalence of meanings derived from possible interpretations of each concept. xx

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I specifically focus on the dynamical character implicit in each of the aforementioned concepts; for this purpose, and acknowledging in passing the scope of the Darwinian influence on both Dewey’s and Deleuze’s thinking, I introduce some notions derived from complexity theory that would have assisted in clarifying several of Deleuze’s novel concepts. The nomadic, that is, experiential and described by Deleuze and Guattari (1994) as movable and moving, thought which envelops within itself the ethical, artistic and affective dimensions is one example, in this respect, of many Deleuzean neologisms.

Deleuze’s philosophy was best addressed in his two works of the late 60s, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and then defined and reconstructed two decades later in What is Philosophy?, co-authored with Guattari.

The latter project gives philosophy, one task of which is the creation and invention of new concepts, an instrumental, tool-like, pragmatic flavor, and invites a philosopher, whose intellectual practice therefore becomes one of a constructive pragmatist, to think the unthinkable. Deleuze identified the realm of unthinkable as the problem of the Outside which represents inquiry that is not solely based on background knowledge but is future-oriented in terms of creating present conditions under which new concepts – “for unknown lands” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

103) – will be produced.

This book would not have fulfilled its purpose if not for the pragmatist legacy of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. Therefore, and despite the fact that Deleuze himself was only partially explicit on this subject and appropriated Peirce’s thinking mostly with regard to his own work on images and cinema, a recourse to Peirce’s triadic logic, or semiotics, is imperative. I intend to discuss the relevance of Peirce’s philosophy and his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness as they pertain to Deleuze’s philosophical thinking. I further examine some works by John Dewey, and not only his educational classic Democracy and Education, but several others including Experience and Nature, How We Think and Art as Experience. By means of positioning them alongside Deleuze’s conceptual space, I address the contemporary relevance and significance, as well as plurality of meanings embedded in Dewey’s naturalistic epistemology and aesthetics.

It should be noted that the meaning of the word naturalistic in this context may be ambiguous. For Dewey, however, it is never reduced just to physicalism, but is based on the belief that a philosophical analysis of any entity proceeds without assuming a reference to some transcendental or supernatural realms. Dewey explicitly rejected the separation and isolation of the “environing conditions from the whole of nature. … [N]ature signifies nothing less that the whole complex of the results of the interaction of man, with his memories and hopes, understanding and desire, with that world to which one-sided philosophy confines ‘nature’” (Dewey, 1925/1980, p. 152).

Following up Dewey’s anti-dualisms, and by means of introducing the powerful concept, borrowed by Deleuze from biology, of the rhizome as a new – nonfoundational – image of thought versus the dogmatic Cartesian image, my intent is to demonstrate the affinity between Dewey’s and Deleuze’s approaches to logic as a dynamic inquiry. Metaphorically, the rhizome describes an open system of xxi

INTRODUCTION

multiple interactions and connections on various disparate planes, with a view that there isn’t a single crossing point but rather a multiplicity of “transversal communications between different lines” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 11). This metaphor, by being used with regard to the question of sources of knowledge in the context of philosophy of education, permits a shift of focus from the static body of knowledge to the dynamic process of knowing, with the latter’s having farreaching implications for education as a developing and generative practice.

The cartographic approach as a method of mapping the conceptual explorations of both philosophers onto each other’s territory also leads us to entertain the possibility that “Dewey [may have been long] waiting at the end of the road which … Foucault and Deleuze are currently travelling” (Rorty, 1982, p. xviii). 2 The road taken by Deleuze is marked by numerous conceptual explorations which, when conducted in a spirit of empirical inquiry, lead to the real, not merely metaphorical, production of effects. This complex epistemology, affecting the process of subjectivation, is inseparable from ethics in terms of anticipated consequences and values “that are yet to come” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 5), and as such may be considered to agree in principle with “Dewey’s pragmatic ethics [as] consequentialist” (Noddings, 1998, p. 146).

The anti-dualisms implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy are based on a complex relationship conceptualized by Deleuze as the inside of the outside, or the fold, which was first addressed by Deleuze (1988a) with regard to Foucault’s thought and then explored, developed and elaborated in his later work on Leibniz (Deleuze, 1993). The concept of fold contributes to the blurring of the boundaries between epistemology and psychology, and subjectivity is able to express itself through the emergence of a new form of content by way of interaction, or the double transformation. Its affinity with the following passage that belongs to John Dewey is close: Everything depends upon the way in which material is used when it operates as a medium …. It takes environing and resisting objects as well as internal emotion and impulsion to constitute an expression. … [T]he expression of the self in and through the medium … is … a prolonged interaction of something issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both … acquire a form and order they did not at first possess. … Only by progressive organization of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ material in organic connection with each other can anything be produced that is not a learned document or an illustration of something familiar (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 63-65, 75).

Each concept, for Deleuze, “should express an event rather than essence” (Deleuze 1995, 25) and exists in a triadic relationship with percept and affect: “you need all three to get things moving” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 165; Deleuze’s italics). The dynamic moving forces, “whether perceived or presented in imagination” (Dewey 1916/1924, pp. 152-153), breathe life into philosophy, and Deleuze’s joy, multiple becomings, and affirmation of life are features that seem to accord with the Deweyan-based naturalization of education:

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DELEUZE, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

What [a person] gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions and ideas, is … a widening and deepening of conscious life – a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. … And education is not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 417).

The transformational pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari begin in the middle and muddle of life per se, yet the quality of folded experience includes multiplicities of both material and immaterial signs, or pure events, giving rise to meaning, producing truth – without a capital “T” – contingent on the context of local situations. Experience is rendered meaningful not by grounding empirical particulars in abstract universals but by experimentation, that is, by treating any concept: as object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, … from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’. … I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiate them (Deleuze, 1994a, pp. xx-xxi).

Finally, and following Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, my intent is to address Deleuze’s philosophy for the specific purpose of considering its potential practical effects and educational implications so as, ultimately, to make Deleuze and Guattari’s voice be heard in connection with what has recently been called the new scholarship on Dewey (Garrison, 1995). Contemporary philosophers of education are open to the assumption that “poststructuralism – its genealogy, transmission, development and application – has ongoing significance for educational theory” (Peters, 1998). Deleuze’s rhizomatic method – summarized in the field of cultural studies as “a strategy of drawing lines of connections” (Grossberg, 1997, p. 84) – has attracted the attention of feminist philosophers of education: Leach and Boler (1998) have invited us to explore Deleuze’s work for the purpose of examining the “potential of thinking differently with respect to the public and current scholarly debates around educational theory and practice” (Leach and Boler, 1998, p. 150). Deleuze’s theory and his idea of the nomadic inquiry have been put into practice in the area of qualitative methods in educational research (St. Pierre, 1997a, 1997b).

Recognizing a somewhat narrow view on education, Deleuze also addressed intuition as method and maintained that “the infinite movement … frees [thought] from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 139). With this in view, I devote a chapter to revisiting Nel Noddings’ remarkable work on intuition in education (Noddings and Shore, 1984) and also address Peirce’s category of abduction, which has recently been looked upon from the Deweyan perspective (Prawat, 1999). I critically examine multiple possible interpretations and applications of this concept by connecting it with the paradox of “the logic of sense” (Deleuze, 1990) and the emergence of meanings at a new level of complexity. xxiii

INTRODUCTION

Last but not least, my attention turns to Noddings’ (1993a, 1998) perspective on specialization as production of breadth. I connect the concept of the breadth of the school curriculum with the Deleuzean notion of an open-ended, smooth space in which a field of choices and “polyvocality of directions” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 382) may emerge as “a function of the place” (Casey, 1997, p. 303).

Providing we explore the practical effects and educational implications of Deleuze’s philosophy in full Deleuze and Guattari’s voice has the potential to be heard in connection with what Jim Garrison (1995) has identified as the new scholarship on Dewey that has recently “emerged among academic philosophers” (Garrison, 1995, p. 1). Dewey’s educational philosophy, from the perspective of such a new scholarship, comprises communication, aesthetics, and creativity among others aspects. As applied to contemporary educational context, those aspects are re-examined and even reconstructed by scholars thereby leading to the strong possibility that “the implications of Dewey’s philosophy of education have not yet been exhausted” (Garrison, 1995, p. 6).

If Deweyan educational philosophy still provides ample scope for further explorations, the application of Deleuze’s philosophical position to education has been barely proposed. Yet, while Deleuze’s theoretical explorations of education per se were not explicit, he has described the experimental course he taught comparing it with the research conducted in a laboratory (Deleuze, 1995): Giving courses has been a major part of my life, in which I’ve been passionately involved. … It’s like a research laboratory: you give courses on what you are investigating, not on what you know. It takes a lot of preparatory work to get a few minutes of inspiration. … [W]e rejected the principle of ‘building up knowledge’ progressively: … everyone took what they needed or wanted, what they could use (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139).

As Dewey would have put it, there seems to emerge the warranted assertibility of continuity between his thought and that of Deleuze. The continuity is made possible, first, due to both Dewey and Deleuze’s adherence to the experiential and experimental, quasi-empirical inquiry in philosophy which “procures for philosophic reflection something of that cooperative tendency toward consensus” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 30). Second, I believe that the interaction between them, albeit having never happened physically, is animated by the presence of an organizing vital force which is “free, moving and operative … [and makes one] … a living spirit. He lives in his works and his works do follow him. … Spirit informs” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 294).

Educating our children in the inform-ation age, let us not forget those words: Spirit informs.

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BECOMING-OTHER

At first sight the two thoughts of the French poststructuralist, Gilles Deleuze, and American philosopher, John Dewey, might appear incompatible. The great divide between the American and continental philosophies is a common notion. Yet the pragmatist movement stands out and, as this book intends to demonstrate, connects two positions seemingly separated by time, place and culture. In order to explore the continuity and the possibility of constructing the common conceptual space shared by both figures, I will first examine the problematics of human subjectivity, alternatively called self-formation, subjectivation (Deleuze, 1988a), or subjectformation, as addressed and developed by Deleuze. For the purpose of developing the concept, this chapter addresses also the notion of freedom of choice noticing the ambiguity of freedom and specifically focusing on the concept of critical freedom – versus either negative or positive liberty – in Deleuze’s philosophy.

By drawing initial parallels with selected excerpts from Dewey’s works, I am going to conclude this chapter by opening the space for a further imaginary dialogue between those two philosophers so as to consider possibilities for applying Deleuze’s philosophy to education in the context of contemporary debates and in a manner continuous with the Deweyan legacy. This dialogue is under construction and, as such, is meant to be continued in the subsequent chapters, and it is my intention that it will not stop there either.

Michel Foucault remarked that the 20th century would one day be known as Deleuzean. The complexity of Deleuze’s intellectual practice is beyond imagination. The language of expression in Deleuze’s thought, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works, is even more complex. As has been noted by the feminist philosophers of education, Leach and Boler (1998), who have been undertaking a pioneering analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for the concrete pedagogical purpose of teaching history and literature, their “projects … are huge” (Leach and Boler, 1998, p. 152). Deleuze’s philosophy is systematic in a manner, for example, that “Foucault does not attempt” (Leach and Boler, 1998, p.

150). By challenging the purely rationalist tradition in philosophy, Deleuze maintained an optimistic and joyful relationship with the discipline making it a site of numerous conceptual explorations and real production of effects at the practical level. Calling himself an “empiricist, that is, a pluralist” (Deleuze, 1987, p. vii) and continuing Foucault’s initiative of cultural critique, Deleuze has been employing visual metaphors and cartographies that aim at the mapping of the new directions for praxis thereby establishing a philosophical position that may be considered pragmatic in the best American tradition (see Wolfe, 1998).

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The states of things, for Deleuze, are what he, after Bergson, called qualitative multiplicities, which are “neither unities nor totalities” (Deleuze, 1987, p. vii) but the relational entities constituted by multiple lines or dimensions irreducible to each other. It is the set of relations per se that counts, and not the terms that are related to each other by virtue of the relations that, as such, do maintain an ontological priority. Subjectivation is the relation to oneself, and therefore it is also a multiplicity. Because, by virtue of the relations, every multiplicity “grows from the middle” (Deleuze, 1987, p. viii), it is the milieu itself that constitutes every multiplicity; by implication, a multiplicity would be irreducible to a rule or a code, the latter being described in either epistemological or moral terms.

Yet, empiricism – even in the absence of any code represented by the dualistic binary logic of excluded middle – is, as Deleuze says, “fundamentally linked to a logic – a logic of multiplicities” (Deleuze, 1987, p. viii). Things begin precisely in the middle in accord with “a theory and practice of relations, of the AND” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 15), constituting the logic of the included middle. The conjunction and is what becomes a principal characteristic of the logic of signs, or semiotics, making it operational in the sense of a “both-and” relationship that in fact makes any entity a multiplicity, “a being-multiple” (Deleuze, 1987, p. viii).

Such logic, as Deleuze notices, remains however “underground or marginal in relation to the great classifications” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 15), their being either classical empiricism or rationalism that are both based on the strict binary delineation of “either-or”.

Positing the equivalence of empiricism and pluralism, Deleuze shares his thinking with American process-philosophy, exemplified in such figures as Alfred North Whitehead, William James and especially Charles Sanders Peirce. The definition of empiricism, as advanced by Whitehead, rests on two characteristics: first, that the abstract must be explained but itself does not explain, and second, that the philosophical aim is not to go back to the eternal but rather discover conditions for the production of something new, to be creative. For Deleuze, this means that the creation of new concepts is unavoidable: concepts are to be created, epistemologically, and states of affairs are to be evaluated, ethically, in order to extract from them new, non-pre-existent concepts.

But – and here is the question usually brought forth by pragmatists – how efficacious would those new concepts be? The answer accords with the pragmatic character of the whole of Deleuzean thought, that is, it does not make sense to attempt to generalize the politics of Deleuze’s philosophy, but rather posit a question, as Hardt (1993) does in his study on Deleuze: “What can Deleuze’s thought afford us? What can we make of Deleuze? In other words, what are the useful tools we find in his philosophy for furthering our own political endeavors?”

(Hardt, 1993, p. 119) or, for that matter, for advancing and broadening the field of the philosophy of education?

The philosophical site, for Deleuze, is always an open space or the multiplicity of planes on which concepts as multiplicities form a social field or a field of lines that would involve at once logical, political, and aesthetic dimensions. The concept “should express an event rather than an essence” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 25) and is to 2

BECOMING-OTHER

be understood as a distribution of points on a plane that would comprise lines, going in multiple directions. Subjectivity is to be constructed in a multidimensional field and – never mind if it sounds paradoxical – is always posited as collective and plural: as a state of any other “thing”, it too is a relational entity, that is, a multiplicity.

The production of subjectivity is not based on any prescribed code, but is creative and artistic, and also includes ethical and aesthetic dimensions punctuated by moments when being old oneself simply would not make sense any longer.

Because “when something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 198199), the infamous death of the subject is not to be mourned. Rather, the occurrence of an event, the human experience per se is to be considered as a condition of possibility, or “the inventive potential” (Massumi, 1992, p. 140), of becoming-other, that is, different from the present self.

The dynamics of becoming, described by a process in which any given multiplicity “changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 8), can be considered a distinctive feature of Deleuzean thought: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-world, always becoming-other and always bordering on the element of minority. It is a minority, surviving on the margins, that serves as a medium of becoming: “all becomings are minoritorian” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 291), all becomings are, first and foremost, becoming-minor.

Subjectivity, when understood as a process of becoming, differs from the traditional notion of the self looked at, and rationally appealed to, from the so called top down approach of the macroperspective of theory; instead Deleuze recognizes the micropolitical dimension of culture as a contextual and circumstantial site where subjects are situated and produced. As a qualitative multiplicity, subjectivity does not presuppose identity but is being produced in a process of individuation which is always already collective or, as Deleuze says, “populated” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 9).

Addressing the micropolitical, that is the pluralistic and particular versus the universal and absolute, nature of philosophical thinking, Deleuze and Guattari, in their final collaborative work, assert that “it does no credit to philosophy … to present itself as a new Athens by falling back on Universals of communication ….

The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 7), thereby transforming the intellectual practice, as Deleuze understands it, into philosophy-becoming.

For Deleuze, the ontological problem of being may therefore be seen “as a kind of ad hoc supporting structure or scaffolding enabling the construction of those planes, which in turn serve a fundamentally pragmatist relation to philosophy” (Wolfe, 1998, pp. 103-104) in terms of the would-be effects produced by relations external to their terms. Theory and practice are interrelated: theory performs a practical and pragmatic function, and “theoretical tools must unsettle and disturb those who would use them in order to bring new objects and events within range of

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thought” (Murphy, 1998, p. 213) in the process of inventing and creating new concepts.

The ontological priority of relations, for Deleuze, “is not a principle, it is a vital protest against principles” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 55). Relations may change, but it does not mean that the terms necessarily change too; what would change is a set of circumstances, the context. Deleuze is adamant that if relations are irreducible to their terms, then the whole dualistic split between the sensible and the intelligible, between thought and experience, between ideas and sensations becomes invalid and what is in operation is the experimental and experiential logic which is not “subordinate to the verb to be. … Substitute the AND for IS. A and B. The AND is … the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 57).

It is a set of relations that are capable of constructing the unpredictable experiential world, which unfolds in a seemingly strange manner, resembling: a Harlequin’s jacket or patchwork, made up of solid parts and voids, blocs and ruptures, attractions and divisions, nuances and bluntnesses, conjunctions and separations, alternations and interweavings, additions which never reach a total and subtractions whose remainder is never fixed. … This geography of relations is particularly important … one must make the encounter with relations penetrate and corrupt everything, undermine being … The AND … subtends all relations … The AND as extra-being, inter-being (Deleuze, 1987, pp. 55-57).

Such is the world as a pragmatic effect of the relations which put “to flight terms and sets” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 57); it continuously varies depending on the relations and is therefore open-ended: it is the relations that affect the world. The intensive capacity “to affect and be affected” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. xvi) is part and parcel of the dynamic subject’s complex rules of formation. The production of subjectivity includes an encounter with pure affect as if it were an autonomous and real being. The powerful intensity of such an encounter marks the passage between the experiential states of the body and accordingly affects the body’s capacity to act. The body, as Deleuze, borrowing from Spinoza – who, incidentally, has been considered by Deleuze to be a prince of philosophers – uses the word, is both physical and mental; the affect is not reduced to just a feeling or emotion but is a powerful force influencing the body’s ability to exist. Thought and matter therefore, as inscribed in the body, are not opposed to each other.

The capacity to exist and act is defined as the body’s power, the latter expressed by means of multiplying and intensifying connections as if producing a complex rhizome 3 rather than planting a simple root and, accordingly, raising the degree to which human capacities may be increased. The body, in the kinetic sense, is constituted by the relations between movement and rest, speed and slowness, which are reminiscent of a musical composition that depends on a complex relationship between multiple sounds. That is how the body lives and what becomes this body’s mode of life: “it is by speed and slowness that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips 4

BECOMING-OTHER

in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms” (Deleuze, 1988b, p.

123).

In the dynamic sense, the affective capacity is what defines the body in action, and it is impossible to know ahead of time “the affects one is capable of” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 125). Rather, the dynamics of knowing constitutes a long experiential affair, a process that would require, for Deleuze, practical wisdom in a Spinozian sense. By constituting the very form of content of intellectually mobile and dynamic concepts, the affective dimension in turn “affects” the notion of truth which in Deleuze’s philosophy may be considered a mobile concept par excellence. Truth, like any other concept, is not out there waiting to be discovered in its pre-existing domain of references to propositions. It “has to be created” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 126) and is bound to be affected by, and to affect in turn, a series of falsifications, so in the final analysis it is falsity that will have been producing truth by its own becoming-other.

The false has its own power, and the latter can be realized not in form, but in trans-form-ation. The field of knowing is greater than truth which is to be generated at each given moment and, for Deleuze, “there is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence” (Deleuze, 1989, pp. 146-147), or giving shape to one’s existence rather than discovering its eternal and invariant form. Philosophical concepts, for Deleuze, are therefore artistic and involve at least: two other dimensions, percepts and affects. Percepts aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings, they are becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else). … Affects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art to philosophy and from philosophy into art (Deleuze, 1995, p. 127).

The Deleuzean subject, in the process of becoming-other, is open to all three forces that in fact construe it by intervention from what Deleuze called the Outside, the latter consisting of: political creations and social becomings: This openness is precisely the “producibility” of being. … The power of society … corresponds to its power to be affected. The priority of the right or the good does not enter into this conception of openness. … What is open …, is the expression of power: the free conflict and the composition of the field of social forces (Hardt, 1993, p.

120).

The power to be affected which, together with the corresponding power to affect, constitutes the power’s organizational structure, is completely filled, according to Deleuze, by passive and active affections. This means that, even in the absence of actions, passions are present: the passions of mind and body, that may become manifest in chance, or aleatory, encounters and assemblages of experiences.

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The interference of difference in-between conflicting schemes of human experience leads to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy as the practical, experiential and quasi-empirical, mapping of such a difference. Philosophy, for Deleuze, borders on non-philosophy, as if on its own other, and conceptual thinking – contrary to conventional logic of reason “proper” – overlaps with ethical, aesthetic and affective domains, indeed as if letting the other be. Deleuze and Guattari say that “affects … traverse [one’s universe] like arrows or … like the beam of light that draws a hidden universe out of the shadow …. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 66). The affects are immanent, and immanence is understood by Deleuze as “no longer immanent to something other than itself” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 47).

Deleuze introduces his notion of the plane of immanence, 4 linking it to radical empiricism, which “knows only events and other people and is therefore a great creator of concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 48). The topological nuance as expressed in the plane inherent in the affective dimension brings forth the spatial metaphor: events or becomings are not totally in flux, but happen in the uncertain, yet highly specific, space – or non-place – between multiplicities, whose mode of existence is, as we remember, a multitude of relations.

The subject-in-process, that is, as becoming, is always placed between two multiplicities, yet one term does not become the other; the becoming is something between the two, this something called by Deleuze a pure affect. Therefore becoming does not mean becoming the other, but becoming-other. In fact, “The self is a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities, as in Rimbaud’s formula ‘I is another’” (Smith, 1997, p. xxx). Becoming is affect by definition – we remember that affect defines the body’s capacity to exist and its power to act – and affect is beyond affection, similar to percept always exceeding a simple perception.

The non-place in-between acts as a gap, or differentiator, introducing an element of discontinuity in the otherwise continuous process of becoming and allowing the difference to actively intervene. Becoming, while “taking place” (pun intended) in a gap, created by non-place, is nonetheless: an extreme contiguity within coupling of two sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection. … It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons (Ahab and Moby Dick … ) endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is called an affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 173).

The presence of such a zone of indiscernibility , a [dis]continuity, “a no-man’sland” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293), constituted by blurred and nonlocalizable relations, transforms Deleuzean philosophy into an open set of pragmatic tools, psychological interventions and artistic creations. This philosophy would not conform to the schematics of the progressive and uninterrupted buildingup of knowledge toward some higher ideal end. Progress of the latter kind, for Deleuze and Guattari, would represent “the submission of the line to the point” 6

BECOMING-OTHER

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293), that is a return to representational thinking and the idea of the correspondence theory of truth, a regress indeed. Instead their philosophy is concerned precisely with: [a] line of becoming [which] is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle. … A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is neither one nor two; … it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. … The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293).

Subjectivation, functioning as a creative potential quite close to the Foucauldian “art of oneself that’s the exact opposite of oneself” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 115) becomes manifest in one’s ability to express oneself passionately and freely, and “has little to do with any subject. It’s to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic field, an individuation taking place through intensities, fields …, it’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities. It’s what Foucault, elsewhere, calls ‘passion’” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 93).

If there is no a priori subject, there cannot be a priori knowledge either: knowledge as the operation of a subject is a meaningless notion. Deleuze (1988b) shares with Spinoza his assertion that rather than our affirming or denying something of a thing, it is in fact the thing itself that would affirm or deny something of itself in us, overcoming in this process the limitations of narrow subject-centered knowledge.

Let us stop for a moment at this point in order to specifically address the aforementioned notion of individuation. For this purpose it will be necessary to take a momentary detour from Deleuze and Guattari as the philosophers in question. The meaning of individuation is ambiguous. The concept of individuation, as well as individualism, has long been considered problematic in American social philosophy. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1996), for example, regard ontological individualism as an ultimately destructive force that contradicts universal moral values and strongly resists such universal virtues “as care … and let alone wisdom” (1996, p. xi).

Forever contaminated by what Bellah et al consider the “mistaken identification” (1996, p. ix) of individuality with adolescents’ striving for independence, the adult self becomes alienated in the very process of finding oneself. For Bellah et al, the assumption of the self as a free agent, capable of exercising free choices throughout the course of one’s life, is unquestionable. They find the detachment of the self from a sociocultural tradition not only problematic but also rooted deeply in historical American “selfhood” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 55) and moral life in general.

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If American culture has succeeded in emphasizing the value of self-reliance, then leaving home as a precondition to finding one’s real Self becomes a common cultural pattern. Severing ties with the past leads, on the other hand, to losing the firm ground under one’s feet and subsequently substituting a set of arbitrary individual values for such a foundation. However the absence of what Bellah et al call “an objectifiable criterion for choosing one value or course of action over another” (1996, p. 76) leads, in their opinion, to the creation of empty selves defined by casual and arbitrary preferences.

The moral universe of those beings is, for Bellah et al, filled with idiosyncratic value judgments; as a result it becomes totally devoid of moral universals as well as of “any fixed moral end” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 76). Accordingly, the sense of self seen by Bellah et al as being perpetually in progress, acquires somewhat negative connotations. After collecting plenty of empirical data and using sound observations, Bellah et al arrive at a characteristic picture of a contemporary self who is free of absolute values or firm moral obligations and who at will can alter not only its own behavior but assume different social roles too.

Putting on one social mask after another, such a self apparently “can play all of them as a game, keeping particular social identities at arm’s length, yet never changing its own ‘basic’ identity, because that identity depends only on discovering and pursuing its own personal wants and inner impulses” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 77). Bellah et al contrast the traditional notion of objectified moral goodness with the subjective goodness of getting and enjoying one’s wants, pointing toward the procedure when utility takes over one’s duties so that the self begins to equate moral goodness with just feeling good as a final result.

Despite everyone obviously being able to figure out what they want based on what makes them feel good, Bellah et al express their doubts about the possibility of true self-knowledge, arguing that one’s values and wants cannot be independent of those of others and thus never uncompromised by others’ feelings. Thus the ambiguity and elusiveness of “individualistic self-knowledge” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 79) are implicit in the pursuit of happiness, the latter becoming reduced to what Bellah calls a radical private validation within a completely autonomous quest separated from “family, religion and calling as sources of authority, duty and moral example” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 79).

In this sense the gap between objective and subjective values expands to incorporate now the absence of commitments as well, and Bellah et al arrive at their bitter conclusion of the narrowness of not only the external world defined solely by economic success, but also of the subjective, introspective and intuitive, world: Ideas of the self’s inner expansion reveal nothing of the shape moral character should take, the limits it should respect, and the community it should serve. Ideas of potentiality (for what?) tells us nothing of which tasks and purposes are worth pursuing …. The improvisational self chooses values to express itself; but is not constituted by them as if from a pre-existing source (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 79).

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Bellah et al reflect on the philosophical tradition of empiricism as so deeply embedded in the human mind that it prevents one from seeing the self in relation to both social and moral realities, so that reality as such needs to be rationalized in order to be seen as coherent and not totally accidental, and one’s arbitrary choices are then justified, however without considering the larger social, historical and perhaps religious context.

Saying that, it becomes clear that Bellah et al describe the process of finding oneself in terms of negative freedom, the idea of which is rejected by them.

Considering the turning points of breaking free from “family, community and inherited ideas” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 83) as manifestations of negativity, Bellah et al provide an unambiguous “no” as their answer to the question of whether the individualistic self with its values independent from any social dimensions “serves us well as a society” (1996, p. ix). The conclusion that the authors reach is mandatory: the transformation of culture must take place, and not only at the level of individual consciousness; the latter will not suffice.

Bellah et al contend, as Noddings (1997) has noticed, that the spirit of a community acting as a group of socially interdependent people “has been too often sacrificed to individualism and the pursuit of secular and ephemeral forms of selfactualization” (Noddings, 1997, p. 4). Yet, despite their proposed and positive move spelled out as a creation of a democratic community in the best civic or biblical tradition, as well as their acknowledging that such a community cannot be formed at once, there are some contradictions implicit in Bellah et al’s recommendations.

I imagine the impact this book had on its readers when first published and I wonder how many of those “selves” rushed forward, with great hopes and equipped with their best intentions, into action and … failed. The question of how one ought to live one’s life in order to overcome moral crisis has not been answered. This vicious circle, as the object of Bellah et al’s understandably deep concern, has not been broken.

Acknowledging in all fairness the uncertainty and complexity of contemporary life, Bellah et al nevertheless insist on fixed moral ends, on one’s self unambiguously defined in terms of objective certainty, and on the course of action leading to finding oneself as a part of larger whole represented by a community of like-minded people. This begs the question, however, of what criterion Bellah et al would use in order to recognize the said like-mindedness? And in relation to what?

To oneself? But how does one know oneself if the very process of finding oneself in terms of a negative freedom is disregarded and rejected by the authors? What would then be the point of comparison? If it is a common moral good, then why do the authors emphasize like-mindedness, or is there an implicit assumption that someone would still pursue “uncommon” good or, worse, common evil?

The concept of complexity, never mind that it is widely used by Bellah et al, is full of diverse and implicit figurations, the main one of which is the following: complexity presupposes, by its very definition, the existence of multileveled relations – the latter, as we remember, comprising Deleuze’s qualitative multiplicities – that constitute the structure, which is not rigid but flexible and 9

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dynamic (see Cilliers, 1998). Complexity theory by its very nature regards the analysis of individual components of a system, that is, “selves” in Bellah’s parlance, to be insufficient conditions to come to terms with the system’s dynamics as a whole, the latter strongly depending on the so-called self-organized criticality.

The rich meaning of this notion, despite the fact that complexity per se belongs to Bellah et al’s vocabulary, is overlooked; instead Bellah et al use a sort of its reduced version in the sense of negative freedom. From the perspective of selforganization, the complex systems may be amenable to analysis within the poststructuralist framework which takes into consideration the many contingencies inscribed in the system’s dynamics and not only the infamous great divide between the subjective world of “I am” and the larger objective order of being.

The posited gap cannot be overcome by a strictly linear connection, despite many noble ideas, including Bellah’s et al democratic community that serves as a means toward building such a link. Living systems, such as human beings, or social structures, or language, are complex by virtue of the impossibility of either a single unified theory prescribing their behavior, or even a single metanarrative as sufficient at the descriptive level. A complex system has its dynamic; the interactions within the system change with time; and time itself becomes an intervening variable precluding the permanency or constancy of any theory. At any given moment complex systems have their temporal history that cannot be ignored.

Moreover, the interactions constituting the system’s dynamics are non-linear; instead, they are loop-like, and a single cause may very well produce various effects, or a single effect may very well appear to be a result of multiple, diverse and indirect causes. The overall influence, due to many interactions, gets modulated and may spread, or become distributed, from the immediate neighboring regions to the far-away territories, like ripples that may create many patterns on the water surface. Many non-local connections are formed by loops, leading to new properties emerging at subsequent levels which are not immediately connected with the preceding ones but nevertheless continuous with the latter by virtue of the effect produced at a new level. There are loops there, that is, any activity – because of the system’s complexity and its unorthodox structure – may feed back on itself creating recurrence and self-reference as a necessary feature of the system’s dynamics.

Yet, the system remains open, that is it exists by means of constant interactions and exchanges of energy, in whatever form, with its environment defying the notion of a strictly defined border – a great divide – between its own inside and outside. Philosophically, and because of the interactions, the meanings of patterns cannot be defined as dependent on either, but instead the possible meanings are conferred by the relationships between the structural components of the system at large, the in-between relations becoming a precursor for the distributed representation inscribed in many connections that are potentially effected by the said relations.

The process itself is responsible for the continuously changing relations, and the system as a whole in which the process is inscribed, is inherently capable of maintaining itself by virtue of continuous coping and adaptation, that is, it has 10

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plasticity enabling its own self-organization. Such is the process-structure of the complex adaptive system.

In this respect, when Bellah et al mention structural changes, they a priori disregard the complex character of the structure per se despite themselves acknowledging the latter’s complexity and recognizing the historical character of a community which therefore becomes a community of memory. The structural changes occur precisely in those nodal points that appear to be presented by Bellah et al as almost of a kind of original sin: separation, leaving home, etc, – leading to the metaphorical loss of paradise in a guise of traditional values and mores. Bellah et al widely use the term of a logic of relations, emphasizing interrelatedness and interdependence as recurrent themes throughout the book, and assert that the moral void in which the individual selves are suspended is derived from their being simply unaware of the possibility of existing sociocultural relations.

But stressing interrelatedness in the larger social context, Bellah et al still seem to distinguish between the individual aspects of self-formation and its social aspects. However the assumption of their – by necessity – interconnectedness leads to acknowledging their mutual interdependence even in the absence of a special or, as Bellah says, second language to articulate the relationship. The paradox consists of individualism and commitments constituting a complex, irreducible to the dyadic relationship, system.

The self, therefore, is never totally empty: a portion of the identity – if we use Bellah’s vocabulary – must be constituted by commitments by virtue of the very relations between the parts acting within the overall dynamics of the whole system.

But are the said commitments derived from the nostalgic pre-existing source, as Bellah would want them to be? The answer may not be affirmative at all, because the source as a feature of complexity cannot be located solely in the past cultural values, as Bellah et al would have insisted, but is constituted – thus losing its very significance as a source – by values constructed in the process of individuation itself because the process in question is non-linear and recurrent by definition.

If Bellah’s fundamental assumptions are challenged, then the very process of finding oneself – although not described solely in terms of a negative freedom, yet incorporating the latter – will stand out as a process of constructing one’s identity.

The individual self, rather than being seen as a self-destructive force stretched to its limits in the dialectical tension that is, sure enough, both “invigorating … [and] anxious” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 154) becomes a site of construction, and it is in this process that the connection – though initially disguised as a separation, its being either physical, or psychical, or both – takes place. Accordingly, if the self is not totally empty, it cannot be totally free either. Bellah et al would perhaps support such a fuzzy boundary; they note anyway that “the notion of an absolutely free self led to an absolutely empty conception of self” (1996, p. 139). Thus the notion of freedom per se becomes ambiguous, and choice becomes a paradox in itself.

Freedom of choice is considered by Bellah et al as given and unquestioned, except in terms of virtues embedded in choice. But the partially free selves are therefore obliged to choose – which means that their making a choice itself becomes a necessity. The choice that is defined as arbitrary by Bellah et al 11

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becomes a contradiction in terms because it is never totally arbitrary, and the self that is simply unable to make choices just according to its own volition is therefore never completely improvisational or unencumbered.

Interrelatedeness leads to the system becoming organized at a new level of complexity by means of the former acting along a delicate and movable (perpetually in progress? Yes, but without Bellah’s et al strings of negativity attached), modulating line, which becomes a constituting part of self-identity, if we continue using Bellah’s discourse. In Deleuze’s terms, however, this in-between line – indeed perpetually in progress, between yesterday and tomorrow, between here and there, between before and after – constitutes becoming-other. It is along this fragile line that “future and past don’t have much meaning, what counts is the present-becoming: geography and not history” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 23), and it is along this fuzzy boundary that the distinction between choice, chooser and the chosen ceases to exist.

This line introduces asymmetry by being itself a “a third which … disturbs the binarity of the two, not so much inserting itself in their opposition as in their complementarity” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 131). All three enter the so called zone of indiscernibility because of the relation of reciprocal presupposition – the term coined by Deleuze and Guattari – enabling their interaction. From the perspective of Deleuze’s poststructuralist conceptualizations – and we have just noted that poststructuralism shares the views advanced by the theory of complex adaptive systems – the self would be defined as a singularity, that is, the one who, in terms of real-life events, may have experienced separation and probably even isolation as a precursor to individuation.

This singular self, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a haecceity – or thisness – embedded in the dynamic regime of its own production from which it must be extracted. The complexity of subject-formation is expressed in what at first sight seems to be a rather strange notion of subjectless subjects. Deleuze asks, “What is a young girl or a group of young girls? … They have in common the imperceptible. … Proust describes them as moving relationships of slowness and speed, and individuations by haecceity which are not subjective” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 93) but always collective, always of the nature of and in relationships. The haecceity is an event, that is a singularity in a dynamic regime of multiple transformations. The relational dynamics constitute an anti-representational, pluralistic and distributive semiotics which cannot be reduced to a static recognition, and Deleuze would have agreed with John Dewey that “there is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about” (Dewey, 1934/1980, 145), an affective impact. In his work Proust and Signs, Deleuze (2000) elaborates on the complexity in the dynamics of meaning-making.

One’s identity, like Alice’s behind the looking glass, is always contested: the seemingly paradoxical element of changing one’s identity leads to self-identity itself losing its stable meaning. It reflects on the dynamics of becoming-other and discarding or transforming the values that were once established. The sense of the self as singular is derived from the individuation not limited to just a person but encompassing the whole event in a context described by Deleuze as “a draft, a 12

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wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

141). It is an experiential situation distributed along the space-time continuum where “something [is] passing through you” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141).

Such a singular self, contrary to representing Bellah’s “completely asocial individualism” (Bellah et al, 1996, p. 145), is capable of multiple “leaps from one soul to another, ‘every now and then’ crossing closed deserts. … And from soul to soul it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 111). The “now and then” are distinctive points, or events within the qualitative multiplicity, the latter functioning, as we remember, as a mode of existence of any “thing” including subjectivity. It is an experiential event that indeed affects the shape, in almost mathematical terms, of one’s life by virtue of itself being a variation on the curve that gives this or that shape to any figure.

The liberation of the self and its entering society occur because of the process described as “their circular play in order to break the circle” (Deleuze, 1991, p.

111). The interval between the pressures of society and the disputes of the individual is creative by embodying the circle of a free play that “no longer has anything to do with an individual who contests …, nor with a society that constrains” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 111), never mind that the circle in question would have been of course considered by Bellah et al as vicious. The choice that the self makes is different from Bellah’s idiosyncratic and arbitrary choice because it cannot but “consist in choosing choice, [therefore] is supposed to restore everything to us” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 116). The circularity of the second order is created, quite paradoxically, by means of breaking the circle as if turning the vicious into the virtuous.

To restore, as Deleuze uses the term, means to have a freedom to choose, that is not to go back to the old, but to be able to make a choice per se a mode of existence. As Deleuze says, reflecting on the whole philosophical tradition from Pascal to Kierkegaard, “the alternative is not between terms but between the modes of existence of the one who chooses” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 114), and what takes place here is a reconstruction of experience. Referring to Kierkegaard, Deleuze comments on the story of Abraham and asserts that the sacrifice the latter makes is not through duty but “through choice alone, and through consciousness of the choice which unites him with God, beyond good and evil: thus his son is restored to him” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 116) at this critical point of no return.

Deleuze uses a powerful visual metaphor to describe the transformation and, by means of this image, accentuating also the significance allotted in his philosophy not to the point, but to the line: “One must multiply the sides, break every circle in favor of the polygons” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 19). For Deleuze, once one steps outside what’s been thought before, once one ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a “perilous act”, a violence, whose first victim is oneself (Deleuze, 1995, p. 103).

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The notion of critical freedom which is implicit in Deleuze’s philosophy is therefore different “from the standard liberal concepts of positive and negative freedom” (Patton, 2000, p. 83). Liberal thought, rather than taking into consideration the overall conditions of change as a whole, assigns to an individual self the center-stage of a volitional and pregiven subject, thus conflating a whole with its single part. By contrast, Deleuze’s poststructuralist “subject” continuously exercises the critical freedom which, as we said earlier, takes place through individuated fields, the very notion of the field implying the collective and distributed nature of the subjectivity-in-process as always already becoming-other.

For Deleuze and Guattari, liberation is not control or manipulation of reality by the subject that would have been located outside of that very arrangement she herself imposed on the world. Instead liberation consists in the free expression of forces that constitutes the subject at the ontological level. The subject is never an isolated independent individual but is the most versatile component of the whole complex collective system. Leach and Boler (1998) notice that Deleuze situates the complex notion of freedom within and as part of the development of nature, rather than its conquest and mastery … Deleuze’s philosophical urgencies have resulted in elaborations of alternative accounts of the processes constitutive of subjectivity (Leach and Boler, 1998, p. 155).

Subjectivity of this sort becomes manifest by one’s being capable of expressing oneself passionately and freely in order “to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141), to break down old methods and to break out into new territories, such a process aptly identified by Deleuze and Guattari by means of deterritorialization and reterritorialization respectively.

The language of expression in a recursive process of de-, and consequently, reterritorialization can exist in the form of both discursive, or articulable, and nondiscursive, or visible, assemblages. Neither is reducible to the other but both can be combined in a diagrammatic mode that functions as a connective link along which all knowledge is produced: according to Deleuze, all knowledge runs in-between the visible and the articulable.

In its pivoting or “piloting” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 142) role a diagram operates by the function it performs. In its functional rather than structural description, it has only “traits,” of content and expression, between which it establishes a connection …. The diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them. … The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. … [O]n the diagrammatic level … form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content. The diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are material and 14

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of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 141-142).

The “in-between-ness” of a diagram constitutes the element of Thirdness in a manner conceptually analogous to Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic model and his diagrammatic reasoning 5 : Both multiplicities “open up on to a third: a multiplicity of relations between forces” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 84) which act in the space of the Outside.

The Deleuzean Outside does not mean the rejection of interiority; just the opposite, the outside and the inside, or the deep layer of the internal world, exist in a dynamic relationship. For Deleuze, The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside but precisely the inside of the outside. …

The inside is an operation of the outside: … an inside … is … the fold of the outside (Deleuze, 1988a, pp. 96-97), this doubling and folding, as Deleuze says, being “the theme that has always haunted Foucault” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 97).

In the same manner, also folded, is a rational thought as related to non-thought or un-thought, making “unthought therefore not external to thought” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 97) but being folded into “its very heart” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 97). The fold thus is the powerful symbol of overcoming the otherwise incompatible dualism between rational and non-rational – or cognitive and precognitive – thinking, or any of the binary opposites for that matter, which traditionally would be considered a seemingly “impossible admixture” (Holder, 1995, p. 179).

The concept of fold, albeit first explored by Deleuze with regard to Foucault’s thought (Deleuze, 1988a), has been later elaborated upon in Deleuze’s work on Leibniz (Deleuze, 1993) where he undertook an analysis of fold in terms of mathematical inflection, a virtual entity. Defined as an intrinsic singularity, the fold “corresponds to what Leibniz calls an ‘ambiguous sign’” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 15).

Using examples of Paul Klee’s art, Cache’s architectural forms and Rene Thom’s seven types of mathematical transformations, or catastrophic events, one of which indeed is called the fold, Deleuze asserts the movement of inflection, or variation, along an infinitely variable curve, which passes through an infinite number of angular points and never admits a tangent at any of these points. It envelops an infinitely cavernous or porous world, constituting more than a line and less than a surface (Mandelbrot’s fractal dimension as a fractional or irrational number, a nondimension, an interdimension) (Deleuze, 1993, p. 16).

Under the guise of an ambiguous sign, “we go from fold to fold and not from point to point … [T]here remains the latitude to always add a detour by making each interval the site of a new folding. … Transformation [is] deferred …: the line 15

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effectively folds into a spiral … The fold is Power. … Force itself is an act, an act of the fold” (Deleuze, 1993, pp. 17-18).

The production of subjectivity, for Deleuze, is effected by unfolding: Being as fold is more than a simple projection of the interior. Its meaning cannot be reduced to the terms of local, albeit nuanced, representation; as we said earlier, the complexity of the process precludes static representations and instantiates instead distribution and recursivity. In this respect the Outside, as a relation proper, always maintains an ontological priority, therefore Being as fold is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not the emanation of an “I” , but something that places in immanence the always other or a Non-self. … I do not encounter myself on the outside. I find the other in me (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 98).

Reproduction of the same would amount to mimesis; the repetition of the different, however, is embedded in a play of semiosis. Far from centering on the “constituting” subject, subjectivation means the invention and creation of new possibilities of life by means of going beyond the play of forces; as such, the subject becomes constituted in a process. In this respect, Deleuze’s philosophy tends towards feminist ethics (see Noddings, 1998) that contrasts postmodern subject as constituted with the volitional, a priori knowing and therefore “constituting”, modern self.

For Deleuze, personal crises that one may encounter in life, are not ugly forms betraying the dream of some aesthetic ideal; instead they are those experiential events – Thom’s catastrophes, indeed – or turning points, expressing the play of forces without which no transformation to a new form would have been possible.

The transformational pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari must begin in the middle as if “among a broken chain of affects” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 9) enfolded in the very middle and muddle of life itself. Yet, the folds of experience would have encompassed qualitative multiplicities of both material and immaterial signs, or pure events, the unfolding of which would have been giving rise to meaning, producing contingent truth(s) embedded in the context of local situations.

Dissonance, for Deleuze, is necessarily enfolded in harmony: the two are in accord, as in Baroque art. The experiential world itself is folded and, as such, we can endure it, so that everything doesn’t confront us at once. … “Children are born with twenty-two folds. These have to be unfolded. Then a man’s life is complete.” 6 … It’s not enough for force to be exerted on other forces or to suffer the effect of other forces, it has to be exerted upon itself too. … That’s what subjectification is about: bringing a curve into the line, making it turn back on itself, or making force impinge on itself. … There’s no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject. The time comes once we’ve worked through knowledge and power; it’s that work that forces us to frame a

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new question, it couldn’t have been framed before. … Subjectification is an artistic activity (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 112-114).

The act of bringing a curve into the line is only possible by means of cutting this curve, the very event of making a cut introducing a discontinuity, an apparent symmetry-breaking as a precursor to novelty. Incidentally, Holder (1995), addressing the conception of creativity and its allusion with the thinking process as derived from John Dewey’s logic as a theory of inquiry, presents a powerful example of such an element of discontinuity in “the instance of a great work of art – for example, the thinking that coordinates the emergence of Michelangelo’s David from a hunk of marble – [this is] a degree of discontinuity that epitomizes the kind of thinking that is called creative” (Holder, 1995, p. 186). The force, as embodied in marble, must impinge on itself, must undergo a cut so as to be creative, to become.

The autoreferential exertion of force upon itself not only leads to a production of subjectivity but also ensures its emergence at a new, higher, level. What is implicated in a fold is not only explicated but also, in the process of becomingother, involves complication expressed as “a set of intensities” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

115), that is, an emergence of a different and new level of organization in a complex living system.

At this more complicated level there won’t be any room for the old set of values, nor are eternal ones stored there. Ethics is inherent in the production of subjectivity, and subjectification, for Deleuze, is “ethical and aesthetic, as opposed to morality” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 114).

Deleuzean philosophy always speaks of values that are to come. … [T]he artist and philosopher do not conjure things out of thin air, even if their conceptions and productions appear as utterly fantastical. Their compositions are only possible because they are able to connect, to tap into the virtual and immanent processes of machinic becoming …. One can only seek to show the power, the affectivity, the … alienated character of thought, which means being true to thought and untrue to oneself …. One … is drawn to the land of the always near-future (Ansell-Pearson, 1997, p. 4).

The tapping into the virtual (never mind real) means a possibility for its becoming-actual. Indeed, the emergence of David out of the marble as an artistic act is “the actualization of possibilities” (Holder, 1995, p. 186) or the new form – that nonetheless has always already been there in its potential, futuristic aspect – having been created or, better to say, having taken a new shape.

Things, sure enough, are never being conjured out of the thin air but are continuously becoming-other. Deleuze says that we “are made up of lines” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 124), we are moving relationships, lines move us, and the most strange line is the one that carries us across many thresholds towards a destination which is unpredictable. This type of line is afforded a special place in Deleuze’s philosophy. This line is “not foreseeable, not pre-existent. This line is simple, 17

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abstract, and yet the most complex of all, … the line of flight and of the greatest gradient. … [T]his line has always been there, although it is the opposite of a destiny” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 125). Many tangled lines constitute what Deleuze calls terra incognita, that is, an unknown territory that may have been mapped, yet would have escaped representation.

Lines always branch and bifurcate, fold and unfold, and “you can only get anywhere by varying, branching out, taking new forms. … In Leibniz’s words: a dance of particles folding back on themselves” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 157). In agreement with Deleuze’s emphasis on the continuous creation of new concepts, the concept itself is described as the future constellation of an event, or the map’s territory, thus implying the distributed, movable or – as Deleuze says – nomadic, character of the would-be representation in the classical sense.

The ontological problem of being in Deleuze’s philosophy is addressed not by means of a rationalistic debate and analyzing arguments but by employing “literary, artistic and ideological forms of mapping” (Bosteels, 1998, p. 146) that belong to the format of cultural studies and indicate the presence of a cartographic tendency in contemporary critical thinking. The praxis of such thought would have involved perpetual dislocations, folding and unfolding up to the point of thought itself becoming an abstract machine that nonetheless may have found its expression in a diagram or a map.

The proverbial relationship between a map and a territory avoids both the trap of a local representation and the temptation of deconstruction; instead it is a selfreferential process during which “the map … merges with its object, when the object itself is movement … [and] the trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 61).

The cartographic approach also affords the reconceptualization of the unconscious which, for Deleuze and Guattari, cannot be reduced just to psychoanalytic drives or instincts, or “playing around all the time with mummy and daddy” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 144). Cartesian consciousness as the sole constituent of thought is devalued because non-thought, for Deleuze, is equally capable of producing effects, and, in the Spinozian manner, Deleuze considers “an unconscious of thought [to be] just as profound as the unknown of the body” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 19; Deleuze’s italics). Mind is not taking priority over material body or vice versa, instead both are considered to be a series in operation: the actions in the mind are the actions of the body and, respectively, the passions of the body are the passions in the mind.

Because production of subjectivity always already includes the realm of the unconscious, “the cartographies of unconscious would have to become indispensable complements to the current systems of rationality of … all … regions of knowledge and human activity” (Guattari, original French, in Bosteels, 1998, p. 155). The unconscious is posited as enactive, itself plurality or multiplicity, that exceeds the scope of traditional psychoanalytic thought. Over and

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above the personal unconscious, it is conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari as Anti-Oedipal, that is, irreducible to the single master-signified.

Reminiscent of the Jungian collective unconscious, it always deals with some social and collective frame and is “a productive machine, … at once social and desiring” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 144). In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze (1987) describes the conversation between Freud and Jung: Jung points out to Freud the importance of multiple elements constituting particular context and appearing in the unconscious. Such is the collective assemblage defined as “[t]he minimum real unit” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 51). Deleuze also reminds us of Freud’s not paying attention to the assemblages within an experiential situation – constituting the qualitative multiplicity – in the famous case of Little Hans: Freud … takes no account of the assemblage (building-street-nextdoorwarehouse-omnibus-horse-a-horse-falls-a-horse-is-whipped!); he takes no account of situation (the child has been forbidden to go to the street, etc.); he takes no account of Little Hans’s endeavor (horse-becoming, because every other way out has been blocked up …). The only important thing for Freud is that the horse be the father – and that’s the end of it (Deleuze, 1987, p. 80).

Unconscious formations are to be brought into play both because an individual is a desiring machine and the “family drama depends … on the unconscious social investments that come out in delire” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 20), that is, in a prerational, differential and excessive, triadic logic of floating images and disparate meanings inhabiting the Alice’s paradoxical Wonderland. Desire is not a single drive – it is an assembly line of affects and effects; machine is not a mechanical law utilized in the production of some predetermined end imposed by a transcendental subject – instead subjects and objects are themselves differentiated and produced as the outcomes of desiring machines.

The unconscious enfolded in subjectivity entails the insufficiency for subjectivity to be interpreted just in terms of the stable identity of the rational and intentional subject, or some ideal authentic self. There is no transcendental subject for Deleuze, it vanishes like the infamous ghost into the unconscious machine, it is nowhere to be found. The unconscious, as yet a-conceptual part of the plane of immanence is always productive and constructive, making subjectivity changing and transient as though forcing it into becoming-other.

According to Deleuze, “the intentionality of being is surpassed by the fold of Being, Being as fold” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 110). In this respect, the unconscious perceptions are implicated as minute, or microperceptions; as such – and le pli, the root of the im-pli-cated, means in French the fold – they are part of the cartographic microanalysis of establishing “an unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 95).

The notion of being as fold points toward a subjectivity understood as a process irreducible to universal notions such as totality, unity or any a priori fixed selfidentity. As a mode of intensity, subjectivity is capable of expressing itself in its present actuality neither by means of progressive climbing toward the ultimate truth or the higher moral ideal, nor by “looking for origins, even lost or deleted 19

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ones, but setting out to catch things where they were at work, in the middle: breaking things open, breaking words open” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 86).

The complexity of subjectivation is related to the complexity of language: there cannot be a single meaning derived from the classical signifier-signified based model, because such description would fail to acknowledge the Deleuzean plural and pragmatic subject’s mode of existence as qualitative multiplicity. Subjectivity is always derivative to the expression of thought, and being true to thought is preeminent to the production of subjectivity. The fundamental Deleuzean concept of fold contributes to the blurring of boundaries between epistemology, ethics, and psychology: subjectivity expresses itself through emergence of a new form of content: it becomes other by way of interaction, or the double transformation – as in the aforementioned and oft-cited example of wasp and orchid.

In the Introduction I have already pointed out the significance of Deleuze’s notion of two-sided transformation and its relevance to Dewey’s philosophy.

Because this concept is crucial and makes the folding of the inside and outside the cornerstone of Deleuze’s philosophy – which in turn, as we will see in the later chapters, affects the very methodology of postmodern research in education – I would like to underline again its affinity with the following expanded excerpt from Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934/1980). Dewey emphasizes the dynamic and mediating function of the material, as well as the “suddenness of emergence” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 75) of new structural forms: The connection between a medium and the act of expression is intrinsic. An act of expression always employs natural material … It becomes a medium when it is employed in view of its place … It takes environing and resisting objects as well as internal emotion and impulsion to constitute an expression. … The act of expression that constitutes a work of art is a construction in time. … [T]he expression of the self in and through the medium … is itself a prolonged interaction of something issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not at first possess. … On the side of the self, elements that issue from prior experience are stirred into action in fresh desires, impulsions and images.

These proceed from the subconscious …. Unless there is com-pression nothing is ex-pressed …. An emotion is implicated in a situation …. The work is artistic in the degree in which the two functions of transformation are effected by a single operation. … Only by progressive organization of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ material in organic connection with each other can anything be produced that is not a learned document or an illustration of something familiar (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 64-75).

In the chapters that follow we will see the functioning of the very process by means of which the emergence of new structural forms is made possible. The aforementioned progressive organization – a growth – makes up a philosophical site which, for Deleuze, as we have seen, consists of a multiplicity of planes including the non-philosophical, aesthetic, affective and social dimensions. The multiple interactions bring non-linearity in a continuous process of growth, create a 20

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place where difference intervenes and becomes repeated – that is, folds onto itself – thus, due to the presence of multiple feedbacks, contributing to the selforganization of the process per se.

The Deleuzean subject is able to avoid being forever stuck in the infamous vicious circle because it is free to break things open: it lives by its philosophy – and philosophy as the creation of concepts is, for Deleuze, an ethical way of life – both putting theory into practice and forming new concepts contingent on the dynamics of experience. Martin Joughin, in his introduction to Deleuze’s book on Spinoza (1992), notices that for Deleuze, the development of a “philosophy” is traced from some version of an initial situation where some term in our experience diverges from its apparent relations with some other terms, breaking out of that “space” of relations and provoking a reflection in which we consider reorientations or reinscriptions of this and other terms within a “virtual” matrix of possible unfoldings of these terms and their relations in time … . Such a “philosophy” comes fullcircle when the “subject” … “orients” its own practical activity of interpretation, evaluation or orientation of the terms of experience within this universal matrix it has itself unfolded (Joughin in Deleuze, 1992, p. 9).

In this respect, what is authentic is first of all singular, here-and-now, that is particular and not general; yet it is something that “has to map out a range of circumstances” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 26), thus making individuation a matter of contingency depending on the broad range of varied situations and the collective assemblages embodying each experience. Individuation as always already becoming-other is bound to collective assemblages: people do not become “without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 240), for the entangled lines of flight.

Everything, according to Deleuze, has “its geography, its cartography, its diagram. What’s interesting, even in a person, are the lines that make them up, or they make up, or take, or create. … What we call a ‘map’, or sometimes a ‘diagram’ is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 33). Such “topological and specifically cartographic” (Bosteels, 1998, p. 146) being is to be evaluated not in terms of rigid value-judgments but by means of spatial metaphors as a locus of situations and events.

Subjectivity exists as a territory and constitutes itself via the cartographic method; it engenders itself through multiple connections by mapping both “the psychic and the social” (Bosteels, 1998, p. 150) that is, the dimensions constituting the fold of both inside and outside: the inside of the outside. A map or diagram, in its function of linking discursive and non-discursive modes of expression, acts as a diagonal connection, the purpose of which is to “pursue the different series, to travel along the different levels, and cross all thresholds; instead of simply displaying phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must form a transversal or mobile diagonal line” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 22).

The connective line establishes “a bridge, a transversality” (Guattari, 1995, p.

23); we may even say that the universality of analytic philosophy becomes 21

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subsumed by transversality: in this respect, philosophy gives way to cartography.

The linear progression toward some transcendental end is replaced by non-linear enfolding and unfolding, and the authentic stable self – the rational and static, finally-beyond-doubt, subject of the Cartesian method, yet forever separated from the equally static world of objects – is transformed into a machinic multiplicity in a dynamic process of autoreferential and triadic relations between “the semiotic machine, the referred object and the enunciative subject” (Guattari, original French, in Bosteels, 1998, p. 167).

The paradigm of complexity, describing the relations enfolded in the inside of the outside, presupposes values contingent on experience as well as aligned with the process-structure of the complex dynamic system per se in which the aforementioned triad is immanent. Deleuze and Guattari make no distinction between man and nature: for them, humankind and nature are coextensive, and “what Deleuze gives us is thereby a philosophy ‘of’ nature, or rather a philosophy as nature” (Badiou, 1994, p. 63).

Ethics in such a naturalistic philosophy will be specified as a mode of existence rather than a pre-existing set of values, according to which human nature is supposed to be judged on the basis of how well it would fit the moral ideal of some abstract authentic self. It is evaluations, for Deleuze, and not prescribed values that characterize one’s ways of being or modes of existence: The notion of value implies a critical reversal. … The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation. … [W]e always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being and our style of life. …

This is the crucial point; high and low, noble and base, are not values but represent the differential element from which the value of values themselves arise (Deleuze, 1983, pp. 1-2).

Instead of conforming to fixed moral criteria, subjectivation is effected by affects, and Deleuze-Spinoza’s system of affects replaces the strict and rigid moral code. The modes of existence are presupposed by feelings, conduct and intentions. … [T]here are things one cannot do, believe, feel, think, unless one is weak, enslaved, impotent; and other things one cannot do, feel and so on, unless one is free or strong. A method of explanation by immanent modes of existence thus replaces the recourse to transcendent values. The question in each case: Does, say, this feeling, increase our power of action or not? Does it help us come on full possession of that power? (Deleuze, 1992, p. 269), or perhaps, we add, it may be rather a cause of hindrance?

One must do what one is capable of; it is the body that can do, but it’s also quite possible that what the body can do becomes cut off from active affections therefore diminishing one’s power of action thus hindering and blocking one’s process of subjectivation. Subjectivity is produced in a series of events and is continually reproduced – as if reborn – again and again upon “[t]he conjunctive synthesis of 22

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consumption-consummation” (Holland, 1999, p. 36). The logical conjunction becomes in some sense an existential conjecture which expresses itself by means of the feeling-tone and not solely as a rational value-judgment.

There is no moral opposition of abstract terms, but deep ethical difference embedded in experience. There is no judgment as some pre-assigned transcendent value, but there are affects that create an immanent evaluation of singular situations in terms of “‘I love or I hate’ instead of ‘I judge’” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 141) combining therefore a fundamental critical aspect of philosophical thought with an ethical conception of action saturated with noble, that is, transformative, energy.

The dynamic character of a nomadic subject in terms of becoming-other is to be understood as a distribution along various planes, or a field of transversal lines going, by definition, in multiple directions. The distributive property inherent in subjectivity makes the notion of an essential human nature a false problem; instead it is an event that functions as a unit of analysis. Event constitutes the aforementioned “line of becoming … [which] produces a shared deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293) thus implying a plurality of meanings ascribed to subjectivity, which is functioning at any given moment as an integral part of the total system.

Each concept, as we said earlier, exists in a triadic relationship with percept and affect: we do “need all three to get things moving” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 165; Deleuze’s italics). These dynamic moving forces, “whether perceived or presented in imagination” (Dewey, 1916/1924, pp. 152-153) breathe life into philosophy.

Becoming-other is a series of real-life experiential events. Deleuze’s multiple becomings happen “‘between’, [they are] in the middle, adjacent” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 30). These are the features that seem to be rhizomorphic, paraphrasing Deleuze, with the Deweyan-based naturalization of epistemology and education.

John Dewey, with respect to education, has identified the aforementioned moving forces with the idea of interest, the latter representing a connection in the sense of an engagement of the self with the world of objects. As such, the word interest suggests – etymologically, and as noted by Dewey (1916/1924, p. 149) – what is always in-between, similar to the Deleuzean conjunction and. To be of interest, for Dewey, is equivalent to being “‘between’ the agent and his end” (Dewey, 1916/1924, pp. 149-150), and one way of arousing interest is by bringing about a sense of connection, therefore What [a person] gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions and ideas, is not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life – a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. … And education is not a mere means to such a life.

Education is such a life (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 417).

Coincidentally, Deleuze’s last work, completed shortly before his death, was entitled Immanence: A Life; “life” as a philosophical concept having both ontological and ethical connotations. It is the philosophical thought as creative, “that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life. Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative power of life …

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Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 101). Because ethics, for Deleuze, is distinguished from morality, the latter tending to substitute transcendental values for the immanent ethical criteria that serve to evaluate various modes of existence, no mode of existence, or any newly created possibility of life, is to be judged so that in all possibility it might lead to a devaluation of real life for the sake of some abstract higher values.

For Deleuze, any mode of life is organic and vital by definition, and therefore good in the sense of its potential power to transform itself and, as a result, “to open opportunities – never to close them” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 13). New possibilities of life means multiplying the connections in practice; respectively, “those connections open doors more effectively and naturally than the forced feedings of theories” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 15) in conformity with some universal principles. Deleuze’s whole philosophical project, as he himself indicated (Deleuze, 1995), was vitalistic and devoted to inquiry into events and signs. Referring to Proust’s work on signs and reading him from the perspective of triadic logic of relations, or semiotics, Deleuze says: [W]e see the pieces of Japanese paper flower in the water, expanding or extending, forming blossoms, houses and characters. … Meaning itself is identified with this development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of meaning. So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two …: essence complicates the sign and the meaning; it holds them in complication. … It measures in each case their relation, their degree of distance or proximity, the degree of their unity (Deleuze, 2000, p.

90).

The concept of unity, as used by here Deleuze, does not mean any unification or totality but is presented in its sense of one more fragment among others: it is “a final brushstroke” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 167).

The theory of signs, or semiotics, would remain just a theory, that is, will stay meaningless, without relation in practice between “the sign and the corresponding apprenticeship” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 92), that is, one’s engaging in active reading and interpreting of the signs. Therefore – and due to the sign’s having an “increasingly intimate” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 88) relation with its implicit and implicated meaning – “[we] are wrong to believe in truth; there are only interpretations” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 92). Accordingly, Boisvert (1998) who addressed the reconstruction of experience by Dewey, pointed to an affinity between Dewey’s articulation of experience as qualitative, multidimensional and inclusive, and Proust’s famous madeleine which becomes “a nexus of meaning far surpassing, ‘infinitely other’ as Dewey puts it, the description in terms of sense data” (Boisvert, 1998, p. 15).

Contrasting Proust’s allusion to petite madeleine as a sign in the present that awakens the memories of the past with the classical empirical method of identifying the basic building blocks of experience, Boisvert asserts the similarity between the effects of signs and the pragmatists’ starting point for the 24

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reconstruction of experience. He stresses that ordinary human experience is always marked by an affective dimension which has been seemingly stripped away “in the reductive empiricism espoused by Russell” (Boisvert, 1998, p. 15).

By defining his philosophical method as transcendental empiricism, Deleuze, similar to Dewey, positioned the philosophical point of departure in the ordinary experiential situation: never mind the philosophical thinking eventually transcending any given experience, or growing “beyond ordinary, lived experience, that is where it must begin” (Boisvert, 1998, p. 16). Any interaction culminates for Deleuze, as well as for Dewey, in a mode of communication, which uses expressive language and shared meanings. The expressive form of language rather than a statement uttered in propositions is itself a precursor for a new experience, for “a continual beginning afresh” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 417).

The diagrammatic mode of description, by bringing in the outside, establishes a resonance between inside and outside as two coresonating systems. Because of the pre-personal, a-subjective and collective, character of the unconscious and the affective dimension enfolded in subjectivity, the modes of subject-formation as becoming-other presuppose what Deleuze dubbed subjectless individuations, the main characteristic of which, rather than being a concept, is an affect. Asserting the presence of affect inscribed in such subjectivities, Deleuze emphasizes its passionate quality: “perhaps passion, the state of passion, is actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable, knowing how to breathe, is about” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 116). 7 For Dewey, too, thought and non-thought, reason and passion, emotion and cognition, exist in the same collective assemblage as for Deleuze: no “emotional, passionate phase of action can be eliminated on behalf of bloodless reason. More ‘passions’, not fewer, is the answer” (Dewey quoted in Holder, 1995, p. 184).

We will see in the following chapters the significance of Deleuze’s empirical method as overcoming the reductionism of classical empiricism by virtue of Deleuze’s approach sharing the pragmatic, Peircean and Deweyan, legacy.

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The word sign is ambiguous. While traditionally defined as something that stands for something else, the notion of a sign as used in this chapter follows Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic conception so as to underline the dynamic character of the sign-process. A sign can be anything that stands to somebody, a sign-user, for something else, its object, in some respect and in such a way so as to generate another sign, called its interpretant. In the broadest sense, Peirce used the word representamen to designate a sign, in agreement with the word representation describing both the dynamic process and the terminus of such a process, by which one thing stands for another.

Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thinking was influenced by Peirce‘s pragmatism and his triadic logic of signs or semiotics. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim establishes the criterion for meaning as production of real effects: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (Peirce CP 5.402). This chapter focuses on the pragmatic aspect of the concept of intuition asserting its place in the cognitive, that is inferential, process. The structure of this chapter, consistent with the spirit of Peirce’s triadic semiotics, will be three-fold.

As a point of departure, I revisit Nel Noddings’ monumental work on intuition in education (Noddings and Shore, 1984), that has enjoyed a recent revival by being chosen as an educational classic. I am going to expand the boundaries of the concept by drawing from selected excerpts in the works of Dewey and Deleuze and asserting the similarity between the two based on their analogous approach to formal logic as semiotics. The locus of this chapter is, specifically, Peirce’s notion of abductive inference, and I suggest hereafter a novel model of abduction and connect it with the concept of intuition for the purpose of exploring the possible educational implications of both “Firstnesses”.

While in the current philosophy of science discourse abduction is usually taken in one sense only, as an inference to the best explanation; this chapter will posit abductive inference as open to interpretation in psychological and, quite possibly, naturalistic terms. Peirce sometimes used abduction interchangeably with retroduction. What he meant however is that retroduction is a process encompassing abduction. This chapter, secondly, will propose a model of such a retroductive process. For this purpose I will employ a mathematical formalism constructing a graph, or a diagram, on the complex plane.

At the conclusion of this chapter I would like to suggest a possible solution, derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s a-signifying semiotics, for the so-called 27

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learning paradox. While paradox per se cannot be overcome, the very existence of what common sense considers a paradox is a feature of triadic semiotics based on a logic of non-non-contradiction. What seems to be a paradox is in fact the Firstness of intuition that is always already present within the Thirdness of cognition. As such, it is inherent in the semiotic consciousness and is a precondition for meaning production in the learning process.

At the outset, since I have already used the terms, I want to briefly address three Peircean categories. Logic, for Peirce, “is a science of the necessary laws of thought, or, better still (thought always taking place by means of signs), it is a general semeiotics, treating not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs” (Peirce CP 1.444). Peirce’s pragmatism, as such, blends logic and psychology and allows for the presensory and preconscious – not limited to sense-data – apprehension of reality upon which, despite its being necessarily vague, people are prepared to act.

The triadic nature of relations between signs leads to Peirce’s classifying signs in terms of basic categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness: First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else.

Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby first and second are brought into relation …. In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation. … Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third (Peirce CP 6.7).

Firstness is quality, possibility, freedom. Secondness, as a relation of the First to the Second, is of opposites, physical reality, billiard-ball forces, rigid deterministic laws, direct effect, action and reaction. Thirdness relates seconds to thirds; it is synthesis, communication, memory, mediation. It is the potentia of Thirdness that connects what is possible with the actual. When Peirce conceived of signs in terms of images, that is as an extra-linguistic category, he described them in numbers which are cardinal and not simply ordinal or sequential, like first, second or third.

Therefore, “there are two in the second, to the point where there is a firstness in the secondness, and there are three in the third” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 30).

As for intuition, it would be classified, in Peircean terms, as a precognitive quali-signification, that is the qualitative immediacy of experience. The immediate Firstness – a sort of premodern natural attraction – was, together with the Thirdness of mediation, left out as insignificant by the “pure reason” of modernity and substituted by the dualistic sin-signification and instrumental rationality based on the conventional logic of excluded middle.

Noddings and Shore (1984), describing intuitive modes, are primarily interested in how intuition is involved in educational processes. They suggest four major features that serve to roughly distinguish an intuitive mode from an analytic, or conceptual, activity. The relation between the two remains complementary, as “it is impossible to isolate the two meticulously and discretely” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 69). They are irreducible to each other but exist in the reciprocal 28

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presupposition similar to Gilles Deleuze’s triadic matrix of percepts, affects and concepts that have already been briefly addressed in Chapter 1: Becoming-other.

Noddings notices how Poincare, in his discussing mathematical creativity, affirmed the role of affect, or “this special sensibility” (Poincare, quoted in Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 66), in producing intuition 8 , so as to “bring them [novel concepts] into consciousness” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 66). The four aspects characterizing the intuitive modes are, according to Noddings and Shore, the following: – involvement of the senses, that is an immediate contact with the object; – commitment and receptivity, that is letting the object act upon the subject, so that subject becomes affected, almost seized, by the object; – a quest, or desire, for meaning which is “realized in seeing, creating a picture in our minds, understanding” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 81) and insight (insight); – and a productive tension between subjective certainty and objective uncertainty.

Sure enough, an intuitive mode involves using concepts, but the subjects return “again and again to the object … [allowing] contact with the object to direct their thought, whereas analytic thinkers are directed by concepts they have attached to the object” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 70) a priori.

The aforementioned tension – created by perplexity, a curious fact, a problematic situation, in short, the interference of what Deleuze dubbed difference – enables the initial distance to be bridged by intuition potentially capable of making the strange familiar.

The situation is problematic, that is, it involves tension and conflict, because it encounters the otherness, or Secondness of “reaction against my will” (Peirce CP 8.144) due to the intervention, sometimes beyond one’s awareness of this action, of the brute facts of human experiences. “[T]he surprising fact … is observed” (Peirce CP 5.185) – and an inquiring mind makes a first step toward apprehending the experience by abduction, a peculiar logic of discovery, bordering on as yet uneducated (if education is taken conventionally) guess.

Despite being initially pre-conscious and necessarily vague, the abductive inference, according to Peirce, belongs to objective logic understood broadly as the “laws of thought, … thought always taking place by means of signs” (Peirce CP 1.144). The causal influence embedded in the semiotic process of cognition becomes indirect and moderated by means of inclusion of the third category that breaks down the direct dyadic cause-effect connection.

Nonetheless the formal, albeit vague, rule of abduction enables mind to reason from the premise to the conclusion; such an inference being described by the following statement: if A is B, and C can be signified by B, then maybe A is a sign of C. The interpretation is triggered by the Firstness of abduction which, tending towards the perceptual judgment, is a hypothesis-bearing statement that asserts its conclusion only conjecturally; yet, according to Peirce (CP 5.189), there is a reason to believe that the resulting judgment, under the circumstances, is true. Peirce (CP 5.184) was adamant that there is no sharp line of demarcation between abduction and perceptual judgment: one shades into the other along the inferential process.

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The given premise must entail some empirical consequences; the explication of the initial perception is achieved by analogical reasoning which unfolds into inferences to the would-be consequences of abductive conclusions eventually leading “to a result indefinitely approximating to the truth in the long run” (Peirce CP 2.781), asymptotically merging into the synthetic inference in the process.

Peirce emphasized the role of diagrammatic reasoning – and we remember from the preceding chapter the importance allotted by Deleuze to the concept of diagram per se – saying that “passing from one diagram to the other, the [reasoner] … will be supposed to see something … that is of a general nature” (Peirce CP 5.148), hence contributing to making one’s ideas clear. The purpose of such a diagrammatic mode of expression was indeed to “depict thought’s very movement, its processual character, in terms of interconnecting lines, schemes, figures, abstract mappings. In fact [Peirce] believed that all thought is sign process and hence it is capable of being presented diagrammatically” (Merrell, 1995a, p. 51).

The epistemic process, for Peirce, means rejection of the Cartesian notion of arriving at propositions that mirror reality. The whole notion of a proposition, whose subject designates reality and whose predicate describes the essence of the said reality, is transformed by Peirce into interpretation of reality and living it out experientially: mimesis turns into semiosis. The abductive guess as a matter of a First borders on intuition; an intuitive knowledge traditionally being a synonym for immediate knowledge. Intuition conventionally has been considered to be the initial perception of an object. For Peirce, however, there is no immediate, that is unmediated, knowledge: all cognition is mediated by signs in a process of semiotic inquiry. Perception differs not in kind but only in degree from other forms of human knowledge, and it is precisely an intuition that enables “perception [to turn] inward upon the objects of conception” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 47).

The very etymology of the word confirms this: to in-tuit means to learn from within, yet “the parish of percepts … [is] … out in the open” (Peirce CP 8.144) of the experiential world. The inside is not opposed to the outside, instead the two are mediated by Thirdness, which folds them – very much in accord with Deleuze’s aforementioned conceptualizations – into the inside of the outside. Affirming the continuity of consciousness, Peirce stressed its temporal character. The cognitive, that is inferential, process of interpretation is a series of thought-signs, and the meaning of each thought becomes understood in each subsequent thought, creating a process of unlimited semiosis.

No thought is ever instantaneous because it needs an inferential stretch (cf.

Dewey, 1925/1958 in the following chapter) for its own interpretation. Yet the immediacy of Firstness is always presented in an instant and, as Firstness, it is had prior to every mediative Thirdness, making inference appear to border on association and guessing. Peirce, as long ago as 1868, stated that cognition exists only in the relation of my states of mind at different instants …. In short, the Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation – the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual) runs in a continuous 30

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stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness (Peirce, 1955, pp. 236-237), enabling the recursive process of what Noddings and Shore (1984) call the dual representation.

Every sign is subject to interpretation by a series of subsequent thought-signs, and the whole triad enveloping the “the relation-of-the-sign-to-its-object becomes the object of the new sign” (Sheriff, 1994, p. 37), according to the following graph (Sheriff, 1994, p. 35):

Figure 1. A triadic relation

Signs reiterate, they become signs of signs, or representations. As Peirce (CP 5.138) stated, “the mode of being of a representamen [… a sign] is such that it is capable of repetition”, that is, of creating sensible patterns. Yet, because every interpretant might be a precursor to a new meaning, different from the preceding one, the repetition is never the reproduction of the same, but, as Deleuze (1994a) put it, the repetition of the different.

For Peirce, the concepts literally take part in the reality of what is conceived, implying holism and a sense of auto-referentiality between the inner and outer realities. As a result of multiple interrelations, signs move from one to another, they grow and engender other signs because the triadic logic leads to signs always already becoming something else and something more, contributing – in the process of their growth – to human development, becoming, and the evolution of consciousness. A hypothetical idea constitutes what Peirce called a psychological ground for a habit that carries a flavour of anticipation: it “is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is not now conscious” (Peirce CP 6.156). For Peirce, mind as Firstness has to be entrenched in habits (as Thirdness) so as to congeal, as he says, into matter (Secondness). It is mind “hidebound with habits” (Peirce, 1955, p. 351) that we call matter.

Because “consistency belongs to every sign, … the man-sign acquires information and comes to mean more that he did before” (Peirce, 1955, p. 249).

The value of knowledge is in its practical import, that is, the way we, humans, will act, think, and feel – in short, assign meaning to our own experience – as the pragmatic effect of the said knowledge. The meaning and essence of every conception depends, in a pragmatic sense, on the way the latter is applied: it “lies 31

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in the application that is to be made of it” (Peirce CP 5.532). Pragmatic maxim presupposes the discovery of meaning notwithstanding that the “meaning lurks perpetually in the future” (Merrell, 1992, p. 189).

Everything is a sign: the whole universe, for Peirce, is perfused with signs; yet “nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign” (Peirce CP 2.308) by means of triadic relations leading to each successive sign having become an interpretant for the preceding one. What seems to be a paradoxical statement is derived from the nature of the pragmatic method itself. Abduction does seem to function instantaneously, not because there is no temporal interval of inference, but because the mind is unaware of when it begins or ends. The result of abductive inference is the guess proffered or the hypothesis drawn.

If reasoning from premises to conclusion is considered to be either deductive, or inductive, or fallacious, then an abductive guess understood as an inference to the best explanation, that expresses merely some likelihood in reasoning, would seem to represent a fallacious kind, indeed, and is considered as such within the analytic discourse. In a Peircean sense, however, abduction suggests that something might possibly be the case (Peirce CP 5.171). For Peirce, what is real cannot be in any way reduced to the actual, in fact “the will-be’s, the actually-is’s and the havebeen’s are not the sum of the real. They only cover actuality. There are besides would be’s and can be’s that are real” (Peirce CP 8.216), such would-be-ness constituting the realm of the virtual, however still semiotically real, world. The semiotically real world therefore includes possibilities “articulated” by means of abduction.

Peirce, describing the structure of perceptual abduction, noted that “the first premise is not actually thought, though it is in the mind habitually. This, of itself would not make the inference unconscious. But it is so because it is not recognized as an inference; the conclusion is accepted without our knowing how” (Peirce CP 8.64-65). Intuition, albeit achieving an intellectual knowledge, the nous of the ancients, is not of something but is something; as an epistemic pragmatic method, it is the very process of knowing.

Rather than being a “ground for knowledge, … intuition is a way of knowing” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 47), and its immediacy as such is indeed questionable: it is quasi-immediate tending towards the perceptual judgment as a kind of “mediated immediacy” (Peirce CP 5.181), or a limiting case of abductive inference, an educated guess, a hypothesis-making that must precede the hypothesis-testing. Thus Firstness in Thirdness is being tested and deliberated upon during the continuous interplay of all three forms of inference, including induction and deduction, although “the intuition [per se] does not deduce; it does not move patiently through strings of logical propositions” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p.

133): instead, it jumps, leaps, and desires.

For Peirce, a sign “in order to fulfil its office, to actualize its potency, must be compelled by its object” (Peirce CP 5.554), as if striving to appear in a mode of Thirdness and become available – because of the established relation, or relevance – to integration into consciousness. An abductive leap thus represents a selective, even if seemingly unconscious, choice, that is, an interference of difference that 32

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would indeed make a difference. Peirce emphasized the feeling-tone of abduction saying that every abductive inference involves a particular emotion: “the various sounds made by the instruments in the orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion …. This emotion is essentially the same thing as a hypothetic inference” (Peirce CP 2.643).

An unconscious inference functioning abductively as intuition is the cognitively unmediated, as Firstness, access to knowledge. The knowledge organization that proceeds in a habitual way becomes “fully accepted” (Peirce CP 7.37) and as such “tends to obliterate all recognition of … premises from which it was derived” (CP 7.37): the inferential steps per se stay out of consciousness, we are not aware of them.

The preconscious state of mind, as manifested inthe fascination of children with … Winnie the Pooh, and most especially, Alice’s adventures – also a favorite pastime of logicians, mathematicians, and physicists – attests to their import to “primitive” perceptual and conceptual modes, keenly picked up by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (Merrell, 1996, p. 141).

Deleuze, in his move against the Cartesian method, speaks of paideia stating that for Greeks thought is not based on a premeditated decision to think. Deleuze considered such a thought-non-thought – functioning semiotically in its aforementioned mode of Firstness – to be “the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192), ultimately in a need of Thirdness so that to integrate that which is still un-conscious in and of itself.

Therefore thought thinks “by virtue of the forces that are exercised on it in order to constrain it to think. … Thinking, like activity, is always a second power of thought, [and] not the natural exercise of a faculty. … A power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 108; Deleuze’s italics). The interplay between the preconscious and conscious states, the change from the Deleuzean non-thought to thought and vice versa, is effectuated by forces that play the role, in Peirce’s words, of “inward [or] potential actions … which somehow influence the formation of habits” (Peirce CP 6.286).

Recognizing the narrow and limited approach to education, Deleuze calls for education of the senses (cf. Poincare’s subtle sensibility quoted in Noddings and Shore, 1984) by means of exploring the faculties of perception not limited to the data of pure sense-impressions. The presence of the line of flight, which is capable of transversing a “fundamental distinction between subrepresentative, unconscious and aconceptual ideas/intensities and the conscious conceptual representation of common sense” (Bogue, 1989, p. 59), characterizes Deleuze’s empirical – and considered by him to be at once wild and powerful – method of transcendental empiricism, the name itself implying the paradoxical contradiction that appears to be present in logic as semiotics.

It is the very presence, that is, the included middle of the transversal link that characterizes Deleuze’s method, which does not rely on absolutes but aims “to bring into being that which does not yet exist” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 147), hence the name transcendental. Deleuze purports to show that which is as yet imperceptible 33

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by means of laying down a visible map of some invisible territory or, in other words, creating a mediatory space between discursive and non-discursive formations. The very “interstice … between seeing and speaking” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 87) is the place where thinking occurs. In this respect Deleuze’s method accords with John Dewey’s naturalistic emergentism, and I have already briefly introduced this notion. Holder (1995), referring to Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology and his method of inquiry, expresses the core of the matter nicely in his description of an event that “can be given without reference to the transcendental …. In effect, higher mental processes are said to be continuous with lower ones (e.g. thinking with the biological pattern of need and search) but such ‘higher’ processes are not reducible to lower ones (e.g. thoughts are not reducible to brain states). See Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 1938) pp. 18-19, 23” (Holder, 1995, p. 190f).

For Deleuze, signs that act in the world engender thought: Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental “encounter” … It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 139).

This is an intuition, a necessary condition for the practical production of meaning, or what Deleuze (1990) called the logic of sense – or sens, that is also meaning, in French – therefore addressing, in fact, the theory of meaning. Such is the Firstness, which is described by Deleuze as the “quality of a possible sensation … [which] is felt, rather than conceived” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 98). This specific logic that contains feelings and affects is, for Deleuze, “inspired in its entirety by empiricism. Only empiricism knows how to transcend the experiential dimension of the visible without falling into Ideas, and how to track down, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 20) as an ultimate expression of meaning.

Deleuze’s method remains empirical by virtue of the object of inquiry regarded as real, albeit subrepresentative, experience. Yet, it is also transcendental because the very foundations for the empirical principles are a priori left outside the common faculties of perception. In this respect transcendental empiricism purports to discover conditions that exist beyond the actual commonsensical experience.

The Deleuzean object of experience is considered to be given only in its tendency to exist, or rather to subsist in a virtual, as yet non-representative, state.

Those virtual tendencies are regarded as capable of constituting a sufficient reason for the actual; while the actual per se is not constituted but becomes constructed by virtual tendencies. The actualization of the virtual always precedes any physical effect appearing out of a cause due to the fact that the very nature of any “thing” is, according to Deleuze, the expression of tendency. Although tendencies, for Deleuze, elude spatial representation, they are real, not merely possible – precisely because they have the efficiency – virtus – of becoming actualized in the process called by Deleuze different/ciation, the term signifying 34

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the character of the process as described by the double difference, or the derivative of the second order.

While the world of mind, for Deleuze, is structured, and ideas are regarded as intensive multiplicities or systems of multiple differential relations, in which differentiation (with a “t”) is inherent, structures themselves have a dynamical character. This dynamics is described in terms of a continuous process, called differenciation (with a “c”), by means of which virtualities actualize themselves.

Because virtualities exist as tendencies, prior to the appearance of any effect, they define the immanence of the transcendental field.

According to Deleuze’s ontological interpretation, tendencies per se cannot be represented, they cannot be thought of in spatial terms – otherwise they turn into discrete multiplicities, betraying the notion of multiplicity as intensive and continuous. For Deleuze, the very spirit of experimentation rejects the binary opposition between universals and particulars (cf. Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 48) and combines in itself mysticism with the mathematicism of concepts: for example, Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus becomes compatible with philosophy as a virtual form of thinking. In this respect, the mathematical form cannot be taken away from natural laws; the latter are models and not just “mere expressions of linguistic truths” (DeLanda, 2002, p. 127).

It is through different/ciation, the term signifying the processual character of the structures of intensive multiplicities, that actualization takes place. The concept of different/ciation as such invokes the notions of both spatial and temporal dimensions. Deleuze’s poststructuralist conceptualization in terms of space-time thereby accords with Noddings’ and Shore’s constructivist view on intuition and their referring to the pure intuition of space in addition to the intuition of time presented as successive states. The relational dynamics creates a connective link across a subject-object divide because “space-time ceases to be a pure given in order to become … the nexus of differential relations in the subject, and the object itself ceases to be an empirical given in order to become the product of these relations” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 89) when brought to consciousness, that is, actualized.

The dynamic character of space-time is expressed in the concept of duration, which in Deleuze’s terms would be described as intensive multiplicity, an openended whole. As embodying duration, Deleuze’s method therefore “seems to be patterned after Bergson’s intuition” (Boundas, 1996, p. 87). Intuition, or access to knowing by means of disjunctions generated by virtual tendencies in the process of actualization, is taken almost literally: to learn from within means to be able to distinguish and differentiate.

Such apprehension of reality seems to agree with the Peircean notion of functionally indubitable, albeit presensory and preconscious, data that are derived from a shared layer of experience. Intuition, functioning in a mode of an indefinite integral of implicit different/ciations, enables the reading of signs, symbols and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience. Intuition works, “it presupposes an impulse, a compulsion to think which passes through all sorts of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and being communicated to the soul in 35

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order to arrive at thought” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 147) therefore, in a pragmatic sense, producing an effect, or meaning, or sens.

And the plane of immanence becomes literally constructed: “immanence is constructivism, any given multiplicity is like one area on the plane” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 48). That’s how Deleuze and Guattari defined the plane of immanence which, for them, was not in any way reduced to reason alone: Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effects with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. There measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 41), implying the awakening of the inner eye, posited by Noddings and Shore (1984) as opposed to the cold, dispassionate and unblinking gaze of the epistemological subject, the Deweyan spectator.

Thinking of this sort, for Deleuze, constitutes “the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought … – that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994a, pp. 59-60). The virtual, which cannot be thought, becomes actual, and as such must be thought, when constructed by means of multiple “differentiations of an initially undifferentiated field” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 10), the latter seemingly analogous to that pre-conscious and tacit “knowledge” which, albeit constituting the aforementioned shared layer of experience, would nevertheless remain a contradiction in terms within the boundaries of formal logic.

Such a field, however, must exist or better, as Deleuze says, subsist, in its virtual mode of existence, in order to bring the Firstness of abduction into being, to initiate the process of that what might be, as Firstness, confirmed by that what is – Secondness , or otherness, of Peircean brute facts of experience – and to find an indirect, yet quasi-causal, conclusion in the Thirdness of that which would be, providing certain circumstances will have been met.

Deleuze describes the transcendental field as a pure stream of a-subjective, impersonal and immediate consciousness without object or self. The traces of the self in this field are non-conscious, and in order to be captured and conceptualized – through self-reflection, indeed – they are to be staged, produced and performed in the production-plant of multiplicities by means of dual representation. Such a semiotic turn is effected by, as we said earlier, the presentations of the unconscious that may be transversally – that is, via the relation of Thirdness which, by definition, always already contains the Firstness in itself – linked with the representations of consciousness.

While not all virtualities may become actualized in the present, they are nevertheless real. Hardt (1993) points to a very subtle and nuanced connection of 36

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Deleuze’s thought to Scholastic ontology. In Scholastic terminology “virtual” does mean the ideal or transcendental, yet not in any way abstract or just possible: it is maximally real, ens realissimum. For Deleuze, as we said in the preceding chapter, it is a line and not a reference point that serves as a basic category: the movable line of flight is real, it is in fact always out there, in the world, “only we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45).

For Peirce, despite the fact – or perhaps due to the fact – that the meaning created by diagrammatic thinking is not actual but “altogether virtual … [and always contained] not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation” (Peirce CP 5.289), it is nevertheless, and betraying the principle of non-contradiction, maximally real because of the possibility of such a thinking being capable of producing real effects in terms of consequences, or “practical bearings” (Peirce CP 5.402) in accord with Peirce’s pragmatic maxim.

In the framework of Deleuze’s philosophy, thinking takes place in the disjunction – that is, negativity or a cut – as has been noted in the first chapter – at a structural level – yet, in its functional sense, it performs a constructive, conjunctive role of a positive synthesis. The leap, the breakthrough, the very differential, establishes a line of flight; this line “upsets being” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

44), yet along this very line “things come to pass and becomings evolve” (1995, p.

45). These are signs in the process of becoming-other that express diversity and multiplicity constituted each and every time by a movable borderline described by the conjunction “and”, that is the diagonal, or indirect – indeed, transversal – connection.

The fundamental Deleuzean notion of difference and repetition (Deleuze, 1994a) is seen in the production of meaning, or the constructive process for which of course a qualitative multiplicity – that perhaps may be expressed as a set in mathematical terms – becomes the necessary and natural state of affairs.

Construction precedes the drawing of dyadic logical conclusions in terms of if-then propositions, yet the former itself is embedded in the triadic logic of relations.

The meaning as produced or constructed (we remember that, as Deleuze says, immanence after all is constructivism) is then equivalent to the possibility “to construct logic from the basic intuitive act … [(so, we might say, ‘intuitive’) that we scarcely notice when it is being used] … of making a distinction and two fundamental arithmetical acts: (1) making a mark to signify the distinction and (2) repeating the mark” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 51; see also Merrell, 1995b). It is multiple bracketing {…{…}…} that represents the construction of concepts analogous to the infinite number series as illustrated by Figure 2.

For Deleuze, because of the symbolic conjunction “and … and … and” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45), a constructive process enters into meaningful organization: each “and” is a pure relation which, as a sign-event in its own in-between-ness, acts in the mode of a distributed marker of a new breakthrough, “a new threshold, a new direction of the zigzagging line, a new course for the border” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45). Respectively, because of the “old” subjectivity passing through the threshold along the line of flight, a new one – contingent on experiential 37

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encounters – is capable of coming into being, as “always a temporary and unstable effect of difference” (Grossberg, 1994, p. 13), such a difference, as we will have seen in the following chapter, being inscribed in the experience itself.

Figure 2. (from Barrow, 2000, p. 160)

John Dewey, writing more than half a century earlier than Deleuze and positing the question of whether reality possesses practical character, also acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar condition of differential – or additive – change” (Dewey, 1908/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p. 131), the peculiarity appearing because of the present condition having both emerged from the prior state and related to the consequent, yet so far absent, state of affairs as its own constituent 38

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part, a condition of possibility. The additive change is by necessity in-between: “it marks the assumption of a new relationship” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 222) that might lead to new properties appearing as a consequence of the said relationship.

Stressing the difference between a pragmatic inquiry and traditional epistemology, the former focusing on “the relation to one another of different successive states of things” (Dewey, 1908/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p.

133; Dewey’s italics) – Deleuze would’ve said, a series – Dewey considers such a relation to be a powerful substitute for the eternal question of “how one sort of existence, purely mental, … immaterial, … can get beyond itself and have valid reference to a totally different kind of existence – spatial and extended” (Dewey, 1908/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, p. 1, 133).

For Dewey, as for Deleuze, reorganization of experience would include “a threshold (… or plateau), … waxings and wanings of intensity” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 313), that constitute a continuous process of adaptation and readaptation when “the old self is put off and the new self is only forming” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 245), which means, in Deleuze’s terms, becoming-other in the process of subject-formation.

All thinking and learning – or “reaching the absent from present” (Dewey 1991, p. 26) involves, for Dewey, the Deleuzean line of flight of sorts described by him as: “a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant. … The very inevitability of the jump, the leap, to something unknown, only emphasizes the necessity of attention to the conditions under which it occurs” (Dewey 1991, p. 26).

This is simply Firstness, and not Secondness, because the occurring situation “calls up something not present to the senses” (Dewey, 1991, p. 75) which would have otherwise guaranteed and determined the direct action-reaction, stimulusresponse, or cause-effect link. Incidentally, Dewey – similar to Deleuze – stressed the cardinal character of Peirce’s categories: “the matter of the experience gets generality because of co-presence of Firstness of total undivided quality” (Dewey, 1935/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 372; see also Garrison, 1999c, p. 682).

The key word for Dewey is suggestion, leading in all probability to a solution that would be merely possible, and the former’s “propriety … cannot be absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken” (Dewey 1991, p. 75).

The statement is as yet vague and tentative, that is, not even a statement in a strict sense: simply put, let X be such and such.

What Dewey in his analysis of thinking described as a pre-reflective state of mind, is a necessary condition arising from “the disturbed and perplexed situation” (Dewey, 1933/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 139) that calls for the momentous state of suspense (cf. Semetsky, 2000), that is an affective state filled with desire and uncertainty, and inherently open to imagination.

Imagination functions so as to create a vision of realities “that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of sense-perception” (Dewey, 1991, p. 224); instead they constitute Peirce’s and Deleuze’s aforementioned virtual realities.

Virtual, that is “the remote, the absent, the obscure” (Dewey, 1991, p. 224) – still, they are not imaginary but totally real and potentially amenable to a “clear insight” 39

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(1991, p. 224). Such an “eagerness for experience” (Dewey, 1991, p. 30) contains in itself – in the shared and social world – “the germ of intellectual curiosity” (1991, p. 32; Dewey’s italics), because “to the open mind, nature and social experiences are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further” (Dewey, 1991, p. 33).

Experience is this milieu, using Deleuze’s term, that ensures that things are had prior to becoming known. It cannot be otherwise in the world of semiotic reality where experience is not shut off from nature thereby creating the dualistic split but “is of as well as in nature” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 4a). It is the totality of experience that emits signs, which by necessity exceed any pre-given system of significations. Conscious decision-making will be deferred for a moment because the state of mind is as yet pre-reflective: “we de-fer conclusion in order to in-fer more thoroughly” (Dewey 1991, p. 108). We remember that Deleuze, asserting the production of subjectivity as unfolding and its reworking through knowledge and power, said that such a deferment would make a line effectively fold into a spiral.

Folding into a spiral means organization at a new level of complexity, therefore more refined inference and more complex meaning and understanding. Inference would have occurred at a later stage, and at a higher – indeed more thorough – level, even if the stopover, that is the abductive leap, is taking place at the limits of our awareness hence it is barely intentional. Human consciousness, the very stuff of subjectivity, thus acquires a derivative status as a result and an outcome, a merely “eventual function” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 308) and not the reason behind the total process: mind as a whole is greater than the sum of its cogito parts.

As for Peirce, he considered consciousness to be a vague term and asserted that “if it is to mean Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us” (CP 8.256), quite in accord with the definition of the fold, posited by Deleuze – and we repeat – as the inside of the outside; the Outside indeed “more distant than any exterior, [and] is ‘twisted’, ‘folded’, and ‘doubled’ by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and exterior” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 110).

For Deleuze, the creation of concepts is impossible without “the laying out of a plane” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 36). To think means to construct a plane – to actually show that it is there rather than merely “to think” it – so as to pragmatically “find one’s bearings in thought” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 37) by means of stretching, folding, unfolding, infolding, that is by multiple movements of this plane’s diagrammatic features that may, or may not, traverse the plane as a result of potential interactions so that concepts would appear as the intensive features of the said plane.

Deleuze uses some terminology from the theory of communication that belongs to the family of complex systems, namely: how information is transmitted in a channel as a sign/signal system. A signal is produced at the moment of structural coupling (an operational closure) between two heterogeneous series of events operating at different levels. This does not mean that “something” actually flows through the channel, just that a relation, or interaction, is being established. A sign as a “bit” of information is Janus-faced: it provides a link as a bridge between 40

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events without actually passing from one to another (cf. DeLanda, 2002, p. 103). It makes possible the transversal communication, and only as transversal, communication can enable the conferment of the necessarily shared meanings on experience notwithstanding that the concepts are forever fuzzy and never completely determined. A sign has to be Janus-faced because of its own autoreferentiality, that is it closes “as if” on itself, however – and this is crucial – by its very closure it is capable of becoming another sign, becoming-other at the new level of complexity, that is at the level of emergent contents or meanings.

Concepts are born from intuitions and impulses; they are created from affects and percepts – as Deleuze said, there exist forces that constrain experience. They may impose impulses that would compel one to think, and “where there is thought, things present act as signs or tokens of things not yet experienced” (Dewey, 1991, 14). In this respect, concepts always contain in themselves such a Firstness of intuition in a vague or potential form.

For Dewey too, impulses are the very pivots, or turning points for the reorganization of experience. Defining impulses as “agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 94), Dewey indeed implies what Deleuze called becoming-other in the process of individuation, or subject-formation.

Deleuze says that “directions … are fractal in nature” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 40), using the image of crossing and zigzagging lines as “a set of various interacting lines” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 33) to describe intuitions populating the plane.

Yet, the implications are far-reaching, and the concepts are never simply deduced but are created anew by means of multiple and constructive connections. The problematic of representation is a real problem in analytic philosophy, which generally adopts an atomistic approach, that is, starting from taking representations for granted, then separating language structure into two independent levels, syntactic and semantic, without attempting to analyze how they may be interdependent. Deleuze, however, posits the grammar of disequilibrium as a precondition for the production of meanings, and which can be considered a specific syntax of a self-organised language-system.

The meanings are conferred not by reference to an external object but by internal structure, that is, the relational network of the system. Complex systems always operate under the far from equilibrium conditions that create a Deweyan tension, or Deleuzean difference, between the levels thus enabling transaction as a mutual transformation of energy or information. An immediate experience needs mediation, and “bringing these connections … to consciousness embraces the meaning of the experience. Any experience however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 255).

The immediate qualities, for Dewey, are inscribed in “the ‘subconscious’ of human thinking” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 299) and have the flavor of this singular Firstness that jump-starts all cognitive reflection, never mind that by themselves they will have been staying out of one’s awareness. Despite the fact that we may not be consciously aware of these qualities, they effect “an immense multitude” 41

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(Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 299) of immediate organic acts. As feelings, that is the affective (or unthought, as Deleuze would have said) qualities, they effectively direct one’s behavior, having “an efficiency of operation which it is impossible for thought to match” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 299).

Dewey asserts that these qualities are indeed “the stuff of ‘intuitions’” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 300). As intuitions, they play the role of “the dynamic or motivational factors influencing intellectual activity” (Noddings and Shore, 1984, p. 51) and, by implication, human habitual behavior. We remember the aforementioned Peircean “inward [or] potential actions … which somehow influence the formation of habits” (Peirce CP 6.286). As immediate qualities, they belong to the realm of the Firsts, and Firstness represents only one of many dimensions, just a single plateau of Deleuze’s complex plane of immanence: its affective dimension.

Without affects’ entering a zone of indiscernibility with percepts, a percept per se would never undergo a deterritorialization into a line of flight in order to reterritorialize, that is, to enter a new territory, the one of a concept, so that the “feelings are no longer just felt. They have and they make sense” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 258). According to Deleuze, the deterritorialization marks “the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriorly” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 9). For Deleuze, the virtual realm, inhabited by problematic ideas, cannot be determined by means of positing traditional rational philosophical questions, but must be exteriorized, that is explored by setting up problems that would address their spatio-temporal distribution and trace the processes constituting the dynamics of (and on) the plane of immanence.

Affective forces, as has been noted in the preceding chapter, are those arrows or directional lines that traverse one’s universe and enable an unknown universe to appear seemingly from nowhere – “out of the shadow” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 66) – as if it were a hidden variable. Virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming actual under certain conditions, namely: when they become unfolded “through differentiations of an initially undifferentiated field either under the action of exterior surroundings or under the influence of internal forces that are directive, directional” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 10).

For Dewey, the immediate being and having as primarily experienced serve as preconditions for reflective knowledge. Human experience based on empirical facts points to nature itself as saturated with “hidden possibilities [and] novelties” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 21). The multitude of things are experiential objects of emotions and desires, joy and pain, happiness and suffering, acted upon and acted by – in short, they are “things had before they are things cognized” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 21), the two predicates, “had” and “cognized”, constituting two different dimensions of otherwise the same thing.

All logical reasoning must be preceded by “more unconscious and tentative methods” (Dewey, 1991, p. 113) because any object of primary experience contains potentialities that are not yet actualized, or factors “which are not explicit; any object that is overt is charged with possible consequences that are hidden” 42

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(Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 20-21). Similar to Deleuze, Dewey acknowledges Bergson’s positing the primacy of intuition: “[I]ntuition precedes conception and goes deeper …. Reflection and rational elaboration spring forth and make explicit a prior intuition. … [R]eflection about affairs of life and mind consists in an ideational and conceptual transformation of what begins as an intuition” (Dewey, 1998, p. 198; see also Garrison, 1997a, p. 105 and Garrison, 2000, p. 115).

The knowledge organization that proceeds in a habitual way becomes “fully accepted” (Peirce CP 7.37) and as such “tends to obliterate all recognition of … premises from which it was derived” (CP 7.37): the inferential steps per se stay out of consciousness, we are not aware of them. Peirce considered intuition not as a full capacity of the mind, but just the opposite, as one of the four so-called incapacities: we cannot intuit knowledge directly as every cognition is logically determined by previous cognition. But “if we were to subject this subconscious process to logical analysis, we should find that it terminated in what this analysis would represent as an abductive inference” (Peirce CP 5.181).

In a pragmatic sense, a number of possible consequences will never be fully exhaustive or complete. So the methods of inference are necessarily “more or less speculative, adventurous” (Dewey, 1991, p. 75), or as Deleuze has said, introducing one of his neologisms, nomadic. The nomad metaphor carries a topological nuance, “a fate of place” (Casey, 1997); indeed the whole philosophy of place is exemplified in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) explicitly naming their approach Geophilosophy. This mode of philosophical thinking utilises “the points of transition, the conceptual shifts, the subtleties, and extra-textual uses” (Peters, 2004, p. 217). It implies the significance of a direction but simultaneously affirms the multiplicity of paths that nomadic tribes wander along in their movement in the “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 371) of the steppe.

The alternative law that guides nomads in their travels cannot be just logos pure and simple; rather, it is nomos, the law of the outside and the outsiders. Nomadic place is always intense because the nomads’ existence is inseparable from the region or space they occupy. Their relation to the earth is deterritorialized to such an intensity, “to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 381). The adjective smooth is contrasted with striated, both terms defining different musical forms: striated – as ordered by rigid schemata and point-to-point connections ensuring a linear and fixed structure, and smooth – as an irregular, open and heterogeneous, dynamical structure of fluid forces, “a field … wedded to nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 381) and filled with the polyvocality of directions that may have also been found “in the Greek milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 88).

Deleuze uses the word polyvocality stressing the very physicality of signs, this special sensibility that we referred to in the beginning of this chapter. In order to find one’s way, one’s bearing or whereabouts in the smooth space of steppe or sea, one must feel as much as see or listen. Nomad is always in-between, always in the process of becoming, “the life of nomad is the intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari,

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1987, p. 380), distributed at once between here and there, between now and then, “always the day before and the day after” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 77).

Those are indeed genuine nomads that “act on the basis of the absent and the future. … [For them,] nature speaks a language which may be interpreted. To a being who thinks, things are records of their past, as fossils tell of the prior history of the earth, and are prophetic of their future” (Dewey, 1991, pp. 14-15). Nomad’s way is an immanent trajectory and not a transcendental end, a deviant footpath and not the royal road. As a symbol for becoming, nomads always “transmute and reappear in the lines of flight of some social field” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 153), thereby extending the original, psychoanalytic, meaning of territorialization as used by Lacan. For Deleuze, as for Peirce and Dewey, social and psychological dimensions interpenetrate, and from the epistemological perspective, nomadic ideas would be, in Deleuze’s words, intensive multiplicities distributed in the smooth space.

The logic of the included middle, the affective logic of nomads’ lived experience precludes the nomadic ideas from meeting “the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 371) – quite in accord with Dewey having rejected what he called a spectator theory of knowledge. Nomads must continuously readapt themselves to the open-ended world in which even the line of horizon may be affected by the changing conditions of wind, shifting sands or storms so that no single rule of knowing that would ever assist nomads in their navigations, perhaps only knowing how would: “the local operations of relay must be oriented by the discovery (and often continual rediscovery) of direction” (Casey, 1997, p. 306).

The technology upon which relays operate is impulse-processing: we are back to impulse, affect, abduction, and intuition, that is the “‘first’, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free …. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it” (Peirce CP 1.302).

Keeping in mind the paradoxical flavor of Peirce’s warning, and remembering that any idea is only a “tentative suggestion” (Dewey, 1991, p. 112), let me tell a dream that I awakened with one morning some time ago. How to explain abduction? How to, rather than looking for any preconceived theoretical foundations, go from some form of experience to constructing an working model of the abductive inference? Mathematics helps, and a diagram as they say may indeed be worth more than a thousand words. I will have to draw a diagram, a familiar Cartesian grid for this purpose of tracing a line of flight. However with a difference.

The grid is not Cartesian in a strict sense, its two coordinate axes being located on a complex plane and marked with imaginary, on a vertical axis, and real on a horizontal axis, numbers respectively; an imaginary number i is the square root of minus one. Imaginary and real numbers together form a plane, on which a point represents a complex number a+bi. The point therefore stands for the pair, a of the real numbers and b of the imaginary numbers (Figure 3).

The smooth place will be indeed striated. This approach, by the way, satisfies Deleuze and Guattari’s positing a condition of the complementary relationship between the two: while all becomings take place in the smooth space, the progress 44

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can only be “made up and in striated space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 481).

Abduction’s place would be on the vertical axis, it is an impulsive and affective jump, a leap in imagination after all, so imaginary numbers seem to be the appropriate symbols to signify abduction.

Figure 3

Descartes had a rather derogatory attitude towards imaginaries: it was he who first coined the name. There was no place for them in Newton’s mechanistic philosophy either: he considered them plainly impossible. Leibniz recognized their intermediary character and positioned them at the ontological level between being and non-being. The true metaphysics of imaginary number was elusive even for Gauss. He however agreed that their geometrical representation establishes their meaning.

Propositional logical reasoning is “measured” along the horizontal axis by means of real numbers, in the reality of the physical world. So in this model the syllogistic reasoning is complemented by imagination, insight, and intuition, such 45

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logic being represented by means of complex numbers as the ordered pair on a complex plane. Also, in this diagram, the Deleuzean thought-non-thought may coexist and may indeed be expressed as an ordered list of complex numbers, or the ordered pair on the slice of the flat surface, a plane. Both abductive inference and deduction may be represented by vectors, or directional forces in the sense suggested by Deleuze, indeed the arrows. Vectors model natural entities, the lines of forces. The two vectors “add up” – or better, converge, using Deleuze’s term – onto a vector on a complex plane, a vector having both magnitude and direction, that is being described by both a mathematical quality and a physical property (Figure 4):

Figure 4

The resultant vector r may be considered to represent new knowledge or rather knowledge different from the preceding level within the heterogeneous system, because abduction contributes to explicating that what was yet tacit and implicit therefore enabling a vertical jump onto the succeeding level of complexity. Peirce indeed distinguished between ampliative and explicative forms of reasoning, 46

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suggesting that the former aims at increasing knowledge while the latter, by contrast, is capable of making hidden or implicit knowledge explicit, of making manifest what is perhaps latent.

True, the addition vector as a whole is not the sum total of its parts, because as a resultant, it is not the sum in the arithmetical sense, it is indeed in-between, necessarily having, as Deleuze asserted, a partial and fractal quality but pointing nevertheless in the determined direction (Figure 4). Without the Firstness of abduction, all knowledge would remain pretty sequential, because signs would stay at the level of Secondness, perhaps growing in magnitude solely because of arithmetical progression along the horizontal line but without having been able to change direction.

It is merely the prior knowledge that would be amplified, but a tacit and preconscious, implicit “knowledge” (gnosis?) would lack any possibility of explication so as to enable a new knowledge – represented now, and totally in agreement with Deleuze’s philosophy, as a singularity (a complex point) on a plane, or “a complex place” (Deleuze, 1990, p. xiv), pointed to by the end of the arrow – to come into being, to enter cognition. The complex plane is “the unfolded surface [which] is never the opposite of the fold … I project the world ‘on the surface of a folding …’” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 93; italics mine) 9 . The triadic structure, therefore, presupposes a level of complexity that by necessity exceeds references: it is the level of meanings implicated in the ternary sign.

The rules of projective geometry that indeed serves as a basis for conceptualising the diagram as per Figure 4, establish the one-to-one correspondence like in a perspectival composition towards a vanishing point implying therefore isomorphism, or Deleuzean mapping, in the process of drawing or tracing a territory onto a map. Thirdness – the diagonal, the very transversal line – enables becoming of the new objects of knowledge as the newly created concepts. A novel hypothesis might bring in “a new direction of the zigzagging line” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45), and the semiotic categories of Firstness and Thirdness, two categories outside formal logic, functioning indeed on the margins of the latter similar to Deleuzean minorities, are capable of constructing an intensive multiplicity of singular points at the new level of organization.

Abduction, which may take the form of intuition, or insight, or imagination, creates a magnitude along the vertical axis, or Depth (Dewey, 1991, p. 37), that is a leap – as if “the genesis of intuition in intelligence” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 111) – towards yet another level of complexity in the heterogeneous and dynamic knowledge-structure. An act of imagination is potentially transformative, according to Peirce, in its function to generate a meaning for a habit. Peirce called these ontological possibilities “airy nothings to which the mind of a poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind” (Peirce CP 6.455). New information, derived from as though “nothingness” of the unconscious with the help of an insight and as the effect of interpretation, not only conceptualizes an idea but also embodies it in the physical world of action As for Dewey, he also used the term, depth, “with respect to the plane upon which it occurs – the intrinsic quality of the [intellectual] response” (Dewey, 1991, 47

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p. 37; italics mine) of different people, asserting that “one man’s thought is profound while another’s is superficial. … This phase of thinking is perhaps the most untaught of all” (Dewey, 1991, p. 37). And for Deleuze, his conceptualizations of the unconscious include the dimension of depth in the sense of an unconscious of thought, which is “as profound as the unknown of the body” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 19). For Deleuze, the thinking process reflects “an adimensional profondeur (depth or depths)” (Bogue, 1989, p. 53) of one’s creative and intensive potential, and “to think is to create” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 94), or to invent concepts. Such is Deleuze’s pedagogy of the concept that involves two necessarily complementary, and both constructive, aspects: the creation of concepts demands laying out of the plane of immanence.

To think is also, as we remember, to different/ciate, and the degrees of differentiation of intensities can be expressed diagrammatically via spatial projection, also enabling, by means of the laws of projective geometry, the reduction of dimensions of the aforementioned adimensional, and initially undifferentiated, field. This field appears to be “what the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own experience” (Peirce CP 1.302). When projected, signs subsisting in their virtual state, undergo transformations that “convey the projection, on external space, of internal spaces defined by ‘hidden parameters’ and variables of singularities of potential” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 16).

The natural world is not limited to its solely mechanical aspect similar to experience as not being reduced to action and reaction taking place at the level of Secondness: being burned, for Dewey, is not yet an experience but merely a physical change. While pain as quality is indeed the first, the child’s initial reaction would be to instinctively, therefore mechanically, withdraw the hand. Thirdness enters the process as mediation and learning, it takes time and self-reflection.

Understanding and mind denote “responsiveness to meanings …, not response to direct physical stimuli” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 315), and meaning is defined as “that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct” (Peirce CP 5.425), thereby contributing to further habits taking. The experiential world is not reduced to the brute facts of Secondness but becomes both an object of interpretation and a subject to the Deleuzean logic of sense (1990).

It is human understanding that enters the process as a necessary Thirdness in the relationship because “man is nature’s interpreter” (Peirce CP 7.54) in a continuous flow of semiosis. In semiotic terms, experience itself is a relational category.

Structured by sign-relations, human experience is an expression of a deeper semiotic process. Every sign conveys a general nature of thought, and the Thirdness is ultimately a mode of being of intelligence or reason. Nature is much broader and includes its own virtual dimension, which is however never beyond experience.

For Deleuze, philosophy-becoming, like the witch’s flight, escapes by virtue of experimentation the old frame of reference within which this flight seems like a sort of immaterial vanishing through some imaginary event-horizon, and creates its own terms of actualization thereby leading to the “intensification of life” (Deleuze 48

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and Guattari, 1994, p. 74) by means of re-valuation of experience. It is an active interpretation and not a passive adaptation that transforms the facts of natural world into interpretable signs with which, according to Peirce, the universe is always already perfused. And interpretation creates the meaning, or provides an experience with value that, albeit implicit in each and every triadic sign, appears to be as yet absent among the brute facts of Secondness.

If the “conception of the role of experience within nature means that ‘human affairs, associative and personal, are projections, continuations, complications of nature which exists in the physical and prehuman world’, [as] Dewey writes” (Campbell, 1995, p. 77; italics mine), then Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism truly serves as a “means of detour” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 4), which is necessary for evaluating and understanding such a complex experience.

Projection is a means of temporal connection too; as Dewey (1991) says referring to the modes of teaching, “projection and reflection, going directly ahead and turning back in scrutiny, should alternate” (Dewey, 1991, p. 217), and abduction itself, being just a guess or a hypothesis, is a projection of sorts: “the mind is in the attitude of search, of hunting, of projection, of trying this and that” (Dewey, 1991, p. 112). That’s why for Deleuze, despite the incommensurability of dimensions but precisely because they are capable of entering a zone of indiscernibility, a flat surface as an image of the plane of immanence serves as a pragmatic effect of the field of meanings, including the interrelated “social and psychological spheres of experience” (Bogue, 1989, p. 4).

The meanings are to be created – we remember Deleuze’s saying that immanence is constructivism and Dewey’s asserting that “the work of education is constructive” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 315) – and it is the surface that becomes “the locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as long as they do not enter into the surface organization which ensures the resonance of two series” (Deleuze, 1990, p.

104) enacted by projection, that is, an abductive, intuitive leap. The depth of the psyche is capable of making sense only when it, “having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 9), and the meaning of events are “all the more profound since [an event] occurs on the surface” (1995, p. 10) in the projection of the former as the nomadic distribution of singular points constituting a line.

The Firstness of abduction as “the presentation of the unconscious” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192) does make becoming, in Deleuze words, unlimited. At the level of Secondness, along the horizontal line, “the representation of consciousness” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192) will surely have a different magnitude: pain, for example, is directly had, but may be interpreted as a toothache – or, as we said earlier, as an effect of being burned – and hence judged to be a singularity of a specific kind (cf.

Dewey, 1938, p. 515), as this and not that. The diagonal or transversal line will cast its own shadow on the horizontal axis appearing as if from nowhere – because it exists at a level of complexity exceeding the realm of real numbers.

We remember that the dyadic logic, by virtue of its very principles, excludes the Thirdness of mediation, expressed by the diagonal transversal that came into being as a resultant, and thus created a closed figure (Figure 4), an area, an integral. The 49

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triangle has closed on itself, as if self-referentially, but – and this is crucial – at a different level of organization. A genuine, that is triadic, sign is ultimately selfreferential indeed. A sign as interpretant is what combines affects and percepts into a concept because it at once represents the paradoxical “future memory” (Peirce CP 7.591) of one’s cognition. For Peirce, a sign can be described as “an Object perceptible, or only imaginable, or even unimaginable” (Peirce CP 2.230).

A complex plane would not be complex without the axis of imaginary numbers, but would have remained a Cartesian grid preventing us from understanding how new objects of knowledge may have come into existence. The infamous learning paradox which is being questioned again and again, and has been recently connected with abduction (Prawat, 1999), 10 will forever remain a paradox unless interpreted pragmatically.

Going back to Plato’s Meno dialogue, Prawat (1999, p. 48) reminds us that if and when any new knowledge is incompatible with prior learning, the latter in fact being a precondition for the understanding of what is new, then there is no foundation on which to build such a new knowledge. Nevertheless the new knowledge is somehow acquired by learners. Presenting abduction as a means of resolving the dilemma, Prawat approaches the former mostly at the level of heuristics, that is, as a useful metaphor. In Peircean terms, however, abduction is a necessary component of the logic of discovery or hypothesis-generation.

Let us recall the Meno dialogue, in which Plato states the famous paradox in the following way: Men. And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you know not?

What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is what you did not know?

Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for he knows, and therefore has no need to inquire about that – nor about that which he does not know; for he does not know that about which he is to inquire. 11 Meno is puzzled by what Socrates means when he provocatively says that we do not learn, and that what is called learning is pretty much a process of recollection.

Are we facing an absurdity because either one knows a priori what is it that she is looking for, or one does not know what she is looking for and therefore cannot have prior expectations of finding anything? According to Plato, the theory of recollection demands that we always already possess all the knowledge unconsciously and simply recognize the given truths. However, if any new knowledge is incompatible with prior learning – the latter is fact being a precondition for the understanding of what is new – then there is no foundation on which to build such a new knowledge.

We either learn what we always already knew, that is, the concept of learning is meaningless; or we are in the dark anyway because it is impossible to recognize this new knowledge even as we are trying to learn something new. Socrates, in 50

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fact, argues that to learn something means to discover a previously unknown truth; it is clear, however, that we won’t be able to recognize it anyway. After the lengthy dialogue with a slave boy, Socrates concludes that it is not possible to acquire any new knowledge that wouldn’t have been already possessed by a learner. Therefore we do not learn but must have all possible truths within ourselves. Such is the Socratic paradox leading to Platonic theory of recollection. Plato’s theory of recollection, we repeat, demands that we always already possess all the knowledge unconsciously and simply recognize the given truths. Simply recognize? Not so, even if the slave boy in the Meno dialogue indeed appears to possess some kind of “tacit precognition” (Magnani, 2001, p. 13).

Several educational studies have inquired into possible solutions to the learning paradox and “the dilemma of enquiry” (Petrie, 1891) mainly with regard to science education and the possibility of students’ conceptual change (Bereiter, 1985; Hendry, 1992). Prawat (1999) ingeniously brought into the conversation the legacy of American pragmatism and Dewey’s logic as the theory of inquiry. Using the paradigm of complexity we may attempt to clarify the paradox even if only partially, indeed abductively, and also in some respect to unpack the following enigmatic statement by Peirce concerning a guess at the riddle: Thirdness is “governing secondness. It brings information, … determines an idea and gives it body” (Peirce CP 1.537 in Sheriff, 1994), that is, it contributes to the objects of knowledge appearing to consciousness in the natural world.

Contrary to Prawat’s asserting that abduction is the sole means to new knowledge, we can see that surely “abduction is involved, but so are deduction, induction, and language moves” (Noddings, 1999, p. 84). 12 If abduction were the only “cause,” no new knowledge would ever come into play because no construction of a closed figure, a triangle of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, representing “any given multiplicity … like one area on a plane” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 146), would have been possible.

The leap of imagination, a sign of Firstness, if such indeed were to take place, would sink back into a dyadic existence, back to the point of its own departure and, worse, we would not even know this! It wouldn’t make a difference to us because there would not be any difference potentially capable of making the difference as its own derivative, in the first place.

Firstness, by definition, does not refer to anything else. We remember Peirce’s having said that abductive inference bypasses our awareness and the mind remains unaware where and when abduction begins and ends. Difference has to be perceived – felt, seen, heard, touched – in order to make a difference, to create “a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 494). The integration into reflective thinking is possible only at the level of Secondness, in the physical world of action, where Newtonian laws are in full power and every action has a reaction. But without Firstness, Secondness is impossible, both are cardinals – and this particular Peircean nuance was totally ignored by modern philosophy.

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So too was Thirdness, which, as we said earlier citing Peirce, governs Secondness, creating a “synthetic consciousness, … sense of learning” (Peirce CP 1.377), the necessary mediation of immediacy, the triadic relation between affects, percepts and concepts that alone is able “to get things moving” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

25). And the triangle simply must close on itself, because “a complete, an integral act of thought requires that the person making the suggestion (the guess) be responsible also for reasoning out its bearings upon the problem in hand” (Dewey, 1991, p. 98), such a problem or perplexity, as an instance of real, even if barely perceived, experience – in the format of the first “immediate element of experience, generalized to its utmost” (Peirce CP 7.365) – having initiated this guess in the first place. In this respect a semiotic triangle (Figure 1) also closes the Platonic gap between the sensible and the intelligible. Because the growth of reason consists “in embodiment, that is, in manifestation” (Peirce CP 1.615), in this semiotic process the sensible world becomes intelligible while in the meantime affording sensibility to the intelligible world.

How can this theorizing help us in an educational setting? The teacher’s task in a classroom then, in order to get things moving, will become one of providing the appropriate conditions, as Firstness, under which something new would be produced. A classroom permeated with a creative potential of desire, curiosity, trust, and interest towards discovering something as yet unknown has the possibility to turn into an experimental, beloved by both Dewey and Deleuze, laboratory. All one should ever do when teaching a course, Deleuze says, is “explore it [a question], play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139).

The saying goes that children are natural philosophers, precisely because children have affects and percepts, posited by Deleuze, in abundance, and here are we, adults, children no more, whose routine conceptual thinking has been reduced to the level of Secondness in the form of solely instrumental rationality. And again, in order to get things moving, teachers are to establish the Firstness, even more – as perpetual, and sharing the inquiry, inquirers – to become Firsts themselves, so as to enable their students to acquire experiential knowledge of the facts, as Secondness, by means of assigning multiple values of meanings, as Thirdness, to their own experience.

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BECOMING-LANGUAGE

The problematics of language and communication, as pertaining to the philosophy of education, is closely connected to the understanding of human subjectivity (Biesta, 1995; Garrison, 1999a). As a follow-up to Deleuze’s becoming-other in Chapter 1 and becoming-sign in Chapter 2, this chapter addresses becominglanguage and focuses on both Deleuze’s and Dewey’s conceptualization of communication as shared. By placing the notion of communication per se in a framework of dynamical systems theory, this chapter attempts a novel approach to Dewey’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of language and aims to reconstruct the ancient notion of poiesis, or making. I would like to suggest that autopoiesis – literally, self-making or, better, the making of the self – is of crucial importance to the contemporary understanding of subjectivity, communication and, consequently, education.

Jim Garrison, acknowledging the traces of postmodernism in Dewey’s thinking, commented on the impossibility of eliminating “the role of signs, words, and language from the search for our selves and the objects of our thought” (Garrison, 1999a, p. 348). Signs, both linguistic and extralinguistic, play a part in the real world by virtue of, in a pragmatic sense, their effects in nature and the human mind. Both Dewey and Deleuze were inspired by Darwinian evolutionary theory, and in the preceding chapters I have introduced, described and developed the Deleuzean concept of becoming as a characteristic of a dynamic process.

Considering, however, that evolutionary science is currently undergoing reconstruction in terms of self-organizing dynamical systems, Deleuze’s becoming may be reconceptualized, from the perspective of the latter, as autopoiesis, that is, a process-structure constituting an open non-linear system. An open-ended process “is determined but unpredictable,” as Doll says (1993, p. 72; quoted also in Safstrom, 1999, p. 229) addressing the issue of transformative and creative languages and relating the concept of self-organization to a postmodern perspective on curriculum development. The dynamic of the process is enabled by continuous, recursive and self-referential interactions that defy an absolute dichotomy between such binary opposites of modern discourse as objective reality and subjective experience, facts and fantasy, profane and sacred, private and public, thereby overcoming “a process-product, objective-subjective split” (Doll, 1993, p. 13).

The rather enigmatic statement of being determined but unpredictable points, as it seems, to a logic of sorts which is embedded in the system’s behavior, the logic in question however being irreducible to physicalism with its Newtonian laws, or the laws of mechanical certainty, that are valid only at the level of Peirce’s Secondness. The classical definition of autopoietic systems, or machines (cf.

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Deleuze’s machinic assemblages, the organization of which does not conform to mechanical laws but proceeds organically, as in the case of desiring and always becoming machines addressed in the first chapter), is as follows: An autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (1) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network (Varela, 1979, p. 13).

Autopoiesis affirms living systems as essence-less and the world as open-ended, albeit not predicated solely on the interference of a subjective act from the outside.

Dewey envisaged that “order is not imposed from without” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p.

14) – which would be an extraneous intervention thus making a system allopoietic – “but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another. Because it is active (not anything static …) order itself develops. …

Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 15), or chaos.

The dual aspect of a continual and recursive feed forward and feed backward processes, of foldings and unfoldings, constitute a network of mutual interactions as if establishing a conversation 13 (see Varela, 1979), or a dialogic communication between the system’s heterogeneous levels. The blurring of divisions between the rigid customary opposites in a complex system represents its qualitative feature, as well as its potential increase in complexity, that is, a system’s functioning on a succeeding level that would have incorporated a previous one. The boundaries of the system therefore have a tendency to expand by virtue of integrating the outside into its own inside.

Communication is not limited to exclusively verbal but encompasses Deleuzean diverse regimes of signs. Deleuze’s neopragmatic philosophy is concerned, as we have established earlier, with the creation of novel concepts. The philosophical concept becomes a product of thinking, of meaning-making: it is an emergent property embedded in a communicative semiotic process. Such a creative act is a prerogative of an autopoietic system which is organized around “environmental perturbations/compensations” (Varela, 1979, p. 167f), effecting the conversation – or Deleuze’s transversal communication that we have addressed in the earlier chapter – across the levels, the very act of communication establishing different and new relations between components because it triggers a compensatory operation, the inside of the system, which itself is part and parcel of the environmental perturbation, the outside.

In this way, old boundaries are crossed and traversed, and new boundary conditions of the system, or its external structure, are being established meanwhile sustaining the integrity of its internal structure, or what Deleuze aptly called – and we repeat it again and again – “the inside of the outside” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 97).

Autopoiesis is effected by the communicative action expressed by means of the 54

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Peircean relation of Thirdness, or continual mediation between “the non-external outside and the non-internal inside” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 60), as Deleuze says emphasizing their interconnectedness.

This relation establishes coordination that may be defined as “the dialogue between present construct and the problems of the environment that determines the emerging, next stage” (Doll, 1993, p. 72). The objects of knowledge, as phenomena of Peirce’s Secondness, are thus necessarily contingent on Thirdness.

What makes an autopoiesis functional, is the concept identified by Deleuze as difference. For Deleuze, Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given. … Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to phenomenon. … Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. … Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 222).

The aforementioned “everything” exists, according to Dewey, not by virtue of “a property which it possesses … [but only] … by a pervasive and internally integrating quality” (Dewey, 1998a, pp. 194-195), or Peirce’s Firstness.

Properties as objects and phenomena of Secondness arise from the act of communication that involves what Deleuze dubbed differentiation – elaborated upon in Chapter 2: Becoming-sign – when the differences in intensity between disparate series establish a flow of information. “The pervasive quality is differentiated while at the same time these differentiations are connected” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 209), the process of connection – or local integrations – being described

by Deleuze, as we said earlier, by means of differenciation to emphasize its “being like the second part of difference” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 209), the differing difference.

Such a double process of different/ciation, that is, the very difference that would have made a difference, manifests itself in a type of communication that indeed cannot be reduced to a back-and-forth discussion a la Mr. Rorty. The symbolic communication in question appears to be, as Dewey noticed, an act of wonder: of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. … When communication occurs, all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision: they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 166), or a communication by means of signs. The logic of relations, or semiosis, ensures readaptation, and – as a consequence of the latter – “events turn into objects, things with meaning” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 166).

The intensity of difference is a function of yet another fundamental Deleuzean concept, desire, that enters the process and becomes an autocatalytic element building multiple feedbacks, or what in the systems-theory discourse is called 55

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structural couplings, at each point of its own entry. As an active principle, it “practically intervenes in the world of everyday affairs … [and not] merely supervenes theoretically” (Garrison, 1997, p. 205) producing a series of “interlocked … communicative interactions” (Varela, 1979, p. 48f). The fact of intervenience and not simply supervenience affirms the autopoietic versus allopoietic structure in the system’s organization.

The desire, or Eros – which is, according to Garrison (1997), the fundamental, albeit implicit, constituent of the educational process – contributes to the reconstruction of Platonic Oneness, that is a harmonious unity between the beautiful, the good, and the true. For Deleuze, desire is a positive and active force rather than a reactive one, the latter operating as a sort of negativity by means of a re-action to some lack or need. The subject does not possess desire; just the opposite, it is desire that “produces reality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 30) enveloping everything, including subjects and objects alike, in itself.

The symbolic Eros “does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings which it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined and in which it introduces breaks and ruptures” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 292). Eros carries the said oneness out from the supernatural realm hereby deterritorializing it and accordingly reversing the direction of “Plato’s ladder [which is] a one-way ascent” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 291).

While still maintaining this unity as a system’s integrity, Eros brings it down to earth so as to reterritorialize it into the diversity of flesh-and-blood human experiences. The process is not mechanical – it is machinic, because the Deleuzean aforementioned plane of immanence becomes consistent with “the material universe” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 59) by virtue of its being an open system. By its very nature, a self-organised system simply has to open itself to “challenges, perturbations, disruptions [that are] the sine qua non of the transformative process” (Doll, 1993, p. 14). An autopoietic machine is, by definition, constituted by movement that, according to Deleuze, is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them all up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them all to be absolutely closed. It is … a mobile section, … a block of space-time (Deleuze, 1986, p. 59), an experience. Therefore it must be the qualitative whole of the total experiential situation and not just a teacher’s instruction that would enable one’s “studying by experience” (Lehmann-Rommel, 2000, p. 194).

It is an experience that enables learning as a construction of new knowledge by means of situated – also enriched with emotions and desires – cognition, that is, by providing conditions “under which something new is produced” (Deleuze, 1995, p. vii) as a necessary outcome of “a shared deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293). For Dewey too, an experience is never a one-way traffic: it is “nothing more – and nothing less – than this ‘close connection between doing and undergoing’ (see MW 12.129)” (Biesta, 1995, p. 279). Signs that are involved

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in such a communicative action are not the signs of pure rationality, but of phronesis, that is, understanding and practical wisdom.

Growth is possible only through participation in the process enacted in rhythmic fluctuations between disequilibrations and restorations of equilibrium at a new level – or the multiple encounters with difference as a precursor to the evolution of meanings. What Dewey identified as tension is embedded in the constant “rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 15). The desire capable of intensifying the difference up to the point of its integration into the process, is the human eros 14 , that is, the passion to create what is good for humans: “everyone passionately desires to possess what is good, or at least what they perceive as good and to live a life of ever-expanding meaning and value” (Garrison, 1997, p. 1).

The evolution of signs from the preceding to the consequent is a matter of contingency: human growth and the continuous reconstruction of experience based on the “integration of organic-environmental connections” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p.

279) in the phenomenal world depends on, as Deleuze says, “veritable becomingmad” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 1). As for phronesis, or the intelligent method which is inspired by “the striving to make stability of meanings prevail over the instability of events” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 50), it wouldn’t be possible if not for the element of madness, namely, the birth of Eros, embedded in it and in fact having originated this very method.

Let us recall the myth: Eros was conceived in a foolish, bordering on preconscious, act that had occurred “in the excesses of intoxication, a kind of madness” (Garrison, 1997, p. 7), in the middle and muddle of “a sort of groping experimentation … that … belongs to the order of dreams, … esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 41). As an affective and chaotic desire, Eros is pure difference, yet – and in accord with its semiotic Firstness in Thirdness – it is a symbol of union: Eros’ practical skill, techne, consists in uniting the opposites, in making two a couple, indeed in effectuating the structural coupling that may manifest in an instance of what Garrison (1997) dubbed a teachable moment.

Being form-less in itself, Eros’ purpose is nevertheless to in-form, or to create something new in the act of (self)-expression. Desire is affect, it envelops emotions, and “emotion is informed … when it is spent indirectly in search of material and in giving it order” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 70) therefore participating in the self-organizing process of producing order out of chaos. The interference of difference ensures an operational closure of the system open at large, making each end-in-view a temporary means for a new end, hence correcting and ordering the course of events.

The closure in question “is the opposite of arrest, of stasis” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 41); as belonging to a dynamic process it is becoming, that is itself an inbetween event, one of the “many twists in the path of something moving through space like a whirlwind that can materialize at any point” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 161).

We have to remember, though, that the complexity of dynamics makes those points “nothing but inflections of lines” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 161). Platonic Eros, in the 57

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process of its own re-organization, that is de- and, subsequently, reterritorialization, leaves the domain of the philosopher-kings and – while still practicing both poetry and prophecy – “steps outside what’s been thought before, … ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 103).

Thinking, enriched with desire, “is always experiencing, experimenting, … and what we experience, experiment with, is … what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 104). Thoughts-signs become embodied in action, and the thought-experiment assumes a function of what Dewey called deliberation, defining it as “a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action. … Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p.

132).

Thought thus extends itself spatially, but not only: it also “runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instructions of actual failure and disaster” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 133) therefore extending itself in a temporal sense too, hence constructing a multidimensional space which is “both extensive and enduring” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 279). It is a manifold, or Deleuze’s complex place.

The many potentialities in a manifold follow the intelligent choice of a direction, or a possible line of action toward its actualization. The pragmatic method of deliberation includes the Peircean would-be-ness; therefore some, albeit yet uncertain, consequences would take place as an outcome of an imaginative rehearsal of various courses of conduct. We give way in our mind, to some impulse; we try, in our mind, some plan. Following its career through various steps, we find ourselves in imagination in the presence of the consequences that would follow. … Deliberation is dramatic and active (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 335).

The imagination functions by providing the opportunities to see what is possible, even if only probable, in the actual and, respectively, to decrease the number of dimensions in the space of potentialities simultaneously increasing the number of degrees of freedom in the actual space.

The imagination is active indeed, and “deliberation has the power of genesis” (Garrison. 1997, p. 121); it “terminates in a modification of the objective order, in the institution of a new object …. It involves a dissolution of old objects and a forming of new ones in a medium … beyond the old object and not yet in a new one” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 220), but within the previously mentioned “zone of indiscernibility” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 173) between the two.

The act of imagination completes “the intercourse of the live creature with his surroundings” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 22) due to which the collection of meanings – yet inactive in the outside of the environment – becomes activated. Those meanings are realized in the process of carrying over “the past into the present that imaginatively anticipates and creatively constructs the future” (Garrison, 1997, p.

144).

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Due to the flavor of anticipation present in such a synthesis of time, meanings find their way into the here-and-now of present experience so that “we are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 195). The mode of communication in a creative process is not an agency [but] a release and amplification of energies that enter into it, conferring upon [human beings] the added quality of meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and transferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, precisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction (Dewey, 1925/1958, p.

174).

A mindful teacher, for whom indeed “language is always a form of action” (Dewey, 1925/1980, p. 184) will have to create, in the process of giving the aforementioned advice and instruction, a new non-representational language of expression, exemplified in what Deleuze called a performative or modulating – that is, always in the making – aspect of language. Such an organic form of action embedded in phronesis is both forward-looking and cooperative, oriented toward the good, so that response to another’s act involves contemporaneous response to a thing as entering into the other’s behavior, and this upon both sides. … It constitutes the intelligibility of acts and things. Possession of the capacity to engage in such activity is intelligence (Dewey, 1925/1980, pp. 179-180).

In other words, what becomes a prerequisite for intelligent activity is a structural coupling which is “always mutual: both organism and environment undergo transformations” (Maturana and Varela, 1992, p. 102) as a necessary condition of autopoietic systems’ information exchange and creation of meanings. In such “a continuum, … there is no attempt to tell exactly where one begins and the other ends” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 227), and the language structure goes through the process of its own becoming-other and undergoes a series of transformations giving birth to a new, as if foreign, language.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987), emphasizing the potential of such a language to be truly creative, refer to Proust “who said that ‘masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language” (1987, p. 98). The language functions on the margins like any other becoming, that is, in a form of “the outside of language, not outside of it” (Deleuze, 1994b, p. 28) or as a limit case of language modulations. The language becomes effective as long as the form of expression exists in assemblage with the form of content. The connection between the two, as described by Deleuze, resembles the relation between substance and form for Dewey: “all language, whatever its medium, involves what is said and how it is said” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 106).

The reciprocity between the two is derived from Peircean triadic semiotics or “a different logic of social practice, an intensive and affective logic of the included middle” (Bosteels, 1998, p. 151) which defines them “by their mutual solidarity, 59

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and neither of them can be identified otherwise” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.

45). In its most effective mode the binary opposition between content and expression becomes blurred, leading to the emergence of a new property: a highly expressive, passionate language, in which an utterance affected by a play of forces becomes an enunciation, or “speaks an idiom” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 106).

At the ontological level this indicates, for Deleuze, the univocity of Being, that is, the highest possible affirmation of its process-structure. Deleuze and Guattari, in an almost alchemical language, describe the dynamical process of becoming as a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limits or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language. … In continuous variations the relevant distinction is no longer between a form of expression and a form of content but between two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition. … Gestures and things, voices and sounds, are caught up in the same “opera”, swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 109).

As a marker of in-between-ness, a threshold, Deleuze uses his ingenious metaphor of stuttering: a “Stutterer, thinker of the outside – what better way is there to register the passage of a philosopher?” (Boundas and Olkowski, 1994, p.

3). Deleuze’s philosophy is different from a rational consensus; the diagonal inbetween line brings irrationality into a world filled with perfect squares. An intellectual understanding gives way to an “intensity, resonance, musical harmony” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 86). The rationale of Deleuzean philosophy is, as we established earlier, pragmatic, and the thinking it produces is experimental and experiential bringing the element of non-thought into a thought, the former, almost by necessity, making the true philosopher think the unthinkable.

In this respect, Deleuze – whose philosophical method, by virtue of the experimentation embedded in it, addresses “the possibility of the impossible” 15 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 60) and allows one to indeed perceive borders, that is, “to show the imperceptible” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45) – continues and revives the spirit of “the philosophical priority of the unforeseeable” (Lehmann-Rommel, 2000, p. 189) reminiscent of the trends of contemporary Deweyan scholarship in education.

It is when expressed by stuttering that some new form of content becomes manifest: the intensity of stuttering, “a milieu functioning as the conductor of discourse brings together … the whisper, the stutter, … or the vibrato and imparts upon words the resonance of the affect under consideration” (Deleuze, 1994b, p.

24). We remember the regret expressed by Bellah et al, and addressed in Chapter 1: Becoming-other, due to the lack of access to some hypothetical second-order language capable of articulating the interconnectedness between the individual and social aspects of self-formation. At this point, and because the concept of resonance is ill-defined and open to multiple connotations, I would like to again 60

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depart for a moment from exploring Dewey’s and Deleuze’s philosophical thoughts in order to briefly examine Charles Taylor’s (1991) important and influential notion of the language of personal resonance.

As Taylor claims, it is the existence of such a language that enables us to be more responsive to the world of nature around us by establishing a connective link to the otherwise inaccessible, yet public, order of meanings and, as a result, being able to reconstruct what Taylor identifies as the ethics of authenticity. Tracing the process of the linear progression toward its ideal end, the authentic moral self, Taylor acknowledges the presence of a point at which this perfectly straight line deviates from the prescribed course. It was then, for Taylor, that the noble ideal has been reduced to its trivial form of self-centredness or self-indulgence, and the private world of the self turned narcissistic and consequently became flat, narrow and shallow.

Moreover, as asserted by Taylor, it is destined to remain such unless the said self recognizes itself as grounded in the pregiven horizon of significance, the latter enabling one to understand one’s existence against, as Taylor posits, “something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape” (Taylor, 1991, p. 39) to one’s life independently of one’s will solely. Taylor notices that “my discovering my identity … [means] that I negotiate it through dialogue … with others” (1991, p. 47). A subtle language is needed as a means to be “aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no adequate words” (Taylor, 1991, p. 85). Such a language should be used “non-subjectivistically” (Taylor, 1991, p. 90) that is, unbiased by the idea of identity stated “exclusively [as] an expression of self” (1991, p. 88) which Taylor specifies as the subjectivation of matter.

Taylor contrasts the subjectivation of matter with the subjectivation of manner, the latter described as a specific form of accessing the otherwise inaccessible realm equivalent to the nostalgic “‘objective’ order in the classical sense of a publicly accessible domain of references” (Taylor, 1991, p. 88). The subjectivation of matter, for Taylor, belongs to “the worst forms of subjectivism” (Taylor, 1991, p.

82) that manifests itself, contrary to the ideal virtues of Romantic poets, in the radical freedom and “love affair with power” (1991, p. 67) of, for example, such figures as Foucault and Nietzsche.

The existence of a language of personal resonance therefore becomes imperative; otherwise the large objective order would have remained beyond access and articulation and the anthropocentric self would have asserted itself as the only reality. Because the discovery of one’s identity requires “poiesis, [that is] making” (Taylor, 1991, p. 62), the language of expression has to change from the mimetic language of representation to the metaphorical and creative – poetic – language rooted in the sensibility of the artist who alone will be capable of exploring “an order beyond the self” (Taylor, 1991, p. 82).

Thus poetic language, for Taylor, becomes a means of engagement “in the real, never-completed battle” (Taylor, 1991, p. 91) to rectify and correct the course of progression to the higher moral ideal. Taylor proposes that such a language is indeed used as “one of our main weapons in the continuous struggle against the flattened and trivialized forms of modern culture” (Taylor, 1991, p. 91).

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Let us pause here … Wow! The language that was supposed to be subtle sounds quite aggressive, and the poet’s quill, as appropriated by Taylor, turns into a weapon. It seems that by focusing on the ideal and “more-than-anthropocentric … wider whole” of public order of meanings Taylor fails to recognize the real human, perhaps all-too-human, flesh-and-blood, and deeply unhappy beings behind the names of Nietzsche or Foucault. If, for Nietzsche, God had not died, would Taylor still have undertaken his work of retrieval of moral values?

Taylor’s subject a priori possesses a sense of self-identity and certainty and, using it as a criterion, is therefore able to discriminate between authentic and inauthentic values and to make moral judgments against the pre-existing higher ideal. Taylor’s creed to “identify and articulate the higher ideal behind the more or less debased practices, and then criticize these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal” (1991, p. 72) is a cause shared by liberal thought.

Taylor’s rationale then follows the trend of analytic philosophy to fix once and forever the relation between the world and its expressive form, because any deviation from such a rigid meaning would be considered a chaotic intrusion in the orderly, once objective, world.

Poiesis appears to sink back to mimesis, despite Taylor’s asserting the former, and the language that was supposed to serve a higher mission, stays at the level of representations; moreover – and as if ironically confusing even more those ranks of order that Taylor insists on maintaining – it risks its own downfall until regressing up to the point of becoming, as we have just seen, hostile and aggressive.

Let us now return to Deleuze. Philosophy, for Deleuze, exists in an “essential and positive relation to nonphilosophy” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 140) thus making new means of philosophical expression, exceeding rational thought alone, imperative.

The new language of expression is as paramount for Deleuze as for philosophers in the liberal tradition but is not limited to its linguistic representation: the language may take either linguistic or non-linguistic forms, from writing to film to hybrids like legible images or signs. Deleuzean form of content and form of expression, addressed in Chapter 1: Becoming-other, may even appear to parallel Taylor’s subjectivations of manner and matter, if not for the different logic constituting the relationships between and within each of the categories.

For Deleuze, both exist in assemblage comprising a machinic multiplicity functioning in accord with the triadic logic of the included middle. As for Taylor’s formalizations, they seem to be presented by means of a single – and not “double articulation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 44) – of binary and dyadic logic.

Dualistic split makes one of the forms of subjectivation take priority over the other, establishing hierarchy and seemingly providing a sound ground for Taylor’s identifying the danger of confusing the proper ranks of order as located on disjoint levels.

Massumi (1992) points out that Deleuze reinvents a concept of semiotics in his different books: In Proust and Signs, Deleuze (2000) refers to four differently organized semiotic worlds. In Cinema-I (Deleuze, 1986), he presents sixteen different types of cinematic signs. Philosophers too are semioticians who must read, interpret and create signs. Moving from the dyadic, signifier-signified logic 62

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to the triadic a-signifying semiotics, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that the primacy of content as the determining factor cannot be posited vis-à-vis primacy of expression as a signifying system, such a break in the double articulation indeed breeding dichotomy. Ranks of order are irrelevant: both content and expression are embedded in a complex, not hierarchical but heterogeneous, system of relations in such a way that one reciprocally presupposes the other. Yet, “[u]tterances are not content to describe corresponding states of things: these are rather … two nonparallel formalizations, … assembling signs and bodies as heterogeneous components of the same machine” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 71).

Deleuze’s brilliant, even if metaphorical, stuttering does enable becoming of a new syntax because it “itself ushers in the words that it affects” (Deleuze, 1994b, p.

23). Stuttering seems to function in a mode of what Dewey would have called “total organic resonance” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 122); as such it is part and parcel of the semiotic process. As a poetic modulation, stuttering is always creative because the subtle variations of the refrain tend to destabilize language, thus creating a change inscribed in “a grammar of disequilibrium” (Deleuze, 1994b, p.

27) or, in Dewey’s words, “a condition of tensional distribution of energies” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 253).

Consequently, by having produced a state “of uneasy or unstable equilibrium” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 253) – that is, an a-signifying rupture that allowed the difference to intervene and be repeated – “the transfer from the form of expression to the form of content has been completed” (Deleuze, 1994b, p. 26): indeed, this is the repetition, or “recurrence [that] makes novelty possible” (Dewey, 1925/1980, p.

253). Pertaining to language in its mediative Thirdness, “content is not a signified nor expression a signifier, … [instead] both are variables in assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 91) the latter described by a distributed, non-foundational and a-signifying semiotic process.

The language of expression is indeed taken in its widest sense, a sense wider than oral or written speech. … A tool or machine … is not only physical object … but is also a mode of language. For it says something, to those who understand it, about operations in use and their consequences. … It is composed in a foreign language (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 80; see also Biesta, 1995, p. 281).

The language of expression – and both Deleuze and Dewey refer to it as foreign – comprises heterogeneous levels and is unstable, described by “style [that] carves differences of potential between which … a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141).

The language may be subtle, sometimes even “like silence, or like stammering … something letting language slip through and making itself heard” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 41), or appearing in its extra-linguistic mode of functioning as the various regimes of signs. Such a mode of communication is indirect and operates in order “to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of the day, to select the

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whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi)” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 84).

The stuttering mode is paradoxical in that it appears as being disjunctive but, in fact, it functions as a conjunction by means of transforming itself into a positive synthesis. Although opaque, it is transparent enough to enable conditions for everything to come forth. It happens when “language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of … intensities. That is when all of language becomes secret yet has nothing to hide, as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 98).

The self, when extracted from experiential happenings and occurrences as “a serial course of affairs” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 232), becomes itself a relational sign-event going by the name moi; indeed “among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 232).

The expressionism of an artist in the pragmatic method complements the constructionism of a craftsman: communication functions in accord with the triadic “logic of artistic construction” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 199). A transformation into a new form takes place at the limit, and the limit in the extreme case is a line of horizon, a destination towards a vanishing point, which becomes – never mind its being just a symbolic concept derived by Deleuze from projective geometry and Poincare’s mathematics – nonetheless visible and accessible to one’s expanded perception.

The Deleuzean lines of flight then acquire the meaning of an escape from some old habit, or frame of reference, within which the flight is yet a sort of immaterial vanishing through some imaginary event-horizon. Habit, as described by Dewey, is a mode of organization and is indeed autoreferential; it both commands an action but also has “a hold upon us because we are the habit” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 21).

Dewey positioned habits as constituting the self in a way of forming its desires and ruling its thoughts. “They are will”, says Dewey (1922/1988, p. 21), but in the affective sense of being “immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 21).

Sinking toward the very bottom of consciousness, habits wear the cloth of Deleuzean desire, or Eros, especially considering that symbolic Eros tends to often embody its own alter-ego, carrying the “traits of a bad habit” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 21) in the guise of some quite undesirable qualities of Trickster in itself.

Habits “perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select, concentrate and organize the latter into its own likeness” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 88). Like the Deleuzean affects, habits are “active means, means that project themselves, energetic and dominating ways of acting” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 22; italics mine).

They are forces that are “dynamic and projective”, yet – because of their being unconscious – they may manifest in human behaviors as “routine, unintelligent habit[s]” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 55). The reorganization of habits then becomes a mode of inquiry so as to make a habit enter consciousness as perceived and “intelligently controlled” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 23).

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Such a mode of organization effected by “cooperating with external materials and energies” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 22) is capable of reaching “our perception and thought” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 26). The transformation of the unconscious, and unintelligent, habit into the conscious and intelligent is possible by means of transversal communications via the movement along the aforementioned line of flight. Any abstract machine – even the line of flight – would , for Deleuze, operate “within concrete assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 510) that may assume the form of human behaviors that embody habits.

The escape, then, from some old habit – and “any habit is a way or manner of action” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 163) – would necessarily bring forth changes and transformations by means of “new percepts and new affects” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 164) as some new modes of thinking, feeling and perceiving. The creative process, by definition, “reaches down into nature … it has breadth … to an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 1).

This stretch – like Peirce’s Thirdness – expands the aforementioned event-horizon and contributes to overcoming the limitations of perceptible reality by fine-tuning the perception per se.

Perception merges into inference because “[t]hat stretch constitutes inference” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 1); as we said earlier, for pragmatists perception differs not in kind but only in degree from such form of human knowledge as cognition. As for Deleuze, let us repeat, he specifically emphasized the triadic relationship based on the inseparability between percepts, affects and concepts.

In the process of stretching beyond limits and inventing new concepts, philosophical thinking functioning in the mode of internal communication necessarily acts in a self-organising manner. It continuously produces discontinuities and a-signifying ruptures in the form of multiple cross-cuttings so that the concept has no reference outside itself. It becomes self-referential, that is, at the moment of creation, it posits itself and its object simultaneously. Concepts, for Deleuze, are invented, or created, or reborn. The concept stops being a logical proposition: “it does not belong to a discursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept shows itself” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 140). Among conflicting experiences situated in the midst of “critical junctures” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 223), the enriched thinking represents a potential “tendency to form a new [habit]” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 281); as such it indeed “cuts across some old habit” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 281). Cuttings and cross-cuttings establish multiple becomings in the guise of “a new threshold, a new direction of zigzagging line, a new course for the border” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45) together with the “emergence of unexpected and unpredictable combinations” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 281) functioning as ideas along many transversal lines.

Ideas, however, despite being virtual, potential tendencies, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, are capable of generating ever new ideas in accord with Peirce’s semiotics that asserts that signs grow, develop and become other signs, making every new actualized idea none other than the created possible. The peculiar “feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior [as] … the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 26) 65

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leads eventually to the transformation of old habits and the creation of new ones.

For Peirce, the meaning of anything would have been contained in the “habit it involves” (Peirce CP 5.4).

The functioning of habits, when described in terms of Deleuze’s poststructuralist conceptualizations, takes place through a diagram, an abstract and informal, yet powerful and intensive, multiplicity which itself is positioned along via media between discursive and non-discursive formations, yet “makes others see and speak” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 34). So Being is univocal indeed, but “because the diagrammatic multiplicity can be realized only and the differential of forces integrated only by taking diverging paths” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 38) it necessarily becomes plurivocal when, due to the immanent difference, it is capable of becoming diversified, articulated and enacted in its actual manifestations.

Deleuze stresses the a-personal and collective nature of the language-system by referring to the concept of the fourth person singular as the specific language expressing the singularity of the event. Subjective voice has to be more than personal by virtue of it being embedded in the indirect discourse. The subject who (as if) speaks in the fourth person singular is not the a priori given intentional and speaking subject. As becoming, developing, and learning by means of multiple interactions embedded in experiential events, it is a collective subject capable of overcoming the Cartesian dualism.

An event per se is as yet subject-less because it is always of the nature of relationships, in which the distinction between first, second or third person is not at all clear. For Dewey too, the “language [is] considered as an experienced event” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 173). The subject “speaking” in the fourth person singular belongs to the multiplicity that functions in the form of undetermined infinitive. … It is poetry itself. As it expresses in language all events in one, the infinitive expresses the event of language – language being a unique event which merges now with that which renders it possible (Deleuze, 1995, p. 185).

The transformation of habits constitutes the very process of becoming. The Deleuzean subject, embedded in the process of becoming-other, thus goes beyond the “traditional ways of modern thinking (intentional consciousness of the modern subject) which are still … characteristic for educational research” (LehmannRommel, 2000, pp. 188-189). The perception of a poet allows one to prophetically envisage the important difference between “what may be and is not” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 225) so that “the action and its consequence … [become] joined in perception” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 44).

Because “to perceive is to acknowledge unattained possibilities, … to refer the present to consequences” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 182), it is an expanded perception that enables one to creatively – that is, “in an unprecedented response to conditions” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 225) – re-organize the “change in a given direction” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 225). Respectively – and in an autopoietic manner – “the created can continue the creation” (Garrison, 1997, p. 79): creativity is what characterizes the process of actualization.

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The Deleuzean Outside as an ontological category is an overcoded virtual space that nevertheless “possesses a full reality by itself … it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 211). However, in order for the virtual to become actual it must create its own terms of actualization. The difference between the virtual and the actual is what requires that the process of actualization be a creation. … The actualization of the virtual … presents a dynamic multiplicity …: … the multiplicity of organization. … Without the blueprint of order, the creative process of organization is always an art (Hardt, 1993, p. 18).

In a pragmatic sense, what is defined as potentiality would represent a departure from the classic Aristotelian telos that, unless thwarted by the interference of unforeseeable accidents, asserts success in actualization and assigns to matter a status of a passive receptacle for essences. Sure enough, “potentialities must be thought of in terms of consequences of interactions with other things. Hence potentialities cannot be known till after the interactions have occurred” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 222). But as embedded in an autopoietic process, matter itself is not inert – it is an active and intensive multiplicity capable of self-organization.

Such a conceptualization would agree in principle with Deleuze’s philosophy, which is considered by Hardt (1993) to be a strictly materialist ontology, that asserts being with respect to both corporeal and mental worlds and refuses the idealistic subordination of being exclusively to thought. Still, Deleuze’s radical materialism tends to its own becoming-other, incorporating spirit in itself.

Autopoiesis becomes a sign of a quasi-purposive process, or a self-cause disregarded by the science of modernity, the latter having “succeeded” in reducing the four Aristotelian causes, including formal and final, to a single efficient causation.

The cause in question, though, is “nothing outside of its effect, … it maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product, the moment that it is produced, into something productive. … Sense is essentially produced. It is … always caused and derived” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 95). Self-cause thus might be considered as “distributed in a field of action that includes the environment, values, tools, language, … other persons, and ‘the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of means’” (Garrison, 1999b, p. 303). 16 Such a feature of autopoiesis is both inscribed in the dynamics of selforganization and can be described, topologically, and using mathematical terms, as a chaotic attractor 17 – a symbolic notation for Eros or desire – functioning as “a rudimentary precursor of final cause” (Juarrero, 1999, p. 48), 18 fractal by its very definition and therefore, in accord with Peirce’s Firstness, necessarily vague.

Autopoiesis describes the process of a continual renewal and self-organization pertaining to living and social systems so as to maintain the integrity of systems’ structures, the latter arising as a result of multiple interactions – or, using Dewey’s stronger term, transactions – between many processes.

The notion of transaction points to the occurrence of potential transformations and “modifications on both sides” (Lehmann-Rommel, 2000, p. 197) and considers 67

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all human activities including “behavings … [and] … knowings … as activities not of [man] alone … but as processes of the full situation of organism-environment” (Dewey quoted in Biesta, 1995, p. 279). As such, all transactions are embedded “in the organization of space and time prefigured in every course of a developing lifeexperience” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 24) and extend beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries of the sole organism.

The dynamic process comprises “the past [that] is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the latter” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 24) but also involves a sense of anticipation of future consequences. The creative “will is thus not something opposed to consequences or severed from them. It is a cause of consequences” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 33). The newly created process-structure is in fact a decision made, an end which, by virtue of itself being means, opens new possibilities.

The Deleuzean line of flight, as we said earlier, “effectively folds into a spiral” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 17), yet each fold represents a change described by a novel probability distribution of parts acting within the overall dynamics of the complex adaptive system. Dewey, quite in accord with systems-theoretical thinking, has considered a part as always “already a part-of-a-whole. … conditioned by the contingent, although itself a [necessary] condition of the full determination of the latter” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 65).

Such a dynamic was envisaged by Dewey as a vital, and not mechanical, organization recognizing – as we mentioned in Chapter 1: Becoming-other, and very much in agreement with the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze – “the empirical impact … of the mixture of universality and singularity” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 48) in the relation of a whole to its parts. An autopoietic process, that includes in itself the Deleuzean transversal communication as a condition of its own vitality, is a creative becoming indeed because it brings forth “the tenor of existence, the intensification of life” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 74) and the previously unknown creative potential expressed by “the manner in which the existing being is filled with immanence” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 137). Contrary to Taylor’s nostalgic sentiments, new meanings and values will have to be created because, sure enough, life cannot be a straightforward affair. Deleuzean subjectivation, therefore, cannot be degraded to what Taylor would have called the worst kind (we remember that he defined the subjectivation of matter in terms of anthropocentric self-determining freedom). It is freedom, sure enough, as well as aesthetics of self (also downgraded by Taylor) understood as a creative, artistic, potential: as embedded in an autopoietic, experiential and experimental, process, it is of the nature of self-making, or the making of the Self.

Phronesis as understanding is a practical and experiential method; it cannot but create the conditions of freedom specified as “efficiency in action, … capacity to change the course of action, to experience novelties. And again it signifies the power of desire and choice to be factors in events” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 209; see also Garrison, 1999a, p. 304-305). In Peircean terms, freedom as a category of ethics is the first category that manifests in the triadic logic of creative abduction.

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Ethics and logic complement each other because it is specifically triadic semiotics, based on the logic of the included middle, which is defined as an ethics of thinking that, for Peirce, would have been inseparable from human conduct, that is, an ethics of doing. Thus the mode of being as filled with immanence leads to becoming necessarily fulfilled due to one’s acquired capacity to act freely and independently precisely because of having learned to experience the connectedness and the reality of mutual interdependence in “the common world” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 107).

The autonomy of the subject is therefore not given but contingent on the act of shared communication embedded within the experiential situation. In this respect, Deleuze’s philosophy, which has been explored in this chapter by presenting his novel concepts as well as by employing some concepts derived from Dewey’s educational philosophy, shares the ethical position of care theorists (Noddings, 1984, 1998, 2002). We have already indicated that Deleuze would have agreed with the feminist view on the subject as constituted rather than constituting.

The ethics of care emphasizes moral interdependence and “rejects the notion of a truly autonomous moral agent. … As teachers, we are as dependent on our students as they are on us” (Noddings, 1998, 196). Deleuze’s conceptualization of becoming asserts a self-becoming-autonomous, as if tending to its own ideal limit, as a continuous function – always already incorporating difference into itself – of an expressive, communicative, interactive and autopoietic process that may very well begin just in the small part of the aforementioned common world, a classroom.

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BECOMING-RHIZOME

Richard Rorty, as we mentioned in the Introduction, acknowledging the pragmatic direction taken by both modern and postmodern philosophy in his “Consequences of Pragmatism” (1982), declared that “James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy travelled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently travelling” (Rorty, 1982, p. xviii). The preceding chapters demonstrated, however, that it’s quite irrelevant to investigate who travelled the farthest along the metaphorical road posited by Rorty. In fact, the competitive mood implicit in Rorty’s phrase would sound foreign to the cooperative spirit prominent in both Dewey’s and Deleuze’s philosophies.

The important thing is that the Deleuze-Dewey series indeed tends to converge along the pragmatic trajectory. The common space emerges; in this chapter it maps a territory constituting Deleuze’s new image of thought, or rather as he put it, a thought without image. This concept is exemplified in the powerful notion, borrowed by Deleuze from biology, of the rhizome. Rhizome, as a metaphor for unlimited growth through the multitude of its own transformations, relates also to Dewey’s naturalistic educational philosophy which presents “learning [as] a process of growth and change” (Garrison, 1997, p. 5).

Deleuze (1994a) contrasts this new image of thought with the dogmatic Cartesian image, the word per se indicating both a philosophical system and a prevailing set of philosophical assumptions. The image of thought then is in fact pre-philosophical, because it precedes the philosophy proper in terms of the set of presuppositions that any philosophy feeds upon. The image of thought as such is subtle but appears implicitly in the classical philosophical tradition, it being empiricist or rationalist, by virtue of thought itself being traditionally considered to be a natural operation of the faculties resulting in true judgment.

Error, as a binary opposite of the classical, true and “normal”, thought, is therefore an anomaly, failure and negativity. In short – and from the point of view of a philosopher of education – it is all that “stuff” that still fills many contemporary classrooms. The classical philosophical method must eliminate error, and the “I think” becomes such a method. “I think”, as identical to “I am”, becomes equated with “I know”, and the sole act of recognition defines the method proper. Sure enough, what is there left to learn, as Patton (2000), commenting on Deleuze’s philosophy and its relation to political thought, asks, if all “knowledge is ultimately a form of recognition” (Patton, 2000, p. 19)?

Yet, there are other “misadventures besides error” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 149).

Referring to teachers, Deleuze (1994a) says that they know how rarely genuine 71

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errors are found in their students’ homework. Much more frequently, there are banalities, nonsensical sentences or poorly posited problems. As Deleuze indicates, pointing towards a subtle relation between sense and nonsense rather than dichotomy derived from the presence or absence of either falsehood or truth, those misadventures are “all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of all of us” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 153). Non-sense therefore is neither true nor false but has its own intrinsic, albeit different value, similar to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, in producing meaning.

In fact, the very otherness of non-sense is a condition necessary for meaningproduction because in its function of a paradoxical “entity [it] circulates in both series … and [is] equally present in the signifying and signified series … [as] at once word and thing, name and object, … etc. It guarantees … the convergence of the two series which it traverses, but precisely on the condition that it makes them diverge” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 40), similar to the looking glass that serves as an entrance into Alice’s a-signifying and anti-representational – Deleuzean – world.

Let us recall a scene from the famous book. Is Alice a little girl or a kind of serpent? Well, she is a serpent because she has tasted eggs, and such is the essence of serpenthood as rightfully deduced by the Pigeon. It appears that Alice is losing her name in her continuous becoming-other yet she is gaining connections with the world of nature, the Wood. … What do you call yourself? … Nothing just now …

The new image of thought that “thinks” differently is presented by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) by means of the powerful metaphor of a rhizome indicating such a thought. The rhizome model is contrasted with a tree, the latter symbolizing the linear and sequential, arborescent reasoning rooted in the finite knowledge located in the striated space. The tree metaphor accords with the infamous tree of Porphyry, which is an example of the classificatory system, or a hierarchical structure based on precise definitions that serve as the foundation for rationally demonstrable knowledge, episteme.

The arborescent reasoning is structured in accord with the tree of Porphyry that operates by means of syllogistic logic incorporating the method of division – a linear method – as a form of precise catalogue. The hierarchical structure precludes any interdependence, relationships, or harmony between “things” located at the separate branches of the sacramental tree. If the tree is a symbol for the history of philosophy that planted its roots firmly into modern soil, then the rhizome belongs to philosophy-becoming, it is “more like grass than a tree” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 149).

For Deleuze, all “becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 2) establishing what John Dewey described as continuity. 19 The rhizome becomes, or is becoming, at any moment of its own entry; it is an a-centered system of uncertain relations comprising a “complex place” (Deleuze, 1990, p. xiv). The relations involved are regulated by machinic becomings and not mechanical laws, that is, the relation in question cannot be reduced, for example, to the universal equation of “motion as F=ma” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 192) but is likely to be “probabilistic, semialeatory, quantum” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 149), starting in the middle and as if by chance, and hence

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embodying both sense and nonsense within “the frequency distributions … and redistributions of what existed before” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 220-221).

The rhizome, as embedded in the perplexity of the situation, goes in diverse directions instead of a single path, multiplying its own lines and establishing the plurality of unpredictable connections in the open-ended smooth space of its growth. In short, it lives. It does not represent, but only maps our ways, paths and movements together with, as Deleuze says, “their coefficients of probability and danger” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 3). The situation is problematic not due to subjective uncertainty but because such uncertainty arises out of the conflicting experiences constituting this very situation.

Deleuze (1990) points out that personal uncertainties cannot be reduced to Cartesian doubt but are derived from the objective structure of the event itself, insofar as it moves in two directions at once, and insofar as it fragments the subject following this double direction. It is nomadic distributions that break down “the sedentary structures of representation” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 37), when a thought encounters a crisis similar to a novice athlete (see further below) who is thrown into water. For an athlete who finds herself in a novel situation, there is no solid foundation under her feet, and the world that she has to face loses its reassuring power of familiar representations.

Because the rhizome’s life is underground, its becoming is imperceptible. All becomings, as we remember, happen in the zone of indiscernibility, all becomings are “the most imperceptible, they are acts which can be only contained in a life” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 3). Thought without image, therefore, is vitalistic, it is a life: the indefinite article is used by Deleuze to accentuate the very immanence of each and every mode of existence embedded in life, similar to Dewey’s defining “an experience … [as] carr[ying] with it its own individualizing quality and selfsufficiency” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 35) and his positing the naturalistic logic of inquiry.

Thought is not simply equivalent to knowledge as the image representing itself, but is a complex process of knowing embedded in triadic semiotics. Concepts, for Deleuze, are not limited to the concepts of, which are defined solely by their reference to some external object. They are artistic creations, like sounds in music and colors in painting, or like cinematic images – they are images in thought. They accord with Dewey’s expanding the realm of thinking traditionally represented “in terms of symbols, verbal and mathematical … [to include] thinking effectively in terms of relations of qualities” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 46) which comprise, as we remember, Deleuze’s qualitative multiplicities.

Dewey’s theory of experimental inquiry accords, interestingly enough, with the logic of relations describing the behavior of complex systems that we briefly addressed in Chapter 1: Becoming-other. As inquiry into inquiry, naturalistic logic is recursive; it “does not depend on anything extraneous to inquiry” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 167) but establishes continuity between the less complex and the more complex activities and forms comprising the multiplicity of heterogeneous levels.

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Indeed, naturalistic inquiry is open-ended, it grows like Deleuze’s rhizome and is based on “the logical … connected with the biological in the process of continuous development” (Dewey, 1938, p. 25) . As an active process, “it does not live in an environment; it lives by means of an environment … [and] with every differentiation of structure the environment expands” (Dewey, 1938, p. 25; italics mine) due to – as we said earlier – “transversal communications between different [that is, differentiated] lines” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 11, brackets mine) implicated in the multileveled rhizome.

Going beyond recognition, the thought without image necessarily becomes a model of learning, and not at all “fall[ing] back, as upon a stereotype, upon some previously formed scheme” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 52). Thinking without recognition is oriented towards the evaluation of one’s current, here-and-now, mode of existence, and “beneath the generalities of habit in moral life we rediscover singular processes of learning” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 25)!

Because such thinking is effected by an encounter with the unknown, therefore at the present moment unthinkable, it is future-oriented tending toward “the limit of a lengthened and unfolded experience” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 20). To think means “to apprehend … relations” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 45). The changed image of thought which, for Deleuze, “cries out” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 148) in affects and guides the creation of concepts – the cornerstone of Deleuze’s philosophy – manifests itself in “new connections, new pathways, new synapses, … [produced] not through any external determinism but through a becoming that carries the problems themselves along with it” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 149) in agreement with Dewey’s asserting that the energy enabling the process “is not forced in from without” (Dewey, 1938, p.

25).

Therefore the production of new connections, as embedded in the dynamic process, is immanent because if and “when you invoke something transcendent you arrest movement” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 147). The movement however never stops: its autoreferential operational closure, although seemingly a contradiction in terms, is not at all an arrest or stasis that would have led to “death and catastrophe” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 281). The metaphor of “death” is poignant: in complex systems discourse “death” would be representing a state of the total equilibrium of the system, or its total closure in the absence of tension that would have otherwise triggered interaction. The movement is continuously effected by means of feedbacks therefore “developing … towards its own consummation” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 41) as a property of reconstruction, re-creation, and creation anew.

Learning as the creation of new concepts is a process of knowing, and the process is produced only through movement.

Philosophy, for Deleuze, indeed needs an intense non-philosophical understanding which takes place by means of thought itself being put into “an echo chamber, a feedback loop” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139) that filters it, and filters it again and again in a process of subtle amplifications. Each time the differentiating process is multiplied, something different is being repeated until thought becomes a multiplicity, or a pack of connections and associations quite unlike the pure striated reason. The creation of concepts is based on a possibility to “read, find 74

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[and] retrieve the structures” (Deleuze, 1967 in Stivale, 1998, p. 270; Deleuze’s italics) implicated in the multileveled rhizome.

Any new concept is derived as a singularity and, sure enough, cannot be considered to be a binary opposite of multiplicity: the logic of relations and the very “existence of differentiation … shows that the singular exists within an extensive field” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 196) which is described by Deleuze, as we remember, as undifferentiated and pre-conceptual.

The learning process must be immanent; it cannot be otherwise because it is on the plane of immanence where “multiplicities fill in, singularities connect with one another, processes of becoming unfold, intensities rise and fall” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

147).

Deleuze reconstructs a powerful story, based on the classic example used by Leibniz (in his idea of the sea as a system of differential relations), of a novice athlete who learns to swim through a becoming – herself in the water, indeed among and not over or above the aforementioned intensities that rise and fall – that carries the problem as the unknown along with it. The swimmer struggles against the waves because she is facing the unknown that includes her not-yet-knowinghow-to swim, and the swimmer’s movement does not resemble the movement of the wave. Nor does it imitate the instructor’s movements given while not in the water but on the shore. The swimmer is learning “by grasping [the movement of the wave] in practice as signs” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 23).

The problematic – that is, the one that requires learning by its very nature – situation is of the nature of real experience that forms “an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 154). Learning cannot take place in the relation between a representation and an action – which would be the reproduction of the same, denounced by Deleuze, as we remember from Chapter 1: Becomingother. For learning to occur, the meaningful relation between a sign and a response must be established, leading – through encounter with the Other – to the repetition of the different.

Deleuze emphasizes the “sensory-motivity” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 23) of the genuine learner who, exemplified in the image of the athlete, tries to co-ordinate her own sensor-motor activity – that is, at every moment evaluate her own mode of existence – with an intense, as if opposite, force of water. Such an evaluation is an effect of the encounter with the unknown, therefore as yet unthinkable.

Sure enough, “in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 229), and the athlete, as Deleuze says, becomes an apprentice in the process of learning to swim. Deleuze is adamant that we learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. … When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other – involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby 75

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constituted. To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself (Deleuze, 1994, p. 23).

The meaning of what Deleuze identified as spatio-temporal dynamisms becomes clear in their embodying the very idea of difference as a process before it may become a category: the identity of the athlete is “swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 56).

What is there left to learn, let us reiterate, if the difference refers back to some primary identity rather than moves forward to further differences? For Dewey too, one only “excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 23). Those who insist on saying, “do as I do”, a priori establishing identity, reinforce the dogmatic tree-like image of thought, and the one “who executes the wish of others, … [is] doomed to act along lines predetermined to regularity” (Dewey, 1922/1988, p. 208). What follows, is the conformity to “the law of reflection” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 5) solely, eliminating the creative influence of otherness and thus ensuring the reproduction proper.

Contrary to the arborescent regularity, the rhizome must contain an a-signifying rupture, and only the heterogeneous elements, exemplified in the aforementioned images of wasp and orchid are capable of forming a rhizome: The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus.

But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. … There is neither imitation nor resemblance … but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. … Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.

10-11), and a complex growth of both partners, we may add, scrambles the presupposed unidirectional evolution.

If imitation or reproduction of the same were to take place, the result would have never been an individuation, or production of subjectivity as becoming-other by means of the actualization of potentialities, or virtual tendencies, this process being described by Deleuze as “always a genuine creation” (Deleuze, 1994a, p.

212). No “personality, selfhood, subjectivity [as] eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 108; italics mine) would have taken place because the Deleuzean qualitative multiplicity would’ve disintegrated, and not even into the presupposed, as if given unity or identity but in fact – due to the absence of multiple differences – into nothingness, the zero degree, the body without organs, as Deleuze and Guattari would call such a limitstate.

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For Dewey, as for Deleuze, it is not that “identity works and then reinstates differences by contiguity. … ‘Identity’ seems to be the result rather than the antecedent of the association” (Dewey, 1998a, pp. 206-207), identity itself being a vague term that Dewey deliberately puts in quotation marks because identity – by virtue of itself being a function – is bound to be different depending on its own spatio-temporal distribution. These are the “processes [that] … are selfmaintaining” (Dewey, 1938, p. 26), and not any individual identities.

The athlete begins by being within the totality of a situation and not at all by repeating movements that have been imposed upon him outside the qualitative whole: her environment is, as Dewey puts it, unified and capable of “vital contact” (Dewey, 1964, p. 116). Dewey’s example is remarkably similar to Deleuze’s: I am told that there is a swimming school in a certain city where youth are taught to swim without going into water, being repeatedly drilled in the various movements which are necessary for swimming. When one of the young men so trained was asked what he did when he got into water, he laconically replied, “Sunk” (Dewey, 1964, p. 116).

Indeed, the athlete has to emerge and not to sink as if assuming a role of a slave overwhelmed by the power of water, or a docile body within the dominant order of being. Such an order is ruled by dogmatic political philosophy based on “universality, method, question and answer, judgment, … a court of reason, a pure ‘right’ of thought. … The exercise of thought … conforms to … the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 13).

But thinking and learning originate in real experience, which is pragmatically providing conditions for multiple becomings by means of active “cutting and crosscutting” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 22) through “a series of waves” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p.

38).

Many turbulent waves exist in the “precarious and perilous” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 41) world, and one must cut through them when either making “suggestions reaching out and being broken in a clash, or being carried onward by a cooperative wave” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 38). The future-oriented, somewhat untimely epistemology makes an object, in effect, a consequence or a limit-case of the inquiry: becoming, for Deleuze, is the very condition of being. Only then the athlete and the water, as an image of the perplexity, even hostility, of the world outside, may undergo a shared deterritorialization, leading eventually to “a growing progressive self-disclosure of nature itself” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. x).

The Deweyan qualitative whole, as embodying aesthetic and emotional qualities, accords with Deleuze’s describing a concept that remains a product of an “intellectual activity” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 38), in terms of a cinematic image, or a musical composition, or an artistic creation rather than a statement or a proposition: A painter is someone who creates in the domain of lines and colors ….

Likewise a philosopher is someone who creates in the domain of concepts, someone who invents new concepts. … Concepts are singularities which 77

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react with ordinary life, with ordinary or everyday fluxes of thought (Deleuze, original French, quoted in Bogue, 1989, p. 155).

The newly created concepts, or concepts, the meanings of which would have been altered, impose new sets of evaluation on the aforementioned fluxes of life, and for Deleuze, as for Dewey, no thinking is value-free. A thinker is the thinker by virtue of her being “lured and rewarded by total integral experiences that are intrinsically worth while” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 37). Because every concept must embody the situation as a whole – otherwise no concept, as a “fragmentary whole” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 16), would be created – it “speaks the event, not the essence or the thing – pure Event” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 21).

Event is always an element of becoming, and the becoming is unlimited, similar to the rhizome whose underground sprout does not have a traditional root but a stem, the oldest part of which dies off while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the tip. That’s why Deleuze describes events by means of infinitive verbs or (present continuous) gerunds: they are as yet subjectless. Thinking as a process replaces the Cartesian point of departure in the form of “I think” thereby closing off the dualistic split between (supposedly private) language and (public) world.

Analytic philosophy presents language as a system of representations a priori distinguished from signs (Tiles and Tiles, 1993). The representational system presupposes a class of things represented, which are not representations themselves, that is, things in the world are posited as existing outside language. A linguistic sign (and other regimes of signs are ignored) represents transparently or literally. On this account, poetic language, which “represents” symbolically, that is, it does not represent in a strict sense, cannot be “objective”. Not so for Deleuze.

Foucault in The Order of Things, regarding language as a system of representations vs. a system of signs, rightly noticed that the language and the world form a single semiotic fabric, that is, things in the world also function as signs.

We may say that things are like signs, that is, the relationship is analogical and not strictly logical or identical as in the system of representations. That’s why Deleuze, in his characteristic language, expressed the difference by contrasting the logical copula “is” with the radical conjunction “and”. Such is Deleuze’s logic of multiplicities or, in other words, a-signifying semiotics similar to Peircean triadic semiotics as the logic of the included middle. That’s why for Peirce, everything is a sign (see Chapter 2: Becoming-sign).

Concepts, albeit belonging to individual minds, make mind per se a processual affair, a verb, an infinitive, an active event, notwithstanding that “belonging is always a matter of … distributive assignment” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 234), a nomad. Therefore when humankind learned how to make fire, “when men come to the point of making fire, fire is not an essence, but a mode of natural phenomena, an order in change, a ‘how’ of a historic sequence” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 235), an event in a series.

The becoming “divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the present” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 5) because what is called thinking contains, in its “‘present’ phase, affairs remote in space and in time” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 279).

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The concept embodies an ethical dimension, the different values being the “intrinsic qualities of events” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. xvi), and the ethical theme of an event’s having an intrinsic value is as paramount for Deleuze’s philosophy as for Dewey’s. Deleuze is firm on the question of the impersonality of event: as a multiplicity an event is profoundly social and collective therefore “irreducible to individual states of affairs, particular images, [or] personal beliefs” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 19).

An individual experience is never “some person’s; it [is] nature’s, localized in a body as that body happened to exist by nature” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 231). One – in whose body an event is localized – is to be worthy of this event: we remember that for Dewey the totality of experience is intrinsically worthwhile. For this purpose, one has to attain an ethical responsibility or, as Deleuze says, “this will that the event creates in us” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 148) as if ourselves becoming a quasi-cause of “what is produced within us” (1990, p. 148). It is an event that produces subjective will, the meaning of this Deleuzean statement leaning towards Dewey’s addressing the central factor in responsibility as being “the possibility of a … modification of character and the selection of the course of action which would make this possibility a reality” (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander 1998, 2, p. 351).

Responsibility is a by-product of learning, but learning is a feature of responsibility, and both operate recursively by means of self-organization making the issue of responsibility all the more crucial: “a creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133).

Responsibility arises from “[t]he fact that each act tends to form, through habit, a self which will perform a certain kind of acts” (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 351). An ethical dimension is complemented by an affective one: the experience would satisfy the conditions of being an experience, that is “an integral event” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 38), when permeated through and through with becomings or affects that alone enable “genuine initiations and conclusions” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 40) versus just “things happen[ing]” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p.

40) without their making any sense.

The specifics of a local situation – and we remember from Chapter 1: Becoming-other Deleuze’s vivid assessment of the qualitative multiplicity in the case of Little Hans – indicate the extent of the interpenetration of the self with objective conditions. … The unique, unduplicated character of experienced events … impregnates the emotion that is evoked. … We could never speak of fear but only of fear-of-this-particularoncoming automobile, with all its specifications of time and place, or fearunder-specific-circumstances-of-drawing-a-wrong-conclusion from such-andsuch-data (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 67).

A concept is derived in its uniqueness, as a singularity, from the multiplicity of its rhizomatic components and connections as datum, as yet “the big, buzzing, blooming confusion of which James wrote” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 203) and as such the only entity that may be given to senses in the full complexity of its “underlying 79

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and pervasive quality” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 195). What must be taken however, is its meaning, what Deleuze (1990) called the logic of sense, or the evaluation depending on “the context of every experience” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 198).

Because every mapping engenders the territory (to which it is supposed to refer, as in the classical image of thought), a static representation of the order of references gives way to a relational dynamics of the order of meanings.

Although “a concept … has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 20), the very singularity of conditions embedded in the experiential situation turns some abstract final knowledge into Dewey’s warranted assertion. As in the case of the athlete who can learn how to swim only if and when immersed in the water and actively moving together and within this milieu, the thinking process for Dewey amounts to the interplay of signs embedded within both an inquirer and an inquiry.

The athlete’s preconceived knowledge of what swimming is, the knowing that, would be of little help under the circumstances of the real-life, given, experience, as compared to knowing how. “A moving force” (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 345) of the aforementioned water, the latter signifying the hazardous and “uncertain character of the world” (Dewey, 1998c, p. 229), “includes the self within it” (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p.

345).

The athlete, we repeat, has to emerge and not to sink: her newly acquired knowledge becomes an emergent property contingent on ever-changing local conditions with which the athlete must interact in order to learn. Learning, as encompassing the Deleuzean triangle 20 of percepts, affects and concepts, amounts to “novelty in action, greater range and depth of insight and increase in poignancy of feeling” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 23). The athlete cannot be a passive spectator maintaining an indifferent gaze with the a priori given certainty: Deleuze uses a cinematic metaphor of the Kino-eye as coined by Dziga Vertov, who was a movie director in post-revolutionary Russia, to emphasize the mutuality – or solidarity – between a camera as an artistic tool and a real-life situation.

An active participation, that is a “unity of the self and its acts” (Dewey, 1932/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 343) and not a set of logical propositions, is what produces thinking. The athlete is moving together with water, the total movement comprising “desire … integrated with an object … completely” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 344) so as to learn, to literally assert and warrant life and not death. Multiple becomings are relational entities, that is signs par excellence, and they are functioning “as clues to and of something still to be reached, they are intermediate, not ultimate; means not finalities” (Dewey, 1929/1984, p. 80).

Deleuze uses the French savoir, that is knowing-how, to emphasize the difference of such a vital experiential education from the traditional tree-like system of knowledge. Only through multiple rhizomatic connections “an organism increases in complexity” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 23) because the rhizome as a new image of thought serves as an example of an open system, and only an open, interactive system is capable of producing something new and “interesting when it 80

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[thought] accedes to the infinite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 140).

Movement and process create the possibility of multiple centers, a plurality of problems rather than a single solution, and a “coexistence of moments which distort representations” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 54) because a rhizomatic processstructure enables any single line to be potentially connected with any other line. A life itself – with an indefinite article, as in an experience – is full of entangled lines and “tangled scenes” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 290), and for Deleuze, as for Dewey, thinking is a practical art. Thinking is “not just a theoretical matter. It [is] to do with vital problems. To do with life itself” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 105).

The lines constituting the Deleuzean rhizome as a new image of thought serve as diverse means to, in Dewey’s words, express the ways in which things act upon one another and upon us; the ways in which, when object act together, they reinforce and interfere. For this reason, lines are wavering, upright, oblique, crooked, majestic; for this reason they seem in direct perception to have even moral expressiveness. They are earth-bound and aspiring; intimate and coldly aloof; enticing and repellent.

They carry with them the properties of objects (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 100101), by means of intersecting, branching out, curving and closing into areas, creating multiple topological surfaces as a precondition for meaning production.

A fate of place, topos, again and again. For Deleuze, as for Dewey, thinking depends on our coordinates in space-time. This relational logic, by establishing relations of the nature “of a spatio-temporal fact” (Dewey, 1938, p. 307), makes the logical copula itself a connective or a verb. The situation as it is being described in the here-and-now is singular, and “typology begins with topology. … We have the truths that we deserve depending on the place we are carrying our existence to, the hour we watch over and the element that we frequent” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 110).

We remember that the plane of immanence has to be constructed, so one area tends to link to another one, they may form multiple connections and they may overlap on the surface. If anything in fact is essential, it is those very linkages, rhizomatic multiplicities, a “ceaseless activity” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 147) of relations, a process of becoming.

Dewey too has reconstructed the meaning of essence – as has been noted by Cunningham (1995) – and he did it in a manner remarkably analogous to Deleuze’s: “once an event has been connected with a potential consequence, it becomes an ‘object’” (Cunningham, 1995, p. 350), saturated with meaning. We mentioned earlier that Deleuze’s situational ethics, the purpose of which is an evaluation of the modes of existence versus the pre-existent universal and abstract judgment, appears to be consequentialist. A value comes into being contingent on the fact of life. For Deleuze, life activates thought, and thought leads to the affirmation of life, and the future would have changed as a function of the initial conditions, or a set of coordinates in the present, singular, moment.

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What inspires the ways of thinking is the complexity of life, or what Dewey identified as a necessity “to cope with the emergence of new modes of life – of experiences that demand new modes of expression” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 303).

For Deleuze, any new mode of existence is always evaluated by means of new ways of feeling – or affects, new ways of perceiving – or percepts, and new ways of thinking by means of newly created or invented concepts. We remember that we need all three to get things, including ourselves, moving!

The athlete is learning how to swim because the means she uses, are intrinsic to the whole situation, and the very “activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. … Means and ends coalesce” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 198). The direction is determined – the athlete has to emerge, we repeat, and not to sink – but the result may be unpredictable (see Chapter 2: Becoming-sign). Learning to swim or, for that matter, learning a foreign language is, for Deleuze, exactly the same because all learning involves an encounter with the unknown and “evolves in the comprehension of problems as such” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192), making learning more of the nature of positing problems rather than answering questions.

Acknowledging a particularly narrow approach to education, Deleuze described it as students’ discovering solutions to the questions posited by teachers. In this way pupils lack the power to constitute problems themselves, and the construction of problems, for Deleuze, is tantamount to one’s sense of freedom. Only if and when “thought is free, hence vital, nothing is compromised. When it ceases being so, all other oppressions are also possible, and already realized, so every action becomes culpable, every life threatened” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 4). In a democratic society, as Deleuze-Spinoza understands it, the power of thinking should be exempt from “the obligation to obey” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 4).

If givens are reconceptualized as takens, then all data become “discriminated for a purpose: – that, namely, of affording signs or evidence to define and locate a problem, and thus give a clue to its resolution” (Dewey, 1929/1984, p. 143). It is “the problematic and confused” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 65) that reflective thinking starts with. Dewey considered construction, in both its manual and symbolic aspects, to be a path to knowing: in fact, the very purpose of construction is knowing because one knows what one intentionally constructs.

Deleuze asserts that “problems must be considered not as ‘givens’” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 159) that is, requiring the Cartesian method as “the search for the clear and distinct” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 161) solution. Learning is “infinite … [and] of a different nature to knowledge” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 192), but that of the nature of a creative process as a method of invention: what is a new concept that would have rhizomatically connected the experiential dots? And a problem in question is always constituted by differential relations “between what is done and what is undergone …. To apprehend such relations is to think” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 45).

Dewey pointed to the “superpropositional” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 85) logic embedded in an artistic creative act. As for Deleuze, he specifically emphasized an “extra-propositional or subrepresentative” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192) quality of learning:

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Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? In short, representation and knowledge are modelled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by themselves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instance which engenders them as cases, and which they resolve or conclude. By contrast, the Idea and ‘learning’ express that extra-propositional or subrepresentative problematic instance: the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192).

We have previously referred to the meaning of the unconscious in this context in Chapter 2: Becoming-sign, when introducing abduction and intuition. It is that which is unthought and unknown, Dewey’s pre-reflective and precognitive thought or Deleuzean non-thought, the tacit information comprising the outside of conscious awareness, especially if we recall that ideas, for Deleuze, are virtual.

They cannot but exist, or – we repeat – subsist, “as a substratum in the depth of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 150) that constitutes the common plane of immanence. And because “immanence is the unconscious itself” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 29), the unconscious is by necessity collective rather than personal.

The unconscious on the other hand, as we remember from Chapter 1: Becomingother, is a productive machine which is “at once social and desiring” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 144). Deleuzean desiring machines are operational because the “unconscious activities are realities … of the kind to re-shape natural objects ….

Hence [their] liberating, expansive power” (Dewey, 1926/1964, p. 145). Affects – although irreducible to feelings and emotions but comprising them – are qualities that, according to Dewey, are “attached to events and objects in their movement … [as belonging] to the self that is concerned in the movement of events toward an issue that is desired or disliked … They … are not … private” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 42). They constitute the qualitative whole of an enduring situation, the whole that is being held together by its rhizomatic process-structure.

All reflective thinking demands turning upon its own as yet “unexpressed” (Dewey, 1991, p. 215) unconscious assumptions so as to be able to express them explicitly: “The im-plicit is made ex-plicit; what was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of the day” (Dewey, 1991, p. 214) when it becomes unfolded.

We remember of course that le pli means the fold. For Dewey, the optimal relation between the unconscious and the conscious is nothing less than the test that determines the success of education! There are no pre-existing equations that would sufficiently describe the relation between the precognitive phase and reflexive thinking. The singular character of concepts makes it impossible to

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establish the general rule of where the unconscious attitude or habitual thinking stop and the analytic phase begins.

Therefore the task of education, for Dewey, consists in nurturing a particular “type of mind competent to maintain an economical balance of the unconscious and the conscious” (Dewey, 1991, pp. 215-216) that should include, besides intellectual seriousness, an element of free play as well. It is the unconscious that “gives spontaneity and freshness; [but] consciousness, conviction and control” (Dewey, 1991, p. 217). We are back to Deleuze’s non-thought or the unconscious of thought, to affects and percepts.

Deleuze calls the ideas “‘differentials’ of thought, or the ‘Unconscious’ of pure thought … related not to a Cogito … but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 194). To put the fractured pieces together means to integrate, to connect, to be a living rhizome, to actualize the virtual, to construct the plane of immanent consistency which thus becomes “the conquest of the unconscious” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 29), to further differenciate that what is being differentiated, and such a deed is truly “the magic of the artist” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 118).

The creative artist reads and interprets various signs that make the very situation problematic and, by being able to select between them, transforms the former – by metamorphosis? – into the new one, in which disjointed fragments ultimately form a unified whole. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use metamorphosis with regard to Jung’s theory of the transformation of the libido, or spiritual energy irreducible to Freud’s limited definition of the libido as a sex drive. We emphasized in Chapter 1: Becoming-other the social and collective, that is a-subjective and non personal, nature of the unconscious in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations. We also conjectured that such a description of the unconscious seems to agree with Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, the latter referred to by Jung as the objective psyche.

Deleuze and Guattari point towards the role of analogy, or mimesis, in Jung’s thought and assert that throughout Jung’s body of work mimesis as a dynamic process “brings nature and culture together in its net” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 236), and the series and their terms constituting the mimetic process assure rhythmic communication – a transversal communication indeed – along the natureculture-nature cycle. Hence Deleuze’s including becoming-animal in his concept of becoming-other, as we mentioned in Chapter 1: animal is a repetitive archetypal Jungian image occupying a middle position in the series, “always in the midst of themselves” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 298), taking up a terrain along the rhizomatic territory.

Becoming-animal is a link affecting what Deleuze calls human forces; as human, those forces imply “having an understanding, a will, an imagination” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 117), consciousness in short. For Dewey, too, animal is not some lower form but an important ancestry sharing the same “organic substratum” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 25) with humans whose consciousness is “the inception of … [nature-culture] … transformation” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 25). Although the word mimesis is employed, Peirce’s semiosis, as the action of signs in all of nature, seems to be an appropriate term (see Semetsky, 2001).

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Coincidentally, Jim Garrison (1999c) invokes mimesis with respect to Dewey’s theory of qualitative thought emphasizing the novel interpretation of mimetic process as non-representational and dynamic, and “not a correspondence to static lumpy substances already in existence” (Garrison, 1999c, p. 678). Garrison’s assertion that mimesis blends two seemingly disparate domains of aesthetics and logic, versus bridging them, carries on both Peirce’s and Dewey’s philosophy as semiotics: only a triadic relation is capable of blending because it is a basic triad similar to one shown in Figure 1 that forms a rhizomatic structure.

The mediative function as Thirdness prevents the two collapsing into a dyad and, accordingly, blocking the very act of artistic construction as well as creative inquiry. Mimesis would never be, as Deleuze says, merely the reproduction of the same because this would have contradicted the very dynamics of signs’ evolution and growth for which the repetition of the different (Deleuze, 1994a) is necessary.

Signs by definition are signs of things beyond themselves, and in its strategic function “of drawing lines of connections” (Grossberg, 1997, p. 84) rhizomatics becomes a method of thinking and learning, the craft of making the unconscious conscious, or performing art of the future-oriented productivity of desire (see Chapter 3: Becoming-language) that creative artists, or children for that matter, have in abundance. Perhaps that’s why Leach and Boler (1998), commenting on Deleuze’s “constitutive conception of practice as a foundation of ontology – a nature produced in practice” (Leach and Boler, 1998, p. 154) notice in his philosophical thinking a subtle quality of “premonition: … he may be describing some of what has yet to come” (1998, p. 152).

A nature which is to be produced in practice always “involves reconstruction which may be painful” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 41) – and we understand why. The I is fractured. The emotion is intense. Any emotion “is a moving and cementing force” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 42; italics mine). The fractured I does not know, it does not remember: “Becoming is an antimemory” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.

294). If there is a memory, is such a memory, rather than being Platonic recollection, Proust’s remembrance, that is, an involuntary memory requiring certain initial conditions for its own becoming? Or, we may ask, is an antimemory a memory of the future?

The enigmatic notion of an antimemory seems to relate to the memory of the future as the future anterior. Indeed, it becomes less obscure if we recall that becoming, for Deleuze, is always in-between. Based on the logic of the included middle, the semiotic process embedded in the production of subjectivity makes the relationship between subject and object of the nature of reciprocal presupposition.

Subject which is always subject-in-process, that is, always already becoming-other, offers to itself – due to the transversal, non-linear but dialogical and diagonal, communication – the object of its own signs, the object of itself.

This does not mean that the subject becomes a “fixed self, but the present self in its dialogic projection toward that self of becoming which is as yet absent but which will have been present, given the appropriate set of conditions” (Merrell, 1992, p. 201). Thus Peircean Thirdness – as addressed in Chapter 2: Becoming-sign and which is, in accord with Peirce’s categorizations, always conditional, just the 85

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would be – describes the said future anterior providing certain conditions will have been met.

Time, in accord with Deleuze’s philosophy, may be considered as becomingtime incorporated in the extra, fourth, dimension of space that – because of its always already becoming in our three-dimensional world – is doomed to remain imperceptible, as if out of joint, if looked at simply as a spatial dimension. Yet, such a memory of the future would constitute a part of, in Dewey’s words, training thought, because “the thinking being can … act on the basis of the absent and the future” (Dewey, 1991, p. 14). The cultivation of reflective thinking will increase one’s awareness of remote objects because it is by thinking that “man also develops and arranges artificial signs to remind him in advance of consequences, and of ways of securing and avoiding them” (Dewey, 1991, p. 15).

Dewey’s examples in this respect describe common, real-life experiential situations: A thinking agent will perceive that certain given facts are probable signs of a future rain, and will take steps in the light of this anticipated future. To plant seeds, to cultivate the soil, to harvest grain, are intentional acts, possible only to a being who has learned to subordinate the immediately felt elements of an experience to those values which these hint at and prophesy (Dewey, 1991, p.

15).

The interpenetration of thought and life leads to Deleuze’s defining his discipline, philosophy, as an enterprise both critical and clinical (Deleuze, 1997).

The critical aspect is compatible with Dewey’s assigning philosophy a function of criticism of criticisms and describing reflective thought as “wide awake” (Dewey, 1991, p. 57). As for the meaning of clinical, as used by Deleuze, it is not derived from some discourse on pathology; instead its focus is the model of vitality, life and health. Deleuze (1995) refers to Nietzsche who tells us that artists and philosophers are the physicians of civilization.

Philosophers, writers, and artists are first and foremost symptomatologists; they read, interpret and create signs which “imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, [signs are] the symptoms of life gushing forth or draining away. …

There is a profound link between signs, events, life and vitalism” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 143). We remember from Chapter 3: Becoming-language that for Deleuze the tenor of life is measured by its intensity: it is intensity that makes a life vital. Ivan Illich, coincidentally, used the same term, intensity, when addressing health not as a current state but as the degree of a live organism’s being able to cope with its environment.

For Deleuze, critical and clinical aspects resonate and are bound to educate each other, and the semiotic process of reading signs is not limited to the fact of understanding a concept, or interpreting a meaning of a novel, or even “reading” a painting. The ethical task as a re-evaluation, or reconstruction, of experience, is clinical not only by virtue of its implying a diagnosis of a particular mode of existence by means of assessing the latter’s symptoms, that is reading them as the signs of the here-and-now in the present, but also because of “a look into the 86

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future, … an anticipation, or a prediction … of some possible future experiences” (Dewey, 1933/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 143) by means of extending or projecting multiple rhizomatic connections. A rhizome does not consist of units, but of dimensions and directions, and the rhizome’s renewal of itself proceeds autopoietically: the new relations generated via rhizomatic connections are not copies, but each and every time a new map, a practical cartography.

Dewey too seems to bring in the clinical metaphor by his comparing reflective thinking with the task of a physician who has to make “a prognosis, a forecast of the probable future course of the disease. And not only is his treatment a verification – or the reverse – of the idea … but the result also affects his treatment of future patients” (Dewey, 1933/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 143), that is the greater community, or society, or maybe civilization invoked by Nietzsche.

Deleuze is careful to point out the ambivalence of his concept of the line of flight. It is becoming-other that is created by the movement along this line, hence the significance of the clinical aspect of inquiry: What is it which tells us that, on a line of flight, we will not rediscover everything we were fleeing? … How can one avoid the lines of flight becoming identical with a pure and simple movement of self-destruction; Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, Lawrence’s disillusion, Virginia Woolf’s suicide, Kerouac’s sad end? … [L]iterature is thoroughly imbued with a somber picture of demolition, which carry off the writer. … How to get past the wall while avoiding bouncing back on it, behind, or being crushed? … How to shatter even our love in order to become finally capable of loving? (Deleuze, 1987, pp. 38-46) The answer is unequivocal, though.

Because becoming is always in the present, although the present per se is elusive, making becoming all the more difficult and challenging, one does not have to remember and does not have to predict. One will become capable of loving again if there is no remembrance of the painful past. Because one never knows in advance, there are only explorations and experimentations. Only then the flight along the lines of becomings is towards life, towards the real: life itself becomes a work of art, yet never by means of fleeing it either by dwelling in the nostalgic memories of the past or fantasizing about the future.

Such an attempt to settle the score would be “what psychiatrists call ‘withdrawal from reality’” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 172) notwithstanding that what is defined as reality may very well be the aforementioned “mimesis of the critical and climactic behavior of natural forces within human career and destiny” (Dewey, quoted in Garrison, 1999b, p. 678). Any climactic and unpredictable behavior that creates a crisis in human affairs would bring in the clinical dimension as emphasized by Deleuze.

The affective state, a clinical syndrome, the very affect that may permeate such a withdrawal from reality, making the persistent here-and-now unbearable, is more than “a personal feeling, … it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 240). We 87

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have already briefly addressed Deleuze’s reading and interpreting the case of Little Hans and his emphasis on the qualitative aspect of the total situation.

What is described by Deleuze, is a symbiosis derived from the affective qualities embedded in collective assemblages. Little Hans’s horse, as Deleuze says, is not the Freudian father-figure; it is not representative but affective. … It is defined by a list of passive and active affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, … having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling …. These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do.” … Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, … the house, the café across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go to the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the danger of winning it … These are not phantasies or subjective reveries. … Is there an yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s but that of becoming-horse of Hans? … And in what way would that ameliorate Hans’s problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 257-258).

Such an ameliorative aspect is also the major feature of Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the purpose of which is to become able to correct a specific, undetermined and problematic, situation.

And the power of the situation, the total affect of the yet unanalyzed whole functioning as an assemblage capable of seizing us, should not be underestimated.

It is here and now, in the experiential reality. And because its meaning is to be produced and reflectively evaluated in its present and unique context, new meanings and values, new signs, do come into existence. As created, those signs acquire life, they are vitalistic or vital signs almost literally, and they do have a healing power, because as embodied in meaningful experience they bring forward “the reward of that … transformation” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 22).

The symbolic death of the subject, addressed in Chapter 1: Becoming-other, is by all means a condition of possibility, because individuation depends on “the harshest exercise in depersonalization” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 6), and “experimentation on ourselves is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 11), expressed in the folding of forces. The critical, as the art of combination, amounts to constructing the plane of consistency as such; the clinical, as the art of declension, demands the evaluation and outlining of the rhizome: “which of [the lines] are dead-ended or blocked, which cross voids, … and most importantly the line of steepest gradient, how it draws in the rest, towards what destination” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 120).

The plane, elaborated upon by Deleuze, can also be translated from French as plan, its meaning thus moving closer to what Dewey called “the drawing of a ground-plan of human experience” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 22). The line of greatest slope on such a plan(e) is the line of flight, simultaneously the most painful and the most healing. As enabling “expansive growth, genesis and becoming” (Garrison, 88

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1997, p. 16), this particular rhizomatic line is also the most educational and educative. It is along this very line that all becomings take place and learning happens.

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Jim Garrison (1997) suggests sympathetic data as a term describing intuitions and perceptions that enable our understanding of others. Even as Dewey long ago spoke about the primacy of emotional reactions as a source of our knowledge, still “our culture has not evolved highly refined methods of collecting [those] data, … researchers do not perform careful interpersonal experiments, [and] the theories of human thought, feeling, and action remain … remarkably underdeveloped” (Garrison, 1997, p. 35). There is a sad irony here with regard to the fact that it is sympathetic data which are maximally “relevant to the topic of teaching” (Garrison, 1997, p. 36).

Indeed, it is not by any accident that Deleuze, as we said in the preceding chapter, used clinical as complementary to critical, asserting the significance of the former precisely because of the violent and perilous experiences as part of the creative becomings of the fractured I. Deleuze emphasized health as a precondition for creativity, the latter derived from percept and affect which both ensure the immanence of ethical criteria in evaluating multiple modes of existence therefore restoring ethics to its original meaning.

In this respect, Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (1997a, 1997b) pioneering research in education modelled on Deleuze’s theory of nomadic inquiry may be considered as representing the collection and analysis of the aforementioned sympathetic data, and the fact that it was Deleuze’s thought that has provided inspiration for her methodology is reassuring! The methods of educational research seem to have undergone a timely experiential reconstruction in accord with Dewey’s philosophy of the reorganization of experience.

In this chapter, I am going to first present a synopsis of St. Pierre’s “methodology in the fold” (1997a). My intent is to establish the important contribution of Deleuze’s critical and clinical philosophy to the methods employed in educational research by virtue of its potentially overthrowing the fact “[t]hat so little theory has been constructed, or research conducted, using sympathetic data” (Garrison, 1997, p. 35). Then I am going to take Deleuze’s geophilosophy into the classroom in order to consider its relevance to the problematics of specialization as articulated by Nel Noddings (1993a).

The plurality of theoretical positions is nowhere more evident than in contemporary feminist thought. Frameworks are multiple, reflecting the passion with which women are searching for ways to analyze, articulate and make systematic and coherent the flux and complexity of everyday experiences. What remains the common thread among many diverse views, however, is the approach

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to knowledge and ways of knowing not confined solely to the use of deductive reasoning by a Cartesian subject.

Standing out among the feminist educational researchers who question the primacy and autonomy of a stable and unified identity is the voice of Elizabeth St. Pierre. This chapter addresses two of her original essays that appeared in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, the titles of both essays explicitly pointing to St. Pierre’s using Deleuze’s concepts: Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data (1997a), and Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: a preface (1997b).

St. Pierre urges us to rethink our understanding of knowledge and its production and to accordingly reframe and reconceptualize the pre-given “transcendental signifiers” (1997a, p. 175), such as identity, truth, method, sexuality etc. If no fixed and permanent meaning exists, then all knowledge is contingent, and such categories as reality, truth, knowledge, and the self as the subject of knowledge, become problematic. In this context, suggests St. Pierre, one first has to start thinking differently about data.

The data collected by St. Pierre in her study on the construction of subjectivity in the women of her hometown are identified as transgressive: emotional data, dreams, sensual data, and also implicit and enfolded – as St. Pierre says, borrowing the concept of fold from Deleuze – response data. Those out-of-the-usual-category data are, as St. Pierre points out, usually missing in traditional research methodology because they do not conform to the latter’s “fatal binarity” (Badiou quoted in St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 178).

Awareness of the researcher’s own construction of subjectivity within a research process that focuses on the subjectivities of others becomes a necessary component: I was both identity and difference, self and other, knower and known, researcher and researched. Foregrounding this doubling of subjectivity became crucial to my theorizing and my methodological practices. … I determined to pay attention to what this folded subjectivity might enable as I practiced qualitative research in a postmodern world (St. Pierre, 1997a, p.

178) The conceptualization of the production of subjectivity as enfolded in a dynamic process of becoming points toward the fold per se functioning in a capacity that disrupts the usual dichotomy implicit in such categories as self versus other, inside versus outside, or identity versus difference.

St. Pierre indicates that she was working within a fold with her participants, using the image of the fold as the sign of the shifting boundary of otherness within identity, a membrane. An image of the membrane therefore corresponds to the Deleuzean double-sided paradoxical element, a genuine and always already Janusfaced sign. The emergence of uncodable and excessive, non-traditional, data is part of such a shifting process.

In fieldwork with her participants, St. Pierre’s interpretations were influenced by her collecting plenty of “corrosive, painful emotional data” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p.

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181), without which the validity of her research would have suffered. Her “desire for validity” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 181) itself became a valuable part of the method for data collection, in a process of which one’s own subjectivity is bound to undergo continuous reconstitution. St. Pierre indicates that she found herself within this emotional process of trying “to understand my participants, to respect their lives, to examine my relationship with them, and to question my interpretations.

The examination of one’s own frailty surely makes one more careful about the inscription of others” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 181).

Another source of transgressive data, for St. Pierre, was a collection of dreams that she chose to describe and, rather than analyze them, display in the narrative form as a text. Citing Foucault who, as St. Pierre says (1997a, p. 182), called the space of our dreams the space of our primary perception, St. Pierre describes how she spoke with some of her participants in her dreams, continuing to interview them, and searching for the sometimes elusive meaning and interpretation of data.

The dreams “added a layer of complexity …, foregrounded problems … and reconstructed and reproduced data in representations that helped me to think about data differently. … My dreams enabled and legitimized a complexity of meaning that science prohibits” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 183), thus contributing to a specific type of self-formation, called by St. Pierre the irruption into (Deleuzean) difference.

The choice of material constituting the third significant kind of data was influenced by the fact that St. Pierre actually used to live in the same community where she returned later to begin her studies. Deleuzean geophilosophy, the philosophy of place and space, has inspired St. Pierre and directed her attention to a possible source of data that she called sensual. The attachment to a place produced the effect of the very physicality, perhaps embodiment, of the site of knowing, a deep carnal knowledge of sorts.

Because the researcher was studying the place where she had been actually growing-up, there might have been a possibility, as stated by St. Pierre, that her consciousness had been “mapped and fashioned in a subtle way” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 184) by those always already present sensual data. We may add that, as Deleuze would have put it, these data may very well have been subsisting in their virtual non-representative state. Foregrounding of those data might have served as a means to bring forth something unexpected and unforeseeable in other participants.

Casting doubt on the positivist approach to scientific research and acknowledging the inadequacy of the usual peer debriefing and member checks, St. Pierre nevertheless recognizes the limitations of data produced by her own subjectivity and states that the very members and peers who produce those data are often the most critical. Such response data, in a Deleuzean manner, can affect the very process of data interpretation.

St. Pierre points to the importance of bringing in the Deleuzean Outside as a source of difference for the purpose of producing different possibilities for response and different kinds of response data. … I have collected response data from an official peer debriefer, my book 93

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committee members, members of writing groups …, my mentor, my mother, … friends who are not academics, my informant who is a dear friend and was clear and transparent and innocent. As the breakdown of humanist language and practice accelerates, we will encounter difference at every turn. … And these differences will … require different language, experimental writing, and … “messy texts”. … My troubles with language … have produced lines of flight I would never have imagined. Emotional data, dream data, and sensual data seem fairly tame compared with response data whose sprawling tendrils creep into and dehisce the staged unity of every research project. …

To play in the possibilities of that space outside language that is opened up when words fall apart is my desire. Many such local, strategic subversions of self-evidence will be required if we are to reinvent education in a postmodern world (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 186).

St. Pierre specifically identifies her method of research as nomadic inquiry, asserting that such methodology would be consistent with postmodern education.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept nomad acquires different connotations in their various works. It is in fact a paradoxical functioning of an “aleatory point” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 56) that runs through the series making them resonate and bifurcate. Nomad is a mobile element, and nomadic distributions would have eventually occupied the whole of process-structure. As for St. Pierre, she uses it in the sense of a journey, or writing excursion into subjectivity analogous to Foucault’s care of the self, or “technologies of the self that people use to create themselves as the ethical subjects of their actions” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 365).

Nomadic inquiry is specified by St. Pierre in terms of attention to particular places and earlier times, retrospective, as well as untimely, memories and dynamic forces, capable of affecting changes and contesting one’s identity to the point of a transformation of who we are and, respectively, reconfiguration of the where of our place at this point in time. The nomadic – smooth – space is an open territory, providing emancipatory potential for those who are situated in this space in contrast to striated, or gridded, space, both terms as St. Pierre reminds us being coined by composer Pierre Boulez. St. Pierre’s usage of the term smooth is similar to that of Deleuze; it defines an open-ended space in which one can, under the influence of a force moving through space, get up at the point of application of the force and move into any direction. It is Deleuze’s Outside, that “fold[s] us into identity, and we can never control the forces of the outside” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p.

367). But certain places – smooth spaces? – may provide conditions that are extremely favorable to practicing “identity improvisation, [therefore] attention to places may be required” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 367).

The construction of subjectivity is effected by nomadic displacement: “life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, … switches adversaries” (Deleuze and Guattari quoted in St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 369), making it necessary to demand a nomadic inquiry into a problematic situation and the contingencies of the environment so as to possibly correct the said situation. Specifically, in the context of St. Pierre’s ethnographic studies, the displacement, and hence conditions for the 94

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reconstruction of subjectivity, were constituted by revisiting some of those spaces – mental space, the space of the text, and the space of theory – by means of using feminist writing as a method of inquiry.

The process of displacement, that is, leaving – albeit symbolically – familiar territory, but nevertheless still continuing “to travel while seated” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 365), is what a nomadic ethnographer is engaged with. Deleuze’s neologism for this action is, as we stated earlier, deterritorialization, that is, an event of leaving the symbolic home and cutting ties with the familiar territory, which thus leads to one’s uprooting. The researcher herself, in the process of inquiry, becomes a nomadic subject who is “more interested in the surprising intensity of an event than in the familiar serenity of essence” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p.

370), an event per se constituting the very perplexity of a problematic situation.

St. Pierre analyzes the relation of subjectivity to the idea of space, drawing from writings of Lefebvre and Spivak and acknowledging the ambiguity of the politics of space. Humanist thought equated the notion of space with nothingness and emptiness; as for posthumanist discourse, it considers space to be an almost physical place and one that is saturated with events, topologies and maps.

Movements, trajectories, flows and fluxes permeate the smooth nomadic space.

Nomadic subjects are always open to the possibility of further deterritorializations, even if they exist, as St. Pierre points out, in one’s imagination only: With Bachelard … I like to think of this mental space as “felicitous space” … intimate space, since “space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space … (I)t has been lived in … with all the partiality of the imagination”. … This mental space cannot be absent or present but is both at once and neither. It seems barely possible but then impossibly obvious. It is an affirmative, joyous space, perhaps the most thrilling of all the fields in which we work (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 371).

Such mental space would not conform to the strict dualistic logic of pure rationality; instead, and based on St. Pierre’s own experience, the writer’s words may appear on the computer screen as if by themselves and without effort, or all of a sudden the never-thought-of answer to some dilemma may just pop out, seemingly accidentally, in a strange and peculiar mixture of actions of both mind and body. Such would be a typical action, we add, effected by the Deleuzean aleatory Outside which is enfolded within Inside. In turn, the smooth textual space, as a construction site of one’s subjectivity, may contain the interplay of words, free-floating associations, or a set of quotations resembling, as St. Pierre points out, some of Walter Benjamin’s texts.

The smooth space of theory, says St. Pierre, is a place of disjunction and discomfort, because that is where different subjectivities, informed by their different beliefs and experiences, meet. These subjectivities, within research methodology, represent subjectivities of the researcher and her participants; and the latter group, as a consequence, quite often may not even share the worldview of the

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researcher, like in the case of the older women who participated in St. Pierre’s studies.

Yet, while being a site of a possible conflict, this conjunction is also “a site of affirmation, since there is a possibility of living differently” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p.

378), of rethinking and reassessing one’s subjectivity by continuing one’s nomadic journey into new, as yet unexplored, territories. St. Pierre (1997b, p. 380) refers to Lyotard’s postmodern position regarding the conceptualization of the future anterior – by now, a concept familiar to us – when the writer works without rules but in order to create the rules of what will have been done, thus implying the event-like character of her text.

Through the course of her study, Elizabeth St. Pierre persists in postulating ethical questions regarding her actions and theoretical underpinnings: “What kind of ethnographer am I? What kind of feminist am I?” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 377).

She emphasizes the effort she puts in so as to ensure a self-reflexivity for the purpose of overcoming the dangerous paradox which might very well create a seemingly messy problem (St. Pierre, 1997b). The problem consists in her interpreting the lives of women who would have, if given voice, likely identified themselves as humanists, from St. Pierre’s own subject-position of a poststructuralist feminist.

Ethical concerns permeate the researcher’s strategies because the pluralism of significations breaks down any a priori definition of ethics as transcendental and being the same for everyone in every situation. Rather, ethics explodes anew in every circumstance, demands a specific reinscription, and hounds praxis unmercifully. … The self is not given, … there is no core, essential self that remains the same throughout time, … subjectivity is constructed within relations that are situated within local discourse and cultural practice (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 176).

Under the above conditions the researcher’s responsibility is to stay with a particular situation and within a fold with her participants in a process of negotiating meaning in the very “middle of things, in the tension of conflict and confusion and possibility” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 176).

Being in-between, as if herself enfolded in the midst of conflicting experiences, leads St. Pierre to acknowledging and respecting the literal alterity of others.

Therefore it becomes necessary to practically create multiple modes of existence posited, as we remember, by Deleuze, while trying hard in this process, as St. Pierre suggests, to invent ethics within each relation so as not to feel “out of place” (St. Pierre, 1997b, p. 377) when conversing with participants. Or perhaps not even conversing. Talking is not the only mode of collecting data. St. Pierre comments that nomadic inquiry may very well “involve practices of silence” (1997b, p. 378) that become a part of postfoundational ethnography.

St. Pierre conducted her research with older women. It is obvious though that her methodology and theoretical framework may be applicable to participants representing other marginal groups like, for example, youth who themselves are 96

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nomads almost by definition. They express their desires in graffiti writings that are contained in their smooth textual space, and they even create their own smooth mental space by wearing headphones and hoods. And quite often they indeed practice silence. Thus, the methodology of the fold as advanced by St. Pierre may be recommended for educational research using adolescents’ narratives and other cultural signs as data in a nomadic inquiry.

By means of reconceptualizing epistemology in a feminist framework St. Pierre is not only able to identify and collect transgressive, indeed sympathetic, data, but also situate them in a broader methodology of a nomadic inquiry derived from Deleuze’s philosophy. She aims to revitalize both “academic and public discourses to guide our teaching and learning” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 175) by employing the strategy of practicing different languages of expression.

Indeed, becoming-language that has been analyzed earlier, manifests itself via multiple forms of expression as different regimes of signs irreducible to the solely verbal representation. Thus images in dreams, as described by St. Pierre, are signs and indeed serve as a form of a language of expression therefore becoming yet another source of data. The concept of nomadic journey allowed St. Pierre to conceptualize and locate the shifting boundaries of one’s subjectivity as an array in an open, smooth, space. By means of multiple dislocations of space St. Pierre has explored different possibilities implicit in the construction of subjectivity, as well as intersubjectivity of a researcher and her participants.

Nomadic inquiry may be conducted by multiple means, articulated in different languages, and exemplified in various practices. Taking the lead among feminist philosophers of education, as has been noticed by Alexander (1993, pp. 1-4), is Nel Noddings. Noddings (1993a, pp. 5-16) holds that feminists are leading the way to new thinking on crucial issues traditionally defined and conceptualized in terms of educational liberalism or, as St. Pierre would contend, within humanist discourse.

Noddings reconceptualizes the notions of excellence and specialization, giving them new meanings – quite in accord, we add, with Deleuze’s calling for the philosophical task of the invention and creation of new concepts – and asserting the primacy and importance of the quality of the present experience. Seeking “new vocabularies and new meanings for old vocabularies” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 6), she agrees with the postmodern trends in education that aim at “the breakdown of humanist language and practice” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 186).

Nel Noddings argues that important aspects of excellence in the school system should include attention to “the quality of life experienced by its students and teachers, … should provide a means for them to explore matters of interest common to most human beings, and … should develop the legitimate interests and talents” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 8) of students. The present experience, as described

by Noddings, may be considered as sharing its qualities with those elaborated by Dewey and Deleuze, therefore making the learning process reconceptualized in terms of learning from experience. Learning is enabled by means of common engagement in shared, transversal, communication (see Chapter 3: Becominglanguage), effecting genuine self-expression in what Deleuze would call a haecceity – thisness – of a particular here-and-now situation.

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Noddings refers to Neill’s emphasizing the legitimacy of children’s personal interests for learning and underlines that Neill’s educational thinking was informed primarily by his taking care of the emotional state of mind of his students, “by a concern for mental health” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 9). The implications of the clinical aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy for such schooling become not only clear but also related to the concept of joy as both the process and the product of educational praxis.

Noddings, describing the actual activities that she and her students engaged in, notices that children “enjoyed what they were doing, made their environment more beautiful, … shared their knowledge, … and grew as competent, caring, loving and lovable people” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 9). They were able therefore to reinvent through practice a new concept – and such is, we remember, the cornerstone of Deleuze’s philosophy – for what is traditionally considered learning. And educational values were also discovered by means of ordinary experiences in terms of Deleuze’s immanent evaluation as “‘I love’ … instead of ‘I judge’” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 141).

Noddings insists that schools should permit the early specialization of students.

Dewey’s and Deleuze’s respective philosophies would have supported Noddings’ argument in favor of early specialization based on students’ interests. Deleuze, reflecting on his own students, commented that “nobody took in everything, but everyone took what they needed or wanted” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139). In fact, as he acknowledged in 1990 in a series of interviews, it was precisely during Deleuze’s teaching days at Vincennes, when he was actually engaged in educational practice and everyday relationships with students, that he “realized how much philosophy needs not only a philosophical understanding, through concepts, but a nonphilosophical understanding, rooted in percepts and affects” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

139) embedded in experience.

In what follows, I not only address Noddings’ notion of specialization but also expand its boundaries by stretching this concept so as to cover some of the figurations that have so far been developed in this book. I follow Noddings’ lead of how “specialization construed in [an] alternative way, might actually produce more ‘breadth’” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 14). By defining specialization in terms of selforganization, effectuated by means of Deleuze’s relational multiplicities and assemblages of experience, I assume that specialization presupposes the plurality and variability of choices available for students to make. In this sense specialization is indeed linked to what Noddings qualifies as a breadth of curriculum.

Further, by virtue of the interactive, self-organizing, and autopoietic character of the students’ learning process, we posit the incapacity for students to experience failure at any point within the process. The notion of process implies convergence with the process-thinking of Dewey and Deleuze, and the dynamics inscribed in such schooling may not necessarily be continuous in a strict sense. It would incorporate discontinuities and ruptures constituting the place of becoming, the inbetween non-place for an “empty square” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 47) that, however, is essential to structure by virtue of articulating it.

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We remember that Deleuze, describing difference, stressed that it must be functionally differing: it creates a “tangled tale” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 51) and assures a passage from one singularity to another. It is a difference that itself makes a difference. It is the subtle and as yet imperceptible difference in the second degree functioning in a derivative sense along the line of flight such as, for example, the line of flight produced by acceleration as a derivative of velocity. By virtue of its being “the in-itself of difference” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 119), it has a power to literally speed things up. It becomes a means of facilitating communication and opening up an “intensive centre of metamorphosis … a process … of becomingother” (Bogue, 1989, p. 121) therefore pragmatically affecting the process of students’ learning as meaning making.

Deleuze’s pedagogy of the concept, if we situate it in the concrete context of schooling, is therefore an important example of indeed “expanding educational vocabularies” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 5). Because specialization is defined as selforganization, it is accompanied by specific features that, in turn, affect the concept of learning which, in its own becoming-other, cannot but break out from old vocabularies. Communication in an autopoietic mode points towards naturalizing the concept of learning which therefore becomes an emergent property of the transactions between teachers, students and the subject-matter, even in the absence of direct instruction and teaching as traditionally defined.

In this respect it is the self-organizing learning process that leads to an increase in complexity and the growth of intelligence: it functions as the process of both intellectual and moral growth that necessarily includes in itself, in accord with Dewey’s philosophy, an added capacity for growth. Folds that are formed in the critical junctions, where different rhizomatic lines cross and interact, are themselves the tightest relations functioning in the capacity of a self-organized criticality and therefore capable of increasing the system’s complexity: they create a perplexity, a novelty, that would have required a decision-making, a choice.

Indeed, we “are never separable from the world: the interior is only a selected exterior, the exterior, a projected interior” (Deleuze, 1988b, p. 125).

Specialization as making a selection among many available options not only requires that those options are present but also stimulates the mode of thinking and acting so that students would not be horrified by possible contradictions and choices that may seem to oppose each other. Rather than perceiving a sense of failure, students – even when folded in conflicting situations, or precisely when enfolded in such situations – may extract from them forces that vitalize the system by diversifying it, that is, by enriching the system with variations.

The tension, or difference, that may exist between seemingly contradictory choices, itself becomes a contingent factor feeding back into the educational process and, according to the dynamic of complex systems, amplifying – and le pli, as we remember, means the fold – its potential for self-organization by acting from within as the quasi-necessary and immanent condition for growth. The value of the idea of interest in education, emphasized by Dewey (1916/1924) represents, within the paradigm of self-organization an immanent condition created by the dynamic

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and “moving force of objects – whether perceived or presented in imagination” (Dewey, 1916/194, pp. 152-153).

The very problematic involved in selecting an alternative and making a choice would, according to Dewey, induce learning. In this respect there won’t be any special educative aim that is imposed from without. The school environment, the milieu per se, would have created conditions to actualize students’ many potentials – and thus having become what Noddings calls an excellent system of education, that is, one that serves “to open opportunities – never to close them” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 13). The absence of any external aim inherent in the self-organizing dynamics functioning in an autopoietic manner also eliminates the hierarchical power structure specific to traditional present-day schooling. What takes place is the heterogeneous distribution of knowledge that, in its shared activity (Dewey, 1916/1924), becomes available to all who are interested.

The body of knowledge, rather than being focused on some abstract and transcendental future telos – as “access to college” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 9), for example – is being held together by virtue of being distributed in the experimental and experiential field of action, the center of which is nonetheless constantly shifting, because of selections, and its circumference expanding because of variations. The distribution of knowledge becomes a function of the shared communication rather than of a centrally administered curriculum. The immanent production of meanings includes not only the sense and worth of chemistry, or literature, or history, or any other subject-matter, but first and foremost, the sense and worth of self.

Deleuze’s nomadic distributions in an open-ended smooth space – provided a classroom, as part of the system of education specified as excellent, is such a space – is a function of multiple encounters with otherness that induce and inspire learning. Each “here-and-now” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. xx) encounter is characterized

by Noddings’ quality of the present experience and itself is a precondition for the emergence of “ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. xxi).

Learning and teaching, the making and remaking of concepts, proceed “along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. xxi) – yet the decentered center holds notwithstanding the polyvocality of directions and plurality of choices. Indeed, it is the interplay of choices that makes the center hold. The quality of present experience, posited by Noddings, is maintained; furthermore at any given moment the novelty of experience – the availability of alternatives – metaphorically pulls the future into the present (see Chapter 2: Becoming-sign), making learning not a rationally deduced abstraction but a sensed, felt and perceived experiential reality of the here-and-now quality of a student’s own “creation” in the mode of her own choice, indeed making one’s experience resemble various Deweyan handicrafts (Dewey, 1916/1924).

The present insists and persists: as Whitehead says, “the present contains all that there is” (Whitehead, 1929/Cahn, 1997, p. 263). The hypothetical golden rule of education advocated by Whitehead states that 100

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Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. This is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow (Whitehead, 1929/Cahn, 1997, p. 265).

In practice and under real classroom conditions, however, this rule, according to Whitehead, is barely followed. Sure enough, because it shifts responsibility to a single pole of the interaction, the teacher, whose task is, as Whitehead puts it, to make the pupil see the wood by means of the tree, the self-organizing dynamics will have been betrayed.

If it is the teacher who is “centering” a situation, then early specialization, advocated by Noddings, would have been practically impossible; indeed what Whitehead focuses on is “a more advanced stage of the pupil’s course” (Whitehead, 1929/Cahn, 1997, p. 266) at which specialization should have taken place. However the critical feature of self-organization, its distributive, nomadic character, makes a transaction per se a unit of analysis and the system itself inherently quasi-causal.

That is, the pragmatic maxim of the production of real effects is achieved via students engaging in transactions because of their encounters with otherness. The added growth – or, in terms of self-organization, some increase in complexity – becomes an immanent and pragmatic function and not at all a result of a fictitious external cause. Because a “purely external direction is impossible” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 30), the growth per se is causally efficacious, therefore pragmatically real. The dubious possibility of some external direction defies the well-intended effort of teachers to make students see the aforementioned wood, hence ironically affirming the difficulty of achieving the golden rule in practice.

This justification is far from perfect and, quite possibly, may be questioned.

However the significance of self-organization is broad and the method of inquiry it implies is not limited to intentional and conscious operations solely. The methodology of the fold comprising nomadic inquiry – two of Deleuze’s figurations addressed in this chapter – is operative also at the level of subtle and unconscious, yet vital, attitudes (Dewey, 1916/1924) in the form of vital energy seeking opportunity for effective exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes place through them (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 84).

The notion of “through them” implies the self-organizing, folded, character of what Dewey prophetically described as a process of reconstruction, that is, reorganization of experience.

As a consequence, and because of the active character of any transaction – it would not be the transaction otherwise – re- or self-organization demands “thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; [and] learning naturally results” 101

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(Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 181) as an outcome of the re-valuation of experience.

Because self-organization is founded on many interactive feedbacks, its dynamic is non-linear. In this respect there may exist a certain lag within the process, which in no respect implies that a student would be failing. Rather, Dewey’s continuity appears, in the final analysis, to be “composed of … cycles, and cycles of such cycles” (Whitehead, 1929/Cahn, 1997, p. 268) creating a rhythmic movement.

Deleuze’s aleatory element in the form of an empty square will be always lurking somewhere in such a movement because its very presence is a sign, a condition of possibility of each new cycle’s spiralling forward. For Deleuze and Guattari , there is rhythm, whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communications of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times … Whenever there is transcoding, … there is not a simple addition, but a constitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage or bridging. … [T]he components as melodies in counterpoint, each of which serves as a motif for another: Nature as music (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 313-314).

Musical metaphors assist Deleuze in articulating the dynamics of the process, and a surplus value implies growth, an increase in power, a potential capacity for what a body can do, a body itself described as a block of space-time, a continuous becoming of a nomadic subject.

Specialization therefore cannot but satisfy individual students’ “specific capabilities, needs and preferences” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 153) because of the multiplicities constructed by variations and selections. While satisfying both capabilities and preferences, the system maintains its stable state, or a certain habit formation, described by means of straightforward linear growth. Yet, such a state is far from equilibrium: it is unsteady, because now and then a new encounter with otherness would have generated a new choice which therefore would zigzag, as Deleuze would say, into being, marking off a new direction and, according to Noddings, actually producing “more ‘breadth’” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 10).

Interestingly enough, by means of students’ utilizing as many choices as possible, the peculiar relationship between complexity and simplicity emerges.

Neither control nor manipulation of environment in a strict sense, nor an adjustment to existing conditions, the new level of organization of experience may be described by a child’s initial “narrow world of personal contacts” (Dewey, 1902/Cahn, 1997, p. 276) having expanded. This development is not accidental despite the high level of freedom enjoyed by students who can and will pursue their interests to their full capacity.

We remember that an intensive capacity to affect and be affected specifies the body’s power. The self-organizing system generates a sort of law-like behavior as a newly acquired habit in harmony with natural law, like the children’s developing literacy, similar to the little girl learning how to read, whose story will be addressed in the next chapter. Such habit will have become second nature in accord with the development itself being “a definite process, having its own law which 102

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can be fulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions are provided” (Dewey, 1902/Cahn, 1997, p. 282).

Normal conditions are not normative, but natural: by naturalizing schooling the opportunity for self-organization to blossom and the potential for self-fulfilment are givens. The suppression of self-, or immanent, organization by extensive organization from the outside would have resulted in creating a set of limiting artificial conditions that would hinder development and arrest growth. We remember that arrest, or stasis, as Dewey stated, introduces death, versus the educational process being equivalent to life itself.

The Deleuzean fold of the inside of the outside prevents the two realms of public and private from becoming separated by the schizophrenic unbridgeable gap: the world is terrifying because of its overall complexity for the simple mind of an immature child who does not know – never was given an opportunity to learn – how to cope with the world outside of her immediate personal environment. But self-organization, by virtue of itself, appears to let “the child’s nature fulfil its own destiny” (Dewey, 1902/Cahn, 1997, p. 288): intelligence is in operation, the child’s mind becomes more complex, the child is learning, the child is making connections, and, we repeat, it is “these connections [that should] open doors more effectively and naturally than the forced feeding of theories” (Noddings, 1993a, p.

15).

The environment – when the door is opened – becomes simple and understandable for a mind engaged in nomadic inquiry and equipped with phronesis: it does make sense. Even for a mind defined as immature, an openended world makes sense; it is real, and the child is empowered with the gift of assigning meaning to her being in this world not by receiving the knowledge of it from some global viewpoint but by understanding and deriving it as contingent on her own local experience.

The conceptualization advocated here may be doubted by insisting that the multiplicity of choices presented to students can easily make the educational system chaotic, and in the extreme case – freedom turned to anarchy – would ultimately contribute not to self-organization but total dis-organization. What if a system becomes over-saturated with information? How would the students react?

In case of it being overloaded, for example, the system may display “either … chaotic behavior or … catatonic shutdown” (Cilliers, 1998, p. 119).

What if teachers unreasonably, even if unintentionally, exceedingly maximise or neglectfully minimise the availability of alternatives by imposing some form of centralized control onto the classroom environment? Complexity, however, does not mean chaos. Contrary to centralized control and rule-based models, a selforganising system is, as we said earlier, plastic and flexible. This means the dynamics proceed so that a system is capable of continuously adjusting – organising – itself “in order to select that which is to be inhibited and that which is to be enhanced. Robustness and flexibility are two sides of the same coin” (Cilliers, 1998, p. 119), precisely as it is supposed to be with the Janus-faced signs.

Diversity is constrained a priori; never mind if teachers intentionally or even unintentionally minimize the availability of alternatives by imposing some form of 103

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centralized control onto the environment. Teachers themselves are always already part of the whole of the educational system and depend on its vitality for their own survival: as partaking of the rhizome, they will have to de- and reterritorialize.

The dynamics is such that it is an interaction between a system and its present environment that induces a selective mechanism so that the environment (the outside of the system) does not directly determine the system’s internal structure (its inside) but instead influences the system’s developmental dynamics to the effect of producing new relations and making new connections. Cilliers (1998) pointed out that similar dynamics, in neural network terminology, would be qualified as unsupervised learning (1998, p. 100) and contrasted with the direct information-processing model of knowledge structure. By active understanding, that is, by means of intelligently evaluating and re-valuating experience, the boundaries of the system have a tendency to expand by virtue of integrating the outside into its own inside.

An excellent educational system is by necessity a qualitative multiplicity based on relational dynamics and not reduced to any individual agency. And by definition, a multiplicity is an open system, which functions semiotically in accord with the triadic logic of the included middle. Precisely because a multiplicity is a complex network of connections, it cannot be divided – or reduced – to its parts; its parts do not add up to the whole; an intensive multiplicity cannot be divided without changing in nature, that is, altering its current state.

An external aim, or a rule-based computation, or a calculus reduced to logical identity, would have been impoverishing the diversity of possible meanings embedded in experience. A self-organised classroom enables the broadening of experiences over and above the traditional curricular breadth. The poetic, creative language, which is capable of continuously diversifying itself, expresses new meanings not solely in the form of deductive reasoning from some pre-given axioms, but in a manner of abductions and interpretations, or as a regime of signs that traverses experiential situations and events.

We remember that meaning or sense (sens) is, according to Deleuze, always “produced … [quasi-] caused and derived” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 95). As an activity produced in relations, it requires work to be done. It is that “work that forces us to frame a new question” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 114), to continue an inquiry. At any given moment the novelty of experience and the multiplicity of alternatives will be organising themselves thereby making learning not a rationally deduced abstraction but a meaningful encounter expressed in terms of students’ literally making sense out of their own experiences.

The very discourse constituting philosophical explorations in education can and must be deterritorialized and reterritorialized respectively, and it remains to be seen if any new connections will be formed and new rhizomatic lines, constituting the very breadth of the smooth space of education, will proliferate. And the space must remains smooth, the field of inquiry must stay open, inspiring us to join other nomads in the life-story that has neither beginning nor end but will have always already been.

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As long ago as 1925 John Dewey, in his remarkable Experience and Nature, noticed that to call someone spiritual does not mean to invoke “a mysterious nonnatural entity” (1925/1958, p. 293). A particular person who, according to Dewey, is endowed with a soul, has in marked degrees qualities of sensitive, rich and coordinated participation in all the situations of life. … When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative, initial as well as terminal, it is spirit. … Spirit quickens; it is not only alive but it gives life. … Soul is form, spirit informs.

It is the moving function of that of which soul is the substance. Perhaps the words soul and spirit are so heavily laden with … mythology … that they must be surrendered; it may be impossible to recover for them in science and philosophy the realities designated in idiomatic speech. But the realities are there, by whatever names they be called (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 294).

How should we, as educators, understand Dewey’s words in our current postmodern and inform-ation age? The objective of this chapter is to specifically address the Deweyan notion of continuity in the sense of its being “the intimate, delicate and subtle interdependence of all organic structures and processes with one another” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 295).

For Dewey, the idea of God represented the active relation between the ideal and the actual. The human desire to unite the two belongs to what Dewey considered a spiritual act. Dewey distinguished between religion and the religious, the latter not to be identified with the supernatural. He held another conception of that aspect of experience, which could be described by a qualitative category which is designated by an adjective, the religious, as opposed to religion. The emancipation of certain beliefs and practices from their institutional organization and developing attitudes that may be taken towards some ideal constitute, for Dewey, the religious quality of experience.

The religious reorientation brings forward the sense of security and stability by virtue of creating a better and more enduring adjustment to real life circumstances and situations. New values are created so as to help in carrying one through the frequent moments of desperation or depression and not submitting to fatalistic resignation. Because an experiential situation calls up something not present directly to sense perception, Dewey emphasized the role of imagination in the process of unifying the self with objective conditions, stressing that unity, as the idea of a whole, is to be understood as an imaginative, and not a literal, idea.

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Imagination expands the world only narrowly apprehended in knowledge or realized in reflective thinking. Imagination exceeds faith, the latter based on the truth of the propositions solely by virtue of their supernatural author. Because faith always has practical and moral import, Dewey (1934/1980) has stressed the difficulty embedded specifically in the moral component. The truly religious attitude is not limited to what is actually out there, but is inspired by belief into what is possible, even if only ideal in character.

The realm of the possible is much broader than an intellectual assurance or rational belief can encompass. A human is never to be taken in isolation from the rest of the physical world: such would be what Dewey called the essentially unreligious attitude. For Dewey, we are parts of a larger whole and we have the capacity to intelligently and purposefully create conditions for a continuous inquiry into the complexities and mysteries of the natural world. Faith in intelligent inquiry – by means of natural interactions between people and their environment – becomes religious in quality.

Jim Garrison, addressing the pressing issue of an “ever creative curriculum” (Garrison, 2000, p. 117), describes such a curriculum in terms of it being a transformative and participatory process that would have continuously embodied new emergent meanings and values. Traditionally, that is, within the boundaries of binary logic and formal thinking, those new meanings have been considered quite “inaccessible to sense” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 32). This chapter purports to demonstrate that the conditions enabling the possibility of accessing the otherwise inaccessible may be realized in practice.

The structure of this chapter is two-fold. The power of “stories lives tell” (Witherell and Noddings, 1991) should not be underestimated, and, first, I am going to tell a particular story by introducing an excerpt from the semiautobiographical novel written by Russian-Jewish émigré to Israel, Julia Shmookler. In 1975 the Russian-language edition was published in Israel, and I took the liberty of translating a part of it into English for inclusion in this chapter.

Rather than building a grand metanarrative, I will re-tell this story, which aims to describe, in a narrative fashion, “a procedure in actual practice” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 295) that demonstrates Deweyan continuity.

The narrator is a four-year-old girl in Russia, whose father has been taken to the Gulag by authorities in Stalin’s times and whose mother struggles to support the family. The girl, surrounded by “politically correct”, that is cold and uncaring, teachers in her pre-school, feels estranged and lonely. But one day a miracle happens …

Dewey’s philosophy of education puts an emphasis on the whole of the experiential situation as a precursor to the process of knowing. This chapter also focuses on Deleuze’s notion of percept and connects it with Dewey’s account of a qualitative whole. Percept that has been related by Deleuze to Spinozian singularity, enables a lesson in becoming, and specifically, as Deleuze called it, becoming-child. I am going to conclude this chapter – and the book, indeed – by asserting that if, as Dewey was saying, spirit informs, then a little girl, a story’s protagonist, has received, without any direct or explicit instruction, a lesson of vital 106

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education that is defined, according to Deleuze, as an immanent mode of existence, and one “created vitally … through the forces it is able to harness” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 135).

Let me now tell this story and remind my readers that Deleuze, describing allegories with regard to philosophy of Leibniz and Baroque art (Deleuze, 1993), pointed to “a new kind of story in which … description replaces the object, the concept becomes narrative, and the subject becomes point of view or subject of expression” (1993, p. 127).

THE MIRACLE

Translated and abbreviated from Julia Shmookler’s book ”Uhodim iz Rossii” (“Leaving Russia”) 21 As if continuing an ancient ritual, my mother put on the black hat, slowly buttoned up the black coat – and all of a sudden I realized that’s how it is going to be from now on, that she was deliberately burying herself in that black color and would remain forever like that: wearing black, and looking dried out, strange and as if stoned. And I became afraid of her, scared to death because of that black hat and black coat hiding away my mother from me – and every morning she would wake me up at 6AM sharp, when black night had not even begun to turn into morning.

She would clothe me, as if covering up her irritation, and at quarter to 7, when the grayish morning was just about to appear, we would leave home and walk in silence towards the subway, and then ride – again without a single word – this overcrowded train which was unbearably noisy.

We always found ourselves among the same people, who looked desperate and were also wearing black, and for some reason it was very important to find your way to the seat and to be able to sit down, and my mother was always silent, and I just knew that’s how it was always going to be.

At quarter to 8 she would bring me to the kindergarten, and herself walked to the factory where she began working after that special and extraordinary day, and I was waiting for her all day long in this damned kindergarten, and every evening she came to pick me up, and we were rushing home, and everything around was shaking and exploding. And I thought that I would go mad in this long train with this loud noise, and again I had to quickly catch up and somehow manage to sit down, and I was always surrounded by black wet coats that were slapping my face.

I was so exhausted that at home I used to fall asleep at once, and the night was too short, and in the morning – which was too long – everything would start from the very beginning, and mama did not pay any attention to me, and the day ahead was full of subways, noise and waiting.

They didn’t like me in that kindergarten.

Somehow I was different and seemed strange; all the kids teased me and did not let me play with them, all games took place without me. The teachers knew for sure that my father was taken far away, somewhere, and were distant and cold. And I 107

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lost all my vigor and forgot all the lovely songs and all the poems and lovely tales

by Pushkin that I used to know by heart – about Tsar Saltan, and the Fool, and Sleeping Beauty (“And she gets out of the coffin – Ah, and both of them are suddenly coughing”). And all day long I would sit by myself on the stool, making up an imaginary dialogue and whispering it to myself, and this never-ending story was always full of really good events and these events were happening to me.

“Stop screwing up your face,” said the head teacher, when she was passing by, and I knew that screwing is a bad word and I decided that “face” is a swear word too, and I was ashamed to say at home that I was cursed at.

They used to give us the same boiled cabbage to eat, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I hated the rotten color and odor of that dish, and even now I tremble if I recognize the smell. It was impossible to eat that cabbage, how revolting it was, but it was impossible not to it either – there was nothing else to eat there – and I was choking on it, remembering how we used to put hard pink galettes in a parcel to be sent to father. (I did not even ask, but they suddenly offered me one. Ooh the sweetest taste of that pink galette.) Still, I was beginning to realize that food somehow is not so important; instead, what is important in life is that you are liked by teachers, that you are chosen for games and that you are respected by those kids who were the leaders.

And I dreamed of being good in that damned kindergarten, I never lied or fibbed and was always well behaved. But everyone around was running, fighting, shouting, spitting and telling lies – yet they were liked more – and, as time passed, I was simply becoming fixed on the idea of being better better better, although it was quite obvious that no happy ending would ever appear in sight.

Once, when I was sitting on my stool, the teacher came in. She was holding a book, and I recognized the cover of the book in her hands. It was one of those books that mama and papa used to read to me in that bygone previous life, and I knew all of those books by heart. And – in one instance of a sudden inspiration – I knew what I was supposed to do. My head started spinning; my heart started pumping – and then stopped – and at that very moment I got up from my seat of shame. “I can READ this book,” I said very firmly, and I felt complete freedom and total weightlessness during this grandiose lie.

Everyone looked at me: nobody among us four-years-olds could read, or even dream of reading, of performing this magical act – and here I am, the last are becoming first! Even the teacher looked sort of kind and amazed – and then it happened exactly in the manner I had always wished for: all the kids sat around me on their little neat and nice white chairs, and I was put in the center and I read those poems one after another turning pages where necessary, because I knew all the pictures and knew what was written under each one of them – and everything turned out just right; one would not wish for more.

Teachers praised me, and set me up as an example, and all day long I played with many respectable people, and they chose me in some games; oh Lord how sweet life happens to be! The next day the same scene took place, the teacher brought another book and again I knew it and I read it by heart. My future seemed settled. I forgot that there could exist a book that I had never seen before.

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That’s why on the third day – when I once more was called up to read, and everyone was taking their seats, and I, like some very important person, went calmly and with dignity to the teacher to pick up the book – the world suddenly collapsed! I have never seen THIS book. All the chairs were already in a circle and mine was specifically in the center, AS USUAL, and I knew that THAT WAS IT, fate just decided to kill me in one momentary stroke, and I would be better really dead or simply would’ve never been born. The walls were rotating in a milky fog, my head was spinning among them, my throat became dry, my soul, hit by thunder, became silent.

My body, meanwhile, was holding onto the book and continued moving toward the central chair. “What for?” I thought, “I’d better tell the truth and do it right now before things become even worse.” But my body, separated from my mind, was still moving. Then it sat down. “What for?” I thought, or did I think this thought before? It would make no difference now, there is nothing that could possibly save me.

The torture was unbearable: I was hooked like a trembling fish and every extra motion was bringing me closer to getting caught. Time was shifting and very rapidly indeed – my hands were already opening the front page. “God,” I remembered, “God…”. Sure enough, I knew very well that God did not exist but there was no time left to make the right judgment.

I opened my mouth to say everything so as to repent and end the terrible torture at once – my eyes fell on the page – and suddenly I heard my voice which was quietly and rhythmically saying those words that were printed on the page. One half of me was reading, and the other was listening in sublime horror – and white trembling light was slowly spreading around. I was reading page after page as if in a dream, and no-one knew that it was a miracle – and simultaneously I was seeing the text all at once and letters very black and pictures very bright and myself too surrounded by all the kids. I was saved, it was a miracle, and it was terrifying too to speak as if someone – who? – was putting words in my mouth.

At last the book ended. The light disappeared, the kids gone, and I sat by myself, my feet cotton-like. I sat alone and totally empty like an abandoned dwelling, and as for this new knowledge, it was too much. I felt its weight as if distributing itself on shelves in my head, and I thought how strange it is that God apparently exists.

How come? And – strangely enough – it might even seem that he loves me despite the fact that I was still frightened, overwhelmed by his recent presence, and the air around was full of ozone as if after a storm. But the main sensation was – it was impossible to move.

At home, in bed, all of a sudden I got scared that I’d forgotten how to read and I jumped out of bed in my underwear and ran to the bookshelf and picked up one of mama’s books. Mama did not read any of her books after that day. I opened it in the middle and clearly saw the phrase: “her right breast was naked”. I have read it but did not understand. What does it mean, “right breast” or “left breast”? A person has one breast – and I looked at mine which was represented by a piece of veneer unevenly covered with goose bumps.

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In amazement, and happy that the ability to read has not left me, I am falling asleep quietly as I know that I am being cared-for and will be protected if there is a need.

Let us pause. We remember that for Deleuze philosophy encompasses both critical and clinical dimensions, and the purpose of philosophy, apart from creating novel concepts, is radically ethical in the manner of being worthy of what is to come into existence, to become. In fact, novel concepts are invented or created so as to make sense of experiential events and, ultimately, to affirm this sense. For Deleuze and Guattari, the major message of their philosophy is “to become worthy of the event” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 160). A concept inhabits the empirical happening; it is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, a living concept, but the ethical work consists in the will itself being transformed into affirmation so as “to set up, … to extract” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 160) an event in this living concept.

The desire propelling an event into becoming is not some magical thinking or even one’s strong will. The desire is not reduced to some mystical link connecting subject and object. This sort of romantic conceptualization would be incomplete; it would make the subject forever split and in search of the object forever out of reach, the latter becoming the infamous obscure object of desire. Desire is embedded in the process and as such creates a field of forces comprising the plane of immanence “crisscrossed by particles and fluxes which break free from subject and object” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 89).

Desire cannot be considered internal to the subject, because the event itself is as yet subjectless. Nor does it belong to the object: it is “immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 89). The plane of immanence is enfolded analogous to Baroque art that expresses the harmonious multiplicity of folds (Deleuze, 1993). According to the Baroque model, “knowledge is known only where it is folded” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 49). Similar to drapes in fabric, things themselves, as Deleuze says, are wrapped up in nature; as for ideas – they are often so enveloped or enfolded “in the soul that we can’t always unfold or develop them” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 49) based solely on our will unless nature itself presents conditions for their unfolding.

Desire constructs a plane – immanence, we repeat, is constructivism – and because it, being as yet subjectless does not presuppose a subject, desire is attained, indeed affirmed, at this very instance of desperation at which “someone is deprived of the power of saying ‘I’” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 89) – like the little girl, the story’s protagonist. Such desire would perhaps be called the will to power by Nietzsche; according to Deleuze, however, “there are other names for it. For example, ‘grace’” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 91). The plane of immanence therefore always presupposes an extra dimension, supplementary to the plane per se.

If we recall one of the previous chapters with its allusions to projective geometry, this esoteric notion becomes perfectly clear because a projection on the surface always involves a loss of dimension: a three-dimensional cube, for example, turns into a flat two-dimensional square when projected. It is what is 110

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unseen, as we said earlier, citing Dewey, that in the long run decides what is there to be seen. For the square in question this extra third, as if hidden, unseen, dimension, in order to become seen, must be inferred or induced on the basis of what it organizes. It is like in music where the principle of composition is not given in a directly perceptible, audible, relation with what it provides. It is therefore a plane of transcendence, a kind of design, in the mind of man or in the mind of god, even when it is accorded a maximum of immanence by plunging it into the depth of Nature, or of the Unconscious (Deleuze, 1987, p. 91).

Yet, for Deleuze, the transcendental field is in no way teleological. Rather than being a blueprint, it is always an immanent and therefore “abstract drawing” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 93), an artistic creation, a geometrical section, a slice.

Because it’s never static – and we remember that Dewey was saying that order, for that matter, itself develops – it is evolving and dynamic and, according to Deleuze, would have involved “the multiplicity of the planes on the plane” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 94). What Deleuze implies here is this subtle and implicate order pointed to also by Dewey, with its peculiar and only post hoc understandable purpose.

Musical terms, as usual, assist Deleuze in articulating the nuances: it is silence that forms a part of a plane of sound, and respectively the voids and hastes form parts of the plane of immanence as if “being thwarted is a part of the plane itself: we always have to start again, start again from the middle, to give the elements new relations” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 94). Indeed we have to, because something forces us, and the plane of immanence is the fold of folds, “all desires come from … the Outside … [and] … [w]e can always call it plane of Nature, in order to underline its immanence” (Deleuze, 1987, pp. 97-98).

Noticing that Spinoza was the one who conceived the plane in this manner, Deleuze is adamant that it is the immanent process of desire that fills itself up, thus constituting a process called joy. We have already demonstrated how becoming fulfilled derives its meaning only from being filled with immanence! On the other hand – and as applied to social psychology – self-fulfilment has been traditionally identified not with personal physical values like, for example, one’s biological or physiological needs, not even with social and communitarian values, but with values identified as spiritual.

Well-known real-life human experiences come to mind: Victor Frankl’s powerful account of his life in a concentration camp gives an example of surviving under extreme conditions contingent on one’s commitment to, first of all, keeping alive a sense of some higher meaning in life. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s description of just one day in the life of a common Russian man in a Siberian labor camp became an improvised textbook that the next generation learned from. The lesson implied in the book was how one’s self-fulfilment among the quotidian routines brings an inner freedom despite oppressive conditions, the latter in fact providing the very challenge to one’s imagination by virtue of contributing to bringing forth

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that which we specified in Chapter 1: Becoming-other as a self-organized criticality.

The developing sense of dignity and purpose necessary for survival leads to one’s feeling free by subverting the existing – given – order, even if only by means of the imaginative Deweyan rehearsal: freedom, as Noddings (1998) says, becomes an achievement. Yet, one’s deliberating along the very line of flight leads to what Deleuze would call an incorporeal transformation, and it is precisely the sense of freedom that leads to literally creating one’s life or – we may even say – one’s destiny, especially taking into consideration that, for Deleuze, what is called destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations …. Consider what we call repetition within a life – more precisely, within a spiritual life. Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another … [and] each of them plays out “the same life” at a different levels. That is what we call destiny. … That is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 83).

Considering the aforementioned examples, it is important to note that Deleuze’s philosophy does not set apart the ideal from the real. Platonism is turned upside down. In Deleuze’s radically materialist philosophy everything is real, including the virtual which, however, is not – as yet – actual.

As for Dewey, when he assigns an ideal status to the state of being beyond good and evil, he implies that this state “is an impossibility for man” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 349). Still, for as long as “the good signifies only that which is … rewarded, and the evil that which is … condemned …, the ideal factors of morality are always and everywhere beyond good and evil” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 349).

So, according to Dewey, going beyond good and evil – especially under certain oppressive circumstances – is equivalent to “going beyond the actual to the possible” (Garrison, 1997, pp. 136-137). It seems, however, that to Deleuze, the state of being beyond good and evil and the one of going beyond the actual to the possible, albeit denoting the same, would appear to have slightly different connotations. Let us try to elucidate this very subtle and indeed almost indiscernible difference.

It is only creative art that, for Dewey, is capable of possessing such a moral potency – Deleuze would have said, increase in valence – as going beyond good and evil, and one of the reasons for it is in art’s being “wholly innocent of ideas derived from praise and blame” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 349). Innocence seems to be the key word here. Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, as we said earlier, frees thinking from common sense. If for him, it is life that activates thought, and it is thought that affirms life, and if immanence is a life, then miracles may indeed happen.

In the world described by Deleuze and Guattari as becoming-world, however, the latter may not be called miracles after all: they belong to pure events constituting virtual reality. Becoming-child, a child by definition embodying the concept of innocence, is the factor that, as it seems, Dewey would have described 112

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as ideal, that is, by his definition beyond good and evil. Yet Deleuze would not equate the latter with going beyond the actual to the possible.

Possible can be realized, and the real thing is to exist in the image and likeness, as the saying goes, of the possible thing. Such is the mimesis of the ancients. But the virtual is real even without being actual and only actualizes itself via multiple differenciations, so the actual does not resemble the virtual, it is different from it, and it cannot be otherwise because the virtual is just a tendency, therefore no-thing.

Such is the semiosis of Peirce.

Virtual tendencies, no-things, become actualized, that is embodied in the actual things, objects, experiences, states of affairs. The nuance is significant: it is “[f]rom virtuals [that] we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 160). The opaque metaphysics is in fact supported by contemporary physical science, and physics was also the inspiration behind the Deweyan thought, like Heisenberg’s (1958) positing the existence of the objective tendencies, or potentialities, for events to occur.

In this respect Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual is reinforced by Dewey’s naturalistic logic in which “there is no breach of continuity between operations of inquiry and biological … and physical operations. ‘Continuity’ … means that rational operations grow out of organic activities, without being identical with that from which they emerge” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p. 166).

The realm called ideal then may be considered real, yet it would have agreed in principle with being a home for Platonic Ideas if the latter are to be considered not as static immutable forms, but dynamic relations, or signs.

As constituted by relations, forms themselves become fractal. They are still amenable to being described by mathematics, albeit not solely in terms of ideal geometrical solids. Becoming-actual means getting actual existence, and differenciation as the method for actualization is intuition, or the pragmatic way of knowing described by Deleuze as his method of transcendental empiricism. What is striving to become actual, is that what is in virtu, and is only waiting for conditions in the real, not merely possible, experience to come forward.

This real becoming-life, as any becoming, takes place within the zone of indiscernibility, or in the instance of “meeting of the old and new” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266). And such a meeting – the connection – is properly assigned the name intuition not only by Deleuze, but by Dewey too, even if Dewey puts the word per se in quotation marks to emphasize its non-traditional sense: “Intuition” is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flush of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long and slow incubation.

Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain. … [T]he background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266).

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The meeting of the old and new, of repetition and difference, is possible through their “jump together” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266), that is by means of a transversal link crossing the levels of order and multiple thresholds.

The image of a spark used by both Deleuze (1995) and Dewey – “old and new jump together like sparks when poles are adjusted” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266) – implies a sense of connection that would have been established via relation rather than an immediate contact. The dynamic forces affecting selections and assemblages do bring “mind … in contact with the world” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p.

267), yet such a contact is what contemporary physics would describe in terms of a non-local connection or correlation.

The contact in question would have been described by means of “nonlocalizable connections, actions [or even passions, as we said earlier] at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions” (Deleuze, 1994a, p.

83; brackets mine). For Dewey, while soul is form, it is ‘spirit [that] informs” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 294) – and the dynamic forces, when becoming active, do bring “mind … in contact with the world” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 267) in that caring relation that Nel Noddings (1984) has all along been attracting our attention to: the little girl is now assured that she will be cared-for.

The contact manifests by its material embodiment in the form of the artifact or the new knowledge which, sure enough, seems to the little girl as being too much: as for this new knowledge, it was too much, I felt its weight …. Something that was virtual and as yet disembodied – like spirit that, as Dewey says, informs but by itself is not a form – became actualized in the uniqueness of experience and, as a consequence of the latter, would have been “marked by individuality” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266), uniqueness: a singularity.

Therefore, this real becoming-life, the meeting of the old and new, can be described as an impersonal and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. … This is a haecceity, which is no longer an individuation, but a singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil (Deleuze, 1997, p. xiv), and, for that matter, beyond truth and lie, or right and wrong, that is beyond all of the dualistic binary opposites that, incidentally, came into existence in the first place as a result of the symbolic loss of innocence. Again, innocence seems to be a key word, a situational variable of sorts, a sign which by virtue of itself being embedded in the dynamic process creates the conditions in real experience for the production of meanings.

As becoming, it is im-percept-ible, unless perception itself would have vitally increased in power, which is indeed the characteristic of Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism described in detail in the preceding chapters. What Deleuze calls percept, is a perception in becoming. The elastic point of inflection, introduced by Deleuze, is what enables “contact [that] remains tangential because 114

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it does not fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 21). Yet at the level of percept, it is indeed on the surface where experience gets organized for as long “as an organism increases in complexity” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 23).

For Deleuze, as we said earlier, it is the surface that becomes a scene of situated meanings as “the locus of sense” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 104). Through organic resonances enacted by transversal communication the continuity is carried further toward the ultimate “unity of sense and impulse, of brain and eye and ear” (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 22-23) overcoming the otherwise ineliminable dualisms. That unity may become manifest – by means of the actualization of potentialities – through breaks in continuity, the latter therefore appearing to be, at the level of concrete experiences, discontinuous and abrupt.

The little girl’s miraculous experience is Deleuze’s a-temporal pure event which nevertheless is – from the point of view of experience itself – “the focal culmination of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in a sudden discrete instant of climax” (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 23-24). The increase in power is taken literally: there is an exponential growth there invoked by Peirce, but the transversal communication carries an exponent towards its limit as if crossing the otherwise asymptotic line, thus becoming a threshold, provided the situation meets the conditions for actualization. And we can specify those conditions in the way reminiscent of Deleuze’s describing the situation in the case of Little Hans.

A little girl as a symbol of innocence; an extreme effort amplified to the point of turning into its own opposite, a long period of endurance and pain. … Black wet coats were slapping my face. … They didn’t like me in that kindergarten. … The sweetest taste of the pink galette …. All the chairs were in a circle … I was seeing the text all at once and letters very black and pictures very bright and myself too surrounded by all the kids. Such is a life of pure immanence, vitalistic life.

Deleuze notices that such an element of vitality is manifest in newborn infants who embody the very passage of life. The actualization of the set of virtualities pertains to attaining a consistency, and it seems that what Deleuze implies here is that a baby would still have the virtual presence of the umbilical cord as a sign of symbiosis with her mother. Such is a “zone of proximity or copresence” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 273) that constitutes an imperceptible, that is, a molecular – because ordinarily perception would operate solely at the molar level – becoming.

Hence, for Deleuze and Guattari, “the child [does] not become; it is becoming itself that is a child” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 277).

And just as a mother gives birth to a child, all becomings begin and pass through becoming-woman because it is “the key to all other becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 277). The creative writers, for example, “even the most virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, … in writing, … becomewomen” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 276) due to their entering a zone of indiscernibility without which their own creative becoming would not be possible: they must give birth to their creations.

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never ceasing to become. … Doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in the molar … sense. But conversely, becoming-woman or the molecular woman is the girl itself. … The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo – that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all her energies, in all of her work …. It is not the girl who becomes a woman, it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. … Joan of Arc? The special role of the girl in the Russian terrorism …? … [C]hildren … draw their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages, the becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the becoming-woman of the man as well as of the woman. … [T]he girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 276-277).

When the little girl was reading the new text, she could not possibly speak from the viewpoint of concepts but rather had to “speak directly and intuitively in pure percepts” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 165). This is, as Deleuze notices, the paradoxical style of Spinoza, who – while remaining, for Deleuze, the most philosophical of philosophers whose Ethics presents axioms and propositions in abundance – nevertheless also brings forward an intense non-philosophical understanding.

For the little girl, the concept of reading is yet unknown, and her perception undergoes transformation or increase in power into becoming-percept which is necessary for the creation of concepts. The very passage between the two is an affect described in terms of what a body can do, or this body’s “intensified, enhanced appreciation” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 279), an “enhancement of the qualities” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 278) of an experience. The newly acquired body’s power to read “must liberate joys, vectorial signs [remember vectors on the complex plane?] of the augmentation of power, and ward off sadnesses, signs of diminution” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 144; brackets mine), thus bringing healing to the situation which would have otherwise remained traumatic.

Although such an experience indeed may seem to be too much – as Deleuze says, “the possible is accomplished … by the exhausted characters who exhaust it” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 163) – and the little girl feels frightened and overwhelmed, her situation has been changed. It has been transformed “into one so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (Dewey, 1938/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 2, p.

171). The question of control or direction in this particular case remains however open: I was saved, it was a miracle, and it was terrifying too to speak as if someone – who? – was putting words in my mouth.

Speaking in percepts as a form of intuition is therefore, as we said earlier, citing Dewey, the meeting of the old and new. Perception would not become a percept without the two-way, reciprocal, communication. In this respect in-tuition always contains a numinous, religious element especially if we read re-ligio etymologically as linking backward to the origin, that is self-referentiality or – literally, as we have shown in our analysis of intuition – learning from within.

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– indeed, transversal – connection; yet the role of re-ligio is to restore broken symmetry and unity. The unified whole is however never the same, because of its self- organizing principle analogous to the Deleuzean multiplicity of organization, which is founded on the difference being repeated, or re-iterated. Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism implies “not a reproduction of the Same but a repetition of the Different” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 98).

Not least is this new different part that entered into the integral whole: this little girl. As Dewey emphasized, the unification of the self through the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers and achieves, cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe (Dewey, 1934/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p. 407).

The newly acquired skill of reading, by means of breaking out of an old habit, means that the little girl is undergoing “a modification through an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 395).

The ability to read becomes a new habit for the little girl in her becoming-other: I jumped out of bed … and picked up one of mama’s books …. I opened it in the middle and clearly saw the phrase …. [T]he ability to read has not left me …. And acquiring is always preceded by “the act of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand” (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 173).

That which is not actually at hand must, as Deleuze would have said, subsist – indeed due to “the experiential continuum” (Dewey, 1981, p. 512) – in its virtual state thereby affording empiricism its transcendental quality. Learning, for Deleuze, always takes place “in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (Deleuze, 1994, p.

165) leading to the conjugation which determines, as Deleuze says, the threshold of consciousness: unconscious-becoming-conscious.

This is the aforementioned unity of sense and impulse, posited by Dewey, or “the readjustment … in every form of consciousness” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 266), when that which is yet obscure or unconscious becomes trans-formed into the clear and luminous. … And white trembling light was slowly spreading around ….

Trans-formation presupposes in-formation, and if, as Dewey says, spirit informs, then the little girl has indeed learned albeit without any direct or explicit instruction but by means of the natural interaction between herself and the whole of the environment that has generated an “intelligence in operation” (Dewey, 1934/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p. 410).

The girl became an apprentice practicing what Bogue (2004) called an apprenticeship in signs and therefore capable of raising “each faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise, … [in her] attempts to give birth to that second power which grasps that which can only be sensed” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 165). The doubling of the repetition and difference, of the old and new, creates a relation 117

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between forces, bringing in that force which belongs to the Deleuzean Outside.

This force “is inseparable in itself from the power to affect other forces (spontaneity) and to be affected by others (receptivity)” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 101).

The most important outcome, however, is the relation that the force in an autoreferential manner will have had on itself, that is, “a power to affect itself, an affect of self on self” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 101).

Dewey was imperative that the role of the teacher should not consist solely in what customarily is called instruction with its emphasis on what has been later specified by Noddings, and we repeat, as the “forced feedings of theories” (Noddings, 1993a, p. 15). Guidance, help and a caring attitude are the means that are continuous with the growth of intelligence as the immanent “ends” in education. The method for solving a problem is not the privilege of the almighty teacher as a knower, neither is it solely a function of the will of a pupil. What Dewey identified as a native impulse is neither some volitional and stubborn want nor is it native in a strict sense; it is rather “the large and generous blending of interests … in the meeting of mind and universe” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 267).

That which is an impulse, shares its complexity with the concept of desire and Eros as addressed in the preceding chapters. Eros acts as an auto-catalytic element distributed across the field of action and therefore encompasses the triad of teacher, student and subject-matter within a problematic situation embedded in the selforganizing and living process. Only functioning as such will it form an intelligent part of the method for solution, and it is indeed the problem to be posited and resolved that determines the method in the final analysis.

We remember the athlete who is learning to swim and her learning from experience: her body (and we always keep in mind that the body is both physical and mental, corporeal and incorporeal) combined some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave. The difference constituted via the encounter with the Other is carried forward, “from one wave and one gesture to another” (Deleuze, 1994a, p.

23) thereby in the repetitive movement constituting the space in which the distinctive points have to be renewed all the time: the space is thereby the learning space.

Such is also the learning space created by the little girl: she has literally undergone the learning from experience when she was trying to, as we said earlier, citing Deleuze, give birth to something new. Indeed, no instruction appears to be necessary: To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy and suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world …; the undergoing becomes instruction – discovery of the connection of things (Dewey, 1916/1924, p. 164).

Dewey describes such a learning staying at the existential level of actual experience. Deleuze takes it at the level of the virtual which – as we remember – is no less real than any actual existence. Different/ciation, for Deleuze, presupposes an intense field of individuation, the Deweyan qualitative whole of sorts. It is 118

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because of “the action of the field of individuation that such and such differential relations and such and such distinctive points … are actualized – in other words are organized within intuition along lines differenciated in relation to other lines” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 247) As constituted by relations, the field is a priori movement: to learn means to get into such a movement. Deleuze (1995) refers to new sports, like surfing, windsurfing and hang-gliding that require one to enter into an existing wave. The always-already wave betrays an origin as a starting point; instead the challenge presents itself in terms of “how to get taken up in the motion of the big wave, a column of rising air” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 121). And the air around was full of ozone as if after a storm.

Jim Garrison (2000), addressing the possibilities of spiritual education, reminds us that for Dewey the idea of God is the active relation between ideal and actual.

An active striving – the materialist Spinoza’s conatus – to unite the two belongs, according to Garrison, to “potentially spiritual acts” (Garrison, 2000, p. 114). The situation itself acquires a feeling-tone that can be “designated by an adjective” (Dewey, 1934/1980, Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p. 402), the religious. The reconstruction always occurs in the direction of “security and stability” (Dewey, 1934/Hickman and Alexander, 1998, 1, p. 405) even if the latter appears to be temporary: I fell asleep quietly knowing that I am cared-for ….

Is calling something into existence and creation, in accord with “Dewey’s testimony, the supreme act of numinous spirit?” (Garrison, 2000, p. 116). Or is it the prerogative of mundane matter – the latter, however, not passive and inert but active and capable of self-organization? “We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 109) up to the point whence the “ethereal things” (Garrison, 2000, p. 117), over and above traditional curriculum, may be created. So shouldn’t we, rather than dwelling in metaphysical questions, just try to do our best contributing to modifying real conditions so that they are altered up to the point at which something new and good would be produced? Isn’t it exactly what Dewey’s laboratory method would call for?

For Dewey, the lesson of the latter is precisely the one of altering conditions, and such is also “the lesson which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the conditions under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not merely externally productive” (Dewey, 1916/194, p. 322). Deleuze too has identified teaching and learning with the “research laboratory” (Deleuze, 1995, p.

139).

The thinking process that takes place in a laboratory is in actu, and giving courses, for Deleuze, must be connected with one’s current research work: “you give courses on what you’re investigating, not on what you know” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139) already. The process of investigation – or inquiry – into an unknown is based on experimentation with conditions, parameters, variables. Thought itself becomes an experiment, and “that’s where you have to get to work. … As though [there] are so many twists in the path of something moving through space like a whirlwind that can materialize at any point” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 161), for example in the little girl’s kindergarten.

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And novelty may be created precisely at such a critical point, “at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. … When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 267) even if clothed “by the inertia of habit” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p.

268) so as to be disguised under the name of miracle.

The emphasis put by Dewey on the word labor in the aforementioned context is in the sense of active doing as one does – experiments – in a laboratory, yet this word also connotes both undergoing and trying, suffering and joy as in labor pains in the creative act of giving birth. The event of birth represents the actualization of the set of virtualities that can materialize at any point, provided of course that certain conditions, among so many twists, will have been fulfilled. Becoming-child is a vital event indeed because its occurrence would have been impossible without this organic immanent connection, this ultimate continuity that represents, as we said earlier citing Deleuze, a key to all other becomings.

So the conditions enabling the possibility of accessing the otherwise inaccessible may indeed be created and realized in experience. This reassurance perhaps moves us closer towards answering Jim Garrison’s persistent and disturbing question, “Dare we teach children to create ethereal things” (Garrison, 2000, p. 117), especially keeping in mind that Deleuze would assert the reality of the latter. Indeed, as productive of effects, these things are “knowable if not known” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 269).

Still, asks Garrison emphatically, “can we stop them [children]?” (Garrison, 2000, p. 117). But of course, we can, and shame on us, educators, if we do! Too often we forget that the “more an organism learns … the more it has to learn in order to keep itself going; otherwise death and catastrophe” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p.

281) would be lurking somewhere along the line described not by the steepest gradient but by the slope equal to zero. Something that was virtual and as yet disembodied – like spirit that, as Dewey insisted, informs but by itself is not a form – became actualized in a singular experience in the material world. Such a contact is what contemporary physics would designate as non-local (Cushing & McMullin, 1989).

The contact in question would have been described by means of “nonlocalizable connections, … resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles, which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 83). At the level of perception by regular senses, that is, prior to becoming a percept, the contact would remain imperceptible. Dewey would have agreed: “contact remains tangential because it does not fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 21). But constructing the plane of immanent consistency (plane, a.k.a. surface) enables one’s perception to vitally increase in power therefore, and in accord with Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism, becoming -percept.

Percept is perception in becoming, that is, an intuitive and affective access to what would otherwise remain inaccessible. At this level of pure percepts and affects it is indeed on the newly constructed surface 22 where experience gets organized for as long “as an organism increases in complexity” (Dewey, 120

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1934/1980, p. 23) that is, learns by means of the Deleuzean pedagogy of the concept: concepts are to be created. It is on the surface as “the locus of sense” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 104) that the implicit meanings are situated and will eventually emerge for as long as the immanent plane is constructed where “the spiritual and the material [as] two distinct yet indiscernible sides of the same fold” (Goddard, 2001, p. 62) meet: … as if someone – who? – was putting words in my mouth …

For Deleuze and Dewey alike, the spiritual dimension is inseparable from organic life, and it is becoming-child that is an indication of this inseparability.

What would be traditionally called a mystical experience is, for Deleuze, an existential practice of sorts, taking place at the level between discursive and nondiscursive formations – that is, precisely a practical art of accessing the otherwise inaccessible, as we said earlier. In one of his books on the analysis of cinematic images, Deleuze (1989) posits mysticism in terms of the sudden actualization of potentialities, that is, an awakening of sense-perception, such as seeing and hearing, by raising them to a new power of enhanced perception, or percept as a future-oriented perception in becoming.

Such “a vision and a voice … would have remained virtual” (Goddard, 2001, p.

54) unless some specific conditions, enabling the interaction with the outside world, are established so as to actualize the virtual. The implications are profound and, to conclude, I would like to remind the readers about Nel Noddings’ great work in the area of moral education (Semetsky, 2006). In her book Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993b), Noddings reminds us of Dewey’s views on democratic education that should include a common truth on the encounter of God in people in all departments of action.

Noddings suggests that existential and metaphysical questions should be raised in an ordinary classroom. Her discussions focus on the nature of God and many gods; the possibility of spiritual progress and the danger of religious intolerance; human desire to experience a sense of belonging; feminism and the politics of religion; immortality, salvation, and humanistic aspirations; science, mathematics and religion; human dependence on God and secular ethics. The question of the meaning and purpose of life is of equal importance to children and adults alike.

Acknowledging that teenagers often succumb to pessimism, Noddings argues for a life-oriented education, which – rather than denying this feeling – is capable of assisting students in realistic self-evaluation and creating a caring environment.

Her innovative approach to moral education suggests that a caring attitude (Noddings, 1984) is necessary so as to enable changes in our schools and the whole of educational system.

Noddings calls for the introduction of spiritual questions into schools’ curricula.

Even mathematics classes may be relevant to a religious or spiritual problematics because such figures in the mathematical curriculum as Descartes or Pascal struggled with the difficulties involved in trying to prove the existence of God. Noddings argues that the modern liberal education devoid of feeling and caring dimensions does not enrich the human mind and spirit but tends to narrow its scope. A central concept in Noddings’ novel approach to ethics in terms of the theory of care, is relation. A caring relation is an encounter between two beings 121

CHAPTER 6

that establishes a sense of connection. Both the carer and the cared-for do contribute to this relationship.

A carer has a specific state of consciousness described by Noddings as receptive and full of desire to help a stranger in need. This desire constitutes a motivational displacement. A cared-for must necessarily be responsive as otherwise a caring relation would not be mutual and reciprocal. The desire to be cared for represents a universal human characteristic, and in this respect the little girl’s real-life story as narrated in this chapter seems to embody the universal experience of mythical scope.

Noddings contrasts the standard model of religious moral education with the idea of confirmation, which represents an act of affirming and encouraging the very best in somebody’s action even if such a better self is only potentially present in the overall process of education. Contrary to the act of individual moral judgment, confirmation sustains a continuous connection between two people.

Addressing questions of children’s belief or unbelief in God, Noddings (1993b) stresses that they should be the subjects of intelligent inquiry. She presents feminist spirituality as an alternative to traditional patriarchal religion, noticing that women have long suffered inferiority under the prevailing theological and philosophical theories.

Noddings suggests that students should be exposed to both the story of the Fall and to its feminist critique with the emphasis on the Goddess spirituality, in which it is the biblical serpent that indeed brings knowledge and healing. Students should have an opportunity to study the plurality of positions and become aware of many alternative and often-controversial religious beliefs. Noddings is interested in the problem of evil. The deep exploration of this and other questions contributes to an enhanced capacity for all people to make intelligent connections to the spiritual realm.

Too often we mature adults assume the position that Dewey (1925/1958) ironically dubbed the supreme dignity of adulthood, therefore betraying the very continuity of the growth process while at the same time trying to foster “growth” in our students. But for them to learn, shouldn’t we too? As Noddings (2002) keeps reminding us, the aim of moral education is to contribute to the continuous education of both students and teachers.

For Deleuze and Dewey alike, the spiritual dimension is inseparable from organic life, and it is becoming-child that is an indication of this inseparability.

How, when, where, under what circumstances, by means of which events, is one capable of becoming-child? These are empirical questions that expand the boundaries of this book’s cartography. Both Deleuze, in his collaborative work with Guattari, and Dewey affirmed the significance as well as “inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 238).

Too often we forget that a folded experience – the inside of the outside, as posited by Deleuze – precludes human attitudes and dispositions from being considered as “separate existences. They are always of, from, toward, situations and things” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 238). They are relational in character, and to secure continuity of those relations is a prerequisite for education understood as 122

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spiritual. For Noddings, Deleuze, and Dewey alike, it is spirit that informs. To not only remember but also to try to put into praxis the words that we have quoted in the Introduction to this book, Spirit informs, remains an educational challenge for the rest of us.

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NOTES 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16 17

Noel Gough refers here to my Roberta Kevelson Memorial Award-Winning Essay, “The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool, or the Semiotics of Learning”, published in Semiotics 1999, S. Simpkins, C.W. Spinks, J. Deely (Eds.), (2000, pp. 477-496), Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. It was republished as a book chapter in C.W. Spinks (Ed.), Trickster and Ambivalence: The Dance of Differentiation (2001, pp. 57-70). Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing In 1982, when Rorty was writing these words, Deleuze was not only still alive but his and Guattari’s milestone What is Philosophy? was not yet published. It appeared in French in 1991.

See Chapter 4: Becoming-rhizome.

See Chapter 2: Becoming-sign.

See Chapter 2: Becoming-sign for Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and their relation to Deleuze’s philosophy.

Deleuze cites here Henri Michaux’s words from The Space Within (first published by Gallimard in Paris in 1944 under the title “L’Espace du Dedans”). Michaux’s book has been published in English as “Selected Writings: the space within” (translated with an introduction by Richard Ellmann) in The New Directions Series, printed in France by Henri Marchand & Company.

A. Shimony, Professor of Philosophy and Physics in Boston University, introduced the term “passion-at-a-distance” to describe a type of the relation connecting non-locally two spacelikerelated events (see Cushing and McMullin, 1989). My reference is not accidental but accords with the whole project of the so-called experimental metaphysics taken up today by scientists and philosophers alike. Dewey’s philosophy too was inspired by contemporary research in theoretical physics. See e.g. Biesta (1994, p. 305, 33f.)

Incidentally, Poincare’s mathematics of phase-space had a profound impact on Deleuze and his asserting the spatio-temporal distribution of philosophical concepts in the process of constructing the latter. See Semetsky 2000, 2001. The semiotic inquiry (e.g. Merrell, 1998, p. 119), by employing the method of mapping an object in Poincare’s phase-space onto a plane, creates a visual notation for the space of possibility, that is, the multiple possible states of affairs, that can be described as sets or alternatively, as Deleuze called them, multiplicities.

Deleuze quotes here Jean Cocteau, La difficulte d’etre (Paris: Rocher, 1983, pp. 79-80).

I admit, with gratitude, that I saw this dream the night after having read Prawat’s article “Dewey, Peirce and the Learning Paradox” in the American Educational Research Journal.

The Essential Plato (1999). Introduction by Alain De Botton. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Bookof-the-Month Club, Inc., p. 442.

See Chapter 3: Becoming-language.

This conversation, as a feature of autopoietic systems, is not the same as, for example, Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatic idea of the linear, back and forth, conversation and discussion. Ironically, especially considering Rorty’s reference to Deleuze (see Chapter 4: Becoming-rhizome), Deleuze and Guattari say: “Rival opinions at the dinner table – is this not the eternal Athens …? … This is the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp. 144-145).

See T. Alexander (1993) who defines human eros as “a radical impulse. … Culture … is the expression of a drive for encountering the world and oneself with a sense of fulfilling meaning and value realized through action” (1993, p. 207).

See Chapter 6: Becoming-child for the analysis of such a possibility.

Garrison quotes here from Dewey’s Experience and Nature, LW 1, p. 189.

See What is Philosophy? (1994, p. 206) for Deleuze and Guattari’s insightful description of strange (chaotic) attractors in the topological terms of divergence and convergence.

125

18

19 20

21

22

Juarrero (1999, p. 130) remarks that “students of complex dynamical systems have coined the neologism ‘heterarchy’ to allow interlevel causal relations to flow in both directions, part to whole (bottom-up) and whole to part (top-down).”

See Chapter 6: Becoming-child for the concept of continuity.

The figure of triangle was elaborated upon in Chapter 2: Becoming-sign with regard to Peircean categories. Cf. Jim Garrison on the relation between the student, subject-matter and the teacher: “I think teaching resembles a triangle; you cannot have one unless there are all three sides and they enclose a pedagogical space” (1999b, p. 312, 84f).

All attempts to locate Julia Shmookler to obtain copyright permission for my translation from Russian into English have been unsuccessful.

Maximilian de Gaynesford, in his essay “Bodily organs and organization” (Bryden, 2001, pp. 87-98) relates Deleuze’s philosophy to fourth- to fifth-century theology and notices a similar kind of approach to the incarnation made recently by some philosophers of religion. He cites Don Cupitt who says that “we may think of the surface of the human body as the primal surface [where] desire and culture [a.k.a. experience] meet, as the body’s feeling-expression is converted by culture into the common world of signs” (Don Cupitt, The Long-Legged Fly [London: SCM Press, 1987], p. 11, quoted in de Gaynesford, 2001, p. 98, brackets mine).

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131

INDEX

assemblage xii, 19, 25, 59, 62, 63, 88 assemblages .... xiii, 5, 14, 19, 21, 54, 65, 88, 98, 114 autonomy ................................ 69, 92 Autonomy ................................... 131 autopoiesis ........................ 53, 55, 67 Autopoiesis ............................. 54, 67 Badiou ............................ 22, 92, 127 Baroque ........ 16, 107, 110, 127, 128 Barrow .................................. 38, 127 becoming .. x, xii, xiii, xv, xx, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 18, 23, 31, 32, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 97, 98, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121 Becoming...... ix, xiii, 6, 85, 125, 130 becoming-child .. xvii, 106, 116, 121, 122 Becoming-child .................. 112, 120 becoming-other.. xvii, 3, 5, 6, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 37, 39, 41, 53, 59, 66, 67, 72, 76, 84, 85, 87, 99, 117 Becoming-other ........................ 1, 23 becoming-woman ........... 3, 115, 116 Bellah..xx, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 60, 127 Bereiter ................................. 51, 127 Bergson............................... 2, 35, 43 Bernstein.............................. xix, 127 Biesta .......... 53, 56, 63, 68, 125, 127

abduction.. xvii, xxiii, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 68, 83 Abduction..................32, 45, 47, 129 abductive inference ....xx, 27, 29, 32, 33, 43, 44, 46, 51 action...x, xiv, 5, 8, 9, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 42, 47, 48, 51, 54, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 82, 84, 91, 95, 100, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130 Action..........................127, 128, 129 actions . 5, 18, 33, 42, 94, 95, 96, 114 affect xxii, 4, 5, 6, 23, 25, 29, 44, 57, 60, 87, 88, 91, 93, 99, 102, 116, 118 affects. 4, 5, 6, 13, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 29, 34, 41, 42, 50, 52, 63, 64, 65, 74, 79, 80, 82, 84, 87, 88, 98, 120 aleatory........................5, 94, 95, 102 Alexander .....xvii, 38, 39, 58, 63, 65, 73, 75, 79, 80, 87, 97, 111, 113, 116, 117, 119, 125, 127, 128, 130 Alice............................12, 19, 33, 72 amplification ......................... xiii, 59 Ansell-Pearson ......................17, 127 apprenticeship ...............24, 117, 127 Apprenticeship ............................129 art ....xix, 5, 7, 15, 16, 17, 20, 67, 81, 85, 87, 88, 107, 110, 112, 121 Art ......................xxi, 6, 20, 128, 129 artist.............................17, 61, 64, 84 artists ................................xiv, 85, 86 a-signifying semiotics .xx, 27, 63, 78 133

INDEX

bodies ............................................63 body..xx, xxii, 4, 5, 6, 18, 22, 48, 51, 60, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 84, 95, 100, 102, 109, 116, 118, 126 Boguex, xvii, 33, 48, 49, 78, 99, 117, 127 Boisvert ....................xix, 24, 25, 127 Boler...................xxiii, 1, 14, 85, 129 Bosteels ...............18, 21, 22, 59, 127 Boundas...................35, 60, 127, 128 breadth....xvii, xxiv, 65, 98, 102, 104 Campbell ...............................49, 127 cartography................21, 22, 87, 122 Casey......................xxiv, 43, 44, 127 child. 19, 48, 102, 103, 112, 115, 116 Child............................................128 children .....xxiv, 33, 52, 85, 98, 102, 120, 121, 122 Cilliers.........................103, 104, 127 code .................................2, 3, 22, 76 cogito.............................................40 Cogito............................................84 collective unconscious ............19, 84 communication....xxiv, 3, 25, 28, 40, 53, 54, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 84, 85, 97, 99, 100, 115, 116 Communication...............xvii, 54, 99 communications xxii, 65, 74, 76, 102 community ....xx, 8, 9, 10, 11, 87, 93 complex number......................44, 46 complex numbers ..........................46 complex plane 27, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 116 complexity.... xiv, xx, xxi, xxiii, 1, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 22, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 57, 76, 79, 80, 82, 91, 93, 99, 101, 102, 103, 115, 116, 118, 120 Complexity....xvii, 10, 103, 127, 130 concept ... xii, xiv, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 15, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 35, 42, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 92,

134

94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 107, 110, 112, 116, 118, 121, 126 Concept....................................... 130 concepts xiv, xx, xxi, xxiii, 2, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 18, 21, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 47, 48, 52, 54, 65, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 92, 97, 98, 100, 110, 116, 121, 125 connection....xii, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 10, 11, 14, 20, 21, 23, 29, 36, 37, 49, 55, 56, 59, 113, 117, 118, 120, 122 connections ...xii, xxii, xxiii, 3, 4, 10, 21, 24, 41, 43, 57, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 85, 87, 101, 103, 104, 114, 120, 122 consciousness xvii, 9, 13, 18, 19, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 41, 43, 49, 51, 52, 64, 65, 66, 83, 84, 93, 113, 117, 122 construction . 1, 3, 11, 20, 37, 51, 56, 64, 82, 85, 92, 94, 95, 97 Construction ......................... 37, 130 constructivism........... 36, 37, 49, 110 contingencies .......................... 10, 94 contingency............................. 21, 57 continuity.. xxiv, 1, 6, 30, 31, 72, 73, 102, 105, 106, 113, 115, 120, 122, 126 Continuity ................................... 113 creativity ........ xxiv, 5, 17, 29, 66, 91 critical and clinical.......... 86, 91, 110 culture. xiii, xx, 1, 3, 8, 9, 61, 84, 91, 126 cultures ........................................ xix Cunningham ......................... 81, 127 curricula...................................... 121 curriculum..... xxiv, 53, 98, 100, 106, 119, 121 Curriculum........... xiv, 128, 129, 130 cut ............................... 17, 22, 37, 77 De Gaynesford............................ 127 DeLanda ......................... 35, 41, 127 Deleuze..... ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2,

DELEUZE, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 depth....................47, 49, 80, 83, 111 Depth.............................................47 depths ............................................48 Descartes ...............................45, 121 desire .xxi, 29, 39, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 67, 68, 80, 85, 93, 94, 105, 110, 111, 118, 121, 122, 126 Desire ......................19, 57, 110, 129 desires ...xxiii, 20, 23, 32, 42, 56, 57, 64, 97, 111 deterritorialization ...ix, 7, 14, 15, 23, 42, 43, 56, 77, 95 Dewey . v, xii, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 12, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130 diagonal... 21, 37, 47, 49, 60, 85, 116 diagram .... 14, 15, 18, 21, 27, 30, 44, 46, 47, 66 difference ... 6, 21, 23, 29, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 51, 55, 57, 63, 66, 67, 69, 75, 76, 78, 80, 92, 93, 94, 99, 109, 112, 114, 117, 118

Difference . xxi, 51, 55, 76, 127, 128, 130 differences ............ 55, 63, 76, 77, 94 differenciation................. 35, 55, 113 different/ciation ................ 34, 35, 55 Different/ciation ......................... 118 differentiation ... 6, 35, 48, 55, 74, 75 discontinuities......................... 65, 98 discontinuity ............................. 6, 17 disequilibrium......................... 41, 63 Doll........................... 53, 55, 56, 129 dualism ................................... 15, 66 duration......................................... 35 dynamic ...xiii, xx, xxi, xxii, 4, 5, 10, 12, 15, 20, 22, 23, 27, 35, 42, 47, 53, 57, 64, 67, 68, 74, 84, 85, 92, 94, 99, 102, 111, 113, 114 dynamics.3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 21, 35, 42, 57, 67, 68, 80, 85, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 Dynamics.................................... 129 education xi, xiv, xvii, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2, 20, 23, 27, 29, 33, 49, 51, 53, 60, 71, 80, 82, 83, 84, 91, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106, 118, 119, 121, 122, 129, 130 Education.ix, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xxi, xxiii, 23, 92, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 educational research xx, xxiii, 66, 91, 92, 97 effect... xiii, 4, 10, 16, 28, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41, 47, 49, 67, 75, 77, 93, 104 effects ..xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 3, 10, 18, 19, 24, 27, 36, 37, 53, 60, 101, 120 emergence..... x, xxii, xxiii, 5, 17, 20, 60, 65, 82, 92, 100 empty square......................... 98, 102 enquiry.......................................... 51 environment... 10, 55, 57, 58, 59, 67, 74, 77, 83, 86, 94, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 117, 121

135

INDEX

epistemology .....xx, xxi, xxii, 20, 23, 34, 39, 77, 97 Epistemology ..............................131 eros........................................57, 125 Eros ....xvii, 56, 57, 64, 67, 118, 127, 129 error...............................................71 Error ..............................................71 errors .............................................72 essencexxii, 2, 24, 30, 31, 72, 78, 81, 95 Essence..........................................24 ethics ....xvii, xx, xxii, 16, 20, 24, 61, 68, 69, 81, 91, 96, 121 Ethics.xvii, 17, 22, 69, 116, 130, 131 ethics of care .................................69 evaluation . 21, 22, 23, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 88, 98 event....xix, xxii, 2, 3, 12, 13, 17, 18, 23, 34, 49, 57, 66, 73, 78, 79, 81, 95, 110, 114, 115, 120 Event .......................................23, 78 events . xi, xiii, xxiii, 3, 6, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 40, 49, 55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 78, 79, 83, 86, 95, 104, 108, 110, 112, 113, 122, 125 excellence............................5, 80, 97 Excellence ...................................130 experiencex, xiii, xvii, xx, xxiii, 3, 4, 6, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 86, 88, 91, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 126 Experience..... xxi, xxiii, 20, 40, 105, 125, 128 experiences. 5, 29, 36, 40, 56, 57, 65, 73, 78, 82, 87, 91, 95, 96, 98, 104, 111, 113, 115 experimentation.xxiii, 35, 36, 48, 57, 60, 88, 119

136

expression . xiv, xxii, 1, 5, 14, 18, 20, 21, 30, 34, 48, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 82, 97, 107, 125 expressions ................................... 35 feedback........................................ 74 feminist ... xxiii, 1, 16, 69, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 122 firstness......................................... 28 Firstness.. xxi, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 41, 42, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 67, 125 fold... xxii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 40, 47, 68, 83, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 103, 111, 121, 131 Fold..................................... 127, 128 folding ...... 15, 18, 20, 25, 40, 47, 88 Folding.......................................... 40 folds .......15, 16, 21, 30, 68, 110, 111 force... xiv, xxiv, 4, 7, 11, 16, 17, 23, 31, 33, 56, 75, 80, 85, 94, 100, 118 Force............................................. 16 forces ... x, xxii, 5, 14, 15, 16, 23, 28, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 46, 60, 64, 66, 84, 87, 88, 94, 99, 104, 107, 110, 111, 114, 118 Foucault .... xii, xiv, xxii, 1, 7, 13, 15, 61, 62, 71, 78, 93, 94, 128 freedom...xx, 1, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 28, 58, 61, 68, 82, 102, 103, 108, 111, 112 Freedom........................................ 11 Freud....................................... 19, 84 future ..12, 18, 31, 32, 44, 50, 58, 68, 78, 81, 85, 86, 87, 96, 100, 108, 117 Garrison ...x, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 39, 43, 53, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 71, 85, 87, 88, 91, 106, 112, 119, 120, 125, 126, 127, 129 Gauss ............................................ 45 genesis ........................ 47, 58, 75, 88 geography ..................... 4, 12, 21, 72 geophilosophy.................. xiv, 91, 93 Geophilosophy...................... 43, 130

DELEUZE, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

Goddard...............................121, 129 Gough............................... ix, xi, xvii Grossberg .............. xxiii, 38, 85, 129 growth 20, 31, 52, 57, 71, 73, 76, 85, 88, 99, 101, 102, 103, 115, 118, 122 Growth ..........................................57 Guattari . x, xii, xiii, xiv, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 27, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94, 102, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 habit.. 31, 47, 64, 65, 66, 74, 79, 102, 117, 120 Habit..............................................64 habits .. 28, 31, 33, 41, 42, 48, 64, 65, 66 haecceity..........................12, 97, 114 Hardt ....... 2, 5, 36, 67, 128, 129, 131 Hegel .............................................75 Heisenberg ..........................113, 129 Hendry...................................51, 129 Hickman ..xix, 38, 39, 58, 63, 65, 73, 75, 79, 80, 87, 113, 116, 117, 119, 128, 129 Holder .................15, 17, 25, 34, 129 Holland..........................23, 129, 131 idea.. xii, xvii, xix, xxiii, 7, 9, 23, 31, 44, 47, 51, 61, 65, 75, 76, 87, 95, 99, 105, 108, 117, 119, 122, 125 Idea................................................83 ideas ....xx, xxiii, 4, 9, 10, 23, 30, 33, 35, 42, 44, 65, 83, 84, 110, 112 identity ... xx, 3, 8, 11, 12, 19, 61, 76, 77, 88, 92, 94, 104 Identity ..........................................77 image of thought .xxi, 71, 72, 74, 76, 80, 81 imaginary number .............44, 45, 50 imaginary numbers............44, 45, 50

imagination ... xiv, xxii, 1, 23, 39, 45, 47, 51, 58, 84, 95, 100, 105, 111 Imagination........................... 39, 106 imperceptible . 12, 33, 60, 73, 86, 99, 115, 120 indiscernibility. 6, 12, 42, 49, 58, 73, 113, 115 individuation xx, 3, 7, 11, 12, 21, 41, 76, 88, 114, 118 Individuation................................. 21 inference ...xx, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 40, 43, 44, 46, 51, 65 inferences...................................... 30 information .... 31, 40, 41, 47, 51, 55, 59, 83, 103 innocence.................... 112, 114, 115 Innocence.................................... 112 inquiry .......x, xii, xiv, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 17, 24, 30, 34, 39, 50, 51, 52, 64, 73, 74, 77, 80, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 103, 104, 106, 113, 119, 122, 125, 131 Inquiry .................................. 34, 128 insight ................... 29, 39, 45, 47, 80 intelligence 47, 48, 59, 99, 103, 117, 118 Intelligence ................................. 127 intensity .4, 19, 39, 43, 55, 60, 86, 95 interaction xxi, xxii, xxiv, 12, 20, 25, 40, 74, 101, 104, 117, 121 interactions . xiii, xxii, 10, 20, 40, 53, 54, 56, 66, 67, 76, 106 interest ................ 23, 52, 97, 99, 101 Interest ............................................ x intuition .... xvii, xxiii, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 83, 113, 116, 119 Intuition .... xvii, 30, 32, 35, 113, 130 James .................................. 2, 71, 79 Joughin ................................. 21, 128 joy................... xxii, 42, 98, 111, 120 Juarrero......................... 67, 126, 129 judgment ... x, xix, 23, 29, 32, 71, 77, 81, 109, 122 137

INDEX

judgments ..............................x, 8, 62 Jung .........................................19, 84 Kierkegaard...................................13 knowing...xix, xxii, 5, 16, 25, 32, 35, 44, 73, 74, 80, 82, 92, 93, 106, 113, 119 Knowing......................................130 knowledge xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 6, 7, 14, 16, 18, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 65, 71, 72, 73, 80, 82, 83, 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 114, 122 Knowledge ...........xiv, 128, 129, 131 labor .......................ix, 111, 119, 120 laboratory .............xxiv, 52, 119, 120 language x, xiv, xx, 1, 10, 11, 14, 20, 25, 41, 44, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 78, 82, 83, 94, 97, 104 languages.................................53, 97 Leach..................xxiii, 1, 14, 85, 129 learning .. x, xiii, xvii, 28, 39, 48, 50, 51, 52, 56, 66, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 82, 83, 85, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 116, 118, 119, 129 Learning .xvii, 74, 75, 80, 82, 83, 97, 100, 116, 117, 125, 127, 130 learning paradox........28, 50, 51, 129 Lehmann-Rommel......56, 60, 66, 67, 129 Leibnizxxii, 15, 18, 35, 45, 107, 127, 128 lesson...........................106, 111, 119 life ..xii, xiii, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 43, 48, 57, 61, 68, 73, 74, 78, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 94, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 121, 122 Life........................23, 127, 130, 131 limit ...............15, 59, 64, 69, 74, 115 limits .......................8, 11, 40, 60, 65 line of flight 7, 18, 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 65, 68, 87, 88, 99, 112 138

Little Hans ................ 19, 79, 88, 115 logicxxi, xxiii, 2, 4, 6, 11, 17, 19, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 59, 62, 64, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81, 82, 85, 95, 104, 106, 113 Logic........................ xxi, 28, 34, 128 logic of sense ........... xxiii, 34, 48, 80 Magnani................................ 51, 129 map ................. xx, 18, 21, 34, 47, 87 mapping .... xix, xx, xxii, 1, 6, 18, 21, 47, 80, 125 maps.................................. 71, 73, 95 Massumi ..... xx, 3, 62, 128, 129, 131 mathematics.......... 64, 113, 121, 125 Mathematics ................................. 44 matter ix, 2, 4, 15, 21, 30, 31, 34, 39, 57, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 78, 81, 82, 85, 99, 101, 111, 114, 119 Matter ........................................... 28 Maturana............................... 59, 129 meaning . xxi, xxiii, 7, 10, 12, 16, 20, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 55, 57, 59, 62, 64, 66, 72, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 99, 103, 104, 111, 121, 125 Meaning........................................ 24 meanings..... ix, xx, xxi, xxiii, 10, 19, 23, 25, 41, 47, 48, 49, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 77, 78, 80, 88, 97, 100, 104, 106, 113, 114, 115, 121 memories ................... xxi, 24, 87, 94 memory................. 11, 28, 50, 85, 86 Meno....................................... 50, 51 metaphor . xix, xxii, 6, 13, 43, 50, 60, 71, 72, 74, 80, 87 metaphors ......................... 1, 21, 102 middlex, xii, xxiii, 2, 5, 7, 16, 20, 23, 28, 33, 44, 57, 59, 62, 69, 72, 78, 84, 85, 96, 104, 109, 111, 117 milieu.2, 18, 40, 43, 60, 80, 100, 102 mimesis....16, 30, 62, 84, 85, 87, 113 Mimesis ................................ 85, 129

DELEUZE, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

mind ... 3, 5, 9, 13, 17, 18, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 58, 64, 78, 84, 95, 98, 103, 109, 111, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121 Mind........................................18, 28 miracle.................106, 109, 116, 120 Miracle ........................................107 miracles .......................................112 moral .... 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19, 22, 23, 61, 62, 69, 74, 81, 99, 101, 106, 112, 121, 122, 130 multiplicity .xxii, 2, 3, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 35, 36, 37, 43, 47, 51, 62, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 103, 104, 110, 111, 117 Murphy....................................4, 130 nature xiii, xiv, xxi, 3, 10, 12, 14, 22, 23, 28, 30, 32, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49, 53, 56, 59, 61, 65, 66, 68, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 102, 103, 104, 110, 117, 121 Nature....xxi, 48, 102, 105, 111, 125, 127, 128 Newton.................................. xiii, 45 Noddings x, xi, xvii, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 9, 16, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 42, 51, 69, 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 112, 114, 118, 121, 122, 123, 130, 131 nomad................................43, 78, 94 Nomad...............................43, 44, 94 nomadicxxi, xxiii, 18, 23, 43, 44, 49, 73, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103 nomadic inquiry xxiii, 91, 94, 96, 97, 101, 103 novelty. 17, 63, 80, 99, 100, 104, 120 ontology ............37, 67, 85, 112, 113 Ontology .....................xvii, 127, 130 open system..............xxi, 56, 80, 104 orderx, xxii, 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 20, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 42, 43, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 67, 77, 78,

80, 87, 91, 96, 103, 111, 112, 114, 120 Order....................................... 54, 78 outside xxii, 4, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 25, 30, 34, 36, 40, 43, 47, 54, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 77, 78, 83, 92, 94, 103, 104, 116, 121, 122 Outside xxi, 5, 15, 16, 40, 67, 93, 94, 95, 111, 118, 127, 131 paradoxxvii, xxiii, 11, 28, 50, 51, 96, 129 Paradox....................... 125, 127, 130 Patton.............. 14, 71, 127, 128, 130 pedagogy .......... xx, 48, 99, 121, 127 Peirce ...xii, xvii, xx, xxi, xxiii, 2, 15, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 65, 67, 69, 78, 84, 85, 113, 115, 125, 129, 130 percept . xxii, 6, 23, 42, 91, 106, 114, 116, 120, 121 Percept ................................ 106, 120 percepts...5, 6, 29, 30, 41, 42, 50, 52, 65, 80, 82, 84, 98, 116, 120 perplexity........ 29, 52, 73, 77, 95, 99 Peters ........... xvii, xxiii, 43, 129, 130 philosophy .xi, xiii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 53, 54, 60, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 91, 93, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112, 125, 126, 129, 130 Philosophy ... xv, xvii, xix, xxi, 6, 62, 74, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 phronesis......................... 57, 59, 103 Phronesis ...................................... 68 plane of immanence6, 19, 36, 42, 48, 49, 56, 75, 81, 83, 110, 111 Plato.......................... 50, 51, 56, 125 pluralism................................... 2, 96 poiesis..................................... 53, 61 Poiesis........................................... 62 139

INDEX

Poincare.....................29, 33, 64, 125 poststructuralism ................. xxiii, 12 Poststructuralism .................129, 130 poststructuralist xi, xix, xx, 1, 10, 12, 14, 35, 66, 68, 96 potentiality ................................8, 67 power.... xii, xxiii, 4, 5, 6, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 33, 40, 51, 58, 60, 61, 68, 73, 77, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 99, 100, 102, 106, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121 Power .....................................xiv, 16 pragmatic maxim... xxiii, 27, 37, 101 Pragmatic maxim ..........................32 pragmatism......... xiii, xix, 27, 28, 51 Pragmatism....................71, 127, 130 Prawat ............xxiii, 50, 51, 125, 130 present ....xi, xii, xxi, 3, 5, 19, 24, 28, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 55, 58, 59, 66, 68, 72, 74, 78, 81, 85, 87, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 104, 105, 122 problemxxi, 3, 18, 22, 23, 41, 52, 75, 82, 88, 96, 118, 122 problems... 42, 55, 72, 74, 81, 82, 83, 93 process..xvii, xx, xxii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 118, 119, 122, 125 Process ........................xvii, 128, 130 process-structure ..11, 22, 53, 60, 68, 81, 83, 94 projection ............16, 48, 49, 85, 110 Projection ......................................49 Proust ............12, 24, 59, 62, 85, 128 psychology ..............xxii, 20, 28, 111 qualitative multiplicity .3, 13, 19, 20, 37, 76, 79, 104 140

qualitative whole56, 77, 83, 106, 118 real number....................... 44, 45, 49 real numbers ..................... 44, 45, 49 reason....6, 25, 28, 29, 34, 36, 40, 48, 52, 74, 77, 81, 107 reasoning xix, xx, 15, 30, 32, 42, 45, 46, 52, 72, 92, 104 reciprocal presupposition. 12, 29, 60, 85 relation2, 3, 9, 12, 16, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 52, 55, 59, 62, 67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 83, 85, 95, 96, 105, 111, 114, 117, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126 Relation ...................................... 128 relations ....2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 22, 24, 28, 32, 35, 37, 54, 55, 63, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82, 83, 87, 96, 99, 104, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 122, 126 religious ..9, 105, 106, 116, 119, 121, 122 repetition.16, 31, 37, 63, 75, 85, 112, 114, 117 Repetition ............................ xxi, 128 representation 10, 16, 18, 27, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 45, 49, 61, 62, 73, 75, 80, 83, 97 representations16, 31, 36, 41, 62, 73, 78, 81, 93 Rescher ................................ xix, 130 resonance ..... 25, 49, 60, 61, 63, 114, 120 responsibility .................. 79, 96, 101 Responsibility ............................... 79 reterritorialization ......................... 14 rhizomatic .... xi, xxiii, 43, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 99, 104 rhizomatics ................................... 85 rhizome . x, xii, xxi, 4, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 104 Rhizome........................................ 71 rhythm .................................. 57, 102 rhythms .................................... xiii, 5 Rorty............... xxii, 55, 71, 125, 130

DELEUZE, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

Safstrom ................................53, 130 Schmookler .................................130 schooling .................98, 99, 100, 103 secondness...............................28, 51 Secondness ....xxi, 28, 29, 31, 36, 39, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 125 self..xxii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 36, 39, 49, 53, 57, 61, 64, 67, 68, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87, 92, 94, 96, 100, 103, 105, 117, 118, 122 Self ....................................8, 64, 127 self-cause.......................................67 Self-cause ......................................67 self-organization.xvii, 10, 11, 21, 53, 67, 79, 98, 99, 101, 103, 119 self-organized..........10, 99, 112, 130 Semetsky ix, x, xiv, 39, 84, 121, 125, 127, 130 semiosis.........16, 30, 48, 55, 84, 113 Semiosis ......................................130 semiotics . xi, xvii, xx, xxi, 2, 12, 24, 27, 28, 33, 59, 62, 65, 69, 73, 78, 85 Semiotics............x, xi, xvii, 129, 130 series ...xix, 5, 18, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 37, 39, 40, 49, 56, 59, 71, 72, 77, 78, 84, 94, 98 Sheriff .............................31, 51, 130 Shimony ......................................125 Shmookler ...........................106, 107 sign15, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 67, 75, 78, 92, 102, 114, 115 Sign .............................................125 signs ..xxiii, 2, 16, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 57, 62, 63, 65, 75, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 97, 103, 104, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 126, 127 singularity. 12, 15, 47, 49, 66, 68, 75, 79, 80, 99, 106, 114 smooth...xxiv, 43, 44, 51, 73, 92, 94, 95, 97, 100, 104, 131

socialxix, xx, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 40, 44, 49, 59, 60, 67, 79, 83, 84, 101, 111 Socrates ........................................ 50 space .. xiv, xix, xxi, xxiv, 1, 2, 6, 15, 21, 34, 35, 43, 44, 48, 51, 54, 57, 58, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78, 86, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 104, 118, 119, 125, 126 Space .......................................... 125 specialization .... xx, xxiv, 91, 97, 98, 99, 101 Specialization ....................... 99, 102 Spinoza ..4, 7, 21, 111, 116, 119, 128 spirit xxii, xxiv, 9, 27, 35, 60, 67, 71, 105, 106, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123 Spirit .......................... xxiv, 105, 123 spiritual.84, 105, 111, 112, 119, 121, 122, 123 St. Pierre xi, xxiii, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 131 striated .................. 43, 44, 72, 74, 94 structure . xvii, xx, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 27, 32, 35, 41, 43, 47, 54, 56, 59, 72, 73, 74, 85, 98, 100, 104, 106 structures .xx, 10, 35, 67, 73, 75, 105 student ................ 100, 102, 118, 126 students.....51, 52, 69, 72, 82, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 121, 122, 126 Students ...................................... 122 stuttering........................... 60, 63, 64 Stuttering ...................................... 63 subjectivity .. xx, xxii, 1, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 37, 40, 53, 76, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 114 Subjectivity..... xvii, 3, 14, 20, 21, 22 surface ....10, 15, 46, 47, 49, 81, 110, 115, 120, 126 symbol ................ 15, 44, 57, 72, 115 symbols............................. 35, 45, 73 Taylor ................. xx, 61, 62, 68, 131

141

INDEX

teacher ...... 52, 56, 59, 101, 108, 109, 118, 126 teachers .... 52, 69, 71, 75, 82, 97, 99, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 122 Teachers .xi, 104, 108, 129, 130, 131 tension . 11, 29, 41, 55, 57, 74, 96, 99 territories ...........................10, 14, 96 territory ..xx, xxii, 18, 21, 34, 42, 47, 71, 80, 84, 94, 95 Territory ......................................127 thinking .. xiii, xvii, xxi, xxiii, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 17, 18, 25, 27, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 97, 98, 99, 101, 106, 110, 112, 119 Thirdness.xxi, 15, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 63, 65, 85, 125 time ix, xi, xvii, xix, 1, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 35, 37, 44, 48, 55, 59, 68, 74, 78, 79, 87, 94, 96, 108, 109, 118, 122, 129 Time ......................86, 109, 127, 128 transaction .......................41, 67, 101 transactions................67, 68, 99, 101 transcendental empiricism 25, 33, 34, 49, 113, 114, 117, 120 transcendental field .........35, 36, 111 transformational pragmatics xxiii, 16

142

transversal communication .. xxii, 41, 54, 65, 68, 74, 84, 115 Transversal communication.......... 76 transversal line............ 23, 47, 49, 65 transversality................................. 21 unconscious ... 18, 19, 25, 32, 33, 36, 42, 47, 48, 49, 63, 64, 65, 83, 84, 85, 101, 117 Unconscious ........... 19, 84, 111, 127 understanding ....ix, xii, xvii, xxi, 29, 40, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 60, 68, 74, 84, 86, 91, 92, 98, 103, 104, 116 Understanding............... 48, 127, 129 valuesxxii, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 22, 24, 52, 62, 67, 68, 79, 86, 88, 98, 105, 106, 111 Varela ............... 54, 56, 59, 129, 131 vector ...................................... 46, 47 virtual..15, 17, 21, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 42, 48, 65, 67, 76, 83, 84, 93, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121 Virtual............. 39, 42, 113, 127, 130 virtue.....2, 10, 11, 13, 25, 33, 34, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 66, 68, 71, 77, 78, 86, 91, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111, 114 whitehead.................................... xvii Whitehead....... 2, 100, 101, 102, 131 Witherell............................. 106, 131 Wolfe .................................. 1, 3, 131 Woolf............................ 87, 115, 116