Embodiment and becoming in secondary drama classrooms: the effects of neoliberal education cultures on performances of self and of drama texts

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault’s governmentality and Ball’s theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.     

Rhizomatic education and Deleuzian theory

Personal experience participating in a Community Massive Open Online Course (cMOOC) discussing rhizomatic education (Rhizo15) helped to ground some of the theoretical issues connected with trying to ‘apply’ Deleuzian work to education. Notions of connectivity and community as a learning resource are compared with the more abstract notion of a rhizome as an n-dimensional network in Deleuze and Guattari; a Deleuzian critique of objectivism is seen as transcending the persistent dualism of objectivity and subjectivity; Deleuzian critique of consensual thinking is seen to be relevant to a perceived problem with ‘group think’. A brief account of Semetsky’s ‘learning paradox’ leads to discussion of the suitability of the cMOOC structure for handling challenging material: participation, solidarity and engagement are encouraged, but opportunities are limited to pursue demanding and disciplined readings of Deleuzian work by excluding the positive and enlightening aspects of pedagogic authority. An example from debates on concept maps shows some neglected possibilities.     

论禅的多元化思维与德勒兹“根茎”的异质同构性

德勒兹创造了"根茎"概念来表达他心目中的后现代主义哲学多元化的思维模式。"根茎"思维模式具有多元化的异质连接功能,是一个开放的、自由的、多元化的生成结构,这种思维模式具有独创性的视角和独特的逻辑。文章通过"根茎"同禅宗思维特点的比较,揭示了两者之间具有"家族相似性"或者说"异质同构性",间接地证明了20世纪以来,西方哲学同东方禅学之间相互影响而形成的某些"同构性"。     

Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari: An exploration of writing as assemblage

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari’s flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, ‘assemblage’. The experiment is theorised and assessed in a non-reductive way that offers future creative possibilities to other researchers. First, the paper presents a context for the subsequent experimental writing. Some current innovative writerly practice and some theoretical and methodological standpoints are reviewed. Next, this paper presents its theorisation of ‘assemblage’ with particular reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the idea, ‘double articulation’. This approach supports and justifies the author’s schematisation of the textual assemblage into four areas: identity, work, territory and dissolving territory. The author explains how these ideas function within an experimental discursive text and illustrates their possible usage in the experimental text itself. Thus, this paper offers a theoretical justification, an explanation of and an assessment of experimental writing, in addition to the experimental text itself, all of which are of potential interest to researchers in the fields of education and philosophy.     

Datafication,testing events and the outside of thought

Education is undergoing various transformations due to new data-driven educational technologies and the management of educational data through data infrastructures. These technologies are frequently promoted to parents and the profession as being ‘revolutionary’ because they represent a new generation of learning. While computer adaptive tests may arguably improve various efficiencies, the argument that they will revolutionise education requires evaluation. In this paper we draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorise (a) the desire for data amongst policymakers and (b) the effects of data infrastructures as systems that coordinate educational thought. We argue that, rather than revolutionising learning as promised, datafication in computer-based modes merely offers more intense expressions of longstanding possibilities for learning. We describe three types of events—breaks, cracks and ruptures—and argue that data-events translate cracks (imperceptible changes that constitute learning) into breaks (information), but either cannot generate rupture (difference) or represent rupture as error. However, the intensification of learning through datafication may, we suggest, rupture educational thought more broadly.     

Sexual assemblages: mobile phones/young people/school

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and a relational materialist notion of ‘more-than-human’ are drawn on. By recognising sexuality-as-assemblage, it is possible to see more-than-human elements (such as mobile phones) as implicated in the becoming of sexuality at school. This conceptualisation implies new texture and dimensionality to the wider project of (re)producing sexual meanings and identities at school. It also necessitates acknowledging an ontologically different understanding of the human-non-human divide, that decentres young people and/or phones as to ‘to blame’ for ‘negative’ practices like sexting. Instead, agency manifests via the intra-activity that occurs when mobile phones and young people are in-relation.     

Performing Difference: Repetition in Context

Abstract

In this essay, I sketch a performative, constitutive theory of difference that avoids the major trappings of this discussion in current communication scholarship. Building from Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, I argue that by focusing on difference in intercultural communication scholarship we can, as a discipline, create more complex understandings of people in cultural contexts. I first examine how difference has been written in communication scholarship. Second, I offer a reading of Deleuze and Butler who, together, provide the grounding for seeing the repetition of difference as political and contingent ontology. I conclude by examining an everyday context, showing how intercultural communication scholarship can benefit from this kind of analysis.     

论德勒兹符号诗学与理论意义

在20世纪中叶法国学术界现象学与结构主义的纠结中,崛起了德里达、福柯和德勒兹等新一代后结构主义思想家。"符号"(sign)是源自当时文学批评争论的一个核心概念,在今天仍然值得深入探讨。在当代西方符号诗学从二元论到多元论的嬗变轨迹中,德勒兹诗学受皮尔斯等人多元符号思想影响,扬弃索绪尔一脉的结构主义语言学观念,体现出多元流变的特质。在德勒兹文学批评著作和电影艺术哲学著作中,符号诗学是一个重要的维度。在跨语境意义上,德勒兹差异哲学衍生出来的符号诗学突破西方传统的二元论思维模式和语言学局域,富于当代学术意识,并且与中国古典诗学题旨构成一定的思想共振关系。这种跨语境耦合,能够激活异质诗学的潜质,开辟新的思想探索空间。     

Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education

Deleuze asserts that education is a mass of signs. Children learn to decode these signs, albeit in randomized and individual ways, displaying great skill in decoding some signs but not others, and demonstrating different acuities with different clusters of signs. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, a fluid becoming to knowledges as formal education is encountered, operate at some distance to linear, culturally loaded apprenticeship concepts embedded in sociocultural theories. Conceptualizing education as gestures and signs, and apprenticeship as temporal rather than developmental, makes it difficult to try to quantify what is learnt. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, whilst troubling, can begin to dislodge teaching and learning conventions, particularly around accessing and responding. This essay explores drawing as education in Deleuzian terms.     

‘We don't believe media anymore’: Mapping critical literacies in an adult immigrant language classroom

This article maps critical literacies conceptually and empirically in the context of adult immigrant language classrooms. It begins by describing Deleuze and Guattari's cartographic approach. Then it traces critical literacies situated conceptually within a Freirean paradigm before mapping them differently through the Deleuzian-informed Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT). MLT frames critical literacies as reading intensively, that is, disruptively. This alternative conceptualization is then mobilized empirically in relation to the problems and politics produced in the qualitative study of one language classroom. In this classroom, reading a newspaper article provoked a series of transformative events or becomings, a concept created by Deleuze and Guattari and which is central to MLT. A research cartography is presented as a series of vignettes weaving data and concepts. This empirical mapping of media literacies and reading intensively offers insights into the politics of becoming in adult immigrant language classrooms and opens conceptual lines of flight between critical literacies and reading intensively.