Preface – A Deleuzian Journey

Standpoints

To follow a small pathway on our map using the openings and invitations of Deleuze, we want to examine again – the understandings we have about aspects of teaching, teacher education, identity, and inquiry. We hope to disrupt and entangle the ways we have seen teaching and research defined and to think again, to see if we might bring fluidity to ways of thinking about these issues to bring possibility to teacher educators and to renew education.

Before we turn to our discussion of Deleuze, we want to acknowledge our standpoints, the ways we look at the world around us. We have worked together as a collaboratory for more than 25 years; some of that time has been as Arizona Group members but most recently (perhaps 10 years) we have worked in collaboration.

Raised up in the academy as qualitative researchers (although Stefinee also has a strong quantitative background) we brought a critical, questioning stance to our work as researchers in teacher education. Most notably we observed that scholars in the academy dismissed the research that could inform teacher education and teaching. Early into our work we could see the need to question the tacit assumptions about research, teaching, and knowledge about teaching and teacher education. What/who was valued and what/who advanced ideas that raised questions for us. We knew then (as we continue to know now) that a focus on the particular reveals much in the study of teaching and teacher education.

We also questioned the ways that the use of certain methodologies distanced educational researchers from the teachers with whom they worked and we noticed that a level of disrespect seemed to exist that questioned the knowledge that teachers had/used in their teaching. We could see that we valued the process and experience more than claims to know and took an ontological stance toward our research before that became a popular turn. We also recognized that we had a constructivist eye for our work tinted by our ideals of justice. To honor teachers and explore critical moments of teaching, we began to study our own practice (with inspiration from others) with attention to ways that knowledge and teaching and students intersected pathways.

From this standpoint, we look across our map to see entanglements, disconnects, and more as we attempt to create openings in the understandings of practice and the ways we might talk about educational issues that (we hope) make a difference. We must note that Deleuze talks about the, “indignity of speaking for others” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 87) and warns against making universal statements. With respect for and attention to these points in this text, we address our own understandings of the works and words of Deleuze and utilize citations to connect our ideas to his words and/or the perspectives offered in the views of scholars who study these works. In the next few pages we present our perspectives on Deleuze’s concepts and how we thread these ideas into our text and why.

Our Perceptions of the Deleuzian World

Deleuze is a philosopher who takes seriously his task of challenging the system/s around him. He came onto the writing/thinking landscape after World War II poking and prodding and ideas and ideals held sacred when scientists seemed to live under the leftover illusion of moral and ethical rightness and surety. He never seemed to waver only to develop and expand as a thinker – from the 1960s when he met Guattari, into the 1980s with the two seminal texts written with Guattari until his too-early passing.

While Foucault noted – joke or not – that the 20th century would be called the Deleuzian age, it seems like he might have been too hasty as, at least in education, the Deleuzo-Guattarian tools to foster deeper thinking and questioning have not reached the writings of many educational researchers beyond an occasional mention. Of course, there are those who have taken up and taken on these issues wholeheartedly (Semetsky, 2003, 2005, 2008; St. Pierre, 2000), most often in methodological writings (Leach & Boler, 1998; St. Pierre, 2013; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) but we can see that some distance along the map of destiny must be traveled before their ideas reach commonplace.

Situating Our Understandings in the Present Moment

In each present moment Deleuze questions the view of history (and life?) as linear, suggesting that events occur and then coexist in that present (Davies et al., 2013, p. 682). Does this raise an eyebrow for you as you read it? Good. We think that Deleuze wants to push our thinking beyond those solidified notions of what is, has been, and will be. From our own work we see that ideas of the present moment fit with our own discussions of the “now” when we address Stern’s work (2004) as well as Bakhtin’s (1981) zone of inconclusivity where nothing is fixed.

Another perspective with which we resonate is the assertion that we are always in the midst or in the middle of BECOMING. Along with these philosophers we see and have written elsewhere (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) about the BECOMING of teacher educators and teachers – never closing, always opening the space between ideas and practices that we study. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that in BECOMING we reach a plateau of many plateaus that is, “always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end” (p. 21).

In contrast with the liveliness and fluidity of BECOMING, Deleuze sees identity as a fixed state and points out that habitual thinking can thwart creative thinking. With attention to disrupting our habits related to identity, he sees BECOMING as, “critical, for if the primacy of identity is what defines a world of re-presentation (presenting the same world once again), then BECOMING (by which Deleuze means ‘becoming different’) defines a world of presentation anew” (Stagoll, 2010a, p. 26). Too often, in our present moments we trap ourselves in our habitual notions. Challenging that tradition, Deleuze sees our BECOMING as a transforming, changing assemblage of forces (of many kinds) that we engage to interact in our world (Livesey, 2010). For them “being” is flat and muddy and a habit (St. Pierre, 2004). We suggest that you return to the quote at the beginning of this section and read again the last line regarding “I.”

About this BECOMING-to-know process Deleuze and Guattari write:

You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life … or at least you can have it, you can reach it … It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a décor or a backdrop that situates subjects … It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262)

In BECOMING Deleuze and Guattari see not individuals as much as they see our individuating and our individuality as related to events (St. Pierre, 2004). Deleuze (1990) writes that:

individuation beyond those of things, persons, or subjects: the individuation … of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of an event. And maybe it’s a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects. (p. 26)

Here, again, he takes a dramatic stand to (potentially) deepen our thinking or at least to de-center it. He goes on to say that the title A Thousand Plateaus, “refers to … individuations that don’t individuate persons or things” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 26).

Needless to say, Deleuze demands that we interrogate our ordinary habits of saying “I.” In Deleuzian terms, “‘I’ is not an expressive subject, only a linguistic marker indicating what body is addressed by the whispered imperative immanent to that particular position within that particular state of things” (Massumi, 1992, p. 33). Too many times it seems that “we continue to produce ourselves as a subject on the basis of old modes which do not correspond to our problems” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88).

Deleuze and Guattari invite readers to rethink the “I,” implicitly reminding us that there may be endings but they are unpredictable and not always happy. We are reminded that Butler (2002) also contests and troubles the “I” and the ways this term is and can be understood as does Barad (2007) who recognized the important of difference and breaking away from habitual thinking that miss the intra-actions with the materials world around them. Pushing further into expressing and addressing the “I,” Deleuze writes:

More generally, every field of forces refers back to a potential energy, every opposition refers to a deeper ‘disparateness’, and oppositions are resolved in time and extensity only to the extent that the disparates have first invented their order of communication in depth and rediscovered that dimension in which they envelop one another, tracing hardly recognisable intensive paths through the ulterior world of qualified extensity. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 236)

To challenge us, we see that Deleuze and Guattari warn us that we can acquire habits at levels of our consciousness and that these habits can go unchallenged (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Phillipe, 2003). They seem to suggest that our thoughts and our examination of assemblages are always in motion. To that end they describe BECOMING as standing in the midst – of ideas, senses, emotions, things – as we shape our thinking and transform our world. Khalfa (2003) reiterates as he states, “identity is not about individuality but the process of individuation and in the process of becoming, ‘subjectivity can be understood differently than a traditional notion of a self’” (Semetsky, 2003). It seems that Deleuze sees tension between BEING and BECOMING and locates it in, “the western tradition’s predominant and unjustifiable focus upon being and identity” (Stagoll, 2010a, p. 25). He de-centers the focus on individuals like academics, “who are burdened by the citational chains through which they are recognized and made recognizable” (Davies et al., 2013, p. 683), and turns toward ways where difference emerges. At this in-the-midst moment or an in-between place he seems to see vulnerability. In his writings Deleuze attempts to push readers to and from tensions that may inspire creative thoughtfulness about difference and how they come to understand that. He broadens versions of self beyond the singular. In fact, Deleuze seems to suggest that we are singular and plural, forever evolving, BECOMING:

single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess - in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return. (Deleuze, 1995)

In the text Difference and Repetition (1994) Deleuze focuses away from sameness, toward difference, noting that creative ideas come from repetition and the ways that repetition pushes us (potentially) toward new ideas. Deleuze privileges difference and moves from a view of BEING to BECOMING (Davies et al., 2013). Davies et al. (2013) note that Deleuze’s move from, “difference as categorical difference, to difference as emergent, continuous difference” (p. 681) affords readers the opportunity to explore issues newly.

While we find many definitions for assemblage – one of those concepts identified by many as critical to the Deleuzian ontology – we think that a complexity of “objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories” (Livesey, 2010, p. 18) that can be arranged, organized, connected, and disconnected with various intensity at different times will suffice for our work in this text. Colebrook (2002) defines assemblage in this way:

All life is a process of connection and interaction. Any body or thing is the outcome of a process of connections. A human body is an assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies. (2002, p. xx)

Livesey (2010) finds that, “Assemblages emerge from the arranging of heterogeneous elements into a productive … entity that can be diagrammed, at least temporarily, and often as the ability to provide an agencing quality” (p. 18). The cartographer looks at the relations between particular sets of forces and creates a diagram or map. According to Deleuze, it can be seen as a “map of destiny” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 36) that codes the function of the assemblages known by the cartographer producing a new reality “by making numerous, often unexpected, connections …” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 35). Wonders that when we decide in advance on the focus of thought, “how else to proceed except by alternatives which implicitly prejudge the final choice?” (p. 37). For her it seems that this could be “the ancient story of the binding and subordination of difference to identity. As soon as there is initial identity, difference cannot long be conceived as a ‘disparate’ multiplicity, as a free proliferation. Now a framework closes it in, rules over it, totalizes it, so that it can only define itself negatively” (p. 37).

We could think of it as a diagram, “the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, of intensity … (Deleuze, 1988, p. 37) that offers a code for the way it operates.” An assemblage can produce a new reality through various and sometimes unexpected connections (Livesey, 2010) and through its multiplicity it “is shaped by and acts on a wide range” (p. 18, underlining added) of possibilities.

Against individuating we can place multiplicity. We can see from Deleuze’s writings that he favors multiplicity rather than identity. Identity can be viewed as a static view of something that captures it in the “right” (unchanging) terms. Colebrook (2002) suggests that at “its simplest, a multiplicity is a collection or connection of parts” (p. xxvi). Multiplicity can be seen as a complexity of ideas or things related to (in some way) but not singular expressions of a singular concept or entity (Roffe, 2010a, p. 181). Importantly, a multiplicity has no one identity or definition.

Stagoll (2010c) points to the multiplicity of “I” and notes that Deleuze finds that the “I” only ever refers to contingent effects of interactions between events, responses, memory functions, social forces, chance happenings, belief systems, economic conditions, and so on that together make up a life. Colebrook (2002) points out that there are “no fixed centers or particular order so much as a multiplicity of expanding and overlapping connections …” (p. xix).

Assemblage and rhizome address connections and the always-in-motion possibility of BECOMING. Rhizome describes the connections with objects, places and people (Coleman, 2010). For Carter (2014), rhizomes

are usually thought of as root systems that grow in multiple directions but that eventually interconnect and strengthen a plant. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use rhizome to theorize research that is non-hierarchical and that uses multiple entry and exit points to represent and interpret data. (p. 36)

When we think of rhizomes we think of tubers and the art of Jeanne Van Heeswijk, particularly the installation called Works, Typologies and Capacities (1993–2012). We see the multi-colored, multi-shaped tubers connected by wire or thread or string as a representation of her art and its influence.

Deleuze, along with Guattari, encourage no universal understandings. In fact, they suggest that if you know the answers in advance (Sarup, 1993, p. 93), you can already predict the outcome. From their perspective, they suggest attending to experience and experiment (Deleuze, 1995). From our perspective, consideration of these ideas suggests that the “right” view and the re-presentation of the view do not support BECOMING~teacher or BECOMING~human or just generally BECOMING. Williams (2010b) points out that, “the commitment to identity in representation furthers an illusion that leads us to repress processes of becoming at work in our own existence” (p. 127).

Deleuze attempts to open up ideas about our world, not close them and sees notions related to our understanding of who we are as fluid (Leach & Boler, 1998). Leach and Boler (1998) suggest that practicing for Deleuze

involves opening multiple lines of exploration for our own work as well as for our students. Naming the multiple at work in education is put in motion by engaging rhizomatic practices whose effects and outcomes may be (one hopes) far beyond our control. (p. 162)

Complimenting this perspective, Martin and Kamberelis (2013) point out that the

ontology of BECOMING enables (even urges) us to see things differently – in terms of what might become rather than as they currently are. It is characterized by its ability to engage productively with real movements of social change that open up new forms of life both for individuals and for collectives …. (p. 670)

In their writings Deleuze and Guattari develop vocabulary to “emphasize how things connect rather than how they ‘are’, and tendencies that could evolve in creative mutations rather than a ‘reality’ that is an inversion of the past” (Lorraine, 2010a, p. 147). Lines of flight would be among the vocabulary and offers a lovely sense of opening, seeking, exploring as we navigate our way around and through multiplicities, assemblages, and plateaus. Lines of flights are those ideas or connections or emotions – usually unexpected – that can, but not always or usually, change our course in thought and/or action. It could be a cough at a silent service or something much more dramatic.

As for interpretations, Deleuze and Guattari

describe them as traces of already established patterns of meaning; and offer maps as a way to pursue connections or lines of flight not readily through the dominant reality. Deleuze and Guattari wrote their book as such a map, hoping to elicit further maps, rather than interpretations, from their readers. (Lorraine, 2010a, p. 148)

And on their maps new directions may emerge along lines of flight (Deleuze, 1995; Semetsky, 2004).

We see that this offers openings in the ways we perceive our world with no closures or cut-offs. On our map we may reach a dead-end but the ability to turn around and consider our direction remains available. In education and teaching we see that some researchers want identities and correct strategies as a way to improve education. On the Deleuzian map, we can see that taking that road brings us to dead-end in a cave where the avalanche has blocked our movement.

St. Pierre (2013) asserts that “Each Deleuzo-Guattarian concept brings with it their entire system of thought, a very different order of things, and a vibrant and seductive ontology” (p. 653). Still, Deleuze and Guattari nudge us at every turn to fold their work into our work to propel our thinking. Their worlds are connected with our worlds are connected to other worlds with veils of ideas that come together or do not. As we walk through our present moments we are encouraged to think of possibilities and avoid the binaries that exist and thwart our creativity. As St. Pierre (2013, p. 655) cautions, “we have our work cut out for us as we try to set aside a system of thought, an order of things, that is so powerful we can slip back into it with a single, telltale word.”

Challenge to Science

We also find that Deleuzo-Guattarian views of science and research relate with our own assemblage as those views establish “connections between certain multiplicities drawn” from “semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus)” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 22–23). When we read their assertion:

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 22–23)

St. Pierre (2013) asserts that if we accept the Deleuzian notion of the past existing in our present and that repetition can bring about deeper understanding and the encouragement to generate new ideas, we find the Deleuzian challenges to science as welcome and inspiring (p. 648). If we stand in our present moment looking forward and back we see a turn toward science as a way to validate certain points of view. St. Pierre (2013) notes that in the 1980s, “to resist so-called value-free scientific knowledge and make public the knowledge and everyday lived experiences of the oppressed, the silenced, and the lost and forgotten in the service of social justice” (p. 648) brought tensions among those with a look toward particular lives and those with positivist attentions and distance. These struggles came on the tails of the War-to-end-all-Wars that saw the extent to which knowledge and science could save/shatter our world (St. Pierre, 2013).

We are not surprised when we read Deleuze’s comparison of education to business:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything … school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 179)

While we hope for something different, teachers, teacher educators, and others seem trapped in the habits of how education has always been (St. Pierre, 2004). We can look to see “what it means to talk of institutions breaking down: the widespread progressive introduction of a new system of domination” (p. 182) and resonate with the Deleuzian talk about the choke hold that governmental bodies have on the standards for and funding of educational research (St. Pierre, 2013).

We believe we offer a counterpoint to the grand narrative that many educational researchers hold dear. It is our intention to disrupt perceptions of culture, self, and ways to contemplate education and educational practice. More important than recognizing that teacher education may mean different undertakings in different areas of the world is the acknowledgment that sometimes we limit ourselves with tacit acceptance rather than exploring infinite possibilities.

Deleuze seems to recommend that we disrupt our thinking and established understandings to reveal differences that exist in the present moment of our lived world. As Stagoll (2010b) notes, awareness “of such specific circumstances means that the notion of some ‘thing in general’ can be set aside in favor of one’s experience of this thing, here and now” (p. 76). Doing this “enables the reading of the signs, symbols and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience” (Semetsky, 2010, p. 93).

Among educational researchers focused on teacher knowledge, identity is a frequent topic. We wonder about the professional identity, the development of that identity, and how we might foster that identity. Deleuze challenges that understanding of identity – where you look for sameness rather than difference. This is not an “I feel differently today than yesterday,” it is an exploration of nuance and how the repetition of who you are today requires that you begin again to discover your BECOMING, “to affirm the power of the new and the unforeseeable” (Parr, 2010c, p. 225).

For Deleuze, identity is reductive and is, perhaps, the strongest example of BEING where an idea is held in stasis and re-presented without critical examination (Williams, 2010a, p. 127). A well-defined identity leaves little space to consider difference. If we think about this notion in relation to the current trends in teaching and teacher education globally, we see that we have become mired in the identity of ideas and strategies without careful, critical examination. (We develop the discussion of these points in more detail in Hamilton, Pinnegar, & Davey (in press).)

As described by Leach and Boler (1998), Deleuze reiterates the lack of distinction between individual and collective and reminds us that “an engagement of concept, percept and effect characterized by energies vibrating and resonating along nomadic itineraries … cause those who travel to become other than themselves. How different this is from sedentariness with its rules of identity, resemblance of the self-identical form …” (1998, p. 156). For us these ideas connect to the ideas of world traveling suggested by Lugones (1987) where we travel across cultures and ideas to connect. It seems that at the crossroads we might find ways to inquire that seem less about decisions and more about opportunities to trace through “hardly recognizable intensive paths” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 236).

Deleuze sees no simple problems and encourages readers to find problems (Deleuze, 1990, p. 15) in a way that “disrupts life and thinking, producing movements and responses” (Colebrook, 2002, xxxiv). Approaching our lives in this way leaves us questioning and exploring the world around us. When reading his work, Greene (2013) recommends that we deliberately not de-couple and separate ideas but entangle them. As we explore these ideas we see it as an attempt to find proper glasses or, perhaps, seek new eyeballs. To understand Deleuze we must move beyond the literal. Defining his terms can be limiting if you capture yourself in the definition. Deleuze has so much to offer current thinkers in education.

We recognize that our understandings of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are BECOMING deeper and that in any present moment a line of flight could take us to a different multiplicity as we develop our assemblages of teacher education, for identity, of inquiry and more. We think carefully when we see Colebrook’s (2002) reminder that more

than any other thinker of this time, Deleuze’s work is not so much a series of self-contained arguments as it is the formation of a whole new way of thinking and writing … For this reason there is an almost circular quality to Deleuze’s work: once you understand one term you can understand them all; but you also seem to need to understand all the terms to even begin to understand one. (pp. xiv–xviii)

Within this text you see our attempts to grapple with issues that we think contribute to understandings of teaching and teacher education.