Notes on:
Gregoriou, Z (2004) 'Commencing the Rhizome:
Towards a minor philosophy of education'.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36
(3): 233-51.
Dave Harris
A follow-up by Lyotard (The Postmodern
Explained) took the form of a series of
letters between him and his friends: 'Marked by
the pragmatic context of their enunciation, they
never claim to be anything more than what they
are: a series of singular explications, each one
evoked in singular occasion' (233). Readers
are invited to join in at any point, and use the
remarks to launch 'another singular
reading'. This is 'minoritarian
writing'. It is designed to oppose
authoritative and complete readings which dominate
reality, and the main opponent here is Habermas
and his project to renew the Enlightenment.
By contrast, Thousand
Plateaus is seen as a welcome non
philosophical text, but it is unpopular,
because it does not meet the demand for
authoritative readings [it is also self-indulgent
bullshit] . At the same time, Lyotard wants
to deny that his own work is simply irrational,
and he writes instead in 'a minor style...arranged
in a paratactic syntax that defies climactic
moments'(234).
There are new demands for the philosophy of
education to provide some master discourse again,
and to split with contaminations from social
sciences, but Deleuze is required as an example of
how to engage with these demands without reviving
the old foundationalism. Educational
philosophy needs to consider the 'devotion to
sense, communicability, and the latter’s corollary
for an ideal speech situation (i.e., a mutual
interest between philosophers and educators about
what each other has to say)', avoid trying to
convert Deleuze into conventional pedagogy, and
develop the 'rhizome as metaphor... searching for
correspondences between that and organizations of
knowledge in learning communities'. [Deleuze
does not rate metaphors though]. A number of
ideas, including those from social sciences, might
be connected to this project.
Postmodern writing has either been stripped down
into lists of bullet points and key concepts, or
dismissed in various ways, including via
accusations of neo- conservatism. Deleuze's
critique of educational language as a series of
'order words' indicates the underlying appeal to
domestication and connection with common
sense. Students are left to 'agonize' about
whether Deleuze's terms are appropriate for
education. The process can be described as
'a discourse of intimidation in producing the
pedagogical subject of education' (235), as in Deleuze and Parnet on
the repressive traditions of philosophy. At
the same time, philosophy can find its place in
Education Studies for bureaucrats by claiming to
be some foundational subject.
Deleuze [Guattari particularly, surely?] sees
power as being exercised through over coding
[surely the abstract ordination of
deterritorialized flows, for capitalism?], as an
extension to Foucault on the regulation of the
subject. Educational philosophy needs to
avoid being coopted into the effort to domesticate
thought [this was apparently discussed in earlier
editions of this journal]. One conclusion is
that the insecurity of the philosophy of education
arises from the lack of a common audience between
philosophers and educators these days [with a
strange argument that bits and bobs of social
sciences have replaced philosophy—not in
Plymouth!]. It is common to describe the
position in terms of 'heteroglossia' or
'hybridity'. Yet little is made of post-
writers themselves, including Deleuze on the
'post-innocent post-Greek analysis of philosophy’s
double movement as "amorous love" that unites
lovers and "rivalry" that prevents the engulfment
of the one by the other through either an amorous
conquest or a consensus' (237). The rivalry
is with social sciences. Such 'avant-garde'
approaches have been squashed by the demand for
relevance and shared interests, for 'realism and
communicability'. Deleuze's insistence on
multiplicity becomes untranslatable, or packaged
under existing approaches in critical education.
The need to avoid domesticating postmodernism as
thought requires a postmodern pedagogy, but there
are clear problems in helping students to focus
their efforts and in assessing their work.
There is still a preference for the linear format,
and a challenge to it can be destabilizing as well
as liberating and entertaining. It is also
impossible to reproduce the kind of
interdisciplinary links demonstrated by Deleuze
and Guattari, and students commonly demonstrates
'a sense of loss' (238), [or vertigo]. The
issue of the utility of the course is also
prominent, and students need a good reason to
invest in particular approaches. Instead of
via the philosophical tribunal, students judge
themselves in the world of 'marketable skills':
these demands overcode learning [again I thinks it
is not overcoding, technically, but abstract
coding converging].
Deleuze is at least one of the more positive
philosophers, and his critique of standard
philosophy has an affirmative tone in advocating
connection and experimentation, play in
Nietzsche's sense. Derrida also stresses the
adventure of pursuing différance, and both
like nomadism. Deleuze's approach can be
contrasted with the paranoid and 'pedagogical
nightmare of positivism' which tries to track down
every line of flight (239). Nevertheless,
Derrida still operates with his own 'theology that
is always combating the nostalgia for presencing',
through the tactic of putting conventional terms
'under erasure'. Deleuze and Guattari simply
express no interest in metaphysics, and admit the
rhizome is a metaphor, 'and deflate with laughter
these metaphors' didactic (representational)
optics' (240). The point is to get the
rhizome functioning, but, tragically, 'the rhizome
has found a hospitable niche in pedagogical
discourse only for decentred and non hierarchical
systems of organization'.
Both root and rhizome are supposed to help us
understand levels of stratification and
territorialization. Trees dominate western
thought, in the form of taxonomy and structure,
whereas rhizomes are multiplicities.
However, rhizomes can be bad as well as good, as
in the example of couchgrass [or fascist rhizomes
in Guattari 2011].
But this continual deployment of organic metaphors
does not have a deeper meaning. The point is
to prefer 'paratactic syntax to the topologies
[rendered here is 'tropologies'] of surface and
depth' (241). In particular, there is no
'ideological subject of enunciation' [but there
are lots of nearly subjects]. There is no
structural depth, nor essence, only endlessly
forming transversal alliances [in practice it is
all fixed down by a fairly standard denunciation
of capitalism]. However, rhizomes are
difficult to separate from trees, and there are no
rigid separations, both are 'just moments in
becoming'. We see this with assemblages that
face towards the strata and also face towards the
body without organs which continually destabilizes
them. Thus rhizome and tree are not coherent
indexical signs or essences, but simply reflect
['trace'] particular intensities. Nevertheless,
philosophy of education has often codified the
rhizome in the name of an empowering critique of
stratification and authoritarianism. The
rhizome can offer some sort of connection between
an otherwise chaotic postmodern world. The
rhizome therefore becomes an organising metaphor,
and one includes using the Web 'as a rhizomatic
system'.
However, Deleuze's and Guattari's work concerns an
open ontology of connection and multiplicity, and
'never culminates in normative statements on
resistance or pedagogy'(242). Deleuze still
says that multiplicities have to be explored, once
we refuse to pin them down [attribute them].
The work only becomes a basis for emancipatory
pedagogy through an analogy 'between the ontology
of rhizomes and the utopia of the system without
any central root' (243), by assuming some
underlying emancipatory impulse, seeing the
ontology as still compatible with Enlightenment
liberation. There is always the danger that
this analogy will end with 'legitimizing micro
fascisms'
Rhizomes and trees are always interconnected,
always part of 'a multiplicity's variations', both
actual and potential. This can not be
managed by dualisms or avoiding stratification and
organization. In particular, any book, even
one with a linear narrative, can become part of a
rhizome [through interconnectivity,
intertextuality]. Root like books can
mobilize desires to cross boundaries.
Rhizomes can also end in new hierarchies,
reterritorialized bodies, the imposition of a
single obsessive line [Harry Potter is the
example!]. Translators and publishers
reterritorialize. Rhizomes are not innately
subversive and have nothing to do with 'normative
ethics' (244). We can see rhizomes 'in
corporate capitalism, in modulations of control in
human resource management, in education's
corporative modulations in order to produce
graduates with flexible markets skills'.
Rhizomes constantly turn into roots and vice
versa, in a never ending process. Paths
which have escaped some controls, like lifelong
training outside universities, reterritorialize
around market skills: Deleuze already anticipates
this in his work on the societies of control.
[Buchanan argues that commerical search engines
reterritorialize the Web. I think Cormier's
communities which discuss stuff can also do
this] Even 'incompleteness', long seen as a
sign of a welcoming ambiguity, appears in
corporate training. Being in debt is the
universal form of control, as in Deleuze's
critique of apprenticeships and training.
Lyotard has argued that philosophy is inherently
an autodidactic activity of opening questions to
thought. For Deleuze, there is always the
possibility of stuttering in one's own language,
making it a minority language. Philosophy of
education can be seen as a minor philosophy and
minor pedagogy. It no longer offers
transcendental answers, or pursues arboreal
philosophy with material gathered from
practice. It requires new encounters of
ideas, and must avoid reterritorializing itself
'as a personal genealogy, as the redeeming of
"voice" or "lived experience", as a new
regionalism' (245). The work on Kafka
demonstrates the nature of the minor, and Deleuze
and Guattari resist making it a biography, which
would avoid the interchanges between Kafka, other
literatures, and other philosophies. It does
break with the constraints of mother tongue, and
paternal hangups about matching with the past
masters and this style. It is experimental,
and connective—literary with political, personal
with social. It should not be seen as
representative but as embodying difference, the
disparate. It is nothing to do with exile or
nostalgia, a quest for recognition or voice.
It awakens the bilingualism of major
languages. It is both impoverished, lacking
certain 'syntactical and lexical forms', and
proliferating, overloading and paraphrasing.
For rhizomes to be creative, they have to be
minoritized compared to conventional pedagogical
discourse, 'as a metaphor for excessive
multiplicity and radical openness'(246),
constructing the multiplicity by subtracting the
unique. Minor writing deterritorializes
language and is politically immediate [somehow
moving directly to the possibility of collective
enunciation, and thus 'surpassing the necessity of
an ideal speech situation']. It is a matter
of living with opposed impossibilities, to have to
write in the major language while preserving a
minor one.
For philosophers of education it is a matter of
remaining skeptical but also having to manage
'normative statements for regulating educational
practice' (247), and these have to be seen as
components of 'the new assemblage of
enunciations', offering both diluted philosophy
and confusing pedagogy. This is a form of
stammering, with language itself. The
dangers are clearly an invitation to parody, and a
'privatized dandyism' in politics. However,
such efforts are immediately political—'everything
in a minor literature is political' [because it
offers an alternative space?], and the personal
becomes the political. We should remember
this if we want to criticize students for their
inertia—it is 'a political question regarding the
future of philosophical thinking'.
Similarly, feminist critique should not aim to
produce a uniquely feminine pedagogy, but to offer
philosophical critique of the main genre.
This is 'philosophy at the N-1 dimension'.
Incredulity towards grand narratives is not
enough. We should reconsider life as a
creative power, as immanence. To some
extent, our individual lives can act as 'the pure
event freed from the accident of inner and outer
life', seen in the ways in which [Deleuze says]
children develop singularities, despite all
looking like. This is what philosophy of
education should do, and which social sciences
cannot do—not preserve the notion of foundations,
but promote 'the respect for the singular' (248),
not offering to facilitate dialogue between
different disciplines as a metadiscourse, but by
offering a minor language, allowing new
singularities to be traced to a new
multiplicities, avoiding the old binary
distinctions, avoiding narrative statements and
the temptation to position one's self in one of
the apparent constants. This also involves
not speaking as the conventional subject of
enunciation, and 'allowing anonymous assemblages
of voices, acts, affects and bodily habits',
becoming bilingual in philosophy. In discussing
Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari also emphasize 'the
collective value of enunciation'. This
partly arises from the scarcity of minor language
speakers, which prevents them becoming
'masters'.
It is still necessary to avoid didactic teaching
of the history of philosophy, and we should
encourage 'finding instead of regulating,
encountering instead of recognizing' [sounds like
Philosophy With Children].
Similarly, writing should avoid 'attempting to
secure an ideal speech situation and a receptive
audience'(248). Philosophers have also acted
like students in their approach to philosophy,
instead of exploring possibilities in different
areas. It is possible to develop a certain
bilingualism, through the technique of 'pick up',
explained in Dialogues:
collecting things, allowing the play of chance,
and then exploring [often pretty superficially, as
in all those throwaways about anthropology, or
maths?].
Kafka did not like metaphors as a way of
synthesizing different elements into a narrative
structure. They domesticate heterogeneity
and hinder future possibilities.
Conventional philosophy of education operates with
these metaphors, still hoping 'to recuperate the
referential language of a metadiscsourse'
(249). The proper development of a minor
language '"deliberately kills all metaphor, all
symbolism, all signification, no less than all
designation"', quoting TP? The way
forward is not to mix or bridge the different
disciplines into some overall 'comprehensible
discourse', but rather the need to preserve
experimentation when encountering pedagogy,
creating 'a field that is non translatable against
the barren rationality of representationalism'.
back to education
studies
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