_
5.151
.; «imam
“Wu. 3mm. .6: ‘
a, .«afiakmmfin

... a :I
3! .35 .3.

t .. ‘
s‘nmwkufin
0L.ut)34

> 4)?!
, 38$ 1-.
4 it“. .51. .

1.1:: .
51c O'T‘uh“) AW‘
3.. ‘

 

, .

Ll

Anal
.1,
1»?

VI. ‘
4‘. l4)!

art: .1.

1:12.813

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO IMMANENCE: TEACHER
BECOMING IN A DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVE

presented by

Kaustuv Roy

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

Ph .D degree in Curriculum, Teaching

& Educational Policy

 

 

Date 08/051] OL-

MS U i: an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

 

 

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE IN REI’URN Box to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE | DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 cJCIRC/DateDuepGS-p. ‘I 5

 

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO IMMANENCE: TEACHER BECOMING IN A
DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVE

By

Kaustuv Roy

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2002

ABSTRACT

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO IMMANENCE: TEACHER BECOMING IN A
DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVE

By

Kaustuv Roy

This dissertation has two components—an empirical and a conceptual
one. The empirical part is a case study of the pedagogical and relational
problems of differential spaces faced by beginning teachers in an urban
innovative high school. I argue that most mainstream teacher education
programs have not been very successful in preparing teachers for the
highly differentiated atmosphere of the urban school Where many of the
assumptions of liberal mainstream schooling cannot be taken for
granted. One result is that beginning teachers face stress, burnout, and
leave the profession in large numbers. The conceptual part of the study,
in search of praxis that would allow teachers to realize the productive
power of difference and abandon identitarian ways, moves to the
theoretical perspective of Gilles Deleuze whose key philosophical
contribution has been the theorization of difference. The study brings the
theoretical power of Deleuzian pragmatics to bear on the experience of
schooling in order to realize the pedagogical possibilities of irregular
spaces; it offers a conceptual mode for new becomings through a
semiotic experimentation, and an analysis of affect in micro-spaces that

can open up new possibilities for curriculum and teacher becoming.

Copyright by
Kaustuv Roy
2002

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my committee at Michigan State University consisting of
Lynn Fendler, Wanda May, Cleo Cherryholmes and David Labaree for
their wonderful support and encouragement without which, it is not an
overstatement to say, this work would not have been possible. Each of
the personalities above, at various stages and in unique ways, have
contributed to my growth as a researcher. David Labaree supported me
throughout as my advisor, Wanda May helped me polish my research
skills, Cleo Cherryholmes, as one of my dissertation directors acted as a
catalyst in crystallizing this project and helped me take the next step in
my career, and Lynn Fendler, as the other dissertation director, with her
relentless critique and advice, helped me set my internal gyroscopes that
brought a greater integrity to what I wanted to say vis-a-vis how I said it.
Special thanks also are due to the Spencer Foundation Fellowship that
gave me the financial support while I wrote the dissertation. Finally, I
thank Raji Swaminathan, of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee,
for having made me part of a larger research project out of which came

the case study on which the dissertation turns.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction .......................................................................... 1

Chapter 2

The Case Study ................................................................... 51

Chapter 3

Rhizome and the Image of Thought ....................................... 74

Chapter 4

Signs and Nomad Thought .................................................. 117
Chapter 5

Affect and the Power of Thought .......................................... 156
Chapter 6

Conclusion: Mapping the Leaks ........................................... 174
REFERENCES .................................................................... 186

Chapter 1

Introduction

One wonders, finally, whether Man
is anything more than a set of
boundaries, a limit on existence...
Robert Harley in Introduction to
Spinoza Practical Philosophy

This study attempts to bring together theory and practice, that is, to
examine the usefulness of certain theoretical notions in the field of
educational practice. Although its starting point is a case study, the work
is not wholly or even largely empirical. It attempts to do what Pierre
Bourdieu (1990) has called “fieldwork in philosophy.” That is to say, it is
an effort to employ empirical work in directly engaging theoretical and
philosophical issues. In other words, it makes philosophy go to work for
us amid the turmoil of the everyday and attunes us to a different kind of
observation or angle of vision that renders visible what was not
previously apparent.

Further, in discussing the different possible approaches within the
domain of qualitative research, Harry Wolcott (1994) has observed that a
descriptive account can serve as a starting point for a theoretical effort of
interpretation. By refocusing on interpretation, such an effort might
attempt to develop the theoretical framework itself, offering thereby a

fresh angle to a problem of practice. This is important, for new solutions

sometimes require an altered theoretical space for their emergence. To
give an example, problems which have remained unsolved for long
periods of time, say, in algebra, sometimes have yielded solutions when
restated in terms of geometry or topology. Likewise, a problem in clinical
psychology is suddenly illuminated by looking at it from the perspective
of communication theory (Bateson 1991). The present work makes an
attempt along these lines in order to develop theory as praxis, as a way of
looking that changes the terrain, the very terms in which we see the
problem and our own approach to it.

In broad terms, the problem, the details of which are laid out in
Chapter 2, relates to teacher induction and becoming in an urban
situation. The urban or “inner city” conditions of schooling are rather
complex by most accounts, with student populations who often have very
different needs that are not accounted for by modernist mainstream
policies and views of education (Giroux 2000). The environment I discuss
demanded a different response from teachers in terms of what counted
as learning and how it was to be approached. And yet, the beginning
teachers I observed, continued to be bounded by the conventional
parameters in their curricular responses to the situation, although the
school itself, structurally, was open to innovation. Ill—equipped to see
difference in terms of its pedagogical potential, these beginning teachers
struggled to cope in a highly differentiated atmosphere. The result was

that they experienced considerable difficulties, friction and stress. The

teacher education programs some of these neophytes had been through
had not helped them to see the curricular possibilities of irregular
spaces, nor were the usual professional development programs, aimed
more at the normative compulsions of mainstream schools, of much use
here.

As I studied the school, a basic conceptual shift seemed necessary
that would prepare beginning teachers to embrace the constructive
possibilities of positive difference. For, as I saw it, the learning spaces
and pedagogical possibilities often were where the teachers were not. But
it appeared to me that it was more than a matter of pedagogy; that it was
not a mere question of adding one more pedagogic dimension to the
teachers’ repertoire, but it connected to the very images teachers held of
themselves and their roles that reified the boundaries and limited
possibilities of action.

Although the problem relates to a specific case, Wolcott (1994)
observes that “complex specificness” while heightening circumstantiality
may reveal implications and relevance to a broader context (p.98). It was
clear that the problem I was looking at had implications beyond the
particularity of the case study, and could be generalized to many of the
problems of urban education and of divergent spaces.

I saw my task as, first to theorize the character of the spaces I was
observing in the school, and the pedagogical possibilities that these held.

And second, to formulate certain conceptual tools for ways of looking,

thinking, and experimenting so that through the operationalization or
enactment of this new mode, the grip of the existing boundaries and
categories that are the result of settled dispositions could be loosened, as
well as the means worked out for realizing the pedagogical possibilities of
irregular spaces. And since settled dispositions could not be unsettled
without an examination of the notion of identity, it was important to look
at certain affective investments of teachers. To do this I chose to look at
stress as an important, everyday phenomenon among teachers, and the
way it affected pedagogical relationships.

As the study proceeded, it also became clear to me that the
problem I was looking at was not merely one of teacher becoming and
induction but could be seen as part of a larger problem of teacher
survival itself, in the context of increasing complexity of urban education,
and the challenge posed by a student body who could by no means be
seen or treated as a homogeneous group, and whose needs were so
diverse that the very assumptions of schooling, like a uniform
curriculum, set timings, and the classroom as the primary site of
learning, were put to question. It appeared to me that the order of
complexity the teachers faced was not to be overcome merely through
exposure and “adjustment,” or a matter of picking up certain “skills” on
the job, but something that required an epistemological shift or a
fundamental change in the way we think about learning. For, often, the

tensions that arose both in teachers and in the learning situation were

the result of attempting to contain diversity within techno—managerial
spaces they were familiar with, that is, within the horizons of possibility
delineated by the teachers’ own habits of thought (Liston & Zeichner
1996) and the training that they had received. Not only did this subvert
the context, and result in important pedagogical opportunities being
missed, but teachers admitted to feeling stressed and expressed fears of
early burnout through friction the situation produced in them.

What was necessary therefore, was a new conceptual space in
which the problem could be considered afresh. My problem, as I began to
formulate it, was to construct a conceptual frame that when entered into,
or a praxis that when enacted, new teachers would be better able to
insert themselves in differential spaces without referring or reducing
them to identitarian ways of thinking. To put it differently, the problem
was to dehabituate us from frozen ways of thinking about the
educational encounter itself, such as through recognition, and
representation, and instead to theorize about the encounter from the
perspective of a creative power of difference that would be helpful for
teachers wanting to meet the demands of the urban situation. The
inadequacy of traditional methods that emphasized uniformity and
manageriality (Blake, et a1. 1998) in the urban environment was borne
out in this case by the conversations I had with the founding teachers
who had opted out of the district curriculum to formulate their own

under the innovative program, and in whose assessment the mainstream

approach did not serve urban youth well. In such a context, my appraisal
was that teachers needed as much conceptual and theoretical support as
material ones in order to survive and flourish in those challenging
conditions.
Rationale for the Study
The rationale for the empirical study lies both in the importance of the
educational problem addressed, and the analytical effort of creating a
framework for looking at the problem from a new angle. First, the
problem of teacher induction and retention is a serious issue not just in
innovative environs but in school systems throughout the US. Eileen and
Stephen Weiss (1999) observe:
Over two million new K-12 teachers will be employed in the US.
over the next decade...more than one-third of these new teachers
will be hired in low wealth urban and rural school districts. This
large population of new teachers will be challenged to educate
diverse learners in an increasingly complex [situation]...
Unfortunately, first—year teachers are frequently left in a “sink or
swim” position with little support from colleagues and few
opportunities for professional development. Well-organized
induction programs are the exception rather than the rule, and
haphazard induction experiences have been associated with higher
levels of attrition as well as lower levels of teacher effectiveness.

Current estimates are that more than 20% of public school

teachers leave their positions within three years. (p.4) (Italics mine)
This means that out of the total estimated number of fresh inductees
mentioned above, more than four hundred thousand will leave their jobs
in the initial years. This, by all accounts, is an alarming rate of attrition.

Further, among those who choose to remain in the profession,
large numbers—in some districts up to 40%——leave the urban settings to
teach in suburban school districts (Weiss 1999). This problem of ‘flight’
among teachers is attributable in part to teachers’ lack of experience and
understanding of the social and economic context of the students. But
school districts, reading the problem in terms of control and classroom
management issues, have attempted to solve the problem of both teacher
flight and low student achievement by referring ‘problem’ students to
alternative schools or programs or by referring them to special education
(Sanders 2000).

However, this system of winnowing and sifting of students does
little to resolve the critical questions of how to help teachers teach in
urban settings and how best to provide a quality education for the
students in such settings. Instead, this approach simply results in the
undesirable formation of school tiers according to student skill levels,
student compliance, and teacher coping abilities. And that is merely to
deflect the issue to an alternative site, not to deal with it.

The answer, as I see it, lies not in categorizing students and

putting them away in special education sites, but in finding ways to help

teachers teach different students differently by reconsidering existing
assumptions of what constitutes teaching and learning. It was apparent
to me that this was not an issue of systemic reform that could be fixed by
making large scale structural changes, but rather, a question of basic
perceptions about education, and the boundaries and categories
employed in constructing school.

Of course, not all of the problem of teacher flight or attrition can be
attributed to problems of inadequate induction processes, but studies
(National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996) show
that it plays a significant role in the loss of teachers. Reports also show
that better induction programs keep teachers from leaving. This makes
teacher induction a vital area of concern and study. Its importance is
also heightened by the fact that “it is a boundary spanning field,
connecting teacher education, teaching conditions in the schools, and
field based professional development” (Olebe 2001, p.71). There are often
interesting problems at the edges and interfaces of these adjoining fields
because the interfacing is not always smooth, and the edges often do not
mesh. These result in odd boundary conditions that have generative
possibilities.

Eileen and Stephen Weiss (1999) also note that, despite the
positive impact of induction programs on retention rates, there has been
little sustained commitment in recent years to permanently institute

teacher induction programs as part of a formal entry process into the

field. New teachers have been left to figure things out once they got into
the classroom. An inadvertent consequence of this has been the tendency
by teachers to reproduce the existing patterns in a desperate bid for
survival. In Practice Makes Practice, Britzman (1988) shows how young
teachers coming in with a set of ideals and ideas often do not either have
the space to exercise them or know how to bring together theory and
practice. My own experience as a teacher educator and conversations
with novice teachers has shown the difficulty they often have in relating
what they learn in their program to actual classroom practice. This
tension is all the more heightened in the urban classroom, where the old
formulas of classroom management, a uniform curriculum, and
standardized assessments fail to work as they fail to respond to the
socioeconomically complex and often racially marginalized lives of urban

adolescents.

Conceptual Framework

I have theorized the above problem as it plays out in the specific instance
of my case study as a question of new teachers carrying with them
conventional ways of constructing boundary distinctions around
learning, teaching, identity, and processes of communication that get in
the way of encountering more fully the complex reality that they face in
the urban setting. The result is conflict, stress, and other problems

including burnout. My belief is that while boundaries help us construct a

reality out of the sensible, when reified they also cut us off from the
subtleties of differential transformations that occur at the peripheries.
So, in a sense, my attempt here is to find ways in which to connect
teachers to the positivity of difference (Deleuzel994). Such a praxis
would allow teachers to draw on the productivity of difference and thus
to connect more fruitfully and creatively to the divergent spaces of the
urban environment. Instead of being passively affected by conditions, I
look for ways in which teachers can affect the situation in which they
find themselves by breaching or rupturing the old boundaries that can
lead to a release of new forces. For, the very breach or rupture is also a
production of differentiation that expands our powers of acting and
affecting, as we shall see.

It is my contention that the constructed role of the teacher and the
learner within the modernist framework are too representationalist to
meet the challenges that today’s diverse settings pose for the teacher.
Decades of Taylorism and Tylerism have narrowed and reified the
horizons within which thought is possible (Kliebard 1992). Citing Oliver
and Gershman, Hartley (1997) observes,

[E]ducation is supposedly about leading us away from where we

are, but its effects may be to lock us into technical rationality as

the only mode of thinking. In short, education ignores ‘ontological
knowing’...one which can include ‘feelings, vague sensibilities, and

inarticulable thoughts’...Here speaks the language of the

10

unpredictable, of the imagination, of the passions...none of which

are objectively reducible to discrete, analysable entities...(p.72)

It is this ‘other’ of education that has been suppressed in the attempt to
scientize learning and make education serve the interests of the
marketplace and of technocratic rationality that will be the focus of our
investigations; that is, I attempt to find ways to allow these submerged
sensibilities, and murmurs, and unformed multiplicities to surface by
means of which we can explore new ways of thinking and feeling, and
find ways of producing new and different effects in thought.

The theoretical lens through which I look at the problem of teacher
induction and becoming is the social philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze conceives of philosophy as a pragmatic practice of actively
creating new and different ways of affective thinking and being. Taking a
N ietschean View that it is necessary “to learn to think differently—in order
to attain even more: to feel differently’ (Nietzsche 1982, p. 103), Deleuze
attempts, through what may be seen as a radical form of empiricism, to
change the very image of thought that has dominated through the
history of philosophy.

And the image of thought challenged by Deleuze is representation-
alism: “According to this image, experience can be reduced to the
interiority of a self-constituting subjectivity” (Hayden 1998, p.55). That is
to say, representationalism assumes that thought is a faithful interior

representation of the “outside” within an autonomous subject. And

11

therefore, recognition becomes the chief tool of thought. This vastly
affects pedagogy as it does other facets of life. From Plato to Descartes,
and Kant to Hegel, we find different forms of representationalism and
synthesis of the faculties occurring that affirms this view. One of
Deleuze’s key projects is to liberate thought from its representationalist
image that, according to Deleuze, has subjugated thought itself and
inhibited it from functioning more freely (Deleuze and Guattari1987).
What precisely is the problem with representation? In Deleuze’s
(1994) words,
Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference.
Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding
perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates
everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. (pp.55/ 56)
This model of thought subordinates the experience of difference to the
notion of representation, seeking to validate experience from a single
center, and therefore leaves us “unable to think difference in itself”
(Hayden 1998, p.6). Immediately it is clear what it has to do with our
problem. Representation captures the experience of difference and forces
it to conform to the four criteria of representation namely, identity,
resemblance, analogy and opposition (Deleuze 1994), thereby
suppressing difference itself in the interests of producing identity or
similarity. This is what I observed in the school where the new teachers

were engaged in producing “similarity” in the learning space. To liberate

12

thought from the clutches of representation is to be able to think
difference in itself and realize the productive power of difference. Then
the curriculum expands in previously unthought ways.

I have mentioned earlier the urban school environment I was
engaged in researching was a highly differentiated one in which the
commonplaces of schooling had to be renegotiated again and again. The
often unarticulated middle class assumptions of schooling like a stable
home, a future orientation, the idea of continuity, and even average life
expectancy could not be taken for granted. Students often talked of not
living beyond thirty or thirty five because they had not seen too many
survive that age in their immediate surroundings. This among other
things changed their perspective on matters.

Given the pressure of these internal differences that distinguish it
from mainstream reliance on uniformity and homogeneity (Kliebard
1992), my contention is that teachers who come to appreciate difference,
not in order to fetishize or hypostatize it, but in order to realize its
creative potential, are more likely to succeed in positively contributing to
the urban learning situation. And as I hope to show, they will also have a
better chance of survival under these complex conditions than those who
think of learning in terms of successfully imbibing the mandates of an
official curriculum in line with mainstream standards and parameters.

Turning to Deleuze, we find that he is the philosopher of difference

par excellence, who has been referred to as “the difference engineer”

13

(Pearson 1997, p.2), and whose effort has been to theorize difference by

moving away from representationalist ground:
The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of
representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of
representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery
that...all identities are only simulated, produced as an optical
“effect” by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We
propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of
representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of
different to different...(Deleuze 1994, p. xix)

In the world of representation, “common sense” or the Kantian concordia

facultatum contributes the form of the Same. That is at the heart of

representation is the image of thought as subjective unity of the faculties

that produces correspondence and recognition. Therefore thinking within

this image of thought becomes limited by the notion of recognition.

Hayden (1998) remarks,
The representationalist image of thought portrays thinking not as
the creation of new values and new senses, but as the proper
allocation and distribution of established values and the
verification of its own image. (p.27).

We want teachers to move away from this image of thought and create

“new values and new senses.” But the modernist curriculum that

14

dominates in schools would persuade teachers to think otherwise.
Hartley (1997) observes,

And yet, whilst postmodern culture is centrifugal, curriculum

planners—despite the rhetoric of choice and diversity—withdraw to

the centre, in a rearguard action, to regroup, not only themselves,
but also the subjects of the curriculum, building in courses which
will serve to integrate the fracturing self of the postmodern pupil.

(P-73)

This attempt to integrate is a last ditch attempt to save representation,
and cannot bring about new thinking in relations or provide solutions to
the problem of difference.

What can Deleuze offer us here? Rejecting the representationalist
image that what is encountered is experienced as recognition, Deleuze
says, “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an
object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter” (Deleuze 1994,
p. 139), and in whichever manner this something is grasped it can only
be of the order of the sensible, and not of the order of recognition which
presupposes the existence of categories of the possible. In rejecting
recognition as the basis of thought, what Deleuze is contending is the
application of the categories of the possible to real experience: “To apply
the possible to the real as if it dictated what real experience can be is to
posit a world of representation rather than to encounter the world of

actual experiences” (Hayden 1998, p.29). Thus, for us to be in touch with

15

the arising of differential experiences in the senses, we have to renounce
strong identification with categories. For Deleuze, what is encountered by
the senses “is not a quality but a sign,” that is, not something universal
but differential (Deleuze 1994, p.140) (italics mine). And the sign
perplexes us “as though the object of the encounter, the sign, were the
bearer of a problem” (op.cit. p.140). In other words, each encounter that
forces us to think posits a problem in the form of a sign that has to be
experimented with and read. Every encounter is a fresh problematic.

Using these Deleuzian insights that it is the differential as the sign
that arises in an encounter rather than universals of representation, and
that, it is “the sensible multiplicities that are the conditions of actual
experience” (Hayden 1998, p.35), I look at the learning encounters at the
school and find it exhibiting such slippages and leakages so as to
constantly exceed and escape the representationalist space of
technocratic rationality within which traditional curriculum tries to
contain it. I show how events, pedagogy, curriculum and relationships in
the school are multiplicitous rather than inhabiting the linearity or
uniformity of techno-rational space.

And since in this differential space what are encountered are signs
rather than universals, I make the theoretical move of casting the
problem of teacher becoming in semiotic terms, that is, as a problem of
reading and experimenting with signs. I claim that new teachers are

better served by being educated to see the learning encounter as a

16

system of signs they have to read and experiment with and not
something they can take for granted or treat in terms of representation or
recognition. Teachers have to construct the plane of action even as they
encounter it out of the differential experiences that are always in excess
of what thought as recognition can expect.

But this demands a very different awareness and a manner of
looking that cannot be apprehended from the static image of thought as
representation, that is, from within the old habits of thinking. In order to
help teachers move away from the old terrain I offer possibilities for a
praxis. I call it the “apprenticeship of the sign,” and explain the process
in detail in Chapter 4. Mined from the work of Deleuze, the
apprenticeship has four components—the generative, the transformative,
the diagrammatic, and the vacant—each a sensitization to the operation
of signs through a performativity and experimentation, the effort being to
open ourselves up to signs in a way that we see ourselves as part of the
process of their arising, what Levi Strauss (1969) called being situated at
the level of the signs themselves and Deleuze (1972) calls being
immanent to the sign. This is a becoming of the teacher unto the sign, a
perception—action that changes the very image of ourselves from
transcendent subjects outside the signs we perceive, to an immanent one
in which we are no longer transcendent subjects looking in but
implicated in the signs as they arise. This perspective closely parallels

what Maturana and Varela (1998) have called structural coupling. In

17

other words, the image of ourselves and reality is displaced from a
universal and representational one onto a differential plane where we
begin to enact and move with the productivity of difference. It is only in a
fundamental displacement of this nature, I argue, that a new approach
to the problem of difference is possible. This results in a change in the
very image of thought by initiating what Deleuze and Guattari (1987 ) call
“schisis” or “secret lines of disorientation” in ourselves making room for
new possibilities.

“Thought is again possible,” wrote Foucault (1977) celebrating
Deleuze’s work, “genital thought, intensive thought, affirmative thought,
acategorical thought—each of these an unrecognizable face, a mask we
have never seen before; differences we had no reason to expect...”

(p. 196). Indeed, in the company of Deleuze, new thought becomes
possible, together with the invention of a new cartography wherein what
was once regarded as a unified subject is redistributed semiotically over
sign regimes—we find ourselves at the level of the sign, being constructs
of signs themselves rather than something apriori— that allows us to
discover the power of difference. We are asked to make small ruptures in
our processes of thinking, start minor dissident flows, not grand
“signifying breaks,” for grand gestures start their own totalizing
movement, and are easily captured. Instead, small ruptures allow flows
that are not easily detected or captured by majoritarian discourses.

These ruptures make connections across domains of signs through a

18

becoming that displaces anthropocentric and humanist obsessions
allowing the emergence of hybrid multiplicities or matter-thought
compositions that are always in the process of change, a becoming-other.
For signs are hybrid entities, matter-thought conglomerates that have
nothing inherently human about them. The framework of the present
discussion therefore is located on a posthumanist plane that is not
tainted by a logocentrism that denies difference.

Deleuze along with Guattari (1987) offer such a framework which
they variously call nomadic or “schizoanalysis” (pp. 17/ 18).
Schizoanalysis displaces us from the transcendent plane of the sovereign
individual to one of composites and multiplicities in which instead of
representation and resemblance we have differential constructions and
becomings. The dynamic constructivism of Deleuze comes out of the
possibility of releasing the traits and singularities trapped within our
composites. I discuss this in Chapter 5 of the dissertation. The discovery
of singularities or traits that have no name, label or directionality allows
us to glimpse the fields of flux and indefinitude that compose us as well
as the events around us, and according to Deleuze (1972), increases our
affective capacities.

Such a conceptual schema where difference is not a threat to an
organizing principle but of key productive potential was vital to the task
of arriving at a theory / praxis for a pluralistic enterprise. My effort was to

open up the conventional boundaries drawn around educational

19

commonplaces in order to create conceptual spaces where teachers can
develop a new relationship with their work through experimentation, and
realize that difference is not outside of us but that we are ourselves
internally differentiated, always already collectives. The study then
unfolds as a praxiological analysis that offers a way of looking at the
learning encounter that helps teachers to emerge onto a new terrain of
complexity and realize in the process the power of their own becoming
and multiplicities.

One of my central claims therefore is that students would be better
served if schools functioned with a Deleuzian cartography, a way of
perceiving the learning encounter, and the mapping of affect and
becoming that leads to new possibilities. As to the relevance and
necessity of engaging the elaborate theoretical machinery of Deleuze in
considering the problem of teacher becoming I contend three things:
First, we have to recognize that the problem that l was encountering had
much broader implications than the immediate context itself. The
particular situation only served to highlight what is rather common in
schools and other social institutions—the helplessness to appreciate and
encounter difference without attempting to subject it to the identitarian
pressures of dominant epistemologies (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2000a),
that is, to the pressures of representation and recognition. Therefore the

issue deserved a deeper consideration and a level of theorizing that

20

befitted its scope since part of the task I have undertaken is to go beyond
the case study and develop an analytical framework.

Second, and equally important is that the existing approaches and
frameworks have not resolved the problem that I address here, and
instead, there is only increasing pressure on institutions to find ways of
“managing" difference. On this issue, teacher education programs have
not done much more than include diversity as an added element to the
existing discourse, an approach thoroughly, and rightly in my opinion,
criticized by theorists such as McCarthy who observe that difference has
been co-opted into the discourse of power “that attempts to manage the
extraordinary tensions and contradictions...that have invaded social
institutions, including the university and the school” (McCarthy and
Dimitriadis 2000b, p.70). The thrust has been to “petrify” difference and
absorb it into the mainstream instead of allowing it a more profound
consideration that it deserves.

And finally, Deleuze has discussed the productive power of
difference in ontological terms, something not found in psychoanalytic
theory, social psychology, or the existing discourses on diversity and
difference.

Thus, the importance and justification for this study lies in its
attempt to move thought toward a new way of operating in the
curriculum field through the formation of a posthumanist plane of

action, and to attempt to free thinking from the domination of reified

21

categories through the production of difference. Its project is to
contribute to what James McDonald and William Pinar have called a
“reconceptualization” of the field of curriculum theory. Pinar (1994)
states that the reconceptualization
begins in fundamental critique of the field as it is. The order of
critique distinguishes it from most reform efforts, efforts which
accept the deep structure of educational and social life, and focus
upon “improving it.” The Reconceptualization aspires to critique
which insists upon the transformation of extant structures. It must
function to dissolve frozen structures. Thus implicit in such an
analysis of contemporary educational practices is their
transformation. (p.66)
Although in his recent address to the AAACS body, Pinar (2002) referred
to the contemporary scenario as “post-reconceptualist,” (p.3), I continue
to use the term without the prefix to indicate the continuing work of
permanent critique. Part of the work of reconceptualization involves
looking at theory as experimental tools of thought in order to open up
ideas about practice. Such labor attempts to transform the field of
curriculum “into a theoretically potent, conceptually autonomous field
which inquires systematically into the multi-dimensional reality that is
education and schooling in ways that aspire to transform both” (Pinar
1994; p.71). And this infusing of the field with theory must be done, as

Pinar has pointed out, in a manner that is sensitive and responsible to

22

our present. I think Deleuzian pragmatism can be appropriated and then
reconstituted through educational experience to form an important

conceptual matrix for advancing thinking in curriculum.

Positioning the Work

Relating the framework of the present study to some chosen bodies of
literature will be helpful at this point in the explication of this work. I will
locate the Deleuzian position using rudiments of five perspectives:
aspects of Marxist and Critical theory, some feminist positions,
psychoanalytic theory, poststructural perspectives, and Luhmannian

systems theory.

Deleuze and Marxist positions

Although both Anti—Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) and A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) are trenchant' critiques
of capitalism and all other forms of institutionalized domination and
oppression that forces our multiplicities into false totalities, Deleuze’s
approach to relations of production and power is different than those of
the traditional left. First, I will run a single thread that is an intertext to
many Marxist analyses in order to highlight this difference—by making a
brief allusion to the theory of surplus-value which is basic to most
Marxist positions, I will attempt to raise a distinction. Deleuze and

Guattari (1987) observe:

23

In these new [late Capitalist] conditions, it remains true that all
labor involves surplus labor; but surplus labor no longer requires
labor. Rather, it is as though human alienation through surplus
labor were replaced by a generalized “machinic enslavement,” such
that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any work
(children, the retired, the unemployed, television—viewers, etc.). Not
only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but
capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than on a complex
qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation,
urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of
perceiving and feeling—every semiotic system. (p.492) (italics mine)
The surprising insight that uncouples surplus-value from labor, and
shows it to be the result of complex qualitative processes that enslave
through consumption rather than exploit through relations of production
is also at the same time a warrant for entering a different plane of
analysis where consumption, or the desire to be passively affected by
other bodies, in a Deleuzian-Spinozist sense, can be resisted. Deleuze’s
work on Spinoza shows us possibilities of transforming passive affects
into active ones, that is, a plane where we learn to be producers rather
than only consumers. This is a very important point from the point of
view of teachers and creates new points of pedagogical resistance against

the consumerist culture that reduces life and learning to the banal.

24

Therefore my position is that although Critical theorists and neo—
Marxists have criticized conspicuous consumption and capitalism’s
culture industries, they have not fully grasped the fact that this has,
paraphrasing Deleuze’s (8r. Guattari 1987) words, created a global space
in which human destiny itself is recast. In other words, I feel that
Marxist positions fall short of giving us the tools necessary to escape
subjugation on this emergent plane that requires new ways of becoming.

Second, critical theorists “tend to employ a dialectical framework of
analysis, and therefore, the analyses tend to explain relations in terms of
opposing forces” (Fendler 1999, p.184). Arguments are cast within such
traditional oppositions such as oppressor/ oppressed, empowered /
subordinate. Deleuze’s analysis instead follows nonbinary modes of
differentiation like “singularities” (Massumi 1992), and change is seen in
terms of becomings or formation of new multiplicities. The trajectory of
becomings of any composite cannot be known in advance and is a
question of careful ethical experimentation. Also, Deleuze suggests that
each constituted subjecr includes totalizing tendencies or micro lines of
domination that need to be worked upon, and therefore there are no easy
oppositions or platforms available. Careful selections have to be made
from our multiplicities that have both de- as well as re-territorializing
elements.

Instead of the broad class struggle of the Marxists, or the broader

race, class, and gender struggles of neo-Marxists, Deleuze’s political

25

project and confrontation with power is mostly at the minoritarian level,
concerned with the conditions of capture and escape of the “molecular”
or singular moments of life by the “molar” or forces of homogenization; it
looks at the conditions of possibility of specific struggles and resistances
of different groups like sexual minorities and other marginal social
movements which Marxism treats as epiphenomenal to the historical
antagonism between classes. Instead of the class contradictions of
capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari enter the micro-political dimension to
look at the kaleidoscopic formations of desire and its becomings, and its
potential in the struggle against hegemony. An awareness of the
molecular within the molar, that is, the singularities within our
constituted experience creates the possibilities of a “civil disobedience,”
to borrow a phrase from Rajchman (2000), that can direct our “badly
analyzed composites” toward a constant unbecoming, and therefore
toward new social formations.

While attention to the microdynamics of desire opens the door to
the molecular politics of multiplicities, yet it is also a threat at the same
time: “There are so many dangers, and each line [of becoming] poses its
own. The danger[s] of rigid segmentation or a break appears
everywhere...The prudence required to guide this line, the precautions
needed to soften, suspend, divert or undermine it, all point to a long
process of labor directed not only against the State, but against itself as

well” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983a, pp.95/ 96). Thus, unlike Marxism,

26

which discounts individual struggle, Deleuze warns that we not only
must struggle against the state but against ourselves as well. Further,
Deleuze and Guattari caution us of “micro—fascisms that exist in a social
field without necessarily being centralized in a particular state
apparatus” (p.97). In other words, all struggles themselves contain the
potential of becoming new hegemonies. All this points to a level of
complexity in Deleuzian ethics and dynamics of struggle and a
differential politics of thought not usually found in Marxist analyses.
Finally, Deleuze detects a kind of violence that remains outside the
state apparatus not conceived of by Marxist analysis. Rajchman (2000)
notes that it appears as
a violence of forces that no state can control or rationalize in
advance, and which comes to the fore in cities or is worked out
through city rather than state-forms...lndeed one might say that in
Deleuze, a city-state tension tends to replace the great state—society
distinction that Foucault came to see as the chief limitation of
modern political thought. (p. 103)
This uncontained elemental is a force of “deterritorialization” that eludes
capture and regularization by the State. It is a violence that always
hovers at the fringes of order and upsets the calculations of power.
Called the “philosopher of the city” by Rajchman (1998, p.3), Deleuze’s
subtle theorization of the “city” as an abstract diagram with a quality of

violence that is not fully captured by the State machinery makes it a

27

powerful analytical lens to look at urban situations, and therefore aligns
itself to my enterprise of looking into an urban institution surrounded by
typical inner city problems.
Feminisms and Deleuze
I will begin addressing some feminist positions with a quote from
Elizabeth Grosz, an anti-essentialist feminist writer whose work on
Deleuze is widely cited. Grosz (1994) observes that Deleuze and
Guattari’s
notion of the body as a discontinuous, non-totalizable series of
processes, organs, flows, energies, incorporeal events, speeds and
durations, may be of great value to feminists attempting to
reconceive bodies outside the binary oppositions [of] mind /body,
nature / culture, subject/ object and interior / exterior oppositions.
They provide an altogether different way of understanding the body
in its connections with other bodies...(pp. 164/ I65)
Grosz sees Deleuzian conceptions of the body and his Spinozist refusal to
subordinate the body to the mind as a possible way of undermining the
phallogocentric positioning of the female body. Deleuze (1992) has
argued that the body always exceeds the consciousness we have of it,
and therefore we do not know what the body is. In Grosz’ work there is a
sense that Deleuze’s writing contains resources that can help feminists

map bodily practices that evade the masculinist notions of the self.

28

There are others (Shukin 2000, Irigaray 1985) however, who warn
against hasty adoption of Deleuze’s texts in feminist thought. While they
agree with Grosz about its potential for escaping Platonic thinking, at the
same time, they also feel that Deleuze’s works mythicize and fetishize the
feminine without paying attention to the actual conditions of embodied
women. Shukin (2000) writes on an apprehensive note,

Throughout A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari indirectly

summon up philosophical and social texts with foreboding

investments...Deleuze believes, perhaps, that his own iconoclasm
is enough to redirect the force of these allusions to subliminally
power his own purposes...l would suggest, however, that while

Deleuze does manage to siphon enormous affective energy off

intertexts that are evoked without being raised, an inexorable

weight of allusions pressures his thinking into old molds —

particularly when it comes to sexual difference. (pp. 152/ 153)

The allusions to the limitless possibilities of geography in Deleuze’s
writings evokes in some feminist minds “colonial anticipations” and male
adventurism. The frequent references to woman-becomings as a “path to
original potency” summons up existing “exploitative discourses of
animalisation and sexualisation” of the feminine in the popular media
(Shukin 2000, p.153). In other words, while Deleuze points to new

possibilities for women, in his writings, gender remains latent and

29

women “a sort of threshold or medium” for possibilities rather than
“embroiled” actualities (op.cit. p. 154).

To Shukin’s question above as to whether Deleuze and Guattari
can “control” the involuntary allusions to exploitative intertexts in their
work, one must respond that Deleuze and Guattari’s strategy seems to be
to take the potency and the potential released by evocative and powerful
intertextual material so far forward as to subvert their own processes,
that is to a point where they cannot recover their original ground in the
reader. Massumi (1992) observes,

The feminine gender stereotype involves greater indeterminacy

(“fickle”) and movement (“flighty”) and has been burdened by the

patriarchal tradition with a disproportionate load of paradox

(virgin / whore, mother/lover). Since supermolecularity involves a

capacity to superpose states that are “normally” mutually

exclusive, Deleuze and Guattari hold that the feminine cliche offers

a better departure point than masculinity for a rebecoming-

supermolecular of the personified individual..Becoming—woman

involves carrying the indeterminacy, movement, and paradox of the
female stereotype past the point where it is recuperable by the

socius as it presently functions. (p.87)

Therefore, bodies of either sex are urged toward a becoming—woman
which takes us beyond the limit of recuperability of gendered

individuality.

30

Along a different trajectory, feminists like Alice J ardine (1985) have
objected to the tendency in Deleuze’s writings to ignore macropolitical
and macrohistorical struggles in favor of minoritarian ones. Jardine also
objects to the dispersal of identity in Deleuze’s work, and the active
encouragement to become other, that is, to be indiscemible or faceless.
To this it is possible to argue that for Deleuze and Guattari, macro-
political struggles that are waged in terms of well recognized patterns of
signification cannot get to the micropolitics of desire at the level where
many of the struggles are actually located. Deleuze’s effort is to create a
geography of intensities that is free of all ideal significations and Platonic
taint which have enslaved thought and maintained territories of
exploitation.

In Platonism and all patriarchal systems Deleuze and feminists
have a common enemy. In order to appreciate the significance of
Deleuzian resistance we have to understand that struggles against
domination and against patriarchal systems are carried out not only in
groups and collectivities, they occur also within the micro-multiplicities
of subjects in uncontrolled, secret and subterranean ways. Thus there
are “nonrepresentative struggles, struggles without leaders, without
hierarchical organizations, without a clear-cut program or blue—print for
social change, without definitive goals and ends” (Grosz 1994, p.193).
That is to say, while overt struggles with recognizable ends, leaders,

symbols, and means are important, faceless struggles that have no

31

particular definition must and do occur alongside, every moment. It is
mostly to this kind of struggle to escape patriarchy that Deleuze and
Guattari address themselves:
It is of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar
politics, with a View to winning back their own organism, their own
history, their own subjectivity...But it is dangerous to confine
oneself to such a subject which does not function without drying
up...It is thus necessary to conceive of a molecular women’s
politics that slips into molar confrontations...(Deleuze and Guattari
1987, p.276).
Molar or majoritarian political projects tend to dry up without
corresponding struggles at molecular or minoritarian levels. It is a
misunderstanding to think that Deleuze is privileging the individual
struggle over the collective. For Deleuze, the so-called “individual” is
always already a collective, a multiplicity, and therefore molecular
confrontations must not be understood as individualistic and solitary
escapades but new movements of desire unhindered by modernist
images of the self. Foucault (1983) has noted that the question raised by
Deleuze is: “How can and must desire deploy its forces within the
political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the
established order?” (p.xii). These struggles without faciality need different
tools and conceptions like schizoanalysis which can de-Oedipalize our

subjectivities and release affective energies for new forms of resistance.

32

Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
Like some feminists Deleuze (1995) attacks what he sees as a totalization
of desire in Freudian psychoanalysis. Deleuze rejects the basic Freudian
position of the unconscious as the Oedipal theater: “We attack
psychoanalysis on the following points which relate to its practice as well
as its theory: its cult of Oedipus, the way it reduces everything to the
libido and domestic investments...” (p.20). For Deleuze, the libido is
invested in the social field in ways that cannot be conceived within the
reductionist space of the Oedipal structure. In Foucault’s (1983) words,
Deleuze and Guattari combat “the poor technicians of desire...who would
subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and
lack” (p.xiii). In Western metaphysics, from Plato to Lacan, desire has
been seen as a lack—a lack in being that strives to be filled through the
impossible attainment of an object. Deleuze rejects this position.
Following Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze turns desire around and
understands it as primary, positive and productive. Instead of aligning
desire with fantasy and illusion, as psychoanalysis does, Deleuze sees
desire as what produces the real, creating connections, relations and
alignments. For Deleuze, desire is a relation of effectuation, not of
satisfaction, it is the primary producer of reality and all relations within
it, and I venture to add that this dramatic inversion of Platonism must

have positive theoretical consequences for feminist positions since

33

women have traditionally been framed as the repositories of that lack
within male epistemologies. In Foucault’s (1983) words, Deleuze and
Guattari attempt to free us from the “old categories of the Negative”
(p.xiii).

To free ourselves from the reductive psychoanalytic and Oedipal
yoke is to take a step toward freeing the multiplicity of desire from
bondage to totalities. But the problem of desire remains, and since we
can no longer leave desire in the hands of the experts and professionals,
who are seen by Deleuze and Guattari as agents of the state, we have to
analyze and actively engage in ethical experimentation in order to make
new “connections”; through a proliferation of connectivities there is a
chance that we might escape Oedipalization (Introduction to Deleuze and
Guattari 1983 b, p.xxiii). This urge toward a freeing of ourselves from the
various agencies of the establishment and the turning toward an ethical
experimentation with our collectivities is an important move from the
point of View of inventing new pedagogical practice, and therefore for the

purposes of my project.

Deleuze and the “Poststructuralists.”

I will begin by comparing Deleuze to Foucault, two thinkers of our era
who often appear very close in their utterances and political
commitments. Although treated as poststructuralists, Deleuze as well as

Foucault can be distinguished from other writers of that genre. In Truth

34

and Power, Foucault (1984) observes, “I believe one’s point of reference
should not be to the great model of language (langue), but to that of war
and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a
war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of
meaning’ (p.56). With this Deleuze would agree wholeheartedly. In fact in
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) monograph titled Nomadology: The War
Machine, as well as scattered throughout their other works, are
references to this different point of reference, of a machinery of war that
is key to understanding social formations and the clash of forces.

But a different distinction between Foucault and Deleuze may be
useful here, not in order to oppose them, for there is a great deal of
resonance between the ideas of the two, but to bring out the subtle
differences so that they can better complement each other. While
Foucault talks of power, Deleuze talks of force. Both Foucault’s ‘power’
and Deleuze’s ‘force’ are, constitutive and productive. But “Force is not to
be confused with power,” says Brian Massumi, one of the most insightful
readers of Deleuze, “Power is the domestication of force. Force arrives
from outside to break constraints and open new vistas” (Foreword in
Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.xiii). One way to understand Deleuze’s
notion of force is to consider the discursive and the nondiscursive and
what brings them together in social action. Massumi (1992) gives the
example of a set of instructions for woodworking which gets translated to

certain actions on the wood although

35

the interrelation of relations between the wood and the tool bears

no resemblance to that between concepts, which bears no relation

to that between phonemes or letters. (p.17)
The implication here is that there is an abyss between the discursive and
the nondiscursive or the Visible and the articulable that is bridged by
force or what Deleuze has also called the abstract diagram. Without
force, that is always already present, the worker, the instructions for
woodworking, the tools, and the wood could not come together. Force
then also acts like insight, that makes the connections. Further,
according to Massumi (1992), what makes any action repeatable,
multiplies it, is a regularizing network of forces. “And since the action of
this reproductive network of forces is qualitatively different from that of
the productive network of forces from which the event arose” in the first
place, we must make a distinction. We give the reproductive network
anther name: “power,” in order to distinguish it from force (p.19).
Therefore while power is the relations of regularization, force is the
instance and the bridging moment between the discursive and the
nondiscursive.

Second, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes:

It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its

domination; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it;

death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most

“private.” (Foucault 1984, p.261)

The notion of power then, in Foucault, is seen to be closely aligned with
the unfolding of the human condition. Death is “power’s limit,” that is, in
death there lies the possibility of a final escape from power or repetition.
Power is thus constitutive mainly of social existence and relations.

It is precisely this human, organicist aspect that is absent in
Deleuze’s notion of power or force. For Deleuze, the “immanent life that is
pure power” is “impersonal and nonorganic...that goes beyond any lived
experience” (Deleuze 1997, p.xiv). It is, instead, “an ontological concept”
in which virtual qualities become actualized in determinate space—times.
Deleuze’s reading moves the concept of force toward the impersonal,
toward an “outside.” Although this might seem somewhat essentialist,
Deleuze is clear that force is always contingent and ever becoming
without an arche or a telos, to borrow a famous phrase from Derrida
(1970)

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze (1985) shows how
Vertov attempts to attain, through cinematic means, a vision released
from human coordinates, a pre-human perception in a “any—space-
whatever” (p.40). Similarly, Deleuze (1997) speaks appreciatively of
Cézanne’s ideas wherein form or even matter give way to forces,
densities, and intensities: the tectonic folds in a mountain, the forces of
germination in an apple, to what Cézanne referred to as the “dawn of
ourselves” or “iridescent chaos” from which the stubborn geometries of

our world later emerge (p.xxxv). Here, death is not “power’s limit,”

37

instead, death itself is a reordering of connections, of making
momentarily visible the ordinarily invisible.

Finally, while Foucault talks of “limit experiences” that generate
new forms of subjectivity, Deleuze’s intervention takes a metaphysical
turn in which “concepts” are created and “ontological speculation
prepares the terrain for a constitutive practice” (Hardt 1993 p. 105). So,
while Foucault’s pragmatics operates through a negation, “through a
refusal” of the kind of subjectivity that “has been imposed on us for
centuries” (Foucault 1984, p.22), Deleuzian pragmatics operates through
an ontological construction and experimentation with concept formation.
1 see the two as bearing in on the same project but from two different
planes, with different coordinate systems, and with important differences
in methods and tools. For Deleuze “when words and things are opened
up by the environment without ever coinciding, there is a liberation of
forces which come from the outside” (Deleuze 1988c, p.87). It is this
emphasis on “force” as also something operating on a space of the
“Outside” that distinguishes Deleuze’s force from Foucault’s power. At
the same time, it brings Deleuze closer to systems theorists who make an
organism /environment distinction as we shall see later.

From the point of View of the case study, the establishment of a
posthumanist ground using the notion of force is useful. For, in the
construction of multiplicities or the “rhizome” as Deleuze also calls it,

what is important is to get rid of anthropocentric obsessions and

38

humanist images before we can even begin to imagine ourselves as
collectivities put together by an aleatory outside. So, although teacher
becoming, that is our central issue here, may appear to be something
personal, it is really a matter of getting away from personalist
conceptions toward a more tectonic and geographical distribution of
forces and intensities through which one can be a producer of affective
power.

It might be useful also to make a distinction between Deleuze and
another of his distinguished contemporaries —Jacques Derrida.
Referring to Derridean deconstruction, Deleuze (1997) writes:

As for the method of deconstruction of texts, I see clearly what it is,

I admire it a lot, but it has nothing to do with my own method. I do

not present myself as a commentator on texts. For me, a text is

only a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of

commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by a

method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of

seeing what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs

the text. (pp.xv / xvi)

Thus, while for Derrida, there is “nothing outside of the text” or “there is
no outside text,” or “there is nothing that is not a text” as his famous line
il n’ya pas de hors texte has been variously translated, for Deleuze it is
the extra-textual practice that “prolongs the text” that is of primary

concern. Using Luhmann’s (1990) insight that the world emerges at the

39

same time as our description of it, the text can be said to emerge
simultaneously with extra—textual practice. Looked at in this way, there
is always an emergent “outside” of the text that remains cognitively
unapproachable to it, except a posteriori. Thus, Rajchman (1998) notes
that Deleuze “makes construction the secret of empiricism,” and that
“deconstruction is not a word in his idiom” (pp.2/ 3).

Also, close textual analysis that exposes inherent contradictions in
the text is not Deleuze’s style. Instead he appropriates selectively from
the texts that serve his pragmatic purpose. That is, although Deleuze, in
an apparently similar fashion to Derrida, seizes hold of the works of
previous philosophers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, unlike
Derrida his work is not directed toward a deconstructive reading of those
works. Instead, Deleuze is after ethical praxis, and describes himself as a
“constructivist.” Reading selectively, with Bergson, Deleuze develops an
ontology; with Nietzsche, he sets that ontology in motion to constitute an
ethics; and with Spinoza he takes a further step in this evolution, toward
politics. His method is a process of accumulation and constitution.
Ontology inheres in ethics, which in turn inheres in politics.

Deleuze’s relationship with an ‘outside’ also allows him to deal with
the danger of an idealism, something that threatens much of the
poststructural oeuvre. Critics like Taussig (1993) and Massumi (1995)
have noted that one of the central ironies of postmodern theoretical

discourse is that the social constructionist critique of transcendence (i.e.

40

reference to an independent reality) and the metaphysics of presence (i.e.
inherent authorial meaning), that was meant to return meaning and
interpretation to the social, historical, institutional and material
processes of their production, has turned instead into its own form of
idealism. By making human language the measure of all things, these
critics allege, the poststructural oeuvre is threatened with linguistic
idealism.
How does Deleuze’s work meet this challenge? I will quote
Boundas’ introduction to Deleuze (1993) on this question:
Deleuze’s thought cannot be contained within the problematics of
the now fashionable textual allegory. The main thrust of his
theoretical intervention is in the articulation of a theory of
transformation and change or, as he likes to say, of a theory of
pure becoming that, together with a language adequate to it, would
be sufficiently strong to resist all identitarian pressures. It is this
relentless effort to articulate a theory of transformation and
change...that motivates Deleuze to replace Being with difference,
and linear time with a difference-making repetition. (p.4)
This intervention in the form of transformation escapes the over-
determination by the linguistic sign by breaching the known in the
process of becoming. The world arises at the same time as the cognitive

being, and therefore is not available as a text in the instant of becoming.

41

There is a relationship with the “outside” of thought that can be better

understood from the systems perspective.

Deleuze and Systems Theory

Like Nietzsche (1967) who believed that the task of philosophy is to
create possibilities and modes of existence, Deleuze and Guattari are
incessant concept creators with which they forge new relations, bring
into View new distinctions. Discussing the work of concept creation,
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) make the observation that no concept is
ever complete, for that would be tantamount to invoking primordial
chaos, that is, in which there is no distinction. Every concept is therefore
limited and “irregular,” and is “a matter of articulation, of cutting and
cross-cutting” (pp. 15 / 16). And further, they continue, “The concept is
defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency, but it
has no reference; it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the
same time as it is created” (p.22).

The idea that concepts are a matter of “cutting and cross-cutting,”
and that they are “self-referential” resonates strongly with certain key
notions of systems theory and especially the work of Niklas Luhmann
(1990). Luhmann writes that all observation is incomplete and generates
paradox and blind spots:

The source of a distinctlon’s guaranteeing of reality lies in its own

operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the

42

distinction cannot be observed...Another way of expressing this is

to say the operation emerges simultaneously with the world which

as a result remains cognitively unapproachable to the operation.

(13-76)

The Deleuzian notion of concept can thus be seen as a close parallel to
Luhmann’s notion of distinction. Just as the viability of a Deleuzian
concept is based on its consistency, the guarantor of the reality of an
observation or distinction in Luhmann’s case is its own “operative unity.”
In other words, both are self-referential.

The second important point of similarity is between Luhmann’s
notion of “world,” or “environment” as he characterizes it elsewhere, and
Deleuze’s (1988c) idea of the “Outside.” Their respective analyses lean on
a similar distinction—system/ environment and concept/ outside, but
these are never absolute dualities, for what is system in one context can
appear as environment in another. For both, the environment and the
outside are inexhaustible but with an important difference. In Deleuze’s
work, the inexhaustibility tends to appear as a positivity, that is, as a
field of potentialities, whereas for Luhmann, the inexhaustibility arises
out of the possibility of new observation or new distinctions.

Deleuze’s work also has close points of correspondence with the
work of the systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

Maturana and Varela’s (1998) notion of “structural coupling” between

43

system and environment resonates with the notion of becoming in
Deleuze:

In an organism...[the] realms of interaction open the way to new

phenomena by allowing new dimensions of structural coupling.

(p.176) [italics in original]

For Maturana and Varela the world is not a given, but is brought forth
continually through the very act of living or structural coupling. Their

term for self-referentiality is autopoiesis, or self—generation that brings
forth a world, and in the very process of world creation a new cognitive
being emerges every moment.

Further, Varela (1992) talks of microidentities and microworlds
that are the result of continual transition of the living organism from one
state of readiness-for-action to the next. There are no stable entities, only
dynamic states. Deleuze too rejects the notion of the stable subject, and
instead talks of haecceities and singularities. Both Maturana and
Varela’s positions are used at several crucial junctures in this work to
clarify the Deleuzian position.

The notion of self-referentiality could be important and useful in
pedagogical relations and in the kind of teacher education I am going to
propose in a later chapter. Self-referentiality could work in two ways: by
steering us away from the representationalist frame that keeps us
bonded to the old identitarian ways it can show us the incompleteness of

any observation, and therefore bring out the differential element always

44

present in every idea, concept, or distinction. This can open our minds to
the notion of difference as an inalienable presence in every repetition.
And second, the notion of “bringing forth a world” points us toward a
deep ethical responsibility, and the need to bring forth new concepts in
our work as teachers in order that we may challenge the existing order
by harnessing new forces or distinctions, and not continue to be
enslaved by old ones and the worn-out spaces they occupy. Further, the
inexhaustibility of an outside or the open link with the environment is
also an indicator that reality or the system is not a given, and we can

collectively change it.

Analysis and Interpretation
Here I will present a brief overview of the general interpretive framework
that I will employ to analyze the case data that follows. My purpose
throughout is to work out a praxiological analysis that will open the door
to a different kind of practice and teacher thinking. To this end, I will
bring to bear on the case study the extensive theoretical oeuvre of
Deleuze and parts of systems theory. Wolcott (1994) says,
Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, interpretation works its
way to center stage, the descriptive account serving only as
introduction or example for a major effort at interpretation. More
than simply linking up with theory or leaning on it for an

interpretive framework, the objective here is to develop that

45

framework. (p.43)
The development of a conceptual framework for helping teachers change
the way they deal with highly differentiated situations is the major goal.
Using the case study as an example from which I draw some categories
for grouping the significant problems that I witnessed, I use that
experiential platform as a jumping off point for a theoretical discussion
in an attempt to illumine some of those categories using a Deleuzian
perspective. I claim that certain naturalized assumptions among teachers
about the nature of boundaries that define curriculum, teacher identity
and the notion of the student contribute to the frustration that teachers
feel, as these boundaries rather than the experienced realities define the
possible, thus restricting the scope of possible responses. Research has
shown that the ‘objective reality’ of the formal organization called school
is largely a result of the continual affirmation of rules, dispositions and
habits of thought through the everyday decision-making practices of
teachers and administrators (Cicourell963). In other words, it is through
the boundaries and categories affirmed daily that school is experienced
in a certain way. The result is a structure of beliefs and categories that
emerge reified as solid and stable in our signification systems. Using
Deleuze, I try to find ways of rethinking and experimenting that will allow
us to move beyond those confining spaces.

In the case study, we see evidence in new teachers of the implicit

assumption that the learning situation is bounded by the walls of the

46

classroom and the fixed reference points of school subjects. The
uncertainty that we witness among new staff when learning spills over in
uncontrollable ways into the streets, placements and beyond, and does
not visibly proceed in a linear fashion within a physical location, subject
area, or measurable markers exemplifies the problem of boundaries and
categories. My use of Deleuze is to force those boundaries open so that
the productive power of difference can enhance our affective capacities.
Students learn things that are valuable to them at off—campus locations
(placements) which are regarded as being outside school, and in between
sites, in conversations between themselves, and in gestures and modes
of being that are often not measurable. Teachers are often unsure how to
connect to the different ways of knowing and how to capitalize on the
individual rich experience of the field and their backgrounds that the
students bring in with them because the teachers perceive traditional
and fixed boundaries around what can be considered school. As a result,
what the students take back with them into the field become limited
because of the habits of thought the school building from its environs,
and the curricular from the extra-curricular.

My belief is that a more complex understanding about the nature
of boundaries in which we are imbricated and the lines of
communication between sites will open the door to a fruitful set of
relationships that is both more fluid and generative. It is for this purpose

I introduce Deleuze, whose work on “deterritorialization” is an attempt at

47

reexamining boundaries and useful for us in looking at the possibilities
of gaps and holes and in-between spaces where learning takes place in
unusual and discontinuous ways. Deleuze is an “ethnographer” of the
nomad; his philosophy tends to be brushed over with molecular elements
of lived experience, and therefore valuable for the explication and
theorizing of the case study. Through Deleuze and the questioning of
“dominant significations” we reach a terrain of multiplicities, a “nomadic”
topology whose cartography is based on flight from “rigidified
territorialities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp.2l4-221) onto “molecular”
or micro-elemental passages that involve a virtual space. Chapter 3 of
the dissertation investigates these in-between spaces and leakages, the
slippages and ruptures that become visible when we use a Deleuzian
map.

A second matter of concern that came out of the case study, the
question of communication or a matter of reading signs is treated in
detail in Chapter 4. Signs arise when we encounter something, a
difference or a distinction; the signs that arise in encounters lead us to
draw boundaries that delimit them, contain them as this or that event
according to majoritarian beliefs, predispositions, and habits of thought
(Deleuze 1990a). The fourth chapter goes into the question of signs and
the examination of sign regimes. The limitation placed around the sign,
or rather, the process by which we recognize the discreteness of an event

or sign often remain obscure to ourselves. In terms of the curriculum,

48

how we define a learning event often treads and retreads
representationalist ground. It is therefore through an investigation of the
sign (Deleuze 1972) that we discover our taken for granted ways of
reading and recognizing signs.

Calling the fundamental educational event as an encounter—
between teacher and student or student and curriculum and so on—
which amounts to the generation of chains of signification, the fourth
chapter explores what happens when one realizes that, to borrow Alfred
Korzybski’s famous words, the map is not the territory. That is to say, we
try to get away from representationalist ground and onto a more open
territory through a semiotic experimentation. Using Deleuzian praxis to
move away from dominant regimes of signification, I examine the
micropolitics of the sign in the construction of the educational encounter
and simultaneously look at our own constitution by the sign.
Redescribed in semiotic terms, our identities begin to become less solid
and boundaries open up for new curricular investigations, for identities
are inextricably woven into the boundaries that we draw around
curriculum (Pinar 1994, 1995, 1998).

And this connects to another important issue that came out of the
case study, the problem of affect and stress, that is dealt with in Chapter
5. Linking up to Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, I examine how signs can be
read so as to release our powers of being rather than diminish our

existential powers. It is toward a pragmatics of the sign and an ethical

49

semiotic experimentation to which I turn in order to theorize about the
problem of teacher thinking that leads to stress. That is to say, I shift the
problem of affect from the domain of private experience to a different
terrain, to a problem of signification and the images in thought that are
the result of dominant significations. By this I hope to show that a
certain manner of relation to signs and the concomitant image that we
have of ourselves is helpful in diminishing the problem of stress.

The key theme of this work therefore is the opening up of
boundaries constructed through representationalist images in pedagogic
encounters by developing conceptual tools for careful examination or
deterritorialization of sign regimes, as well the release of affective powers
by looking at the differential transforms and fluxes beneath our
constituted selves. Deleuzian pragmatics allow us to envisage the
production of new spaces for teacher perception and action, and to
rethink educational commonplaces and thereby release us from the
oppression of reified categories. This release brings with it a certain
energy of freedom and a creative potential of difference that has the

possibility of releasing new powers of being and acting.

50

Chapter 2

The Case Study

Arnie emerges out of an obscure door along North Street’s scruffy,
brick-lined buildings, and ambles down the cold windy street to
the bus stop. A few dry leaves, remnants from the fall, swirl
around him. He huddles in one corner of the shelter and fumbles
in his pocket for the city bus pass. Arnie has just left his placement
for the day and is heading back to The City School for his
afternoon “in-house” science class. He has spent most of the
morning at a Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) distribution
center weighing and checking out the case histories of infants, and
distributing vouchers that mothers can exchange for infant food.
This is a part of his school internship called placement. Arnie does
not get paid for the work at the W1C but gets school credit towards
his graduation—something which seemed a very remote possibility
six months ago.

Near the end of his junior year, Arnie had been expelled from
one of Milwaukee’s high schools. According to Arnie, his expulsion
was the result of a series of difficulties, constant fights, ethnic
tension, and gang activity that he got into during that year.

Thinking over it all during the summer, Arnie realized that he

51

simply had to get back to school, but he found that given his

situation alternative schools were his only option. But he wanted

no part of alternative schools. It was his father who first heard
about The City School, and together they paid a visit to the
school’s lead teacher, Jim, to make enquiries. Jim was skeptical
about Arnie’s ability to work in the community without supervision
but Arnie’s persuasiveness won the day and he got his second
chance. Talking about his experience Arnie says, “I learned more
in the first nine weeks here than I did in all of high school.”

(Journal Entry#8)

The City School is by no small measure a remarkable place, an
evaluation that someone like Arnie would agree with wholeheartedly.
The group of teachers who founded The City School did not form a
charter, but applied to start a school within the District Public School
system, under a scheme called the Innovative Schools Program, a
program floated in order to invite new ideas for catering to difference,
that is, for responding to different needs of urban adolescents.

At the time I began visiting the school it was entering its eighth
year of existence. District reports on The City School showed high level of
attendance (93%) and graduation (90%) rates in a district with a truancy
rate of 40 percent and an equally high dropout rate. A Regional
Educational Laboratory report (NCREL 1998) also stated that the

innovative schools “outperformed their district peers on the whole,”

52

achieving “Board Standards on seven indicators, while the district as a
whole achieved standards on two” (p.3). While the statistics were
impressive, it is the actual feel of the place that made me want to get
involved in what the school was doing for these young people and find
out how it was doing what it was doing, the kind of people that took on
this challenge and the demand the school placed on its teachers.
Preliminary visits showed that this school, which I will call The
City School, had, since its inception, distinguished itself in many ways.
Its beginning itself was remarkable. A group of teachers had decided to
provide a very different atmosphere than the “faceless and hostile
buildings [mainstream urban schools] where thousands are held” and
where “students have to switch off certain parts of their humanity in
order to survive.” They wanted to create a place where “you did not need
to look over your shoulder in order to feel safe” (cited from interviews
with teachers). Not only did they want to build a different atmosphere
but also offer a curriculum that was much more suited to the needs of
urban youth whose lives were rather complex, many of whom had to
support themselves and their families from an early age, had no regular
homes, lived in unsafe neighborhoods, and among whom teenage
pregnancy, drug problems and dropout rates were high. It is under these
conditions that I began to look at how beginning teachers and teachers
new to the innovative environment coped with the very different needs of

urban youth.

53

For those of us for whom the public school is an article of faith,
studying new approaches and creative solutions for the system becomes
vital. For me, the public school is not just an educational place but an
arena for the formation of the public itself. The big reason for looking into
such a school, out of which evolved the question of teacher induction
and retention, was my belief that one possible future of public education
is in innovation of the kind I was witnessing.

The building in which The City School is located is not very
different from Arnie’s placement. It is at one end of downtown where the
banks and prosperous businesses taper off and a rundown quality takes
over. At the street level there are shops and eateries and the lift takes
you up to the fifth floor where you step out directly into the lobby of the
school. There is a security person at the desk, smiling and friendly. The
ceiling is low and the walls are white and clean, with large sections
covered by notice and display boards. The corridor makes sharply angled
turns and opens into a series of classrooms on either side. Most of the
classrooms are generous in size and have large windows. Seating is
grouped around tables. As there is acute shortage of space, students use
the public library, which is only a couple of blocks away, as their library
resource. There are no science labs or other auxiliary facilities as far as I
can see.

The pedagogical principle on which the school was built, one

teacher explained to me, was that learning is not a special condition, that

54

a human being was naturally predisposed to learn: “Children learn all
the time, you cannot stop them from learning.” Only, one could be
learning all the wrong things, all the destructive things if one didn’t have
the right opportunities. In other words, when we say a child refuses to
learn, s/he is learning the art of resistance or something else. This, she
pointed out, made nonsense of the bell curve and the myth that some
children don’t learn. Which brought upon the teachers the enormous
responsibility of finding out how each child under their care did learn.
And so individualized instruction played a large part in the design of the
curriculum here.

The City School’s curriculum was organized by fusing two broad
curricular strategies. One was the city-as-school model that originated in
the New School for Social Sciences; it involved bringing in the issues of
urban life into the school as much as possible and taking the school
beyond the physical walls back into the city. The idea was that the
students must not be trapped within walls of the classroom for too long
and pursue their learning into the life around them that included
educational field visits.

The second model brought into the picture was the idea of service
learning, that is, learning through experience whose roots can be traced
all the way back to Dewey. Service Learning is structured around
placements that put students in the community in a work-learning

experience. Placements are located in enterprises ranging from law

55

offices, to elementary schools to community health centers. The teacher,
also called the resource coordinator here, supervising the student in the
placement, writes a curriculum for each placement that reflects the type
of work in which the student is engaged. So the teacher here is also a
curriculum developer which is important to note. A Learning Experience
Activity Packet (LEAP) is supplied to the student by the resource
coordinator. The packet consists of a series of assignments or projects
related to the placement. LEAPs are due at the end of every nine-week
cycle.

Besides supervision by the resource coordinator, students are also
mentored by personnel at the cooperating placements. These individuals
help plan learning goals and activities and see that the agreement to
provide the student with a meaningful learning experience is fulfilled.
The cooperating resource records the students’ attendance and assesses
the student’s growth and learning as part of an evaluation report. The
students are not paid for this work but receive 1/4 credit hour time toward
their graduation for every 36 hours worked at a placement.

The students indicate that the placements are a big reason why the
school has clicked for them. “Our placements depend on us a lot, expect
a lot from us...and we have placements where we can usually learn new
things,” one student observed. Another said, “ They know that I can do
the job.” The sense of reliance and responsibility seems to play a big part

in the relationship between placements and the students. Supporting

56

this view, the school program coordinator says, “Having them [students]
out in the community does a lot for their self—images a lot of the time.
Also, it’s good for the community to know that these kids are okay” (Field
notes 04/05/02 and Interview excerpt).

While placements are a key feature of the City School curriculum,
the students also enroll in other core classes at the school which meets
the state and district competency and proficiency standards. The options
are not too many but the science, math and language courses are all
there. As for the AP courses, the students take them online with support
from the staff. Students also enroll in university courses and get college
credit. Recently the students voted to learn Latin when an option was
given for including an additional course! The real limitation is staffing.

Innovative schools typically tend to be small. This one is a high
school with fewer than two hundred students of whom nearly seventy
percent are African Americans, seven percent Hispanics, fifteen percent
Whites and the rest Asians and Native Americans. Most of these students
can be described as being “at-risk” (although even as I use that phrase, it
is not clear as to who is at risk, society or the youth). A majority of them
had dropped out of school at one time or another and had found their
way to this place. The school has ten staff members in all, roughly
balanced in racial composition.

Politically, the founding teachers did not want hierarchy. They

rejected the usual separation between teaching and administration, and

57

felt that the two realms were inseparable. One of the older teachers
explained that by creating artificially separated zones of responsibility
“the work of the educator is fragmented.” Therefore the City School,
although a part of the public school system, became a teacher run
school. For formal purposes, they had to have one of the teachers
function as the nominal head but the responsibility circulated among
them, and the functional head continued to teach at the same time.

A four-tier structure exists for governing The City School. The
School Advisory Board represents broad and diverse community
interests. It meets quarterly and provides a direct link between the
community and the program. Board input guides and informs the
overarching goals of the school and brings in reflections of changes in the
urban community. Next, the Board of Directors, composed of school
faculty, parents, and resource site representatives oversee operations of
the school. The group meets monthly and through its site-based
management orientation, monitors the schools activities and provides
support where necessary. Third, day-to-day decision-making occurs at
weekly staff meetings. Decision-making takes place through consensus.
And finally, a Student Council composed of student volunteers sees to
the more student-centered, day-to—day interests of the school such as

planning field trips and other activities.

58

Refining the Question

The history of innovations shows that such innovations as I am talking
about often tend to have a limited life; after an initial period during
which there is a burst of enthusiasm there is a tendency to get
reabsorbed into the undifferentiated middle one way or another. This
tends to happen frequently when the founders retire or the original group
fragments and new group members join; the power of the original vision
begins to dilute and fade and the school falls back into the
undifferentiated mass from which it had distinguished itself.

The City School, is precisely at this critical juncture now. My
concern is that in the process of falling back into the sea like a spent
rocket the considerable positive gains made and insights achieved are
lost to the educational community. It is important that the hunger for
change and reform must actively take into account the considerable good
work that has evolved in such places without attempting to use it as a
cookie-cutter model nor pushing it aside as one-of-a—kind experiment;
instead the educational community should develop an active relationship
with such innovative moves. The City School is struggling to find out how
to resist that gravitational pull of the undifferentiated mass: “The
vultures are always circling overhead, waiting to rub us out...And
internal resistance, that’s key to our survival,” MS, a lead teacher

observed. (Interview with MS#1)

59

Now, one of the major sources from which such a centripetal
tendency toward the ‘Same’ and the elimination of difference comes is
from the direction of fresh induction of teachers. MS tells me,

Soon there will be only myself and two others left of the original

group. Unless the incoming teachers learn how to run this place,

do the placements and things the school will slide...maybe close
down. All the innovative places I know are having trouble with
their new hires. Most of them simply don’t understand how these

places work. (Interview with MS #1)

There are powerful reasons for this. First, teachers bring with them their
conventional expectations of what a teacher’ s job entails (Labaree 2000).
Second teacher education programs rarely take into account innovative
school programs and their very different needs. Also, new teachers often
do not have much of an appreciation of the original imperatives and the
struggles the school has had to face nor do they fully comprehend the
vision of the founders. The problem has been to incorporate their
energies without subordinating them to a fixed vision, as well as to
maintain that critical line of flight without severely compromising the
very purpose of the innovation.

As the reader will observe, I have narrowed down the problem to a
specific region: that of teacher induction without severe compromise; a
question of bringing the two, novice teacher and school, together without

disabling either. The implications of this goes much beyond the current

60

context, for, not only can innovation be important as a way of
introducing much—needed change, the lessons learnt from such
experimental sites can point to what is wanting in regular set-ups in

mainstream schools.

Talking to Teachers

In the data, we frequently find concern on the part of older staff
regarding how to integrate new staff. Interestingly, in the early meetings
we attended, the talk was about how the new teachers will “fit in” to the
existing set up. In subsequent references to this issue, the question
became “how do we integrate new staff?” More recently, the question has
further evolved into “how can we work together.” This last has also come
about with the realization on the part of the school staff as a group that
they will have to be responsible for their own staff development in ways
that they had previously not considered.

The problem then is this: new teachers trained in average teacher
education programs and / or having taught in mainstream schools faced a
new challenge in an urban innovative high school, demands were made
on them that often upset all ‘normal’ expectations associated with what
people have come to know as doing school. Discussing new hires, MS
comments

They usually tend to be managerial...in one of the other schools

they are having trouble with one of their new hires. He believes in

61

confrontation, suspending kids...you know...We are beginning to
get some of that too, but that is not what we are all about.”
To my question as to why he thought they tend to be managerial, MS
responded,
Places like this are hard. The kids range from overeffusiveness
[laughs] to total indifference. Their backgrounds are very
complicated and our educational assumptions and ideas of what
they need are simplistic...To come to terms with all that is a
first step...But the first impulse is to control and the kids react to
that... (Interview with MS #1)
I ask MS whether he thinks teacher education programs can help new
teachers confront these tendencies and issues in any systematic manner.
MS seems doubtful: “It’s a very different tack we are talking about...what
could be done other than somehow find the “right” people?” he muses.
Next I speak to LS, one of the new teachers. Speaking about her
difficulties at The City School, she says:
I have never done scheduling for students or the writing of
curriculum. In the schools I have worked in, the students get their
schedules from wherever... I am having to learn very different
things. Also, students can actually choose and write up their
schedules but I had to learn how to keep track of them all. I have
never seen a placement before or worked at going out and creating

a new placement or internship. That is a whole new skill l have to

62

learn. And each student’s learning program has to be written up
around the Placement. I feel a little overwhelmed at this point, but
I’m sure I will love doing it but it is all very new. (Interview-LS#1)
Another teacher, AD, a teacher from West Africa and with a background
of having taught IB programs in Science in one of the city’s well known
schools — one that boasted of all its students going on to college, came to
the school because he was looking for “a challenge.”
I wanted a change and I knew some teachers here — and they said —
come on over and try this place if you want a change - you are
sure going to get it. And they were right. This is very different. The
onus is on the students to learn. The student is empowered to take
charge of how much they want to learn. But for new teachers like
me, it is also a change. We are not always sure - what are the
Learning Experience Activity packets? How do we actually do
attendance in this place? How to develop resources? There are
many new adjustments to be made. Student class size is another
issue — there are small classes — how to teach multilevel students?
(Interview with AD #1).
“The problem is,” GM, an older teacher says to me, “these are not
separate skills that some of us possess. They are part of a certain
approach to students...it comes out of that.” What kind of approach, I
press him. “Well, some of us would fight for them to get educated...and

they know that. We do what is necessary. All this is taxing, I admit, but

63

the school is innovative only so long as each one of us innovates”
(Fieldnotes 04/05/ 02). GM seems to imply that what it takes to educate
these kids is not so much a list of skills as it is a matter of attitude and
perception.

I ask KC, a teacher new to The City School, who has ‘substituted’ a
lot in the district, how working here compared with the other places.
“This place is small,” KC says, “and you work much closer with the kids.
Like mentoring, for example, which is big here.” What kind of additional
effort does it involve to work here, I ask. “I don’t know that it is some
additional thing, but there’s lots of things taken for granted which you
find out little by little.” For example? I persist. “Well, teachers are
expected to keep track of each student...that rarely happens in large
places. If the kids goof off in the placements, they close the door on us.
The community comes to know...there is always this pressure, of things
outside your control” (Interview with KC #1).

The fears of burnout are always present among staff. Some have
taken retirement at an unusually early age. Touching upon this issue,
NC, an older teacher says, “ I saw two people fall apart.” Are the
challenges here greater than, say, at a regular school, I ask. “Not
necessarily,” she responds, “but if you get close to the kids, there is an
enormous burden...too many things going on in their lives. There is a

frustration sometimes in not doing enough.” How do new teachers cope

64

with this? “Some leave,” NC responds, “but for those who stay, things
begin to change after a while” (Fieldnotes 04/ 07/02).

A significant strand in what I was observing thus far appeared to
me to be: that the ways in which new teachers, whether new to the
profession or to the innovative environment, came together with the
school seemed to throw up some unique problems of practice for the
entrants, and that there were significant gaps in the visible and invisible
ways in which the functional whole of the school worked and the ways in
which often new people were initially prepared to function as teachers. In
other words, there was an interesting hiatus between the two orders of
perception—those of the coterie of older teachers who were founders and
recent entrants—that gave rise to tensions within the school as well as to
frustration for the newcomers. It was a good moment to begin making

sense of what I was seeing.

A Note on Method

Michael Agar has written: “In ethnography... you learn something, then
you try to make sense out of it, then you go back and see if the
interpretation makes sense in light of new experience, then you refine
your interpretation, and so on. The process is dialectic, not linear” (cited
in Wolcott 1994, p.11). In the spirit of this I began to look for enduring
patterns and relationships in the data, for ways of grouping the chunks

of experiences that I had recorded. According to Wolcott (1994), analysis

65

begins when you start to identify critical components in the data. It is
when the data begins to get transformed into a story worth telling. There
are various approaches to this process of turning raw data into “cooked”
data. In attempting to make sense of the field, I have used a four-tier
system of analysis found in ethnographic research namely: 1. Item level
of analysis; 2. Pattern level of analysis; 3. Structural level of analysis;
and 4: Complex and multi-level analysis (LeCompte 86 Schensul 1999).
First, ‘items’ are those events, behaviors, statements or activities that
stand out because they occur often, or are rare and influential, or
because they are conspicuously absent. Second, when related items are
organized, higher—order patterns or “cultural domains” begin to emerge.
Following the creation of cultural domains, a structural analysis involves
linking or finding consistent relationships among these patterns or
domains. And finally, a complex level of analysis yields the larger picture
or a viable model by testing hypotheses against data (LeCompte 81,
Schensul 1998). Although on paper this looks formidably linear, the
actual operation has been recursive, guided partly by intuition, and

gestalt driven.

Analysis
From a certain meditation then on the data, that is, from the interviews
and observations, various themes have emerged and I have grouped

these under six analytical categories as follows: 1. The Problem of

66

Decentered Authority; 2. The Problem of Multiple Roles; 3. The Problem
of Communicative Competence; 4. The problem of the Missing Middle; 5.
The Problem of Creativity; and 6. The Problem of Affect. I will discuss
each of these in turn below.

1. The Problem of Decentered Authority. The City School is a
teacher run school, meaning it has no separate administrator. This was
one of the founding principles, that there will be no hierarchical
separation of teaching and administration. One of the senior teachers
carries out the principal’s role as a nominal head, but the role circulates
and all decisions are taken jointly. Teachers coming from regular setups
used to the clear dichotomies of teaching and administration often find a)
the lack of central authority somewhat unnerving; b) there is no principal
to whom you can send a difficult student or whose proxy one can use as
a threat; c) that they are wanting in the skills of dialogue that is
necessary to make the joint decision making process work.

Further, my data suggest that beginning teachers often come in
with certain conventional metaphors that guide teacher behavior one of
which is “classroom management”; in Deleuzian terms, this is capture
and stratification that seeks sameness and identity. But innovative
schools such as The City School attempt to operate on a different plane
with regard to such issues. Instead of the compliance, control and
confrontation paradigm, which springs from the traditional vision of

adults as legislators and students as subjects, small schools such as this

67

one attempt to create an atmosphere of close interpersonal relationships
that tend to obviate the need for harsh disciplinary measures. Occasional
wayward behavior tends to be seen as a signal for help rather than an
isolated problem. For new teachers, the move to get away from the
“classroom discipline” mindset takes considerable work and revisioning
of what it means to work with adolescents. It means discovering the
pedagogical possibilities of irregular spaces and difference, and
perceiving the need for breaking down categories. This is explored in the
next chapter.

2. The Problem of Multiple Roles. Teachers play a multiple role at
The City School. The teacher is not just an instructor but also a
curriculum developer, a placement guide and a mentor. The fact that the
students are out in the community part of the time changes the
dynamics of the school requiring teachers to be more inventive about
their roles as well as make connections between experience and school.
Connections have also to be made between the different sites. There is an
interesting “between-ness” in the roles that result. One of the most
difficult parts some felt was the role of placement guide. This involved
being partly responsible for the student’s actions in the community.

Conventional categories, and boundaries around the teacher’s role
thus tend to break down at The City School, and the demand is for a
level of flexibility for which newcomers are often unprepared. As the

discussion in the subsequent chapters will reveal, a Deleuzian

68

conception of ourselves as multiplicities is very helpful here, as it tends
to dislodge us from identitarian ways of thinking, and helps us to see the
generative possibilities of what Deleuze calls a “becoming-other.”

3. The Problem of Communicative Competence. The success of a
place like The City School depends to a large extent on the ways each
player finds or invents channels and bands of communication both
within and without the school, that is, between student and teacher,
teachers and parents, the school and the district or among teachers
themselves. Apart from the fact that in a school that is jointly run by
teachers, much hinges on the ways in which the players communicate
with each other, the fact of being different and the effort to justify
difference itself calls for a different kind of communicative competence.

Besides normal instruction, teachers also have to monitor the
students at their work places, finding ways of individually assessing the
work each student does at the placement through the LEAPs. Difficulties
often crop up at the placements which have to be smoothed out. Liaising
between multiple sites, the successful placement coordinator has to
project continuously a forward looking agenda that keeps all parties
positively engaged. Each of these require a degree of sophistication in
communicative abilities that are not typical of teacher situations.

Even instruction tends to have a somewhat different emphasis. My
data show that the teachers who are successful with students at The City

School, that is, who are considered to have made a difference in some of

69

their lives, invariably are those who have taken a step beyond their
didactic roles and taken a special interest in students’ lives and in their
ability to succeed.

Here again we have a boundary issue. Conventional teacher roles
are heavily circumscribed. Teacher’s work is rarely envisioned as liaison
work between the community and the place of learning. Occasional
rhetoric apart, the emphasis is on what happens within the four walls of
the classroom. Not surprising then, that the data show the struggle new
teachers have with the breakdown of the categories.

4. The Problem of the Missing Middle. In innovative schools
typically class sizes tend to be small. Such is the case at The City School.
Mainstream teachers often have a problem with small classes because
they are trained to and used to teaching to the middle, to pegging their
instruction to the imagined average. But there is no average in a small
class, no middle. One is forced to reckon with the individual differences
and levels of each student and teach multiple levels. No longer can the
teacher treat the class as a mass. Each student’s situation must be
noted and pedagogical opportunities created based on differential
demands rather than identitarian ones. The continuous jumping of levels
within the class can be quite demanding for teachers who have never
faced such situations. My observations show that even older teachers at

times find it hard going.

70

Under such circumstances a radically different approach is
necessary to subject matter by which the emphasis moves from the
disconnect between different levels, topics and ideas to seeing/
constructing/ inventing the connections between them, and thereby also
multiplying the pedagogical directions from which to tackle an issue.

5. The Problem of Creativity. The bottom line for innovative schools
is an ever present demand for a degree of creative enterprise. Because it
is small, unusual, surviving against enormous odds, The City School
staff must continually improvise. They must take decisions which no one
else can take for them. They are a square peg in a round hole; the district
rules, from attendance to assessment to school hours do not fit them.
Therefore at every turn there must be a creative response to overcome
the difficulties of being an innovative place.

Further, especially in an urban situation, where material
conditions are less than desirable and the level of resentment against the
official curriculum high among students, the need is for new ways to
reach students, and create new learning spaces and curriculum from the
differential experiences of the students themselves. This demands from
teachers a new kind of creative response whereby one begins to sense all
around one, and in the educational encounter itself, material for
investigation.

6. The Problem of Affect. Working closely with needy adolescents

whose backgrounds are anything but trouble-free is challenging work.

71

Many of the students at The City School come from difficult backgrounds
and some have turned around due to the individual efforts and care
taken by staff. For new teachers the situation is stressful and sometimes
affectively draining especially if it is accompanied by student disinterest
and apathy. In the fairly extensive literature on teacher burnout, there is
considerable evidence for believing that beginning teachers are
particularly prone to leaving the profession due to burnout (Weisberg, J.
85 Sagie, A. 1999).

My data show a range of coping behaviors. One teacher tended to
engage a few students in extended trivial conversations that led nowhere,
another created a strict classroom atmosphere and acknowledged that he
was “becoming just the teacher I never wanted to be” (Fieldnotes
04/08/ 02). Typically, mainstream literature talks of “coping strategies”
to deal with emotional stress (Abel 8r. Sewell 1999). But as Byrne (1999)
points out, coping is not the same thing as teaching. When coping, we
are in a survival mode whose focus is ourselves and therefore the
pedagogical choices available tend to get restricted.

The Deleuzian praxis I construct makes available to teachers a way
of thinking that gets past the illusion of the transcendent subject. that is,
a pre-existing coherent identity that stands to get worn down in daily
confrontation with students. Instead, we learn to rethink ourselves in
terms of micro-intervals of interaction in. each pedagogical encounter that

poses a fresh problematic in terms of the signs that are generated in

each encounter. In such a praxis, signs, affects, and percepts come
together to create rhizomes or multiplicities that by spilling outside the
boundaries that thought has create through habit can generate large
amounts of affective energy, and thus reverse the problem of stress.

To summarize then, the effort so far has been to formalize the data
into a few analytical categories that capture some important and
recurring themes and give a certain flavor of the findings. I will next try

and interpret the findings by mapping these on a Deleuzian topography.

73

Chapter 3

Rhizome and the Image of Thought

If thought really yielded to the object,
if its attention were on the object, not
on its category, the objects would
start talking under the lingering eye.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics.
Practicing the Contingent: An Analysis
In his well known ethnographic account titled “Adequate schools and
Inadequate education: The Life History of a Sneaky Kid,” Harry Wolcott
(1994) makes the important observation that adequate schools do not
necessarily lead to an adequate education. Increasingly, there are youth
who, while not averse to learning as the “sneaky kid” testifies, find
schools to be impossibly circumscribed spaces, and as a consequence for
them there is no alternative but to drift. Listening and observing at The
City School I find ample confirmation of the above statement in the
accounts I hear, not only from students who had dropped out from
regular schools, but among staff as well.
In organizing itself along different lines, The City School, in some
ways appears to have made an attempt to address some of these issues
that Wolcott raises, in being more than just an “adequate” school, as well

as in extending schooling in important ways to other areas of social

experience. By making central to its focus issues of relationship and

74

connectedness, it makes a serious attempt at constructing conditions of
possibility for urban youth to stay connected to education and continue
to learn in non-conventional ways. Although there is some literature on
service learning, these attempts at innovation remain under-theorized
especially in the context of professional development of new teachers.

In this chapter I will provide an analysis of the case that we saw in
the previous chapter; I will attempt to show two things: first, The City
School curriculum as well as the social and learning environment
associated with it display evidence of somewhat open, leaky, and
indeterminate spaces that can better accommodate some “border” youth
who cannot fit into mainstream schools. I will use Deleuzian concepts to
theorize these “spaces of indefinitude” or differential formations. And
second, I will suggest that the difficulties new teachers face on entering
such an environment, where there is less reliance on the regular
curriculum adopted by the district and an absence as well of traditional
appeals to authority for structure and discipline, are the result of certain
unexamined conceptual conventions and interiorized notions of what
constitutes learning and the role of the teacher. Together these form the
basis of my claim that teachers need to re—examine the very
commonplaces and categories on which the experience called school is
built. My point is that teachers brought up with the idea of primarily
seeking order in the classroom, perceiving learning as coincident with

what takes place within the boundaries of the classroom, and looking for

75

certainty in the curricular process have to reckon with the fact that
learning often takes place in non-localizable, in—between spaces and in
ways that are uncertain and sometimes inarticulable. And besides, the
things that seemed most important to these young adults, like a sense of
belonging or deeper communication with adults, lay beyond the mostly
circumscribed roles of teachers in regular settings.

My strategy here will be to point out the Deleuzian spaces and
possibilities in the school, and at the same time show how new teachers
often miss pedagogical opportunities by holding on to the mainstream or
conventional positions on learning and curriculum. This is not to claim
that public schooling is monolithic or homogeneous, but to point out that
the overall emphasis that arranges education in a techno-bureaucratic
space (Kliebard 1992) missed the boat, so to speak, where these urban
youth were concerned. J S, a beginning teacher, tells me: “I come from a
minority community. The public school system did nothing for me... I
came close to dropping out” (Fieldnotes 04/ 12/ 02). The system forced J S
to occupy spaces where he did not want to be and did not give credence
to his own Lebenswelt and sensibilities. Giroux (2000) points out, “the
dominant features of public schooling are characterized by a modernist
project that has increasingly come to rely upon instrumental reason and
the standardization of curricula” (p.177). This centered curriculum,
Giroux further observes, that is devoted to the logocentric rule of reason

and in which affects and emotions mostly find no place except to

76

pathologize youth, is a heavily “racially coded cultural legacy...that
privileges the histories, experiences, and cultural capital of largely white,
middle-class students” (p.178). In Deleuzian language, these are spaces
governed by “strata,” and captured by “molar” or majoritarian politics.

In a school that attempts to serve marginalized youth, teachers
need, not merely a separate set of skills, but new lenses through which
to rethink curriculum as a whole. It is therefore an important move to
help teachers to re-equip themselves with theoretical tools and concepts
with which to rethink what is going on and gain a fresh perspective on
things, a perspective that helps to move away from the old habits of
thought and abandon worn out spaces.

I introduce Deleuze in order to provide such a lens. Rajchman
(1998) calls Deleuze the philosopher of the city, meaning one of urban
spaces and environments, an allusion that I find strangely apt for
constructing experiences at The City School and of its urban youth.
Deleuze is also an artist of unfinished geometries, of “what might yet
happen” and ceaselessly constructs in order to free the idea of
“aesthesis” from regulated spaces or previously staked out ground. In
other words, Deleuze is an architect of broken, fractured spaces in the
fissures of which he constructs new openings for thought and action. In
this work, I use Deleuzian concepts and cartography, chief among them
the notion of the rhizome explained later on, in order to construct a

theoretical lens for understanding the phenomena in the school. I do not

77

claim that the school is already functioning with a Deleuzian perspective;
rather that the existing conditions would be better served if such a
perspective were to be deliberately employed, especially in
communicating to the new teachers the alternative possibilities of the
school

For, Deleuze attempts what may be called a perspectival reversal of
Platonism in order to form new sense of space and identity from the
irregularities of thought: it is not in regularized spaces, but from the
irregularities that new thought is born. Therefore, the added value of
seeing the processes through Deleuzian lens is that it will allow teachers
to see in a positive light the very slippages, affects, and other “unruly”
curricular experiences that tend to embarrass technocratic rationality,
and look at these as new possibilities for curriculum development.
Besides, these are also openings for teachers for reconstituting teacher
identities. No longer is the self of the teacher a given but something to be
composed in conjunction with traits that emerge from alterity.

As we have seen in Chapter 2, the fluidity and multiple demand for
respond-ability, and the constant slipping in and out of different
functional and perceptive areas is disturbing and unsettling for those
who have been used to the security of more circumscribed roles. One
new teacher, I’ll call her LS, finds the conditions difficult to cope with.

[ I: Interviewer, LS: Teacher]

1: Is this place a big change from where you did your student

78

teaching?
LS: Oh it sure is. For new teachers like me, it is a big change.
I: Can you describe some of that for me?
LS: I am not always sure of my ground here— what are the Learning
Experience Activity Packets for example? In my previous school we
knew what to do. Here no one tells you.
I: Can you say more about that?
LS: I am left alone to plan or construct the curriculum as far as the
LEAPS are concerned. Although they don’t normally require first
year teachers to do that. Also, how do we develop the [off campus]
resource centers? There are so many new adjustments to be made.)
I: It seems to me that you are referring to more than just a list of
things or skills. You seem to be suggesting that there’s something
else operating here. Is that the case?
LS: Well, it is a sort of culture. I mean, in the regular schools you
did things the way...there were lots of guidelines and the
expectations were clear. Here it is like it comes out of the culture of
the place. Things are not as explicit.
1: Does that make it seem disorderly?
LS: No, but I am not always sure what the students are learning.
Things are more chaotic. (Interview with LS #1)

Let us recall the problem of decentered authority from the analytical

structure laid out in the previous chapter. LS gives us a good example of

79

the kinds of certainty many teachers look for in schools, which is an
appeal to authority. LS, as the above conversation illustrates, wants
order in the form of expectations and rules. She is also looking to be
trained in the correct way to do things. She uses the term ‘culture’ to
mark a difference, of not being at ease herself in a space that is
unfamiliar. LS wants to be sure of ‘what the students are learning’
perhaps in clear quantifiable terms. LS says twice, “I am not always
sure...” The need for surety, certainty is so ingrained that we rarely stop
to question it. Hartley (1997) observes,
The school is a monument to modernity. Virtually everything is
arranged rationally, including space, time, curriculum, assessment
and discipline. Children are classified according to a range of
criteria. Rules regulate us. There are set procedures [for
everything]...Schools are places where reason prevails over
emotions” (p.125).
Given that achievement of rational order is of the highest priority, it is
not surprising that LS feels uncertain in her role at The City School, that
represents what Hartley calls a “lapse” that is “too unwieldy for our tidy—
minded modern ways” (p. 125). The unwieldiness comes from an
entangled, multiplicitous and divergent space in which things refuse to
fall into neat categories.
The entangled character of curricular relations in the school leads

me to posit the concept of multiplicities—a key Deleuzian term. Every

80

event or entity including ourselves, according to Deleuze is a multiplicity,
or rather, multiplicities. Beneath the apparent unity or coherence of an
entity or an event lie fields of flux and indefinitude out of which arises a
temporary assemblage of elements, composites that follow abstract lines
of development and organization. Take an “event” like the French
Revolution. Once we get past the label that identifies “it” historically, it
becomes impossible to localize it or see it as something unified with a
clear boundary. There are too many things going on for there to be a
center that can be clearly identified. Further, Latour (1993) notes that
French historians have recently discovered that “the actors and
chroniclers of 1789 used the notion of revolution...to influence their own
fate” (p.40). In other words, the revolution was being produced in part by
the idea of revolution. It is the lack of a center of coherence that makes
all phenomena multiplicities.

Thinking in terms of multiplicities become important, and gains
theoretical power when we realize that each abstract line of potentiality
or combinations of sense—matter-thought that enters into a multiplicity
also has an exit. That is to say, although events or entities are born of
capture of these virtual lines that produce the illusion of a localized
phenomena, there are also exits or escapes from these gross categories.
In other words, each entry or virtual line is also a potential escape route
from the assemblage and multiplicities can be rearranged, disassembled

and reassembled to form new assemblages.

8.1

Another name for operational multiplicities used by Deleuze is the
rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.3). Rhizomes are contrasted to
trees or arborescent systems in Deleuze’s work; whereas trees are
vertically ordered, rhizomes tend to be nonhierarchical, laterally
connected multiplicities that do not feature linear development. Like
tubers and mosses, they grow laterally and entangled; any point on a
rhizome can be connected to any other point making such a structure
open and democratic. Rhizomes can be interrupted at any point only to
start up again, proliferating lines of flight that sprout contingently, not
according to fixed pathways. Rhizomes thrive in irregular and in-between
spaces, and have no specific starting or ending point; they are always in
the middle. I claim that the concept of the rhizome is particularly
suitable for theorizing the tendencies and potentialities of the narrative
and descriptive spaces of The City School. Seeing ourselves as rhizomes
or collectivities that are laterally dispersed and connected gives us room
to challenge the vertical inner authority of our reified notions and
boundary constructs about learning, as well as the way we structure our
organizations. The rhizome is at the same time an analytical tool and a
becoming that can help in constructing new spaces for teaching and
learning. As a tool of analysis it helps us to see the possibilities and
connections in a non-Cartesian way, that is, in non-binary modes of
thinking. As a way of becoming it allows us to conceive of linking our

collectivities to other assemblages for acting upon the social field.

82

Introducing this vital Deleuzian notion, I claim that the City School
has in it potential rhizoid spaces. I watch a minor student “revolt.” They
insist that the name of the school be changed. The actual name, which
cannot be revealed here, is found to have certain associations that are
unacceptable to many of them. After several discussions, they have a
confrontation with the staff over this, and propose a referendum on it.
There is resistance from the staff but power relationships are challenged.
Staff and students agree to do a survey on possible alternatives and let it
go to the ballot. These moments of rupture, which are mostly
discouraged in regular schools, allow for a creative uncertainty and
inversion of power relationships to occur without being stamped out. It is
for this reason that I claim that a rhizomatic possibility exists in the
school. For, the example cited above is more than a mere instance of
student empowerment. The rhizome grows from within, making the
necessary connections in a system-environment coupling, whereas the
notion of empowerment invokes an external empowering agent.

In contrast to the open structure of the rhizome, is the hierarchical
structure of the tree or “arborescent” systems that constitute “State” or
“Striated” space:

Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of

imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into...molar

aggregates. Strata. are acts of capture, they are like black holes

striving to capture whatever comes within their reach. (Deleuze

83

and Guattari 1987, p.40)

Strata are bands of thickness produced by repetition; they generate
gravitational fields, fields of determinate spaces like techno-managerial
ones that provide a sense of certainty and security. To seek certainty in
the context of learning is to inhabit striated space; that is, to operate in
determined territories that resist border crossings, and therefore cut
communication lines stretching across boundaries. Open borders are
terrains of uncertainty and are the very conditions of the possibility of
learning, a movement in thought. The growth of the rhizome in
unpredictable ways and its self-description can provide learning with a
cross fertilization between widely separated lateral spaces that promote a
dramatization of knowledge.

To go back to the Learning Experience Activity Packages (LEAP)
that trouble LS, these are as much a creative effort as a procedural one,
according to the more experienced teachers. There is no one way of doing
the LEAPs, since placements change all the time, new ones are added
and some old ones are dropped. Additionally, teachers have to design the
LEAPs according to the project the student is working on at the
placements and cannot be generic, thus giving us an instance of the
analytical category I have called the “missing middle.” For example, at a
placement in the Legal Action Council, a student may either work on a
project that is based in History or in Citizenship. The teacher must

create a LEAP that is congruent with the project and the disciplinary

84

credit granted for it. Further, students’ requirements are different, with
each configuration required to dovetail with in-house classes that lead to
graduation. In this way, curriculum appears more and more like rhizoid
structure, concerned with building connections.

In other words, we ask what constructs we want and what
determinations and intensities we are prepared to countenance. The
curriculum seen more like a rhizome, that is in terms of connectivities,
than as a rigid structure, has lots of advantages. As Deleuze points out,
rhizomes are offshoots and not sowings, irregular growths and not
deliberate plantings, therefore, a Rhizomatic conception allows existential
narratives to be reinstated in learning and in the classroom by finding
educational opportunities in irregular spaces not provided for by the
official curriculum but that are lived realities of the social actors in the
school. In other words, every movement, gesture, autobiographical event,
accidental phenomenon can become a learning opportunity. LS’ concerns
about what the students are learning are mostly to do with learning on
the visible and officially approved plane. As we see later on, there is
important learning going on in non-regulated spaces, learning that is
important for the lives of these young people.

Coming from a way of doing things that is firmly “territorialized” or
set in its practice of containment as well as predetermined in terms of
the intended effects, the activities at the school seem “chaotic” to LS.

But, as she acknowledges, seeing the various activities as disparate and

isolated from each other is not helpful. Instead, it all seems to come out
of a certain “culture.” This culture is what I call a “practice of the
contingent,” an exercise of a not fully determined space without which a
school catering to urban conditions cannot survive—a repetition with a
difference.
But contingency is seen “as an enemy” of the modern
governmentalized social order (Bauman 1992). Giroux (2000) observes,
Rather than accepting the modernist assumption[s]...it makes
more sense in the present historical moment to educate students
to theorize differently about the meaning of work in a postmodern
world. Indeterminacy rather than order should become the guiding
principle of a pedagogy in which multiple views, possibilities, and
differences are opened up as part of an effort to read the future
contingently. . . (p. 179)
Partly, the necessity for understanding the nature of contingency arises
from the changed global conditions related to work, markets, media and
identities, that require new forms of literacy on the part of the teacher as
well as the student, since both have to face these radically changed post-
industrial conditions in which the character of the economy, culture and
knowledge have become uncertain. I do not mean to suggest here that
schools ought to change in order to fit in with the emergent world order
and help to normalize it, but that curriculum must take advantage of

fissures that arise in times of acute change, and open up complex,

86

indeterminate regions, that are “not-fully-formed” elements but patches

of intensities and connections. This impulse flies in the face of the

modernist urge to regularize events and prevent change.
Following is an example of the predicament teachers face in

educating in this changing and problematic space.
TG: Take S, she is currently undergoing training for six weeks and
is out of school. This is part of the W2 requirements. The law now
requires that she get training in order to qualify for welfare, she is
a teenage mom and wants to complete school. However, by the
time she completes training, she will turn 18 and so legally she can
be asked to work full time. That effectively puts her out of school
and she can kiss graduation goodbye. We here have decided not to
let that happen. So she is taking Independent Studies with us and
that will give her the few required credits she needs to graduate.
One of our teachers goes to visit her regularly to check up on how
she is doing. She is a diligent student and will graduate but we
have to find ways and means and come up with creative solutions
to these conditions that kids face. They are at the intersection of
work, the law, poverty and needing to graduate. (Interview with TG
# I)

Here is an instance of the problem of multiple roles. As TG relates it,

there is a gap between what the students need and what bureaucratized

education provides, a gap between schooling and education. Nancy Lesko

87

(1995) has identified such mixed needs that policy is unable to come to
terms with as “leaky needs” (p.199). There is a necessity for teachers to
find creative solutions to meet such leaky needs and find the resources
to be able to do so. Often, it is the flexibility and the mutual
understanding that the teachers have developed between themselves that
provides the ground for this additional “respond—ability.” But just as
often, it requires a somewhat different sensibility that is able to see the
curricular possibilities of the in-between or irregular spaces that come
up in investigating difference. It is this sense of connected-ness and the
ability to function in between things that evoke the notion of the rhizome.
The rhizome is always reorienting itself along new lines of becoming.
From a critical angle, it is possible to read the above example as a
neo-liberal mechanism that does not question the underlying ideology of
W2, and merely ensures that the student fits in with the needs of the
marketplace. But the thing to which I point here is the multiplicitous and
provisional roles and alliances that teachers have to form in order to
function. I am not suggesting that teachers at The City School are
already installed in a Deleuzian plane. Instead, it is the echo and the
resonance issuing from the site that alerts me to the possibilities of using
a Deleuzian framework in order to understand experience, and work out
a praxis. These timbres suggest the possibility of becoming, of
encountering the student along dimensions not usually considered by

teachers in more conventional settings.

88

The plane of becoming, also called the plane of immanence, is a
powerful Deleuzian concept in which incorporeal transformations take
place that insinuate us into new becomings:

The plane of composition knows nothing of substance and form. It

consists of modes of individuation, in relations of speed and

slowness between unformed elements, and in compositions of
corresponding intensive affects [that] ties together heterogeneous

multiplicities of the rhizome type. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,

p.507)

Substance and form are useful, but they become obstructive when
overemphasized as in the modernist curriculum. Instead, Deleuze offers
conceptions of speed and slowness, flows, densities and transformations
that help us to change the image of ourselves and open ourselves to the
nonhuman. There is an evocation of a sense of the fluid and of
continuous transformation rather than staticity and status quo. The
fluidity allows us to open up boundaries long reified by linguistic habits
and cultural normalizations.

In developing the concept of multiplicities and a plane of
immanence in which bodies come together to form different intensities,
Deleuze offers the possibility of a new pedagogy of complexity in which
teacher and the student are in a rhizomatic relationship that goes
beyond the separate individualities that is emphasized by the modems. It

reveals the radical possibilities of new kinds of conjugations unthought

89

before that are composed of singularities or moments of life. The word
individuation as employed here must not be confused with the notion of
individuality. As used by Deleuze, individuation refers to traits or
attributes that pre-exist the entity and continue into other becomings
even after the entity has ceased to exist. Thus an individual is only a
bundle of individuations that come together and fall apart under certain
circumstances. I explore these ideas at length in chapter 5, but will
observe here that such a perspective and the insight it offers is useful for
constructing a different and more generative image of ourselves with
regard to the formation of multiplicities and alliances that is the focus of
this chapter. It also offers new ways of connecting to “border youth” who,
as Giroux (2000) has pointed out, anyway reject the modernist world of
certainty, and increasingly inhabit what Paul Virilio has called “speed
space,” seeking other ways of becoming (cited in Giroux 2000; p.180).
Concerned about the despair and indifference in contemporary
youth and the ebbing away of “ethical discrimination” and “social
responsibility,” Giroux above notes: “The challenge for critical educators
is to question how a transformative pedagogy might be employed to
cancel out the worst dimensions of postmodern[ism]...while
appropriating some of its more radical aspects” (p.181). Reading Giroux
along with Massumi’s (1992) commentary on Deleuze, what is under
criticism here is the “consumer/commodity axis of the capitalist relation”

that increasingly allows participation in the life of the world only as

90

consumers (p. 133). Massumi contends that although the body’s realm of
possibility has expanded infinitely, the transformational potential is still,
for the most part, subordinated to the axiomatics of capitalist relations.
In order to release “postmodern” transformative potentialities from the
grip of existing power relations we have to realize and embrace our
collectivities that presents an avenue for escape. And this, according to
Deleuze, becomes possible when we begin to think in terms of
production—the production of affect: “For affect is not a personal feeling,
nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that
throws the [constituted] self into upheaval and makes it reel,” and we
cross over into our multiplicities, into becomings that release active
passions, we become “sorcerers” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp.240/
24 1).
Observing existing conditions, I catch a momentary glimpse of the
affect at The City School. An opening into such a plane is provided by J S,
a teacher, who although new to the school, has had several years of
grassroots organizing experience in raising “ethnic consciousness” and
bringing about awareness of cultural heritage among minority groups:
For me it is passion that holds the things together. That makes the
connections. But I need to know that others are in it with me, that
I am not alone in feeling this way. (Interview with J S #2)
Passion helps JS move beyond the personal frame and into a collective

field of action. Active passions in Deleuze are what creates expanded

91

powers of being and affecting; passion, is not subordinated to thought
but is a field of becoming through which we form new assemblages.
Desire, or active passion, is the matrix of connectivities, and contains the
possibility of taking us beyond our subjectivities. Unlike psychoanalytic
space, where desire is a lack, in Deleuze it is the very field of production.
This replaces lack by a proliferation of possibilities, especially in a
pedagogic encounter, as I explain below.

Observe below the reactions of LS, who sees the lack of academic
rigor and equipment in the school as problematic and is frustrated by
her own construct of science as a formalistic exercise:

LS: Going over to the science museum what does it achieve...l

would not give science credit for it. I’m sure of that.

I: Could it maybe fit in some other way with the rest of the

program?

LS: Maybe. But it cannot compensate for competency in specific

areas such as science. I don’t believe it can.

I: What about emotional growth, would you consider that as part of

science education?

LS: No, I don’t know how that fits. My frustration is that I find no

science equipment. That’s another source of tension for me.

Nothing here to show that the school has been up and running for

the last eight years. (Interview with LS #2)

LS’ thinking is representational; she is concerned with the fact that
students are not obtaining the science lab experience, but she does not
consider the possibility that perhaps the museum might serve as a lab
for learning science in unexpected ways. Varela (1992) observes that
Cognitive science is waking up to the full importance of the
realization that perception does not consist in the recovery of a
pre-given world, but rather in the perceptual guidance of action in
a world that is inseparable from our sensorimotor capacities. (p.17)
Learning, therefore, consists not of representation, but what Varela calls
“embodied action.” It is to the pedagogic possibilities of embodied action
to which LS must be invited to open her mind, instead of being fixated
solely upon the recovery of existing knowledge. I argue that such an
approach works better in the urban situation and moves away from the
notion of lack or deficiency. Deleuze points out that our fixation on
deficiency or lack is due to a general Oedipal orientation that prevents
our opening up to the forces that lie within the immediate: “In order to
harness the active forces that lie embedded within mutant empires of
reactivity, [we] must acquire an altered sensibility to deficiency and lack”
(Conway 1997, p.82). In my reading, whereas The City School, through
its innovative curriculum, has made attempts to mine the urban
situation for providing learning opportunities, beginning teachers like LS

are conceptually under-prepared for it.

\0
CU

Progress and proof of growth is important for maintaining a sense
of orientation in striated space. But when these old coordinates come
under suspicion as they increasingly have in our times (Giroux 2000), we
need a different metaphor to help us construct alternative paths of
becoming that may be more generative like the rhizome. Further,
frustrations are also part of the curriculum; they are not extrinsic to our
becoming. A new lens can alert LS to the fact that her frustrations are
also entry points into a curriculum of affective becoming. For, the
rhizome is also connections between intensive states or plateaus of
intensities. Frustrations in this view would form what Deleuze calls “sad
passions,” and have the potential to turn into generative ones as it helps
us to change the image of ourselves from entities to multiplicities: it
moves us from a transcendent viewpoint to a Deleuzian plane of
immanence or becoming. This is further explained in chapter 5. Below is
another example of how the allegiance to rigid boundaries brings about
frustration in its wake.

Another new teacher AD expresses similar concern for low
academic standards:

I feel like I am doing nothing here. I feel like I am wasting my time

here. The standard is so low and students do not show any interest

in learning at all. Ask me questions, I am here for you. There are
only 6 students in the class — so take advantage of this. (Interview

with AD #1)

94

AD sees the “low” standard as a problem of the outside, as an objective
thing, and gives it a transcendent meaning beyond the active processes
of which he is a part. But where is the “standard,” this material
abstraction of the level of ignorance? If AD perceives himself as a part of
the process he is discursively engaged in, the issue of low standards
evaporate. Immanence evokes life, eschewing the notion of lack. Deleuze
helps us to change our image of ourselves: from solid entities to
processes and composites, currents and intensities that can combine or
flow differently.

AD also feels discouraged by what he sees as an unsupportive
atmosphere:

AD: This is the most hostile environment that I have come across

in all my years of teaching.

I: Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

AD: They don’t do any orientation here at all. New people are left to

find out things themselves.

I: Is that the only reason for the hostility you feel?

AD: No, there are others. It’s hard to put your finger on them. The

atmosphere of the place is part of it. Some people here like to

think of themselves as really big and go about shouting—“we built

this school”; So what? They think that they are the only ones

doing work. RS [refers to another teacher] told some

visitors that I watch TV! Yes, I watch the news when I finish

95

teaching. I am not disturbing anyone and what else do I do when I
finish teaching? (Interview excerpt)
RS, an older teacher, responds to AD’s comments :
One day he said — “well, it is 2:00 pm and I am going to get a
haircut” ! Sorry, if you are here and you have nothing to do then
you should go out and start cultivating some resources. That is
why he was hired. (Interview with RS #1).
AD exhibits an ‘us-versus-them’ angst, a minor power struggle between
new teachers and older staff to determine the boundaries of what
constitutes teacher’s work. In the regular schools this is decided through
established mechanisms like a union contract. Although part of the
union, The City School has relied more on internal negotiations to
determine how the unconventional nature of its curricular demands
could be met by the group. The older staff insist that they do not wish to
impose their vision on newcomers, but as Cherryholmes (1988) has
observed, the search for a negotiated settlement “cannot proceed without
normative commitments and power arrangements” (p.91). Here we have a
double bind: the senior staff not wanting to exercise authority but
wanting newcomers to “voluntarily” see the needs of the place. I suggest
that a way out of the double bind can be seen in Deleuzian pragmatics:
There’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, Subject, Reason; there are
only processes. These processes are at work in concrete

multiplicities. It’s multiplicities that fill the plane of immanence.

96

[that] has to be constructed area by area, any given multiplicity

is like one area of the plane...As one area links up with another

[what emerges is] the world as a patchwork. (Deleuze 1995, p. 146-

147)

Processes have no subject: “it’s raining”; this has been known since the
days of Heraclitus. What Deleuze adds to this is that processes are
becomings or “nonsubjective individuations” and can enter into other
becomings to form a plane of immanence, productions of patchwork. In
this new image of ourselves as process or patchwork we can break out of
the double bind by entering a different level of description.

Further, AD’s “Ask me questions” approach is a symptom of the
traditional role of teacher as repository of knowledge. Britzman (1986)
has observed:

The view of the teacher as expert also tends to reinforce the image

of teacher as autonomous individual. As a possession, knowledge

also implies territorial rights, which become naturalized by the
compartmentalization of curriculum. The cultural myth of teachers
as experts, then, contributes to the reification of both knowledge
and the knower. (pp.450/451) [italics mine]
‘I am the teacher, ask me’ is precisely this territorial problem, the
problem of boundaries that needs to be deterritorialized in a way that
those boundaries are reconfigured. In my own experience in urban

schools, the “ask me” approach rarely works. For, teaching and learning

97

are much more furtive and surreptitious acts than is often
acknowledged, and in the representational space of the formal
curriculum furtive moves appear ingenuous.

Thus far we have seen how The City School offers new challenges
and reveals irregular learning spaces that often result in difficulties for
new teachers when they are unable to appeal to the authority of
conventional assumptions about teaching and learning. I have suggested
that a Deleuzian lens is useful for teachers not only to consider what is
going on in those fissures but that such a perspective helps us to loosen
the boundaries and assumptions about the identities in which we are
often “locked” as Deleuze points out. This is important, for, how we think
is closely tied to our notion of who we are. Such a praxis of
“destratification” in the way of an apprenticeship of the sign is offered in
Chapter 4. In the rest of this chapter I will explore the space of
difference that arises in the school that further sheds light on how a

Deleuzian praxis might contribute to teacher becoming.

Difference and Repetition

The present is always problematic, multiple, not only because it is the
ground for a colossal struggle between different pasts, different lenses,
but also because it is a contest between different futures, different
desires. It is this multiplicity l have to contend with in my relationship to

the school. Every time I walk into The City School, the first thing I notice

98

about the atmosphere is a certain gruff security. Students look at me in
the eye, and most nod or smile, but these are also tempered by a wobbly
sense of difference: What the school has not eliminated is a certain
productive sense of indeterminacy that comes partly out of the fact that
these students spend much of their time in placements and bring those
qualitatively different experiences with them into the school throughout
the day.

Consequently there seems to be a clearing here, a differential space
in which besides the repetitious formal curriculum “issues of allegiance,
commitment, destruction, trauma, and community can be taken
seriously” (Britzman 81, Dippo 2000; p.36). In other words, there is space
to consider issues that often tend to get censored or elided or reduced by
repetition into facile vocabulary and unproblematized assumptions. One
teacher, CM, tells me that she has been helping some of the teenage
single mothers with day care issues and other kinds of support that are
key to their remaining in school. CM denies my suggestion that this was
out of a sense of charity, but instead says “it is a building of something
in myself” (Fieldnotes 04/ 12/02). Rhizomes are extensions and
entanglements.

The setting of the school, its beginning, and its continued struggle
to remain different within a bureaucratic space that attempts to reduce
everything to identity bestows on it a certain sense of urgency that is not

simply the urgency born of daily business. Instead, it is born of asking

99

searching questions about curriculum, pedagogy and its relevance to the
lives of the people it is meant to serve. At weekly staff meetings, there are
always questions, reservations, and contrary opinions about the
directions the school is taking. More importantly, student views are
actively sought, discussed and taken into consideration in determining
curricular directions. In a recent vote on a vacant slot for a course,
seniors voted to learn Latin. Some of them thought learning Latin was
“cool.” Urban kids voting to learn Latin took even staff at the school who
are used to unpredictability by surprise. As a result, there is a distinctly
nebulous quality, a becoming that is uncertain and has a mitigating
effect on the strict boundaries that define teacher and student roles in
larger, more impersonal settings where difference gets reduced or forced
into identity with its resultant violence.

Deleuze (and Guattari, 1987) claims that dogged identities are the
product of an “arborescent model” of thought, a proud, tree model of
hierarchic representation that replicates the established order. I am a
teacher because the statute book has laid down the model of a teacher
and I am a replica of that model. In repetition there is certainty, and
since Descartes, certainty has been regarded as a desirable trait of
modern thinking. The “arborescent” order functions on the basis of
resemblance: on likeness to the model of the good student, or the model
of the good teacher, a derivation of the Platonic ‘image-copy’ or repetition.

Its modus operandi is negation: if you are not a good student then you

100

are a poor student (X = X = not Y). There are clear outlines and categories
that one must fit, or fall into an alternative category. Such spaces
thickened into strata by repetition demand clear and constant
reinforcement of boundaries for the purpose of not losing control, for
lines of delineation are also borders that control possibilities of
movement.

The relatively fluid space at the school however does not mean that
teachers here give up their adult roles and become indistinguishable
from adolescents. As MS, a senior teacher, observes: “Some people come
in thinking ‘I want to be their friend,’ I too went through that phase, a
long time ago. But they [students] don’t want that, they want you to be
the adult...the caring but firm grown-up. They want to feel the
boundaries” (Interview with MS #1). So it is much more complex than
simply a question of dissolving all boundaries. It is not difference or
repetition, but difference and repetition. It is what Deleuze calls the
“molar” within the “molecular,” or “striated” spaces within “nomad”
territory, implying that there are and have got to be regulated spaces
within more open territory and one has to pay attention to both because
the binary is always breaking down—controlled spaces lose their
boundaries at critical moments and open territories become bounded
and reified over time.

As I probe and listen, it appears that The City School is groping

toward a different order for which it does not yet have a language. It has

101

 

the appreciation of difference and leaky spaces in the context of which
teachers might profitably embrace a Deleuzian perspective and acquire
theoretical power. More importantly, theorizing this attitude, I believe,

will help to communicate this better to new teachers.

In some of the teachers’ actions at The City School I see the
inchoate stirrings of the “nomadic.” This is an instance of the category I
have called affect in the framework. Many of them go way beyond the call
of duty to accommodate students’ needs. In Brian Massumi’s words
“Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation (I = I =
not you) with an open equation” that might look like: I + you + her
+...(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.xiii); that is to say, it opens up chains
of communication to create open patchworks rather than delimiting
boundaries. To give an example from the field notes, one student
commented: “What kind of teachers would come together for us like they
did when we had to take the proficiency tests...It was like they were
taking the tests with us, helping us study, buying food, doing everything
else just to get us going” (Fieldnotes 04/ 19/02). Here I see evidence of a
different kind of responsibility functioning and a greater degree of
conductivity and communication across boundaries than present in
regular schools.

The somewhat open patchwork that I sense here, on which a

Deleuzian lens can operate to generate new possibilities, is also a

102

challenge to the liberal-technocratic vision that rests on the ideology of
possessive individualism, that is, on repetition:
The View of society as composed by “possessive” individuals
provides a basis for organizing schooling. Attitudes, knowledge,
and skills were conceived of as personal property of the individual.
The psychology of a possessive individual is incorporated into
contemporary curriculum through the use of behavioral
objectives...and psychological testing and measurement. Methods
of teaching are to enable individuals to develop particular
attributes and abilities and to internalize some logical state which
they “own” as one would objects or commodities. (Popkewitz 1988,
p.86)
The organizing of schooling based on the idea of the possessive individual
that emphasizes conservation and resemblance, leads to a strange
dilemma for the critical theorist. If one criticizes the notion of possession
one risks further dispossession for the already marginalized. If one
embraces the dialectical position, one remains wedded to the already
staked out territory in which the rules of the game are the master’s, that
is the dominant group’s. Between the Scylla of the cult of possession and
Charybdis of taking away possibility of struggle and agency lies the
escape route to a nomad territory, where the dialectical opposition
possession / poverty is replaced by becoming in a plane of immanence.

Struggle for worn out spaces is replaced by production of new spaces.

103

Here a creative becoming makes up for what might be perceived as a loss
of critical leverage. The patchwork is a rhizome of connections in field of
immanence where ownership, or “thickening” by repetition, has little
meaning other than in transition to combine and recombine with bodies
in order to become something else, a movement of difference, and
thereby a new politics emerges; a politics of becoming that refuses the
master’s tools and invents a new plane.

A minor movement in this direction is evidenced in the way in
which teachers often break down the boundaries between personal time
and work time. MS observes:

Sometimes I have to work during weekends and the evenings

because the students are in all kinds of placements. We are not in

a position to make those clear distinctions here between personal

time and school time, but we try to be fair in load distribution”

(Interview with MS #2).

This attitude makes a minor dent in the ideal of possession, the clear
boundaries of the mine and the yours. But this can also be oppressive to
some as we saw earlier in the chapter, and therefore an open patchwork
in the Deleuzian sense wherein all arrangements along with the actors in
it are in the process of becoming becomes important.

Connectedness to the multiplicities does not mean the actors
become amorphous or lose any of their sense of personal identity. A

useful metaphor for thinking about this is the “pack” (Canetti cited in

104

 

Deleuze 8r. Guattari 1987). Canetti notes that in a pack each member is
alone even as they participate closely in the activities of the group: “In
the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he
will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center and
then, immediately afterwards at the edge again. As the pack forms a ring
around the fire...each man’s back is naked and exposed to the
wilderness” (p.93). This sense of being in the group and yet having one’s
back exposed is peculiarly present here. Deborah Meier (1995) has
observed that it comes partly from the dangers many of them face
everyday in order even to get to school and the lived uncertainty of their
lives. It is important for new teachers to appreciate the complexity of the
lives of some of these young adults whose economies often run without
intersecting adult ones in regular schools. Pedagogies are apt to undergo
change when a teacher actually comes to terms with the ever shifting
horizons in the lives of these young people and the world into which they
awaken each day.

MS says, “Every little thing affects the whole school” (interview
with MS #2). This recognition that each encounter has consequences for
the entire school shows how discrete categories breakdown replaced by a
web of connectedness. In striated space or on a State grid, encounters
are assumed to take place in isolation with local effects only. But in
Deleuzian space each point is connected to all other points in a

“rhizomatic” relationship. Such an approach leads to a very different

105

response to, say, the manner in which disciplinary issues are handled,
among other things. There are no detentions or suspensions here, a fact
that new teachers often find problematic, nor is there a principal to
whom you can send a recalcitrant student. Thus there are openings or
beginnings of a rhizomatic or lateral relationships.

As there are no isolated events on this plane; no absolutely
bounded sequences; a minor quaver at one corner of the web sends a
message through all its whorls and radials. By avoiding the one versus
the many—child versus the school—mode of ‘State’ interactions what is
avoided here is the constant threat that is present in rigidly managed
climates, or in State spaces: the absolute penalties of transgressions and
boundary violations. Threats and punishments are ways of maintaining
and reinforcing boundaries, of insisting on separation from entanglement

in the first place.

Grassroots Organization

The City School teachers believe that what young people need most, in
the kind of school they had created, were “sane adults” in whose
presence “students felt safe,” who were “willing to listen to them,” and
with whom they could hold conversations without the feeling of “being
judged all the time.” I ask DN, one of the teachers, what the term “sane”
meant to him in this context. He said, for him it meant “people who were

willing to move away from fixed positions” (Interview with DN #1)).

106

Phil, a fifteen year old, was expelled from his previous school. His
story of the events that led to his expulsion is as follows: Phil lived
with his grandmother and earned for the two of them working in
the evenings after school. Phil fell ill and was absent from school
for a week; then his grandmother fell ill too. Being unwell himself,

Phil could not work nor could he take care of his sick

grandmother. So he took her down to Texas to some relatives, and

when he came back to school he found that they had struck his
name off most of the classes that were important to him, and
wouldn’t let him back in. When he protested, one teacher
dismissed him saying he was “totally irresponsible.” Irresponsible?

He, caring for a sick old woman? Enraged, he yelled back and was

promptly thrown out. No one was willing to hear his side of the

story (Journal entry #14).

State space is also mutilated silence. In this domain one can move only

along approved gridded points; all other movements are illegitimate. This
was unlikely to happen to him at his present school, Phil asserts, “Here,

they listen to you...most of the time” (Fieldnotes 04/ 17/02).

Flexibility once again becomes visible in a positive way through the
lens of the rhizome. The rhizome is contrasted with arborescent systems,
that is with roots and trees, that, according to Deleuze, “fix an order” and
are thereby restrictive and authoritarian. The image of the tree with its

linear hierarchy is present everywhere in Western thought (the tree of

knowledge, the tree of lineage etc.) that denies multiplicity; there is very
little lateral movement. Rhizomes, instead, slide laterally, tubers or
mosses spread sideways, grow from the edges at any point. Evidence of
lines of communication criss-crossing and making possible new
becomings are always present here, teachers becoming counselors,
students taking charge of their classroom.

Selena and Jennifer, two seniors are offering a semester-long
course on Greek mythology. The class is full. They demonstrate a
surprising depth of knowledge on the subject. Observing these two
students take on the role of the teacher and co-teach gives a sense of the
different possibilities that arise when students are involved in the
curriculum not merely as recipients but also as organizers. JC says, “this
is a grassroots organization. We have to be prepared to do different
things, do what’s necessary” (Fieldnotes 04/ 19/02). For Deleuze, grass is
rhizome, grows through the cracks, and “in—between” the cracks. The
grassroots metaphor is therefore strikingly apt.

Developing the metaphor of the rhizome further, in Deleuze these
are collective assemblages of enunciation, heteroglossic chains of every
kind that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also
states of things of different status. A rhizome “ceaselessly establishes
connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and
circumstances relative to [knowledges] and social struggles.” Deleuze

explains semiotic chains as tubers “agglomerating very diverse acts, not

108

only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive”
(Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987, p.7). In other words, a rhizome cuts across
boundaries between the discursive and the non-discursive and directly
acts upon the micropolitics of the social field.

Also, it is to the rhizome that one can appeal in order to
understand a system that tries to function without a center or a clearly
identifiable central authority, and with a positive affect in that regard.
The City School, with no administrative center that is distinct from the
teachers or knowledge workers is of the order of the moss, one that has
multiple connections and is held together by the dynamics of its
multiplicity of intertwining conductivities, and not by a central arboreal
structure. But this can function only through making “ceaseless
connections” between people, ideas and materials, and through
entanglements of concept, percept, and affect.

Mentoring is part of this rhizomatic dispersion and links back to
multiple connections. Asked to identify one key factor that played a role
in his renewed interest in academics, Jardine, a senior at the school who
had once been a drop-out, said it was the way teachers here mentored
him and “were interested in his life.” It had little to do with academics
directly. It was as if he had suddenly “regained something,” a side of him
that was missing and had rejoined him. MS observes that “in large urban
schools students survive and sometimes even do well, but they do it by

shutting out a part of themselves” (Interview with MS #2). That is, MS

109

seems to suggest, it is only by severing certain pathways and ways of
connecting to the world around them, that students are able to remain
within the restricted domain where State space puts them. In Deleuzian
terms, the rhizomatic multiplicity of ourselves is forced into arboreality
by repetition, with the resultant loss of intensity as well as breakdown of

communication among people at the school .

Reading Signs

“1 am always having to read students’ auras,” laughs MS (Interview with
MS #2). Several things in this utterance are remarkable. First, it is
unusual to hear a reference to “auras” in mainstream discourse of
schools. Auras are not objectively observable; they are esoteric, uncertain
and according to the literature have fuzzy boundaries. Metaphorically,
the “aura” that MS attempts to “read” is not only a reference to the occult
personality that hides behind the visage but also an acknowledgement of
the uncertainty of its boundaries, and a degree of mutability that is
inherent in the educational encounter. For, the aura has to be “read,”
according to MS, which I take to mean interpreted, and does not disclose
itself as transparent self presence. The reference to the aura is thus also
an indirect acknowledgement of the presence of the absent. It is an
important indication of the impossibility of reducing everything to the
simplistic grid of techno-managerial space. The value of such a reading is

that it leaves room for the student’s becoming in the encounter, of the

110

possibilities of realizing unsuspected movements that striated space
excludes in its reinforcing of rigid boundaries.

But “Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to
which it is stratified, territorialized, organized...as well as lines of
deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (Deleuze 85 Guattari
1987; p.9). Elena, who is also a teenage mother, has not fared too well
academically. Her placement is at NH Academy, a private school. CM
and I talk to her placement mentor who is full of praise for Elena.

She has developed a full schedule for herself here, teaching library

skills and tutoring math. But what is remarkable is that she has

this strange way of communicating with the girls. We have some
middle school girls who give trouble to some teachers. Elena just
pulls them aside and talks to them and they listen to her. She has
become an advocate for them with their teachers as well.

(Fieldnotes 04/ 09/02).

From a critical angle, it is unclear whether Elena’s efforts at enhancing
communication between students and teacher by a certain advocacy and
informal advising is empowering for the girls or is complicit in further
extending the teacher’s authority over them. But seen from a Deleuzian
perspective, it is not necessary to “clarify” or comprehend Elena’s
position as either empowering or subordinating, but instead whether the
girls find new ways of expressing and communicating, that is, ways of

becoming.

111

According to Deleuze, liberatory acts and acts of capture go on side
by side. There is no dichotomy, only selections says Deleuze. That is to
say, although hidden in every rhizome is also the possibility of
recapturing centrist movements, “Oedipal resurgences and fascist
concretions,” we can choose to focus on the deterritorializing aspect
being aware at all times of the reterritorializing movement. In terms of
the above example, while Elena’s acts may be liberatory and hegemonic
at the same time, we choose to focus on the creative possibilities while
alertly watching for the other movement. New boundaries come up all the
time, even as the effort goes on to hold the existing ones open and
flexible. A constructivist curriculum may contain in its bosom modernist
assumptions even while attempting to escape from it.

Therefore there is no question of forming a “dualist opposition,” as
Deleuze points out, between unitariness and multiplicity. Trees have
rhizome lines, and rhizomes have points of arborescence. “How could,”
asks Deleuze, “mad particles be produced with anything but a gigantic
cyclotron? How could lines of deterritorialization be assignable outside of
circuits of territoriality?” (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987, p.34). State space
and nomad territory, each needs the other for definition and for action.
What state philosophy tries to do is to bring under control the
unmanageable existence, but in the process of doing so it reifies the

reference points, thus reducing existence to a grid. Nomad thought,

112

 

which is its outside, can reintroduce multiplicity to free thought from the
death grip of gridded existence.

At their placements, some of the students display a singularly
different disposition. One student, a surly youth disconnected from
academics and at times facing difficulties in school relationships, is a
very different person when he enters the elementary classroom where he
is placed. The children obviously adore him and he is absorbed in his
work with them. Watching him stand there loosely, talking with staff at
the placement facility, one notices the emergence of a different person.
State space denies this multiplicity by casting people into fixed roles.

Also, what the multiplicity allows is a cross-fertilization between
zones that need to be explored more seriously by the teachers at the
school than it is at the moment. While the language of the placements
intermingle at a certain level with the language of the school, a more
substantial cross-use of the different experiences is not often there. For
instance, the stories of students’ experiences can consciously form a
“rhizome” with the rest of the curriculum; these narratives can reach into
the very micropolitics of public formation at the school. We form a
rhizome with our viruses, says Deleuze that transport genetic material
between species, thus making it impossible to draw definite lines
between species (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987). Here the “genetic material”
would be field material available daily once students are trained to be

careful observers and biographers, a task that invokes the emphasis on

113

autobiography in Pinar (1995) and Grumet’s (1980) work. Through
material drawn from the field and connected to the school curriculum
learning becomes cross-fertilized, exchanging material along many lines,
as will be clear from the following narratives.

A field visit to the local newspaper office turns out to be instructive
in a surprising manner. We sit around, and the editor holds forth on an
issue he is bringing out on alternative schools: addressing issues on
teenage pregnancy, drug abuse etc. Macy whips around angrily: “Did you
hear how he said “teenage mothers”? What’s he know about teenage
motherhood? I’m a teenage mom and am proud of it. Wouldn’t give it up
for nothing. I love my baby.” With these words, Macy thrusts away the
patronizing discourse about teenage pregnancy, a new plateau of
intensity emerges showing the poverty of the discourse. I am witnessing a
living curriculum. Macy spotting patriarchy, Macy grappling with
monolithic patriarchy, Macy resisting with her multiplicity, with her right
to be a student + a mother + a teenager +...+.

Talking to AD later on, I realize that he was more focused on what
the editor had to say and had not paid attention to what Macy said and
the curricular possibilities and connectivities that could emerge out of
that experience. AD seemed more focused on the formal aspects of “what
the students learned,” that is, on recovering what was given in the
newspaper office, rather than actively seeking the embodied perceptions

of students. In the process, he missed what the students had to offer and

114

the rhizomatic connections that surrounded him. Part of the challenge of
an innovative curriculum is to continually turn situations into learning
opportunities, and to produce the curriculum in conjunction with the
students. That is to say, it urges us to conceive of learning and
perception in terms of constructing rhizoid spaces. This means
remaining ever vigilant about the production of signs that is going on all
around one, and aware of the clash of forces that generate these new

regimes of signification.

Conclusion
As I investigated the curricular and learning relationships in the school,
it seemed to me that the problem new teachers faced in finding their feet
in this fluid environment could be seen as a semiotic problem: of getting
away from perceiving the signs of learning as bounded, convergent and a
function of representation, towards experimenting with differential
possibilities within repetition, and multiple ways of making connections
that continually undergo change and reveal unexpected and irregular
learning opportunities. I have suggested that a Deleuzian praxis can help
teachers constructively to come to terms with the somewhat open and
indeterminate spaces in the school that provide new openings for the
play of signs.

In the next chapter I discuss ways of taking this deterritorialization

or undermining of conventional wisdom further through a semiotic

115

exercise of getting to experiment with signs in a Deleuzian manner, an
exercise I call “apprenticeship of the sign.” Umberto Eco (1980) remarks
that signs are all we have to orient us in this world. Also signs displace
us from the world of representation onto a differential plane. Therefore a
lot depends on how we read and experiment with signs, and I claim that
investigating the sign reconfigures some of the existing boundaries that
have become normalized in the teachers’ lifeworld. What follows are some
ways in which teachers can rethink the signs that arise in the
educational encounter and see themselves not as something outside the
production of the sign, that is as something transcendent, but as an
entanglement, or as part of the generation of the sign itself. In this way
we move from the transcendent plane to one of immanence in which we
are always implicated in the signs that we observe. In other words, we
realize our productive role in the generation of the sign that can lead to a
more active mode of being. To put this in systems theoretic terms, with
which Deleuze’s philosophy resonates closely, we see learning and
perception as “embodied action,” or recursive loops in perpetually
shifting and changing cognitive structures or becomings that result out
of the coupling of the system and the environment, neither of which
exists without the other (Varela 1992). These parallels will be helpful in

grasping some aspects of what follows next.

116

Chapter 4

Signs and Nomad Thought

The nomads are the ones who don’t

move on, they become nomads

because they refuse to disappear.
A. Toynbee.

In the previous chapter we saw the manner in which the learning
activities and needs of the actors in The City School as well as their
identities leaked happily out of the regular and more circumscribed
spaces onto irregular territory, as also the difficulty new teachers faced
in contending with complexity and indeterminacy that arose in spaces of
difference. Observing that difference and divergence and not
representational certainty was key to understanding what was going on
at The City School, I offered the Deleuzian notion of the rhizome not only
as a descriptive tool but also as a way of conceiving identity in terms of
becoming; for, who we are, that is, the image we have of ourselves, is
inextricably linked to how we act. I argued that rhizomatic thinking
would be able to respond more adequately to the flux and indefinitude of
urban education in particular.

But a fundamental rethinking or reconceptualizing of the ways in
which we construct learning and the image of ourselves also requires a
different semiotic exercise; it needs a reexamination of the ways in which

we read reality or signs, for all percepts and constructs are made up of

117

signs that arise between perceiver and perceived (Deleuze 1972, Bateson
1991). Deleuze (1972) observes:
Learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object
of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To
learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if
they emitted signs...Everything which teaches us something emits
signs, every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or
hieroglyphs. (p.4)
This seems to evoke a classic hermeneutic position. However, as we shall
see, Deleuze takes us in a very different direction and into the sign itself,
to enter it, to take apart the hecceities or singularities of its composition,
This chapter, then, sets itself the task of inquiring into the
complexity of the sign from a Deleuzian perspective, and offers a certain
semiotic experimentation which a practitioner might undertake so as to
be able to insinuate her/himself into differential spaces. In order to
construct such a conceptual apparatus I offer here a mode of
experimentation that I call an apprenticeship of the sign that allows us to
uncover the nuances of signs. I argue that for teachers entering into the
profession it is important to become apprenticed to the sign; become
what Deleuze (1972) calls “Egyptologists” of the signs generated in
encounters. Therefore, a substantial part of the chapter is devoted to
developing an analytical framework derived from Deleuze’s work for

studying signs, an endeavor which I have said. in the introduction is a

118

major purpose of the dissertation; in the other part I use data from the
case study to throw light on the working of the framework.

The framework developed here is directed at raising complex issues
around teacher becoming and teacher education. As Britzman, Dippo et
a1. (1998) have pointed out, the question of teacher becoming must
consider “complex conversations about... conflictive forms of knowledge,
culture, identity, community, language...” without which inequalities in
education will persist (p. 15). For, denial of complexity is the counterpart
of denial of heterogeneity. And in a highly differentiated environment to
deny complexity is to abet hegemony.

I claim that an apprenticeship such as I suggest here can help
teachers open themselves up to the kind of conversation that Britzman
has indicated. And this means that teachers have to learn to
problematize what they are “seeing” and not fall into the trap of a naive
realism; they have to see themselves as joint producers of the sign
regimes in which they participate. This switch in the mode of perception
is attempted through the apprenticeship, which is very different from
“reader” or “interpreter” of signs. The very ontological assumptions and
boundaries that construct school and learning undergo a fresh
examination once we become apprenticed to the sign differently. And a
new sense of looking and listening is urged on us by the realization that
we are at all times implicated in the signs that we become part of. This

brings about a fresh orientation in the educational encounter where the

119

opposite end of the encounter, or the ‘other’ is no longer an absolute
other but an inescapable part of the signs that are jointly generated in
the encounter.

Referring to Derrida’s phrase “Tout Autre est Tout Autre,” Doll
(1999) says: “The phrase is easily translatable as a truism “every other is
every other.” But it can mean...Every one is every bit other. The
challenge then, ethically and educationally, is to work with this new
notion of “otherness,” to realize that as humans we are all other—
generally and locally” (p.89). That is, we are at the same time self and
alterity—repetition and difference. To put it differently, no identity is self-
coincident, and most importantly, identity is produced always and only
in an encounter. It is the clash of forces between the observer and the
observed, each of which is implicated in the production of the other, that
gives rise to the sensible, the sign. And, it is the sign that we must learn
to engage in this new way, that is with the awareness of co-production, if
we are to respond to the challenge of becoming aware that we are both
self and other, difference and repetition. No longer is it possible to believe
that the signs—the students that we face, the curriculum that is handed
down to us, the concepts and language that we use—are independent of
us. In this manner we “enter” the sign, as it were, become implicated in
it.

This complexifies the way we observe and react to things, and

brings about a moment of diffidence, of creative hesitancy, between

120

observation and recognition, producing a murmur or a “creative
stammering,” to use a Deleuzian concept (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987,
p.98). For no longer is the sign entirely outside of us. I present an excerpt
from the case:
I: On quite a few occasions I have heard you refer to having to read
students’ auras. Can you clarify it a little for me what you mean
by this process?
MS: Well, I don’t mean anything very esoteric. It is a sort of
intuitive grasp of symptoms they show.
I: Are these symptoms entirely generated by the student or are
these subjective as well?
MS: I am not sure I understand. Do you mean whether I am
imagining it?
I: No. I mean do you see yourself only as a passive receptor of these
symptoms?
MS: No, I think a lot of me comes into play, my experience and so
on, so in that sense it is subjective. (Interview with MS #2)
The grouping of symptoms or signs is a creative act, something that
happens between the student and the teacher. An explicit realization of
this creative process, I claim, changes our habits of thought and the
construction of relations, we become every bit other.
The creative moment of hesitancy or stammering brought about by

the realization that we are implicated in the signs we experience is a

121

minor but important surge of destratification; it opens up a space for
moving away from repetition and toward a careful experimentation with
signs. It helps us set aside our habitual, everyday mode of apprehending
reality, and we begin to read signs as if in a “foreign language” (Deleuze
1995, p. 133), which is the breaching of the old boundaries and divisions
producing minor disorientations and dissident flows in an otherwise
repetitious reality. I argue that the reorientation in thought’s relation to
signs in terms of a “foreign language” is facilitated by an apprenticeship
of the sign. In the following pages I aim to show what that involves and

develop a framework for such an apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship of the Sign

It will be necessary, before going on any further, to dwell for a moment
on what I mean by the sign. One way to talk about signs is to say they
are aggregates of differences by which a perceiving organism is able to
orient itself. Bateson (1991) observes that the key question at any given
moment of human life, or probably any life, is, “What’s happening?” In
an effort to respond to this existential question the organism encounters
differences that constitute information. Broadly speaking, then, a sign is
anything that brings about a perception of change, difference, or
information. From a systems theory perspective it is a difference that

makes a difference (Bateson 1991).

122

But to Deleuze, signs are the result of a clash of forces. Therefore
Deleuze looks at the processes that occupy the sign itself:

A phenomenon is a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an

existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a

semiology...

The sign in this View is therefore simply a vehicle of force, it is an arena
for the struggle of forces for possession and it is in this sense I will use it
here. The same object, phenomenon or sign “changes sense depending
on the force which appropriates it” (Deleuzel983, p.3) and therefore my
focus will be on the becoming of the sign, on the forces that appropriate
it, rather than on signification; that is, on construction rather than
recognition. Therefore, to read signs is to stutter in a foreign language, to
construct a language of difference.

The plane of representation cuts off the becoming of multiplicities
which is a mutant space or a plane of difference, that is to say, it hinders
our understanding of the multiplicity of forces that occupy a sign at any
moment because the drive is toward recognition through resemblance.
The Deleuzian attempt is to reconstruct the sign, to enter the sign itself
and become with the sign in an immanent fashion, situated in the plane
of the sign. To recount our major purpose, it is the formulation of certain
conceptual tools for ways of looking, thinking, and experimenting that

loosens the grip of existing boundaries and categories. Ceaseless

123

problematization of signs is one way to prevent boundaries from closing
in on us.

To attempt a praxiological analysis therefore, or to serve what
Deleuze (1972) calls an “apprenticeship of the sign,” I will offer next a
four-part analytical frame derived from Deleuze’s work and illustrate its
working through examples from the case study. “Experiment,” says
Deleuze to the apprentice, “don’t signify and interpret! Find your own
places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight!
Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 139). To semiotize ourselves is to ride the
differential of the sign and recreate ourselves, a fashioning of the self
after Foucault (1994), a practice of freedom that alters our sensibilities.
Following are the components of the framework that I propose as an aid
to thinking and experimenting on sign regimes that bring about a change
in our relationship to signs and help us to be situated at the level of the
signs themselves without seeking a transcendental viewpoint: l. The
Generative; 2. The Transformational; 3. The Diagrammatic; and 4. The
Vacant. I will explain each of these components below.

1. The Generative. The generative element shows “how a form of
expression located on the language stratum appeals to several combined
regimes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 145). That is, in apprehending
signs, the generative factor involves an awareness of the different regimes

and orders of signs that come into play in any situation. It alerts us to

I24

what Deleuze calls “the points of subjectivation” (Deleuze and Parnet
1987, p.114), that is, where signs begin to coagulate toward specific and
dominant significations. To give an example, the notion of “care” in
current educational literature is a complex mix of different regimes of
signs—essentialist, liberal, black feminist, etc—that try to give it
particular signification. But in actual practice, care remains an uncertain
heterogeneous flux with continuous variation even within each sub-
conversation. This shows how signs coagulate toward specific meanings.
Let us look at a very different example next— Thanksgiving. It has a
powerful majoritarian cohesive signification for White America, whereas
for Native Americans it is a day of mourning and of loss. To see the
polyvocality and the multiplicity of the event is a first step away from
being trapped in dominant significations that prevent new ways of
looking. This does not mean replacing the majoritarian view with the
Indigenous People’s view. It means engaging with the term in its
multiplicity of meaning. It is not simply a question of decentering of
meaning, but the associated “prefab” constructions of the self that are
washed away in the process that opens the door to possible new
orientations. It is important to clarify that sign regimes are not to be
confused with language. Instead, they are “fluxes of expression and
fluxes of content” and “language is never the only flux of expression”
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p.1 1'7). Therefore language is only one aspect

of assemblages of enunciation. For Deleuze, signs have as much to do

125

with the extra-textual as with text. It is through careful attention to the
sign and a persistent awareness of the generative factor that we begin to
lose the sense of reality as concrete and given.

2. The Transformational. This element or function shows how one
regime of signs gets translated into another, that is, with what
“transformations, residues, variations and innovations” change becomes
possible. It would show “not simply how semiotics mix, but how new
semiotics are detached and produced, and how they inspire new
assemblages” and mutants (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p.114). Awareness
of transformation or mutation show us how reality is produced out of
mutating sign regimes. For example,

We may ask when statements of the Bolshevik type first appeared,

and how Leninism, at the time of the break with the social

democrats, effected a veritable transformation that created an
original semiotic...ln an exemplary study, Jean-Pierre Faye

did a detailed analysis of the transformations that produced

Nazism, viewed as a system of new statements in a social field.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.139)

It is crucial for the apprentice to become aware of these births and
transformations for they constantly lead us to view how new regimes
emerge from old ones, and what residues they leave behind. These
residues no less than the emergent regimes define the boundaries of

what we consider as reality.

126

In studying transformations, it is useful to make distinctions
between several kinds. Transformations that take sign regimes into a
“presignifying” zone, that is, where the privileged status of language is no
longer assured, are called analogic by Deleuze. An example from the case
study is MS’ evocation and tracing of auras which have an “extra-textual”
aspect. Second, transformations that take signs into a “signifying” zone,
that is, where the signifier dominates and there is uniformity of
enunciation and expression, are called symbolic. An example is LS’
insistence on the formal way of doing science seen in the previous
chapter. Third, transformations that take sign regimes into a
“countersignifying” zone, that is, into an oppositional frame are called
strategic. An example is Macy’s rejection of the editor’s point of View that
we saw in the previous chapter. And finally, transformations that take
semiotics into a “postsignifying” zone, that is, into mimicking
consciousness itself, like the experience of E in the next chapter where
she cannot name her feelings anymore, are referred to as mimetic
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 135-136). Close attention to these four
aspects, the analogic, the symbolic, the strategic, and the mimetic
together show the constant becoming and unbecoming of sign regimes
from moment to moment, and help us to access differential spaces by
moving away from identitarian frames of thinking.

3. The Diagrammatic or Pragmatic. Transformations that “blow

apart semiotic systems” and bring about large scale deterritorialization

127

are diagrammatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 136). In other words, on
the diagrammatic plane the regime of signs collapse and consequently
there is a freedom from signification, momentarily. The separation
between perceiver and perceived or experiencer and experience is
momentarily lost, the dualism between cogito and consciousness is
eroded. This plane of destratification is also called the plane of
immanence by Deleuze. Now, how does this occur?

Events or phenomena, including ourselves, according to Deleuze,
are multiplicities composed of bundles of unformed traits or abstract
lines of possible trajectories that have no name. The diagrammatic
component consists in extracting from regimes of signs traits that are
capable of being combined with one another to form new matter-sign
assemblages or multiplicities that is the basis of a creative moment. In
other words, the diagrammatic function tips us over momentarily onto a
plane of immanence from which we emerge with new combinations. The
first step to freeing the unformed trait is to find what Deleuze calls secret
lines of disorientation; we have to find the breaks in our rigid
subjectivations through awareness of what Deleuze calls “haecceities”—
unique moments of rupture in our apparent continuity; singularities that
arise when in moments of crisis feelings break down to reveal fields of
flux that have no particular name, alerting us to the tiny cracks in our

postures. A further discussion of this follows in Chapter 5.

128

Here, I will add that observation, insight, art, literature, scientific
breakthroughs, existential moments, critical experiences, all accomplish
such moments of deterritorialization. Through these micromovements,
that is, with the aid of these tiny flows, we move toward an anonymity
that is the beginning of a subconversation within the micro-politics of
larger discourses. Thus, underneath the vast movements of regulated
discourse that correspond to the overt social attitudes and positions of
each of us, we come upon uncertain terrain, an indeterminate in-
between-ness of sensations, feelings, changes and becomings that cannot
be forced into any category; we find a gap, an impossible question, an
aporia through which to escape to new becomings. And as knowledge
and curriculum cannot escape the flux and indeterminacy of this new
terrain upon which we find ourselves (Ricouer 1985), we begin to see and
create new curricular opportunities.

The usual thing is to walk past such moments either ignoring them
or seeing them as aberrations in our repetitive continuities. But once
alerted to the creative potentialities of difference, or the possibilities of
becoming, we begin to seek out these haecceities, and study these
unique moments of becoming that are ever forming and reforming.
Nurturing these inaudible murmurs opens a crack through which life
leaks out on to a nomadic terrain, and we learn to redistribute ourselves

in different ways; the traits freed from the limitations and boundaries of

129

a coherent subjectivity can then function in conjunction with other traits
to form multiplicities.

4. The Vacant. Lastly, the apprentice must also know how to
recognize what Deleuze calls the “worldly sign.” The “worldly sign” is the
vacant or empty sign, stereotypical and vacuous. It is the product of
repetition. It invents the stereotype and attempts to replace or “stand in”
for action and thought. It repeats, and “anticipates action as it does
thought, annuls thought as it does action.” Although empty, these signs
are everywhere, and Deleuze (197 2) says that the apprenticeship would
be incomplete “if it did not pass through them” (p.7). Pedagogically signs
that typecast the poor student as incapable, that see political resistance
or dissent as intransigence, and differing abilities as failure, replace
thought and action with empty vacuity. Nevertheless, to wake up fully to
the sign, the apprentice must live through these vacant signs as well and
be aware that s/ he is capable of producing the worldly sign which
incapacitates.

To observe how the worldly signs—“inner city,” “Hispanic,”
“multicultural,” to give a few examples—operate in education, and to see
how these reify categories through repetition, is crucial for the beginning
teacher. Teachers must seek these out and discover together with the
learner how these empty signs anticipate thought and action by staking
out the ground, propel the observer toward certain overarching modes,

and thereby prevent the arising of multiplicities. The thing to observe

130

 

though is that the worldly sign itself is not the stereotype; it invents the
stereotype. It has other potentialities or ways of becoming, which is a
pointer that any sign can begin to function like a worldly sign. Therefore
one must enter its plane of becoming in order to become familiar with
how it acts. In other words, while criticism is possible from the outside,
in a Deleuzian perspective one must in some sense become the empty
sign in order to perceive what it does. Another cautionary for the
apprentice of the sign is that s/ he is capable of slipping into the worldly
sign at any time. In other words, without constant watchfulness, a
“deterritorialized” sign can quickly become reterritorialized again.
Working on the above components allows us to see how “abstract
diagrams” actually operate in concrete assemblages. Abstract diagrams
are maps of the “line of flight” of each group of signs or assemblages that
can be explicated with the help of the framework as we shall soon see in
our analysis of the data. The dominant features of assemblages at all
times are difference and repetition; they may sometimes obstruct new
possibilities and other times liberate. A map of the different becoming of
signs, different lines of flight at each moment makes a diagram.
Awareness of the above is the nomadic territory in which the
apprentice becomes located. The relentless examination of signs and our
relationship to them opens up minor fissures, cracks, fault lines and
gaps through which fresh orientations and new imaginings become

possible. The apprenticeship therefore leads to what Deleuze and

131

Guattari (1987) have called “schizoanalysis,” referring to the possibility of
minor schisis or fissure in our normal flows (p. 146). Minor here does not
mean unimportant, but not readily discernible. Small changes or
dissident flows may begin as a result of schizoanalysis, and minor flows
of disorientation have the possibility of changing the habitus (Bourdieu
1990) of thought from relying on representation and recognition to
difference and experimentation. The four components of the praxis can
generate a new image of ourselves as assemblages or compositions that
can be recomposed at any time.

Britzman and Dippo (1998) have observed that the conventional
approach to curriculum is to get teachers to move toward a more certain
ground, toward more rigid planes or “segmentarities,” through higher
requirements, testing, certification and so on. The teacher preparation
and professionalization literature and the standards movement extol the
objective side of teacher education. Being concerned with regulated
spaces they mostly do not take into account irregular becomings, the
actual starts and stops, the faltering, the errors and accidents, desires
and other complexities that constitute learning. In contrast to the
“segmentarities” or stratifications assumed by conventional teacher
education as pointed out by Britzman (1998), Hargreaves (1994) and
others, a Deleuzian analysis reveals fields of indefinitude and flux that
underlie events and identities, mixing in new composnions, becoming

that are filled with learning and educational opportunities. Ignoring

1.32

becoming, ignoring moments of deterritorializing leads to great
contradiction and to impotence, since what is ignored is precisely what
we need to get people interested in education: a sense of becoming that is

not merely a signifier on a grade sheet, but something palpable.

Case Analysis
Next we will look at an example from the case study to see how the
Deleuzian analysis operates. Following is an excerpt from the fieldnotes:
This is a Friday seminar on journalism; the students are working
on the school paper. All around me are signs of different kinds:
linguistic, photographic, artistic, all being processed toward a final
articulation. Some of the students are working on PCs editing their
pieces. According to the teacher, Carla has been uncooperative for
some time, and her work has suffered. She is sitting in one corner
frowning at some sketches.
Teacher: Carla, these cartoons of yours, you’ll have to explain to
me what they mean.
Carla: I don’t know. Cartoons don’t have to mean anything.
Teacher: Probably ‘mean’ is not the right word. What do they
indicate? What do they direct the reader at?
Carla: [Pointing to a Calvin and Hobbes strip] What’s this one
mean here...a child and a stuffed toy?

Teacher: Now just a moment. You said “a stuffed toy.” Is that just a

133

stuffed toy to Calvin?

Carla: I don’t know. Well, yes and no. I mean, He knows it’s a
stuffed toy...

Teacher: Yes?

Carla: He’s also talking to him, and pretending it is talking back at
him, so in some ways it’s real to him I guess.

Teacher: So there are already two viewpoints, right?

Carla: How does it make a difference? It’s all in the author’s head
anyway.

Teacher: But animals do communicate. Children talk to animals all
the time.

Carla: Only children and people who are screwed up.

Teacher: But you do see the possibility of at least two perspectives?
Why’s that important here?

Carla: Yes...okay, it’s like...there are different ways of looking at
something.

Teacher: No, not looking at something. But they are different
things depending on how you look. So now let’s look at your
pieces. What are you indicating here?

The discussion continues in an uneasy fashion with Carla
participating reluctantly and becoming increasingly fidgety.

(Fieldnotes # 15)

1.34

 

As I read the situation, the teacher saw Carla’s attitude as a case
of a disengaged student, going through the motions of school reluctantly.
Positions of oppositionality and conflict have been theorized by
contemporary curriculum theorists such as Deborah Britzman and
Henry Giroux among others. As a contrastive device I will briefly allude to
the positions of the two theorists mentioned above in order to situate my
analysis.

In her recent work in curriculum studies, Britzman (1998) has cast
her arguments in terms of a Freudian ontology and epistemology, and
works with the psychoanalytic assumption that education is necessarily
an interference with the various unconscious desires of a child which
give rise to fundamental conflicts not only between the learner and the
teacher, but within the learner herself. Britzman (1998) observes:

At the heart of psychoanalytic work is an ethical call to consider

the complexity, conflicts, and plays of psyche and history. These

are the conflicts—Eros and Thanatos, love and aggression—that
education seems to place elsewhere. And these forces seem to
come back to education as interruptions, as unruly students, as
irrelevant questions, and as controversial knowledge in need of
containment...The problem is that...How might educators

begin to complicate not just the difficult knowledge on the outside

but also the response to the difficult knowledge within—that other

war? (p.133).

135

 

That “other war” Britzman refers to is the Freudian theatre of the
unconscious and its battle with the ego. The oversimplified modernist
curriculum remains in denial of these complex dramas, and results in
placing the difficult questions of life elsewhere, outside the realm of
education. But these forces, so carefully kept out, come back to haunt
the teacher in the classroom. They return in the form of interruptions,
disengagement, and classroom battles giving rise to feelings of
Oppression and irrelevance in the student and to a sense of hopelessness
and defeat in the teacher.

Thus far I go along with Britzman’s position, but by tying her
analysis to the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos of Freudian theory
Britzman directs attention to the psychological aspect of the individual
rather than toward the possibilities arising out of desire in the learning
encounter. Deleuze (1995) iterates his position with respect to Freud:

What we’re saying is that Freud at once discovers desire as libido,

as productive desire, [but] is constantly forcing the libido back into

a domestic representation within the Oedipus complex. (p.16)
The Oedipal theater rests within the individual unconscious, and
therefore Carla’s “oppositionality” in this framework must be seen as
arising from the repressive mechanism of the Freudian position. But
from a Deleuzian viewpoint Carla’s indifference or hostility must be

engaged with as an instance of the in-between, it takes place in an

136

encounter, and it is precisely this encounter which is the theater of
production that must be theorized and not the individual unconscious.

I would like to examine the above data from yet another
perspective before I proceed to the Deleuzian analysis with regard to this
case, this time from the critical perspective of Henry Giroux, a
curriculum theorist who may be seen as occupying a sort of border land
between critical theory and postmodernism. Giroux is a significant
commentator on contemporary urban youth culture, especially what he
calls “border youth,” and so is most pertinent in this case. Giroux (2000)
has pointed out the “fractured condition” of the new generation of youth,
as well as those who attempt to educate them, who are caught “between
the borders of a modernist world of certainty and order, and a
postmodern world of hybridized entities, electronic technologies and local
cultural practices” (p.176). In this shifting context, Giroux advocates a
critical appropriation of postmodern pedagogic practices and a strategic
engagement with modernism for a transformative political project in
educafion.

Criticizing the “racially coded cultural legacy” of modernist
schooling which valorizes the experiences of the middle class, Giroux
(2000) notes:

The modernist nature of public schooling is evident in the refusal

of educators to incorporate popular culture into the curricula or to

take into account the...massively new socializing contexts for

137

 

contemporary youth. (p.178)

The fact that education has not been able to come to terms with popular
culture and has often deliberately overlooked it is an important point in
understanding the coolness of youth toward schools, and their view of
them as hostile places.

Given the gap between the official culture of schools and that of
youth who inhabit them, it is possible to see Carla’s cartoons (apples
talking to each other as they are being baked) as a sign of popular
culture and her mood as resistance. Her inability or unwillingness to
explain her work can be seen in the light of a refusal to participate in the
overt culture of the school, and an air that seems to say, “Oh! What’s the
use. You wouldn’t get it anyway even if I told you.” Writing about the
increasing alienation of dislocated youth Giroux (2000) argues
passionately about the need to rethink the entire curriculum of schools
that take into account the “cultural transformation” of schools that has
occurred in recent times due to “massively new socializing contexts”

(p. 178) that includes change in demographics and the impact of the
information age.

But Giroux’s critique, like those of some other critical theorists,
while important and incisive, rarely gets down to the question of practice.
In other words, while Giroux offers a powerful “language of critique,”
what is often missing is a micro-analysis of the “language of possibility,”

to use Giroux’s own terms. Hlebowitsh (2000) has remarked that there is

138

 

an explicit admission of this among some critical theorists themselves:
“Giroux and Aronowitz have noted that the scholarship inspired by
critical theory has a pessimistic character that tends to default on the
commitment to curricular possibilities,” further, he also cites Giroux’s
observation that “radicals need to develop theories of practice rather than
theories for practice” (p.91).

The above lacuna is met to a large extent by the Deleuzian

approach, a thoroughgoing pragmatist one that is concerned with

 

experimentation at the level of practice. To move to the Deleuzian

perspective then, the first thing for the apprentice to note is that the

 

pedagogic encounter itself is a production of which teacher/apprentice is
a co-producer. Several regimes of signs enter into the production. This
may be seen as the generative component of the framework I developed
earlier: ...+ Teacher + Carla + Cartoon + Classroom +...is the matrix of
the signs or the theater of production. Multiple regimes of signs converge
in this production or subjectivation of the cartoon. In other words, the
question of cartoons and the rest is itself within the production of signs
and the teacher as a participant is involved in their generation. This
shifts attention from the macro—perspective of subjects and
interpretations to the micro-production of signs—that is, to the gestures,
language, semantics, speech acts, color, support, lines, body movements,
random thoughts, irritation, irregular breathing, and to all other signs

that arise in the tri—partite encounter consisting of teacher, student and

139

cartoon, each of the multiplicities bringing forth a pedagogical possibility
opened up when we shift our attention to the micro-movements and
becomings of the signs.

Admittedly, it takes a considerable effort of thought to get away
from the phenomenological subject, that is, to give up the transcendental
viewpoint of the teacher and enter into a destratified plane wherein one
has the same status as the signs themselves. But it becomes attractive
once we see the pedagogical opportunities in doing so. The semiotization
makes us lose the hard boundaries of our identities and the image of
ourselves which makes a considerable difference to the encounter. The
entire scenario of Carla, the cartoons, her uncooperative mood are now
no longer wholly outside or independent of the teacher and is in a sense
a production in which the teacher, who is the other end of the encounter,
is inextricably implicated. As we “semiotize” ourselves, our reactions
undergo a minor deterritorialization. This is the first step toward a
Deleuzian empiricism, and the construction of the plane of immanence.
It is also a first step toward establishing a more creative relationship with
the ‘outside,’ as well as a way of making fuzzy one’s notion of boundaries.

The second component of the analysis is the transformational.
Looking at the conversation, it is interesting to note that throughout the
piece neither teacher nor student mention humor, which is what
cartoons actually generate. They produce humor. They collapse different

orders of concepts, or what Bateson (1991) has called “logical types” in a

140

sudden precipitous move that brings about laughter. This is the
transformational aspect, when sign regimes undergo change or mutate to
produce new signs, new matter-thought conglomerates. Observation of
these processes makes visible formations of micro—identities (Maturana
and Varela 1998), and makes our identities and boundaries more open
and fluid. Also, the teacher’s idea that cartoons must mean something
undergoes a change once attention moves from meaning to
experimentation and production of humor. Thus there is transformation
of sign regimes. In the play of difference and repetition, differences
repeat, but in the act of repetition become different. The transformational
aspect helps us realize that we are constantly being produced even as we
produce signs because there is no resting place; signs are constantly
undergoing transformation, being taken over by new forces; new
connectivities alter the significance of a sign, no longer signifying today
what it signaled yesterday. This is important in the pedagogic relation—it
foregrounds the continual minor transformations going on in our
relationship to the distinctions with which we orient ourselves. Such
reorientation, even if they be minor, result in a changed relationship of
ourselves to ourselves, to knowledge, and to the student, and I argue
that a different sensibility comes into play as a result of becoming aware
of the flux that underlies the sign. It is an important step in the
construction of the plane of immanence, where no firm line can be drawn

between the experiencer and experience or observer and observed.

141

The third factor in the apprenticeship is the diagrammatic. In the
above example, humor as a deterritorializing, carnivalesque factor
(Bakhtin 1984) brings us to the diagrammatic or pragmatic part of our
analysis. We have seen that signs contain singularities, haecceities,
moments of becoming that begin prior to and spill beyond entities or
subjectivities. Humor or laughter as packets of sensation spill out of the
boundaries of personhood and are the reason why they are important in
creating free spaces that are indeterminate, unregulated, even if
momentarily, before being taken over by other forces.

These “free spaces” by loosening older arrangements make room
for new sensations to arise (Rajchman 1998). In the case of Carla’s
cartoons, as a teacher one would have to refer to the production of
humor, to the “anorganic vitality” of laughter which develops through
minor crises in the sensory system. It is at this point, when teacher and
student discover together their respective sensations in viewing, or
otherwise reacting to a sign, that an infinitesimal moment of
deterritorialization occurs. For “sensations are prior to forms and
representations” (Rajchman 1998, p.7), and provide a space for embodied
action or a becoming. Teacher and student occupy, if only for the briefest
of intervals, an indeterminate space. As we have noted earlier, the small
interval is crucial for Deleuzian analysis, and in this case the space of
the sensation construct becomes the smallest interval in which

differential movements can be discerned. Varela (1992) argues that, “ the

142

temporal hinges that articulate enaction are rooted in the number of
alternative microworlds that are activated in every situation. These
alternatives are the source of both common sense and creativity in
cognition” (pp. 17/ 18). The alternative microworlds thus generated
become sources of new curricular possibilities. To put it differently, since
the sensation in the small interval is indeterminate and emergent, other
configurations are always possible; that is, Carla’s reactions may find
new architectures in which to express themselves. Thus affects become
ways of generating new spaces that spin out of the cracks provided by
the small interval.

And finally there is the fourth component of the analysis—what I
have called the vacant. The vacant sign is the worldly sign that
reterritorializes, that is, reduces signs to cliches and stereotypes. In this
case the teacher struggles with the student over the meaning of cartoons
and thereby reifies it. The teacher remains with the representationalist
ideas of what cartoons are rather than what they do, and thereby hollows
out the sign eliminating the possibilities of becoming with the sign and
forming alternative microworlds.

Next I will employ the framework of the analysis on another piece
of data from the case study. This time I will turn the Deleuzian lens on a
lengthy conversation I have with J S, a teacher.

I: The other day you mentioned some difficulties you were having

with one group of students. Could we discuss that a little bit?

143

 

J S: Yes. I was doing some slave narratives and they seemed not to
be interested in it at all.

I: Do you feel they should be interested?

J S: Well, I certainly think these pieces are relevant. They are
powerful and moving. It is also our history.

I: What themes were you thinking of, precisely?

J S: Well, there are issues of power and domination, subjection
and dehumanization...

I: But on what plane are you casting them? I mean, there are the
students, there is yourself, and there are these narratives, right? It
seems to me that something else must happen for us to take our
place within these narratives.

J S: You mean, I have to connect it to the students’ experiences, is
that what you are saying?

I: Not exactly. But let’s see if I can get this right. What is the
sensation one might have when reading about extreme domination
or dehumanization?

JS: Oh! Fear, hopelessness...and also anger.

1: Okay. Let’s take fear for the moment. Fear has a way of removing
the barriers.

J S: What barriers are you talking about?

I: In the moment of fear there’s not your fear or my fear, right?

There’s fear as an impersonal movement. Fear is just fear, the

144

animal’s fear is the same as my fear. The your and the mine come
later.

JS: I am not sure I get this, but go on.

I: I am basing this on my observation that fear is nothing special to
me. Just like pain: neuromuscular discomfort. Therefore, I say we
can construct the map of fear together. That’s what I meant by
taking our place in it. We can do the same for hopelessness or

whatever. These traits can issue from...

 

J S: You mean like separate threads but coming together. Sounds
weird. But I can see vaguely what you mean.

1: Right, functioning together in a way that is neither you nor

me nor anybody else, but at the same time all of us because we are
made of these traits...

J S: And you think we can do this with the students?” [Laughs]

I: I think we can, we have to be careful with this though. We have

to talk about it in a very careful way. (Interview with J S #2)

The above is more a dialogue than an interview; here I am trying to test

Deleuzian ideas with the teachers. Fear as an abstract diagrammatic

deterritorializes, releases us from strata I claim, forms a rhizome with

others’ fears. There is a becoming in fear or in any other trait that flees

along virtual lines that have nothing to do with historical circumstances.

It has to do with becoming. Capture it, enter into it and we begin to

develop a plane of immanence that ultimately changes the nature of fear

145

itself, becoming something else. The same thing happens with desire. For
Deleuze, desire precedes being, and is therefore immediately practical
and political. It is practical precisely because it can actively participate in
the drawing of the traits before the terms and relations are set, that is,
before the boundaries of self and other are drawn. Fear and desire,
reward and punishment have been used in the conventional curriculum
as instruments of territorialization, that is, for emphasizing repetition

and the thickening of strata through repetition which become authority

 

structures. In a Deleuzian analysis, the same are now overturned to be
used as tools of deterritorialization, as instruments of flight, of becoming.
To proceed with our analysis, let us look at the first component of
our framework, the generative. The sign regime of the slave narratives in
our example above was ostensibly bringing into play another set of signs
seen by the teacher as disinterest and apathy—fluxes of expression and
fluxes of content. But the important thing is to see the different regimes
as mutually productive and playing into each other. That is, we do not
look to see how to overcome the signs of apathy. Instead, we let the
students’ reactions or sign regimes flow into the theater of production. In
other words, to the narratives of enslavement the teacher can invite the
students to add their own feelings of being enslaved—to the teacher, the
topic, the curriculum, or any other aspect—and dramatize the situation.
Dramatizing the situation here would mean subjectivizing the feelings in

different ways and connecting it to the topic of discussion. This way there

146

is a cross-fertilization between two regimes of signs that may give rise to
yet others. Of course, the students may refuse to participate. But refusal
brings forth an equally interesting regime of signs, evoking a new trope of
resistance which is the transformational aspect—when signs mutate or
undergo transformation and a new regime is born. The important thing
in this is to look at all the signs as production, and keep oneself at the
level of the sign.

Next we must consider the diagrammatic component. In the
conversation above, I discuss with J S the possibility of detaching traits
like fear or pain or helplessness and the possibility of constructing a map
or an abstract diagram of traits or microworlds issuing from different
bodies whereby our separate boundaries might undergo a minor
destratification. In other words, experimentation with the generational
and transformational aspects of signs can bring us to a point where we
can see the possibility of traits emerging from under signs and combining
to form new multiplicities. This changes the image we have of ourselves
as fixed entities, as there is the possibility of a sudden crossing of
boundaries when the traits become deterritorialized, that is released from
the composites or aggregates. This dissident flow or a minor current of
disorientation unsettles our subjectivities and a rhizomatic moment can
emerge. The rhizoid spaces thus generated create alternative microworlds
for curricular exploration and is an enactment of a praxis that brings

about embodied action rather than representation.

147

 

In order to construct the diagrammatic, we have to pay attention to

the smallest interval of interaction, in order that we may work our way

 

past the dominant significations. We begin by paying attentions to the
small differences, inconsistencies, and gaps in our feelings, thoughts and
attitudes. In other words, subversion must be carried out at micro levels.
In the small interval, Deleuze remarks:
We witness a transformation of substances, a dissolution of forms,
a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces

or flows such that a body or a word does not end in a precise point.

 

We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the

material power of that language. (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987, p. 129).
It is the small interval where incorporeal transformations occur, where
catastrophic changes take place, where according to Varela (1992) new
microidentities emerge. An incorporeal transformation is thus “a passage
to the limit” where change occurs like at the limit in differential calculus
wherein lies the power of that notion. We cease to end at a point or in the
vicinity of a pre—given representational outline. In terms of practice we
observe and practice small changes in daily interaction, each observation
of flux and indeterminacy constructs new awareness of embodied action
in place of representationalist thought that leads to further changes in
the ways we think and act. Bring about change in homeopathic doses,
says Deleuze, not in grand sweeping reforms. It means, in order to

deterritorialize our boundaries and subjectivities we have to observe the

148

smallest variations in tone, language, gesture, thought and movement
that we produce in encounters. The more minute the observations the
more effective it is. It is in the small interval that our traits and
singularities begin to detach themselves from the composites, and we
become aware of our collectivities.

Lastly, we have to consider the vacant component of the
apprenticeship, or the empty sign. The sign regime of the slave narrative
that J S brings into play can quickly turn into a cliché or acquire
stereotypical features unless an investigation into the micropolitics of
desire, subjection and resistance makes each sign also into an action, a
becoming in the lives of the actors that allows it to escape repetition. At
the same time the desire to enslave or be enslaved must be part of the
forces that occupy the above signs and therefore must be kept under
close scrutiny. The purpose of the whole exercise, it is useful to remind
ourselves, is to establish a different relationship with signs that allow
fresh pedagogic possibilities, to enter the sign itself, and unleash a
becoming that is a joint production in the learning encounter. We
become not reflective practitioners but creative ones.

This then is nomadic territory, populated by fluxes, flows,
densities, and intensities, rather than things and outlines where new
pedagogic possibilities arise as a result of attaining the limit in the
boundary constructs and the consequent collapse of dominant

significations. We have to be cautious though, for as Deleuze points out,

149

stratification and destratification follow each other, and there is no such

thing as being permanently situated in the nomadic, as we see below.

Some Methodological Precautions

In the following section I will explain certain additional methodological
precautions that we must observe in the apprenticeship and in creating a
logic of multiplicities, that is, a logic of difference.

First, encounters continually generate signs which coagulate or
decompose in multiple ways. To make sense of these continuous streams
of signs is to invent a language. Deleuze has observed that there are
many languages within a language. The reference here is not to a
langue/ parole distinction, nor is it an allusion to different registers or
dialects within a language. Here Deleuze is asking us to take
responsibility for creating our own minor languages within major ones,
languages of becoming without which we fall prey to the worldly sign.
This acutely brings out the ethical responsibility in an encounter.

The second thing one must note is that deterritorialization and
reterritorialization follow closely on each other’s heels. To give an
example, let us look at some excerpts from Maxine Greene’s Teacher as
Stranger. Greene admits the impossibility of establishing fixed criteria for
interpreting cultural signs, but immediately afterwards declares,

Nevertheless nostalgia remains, and it is significant too. When a

person thinks, for example, of The Iliad, with its heroic seekers

150

after excellence...or of Shakespeare’s plays, the magnitude of these

works make them seem truer, more intrinsically artistic than, say,

 

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer,

John Barth’s End of the Road or Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. (p.292)
Greene makes a move away from any attempt to totalize signs, but she
cannot maintain that line of flight and reterritorializes the ground she
had opened up by claiming nostalgia as “significant,” which takes us
back to representationalist ground.

Again, let us consider Greene in the same essay. She importantly

 

notes the necessity of setting aside “everyday mode of apprehending” in
interpreting signs, but then goes on to establish representational
boundaries around a sign:
Encountering a work as art, the beholder is expected to set aside
his everyday mode of apprehending. Guemica cannot be
encountered as if it were a cartoon or a distorted rendering of an
actual bombing (p.293).
In the production of the sign, which is relational, an interdiction or taboo
merely interferes with seeing the multiplicity of forces that occupy a sign.
To say Guemica cannot be encountered as a cartoon is to reify both
Guemica and the notion of the cartoon and deny their multiple ways of
becoming in relation to the observer. In both the above examples, the

apprentice must note the manner in which deterritorialization or

151

destratification is quickly followed by reterritorialization. Dominant
significations make their appearance after a momentary decentering.
The third thing to be aware of is that signs or phenomena are only
partly sheathed in history, and therefore we must not make the error of
over-historicization. Chaos and complexity theory have amply
demonstrated that a system’s behavior cannot be wholly predicted from
its history. Citing Nietzsche, Deleuze (1995) observes that “nothing
important is ever free from a “nonhistorical cloud.” What history grasps
in an event is the way it’s actualized in a particular set of circumstances;
[but] the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history” (p. 170). This
can be illustrated by taking an example from embryology. An organism
starts with a single cell, with a certain amount of genetic information.
Then through mitosis the cell divides and multiplies, at all times the DNA
replicating itself. But then at one point groups of cells begin to
differentiate, and one clump becomes the heart and another the liver.
Nothing in the chemistry of DNA itself can tell us how this happens,
since all the cells had the same initial conditions. Historical determinism
fails since historically all the cells had the same initial conditions. There
is no way to tell which group of cells would acquire certain morphological
characteristics. Chance and contingency cannot explain the process of
differentiation either. Something else is going on here that Deleuze terms

pre—historical. This cautions us against overly historicizing phenomena.

152

In the View that I take here, the sign’s becoming is partly an
atemporal flux that has no directionality but one which appropriates all
the tenses simultaneously. Its becoming is prior and parallel to its
unfolding in time. It has the advantage of giving the teacher the space
not only to think of her/ his responses in learning encounters in terms of
“Chronos” which has directionality, but also in terms of “Aion” which is
timeless in the sense of maintaining no linear direction (Deleuze and
Guattari1987). A meditation on this can give insight not only into the
historicity of our subjectivities but also the other dimension, that is, into
the atemporal flux which is the outside of history—the “Untimely” of
Nietzsche (1983). The awareness of the timely and the untimely together

aid the apprentice of the sign to destratify and enter nomadic terrain.

Conclusion

There are no grand plans here, no overarching schemes for change, but
an awareness of the smallest interval in which transformation can take
place, a constant looking out for microfissures through which life leaks:
“Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, p.24) open up these possibilities, stammerings and murmurs that
start the movement toward a nomadology. To this end, the
apprenticeship of the sign involves the realization of the following: a)
every encounter generates signs; b) the meaning of a sign is not a given;

0) signs are the result of production in which the observer and the

153

observed are both implicated; (I) one must forsake all tendency toward
nostalgia in reading signs and treat them as a fresh problematic; e) signs
are partly sheathed in a becoming that is outside history, that is, they
are partly Chronos and partly Aion; i) one must hold at bay habitual
responses while observing signs, the way one would in looking at a piece
of art; g) signs must be freed time and again from old meanings and
observed to see what they do and to whom; h) the apprentice must be
aware of her/ his tendency to produce the worldly sign. A four-fold
framework called the apprenticeship of the sign is advanced as praxis
toward such a transformation in thought.

The work here is one of constructing a nomadic topos, an
agencement or assemblage that is an intersection between teacher,
student and curriculum, between matter and thought, consisting of
singularities that are not bound by subjectivity, because, as we have
seen, the old boundaries cannot deal with the multiplicities; using the
differential of the sign we construct a region that mainly consists of
connectivities, lines, flows and densities, for these are much more useful
in place of conventional identities like student, teacher, and other well
determined categories. It involves a certain movement in awareness
beyond these habitual categories that can be accomplished through
paying close attention to the nature of signs.

And this leads us into the question of affect, since a key move in

the formation of such rhizoid spaces is to “free the trait,” or become

154

aware of haecceities or microidentities that are also affects—the
transforms and fields of flux beneath our constituted selves. I discuss

this at length in the following chapter.

155

Chapter 5

Affect and the Power of Thought

Affects aren’t feelings, they’re

becomings that spill over beyond

whoever lives through them.

Deleuze, Negotiations.

Let us recall that one of the categories in our six-part analytical
framework outlined in Chapter 2 was the problem of affect, in particular,
stress, in beginning teachers. In the introduction and the third chapter I
observed that a restrictive and limiting view of curriculum and learning
that came out of representationalist conceptions created resentment and
stress in teachers who unfortunately sought resemblance and identity in
the highly differentiated urban conditions of The City School. Let us also
recall that our commitment is to find ways of looking, thinking, and
experimenting that allows us to escape the representationalist ground
and enter a more nomadic terrain that can deal with irregular and
divergent spaces. In this connection I noted that the way teachers looked
at learning and curriculum could not be fully separated from the kind of
images they held of themselves and their roles as teachers. That is to
say, representationalist and identitarian notions went along with certain

kinds of affective investments. Therefore, an investigation of stress would

involve looking at both concept and affect simultaneously.

156

In this chapter, our effort will be to help teachers move away from
resentment and stress to a more generative and productive terrain
through a reconceptualization of identity and affect. To this end I will
continue to develop notions of the diagrammatic in Deleuzian schizoid
space, and show that the remapping of identities and boundaries with
different kind of conceptual coordinates and ontological characteristics
has a meliorative effect on teacher stress.

In explicating this position, besides Deleuze, I am going to draw on
parts of Deborah Britzman’s work who has made some important
contribution in this border region, where the conventional divisions
between concept, affect and percept are no longer clear or unambiguous.
I hold, along with Britzman and Dippo (1998), that

Conceptualization is not just about articulating ideas but also

about making sense about the myriad feelings one has about

ideas. Conceptualization brings together affect and cognition
precisely because structures of meaning cannot be divorced from

structures of feeling, investments, and desires. (p.22)

Thus, a concept is not just an intellectual notion, a product of Cartesian
reason; it has woven into it affective qualities at the same time. How we
construct something conceptually is inextricably linked with our
structures of investments, feelings, and desires. Conceptualization is a
hybrid of thought, emotion and desire. Therefore reconceptualization can

also affect stress. In other words, my claim is that a change in the

157

conceptual structure can deeply influence affective states and thereby
diminish stress. But what is more important is the possibility of
producing affect, a unique contribution made by Deleuze, that goes
beyond containment to the generative. It is this positivity of affect that

can lead us into new becomings.

Review of Literature

First, in order to establish a horizon for our discussion, I look at the
problem of teacher stress as portrayed in mainstream education
scholarship, and briefly review the literature around it. Stress is an
aspect in the becoming and the unbecoming of a teacher that is of
serious concern according to all available indices (Byrne 1998). Abel
(1999) observes that prolonged stress associated with the gradual erosion
of important technical, psychological, and social resources result in
burnout. Maslach (1993) has suggested that burnout among individuals
who do "people work" tends to be multidimensional composed of
emotional exhaustion, depersonal-ization, and reduced personal
accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion includes increased feelings of
depleted emotional resources and feelings of not being able to provide
oneself to others at a psychological level. Depersonalization occurs when
an individual develops negative attitudes toward students because of
depleted emotional resources. Abel and Sewell (1999) emphasize the need

for effective coping strategies targeting sources of stress.

158

The existing literature recognizes that relationships with pupils
have been the most important source of stress for teachers (Friedman
1995), and several studies have also indicated that poor student attitude
is consistently a predictor, if not the best predictor, of teacher stress
(Borg 85 Riding, 1993; Boyle et al.,1995). Some other major sources of
stress identified by teachers have been administrative apathy and work
overload. A review of the literature also reveals that the organizational
approaches which have been used in schools to combat burnout have
been managerial in style and technique (Boice, 1993). These include the
skills of managing time, communicating, planning leisure time, and
reducing psychological stress. Finally, the literature states that in-service
programs and workshops devoted to various forms of relaxation training,
such as visualization, quieting reflexes, autogenics, and biofeedback,
often provide renewal techniques for the burned out teacher.

What is important to note in the above is the way stress is taken to
be an attribute of the teacher. This contrasts with the Deleuzian
viewpoint where affects are not attributes of an entity but are prior to,
and constitutive of that entity. The second thing to note is the localized
nature of the actions proposed in order to “combat” stress and burnout.
Each of these, ranging from positive feedback to stress reduction
training, from meditation to managerial techniques, are individualistic
and therefore deal with one end of the problem ignoring the relationality

of the issue. I claim that although the symptoms that are grouped and

159

labeled as stress are easily identifiable with the body of a teacher, the
problem itself cannot be separated from the educational encounter of
which the teacher is only one end. In the tormentor/ tormented mode of
analyzing the problem, the vital two—way relationality of the encounter
gets eclipsed. There is, thus, in the mainstream literature, a one-sided
analysis of the problem. And further, it sees feelings as things-in-
themselves, having ontological status, around which boundaries can be
drawn, whereas in the Deleuzian view, affects are differential relations
between states and are always becoming; not something fixed. In a
preview of what is to come, this leakage and spillage of affect in the
Deleuzian construct allows us recompose stress in productive ways as we
shall see.

Going back to Deborah Britzman, who shows a more complex
understanding of this problem—that is, of the relationality of feelings—
Britzman (1998) notes, “feelings are a response to something and are
already constitutive of other relations,” and to deny this is to “shut out
the infinite variations and slippages of affect...and ambivalent forms of
thought” (p.84). It is precisely this relationality and ambivalence that is
constitutive of other relations that gives us an opening into a Deleuzian
approach. Other phenomena or agglomerates are implicated in feelings,
and must be taken into account if we are to find a tolerable response to

stress. In other words, we have to investigate entanglement.

160

Apart from Britzman, another body of literature that I will draw on
here is the systems theory of Maturana and Varela, to which I have
alluded from time to time in other parts of the dissertation. For Varela
(1992), “who we are at any moment cannot be divorced from what other
things and who other people are to us” (p. 10). In other words, in the
moving, seething flow of existential moments, every transition or change
in the direction or architecture of relations produces a new cognitive
being that cannot be determined in advance. These ephemeral, emergent,
and enactive singularities Varela calls “microidentities,” and their
corresponding lived contexts “microworlds.” The notion of microidentities
resonates with Deleuze’s haecceities, and supports the Deleuzian
contention that we, as well as phenomena in general, are aggregates and
multiplicities that decompose and recompose in multiple ways. It will be
important to remember the notion of the microidentity and transitionality
in breaking down ideas of “presence,” and the apparent coherence of pre-
existing identities that resist new ways of becoming.

In Deleuze (1988a), affects, also called traits, are not feelings or
emotions, but movements from one state to another, “transitions,
passages that are experienced, durations through which we pass” to an
enhanced or diminished sense of being. Here too, as in Varela, we
encounter the notion of transitions. For Deleuze, “these continual
variations” that create a movement in time from a “preceding state

towards the next state” are called affects. That is to say, affects are

161

 

modifications that act upon previous modifications leaving corporeal
traces which involve both “the nature of the affecting body and the
affected body.” And further, affects are “purely transitive, and not
indicative or representative, since [they are] experienced in a lived
duration that involves the difference between two states” (pp.48/ 49).

In other words, affects are transitions or differences between states
produced in relationship, and if we ask about the nature of these
differences, we cannot get a representational interpretation precisely
because difference is experienced as a transition between states. “But
the idea which constitutes the form of the affect affirms of the body
something which involves more or less of reality than before” (Spinoza
cited in Deleuze 1988a, p.49). This means that although we cannot
translate the differential into representational terms, its effect is felt as
an expansion or diminution of our “mode” of being, that is, our capacity
to be affected and to act.

To put it simply then, affect is something which either increases or
decreases our power to be affected, and since it is always relational, it
produces new modes from preceding states that affect all parts of the
relation, that is, all bodies that enter into the relation. So when I say a
body is affected, I mean that a certain mode encounters another mode
and enters into a composition with it thereby increasing or diminishing
its “power of acting or force of existing” (Deleuze 1988a, p.50). This way

of visualizing affect is more helpful in constructing a praxis for dealing

162

with stress, as we shall see. I will next attempt to highlight how the
Deleuzian praxis can help teachers to emerge onto a new terrain that is

generative of affect instead of being depletive.

Analysis of Data from the Case Study
Let us look at the following example from the case study. I talk to a new
teacher who reveals an unusual angle to the problem of stress.

[TR: teacher; I: Interviewer]

I: Could you talk about some specific things, behaviors, attitudes

that have been stressful for you this last year.

TR: Oh, where shall I start! There are several things but I have
this feeling that some of the students either want to push you up
or bring you down. And that is one. Do you know what I mean?

I: I am not sure if I followed you. Could you elaborate on that?

TR: Well, I think it is a status thing. Either you must have status
in their eyes or they ignore you. I have spoken to some others
and they have similar feelings.

1: Oh I see. But how does one acquire status?

TR: Oh, it could be many things. You may come in with a certain
status for various reasons, or it could be the way other staff treat
you, the way they look at you. It could be the subject you teach.

I: And in what ways does this affect you?

TR: It interferes with the way you function as a teacher; there is

163

 

an invisible frame around you. And the status determines whether
students pay any attention to you or not. And also you feel
crowded, less room to maneuver.

I: Do you feel this is entirely beyond the control of the teacher?
TR: I think a large part of it comes out of certain expectations.

(Interview with TR #2)

TR sees the problem of stress as vitally related to the issue of status, to
the way one is seen in the other’s world, to how one is positioned. Thus

feelings of indifference or student apathy that cause stress are

 

importantly shown to be constituted of yet other complex relations. And
this complexity cannot be treated in one-sided analyses. Further, it also
reveals how the idea of status, or the perception of how one is viewed,
has a significant effect on affective states, thus bringing the two, concept
and affect, close together. Observing TR further, I note:
One thing to be noticed about TR is how hard she tries to
be part of the youth culture, adopting their manner of talk and
attempting to relate to the students by talking about details from
her personal life while teaching in class and outside. But the
harder she tries the more the students seem to Spurn her, make
fun of her language, and in small ways repudiate her. All this is
taking an immense toll on TR. The other day she was complaining

about how quickly she is “getting old” here. (Journal entry # 11)

164

affirmation or negation TR is engaged in a mental effort of representation,
one that attempts to create a coherent map of her relations in advance
and thereby brings forth a compelling narrative-world that is negative

and stressful. The conceptual shift that is to be made here is to realize

 

In attempting to follow the student in the psychologistic game of
that these relations are not positivities but emergent differentials, and

the affects they trigger are fields of flux. In other words, stress is not a

state but a sensation that arises in transiting between states. And '

 

therefore, the causal claim that “I am stressed due to...” is an abstraction

 

whose actual embodied action needs to be studied, for, as Varela (1992)
has pointed out, “cognitive intelligence resides only in its embodiment”
(p.59). What all this amounts to is a shift in attention from overarching
descriptors such as stress to the planes of fracture and microintervals
produced by tectonic shifts wherein the nameless enactive moment
actually emerges, and which contains generative possibilities. Such a
praxis can be achieved by becoming aware of the transitional moments of

the appearance of the haecceities or microidentities and microworlds.

 

The excitement begins once we take hold of this theater of production
and the dissipative structures within it (Massumi 1992, p.67), and
through careful observation and experimentation discover what Deleuze
calls the possibilities of the virtual, and what Varela (1992) would call
“neural narratives” of the imagination. That is to say, one becomes

situated in the in-betweenness of the transitive that moves not along pre-

165

determined lines, but along the virtual and therefore has a certain
flexibility and spontaneity.
The above points may be further clarified by looking at another

piece of data from the case study and the analysis that follows. E, an

 

older teacher expresses her fears and her stressful condition:
E: I think my real stress has come about because of working with
students and getting closely connected to their problems for a long
time. I love the students and many of the kids come in and tell me

what is going on. Sometimes listening to them can be exhausting. I

 

find myself jumping in wanting to act and do something to change
what is going on in their lives. I feel very strongly about this and
this causes me a lot of stress. I go to their homes, I contacted T by
going to her house to tell her she has to be in school to meet the
psychologist the next day if she wanted a referral from her. But her
home conditions overwhelmed me. I found I could not teach after
that for a whole day. Over time, this has become very depressing
for me. How does one listen to the depressing stories of kids lives
and not get depressed oneself? But maybe depression is not the
word. I do not know my own feelings anymore. That is my
question. I have been working with these kids and their personal
problems so closely and I have felt recently that I cannot continue

here anymore because I am too fragile now. (Interview with E #2)

166

Here we see the case of a teacher who is close to what she feels as a

breakdown in her emotional well-being due to stress. The pressure of

 

consistent close interactions have opened up lines of fracture, but it is
these lines of break or affective rupture that offer possibilities of fresh
investigation. To quote Britzman (1998):

Precisely because feelings are a matter of history, of location, and

l.‘-_EKUE

of bodies, one might consider them as symptomatic of
contradictory pushes and pulls of relationality and need. In this
context, a more useful way to think about feelings requires

attention to what it is that structures the ways in which feelings

 

VI
.‘.

are imagined...[Therefore] pedagogy might provoke the strange
study of where feelings break down...pedagogy might become
curious about what conceptual orders have to do with affectivity.
(p.84)
According to Varela (1992), where feelings break down, is precisely where
“the concrete is born” (p.11). In other words, knowledge as action takes
place in between states; critical transitional moments open up gaps in
our “molar identities” or apparent continuity and inspire a certain force,
a freedom of observation and action due to the indeterminacy inherent in
the situation. Even more emphatically, Varela (1992) notes that “ it is the
breakdowns, the hinges that articulate microworlds, that are the source
of...the creative side of living cognition” (p.11). In Deleuzian terms,

schisis leads to leakages and the consequent regaining of a degree of

167

“molecularity” ; it acts to remove the organism from its normal habitat of
sameness and identity to a becoming-other or a continually differentiating
space where a degree of spontaneous generation can occur. In other
words, “breakdowns,” or critical moments of transition are generative
moments when something new might happen. In such a praxis, concept,
percept, and affect act together to produce the observation of a
microidentity or haecceity that is

a mode of individuation very different from that of a

person, subject, thing, or substance. They consist entirely of

relations of movement and rest...capacities to affect and be

affected. (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1987, p.261)
These becomings that spill out of determinate boundaries form modes of
enactive perception. E’s condition inadvertently exhibits such a
becoming. The temporary absence of boundary or “supermolecularity”
that E experiences, rather than diminishing her capacities to be and to
act, can actually enhance it once she learns to look in terms of
haecceities or microidentities and fully embraces the field of
entanglement giving up the struggle to maintain transcendent categories.
According to Massumi (1992), such an operation “opens a space in the
grid of identities those categories delineate, inventing new trajectories,
new circuits of response, unheard-of futures...and maps out a whole new

virtual landscape” (p.101). It is the deliberate cultivation of this field

168

through the observation of transitions and the arising of haecceities or
microidentities that is key to the praxis.

Further, E says she does not know her feelings anymore, revealing
an indeterminate state where E can only have a sense of her fragility.
According to Massumi’s (1992) reading of Deleuze, the “zone of
indeterminacy, creating the conditions for becoming-other [is] a process
as fragile as it is infectious” (p.101). It is the careful direction of such
moments of “schisis” aided by a conceptual deterritorialization that leads
to the opening of a

fractal abyss where [earlier] there was only a hyphen between

stimulus and response, and canned reaction. The body’s zone of

indeterminacy...widen[s] beyond measure. This increase in the
body’s degrees of freedom is called “imagination.” Imagination

takes the body not as an “object” but as a realm of virtuality...as a

site for superabstract invention. (Massumi 1992, p. 100)
Therefore, E would be helped if she rethought her body as a realm of the
virtual, and move away from the habitus of whole dimensions—like “me”
and the “kids”—to the fractal alternative of microidentities that
recombine in spontaneous and newly affective ways.

Without the benefit of an experimentation of the kind outlined in
the apprenticeship to direct her deterritorialization, E unfortunately has
moved toward a diminished state of powers of acting and being. I claim

that, with an experimental awareness of the process of becoming and

169

deterritorialization teachers can turn such affective moments to
productive use and redirect them into the forming of multiplicities. That
is, they can allow themselves to generate new microworlds and
microintensities that have the possibility of escaping stress.

To recount then, in Deleuzian-Spinozian terms, stress can be
redescribed as transitional states in the combination of bodies that leads
to negative consequences. Given the concept-affect correspondence, it
leads to the position that stress or a decrease in powers of acting and
being, can be a consequence of the habit of maintaining transcendent
categories. This can be reversed by affective formations that recombine
intensities according to a different schema. In the above example, E says
that her condition is the result of “being too closely connected” to the
kids and their problems. But these categories are external to the
experience of stress itself. In other words, these categories do not pre-
exist on the plane of affect; instead, what is, is the experience of intensity
and entanglement. A Deleuzian praxis can help E to widen her repertory
of responses.

However, no one knows at the outset, the affects of which the body
is capable. Therefore, “it is a long affair of experimentation, requiring a
lasting prudence” (Deleuze 1988a, p.124) that is necessary to enter a
widening range of responses and invent the necessary neural narratives
for those becomings. Below is a piece of case data that exhibits

possibilities of pedagogic experimentation.

170

 

J S has been teaching slave narratives in his literature class. It is
something he feels passionate about but he is disturbed by his
students’ lack of response to these powerful accounts. Over the

term J S’ anxiety rises over the apathy and general indifference of

 

the students. He admits to feeling increasingly stressed. But
something happens that begins to turn things around. J S’ class
starts to move in a new direction when in a series of individual
interviews with students he discovered that they had very different

perceptions of the class. Many of them were sixteen and over, and I

 

felt that the classroom was an aging process and that they were

 

wasting their time in school. The compulsory credits that they had
to earn in order to graduate were thus gone through in opposition
that had its effect on the teachers. Reflecting on this, JS said, after
a while he could see their point of view and shared the students’
sense of frustration. As soon as that happened, the character of his
negative emotions began to change. Now, he said, the study of
frustration was a key element in his teaching. (Fieldnotes # 16)

J S: At this point I realized that I have to change my orientation,
that I had certain fixed ideas about what they should be
learning and how.

I: What about the sense of frustration you spoke about earlier?
J S: There’s less of that now, that’s one result of the change, I began

to feel less of it personally.

171

1: Why do you think that happened?
J S: I think it happened one day when I had hit the bottom. I

asked myself what was I opposing. I hadn’t taken into account

student frustrations seriously up until that point. Since then I

have begun to change some things.

I: You mean there is no frustration now?
J S: No, but it does not have the emphasis on myself anymore. I am

doing things differently now. (Second interview with J S)
Earlier J S had not taken into account students’ views and frustrations.
In other words, their affects were not allowed to enter into a rhizomatic
relationship with the material. Instead, the focus was on the material,
and the maintenance of “molar” categories. Once he did, the character of
his own stressful feelings began to undergo a change. The small shift in
the order of concept in J S allowed a corresponding shift in the order of
affect. On allowing stress into the curriculum the very negativity began to
change and turn productive. Proceeding in this manner, with careful
experimentation, J S can attain a degree of supermolecularity and “evoke
an indeterminate number of pragmatic responses” (Massumi 1992,
p. 100). The space that was occupied by personal stress can now be
remapped onto a different set of coordinates consisting of becoming-other
and its fractal geometries or non-whole dimensions, and this is the

beginning of a Deleuzian construction.

172

 

Conclusion

Thus in a given encounter or combination, careful observation and
cautious experimentation will reveal the scope of affectivities. This has
significant consequences for the problem of stress. For, it means that
certain modes and images of thought—thought invested in molar
categories— will induce stress in the pedagogical situation, and once
reframed the same will turn around and help us escape or diminish it.
The effort is to somehow take charge of that production, seize the means
of constructing the patchwork of the plane of immanence in which we
ourselves become the cause, the producer. This is the central difference
between say a social psychology approach to stress and the Deleuzian
approach. Deleuze discusses and shows us the possibility of the
production of aflect which is not found anywhere in the social psychology
or psychoanalytic literature.

In our analysis, the production begins when we realize, by means
of the apprenticeship, that our molar categories are built from “small
domains composed of microworlds and microidentities...” (Varela 1992,
p. 18) the “unruly interactions” and not totalizing integration between
whom give rise to a cognitive moment. The realization of these
microidentities or multiplicities that links up with other microaffects
affords us the possibility of moving from effect to cause or stress to
productivity, and is capable of dealing with the problem of stress and

affect in a singularly comprehensive way.

173

 

 

Chapter 6

Conclusion: Mapping the Leaks

Upon me and many of my contemporaries

the stuttering of birth weighs heavily. We

learned to mumble—not to speak—and it

was only after paying attention to the

increasing noise of the century, and after

we got bleached by the foam of its crest,

that we acquired a language.

Ossip Mandelstam, Le Bruit de Temps.

We started by looking at some problems that surfaced in the case
study—the difficulties beginning teachers faced in a highly differentiated
environment where they sought identity and resemblance. The urban
school described in the case offered pedagogical possibilities more in the
way of irregular, uncertain, and in-between spaces that were closer to
the “leaky” needs of urban youth who attended the school. Whereas the
data showed that teachers who were new to the environment were often
unable to take advantage of these in-between spaces for making
pedagogical moves, the dynamics of school relations at this particular
site often resisted being confined to the staid space of representation and
resemblance. Something substantial always leaked—the school leaked
out of “State” space in serious ways; few in the district office understood
what it was doing; the staff leaked out of contractual space in attempting

to make school somehow relevant to youth with different needs within an

unresponsive and wooden state system; the students spilled out of the

174

 

formal curriculum and onto wider social spaces, and the curriculum was
designed to be full of leakages through which students, many of whom
would otherwise have dropped out, could find escape routes to different
becomings not anticipated within the district’s official curriculum.

The case study illustrated the difficulty beginning teachers had in
constructing and practicing a contextually relevant pedagogy in this
highly differentiated urban space; the tendency was to reduce difference
to identity, to the established, conventional mode of curricular practices
from which the school had attempted to escape in the first place. It
resulted in a strong pull toward the center. Therefore, my theoretical
intervention in the way of offering theory as praxis was to find a way to
make teachers aware of the constructivist possibilities of positive
difference. My theoretical effort was to help educators to imagine a
conception of reality other than the representationalist one—I worked
within a Deleuzian pragmatics that insists that reality is cocaused, and
is not a given but rather an “eternally recommenced creation” (Massumi
1992, p.53).

Following Spinoza and Hume, Deleuze considers all phenomena or
beings to be nonidentical, provisional, multiplicitous, and a product of
difference. In considering the case study in this light we saw the case
data resonate with the notion of multiplicity and rhizomatics. Realizing
our multiplicities is a first step toward breaking down identitarian ways

of thinking, and releasing the power of difference. It is not a mere

175

 

 

 

question of teaching ourselves to value diversity in which difference is
still the “other”; it is to realize that we are ourselves the product of
difference and not static beings, thus allow ourselves be located in the
ever-shifting interstices of difference itself. In other words, it is an
invitation to occupy, even if momentarily, unknown regions in which the
Platonic pressure to seek resemblance and identity shrink giving us
glimpses of alternative possibilities of which the rhizoid space is one.
Thus, Deleuze’s philosophical project is to release us from
representationalist thinking by embracing “the constantly changing
sensible world of multiplicity and becoming” (Hayden 1998, p.133).
Ethical experimentation with the manner in which boundaries come up
around the sensible helps us to remain close to the relations of
existence /difference themselves instead of relying too much on existing
categories. Deleuze offers useful insight into the ways in which arbitrary
composites or aggregates like the human identity gain sovereignty
through “despotic sign systems” and acquire reified boundaries through
re-presentation. Therefore, examining sign systems earnestly begins the
work of theory as praxis; experimenting with signs leads to an altered
perception of the learning encounter as a cocausal, joint production of
signs. And since signs are differentials the productive power of positive
difference comes into play. Each new sign or movement of difference

poses a fresh problem for pedagogical investigation.

176

Further, Deleuze’s concepts allow us to travel beyond our confining
coordinates to a field of flux and indefinitude from which arise
sensibilities and assemblages that are able to operate in new ways. From
the point of view of meeting successfully the challenges of divergent
spaces, this is of great importance; it validates differential experience not
merely as an acknowledgement of an other, but as the very processes
through which reality is generated. Therefore it frees us to look for and
affirm curricular possibilities in unusual spaces that are generally
overlooked. In particular, it helps us to see how the student and the
learning encounter are fonts of curricular possibilities. Deleuze urges us
to reach for the haecceities and singularities of our experience with
which to strive for new configurations of thought and feeling. From being
transcendentally situated as the experiencer, there is the possibility of
being inserted into the plane of experience itself. For example, when the
categories around feelings break down, we enter an uncertain field of flux
that is usually pathologized as schizophrenia by institutionalized
psychoanalysis. But for Deleuze there is a creative schizoid process that
gives access to an immanent state if “controlled schisis” can be
maintained. Using Deleuzian concepts allows not just new curricular
spaces but new ways of defining identity that is more compatible with
irregular spaces.

Boundaries around curriculum and boundaries around identity

are seen to open up when redescribed in Deleuzian terms of composites

177

or aggregates. But, for this to happen, we have to pay close attention to
the internal differences within them. In other words, through theory as
praxis the “badly analyzed composites” can be seen to be nothing other
than exactly that—composites made up of traits, which can be
destratified, and the haecceities or microidentities released.

Once our sensibilities are opened up in a Deleuzian manner, life
leaks out of the holes or fissures and forms multiplicities or rhizomes or
plateaus of intensity with other composites. Entities lose “faciality” and
become anonymous; boundaries lose their hard edges. The advantage of
creating the image of ourselves as a rhizomatic multiplicity is that
rhizomes have open borders and are constantly changing in architecture.
They are non-hierarchical and more democratic. They are of the order of
the moss and form plateaus of intensity, laterally strung out and
contingent. And because of this flexibility they are eminently suitable for
modeling uncertain and irregular spaces and becomings.

In terms of the curriculum, they offer great flexibility, for rhizomes
are connectivities; they ceaselessly attempt to establish new connections
and interrupt molar formations. New connectivities generate vectors of
virtuality and regions of surprise. They give us the freedom to consider
new matter-thought compositions. In short, rhizomes have the possibility
of reinserting life into the classroom because they search for intensity

and cull it from difference; they show new ways of becoming, tapping

178

 

from the existing life around them, bringing forth new concept-affect and
matter-thought combinations.

As a first step toward such destratification I offered the
“Apprenticeship of the Sign,” derived from Deleuze’s work. The
apprenticeship as I have constructed it, consists of four components: the
Generative, the Transformational, the Diagrammatic, and the Vacant.
Each of these components performs a particular work of destratification,
or conducts a move away from representation and resemblance. The
apprenticeship is geared toward a moment to moment transformational
awareness of the way sign regimes behave, and within that awareness,
the rhizomatic possibilities of becoming different, of becoming somebody
else together with other bodies. It teaches us to read everyday reality in a
“foreign language” with a hesitancy and a stuttering, keeping in abeyance
our everyday modes of apprehension.

The stuttering as creative hesitancy, a moment of generative flux in
the curriculum is another point I make in this work. In applying the
fourfold analytical framework of the apprenticeship to the conversation
between Carla and the teacher in chapter 4, we see how the possibility of
such a moment arises but goes unheeded. If the attention was turned at
that point to production of affect instead of being centered on meaning, it
is conceivable that the entire situation could have evolved differently. In

a different example, another teacher (J S) takes advantage of hesitancy or

179

 

“stuttering” and begins to put to productive use the negative affect—in
this case frustration and stress.

The next important point to come out of this work is the potency of
the small interval. It makes use of the systems theoretical perspective of
Francisco Varela in particular to support and clarify the Deleuzian
emphasis on the small interval. The apprenticeship opens the door to
dissident flows and lines of disorientation. It creates minor derailments
from our gross identities, and contains the possibility of generating out of
that disturbance minute, qualitatively different, space-time intervals.
Small intervals can be very potent and theoretically powerful. The study
of change must inevitably look into the small interval, since all
transformation takes place in the confines of the infinitesimal as a
passage to the limit. “Imperceptible rupture,” and not “signifying break”
thus becomes, in terms of praxis, the sites of rupture, allowing us to
become aware of the fluxes that lie beneath our constituted selves. The
signifying break or grand schemes of reform or change becomes quickly
taken over by territorializing forces, but an imperceptible rupture
remains the hidden, unnoticed faultline that can allow what Britzman
and Dippo (2000) have called “awful thoughts” or dissident movements to
surface.

In terms of education, what this signifies is that the grand scale
reforms and large structural initiatives, although they may look

impressive, are less important from the point of view of real change, than

180

the minor movements of disorientation and dissidence. For, as Deleuze
has observed, major signifying breaks are always captured by existing
forces after a brief while and reinserted into the old spaces. This is what
Deleuze calls reterritorialization. Instead, smaller acts of rupture have
greater possibility of escaping capture.

This brings us to yet another praxial point offered in this work—
mapping affects. When we realize our multiplicities there is a change in
the image of ourselves, and what escapes through these ruptures and
fissures are traits and singularities that can combine with other matter-
affect combines to form new multiplicities or rhizomes or plateaus of
intensity. Beneath the gross categories in terms of which we have become
accustomed to thinking of ourselves, lie singularities and what I call
complex fields of indefinitude, fluxes and tendencies that have no
particular shape and cannot be fitted into preexisting categories. It is
precisely these unqualifiable fields of indefinitude that holds out the
possibility of escaping our constituted selves or to “pour out of the holes
of subjectivity,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1987, p.190). The case of
E in the previous chapter was an illustration of the beginnings of such a
deterritorialization, but without the necessary conceptual shift, E’s
partial deterritorialization could not be mapped onto other assemblages.

To map affects therefore requires a combined concept—affect shift.
In fact, in Deleuze, these are not ever fully separable. Concept and affect

go together; conceptual architecture is closely connected to affective

181

'6 J Wm

 

 

states which in turn affects what it is possible to conceptualize. To create
a map or an abstract diagram, sensation in the smallest interval must be
watched for in a pedagogic relationship, and like in E’s case, sometimes a
spillover occurs and a loss of sense of boundaries take us to the limit
where feelings intermingle with other bodies resulting in the
intensification of our powers of affecting and being affected. This is the
construction of the diagrammatic.

The important claim here is that the pragmatics of the
diagrammatic can help prevent stress and burnout in teachers, that is,
in those who are willing to experiment with the apprenticeship, by
inserting the experimenter in a plane of immanence through minor
destratifications.

This work of controlled schisis that Deleuze describes, must
proceed with a lot of caution and careful experimentation. Desubjectific-
ation and the attempt to place the body in direct relation with the flows
of other bodies by working past the naturalized organic unity does not
imply a complete loss of all sense of cohesion and integration: “You have
to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have
to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn
them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it...and
you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to
enable you to...[m]imic the strata. You don’t reach the plane of

consistency by wildly destratifying” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 160-

182

61). In other words, it is neither possible nor desirable to fully
deterritorialize the apparent organic unity of the entity; for strategic
purposes we have to maintain certain outward stratifications. Instead,
the way to go about it is through minor destratifications and small
intensifications, changes of velocity, retarding flows here and intensifying
it there.

To summarize the significance of the study then, it offers four
things. First, it offers a praxis in the way of the apprenticeship that
allows the teacher to become experimental with percept-concept-affect
conglomerates in the pedagogical context, and insert her/himself in the
plane of experiment by means of a semiotic exercise. Second, it turns
attention to the small interval as the important unit of change as
opposed to large scale reform that plays such an important role in
conventional wisdom. Third, it offers a way of mapping affects that spill
over to generate plateaus of intensity and new becomings. And finally, it
points to the need for constructing the immanent plane using the tools
and insights acquired from the above three as a way of deterritorializing
stress and burnout.

I have described my work here as fieldwork in philosophy, in that it
is a theoretical mode of analysis that nevertheless pays close attention to
the complexities and dynamics of the educational encounter. It puts
philosophy to work in a true Deleuzian fashion. I have tried to use

philosophy to interrogate the lived experience of curriculum and thereby

183

 

find new possibilities of action. It involved replacing the one-sided
analysis of what happens to the teacher, usually found in mainstream
literature, to the more complex one of theorizing the pedagogical
encounter itself.

The shift from transcendence to immanence implies a renunciation
of apriori, transcendent categories in terms of which change usually is
sought. The transcendent is “paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical and
referential” (Deleuze 85 Guattari 1994, p.89), whereas immanence is the
jouissance of difference and movement. Instead of the transcendent
which blocks movement and becoming, we construct a plane of
immanence or of teacher becoming from within, through cautious
experimentation and our eye on differential movements in small
intervals. According to Deleuze, this is perhaps “the supreme act of
philosophy,” the task of showing the plane of immanence. The plane of
immanence is not given but is constructed piece by piece even as we take
our place in it, and it is subversive to domination and oppression.
Deleuze (1995) remarks: “It is not immediately clear why immanence is
so dangerous, but it is. It engulfs sages and-gods. [For] immanence is
immanent only to itself...and leaves nothing to which it could be
immanent” (p.45). Immanence flattens authority structures and all
transcendent claims to truth; it fills the dimensions with the jouissance

or ecstasy of difference.

184

 

Future Research Possibilities

There are several strands of research that can be generated from this
work. One possibility is to further develop the four part framework I have
offered here and bring it into teacher education as a way of theorizing the
pedagogical encounter beyond the usual “molar” or macropolitical
categories of race, class and gender. The advantage is that it allows a
“molecular” or minoritarian perspective—a posthumanist lens to look at
curriculum theory and relations to the ‘outside.’ A second possibility is in
empirically testing the hypotheses about the release of traits and the
formation of assemblages in learning spaces by means of further
dialogue with teachers. A third possibility is to take this conceptual
structure to the level of the functioning of teachers and see what effect it
has on their levels of stress and affectivity. A further research direction is
to appropriate Deleuze’s work and link it up to the work of Luhmann,
Maturana and Varela, and Donna Haraway to more fully explore and
elaborate on what a posthumanist curriculum would look like without
much of the presumptions of the prevailing humanism that has been so

thoroughly criticized in postmodern discourses.

185

 

REFERENCES

Abel, M. H. 85 Sewell, J. (1999). Stress and burnout in rural and urban
secondary school teachers. The Journal of Educational Research
(Washington, DO) U. 92 n05 (May/June 1999) p. 287-93

Agar, M.M. (1980). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to
ethnography. New York: Academic Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin:
University of Texas.

Bateson, G. (1991). A sacred unity: Further steps to an ecology of mind.
New York: Harper Collins.

Bauman, Z. (1992). Intimations of postmodemity. New York: Routledge.
Best, S. 85 Kellner D. (1991). Postmodern theory. New York: Guilford Press

Blake, N., Smeyers, P. et al. (1998). Thinking again: Education after
postmodernism. Connecticut: Bergin 85 Garvey.

Boice, R. (1993). Writing blocks and tacit knowledge. The Journal of
Higher Education. Vol. 64, Jan/ Feb; pp 19-54.

Borg, MC. 85 R.J. Riding. (1993). Teacher stress and cognitive style. The
British Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 63, June; pp 271 -286.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Boyle, G. et a1. (1995). A structural model of the dimensions of teacher
stress. The British Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 65, pp 49-
67.

Britzman D. P. (1986). Cultural myths in the making of a teacher.
Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 56, No.4 ; pp 442-455.

Britzman, DR 85 Dippo, D. (1998). Toward an academic framework for
thinking about teacher education. Teaching Education. Vol. 9, No.1.
15-26.

Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a
psychoanalytic theory of learning. New York: SUNY Press.

186

 

Britzman, D. P. 85 Dippo, D. (2000). On the future of awful thoughts in
teacher education. Teaching Education, Vol. 1 1, No.1; pp 31-37.

Buchanan, I. (2000). Deleuzism: A metacommentary. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.

Byrne, J. J. (1998). Teacher as hunger artist: burnout, its causes, effects,
and remedies. Contemporary Education v. 69 n02 (Winter 1998) p.
86—9 1 .

Canetti, E. (1984). Crowds and power. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York:
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

Cherryholmes, C. (1988). Power and criticism: Poststructural
investigations in education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Conway, D. W. (1997). Tumbling dice: Gilles Deleuze and the economy of
repetition. In K. A. Pearson (ed.). Deleuze and philosophy: The
difference engineer. New York: Routledge.

Cicourel, A.V. (1963). The educational decision-makers. Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill 85 Co.

Deleuze, G. (1968/ 1994). Difference and repetition. Translated by Paul
Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1972). Proust and signs. New York: George Braziller.

Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and philosophy. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1985). Cinema 1: The movement image. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1988a). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City
Lights.

Deleuze, G. (1988c). Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990a). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by
Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. (1990b). The logic of sense. New York: Columbia University
Press.

187

 

Deleuze, G. (1993). The Deleuze Reader. C. Boundas (ed.). New York:
Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difi‘erence and repetition. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays critical and clinical. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. (1983a). On the line. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. (1983b). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. (1986). Nomadology: The war machine. New
York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and
schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Translated by
Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues. Translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University
Press.

Derrida, J. (1970). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the
human sciences. In R. Macksey (ed.). The structuralist controversy.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Doll, W. (1999). Conversing with “the other.” Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing. Vol.15, No.3. 83-89.

Eco, U. (1980). The name of the rose. New York: Harcourt Brace 85 Co.
Fendler, L. (1999). Making trouble: Prediction, agency and critical
intellectuals. In Thomas Popkewitz and Lynn Fendler (Eds),

Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and
politics. New York: Routledge.

188

Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D.F. Bouchard (ed.)
Language, counter—memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews.
New York: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Theatrum philosophicum. In D.F. Bouchard ed.,
Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews.
New York: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. (1983). Introduction. In Deleuze, G. 85 Guattari, F. Anti-
Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow (ed.). New York:
Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1994). Ethics, subjectivity, Truth Paul Rabinow (ed.). New
York: New Press.

Friedman, I. A. (1995). Student behavior patters leading to teacher
burnout. Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 88, No. 5 (May-June
1995): 281-289.

Giroux, H. (2000). Postmodern education and disposable youth. In Peter
Trifonas (ed.). Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural politics, instituting
education, and the discourse of theory. New York: Routledgefalmer.

Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the
modern age. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Grosz, E. (1994a). A thousand tiny sexes. In Boundas 85 Olkowski (eds).
Gilles Deleuze and the theatre of philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Grosz, E. (1994b). Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. Sydney:
Allen and Unwin.

Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: teachers’ work
and culture in the postmodern age. New York: Teachers’ College

Press.

Hartley, D. (1997). Re-schooling society. Washington DC: The Falmer
Press.

Hayden, P. (1998). Multiplicity and becoming: The pluralist empiricism of
Gilles Deleuze. New York: Peter Lang.

189

 

Hlebowitsh, RS. (2000). Radical curriculum theory reconsidered: A
historical approach New York: Teachers college Press.

Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.

J ardine, A. (1985). Gynesis: Configurations of woman and modernity.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kliebard, HM. (1992). Forging the American curriculum. London:
Routledge.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

LeCompte, M. 85 Schensul, J. (1999). Analyzing and interpreting
ethnographic data. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

LeCompte, M. 85 Schensul, J. (1998). Designing and conducting
ethnographic research. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Lesko, N. (1995). The “leaky needs” of school-aged mothers: An
examination of US programs and policies.” Curriculum Inquiry. Vol.
25, No.2.

Levi Strauss, C. (1969). The raw and the cooked. Transl. J. Weightman 85
D. Weightman. New York: Harper 85 Row.

Liston, DR 85 Zeichner, KM. (1996). Culture of teaching. Mahwah, NJ:
L.Erlbaum Associates.

Luhmann, N.(1989). Ecological Communication. Trans. John Bednarz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Luhmann, N. (1990). The cognitive program of constructivism and a
reality that remains unknown. In W. Krohn et al. (eds.).
Selforganization: Portrait of a scientific revolution. Dodrecht: Kluwer.

Maslach, C. (1993). Burnout: A multidimensional perspective. In W.B.
Schaufeli (ed.) Professional Bumout: Recent developments in theory

and research. Washington DC: Taylor 85 Francis.

Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia:
Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

190

 

Maturana, H. R. 85 Varela, F.J. (1998). The tree of knowledge: The
biological roots of human understanding. Boston: Shambhala.

McCarthy, C. 85 Dimitriadis, G. (2000a). All-consuming identities: Race
and the pedagogy of resentment in the age of difference. In Peter
Trifonas (ed.). Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural politics, instituting
education, and the discourse of theory. New York: Routledgefalmer.

McCarthy, C. 85 Dimitriadis, G. (2000b). Globalizing pedagogies: Power,
resentment, and the renarration of difference. In R. Mahalingam 85 C.
McCarthy (ed.). Multicultural curriculum: New directions for social
theory, practice, and policy. New York: Routledge.

Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a
small school in Harlem. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. (1996). Report
of the Commission. Washington DC.

Nietzsche, F. (1967). On the genealogy of morals. Vol.1. Transl. W.
Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale. New York: Random House.

Nietzsche, F. (1982). Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality.
Transl. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1983). Untimely Meditations. New York: Cambridge
University Press.

North Central Regional Educational Lab (NCREL). (1998). Milwaukee
Public School District Innovative School Program: Final Report
Addendum. Oak Brook, IL: NCREL.

Olebe, M. (2001). Beginning teacher support and assessment program.
Teacher Education Quarterly. Vol. 28, No. 1; 71-84.

Pearson, K.A. (ed.). (1997). Deleuze and philosophy: the difference
engineer. New York: Routledge.

Pinar, W. (1994). Autobiography, politics, and sexuality: essays in
curriculum theory (1972-1992). New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar, W. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study

of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York: Peter
Lang.

191

Pinar, W. (1998). Curriculum: Toward new identities. New York: Garland
Publications.

Pinar, W. (2002). The Internationalization of curriculum studies: A
history and status report. Paper presented at AAACS Conference,
New Orleans.

Popkewitz, T. S. (1988). Educational reform: Rhetoric, ritual, and social
interest. Educational Theory 38, (1).

Rajchman, J. (1998). Constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press

Ricouer, P. (1985). History as narrative practice. Philosophy Today, Fall
1 985.

Sanders, M. (2000). Schooling students placed at risk: research, policy ,
and practice. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Schwanitz, D. (1987). Systems theory and the environment of theory. In
C. Koelb and V. Lokke ed. The current in criticism: Essays on the
present and fixture of literary theory. W. Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue
University Press.

Shukin, N. (2000). Deleuze and feminisms: Involuntary regulators and
affective inhibitors. In Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds.).

Deleuze and feminist theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and alterity.: A particular history of the
senses. New York: Routledge.

Varela, F. (1992). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Weisberg, J. 85 Sagie, A. (1999). Emotional burnout: impact on intention
to quit. The Journal of Psychology v. 133 n03; (May 1999) p. 333-9 .

Weiss, E. 85 Weiss, S. (1999). Beginning teacher induction. ERIC Digest;
US District of Columbia: ERIC; 1999-11-00.

Wolcott, H. (1994). Transforming qualitative data. London: Sage
Publications.

192