Conceptual ecologies for educational research through Deleuze, Guattari and Whitehead

Abstract

This article will explore the increasing interest in the application of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Alfred North Whitehead to educational research, for example, as a conceptual underpinning for inquiry in the new materialisms, and/or educational posthumanism. The exploration of this paper is complicated by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari changed their philosophical position in their dual publications, with, for example, their last book: What is Philosophy? representing a substantial departure from their rhizomatic work in, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This article will explain the changes in position with reference to the mapping of conceptual ecologies that Deleuze and Guattari are describing through their philosophy, and not dualism. Concept creation appears in the analysis of Western philosophy in: What is Philosophy? and as the job of philosophy. In contrast, A Thousand Plateaus presents a whole raft of interrelated concepts that help explain the connections between capitalism and schizophrenia, but do not present ‘concept creation’ as a positive task as such, even though one could impute that they are successfully doing it. This article will explain these changes in positioning of Deleuze and Guattari as a mode of sophisticated conceptual ecology, which takes into account the work that they want their concepts to perform. Transcribed to educational research, ‘concept creation’ is an importantly non-methodological task, which is augmented and expanded with reference to the metaphysics of Whitehead’s process philosophy (a non-method), and how it has been taken up, for example, by Isabelle Stengers in terms of research positioning and science.