Schizo-Feminist Educational Research Cartographies

Abstract

Deleuze and Guattari have set the onto-epistemological ground for much of the enlivening new work that is happening in the ‘affective’, ‘non-representational’, ‘posthuman’, and ‘new material’ ‘turns’ in educational research. However, where I think discussion needs to gain ground is around the ethico-political dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought for conducting research in relation to the conceptual apparatuses outlined in their treatises on schizoanalysis. It seems what is lacking in some of the take-up of Deleuze’s solo philosophy, for instance his treatise on ‘societies of control’ as well as perhaps Deleuze and Guattari’s later, A Thousand Plateaus, is adequate attention to the psyche and subjectivity, which was paramount in Anti-Oedipus. While their work is celebrated for ‘flattening out of the social and psychical so that there is neither a relation of causation (oneor twoway) nor hierarchies, levels, grounds, or foundations’ (Grosz 1994: 180), flattening does not mean eschewing attention to the psyche-subjectivity. To address my concerns about the sometimes missing dimensions of subjectivity in the take-up of Deleuze and Guattari in some educational research, in this short article I would like to return to the basic premises of schizoanalysis as outlined in Anti-Oedipus and Guattari’s later Schizoanalytic Cartographies – both issue radical calls to engage with the complexity of the social field, capitalism and the unconscious and explore the conditions through which schizoanalytic change is made possible. My aim is not to define or defend the correct schizoanalytic tasks or methodological rules but to show how this orientation may be experimented with through assembled relations that make up the apparatus of conceptual inquiry: ‘The most desirable effect that can be anticipated in the conceptual field is not in the order of comprehension