Deleuzoguattarian Concepts Research Articles

Dwelling in matter: flows of affect in teachers’ professional becoming-with-technology

ABSTRACT The aim of the present article is to leverage new materialism as a framework for re-conceptualising teachers’ digital professional development. Building upon the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of affect and machinism, I suggest that technology use cannot be conceptualised as pre-given property or service of independently existing entities. Instead, it needs to be studied as a relational phenomenon in its ongoing materialisation. I further argue that technologically supported processes of teachers’ professional development cannot have a pre-existing status, since they gain substance only when drawn into machinic encounters occurring between human and non-human entities. My main argument is that such encounters generate new potential that interrupts and differentiates the intensity and quality of teachers’ becoming-with-technology. By building upon these insights, I propose the concept of techno-ontology as an ontology of meaning that can help teacher educators re-examine the multiplicity of the affective forces that constitute the conditions of human-technology interaction. This is a vision that seeks to free teachers’ professional development from rigidified standards of digital competence and attend to its reinvestment as a creative process of digitally agentic becomings.

Becoming a technology-capable language teacher: a new materialist perspective

ABSTRACT Research shows that in-service teachers often struggle to incorporate learned knowledge from their teacher education programs into the irregularities and complexities of their classrooms in part because of neoliberal values and practices that promote regularity and quantifiable outcomes. This is one of the reasons why, in recent years, a number of scholars have called for an ontological turn in teacher education that takes into consideration the intricacies and non-linearity of becoming a teacher. In the same spirit, this article draws on new materialist scholarship and the associated Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of becoming, assemblage, affect, and learning (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 1994) to detail how two teacher trainees’ professional knowledge and selves were constantly re-shaped within tangles of relations between human, material, and expressive elements associated with an online teacher education course in technology-enhanced language education with an optional community service learning component. Data consisted of the course assignments, student interviews, and online blogs. Through traditional analytical methods such as coding as well as relational practices such as rhizoanalysis, new knowledge and understandings were produced regarding the role played by matter in the relational production of teacher education. As such, this article shows how re-theorizing the function, and impact of human, expressive, and material elements in teacher education can open new avenues of potential transformation for teacher trainees away from neoliberal thinking and practices.

Minoritising process drama for teaching Cantonese to ethnic minority children in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This paper reports a case study of teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong ethnic minority pre-schoolers using process drama. Based on Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of minor literature and language, becoming and de-/re-territorialisation, this paper aims to reconceptualise a playful adaptation of process drama developed by Joe Winston (2012) as a language-minoritising approach to the teaching and learning of a major language that is very foreign to children. The findings suggest that, to accomplish ethnic minority children’s becoming Cantonese speakers, the theatre games and language play should involve minoritorisation and de-/re-territorialisation of the normative practices of process drama, the target language as well as learner identity.

Teaching in the afterward: undoing order-words and affirming transversal alternatives

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the irruptive potentiality of language in rethinking pivotal concepts in pre-service and in-service teacher education. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of language, we undertake a radical undoing of dominant concepts of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment as ‘order-words’ that variously segment, delimit, and potentialize lines of subjectification and signification in professional learning settings. We argue for a speculative and affirmative engagement with the complex trajectories of teacher education in light of this post qualitative turn, focusing on how Deleuzoguattarian concepts decouple the act of teaching from the ‘teacher’ as personal subject, and resituate the event of teaching within assemblages of felt transitions and vital forces. Working through vignettes that affirm transversal alternatives for exploring how teaching ‘thinks’ through events, we conclude by considering ways that teaching approaches the immanent outside of language, or what Deleuze simply referred to as ‘a life’.

The “Flatness” of Deleuze and Guattari: Planning the City as a Tree or as a Rhizome?

Flat ontology has become an umbrella term for several theoretically based approaches, notably Delanda’s controversial reconstruction of DeleuzoGuattarian concepts. I highlight key divergences in Delanda’s “flat ontology” from that of Deleuze and Guattari’s “flattening” of multiplicities on a plane of immanence. The rhizome is arguably the concrete image of Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicity, constituted by intensive relations, or becomngs, between heterogeneous singularities. A rhizomatic multiplicity contrasts markedly with the hierarchical dualism of the pseudomultiplicities of arborescent structures. Referencing Marston et al.’s “flat” site-ontology, I introduce sites as DeleuzoGuattarian eventspaces; emergent properties of entangled human and non-human relations and their capacities to affect and be affected. I select two spatial planning sites from urban fringe Australia, both of which involve significant transformation of (semi-)riparian habitat. One illustrates an arborescent system of thought and practice and the other a more rhizomatic approach which explores the situational potential of human/non-human encounters. I explore capacities of both sites to affect humans and non-humans and how the respective planning systems engage with them. I then question the possibility of rhizomatic planning practices, whether arborescence is inevitable, or whether a double-structure is possible, before concluding that a double-structure may afford glimpses of the bi-directionality or “flattening” of DeleuzoGuattarian multiplicity – “both/and” – an inclusive disjunctive synthesis of becoming.

Material-discursive changes: posthuman methodologies to (re)conceptualize postgraduate encounters in/with/through language

This paper aims to demonstrate how posthuman research methodologies foster change in analytical thinking strategies to encourage new understandings of academic literacy. It details data and insights from a recent PhD study exploring postgraduate students undergoing transformational entanglements of becomings with ‘academic language’. By presenting fragments of interviews with postgraduate students sites of contradictions and assumed expectations of communicative competence are explored. This is analysed by overlaying several thoughts on top of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts major and minor language, desire, and the pre-personal. Posthuman methodologies are used to re-think ‘the problem’ of academic language, unsettling longstanding ‘deficit model’ understandings of academic literacy. Exploring possibilities of the ‘more than’ in and of language creates generative spaces for new possibilities in analytical processes. Thus, I unsettle my own thinking practices by re-turning to the data to offer multiple diffracted readings for alternative ideas about the role of language in postgraduate learners’ becomings.

Faces and Surfaces in the Landscape of Pasolini’s ‘Palestina’

Hardly known that Pier Paolo Pasolini has created a landscape trilogy through the location-hunting documentaries in his oeuvre. The first of these works is also the one that comprises the spine of this essay, Sopraluoghi in Palestina (Locations in Palestine, 1963), the second one is Appunti per un film sull'India (Notes for a Film on India, 1968), and finally, in Per un'orestiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969/70). The use of historically and culturally layered landscapes from varying perspectives makes his documentaries a ”territorial assemblage” in which any number of things or pieces of things has gathered. Following the footprints of Pier Paolo Pasolini, this study aims to explore the film, namely Sopraluoghi in Palestina (Locations in Palestine, 1963) and to present different articulation of space, landscape, territory and place. Particularly, the narrative information, pure observation and his self-experience of landscape are spliced together in mythical as well as historical shots which have been incandescently defined by his poetic realism. Film, indeed, not only does enable to mediate some Deleuzoguattarian concepts penetrating from philosophy to cinema, but also does open new paths for ”thinking differently” on the complexity of space. This article, by delving into the real-time shots of the film will problematize the spatial-temporal dimensions are involved in the cartography formed by heterogeneous forces or/and multiplicities defined by ”zones of indiscernibility” in the landscape. In this way, I target to reveal its diagrammatic formation which provide the viewer thinking through words and images, nature and culture, faces and surfaces.

Love in early childhood teaching: reading data diffractively with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts

Love is a significant, complex, and problematic aspect of early childhood teaching that is simultaneously valued, undervalued, feared, and overlooked. This article investigates complexities and tensions within perceptions and experiences of love in early childhood teaching from a posthumanist perspective. Data from a research study exploring emotions in early childhood teaching are analysed using concepts of affect and assemblage; and sense, nonsense, and paradox. Diffractive data analysis teases out flows of affect and forces that enable and constrain ways that love is continuously becoming in early childhood teaching and delves into the process of sensing in between bodies and language. This theoretical framework and methodology provides opportunities for productive ways of perceiving children, teachers, researchers and other-than-human components of early childhood assemblages as continuously produced within complex, unpredictable, and significant loving relationalities.

Experimenting with creativity, immigration, language, power, and technology: a research agencement

PurposeThis paper is the actualization of a researcher’s attempt to engage, both conceptually and methodologically, with the dynamic and ever-creative connections and forces associated with the schooling experiences of immigrant students. The research reported that in this paper comprises part of a three-year research project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and focuses on the interrelationships between immigration, technology and pop culture in a Canadian French-language secondary school. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from new materialist thought, the experience of one immigrant student is put to work with(in) the Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts of agencement, machines, language and power (pouvoir, puissance) with(in) the rhizoanalysis of a short video clip provided by the student.FindingsWith(in) the rhizoanalysis, the publication machine emerges as a force that could potentially affect the expression of one’s becoming citizen, and hacking emerges as a force that could contribute to the destabilization of the publication machine’s power (pouvoir).Originality/valueThe originality of this paper is that readers are also invited to contribute to this experimentation in contact with the real.

Hawks, Robots, and Chalkings: Unexpected Object Encounters During Walking Interviews on a College Campus

A feeding hawk, a sculpture of a fallen robot, and chalk markings pointing to a slave cemetery-each of these objects was unexpectedly encountered during walking interviews on a college campus. This article explores these object encounters in turn as provocations toward the potential for walking as a method to generate interventions in the reproduction of hegemonic spaces. Specifically, this paper takes up the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome and the assemblage to explore how the practice of walking makes possible creative and imaginative explorations in the relationship between objects and place. Methodologically, walking produces the possibility for affirmative difference in the interview, a positive embrace of reading objects as complex and connected through an embodied enactment of rhizomes and assemblages. Inquiry that thinks with rhizomes and assemblages connects disparate encounters, moments, and objects through affirmative difference, embracing connections and relations. This article suggests implications for how the walking interview might engender reflective entanglements of theory and methodology, resist extractive methods, as well as produce imaginative reconceptualisations of place, and interventions and disruptions of hegemonic narratives.

Agencement, second language education, and becoming: A Deleuzian take on citizenship

ABSTRACTThis article makes novel use of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of becoming and agencement to frame qualitative research on how youth from second language immigrant families conceptualize citizenship. Even though our work here is primarily conceptual, we refer to aspects of a previously published study to concretely illustrate these concepts for the reader. The study in question found that the participants exhibited a mixture of conceptualizations of citizenship, some of which aligned with dominant trends in citizenship education. Other conceptualizations presented dimensions of citizenship that were unexpected and intensive. In our discussion, we use two Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts to deepen our understanding of the complex relationships between competing discourses on citizenship in the context of second language education. We argue, in short, that becoming and agencement help “disturb” the once axiomatic linkage between citizenship education and the nation-state and challenge clichéd notions of “global citizenship.”

Unformed Sound in Multimedia Composition: Andrius Šarapovas’ Project Silver Dust

The paper is based on the Deleuzean concept of the deterritorialization of refrain, using unformed sound and an investigation into how it works in the multimedia project Silver Dust. The experimental video project created by Lithuanian artist Andrius Sarapovas is interdisciplinary, comprising of music, dance, and poetry. In the project, different art lines run separately, parallel or in different directions, are full of cracks, and at the same time create unity through the invisible links. Our question is: How does G. Deleuze and F. Guattari’s mention of “raw sounds” in What is Philosophy? stimulate the appearance of the art’s machine, vibration and clinches between the different art lines in the composition Silver Dust? Using Deleuzoguattarian concepts of crack and flesh, the arrangement of composition, the rearrangement of characters in art machine, and the acting of a dark precursor is analyzed. The conclusion is that A. Sarapovas tries to compound raw sound / noise, unexpectedly coming into music and poetry and the raw view in image (image behind the scene) and allows for their interconnection during the montage, opening up the conditions for vibrations and couplings between heterogeneous elements and division. Consequently, sounds are held as G. Deleuze and F. Guattari state, in their “extinction”, “production and development” by the multimedia art machine.

Emerging childhoods and immanent becomings: considering difference in one child's encounters with popular culture

ABSTRACTOngoing debates over children's encounters with popular culture are grounded in representational images of what childhood is and what childhood should be. As such, the tendency to overcode and regulate children's behaviors, relationships, and desires are often part of a greater effort to prepare the child to fit fixed and essentialized notions of what she should be as she grows into a person, capable of contributing to a globalized society. These efforts toward molding the child for adulthood disparage the moments that she is already a part of and the most important thing then becomes preparing her to participate in a world that we can neither foresee nor predict. In this paper, I consider the research encounters with an 11-year-old girl, who participated in a university-sponsored weekend art school, where she created seemingly subversive drawings and comics as she engaged with popular culture related to Justin Bieber. Employing Deleuzoguattarian concepts, I describe the ways in which the girl transcended representational images of childhood. In doing so, I reconceptualize childhood itself as affective, emergent, and always in processes of difference.

Curriculum as post-intentional phenomenological text: working along the edges and margins of phenomenology using post-structuralist ideas

In this article, I experiment along the edges and margins of the phenomenological notion of intentionality using the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of multiplicity and line of flight. Working from Pinar et al.’s anticipation that phenomenology would undergo discursive shifts tending towards the post-structural, I theorize curriculum as post-intentional phenomenological text. To illustrate, I use this post-intentional figuration to theorize some of my recent professional development work with teachers and argue that post-intentional phenomenological theorizing might be useful for curriculum theorists.

Encountering methodology through art: A Deleuzoguattarian territory of action research

The philosophy of Deleuze, and his collaborative work with Guattari, has begun to appear in the field of action research. This article seeks to build on this scholarship through a discussion of the literature in which Deleuzoguattarian concepts are used to reconsider action research methodology. Framing action research as territory, I suggest that artmaking can facilitate the creation of new ideas, thus initiating the process of deterritorialization. For an examination of the concepts used and the implications for action research methodology, I draw from my experience creating art as an action researcher with a local Somali nonprofit organization.

THE INVISIBLE WITHIN

:Visual culture – art, film, entertainment, advertising – are saturated with images of normative heterosexual masculinity. They form visual narratives that project a largely coherent kind of masculinity where heterosexual men are shown to be creative and powerful; they initiate heroic action, take the moral high ground and preserve traditional roles and the status quo. This widely extensive visual field, peopled with normative images of masculinity, also affects and infiltrates the domain of art exemplified by Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism which, to the present day, continues to project masculinity as the originator and pioneer of aesthetic value. This essay reviews feminist and queer artists’ image making that appropriates the myth of homogeneous masculinity and turns it into a medium for a variety of creative and hybrid explorations. I argue that Deleuzoguattarian concepts such as becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible help us to understand this molecularisation of masculinity. And importantly in the other direction, these feminist and queer image makers allow us to understand and explore more fully these concepts.

University-based professional learning for women teachers and the ‘to care’ or ‘to lead’ dilemma

The authors consider the recasting of teaching as leadership with reference to school principals or heads and claim that many women teachers decline such senior roles and instead prioritize an ethics of care in resistance to neoliberal performative educational cultures. A future-orientated poststructuralist version of authenticity or authentic practice derived from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Grosz is introduced that does not risk reinforcing gender stereotypes and a consequent political marginalization of women teachers. Grosz mobilizes the concept of authentic futurity in relation to feminism, but the authors contend that this concept might usefully provide women teachers with a less potentially marginalizing lexicon of resistance, and facilitate localized initiatives informed by an affirmative poststructuralist ethics embracing contingency and relationality. Care is interpreted as supporting virtual potentialities and their actualization. The Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of ‘becoming-woman’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ are explained in relation to ‘active listening’ as a leadership ‘skill’. The importance of university-based professional learning in addressing variations in professional capital and problematizing tired neoliberal discourses concerning leadership, teacher quality and ethics is emphasized throughout the paper.

The Relationship between Identity Crises and Crises of Control

Corporate governance is a theme that is important to Business Ethicists for various reasons. It relates to how and for whose benefit corporations are governed, to how important corporate decisions are taken, and to how organizational cultures are “managed.” In this article, it will be argued that in each of these respects, corporate governance relies on particular identity constructs that need to be questioned. In fact, it will be argued that the way in which corporate governance initiatives address the various crises of capitalism, allows us to gloss over some crucial ontological questions that could precipitate a more rigorous questioning of capitalist practices. The article will plot the limitations of the kind of thinking that we encounter within the corporate governance realm, and expose its problematic assumptions by exploring a selection of Deleuzoguattarian concepts. It will be argued that the challenges facing corporate governance relate to the relationship between identity crises and crises of control. We will argue that a better understanding of the nature of capitalism could open new avenues for ethical questioning of contemporary corporate practices, and put the various “crises” that capitalism faces in a new perspective.

Man–machine–music: Resonances of craft and technology in a study of guitar building

Craft is often discussed from the perspective of the maker or artisan, but seldom addresses the assemblage of other agents involved, like materials and tools, and how they affect the outcome. One way to examine this issue could be to use a Deleuzoguattarian perspective in order to draw attention to the role of the various vibrating parts of an assemblage on an individual as well as an abstract level. This article argues that a musical interpretation of the process of craft can help render visible several agents involved in the shaping of a guitar, an assemblage composed of intentions, craftsmanship, material and tools. Juxtaposing David Pye’s notions of ‘workmanship of risk’ and ‘workmanship of certainty’, the works of luthiers reveal several traits of what Deleuze and Guattari called the ‘nomadic sciences’, which, in turn, can point towards more polyphonic perspectives on research in the crafts. The text offers an associative application of the Deleuzoguattarian concepts to expose how several ‘kinetic melodies’ can help expose guitar building as a craft in resonance with contemporary technologies.

What Concepts Do: Preface to the Chinese Translation of A Thousand Plateaus

This essay suggests an approach to the reading of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, grasped as a philosophical event that is as directly pragmatic as it is abstract and speculative. A series of key Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts (in particular, multiplicity, minority and double becoming) are staged from the angle of philosophy's relation to its disciplinary outside. These concepts are then transferred to the relation between the authors' philosophical lineage and the new cultural outside into which the Chinese translation will propel their thought. Emphasis is placed on the writing – and reading – of philosophy as a creative act of collective import and ethical force.