Guattari Research Articles

A Portrait of Rhizomatic Teaching in Philippine Secondary History Classrooms: An Interpretative Study

Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze introduced the rhizome as a metaphor in curriculum theorizing. It is a philosophical lens that subjects curriculum and knowledge to multimodal ways of making meaning devoid of any arborescent or linear source. The study applied this framework to plot the teaching episodes in History classes in Philippine secondary schools against the six principles of the rhizome theory as a shift in teaching History from factual knowledge to domain-based skills. This research is novel, as there, is currently a dearth of literature on the subject in the Philippines. Ten secondary History teachers were purposively chosen to participate in classroom observations and semi-structured interviews. Using narrative inquiry this study afforded an eidetic description of actual teaching practices that typify traces of rhizomatic principles. Key results of this study include a finding, that: (1) History, as a discipline, is taught from different lenses and perspectives; (2) History teaching is a multiplicity; (3) new ways of teaching History are developed when teachers problematize what limits students' achievements; and (4) historical discourse is open to interpretations, connections, and parallelisms to contemporary context. Teachers and school administrators may find value in this study by exploring the use of rhizomatic teaching as an innovative teaching practice, which can eventually become a criterion for teaching effectiveness.

On Architectural Space and Modes of Subjectivity: Producing the Material Conditions for Creative-Productive Activity

This article discusses extended implications of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space in the context of contemporary global neoliberalism, by focus on its presence in architectural space as lived space and spatial practice. The main discussion concerns Lefebvre’s concepts of abstract space, in relation to Felix Guattari’s three ecologies, and the Aristotelean triad of aisthesis, poiesis and techné. The focus here concerns material architectural space and its relation to modes of subjectivity, especially creative-productive versus consuming subjectivities. The argument begins by elaborating on an understanding of abstract space as present in material architectural space as pervasive processes of disassociation of materiality and labor, and proceeds to through these concepts discuss modes of subjectivity—the dependence of abstract space on subjects as consumers—and the way this relates to challenges of sustainability. It further points to the importance of architectural space considered as built material environment for creative-productive modes of subjectivity which challenge abstract space and in extension consumer society, by offering potential dispositions that set subjects in a different relation to the world.

Memórias dos corpos sem órgãos nas duas Agdas, de Hilda Hilst

Resumo: “Alguém lhe toca, minha senhora? Ele disse isso.” É uma pergunta que move o conto Agda (1), de Hilda Hilst. A indagação é feita pelo médico de Agda, personagem um tanto deslocada psicossocialmente de sua rede interpessoal. Esse conto faz parte do livro Kadosh, no qual há outro conto com título idêntico, Agda (2). Hilda Hilst representará e expressará dois de seus temas culturais recorrentes: o corpo feminino envelhecendo e a preparação para a morte. As duas Agdas complementam-se nos enfrentamentos às formações discursivas excludentes que tentam submetê-las a subjetivações avessas aos seus desterritorializantes desejos. Em contexto socioestético, analisaremos os dois contos perspectivados por Michel FOUCAULT (2011; 2006a; 2006b; 2001) em relação aos cuidados de si e às tradições de preparação para a morte. Também abordaremos a produção do Corpo sem Órgãos (CsO) e seu corolário psicossocial pensado por Gilles DELEUZE e Félix GUATTARI (1995; 1996), entre outros referenciais sobre transversalidades subjetivas, erotismo, velhice e finitude.

Detour and Access, Deleuze and Guattari’s Researches on Chinese Immanent Becoming

Detour and Access, Deleuze and Guattari’s Researches on Chinese Immanent Becoming

A Joycean Interface: Re-Territorializing between Deleuze and Lacan

This article argues that aspects of Jacques Lacan's late seminar on James Joyce supplements his failed attempt to work with Gilles Deleuze. Lacan's Seminar XXIII (1975–76) was presented shortly after the publication of Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), and he asserts that Joyce's use of language, particularly in Finnegans Wake (1939), exemplifies how creative and potentially psychotic self-naming can operate as an Oedipal traversal, transforming the symptom into what Lacan terms the sinthome. This article argues that Lacan's theory of the sinthome significantly reconfigures his prior psychoanalytic frameworks due to engagement with concepts found in Anti-Oedipus. Critically fortifying this correlation provides the means for etching out a theoretical intersection between Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, and it consequently provides an innovative interpretation of Lacan's late work.

Gothic fairy-tales and Deleuzian desire

This article seeks to address the ‘identity’ of the ‘gothic fairy-tale’ through an investigation of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of globally oriented short stories that straddle the line between the gothic and the fairy-tale. The argument provides a close analysis of a number of the tales within Dasgupta’s collection to highlight the parity between the gothic and the fairy-tale at the level of both plot and character. Moving beyond the well-documented case of how a writer and critic such as Angela Carter exposes the latent horror of the fairy-tale, the argument seeks to explore the juncture of the gothic and the fairy-tale represented in Tokyo Cancelled and, in doing so, illustrate the ways in which fairy-tales and the gothic both depend upon certain configurations of desire while questioning the primacy of ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ to definitions of the gothic mode. While highlighting the similarities between fairy-tale and gothic forms, this article also posits the existence of ‘fairy-tale’ and ‘gothic’ sensibilities that are fundamentally different from one another, a difference that is founded ultimately upon the question of desire. Employing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of productive desire, a model that opposes that of ‘desire-as-fantasy’ and ‘desire-as-lack’, which are associated with the fairy-tale and explicitly rejected in Tokyo Cancelled, the article posits a particularly gothic conception of desire. This ‘gothic desire’ is central both to the gothic mode generally and to the ‘gothic fairy-tale’ more particularly. Rana Dasgupta’s work acts as an illustration of this conception of the ‘gothic fairy-tale,’ one which moves away from an emphasis on terror, horror, transgression and fear to focus instead on a widely differing creative project and a conception of desire as definitional to form.

Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse

Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Felix Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of social relations, and of h...

Always More Than Two: Vibrations, the Foetus, and the Pregnant Person in Childbirth Singing Practices

The goal of this article is to expand the theoretical approaches in feminist research that have explored the relationship between the pregnant person and the foetus in terms of constitutive relationality. I examine new ways of understanding and conceptualizing such a relationship, which may be enabled by the concept of vibration, by focusing on a childbirth-singing method developed and taught by Finnish music educator Hilkka-Liisa Vuori. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork; I participated in a course on childbirth singing taught by Vuori and interviewed women who had used singing and vocalizing during pregnancy and labour. With the help of new feminist materialisms and feminisms inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thinking, I suggest that sound and music as vibrations are agential matter that allow us to rethink the dyad between the pregnant person and the foetus. I argue that when the foetus–pregnant person dyad is approached as a constitutive relationality, more than two bodies are always involved.

Re-considering the ontoepistemology of student engagement in higher education

The aim of this article is to reconsider and explore the ontoepistemology of student engagement in higher education as part of a democratic education, going beyond neo-liberal groundings. This is urgent as the concept of student engagement seems to be taken for granted and used uncritically in higher education. In addition, higher education is affected by, and under pressure from, different global and societal forces, which raises questions about the purpose of education. In our exploration, we mainly draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his co-writers Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet, but also Karen Barad and writers who are inspired by these theories. We present four arguments on which we elaborate: (1) Rethinking power relations, (2) Questioning linearity and how to use goals, (3) Appreciating pedagogical relationships as multiple voices and becoming-multiple-others, and (4) Considering assemblages, rhizomes and lines in student engagement. These arguments open up, as we argue, the possibility of rhizomatic thinking about learning in higher education where multiplicities, otherness and the unpredictable are appreciated. In addition, we regard the exploration of assemblages that are intercorporeal, affective and entangled as something powerful when reconsidering student engagement as part of democratic education.

Gilles Deleuze: Becoming Alcoholic, Becoming Addict, Becoming Imperceptible

In the article an attempt is made to reconstruct alcoholic and drug abdiction lines of flight relying on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reflections and some Lithuanian writers’ insights by asking the question what are the peculiarities of this line looking from the perspective of everyday economy. The author notices that Deleuze connects the everyday regime of an alcoholic style of life with the concepts of limit and threshold, the paradigm of disenchántedness and becoming imperceptible. On the other side, he discerns alcoholism as a social style of life preferred by creative personalities, relying on the mode of life examples of some American creators, John Ford (1894–1973), Jack London (1876–1916), and Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Thirdly, the author in this article notices that by connecting the drug users line of flight with the molecular becoming and taking the examples of Henri Michaux (1899–1984) and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) experiences Deleuze and Guattari discover the paradoxical sticking of this line of flight to the spiral moving not upwards but downwards. In the article the rhetorical question is asked: is it possible that Deleuze and Guattari wax lyrical these destructive modes of life as creative lines of flight? Nevertheless, the final conclusion is that after making the attempt to discover the inner framework of such possible styles of life, Deleuze and Guattari come to the conclusion that the best intoxication is abstinence, and the topmost level of intoxication is reached by pure water.

Datafication, testing events and the outside of thought

ABSTRACTEducation is undergoing various transformations due to new data-driven educational technologies and the management of educational data through data infrastructures. These technologies are frequently promoted to parents and the profession as being ‘revolutionary’ because they represent a new generation of learning. While computer adaptive tests may arguably improve various efficiencies, the argument that they will revolutionise education requires evaluation. In this paper we draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorise (a) the desire for data amongst policymakers and (b) the effects of data infrastructures as systems that coordinate educational thought. We argue that, rather than revolutionising learning as promised, datafication in computer-based modes merely offers more intense expressions of longstanding possibilities for learning. We describe three types of events—breaks, cracks and ruptures—and argue that data-events translate cracks (imperceptible changes that constitute learning) into breaks (information), but either cannot generate rupture (difference) or represent rupture as error. However, the intensification of learning through datafication may, we suggest, rupture educational thought more broadly.

Grupo como dispositivo: a microintervenção ecosófica nos processos de formação em educação ambiental

Resumo Como produzir modos e formas de coexistência que suscitem transformações subjetivas nas pessoas, contribuindo ao mesmo tempo para qualificar o seu relacionamento com os outros e com o meio ambiente, problematizando a institucionalização da vida humana no mundo contemporâneo? Eis a questão motriz da pesquisa proposta. A hipótese ora apresentada encaminha-se no sentido de que isso pode acontecer através da realização de microintervenções pedagógico-ambientais, tendo seu principal foco nos processos grupais e na análise da implicação do pesquisador com o processo de pesquisa. Trata-se de uma pesquisa-intervenção fundada no campo epistemológico da análise institucional, especificamente no método cartográfico e na ecosofia de Félix Guattari. Esta concepção de educação ambiental destaca a relevância dos três registros ético-estéticos – as ecologias ambiental, mental e social –, e fornece os aportes teóricos necessários para analisarmos a capacidade de reinvenção de si e do ambiente na perspectiva do processo de formação em educação ambiental. O dispositivo grupal buscou intensificar as transversalidades, as capacidades emocionais, inventivas, afetivas, imaginativas e intuitivas do humano, privilegiando a participação e o aprendizado coletivo, a autonomia, a solidariedade e os processos autogestivos. As atividades realizadas apresentaram-se como alternativas possíveis para desenvolver tais capacidades, colocando em movimento forças instituintes nos processos grupais, promovendo a ação-reflexão e o cuidado de si, do outro e do ambiente.

Living Plants, Dead Animals, and Other Matters: Embryos and Demons in Porphyry of Tyre

ABSTRACT This article uses the notion of the body as “machinic assemblage” in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a lens through which to approach the complex nature of embodiment in the work of the third-century Platonist and student of Plotinus, Porphyry of Tyre. In particular it focuses on the many assemblages Porphyry's embryonic and demonic bodies make with other beings and forces in the late ancient cosmos. It concludes that by using this lens, we are invited to shift our attention away from approaches to ancient discussions on embodiment that focus on ontology and questions of static, singular essences and organisms, and instead focus on multiplicity and becoming. This approach, the article argues, gives rise to a more nuanced and complex picture of ancient cosmological and taxonomic thinking.

<b><i>Marcovaldo</i>, de Ítalo Calvino: sobre a busca e a (im)possibilidade do convívio ecológico

Ao considerar, com Cheryll Glotfelty, que “[...] ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (1996, p. xx), e entendendo que a referida crise diz respeito não apenas à ecologia do meio ambiente, mas também à das relações sociais e da psique, como elucida Félix Guattari (1990), este texto pretende explorar o discurso de Italo Calvino nos contos de Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città (1963), como resposta à crise ecológica resultante da conjuntura instável que a sociedade humana experimenta na presente fase da modernidade. Além das ideias dos dois teóricos já mencionados, serão utilizadas as de Greg Garrard (2006) e de Michel Serres (1991). Não se pretende, a respeito da obra referida, esgotar qualquer possibilidade de análise; antes, pretende-se dar indicações que possam servir de base a outros estudos, posto que cada conto da coletânea guarda um grande potencial para leitura ecocrítica e, portanto, para uma resposta em termos de conscientização sobre a crise ecológica, advinda senão da crise de percepção do lugar do homem na natureza.

El arte de andar en la naturaleza

El arte de andar en la naturaleza gira alrededor de la cuestión ética y política de, ¿cómo los hombres nos relacionamos con la naturaleza cuando recorremos caminos? La respuesta se nutre de la filosofía ecofeminista espiritual de Vandana Shiva, la cual considera, junto con comunidades indígenas, a la tierra como un ser vivo, con el cual el hombre tiene una conexión espiritual y no es solamente garante de su existencia mediante la explotación ilimitada. Se amplía la reflexión en torno a los modos de relacionarse el hombre con la comunidad de los seres vivos mediante la propuesta de la ética de la tierra elaborada por Carlos Alfredo Vargas. Como práctica artística y proyecto de investigación, el arte de andar es una experiencia vivencial cotidiana consciente en el caminar diferentes recorridos, durante la cual se establecen relaciones de diversos órdenes, explorando los procesos creativos a partir de sensaciones corporales gracias a la apertura del caminante a las fuerzas intempestivas que atraviesan y modifican su cuerpo, tomado como referencia el “cuerpo sin órganos”, categoría desarrollada por Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari. El andar diferentes territorios permite la resignificación simbólica de los lugares, no necesitando expresarse en materialidades; por el contrario, esta práctica es tan respetuosa que solamente deja huellas móviles y evanescentes.

Theologische Grenzüberschreitungen Annäherungen an einen paradoxen Begriff

This paper examines the essential yet ambivalent role of the law, i.e. of limits and prohibitions, within the subjective experience of desire. In order to investigate the dialectics between limit and desire, it firstly focuses on the perspective of George Bataille and his analysis of eroticism. Moreover, the contribution takes into account the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who focus on the relationship of desire to capitalist society, in order to affirm a different revolutionary economy of desire, celebrating immediate libidinal transgressions against any limitations. On the contrary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shows the absolute need of the law for the experience of desire and the process of subjectivation, since only through the Symbolic order the subject can join a sociolinguistic community. The final part of the contribution aims at enlightening possible correspondences among these perspectives, focusing on the Letters of the Apostle Paul and his profound understanding of the dialectics between law and desire. The Pauline Epistles offer a significant paradigm to understand the necessary but not sufficient role of the law in the experience of the Christian believer as well as of the subject as such.

Play as dynamic movement in an assemblage: A novel approach to the concept of “play”

As Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens, “play” has not only been part of all human societies throughout history, it has also contributed to the development of numerous cultural, social and political activities, including structured games and sports, certain judicial and legal activities, war, and numerous forms of art. Despite its importance, “play”, with its various manifestations, is often relegated to being a children’s activity or an occasion of pure waste, and is a surprisingly marginalised topic in academic scholarship. In part to remedy this deficit, my aim in this article is to create a novel philosophical conception of “play” by adapting selected concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as from the theories of Brian Sutton-Smith and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The concept of “play” that I propose is not only a useful heuristic for mapping various forms of “play”, it also highlights the creative and transformative potential that is inherent to “play” phenomena.

Dark Matter

Following material and theoretical encounters the author has with “dark matter” in her daily life in the Otway Ranges in south-east Australia, this article explores architecture’s complicity with climate change and possible paths for its redemption. Dark matter is simultaneously the building materials produced from crude oil, the production of which is a significant contributor to global warming, and speculative practices of resistance: “dirty” material explorations with dynamic, messy materials by a range of architects and theorists since the 1990s; Donna Haraway’s “compost” thought; and Philip Ross’s “mycotecture”, architecture made from mycelium. The paper argues, with reference to Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, that these “speculative fabulations” model new social and mental ecologies that could transform architectural practice.

Community of Philosophical Inquiry and the Play of the World

This paper seeks to identify the role of play in the design and function of Socratic dialogue as practiced in community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) in classrooms. It reviews the ideas of some major play theorists from various fields of study and practice—philosophy, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and education—and identifies the epistemological, ontological, and axiological judgments they share in their analyses of the phenomenon of play. It identifies five psychodynamic dimensions in which the Socratic play of “following the argument where it leads” can be identified: the “play space,” the “time of play,” “the rules of the game,” “the stakes in play,” and “play and power.” Finally, it suggest that there is a historical relationship between the reconstruction of Socratic dialogue in CPI and the cultural reconstruction of “child” in post-modern philosophy, with special attention to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-child” as emblematic of an emergent “post-human” style of subjectivity.

Curriculum, text and forms of textuality

Building on Peters’ and Jandric's previous work on curriculum as ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ (Peters, M. A., & Jandric, P. (2018b). The curious relationships between discourse, genre and curriculum. Open Review of Educational Research, 5(1).), this article seeks to refresh and extend the central metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ that is adopted as the organizing metaphor of William Pinar’s 2006 book Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. We undertake this analysis by referring to five theoretical notions: Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The garden of forking paths’ (1941), Roland Barthes’ structuralism (1977), Julia Kristeva's intertextuality (1966/1986), Ted Nelson's hypertextuality (1965), and Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's extratextuality (2004/1980). In conclusion, we show that the text is neither simply an artefact nor is it simply a sequence of uttered sounds. The text does not solely reside within the domain of the reader and cannot be considered as the exclusive domain of the author. Looking at relationships between text, textuality, curriculum, and technology, we show that the metaphor of ‘curriculum as text’ is inherently postdigital and that it requires development of a new postdigital language of inquiry and new postdigital forms of textual and non-textual expressions of that language in the years to come.