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CE: J.R.; QA: N.D.; Coll.: M.T.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol. 33, No. 1, February 2012, 13
INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE Education and the politics of becoming David R. Colea* and Diana Masnyb a
University of Western Sydney, Australia; bUniversity of Ottawa, Canada
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One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucratstudents. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling (Deleuze, 1990).
The future that Gilles Deleuze envisaged in conversation with Antonio Negri in 1990 is already upon us. Advances in digital technology have aided the universal culture of management systems being set into place throughout education, often in the name of reform and even under the title of revolution. Yet why has education become so riddled with the presence of control? What factors have lead to Deleuze’s diagnosis about education becoming true? This special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education looks to answer these questions through a collection of international essays that take questions about power, agency, identity and politics seriously, and have turned to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze for some possible escape routes from enclosure. The politics of becoming is a good way to understand this search for an exit door in education, as becoming is suitably ‘light’ in that it is not centred on a counter politics or sites of resistance to the tactics of control as they are now manifest in education. This tactic is useful because any such subjectivity in educational politics would likely become taken over by dominating paradigms that are intent on control and exploitation. For example, the use of the term ‘radical’ was taken over by the Right during the 1980s, and has come to signify economic reform, henceforth confusing the left-wing revolutionary intent of the term. The image of Che Guevara has been packaged and commodified and is now the epitome of capitalist cool. Deleuzian philosophy demands that we analyse terms and images down to the affective level in order to understand their impact and intentionality. Affect is bound to becoming through the ways in which one may affect and be affected, which define a continuum of change that gets inside of what it means to exist in a situation. For example, classrooms have definite affects that can be analysed and articulated, teacher education colleges have discernible affects that are often different from the rest of the university, in that pre-service teachers and teacher trainers often bring *Corresponding author: University of Western Sydney, School of Education, Building JG. 16, Penrith Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2751. Email:
[email protected] ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.632156 http://www.tandfonline.com
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with them the atmospheres of the classroom! The job of the Deleuzian analyst is to understand these affects and to try to get inside of them in terms of explaining how they work. This job also defines an aspect of the politics of becoming. Contiguous with the microanalysis of situations and their requisite affects, is the macro political situation within which educational events occurs. Governmental intervention, which is often aligned with the requisites of big business and societal concern, has made the educational sphere riddled with power concerns and directives that alter the practice of teaching and learning. Once again, the politics of becoming does not define an outside to these pressure points and exposures, but looks at these influences in a new manner. This new manner has the aim of producing difference in education, not as a rhetorical slogan or political banner, but as a grounding in the ontological realities that beset education. This is why the use of data is important in the politics of becoming, and several papers in this collection take the conjunction between Deleuzian theory and empirical study seriously as a fresh means to building ontological matters in education that are supple, lithe and pertinent (see Cole, Kofoed & Ringrose, Waterhouse, and Masny in this special issue). Of course, using Deleuzian philosophy helps to build parallel educational theory, which is aptly demonstrated in this issue through Semetsky, Wallin, and Webb & Gulson’s papers. However, the educational theory that one might take from Deleuze also responds to the politics of becoming. This is not theory meant to cast otherness and aspersions on the realities of real life in and through the educational box. This theory takes the lives of those of us inside the educational machine and enhances this reality by pushing at points of non-equilibrium, by working through the interstices, by adding colour to educational thought. This series of essays simultaneously works on the level of praxis, whereby data can be theorised and theory can be broken down into data. Marble, Knight, Gould and Sellars’ papers show how this can be achieved, and to what ends one might infuse educational practice with Deleuze. So, how can attending to the politics of becoming help us in education? What are the objectives of the politics of becoming and how might one achieve them? Becoming is a process, and this process is an introduction and prelude to a future generation of educators and their education. The potential of the politics of becoming and its activation through education, hovers in a virtual cloud, it is locatable as distributed systems of affective relations and experimental bodily tendencies. Unlike traditional party politics, the politics of becoming does not come about through learning a pre-written script or memorising the party line on any particular topic. The politics of becoming is more creative, perhaps harder to fathom, and has access points via serious thought and the total commitment to unearthing assumptions in one’s practice. We, the authors, would like to commend to you the readers of this edition the journey and the challenge of this politics of becoming. This special issue represents different stages in this journey, from grappling with the theory, to using the theory to analyse data, to enacting the theory through practice. The politics of becoming is not connected to representative politics. Deleuze (1997) discussed this point in conversation with Michel Foucault, where he suggests that when people are empowered to speak for themselves, they do not transfer one form of representation for another. On the contrary, the politics of becoming in education is not about representing any particular teacher, student, or set of views, but relies on digging through the layers of political interference that currently overlay practice.
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Deleuze, G. (1990). Control and becoming: Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri (M. Joughin, Trans.). Futur Anterieur, 1 (Spring). Deleuze, G. (1997). Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (D.F. Bouchard, & S. Simon, Trans.). In D.F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice (pp. 205217). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original interview 1972.)
