Deleuzeian Thought

Gilles Deleuze's philosophy as applied to rethinking the curriculum foundations of education has received more and more attention. Historically, Jacques Daignault, Ted Aoki, Gustav Roy, William Reynolds, and Julie Webber have attempted to theorize Deleuze along curriculum lines. Most often Deleuze is labeled a poststructuralist, but such a generalization fails to recognize his own unique contribution to psychoanalysis and the Bergsonian dynamics of image and memory; both domains challenge the linguistic text. Under Deleuze, desire is given a positive conceptualization at the prereflective unconscious, while the image of thought presents a radical affective epis-temology that confronts categorizations.

Generally speaking, a number of concepts developed by Deleuze (along with his cocollaborator Félix Guattari, his often cited coauthor) lend themselves to curriculum theory, which are proving to be influential: rhizome, minor literature, multiplicity, and difference. Their reception and articulation into the field of curriculum theory, however, remains uneven and reductionist, dependent on the knowledge and application of the educator. Deleuze's comprehensive theory requires standing the philosophical tradition on its head and then further making sense of pedagogy and the curriculum in such a changed universe. Some broad strokes as they pertain to curriculum theory can be articulated to give the reader a sense of the potentiality (and not possibility as is so often stated) of a Deleuzian philosophical invasion comparable to the one that has already taken place by a portion of the educational field embracing the philosophy of Michel Foucault.

The most dramatic aspect of Deleuzian thought is his reorientation from transcendent to immanent [Page 277]modes of thinking—that is, from notions that structure knowledge and time from universalist positions of authority, meaning, and law to an emergent creative process of actualization to produce events that have their own singularity of time. Time is not homologous and linear, but constituted by heterogeneity and difference. Deleuze paradoxically names his philosophy as transcendental empiricism. This term also means a rejection of dialectics that has characterized critical pedagogy in education spearheaded by Paulo Friere and followers such as Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren. Deleuze searches for a nondialecti-cal philosophy of becoming that avoids the path of negation as famously developed by the Hegelian dialectic of sublation as the synthesizing of differences. In contrast, the Deleuzian trajectory is meant to forward difference and singularity in such a way that avoids the notion of difference caught by representation as practiced by all forms of pedagogical identity politics, not to mention this also being the very form of designer capitalism. The ontological quest for being is supplanted by the ontological creation of becoming.

Such an inverted universe, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the plane of immanence, if embraced by educators would begin to ruin representation as the mobilization of their concepts would begin to deterritorialize the educational cur-ricular field. The most obvious start of such ruination would be the planned curriculum, which is based on a lineal model of quantifiable time and restricted resources, thereby occupying an unreachable transcendent ideal position. Each reenactment or lesson already presupposes a failure, appearing as its shadow in the form of the lived curriculum. In this sense, curriculum as a lived possibility is supplanted by its potentiality. This important distinction between the two terms—potentiality and possibility—articulates why there is a continuous failure to achieve the transference of knowledge planned by teachers, measured and evaluated against a transcendental standard of development or achievement. Such efforts always remain in the realm of possibility.

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