Education and the Politics of Becoming

Diana Masny, David Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780415741194
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000155709
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection examines education in the light of a politics of becoming. It takes a non-hierarchical transdisciplinary approach, challenging the macropolitics of pre-established governmental and economic agendas for education. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the contributors consider questions such as how education might engage a politics of becoming, and how education and becoming function in a society of control. Since Deleuze and Guattari contend that a society is defined by its becomings, its transformations, this collection asks how education, itself a process in becoming, may contribute "collective creations" to a society in continual flux.

The chapters bring theory and praxis together, deploying power, affect, cartography, space, relationality, assemblage and multiple literacies in order to experiment with music, art, language, teacher education, curriculum and policy studies. This collection is an innovative resource, creating an encounter with the macropolitics of education, and altering teaching, learning, evaluation and curriculum.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

INTRODUCTION

Education and the politics of becoming

David R. Cole and Diana Masny

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 bureaucrat-students. 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, identityand politics seriously, and haveturned 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 issuitably ‘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 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 showhow thiscan beachieved, 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.

References

• 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. 205 217). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original interview 1972.)

Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens

Jette Kofoed and Jessica Ringrose

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young people’s affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out.

Introduction

This paper aims to contribute to applying Deleuzian theory to practical problems in education by looking at problems of understanding and responding to cyberbullying in on-line communities and schools. We combine a Butlerian approach to exploring discursive subjectification with a Deleuzian and Guattarian approach to mapping affective flows. Moving beyond a discursive analytical approach (that is, Davies & Harre, 1990, Ellwood & Davies, 2010), we argue Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking helps us understand affect as bound in, but not limited to, discursive signification. The open-ness of what we will call a Butlerian/Deleuzian/Guattarian approach helps us understand both fixity and becoming in how young people navigate conflict and extreme exclusions. In this paper we draw on these lines of thinking and focus the analytical lens to affective processes of becoming and to how an affective tenor of being (temporarily) included and excluded is maintained and shifting when technologies are mediating the processes of bullying.

To illustrate our points we draw on two data sets focused on young people’s experiences at social networking sites, Arto in Denmark and Bebo in the UK. We bring together two diverse projects engaging in a dual analysis. While aware of methodological limitations in bringing together data from diverse studies, we limit the purpose of this joint analysis to re-conceptualize cyber fights as ‘events’ across time/space/locations. For this purpose, analyses across the two datasets have proven fruitful in investigating cases which involve a number of different subjects and a number of different technologies. Here we focus on incidences where sexual subjectification happens via networked communications in school and cyber assemblages. Cross-data-analyses have helped us understand the singularities of our own research findings and the commonalities across contexts.

Researching cyberbullying

In this paper we draw on the field of cyberbullying studies and argue for ways to develop a theoretically refined approach to the particularity of bullying when it is technologically mediated. We will first highlight the basic assumption within bullying research (both socalled traditional bullying and cyberbullying); second, we highlight the particularities of cyberlife, and third, we move on to the arguments of why we introduce a theoretical framework to grasp the specificities of technologically mediated bullying. Within bullying research there is a general and widely acknowledged assumption that a number of relative stable positions are at work in cases recognized as bullying. Those would be that of the victim, the bully, and the bystanders (Olweus, 1993; Salmivalli & Niemenen, 2002; Smith, 2009; Smith et al., 2002; Smith et al., 2008). Much work is based on this assumption of stable, individualised positions.¹ Apart from this focus on a recognizable number of positions, it is in addition assumed that these positions are fixed in the sense that a position over time is taken up by the same individual. In the most quoted definitions of bullying this is referred to as exposure to negative action on the part of one or more persons, to patterns of repetition, and intentional harm (Olweus, 1993; Smith et al., 2008). Personalities of individuals play a significant and central role in these definitions of bullying. This classical work was coined by Dan Olweus during the 1970s and has been influential internationally over the past 30 years not only in research but also within the development of local and national intervention programmes (for critical analysis of this, see Schott, 2009; Eriksson et al., 2002).

Within cyberbullying studies there is widespread agreement that specific characteristics characterize cyberbullying. First is anonymity, that is, the possibility of hiding the identity of the sender and to blur the number of subjects involved. This is also referred to as ‘disinhibition’ (Shariff, 2008), where young people borrow each others’ phones, use each others’ profiles (whether with or without the acceptance of the owner of the profile), or the practice of sending messages collectively, for instance, four people agree upon a message that is sent in the name of one of them. Thus there is uncertainty of the correspondence between the name displayed on the screen and the actual sender (Kowalski & Limber, 2007; Shariff, 2008; Spears et al., 2009). In addition, there is general agreement that the impossibility of escaping derogatory messages is crucial in understanding cyberbullying. There is no sanctuary, as Kowalski and Limber put it (2007, p. 23). The fact that cyberbullying can occur at any time raises the experience of vulnerability. A third characteristic of cyberbullying is the possible infinite audience that can witness the evaluations posted online (Shariff, 2008). It makes a difference whether a negative evaluation is witnessed by and commented on by close peers or by possibly ‘the whole world’. A fourth trait of cyberbullying is how a distinction between in and out school activities is blurred (Hinduja & Patchin, 2009; Slonje & Smith, 2008) because messages are sent during classes and recess and late at night, by and to classmates. Boundaries are less clear. We would like to add a fifth trait: the non-simultaneity of emotional intensity in cases of cyberbullying. Technologies slow down and accelerate the pace of communication in such a way that communication is characterized by nonsimultaneity in emotional intensity (Kofoed, 2009a).

In this paper we focus both on the individuals and on social and cultural aspects of the becoming of individuals, groups and the organisation of schools. In our view, bullying is a social rather than an individual phenomenon. In developing this perspective we build on the findings and assumptions of the first generation of bullying research, and embed this in a larger pool of possible interrelated complex constituents. The basic assumption is that the socio-emotional condition of a child is important in ways in which bullying is constituted, maintained and changed; but social-emotional conditions are not the only forces enacted in cases of bullying. Recent research illustrates that a number of interacting forces are producing the phenomenon of bullying. Such forces are social a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Education and the politics of becoming
• 2. Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens
• 3. Becoming-teacher: Encounters with the Other in teacher education
• 4. Latino families becoming-literate in Australia: Deleuze, literacy and the politics of immigration
• 5. Living, learning, loving: Constructing a new ethics of integration in education
• 6. 'It's all about relationships': Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage
• 7. Uprooting music education pedagogies and curricula: Becoming-musician and the Deleuzian refrain
• 8. Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters, becomings, and phantasms
• 9. Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education
• 10. Multiple Literacies Theory: Discourse, sensation, resonance and becoming
• 11. 'We don't believe media anymore': Mapping critical literacies in an adult immigrant language classroom
• 12. Bon mots for bad thoughts
• Index