Deleuze and Lifelong Learning

Creativity, Events and Ethics

C. Beighton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137480798
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137480804
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Adult Education

This book examines Gilles Deleuze's ideas about creativity in the context of lifelong learning, offering an original take on this important contemporary topic using cinematic parallels. Discussing Deleuze's difficult notion of 'counter-actualization' as a form of creative practice, it draws practical consequences for those across a diverse sector.

Part I

Lifelong Learning

1

Logics of Lifelong Learning

In his well-known “Postscript to Societies of Control”, Gilles Deleuze predicted that continual training would increasingly be deployed as a form of über-surveillance on a bureaucratic model:

One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workplace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students.

(Deleuze, 1990/2003, p. 237 / 1995, p. 175)

Deleuze’s prediction concerns trends in lifelong learning, the vehicle by which lifelong learners engage in the development of their own economic, social and human capital. Like the regular critiques of the “Orwellian” language of education management (e.g. Nuffield, 2009) a “persistent hegemony” of individualistic, reductivist divisiveness in the neoliberal discourse has been identified (Evans, 2014, p. 46; see also Tuomisto, 2005). On this view, the importance of many, if not most, of these trends lies in the fact that they are integral to global factors and are best described as “movements or impulses”, which are “dynamic, complex, messy, even paradoxical” (Waite, 2014, p. 298; see also Briggs, 2005; Fenwick and Edwards, 2011; Guttorm, 2012). This is crucial for those who, like Gregoriou (2008, p. 102), draw on Deleuze’s views to argue that, for all its creativity, lifelong learning risks being subsumed by the demands of a globalized, dehumanizing market model. “The rhizomatic structure of lifelong training”, she claims, “is actually reterritorializing itself around the forces of market economy” and the “post-utopian need of employability”, which is its necessary supplement. For Mats Alvesson (2013), learning society organizations are riddled with the grandiose pomposity of their own pointless rush to consume and be consumed. When the development of children is no more than a homologue to the development of the nation as a competitor in a global knowledge economy, as Maja Plum (2014) wryly says, is this the future of education and training for everyone? Is the resulting continuous change simply a case of unmanageable chaos (Gravells and Wallace, 2013, p. 22), or does it perpetuate a “system of quasi-enslavement”, as Gerald Raunig claims (2013, pp. 31–32)? In this system, creativity expresses the despotic norm of the unceasing, infantilizing recommencement of self-discipline (Raunig, 2013, p. 102).

Criticisms of the sector’s instrumentalization for the purposes of social control are common, but their pessimism clashes with those who see lifelong learning as the benevolent substructure of a better, fairer, learning society. Control is recognized as an “agenda”, but only insofar as it competes with others, from employability and empowerment to access and inclusion (Spenceley, 2014, p. 107; see also Smith, 2001; Trotman and Kop, 2009). High levels of uncertainty and “new policy narratives” are used to justify the view that (UK) lifelong learning’s contribution to a wide range of social issues should be maximized (NIACE, 2013, p. 3). This “lifewide” reach of the sector was evocatively summed up in 1972 by Edgar Faure, whose United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, Learning to Be, claimed, for example, that without lifelong education one “never does become an adult”, and that one is “obliged to learn ceaselessly in order to survive and evolve” (Faure, 1972, p. 157). Equally ambitious are the many attempts to establish Lifelong Learning as a tool of social cohesion, often in response to increasingly rapid socio-political change. Influential post-war thinkers of a “learning society” included Torsten Husén (1974; 1986), Donald Schön (1973) and Robert. M. Hutchins (1970), who argued that two convergent facts imply the need for a learning society. Rapid change, he felt, requires continuous education, while the increase in the availability of free time makes such education possible. Delors’ UNESCO report (1996) reflected this overarching perspective, arguing that lifelong education involved four different “pillars”: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live and participate in a democratic knowledge society. As UNESCO continues to enthuse about learning as more than a vehicle of economic utilitarianism (Sobhi and Cougouroux, 2013, p. 4), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Teaching and Learning International Survey drives home the message that teachers must not just prepare students for lifelong learning, but must become lifelong learners themselves (OECD, 2014, p. 5).

A culture of endless, turbulent change (cf. Edward et al., 2007) is just one effect of this optimism, and it is an implicit critique of what some have long questioned as the “myth” of a learning society which is simply not happening (Hughes and Tight, 1995). This is, nonetheless, the new educational order, so sprawling as to seem promiscuous because it has always tried to embrace such a wide range of education, training and human resource objectives and organizations (Field, 2006, p. 32; see also Sargant, 1996; Worpole, 1996; Ranson, 1998; Tett, 2002; Scruton and Ferguson, 2014, etc.). Moreover, if the recent enhancement of global mobility, living and working across frontiers, is an increasingly consensual 21st-century policy goal, it cannot fail to remind us of the link between lifelong learning and “the American dream of success and prosperity” (Tate et al., 2011, p. 1). I have argued previously that this criticism is to a certain extent justified when the micro-practices of testing, streaming and categorization in the sector are examined (Beighton, 2013). For Terence Lee, it is matter of the state’s desire to justify and perpetuate itself by colonizing and manipulating an ever wider net of practices and events: it is “by collapsing the fields of cultural possibilities”, he pithily comments, that “the state validates itself as the most determining influence over most aesthetic, creative and culture practices” (Lee, 2014, p. 7).

On this view, lifelong learning is more than a training programme: it is, instead, a cultural, biological, economic and moral imperative. Compensating for the neoliberal destruction of the social with dreams of empowerment, it offers wealth and possessions to “anyone who gets it ‘right’ ” (Brunila and Siivonen, 2014, p. 12). “Getting it right” in lifelong learning includes recognizing – or confessing – the poor levels of skills (for example in literacy) which have often been used to support a broad international consensus that a “population with this level of skills can hardly be expected to adapt rapidly and respond innovatively to the ongoing structural changes” (OECD, 2007, p. 9).

There is another recurrent and troubling theme here. Learners are constructed as children or patients by a never-ending cycle of demands: as John Ohliger was already arguing in the 1970s, mandatory continued education, over-certification and increased surveillance are there to make one feel irremediably inadequate (Grace and Rocco, 2009, p. 48). The kind of skills demanded is, of course, changing in line with (for example) technological development. Instead of a deficit of the “basic” or “functional” skills in (digital) literacy, numeracy or technology use, it is increasingly recognized that “imagination, insight and ingenuity” are responsible for progress (Thomas, 2009, p. 21). More and more, creativity is recognized as a form of capital, replacing material production as an economic driver (Carlile and Jordan, 2012, p. 27). A simple example is the way in which university fees in the UK have risen higher than in any other OECD country (Holmwood, 2014), leading to speculation that investment in learning may be the next financial bubble to burst as employers and other stakeholders withdraw when training costs exceed perceived benefit (cf. BIS, 2012c, p. 11). Capital, in its various forms, is crucial in lifelong learning, and, more than ever, needs a deficit to be filled, in this case by creative learning. This, perhaps, explains what Susan Wallace calls a model of “mutual damnation” in UK further education: the neoliberal economy needs the cyclical process by which the poor performance of individuals reflects back on the reputation of learning organizations, reducing the chances that high achievers will bother to engage in this part of the sector (Wallace, 2013, p. 25), fixing its reputation and that of those within it.

The importance of teacher education in supporting this trend is beyond doubt for Petty (in IfL, 2013, p. 27), for whom “[o]ur economy is irrigated by a well of knowledge and skills, and it is teacher trainers who have their hand on the pump”. Petty’s assertion raises interesting questions about the ways in which creativity is promoted and conceptualized in, by and for the sector’s educators. Is there a conflict between the promotion of creativity, on the one hand, and an agenda of performativity and compliance, on the other? Does this presage a culture of surveillance and a lack of trust, or simply a preference for expedience over creative practice?

It’s possible, in fact, that the state’s basic logic is deregulatory and, seemingly paradoxically, anti-state, as its gaze increasingly amalgamates, penetrates and recruits the individual. Deregulation, in these conditions, is a sign of the state gathering strength (Žižek, 2009, p. 145), since the forms of deregulation that it espouses simply mean an increasingly omnipresent form of control, of which the current discourse of creativity is a key part. Here, freedom and control actually depend on each other in a double movement: freedom becomes the liberty to control oneself and one’s productivity just as deregulation provides the discursive and ideological vehicle for self-regulation. On this view, libertarianism and hedonism are fully compatible with a Foucaultian dispositive or web of regulations and mechanisms (cf. Foucault, 1976/1997; Deleuze, 2003, pp. 316–325; Agamben, 2007). This “biopolitical” mass-management can seem just as invasive of learner and teacher professional autonomy as it is of their judgement. Identifying the exact relation between creativity and the mechanisms which seem to repress it might contribute to an understanding of exactly what lifelong learning is becoming, and even the art of governance itself.

Recommended by decentralizing policy, changes are promoted on the grounds of enhanced quality and a better student experience, but are inseparable from a continued desire for lifelong learning to guarantee economic effectiveness and institutional accountability through increasingly detailed measurement of its own output. If this self-surveillance seems abstract, circular or even nihilistic, this is not by coincidence. On Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis (1972, pp. 274–275), capital as such only exists once this step into abstraction has been taken. Capitalism, they assert, only comes into being when the flows of money in exchange for greater quantities of concrete commodities are supplanted by the differential operation of flows of money in exchange for greater quantities of abstract currency. This abstraction should come as no surprise for lifelong learners, who have long known that education is “is not a commodity like food” (Peters, 1970, p. 126). But the demand for knowledge workers increases “exponentially in the knowledge economy” (TLRP, 2009, p. 19), and the post-industrial emphasis has shifted towards a knowledge economy which considers learning precisely “as a commodity that can be sold or exchanged for goods” (Holme, 2004, p. 11). The related development of a compulsive data-farming economy in education confirms the purpose of the sector as a cultivator and manager of data about learning whose value only exists in its exchange relations with other sources of comparable data. In this context, the mutual benefits predicted from the assumed convergence of abstract knowledge and physical economy may be illusory and even counterproductive. Arguably a feature of a “society of the spectacle” where representations and simulacra have dislodged real experience as the stuff of everyday life, the collection of large amounts of data for the purposes of surveillance (“dataveillance” for Genosko and Bryx, 2005) is clearly a growing aspect of this economy. Practices of what we might term “affective exchange” are highly congenial to the cultivation and subsequent farming of data facilitated by a burgeoning virtual world of easy collection, storage, retrieval and even “breeding” of data (Fenwick and Edwards, 2011, p. 718). A suitable overarching term for the whole process might be “data grooming”, with all that implies.

Events and lifelong learning

This appraisal of lifelong learning’s goals highlights the need for a practical and theoretical perspective adequate to its differences and complexity, and a suitable term can be found in Deleuze’s concept of “event”. The scope of an event is not representative, but, rather, creative, being defined by the problem it poses and the future it creates (Stengers, 2000, p. 67). The point here is that the concept might actually be necessary if we are to analyse the elusive world of lifelong learning and its differences. Burbules and Berk (1999) have argued that there is “something” about the preservation of such differences that yields new insights, and that this “something” is lost when the tension between differences is erased by a single perspective. Crucially, though, this “something” does not have to be vague or undecidable, but can be analysed and deployed to better explain what lifelong learning does, and can be defined as the “event” of lifelong learning.

“Event” here is used to highlight the importance of ontological variance in the complex education world. Here, diversity is not just the result of multiple perspectives, but, rather, an indication that that we participate in multiple worlds which “coexist and overlap, patched together in the same material spaces” (Fenwick and Edwards, 2011, p. 710). The structure of events, or “the contingent encounter of affects and percepts” (Olkowski, 2011, p. 127), describes this participation well, drawing attention away from the limitations of seeing the sector either as an object to be manipulated, or as a purely discursive phenomenon to be discussed, or even as an administrative metaphor to be dismissed. I discuss in more detail later what this implies, but an event in this context can be defined as an emergent structure whose complex relations indicate a definite internal dynamism which is essential to it. It is, perhaps, unhelpful to state that events are only significant if they have meaning or sense for us, but even this sense can, and often does, have an “infra-sensible” aspect (Zarifian, 2001, p. 92), that is to say “deeper than the question of the emergence of meaning”. Because of this infra-sensible depth, an event embodies dynamic change which relates events to what they are becoming rather than what they are. It is the event’s relation with its own outside, not its unity, that is particularly interesting.

Choice and lifelong learning

So events are, provisionally at least, choosing to have more choices (Lawlor, 2008) and denying the exclusion of options implicit in any choice. They insist that change is not teleological but creative and emergent, and that change is “evasive to mechanical explanations” (Olma and Koukouzelis, 2007, p. 7) and therefore to anticipation (Roth and Lee, 2007, p. 202). This reminds us of the constant, pragmatic need for more choices, not fewer, and for ways of actually dealing with change which do not reduce it to this change.

This might seem an impossible aim. Certainly, if education generally is increasingly described as complex, this implies the need to recognize the role of self-organization, and the dynamism it requires. This implication is not in itself an innovation: for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed that the philosophy of such objects “is collapsing before our eyes”, since natural objects have disappeared. Discoveries in physics have recognized this, and it demands a recasting or reshaping of things (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 56). More recently a number of thinkers have argued that quantum theory justifies a more materialist form of realism (see, for example, Latour, 2005; Barad, 2007; Brassier, 2007a; 2011; Bryant, 2011b), but lifelong learners in particular need to do more than simply proclaim a new constructivism by vaguely asserting that people and things interact in some undefined way. Henri Bergson (1907/2013, pp. 8, 20) also argued that our tendency to mechanize is based on a fundamentally false appraisal of the objects of perception. The impact of this on creativity is profound, shifting our focus from space and objects to time and processes. In fact, in the historical, emergent conditions of the present, there is “no reason for us to talk of ‘being’ any more” (Debaise, 2012, p. 44; see also Delanda, 2002; 2006; Linstead and Mullarkey, 2003; Marcus and Saka, 2006; Radford, 2007; Osberg et al., 2008; Fenwick, 2012a). Laplace’s demon, who could predict the ends of any action given sufficient data about initial conditions, is deprived of precisely this data, and therefore cannot predict outcomes from it. The “baker’s transformation” is perhaps the most commonly used example of the way in which phenomena complexify over time by successive foldings. This complication produces situations whose point of departure cannot be identified from current conditions and whose end point cannot be anticipated without generalizing. According to this principle, the initial conditions of a piece of dough, kneaded many times, cannot be determined by examining its current state. Any properly complex system, by implication, is not just open to change over time but unpredictable as a result.

Time and lifelong learning

Williams’ (2013) discussion of different conceptions of the event in Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari helps highlight the ethical portent of this abstraction. In times of economic crisis, the increasingly intense circulation of money (hyperinflation) implies an acceleration of time itself, forcing a physical response from bodies which run ever faster to allay the collapse of financial value and livelihood. The wider ethical question raised by Williams concerns the implications of this for our possibilities of action. For Lyotard, the event of acceleration leads headlong into a labyrinth with no exit point (fuite en avant) and, ultimately, death. For Deleuze, on the other hand, lines of flight (lignes de fuite) constitute events genetically. They multiply exit points synthetically in an open system that “cracks” or “unhinges” time, introducing new series. Lifelong learning practitioners, too, are “running ever faster” for Coffield (2006; see also Coffield and Edward, 2009), and so determining events and what creativity is possible within them is the key ethical question facing the sector.

If we are to take this logic of complex relations and events seriously, our analyses of dynamic phenomena need to situate this dynamism at the heart of a system like lifelong learning, rather than simply attributing it to a given idea. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Deleuze and Lifelong Learning
• Part I  Lifelong Learning
• Part II  Events
• Part III  Ethics
• Conclusion: Counter-actualization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index