Thinking like Grass , with Deleuze in Education ? 1

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze might not be well known yet to the Canadian education landscape. So in this paper, I begin with a close-reading of “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature”, a chapter in Deleuze’s collaborative works with his colleague Claire Parnet, appropriately titled Dialogue, where they exemplifies their own “deterritorialization” of thought across disciplines and geographical domains. I then give a sketch of his reflection on the major movements in Philosophy as an attempt to envision his own possible orientation of philosophizing that is close to life in its creative force. By introducing some of the important yet creative concepts as well as the fresh spirit of his philosophical movements in thinking, I intend to create a space of openness where we the educators could think anew on the some fundamental theoretical questions in curriculum studies, for instance: what does it mean to attempt to bring Deleuze’s work from the “outside” in the proximity of our educational realm, or rather, to extend our ignorance to the edge of the inter-disciplinary borders, to think about curriculum questions with his diverse philosophical thinking?


psychoanalysis, literature (most notably Proust, Sacher-Masoch and
Kafka) as well as other areas of the arts, such as painting, theatre and cinema. And it is precisely from these works of "assemblage" traversing intellectual disciplines and artistic domains that Deleuze drew himself an immense "cartography" and conjured up many refreshing images of thought throughout his life. I began to read Deleuze by pure chance in a classroom during my exchange in France.
One cannot intend to read Deleuze's work; one encounters it in the middle. And this is the best approach, according to Deleuze, "what is interesting is the middle" (Dial., p. 29), in the middle of things, in the middle of worlds. So, let's forget about what we were reading before, what questions were on our mind; forget about what we plan to do -and what answers we can expect -just suspending ourselves in this deliciously luxurious cloud of ignorance. Forget everything. Know nothing. We are in a foreign territory… Suppose you happen to turn to page 27 in Deleuze's Dialogues II with the chapter title: "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature", and you read the first few lines: "To leave, to escape, is to trace a line. The highest aim of literature, according to Lawrence, is 'to leave, to leave, to escape … to across the horizon, enter into another life… It is thus that Melville finds himself in the middle of the Pacific. He has really crossed the line of the horizon.' The line of flight is a deterritorialization." We are literally in the middle of Deleuzian thought. Dialogues II is a book composed by Deleuze with his former student and then colleague Claire Parnet, originally published in France in 1977. As Deleuze explained in his preface to the English edition, this is a book written between the two well-known books that he co-wrote with Félix Guattari, namely: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateau. In his own words, the 'between'-ness of this book is not only between two books written between two persons -Deleuze himself and Guattari -there is also the 'offshoot' of his Thinking like Grass,with Deleuze in Education? LING 33 conversation between himself and Parnet, a "new line-between." A little further down the chapter, we encounter a rather striking passage: The English and the Americans do not have the same way of beginning again as the French. French beginning again is the tabula rasa, the search for a primary certainty as a point of origin, always the point of anchor. The other way of beginning again, on the other hand, is to take up the interrupted line, to join a segment to the broken line, to make it pass between two rocks in a narrow gorge, or over repeated? A few words haunt us, "line", "middle", "beginning", "point", "zero", "broken", "flight", "leave", "horizon", "trees", "grass", even the notion of "English" versus "French". What does it all mean? Before we can make any meaning at all out of the text, we observe a few things: First of all, he seems to be distinguishing two different ways of beginning: There is the French beginning, "the search for a primary certainty as a point of origin". Then there is the English way of starting at "zero", but then this "zero" is not at all a tracing-back of "origin", as he says "the English zero is always in the middle". A zero in the middle! A mathematical coordinate is the only image I know that seems to exemplify this paradox of a "middle zero" that one can place anywhere such, yet it is a propitious moment to learn a bit of basic knowledge of the western trajectory in philosophy, so as to better understand the highly-metaphorized images of philosophers that Deleuze has brought forth in his text. Also in so doing, some essential characteristics that associate with these images will also come to the fore and will provide a ground for further discussion on Deleuze's own "style" in philosophizing.
Platonism is the best-known image of philosophy because of its long history since the Greek Academy to its persisting domination in Western societies. Plato presented Socrates as the ideal embodiment of philosophy; hence Platonism is often called Socratic philosophy. It is Socrates, the inventor of dialectics, who reasoned rigorously often through argumentative strategies employed and taught by the Sophists in Greek antiquity. And dialectics has been the platonic method par excellence in the linage of western philosophy, although it passed its own development through later well-known philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel. In this image, the philosopher is a being of ascents and is the one who leaves the cave and rises up.
However, following Nietzsche, Deleuze is profoundly dissatisfied with the Platonic orientation toward height. They see Socratic philosophers and their successors as tragic thinkers with Platonic wings striving for heights of transcendence. He considers them to be tragic for their "degeneracy" in philosophy from the pre-Socratics and regards the enterprise of philosophy since Plato as a sad dream that tries too hard to distinguish -the "True" (philosophers)" from the "False" (sophists), "the Original" from "copies" -"the High" from "the Low", "Soul" from Thinking like Grass, with Deleuze in Education? LING 37 "body" -a whole series of splitting that essentially treats the body as an abject or at least not worthy of attention.
It was Nietzsche who plunged into the depths of history and dug out the pre-Socratics and found another image of philosophers that is much closer to his taste. The so-called pre-Socratics were early Greek thinkers who were active back in the sixth century B.C. They were concerned with cosmological questions in the style of so-called "natural philosophy" (physiologia), which is named for their close tie with the observable world by the concept of physis (nature), and for their stress on a basic uniformity of behavior in the natural world. Heraclitus and Parmenides (both are the Eleatics) in particular, were concerned with the problem of unity and diversity of the universe. What they differ from Platonism in philosophizing is their attachment to immediate experiences in the concrete and changing world. This ancient gesture of philosophizing, a mode of thought or a style of life, might be called a vitalistic approach to philosophy.
Essentially it's of the depth, as Deleuze characterizes it to be a philosophy with "a hammer-blow" and with "Empedocles' lead sandals". Here, the hammer-blow is referring to these pre-Socratics who philosophized with a "hammer", "the hammer of the geologist and speleologist" for they thought, unlike the Platonism after them, in the depth of life, "inside the caverns". Stoics represented by Chrysippus also sneer against Plato in their attempt to unseat the Ideas, but to show that "the incorporal is not high above (en hauteur), but is rather at the surface, that it is not the highest cause but the superficial effect par excellence, and that it is not Essence In the last collaborative work with Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Deleuze and Guattari give a "brand" to their philosophy, "Geophilosophy". As a philosopher, Deleuze has always been concerned Philosophizing in this sense is then a process of reterritorialization on the terrain of concepts in a "milieu of immanence" that requires the development of a particular mode of deterritorialization (WP, 85-88).
Concepts imply "only neighborhoods and connections on the horizon" according to a "synthetic and contingent principle -an encounter, a conjunction" (WP, p. 93). Indeed it was David Hume's empiricism inspired him to take a decisive step in favoring the conjunction over ontology, that is, replacing the IS with AND, valuing the n th power for a relation with "AND…AND…AND…" It's a philosophy of becoming; a becoming of a philosopher; a philosopher in becoming.
As such, philosophical activity, for Deleuze, is not different from other creative acts such as writing, music making or painting. "Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and Perhaps that is what he means by saying that "a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction" (DR, p.xx). By detective novel, he means that concepts are called upon (in the sense of being created at hand) to "resolve local situations" with their "zone of presence". And these concepts change along with the problems. By science fiction, he means a tracing-out of a world where "individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre-individual: the splendor of the pronoun 'one'"; Erewhon, "signifying at once the originary 'nowhere' and the displaced To philosophize in this sense is to become nomads, as Deleuze suggests.
Since nomads need a desert to begin, a geophilosophic thinking is then to populate a moving desert that one constantly makes through the encounter with outside. Evidently, in this endeavour, whether one is physically traveling or not is of no importance, for what is to be deterritorialized is the thinker-in-becoming.
Indeed, throughout his philosophical life, Deleuze sought many outsiders for thinking with others, with other disciplines or geographies.
For him, as he did, to lead a life is to become, to become what one is not yet. To illustrate more concretely with one of his images of philosophizing, it is to release oneself into the function of the "cofunctioning" of the "symbiosis", "sympathy", and perhaps symphony also. He says, "There is no need for philosophy: it is necessarily produced where each activity gives rise to its line of deterritorialization.
To get out of philosophy, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce it from outside." (Dial., p. 55) Then, what could Deleuze mean to the field of Education? My first temptation is to simply boldly borrow his phrase above and to propose thus: There is no need for education: it is necessarily produced where each activity gives rise to its line of deterritorialization. To get out of education, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce it from outside! Perhaps, it is indeed a Deleuzian repetition 6 that we can aim for in education, a kind of repetition that is a transgression, in which its possibility hinges on opposing as much to moral(nomos) law as to natural (physis) law (DR, p. 2-3). By working in opposition to the order of the always already-existing laws, in the spirit of parrhēsia prefigured by Diogenes the Cynic, Deleuze is proposing new possibilities of working in the direction of creating artistic realities; that is, to treat philosophy itself as an artistic endeavour in its essential nature. And if one is to realize the fundamental role that education plays in forming our frames of thinking, that is, providing existing and always the dominant images of thought of our society in general, the relevance of Deleuze's analysis and his "anecdotes" of philosophizing is hard to deny. Or, at least we are tempted to make this parallel: that if philosophy can be made fecund with the openmindedness of an artist, then the work of education can also be made fertile through the exigency of treating it as an artistic engagement, something that not only demands creativity but more importantly a critical consciousness of the ethical dimension that is inherent in education.
To do that concretely, perhaps one thing is to be recognizant of the dogmatic images of thought in the history of knowledge heavily critiqued in Deleuze's works, so as to facilitate our own process of deterritorialization out of the "comfort" zones that these entrenched images of thought often provide and perpetuate through the dominant discourses which in turn manifest themselves in curricula at various levels in the field of education. Also, keeping in mind not only the concrete objections that Deleuze raises regarding the obstinate presence of the doxa in its various forms, but also his own encounters with his outside-of-philosophy, of making them events of thinking, we, who are interested in the territory of education, can begin to ask some questions: For instance, what does it mean to attempt to bring Deleuze's work from the "outside" in the proximity of our educational realm, or rather, to extend our ignorance to the edge of the inter-disciplinary borders, to think about curriculum questions with his diverse philosophical thinking? If one takes curriculum to mean something akin to a wall or a back-bone to the structure of educational system, how could one approach it in such a way that allows the multiplicities in the creative work of education come to the fore, to "pierce the wall" of curriculum itself, or, to make it porous? What might be the exigencies on us educators ourselves in this kind of attempt? If the attempt to make deterritorialization in the field of education indeed demands a Deleuze often pays for bringing out the dynamic forces that they bring in the matter of thinking; they could be regarded also as small linguistic device to strike certain resonance with the kind of geographic philosophizing that Deleuzian engages in his work, stand in tension with the default fixity of representation. The "in" of "in Education" ostensibly refers to the situated-ness of this thinking exercise within the terrain of Education; yet, this "in" can paradoxically signals an "out" or "outside" that I attempt here "with" Deleuze.
As such, I place a subtle tension that readers may recognize only after reading the whole text, for it is facilitated by an encounter with Deleuze's concept such as "deterritorialization", which is what I am trying to introduce here. "With" then stresses the possibility of thinking along with Deleuze's creative (images) of thought; to be in flight with him through a process of deterritorialization of reading. Reading here not only refers to reading into the contents as concepts, ideas, (i.e. representations of knowledge), but even more so into his creative way of thinking shown by his style of writing (numerous metaphors, for example) as well as his "anecdotes" of living in philosophy. The "like" serving as a preposition evidently signifies a simile to convey the possibility of having one's thinking unroots itself, be blown away and then reroots again in a different territory, imitating the way that grass do to populate any crake of fertile land.
The use of "a" is hence deliberately used to emphasis both the general ability and the singularity of each rooting of grass. The form that this "minor" (in a Deleuzian sense, it is far from the common meaning of "less") book takes is rather unusual (for a contemporary professional philosopher at least), for it was written in series with thirty-four themes or sub-titles and lengthy appendices. In fact, one could almost read it like a collection of short stories! But the decisive form that this book takes, along with its multiple way of thinking, marks Deleuze the philosopher his own creative path to thinking. god among men" after being devoured by the fire. However symbolic this return to the earth as a divine might be, this latter interpretation seems to adhere to Empedocles' view of the cyclic reincarnation of the mortals. He himself though, has exited out of that cycle -only the sandal remained as a messenger to tell of his immortal return.
5. American scholar Gregg Lambert has written an extensive book on the various aspects of Deleuze's philosophy of non-philosophy, appropriately titled: The Non-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, New York: Continuum, 2002. 6. As the concept of "repetition" with Deleuze is central in his book Repetition and Difference (1994/1968), it is here worthwhile to cite a few fragments to help understand its singular meaning: "Repetition as a conduct and as a point of view concern non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities." (RD, p. 1) "The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without concept, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. (DR. p.1-2) "If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of law. … If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality. " (emphasis mine, DR, p. 2-3.) 7. To translate these Cartes into English: Carte-postal, post card; carte d'invitation, invitation card; carte-de-visite, visiting card, a kind of note that the French used to use to leave at the door of the person one desire to see but who is absent for the time being, which is also used as wishing card that accompanies a gift; carteréponse, answering-card; cart(e)-o-graphie, cartography, which means the art of making maps.