What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

According to a widespread view, one of the most important roles of education is the nurturing of common sense. In this article I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of sense to develop a contrary view of education—one that views education as a radical challenge to common sense. The discussion will centre on the relation of sense and common sense to thinking. Although adherents of common sense refer to it as the basis of all thought and appeal to critical thinking as (...) instrumental in eliminating its occasional errors, I shall argue, following Deleuze, that common sense education in fact thwarts thinking, while only education which revolves around making sense may provoke thinking that goes beyond the self-evident. I demonstrate how making sense can become an educational encounter that breaks hierarchies and generates thinking independently of the thinker’s knowledge and place in the sociopolitical order. The present article attempts, therefore, to put some sense into Deleuzian education for thinking, and thereby shed new light on its radical-political, counter-commonsensical power. (shrink)

This paper situates moral education in the context of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and as embedded in lived experience qualified by three dimensions, namely critical, clinical, and creative (‘3C’). The construct of ‘3C’ education will be enriched by reference to the theoretical corpus of Nel Noddings, specifically her 2006 book Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach. The paper argues that only as embodying all three ‘C's in experience can education become genuinely moral and bring the missing element of values into (...) quality teaching (cf. Lovat, 2006a). The novel concept ‘pedagogy of values’ is proposed, analysed and synthesized alongside Deleuze's unorthodox ‘pedagogy of the concept’. (shrink)

This paper explores how affirming events rather than substances, and difference rather than identities, might affect how one responds to life's exigencies, in particular the act of choosing when to end the life of a dog that was a beloved companion. The paper addresses the concepts of the event and the time of Aion as they are presented in The Logic of Sense, and examines the resonances these concepts have with a notion of learning presented in Difference and Repetition and (...) a notion of essence presented in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. The argument is made that Deleuze presents us with a notion of death that is a part of the creative unfolding of life, and that affirming events rather than substances and difference rather than identities can give us insight into practical questions about how to live one's life. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this paper I try to 'rethink' consistency as an educational quality for the 3rd millennium, following Italo Calvino's choice to take it up in his lecture series Memos for the Next Millennium, and despite the fact that the (final) lecture devoted to this quality remained unwritten. After reflecting on how consistency already plays a certain role in Calvino's other lectures, I expand on the specific educational implications of this role's unresolved ambivalence, in order to argue that this ambivalence, properly (...) understood, might be fully constitutive of the educational significance of consistency. To achieve such an understanding I turn to Gilles Deleuze and his concept of style as a 'practice' of consistency. Not only does a stylistic understanding of consistency offer interesting possibilities for a more constructive approach to the said ambivalence—between consistency as static stability and dynamic keeping-together- but as such it also speaks to a number of issues that are directly and fundamentally educational in nature. (shrink)

In this article I explore the pedagogical value of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts for helping make an ‘event’ of thought, with a view towards fostering deep learning in Chinese students' learning theory and criticism in a second language. Paying attention to the qualitative role of bodies, humour and creativity alongside an expanded trans-personal concept of ‘educational life forms’ that stretches out to include an affective assemblage of inhuman elements (such as art and technology), I explore how Deleuze (...) and Guattari’s philosophical models provide a ethical alternative to corporate, Confucian and Cartesian models otherwise inhibiting students and teachers in the modern Sino-international university context. (shrink)

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both (...) Deleuze and Guattari - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)