This presentation will address the issue of conceptual framing for educational research through the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari. The picture of what this means is complicated by the fact that in their combined texts, Deleuze and Guattari present different notions of conceptual framing. In their final joint text, What is Philosophy? conceptual framing appears in the context of concept creation, and helps with the analysis of western philosophy through concepts such as ‘geophilosophy’. In their joint texts on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, concepts are aligned with pre-personal and individualising flows that pass through any context. This presentation will make sense of the disparate deployment of concepts in the work of Deleuze & Guattari to aid clear conceptual work in the growing international field of educational research inspired by their philosophy.

1. CONCEPTUAL FRAMING FOR
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH THROUGH
DELEUZE & GUATTARI
David R Cole
Western Sydney University

2. “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science”
– W.H. Auden (1946)

3. TENSIONS IN CONCEPTUAL
RESEARCH
• Where do Deleuze & Guattari sit in relation to quant & qual research?
• Where/how do concepts fit into a research programme?
• How/why should we use concepts?
• What issues do concepts in educational research solve/raise?
• Are concepts generic, or is there a specific Deleuze-Guattari conceptual field that
can be usefully deployed?
• How can we make sense of the different ways in which concepts are understood in
the work of Deleuze/Guattari?

4. CONVENTIONAL
EDUCATIONAL
RESEARCH
Follows a sequence
Answers a question
Has definite steps to find an
answer/solution
Is written up in a certain manner
(academically/normatively pre-defined)
Mechanical-technical-reproducible
Concepts are integrated into the whole

5. THE LABYRINTH

6. A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

7. WHY DELEUZE & GUATTARI?
• A break from the past – for a ‘people yet to come’
• Non-reductive/non-normative/post-positivist (emergent-coded-reciprocating)
• Allows for/encourages methodological arrangements depending on context and
requirements
• Pushes research to the ‘nth’ degree
• Always posing further questions
• The concepts that may be evolved from a context/particular study are unknown/open …
• Political-social-cultural-ethical (immanent)
• Have an array of previously evolved concepts for deployment; e.g. assemblage, BwO,
desiring-machines, plane of immanence
• The use of these concepts depends on the study undertaken (toolkit) …
• Are Deleuze/Guattari primarily non-conventional?

8. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1994) ?
• What is a concept?
• Introduce the pedagogy of the concept…
• Relates concept creation to the history of (western) philosophy, e.g., Descartes’ Cogito (see figure
for mapping of concept)
• A concept is way to bring different aspects of a problem together to admit and recognise the
components of the problem
• Philosophy, science and the arts are conceptual
• Concept creation attests to a mode of constructivism
• Concepts have definite attributes; e.g. Descartes’ cogito, and survive
through use/applicability
• Concepts are not propositional or grammatical …

9. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? II
• Conceptual personae
• Do concepts create/involve identity/thinking deeply with a particular context/time?
• Are concepts primarily given/made by philosophers?
• What is the relationship between nature and concepts?
• The plane of immanence and concepts
• How are concepts organised?
• What is the politics of concepts?
• geophilosophy

10. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? III
• percepts, affect, and concepts
• Function and concepts. Do concepts depend on how they are used or vice versa?
• What are the relationships between philosophy, science, logic, and art
• Where do concepts fit into these activities?
• Why are some concepts important and others fade and are forgotten?
(evidence/applicability, take up?)
• How do we resist the present, that is constituted by commercial professional
training – through the pedagogy of the concept
• What is meant by the pedagogy of the concept?

11. A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988)
• RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS =
MICROPOLITICS. These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say,
number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata,
molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence , etc.) (p. 22)
• Resist the academic habit of ‘staticism’ ‘the authority of the reference’…

12. POLITICS OF THE SELF: 1000PS (II)
• “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown
through the window.” (foreword, xiii)
• “State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts
it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The
subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied
have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity.” (foreword, xi)
• “More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and
government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the
propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute
State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.” (foreword,
xii)

13. Q: IS THERE ANY CONSISTENCY
IN/OF THE CONCEPT?

14. STENGERS ON WHITEHEAD
• “The question of what is an object and
thus what is an abstraction must
belong, if nature is not allowed to
bifurcate, to nature and not to
knowledge only” (Stengers, 2011, p. 96)
• “The passage [of nature] is neutral, the
point of view does not belong to you,
except that you occupy it, but it is
much more accurately described as
what keeps you busy rather than what
you own” (Stengers, 2011, p. 82).

15. WHY WHITEHEAD?
• Reality as a disconnected set of material
objects and/or knowledge of these objects
makes no sense
• Panpsychism: mind in matter, matter in
mind …
• Prehension: more than memory …
• Education is rhythmic, and to be
constructed in situ depending upon
available conditions/resources
• [Events]–[flows]–[quanta]
• Feelings …
• The fallacy of misplaced concreteness

16. ‘CREATION OF WILD AND FREE
CONCEPTS’
• A return to metaphysics?
• “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done
its best, the wonder remains.” (Whitehead, 1934, p. 46).
• “Instead of fixing attention on the bodily digestion of vegetable food, [human
experience] catches the gleam of the sunlight as it falls on the foliage. It nurtures
poetry. Men are the children of the universe, with foolish enterprises and irrational
hopes.” (Whitehead, 1934, p. 30).

17. EXAMPLE 1: MLT (MASNY & COLE, 2007)

18. EXAMPLE 2: EDUCATIONAL LIFE-
FORMS (COLE, 2011A)

19. EXAMPLE 3: 2-ROLE MODEL OF
AFFECT (COLE, 2011B)

20. EXAMPLE 3: IMMANENT
MATERIALISM (COLE, 2012)
• … the over-whelming message of immanent materialism is to question capitalist
modes of production, not through critique and transcendence, but by activating
forms of nomadism, that burrow through sedentary overlays of capitalist codes and
subjectivation immanently. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) call this process rhizomatics
(pp. 3-26) in the introduction to 1000 Plateaus, and rhizomes are characterised as
subterranean connections and a form of politics. This politics is fully applicable to
educational practice …

21. EXAMPLE 4:
EDUCATIONAL
NOMADOLOGY (COLE, 2014)
A nomadic line of flight .
1 Guattari-Freinet machinic object
2 breakthrough/breakdown/breakout
3 self-immolating line of flight – contra
machinic répétition mortifère

22. EXAMPLE 5: SUPER DIMENSIONS IN
GLOBALISATION AND EDUCATION (COLE &
WOODROW, 2016)
• On one side of the equation, is the superdiversity as explored by Vertovec in the
2000s in the UK, and which has been recently taken up by globalised educational
researchers, especially in terms of linguistic and literacy research. Superdiversity
points to the ‘diversity in diversity’, and the ways in which the current globalised
situation puts continual pressure on stable identity construction and the analysis of
ethnicity, race, nationhood, migration status, and other social markers. On the other
side of the equation is the supercomplexity of the current globalised situation.
Theoretical frames seem inadequate almost as quickly as they are prepared,
presented and articulated, due to the rapidly changing conditions …

23. EXAMPLE 6: DELEUZIAN CRITICAL-
THINKING –PRACTICE (COLE, 2015)
• Understanding the 8 postulates and how they relate to the image of thought - away
from phenomenology and into the subsequent mode of non-representative
philosophising and metaphysics.
• The image of thought is not only applicable to the dogmatic thought of the
philosophers, but can also be used to initiate an expanded mode of questioning as
a practice.
• Transference of the techniques of the production of the new image of thought into
pedagogy. This opens up questions with respect to knowledge, power, collectivity
and relationality. Guattari (2013) was especially concerned with this aspect of the
new image of thought through the practise of cartography.

24. IS THERE A ‘SUFFICIENCY’ TO
CONCEPT CREATION?
• How much is too much/too many concepts?
• How often and why should we be creating new concepts through our research?
• How do we know if we have evolved a useful new concept?
• Does every research project necessitate new concepts?
• What if the audience reading our work do not understand out concepts?
• How do concepts work in the educational context?
• Do we want our concepts to be taken up/understood by
teachers/researchers/administrators/other Deleuzians not interested in education?

25. CONCEPTS & ‘EDU’-TERMINOLOGY
• What are the common educational framing concepts of our time?
• Neoliberalism –capitalism …
• Pedagogic efficiency (corporate identities)
• Standards
• Rankings
• Debt
• Online learning
• The human subject and its learnings … non-human/post-human/anti-human?
• Pre-school, school, university, lifelong learning …
• Does the ubiquitous nature of educational provision help/hinder the creation of new concepts?
• What is relationship between education and democracy? Education and capitalism, e.g. Pearson
Inc. …

26. CONCEPTS AND CURRICULUM
• Transversal
• What is knowledge?
• Currere (what does the curriculum feel like?)
• How is the curriculum enacted in situ?
• What are the underlying beliefs in/of the curriculum?
• Does the curriculum model used transmit (western/colonial/European/elitist)values &
notions of society?
• Does the curriculum merely serve the ruling techno-capitalist elite?
• How does the curriculum relate to nature/the natural?
• What are the messages in/of community embedded in the curriculum?
• Can the curriculum be questioned? Is there an alternative curriculum that we should adopt
(Deleuze-Guattarian)?

27. CONCEPTS AND PEDAGOGY
• How/for what purposes is knowledge transmitted?
• Who/what/is anyone behind the model and concept of pedagogy that we use?
• Pedagogy or didacticism?
• To what extent is pedagogy reciprocating?
• Do we learn from our students/from nature/from the unconscious?
• Does pedagogy include experimentation with the learning process? How?
• What constitutes evidence for good/new pedagogy?
• To what extent does good teaching depend on the subjective inclinations of the teacher?
• Could teaching become Deleuzian?

28. TEACHER EDUCATION AND
CONCEPTS
• The production of new teachers?
• How are their subjectivities molded?
• Do we (primarily) report to government about what we deem to be the best ways to create
new teachers?
• What is the nature of our evidence for our claims about good/bad teachers?
• Can we still speak in these (evaluative) terms with applied Deleuze/Guattari concepts?
• What is classroom management?
• Is there a place for Deleuze/Guattari in teacher education?
• What would the effects be of the application of Deleuze/Guattari concepts to teacher
education?
• Should we educate for the teachers of the future?

29. • Thank you
• David.cole@westernsydney.edu.au
• https://uws.academia.edu/DavidRCole

30. REFERENCES
• Auden, WH (1946) ‘Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times’. Harvard: Harvard University imprints.
• Cole, DR (2011a) Educational Lifeforms: Deleuzian Teaching and Learning Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publilshers.
• Cole, DR (2011b) The actions of affect in Deleuze - Others using language and the language that we make … Educational
Philosophy and Theory, Volume 43, Issue 6, August 549-561
• Cole, DR (2012) Matter in Motion: The Educational Materialism of Gilles Deleuze, Educational Philosophy and Theory,
Volume 44, Number S1, May, 3-17
• Cole, DR (2014) Inter-collapse … Educational Nomadology for a Future Generation, Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and
Education: For a People-Yet-to-Come, Bloomsbury, Matthew Carlin and Jason Wallin (eds), New York & London, 77-95
• Cole, DR (2015) What is the image of thought? Notes on a Deleuzian critical-thinking-practice’, Keynote address at the
Schizoanalytic Applications Research Collective (SARC): ‘Philosophy, Nonlinearity and the Migrations of Thought’ University
of Wollongong
• Cole, DR & Woodrow, C (Eds) (2016) Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education, Springer
• Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia & Capitalism, B. Massumi, trans. London: The Athlone
Press.
• Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994) What is Philosophy? H. Tomlinson & G Burchill, trans. London: Verso.
• Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies, A. Goffey, trans. London: Bloomsbury.
• Masny, D & Cole, DR (2007) Applying Multiple Literacies Theory in Canadian and Australian contexts [ppt]. University of
Sydney.
• Stengers, I (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts, M. Chase, trans. Harvard: Harvard
University Press.
• Whitehead, AN (1934) Modes of Thought. New York: Capricorn press.