This slide share analyses learning and practice together. The idea here is that if analysed together, learning and practice become comprehensible as a conceptual unit that does work in education as a ghost. This ghost acts as means to separate and analyse the educational machine. in

1. Learning-practice
The ghosts in the educational machine
David R. Cole
UTS

2. What are we doing?
Epistemology
Pedagogy - identity work?
Discourse
Philosophy of education
Tracking bodies

3. Why ghosts?
Practice and
learning are
‘empty vessels’
This emptiness
invites
otherness -
redundancy -
power
concerns…

4. What are the prime-
connectors
Practice>language
Learning>context
“Gothic affect theory”…

5. Mapping the journey
From the philosophy of mind to
educational postructuralism
“‘Theory’ in the classroom operates
in terms of what Tomkins calls the
‘fear/terror’ couplet of affect. As a
shield wielded by the academic,
theory serves to protect our bodies
and psyches against our fear and
the students’ terror induced by the
highly theoretical text,” (Probyn,
2004, p. 35).

6. Starting points
Post dualistic position
Empiricist & rationalist
How does the body work in
practice & learning?
Questions about habit, pre-
figuration, representation &
‘subjectification’…

7. Gilbert Ryle
Closing the
gap between
ontology &
epistemology
Addressing the
conjunction of
language &
practice
Category
errors?

8. Dispositional sentences
Ryle (1949) proposed a solution
to the [ghost in the machine] in
his dispositional sentences that he
explained were to be: “at once
narrative, explanatory, and
conditionally predictive, without
being a conjunctive assemblage
of detachable sub-statements,” (p.
135).

9. Problems with
dispositional sentences
Educational psychology (the
self)
Who is talking?
How should one assess
dispositions?
How are attitudes connected
to language? (affect)

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Investigations
Questioning of
the rational self
behind
judgement &
language
No private
language

11. Language-games
Suppose you came as an explorer into
an unknown country with a language
quite strange to you. In what
circumstances would you say that the
people there gave orders, understood
them, obeyed them, and rebelled
against them and so on? The common
behaviour of mankind is the system of
reference by means of which we
interpret an unknown language
(Wittgenstein, 1963, section 206).

12. Naming
“only someone who already knows
how to do something with it,” writes
Wittgenstein (1963), “can
significantly ask a name,” (section
31) and later, ‘[W]hen one says,
“He gave a name to his sensation”
one forgets that a great deal of
stage setting in the language is
presupposed if the mere act of
naming is to make sense,’
(Wittgenstein, 1963, section 257).

13. Problems with
language-games &
naming
What is lying?
How can poetry/aesthetics move
us?
What are the drives in
language>practice?
Is the rational ego replaced by the
irrational/unconscious? Or to what
extent should it be reduced to a
surface-effect?

14. Learning + practice
Position that takes account of
power concerns that might take
hold and use the conjunction l + p
for their own purposes…
Argument that explains the ways in
which language and context carry
meaning and subjective principles
Conjunctive synthesis.

15. William Labov
some of the rules of language, that Labov
called “variable rules” generate systematic,
endogenous variation (Labov, 1971). For
example, in small urban communities, social
networks develop that use language as a
“badge of identity” (De Landa, 1993, p. 14).
These identities circulate around the
community and define power relationships,
allegiances and structures that maintain and
transform the local dialect.

16. Language redundancy
“the collective assemblage is the redundant complex of the
act and the statement that necessarily accomplishes it. But
this is still only a nominal definition; it does not even
enable us to justify the previous position that redundancy
is irreducible to a simple identity or that there is no simple
identity between the statement and the act. If we wish to
move to a real definition of the collective assemblage, we
must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language
that are in redundancy with statements or constitute order-
words,” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 80).

17. Order-words
Incorporeal acts
Cyborgs
Becoming-other…
Transveral communication
Assemblages and schizo-analysis
Holes in space & time…

18. Machinic phylum
“…the machinic phylum develops as
a location of intensity for the order-
words; it is “materiality, natural or
artificial, and both simultaneously – it
is matter in movement, in flux, in
variation, matter as a conveyor of
singularities and traits of expression.
This has obvious consequences:
namely, this matter flow can only be
followed,” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 409).

19. Circulation of order-
words
Description of ‘best practice’
(teacher talk)
Ryle’s dispositional sentences
(attitudinal affects)
Wittgenstein’s language-
games (relational affects)
D & G’s machinic phylum
(synthetic affects)

20. Curriculum-construction
Curriculum innovation (working
with knowledge)
Exploring the affective
environments created by
knowledge (attitudinal affects)
Matching knowledge needs with
knowledge production (relational
affects)
Unpacking the domain of
knowledge production (synthetic
affects)

21. Teacher training
Embodiment of pedagogy (holistic
learning)
Examination of teacher-beliefs
(attitudinal affects)
Testing of pedagogic strategies
with cohorts (relational affects)
Reflective practice that is
responsive to learning (synthetic
affects)

22. Concluding remarks
A ghost never
dies, it remains
always to
come and to
come-back.--
Jacques
Derrida (1994),
Specters of
Marx
…ghosts in machines
always appear as
malfunctions, glitches,
interruptions in the
normal flow of things.
Something unexpected
appears seemingly out
of nothing and from
nowhere. Through a
malfunction, a glitch, we
get a fleeting glimpse of
an alien intelligence at
work. Janne Vanhanen
(2001) Loving the Ghost
in the Machine

23. references
De Landa, M. (1993). Virtual environments and the emergence of
synthetic reason. Retrieved 4/8/08 from:
http://www.t10.or.at/delanda/delanda.htm
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Labov, W. (1971). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Probyn, E. (2004). Teaching Bodies: Affects in the Classroom. Body &
Society, Vol. 10(4): 21–43.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson.
Vanhanen, J. (2001). Loving the ghost in the machine. CTHEORY, (EJ):
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312#bio
Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical investigations. Oxford:
Blackwell.