Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education

For a People-Yet-to-Come

Matthew Carlin, Jason Wallin, Matthew Carlin, Jason Wallin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628922592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte y política

Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education mobilizes Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to Western thought. Operationalizing Deleuze and Guattari's challenge to contemporary philosophy, this book presents their view as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to the current state of Western formal education. This book offers an experimental approach to theorizing, creating an entirely new way for educational theorists to approach their work as the task of revolutionizing life itself. Examining new conceptual resources for grappling with and mapping a sustainable political alternative to the cliche's that saturate contemporary educational theory, this collection of essays works toward extracting a genuine image of education and learning that exists in sharp contrast to both the neo-liberal educational project and the critical pedagogical tradition.

1

Schizoanalysis and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Ian Buchanan

In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), Deleuze suggests that in order to understand a thinker properly one has to know who they were against (p. 162). In the case of Deleuze, both on his own and in collaboration with Guattari, the received wisdom is that he was against Hegel. In part this is because of the way in Nietzsche and Philosophy he positions Hegel as Nietzsche’s enemy. But this ‘meme’, if you will, which is reproduced in the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari with such monotonous regularity it can justly be termed a cliché, obscures more than it reveals, giving us an image of thought (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s own useful concept for clichéd thinking) in the place of what was actually thought. However, it is not just Deleuzians who are guilty of this. Hegel is frequently painted as a dark figure in French thought, particularly by the generation of thinkers loosely known as post-structuralists, e.g., Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. But this depiction of Hegel as a kind of a philosophical wrong turn overlooks the fact that he was also a profound inspiration to some of the keenest and most radical minds of the generation before the post-structuralists, such as Sartre and Beauvoir, and the many thinkers they inspired such as Fanon, Memmi, and the great Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire. In other words, in the span of a single generation Hegel went from being the potent ally of politically-motivated philosophers to the arch enemy of the same, despite the fact that the later generation of philosophers were, politically speaking, largely in sympathy with their predecessors, sharing their concern for justice, equality and the need for critical thinking. This scission needs to be explained.

The key issue here, I will argue, is not, or not only, why were Deleuze and Guattari opposed to Hegel, but rather why were they opposed to Hegel at this particular moment in history? I tend to follow Perry Anderson (1976), one of the most reliable guides to the history of Western Marxism, in thinking that contrasting ‘Hegelian and anti-Hegelian schools is wholly inadequate to define the exact locations of the different schools within Western Marxism [in contrast to Anderson, though, I would very much include Deleuze and Guattari within the ambit of this history], or the inter-relations between them. The very multiplicity of the philosophical filiations […] – including not only Hegel, but Kant, Schelling, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Schiller, Rousseau, Montesquieu and others – precludes any such polar alignment’ (p. 73).

Against this point, though, I also agree with Jameson that anti-Hegelian assertions in this period were always something other than mere announcements of philosophical disagreements; rather, they were statements of position and of personal allegiance in a rather closeted post-war academy. I doubt Anderson would disagree with this in any case since he also makes the point that post-war Western Marxism was shockingly insular, compared to its first incarnation in the years before the First World War and more especially the Russian Revolution. He describes Adorno, Althusser, Colletti, Della Volpe, and Sartre, and many others too, as: ‘utterly provincial and uninformed about the theoretical cultures of neighbouring countries. Astonishingly, within the entire corpus of Western Marxism, there is not one single serious appraisal or sustained critique of the work of one major theorist by another, revealing close textual knowledge or minimal analytic care in its treatment’ (ibid., p. 69).

What one finds instead is a near constant search for ‘worthy’ philosophical precursors to Marx, which Anderson reasons became necessary when – as I’ll explain below – Western Marxism jettisoned the practical dimension of Marxism in favour of its more purely theoretical dimension.

Interestingly, Anderson’s observations hold true today, nearly four decades later: it is still the case that critical theorists of Deleuze’s generation do an extremely poor job of reading each other’s work, as is amply demonstrated by both Badiou’s (2000) and Žižek’s (2004) books on Deleuze (Deleuze’s (1986) book on Foucault is no exception; it is simply partisan and partial in an affirmative rather than negative direction). And they are still obsessed with the question of the ‘worthy’ precursor, as the countless books on Deleuze can testify. Instead of trying to figure out what can be done with Deleuze and more especially what can be done with Deleuze and Guattari, the field of ‘Deleuze studies’ seems to be altogether stuck on the question of whether Deleuze was Bergsonian, Nietzschean, Spinozist, or, even more esoterically, whether Deleuze and Guattari were inspired by or somehow rely on evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, higher mathematics, and so on. Consequently, as Anderson put it speaking of Western Marxism, ‘Deleuze studies’ is in danger of becoming ‘a prolonged and intricate Discourse on Method’ (ibid., p. 53). The issue of whether Deleuze and Guattari are anti-Hegel is a part of this and for that reason the question should be refused in that form. To reorient the question in an historical way, in the manner I have suggested, is really to ask why in that particular period it seemed necessary to Deleuze and Guattari to perform anti-Hegelianism. And I use the term ‘perform’ here quite deliberately and not as a provocation. As many commentators have pointed out, there is no general critique of Hegel to be found anywhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. All we have to go on is the scant pages explaining why Nietzsche opposed Hegel in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book and the various and far from coherent pronouncements they both made in interviews. Guattari was largely silent on the subject of Hegel, but Deleuze famously said he loathed dialectics because of its altogether too mechanical one-two simplicity. My point, though, is that this hardly constitutes a philosophical argument against Hegel. Nor does it even begin to do justice to the complexity of Hegel’s thought.

In saying that Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism was a performance I am suggesting, with Jameson, that we should ask: Who or what did Hegel stand for in Deleuze’s eyes? Fredric Jameson has proposed that for French thinkers of Deleuze’s generation Hegel became a kind of code word for Stalin; it was a way for Marxists to use theoretical fights as a cover for deeper political disagreements. This certainly rings true for Althusser and the Althusserians, but I’m not so sure it holds for either Deleuze or Guattari because neither of them were all that interested or engaged in the internecine wars being played out on the French Left in the 1950s and 1960s. Neither were part of any recognized ‘schools’ and both were in any case quite scathing of such factionalism. The other obvious possible explanation is of course that Hegel was the ‘arch’ enemy of the Spinozists and that being anti-Hegelian was simply the flipside of being pro-Spinozist. But this is just factionalism of a different and possibly even meaner kind and for that reason should also be rejected. I think we have to look for an explanation elsewhere. This isn’t to say, however, that Marxism doesn’t provide an important clue, and not just because Spinoza was a beardless Marx according to Plekhanov, because I cannot but think we have to look in the direction of a political problematic rather than a philosophical problematic in order to satisfactorily resolve this issue (ibid., p. 64 n20).1 While I do think Hegel functions as a kind of code word for Deleuze and Guattari, as a particular kind of ‘image’ of thought, or performance, I don’t think it is Stalin or any other factional figure that they have in their sights. I want to suggest rather that they saw the recourse to Hegel as a cul-de-sac in the road on the way to answering the key political and theoretical problem of the era. In responding to this theoretical problem, as I’ll explain in what follows, Deleuze and Guattari reunite theory and practice, long since divorced according to Anderson.

In the 1950s and 1960s the key political problem for the Left was why hadn’t the great socialist revolution Marx predicted taken place in Western Europe? According to classical Marxist theories, the socialist revolutions in China and Russia were historical anomalies because they were peasant-led revolutions and not proletarian-led as they were supposed to be. Marxist doctrine held that the revolution(s) should have taken place in France, England or Germany. The bigger problem though was that once the spark was lit in Russia the fire didn’t spread west. This led Western Marxism as a whole to see itself, in Perry Anderson’s words, as the ‘product of defeat. The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia […] is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair’ (ibid., p. 42). Paradoxically, the socialist victories in Russia and China, did not leaven this despair, nor energize Western Marxism as one might have expected, because they brought with them their own problems: first, in both Russia and China the needs of the Party were prioritized over and above all other considerations, with the effect that Marxism became in some circles synonymous with authoritarian bureaucracy (later as news of the Gulags became common knowledge this image soured further to the point where high-profile Marxists began to leave the party in protest – the so-called ‘nouveau philosophes’, despised by both Deleuze and Guattari, were only the most prominent); second, as the geographical axis of Marxism shifted from the West to the East, Marxism lost its meaning on the ground in its former strongholds in Paris and Berlin – where once it had been part of working-class culture, now it was simply an ideological cover for the Power of the Party (ibid., p. 43). In the process, Marxism became separated from mass struggle, and theory lost its mooring in praxis.

This situation created a problem that Marxists writing in the latter part of the twentieth century were largely unable to resolve. The Party steadily assumed the position of central organizing pole, thereby cornering Marxist theorists into having to decide whether to join or not. If they did, their prestige and authority was greatly enhanced, they gained a constituency, a body of readers who looked to them for guidance, but it came at a price. They had to accept the discipline and control of the party, which meant that in some circumstances they would have to remain silent about both the conduct and the actions of the Party. As Anderson states, ‘No intellectual (or worker) within the mass Communist Party of this period, not integrated into its leadership, could make the smallest pronouncement on major political issues, except in the most oracular form’ (ibid., p. 44). If they made the opposite choice and turned their back on the Party, the gain in freedom was more than offset by the corresponding loss of what Anderson usefully refers to as ‘anchorage’ in the very class of people who were supposed to benefit from their theorizing. Thus the great Marxist scholars of the 1950s and 1960s – Adorno, Marcuse, and Sartre, in particular – tended to be silent on the issues that had given Marxism its initial impetus, namely the study of economics, the analysis of political machinery, revolutionary strategy, and so on. It was under these conditions that so-called ‘cultural Marxism’ emerged and with it the dominance of philosophy as the primary area of interest (ibid.). Hegel’s prominence in this period is a symptom of this fading away of the materialist side of Marxist thinking. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Marxism thereby went into an idealist free-fall as many said at the time (Althusser and Colletti in particular), but it does point to a strange lacuna in a theory that at its outset chastised philosophy for merely trying to understand the world when the real point of such work was to try to change the world.

This failure of history to unfold according to script became even more perplexing for Western Marxists when they turned their eyes southwards and gave their attention to decolonization, which swept through Africa, Asia, and South America in the post-war years with varying effect. Most of the liberation movements were socialist inspired – e.g., Cuba, Indonesia, Kenya and Vietnam, to name just a few of the most important. These revolutions no doubt radicalized people in ‘First World’ countries, particularly students, some of whom went so far as to identify as Maoists (most notably Badiou and his circle). But for all its high points, and there were many (huge advances were made in the battle for gender and racial and sexual equality), 1960s radicalism didn’t amount to much in the way of a revolution. The structures of power in the West survived unscathed and were in many cases strengthened because it created the perfect conditions for its naked expression. Indeed, on the bleakest view of things, 1960s radicalism, in all its counterculture glory, simply paved the way for a still more complete capture of society as a whole by capitalism by setting aside all the social and cultural impediments that hitherto blocked its expansion.2 Neo-liberalism is the result of these transformations. Government mishandling of various crises through the 1960s became the justification for the rolling back of the ‘welfare state’, i.e. the very idea that the state’s primary purpose is to oversee the welfare of the people, and the subsequent privatization of services hitherto deemed the preserve of the state, such as healthcare, but also key infrastructure (roads, sewerage, telecommunications, water and so on), and even elements of both the military and the police.3 Moreover, in the United States in particular, the state responded to the civil unrest generated by 1960s radicalism by declaring ‘war’ on its own people – the war on poverty saw the steamrolling of entire neighbourhoods deemed ‘slums’ only to be left as a vacant lots because the state lacked the resources to rebuild them; the war on drugs that followed was even more devastating because it resulted in extraordinarily high and utterly disproportionate levels of incarceration, particularly among the Black and Latino populations.4

There was no obvious historical answer to the problem of the failure to revolt in Western Europe. According to all the indicators Marxists generally relied on, the circumstances were in fact ripe for revolution. A large and well-organized working class existed at least until the early 1960s and although it had suffered several defeats, it was still more than willing to flex its muscles to obtain better conditions, as May 1968 demonstrated in Paris when more than 10 million blue-collar workers went on strike and brought the whole country to a standstill. This, for Marx at least, was the essential precondition for revolution and yet it had not happened. Why not? Western Marxism’s answer to this rather perplexing problem, which it used Hegel to theorize, was that although the economic conditions were primed for revolution, the social and cultural conditions were not. The problem was that the people – understood in the broadest possible sense – lacked not just revolutionary spirit, but revolutionary consciousness, the sense that the position of the oppressed is in fact powerful. But more than that, it is the sense that it is in the people’s interest to revolt. As Freire (1996) puts it, ‘what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms’, adding that ‘true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these “beings for another”’ (p. 31).

Education is the royal road to revolutionary consciousness, according to Freire; not only that, it is also the springboard to a successful revolution, which is to say a revolution that endures beyond the initial storming of the barricades and the firing of the first shot. In Freire’s view, it is the task of revolutionary leaders to begin critical education prior to the firing of the first shot so as to ensure the revolution’s sustainability. Taking power is but a single moment, an event, albeit decisive, in the revolutionary process which is meant to transform both oppressor and oppressed (ibid., p. 117). In a brief essay on Lenin, Jameson (2007) makes the useful suggestion that one could even read event and process in this context in dialectical terms. The event is the moment of rupture in which power is taken, while the process is the accompanying long, often tedious, work of transforming a society so that the original revolution does not get forgotten, nor dwindle into a sad charade of power passing from one oppressing group to another (ibid.,...

Table of contents

• Also Available From Bloomsbury
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword: A Pedagogy of the Concept John Rajchman
• Preface: For a People-Yet-To-Come Matthew Carlin and Jason J. Wallin
• 1 Schizoanalysis and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Ian Buchanan
• 2 On Cinema as Micropolitical Pedagogy: Is there an Elephant in the Classroom? jan jagodzinski
• 3 Deleuze, Guattari, and Environmental Pedagogy and Politics: Ritournelles for a Planet-Yet-to-Come Petra Hroch
• 4 Inter-collapse … Educational Nomadology for a Future Generation David R. Cole
• 5 Diagramming the Classroom as a Topological Assemblage Elizabeth de Freitas
• 6 Education Needs to Get a Grip on Life Jason J. Wallin
• 7 Financial ‘Innovation’, Financialized Education and Deleuzean Modulation: FinLit and the ‘Breeding’ of Indebted Subjects and Subjectivities Matthew Tiessen
• 8 Amputating the State: Autonomy and La Universidad de la Tierra Matthew Carlin
• 9 Chaosmic Spasm and the Educational Chaoide Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
• Index
• Copyright