8. Reading Signs/Learning from Experience

RONALD BOGUE AND INNA SEMETSKY

8. READING SIGNS/LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Deleuze’s Pedagogy as Becoming-Other

In Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, becoming is one of central metaphors; and the concept of becoming resonates with a number of contemporary debates in educational theory (Semetsky 2006, 2008). Several of Deleuze’s philosophical works were written together with practicing psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; 1994), such a collaboration bringing theoretical problematic into closer contact with practical concerns and socio-cultural contexts. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualized their philosophical method as Geophilosophy, privileging geography over history and stressing the value of the present-becoming, that is, a possibility for becoming-other in each and every present moment. In this chapter we explore Deleuze’s dynamics of becoming-other situated within a larger milieu of informal education in terms of learning from experience as a mode of cultural pedagogy. Deleuze’s pedagogy implicit in his philosophy entails the reading of signs, symbols, and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience. Experience cannot be limited to what is immediately perceived; still, the Deleuzian line of flight or becoming is real even if “we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45). We are affected by experience, and thinking enriched with its affective dimension is always experimental, like a process of trying, testing, and creating. Experience is future-oriented, lengthened and enfolded, representing an experiment with what is new, or coming into being, becoming. For Deleuze, as for Foucault, language and the world form a single, extra- linguistic or semiotic, fabric: “things” are signs or multiplicities understood as the relational, and not substantial, entities. The dynamics of becoming, when any given multiplicity “changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 8) – hence participates in the process of becoming-other – is a distinctive feature of Deleuzian and Guattari’s thought. As noticed by Genosko (1998), Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics present a conceptual mix of Charles S. Peirce’s logic of relatives and Hjelmslev’s linguistics; both frameworks are taken to oppose Saussurean semiology. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that content is not a signified, neither expression is a signifier: instead both are variables in common assemblage. Fixed and rigid signifieds give way to the production of new meanings in accord with the logic of sense (Deleuze, 1990). An a-signifying rupture ensures transfer from the form of expression to the form of content. Dyadic, or binary, signification gives way to the triadic, a-signifying semiotics, and Deleuze and Guattari employ Peircean

I. Semetsky (ed.), Semiotics Education Experience, 115–129. © 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. BOGUE AND SEMETSKY notion of a diagram as a constructive part of sign-dynamics. A diagram is a bridge, a diagonal connection that, by means of double articulations, connects planes of expression and content leading to the emergence of novelty. According to Deleuze’s a-signifying semiotics functioning on the basis of the logic of multiplicities, a diagram serves as a mediatory in-between symbol, “a third” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 131) that disturbs the fatal binarity of the signifier-signified distinction. It forms part of cartographic approach, which is Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics par excellence that replaces logical copula “is” of the logic of identity with the radical conjunction “and” of the logic of multiplicities. A diagram functions as a map which engenders the territory to which it is supposed to refer; a static representation of the order of references being replaced by a relational dynamics of the order of meanings. Meanings are not given but depends on signs entering “into the surface organization which ensures the resonance of two series” (Deleuze 1990, 104), the latter converging on a paradoxical differentiator, which becomes “both word and object at once” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 51). Yet, semiotics cannot be reduced to just linguistic signs. There are extra-linguistic semiotic categories too, such as memories, images, or immaterial artistic signs, which are apprehended in terms of neither objective nor subjective criteria but learned in practice in terms of immanent problematic instances and their practical effects. Analogously, a formal abstract machine exceeds its application to (Chomskian) philosophy of language; instead semiotics is applied to psychological, biological, social, technological, aesthetic, and incorporeal codings (Guattari 1995). The diagrammatic mode of description, by bringing in the (unconscious) outside of the (conscious) thought, establishes a resonance between inside and outside as two co-resonating systems. Because of the pre-personal, a-subjective and collective, character of the unconscious and the affective dimension enfolded in subjec- tivity, the modes of subject-formation – especially important in education – as becoming-other presuppose what Deleuze dubbed subjectless individuations, the main characteristic of which, rather than being a concept, is an affect. Concepts that exist in a triadic relationship with both percepts and affects express events rather than essences and should be understood not in a traditional representational manner of analytic philosophy, which would submit a line to a point, but as a pluralistic, a-signifying, distribution of lines and planes. Affective forces are those arrows or directional lines that traverse one’s universe of habitual thinking and being and enable an unknown universe to appear seemingly from nowhere – “out of the shadow” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 66) – as if it were a hidden variable in the assemblages of signs constituting an experiential milieu. Asserting the affective dimension inscribed in pre-personal subjectivities, Deleuze emphasizes its passionate quality: “perhaps passion, the state of passion, is actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable, knowing how to breathe, is about” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 116). The transformational pragmatics embedded in experience consists in destratification, or opening up to a new, diagrammatic and creative, function as the genuine learning from signs in the unfolding experience. Ontologically, Being as Fold (Deleuze 1988a, 1993) defies signification. The Deleuzian object of experience is presented only in its tendency to exist, or rather

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