6 Education Needs to Get a Grip on Life1 Jason J. Wallin A people to come. Is such a thought even fathomable in institutional education, that for its general reactivity towards life has produced the extreme blinkering of expression at varying scales from kindergarten to the university? Suffice it to say that education has always been a matter of producing people, yet certainly not of that nomadic and experimental quality Deleuze and Guattari (1987) connect to the creation of a war-machine or ‘outside thought’ transversally poised to break with the doxa of an age. The dream of technical efficiency grounding the early curriculum work of Taylor (1911), the ideal of Fordian utilitarianism in Bobbitt (1924) and the valorization of progress and instrumentalism in Tyler (1949) suggest the image of a people, yet a very specific image adapted to the homogeneity of factory routine, the generalized reproduction of class distinc- tions and the reification of the given. In a vision of schooling as prescient today as at the turn of the twentieth century, Cubberly (1916) extolls that ‘our schools are, in a sense, factories in which raw materials (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to the meet the various demands of life’ (p. 338). While the image of the factory that dominated early curriculum thought is slowly being deterritorialized upon the ‘flexible’ ideals of neo-liberal corpo- ratism, what remains intact is the school’s figuration in the production of social life-forms. The school not only anticipates the kind of people it will produce, but enjoins such production to an a priori image of life to which students are interminably submitted. Despite the general wearing out and criticism of such forms of educational organization, the fabulation nevertheless ‘retains its place and hangs on like an ailing patient’ (Guattari, 2009, p. 173). Such American educational policy-programmes as No Child Left Behind, America 2000 and, Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved. All rights Academic & Professional. © 2014. Bloomsbury Copyright 1 The title of this chapter is borrowed directly from Guattari’s (2009) provocation that ‘Psychoanalysis needs to get a Grip on Life’. Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education : For a People-Yet-to-Come, edited by Matthew Carlin, and Jason Wallin, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1675041. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-10-04 12:32:45. 9781474265225_txt_print.indd 117 11/09/2015 11:47 118 Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education more recently, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top repeat an image of ends-means production and conformism that were the telos of curriculum’s pre-war meta narratives, palpating the renewal of standardization and its delete- rious effects upon the material actualization of difference in classrooms today. The Molar Institution: Schools are not made for children: Children ought to be made for schools Aoki (1993) refers to the closed and self-referential educational territory of standardization as the planned curriculum. For all intents and purposes, the planned curriculum functions as an image of thought for coding, albeit inexactly, the desiring-flows of the classroom towards homogeneous and regulated outcomes. In this vein, the planned curriculum functions as a mechanism of negation and opposition, reactively constraining the flows of the classroom according to injunctions of what it ought to do. Such injunctions, Aoki argues, are abstractly mapped, yet materially lived via such curricular order words as ‘goals’, ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’ (Aoki, 2005, pp. 202–3). Constituting an image of the ‘possible’ for the material life of the classroom, the planned curriculum arrays desiring-flows within highly blinkered forms of institutional expression and production, palpating both the dependency of the subject upon the insti- tution’s mechanisms of representation, problem-solving and, ultimately, the standardization and infantalization of desire under bureaucratic controls. It is unfathomable, Guattari (2009) argues, that life in schools could be thought of in a manner wholly independent of such abstract forms of reference. As the strategic reduction of teacher agency and systematic institution of universal- izing standards irrespective of local difference demonstrate, the very question of how the school works is bound to the problem of an image of thought that for its contraction of classroom life to prior circuits of desire is definitively real. ‘What are the … possibilities for intervention’ Guattari asks, ‘what degree of freedom do teachers, mental health workers, and social workers really possess?’ (p. 45). Guattari’s question remains germane to the contemporary conceptualization of the school and the image of universalization that informs upon it as the planned curriculum. What is at stake in such a scenario but the very possibility that education might become a matter of both producing and Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved. All rights Academic & Professional. © 2014. Bloomsbury Copyright following singularities, or, rather, of palpating the ‘freedom of individual and collective creation away from … conformism?’ (Guattari, 2009, p. 203). Amid innumerable problems facing the future of education is perhaps the most Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education : For a People-Yet-to-Come, edited by Matthew Carlin, and Jason Wallin, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1675041. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-10-04 12:32:45. 9781474265225_txt_print.indd 118 11/09/2015 11:47 Education Needs to Get a Grip on Life 119 destructive ‘squeeze on … the singular’ being promulgated by the increasing instumentalization of schooling and its submission of institutional life to the dominant values and systems of perception lauded by both the State and the private sector (Massumi, 2002, p. 21). It is on this point that the annihilation of the singular2 constitutes a key political problematic for educational thought in so far as it negates the potential for thinking a people out-of-sync with the people in general. As it pertains to the historical relation between schooling and social engineering, this annihilation functions to buttress the educational ideal of an adapted ‘public’ and prior ‘territorialities of use’ through which thought and action are brought into regulatory collusion (Guattari, 2009, p. 48). Today, the effects of such abstract ideations persist. On 9 October 2012, the New York Times reported a growing trend among physicians to prescribe such psycho- stimulants as Adderall to students experiencing academic and/or behavioural difficulties at school (Schwarz, 2012). Assenting to the supposed inalterability of contemporary schooling and its general failure to recognize the lives of those that undergo it, what option remains, the proponents of medicalization suggest, but pharmacological intervention aimed at the regulation of neuronal activity as it suits the demands of the institution. Among a litany of issues inhering such pharmacological ‘mediation’ is a key premise implicated in the obliteration of the singular: Schools are not made for children: children ought to be made for schools. This is hardly a new sentiment, remarkable only in so far as it signals the continual assault on difference at intensifying scales of control. The people are missing in education As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, 2 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved. All rights Academic & Professional. © 2014. Bloomsbury Copyright The notion of singularity plied in the course of this chapter is a means to think the unique being or, rather, the individuation of pedagogical life. It is, in this way, a means of thinking about education subtracted from the common notion of the singular as a universal. As it is employed throughout this chapter, the notion of singularity by contrast pertains to the immanent differences or sensitive points inhering institutional life and through which the institution might be thought about anew. Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education : For a People-Yet-to-Come, edited by Matthew Carlin, and Jason Wallin, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1675041. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-10-04 12:32:45. 9781474265225_txt_print.indd 119 11/09/2015 11:47 120 Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘represen- tational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where