A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation)

A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation Series Editors: jan jagodzins...

Author: Jason J. Wallin

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A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum

Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation Series Editors: jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta Mark Bracher, Kent State University The purpose of this series is to develop and disseminate psychoanalytic knowledge that can help educators in their pursuit of three core functions of education: 1) facilitating student learning 2) fostering students’ personal development, and 3) promoting prosocial attitudes, habits, and behaviors in students (i.e. those opposed to violence, substance abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.). Psychoanalysis can help educators realize these aims of education by providing them with important insights into: 1) the emotional and cognitive capacities that are necessary for students to be able to learn, develop, and engage in prosocial behavior 2) the motivations that drive such learning, development, and behaviors, and 3) the motivations that produce anti-social behaviors as well as resistance to learning and development. Such understanding can enable educators to develop pedagogical strategies and techniques to help students overcome psychological impediments to learning and development, either by identifying and removing the impediments or by helping students develop the ability to overcome them. Moreover, by offering an understanding of the motivations that cause some of our most severe social problems—including crime, violence, substance abuse, prejudice, and inequality—together with knowledge of how such motivations can be altered, books in this series will contribute to the reduction and prevention of such problems, a task that education is increasingly being called upon to assume. Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation By Mark Bracher Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: The Popular Holocaust and Social Change in a Post 9/11 World By Robert Samuels Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia By jan jagodzinski Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education By K. Daniel Cho New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Lacalu By Robert Samuels Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye By jan jagodzinski A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life By Jason J. Wallin

A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum Essays on a Pedagogical Life

Jason J. Wallin

A DELEUZIAN APPROACH TO CURRICULUM

Copyright © Jason J. Wallin, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10400–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallin, Jason J., 1975– A Deleuzian approach to curriculum : essays on a pedagogical life / Jason J. Wallin. p. cm. — (Education, psychoanalysis, social transformation series) ISBN 978–0–230–10400–6 (alk. paper) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Education—Curricula. 3. Education—Philosophy. 4. Critical pedagogy. I. Title. B2430.D454W35 2010 370.1'2—dc22 2010015647 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to. Jean-Luc Godard

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Contents

Preface

ix

1 The Conceptual Powers of Currere

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2 The Illusion of Transcendence and the Ontology of Immanence

15

3 Powers of the False and the Problematics of the Simulacrum

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4

43

Becoming-Nomad

5 Becoming-Music: Improvisation and Instrumentalism in Curriculum Theory

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6

77

Uncertain Games

7 I’m Not There: The Cinematic Time-Image, Cultural Curriculum Studies, and the Political Arts of an Untimely Subject 8 9

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Making a Holey Curriculum: Untimeliness, Unhomeliness, and the Schizophrenic Potential of the ANOMAL

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Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines

163

Notes

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References

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Index

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Preface

As it is deployed in the course of this book, the concept of currere marks a departure from the autobiographical method pioneered by Grumet (1976a, 1976b) and Pinar (1972, 1974). This book is not autobiographical, nor is it oriented toward reflection. It is however, a work that approaches currere as a concept for pedagogical thinking. It is a work that departs, not merely from quantitative fetters, but from phenomenology, structuralism, and the dogmatic image of life Deleuze and Guattari (1983) call “Oedipal.” More specifically, it is an exegesis on what currere wills to power. Put differently, this book surveys the question of what currere does and might do. In this vein, my mode of analysis might be conceived as a thought experiment. More specifically, through the creation of artistic affects and philosophical concepts, this book attempts to open new ways for thinking the course of a pedagogical life. In this sense, the approach to the concept of currere herein is intimate to the Deleuzian (2001a) notion of individuation, or rather, the setting apart of pedagogy from pedagogy in general. Such a mode of conceptualization does not appeal to any particular ontological foundation or presumed image of reality and, hence, breaks from representation and idealism. Following the philosophical challenge of Deleuze, this book endeavors to mobilize a philosophical passage for thinking pedagogical difference, in turn creating an excess of concepts for a people yet to come. In this “productive” desire, I attempt to avoid what Deleuze (1994) has dubbed “the plague of philosophy,” or more specifically, the practice of criticism without creation (p. 28). In other words, this work does not aim to represent a specific image of the world, but rather, to affirm its creative powers of becoming. For pedagogy to remain open to the future, I assert that new ways of pedagogical thinking must be mobilized. As Deleuze writes, “the search for a new means of . . . expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of other certain arts” (1991, p. xxi). Against those “regimes of truth” operative within contemporary education, this book attempts to experiment with the concept of currere to produce ways of thinking pedagogical difference unfettered by both popular opinion and common sense. In this vein,

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PREFACE

A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum attempts to mobilize the concept of currere in a way that forces one to think about the curriculum as an encounter (recontre) of another kind or logic altogether. Analyzing the ways in which modern institutions colonize desire and produce dogmatic images of subjectivity, this work attempts to wage a transformative critique on the discourses of representation that continue to circulate in the field of curriculum theory and design. This book will concomitantly seek to “root out” a legacy of transcendent thinking in curriculum studies that continues to reduce potentials for thinking new forms of subjective and social organization. In this task, I articulate the rampant “rootedness” of a hierarchical, developmental, and situated thinking Deleuze and Guattari dub arboreal. This work argues that such an arboreal image of pedagogy has given rise to the proliferation of institutional nihilism, cynicism, and conservatism. In contrast, this work seeks to intervene with such thought by developing an image of pedagogy that is en fuit or “leaking,” an idea conceptualized throughout the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, who mobilize a host of “leakages” (rhizomatic, nomadic, and schizoanalytic) as weapons against fascist thought. Against the myriad control mechanisms of the institution, lines of productive escape are constantly being prepared. This book is oriented to the affirmation of such lines or micromovements rather than simply treating them pejoratively. In this vein, this work is oriented to a productive way of thinking organization and (dis)organization without dividing them into two separate ontological substances. I argue that this approach allows for the liberation of the subject, who is no longer cathected to preexistent identity structures. This ontological approach is necessarily in a time of political ambivalence and negativity, enabling a new orientation to theory and practice no longer fettered to a primordial or final totality (teleology or the dialectic). Drawing on curriculum scholarship that is micropolitical, or in Deleuzian terms minor, this book seeks to accomplish two tasks. The first is to create a new lineage for the field of curriculum that is oriented to the problem of difference and multiplicity. This will benefit scholars for whom the “official” genealogy of the field is overcoded or moribund. Additionally, it will encourage a way of navigating curriculum scholarship that strikes new fidelities between hitherto unrelated scholars. This task will enable academics to enter into the problematics of difference and multiplicity with a new set of conceptual tools and theoretical lineages in which their own work might participate. Explicating the power of the arts to liberate productive desires and potentials, this book draws from numerous artistic innovations to

PREFACE

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consider the material ways in which the “arts” have opposed power, affirmed difference, and dehabituated normalized discourses. This is beneficial in that it suggests a way of thinking and a material practice upon which subjectivity and social organization might be rethought. This book asks what education might learn or use from such practices; Or rather, what becomings are available to education if we take such artistic innovations seriously. I argue that such artistic “deterritorializations” offer us a way of thinking unfettered by both instrumentalism (which organizes or colonizes desire in advance) and positivism (which posits a system of ideals and morals insensitive to local conditions and immanence). This question relates directly to the contemporary call for an end to experimentation in the social sciences, and concomitantly, an institutional intolerance for the kinds of desiring flows produced in the arts. In contrast to this, I attempt to develop a toolbox of concepts for curriculum design that affirm, rather than “capture” difference. Further, I aim to explicate the ways in which teaching and learning are always already traversed by differences through which they might be reorganized. Put differently, organization is already a difference. In this way, my task is to return pedagogical thought to the creative and productive difference from which it was “territorialized.” This will provide educators and curriculum scholars a means of engaging the contemporary problems facing education (nihilism, transcendence, overdetermination, instrumentalism) with a “new” criteria for assessing and understanding “how a life might go.” This approach is not only focused on thinking, but further, the dehabituation of behavior and affect contemporarily cathected to an image of “how life should go.” This book attempts to create unconventional images of pedagogy, teaching, and learning. This task is approached, in part, through an analysis of artistic forms that offer, albeit often obliquely, a means to imagine the pedagogical relationship as a singularity, and not, as much theorizing in the field today would presume, as the representation of a prior model (Oedipal, humanistic, hierarchical). It is in this vein that I mobilize examples from contemporary film, music, and other performative arts as an experimental “plateau” for thinking how a life might go, that is, how the time, space, and becoming of a life might be thought differently. Further, this work attempts to articulate those dynamic practices in the arts that reorganize conventional flows of knowledge, meaning, and significance. In this task, I aim to highlight didactic examples that make “normalized” pedagogical practices “strange.” This maneuver will allow educators/theorists both imaginary and material examples of pedagogy irreducible to a genus or the demand of some superegoic “meta-structure.” Instead, this book endeavors to mobilize concepts for thinking and practicing curriculum as a qualitative multiplicity (as a difference in kind). I argue that these

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PREFACE

shifts in thinking will mark an innovative passage for many educators and theorists constrained by conceptual models that reduce difference to degrees of variation from established norms. Each of these tactics for rethinking the field of curriculum studies draws upon the philosophical work of Deleuze, Deleuzeguattari,1 and their mobilization of a “bastard” philosophical lineage including Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza. In part, this work explicates the import of Deleuzeguattarian philosophy for the contemporary problems facing education. Further, it is via the mobilization of Deleuzian and Deleuzeguattarian thinking that this book attempts to create lines of flight for political resistance and social transformation. This work does not simply devolve on a “survey” of what curriculum theory is, but rather, seeks to alter the way in which one might do curriculum theorizing. This book does not simply explicate the positions of the thinkers that populate its pages, but attempts to illustrate what their thinking does, and further, what potentials such thought opens for educators today. In this task, I argue that by decoding particular institutional flows (the colonization of desire), we might begin to create new types of decentered subjects and social organizations no longer accounted for by representational or identitarian thinking (Villani, 2006). This will enable theorists and educators alike to approach curriculum as an act of creation rather than reproduction.

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The Conceptual Powers of Currere

Every discipline creates its own illusion and hides behind its own smokescreen (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 3)

F

or Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a concept is more than simply a name attached to a subject or object. A concept is a way of approaching the world, or put differently, a way of creating a world through the active extension of thinking the possible. Such extension is not simply idealistic, but rather, an opening of experience to what it is not. In this way, the concept extends experience through an affirmation of difference. In Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, what a concept is is of less significance than what it does. Rather than a tool that purports to reflect an a priori reality, the active force of the concept creates connections across fluxes and milieus, allowing us “to consider . . . a new way of conceiving being, the world, or what there is” (May, 2005, p. 116). Concepts are thus not readymade or immutable structures beyond experience. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) follow the task of philosophy set out by Nietzsche: “[we] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, not merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them” (p. 5). As an experimental endeavor, the active force of the concept marks an engagement with thinking in its most extreme artistic and philosophical forms. Throughout such extreme encounters, the active creation of concepts creates an experimental interface with new ways of thinking. Yet, because the concept actively extends the field of experience, it also creates a plane for the exploration of new artistic, political, and ethical praxis (Bogue, 2003). In the incisive What is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari assert that the purpose of philosophical inquiry is located not in its

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characterization of the world as it appears, but rather, in its capacity to create concepts. Such an orientation is practical rather than reflective, productive rather than reactive. It suggests, following Nietzsche (1961), that the active and connective powers of the concept to think about difference become emaciated when reduced to given objects of knowledge or representation (Deleuze, 1991). Yet, it is crucial to reiterate that for Deleuze and Guattari, “the concept is not given, it is created; it is to be created” (p. 11). In this vein, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the active power of the concept against the reactive understanding of the concept as simply a representation of knowledge ordered and employed according to the faculties of its creation. The reactive treatment of the concept reduces its complexity by grounding difference within the presupposed limits of popular opinion and a priori image of the world as it is. As its etymology suggests, curriculum extends from the Latin currere, meaning to run. This alone evokes a way of thinking where the curriculum is an active conceptual force. In other words, to run implies that the conceptual power of currere is intimate to its productive capacity to create new flows, offshoots, and multiplicitous movements. For example, the “running” roots of rhizomatic bulbs and tubers extend to create new interfaces with other organic and nonorganic bodies, extending the experience of what a body can become (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Running flows of volcanic magma create new courses along and through the ostensible stability of the Earth’s mantle, articulating the immanent geomorphic potential of territories to deterritorialize (Bonta & Protevi, 2004). A musical “run” creates a line of flight potentially incongruous with the codes that structure it, overflowing, extending, and traversing tonal registers in the production of new affects. In each of these examples, currere creates a line of becoming that expands difference, implying experimentation, movement, and creation. Along this line of flight, currere abolishes an image of the world given dictatorially. As soon as an image of the world begin to ossify, the active forces of currere plant a “seed of permanent revolution” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 78). While the concept of currere opens the course of life to active creation, this conceptual approach to thinking the curriculum is sublimated by a reactive image. In other words, the potential modes of becoming opened by currere are reduced in complexity and difference through the transposition of an a priori image of life’s potential for becoming. The a priori image in which the active potential of currere becomes territorialized is similarly relational to its etymology. While the active concept of currere intimates “running,” its reactive a priori image (cursus) refers to the ancient Grecian “chariot track” or literal “course to be run.” Taking the chariot track as its

THE CONCEPTUAL POWERS OF CURRERE

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image, the multiplicitous movements attributed earlier to currere become captured, thereby reducing a “swarm” of potential movements to this most common and calcified representational structure (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Just as the active conceptual force of currere creates an orientation for thinking, so does the image of life imprisoned within the closed circuit of the racetrack. Contained in this manner, however, life might no longer be understood as a creative maximization of its potential to become. Rather, as a reactive structure, life is understood relative to the image of the “course to be run,” an image that Western education has mistakenly taken as an a priori reality. For institutional education, the image of the track has come to constitute a homogenizing territory. Taken as a transcendent ground for experience, the course to be run constrains the potential becomings of a pedagogical life. Instead of thinking through the active powers of currere to traverse boundaries, produce anomalies, and unfix identity, the course to be run assumes the givenness of a well-tread path or course of life. In Nietzschean (1961) terms, such reactivity is intimately connected to a herd mentality that acquiesces to life given through popular opinion. In what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) regard as a philosophical error of vast proportion, the “course” has mistakenly been taken as the ground from which difference extends as a secondary movement. In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) philosophy, the error of such a conceptualization lies in the assumed primacy of the a priori image. That is, opposed to understanding the image as an abstraction from chaos, it is taken as a fundamental representation of reality (Ansell Pearson, 1999). The difference is crucial. If the course to be run is taken as a truth that exists outside of experience, then the potential for thinking difference is prone to become entwined or marginalized by this elevated external power. Further, as a ground that exists beyond immediate experience, the image of the track is closed to immanent transformation. As May (2005) writes, “Transcendence freezes living, makes it coagulate and lose its flow; it seeks to capture vital difference . . . and submit it to a single perspective, a perspective that stands outside difference and gathers it into manageable categories” (p. 27). Contrariwise, if the stabilized image of currere is approached as an abstraction from a multiplicity of “coursings,” then the conceptual force of difference maintains its potency to create new ways of thinking “ungrounded” by transcendent structures. The impetus to create images of life is characteristic of the human species. According to Deleuze (2004), it is inevitable. The concept creates a plane amidst what Guattari (2000) has referred to as the “chaosmos.” It is a territory sliced from chaos, a strata amidst geomorphic multiplicity or

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refrain in the midst of musical improvisation. The concept creates a way of thinking amongst an immanent virtuality. The concept is thus always non-all. It cannot contain everything, for this would be akin to the chaos from which it is an abstraction (Buchanan, 2000). Yet, an important distinction between the active force and reactive power of currere must be made. While “force . . . breaks constraints and opens new vistas . . . power build walls” (Massumi, 1987b, p. xiii). Put differently, currere’s active conceptual force works to create a strata constituted by heterogeneous and vital components. Its rhizomatic tubules create assemblages across unlikely territories of relation. Recall Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) challenge: philosophy has nothing to do with the representation of the world. Akin to what we might call the philosophical work of filmmakers, painters, and musicians, it is rather an exploration into the potentials of their respective mediums and deviations from the “beaten path” (Massumi, 1987b). For Massumi, the concept might be likened to the potential of a brick. It can assemble with the arm (y z) to crash through established boundaries or be combined with mortar in the construction of more resilient barriers against difference (x x not y). In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) thinking, the concept does not appear ex nihilo. It is always intimate to a problematic(s). Without this relationship, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) assert that the concept has no meaning. For example, Descartes’ concept of the cogito creates a way of thinking the problem “What can be known without doubt?” (ibid.). In the course of Descartes’ dream, he creates from the chaotic whirlpool and firestorm a conceptual force for thinking the certainty of Being (Descartes, 1998). In another instance, Plato’s Forms emerge in intimate relation to the problematics of universality. Put differently, Plato’s Forms conceptually rejoin the problematics of reality and illusion. This is the lesson of Plato’s cave in The Republic (1992). Beyond the shadowy illusions of worldly experience, Plato conceptualizes the existence of pure archetypal structures that are everywhere mimicked in the world. In other words, the Platonic Forms constitute a transcendent reality that find expression in a myriad of worldly simulations. The Platonic task is thus bound to the reflective process of identifying which forms of simulacra best represent the pure Forms from which they are generated. For the lineage of bastard philosophers evoked by Deleuze (1987, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2003a, 2004) and Guattari, the concept is “created as a function of . . . problems . . . thought to be badly understood or badly posed” (p. 16). Spinoza’s ontology of immanence, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and Artaud’s crowned anarchy each create an opening within the rigid territories of “State philosophy,” or rather “the representational thinking


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that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato” (Massumi, 1987b, p. xi). They each create a way of thinking difference through the creation of a conceptual brick hurled at the edifice of the State (logos). This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) refer to as a pedagogy of the concept. New concepts are constantly required where others have territorialized a limit. If we take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) concept as a “tool” for understanding the problematics of life, then the question of what problems the reactive concept of currere answers becomes crucial to its continued opening. As illustrated above, currere’s reactive image is that of the Grecian “chariot track.” Today, this strange attractor for the conceptualization of curriculum has calcified in a myriad of institutional forms. Dominated by disciplinary practices aimed at keeping students on track, contemporary education impels a self-similarity between student desire and an a priori image of the course to be run. Put differently, the creative forces exerted by students are made to resemble the ordered and prescribed course of currere’s track. Mutations, deviations, and monstrous protrusions are reterritorialized in currere’s image of synthesis. That is, the reactive image of currere is conceptualized as an organized whole from which no lines or flows escape. Akin to Hegel’s dialectic, thesis and antithesis (being and nonbeing) are brought into homogenous union. In this conceptualization, the potential for radical disjunction is suspiciously circumvented. For Deleuze (1994), the dialectical synthesis marks the termination of difference wherein “identity [becomes] the sufficient condition for difference to exist and be thought . . . the obscure is already clarified from the outset” (p. 263). As an image of synthesis, the reactive form of currere responds to the problematics of chaos and radical difference. It does so by establishing an a priori character of unity as the ground of reality.

The Reactive Image of Currere The stable and closed image of currere finds expression in the early theoretical works of Bobbitt (1924) and Tyler (1949). In their Fordian image, the student becomes the product of a vast mechanical apparatus designed to instill the normative conditions of State thought in every mind. The explicit pedagogical questions introduced throughout their canon illustrate a preoccupation with the organization of educational experience and the conformity of student behaviors to preestablished norms (Tyler, 1949). The canon of the rationalists would similarly answer the problematics of what to teach with the installation of a

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teleology. In other words, the content of currere’s course is conceived in terms of its alignment to a predestined image of Being. The student’s preparedness to enter the workforce is thus signified by their selfsimilarity to a priori ideals of development. Is this not also the case for the pervasive use of standardized testing in schools by which students are relentlessly tracked along normative criteria and arranged hierarchically against an a priori image? Such tracking is today intimate to the hysterical rhetoric of accountability and efficiency through which students are only ever distributed by degrees of variation from the norm. That is, the demands of standardization suggest the homogenous treatment of the pedagogical course, which in turn becomes distinguishable according to varying degrees and less radically in terms of kinds of currere. The primacy of student tracking and standardization has today created a vile habitus in pedagogical thought. It has constituted the most macabre territorialization of the “pedagogical course” that fulfills itself by most closely resembling the image of learning proffered by the State. “It is through [such] boundaries . . . that school is experienced in a certain way” (Roy, 2003, p. 12). In other words, by habitually ascribing to a recognizable image of competency and intelligence, the reactive image of currere appears as a foundational reality rather than an illusion mobilized by a variety of disciplinary constellations. Institutional recognizability becomes tethered to the homogenizing powers of the Same. The territorialization of the pedagogical course is indicative of another privilege central to its reactive image. That is, the reactive image of currere is distinctly humanistic, reducing life to its human-all-too-human enframement. Potential ways of thinking a life are reduced to the image that the world is “just like us,” and following, that the course to be run finds full representation in the anthropocentric imaginary. The capacity for thinking the inhuman potentials of currere are disallowed via the presupposition of life as a distinctly human affair. Akin to the reactive image of currere, the course of life finds expression in the most human of constructions. As a perfect analogue for the pace and habitus of contemporary schooling, the racetrack is taken for the image of a life, circumventing rhizomatic, amoebic, geomorphic, and a swarm of other ways to think the course to be run. Such thinking is not simply the creation of a new humanistic image, but a way of attaining a thought without image; after all, as Daignault avers, the “curriculum does not exist, it happens” (cited in Hwu, 2004, p. 183). In this vein, currere’s reactive image is constituted through the elevation of a binary system of identity. The interiority of the course prescribes the limits of movement defined by State territorializations.


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It suggests a rhetorical vision of education as an “ongoing” and “guided process.” Yet, even the ostensibly neutral rhetoric of guidance can scarcely obfuscate its proclivity to interpret every sign in advance, to “lead out” (educare) along well-traveled paths. Today, there are guides everywhere, but rarely do these force us to think. Contrariwise, they create an image of thought that murders thinking (Daignault and Gaultier, 1982). In much contemporary education for example, the guide has been literalized in the teaching manuals, textbooks, and ready-made course(s) of pedagogical life. It is the course of this life that such literalized guides overcode (surcodage), disallowing heterogeneity “in order to produce [an immutable] substance” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 112). In relation to this noology of currere, the “immutable” substance might be taken to mean the pedagogical course itself. As Deleuze (1994) asserts, we are often disposed to approaching life as if it were a homogenous matter or fixed territory. This is not simply a process of “teacher proofing” but more radically, the creation of an image for thinking the course of pedagogical life that maintains the normative and microfascist features of State thought. Nomos, the tunneling or subterranean thinking that subverts territorial overcoding is thus defined as nonidentical to currere (x x not y). In this molar or binary system of identity politics, the active force of currere becomes reduced to its most entrenched character of recognizability, dogmatically limiting the ways in which the course of a pedagogical life might be thought. In direct response to the problematics of subjective agency and heteronormativity, currere’s reactive image wards against the dangers of nomadic thought that everywhere seek expression through processes of creative deterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) assert, the concept creates a world. It organizes matter and mobilizes particular systems of relation from a preconceptual “chaosmos” prior to the image of the world (Guattari, 1995). Simply, the image gives form to the chaos of life. The reactive image of currere is thus not simply right or wrong, but rather, the creation of a strata for understanding the course of pedagogical life. It is both an inevitable and perhaps necessary “beginning.” Yet, as discussed earlier, it is not the only way of thinking the course of pedagogical life. Currere’s overcoded territorialization requires new concepts and the chaotic return of difference that pushes all systems toward creative becoming. Despite the preeminent image of currere as a self-enclosed and stable track, the active force of currere evokes a radically different way of thinking the course to be run. Cross-cutting the reactive power of currere with its active conceptual force is thus not simply a means to describe the paradoxical character of currere’s etymology but, following Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a way of doing something to currere

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itself. Experimenting on the lines of flight created by an active concept of currere becomes a way of transforming life and extending experience beyond knowledge and opinion (doxa). Further, by creating a strata upon which currere and its problematics are assembled, the generation of more adequate problems and conceptual lines of flight might be posed (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007). While the formulation of currere’s paradoxical character is significant, we have yet to fully explore what a body—a course of life—can do (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984). In this vein, Deleuze (1991) suggests that today, we desperately require an excess of concepts. This intimates more than simply adding new words or images to an already engorged academic lexicon. Rather, it is a challenge to not simply say what an artist or philosopher has already said, but to do what they did, that is, “create new concepts for the problems they posed” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 28). This response emerges in part as an ethical intervention to the error of reactivism. Enslaving the power of life, reactivism separates the body from its future. The task of currere’s active force lies in exploring the vital powers of a life, its lines, assemblages, and potentials for becoming. Such becomings ward against reactive thinking. They cannot simply be valued according to an a priori image that supports identitarian ways of thinking. Reactive powers do not create becomings, they territorialize Being from the perspective of reflective self-similarity (x x not y), hence limiting potentials for thinking difference (Roy, 2003). To engage with the vital and creative forces of difference, the Universal reactive image of pedagogical life must first be explained. In other words, the image conflated with reality, with what is, must be decrystallized and opened to the flux from which its impression as a stable strata is sliced. As Roy (2003) remarks, this task entails creating “an immanent place . . . that would aid in dehabituating us from frozen ways of thinking about the educational encounter itself [as it is bound to] a will-to-recognition and a will-to-representation” (p. 9). Contemporarily, lines of dehabituation proliferate. In film, music, art, and video games, molar territories and identitarian thinking are continually undergoing productive deterritorialization. Subterranean movements everywhere push stratified systems toward points of rupture. The processes of territorialization and deterritorialization are thus not simply an antagonistic binary pair, but a mutual relation intimate to the differentiating forces of vital systems. As Colebrook (2002) states, “the very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialize) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialize)” (p. xxii). Yet, as Deleuze (2004) articulates, “non-Euclidian geometries don’t keep Euclid from being fundamental” (p. 141). That is,


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just because the social field is alive with nomadic movements does not preclude the habitual perpetuation of a unified image of life. Today, the stable and closed form of currere maintains itself in a myriad of institutional practices and signifiers. The contemporary challenge is thus to open what it means to think the course of life “adequate to what is happening around us” (ibid., p. 138). It is, as Deleuze (2004) remarks, to explore the potential forms of nonintegration and refusal alive in challenges of art (1990; 2000), music (1987), film (2003a; 2003b), video, and youth culture. “It must adopt as its own those revolutions going on elsewhere, in other domains, or those that are being prepared” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 138). In productive connection with such heterogeneous domains, this manuscript will explore the development of new concepts for pedagogy in an age of schizo-capitalism. This inquiry will be articulated as an artistic, political, and ethical attempt to transform the normative limits ascribed to pedagogical Being. Opposed to defining what currere is, the task of this work is oriented to the expression of what its active conceptualization might do. Experimenting on the line(s) of flight evoked by an active conceptualization of currere, this book will practice an arts-based research in its most radical, nonrepresentational form. Critical to this work will be its potential for thinking difference. In this vein, the second chapter of this book will draw upon Deleuze’s (1988) reading of Spinoza as a way of addressing the limiting powers of transcendence. Put simply, transcendence establishes the privileged ideal “outside” of experience, suggesting the primacy of identitarian thought prior to difference. Against the legacy of transcendent thought in education, Chapter 2 will develop a vector of productive escape through what Deleuze (1994), apropos Spinoza, has referred to as immanence. Through the deployment of Spinoza’s heretical critique of the transcendent, this chapter will deploy the concept of immanence in relation to its ontological import for thinking difference. Chapter 3 will continue to develop the thinking of Deleuze’s (2004) “broken lineage [of] explosive [and] volcanic” philosophers in its creation of an artistically, politically, and ethically charged concept of difference (p. 141). While Chapter 2 will primarily focus on the interface of Deleuze and Spinoza, Chapter 3 will focus on the Deleuzian (2006a) encounter with Nietzsche. More specifically, it will grapple with the concept of difference via the eternal return, that is, the “positive simulation” that recurs in difference-to-itself. “If everything is a mask” Deleuze (2004) writes, “ultimately, there is nothing except the will to power, which is the power to metamorphose, to shape masks, to interpret and evaluate . . . as a plastic force, as the highest power of art”

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(p. 119). In this vein, Deleuze (2006) mobilizes what might be dubbed the “positive simulacrum” in order to think the “powers of the false,” or rather, to affirm the productive forces of art. No longer tethered to a model upon which representational identity is reliant, the simulacrum can be thought in a manner immanent to difference, and not, as the primacy of transcendent thought in the West has presumed, as a degraded copy of reality. In this vein, Chapter 3 will question the significance of affirmation and the eternal return for the conceptualization of difference. Further, it will interrogate the nihilism of Baudrillard’s simulacrum in an effort to rediscover the positive force of simulation for a people yet to come. The remainder of my proposed study will be developed across six lines of flight. It is crucial to note that for Deleuze (1987), the line of flight “escapes” in a constitutive rather than solipsistic sense. In this vein, the line of flight assembles to bring something new into existence. While the molar habit of capture particular to contemporary schooling ontologically territorializes the curricular map as a tracing of routes/ roots already known, my first line of flight will consider pedagogical possibility through the conceptual Deleuzeguattarian (1987) strategy of becoming-nomad. Deploying the experimental force of Director Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, this chapter attempts to engender a way of thinking that is not merely representational, but rather, an invention of pedagogical difference. This chapter will ask “What kinds of pedagogical ethics might be created by experimenting with Deleuzian nomadism?” and further, “How might nomadic thought pose a challenge to Western ontological presuppositions?” The Deleuzeguattarian notion of music is not simply limited to the discourse of musicology. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari deploy ways of thinking about music as a noncanonical means of interrogating the philosophical canon. In Deleuzeguattarian philosophy, music is both an affective force and a means of empowering what affects and forces music makes possible. Whereas popular music territorializes affective potential through repetition and rigidity, such overdetermination does not mark the limit case of musical potential. As in the previous line of flight, becoming-music will deform the familiar contours of musical territorialization by drawing upon improvised music as a passage for thinking currere’s difference. This line of flight will continue to interrogate both the political and creative power of the nomad while challenging the limits of subjectivity and authority. Specifically, this line of flight will grapple with the question “How does improvisation create a rupture in instrumental thought?,” and further, “How might the affective


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forces of music be deterritorialized and redistributed to constitute new lines of thought?” Such “uncertain games” as Go (a traditional Chinese strategy game), parkour (free running), and computer hacking provide a radically different affective understanding of movement untethered from the hierarchies and predestination of molar or stastical territories. In other words, the “rules” of each aforementioned “game” posit an image of movement, relation, and assemblage that begin to “escape” the logic of State controls. Chapter 6 will attempt to displace the molar organization of currere by detailing the ways in which such uncertain games work to unhinge active thinking from molar or arborescent fetters. The line of flight entitled uncertain games will also consider the ways in which youth today are deterritorializing the social terrain and limits of State authority. That is, while many institutional settings have continued to consolidate the structuralist notion of “the course” as a sedimented and transcendental form, this chapter begins to expose such endeavors as anachronistic territorializations nostalgic for a sense of teleological and ontological certainty. Against the lure of nostalgia, the vector of this chapter will ask “How do rhizomatic movements create a way of thinking that productively deterritorialize the sediments of State thought?” I’m Not There advances a radical cinematic style for thinking an antiOedipal, antifascist, and nonrepresentational subject. This chapter argues that many of the ostensibly libratory images of life being mobilized in contemporary curriculum theorizing continue to be caught within an Oedipal image that submits desire to the identity politics of self-resemblance and self-reflection. Attempts within the field to dissimulate such identity politics have had varied success. For example, I’m Not There argues that the lauded power of heterogeneity in much curriculum theorizing does not necessarily equate to either creative resistance or the loosening of identitarian (molar) thinking within the social field. Today, curriculum theory requires new conceptual resources for thinking a life that does not fall back on prior images of thought. This task, I’m Not There avers, is intimate to what might be called the political-arts of curriculum theorizing. Toward the conceptualization of such political-arts, I’m Not There mobilizes the Deleuzian time-image (a cinematic style of thinking time as a crystalline, irrational structure) in order to experiment with both somatic and social organizations. Following this line of flight, curriculum theorists might “think” the cinema not simply as an apparatus of interpretation or representation, but more crucially, a vehicle for experimenting with how a life might go. As the course of this chapter argues, the arts do not resemble the world as it is, but how it might be.

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While Chapter 7 develops a radical conceptualization of time for curriculum theorizing, Chapter 8 promulgates an experimental approach for thinking the curriculum as a holey space, or rather, a space capable of communicating across both striated (organized) and smooth (or deterritorialized/ nomadic) terrain. It is via such a conceptualization of space that curricular thinking might escape the identitarian rhetoric of adaptation in favor of a commitment to the kinds of creative modifications currently underway in hacker-culture, revolutionary art-collectives, and underground music scenes. It is via the conceptualization of such holey spaces that we might begin to prepare a site that is not yet overdetermined by State powers of surveillance or capitalist modes of capture. Such a conceptualization of space is desperately needed as institutional laborers find it increasingly difficult to engage in a style of thinking Deleuze and Guattari dub “private” or “untimely.” For Deleuze and Guattari, holey space is the site of both historical and contemporary betrayal, poised to break from powers of overcoding, whether functioning overtly as a corollary of the State apparatus or as stealth agents reinvigorating old hegemonies under the banner of political or pedagogical progressivism. Making a holey curriculum attempts to develop such betrayal as a tactic for affirming difference, creating a way of thinking curricular foundations without foundations, and further, for problematizing implicitly emancipatory conceptualizations of rhizomatics, “borderline-work” and “third space” in contemporary curriculum theorizing and arts-based research. This caveat is fulminated via an extended analysis of auteur Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), a film in which the difficult composition of an anomalous life is most vigorously thought. Against the binary conceptualization of technology as either a utopian vehicle for human progress or the apocalyptic harbinger of humanity’s end, Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines extends along two lines of flight. In the first, I articulate the significance of techne for the theorization of a process ontology capable of thinking a life that does not fall back onto either humanist metanarrative ideals or an anthropocentric image of the world. Such a “failure” at the level of representation is already underway in contemporary music (via the prosthetic assemblage of the turntablist), cinema (via the camera’s deterritorialization of the human perspective), and visual art (via the experimental creation of a post-human bestiary). To think the productive potential of such symbiosis from under the legacy of anthropomorphism and the “ejector-seat theology” of posthumanism requires a mode of thought responsive to the unknown. It is along this second line of flight that Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines develops the Deleuzian idea of machinic thinking as


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a resource for both ontological experimentation and artistic innovation that does not fall back upon prior models of hylomorphic possibility. Rather, it is via machinic thinking that this chapter explicates the significance of what might be called the transhuman. In this vein, this chapter begins to imagine a strange pedagogical machine that queers, or rather, counteractualizes the material repetitions that compose orthodox images of schooling. Folding back upon earlier developments, this advocacy reiterates a central premise of this book; that is, we do not yet know how a life might be composed.


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The Illusion of Transcendence and the Ontology of Immanence

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he “traditional” conceptualization of currere is marked by a transcendent commitment. The a priori image of the world forged through such discourses as structuralism and phenomenology presume a stable ontological ground from which the course of pedagogical life emanates. As Foucault (1972) avers, while structuralism was conceived as a means to overcome the values of humanism, it nevertheless advanced an image of life requiring universal structuration. That is, structuralist approaches to currere would assert the a priori image of an underlying system or universal grammar prior to difference. Put differently, the structualist legacy in curriculum theory posits a transcendent point or structural ground beneath structure. It is such a legacy that inheres in the Marxist, Saussurian, and Freudian coordinates of curriculum theory. Political theorist Bowers (1980) has argued that Marxist curriculum theorists “have been [unsuccessful] in avoiding a thought process that organizes reality into rigid categories and linear causal relationships” (p. 278). In the Marxian curriculum analysis of Apple, Bowles and Gintis for example, Bowers observes the rigid structural framing of socialism and capitalism within the dualist logic of right/wrong, truth/illusion, and salvation/perdition. Further, Bowers would admonish the politics of curriculum theory for its structural adherence to “deep” binary structures, its image of “atomistic . . . individualism” and its latent anthropocentrism (p. 282). Analyzing the self-professed radicalism of early curriculum theory, Bowers would perceive an ongoing commitment to conservatism. Further, he would detect a transcendent image of pedagogical life that would presuppose a limited and privileged ontological ground for social transformation. In Marxian thought, one such

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“ground” is constituted by the economic infrastructure of production. For Marx and Marxian curriculum scholars, the infrastructure of production emanates the ideological superstructures of education, religion, law, politics, art, etc. The ontological ground of production is hence imagined as an unconscious structuring power that creates ideological relations in the world. Another example of the structuralist legacy in curriculum theory comes from Roy’s (2004) analysis of “pedagogic communication.” As Roy asserts, the instrumentalist conception of “clear communication” advances a “tripartite structure of designation” that presumes the presence of a unified subject (manifestation), unified object (designation), and unified Idea (signification) (p. 311). This image of pedagogic communication privileges the conviction that a subjective agent and stable milieu can be assumed a priori, that signification is politically neutral, and that language can be brought under rational mastery. Further, it suggests that pedagogic communication is representational, or rather, an articulation of life as it actually is. Inhering the traditional senderreceiver model of pedagogic transmission, this representational ideal assumes the correspondent stability of signifier and signified inherited via Saussure. It is in this sense that curriculum theories privileging the contextualization of the subject begin from the image of an organized, or dialectical whole. Yet, as Roy argues, such a model can only be “willed into existence by denying the stubborn messiness of everyday life” (p. 299). For Roy, such a model ultimately degenerates into a nihilistic resolution, utterances of which do not effectuate reality but simply reflect stable relations of signification given in advance. Put differently, in the traditional pedagogic model of transmission, language is not seen as politically or affectively charged. Rather, it is conceived as a transparent medium supported by the universal structures of subject, context, and “reliable” signification. A third structural legacy that inheres curriculum theory is that of Freud’s Oedipus, the trace of which might similarly be perceived in the hierarchical structure and subject politics of the traditional educational apparatus. Behind the signifiers of everyday classroom life is imagined the implicate familial model of mommy-daddy-and me. Put differently, the Oedipal drama constitutes in many conceptualizations of education a fixed template or automatic interpretation machine for the psychical relations of the classroom. Working parasitically on the intentions of student and teacher, the “unconscious” structure of the Oedipal drama transposes desire upon the a priori psychical dynamics of the family, positing an image of classroom life in which desiring-production becomes implicitly dangerous. Negatively defined, desire impels the disciplinary prohibitions

THE ILLUSION OF TRANSCENDENCE

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of the Symbolic apparatus, which functions to maintain the privileged edicts of common morality and Law.

The Transcendent Error The structuralist image of currere asserts that difference is relative to a foundational context or milieu. Thus, in structuralist terms, difference can only be conceived by degrees of variation from a universal, underlying image of reality. This underlying image marks a philosophical commitment to transcendence. Following Spinoza, Nietzsche (2000) remarks on the “four great errors” of Western philosophical thought. Before all others, there is first the illusion of transcendence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aver, the Western metaphysical tradition presupposes the existence of a substance above and beyond empirical space, power or ontological being. In Nietzsche (1969), the primary example of transcendence is that of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. God transcends not only the world of experience, but the world itself. “He” exists above and beyond our capacity to conceive of him. Yet, while the Judeo-Christian God forms the most insistent legacy of transcendence in the Western philosophical canon, it is not the singular case (May, 2005). The Platonic Forms that predate Christianity constitute another legacy of transcendent thought in Western philosophy. Like the Christian God, Plato’s Forms exist above and beyond experience. They eclipse the material world. In this manner, the Platonic Forms find worldly expression only as copies of an a priori Ideal. As Plato’s (1992) lesson in the cave teaches, material experience is but the shadow of a deeper reality that can scarcely be perceived. While worldly objects are mutable and imperfect, Plato (1992) asserts that they are expressions correspondent to unchanging and perfect a priori Forms. Drawing from Socrates’ Meno, Plato (1992) wages an argument on the transcendent Idea of Equality. While Equality might not empirically exist in the world, Plato argues the Idea of an essential Equality exists beyond empirical means of capture. Two people of ostensibly the same weight or height might be differentiated when subjected to intensified scrutiny. In the world, Plato asserts, a perfect Equality is impossible, as difference might always be discovered. Yet, in Platonic thought, the perception of imperfection intimates the existence of a perfect Form. Covered over in empirical life, the Idea points to a deeper reality. Beyond the imperfect forms of the world, Plato suggests a pure essence, a stable and unchanging Universal. It is toward this deep reality that the full expression of life aspires. Beauty, goodness, and truth are only thus according to the immutable Forms of

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Beauty, Goodness, and Truth given a priori. In Platonism, reality can thus be grasped only by bringing worldly experience in alignment with transcendent Forms. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, this task befalls the philosopher king, who is charged with understanding and recreating the world in resemblance to the a priori Ideas. All relations issue from the substance of the Forms, which in turn constitute the “correct categories” of thought. In the tradition of Western metaphysics, we are given the foundation of Being as a transcendent, immutable, and stable power outside of experience. A similar stability grounds the transcendent legacy of subjectivity in Western metaphysics. Therein, the transcendent subject finds its greatest expression in Descartes’ (1998) “I think” (cogito). In the Cartesian formula, the subject is located in a position external to material experience. Beyond doubt exists the subject and its capacity to doubt. Above the possibility that the world is an illusion exists the subject and its capacity to think thus. The Cartesian cogito elides epistemology with the certainty of Being. Exceeding error and the possibility of deception, the subject is conceptualized as a transcendent ground. In the libratory project of critical pedagogy, the transcendent image of the subject is often presumed as the most “basic” social unit in “which we locate the source of freedom and rationality” (Bowers, 1987, p. 2). In this manner, the subject constitutes a “limit case” or transcendent ground for social transformation and educational reform. Yet, the birth of the cogito is mired in difficulty. For the transcendent subject to be established, Descartes must rely upon the power of God. That is, to ensure the reality of the thinking self, Descartes evokes the power of God as a guarantor of the cogito’s ontological legitimacy. Descartes (1998) writes, “It follows that [the idea of truth, clarity and distinctness] is innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me” (p. 42). This innate image of a pure subjectivity to which Descartes alludes is not an immanent creation. Rather, it is through the transcendent power of God that the ontological certainty of the stable subject is given. This ontological move marks a dual transcendence at the heart of the Cartesian project. Cartesian reliance on a transcendent God is ultimately eclipsed. The human subject comes to usurp God’s place on the transcendent plane. Philosophy from Kant to Sartre becomes enthralled with the image of the subject’s control over material reality (May, 2005). The post-Kantians, for example, attribute the creation of concepts to a pure subjectivity rather than a transcendent God (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). “Kant discovers the modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence of a Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation), but that of a subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed


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by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself (reflection)” (ibid. p. 46). While ontological shifts populate the transcendent plane, the legacy of transcendence remains intact. Behind the flux of worldly life, the Idea of a True reality remains intimate to the image of Western thought (Foucault, 1972). In this vein, much twentieth and twenty-first century theory maintains the transcendent status of the subject. While we might define the subject along degrees of class, gender, and culture, the presupposition of a transcendent subject continues to be assumed. Today, this conceptualization extends far beyond philosophy in popular culture, popular opinion, and common sense. We act as if the world were experienced by discreet observing subjects and further, presume that such subjects are representations of a relatively stable and transcendent self. Foucault (1972) defines his own philosophical project as breaking with a “subjection to transcendence” (p. 203). The image of Western thought and institutional power, he claims, is always oriented to some foundational “exteriority” that can be interpreted, discovered, or unequivocally known. For Foucault, exteriority captures desire by establishing “an ethics of knowledge.” As Foucault avers, an “ethics of knowledge” presupposes that by subscribing to some hierarchical “exteriority,” we might know the world as it Truly is. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) have described such subjection to transcendence as “interpretosis,” or rather, the diseased will to imagine some deeper reality to be revealed or discovered in every phenomenon. As Deleuze (2004) writes, this will is alive in a litany of institutional settings. In traditional psychiatry, the logos of the clinician crushes the pathos of the patient, presupposing all thought to a sensible order of causes and symptoms. In education, the desire of the student becomes captured in the logos of currere’s course. In this vein, the pedagogical task is not oriented to the creation of concepts, but the discovery of images for thought installed a priori (Doll, 1993). As Doll remarks, the “discovery curriculum” functions instrumentally to align the presumptions of both educator and student to prior outcomes. In this model, the representational correspondence of the curricular blueprint with its actualization in the classroom confirms the transcendent ideal of currere. The creation of a blueprint for the organization of pedagogical form constitutes a restricted set of singularities for a body and thus operates “as a plane of transcendence” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 162). Akin to the philosophical project, the reactive image of currere is based on the “premeditated decision” that life is naturally oriented to seek the Truth (Deleuze, 1994, p. 94). This is the image of thought that subjection and interpretosis maintain by privileging a transcendent reality. Be it God, Truth, Goodness, or Being, a foundational exterior is erected against the material flows of a life. Put differently, rather than seeing the

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immanently productive relations between our actions and the world, we imagine that some underlying Truth exists to be uncovered beyond such immediate and material experience. This covering of life’s intensive forces by extensive powers constitutes for Deleuze (1995) the greatest erasure enacted by the transcendental illusion. The Judeo-Christian God, the Platonic forms, the Cartesian cogito, and Foucault’s “ethics of knowledge” are but four brief examples of the transcendent legacy in Western thought. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), such transcendent forms are not simply wrong, but rather, attest to the profound creative potential of thought. Only the most productive and creative powers of thought, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) remark, could enslave life to an external image. By approaching transcendence as an act of creation, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) posit a way of surveying history by observing all of the “thousand plateaus” of transcendence humans have created. Yet, they are not apologists for a transcendent image of the world. If anything, Deleuze and Guattari take up Nietzsche’s admonishment of transcendence as the great error of Western philosophy. Today, education is enslaved to a litany of a priori images, including those informed by the legacy of Marxian, Saussurian, and Freudian thought in curriculum scholarship. While each of these educational plateaus mark a way of thinking the world, they concomitantly restrict the ways the world might be thought. The Jungian objection to Freud’s reduction of the complex libidinal economy marks one example of this restriction (Roy, 2004). For Jung, Freud’s error extends from his reduction of psychosexual development to the dogmatic image of the Oedipal template. In the transferential relationship, Jung argues, the analyst often appears to the analysand as a “devil . . . god . . . or sorcerer” (Jung cited in Roy, p. 303). Jung suggests that there are a litany of ways in which the analysand or student might “see” the analyst or teacher disjunctive of the familial template. The reduction of the psychical life of the classroom to the Oedipal template thus covers over a swarm of ways in which the pedagogical relationship might be understood. Further, Freud’s privileged image of the family contravenes the productive powers of the foreign to open new ways of thinking the qualities and values of relation. The result of this dogmatic image of pedagogical life is a “narcissism that shepherds diverse experience toward the reflection of a unity that can then be easily placed within a preexisting hierarchized system of values” (ibid., p. 303). In this vein, Freud not only cements the negative conceptualization of desire, but the foundation of subjective development as a direct extension of the familial image. A “swarm” of potential becomings or relations are thus “captured” in this ontological move to the transcendent Same. Overturning such transcendent thought is, for Deleuze and Guattari, critical to the conceptualization of difference. In this task,


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Deleuze (1997; 1988) turns to the philosophical works of Spinoza and the concept of immanence. The philosophy of transcendence relies on two basic commitments. First, transcendence requires the conceptualization of two ontological substances. If God, the Platonic Forms, or Cartesian subject is thought to transcend the world, then its composition must necessarily be of another kind. Put differently, if God were composed of the same substance as the world, the two would be akin. The transcendent substance would become the mirror of a mutable, unstable, and limited world. In this formulation, “God might be elsewhere in space and time, but he would not be beyond” (May, 2005, p. 28). Without the presence of two ontological substances, the conceptualization of a transcendent beyond would be impossible. In the legacy of Western philosophy, the transcendent is not an analogue of earthly substance, but rather, immutable, stable, and certain, acting upon the world from a position unfettered by the morphologies of material reality. The philosophical concept of the cogito for example, acts to give an image to an otherwise inert and characterless world. The image of transcendence is thus not simply that of a colonizing power, but a liberating authority that confers its superiority through the expression of an image of the transcended world’s greatest capacity for Being. The first commitment of transcendence is to the conceptualization of at least two ontological substances without which there could be no plane beyond the material. The second is to the hierarchical ordering of the substances in terms of power and value (May, 2005). While transcendence requires at least two ontological substances in its constitution of an exteriority, it requires further the privileging of one substance over another. In the metaphysical tradition, for example, the transcendent is incommensurate with the chaotic flows of material life. This ontological requirement is pivotal if the transcendent is upheld as a deeper reality worth seeking. Put differently, the presupposition of transcendent thought is oriented beyond material life. Without a higher order, no such beyond could be sought. The transcendent image of the world is thus predicated on the privileging of particular substances while degrading others. The Medieval conception of God, the Platonic Forms, and the Cartesian cogito each constitute superior ontological substances not of this world. In the transcendent tradition, the privileged ontological substance is conflated with the “nonphysical, the unlimited, and the unity of a self-identity” (p. 31). Nonidentitarian, chaotic, and material forces become, in the legacy of transcendence, substances to overcome. For Nietzsche (1966), the commitments of transcendence give us the ascetic priest. This priest, Nietzsche writes, proffers the curative powers of a transcendent ideal to the unhappy, the suffering, and melancholic.

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In brief, the ascetic priest comforts the masses with the image of an unchanging transcendent power above the difficulties and temptations of living. Nietzsche (1968) refers to this turn as the “will-to-nothingness,” that is, the acquiescence to a utopic plane of immutability and certitude. In this vein, the ascetic “teachers of the beyond” are “of the same origin [as] the pessimists, nihilists, romantics of pity, criminals, [and] vice addicts,” for each posits salvation in some transcendent form, be it Truth, God, Love or Justice (p. 71). “The human will,” Nietzsche (2000) writes, would “rather will nothingness than not will” (p. 533). Against the horror of a vacuum (horror vacui), the ascetic priest produces a goal for the will in the image of the transcendent. Inverting the ressentiment of the masses back upon themselves, Nietzsche’s priest avers: do not blame the other for your ills, blame yourself! Intimately tied to the rhetoric of self-discipline and repression of productive desire, asceticism enjoins the subject to a higher set of values beyond the immediate and visceral materiality of life. The ascetic priest thus entreats the subject to overcome itself by taking the image of transcendence as its immutable law. While material reality may by chaotic and mutable, the transcendent ideals of Truth, God, and subject affirm a stable image that preserves one from the abyss (Descartes, 1641/1998). Ascetic ideals, Nietzsche (2000) writes, are erected against the degenerating forces of life, “as an artifice for the preservation of life” (p. 556). The transcended world, while appearing as an affirmation of life, actively denounces its immanent and creative forces. Put differently, the transcendent affirms the power of life by limiting its powers of difference. The productive potential of desire is morally reduced to an indulgence, the immanent overcoming of negative affects dubbed delusional. It is in this way that Nietzsche regards the transcendent ideals of the ascetic priest a means of enslaving the masses according to the “common sense” of the herd (p. 456). Nietzsche rebukes, “[the priest] combats only the suffering itself, the comfiture of the sufferer, not its cause, not the real sickness: this must be our most fundamental objection to priestly medication” (p. 566). As Nietzsche (2000) writes, the outcome of ascetic reactivity in Western philosophy is nihilism. Asceticism purports that some greater power or value exists beyond material life, and that as disciplined subjects, we must renounce our desires in submission to their a priori image. In the image of a transcended world, the will aspires to a stable and immutable world beyond the material flow of reality. Yet, because this world does not exist, one ultimately realizes that it is ungraspable. That is, because there is no graspable reality beyond the flux of life, we are given to feelings of despair, abjection, and despondency. For Nietzsche (2000), the realization that no


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ultimate truth exists leads to nihilism and ressentiment. The transcendent image of the world is thus the very idea that ultimately leads to nihilism. That is, if no superior ontological substance exists to confer meaning upon the subordinate substance of material life, then life is necessarily unintelligible. The legacy of transcendence collapses into cynicism. For Nietzsche then, nihilism is counterpart to the philosophical error of transcendence, constituting in part the real sickness that inheres the legacy of reactivity in Western thought. Roy (2004) argues that the traditional model of pedagogic transmission similarly lapses into nihilism. In Saussurian linguistics for example, the description of the world is conceived as an ostensibly neutral process. Such neutrality not only assumes the transparency of communication, but further, the general neutrality of the word as the reflection of a stable, referential reality. In this image, language is regarded in terms of it’s a priori Form or communicative ideal. Against, this, Roy argues for a formative or expressive approach to language that introduces foreignness into the representational ideal. Put differently, Roy asserts that language should aspire less to the approximation of fixed meaning and discursive norms, both of which lead to a form of nihilism that resolves the unproductive nature of communication. Instead, Roy introduces the Deleuzian notion of orderwords, constitutive speech-acts or commands that carry transformative affects. Language is hence not simply communicative, but performative, capable of altering relations, introducing hemorrhages in the Symbolic system, and opening new worlds of meaning. Performative order-words interrupt the idea of language as a code, for as Roy asserts, “A code is the condition of possibility for all explanation” (p. 305). Further, Deleuzian order-words or performative language make it impossible to differentiate between semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics. The speech act traverses each by introducing an enfolded performative affect. In a related sense, “the meaning of language can no longer be defined independently of the [speech act]” (p. 305). That is, the speech act affects meaning as to preclude its advanced signification. As Roy deterritorializes, language might be understood not simply in terms of its homogeneous Form, but rather, as an expressive formation. Such an approach creates a wedge against the representational model of language. Language does not simply describe things in the world, it does things.

Spinoza and the Plane of Immanence Nietzsche’s commentary on the nihilistic collapse of Western thought is intimate to the ontological problem of substances. This problem is

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confronted directly in the philosophy of Spinoza (Deleuze, 1997). While the God of Spinoza’s time was conceptualized as a substance of greater value and power, Spinoza (1951) remarks that “there can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God” (p. 39). The Spinozian critique is thus railed against the differentiation of substances, and further, against the distinction of the mind and body. For Spinoza, the thinking (mind) and extended (body) are in fact not different substances, but rather, different expressions or modes of substance (Deleuze, 1997). Conceived thus, Spinoza repudiates transcendence in favor of the concept of expression. While the image of a transcended world relies on ontological commitments, it is haunted by a single question. That is, if transcendent thought relies on the presence of at least two ontological substances, what is the character of their interaction? For Spinoza (1951), the relationship between what exists and transcendent substance is one of emanation. “By substance,” Spinoza remarks, “I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself ” (1951, p. 45). Spinozian emanation is unlike the creative process of production ex nihilo. Dissimilar to the story of pure creation in Genesis, emanation suggests that something is created from the substance of its creator, who “[produces] while remaining in themselves” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 171). In emanation, there is only one substance from which all creations issue. Yet, while emanation challenges the conceptual power of transcendence, it retains its hierarchical character. That is, the concept of emanation reasserts the ontological distinction between creator and created. In this manner, it fulfills a key commitment to transcendence. In fulfillment of the other, the creator is privileged above its creations. The immanent character implied in emanation, that is, emanation’s capacity to “self-generate,” is thus covered over via its dual ontological commitment to transcendence. Spinoza’s ontology does not cease with emanation. Rather, he seeks to redress the error of transcendence via an ontology of immanence. In a deeply heretical maneuver against transcendent thought, Spinoza conceptualizes the univocity of being. While transcendence relies upon the perpetuation of an ontological gap between creator and created, the concept of univocity destroys its hierarchical commitment. Put differently, Spinoza’s univocity of being collapses the difference between ontological substances into a single plane. In proposition thirteen of The Ethics, Spinoza writes: “Substance absolutely infinite is indivisible” (1951, p. 54). As Spinoza argues, the cessation infinite through division is absurd. Hence, for Spinoza, God is no longer composed of some ontologically varied substance, but rather, of one indivisible substance. As Spinoza writes in proposition fourteen: “God is one, that is . . . only one substance can be granted in the universe,


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and that substance is absolutely infinite” (p. 55). Spinoza’s univocal Being is not simply a new ground for Being, but rather, an open Whole or “pure variation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 39–41). That is, the ontology of immanence conceptualized by Spinoza is not the emanation of some stable ground or transcendent power, but an infinite and uncoded chaosmos prior to organization. For Deleuze (1997), Spinoza’s ontology of immanence frees expression from the tyranny of causality, from the powers of a higher being, and from the dictates of a fascist Other. Unlike emanation or creation, immanence is not reduced to the notions of following, subordinating, or resembling (May, 2005). In this manner, Spinozian immanence becomes open to difference. In other words, because the plane of immanence has no transcendent image or identitarian politics dictating its potential for expression, currere (the course of a life) becomes an open plane for experimentation. Yet, if the repudiation of the transcendent division of ontological substance is predicated on univocity, how could this possibly be an affirmation of difference? With univocity, are we not left with a uniform plane that denies difference in its conceptualization of a single substance? It is here that Deleuze (1997) returns to Spinoza’s concept of expression. Without falling back into the trap of transcendence, Deleuze remarks that in Spinoza, the substance of being finds expression in attributes which in turn find expression through modulation or modes. The attributes of substance accessible to human consciousness include thought and extension, both of which Deleuze conceptualizes as an unlimited finity (Deleuze, 1997). Attributes, Deleuze remarks, are active and dynamic. They are not attributed, that is, given to substance by some transcendent figure, but rather, attributive—immanent of the substance itself. Put differently, emanation suggests that attributes are given by some greater ontological value or power. Behind the attribute, the legacy of transcendent philosophy suggests an immutable substance, such as God, the Platonic Forms, Truth, or the subject who creates its attributes in the material world. Contrariwise, immanence conceptualizes the attribute as an expression of substance. That is, the attribute is not attributed by a transcendent substance, but is rather one of an infinite number of attributive ways a substance might be expressed. Apropos Deleuze, this concept might be thought through the elementary example of Japanese origami (paper folding). While origami takes a single piece of paper as its substance, its attributive or immanent potential might be expressed through a multiplicity of folds and differential configurations. It is in this vein that art, music, film, and video play a significant role in articulating the active force of currere. At their most significant, each explores the immanent expressiveness of substance. In turn, the

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attributive force of art finds further qualitative differentiation in the expressiveness of its modes. In music, for example, we not only have the varied attributive expressions of such music styles as jazz, heavy-metal, and drum and bass electronica, but the vital difference of their respective modulations in improvisation, folk inspiration, and the generative potentials of such inhuman technologies as the phonograph, the synthesizer, and digital sampler.1 Life strives to intensify its expressive potentials for becoming. This, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1994) is the ethical challenge of art and philosophy. Put differently, the tyrannical image of what life is becomes, through art and philosophy, both what it is not as well as what it might become. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) remark, art is monumental. It stands alone without resembling the world. That is, art produces affects that are not enjoined to an a priori image, but are instead affirmations of life’s expressive potential (Massumi, 1995). It is in this vein that we might think currere’s active force as less a matter of representation than an expression of what a pedagogical life might do. In the tradition of educational theorizing, such a conceptualization of currere might be regarded as strange. Indeed, the political orientations of such grassroots movements as “back to the basics” posit an image of what life is stripped of its expressive excesses and monstrous births. In place of such expressive potential, a stable transcendent ground functions to territorialize thought and action (extension). Such territorializing movements arrest the flow of difference by reducing currere to an a priori image of life (x x not y). For example, the impoverished image of currere offered by “traditionalist movements” creates rigid segmentations between the disciplines, privileging the elevation of foundational knowledge while correlating the quality of pedagogy to its representational parallel in standardized examinations. Such movements remain intimate to the commitments of transcendence by enjoining pedagogical life to a static image of Being. Put differently, currere becomes a fixed territory bound by a political claim to what is “basic” to pedagogy. This a priori image of life attributes to thought and action, reactively organizing pedagogical life according to the habits of representation. The reactive image of currere limits the expressive forces of thought and extension. In this image there is a failure to see the potential for philosophy and art to exceed what life is in lieu of what it might become. In traditional schooling, this line of flight is counter-intuitive. According to rationalist educational discourses for example, the object of pedagogy is not only oriented to the definition of what is, but further, to what is as an a priori given. The legacy of instrumentalism in education correlates the value of concepts to their ability to accurately represent phenomena.


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Contrariwise, the Deleuzian challenge is an ethical impetus against the world given in advance. In this vein, the creation of affects in art and concepts in philosophy are expressions of the active force of currere. They are attributive rather than attributed, not metaphorical, but metamorphic. Spinoza’s ontology of immanence is thus of significant import to the ways in which we approach currere. As Adorno (1966) writes, “Closed systems are bound to be finished” (p. 35). Adorno’s forecast is evident in the epidemic cynicism of contemporary culture. As Nietzsche (2000) writes, at limits of transcendence and ascetic self-discipline, thought collapses into nihilism. As an ungraspable utopia, the founding image of a superior ontological substance miscarries, leaving no stable ground from which the world might emanate (Lyotard, 1979). Marking the cessation of thinking as a transformative and productive force, nihilism produces the negative affects of ressentiment. The response to such ressentiment, Nietzsche (2000) avers, is not in the founding of some new truth or transcendent ground for Being. Put differently, the cessation of transcendent thought does not beg the installation of a new, or more stable ground for reality. Rather, for Nietzsche (1969), it is in the repudiation of all transcendent truths that an ethics of amor fati might be created. Amor fati, or a love of “what is,” does not presuppose a transcendent image of Being. What is is not some superior ontological substance that assures identity or “ethics of knowledge” (Foucault, 1972). Rather, Nietzsche insists that an ethics of amor fati is intimate to the affirmation of expression and the innovative character of life. For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati becomes the ethical impetus for philosophy and art. It is not enough to simply reveal the transcendent image of the world as an illusion, nor to displace its naturalized image by revealing it as a cultural construction. What is required, Deleuze (1994) insists, is an affirmation of the powers of thinking to liberate, to create, and produce new ways for thinking. Amidst the transcendent legacy of Western philosophy is thus, for Deleuze, an affirmation of thinking that is profoundly expressive. Philosophy cannot simply be a practice of critique. It must also affirm the productive or expressive potential of thinking difference. Philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is not merely about becoming (genesis), but becoming-other (heterogenesis). Waging a nomadic war on transcendent thought, Deleuze and Guattari birth the monstrous challenge of transcendental empiricism. There is no world “x” that then differentiates, folds, divides, mutates, distorts, etc. This is the illusion of transcendence forewarned by Nietzsche (1969). The world “x” is, for Deleuze (1994), an expression of the ontology of immanence. Put differently, it is a “slice” or “strata” amongst a swarm of virtual potentials,

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a concept that cannot be foundational because it is already a response to a problematic. Following, if there is no transcendent ground for Being, then we might begin to think about relations in terms of productive encounters (and . . . and . . . and). This conceptualization is contrasted by the transcendent model of relations (and, because, or) that equate to being (is) (Colebrook, 2002). This describes respectively, the active force of currere to its reactive image.

3

Powers of the False and the Problematics of the Simulacrum

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ith postindustrialization and the rise of consumer culture, the status of the model as a transcendent ontological substance has disappeared (Baudrillard, 2002). Signs are detached from their symbolic obligations to “float” in a sea of ambient consumerism. Akin to Deleuze (1983), Baudrillard cites in this movement the collapse of the dualist model/copy hierarchy promulgated by Plato (1992). The transcendent model as the deep actuality from which material life is thought to emanate is evacuated. What remains in lieu of such ontological certitude is a pure virtuality or simulacrum. In Deleuzian (1994) terms, this virtuality is the ontology of immanence. For Baudrillard (1983), what remains is the “more real than real,” the hyperreal unhinged from a transcendent model. In hyperreality, the transcendent image of currere is jettisoned. Yet, the problematics of the simulacrum for an active concept of currere remain to be explored. This exploratory task will form the trajectory of this chapter.

Baudrillard’s Lament Baudrillard’s (1993, 1994) apocalyptic augury of the simulacrum is a lament on the disappeared authenticity of symbolic reality. Conflated with the loss of subjective agency, the fetishization of the image, and the dislocation of history awash in a sea of “floating” signifiers, his theory of the simulacrum poses an inconsolable challenge to the reactive image of currere (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2000). To begin, Baudrillard’s rereading of Saussure produces the detachment of signifier and signified. The correspondence of a signifier, a word or image, and

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its signified concept is not simply the effect of a natural correspondence. As Baudrillard (1994) avers, the assumed consonance of signifier and signified is motivated. The signifier currere for example, does not arbitrarily correspond to the signified concept of a closed system, but rather, is restricted to such correspondence through the identitarian formula x x not y. This contention usurps the assumption of ideological and political neutrality undergirding the curriculum theory of such rational and instrumental curriculum theorists as Tyler and Schwab (Cherryholmes, 1988). In Tyler for example, curriculum design not only defines and regulates currere’s course, but “constitute[s] its reality” (p. 25). “Every simulation” Massumi (1987a) writes, “takes as its point of departure a regularized world [of] stable identities of territories” (p. 3). In his curriculum rationale, Tyler assigns currere a linear image, an a priori condition for transformation, and an identitarian matrix ensconced within the molar orders of organization/disorganization, purposeful/purposeless, and continuity/discontinuity (Cherryholmes, 1988). In this vein, Tyler’s curricular simulacrum constitutes a map that exists prior to lived cartography, constituting a readymade matrix for pedagogical design. In Baudrillard’s (1994) terms, such hyperreal design functions as a code that constrains the potential expressions of a life. In this sense, life is reduced to the tracing or “running” of a coded course. While such a course is no longer determined according to an a priori transcendent ground, the “ambient” code of Baudrillard’s simulacrum virally infects the potentials of the immanent or virtual plane. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is a nefarious matrix in which the image of reality becomes overdetermined, immobilizing difference by reducing life to an object of social and instrumental organization. Within Baudrillard’s (1994) negative simulacrum then, life is liquidated of its vital forces. It is overdetermined and ultimately “passified” (p. 106). In hyperreality, there are only fictions of reality that in turn “stand for nothing except themselves” (Massumi, 1987a, p. 3). Following Baudrillard, taxonomic and developmental curricular discourses do not illustrate an actual ground or truth, but rather, form a technology that is transposed upon the subject. What appears as a deeper reality then, is nothing but the function of a homogenizing sign correspondence (x x not y) or a priori mapping. In the simulacrum, Baudrillard (1975) writes, “[o]nly affiliation to the model has any meaning . . . the ‘signifier of reference,’ functioning as a foregone, and the only credible conclusion” (p. 56). The code of the simulacrum constitutes an “automatic interpretation machine” that overdetermines thought by reducing it to a homogenous appearance (Deleuze, 2004, p. 275). In educational

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discourse, the negative simulacrum or ambient code inheres within both developmental and taxonomic thought. That is, the subject, its classifications, limits, and potentials are mapped via the institution’s complex coding machines. From diagnostic testing, the differentiation of behaviors, linear imaging of the subject, and ordered perspective of pedagogical sequence, the simulacrum functions as a reproductive mechanism, recreating the world in its self-same image. While such transpositional mapping circulates with the appearance of neutrality, Baudrillard’s abandonment of the structuralist sign as a self-enclosed entity posits that such claims to reality are themselves fictional images of currere. Indeed, in both Baudrillard and Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, there is no deeper reality or stable ontological ground upon which an unequivocal sense of Being can be anchored. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write “modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery . . . that all identities are only simulated, produced as an optical effect by the more profound game of difference and repetition” (p. xix). Overturning the neo-Platonic model/copy dualism, “reality” collapses with the simulacrum. With hyperreality, meaning implodes in the ecstatic exchange and pleasureless orgy of minimally differentiated signs (Massumi, 1987a). Today, such a dystopic scenario aptly characterizes the image of institutional education. Bound to the commercial circularity of exchange value, institutional labor is “efficient” only insofar as it evokes the signs of labor. Put differently, signs of institutional productivity have eclipsed the problematics to which the reactive image of currere constitutes a conceptual response. While there is always an overabundance of work for students to accomplish, the frenetic pace impelled by such tasks are often undertaken with marked discontent. While repudiating the transcendent image lauded in structuralism and phenomenology, the Baudrillardian simulacrum ultimately engenders yet another form of nihilism. The demand to access, process, and know more has become a maxim of contemporary education. Overburdened by the constant circulation of information, Baudrillard’s individual is reduced to an institutional servomechanism, a feedback nodule that accesses and reproduces information. This image of currere inheres the project of “traditional schooling,” wherein the student is ideally conceived as a reproductive servomotor of dominant culture. The image of the student as an institutional servomechanism is anachronistic with the contemporary rhetoric of educational choice. As Aoki (2005d) avers, the curriculum and instruction landscape “suggests a diversity of offerings” (p. 417). However, a caveat must be advanced on the illusion of diversity promulgated by the institutional rhetoric

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of “free choice.” “[T]he seeming . . . diversity [of the curriculum] is an illusion because ‘they’ are manifestations of a [single] meaning of curriculum: the curriculum-as-plan” (p. 417). It is in this vein that the ostensible freedoms of the student are coded in advance by an a priori image of pedagogical life. The student’s relationship to curriculum is not simply interactive or passive, but interpassive. Whereas interactivity connotes the incompleteness of currere, requiring in turn the efforts of an active subject, interpassivity expresses the individual’s relationship to a system that is already more-than-complete. In interpassivity, an agent is relieved from the active demands of creation (Pfaller, 2003). For example, in currere’s reactive image, the subject no longer has to face the demands of creating new ways of thinking. The image of life projected by currere’s reactive power establishes particular ways of thinking for them. As May (2005) writes, “[f]or the dogmatic image of thought, there are already constituted identities, each with its qualities, which are to be represented by thought” (p. 120). In this dogmatic image, “‘teaching’ becomes ‘implementation’ and ‘instruction’ becomes in-structuring students in the image of the given” (Aoki, 2005d, p. 418). The “choices” available to the individual, however dilated, are already constituted. Interpassively, the individual takes them to be his or her own without having to risk thinking difference. The task thus becomes representing in one’s own thought that which comes a priori. Both the passive and interpassive individual is recapitulated in curriculum theory, wherein the simulacrum is conflated with the obliteration of vital innovation (zoe) by the acculturating forces of commercial media (Habermas, 1990; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2000; Postman, 1993). “Energized” or vital expressions of the plane of immanence are neutralized amidst the “mass entropy of the silent majority” (Massumi, 1987a). While Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum repudiates the transcendent ground of modernity, its effect creates a new condition for nihilism. The “real” is evacuated and replaced by signs of the real, provoking a hypercynical approach that embraces a moribund fatalism. Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum constrains the potential force of immanence advanced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Either we regress into a naïve representational realism that assumes an underlying reality, or we become sponge-like neuroreceptors in a vast parasitic matrix of images (Massumi, 1987a). Put differently, Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum mourns the loss of symbolic reality, recapitulating the differentiation of actual and virtual life. In the feudal period, Baudrillard (1993) asserts, signs were bound to social position, traditional usage, and ritual. Baudrillard thus proposes a reality prior to the postindustrial virtualization of the social sphere. Against the differentiation and the nihilistic collapse of reality and

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virtuality, Deleuze and Guattari advance what Massumi has referred to as a third way of theorizing the simulacrum.

Deleuze’s Affirmation Baudrillard evades the question of whether simulacra replaces a preexisting reality or precludes it (Massumi, 1987a). For Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the answer to both questions is an affirmative “yes.” For Deleuze (1990), the simulacrum is not secondary to life, but rather, is life itself. There is no “real” world supplemented by its unreal virtual image. For Deleuze (1983), reality is actual-virtual. That is, the actual is already an image. The human Being, for example, is actualized in part through taxonomic and developmental images. There must be an image of the human—its limits, features, and differences—for it to be recognizable as such. Yet, for Deleuze (1983), such actuality is produced through the potential becomings of a virtual or immanent plane. In other words, there is no “real” human that then becomes what it is not, but rather, a virtuality or swarm of potentials that are territorialized in the representational image of the human. This does not suggest that the actual is simply an effect of the virtual, but rather, that the actual inheres a virtual potential. Put differently, as territorializations of the plane of immanence, the actual is not an immutable a priori, but rather, an affirmation of the forces of becoming. Actualization is not simply what is, but an expression of becoming. The human, for example, can become a filmic image, a photograph, an idol, monster, or vegetable. The human might become more than, or less a human (Colebrook, 2009). A similar case might be made regarding the reactive image of currere. For currere to be thought in instrumental or rationalist terms, one must have an image of the course to be run. There must be some design that allows for the recognizability of teaching and learning as a process of exchange, habitualization, and order. Baudrillard’s negative simulacrum posits such an image as a sign of the real that has effectively replaced reality, standardizing the actions of what a body might do (Massumi, 1987a). As Massumi writes, “What bodies do depends on where they land in an abstract grid of miraculated identities that are in practice only a bundle of normalized and basically reproductive functions” (p. 4). This reactive image currere is figured, much like the image of the racetrack, within its own circumlocutionary negative feedback loop. In practice, this negative feedback system confirms its identity (x x not y) by establishing specific parameters of control that discontinue virtual deterritorializations or rogue lines of flight.

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The map or image as the antecedent of an active currere thus functions to territorialize the course to be run as foundational actuality. In this vein, the rationalist or instrumental design maintains itself as a stable ontological territory. Yet, to return to Deleuze, this ontological territory is but one of many. For Deleuze (1983), reality is neither expressly actual or virtual in the Platonic sense of the model and its copy. Rather, reality is both actual and virtual simultaneously (actual-virtual), capable of constituting both stable territories and new, deterritorializing lines of flight. For Deleuze, the power of the virtual is the productive or affirmative quality of the simulacrum. Contrary to Baudrillard’s (1994) negative virtuality, Deleuze approaches the virtual as a creative force for thinking difference. Repudiating the duality of the model and copy, Deleuze approaches the simulacrum as an ethics of the virtual. Such an ethics suggests that there is no a priori image or model of currere that exists prior to the simulacrum. Put differently, there is no natural, politically or ideologically neutral course of life that then differentiates, undergoes reform, or reconceptualization. The simulacrum is life, or rather, the potential to relate and create images of what life might be. In this vein, the active expression of currere is intimately bound to its virtual powers. That is, currere’s active force is an expression of immanent difference that creates new ways of thinking. It is in this way that the actual and virtual are wed. What is “actual” is only such because of its virtual potentials for becoming. What is virtual is imperceptible except to the extent that it might be witnessed in new thoughts, actions, or conceptual experiments that engender new potentials for thought and action. Thinking new philosophical concepts or artistic affects is to engage the expressive forces of the immanent or virtual plane. While such concepts or affects might create new strata or territories for thinking, the actual and virtual do not constitute a binary pair. Rather, they are mutual processes intimate to any active concept of currere. That is, the Deleuzeguattarian (1987) philosophical project is not simply oriented to the question of “what can we know?” nor to the identitarian inquiry of whether the images we have of the world accurately reflect the world. Put differently, the challenge to thinking issued by Deleuze (2004) does not devolve on the representation or recognition of some actuality. Contrariwise, the Deleuzian challenge to thinking is oriented to the creation of a virtual nonimage of currere, that is, a nonrepresentational currere that maintains the immanent unfoldment of difference. This nonimage similarly suspends the transparent communication of the sign by returning the concept to its virtual power to create a multiplicity of potential passages for thinking.

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Block (1998) posits such an approach to currere in his concept of a vagabond pedagogy. In Block’s nonrepresentational expression of currere, there is no path, no “exercise of power” determining the way in advance (p. 335). While a new strata or territory for thinking might be constituted through concepts or affective forces, the Deleuzian ontology of univocity asserts that such actualizations are never formally divided from the plane of immanence. “[Territorialization] is not the enemy to be overcome . . . it only becomes the enemy when we become blind to [the virtual force] of deterritorialization” (May, 2005, p. 139). When a territory is severed from its virtual immanent powers of becoming, it becomes reactive and dogmatic. The actualization of currere in a reactive image marks the territorialized selection of a certain course to be run amidst a swarm of virtual potentialities. The powers of territorialization figured in the “will-to-recognition and . . . representation” conceal the virtual forces of the Deleuzian simulacrum, positing the existence of a transcendent or encoded model (Roy, 2003, p. 9). Similar to Massumi (1987a), Baudrillard and Deleuze describe two modes of the simulacrum. While both reject the neo-Platonic model/ copy dualism, and hence the tyrannical powers of the transcendent, Baudrillard’s negative simulacrum is conceptualized as a repressive and regularizing matrix. In Baudrillard’s simulacrum “it is not a question of Platonic copies,” Massumi writes, “but of human replicants” (p. 4). In this conceptualization, currere remains bound by the regulated limits of the code. In this vein, the Spinozian (1985) challenge of what a body can do becomes overdetermined by repressive categories of thought. The other mode of simulation, Massumi observes, “turns against the entire system of resemblance and replication” (p. 5). Rather than limiting the regulatory selection of only certain properties or modes for Being, the Deleuzian simulacrum selects a virtual multiplicity of potential becomings. For Deleuze (1983), there is no replication without difference, no actuality without the vital intervention of the virtual. Beings emerge from virtual processes of doubling, imaging, and simulation. Not simply the product of a mass replicating apparatus, such Beings are expressions of the virtual powers of differentiation. Genes are copied from one generation to the next, but unfold with vital difference. Music assembles with the differential qualities of its venue and technologies (techne) of production to produce a unique difference. Pop art similarly breaks with Platonic dualism, illustrating how reproduction inheres a vital difference that allows for the emergence of unique, nonentropic singularities. Like the dinosaurs of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, repetition creates new mutagenic directions and becomings.

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Preserving the Passage of Difference In the curriculum scholarship of Daignault (1992), currere marks the “passage” of thinking untrapped by either the “nihilistic” abandonment of experimental risk-taking nor the “terroristic” powers of actualization. He writes, “thinking happens only between suicide and murder” (p. 199). Between the reactive murder of thinking and the nihilistic abandonment of an ethics of potentiality, difference inheres. Such a passage cannot be maintained in Baudrillard’s negative simulacrum. First, Baudrillard (1975) conceptualizes the simulacrum as the succor of capital. All signs are co-opted and inserted into the capital logic of positive, rational, and exchangeable circulation. In the negative simulacrum, the sign is thus an accomplice of murder. It reduces and constricts meaning into an a priori actuality that impels reality. In the Baudrillardian simulacrum, reality is an effect of the sign drained of its virtual power. Hence, virtuality becomes for Baudrillard not only the “eternal repetition of the Same,” but concomitantly, the negative desire for perfection, the “perfect crime . . . the finishing off of the world, for which we now have to undergo a process of mourning” (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 200). In the Deleuzian concept of the simulacrum, mourning is eclipsed by affirmation. The dogmatic image of currere is habilitated to its virtual powers for becoming. The repudiation of the Platonic model/copy dualism avows the constitutive powers of the virtual. Further, the negative simulacrum is reimaged along an ethics of potentiality that do not unequivocally constrain what a body might do. Deleuze (1991) writes, “[m]odern life is such that, confronted with the most mechanical, most stereotypical repetitions, within and without, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications” (p. xix). Where Baudrillard posits the termination of difference through the repetition of the Same, Deleuze perceives the expression of a vital difference via the conceptual force of Nietzsche’s eternal return. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1969), the concept of the eternal return suggests the cycling back of the same things over time. Yet, for Nietzsche, the eternal return is not the “same,” but “a thought of the absolutely different” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 46). As Deleuze remarks, “return is the being of that which becomes” (p. 24). Open to the multiplicity of the future, being is no longer simply itself, but a differentiating potential for becoming. In other words, the eternal return is for Deleuze the affirmative and constitutive power of the future. As May (2005) writes, the future is an overflowing “unactualized difference” that “comes to meet us with no pregiven identities [or] preserving constants” (p. 61). Analogous to the challenge of the eternal return for contemporary pedagogy, the affirmation of the future is the most difficult

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task for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1969). The challenge of the eternal return lies in its willing affirmation of the future as a multiplicity. To affirm the eternal return is to repudiate both the image of identitarian thought and the will-to-representation. It gives up on the faithful attempt to represent an actualized image of the world. Instead, the eternal return embraces the power of life to differ in the creation new passages for thinking and action. Herein lies the pedagogical import for the active concept of currere. It must not simply say yes to the future, but to risk the difference of the eternal return without knowing in advance how the dice will fall back. The eternal return avows the emergence of a unique style that assumes a life of its own. Deleuze remarks in this vein on the affirmative powers of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Daignault on Joyce’s Riverrun. Neither work claims to represent a given reality. Yet, each work mobilizes the virtual force of reality to overrun the reactive image of the world. Nietzsche does something similar with the introduction of poetic and aphoristic forms into philosophy. His style, or stutter, breaks from a territorialized line, “[implying] a new conception of philosophy, a new image of the thinker and of thought” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 65). Daignault’s pedagogy, like Deleuzian philosophy and Nietzsche’s countercultural gesture, affirms the singularity of a life, that is, life composed of “virtualities [and] events . . . not . . . lacking in reality” (Deleuze, 2002, p. 31). Put differently, the affirmation of the virtual in Wonderland, Riverrun, and Nietzsche’s philosophical style multiplies the expressive potentials of reality. Each does something to the frozen territories of thought by opening them to the multiplicity of the future. This is neither the murder of thinking forewarned by Daignault, nor the nihilistic treatment of the future as an empty vacuum. Rather, the eternal return marks the passage between the consolidation of a reactive actuality in educational thought and the instrumental manipulation of the pedagogical process. In other words, the overcoding powers of territorialization are destroyed through their differential repetition. Likewise, the technical control of currere is subverted through the dice throw of the eternal return. Against the reactive or monist image of the course to be run, the active expression of currere affirms the difference that inheres repetition. Daignault’s pedagogical project of preserving the passage of difference might thus be conceived as enjoined to the Nietzschean eternal return, the affirmation of immanence amidst the overdetermination of reality.

Powers of the False In Nietzschean terms (1967), the concept of the eternal return is a will-topower. It is an affirmative power of joy, liberation, and creation. Deleuze

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(2006a) writes, “Nietzsche’s practical teaching is that difference is happy; that multiplicity, becoming and chance are adequate objects of joy by themselves” (p. 190). Nietzsche’s will-to-power is alternatively described by Deleuze as a “[power] of the false” (p. 89). In the Deleuzian positive simulacrum of virtual immanence and difference, the powers of the false mark the creation of counteractualities. These counteractualities bear no resemblance to the reactive image severed from its virtual powers. Rather, the powers of the false are an affirmation of reality’s virtual powers for imagining the multiplication of life’s expressive potentials. This affirmation of the virtual in turn increases the expressive powers of life. Indeed, if the simulacrum is life, then the powers of the false play with life’s potential for becoming. As Massumi (1987a) writes, the powers of the false might be constituted as a working simulation injected into a society. Baudrillard (1990) refers to these powers as seductive. As Baudrillard details, modernity is an era in which the Law espouses a transcendent truth that underlies reality. To achieve an understanding of the truth in the era of the Law, Baudrillard avers that one must continually be productive. One must continually materialize “reality,” make it visible, and allow it to enter into commodified circulation. Against the linear progression and “determinate finality” of meaning in the era of the Law, seduction plays a deadly role (p. 132). That is, while the Law espouses a perspective on reality that is “irreversible” and steeped in the “recurrence of conventional procedures,” seduction decenters signs from their productive or truthful “reality” (p. 139). Put differently, seduction can be evidenced when life does not aim at the representation of reality, but produces real effects through play and artifice. Like the simulations orchestrated by Orson Welles, the willto-deception creates new actualities that traverse the official meanings or images of the Law/State. Traditionally, stage illusionists have practiced the will-to-deception or seductive powers of the false, playing with the virtual potentials of the positive simulacrum to create new truth affects. Such a deception is not simply illusory, for as I have attempted to describe, reality inheres both actual and virtual expressions. In this vein, the counteractualities imagined by artists and philosophers are no less real. It follows that powers of the false might create new ways of conceptualizing the active expression of currere. The question of what significance film, music, art, and video have for pedagogy is tied to the Deleuzian concept of the will-to-deception or powers of the false. As Bogue (1999) asserts, the powers of the false mobilize minoritarian perspectives. While the Deleuzeguattarian (1987) concept of the minor shares allegiances with racial and ethnic groups, it is extended beyond this definition to affirm the virtual quality of art and culture. Against the monolith of sanctioned or restrained

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State forms, minoritarian thought is imbued with a “high coefficient of deterritorialization . . . everything in it is political” (p. 115). Put differently, the powers of the false subvert the towering figure of tradition in the expression of another possible community, a “people yet to come.” Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer here to both Kafka and Joyce. Both authors interject a minor literature or language no longer bound to an identitarian or representational image of the world. Each deterritorializes the decorum of language, Kafka by destabilizing, affecting, and exaggerating the tendencies of Prague German, Joyce by breaking with any a priori standards of writing through “the power [of affirming] all the heterogeneous series” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 260). The minoritarian lines opened by Kafka and Joyce posit a belief in the future of the future, opening up a space for a people not yet seen or a people in the process of becoming. In this manner, the minoritarian powers of the false have significant import for the active conceptualization of currere. As the minoritarian works of Kafka and Joyce deterritorialize the decorum of language, so too the active force of currere must draw upon its minor powers in affirmation of its virtual potential for becoming. Such becoming, in turn, opens space(s) for a people not yet seen, a pedagogy for a people yet to come. Introducing a problematics into identitarian thought, the powers of the false “[work] by pushing systems to their intensive states in order to follow traits . . . to reveal their virtual structures or multiplicities” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 114). In this manner, minor art and culture are not additive, but multiplicitous expressions of what a body of art might do. In this vein, the powers of the false productively engender a foreignness in the familiar, problematizing representation through heterogeneity and variation. For example, the manga industry of Japan has recently observed an upsurge in the appropriation of copyrighted characters by individual and collective artists. Japanese otaku (culture designers) have begun to recreate the narratives and characters of mainstream manga, mutating them into unfamiliar genres and reterritorializing them into hidden, taboo, or unrealized storylines. The virtual powers of the false have created novel narrative actualities that have drawn an entirely new fanbase, usurping the popularity of mainstream manga narratives. Further, their virtual powers have explicitly altered the ways in which cultural production is being thought in contemporary Japanese culture. Japanese publishing conglomerates are now overlooking their character copyrights, allowing the otaku to recast their creations into a myriad of morphological affects. The powers of the false might be understood in this way as intimately connected to the enjoinment of the individual to political immediacy (Bogue, 1999). That is, through the works of minor art and culture, the territorial is deterritorialized, thereby rendering the familiar

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foreign in a line of becoming open to the future and a people yet to come. The powers of the false practice the eternal return by affirming the most radical difference that inheres repetition.

Currere and the Positive Simulacrum The powers of the Deleuzian (1983) simulacrum are significant for the active conceptualization of currere. First, the positive simulacrum conceptualized by Deleuze constitutes an ethical orientation to the chance and necessity of experimentation. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), experimentation overturns the a priori image of life advanced by neo-Platonism. Yet, experimentation is more than simply the renunciation of stability. This is where a vast number of postmodern curricular discourses terminate their inquiry. What is maintained in the appeal to pure flow is the a priori commitment to flow. Contrariwise, the Deleuzeguattarian challenge of experimentation abjures all a priori or reactive principals. Only then can one “see what a body can do” (p. 251). Sometimes more stability is what is required. Other times, “a little more flow . . . or escape . . . is needed to shake up an overly rigid system” (Bonta & Protevi, 1004, p. 83). As Deleuze (1983) asserts, reality is actual-virtual. Thinking the actual and virtual as dualistic thus constitutes a philosophical error that lapses back into Platonic reactivity. Second, the positive and creative force of the Deleuzian simulacrum is oriented to the affirmation of life. The will-to-deception, the powers of the false, and minoritarian production respectively escape the closed system of currere’s reactive image. Following Deleuze, curriculum theory that imagines currere as an entropic death-drive or “moribund” replication of the Same fails to think through the virtual powers of the eternal return. Put differently, the entropic image of currere becomes caught in a “frozen futurism” that forecloses on the future. The articulation of a “moribund” curriculum and its dead agent of delivery collapses back into identitarian thought. As Ansell Pearson (1999) writes, the desire for death “assumes that there is an original model of death to be returned to . . . [as] such, the death-drive is a desire for identity” (p. 118). As it is severed from the powers of the eternal return, the image of a dead curriculum is an articulation of Being in its most static and fixed figuration. Such a fixed image of Being is similarly evidenced in the pedagogical compulsion to repeat. Through the habitual repetition of territorialization without becoming, the question of what a pedagogical life can do becomes overdetermined. Such compulsive-repetition is aptly characterized via the symptomatic reproduction of currere’s closed image. The active expression of currere

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is thus a turn against “forms of representation that reduce it to the Same” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. xix). Through the powers of the false mobilized by artists and philosophers, the active conceptualization of currere is an attempt to interject the powers of difference into pedagogical thinking (Roy, 2003, p. 21). In this vein, the Deleuzian challenge shifts from the passivity of the moribund simulacrum to the active force of currere to differ. Put differently, Deleuze shifts the emphasis from what is (Being), to what might become. Yet, it is crucial to reiterate that becoming is not a passive process. Becomings are the active creations, powers of the false, and chance productions of play (jeu) that deterritorialize assignable identities (je). Following, the power of art and philosophy for pedagogy germinates from such powers of becoming and the experimental ethics of the eternal return. Third, the positive simulacrum affirms the creation of new affects and territories. In curriculum terms, the powers of the false refute the act of tracing, that is, of following a map or guide set out in advance. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) eschew the logic of reproduction presumed by the act of tracing, the goal of which “is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start” (p. 13). In contrast, the powers of the false emphatically affirm the cartography of new topographical terrains. The active force of currere is thus not a theater where Being is “staged” in the image of such a priori frames as that of the familial Oedipal drama. Rather, the active conceptualization of currere might be better construed as a factory, a production machine that is immanent and hence, continuously unfolding a multiplicity of potentials for becoming (Lorraine, 1999). The Deleuzian powers of the false in this way challenge pedagogy to create new maps rather than compulsively trace old routes.

4

Becoming-Nomad

The Western is the American cinema’s pride and joy as well as its good will ambassador . . . even during the heyday of the “anti-Western” . . . there was nothing as bluntly dismissive of the United States of America’s very existence as Jarmusch’s cinematic poem of embitterment. (Jones, 1996, p. 45)

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ubsequent to its 1995 Cannes premier, writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man was met with mixed and perplexed reviews. Breaking with the conventional tropes of the Western movie genre, Dead Man, alongside it’s filmic predecessors The Wild Bunch (1962), Little Big Man (1970), Ulzaana’s Raid (1972), and the 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, mobilized a political direction that was distinctly post-Western. Deterritorializing the traditional codes of the Western film, Dead Man recaptured the nightmarish trajectories of colonial genocide, environmental ruination, capital ascension, and the spread of Christian morality normalized by the genre between 1930 and 1960 (Jones, 1996; Levich, 1996; Rickman, 1999). The teleological ideal of progress, the ontological certainty of Eurocentric masculine being, and privileged status of Western rationality were rendered “strange” by Dead Man. As a transgressive line of flight “escaping” the regulative containments of the genre, Jarmusch, along with his film, became an outlaw. As influential movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his damning assessment, “Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is . . . Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning” (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com). There is something distinctly pedagogical haunting Roger’s admonition. In his derisive analysis of Dead Man as strange, slow, and disconcerting, Roger posits a qualitative condition through which new meanings, relations, and modes of evaluation might be created. That is, as Dead Man renders the familiar coordinates of the Western genre strange, a becoming

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is underway. Following Deleuze, this notion of “becoming” is an involution, an involvement that “runs its own line ‘between’ . . . and beneath assignable relations” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 238–239). Complicating the Master narratives of the Western, Jarmusch’s Dead Man creates a new experience of the West. This account is not simply the teleological evolution of the genre, but a new assemblage of its immanent components. It is in this respect that the strange yet creative trajectories inhering Jarmusch’s film constitute a pedagogy of ethical experimentation. While foreign to the project of Western education, Dead Man’s pedagogy recaptures the West in a manner productively incommensurate with its dominant mythemes. As I will attempt to explicate, Dead Man is not simply a metaphor for an ethical pedagogy of experimentation, but rather an experimental pedagogy that opens new relations of history and subjectivity. Jarmusch’s film posits “looking at the same thing in different ways—or looking at different things the same way” (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 13). In Deleuzian terms (1987), Dead Man is a becoming-minor of the Western. Resisting mimesis, Dead Man enunciates new patterns of relation and assemblage across unlikely heterogeneous milieus, altering the dominant cultural terrain while mapping another. For Pinar (2004), the task of curriculum theory is similarly the “creation of untimely concepts . . . acting counter to our time, and thereby on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (p. 22). In this vein, the untimely character of Jarmusch’s Dead Man marks a significant (albeit uncanny) pedagogical hallmark of curriculum theorizing. The “Deal Breaker”: Becoming-minor in Dead Man As a demythologization of Western archetypes and outlaw of overcoded genre tropes, Dead Man constitutes something of a “deal breaker” (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 7). Not only would Dead Man’s Cannes premier signify the end of Jarmusch’s celebrated status as a savvy arthouse raconteur, it would pose an interminable challenge to the profit-driven machine of the corporate film industry. As an outlaw of major motion picture studios, Jarmusch is one of a few independent auteurs who retains ownership of his film negatives. Whereas such venues as Sundance have redefined the success of independent films by their appropriative purchase or backing by major studios, Jarmusch has retained creative control over his developments from the point of their conception to their final cut. This degree of independent control is anomalous in the shifting climate of contemporary filmmaking, wherein the notion of the “independent” film has been territorialized by business models and marketing agendas. Breaking the implicit ideal of corporate filmmaking, Jarmusch retains a nonalienated ethical stance toward his labor.

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Jarmusch’s Dead Man would emerge as a film with distinct political immediacy. Not only does the film assume a First Nations audience, it portrays the underside of Western colonial influence, offering “one of the ugliest portrayals of white American capitalism to be found in American movies” (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 18). It is from this noncanonical, “minor” perspective that the film unfolds. As a “minor” film, Dead Man is an effacement of the power relations traditionally espoused in the Western genre, one that has historically portrayed First Nations’ people as either hedonistic cannibals or noble, mythic savages. Experimenting with the “deformation of the institution, codes, mechanisms and practices,” Dead Man marks what Deleuze and Guattari have described as a deterritorialization, “the decoding of flows on the periphery . . . by means of ‘disarticulation’ that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors” (Bogue, 2005, p. 116; Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 232). Dead Man is in this vein distinctly peripheral, and from this peripheral or “minor” perspective the film exposes the traditional tropes of racism, capitalism, and colonialism that are interred in the territorialized codes of the Western metanarrative. Such a process of deterritorialization is not simply anarchic, but rather opens new trajectories for creative experimentation and political action along “existing vectors of force actualized through various patterns of discursive practice” (Bogue, 2004, p. 72). The “Acid” Western Constituted by sociolects and idiolects, the poetic body of Dead Man deviates from a standard filmic syntax, thereby deterritorializing the language of the Western. Such deterritorialization detaches the traditional syntax of the film “from its clearly delineated, regularly gridded territory of conventions, codes, labels, and markers” (Bogue, 2005, pp. 111–112). In this vein, Rosenbaum (2000) forwards the epithet “acid western” in his description of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The “acid” or “peripheral” Western is a narrative body “open” to peyote visions and hallucinogenic experiences. It is a body that assembles with heterogeneous components and synaesthetic modes of perception. Obscuring the delineated lines between imagination and reality, conscious and unconscious, self and other, Dead Man is “more like a ghostly burnt-out shell of a Western,” a nonhabitual Deleuzeguattarian (1987) Body without Organs (BwO)1 (Martin, 1996). The surreal nomadic journey of Jarmusch’s Dead Man is a narrative of transversal becomings that are not simply metaphoric but metamorphic. Altering the relations of its components, Dead Man posits the historicity of the West as a variable, interactive, negotiable, and contestable story of becoming rather than a metanarrative fixed by asymmetrical relations of power (Bogue, 2005).

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The minor is always both personal and political, mobilizing peripheral elements beyond current identities and images of the West/Western. In Dead Man, this process of becoming-minor marks an ethical engagement with political and aesthetic difference. Such difference is an interminable practice or set of practices replete with immanent pedagogical trajectories (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Jarmusch’s disposition toward creative agency, syntactical experimentation, and the deterritorialization of the canon each marks a pedagogical ethics of singularity. The becoming-minor or deterritorializing force of Dead Man suggests a practice of personal experimentation that is concomitantly a political action and performative act. Returning the nightmare landscapes of destruction and genocide to the Western, Dead Man overthrows traditional systems of judgment and relations organizing the filmic code. As “major” or dominant codes of text are deterritorialized via the assemblage of peripheral forces, new lines of revolutionary or libratory flight are potentially realized via Dead Man’s pedagogical ethics of experimentation. Following Vähämäki and Virtanen (2006), “thought can move, extend and connect only after the [mutation] of meaning . . . only then can thought effect a disequilibrium” (p. 209). Jarmusch’s filmic act is pedagogical insofar as it engenders complex patterns of relation untethered from a priori ontological or teleological ideals. Disengaged from “the task of representing the world,” such deterritorializations “assemble a new type of reality” without according to a fixed actuality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 343/280). Yet, the forms of friction and abrasion mobilized in Dead Man emerge from a productive conflict that effect the “material and sensible” territories of discourse (Vähämäki & Virtanen, 2006, p. 209). Eliciting the difficult questions of economic violence, the absence of the other, and the founding violence of the Western frontier, Dead Man inaugurates an ethics through dissymmetrical/disjunctive micropolitical (molecular) action. Cartographic Lines The journey of Dead Man’s focal character, William “Bill” Blake, is marked by a deterritorialization that opens a series of immanent lines of flight. Yet, a line of flight can be a dangerous thing, and Blake exists along-two (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). First, there is a contiguity of territory “on which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 195). We learn that Blake is an accountant from Cleveland, a welleducated and cultured individual. His life is segmented by molar codes of class, profession, manner, and intellectual cultivation. Blake’s journey is conceived as two points, Cleveland at its beginning and the frontier

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town of Machine at its terminus. Early into the film, Blake’s journey is measured by the passing time of his pocket watch, while the written Word of Dickinson2 signifies the confirmation of his position at the metalworks. His journey to Machine might thus be conceived as “a future but no becoming” (p. 195). Tracing a molar line West, Blake’s lifeline is semiotically constructed via the repetitive churning of steam engine wheels and the limit-cycle swaying of a kerosene lamp affixed to the coach ceiling. The molar line fabricated by Jarmusch repeats itself in a self-enclosed loop. Nothing seems to live in the midst of this repetition, and yet nothing dies. Blake’s symbolic position might be defined similarly. While his education, clothing, and mannerisms provide him with a privileged position in the world, his life is frozen as it traces an a priori molar path. While molar lines confer a life in the Symbolic order, Blake is devoid of vitality. The second line or supple segmentation in this opening sequence escapes the molar ordering of the rigid, calculable segment (AlbrechtCrane, 2005). This second line is particularly apparent in the stuttering style of Jarmusch’s prologue to Dead Man. Ruptured by a series of fades, the constancy of the molar segment is positioned upon a chasm crosscut by “secret lines of disorientation or deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 196). Molar territories are not simply fixed or permanent, but undergo molecular or supple change. While the familiar trope of the steam engine becomes relational to Blake’s aspirations for a new life in Machine, the supple or molecular line of Dead Man’s opening sequence interrupts this journey of prosperity. Against the molar certainty of his contractual letter of employment (the Word), the engine’s fireman cautions, “You’re just as likely to find your grave.” Early into his trip, he is admired by the coach passengers, each time he awakens from the stuttering, impersonal time of the journey, his privileged position and hierarchical status is decoded. Waking each time to a new set of relations with his co-passengers and surroundings, Blake changes from the erect and aloof intellectual to the semiparanoid milksop cowering behind a leather satchel. Blake’s body, a mirror of Dead Man’s opening title shot, begins to disperse. As Blake travels into the deterritorialized and wild landscapes of the West, the terms of his molar segmentation markedly mutate. His new world becomes painted on his flesh (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The stuttering prologue to Dead Man is an immanent molecular line within the rigid molar segmentation. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, reacting upon each other, introducing into each other either a current of suppleness or a point of rigidity” (p. 196). The pedagogical import of these two intersecting lines exists in the molecular or supple segment. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) avoid the binary conceptualization of

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molar/molecular and rigid/supple by conceptualizing how these lines are irremediably knotted. The interspersion of molar and molecular lines “open” the way in which we might understand Blake’s journey West. Territories are not established a priori, nor are they immutable structures. Rather, territories/territorializations are immanently in/de/formed by distributive micromovements. The prologue of Dead Man follows the pulse of such imperceptible micromovements, punctuating the ostensible monotony of the journey with a “stuttering” of deterritorializations. The rigid character of Blake’s body is “opened” via such micromovements to new patterns of relation and perception. Indeed, throughout Jarmusch’s opening scenes, the sedentary Blake is becoming-other, though we have yet to grasp what he might be capable of becoming. This is as much a political as it is a perceptual affair. Politically, rigid segmentarities (break lines) create patterns of interference with supple segmentarities (crack lines) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Within overcoded discursive structures are submerged immanent lines of molecularity (details in details), roller coasters of possibility, “tiny movements that have not yet reached the edge,” and “segments that move by jerks” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 201). Pedagogical life is cartographically crosscut by such molar and molecular lines. While molar lines break things up into definable segments, vast outlines, and binary structures, molecular lines can crack open molar segmentations, leading to new patterns and nonbinary distributions. What we might take for the curriculum-as-plan is not a fixed territory. Rather, the cartography of the curricular plan is crosscut by molecular lines, potential paths of negotiation that undercut the illusion of curriculum implementation as a molar tracing rather than a cartographical map-making. In this image, pedagogical life is reduced to an effect of preestablished functions rather than an “imaginative mapping” of potentials (Gough, 2004, p. 254). That is, while the broad molar segment of the curriculum prescribes nondeviant repetition, immanent molecular lines conceive unique passages untethered from the reactive plan-as-tracing. These personally political molecular lines of negotiation have the capacity to push pedagogical conditions toward productive deterritorialization. Indeed, the significant classroom “event” is often punctuated by an active molecular line of flight that acts like a wedge, allowing for creative “escapes” (Aoki, 2005d). Rather than route/ root tracing, the molecular line supposes the immanent cartographical creation of curricular maps. As Aoki advocates, “[i]f . . . being and becoming . . . matters in education, it behooves us to transform [the ways we think] of school life such that multiple meanings of the word curriculum can prevail” (p. 420).

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Lines of Flight: Molar (Arborescent) and Molecular (Rhizomatics) Cartographies Machine, that’s the end of the line . . . What is it that you expect to find out there . . . out there in Hell?

Blake’s future at Dickinson’s Metalworks is haunted by the molecular “stutter” of his disorienting journey West. As he enters the town of Machine, Blake’s backdrop is permeated by grizzly harbingers of death. Animal skulls, newly built caskets, and plumes of ethereal smoke from Dickenson’s Metalworks bisect his languorous walk down the town’s main street. His foreignness and naivety are marked by his amusement at a horse pissing in the street and surprise at the sight of a prostitute performing oral sex in an alley. Entering the office of Dickinson’s Metalworks, Blake is dealt another jarring molar break: his promised position is already filled. Nearly penniless, Blake informs the office clerk (John Hurt) that he wishes to speak to Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) directly. Erupting into mocking laughter, the clerk ominously confirms Blake’s request, granting him access to the boss’ office. A human skull, animal bones, a taxidermy bear, and pile of money semiotically construct Dickinson who appears in a hitherto empty chair with a loaded doublebarrel shotgun pointed directly at Blake. “The only job you’re gonna get in here is pushing up daisies from a pine box,” Dickinson deadpans. As Blake swiftly leaves the Metalworks, he becomes lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the factory. With a last few coins, Blake visits Machine’s saloon where he meets Thel (Mili Avatel), a paper flower producer-seller with whom he becomes instantly enamored. Returning to Thel’s hotel room, the scene is cut by another secretive black out, whereupon she and Blake lie together in bed. Reaching under one of the pillows, Blake produces a gun, “Why do you have this?” he queries. “Because this is America,” Thel responds, taking the gun from Blake’s hand. Suddenly, Thel’s ex-lover Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) appears through the chamber doorway. Incensed by Thel’s revoked love, Charlie draws his pistol, training its site upon Blake. As he fires, Thel shields his body, dying instantly.3 A shocked Blake produces Thel’s pistol, awkwardly firing two errant rounds into the hotel wall before ingloriously shooting Charlie in the neck. Nearly passing out, Blake realizes that Charlie’s bullet has passed through Thel and entered his chest. Fleeing the hotel via the window, Blake “falls” hard to the ground. Against the star speckled night sky, an errant meteor suddenly streaks across the heavens. This meteor is Blake, a rogue unfixed object in the night, blazing without destination or reason. Gathering the last of his strength, Blake rides from

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Machine on a stolen horse, becoming a chaosmodic outlaw figure against the night sky. When the fireman warns in Dead Man’s prologue that Machine is the end of the line, he suggests something of Blake’s immanent line of escape. Blazing in tension with the limits of the atmosphere’s threshold, Blake is driven beyond the interiority of Machine’s capital forces. As molar lines dissolve, Blake begins to live an unlife outside of the rigid segmentarity interpelled by the capital apparatus. The quanta of his molecular lines run-off in rhizomatic, multiplicitous disorganization, producing new offshoots and patterns of relation. Yet, death need not be the unproductive black hole of Machine, the site of Dickinson’s centralized, destructive power (Braidotti, 2006); Nor need it be the “end” as conferred by the rigidity of the hierarchical (quantitative) arborescent4 line (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Entwined with State codes of accumulative vertical progress and development, the model of arborescence functions “on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (p. 12). The arborescent line is alone a deadly force overcoding the singularity of a life, a factory-machine that systematically territorializes its components into organized, static structures. Lives are conceived along this arborescent line, and indeed, one might imagine accountant Bill Blake as its sedentary, anxious ideal. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “we are always afraid of losing . . . the great molar organizations that [sustain] us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well defined status . . . the system of overcoding that dominates us” (p. 227). What happens outside the interiority of the arborescent model is uncertain, and hence, we cling to the rigid molar segments that territorialize immanent lines of flight, resignifying exactly who, where, and what we are. Nothing escapes this arborescent model that is not dubbed mutant. Yet, the active pedagogical lesson of Dead Man comes from such mutant or monstrous flows. Crosscutting the arborescent codes inscribed upon the flesh of the organism are often imperceptible lines that germinate from the middle (rhizomatically), crossing molar thresholds and borders. It is via such horizontal movement that we might crack open “the shield of tedium and predictability in which we wrap ourselves up in order to get through the day” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 215). Of such cracks, Dead Man is an extreme, yet instructional example. As Braidotti (2006) suggests, death can become a “point in a creative synthesis of flows, energies, and becomings . . . removed from the metaphysics of finitude, it is neither the significant closure, nor the defining border of human existence” (p. 235). While the arborescent model posits death as a finality, the molecular or rhizomatic line has yet to reach its

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definitive limit point. The rhizomatic line grows intermezzo, shattering the linearity of the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In the early scenes of Dead Man, the narrative extends from its middle to form connections outside of its textual body. Jarmusch’s early allusion to poet William Blake’s Book of Thel (1789/2006) cross-cuts the self-contained body of the film. In Blake’s eight-plate book, Thel is a wandering nomad, consumed with the question of springtime’s waning and the end of all things. Plagued by the question of death, Thel consults a cloud, a worm, and clod of clay for clear answers, and yet, is uncomforted. The cloud avers that while things appear to disappear, they imperceptibly remain, the clay that one must live not for oneself, but in openness to others. Accountant Bill Blake’s line of flight intersects with that of Thel as his lifeline is nomadically opened to otherness. Implicate within reactive molar lines, an imperceptible multitude of virtual lines vegetate. Such multiplicity is different from sheer multiplication, which is, after all, an anagram of accumulation. Multiplicity might rather be understood as means of opening to nonresemblant, heterogeneous, mutagenic elements (Marks, 1999). Rather than the accumulation of such tropes as the ascetic hypermasculine hero of the Western, Dead Man opens new passages of thinking the Western/West. Blake is not the macho stranger of the prototypical Western, nor the grandiose hero of “major” texts.5 Instead, he is a bumbling, awkward, and apprehensive creature of habit. This is neither to say that Blake is an archetypal “everyman,” certainly, his commonness is dispersed as he becomes an anomaly during the course of his journey West. Whereas multiplication might accrue selfsame meanings as to reterritorialize familiar tropes, outlines, and binary codes, multiplicity carries the potential of morphologically altering the familiar operative conditions upon which structure unfolds. In this vein, the pedagogical molar overdetermination of the organism is deterritorialized by the implicate order of the singularity, the vital life that springs in the midst of decay and morbidity. While informed by molar codes, pedagogical life might more accurately be described as a singularity. Like the rhizomatic connections of Jarmusch’s film, currere’s active force deterritorializes the often debilitating illusion of the curriculum as a self-enclosed document or route/root to be traced. In such tracings, the productive desires of the classroom are territorialized along the projected image of the molar line that proceeds incrementally from one point to the next toward its teleological terminus. It is this image of curriculum that today requires new concepts for thinking difference. As Aoki (2005d) writes, “the word curriculum . . . feels choked, out of breath, caught in a landscape . . . [of] splendid instrumentalism” (p. 423). In this impoverished model of pedagogy, lines of molecular escape become

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terrible rem(a)inders of the molar orders’ nonunified structure, the very excess it means to control. Dead Man becomes an important example in this respect. Exterior to centralizing molar powers, a life of vital creativity and political action might be constituted. At the periphery of logos, a nomadic (nomos) “exteriority . . . very different from the ‘law’ . . . [exists] in its own metamorphoses” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 360). A pedagogical life is necessarily a vital line that assembles with productive elements outside of “itself,” undergoing metamorphic mutations of “another species, of another nature, of another origin” (p. 354). In the midst of the reactive curricular molar line that “we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking,” molecular flashes open broad connections of relation or assemblage that require a cartographical orientation to curriculum map-making (p. 354). Yet, the cartographical borders of a life have yet to be drawn, for no Euclidian edge can be signified without the destructive cutting force of the molar line.6 Perhaps the greatest degree of ruination occurs when the opportunity for molecular movement is redistributed along habitual and modeled lines of thinking. Such redistribution of the Same marks a nonvital death drive that wards off death through compulsion and habitual repetition. It is an ontological error to assume this is what curriculum documents demand of pedagogical practice. As Deleuze and Guattari aver, molar lines and molecular lines are knotted. Too much time on either line could spell disaster.

Recapturing the Nomad Blake regains consciousness somewhere along the periphery of Machine as a lone Indian7 (Gary Farmer) attempts to cut the bullet from his chest. “There’s White Man’s metal next to your heart,” the Indian informs a struggling Blake, “I tried to cut it out, but it’s too deep inside. The knife could cut your heart and release the spirit from within . . . stupid fucking white man.” Meanwhile, Charlie’s father turns out to be none other than the patriarchal figure of Dickenson. Vengeful over the death of his son, Dickinson deploys three bounty hunters to hunt down the outlaw Blake.8 As they take flight into the nowhere lands surrounding Machine, Blake appears without a future, condemned to a struggle against the State apparatus that is lost from the start (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). “Did you kill the white man who killed you?” the Indian queries. “I’m not dead,” Blake replies coyly as the Indian looks upon him with a grave expression. After a punctuating silence, the Indian asks “What name were you given at birth, stupid white man?” Blake is ignorant to his symbolic death, an outlaw to

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the sovereign order, which now seeks his capture and reterritorialization. This is of course the tendency of molar ordering, to recapture and recode anomalous growths and outlaw lines of flight. Jarmusch’s original screenplay includes a scene in which a nearly incoherent Blake asks his Indian friend why he is helping him (Rosenbaum, 2000). “A bird told me,” the Indian replies. In the original script, this scene refers to the indigo bunting, a rare psychedelic bird with iridescent plumage. When the Indian first encounters Blake’s body, the bird is drinking blood from his bullet wound. Thereafter, the indigo bunting flies in a straight line toward the Western horizon. Yet, this is not simply a “sign.” It is in connection with the indigo bunting that “an alliance with another human group” is created (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 247). A bloodied yet beautiful bird projected along the molar line of the West, Blake passes through his humanistic character and becomes-animal. Through their mutual affinity with the indigo bunting, Blake and the nomadic Indian become bound in a new tribal assemblage. Breaking with the established norms of Western rationality, the boundaries between man/animal, and privileged clarity of the Word are deterritorialized, creating new borderlines of alliance that are neither those of the family or the State (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, this new alliance is an expression of a minoritarian group, a group that is “oppressed, prohibited . . . or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, accompanied . . . by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established” (p. 247). As Bill Blake becomes exteriorized, his line of flight risks the pursuit of the State apparatus and institutional recoding. Yet, passing through the strange mediating forces not unlike the indigo bunting of Dead Man, a singular cartography is created. Such passages are not simply traumatic, but potentially morphogenic, mutating the traditional borderlines of instrumentalism and humanism that code the molar curriculum line. Such mutation elicits the question of what it means to live pedagogically. In this vein, May (2005) proposes, “if living is a matter of the unfolding of vital difference, then the one that lives can either be less or more or other than a person” (p. 24). As practiced in Dead Man, the curriculum might be conceptualized as a process of becoming. In other words, there is no transcendental pedagogical prescription upon which we might rely: Teach thus (May, 2005)! Nietzsche’s pronouncement of God’s death is an ontological provocation. It enjoins one to a life without deferral to transcendental authorities. Indeed, the Nietzsche-Deleuzian question is distinctly ontological, a challenge concerning “the creation of concepts of difference . . . [through

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which] we may find a variety of understandings of ourselves, and this variety of understandings may open up a variety of futures to be lived” (May, 2005, p. 24). In this manner, the curriculum might be conceptualized as a BwO, a plane of immanence or virtuality from which elements have yet to be actualized. Separating us from habitual thinking, and yet, raising us to action, the realization of the virtual plane might be immanently creative and unique. Like the rhizome, the plane of immanence is micropolitical in its tendency to “escape” habitual molar tracings and the dogmatism of opinion (doxa). Yet, such “escapes” are constitutive rather than solipsistic. They assemble to bring something new into existence, a phoenix from cinnamon ash. Irreducible to the play of creative imagination, this commitment to making a strange curriculum cartography is a consideration that “the world (or, since the concept of the world is too narrow, things or being or what there is) outruns any of the categories we might seek to use to capture it” (May, 2005, p. 81). The molar habit of capture underscores the project of much contemporary schooling, which epistemologically territorializes the curricular map as a tracing of what is already known and what everyone already knows. The willing-death alluded by Zourabichvili (1996) purports a different way of proceeding pedagogically. It suggests an ethical stance of negotiating the curriculum with difference, of snatching vitality back from habitual modes of practice and thought. In this Spinozian turn, we have yet to realize what a curricular body can do. As Deleuze remarks of the philosophical endeavor, pedagogy is the work of “forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2). This is neither the discovery curriculum of which Doll (1993) warns, nor the humanistic closed loop of creation for its own sake. Indeed, even the most exploratory works can emerge in deep conformism to established categories of opinion (doxa) and representation. Such a pedagogy simply rediscovers the “State,” the “Church,” and the values of a transcendent object through an orthopedic reliance upon dogmatic images of thought. As Deleuze (1994) writes, “how could [one] not be isolated when they deny what “everybody knows”?” (p. 130). Such becoming-minor is in-part the price of nonconformism to representational forms that are already possessed by the State and doxa of popular culture. It is a question, Deleuze continues, “of someone—if only one—with the necessary modesty [of] not managing to know what everybody [already] knows” (p. 130). The Schizo: Who/Where is William “Bill” Blake? When Blake reveals his name, his Indian benefactor flies into a rage. “Is this a lie, or a White man’s trick?” he challenges. As Blake assures him that

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he is indeed who he says, the Indian replies, “Then you are a Dead Man.” Blake admits his confusion. “But I understand, William Blake,” the Indian recounts, “you are a poet, and a painter, and now you are a killer of White men.” In this exchange, the conventions of the Western are ruptured. The exchange between the Blake and the Indian is unhinged from the asymmetrical power relation of the one who knows against the ignorant savage. It is instead the Indian who is versed in the romantic poetry of William Blake, and Blake himself who is oblivious to its meaning. “Every night, and every morn, some to misery are born,” the Indian recites from memory, “every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight . . . some are born to endless night.” This recitation from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (1757) does not simply invert the binary power relations of the traditional Western film. Rather, it marks the stain of colonial influence in the West perpetuated by the State educational apparatus. Yet, the way such influence is taken up in Dead Man might be more profound than its simply repressive interpretation would allow. The aphoristic poetry of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are captured by the Indian and made his own. Following the death of a transcendent God, the words of an author invariably take on idiosyncratic and singular meanings to their users. Even the most ostensibly territorialized modes of speech can become idiolectical. While this does not negate the haunt of genocide interred in the Indian’s story, it does suggest the capacity for one to assemble with molecular elements interring within the State apparatus. As Rosenbaum (2001) writes, “Some of the Blake adages [the Indian] quotes . . . sound like [First Nation’s] sayings to Blake and to us, and conversely, some of [the Indian’s] own pronouncements sound like the poetry of Blake” (p. 74). As it coincides with the historical context of Dead Man, the publication of Blake’s poetry and art was largely considered the work of madness, informed as it was by hallucinations and conversations with Old Testament prophets. Hostile toward the established Church, Blake developed his own religion articulated in such prophetic books as The Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Anomalous in his time, Blake’s works defied categorical recognition, escaping the doxa of the State and Church apparatus. Rosenbaum’s (2001) assessment of Dead Man as an acid Western is recapitulated in the artworks of Blake, who etched via the “infernal method” of corroding plates with acid. As Blake avers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), this practice melts away apparent surfaces, revealing the “infinite” that was hid. Blake’s “infernal method” is apparent in Dead Man, wherein the strange journey of accountant Bill Blake is concomitantly the creation of a BwO or uncoded body without organs. This plane of immanence is “infinite” insofar as it is a virtuality prior to distribution.

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Deterritorializing the Body-Machine Producing the gun used to shoot Charlie, the Indian asks if Blake knows how to use the weapon. “Not really,” says Blake resignedly, in contrast to the gun-slinging hero of the traditional Western. “That weapon will replace your tongue,” the Indian instructs, “you will learn to speak through it, and your poetry will now be written with blood.” The organized, overcoded body is deterritorialized as new assemblages are created. The gun becomes Blake’s tongue, his speech a nomadic idiolect aimed at pursuing agents of capture. In this deterritorialization of the coded body, poetry becomes a revolutionary power against sovereignty, a language of war “in the position of betraying everything” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 354). Called to action through an ontological metamorphoses of being, Cleveland accountant Bill Blake is no longer one, but multiple. That is, as he assembles with elements of the natural landscape, with the poetry of his namesake, and weapons of war, he can no longer be thought of as a unified Being. Rather than points on a linear, arborescent line, Blake develops “peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 378). Blake’s becoming does not occur in isolation, but in relationship to his new tribal assemblage. Through creative pedagogical misrecognition, Blake is enabled to embark on a quest of becoming that cracks his sedentary life. The quantitative framing of Blake as an accountant is opened to immanent qualitative directions. In this vein, his becoming is not simply additive (n+1), but qualitatively transformative, extending in directions that vitalize through productive increases in agency. Both the poetry of William Blake and the gun that deterritorializes the tongue posit a productive pathos (an antilogos and antimythos). Against the moribund subject determined by language, Dead Man creates new modes of speaking. First, through the differential repetition of a Blake’s aphoristic thought and second, through the deterritorialization of the tongue in place of a weapon. Following Artaud, Deleuze asks, “What is a thought which harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else?” (1994, p. 135). Nomadic speech is a dangerous thing, its poetry written in the vitalizing medium of blood. Yet, in the deterritorialization of Blake’s tongue and the creation of an idiolect, a form of counterharm emerges. Blake’s encounter with the “minor” language of nomadism mobilizes an immanent singularity. Untethered from alienating molar discourses, Blake’s “minoritarian” speech is an opening into which he becomes, inaugurating a new condition for life dispossessed by the petrifying imposition of language. The privileged discursive coordinates of clarity

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demanded by the molar order are supplemented by Blake’s deterritorialized affective speech. Instead of the self-contained, rational text, Blake’s poetry becomes an affect that “sweeps [one] away . . . [such that] no subjective interiority remains” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 356). “Affects transpierce the body like arrows,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “they are weapons of war” (p. 256). Moral transcendent values and the patriarchal father figure of Dickinson (the Law) are transformed by Blake’s Indian benefactor. The Indian is not the great teacher or master that one might have expected. Indeed, their aggregate relationship is marked by a distinct absence of hierarchy. That is, one cannot tell who is teaching whom. Blake appears to ruminate deeply on the very axioms the Indian attributes to Blake (“the eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow”). There is a pedagogical relation herein that does not easily accord to contemporary teaching and learning or models of psychoanalytic transference. Instead, Blake and the Indian are nonhierarchically knotted, an aggregate “tribe in the desert” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 379). No great teacher emerges with the lesson to be learned, and for as much as he seems to listen, Blake learns nothing, betraying the traditional pedagogical moment (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). As Dead Man emerges as a filmic “deal breaker,” so too might minoritarian curricular thought break with the established molar coordinates of clarity, unity, and subjectivity that are its hallmarks. Curriculum theory continues to develop vital minoritarian lines. As a “fuzzy aggregate,” the field exhibits desubjectivized schizo tendencies. That is, its discursive cartographies are not unified but disjunctive, not one, but multiple. The field extends outside of any compartmental limits, traversed by the errant tendencies of myriad disciplines. Assembling minoritarian, peripheral positions, the claim to an interiorized self-evidence is deterritorialized. In Dead Man, the strange aphorisms of William Blake and deterritorialization of the tongue enable a constitutive line of escape from sedentary life. For curricular thinkers and cartographers, this practice of taking up the arrows left by other thinkers is instructive. Yet, such arrows need not proceed along readymade trajectories. Indeed, if we are to take Deleuze seriously, curriculum theorizing must perform a kind of buggery (enculage) whereby the works of others are reproduced with difference in lieu of blind conformism. Such conformism is marked by a “refusal to think, to act, to live in accordance with a difference that is always there, always subsisting within the world that is presented to us” (p. 170). The practice of difference articulated in Dead Man bespeaks a way of living a pedagogical life, “living [as] a matter of the actualization of difference” (May, 2005, p. 170).

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The Colonial Haunt “What is your name?” Blake eventually asks his companion. “My name is Nobody,” the Indian replies. As a child of mixed blood, Nobody articulates his marginalization by both the Apsaalooke (Crow) and Amskaapi Pikanii (Blackfoot) tribes of his father and mother. “This mixture was not respected,” Nobody admits. Between the accepted genealogical bloodlines of his parents, Nobody exists with Blake at the periphery of the Law. Captured by a deployment of English troops as a child, Nobody was imprisoned, and subsequently sent to the courts of Europe as a “savage” curiosity. Yet, as Nobody learned to mimic his European captors, his novelty as an alien other quickly grew tiresome. No longer a rogue line to be recaptured, Nobody was integrated into mainstream English schooling, wherein he became enraptured by the poetry and art of William Blake. Escaping his imperial captors, Nobody returns to the tribes from which he was ostracized as a child. Believing his tale of great adventure will finally procure him social recognition amongst his peoples, his account is conversely met with spiteful laughter and dismissed as lies. Dispossessed to the abject limit of both American Indian and European cultures, Nobody is renamed Xebeche, “He who talks loud, says nothing.” “I prefer being called Nobody,” he confesses to Blake. The emphasis on ontological experimentation and the creation for new conditions for living ostensibly evades the influence of history and historical forces. However, history is not irrelevant. The strange journey of Dead Man, while deterritorializing the ontological categories of conventional identity, are significantly entwined with historical processes, “the virtual character of the past as it inhabits the present” (May, 2005, p. 115). The story of Nobody exemplifies the historical character of colonization, the fetishization of the “savage” and the subsumption of alternative lifelines under the universalizing values of the colonials. Nobody’s preferred name marks not only his nomadic becoming, but the erasure of First Nations’ people under the ostensibly benign banners of progress, capital and religious prosperity. In Dead Man, the aboriginal population is literally erased from the landscape of the Western frontier. Yet, Nobody’s story is not entirely the product of historical forces of colonization in the Western. This is not to say that his lifeline is not irremediably entwined with molar forces of organization and oppression, rather that such molar lines are populated by fields of difference. The conceptualization of the subject as wholly constructed via sociohistorical forces is itself a denial of vital difference and an appeal to “the dogmatic image of thought [wherein] there are already constituted [stable] identities” (p. 120). May (2006) writes, “[h]istory is the folding and unfolding of particular swarms of difference

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in particular relationships” (p. 115). Our present situation is inhabited by realms of difference, molecular lines that interrupt and crosscut the molar. This is not to say that anything is possible, but rather under the right conditions, we do not yet know what is possible (May, 2005). Lines of difference populate the historical field. In its creation of frontier life as a space of possibility amidst oppressive molar forces, Dead Man emerges from such a differential historical plane. The acid Western is thus not a creation separate from the “official history” of the West, but a differential assemblage indwelling the Western historical project. Nobody produces connections rather than searches for rediscovery along the established lines of the State and Church apparatus. In this way, Nobody escapes the closed identity politics that would render him a recognizable, and hence governable subject. Nobody is unbound by the moral or structural edicts of any one belief, and like his luminary William Blake, creates a new line of religious and spiritual flight untethered by the deep structures of orthodox dogmatism. In this sense, no transcendent figure or morality is transposed upon the identity of Nobody. Producing connections opposed to pursuing “deep” needs, Nobody is in a process of becoming through the development of a unique idiolect and orientation to the world. When Blake’s life is later threatened by three trappers enacting a perverse rendition of the Oedipal triangle, Nobody becomes a bolt of lighting, appearing instantly, and slicing the throat of Blake’s antagonist. In a later scene, Nobody ingests peyote and has a sacred vision of Blake becoming-death. Each of these rhizomatic connections, becomings of different intensities and durations, arise from Nobody’s immanent relationships opposed to transcendent structures. For the nomadic Nobody, there is no organizing matrix “that imposes specific modes of connections from outside or above” (May, 2005, p. 126). Rather, Nobody practices a kind of productive desire through which new conditions for how one might live arise. Passing Through the Mirror: Diagrammatic9 Components Throughout Dead Man, there is an active schizo doubling at work: The overcoded mills of Machine at the “beginning” and the Makah village at the “end,” the molar sojourn on the train and the chaosmodic voyage in the sea canoe, the unified ego of Blake and his schizo becoming-multiple. “Punctuated by losses of consciousness and fade-outs,” actuality is crosscut by deterritorializing, multiplicitous potentials (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 76). The nomadic movement of Nobody and Blake cannot be pinned down or attributed to a line marked by definitive beginnings and ends, points of view, or positions of moral privilege. The doubling effect of the acid

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Western is in part marked by its perspectival shift from that of “White” anthropocentrism to the peripheral perspective of non-Whites (Indians, animals, environments). Similarly, the acid Western moves from majoritarian models of capture to minoritarian peripheral practices of constitutive escape. As I have asserted, Dead Man is a performative, minoritarian work in its creation of a revisionist West, one that does not elide the nightmarish history of religious, industrial, and colonial genocide. Against nihilistic cynicism, “a thin but fabulous hope” emerges in such movements: “that of becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making” (Massumi, 1987a). The Deleuzian challenge of experimental deterritorialization is intimate to a pedagogical life of our own making. It is, as Massumi avers, a thin and fabulous hope. Its success is not guaranteed, and akin to the story of Dead Man, might ultimately prove too much, enveloping us entirely. This is, of course, the risk of journeying out on molecular lines. Yet, curriculum theory must continue to posit such experimental lines of flight, passing through the mirror of its own self-resemblances and representations. As Buchanan (2004) suggests, “stratification is secondary” (p. 14). As such, it is spurious to take deterritorialization as a process whereby something is removed from an a priori unified entity (ibid.). To understand deterritorialization as primary intimates that the limits attributed to pedagogical practices are effects of sedimentation. Following, we must question the territorializations of the field in terms of what they do, how they capture desire, and form an image of life’s limits. “We are always quelconque—we are and remain ‘anybodies’ before we become ‘somebodies’” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 14). Such an approach suggests a “making strange” the field of curriculum theory in such a way as to open new passages for the conceptualization of teaching and learning. An opportunity for thinking differently about the “in-structured” body of the student also emerges in the making strange of curriculum theory (Aoki, 2005d, p. 423). Against the a priori organ-ization of the body along developmental and regulatory images, we might begin to think the body “outside any determined state, poised for any action in its reparatory . . . the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality” (Massumi, 1992, p. 70). In this vein, the creation of a body without organs is conceived as a virtual opening for the emergence of the new, having “nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 8). The body without organs is therefore the opposite of the body image, that is, the representation of the body as a genetically encoded, biochemically constituted, or State-controlled organism. The challenge of experimentation is also a provocation to commandeer the field for the obscure purposes of unhinging the mythologies and

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ontology of the West. To do anything less would claim satisfaction with the molar segment and acquiesce: There is nothing more than what is already present! Perhaps such experimentation is unavoidable so long as desire is understood as constitutive (desiring-production) and not negative. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, becomings must first be created. Yet, there is an “art of caution” that must be cast into play when one proceeds experimentally, “[y]ou don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file” (p. 160). In the creation of monstrous contagions and minoritarian performative acts, a productive deal-breaking is engendered. This is not simply a cynical tactic of causing trouble for its own sake. It is rather an approach to the world that suggests other ways of proceeding. Such an approach might very well require the radical betrayal of obese intellectual territories, “deep” structures, and accumulated egoic profits. It is a practice, as Rosenbaum writes, of “looking at the same thing in different ways—or looking at different things the same way” (p. 13). This double movement concomitantly bespeaks a practice of nonbinarized multiplicity and singularity, the multiplicitous potentialities of a life. To engage in life as an experimental endeavor of multiplicitous becomings, we risk a form of Symbolic death if nothing but to create a new way of proceeding posthumously.10 Such is not the finite death of the body, but its morphological transformation along exploratory lines.


5

Becoming-Music: Improvisation and Instrumentalism in Curriculum Theory

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n Aoki’s (2005a) curriculum seminar featuring jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew, the question of music’s import to curriculum theorizing is explicitly posed. Toward this question, Shew’s performance addresses two lines of inquiry. First, “When does an instrument cease to be an instrument?” and second, “What is improvisation?” (p. 367). These lines of inquiry remain significant to the contemporary field of curriculum theorizing as a way of exploring the potentials of what a curricular body can do. As Aoki avers, Shew’s performance would intersect the instrumental image of pedagogical life captured in the language of goals, objectives, production, and achievement. Under the hold of “technocratic rationality,” Aoki remarks to Shew, “a way to do, has become the way to do, indifferent to differences in the lived world of teachers and students” (p. 368). Territorialized in the image of a closed, overdetermined model, currere is severed from its constitutive powers of becoming. By Aoki’s admission, his inquiry with Bobby Shew seeks “a way out” of instrumental thinking (p. 368). What is being escaped in Aoki’s thought experiment but the Platonic Form of Unity, the “integrated totality” in which the reactive image of an “integrated” curriculum is territorialized? (p. 370). The ideal of Platonic Harmony, Aoki writes, suggests a “fitting together, a con-c(h)ord, and integration of sounds” (p. 370). In the Western world, such an ideal image of dialectical synthesis has been conflated with moral goodness and truth. The Roman orator Quintilian for example, lectured on a fictional legal case in which a musician is charged with manslaughter for playing in the wrong mode during a sacrifice. By playing in the Phrygian mode, Quintilian argues, a piper causes an officiating priest to hurl himself over a cliff in a fit of madness (Walser, 1993).

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By way of its unique chord structure, it is significant that the Phrygian mode produces an unstable and ominous tone, in turn creating the uncanny effect of a shadow, or looming second timbre. Hence, the caveat issued in Quintilian’s case cautions against a multiplicity of expressions in lieu of a more integrated tonal register. Perhaps more significantly, Quintilian’s rhetorical case counsels on the powerful affective force of musical modulation, the way it assembles with the body and comes into conflict with the powers of the law. In his inquiry of musicological forces, Aoki cautions on the privileged rhetoric of harmony and integration. Shifting away from the common valuation of harmony, Aoki advances the mediation of Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki: “To seek harmony is to kill nature, to stop its pulsations, and to embrace the dead corpse that is left behind” (p. 371). Advocates of harmony and integration are, following Suzuki’s insight, exponents of death, emissaries of entropy that cling to the overdetermined body of currere. Against the reactive territorialization of difference, the manner of Aoki’s escape draws upon the active transformative potentials of currere. Through the improvisational forces of sonare, Aoki experiments with the concept of a polyphonic curriculum. This nonimage of currere destroys the transcendent ideal of harmony and dialectical fidelity championed by Plato. Further, it mobilizes a multiplicity of ways a pedagogical life might unfold as a difference of kind rather than degree. Aoki does not simply advocate for what might amount to a new composition in the familiar mode. Such a move would simply appeal to an image of the world given a priori, or rather, to reduce the concept of multiplicity to that of multiple identities (Aoki, 2005b).1 As Aoki argues apropos Deleuze, the reduction of multiplicity to multiple identities risks presuming the presence of a superior ontological substance from which identity emanates: “Identity [is] not so much . . . something already present, but rather a production, in the throes of being constituted as we live in place of difference” (p. 205). In Aoki’s terms, such difference inheres the lived or immanent space between the curriculum-as-plan (currere’s reactive image) and curriculum-as-lived. It is from this middle, the Deleuzian “fuzzy locus” of difference, that the active force of currere deterritorializes the dogmatic image or “chiseled motif ” of representational thinking in the curriculum field (p. 204). In this vein, the transformative spirit of sonare extends by shifting the mode of expression, repeating familiar curriculum territories with difference, in turn rendering them foreign to themselves. It is in the multiple modulations or mutations of sonare that new kinds of passages for thinking are created. Such passages—of which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write there are thousands—are not representational. Rather, they ruin the claim to

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representation through the creative force of an active and constitutive currere. It is in this vein that Aoki’s escape is not of the transcendent variety, but rather, an opposite action of approaching the lived production of a pedagogical life. These tensions speak to the problematics faced by the field of curriculum theorizing. Should we integrate the lines of flight born of an active currere into a “sonic unity . . . [or] allow the strands to sing polyphonically and pray that, on occasion, they glow white hot from within?” (p. 371). Are the productive desires of currere to be territorialized in the neo-Platonic image of Unity or conceived rather as an immanent pedagogical force for thinking difference? Assigning either a territorialized or deterritorialized status to pedagogic thought neglects Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) analysis of the plane of immanence. That is, territorialization, deterritorialization, and the Deleuzeguattarian tertiary concept of reterritorialization are not movements in a successive evolution. Rather, “[t]hey are three aspects of the same thing” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 312). While an unproductive misreading of Aoki’s concepts might summon the image of a dualism, Aoki posits a third space in which the curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived intersect as a meshwork. This “zone of between” is the meshwork of “two horizons,” the curriculum-as-plan and the curriculumas-lived (Aoki, 2005b, p. 161). Against the image of pedagogical thought as either a “plan” or “lived,” Aoki posits the two forces interacting, modulating, and interfering one another. In this vein, the reactive and active forces of currere might be thought not simply as a binary pair, but mutations or expressions of flow. While the reactive powers of currere arrest flow, its active forcefields unleash flow into new patterns of relation. As such, it is not that the world is either reactive, active, or engaging a line of flight between two, but rather, a continuous modulation among all three aspects. For Deleuze and Guattari, aspects of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization are thus not ontologically distinct substances. They are each aspects of the concept of the Refrain (ritournelle). Deleuze and Guattari write that singing plays a pivotal role in the formation of territories. That is, a song can create a sense of stability against tumult. To exemplify this, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) evoke the image of a child walking home in the dark. Frightened, the child comforts himself with a song beneath his breath, creating a shelter in the midst of the unknown. “The song is like a rough sketch,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos” (p. 311). The song is a “skip,” jumping from chaos to order amidst the threat of breaking apart at any moment. The child’s song creates a home, Deleuze and Guattari write, “but home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a

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limited space” (p. 311). Like the blaring headphones that mark territories on public transit, the laborer that whistles to lighten the task, and the “housewife [who] sings . . . as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work,” each keeps forces of danger at bay (p. 311). The sonorous expression creates a territory that defends against anxieties, fears, and pressures. While it does not simply dispel them, it gives them a different form that creates a barrier sheltering against the immanent forces of deterritorialization (Buchanan, 2004). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, the content and expression of music is concerned with death: “[A] child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off . . . these are not accidental themes in music . . . they are something essential” (p. 299). Against the territory or repeated refrain, Deleuze and Guattari remark that there is a “danger” in lines of escape and deterritorialization. This danger extends from the possibility that while creative lines of deterritorialization might engender new ways of thinking or acting in the world, they might also lead toward destruction and abolition. “This is why,” Buchanan (2004) writes, “the refrain is the content proper to music: the refrain is our means of erecting, hastily if needs be, a portable territory that can secure us in troubled situations” (p. 16). The expression of the refrain or repeated block of content “proper” to music is thus a way to confront death without giving oneself over to its potentially disastrous powers. It is a territorialization that wards against experimental lines of deterritorializing flight and the question of what a body might do. In this vein, the territorializing aspect of the refrain functions to stabilize Being, warding off the forces of transformation.

Orchestrating and Conducting Currere Today, ubiquitous talk of curriculum orchestration and composition suggest a transpositional affinity between currere and musicology. In this sense, the territorializing powers of the refrain might tell us something significant about the image of thought as it is ascribed to pedagogical life. As the territorialization of a milieu (a noncoded space), the refrain might be distinguished from the nomadic lines of improvisation characteristic of such jazz musicians as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. A contrasting or “orchestrated” expression of currere might hence be associated with both the Greek terms polis and logos. As Holland (2004) writes, polis refers to the interior space behind city walls, while logos, the Law of the State. Each is an expression of fidelity toward territorialization. Polis designates the enclosed and regulated space of the city while logos expresses the rational

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center around which State thought is territorialized. Against the nomadic “outside” or line of escape, the territorializing connotations of both polis and logos are musically akin to the stratified image of classical symphonic orchestration. Analogous to the image of the racetrack connoted by the curriculum-as-plan, the orchestral concert is organized to “regulate the energy of all its parts, to channel . . . collective desiring-production into the linear simplicity of the harmonically stratified, monophonic melodic line of the symphony” (Gilbert, 2004, p. 128). In this reactive mode, the desires of the symphony are territorialized in the a priori image of “the course to be run.” Put differently, the multiplicitous potential for musical expression is Unified according to the transcendent ideal ascribed by the embodiment of the orchestral score in the figure of the conductor. The simultaneity and sequence of the score embodied by the conductor thus becomes the law according to which the score is reproduced without difference. As Canetti (1962) writes, “the music the conductor evokes is thought to be the only thing that counts . . . he has the power of life and death over the voices of the instrument” (pp. 394–395). Hence, both the code of the orchestral score and bourgeois figure of the conductor function to militate against deterritorializing lines of flight. Indeed, within the orchestral composition, a renegade line of flight could bring about a deadly abolition. The pedagogic image of the curriculum-as-plan or reactive image of currere runs parallel to the classical orchestral performance. Against the threat of a line of potentially disastrous flight, the compositional score, or curriculum-as-plan, becomes a song in the night. It arranges a priori the course of the composition, creating a territory that actively wards against difference. As Holland (2004) elucidates, the logic of the classical orchestral score is reproductive. That is, it captures difference within the logics of tracing and representation. The orchestra is not challenged to create something nomadic or improvisational, but rather, to reproduce the score-as-code with fidelity to the conductor-as-law. Parallel to the ossification of pedagogical life under the reactive powers of currere, the orchestra is impelled to represent the transcendent image of the a priori course to be run. In both classical orchestration and the reactive image of currere, this a priori course constitutes a transcendent ideal above and beyond the immanent expressions of the curriculum-as-lived. Like the classical orchestrations of Bach and Mozart, the reactive powers of currere create a refrain, a coded block of antichaos that does not simply reflect social relations, but rather, creates them (Attali, 1985). As Holland (2004) argues apropos Attali, the classical orchestra produces

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the nonmusical division of the social milieu. Put differently, the orchestral score and reactive image of currere each territorialize spatial relations (polis) through the striating, hierarchical, and delimiting powers of the State. In classical orchestration for example, a spacio-political hierarchy is established between the composer and orchestra. As Canetti (1962) suggests, the conductor and score exert powers of life and death over the “voices” of the symphony. The conductor and score guarantee coordination, but at the cost of the orchestra’s assent to an a priori image of what a (musical) body might do. The players become, in this social division of labor, obedient to the composer as a transcendent figure of authority. In Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, the player becomes Oedipalized, that is, overcoded by the representational logic of the State. In this image, the orchestral members passively trace the dictates of the conductor, indeed, the valuation of the orchestral player is predicated on this doing. Attali comments that the image of social relations advanced by the classical symphonic orchestra parallels the bourgeois ideal of harmony, that very concept Aoki (2005a) linked to the death of life’s vital force. Indeed, the harmonious image of the sociopolitical sphere heralded by classical orchestration is oriented to the generation of a stable image of life amidst the virtual multiplicity of chaotic noise. Yet, such structural organization of the social field does not terminate in the hierarchical subordination of the player beneath the composer. As Canetti (1962) argues, the classical symphony introduces an additional hierarchy between the composer and the audience, whose bodily obedience is demanded during the performance. The audience “is under the compulsion to keep still,” Canetti writes, “and as soon as [the conductor] finishes, [the audience] must applaud” (p. 395). The social organization of composer and score above both orchestral player and audience is analogous to the hierarchical organization of many contemporary classrooms. Under the letter of the curriculum and its embodiment in the instructor, students are impelled to “trace” the course to be run. Through the tract set out by the curriculum-as-code and teacher-as-law, the homogenous “unity” of the class is assured. Yet, such unity is predicated on a dogmatic social division of labor. Teachers embody the curriculum-as-code that students passively or perhaps interactively iterate. In other words, while the orchestral player engages with the score as a sign, this engagement is not active. Rather, it demands that the player follow the score with fidelity. In turn, while the bodily energies of the player are ostensibly engaged, this engagement is cathected in a system of signification established in advance. Put differently, while students might very well be engaged in an interactive relationship to their work, there is always a danger that such

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interactions simply reproduce a dogmatic image of thought. Ensconced in this logic of representation, pedagogical life becomes reactive, fettering student desire to the monotonous sensibilities of the herd.

The Arborescent Image of Currere In Deleuzeguattarian terms, the reactive course is striated, that is, hierarchical and arborescent. As Aoki (2005b) elucidates, an arborescent image also inheres the ways we think and talk about the curriculum. He writes, “[F]or many of us, curriculum, in spite of its inherent indefiniteness, has become definitive, so much so that we speak with ease of the curriculum . . . and when we so speak, we seem heedless of the way we have been drawn into a curricular landscape where in privileged aplomb stands, a tree does, a single curriculum” (p. 204). The arborescent image of curriculum that Aoki apprehends at the heart of much curriculum discourse is for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the model of homogeneity that inheres Western philosophical thought. The arborescent “root-tree” image of the world describes the linear and unified organization of Western Being (p. 6). Akin to classical symphonic orchestration, the curriculum-as-plan instrumentally creates a linear or developmentally sequenced image of life that proceeds from one “fixed” point to another. In this instance, the “roottree” is an expression of the segmentarity of the social field, or rather, its subjugation to the hierarchical powers of State organization. Entwined with State codes of accumulative vertical progress and phallic power, the model of arborescence functions “on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). The arborescent line is in this sense a deadly force overcoding the singularities of a life, a factory-machine that systematically territorializes its components into organized, hierarchical, and static structures. Instrumentally, the striated curriculum-as-plan moves from beginning to end, from a seed to the teleological image of its mature Form. What the curriculum-as-plan can do or produce is known a priori. In this vein, the potentials for unanticipated heterogeneous assemblages or qualitative connections are precluded, reducing a multiplicity of curricular becomings to the monological image of the curriculum. This arboreal landscape marks for Aoki (2005b) the primary image of thought adopted by the field of curriculum and instruction (p. 204). Yet, the landscape that Aoki describes is not produced via the active forces of curriculum cartography, but rather, is mapped via the logics of tracing and representation.

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Representation, Repetition, and Compositional Curreres The mode of representational tracing performed in classical symphonic orchestration characterizes for Attali (1985) a phase of musical production intimate to early modern society. In Attali’s age of representation, music functions to inspire belief in social harmony under the auspices of a leader and plan. Its power is to make people believe that social unity is requisite upon the stratification of the social order and the enjoinment of individual desire to State power. The curriculum-as-plan functions similarly to striate the productive powers of the individual toward a unified, harmonious, and linear image of pedagogic Being. While Attali’s age of representation orients people to believe in the benevolent social function of the leader, the capitalist age of repetition functions to silence the masses through music designed to distract, capture, and satisfy consumer appetite. As Holland (2004) avers, the age of repetition is characterized by commodified “elevator and grocery store . . . Muzak; top-40 hit parades and the record industry in general” (p. 28). Against the image of broader social cohesion under State power, consumers are now encouraged to participate in the solipsistic act of endless and silent listening (Holland, 2004). Such practices function to territorialize social space at microsocial levels of organization, creating a depoliticized space occupied by passive, alienated, and overly territorialized xenophobes. It might be conjectured that while the curriculum-as-plan emerged from the age of representation, it has been sustained, albeit differently, in the capitalist phase of repetition. In its repetitive phase, the curriculum and instruction landscape is no longer oriented to the creation of a unified society, but rather, the mimetic repetition of the consumer rhetoric of demand, desire, and satisfaction. The curriculum-as-code becomes, in the repetitive phase, a ready-made commodity object. Rendered teacherproof, the curriculum is imaged in its most reactive sense, reducing the pedagogical event to a mechanism for the delivery of someone else’s mail. Akin to grocery store Muzak, the curriculum in the repetitive age becomes anesthetized, designed to preoccupy and territorialize the consumer within the readymade course of currere. As Attali avers, the age of repetition functions to induce forgetfulness. In the mimetic habitus induced through repetition, we are oriented to forget that the curriculum is a curriculum. Further, as one is increasingly oriented to a particular image of pedagogical life, the active exploratory forces of currere are covered over by the inevitable flood of content and hyperactive demands of institutional life. As a corollary of capitalism, the repetitive function of currere motivates the alienating segmentation of social and

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mental space, making institutional life increasingly atomistic, difficult, and joyless. For Attali (1985), the age of repetition is followed by a final stage: the age of composition. While the age of representation emerged from the “technology of printing (musical scores)” and repetition from new reproductive technologies, such as CD-ROMs and MP3s, the age of composition is marked by the invention of new musical instruments, codes, and genres (Holland, 2004, p. 29). Attali’s age of composition is thus not preoccupied with the reproduction of an a priori code nor solipsistic listening restricted to one’s territory. Rather, it is deterritorializing, actively producing new topographies through disjunction. While connective synthesis might create a circuit linking pedagogical life to the reactive image of currere, the disjunctive synthesis surveys and “records” the excluded expressions of this process. For example, while the connective synthesis of the classical symphony creates a circuit organizing the drives of the orchestral player to the representation of the score-as-code, the disjunctive synthesis enfolds a multiplicity of courses for the expression of the musical course. In Deleuzeguattarian (1983) terms, the disjunctive synthesis is virtual, hence, not coded as a territory or refrain. The connective synthesis functions similarly in education, wherein the drives of curriculum writers and policy makers are circuited to the instrumental or reactive image of pedagogy. This circuiting is apparent throughout Aoki’s (2005b) critique, wherein the disjunctive multiplicity of curricular expressions are cathected to the reactive illusion that only one curriculum exists. The age of composition might be regarded as a disjunctive synthesis, a circuit-breaking force that maps new musicological terrain. As musical forces are harbingers of social conditions and divisions of labor, the age of composition is marked by the creation of new power relations and passages for thinking difference. Attali’s “composition” functions to deterritorialize the refrain of modern representation and capitalist repetition. In this vein, Attali’s concept of “composition” might be exemplified by the improvisational forces of jazz. Herein we return to Aoki’s (2005a) question on the significance of improvisation to the field of curriculum and instruction. Put differently, how might the dominant circuits in education be deterritorialized through the disjunctive forces of improvisation? Following, through what new concepts might pedagogy be thought?

Jazz and an Improvisational Currere As Holland (2004) develops, improvisational jazz is both nonrepresentational and nonrepetitive. It does not reproduce a score, but creates it.

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Such creative force is intentional. The jazz ensemble actively deviates from any notion of an a priori course (score) in mapping new terrain. Rather than iterative, improvisational jazz is itinerative. It does not trace, but travels, employing a multiplicity of tempos, keys, and styles. Often, improvised jazz will feature the use of numerous tempos, keys, and styles simultaneously. In this vein, the jazz composition is not Unitary, but schizo, breaking apart circuits of exchange while eluding capture by representational or repetitive powers. It is, in Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, nomadic. Improvisational jazz plays across the three aspects of the Deleuzeguattarian refrain. Not only does improvisational jazz create “blocks of content” or repeated riffs, it also plays with the degeneration of the refrain into noise. From such noise, recognizable riffs once again assemble to create new, reterritorialized refrains. In this way, jazz demonstrates both the structuring and destructuring powers of the refrain. The recognizable world is thus never the world a priori, but a temporary refrain or plateau inhering the immanent forces of deterritorialization. In Quintilian’s rhetorical example, the deterritorializing force intimate to music is also its danger to State rule. Simply, if territories can be shifted through creative practices, such practices in turn become political. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) three aspects of the refrain also apply to the production of social relations in improvisational jazz. The jazz ensemble is often marked by the absence of a formal leader. Instead, each player exerts influence in the creation of the musicological terrain independent of a transcendent ideal or authority. In this way, the jazz composition is immanent to the desiring-improvisation of the collective. Unlike the classical symphonic orchestration in which the drive of the player is circuited to the reproduction of the score, improvisational jazz becomes open to disjunctive lines of flight from within. The “fiction of sameness” that defines the curriculum-as-plan and organizes the pedagogic drive might be similarly opened by the active forces of currere (Aoki, 2005c, p. 161). When we meet the curriculum-as-plan in the mode of improvisation, the immanent flows of classroom life deform, stretch, and contort it in singular ways. As improvisational jazz exemplifies, the active coursings of currere are plastic, capable of assuming non-Euclidean forms. Such immanent morphologies are not those of an artificial life circuited to a transcendent ideal, but those of a life in the process of becoming. Akin to jazz improvisation, the active powers of currere are prepared to follow, not iteratively, but itineratively. In this active sense of currere, order is created in the middle of things, that is, between the reactive image of the curriculum and the disjunctive recording of what such an image of pedagogical life excludes.

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Such an active image of pedagogy requires another deterritorialization intimate to improvisational jazz. Improvisation does not demand a repetition of the Same, but is rather a repetitive expression that differs. Against the technological repetition of the musical form in capitalism then, the improvisational jazz performance is in each expressive instance a singularity. It is in this immanent sense that jazz has become most notable as a live musicological expression (Holland, 2004). Against the devitalizing powers of harmony and unity forewarned by Aoki, improvisation creates a disjunctive event. It does something to the course to be run, imbuing currere with a vital and active sense of creation. This sense of vitality is operative in the live jazz performance, in which the messages and codes of each player are no longer atomistic, but rather, function as a meshwork of productive interactions. Whereas Attali’s age of repetition is marked by solitary listening, jazz improvisation bears the character of collectivity unfettered by the score-as-code or the conductor-as-law. Improvisational production “disalienates” the atomized individual by drawing them into productive collaboration. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast this to the enterprise of antiproduction impelled by the law of the composer. In improvisation, it is not simply the individual that affects the course of the composition, but rather, the interacting forces and flows of the improvisational collective. This collaboration is for Deleuze and Guattari an example of the dividual, that is, “a collectivity that cannot be reduced to the individuality of its members or to some leviathan meta-subject which encompasses them all in a perfect unity” (Gilbert, 2004, pp. 124–125). The Deleuzeguattarian dividual breaks down the unified image of the subject. In contrast to the externally organized and composer-centered symphony, this sense of dividuality is apparent in improvisational jazz, wherein the collective functions as an autopoietic, self-organizing force. The forces of expression mobilized by improvisational jazz usher forth a radically different way of thinking about currere. Contrary to the arborescent image that has come to characterize the field of curriculum and instruction, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advance the active idea of the rhizome: “Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome” (pp. 11–12). Different from the ordered perspective of the arboreal model, the rhizome is heterogeneous, that its, capable of making connections other-than-itself. For example, the jazz performance is not overdetermined by a code the player must follow. Rather, its improvisational expression emerges from the affective connections made between the various heterogenic “voices”

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of its players. Further, the improvisational praxis of itinerative following intimate to jazz creates a multiplicity of lines that escape reactive entrapment. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has an available supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines” (p. 9). Put differently, there is no foundational code that might be grafted upon the jazz improvisation, as its function works by productive escape rather than iterative tracing. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), such movements break with the immutable image of Being and mobilize potential lines of becoming-other. Like the rhizome, the improvisational event is marked by flows that create, destroy, and reconstitute the refrain with difference. In this sense, improvisation does not simply perform the powers of the multiple, but actively creates them. Currere’s active expression might be thought to create similar conditions of escape, deforming the power relations between the curriculum (score) and student (player) and the student and teacher (composer). The rhizome advances an image of currere as a vital and creative singularity. To “engage” the curriculum is thus not simply to accord to the arborescent codes of institutional life (the curriculum), but to actively survey the question of what a (curricular) body can do. Such a task might be approached via the active concept of currere, which does not take the curriculum as an a priori course to be run. To think currere in this way necessitates overturning the image of an arborescent ground foundational to education. Further, the rhizomatic expression of currere must risk assembling across heterogeneous power structures, disciplines (such as music), and concepts for thinking difference. In such movement, the ontology of Being (polis, logos) is opened to the albeit dangerous movements of becoming (nomos). Yet, such becoming, despite its dangers to State thinking, might break from deadly circuit of passivity and the solipsistic nihilism that is engendered through iterative following. Rhizomatic becoming emerges in the middle of things, in the “fuzzy” space between the reactive and chaotic, between the score-ascode and the absolute deterritorialization of music qua noise. In Aoki (2005c), it is in the similar “space between” that the curriculumas-plan and curriculum-as-lived mesh to create a vital life. Akin to the Deleuzeguattarian refrain, a pedagogical life is not birthed in opposition to the territorialization of the curriculum or the chaos of its absolute deterritorialization. The active concept of currere requires chaos to open new passages for thinking and exploration. This is apparent in jazz improvisation when an instrumental “voice” escapes through a modulation of key, tempo, or style. Only by breaking with the refrain,

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the territorialized block of repeated content, does music open to its powers of becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “To improvise is to join with the world, or meld with it” (p. 311). That is, to improvise connects one to flows of difference that are constantly being composed and decomposed. This vital approach to improvisation suggests that a pedagogical life both composes and decomposes the curriculum in the course of its running. In the “space between” the transcendent image and virtual multiplicity, a curriculum territory is created. Yet, this creation deterritorializes currere in its reactive sense. Attali (1985) writes, “to improvise, to compose, is thus related to the assumption of differences, of the discovering and blossoming of the body . . . it is . . . laden with risk, disquieting, an unstable challenging, an anarchic and ominous festival, like a Carnival with an unpredictable outcome” (p. 143). In this vein, the active force of currere maps new terrain through the decomposition of the course to be run. As Attali asserts, this is a dangerous task, forcing us out of field and from the shelter of our territorialized spaces and habits of thought. It asks of pedagogues how one might “perform an atypical expression capable of diverting [territorializations] . . . into rebecoming” (Massumi, 2002, p. xxvi). The active forces of improvisation constitute one way of thinking about currere that invokes the reterritorialization of both social space (polis) and the image of thought (logos). As Gilbert (2004) writes, we must learn how to take such improvisation seriously, “improvisation in music is . . . a gesture with which to refuse the whole system of meanings and affects which the [hierarchy of the orchestra and twentieth-century recording industry] reproduce” (pp. 127–128). Thinking about the course of a pedagogical life as improvisational thus provides a circuit breaker against the overdetermination of the curricular refrain, that is, the reproduction and repetition of the course to be run. As there is danger associated with the praxis of improvisation, so too do Deleuze and Guattari (1987) issue a caveat on the territorial aspect of the Refrain. “The refrain,” they write, “is a means of preventing music, warding it off, forgoing it” (p. 300). Like the harmony and unity demanded by the conductor of the classical symphony, the reactive refrain of currere terminates its vital potentials. As Aoki (2005a) argues, to court harmony and unity is to invite death. Like improvisation, the active expression of currere is a double articulation, neither exclusively territorial or deterritorializing. In this vein, the active expression of currere breaks the binary circuit of creation or destruction. More aptly, it might be said that like improvisation, the active force of currere destroys as it creates. Against the “antiproduction” demanded by the classical conductor, improvisation produces its own

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code, engaging the desiring-production of the collective. In the “fuzzy” space between the curriculum and its disjunctive synthesis inheres such a collective. Itineratively following the concept of improvisation, the meshwork of a vital classroom life might similarly produce its own composition, and in this desiring-production, transform the social conditions that would seek to reduce currere to a unified “act” of reproduction or repetition.

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he curriculum theorizing of Alan Block (1998) posits an approach to curriculum that dislocates currere from its homogeneous course. Yet, such dislocation is for Block the exception rather than the rule of contemporary pedagogy. Education, Block argues, is “centered” on the notion of homecoming, that is, the continual reproduction of habitual thought and behavior. Like the path of shiny pebbles left by Hansel in the Brothers Grimm tale, the educational project is “devised to keep students and teachers on track, in place, observed by [a] ceaseless . . . body of knowledge and methods” (p. 325). Akin to the arborescent model critiqued by Aoki (2005b), the pebbles left by Hansel tether peripheral movements to a stable center. This image of pedagogy thus does not depart from the reactive image of currere, but rather, functions to reproduce the idea that all pedagogical movements accord to the control mechanisms of a panoptic nucleus (Foucault, 1979). In this reactive image, all “lines out” are governed by the territorializing powers of the center. Within this representational or arboreal logic, the reactive image of currere is projected upon all anomalies and differences, reproducing the illusion of a transcendent point from which life is eminently surveyed.

The Panopticon Like the striated image of the arborescent model, the panoptic structure analyzed by Foucault (1979) works by segmenting space and fixing the positions of individuals through recording, assessment and supervision. As a disciplinary mechanism of the seventeenth century, Foucault analyses how State powers of supervision functioned to partition the social space of plague-ridden cities. From guard posts and sentry towers, plague-infested areas were placed under surveillance. Subjected to the ubiquitous gaze of State authorities, civilian movements were hence controlled through

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the sheer possibility of observation. Foucault writes, “[S]urveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (p. 201). That is, the very possibility of being watched impelled the subject to move, behave, and relate to others in accordance with State regulations. At the heart of such discipline Foucault writes, “was . . . a political dream . . . [of] strict divisions . . . the penetration of regulation into the smallest details of everyday life . . . the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power . . . the assignment of each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease” (1979, p. 198). The political dream of panopticism is in this sense reactive, oriented to the overdetermination of what a body can do. Following, the disciplinary power of the panopticon ossifies Being in the image advanced by the State, hence severing the subject’s powers of becoming. Surveyed panoptically, the subject becomes encoded according to a priori evaluative and identitarian categories. Contra the darkness of the subterranean dungeon, the panopticon functions through the production of a clearing. For the power of the panopticon to exert its control, the subject must be visible in both spatial and identitarian terms. That is, the subject must be mapped, and hence rendered recognizable according to an a priori image of Being. Alienating and atypical expressions foreign to State thought are domesticated under the surveillance mechanisms of the institution. As Foucault (1979) writes, the panopticon functions to isolate deviations from the “normal” case, creating a litany of binary divisions and individuating differences that function to segment the social field. The categorical divisions of the social field recorded through constant surveillance work to distinguish the healthy from the sick, the sane from the mad, and the harmless from the dangerous. Under the disciplinary powers of panoptic surveillance, life’s vital forces of difference are coded relative to a model of normalcy. From such a model, deviations, deformations, and mutations are reactively categorized, disciplined, and brought “in line” with the course to be run. In this reactive mode, life is defined by what it is not, limiting otherness by subjecting it to strict disciplinary power. “What does education do?” Thoreau writes, but make “a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook” (cited in Block, p. 326). In this reactive sense, currere becomes a mechanism of adaptation and regulation, bringing its subjects in representational proximity to the institutional norm. Reproducing the image of currere as a mechanism of adaptation and regulation, teaching and learning that “follow[s] the path home” ultimately does or harms nothing (Block, 1998, p. 335). As Deleuze (2000) avers apropos Proust, “thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it” (p. 95). In the panoptic structure, the forces

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of difference, of transformation, and chaos are forestalled through the territorialization of space (polis) and thought (logos). It is thus not surprising that in Hansel and Gretel, it is the father, the figure of State authority, who teaches the son the practice of homecoming. Without the return of his children, Block comments, the father has no one to subjugate. In Deleuzeguattarian (1983) terms, repression always requires a subject that can be assigned. As it is surveyed by the gaze of the State, the panopticon produces a subjected individual, or rather, a subject born of a “system of permanent registration” (Foucault, 1979, p. 196). Analogously, without the stability of an arboreal ground to which we might pedagogically return, we risk the dangers of the periphery. This is, or course, a key didactic lesson in the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel. In contemporary education, Block avers, the panopticon functions similarly by ensuring that students are not only visible, but that each is accorded his “true” place within the apparatus. “We are always to be found,” Block observes, “by our position on the well-traveled, well-lit, and heavily-marked path which is the curriculum” (p. 327). Fixing the individual within the a priori social relations of the institution, pedagogy becomes reactive, bound to the logic of representation and the dictates of a transcendent authority. In this vein, the exertion of panoptic power requires that the individual become subject to the surveilling mechanisms of the institution. The subject “inscribes himself in the power relation in which he simultaneously . . . becomes the principal of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1979, p. 203). That is, the subject internalizes the disciplinary powers of the State as a means of shoring up his institutional identity. It is in this sense that power is not simply repressive, but invites participation. By inscribing oneself within the disciplinary powers of the panopticon, the individual is ushered into a social and subjective Unity. This is the homecoming that Block asserts is operative in contemporary pedagogical life. Yet, its political agenda is hardly new. The intent of education in the seventeenth century, for example, “was . . . to ‘fortify,’ to ‘develop the body,’ to prepare the child ‘for a future in some mechanical work,’ to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’” (Foucault, 1979, p. 211). The institutional beginnings of education are predicated on the powers of discipline to bring about a “functional” subject from a “docile body.” That is, through adaptation to the regulatory course of education, the individual is brought in alignment with his greatest potential for State-defined Being. In this image, the foundations of institutional education are reactive, advancing the notion that through submission to State authority and the a priori image of currere, an “ideal” self or society is engendered.

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Games of State Analyzing the potentials of currere through games theory, we might posit that the image of pedagogical life sketched by Block corresponds to the Deleuzeguattarian (1987) game of State: chess. Analogous to currere’s reactive subjugation of the individual, chess pieces are coded in advance. They are accorded intrinsic properties and internal nature from which their movements are derived. For example, the movements of the “knight” accord to an intrinsic code from which its potential situations and confrontations proceed. The intrinsic qualities of the piece determine its movements, and further, differentiate them against those of other pieces; a knight is a knight, a castle a castle, and a pawn a pawn. Against the Spinozian (1985) assertion that we do not yet know what a body might do, each piece in the game of chess carries a certain identity that defines in advance what it is capable of doing. It is in this vein that Deleuze and Guattari write that the functionality of the chess piece is structural, “[entertaining] biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces” (p. 353). The biunivocal relations of the chess piece function to enforce categorical distinctions and contravene the multiplicity of ways in which forces might interact and connect. In chess, such connective relations become antagonistic and subject to negation. One piece always dominates over another, connecting through nullification rather than connection or disjunction. The reactive image of life advanced by the courtly game of chess is also figured in the field of curriculum and instruction. In the contemporary field, Block (1998) writes, “control is maintained by the nature of the path and the impossibility—indeed, unthinkability—of deviation from it” (p. 326). In game theory, Block’s reactive image of currere finds expression in the fixed identity structures of chess pieces. For Deleuze (2001), “what characterizes reactive [powers is] their tendency to limit the other: in them, negation comes first . . . [e]verywhere we see the victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action” (pp. 74–75). Like the reactive image of currere that functions by negating active lines of flight, the chess game is premised upon the negation of potentials and ultimately, the entropy of the gridded game board. Put differently, the coded qualities of the game pieces make particular deviations unthinkable. Like the reactive image of currere that designs in advance how pedagogical life will proceed, otherness is negated. Conceived thus, education reactively proceeds on the assertion of a “No,” that is, the covering over of a multiplicity of coursings by the homogeneous image of the curriculum. As Block (2003) describes, the reactive image of currere has collapsed with disciplinary powers of the institution. Students are no

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longer “engaged . . . with the struggle of understanding curriculum but the technique of managing it-they will never be required to interrogate what it—the curriculum—might be and if it might be different . . . our students have been taught to desire only to be told what to do” (p. 37). For Nietzsche (1968), the victory of intellectual negation and reactivity described in Block’s critique marks the triumph of nihilism. In this vein, the indefinite and singular qualities of a pedagogical life are obfuscated in lieu of the stable and controllable image of currere. In this reactive image, belief in the potentials of a life, of disparity and chance, are lost (Rajchman, 2001). Chess, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “[arranges] a closed space” (p. 353). It is a war, but one that is institutionalized, coded, and regulated. Pieces move from one point to another, “occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces” (p. 353). Like the arboreal image of the curriculum, the State game of chess creates a “striated” space in which battle lines are clearly demarcated. In this reactive image, the object of chess is to territorialize an unbreakable and closed space, to determine absolute values for each of its components, and install a priori points of entry and exit. The reactive image of currere creates a similarly “striated” space in which relations of power, institutional identities, and codes of movement are overdetermined. In this image, movement and identity do not actively constitute themselves through difference, but rather, by reactively tracing the path home, fortifying themselves behind territorialized walls (polis) and instrumental, rationalist thought (logos). Each of these homecomings wards against the dangers of an untimely and unhomely “outside.”

Nomadic Games The panoptic or centralized system of disciplinary power analyzed by Foucault finds an analogue in both the reactive image of currere and the State game of chess. This image of identity, movement, and social relation constitutes the limit case of indoctrination. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, the panoptic segmentation of the social field is traversed by subterranean flows of difference. These nomadic lines of flight upset the sediment borderlines and a priori codes from which the potential for thought and movement are actualized. That is, nomadism betrays the rage for control by creating an open, heterogenic, and constitutive space of affirmation rather than negation. We do not yet know what a body might do, and in this vein, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the courtly game of chess with that of Go.

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Go has seen a recent insurgence in popularity as a result of Hikaru no go, a Japanese manga featuring the game as a central facet of its narrative. Yet, perhaps increasing youth interest in Go might be affirmed as less a fad than a way in which the young are today negotiating social terrain and institutional structures. As Pinar and Grumet (1976) advocate, the field of curriculum theory must “transfer [its] attention . . . to the ways in which a student uses . . . and moves through [institutional forms]” (p. 2). Following Attali’s thesis on music (1985), one might conjecture that games are not simply a response to ideology, but rather, advance a way of thinking the world. In this vein, the difference between Go and chess mark radically different ways of conceptualizing currere. While chess accords to the panoptic territorialization of space (polis) and thought (logos), Go unleashes the forces of difference (nomos) in the reterritorialization of the course to be run. Whereas chess pieces are accorded a priori qualities of movement and distinction, Go pieces have only an “anonymous, collective, or third person function” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 352). As Deleuze and Guattari write, the pieces in Go are not imbued with a priori properties. Instead, their function is situational. While the potential movements and confrontations of the chess piece are coded as qualities proper to their interior identity, the Go piece functions in a milieu of exteriority. That is, the Go piece functions by way of creating “constellations” or “nebulas” of relation. Through such relations, functions of bordering, encircling, or shattering are situationally and not universally actualized. How the Go piece assembles or becomes is hence not dictated by their interior of transcendent quality. Rather, the way a Go piece relates to its exterior “constellation” is immanent. Hence, Go breaks with reactive thought, affirming instead a multiplicity of identities and ways of populating, expressing, or deforming a territory. In a radical sense, Go posits an image of currere that has no a priori identity or quality of movement. Akin to the active or lived sense of currere, Go unfolds situationally, immanent to the ways in which its pieces assemble into networks of broad, interconnected meshworks. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that while chess “striates” space, ordering it hierarchically, Go creates a “smooth” or dynamic space of transformation and becoming. In Block’s (1998) repudiation of pedagogical homecomings, he advances an image of currere analogous to Go. Unfettered from the “path already defined and marked,” currere functions as an immanent constellation or nebula of coursings that unfold, like the game board of Go, through extrinsic relations (p. 339). In this vein, currere becomes active through the conceptual forces of connecting, linking, and syntagmatics. Opposed to the transcendent and centralized powers of the panopticon, the active

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force of currere unfolds from the constellation of concepts that populate its plane of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Put differently, the creative action of currere organizes in relation to the “nebula” of interacting concepts that are cast into play. “The concept of a bird” Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, “is not to be found in its genus or species but in the composition of its postures, colours, and songs . . . a concept is heterogenesis-that is to say, an ordering of its components by zones of neighborhood” (p. 20). The performative expression of the concept, the overturning of the transcendent ideal, and the positive powers of the simulacrum are but three concepts that form the “constellation” of currere’s active force. Currere’s active expression is hence not a “readymade” projection panoptically surveyed upon the world, but a conceptual approach born immanently through the resonance of its neighboring concepts, each concerned with the problematic of thinking difference. The active forces of currere do not simply mark an engagement with the world, as such a conceptualization would merely reproduce the panoptic or transcendent powers of reactivity. Rather, currere’s active powers immanently birth the world through the resonance of its myriad conceptual forces. In chess, we are given the a priori identity of the piece, which in turn structures its relation to the striated space of the board. Hence, the identity of the chess piece becomes paramount. In contrast, the active force of currere unfolds in relation with the features of its milieu. Individuality becomes dividual. The relations of Go pieces are not organized hierarchically, hence delimitating what a body might do. Rather, Go is as much a game of territorialization as it is of immanent deterritorialization. It is a war, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy whereas chess is a semiology” (p. 353). In this vein, the organization of space in Go deviates significantly from the closed space or coded territory of chess. In Go, the pieces are arrayed in open space, maintaining the possibility of immanent deterritorialization from within. Whereas chess creates a closed space delineating the linear lines of advance, retreat and segmented borderlines, Go is played in the open, extending nomadically by way of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Go might hence be analogous to currere’s active expression in that it advances a way of thinking that abdicates the identitarian, linear, and coded relations of power inhering the reactive image of the curriculum. While chess establishes an interiority (polis) antagonistic to “outside” forces (nomos), Go radically deforms this binary by positing the potential of immanent transformation. An analogue of this movement is evident in Jardine’s (1996) regard for the deterritorializing force of the

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“pedagogical event.” Making the educational topography foreign to itself, such deterritorialization is not a power exerted transcendently. Rather, it unfolds in the “roil” or sediment of pedagogical space, deforming the battle lines of institutional meaning through the birth of something unusual, minoritarian, or circuit breaking. While the reactive powers of currere hierarchically project an image of the course to be run, currere’s active expression connects vertically (rhizomatically) with the forces of its milieu, deterritorializing the spatial binary by continuously traversing and redefining its topographical contours. Currere’s active forces, like the pieces of Go, operate in the open, connecting with heterogenic elements and patterns in an unfolding process of becoming. In this sense, Block’s (1998) caveat on the stultifying character of “home” is decentered. As Go illustrates, one’s arrayment in open space precludes the certainty of territorial boarders. Home is always in a process of deconstituting and reconstituting itself differently. As Leibniz said, “I thought I had reached port; but . . . I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea” (cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 22). In Go, as in the active expression of currere, home is indiscernible, always shifting in connection with a multiplicity of emergent forces. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aver, the indiscernability of such foundations are evident in the work of philosophers who recast and change their concepts, adding points of detail, withdrawing components, forgetting conclusions. Such transformations are not simply ideational, but mobilize new ways of creating a life. As Block observes of Thoreau’s life at Walden, “the single path he had worn to the pond for his morning ablutions supervised and determined his way . . . [he then knew he would have to leave] . . . for [he] had other lives to live” (p. 330). The nomadic lines created by Thoreau are hence not analogous to the movements of chess, whereby a piece moves from one fixed point to another. Instead, akin to Go, such nomadic lines of flight are perpetual. One might deterritorialize his own territory by going elsewhere, creating a line of escape unfettered by the disciplinary powers of State thought (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 353).

The Synopticon The nomadic character of Go and active expression of currere break with the centralizing powers of the panopticon, yet they evoke a contemporary problematic to which I will now turn. The society of control, Deleuze (1992) argues, is replacing disciplinary society. New forces of societal control no longer discipline the movement of the individual from one

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closed or assignable space to another. Rather, as a corollary to neoliberal capitalism, the subject is encouraged to circulate and consume “freely.” Such circulation in turn constitutes the illusion of “freedom.” That is, in control society, the subject’s circulation is continually monitored, checked, and recorded (Deleuze, 1992). In this vein, the caveat on “homecoming” articulated by Block (1998) has become increasingly complex. That is, if neoliberal society requires the differential movement of the subject, then practices of “wandering” and “lostness” are under the threat of appropriation by the new system of control (p. 323). While disciplinary society worked to contain its subject within a spatial or identitarian mold, control society works by modulation, deforming as to continually record atypical movements in the social field. Put differently, under panoptic discipline, the subject was fixed by the gaze of a centralized, albeit discontinuous authority. Contrariwise, in control society, the image of the subject is constituted through such informational gateways as the Internet, banking records, credit ratings, and academic transcripts. The subject’s social movement is in turn constituted in the form of a digital double. Disciplinary watchwords, prearranged replies or orders, are replaced in control society by passwords. As Deleuze remarks, such passwords provide access to information or reject it. While the closed space of disciplinary society contained the subject, control society is designed as a meshwork of permeable thresholds. These thresholds are in turn controlled by passwords, passports, degrees, PIN numbers, etc. Whereas the Althussarian (2001) conceptualization of disciplinary power is predicated upon the interpolating power of the policeman’s hail, Massumi (2002b) suggests that today, the power of capitalism hinges on “gatekeeping” functions. As Massumi elaborates, “It’s all about checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN number on your card checks you into your account” (p. 9). These checkpoints do not restrict the mobility of the subject nor do they interpolate the subject’s activities. Such checkpoints are not repressive in the sense of “controlling from above,” but as Massumi suggests, are activated by our coming to them.

From Panoptic to Synoptic Games The society of control is aptly characterized in the departure of contemporary video game design from the more mechanical, disciplined games of the 1980’s. Notoriously overcoded, such early arcade successes as Donkey

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Kong (1981) and Pac-Man (1982) were dictated by the strict delimitation of screened space. Their interface was dominated by clearly demarcated avatar identities and objectives. Early games functioned through the segmented succession of the avatar from one enclosed level to another, wherein points of departure and arrival were clearly defined. Panoptically, early video games were designed so that players could survey the field of action. Such game space was exposed, made transparent and largely static in its orientation. What the avatar’s body could do was also strictly coded, reducing the interactive circuit between player and avatar to a disciplinary, structural relationship. In this disciplinary circuit, player desire was cathected to the a priori course to be run. This disciplinary relationship was thus not simply interactive, but rather, interpassive (Pfaller cited in jagodzinski, 2008). In this vein, the game plays the user, not simply at the level of a conscious narrative, but more significantly, as an affective relation that codes the body along particular contours of space, territory, and habits of response. Following, in Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, early video games are “straited.” That is, they are constituted hierarchically, designed in terms of levels, absolute objectives, points of departure and arrival. Their space is limited and confined, clearly demarcated and seemingly impossible to eclipse. In contrast, such contemporary games as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2006) and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) rethink the screened space. In such “free roaming” games, the player’s avatar is liberated from the path to be run. In unparalleled complexity, games like Oblivion allow the avatar to assume a myriad roles and routes to completing, or deferring the completion of the game. Contrary to the arcade games of the 1980’s, contemporary console-based games work not by confinement, but by dilating the potentials for avatar movement. In this synchronic opening of screened space, positions of departure and arrival become ambiguous and opened to multiple paths. The same shifting relation inheres the creation of the player’s avatar. No longer designated a priori, avatar creation in games like Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights (2002), and Warcraft (1994) is elastic and variable. Following, contemporary gaming avatars are individuated in a manner that is designed to differentiate the player’s gaming experience. While breaking with the “striated” design of earlier generations, the ostensible freedom of contemporary gaming works by a different system of control. Whereas the disciplinary powers of the panopticon centered on visibility, the rigid segmentation of space and identity, control society functions through the invisibility of the code. In video gaming, avatars no longer ascend from one hierarchical level to another, but through invisible thresholds that record the player’s progress while rendering

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imminent encounters and environments. Exposing the desires of neoliberal capitalism, contemporary games are predicated on the “free choice” of the player. Yet, amidst the most complex gaming scenarios, “choice” continues to be determined by the a priori code. That is, no matter how complex the gaming engine, movement and identity is nevertheless constrained by the parameters of the program. Synoptically, while the avatar is encouraged to roam freely, to indulge its desires, and create its own experience of the gaming world, what a body might do is nevertheless anticipated in advance. The player, while freed from earlier structural constraints, continues to be interpassive. In the gaming experience, space is thus never deterritorialized in the Deleuzeguattarian sense. The player is not permitted to wander out of field. Rather, movement becomes caught in a cycle of decoding and recoding. An avatar’s actions hence do not radically transform the gaming space, but rather, create seemingly unique pathways through myriad preexisting circuits. Deleuze (1992) agues that the character of a society is expressed through the machines it creates. While sovereign society was dominated by simple machines, such as levers and pulleys, disciplinary society created machines involving the use of energy. In contrast, control society is figured in the computer as a device that functions via passwords to record and anticipate social movement. Yet, as Deleuze argues, the computer is distinguished as much by its powers of control as by its passive and active dangers. Deleuze argues that the passive danger of the computer is figured in freezing, while its active danger is expressed in its potential for piracy, viral infection, and hacking. It is in the active danger of the computer that we might begin to deterritorialize the coded limits of control society (Daignault, 2005).

Hacking (Un)certain Games Artists such as Alex Galloway and Corey Arcangel play with the active dangers of the computer to deterritorialize its coded limits. Hacking first generation video games with uncanny results, Arcangel and Galloway make the gaming experience foreign to itself. Their praxis is not simply interested in running the readymade course of the game, but in producing something new and unanticipated by dissembling the game’s coded pathways. That is, Galloway and Arcangel radically alter the course to be run in the active deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the game. Against the “striated” character of early games, Galloway and Arcangel think about video as a “smooth” space. This “smooth” space is for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) a synonym of rhizomatic thinking. Hacking games

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like the linear, goal oriented, and hierarchical Super Mario Bros.(1985), Galloway and Arcangel produce strange, asignifying systems that no longer represent conventional video game protocols. The game space becomes radically deterritorialized, populated by mutated avatars and environments unintended by original programmers. In these unhomely game spaces, there are no aims or objectives, but rather, the affective expression of colors, frame rates, music, and text. As the linear algorithm of the game is destroyed, the affective qualities of the game are exposed. That is, the affects populating the game space are revealed through the noncircuited sounds, colors, and movements of the hacked game. In this scenario, both player and avatar enter into a new albeit unusual relationship no longer organized in advance or toward an a priori objective or assignable character. In the midst of the program’s code, Galloway and Arcangel posit a different way of understanding space, territory, and the immanent forces of difference. Galloway (2006) argues that the technical is political. Following, the kind of ethical hacking advocated by Arcangel and Galloway is less oriented to destruction than a praxological intervention on the overdetermined state of media today. That is, the hack intervenes with State thinking, troubling high-tech proprietary rights through the low-tech transmutation of digital content into art. In the active sense of currere, hacking exposes the potential for deterritorialization that inheres every territory (Hwu, 2004). Galloway and Arcangel mobilize an approach to media that is not simply reactive, reproductive or repetitive. Instead, they create the unusual conditions in which preestablished code is reproduced with vital difference, creating an entirely new gaming topography that deviates from all manner of habit and cathected desire. Assembling their own desire with the computer code, Galloway and Arcangel produce a unique pedagogical offshoot, the kind of rhizomatic wandering root championed by Block. In the midst of overdetermined space, Galloway and Arcangel create (hack) a life, deforming the binary differentiation of interior and exterior. As Roy (2005) remarks, the creation of a life “does not restrict itself to outlines or borders and therefore to recognition, representation or recovery of things or objects” (p. 33). Thoreau’s cabin at Walden was thought in a similar manner. As Arsic (2005) writes, “he tried to build . . . the house without a clear distinction between its interiority and exteriority, as a house without a stable form” (p. 131). In Galloway and Arcangel’s hacking, as in Thoreau’s praxis of building, the immanent deterritorializing potential of a territory to break apart and coalesce into something new is activated. The active expression of hacking escapes the entrapment of State thought through the production of forces not yet recorded or coded.

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In turn, the ethical hacking advocated by Galloway and Arcangel produces new ways of thinking and living currere. Pedagogically, the active forces created through hacking are those that decenter the transcendent ideal of homecoming. More specifically, the hack immanently illustrates that home was only ever a contingent circuit, a secondary process of actualization crosscut by a multiplicity of virtual potentials. Akin to the computer code, an active approach to the curriculum-as-plan might similarly be expressed via the concept of hacking. In this vein, hacking might become the positive practice of transformation situated immanently. Akin to the concept of the pedagogical event, the hack disrupts the common circuits of institutional thought and behavior. Lines of escape are thus not transcendent, but relative “to the critical point at which it is connected with the . . . milieu” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 100). Mobilizing the positive powers of the simulacrum, the concept of hacking interjects heterogenic aspects into the dominant code with untimely and unexpected results. Such untimeliness is significant if currere is to open space for a people yet to come. Put differently, the deterritorialization of the code practiced by hacking creates a passage for rethinking and practically engaging the course of life. “To the extent that . . . thought is made of different relations . . . it always delineates a new space” (Arsic, 2005, p. 127). In this vein, currere shifts from a “straited” or reactive perception of space to the “smooth” or active space of the rhizome. In this transformation, the concept of currere changes from optic to the haptic, that is, from panoptic distance to tactile and intense spatial experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is in this haptic or intense relation to space that I turn to one final “game” that questions what currere can do.

Deterritorializing currere: Parkour Parkour is less an orthodox “sport” than a form of artistic movement by which the body relates to, and traverses its environment in creative and emergent ways. The kind of movement inspirited by parkour includes the uninterrupted flow of the body over, under, through, and around a variety of environmental “obstacles.” In this manner, parkour is often practiced in urban settings due to the variety of forms and challenges that might emerge in interaction with walls, rails, buildings, gaps, and a litany of other “obstacles” populating the city space. Yet, the term “obstacle” is not entirely appropriate in consideration of parkour as a bodily art form. Parkour practitioners (a traceur1) think the urban space as populated by multiple potentialities, intensities, and lines of movement. As parkour founder David Bell avers, “We know

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what it’s like at ground level, we’ve been walking the same paths for years. But no-one has ever taken this route” (p. 1). The “obstacles” involved in parkour thus undergo a productive recoding, delivering them from their overdetermined functionality and relationship to the body. Instead, the urban “obstacles” of parkour become passages for movement with difference. That is, the territorialized “obstacle” becomes a genetic cite of virtual movement, or rather, of what movement might be. In this regard, parkour suggests the deterritorialization of both the urban milieu and conventional lines of movement through the imaginative negotiation of territorialized space. It is in this deterritorializing movement of the body that parkour becomes a form of kinetic art through which new lines of movement and “flow” are explored and created. In this vein, the relationship between a traceur and the urban milieu might be understood as an emergent dance in which neither traceur or environment is privileged, but rather, constitute a virtual, multiplicitous (khoreia2)graphy. It is through the virtual, potential relations of the traceur to the parkour milieu that movement is actualized. Akin to a dance, such actualizations are marked by becoming as a ‘flow’ of intensities, of speeds, rates, and trajectories. This notion is explicated by such traceurs as Sébastian Foucan, who suggest that in parkour, the body becomes like the flow of water. Not only is the physical space deterritorialized through the movement of the traceur, but the body also undergoes a transcoding through the virtual passage of physical space. Against a territorialized notion of the body as traversing readymade urban corridors, parkour poses a way of thinking “the course to be run” as a virtual passage of differentiation. In the traceur’s deterritorialization of urban space, the body similarly undergoes a process of becoming-other. While the body of conventional, structural movement becomes rigid, linear, and somnambulistic, the traceur’s body is distinctly poststructural and imaginatively wakeful. While inhabiting familiar urban milieu, parkour thinks the embodied negotiation of such spaces in profoundly creative and singular ways. The name parkour, from the French “parcours” translates literally as “course.” Yet, this “course” is neither the coded conceptual form of structuralist thought, or the image of a track demarcated by boundaries and rules of bodily relation that organize and determine the developments of movement. The movement of the body in parkour is not organized in advance, nor does the “course” have an a priori or teleological image to which actualized movement accords. The artistic beauty of parkour emerges via the imaginative and disjunctive actualized movement of the body through space. That is, of all virtual lines of flight, the traceur actualizes one, producing by way of a disjunctive synthesis a singular trajectory. Such movement, because of its disjunctive actualization, is acutely original.

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Each traceur negotiates their relationship to space differently, based not singularly on skill or athleticism, but the actualization of a multiplicitous potential for bodily movement. Irreducible to the binary subject/object distinction, the relationship of the traceur to the parkour milieu is closer to a “flow,” described earlier as a dance in which both body and environment are deterritorialized through an active process of transcoding or becoming-other. Parkour collapses the stable distinction of self/other via deterritorializing force through which both self/other become what they are not. In this manner, founder David Belle suggests that the notions of “escape” and “reach” are pivotal to both a philosophical and practical approach to parkour. Herein, escape intimates the necessity of a deterritorialized understanding of movement, freed from both physical and conceptual organ-ization. It is against the overdetermined image of the body, the ostensibly immutable rules that frame the potential for its movement, and the conceptual signification of the “course” that parkour perform a creative and artful escape. Such escape carries an anarchic force, a desire that “reaches” in difference to the limits of the territorialized body’s demarcated reach. This understanding of the “course” is capitulated by Aoki (2005b), who suggests that pedagogical reaching might similarly be understood as a mode of becoming or “multiplicity growing in the middle” (p. 211). In pedagogical reaching, currere becomes closer to the dance of parkour in its improvisational approach to movement and relationship. Rather than the implementation of the “course to be run,” Aoki postulates the idea of “curricular improvisation” as deterritorialization “vitalizing [a] possibility that causes our whole body to beat a new and different rhythm” (2005a, p. 369). Aoki’s polyphonic notion of “curricular improvisation” suggest the importance of both imminence and movement(s) with difference. This too is the élan vital of parkour, that is, the improvised “course” to which no a priori image of the course accords. Embodied in such improvised movement is a pedagogical reaching or experimental dis-position of deterritorialization which rend territories porous, deformed, and again, vital. In parkour, reaching intimates the force of desire as crucial to a mode of becoming. Rather than the cite of lack interpolated by an other,3 Deleuze (1983) thinks desire as a productive, creative force which destabilizes common sense and the organ-izations of everyday life (Colebrook, 2002). This notion of desire as a productive force is performed in parkour through the traceur’s multiplicitous relation to the “course to be run.” The traceur’s line of flight is marked by a desire that thinks movement in ways that deform terra cognita, and concomitantly, stable ontological organ-izations. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that the deterritorialization of the body is orchestrated through such experimental practices as parkour,

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in which desire is understood as a noncoded, unrestricted flow of affective intensity. The “course” of parkour is thus not an imagistic track installed in advance, but rather, a flow of desire through which potential lines of flight are productively actualized. In this way, desire becomes an active staging point for the creative negotiation of new relations between the body and the “course to be run.” Through the development of such new relations, thinking becomes more than an additive aimed toward an immutable image of “reality,” definitive theory of life or teleological end. Contrariwise, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) aver, the development of new passages of thinking act no less than to transform “the course of life.”

Thinking Leaving Thoreau’s writing at Walden creates the possibility for thinking leaving (Block, 1998). As he conceives it, Thoreau escapes the sentimentality commonly associated with departure. Further, he avoids the imaginary trap of mythologizing a “better” world (Arsic, 2005). Yet, in thinking leaving, Thoreau leaves us with a pedagogical paradox. “For was it not Thoreau who enforced the . . . desire of humans to be protected by building wall after wall after wall?” (Arsic, 2005, p. 128). That is, does Thoreau not epitomize the common desire to territorialize oneself through escape, isolation, and the multiplication of self-identity through journaling? Yet, as Arsic asks apropos Cavell, why would anyone build a house as Thoreau did at Walden “only in order to leave it after it was built?” (p. 129). In the midst of Thoreau’s day-to-day life at Walden, why is it that he suddenly departs, into the forest and into imperceptibility? The answer, Arsic contends, is not to be found in death, but in teaching how one might leave to (be)come. Thoreau’s home at Walden is not simply the static structure that constitutes the foil of Block’s theory on the necessity of pedagogical departure. Akin to the experimental processes of hacking and parkour, Thoreau dubbed his process at Walden a “deliberate building.” Yet, his active creation of a home did not accord to a plan or calculation. As Arsic writes, “building becomes the process of . . . [thinking] in a new way” (p. 134). The design of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden for example, had neither a basement nor substructure. That is, it had no formal foundation upon which it was constructed. Further, Thoreau’s cabin was designed without an upper floor, the site of self-surveillance and panoptic power. As previously noted, Thoreau’s cabin was designed to be permeable and open to the outside. The cabin at Walden was thus less “structural” than a way of thinking the space between descendancy/ascendancy, higher/lower, inner/outer, etc. As Thoreau (1962) wrote, the house reacts to the movements of those things

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and people that inhabit it. Rather than fixed and static, Thoreau esoterically writes that the house is as light as a cloud, a territory traversed by a myriad of deterritorializing lines. The pedagogical interventions on State thought advanced by hacking and parkour are tied to an ethics of nomadism. That is, they do not fixate on the powers of death, but rather, the joyous affirmation of life that comes with departure, bifurcation, and experimentation. Thoreau’s experiment in leaving, Arsic writes, “had as its single goal . . . the possibility of building a house that one could joyously leave” (p. 131). In his philosophy of pedagogical vagabondage, Block similarly contends that by leaving the reactive path, one joyously affirms the creative powers of difference. Against the melancholic lament over lost objects, joyous departure necessitates that we become, like Thoreau, imperceptible, altering the limits of identitarian thought by becoming-other. Put differently, the Deleuzeguattarian (1987) concept of becoming-imperceptible disorients je (identitarian thought) in favor of jeu (play, gambling, the Nietzschean dice-throw), “[exploring] the virtual without knowing what it will yield” (May, 2005, p. 172). In such becoming, a new space is created in which one must “learn how to invent new motions, emotions, thoughts, languages and (even if for a day) how to build a new house” (Arsic, 2005, p. 130). This is the work of currere’s active force, to create, in the middle of territorialized space and thought, new ways of thinking and taking action. It is in this way that old habits of thought, cathected desires, and patterns of behavior are deterritorialized through the active creation of a new social space for a people yet to come. In this vein, such youth practices as hacking and parkour are harbingers of a new way of thinking that actively engages the virtual powers of difference.

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I’m Not There: The Cinematic Time-Image, Cultural Curriculum Studies, and the Political Arts of an Untimely Subject

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n his introduction to Anti-Oedipus (1983), Foucault writes that Deleuze and Guattari’s work “can best be read as an ‘art’” (p. xii). For Foucault, the “art” of Anti-Oedipus is deployed in three transitive forms: ars erotica (an erotic-art), ars theoretica (an art-theory), and ars politica (a political art). Each mobilized by the Deleuzeguattarian concept of desiringproduction,1 Foucault plots the “artistic” problematic of Anti-Oedipus thus: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action . . . How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order?” (p. xii). In Deleuzeguattarian terms, desire is not a passive or parasitical force enjoined to lack, but rather, a somatic and social process of linkage and relinkage, of forming (reterritorializing) and breaking (deterritorializing) flows. The “arts” of desiring-production are mobilized in this manner as a weapon against oedipalization, attacking “what is all-too-human in mankind” (Seem, 1983, p. xvi). The human, all-too-human is epitomized by the man of ressentiment, who seeks at every turn to render desire into a fascism, to subjugate desire under such Oedipal territorialities as the Family, the Church, the School, the Nation, and the Party (Foucault, 1983). Foucault elaborates further on the opponents of Anti-Oedipus, implicating three emissaries of oedipalization. The first Foucault dubs the “political [ascetic], the sad [militant], [and] the terrorists of theory,” those who reterritorialize difference in the

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totalized image of the Truth (p. xii); second, Foucault juxtaposes the “art” of Anti-Oedipus against the “poor technicians of desire,” those structural and psychoanalytic discourses that seek to “subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack” (pp. xii–xiii). Finally, Foucault posits the greatest enemy to desiring-production in the figure of the fascist. Herein, Foucault inculpates both the historical organization of desire by Hitler and Mussolini, and further, the common and everyday will to cling to rigid transcendent identities adapted to prior social production networks. The sickness that Anti-Oedipus seeks to diagnose is none other than the Oedipal cure, the all-too-human image of the identitarian and individualized body. In Nietzschean (2000) terms, what constitutes both our historical trajectory and contemporary sickness is the becoming reactive of the body; that is, the image of the body severed from its active potentials, or rather, from that which is inhuman, mutant, and anomalous in (wo)man. In this Oedipal model of reactivity, “alien and rogue . . . assemblages” are captured and organized by myriad transcendent powers of organ-ization (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 147). Repressed by the totalizing narratives of the “political ascetic,” the “poor technicians of desire” and the fascist champions of identity, desiringproduction is submitted to the cruelty of overcoding (Foucault, 1983, pp. xii–xiii). In this sense, the “coextension of the social field and desire” is subjugated under a reactive image that functions to repress productive forces of difference (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). For example, the image of rational man marks the territorialization of bodily drives symptomatic of oedipalization. “Dominated by the head of reason, expressed through the eyes of the soul and the demeanor of the face, and sexualized through the private genital organs,” our experience of the modern self is marked by the violent overdetermination of the organ-ism (Colebrook, 2006, p. 145). Yet, such organ-ization belies the more insidious fascist “demand that war be carried into the body itself” (Guattari cited in Alliez, 2006, p. 159). For the body to be fully politicized, its overcoded image requires internalization. Such internalization occurs in classic psychoanalysis, when we “learn” to treat desire as reactively cathected to prior circuits of interpretation (the Oedipal drama, the family, lack, etc.). In this sense, consciousness is no longer seen as pressured or parasited by unconscious desire. Rather, in Deleuzeguattarian terms (1983), it is consciousness that pressures the unconscious, demanding that it conform to normalized images of life. A similar violence is critiqued by Nietzsche (1968), who decries the overdetermination of desire by the transcendent morals of Christianity and further, in Artaud’s (1976) assessment of the diseased body promulgated by the Western biomedical model. Captured in the

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image advanced by prior circuits of such oedipalizing structures, the body becomes sedimented and submitted to a time, space, and reality measured in advance. Subjugated to the automatic interpretation machines of psychoanalysis, Christian morality, and biomedical symptomology, the potentials of the body become bound by the signifying violence of identitarian representation (Artaud, 1976). Anti-Oedipus (1983) posits the body as a contemporary problematic. Toward the articulation of this problem, Deleuze and Guattari approach the reactive image of the body as a failure to think the body’s active or experimental potentials. As Deleuze (1988) affirms apropos Spinoza, we do not yet know what a body can do. In contrast to the territorialized (oedipalized) individual, Deleuze (2003a) posits that the body must be given back to thought. It is in this sense that the ars erotica, ars theoretica, and ars politica of Anti-Oedipus are waged against the ego (the “me”) and further, the image of life captured and overcoded by the automatic interpretation machines of the State. Towards this, Deleuze and Guattari affirm an ontology of becoming, “which never cease[s] to undo the sedimentation of identities” (Alliez, 2006, p. 156). Deleuzeguattarian process ontology hence approaches the body as a potentiality, or rather, a multiplicity prior to reactive processes of individualization.2 Put differently, Deleuze and Guattari do not presume a transcendent subject that subsequently changes, nor do they presuppose an inherently human condition from whence life naturally unfolds. Instead, Deleuzeguattarian process ontology affirms Artaud’s politics of sensation dubbed the body without organs (BwO)3 (Alliez, 2006). Against the “strongly patterned body” of oedipalization (the institutional image of the body), Artaud’s body without organs is a provocation to experiment with the compositional assemblage of a “body without image” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). In other words, a body without organs is the deterritorialized or non-organismic body dehabituated from prior habits and circuits. Hence, the body without image might be thought as a practice of creating affects, experimenting with the potentials of what a body can do and undergo. As an experimentation with the body’s potentials to affect and be affected, to connect and interrupt flows, the body without organs is less an image than an event. That is, the body without organs may be able to exceed the oedipal territories of contemporary thought “by functioning as a fulcrum for a processural relaunch . . . between art and life” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). In this manner, the “art” of Anti-Oedipus might be thought as an “art of the self,” wherein the body is given back to the question of how individuals are constructed in the first place (p. 156). This question is significant for the problematic of currere, that is, the question of how a life might go.

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The root of the subject is habit (Buchanan, 2008b). Through habit, the virtual multiplicity of perceptions immanent to the body without organs are actualized into stable patterns marked by determinate connections. Such patterns and determinate connections organize the fluxes of the body into what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as molar aggregates. That is, molarizing social forces4 organize the body in the image of a statistical standard from which deviations might be measured. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), molar powers and their counterpart molecular forces can be distinguished by two kinds of movement. While molar powers organize systems in increasingly homogenous, equilibrated, and normalized states, molecular forces move toward less probable, nonnormal and deviant thresholds. It is in this sense that the body is immediately political, for the State apparatus requires a subject that can be represented, recorded, and surveyed according to statistical norms, or rather, such molar aggregates as sex, gender, ethnicity, race, age, etc. The habitual or molar body is in this respect the ideal biopolitical entity, enjoined to the subjectivized positions of State thought. The dangers of molar thinking, Buchanan (1999) advances, are inexorably linked to the presupposition of the subject as given. That is, if the subject is simply the emanation or representation of a molar image, then its potential to affect or be affected by the social order is repressed. Put differently, if we begin with the assumption of a molar, equilibrated, or totalized identity, then we have already stifled the potential for thinking desiring-production as coextensive of social production. Simply, the molar aim of desire is representational, not inventive. In contrast to the immanent forces of Artaud’s body without organs, the molar subject is oriented to constitutive forces that exist outside of itself. In the image of a normal person, a rational animal, or human Being, the desire of the molarized subject is cathected to the representation of a prior identity. It is in this image of ontological impoverishment that the body becomes overcoded, hence reducing its potentials to instantiate new ways of living. What is required today is, hence, a way of thinking subjectivity as both the product of social mechanisms (molar powers) and forces capable of manipulating such social mechanisms in the creation of a life (molecular forces). As Deleuze (2001b) challenges, “there is only a practical subject” (p. 104). While the body is subjectivized through molar powers of organization, it remains immanent to molecular forces through which it might become, or rather, be recreated. Against the putrification of life imaged by the gross statistical categories of sex, gender, and race, we must today begin to diagram other ways of living beyond the condition of identity. This entails the affirmation of an anti-Oedipal political art (ars politica),

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or rather, an art of the self dedicated to the experimental creation of a body without image. Tarantinian Thinking in Curriculum Theory In Cultural Curriculum Studies, Multiplicity, and Cinematic-Machines (2006), Reynolds advances a way of thinking a curricular body without image. In modern cinema, Reynolds locates a potential site for the resistance of stratification and the molar aggregation of the curriculum field. Toward this, Reynolds illustrates the “complicated conversation” created in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes One and Two (p. 42). Citing the events of Kill Bill Volume One, Reynolds briefly argues that the filmic interspersion of “Japanese anime, black and white scenes, surrealistic gore, severed body parts, and a Japanese rock band” constitutes an original multiplicity through which we might begin to rethink the curricular body differently (p. 49). That is, Reynolds imagines a desedimented curricular body through the rhizomatic assemblage of heterogeneous forces: “Schools and sitcoms, fast food and faculty, science fiction and science curriculum, math and movies, accountability and AC/DC, bricolage and biology, French and fusion cuisine . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . ” (p. 47). Against the aggregation of the curricular field into compartmentalized subject areas and instrumental methodologies, Reynolds approaches the curricular field as a matter of invention rather than representation, a cartography (calques) rather than a tracing (cartes). Following this line of flight, Reynolds avers that the compositional multiplicity of Kill Bill creates productive lines of flight along which the virtual elements of a somatic or social body might be rethought. Put differently, the stylistic multiplicity of Kill Bill constitutes for Reynolds an original way of thinking a life unfettered by the habits of molar thought. In this vein, he advocates a kind of cultural curriculum theorizing oriented to the deliberate creation of heterogeneous assemblages. It is through such assemblages, Reynolds theorizes, that the field of curriculum studies might begin to subtract molecular forces from identitarian or molar powers of oedipalization. “Our present historical moment is one of control,” Reynolds argues, “[stressing] identity over difference and disciplinary over interdisciplinarity” (p. 52). Killing Bill and the Persistence of Identitarian Thought In order to mobilize the political art of the cinema toward a transformation of social and somatic life, we might first question how it is that

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identity perseveres. Along this line, while Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2004a, 2004b) is composed of heterodox styles and unique assemblages linking kung-fu, blaxploitation, spaghetti western, and anime, are these assemblages not still overcoded in the image of Oedipus? That is, does Kill Bill not reterritorialize in the very Oedipal image that a contemporary cultural curriculum studies might seek to desediment? While replete with heterogeneous cultural references, does the very premise of Kill Bill not overcode the subversive potential of such variegated influences in an all-too-human image of thought? I assert that Tarantino’s Kill Bill is haunted by the image of Oedipus. To begin, Tarantino organizes his narrative around the father figure Bill5 (David Carradine), who functions as the object-cause of Tarantino’s revenge drama. That is, Kill Bill unfolds as the overbearing father figure (Bill) tenaciously attempts to restrict access to the maternal body of Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman). At each juncture of the film, Bill and his vassals attempt to capture and sediment Kiddo’s desire. Against this, the desire of Tarantino’s heroine is teleologically oriented to the destruction of this sublimating power. In this vein, is Tarantino’s film not tantamount to a death wish, or rather, an Oedipal wish figured in the title of the film itself? Bill must die such that the mother can love another. This Oedipal scenario is mobilized throughout Kill Bill Volume One, wherein Bill’s object of desire (the pregnant Beatrix Kiddo) is prevented from marriage by Bill’s assassin squad, The Deadly Vipers. In Tarantinian style, The Deadly Vipers execute Kiddo’s wedding party in an aesthetic spectacle of cartoonish gore and slow motion deaths. In the culmination of this scene, Bill shoots Kiddo in the head, hence organizing the film around the exclusivity of her love. From the perspective of the Oedipal father Bill: if I can’t have her, no one can. Tarantino’s Oedipal revenge scenario is further developed in Volume Two, wherein the hitherto godlike figure of Bill is humanized and weakened.6 The superegoic figure of Bill is rendered fallible and superseded by the cruel kung-fu master Pei-Mei (Gordon Liu), who teaches Kiddo the secret technique that Bill lacks.7 Significantly, it is at this juncture that Bill can finally be killed. Prior to the culmination of the Kill Bill revenge drama, however, Tarantino melodramatically stages an idealized image of the Oedipal triad (mommy-daddy-and me), reuniting Kiddo with the daughter Bill abducted while she lay comatose in a hospital. Yet, Tarantino’s nostalgic reunion of the nuclear family is brief, for the teleological course of Kill Bill is locked in the a priori death wish of the Oedipal complex. The father figure in Tarantino’s revenge narrative must die, a teleological course guaranteed by the promise of the film’s title.

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The Oedipal image is perhaps nowhere as apparent in Kill Bill as in its orientation to identity and personal history. That is, through the father figures of Bill and later, Pie Mei, Beatrix Kiddo discovers her true potential. Yet, Kiddo’s identity and desire are already fettered to the teleological death wish of Tarantino’s film: Bill must be killed. In this vein, Kiddo’s becoming is not that of invention. Rather, Kiddo’s desiring-production is already sedimented within patterns of ressentiment and revenge. It within this pattern of revenge that Kiddo’s desire orbits as she systematically hunts and dispatches each member of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. The unusual perceptual and somatic states that affect Kiddo’s body, including comatic unconsciousness, paralysis, and exhaustion, are treated as becomings to overcome. That is, the multiplicity of ways that a body might affect and be affected are from the outset of Tarantino’s film already determined.8 Kiddo’s desire is caught in the identitarian production of a past self. Captured within the patterns of revenge and resentment, Kiddo identifies in the image of her former Deadly Viper alter-ego, Black Mamba. It is in this past image or reactive memory that Kiddo is reterritorialized. This Oedipal or identitarian turn gives way to another at the conclusion of Volume 2, when Kiddo confides to Bill that she can identify with no other image than that of a warrior, expect perhaps, the molar identity of a mother. A final example of identitarian thought inhering Kill Bill might be drawn from Bill’s closing monologue, wherein he employs a popular culture analogy to convince Kiddo of her true nature. “As you know, I am quite keen on comic books,” Bill avers, “especially the ones about superheroes . . . I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating” (Bender and Tarantino, 2004b). Following, Bill differentiates between the superheroic persona and her/his alter-ego: “Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spiderman is actually Peter Parker,” he argues. Yet, for Bill, Superman poses a compelling exception. As an alien from the planet Krypton, Superman is always Superman.9 That is, while Batman and Spiderman become their superheroic personas by donning their costumes, Bill argues that Superman’s costume is in fact the alter-egoic persona Clark Kent. “[T]he glasses, the business suit . . . that’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us” (Bender and Tarantino, 2004b). In this vein, Bill asserts that Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race, characterized by insecurity, cowardice, and weakness.10 Bill’s analogy runs parallel to the central conflict of Kiddo’s character. That is, he asserts that Kiddo is a natural born killer, and that her conflicting desires are in fact, betrayals of this unavoidable truth: “You were born Beatrix Kiddo . . . and every morning when you woke up, you’d still be Beatrix Kiddo . . . a natural born killer . . . you always have and you always will be.” For Kiddo to become anything other than a

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killer, she is forced to play out the very identitarian role impelled by Bill. Put differently, the Tarantinian father figure Bill overcodes Kiddo’s desire, requiring her to identify with the immutable and stable image of a true self given in advance. While we might think of Superman’s subjectivity as split, indefinite, and complex, Kiddo’s subjectivity is externally subordinated to habit, playing out a deadly Oedipal tale of “bloody revenge” (Bender and Tarantino, 2004b). While Reynolds (2004, 2006) urges the conceptualization of curriculum theorizing through the unique assemblage of heterogenic cultural elements, this tactic does not necessarily loosen molar or oedipalizing tendencies at work in the social field. Put differently, one cannot presume that the creation of complex referential assemblages will by necessity produce sociopolitical sites of creative resistance. Kill Bill is a case in point. While the two volumes of Kill Bill are undoubtedly composed of myriad pop culture references, these elements are put to work in the image of Oedipus. That is, they are mobilized toward the production of an oedipalizing image that territorializes, rather than desediments, identitarian or all-toohuman thinking. In this vein, Tarantino’s Kill Bill does not yet create a new image for thinking, as the multiplicity it mobilizes is already overcoded in the transcendent image of how a life will go. In Deleuzian terms, what Tarantino produces is indeed a multiplicity. Yet, I assert that the character of Tarantino’s multiplicity is largely quantitative, differing only by degree, that lowest degree of difference (Deleuze, 1991). The myriad references composing Kill Bill are territorialized as a reactionary variation of clichéd movements well-worn within the track of our thinking. While Kill Bill does engage with the filmic creation of temporal discontinuities, postmodern pastiche, and the problematics of consumerism, these trajectories insist on clinging to identity, to teleology, and ressentiment. In other words, the unique Tarantinian devices used in Kill Bill are not oriented to the production of a political body without image, but rather, function to shore up identity through the composition of a narrative unity, or rather, an image of the body. It is in reference to this image of the body that hooks (1994) remarks on the “cool cynicism” of Tarantinian films. For hooks, Tarantino’s films implicitly assert that nothing is going to change, “’cause the real deal is that ‘domination is here to stay’” (p. 47). The domination hooks critiques in Tarantino might be seen in the ways that Kill Bill remains caught in the complex of molar determination (one goal, one genealogy, one desire, one true identity), an image that poses a problematic for the creation of a body without image, and further, a political cultural curriculum studies. As Reynolds (2006) avers, the creation of a cultural curriculum studies might indeed be a matter of making a multiplicity. Yet, this multiplicity

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cannot be measurable in relation to a model, wherein plurality is conceived as a variation organ-ized by a prior image of thought. Such a conceptualization of difference is demonstrated in Kill Bill, wherein Tarantino’s chic narrative is overcoded by conservative and ultimately conformist images of identity and desire. Rather than experimenting with the creation of a destratified subject, quantitative multiplicity reproduces the properties of stratified bodies by mapping them according to prior attributes. In this sense, multiple subject positions, multiple genres, and multiple pop culture references are not, by necessity of their construction, revolutionary. Multiplicities might too become parasited by “transcendent organizing [metrics]” (Bonta & Protevi, 2006, p. 117). While heterogeneous, a multiplicity might still be unified, halting disjunctive lines of flight by overcoding them in particular organ-izations of identity, desire, or teleology. Despite the composition of unique heterogeneities, such variegations are susceptible to capture by transcendent overcoding. In this sense, hooks (1994) comments that while the character of Tarantino’s films, “titillate with subversive possibility . . . everything kinda comes right back to normal” (p. 48). Perhaps this return to normal marks the paranoid-fascist pole of Deleuzeguattarian (1983) desire, through which subjects are rendered whole by clinging to coded (true and natural) identities. Opposed to the creation of an experimental anti-flesh, this identitarian pole of desire has yet to break from the habit of self-reflection, in the image of which difference is reduced to the difference or variation of a prior thing. This is not to say that every multiplicity becomes subject to overcoding. Indeed, such multiplicities as packs, nomads, mutants, rhizomes, and symbiotes create lines of flight that might escape molar coding, producing qualitative changes or becomings that push equilibrated systems to thresholds of productive deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is in this vein that the conceptualization of multiplicity in curriculum studies must continue to approach its composition as a political art oriented to the mobilization of transformations in both somatic and social milieus. Put differently, the political significance of a cultural curriculum studies requires that it be the work (an ars politica) of invention rather than representation. Toward this, one must begin to discern a molar tendency at work in contemporary cultural production, a tendency that functions by harnessing molecular forces and putting them to work in the reproduction of prior identities (Bogue, 1996). This entails that a cultural curriculum theorizing begin to experiment with the creation of a multiplicity no longer fettered to a transcendent image or prior identity. Instead, a cultural curriculum studies oriented to the creation of new social and somatic life might work to release intensities from prior circuits and

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patterns of organ-ization. In part, this political maneuver presupposes that the organization of life into “various forms . . . could always have been otherwise” (Lorraine, 1999, p. 168). Deleuze and Guattari (1983) affirm that experimentation with the potential becomings of a life entails “taking apart egos and their presuppositions . . . liberating the . . . singularities they enclose and repress” (p. 362). In the creation of a body not yet overcoded by molar or State thinking, cultural curriculum studies must begin to think of a difference in kind, that is, an immanent difference that is not immanent to some prior model of life. It is toward such a conceptualization of difference that this chapter is oriented to the political art of the Deleuzian time-image. Further, it is via a consideration of the Deleuzian time-image that a cultural curriculum studies might begin to consider a change in somatic and social organization demanded by the political arts of desiring-production. Before developing an image of a cultural curriculum studies through the Deleuzian concept of the time-image, it is important that we first recognize how the field of curriculum theory remains haunted, even in its most progressive figurations, to identitarian thinking, and more specifically, to the Deleuzian notion of the movement-image11 (a concept I return to more fully in a later section). As an implicit concept in curriculum theory, the movement-image might be understood as intimate to the notion of self-reflection and the image of memory upon which it territorializes. It is in this self-reflective vein that life is organized as an endeavor that aspires to synthesis and the dialectical activity of self-remembrance. As Reynolds (2002) develops, the reterritorialization of life in the image of “unity, identity, security, [and] popularity” marks an attempt to sediment desiring or molecular flows in the organ-ized circuits of State thought (p. 46). This image of capture is critical to an understanding of currere, for it suggests that reactionary powers function by parasitically overdetermining how a life might go. One example of such overcoding, Reynolds argues, is manifest in the process whereby a life is captured in the image of a universal self.

The Clockwork of Person Constructing The explosion of biographical and autobiographical scholarship in the curriculum field has been heralded as both a transformative and political project (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2000). Yet, much autobiographical research remains cathected to the transcendent image of an ontological unity. In other words, while the orientation of much autobiographical research is aimed at differentiating subjective experience from the

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gross statistical categories under with it is often overcoded, it paradoxically remains organ-ized by prior ontological presumptions regarding the unity of identity, the dialectics of subjectivity, and the synthesis of subject and situation. Herein, the transformative possibility of autobiography often proceeds by degrees of difference. That is, while autobiographical modes of research might seek to reconstruct the subject through an analysis of their molar political, economic, ethnic, and gendered organ-izations, such reconstruction often reterritorializes the subject within an equally harmful identity politics. In Nietzschean (1986) terms, such reterritorializations are harmful insofar as they cathect life to its most racist character, that is, the anthropocentric images of human Being, human nature, and human experience. It is our failure to think, May (2005) writes, that purports that “there was only one way [that a life might go] and that it was a human one” (p. 24). While autobiography might be oriented to the political and social transformation of its subject, it often continues to participate in the reproduction of an essential tyranny that presupposes in advance how a life might go, how it will divide, and in what image it will appear recognizable. In the appeal to human nature for example, much autobiographical research already assumes that we divide up into a pure species and that this division constitutes an ontological fact. Yet, as Bryant (2008) contends, “the subject is not ontologically primitive” (p. 178). In this vein, if we are to insist on the transcendent image of the human and the coherence of identity it connotes, then we will produce nothing new, in turn putrefying life’s potential for radical becoming. The question of creative action, Nietzsche (1986) writes, is “whether it is at all possible . . . to suspend the clockwork of . . . [the] person-constructing, person-inventing drive even for a moment” (p. 219). A reproductive tendency also inheres the contemporary trend to multiply identity. While a relevant innovation on the immutable self promulgated throughout modernity, the multiplication of identity continues to labor under a transcendent image by which its multiple variations are rendered different only by degree. That is, even in its most extreme figuration, the pluralization of identity reterritorializes in the image of arborescence. While identity might be multiplied and variegated, such multiplication continues to presuppose identity as the center of Being. In this vein, identity is presented as a transcendent image prior to difference, “so that any solution that is sought will be a solution on the scale of the individual” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 189). It is in this image of thought that difference always relates to the primacy of identity and is hence reduced to a secondary movement or degraded aftereffect. While curricular research might produce a plurality of identities or subject positions, this plurality remains monocentric when fettered to the

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transcendent category of identitarian Being by which its variations remain recognizable, domesticated, and ultimately molarized. The illusion upheld by this transcendent maneuver insists that the subject is the ultimate ground of an individualized world (Bryant, 2008). While one might think in terms of multiple identities, insofar as such identity is treated as a transcendent image that precludes difference, it remains in the orbit of oedipalization, and in particular, the fascist-paranoiac pole of desire wherein the body is habitually reterritorialized as an identity. While molar powers constituting the individual might be interrogated, “what is essential hasn’t changed” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 71). The domain of the rational individual remains intact. As May (2005) writes, the error of humanism in which this image participates is the “error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject” (p. 24). While a frequent viewpoint for the political project of autobiography, such anthropocentrism must be understood as only one way that a life might go. It is against this notion of difference in kind that much autobiographical research privileges the synthesis of identity from the start (Widder, 2006). In this Hegelian vein, the self is constituted via a process of negation. Put differently, the dialectical synthesis of the subject is produced by defining it against everything it is not. It is in this sense that the dialectical synthesis of the human subject is possible insofar at it reflects the a priori image of how a life ought to go, how it should divide up, and how the flows of its memory should be organized. Autobiographical curricular research oriented to the discovery of identifiable entities continues to participate in the ontological articulation of an essence that persists as the ground of difference. In this vein, the often heralded metaphor of finding (oneself, one’s voice, one’s identity) must first answer how it is that one finds or discovers some thing essential to itself. That is, the essential character of millions of people must first be explained. Toward this, May (2005) writes, “in order for something to have an identity, it must have characteristics that can be identified over time” (p. 18). While such characteristics do not presuppose the stability of an identity, May argues that stability inheres the concepts by which identity is mapped. Human nature, the dialectically synthesized self, and the presupposition of life as a chronological unity stabilize identity through the creation of an essential ontological ground. It is by mapping these prior images of thought onto the presubjective or body without organs that such images circulate as the a priori possibility of life. The Oedipus complex functions similarly by contending that the nature of human development can be located in the tension between one’s formative and present relationships. While May contends that there “is no particular way of solving these tensions . . . essential to human unfolding” the identity of human beings

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are nevertheless caught in the organ-izing matrix of such tensions (p. 18). In this instance, while identity might be unstable, such instability remains fettered to a stable ontological ground in the image of which difference is tethered. The presumption of an identifiable entity can proceed only by difference in degree12 from prior indexes, codes, or symbols. This assumes that difference, as the “cauldron” of the unconscious, is immanent to a prior ontological reality, such as the human Being, the synthesis of identity, or the dialectics of self. In this image of identitarian conformity, the potential of radically thinking the future13 becomes apolitical, reduced to cliché images of how life ought to go. As Land (2006) cautions, “We should be wary . . . of calls to a return to human values when they seek to arrest change and development, returning to a facial and fascistic overcoding in the name of the father” (p. 126). When desire becomes tethered to the particular norms, tendencies, and organ-izations of what it means to be normal human beings, abnormality can only be understood as the failure to become fully human (May, 2005). If thinking entails “discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life,” then the degraded status of abnormality marks the radical failure of thought (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 101). In this vein, the desire of autobiography might already be cathected to the reproduction of an image of the body as opposed to the experimental creation of a body without image.

Time is Out of Joint: The Deleuzian Time-Image and the Body Without Image Reynolds (2006) remarks, albeit briefly, on the significance of the Deleuzian time-image to the conceptualization of a cultural curriculum studies. It is in this concept that the field might begin to think ontological difference. Further, it is in the Deleuzian time-image that a weapon against the identitarian and self-resemblant presumptions of the movement-image or image of the body prior to radical difference might be mobilized. Put differently, the Deleuzian time-image might be deployed as a political art that affirms the coextension of desiring-production and the social field. The Deleuzian time-image marks a philosophical shift in selfperception. Inaugurated by Kant’s reversal of movement and time in the Critique of Pure Reason (1998/1781), “time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it” (Deleuze, 1984, p. viii). Deleuze (2003a, 2003b) broadly articulates this perceptual shift in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. “Time constitutes the self,” Deleuze writes, “but it does so in a disjunctive way, because time is the form of

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interiority that constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end” (p. ix). This particular philosophical approach posits a radically different orientation to the problem of currere. A pedagogical life territorialized in the movement-image remains tethered to the representation of identity over time, hence reterritorializing the future in the image of the past present.14 In this manner, we “skip over the diversity” of differences, attributing to objects disguises of “self, substance, unity, and identity” (Olkowski, 1999, 108). Put differently, so long as time is subordinated to the movement-image (the image of the body), thought remains captured in the normalizing processes of individualization, producing in turn the very biopolitical entities required by the State.15 As Crockett (2005) developes, the movement-image overcodes potential difference by tethering potentias (the immanent potentials inhering life) to potestas (the actual power of the State apparatus). “One way to think about the Deleuzian distinction between the time-image and the movementimage,” Crockett contends, “is to read the time-image as referring directly to potentia whereas the movement-image necessarily concerns potestas” (p. 188). The Deleuzian time-image intervenes in this circuit of potentia and potestas, releasing the body from reactive patterns of sense, perception, and action. Alliez (2006) argues that this circuit-breaking force requires an artistic intervention oriented to invention rather than representation. The movement-image is the “first sign of the cinema” (Crockett, 2005, p. 179). Its function is based solely on the speed of the image, forming movement-linkages that instantiate the impression of chronological causality. Crockett contends that much of contemporary cinema, particularly the action genre, continues to be dominated by the movement-image, producing habitual sensory-motor linkages that “eventually deteriorate to the level of clichés” (p. 179). The movement-image also inheres conceptualization of cinema as a “narrative code structured like a language” (Rajchman, 2000, p. 123). As Rajchman argues, the organization of cinema as narrative marks the triumphant formation of the movement-image. It is in paradigmatic contrast to this image of thought that Deleuze mobilizes the time-image as a technology for thinking unfettered from the submission of time to movement. Freed from the habitual sensorimotor linkages of the movement-image, cinema becomes a tool for experimenting with both somatic and social organ-izations. As Rajchman writes, “the break with . . . narrative is . . . to be understood in terms of the emergence of a new kind of cinematic ‘image’” (p. 123). In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze (2001b) employs the concept of the crystal to describe a nonchronological time out of joint. “The crystal refers . . . to the splitting of time as it unfolds” Deleuze writes (p. 81).

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No longer fettered by the measure of movement or sensorimotor habits, “the interval is set free, the interstice . . . stands on its own” (p. 277). This philosophical shift is promulgated by the cinematic time-image, which produces intervals no longer fettered to the habitual reproduction of movement. “The interval is no longer a rational cut,” Crockett (2005) writes, “but appears as irrational, or at least set free from any particular constraints of rational standards defined in terms of movement, such as a ruler or canon” (p. 180). In the cinema, the time-image registers the nomadic mind unlinked from clichéd movements of thought and action. In one particular case of the time-image, the interval creates a disjunction between what is aurally perceived and what is seen on the screen. That is, while aural and visual information are sensed concomitantly, they are separated by an interval that produces a disjunction. Rodowick (1997) articulates another example of the time-image from Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Lying motionless on a cell floor, a prisoner relates another time, freeing himself from the “thread of chronology where past, present, and future are aligned on a continuum” (p. 4). In Rodowick’s example, time is no longer subordinated to the sensorimotor mechanism, constituting instead another way of perceiving how a life might go. The work of Powell (2005) articulates the ways in which the horror film genre is populated with such transpersonal, transtemporal, and nonchronological ways of thinking time beyond movement. Powell draws one example from the geographic setting of the 1963 horror film, The Haunting. The spatial presence of The Haunting’s Hill House, Powell argues, is subordinated to duration. “The house is in duration” Powell writes, “and forces the characters to live there too” (p. 166). Hill House itself has a virtual memory actualized by the researchers investigating its strange phenomenon. The film unfolds, not through the spatial movements or actions of the researchers toward their goal, but via the inhuman time of Hill House. In this image of time out of joint, the lives of the researchers are barred from achieving a durational or chronological consistency. That is, the research team is constantly drawn into the demented time of Hill House, and in this particular case, into a virtual memory out of joint with the present. The cinematic time-image creates a way that we can begin to both think and experience time of another kind. That is, the crystalline structure of the time-image posits a qualitative multiplicity of duration that ceases to carry the illusion of identitarian consistency or narrative unity. It is in this sense that the time-image is inherently futural. Yet, this future does not reterritorialize in the image of the past. While the future repeats, its repetition is not identitarian, but rather, the repetition of difference. Following Bergson (2007), time does not unfold upon a single course, but rather, explodes along multiple trajectories of linkage, relinkage, and creative

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evolution. “Time . . . splits into two asymmetrical jets, one of which make the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past . . . [w]e see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time” (Deleuze, 2003b, p. 81). Via this concept of the crystal, Deleuze argues that time is out of joint, launched towards the future while falling into the past. Composed within time and yet not a measure of it, the self is also out of joint. As Widder (2006) contends, the “I” becomes “a multiplicity of subjects living different temporalities within the same, not so unified Being” (Widder, 2006, p. 411). Repudiating the reactive philosophical tendency for durational continuity, Deleuze’s time-image might be postulated as the affirmation of the affirmation of becoming.

An Untimely Currere: The Body to Come in Cultural Curriculum Studies The creative interval of the time-image is intimately linked to the political import of the cinema (Crockett, 2005). “The political task of the cinema,” Crockett writes, “is to contribute to the invention of a people, and the time-image is what enables this possibility, because it allows for linkages and relinkages among ideas, images and bodies, not merely for the sake of a movement or territory, but for the purpose of . . . creating a people” (p. 187). In Deleuzian (2003b) terms, the people are missing. That is, we have yet to think the complicated time or qualitative difference of a people yet to come. Overcoded by the identitarian-chronological image of how a life ought to go, our resources for thinking life unfettered from substantial, statistical categories of Being are reduced. It is in this vein that the time-image might be mobilized as an affirmative political force of difference. Via the time-image, we might begin to diagram other durations of human, nonhuman, and transhuman life. Such an expansion of perception is, according to Deleuze (2006a), the ultimate aim of art. Creating a way of thinking no longer fettered to either sensorimotor habits or the actualization of the future in the image of the past present, the Deleuzian time-image “dismantles the very basis of our perception and its conformity to the speed-body of the state with its spectacular images and dissimulative strategies of biopolitical control” (Widder, 2005, p. 186). What Deleuze dubs “smooth or non-pulsed space-time” detaches from striated or organ-ized space-time, allowing “the identification of the variation, or individuations without identity” (pp. 296–297). The Deleuzian time-image is significant to the conceptualization of a cultural curriculum studies, for it mobilizes a heterogeneous approach to thinking that no longer orbits the habitual linkages of identitarian

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thought. The Deleuzian time-image creates a passage for thinking the course of pedagogical life (currere) unhinged from the movement-image, constituting a manner of deterritorializing the overcoded body. Whereas the pedagogical models of modernity defined individuals relative to gross statistical categories and prescribed social positions, the time-image requires rethinking the “self ” at the edge of individualization. That is, the time-image creates a passage for thinking durational difference (difference in kind) in which the subject becomes qualitatively metamorphic, “a cracked self in a world of multiplicity” (Widder, 2005, p. 413). The time-image hence intervenes with the implicit movement-image underpinning the concept of currere. Derived from the image of the Grecian racetrack, currere (the course to be run) presumes an image of time already submitted to circuited movement. While intensities and speeds of movement might vary along the circuited course, movement continues to persist as time’s measure. Put differently, the jointed image of the racetrack composes a chronological time in which difference proceeds only by degree from a prior, in this case circular, course. It is in this sense that currere’s movement-image provides a conceptual ground for identitarian thought in curriculum theorizing. It is this very identitarian agenda that remains complicit with the State task of biopolitical control. That is, so long as time remains submitted to movement, curricular thought will continue to labor under the clichés of representational thinking, unable to produce a complicated conceptualization of time out of joint with prior memory-habits. Riveted to the movement-image, currere might continue to reterritorialize upon a dialectical rather than disjunctive image of time. This ontological tendency would in turn maintain the conditions for identitarian thinking, self-reflection, and the reification of difference as a matter of degree rather than kind. In this way, curriculum theory fails to instantiate the kind of untimely thinking that Pinar (2004) suggests is gravely needed today. Evoking the Deleuzian time-image, Pinar (2004) argues that contemporary curriculum theory requires interceders out of joint with the image of thought ascribed to “our time” (p. 22). This political task is not simply oriented to the instantiation of the “new.” Rather, Pinar’s advocacy for the untimely is mobilized against the identitarian politics of the movement-image. It is only by inverting the primacy of the movement-image that the curriculum field can begin thinking a time to come unfettered from the past present. Thinking currere no longer submitted to the movement-image would enable curriculum theorists a strategy against the overdetermination of pedagogical life figured in such conceptualizations as the curriculum-as-plan (Aoki, 2005a). Further, the inventive difference of the time-image marks a political intervention with instrumentalism

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and the ostensible inevitability that pedagogy reterritorializes in the image of what others “[declare] to be worth learning” (Pinar, 2004, p. 209). It is in this vein that the untimely intercession of the time-image is not simply a disavowal of the present. Rather, the time-image is the affirmation of difference that exceeds the present, producing lines of flight out of joint with strategies of biopolitical control intimate to the representational politics of the movement-image. As an affirmation of the affirmation of becoming, the time-image creates a new line of time that disallows the complete identity of pedagogical life. It is in this way that the time-image is an inventive vehicle for thinking currere as an active or inventive task enjoined to desiring-production. Calling upon an original regime of images and signs out of joint with the identitarian habits impelled by the movement-image, the time-image contributes to the creation of a curricular body without prior image. That is, by inverting the primacy of the movement-image, curriculum theory is forced to think in a way no longer conditioned by an image of the body persisting in time. As Pinar (1994) avers, such a strategy is critical in a time of “pervasive anti-intellectualism” promulgated by “academic philosophers in uncritical service to the State” (p. 22). It is in this vein that curriculum’s complicated conversation requires first the search for new weapons against the dissimulative strategy of control galvanized by the movement-image. The untimely interceders of the time-image constitute one such weapon. The time-image constitutes a heterogeneous passage for thinking a culture out of joint. That is, the political significance of the cinematic timeimage is oriented to the composition of a people yet to come, “the emergence of something new and singular, which precedes us and requires us to ‘invent’ ourselves as another people” (Rajchman, 2000, pp. 122–123). The question that Deleuze poses via the time-image is intimately linked to the problematic of representing the masses, insofar as the time-image fabulates a style of ontological thinking unequal to the statistical and identitarian image of life advanced by the State. As Rajchman articulates, the subject of the time-image is “a kind of as yet indefinite or inchoate ‘multitude,’ prior to the ‘constitution’ of societies, singular, unformed, without myths or ‘majority’ models or histories, yet to be invented” (p. 29). The complicated time of a culture out of joint is critical to the political conceptualization of a cultural curriculum studies. Unfettered from an oedipalized image of currere, a cultural curriculum studies might begin by creating a body that is no longer prefigured as a hindrance to thought. Put differently, if cultural curriculum studies is approached as a project of invention, then its task should be oriented to the creation of a body without image, that is, a life not yet overdetermined in the image of Oedipal identities or oedipalizing powers. The body prefigures the unthought,

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“[forcing] us to think, and [forcing] us to think what is concealed from thought [and] life” (Deleuze, 2003b, p. 189). It is toward the creation of such a complicated and original body that Reynolds (2006) theorizes the task of cultural curriculum study. Cultural curriculum studies, Reynolds writes, shares with such fields as philosophy, art, cinema, and science the “activity of creation” (p. 47). It is in this image that Reynolds articulates a cultural curriculum studies oriented to “think[ing] something new, something original, to create” (p. 47). As a task oriented to the desedimentation of identitarian thinking as a condition of the new, the political import of cultural curriculum studies cannot draw solely from the movement-image as a point of conceptual reference. Smith (2007) succinctly articulates that “if identity (A is A) were the primary principle . . . there would in principle be no production of the new (no new differences)” (p. 1). Instead, a cultural curriculum studies aimed at the creation of a complicated time for a people yet to come might more adequately draw upon the time-image as a tool for thinking a body irreducible to prior images of thought. This move necessitates a conceptual turn from difference in degree to a durational difference in kind. That is, a cultural curriculum studies oriented to the invention of a body without image can no longer be enslaved to the technics (methods) of the movement-image. Instead, we must begin to think of currere (the course of how a life might go) as the task of diagramming other times, and hence, kinds of living. It is in this way that a cultural curriculum studies might begin to release the body from reactive patterns, producing instead the creation of new lines of time out of joint with transcendent and appropriative categories of Being. This philosophical impetus is mobilized by the nonphilosophical arts of the cinema. That is, the experimental art of postwar cinema creates a way of thinking an anti-Oedipal ars politica (political art). It is this political art that is today required in an effort to rethink the body from under the burden of its bureaucratic overdetermination. In this effort, we might begin to think currere (the course of how a life might go) as a nonrepresentational art, that is, an art aimed at releasing vitalism from identitarian modes of capture. The cinematic time-image is hence one tool for thinking a life beyond the power of identitarian movement and its control. Marking a conceptual tool for thinking currere as a political activity aimed at the desedimentation of majoritarian structures, the time-image releases potentials for thinking repressed by identitarian politics, in turn mobilizing a “processural relaunch between art and life” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). This movement posits a significant challenge for curriculum theory, suggesting the necessity of self-refleXion (the creation of a new time out of joint with the movement-image) as a political refutation of the self-reflective

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movement-image (jagodzinski, 2008). Such a tactic might be one way for cultural curriculum studies to give identity back to difference and further, to produce an experimental body without image. It is through such experimental production that cultural curriculum studies might become adequate to the creation of an indefinite life for a people yet to come. One such example for thinking an indefinite life is created in Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan antibiopic, I’m Not There (2007).

I’m Not There: The Complicated Time of the Untimely Subject I’m Not There is composed through the crystalline structure of the timeimage, producing a “drastically collective, a-chronological, and nonpsychological” life irreducible to representational politics or the durational stability of the movement-image (Gross, 2007). Departing from the chronological trope of the biopic, the “Bob Dylan” of I’m Not There is portrayed by six actors. In this vein, Haynes’ Bob Dylan is neither a dialectical or synthesized subject. Collectively composed across six conceptual persona, the Bob Dylan of I’m Not There is instead created as a complex and complicated multiplicity. As an opening voice-over elides, Dylan involutes as a “poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity . . . even the ghost was more than one person” (Haynes, 2007). This tactical politicalaesthetic approach affirms a passage for thinking currere as the task of releasing a life from the tyranny of overdetermination. In the course of I’m Not There, the body of Bob Dylan is approached as a practical matter of creation. In this vein, Haynes rebukes the traditional style of the biopic. That is, Haynes’ film tasks itself with the creative invention rather than representation of a life. As Gross writes, “Haynes isn’t interested in supplying a convincing representation of the events of Dylan’s life, nor some conclusive, coherent, emotionally rewarding interpretation of those events.” Yet, Haynes’ approach to I’m Not There is neither concerned with the criticism or deconstruction of “anecdotal [or] pathos driven narrative structures” (Gross, 2007). Drawing from the time-image as a political-aesthetic concept for inventing a life, Haynes joyously unhinges the cinematic brain from its movement driven structure. In this manner, Haynes creates a passage for thinking life out of joint, that is, no longer submitted to the monolithic molar categories of identity, integration, or unity. Put differently, Haynes invention of Bob Dylan creates a way of thinking identity as a multiplicity unfettered from either a personal past or habitual recollection-image. This tactic is germane to the creation of a life not yet captured by a prior image of thought. Further, it is this very tactic that is mobilized by Bob

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Dylan’s conceptual personas as a form of resistance against State powers of oedipalization. It would be inadequate to theorize Haynes’ Bob Dylan in terms of either dialectical thinking or transcendent categories of molar organization. Instead, I’m Not There is a film that aims at portraying Dylan as an event (Gross, 2007). That is, the film composes Dylan as a process of productive linkage and relinkage with such conceptual persona as Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, Billy-the-Kid, and a film star cast to play Bob Dylan in a film within the film. It is in this vein that the structure of Haynes film is distinctly rhizomatic, a decentered multiplicity that experiments at composing a body without image. This experimentation is pertinent to the political force of the film. As the forces of oedipalization descend to banalize and capture Dylan, the film moves out of joint, producing complex assemblages that affirm nomadic over identitarian thought. Haynes’ creative approach to the composition of a life might be dubbed schizoanalytic, that is, an experimentation with assemblages, rhizomes, and a time out of joint with narrative unity and egoic insistence. Rather than reducing a life to its psychological experiences, I’m Not There releases Dylan’s life to a virtuality of lives not lived. In the course of the film, Dylan is schizoanalytically portrayed as an indeterminate body without image. More specifically, Haynes’ composition of Dylan’s life is assembled through 10-year-old African-American Marcus Franklin, who portrays the conceptual assemblage of Dylan-Guthrie, Richard Gere, who portrays a Dylan-Billy-the-Kid assemblage, Ben Wishaw as Dylan’s becoming Rimbaud, Heath Ledger, an actor decentered through his experience of playing Dylan in a film, Christian Bale as an early incarnation of Dylan, and Cate Blanchett as Dylan during the years of Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Pennebaker’s Documentary, Don’t Look Back (1968). As Ben Wishaw’s conceptual Rimbaud-Dylan persona remarks early in the film, “je est un autre”; the I is an other. “Individuals find a real name for themselves . . . only through the harshest exercise of depersonalization, by opening themselves to the multiplicities running everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them” (Deleuze & Guattari cited in Gross, 2007). It is through Dylan’s depersonalization across six conceptual becomings that one begins to make out the multiplicity of connections, escapes, and reconnections populating Haynes’ Dylan-event, an event in which Dylan is literally not there. That is, Dylan’s name is not only absent from the course of the film, but his “true” image appears only in the final moment of the antibiopic, when his image is captured in coordination with the literal end of the film. Creating a passage for thinking Bob Dylan without speaking “his”16 name, Haynes demonstrates how relations are external to their terms.

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As Dylan-becoming-Rimbaud avers early in the film “a song is something that walks by itself.” Akin to Haynes’ Dylan, a song detaches, connects, and reconnects with other forces. The Dylan of I’m Not There is found in the assemblage and not, as common logic would demand, in the image of an individualized identity. The political power of I’m Not There is, in part, created through this tactic. Haynes implicitly avers how one might speak of a life without reducing its modes of being and becoming to prior forms of representational thinking. Rather, Haynes treats the “self ” as a partial object with machinic tendencies to link and relink with other ideas, images, and bodies. Via the conceptual tool of the time-image, I’m Not There creates a line of flight for how one might conceive of our ethos, our modes of being, in a manner no longer hinged to the identitarian politics of the movement-image. It is through the composition of a rhizomatic brain that Haynes creates a passage for thinking difference in kind. I’m Not There experiments with an image of time and subjectivity no longer overdetermined by such movement-image devices as the montage, the contiguous edit, nor the durational consistency of actors and plotlines as its germinal point of reference.17 Rather, the point of reference for I’m Not There might more adequately be understood as difference itself. That is, the Dylan of I’m Not There is a less insistent personality than an indefinite life that creates new lines of time and genealogical lineages at the very point when the movement-image begins to intervene as a power of overdetermination. As Dylan-Rimbaud narrates over a scene in which Billy-the-KidDylan is greeted differently by the townspeople of Riddle County, “never give your real name . . . if ever told to look at yourself . . . never look.”18 Dylan-Rimbaud’s caveat on self-reflection is intimate to the way in which Haynes (2007) wanted to think about Dylan’s life. Haynes (2007) writes, “[T]he minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was. He’s like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you’ll surely get burned . . . [he] is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.” Yet, the identificatory process on which Haynes remarks is not that of the movement-image. One does not identify with the Dylan of I’m Not There as an image of egoic insistence and durational consistency. Instead, Haynes implicitly suggests that what is identifiable in Dylan is the complicated virtuality that one might will for “itself.” The Dylan of I’m Not There is not the production of self-reflection but rather the invention of the crystal time-image. Put differently, the creative invention of Haynes’ Dylan requires a time out of joint from the political and cultural powers of capture intimate to the movementimage. Not only is I’m Not There punctuated by a disjunctive stuttering

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that shatters the chronological conceit of Hollywood filmmaking, it further invents an image of a life that moves in difference from the determinations of habit, memory, routine, and the practices of identification in which the individual is often caught. In this sense, Haynes not only creates a cinematic brain for thinking difference in kind, but further, produces a complex and original body no longer based on the image of any substantial or overcoded identity. I’m Not There is marked by the creation of an “original” life brought together in new times and spaces of interrelation. Haynes hence provides the viewer with a way of thinking ontology unhinged from identity. Mobilizing the time-image as a conceptual tool for thinking the body without image, Haynes also engages with the political task of cinema by creating a passage for a people yet to come. The body without image invented throughout I’m Not There is mobilized against the parasitic desire of both State and popular opinion (doxa). In Deleuzian terms, I’m Not There releases the virtual potentials inhering the overorganized image of Dylan, inventing a molecular subject that bifurcates, crosses molar thresholds19 and reterritorializes upon new attractors. Put differently, through the conceptual force of the timeimage, the Dylan of I’m Not There is able to move out of joint with the molarizing powers of the State, in turn experimenting with the political composition of a life. As Gross (2007) writes, “[A]t any given point in the film [Dylan] is constantly attempting to outrun . . . the phenomenon of celebrity, journalistic analysis, or cinematic representation itself—and always at risk of being cannibalized by a relentless, never-ending process of idolatry, imitation, and interpretation.” This tension is aptly articulated through Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the conceptual persona of Dylan in the early 1960’s, whose minoritarian songs are captured and banalized by both the music industry and liberal political nostalgia for an earlier time (Gross, 2007). At this juncture, the film itself bifurcates, and through the time-image, Dylan is relinked through Marcus Franklin’s Dylan-becoming-Woody Guthrie.20 Traveling by railcar at night, Dylan-Guthrie is awoken by three vagabonds who attempt to steal his guitar. Narrowly escaping their attack, Dylan-Guthrie jumps from the train, plummeting into a river below. In a subsequent time-image, Jude Griffin (Cate Blanchett), Dylan’s late 1960’s conceptual persona, betrays his fans and supporters by inventing an original sound and style. As Dylan-Rimbaud narrates across this transformation: “me . . . I was in a ditch, up a cliff, out of step, ready to quit. I wrote the kind of stuff you write when you have no place to live and you’re wrapped up in the fire pump . . . and then I wrote it. It was like swimming in lava . . . skipping, kicking, catching a nail with your foot” (Haynes, 2007). This transformation is phantasmatically articulated as Jude and “his” band

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produce submachine guns from their guitar cases and assault a crowd at the New England jazz and folk festival. Like the epitaph that appears on the guitar case of Dylan-Guthrie,21 Jude’s musical transformation kills fascists. That is, Jude Griffin’s creation of a new line of time engineers an original assemblage railed against the overdetermination of identity and sedimentation of desiring-production. Escaping from the confines of Rollins’ identitarian image through the production of a radical musical and political disjunction, Jude is harried by fans and reporters who seek to reconcile this slippage into a narrative continuity, and further, to recapture the desire of Dylan in a previous identitarian form. Amidst this popular and media fervor, the time-image creates a connection from Jude to Billy-the-Kid-Dylan, a nomad outlaw we subsequently learn is “on the run from the inevitable encroachment of 20th century capitalist forces” (Gross, 2007). It is via the rhizomatic temporal logic of the time-image that the Dylan of I’m Not There is able to creatively escape the oedipalizing powers of psychologization, interpretation, and idolatry that seek to hinge “his” becoming to an identitarian image. As Dylan’s Billy-the-Kid persona warns later in the film, “People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom” (Haynes, 2007). It is in this sense that Haynes’ experimental time-image unhinges life from one particular course, creating instead an active currere immanent to a virtuality of lives and times not lived. Through the conceptual tool of the time-image, I’m Not There is able to break from the colonizing powers of the movementimage, releasing desiring-production from the circuits of subjugation. Following Gross (2007), it is crucial to differentiate I’m Not There from a filmic structure akin to that of Kurosawa’s Rashomon or Welles’ Citizen Kane. Unlike Rashomon and Citizen Kane, I’m Not There is not a variation on the modernist theme of multiple perspectives or the “anxiety of representing a Self ” (Gross, 2007). Rather, I’m Not There might more adequately be thought as a joyful experimentation in depersonalization. Breaking apart the numerous yet insistent positionality of multiple agents, I’m Not There is first an affirmation of identity’s untimely invention. In this vein, Dylan’s multiplicity is not reducible to a plurality of perspectives, for “his” becomings are borne of impersonal linkages that constantly detach from located, spatial, perceptual vantages. This is the very logic of the depersonalizing camera in I’m Not There. Rather than shifting from one personal vantage to another, tethering character to plot action, the cinematic brain of I’m Not There is uniquely compositional. That is, through its disjunctive cuts and rhizomatic connections, the camera documents an assemblage in the process of composing itself. Bypassing the modernist theme

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of multiple perspectives by breaking from the movement-image, I’m Not There uses the time-image to create a meshwork of perspective(s) irreducible to either a quantitative multiplicity of agents or consistent object-event of contemplation. Instead, Haynes mobilizes a qualitative multiplicity that “celebrates the impersonal freedom of art” (Gross, 2007). Through this, he surpasses the movement-image by producing perspectival breakthroughs, flows, and schizzes. The conceptual creation of a DylanRimbaud assemblage is significant in this respect, given Rimbaud’s poetic desire to “disorder . . . all the senses,” releasing affect from overdetermined circuits of interpretation and organization (Marks, 1999, p. 75). Apropos Rimbaud, Marks (1999) writes that “to speak in the form of the subject I, we must synthesize time, and yet the ego is constantly changing through time. The subject becomes an ‘infinite modulation’ rather than a mould” (p. 74). As an articulation of this “infinite modulation,” I’m Not There is irreducible to the play of difference by degree. In Haynes’ film, everything is made to stutter and break through, “no longer [belonging] to any [one] time, any milieu, any school” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 69). In this vein, I’m Not There is significant as a work of desiring-production. In a key scene during which Robbie (Heath Ledger) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) watch a biopic on the life of Jack Rollins (featuring Robbie in the starring role), Haynes (2007) adopts a passage from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine-Féminin: “It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and, secretly, wanted to live.” Godard’s quote, itself drawn from Perec’s (1990/1965) novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, is deployed as a counterpoint to the image of Rollins’ life captured by the mainstream movie industry. At its best, I’m Not There practices this very counterpoint, composing a life via a political art of desiring-production. In other words, I’m Not There functions as the very form of tactical resistance required for thinking a life not yet overdetermined by a prior image of the body. Dylan is instead composed as an indefinite life. Immanent to a virtuality of conceptual resources such as the untimely lives of others, Haynes “Dylaneffect” is itself a tactic against the sedimented image of life arraigned by Godard. Not simply a work composed of savvy references, pastiche, and allusion, I’m Not There puts its concepts to work in the creation of a cinematic brain and new image of currere. In this respect, Haynes composes an image of how a life might go through the inventive mobilization of the time-image. Out of joint with the power of movement and chronology, Haynes’ image of a life redresses the morbid powers of fascism, resentment, and depression intimate to identitarian politics. It is in this sense that I’m Not There intervenes with Godard’s admonition of Hollywood

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cinema and the parasitical powers of the State, promulgating the question of whether or not we still want to live, and if so, how? Creating a complicated time for a people yet to come, I’m Not There produces a currere that has yet to be mobilized as a tool for conceptualizing the field of cultural curriculum studies (Pinar, 2006). Implicating the ways in which we think ontology, memory, multiplicity, and resistance, the cinematic time-image is itself a political art (ars politica). As an experimental practice, the time-image becomes one way in which cultural curriculum studies might begin composing a life that no longer functions in service of a prior circuit of thought or habit. Rather than asking what knowledge is of most worth, a cultural curriculum studies aimed at the production of a complicated time must first ask how a life might go when representation is no longer adequate to the creation of a people. It is in this vein that a cultural curriculum studies aimed at invention might begin to orient itself to the practical matter of creation rather than representation, invention rather than communication. In this aim, a cultural curriculum studies might be judged by its ability to create new lines of time and conceptual events (such as the experimental use of the cinematic time-image) that allow for the unique actualization of life’s virtual resources. The task of cultural curriculum studies hence amounts to more than an analysis of popular culture as it informs our understanding of education both within and outside of the school. Rather, one might begin to conceptualize cultural curriculum studies as the task of mobilizing virtual potentials for thinking qualitative difference, to create and connect with social deterritorializations already underway (Buchanan, 1999). In this task, cultural curriculum studies might become more adequate to a society that is already en fuite, “leaking” decoded flows across sedimented terrain. Yet, against the often reactionary powers of popular culture (doxa), a cultural curriculum studies oriented to experimentalism might be the very weapon necessary for the intensification and cartography of such fuites (leakages), diagramming other times of living contrapuntal to gross statistical categories, automatic interpretation machines, and the sad passions of oedipalization. “Any work of art points a way through life, finds a way through the cracks” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 143). If cultural curriculum studies approaches cinema as a political task, it must begin to mobilize the cinematic arts as a creative tactic for producing and intensifying passages of resistance and productive escape. The cinematic composition of the time-image is in this sense pedagogical. Not only does the Deleuzian (2003b) timeimage instantiate new lines of time capable of departing from teleological and genealogical determinations, it perhaps more significantly diagrams the nomadic mind and the potential creation of a body without image. Put differently, the time-image creates a trajectory for thinking a process

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ontology immanent to a virtuality of potential life courses. In this vein, the time-image becomes a vital conceptual tool for thinking currere no longer enslaved to an image of who we are or should be. Following this line of flight, the cinema is not simply an apparatus of interpretation or representation, but more crucially, a vehicle for experimenting with how a life might go; The arts do not resemble the world as it is, but how it might be (Pisters, 2003). This task necessitates that cultural curriculum studies becomes more than critical. Rather, as Rajchman (2000) advocates, we must begin to see the positive and revolutionary side of invention.

8

Making a Holey Curriculum: Untimeliness, Unhomeliness, and the Schizophrenic Potential of the ANOMAL

Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, “This is not enough.” (Tsunetomo, 1979, p. 37)

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ietzsche contends that the philosopher is neither eternal nor exclusively historical. Rather, a philosopher is always untimely (Deleuze, 1983). Like an arrow launched along a particular trajectory or fired upon a target, a thinker is mobilized toward the challenges and problems of a particular place and time. Yet, an arrow might be taken up from where it falls and fired in a new direction, at a different target, along a new line of flight. As Guattari (1995) writes, “Who knows what will be taken up by others, for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead to!” (p. 126). Untimeliness is in this way a potential for redisposing thought to the creation of new events or becomings. It is to mobilize the event in a way that exceeds the historical, or rather, to make visible the virtual powers of thought that exceed historical actualization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). It is in this way that the untimely might catalyze new problems and opportunities for experimentation unequal to the conditions for action and common sense established by the fait accompli of history (Vähämäki & Virtanen, 2006). Put differently, the force of a thinker might arise from history without merging with it, “arising only to leave it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 112). The untimely is neither an instant of the present, that which we are and are already ceasing to be, but an event for our becoming-other. That a

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thinker might take up and deploy the ideas left by another hence marks an experimental tactic against an expectation that the future will reterritorialize in the image of the present (Mengue, 2006). While experimentation without history would be “indeterminate and unconditioned . . . experimentation is not historical” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 111). Rather, experimentation necessitates the philosophical preparation of concepts for the benefit of a future that is neither historical nor utopian, but the difference between the present and that which “we are in the process of becoming” (p. 112). While a philosopher’s concepts might dovetail with a particular political-historical milieu, they never return to it completely. Put differently, while an idea might be found in time, it might concomitantly work against time. In this way, the untimely might be thought as a repetition which fecundates the present, incompleting both the present and past present moment (Baross, 2006). By intensifying the concepts of past thinkers through the creation of new linkages and interactions, the untimely departs from representational fidelity to present conditions, engaging a way of studying “past [philosophies] to discover what is still new in them” (Rajchman, 2000, p. 39). In this task, Deleuze’s (1988, 1983) untimely philosophical lineage of volcanic thinkers is deployed against the limitation of life, subtracting thought from its historical overdetermination. In Deleuzian (1995) terms, such pedagogical buggery (enculage) works to birth a philosopher’s monstrous offspring through processes of slipping, dislocation, and releasing “hidden emissions.” Put differently, the untimely might be thought as a pedagogical teratology through which molar identities are given back to their virtual potentials of differentiation. Where one might find satisfaction in submitting to the questions and answers posed by another, the import of the untimely posits another course for a pedagogical life (Vähämäki & Virtanen, 2006). For example, in a letter to critic Michele Cressole, Deleuze (1995) writes that his encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy forced him to abandon a style of writing proper to historical philosophy. The untimely forces Deleuze encountered in Nietzsche required a new style of writing organized less by codes than fluxes. It is in this way that the untimely might be thought as an event or encounter capable of replacing an ontology of Being, constituting a circuit breaker superseding the verb “to be” with potentials for becoming. Becoming-Samurai: The Hagakure as an Untimely Shock-to-Thought Jim Jarmusch’s (1999) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a filmic work populated by a multiplicity of untimely influences. Perhaps foremost of

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these influences is Tsunemoto’s Hagakure, a text that circulates throughout Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog as an untimely shock to thought. Subtracted from the determinations of history, the eponymous Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) lives a life assembling eighteenth-century Bushido and the twentieth-century urban milieu. While Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai bears genetic resemblance to the filmic works of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kobayashi, and Melville, it is perhaps best understood as a monstrous birth. As Lanzagorta (2002) and Otomo (2000) have argued, Ghost Dog fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre. Perhaps more radically, the adaptive failure of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is redoubled within the film through an emphasis on the potential extinction of the untimely itself. That is, the “ancient tribe” to which Ghost Dog espouses fidelity is by “his” own admission vanishing. However, the problem inaugurated by Ghost Dog does not simply devolve on a failure at the level of adaptation. Inadequate to the conceptual force of the untimely, adaptation presumes the dialectic as an optimal model for the judgment of life. In other words, the concept of adaptation takes the antiproductive image of synthesis as its exemplary case, territorializing difference in accord with prior conditions for how a life might go. Adaptation as such is inadequate for the theorization of becomings “for the benefit of . . . a future” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 112). That is, the concept of adaptation is ill suited to the creation of the unanticipated or untimely, insofar as it already presumes the submission of potential becomings to prior states of Being. Rife in institutional schooling, the concept of adaptation is a corollary of reactivism in that it presumes how a pedagogical life will unfold. As Davies (2005) asserts, contemporary neoliberal regimes require a highly adaptable subject, yet such adaptability becomes horrific when “we realize that we cannot afford to stop” (p. 9). In this reactive image of pedagogical life, students learn to adapt their desires to those of the school, in turn adopting the ready-made desiring-machines of the institution for themselves. The problematic introduced by Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is not simply one in which the untimely figure of the twentiethcentury African-American Bushido fails to adapt to contemporary cultural conditions. Indeed, Ghost Dog is a resilient and inventive conceptual persona perfectly adapted to urban survival. Rather, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai prepares the question of how adaptive failure is concomitantly the affirmation of a creative modification that escapes from prior circuits of thought. As a monstrous birth, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog might fail as an adaptation, but this failure is only the beginning of its pedagogical import. Ghost Dog’s unsuccessful translation of the

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samurai genre signals its inauguration of an untimely life irreducible to a dialectics of adaptation. That is, while Jarmusch samples from the politico-historical significance of the samurai film, Ghost Dog does not fall back into history. Jarmusch nocks1 the samurai film like an arrow, firing it along a new trajectory and into a new series of perplexions. In this vein, Jarmusch experiments with the creation of an untimely life that introduces a “dead time” or singularity into the present. Developing peripherally and by way of a central breakdown, this life begins to diagram the emergence of a potential war machine aimed against the strategies of limitation particular to both State thinking and neoliberal economics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). Private and Public Thinkers In an era of rapacious anti-intellectualism, the untimely assumes political force. The untimely, Pinar (2004) conjectures, is characteristic of the kind of scholar required in the field of curriculum theory today. Jettisoning the conceit of an intellectual vanguard who knows better, and decrying the thinker who labors in uncritical fidelity to the State, Pinar evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) notion of the curriculum philosopher as a private thinker. Opposed to the public professor who unquestioningly adapts to the desiring-machines of the State, and hence ceases to think, the private thinker confronts thought with counterthoughts “violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearance, and . . . mobile in history” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, p. 44). Yet, by Deleuze and Guattari’s own admission, the private thinker is a poor expression. That is, while the idea of privacy attests to solitude, the mode of solitude that Deleuze and Guattari seek to evoke is populous and “interlaced with a people to come” (p. 44). Against an image of the philosopher as a figure of pure interiority then, the question posed by the private thinker is one of outside thought, or rather, of placing thought in relation to the forces of the outside.2 In this task, the private thinker does not aspire to adapt to the world as it is. Rather, it might be said that the task of the private thinker is to mobilize an experimental outside thought that allows one to pose the question of how a life might go. It is in this vein that the private thinker mobilizes a war machine (a circuit breaker) against the very models and images meant to think on our behalf (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). The work of Deleuze is significant in this manner, for the Deleuzian gesture is one that works to ward off the formation of “schools” and their “methods.” Throughout his work, Deleuze would neither belong to any particular school or found one, insisting instead as an outside to encyclopedic thinking.


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Jim Jarmusch is not, in any formal sense, a curriculum scholar. As a private thinker,3 however, his work composes an untimely style for thinking contemporary curriculum theory. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, this untimely style begins with the question of death, or rather, of how one might live once representational logic becomes inadequate to the fabrication/fabulation of new social forces. Jarmusch’s answer, by way of Ghost Dog, is to replace the problem of representation with the Deleuzeguattarian (1987) notion of singularity. That is, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog no longer relies on a representational mirror image in its composition of a life. Instead, his untimely compositional assemblage of eighteenthcentury feudal Japan and twentieth-century urban America fails to conform to the figure of the speculum mundi or reflected face of the world. In lieu of the mirror, the notion of singularity evokes the cartographic registration of previously unthinkable forms. As Conley (2005) develops, fifteenth-century oceanic exploration of the Indies and Caribbean led European explorers to abandon prior representations of the world. Unable to think the diversity of encountered space through a prior image, cosmographers shifted their practices to account and record “new shapes of alterity and difference” (p. 252). In this vein, the cartographic registration of islands as unique points of variation became a corollary for the recommencement of thought. Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might be thought as one such island. As a tactic for the conceptualization of currere (the course of a life) at the end of the age of representation, Jarmusch’s filmic cartography is of significant import for the field of curriculum theory. Dominated by the epistemic topology of University Faculties, curricular categories, and the continued reading of education philosophers in a certain way (curricular foundations), the curriculum landscape has become the stratified site for intensive practices of tracing (Gregoriou, 2008). That is, the curriculum landscape has become in its most impoverished image just that—a habitual image abstracted from a virtuality of potential cartographic connections. Counterposed to mapping, tracing works by selection and isolation, reproducing only the blockages, points of structuration, and redundancies of the map itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In educational circles, we continue to produce ourselves on the basis of movements and circuits of organization that no longer correspond to our unique problems (Deleuze, 1988). Rather, we continuously find ourselves working on the a priori problems of the curriculum-as-plan. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, however, Jarmusch is able to transpose tracings back onto the map, composing a plane for an analysis of the potentials, unique points, and blockages affecting a life.

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Such a tactic is important for contemporary curriculum theory, for it not only enables us to think the relationship of territories (tracings) to their leakages (fuites), but further, allows tracings to enter into new forms of relation that no longer fall back into habit. The task, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, “is to connect the roots or trees back up with the rhizome . . . impasses must always be resituated upon the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight” (p. 14). Against the opposition of arborescence (tracing) and rhizomatics (an active mapping), the two might be drawn into tactical assemblage such that tracing might be made to stutter, or rather, to repeat with difference. Ostensibly, such a tactic is intimate to the compositional plane of deejay turntablists, who plot cartographic variations across the habitual grooves of vinyl records in the production of original refrains.

The Unhomeliness of HΠoΠlΠeΠy Space It is along such a cartographical plane of “stuttering” that Ghost Dog is introduced. Through the inhuman perspective of a carrier pigeon, the film opens with a sweeping diagram of the urban milieu. Floating across shipping yards, power stations, subway lines, and highway junctions, the opening scenes of Ghost Dog compose the urban milieu as both arborescent (tracing) and rhizomatic (cartography). Put differently, the urban space composed through the inhuman perspective of the carrier pigeon registers the circuited routes of urban movement, those pathways of habitual tracing that have come to stand in for the map itself. Yet, the becoming-pigeon of the camera’s eye performs a registration of another kind. Creating a plane of composition that assembles the traceable routes of urban movement with the immanent potentials of the map, Ghost Dog’s germinal scenes begin to diagram what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as holey space, a space that communicates across both striated (organized) and smooth (or deterritorialized/nomadic) spaces. As the becoming-pigeon of the camera comes to rest at a rooftop shanty, we learn that this is the holey space of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog. That is, while Ghost Dog inhabits a dwelling within the striated corridors of the urban milieu, this space is concomitantly off-the-grid, a superterranean hole or gap punched from coded space. Yet, Ghost Dog’s composition of holey space is perhaps more adequately sketched through “his” imperceptible movements under the protective cover of shadowed streets, derelict housing projects and abandoned alleyways. In one significant opening sequence, a hooded Ghost Dog utilizes such holey space in order to avoid police detection. In a later scene, Jarmusch’s antihero utilizes the cover of


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the forest as a staging point for his attack on an arm of the Italian mafia.4 It is in this vein that Ghost Dog enters into assemblage with a particular use of holey space employed by guerilla armies and cyberspace hackers. Utilizing the holey space of the forest and Internet respectively, such underground movements mobilize gaps, voids, and protective cover in order to evade the surveillance and military strategies of the State. It is in a similar vein that the student drop out has become an anxious preoccupation of educational organizations, for in part, the drop out deflects the very mechanisms of surveillance and permanent registration meant to work upon and prefigure the subjectivity of the student(’s) body. Holey space might hence be thought along two modes of liaison: one rhizomatic, with its subterranean passages, gaps, and openings, and one that is coded, traceable, and plugged (Swiboda, 2004). That is, while holey space inheres in coded space, it concomitantly exploits all manner of rhizomatic openings to sustain its underground becomings. Such underground becomings are, in turn, “only imperfectly controlled by the state” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 96). It is little surprise then to note the relationship of youth dance, music (rave), and graffiti (bombing) movements with such holey spaces as abandoned warehouses, subway tunnels, clandestine radio, and Internet sites. While a threat to the State, the assemblage of such spaces with various underground youth movements is a corollary of the desire to escape the networks of surveillance that trace and capture social leakages (fuites). Against the metaphysics of presence particular to the Western logos, holey space is closer to logocentrism’s ancient twin, loxos (a place of ambush). Hidden from heaven (the transcendent powers of Ouranos), loxos constitutes the staging point for the emergence of a “new race of barbarians” set to arise to evacuate Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 217). Significantly, loxos appears in Hesiod’s creation myth Theogeny, in which the defilement of the Earth (Gaia) by Heaven (Ouranos) ends with Kronos leaping from a place of ambush (loxos), castrating the unwelcome suitor and separating Heaven from the body of the Earth (Lambert, 2005). In this sense, loxos marks a conspiracy with the Earth to ward against overcoding from above, a problematic Lambert gives contemporary urgency when one considers “a new Heaven in the obese figure of globalization . . . who lies a little too heavily on the Earth and which internalizes all desiring-production within its ever expanding body” (p. 224). It is perhaps not surprising that Foucault’s (1979) genealogy on state surveillance begins with the abandonment of the subterranean dungeon in favor of the panoptic plane and public character of disciplinary surveillance. “The panoptic mechanism,” Foucault writes, “reverses the principle of the dungeon . . . to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide . . . [v]isibility

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is a trap” (p. 200). The genealogy of surveillance begins with the formation of a social machine that attempts to plug holey space (loxos) by bringing bodies into the light and into a “small theater . . . in which each actor is . . . constantly visible” and immediately recognizable (p. 200). As Foucault (1979) documents, the problematic emergence of the plague during the seventeenth century was met with a new social apparatus of ceaseless investigation and permanent registration that in turn proliferated into the disciplinary machinery of the prison, the hospital, the factory, and school. Such disciplinary machinery, figured in the generalizable model of the panopticon, functions by making hypervisible the behavior, movements, and distributions of inmates, interns, workers, and students. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it . . . becomes principle of his own subjection” (p. 203). It is in this sense that holey space enters into antimony with the geopolitically striated space of the school—a space that functions largely through processes of evaluative surveillance and recording. A pedagogical life subtracted from pedagogy in general might hence require the creation of holey space, that is, a conspiracy with the BwO of the Earth that wards against the intervention of panoptic power while preparing an antihouse (an anti-Oedipus) for an unanticipated body or bodies-in-becoming. Put differently, the task of creating a pedagogical life is not that of occupying a ready-made plane or territorializing a new space in one’s name. Rather, the task of creating a life might be thought as one whereby we learn to occupy a plane in order to make it holey, that is, to introduce fractal5 contours upon its striated form, preparing the ground for the emergence of a people yet to come. It is through the creation of a fractal social space for example, that the life of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is able to emerge as a productively nonnormal subjectivity, that is, a subject no longer denumerable along established patterns of signification. The problematic of nondenumerability, or rather, Ghost Dog’s production of a countersignifying regime is given expressive force throughout Jarmusch’s film. In one particular scene, the Mafioso tasked with killing the hitherto imperceptible Ghost Dog anxiously speculate on his possible appearance, haplessly depending on categories of molar identification (big and black) to profile their mark. Following, the Mafioso strain to assign a recognizable identity to a man that may or may not be Ghost Dog: “Yo, what the hell are you?” one gangster queries, gun raised. “Cayuga” the man (Gary Farmer) rejoins. “Cayuga, what the fuck is Cayuga?” the mobster spits with manifest confusion. Significantly, the problem of nondenumerability introduced by Ghost Dog leads the Mafiosi to perform a series of violent acts. Through this, Jarmusch exposes the violent structure of molar (statistical) thought and its inadequacy for the creation or explanation of a singular life. Put


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differently, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai reveals the failure of identitarian politics to think difference, and further, connect this failure to the murder of difference itself. Jarmusch aptly conveys this in a scene wherein Ghost Dog confronts two bear poachers who disclose their pleasure in killing such a “rare” animal. Jarmusch’s composition has its corollary in curriculum studies, persisting in a form of institutional violence that seeks to transform variations and ANOMALies into what exists or what we believe it ought to be (Hwu, 1993). The geopolitics of Ghost Dog emerge in the fractal space that communicates across both surveilled (striated) and derelict (smooth) urban space, coded (streets, gated houses) and open space (public parks, the sky), and identitarian (the closed ethnic space of the mafia) and nonidentitarian space (figured through the hybrid ethnicity of Ghost Dog). Holey space also figures in the fractal memory of Ghost Dog, who becomes-samurai through the untimely writings of the Hagakure, affectively constituting a fractal reality assembled from coded maxims of eighteenth-century Bushido and the freestyle flows of hip-hop culture. Elsewhere the contour of fractal memory is introduced by way of an allusion to the multiple percepts that compose the events of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. In a time-image revealing the event precipitating Ghost Dog’s vow of fidelity to Mafioso Louie (John Tormey), the audience is drawn into two differing recollectionimages. Evoking a brutal physical assault suffered in his youth, Ghost Dog recalls Louie’s timely intervention, shooting the white assailants moments prior to their would-be murder of Ghost Dog. In Louie’s recollection however, the assailants turn their weapons on the mobster, who guns them down in self-defense. The preparation of holey space in Ghost Dog creates a breach in the world as it is, producing what Massumi (1992) calls “shreds of futurity” (p. 105). That is, holey space is a preparatory zone for all kinds of bodies-in-becoming. Breaking through by rendering striated space into a slice of Swiss cheese, “holey space promises a way of welcoming, and not evading, what Deleuze . . . calls ‘ . . . a life’” (Frichot, 2007, p. 170). The challenge of creating a life is articulated by Frichot as the question of how one might “pass on the inside as part of the striated, molar organization, at the same time as maintaining a derelict or holey space upon which the dominant order is not able to enforce its repressions absolutely” (p. 176). Following Agamben (1998, 1999), it is a question of how creative powers might be mobilized to allay the exertion of biopower over life. This is a crucial question facing contemporary curriculum theory in that it suggests that task of private curriculum thinkers be oriented to creative practices of hollowing out or preparing “regions of escape” (Frichot, 2007, p. 175).

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Such practices might be seen in the pedagogical experiments of the post-Situationist Institute for Applied Autonomy, Critical Arts Ensemble, or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, each of which detour though other fields of study in order to overcome false problems and introduce new ones. That is, each punches a hole through the traditional plane of disciplinary thought in order to produce mobile workshops for guerilla art practices. For example, the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee project plots the positions of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTC) throughout New York, diagramming holey spaces of “least urban surveillance.” It is in this vein that a curriculum theory oriented to the preparation of spaces for bodies-in-becoming must desire the production of derelict cartographies that aspire to neither the striation of space nor its absolute smoothing. After all, even the smoothest spaces of desert and sea can be contemporarily mapped by State satellites and spy planes. Instead, a pedagogical life might be thought in a manner enjoined to the Deleuzeguattarian concept of holey space as a conceptual force for thinking the itinerant’s creation of temporary shelter.

Caveats on the Potential Dangers of Smooth (Uncoded) Space The creation of holey space lies at the edge of Block’s (1998) vagabond pedagogy insofar as it no longer submits to habitual practices of tracing. While the vagabond might occupy striated space, “its” occupancy is oriented to making such space flee, or rather, to the creation of a smooth space for escape. However, a caveat on the vagabond’s engagement with the absolute limit of deterritorialization must be posed. In the contemporary geopolitical order, resistance via practices of wandering and lostness have entered into conjunction with State mechanisms of control. As Deleuze (1992) develops, such synoptic modes of surveillance as the closed-circuit camera, bank card, internet tracking software, and satellite mapping function to capture social wandering. “The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction” (p. 7). Such a shift extends to the educational institution, the organization of which is no longer predicated on the strict segmentation of sites or practices. Today, the educational apparatus has been smoothed through the introduction of an economy of transfer credits, transferable degrees, and the creation of University entrance programs at the high school level. Perfectly adapted for a society of control, the exchange values of such institutional passwords effectively produce new forms of educational organization that


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collapse with the forces of market economy. Cut-off from the arboreal telos of graduation as its ostensible “root,” contemporary education is revisioned within the market’s model of flexibility, incompleteness, and modulation (Gregoriou, 2008). Within this model, “education mutates into an open system . . . of training . . . where one is always in debt in the sense that one is never finished with anything” (p. 102). It is in this way that the commodification of education is itself rhizomatic (smooth). That is, the commodification of contemporary education is characterized by the often-valorized notions of perpetual becoming, interminable prolongation, and recommencement. It is along such lines that institutional education has been reterritorialized as a project of lifelong learning, permanent retraining, and ongoing evaluative and performative registration aptly organized within the interminable pedagogical project of “learning how to learn.” As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert, the production of smooth or decoded spaces do not have innate libratory qualities. Ostensibly, the commodification of education desires both to attract and produce vagabonds, subjects constantly on the move for whom new forms of flexible training and registration (educational “services”) can be continuously mobilized. Under threat of capture, vagabond practices must be made to resonate with both striated and rhizomatic space. This point of resonance might be figured in the shelter of holey space, one that constitutes a temporary tactical site for resistance. Artist cells like the para-academic O(rphan)d(rift>), underground ®™ark collective, and such noninstitutional academic “concept engineers” as Sadie Plant’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit begin to diagram such holey space. In these instances, holey space takes on another dimension as a tactical staging point for the punctuation of habitual thought and action, plotting lines of escape against “the necrotic side of [thought]” and powers of “institutional lockdown” that inspired Plant to recreate herself as a freelance academic (Eshun and Plant as cited in Reynolds, 2008, p. 178).

A Holey Space for Ghosts, Dogs, and other ANOMALs The question mobilized in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog extends from the Deleuzeguattarian concept of holey space. Specifically, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai experiments with the creation of a life resonant with both striated and rhizomatic forces. This experiment is most profoundly figured in Ghost Dog’s communication with Tsunemoto’s Hagakure. Through the Hagakure, Ghost Dog enters into relation with the strict feudal precepts of Bushido, creating an untimely way of life out of step with contemporary identity politics. Becoming-samurai, Ghost Dog performs ritualized

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meditation, trains in martial warfare, and practices the maxims of the Hagakure in his itinerant work as retainer for mafia capo, Louie (John Tormey). However, while in communication with the coded maxims of the Hagakure and the martial ways of Bushido, Ghost Dog is concomitantly a proficient code-breaker. Early in the film, Ghost Dog uses an electronic device for hacking car alarms and ignition assemblies. In a later scene, he purloins a suit, swaps the license plates of his stolen vehicle, and impersonates a real estate agent in order to gain access to the mafia’s country hideout. Elsewhere, Ghost Dog is portrayed as breaking from the semiotic code of both Bloods (reds) and Crips (blues), producing untimely affiliations that escape the production of an enemy necessary for the function of the State military apparatus. Instead, Ghost Dog’s radicalism stems in part from “his” ability to “communicate” across oppositional forces in the production of relations not predicated upon the necessity of either friends (strong affiliations) or enemies (overcoding). Significantly, Ghost Dog and his best friend, Raymond the Haitian ice-cream vendor (Issach de Bankolé), cannot understand a word each other say. That is, their relationship does not devolve on the privileged status of “intelligible” or representational modes of communication. Such incidents of code-breaking are not separate from the strict martial code of Bushido, but instead, are unique to Ghost Dog’s practice of the Hagakure itself. For example, Ghost Dog’s use of social and environmental camouflage is precipitated by Tsunetomo’s (1979) maxim: “It may happen that when one is sobering up or waking from sleep, his complexion may be poor. At such a time it is good to take out and apply some powdered rouge” (p. 75). Tsunetomo’s instruction on the obfuscation of one’s appearance is mobilized by Ghost Dog in order to hack identity and gain proximity to the mob’s fortified hideout. In another scene, Tsunetomo’s teaching that one should live as though already dead precipitates Ghost Dog’s spectral urban movements. Throughout the course of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, the coded maxims of Hagakure are brought into relation with their code-breaking potentials, hence disrupting the oppositional conceptualization of coded (arborescent) and noncoded (rhizomatic) forces. Instead, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog creates a holey space that communicates with the maxims of Hagakure while concomitantly producing its teratological difference. Giving Tsunetomo’s Hagakure a monstrous birth within a new milieu, Jarmusch practices what might be called an ethics of betrayal,6 giving that which can only be stolen (Deleuze, 1990). As Derrida (2003) contends, fidelity to either a thinker or thought has nothing to do with tracing or following. Rather, to follow “in the most demanding and authentic way . . . implies the


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‘anacol,’ the ‘not-following,’ the break in the following, in the company so to speak” (p. 7).

The Untimely and Unhomely: Toward the geopedagogical creation of a life Ghost Dog emphases the composition of a currere through the assemblage of remarkable or unique,7 rather than general or global, points. Such an assemblage might be dubbed geopedagogical, a concept intimate to Deleuze’s (2004) notion of the problem. As Deleuze writes, we have been led to believe that problems emerge ready-made, only to disappear through the formulation of responses or solutions. This illusion, Deleuze avers, is evident in “the grotesque image of culture we find in examinations and government referenda,” where we are consoled or distracted into the belief that “we have won simply by being able to respond” (p. 197). In this infantalizing scenario, we are continually caught working on problems that come from elsewhere, set by a master who accreditates our solutions as true or false. Deleuze reverses the flow of this problemsolution binary rampant in educational thought. “[E]very solution poses a problem,” Deleuze recounters (p. 215). Following, the actualization of a solution does not exterminate the problem, or in the case of geopedagogy, the potential for a people to both possess and determine the value of problems. It is in this vein that the concept of geopedagogy might be thought as a site for the fabrication of problems unequal those prejudged important by the State, media, or common sense of the public (doxa). Yet, as previously stated, such problems cannot simply be reduced to the actual, to solutions, or responses. For example, while the problem of how a life might go marks an “indispensible [challenge] without which no solution would ever exist,” the problem remains irreducable to any particular solution (p. 215). Simply put, problems do not resemble their solutions. As such, the challenge for curriculum theory is to think the geopedagogical as a compositional holey space that remains immanent to the virtual problem of how a pedagogical life might go (currere). Put differently, the geopedagogical composition of holey space might be thought as a slice, unequally linked, yet resonant with the problematic of currere—a problematic that cannot be fully represented, grasped, or registered in its multiplicity. It is in relation to this multiplicity however, that the geopedagogical character of holey space becomes a way of imagining the problem of how a life might go, actualizing singular assemblages capable of stuttering or “perplexing” those majoritarian images of life composed by “Royal geography.”

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While Royal geographers8 or State-sponsored researchers trace the “the boundaries of empires, revealing the best ways to colonize and educate, to establish transportation and communication networks, and to wage wars,” such minor geographers as Krapotkin and Reclus worked for the creation of a new earth (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 91). Such movements might be traced in contemporary curriculum scholarship, revealing the work of a “Royal geopedagogy” oriented to the broad mapping of disciplinary boarders, the organization of the field into warring territories, and the tracing of heavily surveilled historical and philosophical passages. Such Royal geography is of little interest to Jarmusch, whose filmic work takes seriously a minor geography sensitive to both local and translocal potentials. By extension, what might be called the geopedagogical force of Jarmusch’s work is oriented to that which is overlooked or disregarded by the State. It is in this vein that Jarmusch’s composition of the untimely urban Bushido, the anachronistic organizations that multiply within the city, and the antimodernism of feudal thought constitute a geopedagogy that prepares a new Earth, that is, new potentials for creation and creative action (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The kinds of minor geographies produced by Jarmusch offer “numerous solutions to complex problems that the apparatus of capture of the State, or transnational development organizations, [tend] to interfere with or parasitize more than improve upon” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, pp. 91–92). Hence, an active geopedagogy might be linked with the formation of holey space or heterogenic galleries, the very minor geographies overlooked by the desiring-machines of the Royal geopedagogue, whose project is fettered to practices of tracing, striating the disciplinary field into strict determinations, and severing the actual from its virtual potentials for becoming. Borrowing from Holland (2006), the distinction between Royal and minor geopedagogy might be put differently. As a corollary of the Fordian influence upon educational thought, Royal geopedagogy is oriented not only to a certain constancy of design, but further, to the conformity of its elements to a priori models of organization. In other words, Royal geopedagogy might be thought as the reactive desire to fetter pedagogical life to prior circuits of design, whether specified disciplinary borders, identitarian politics, or the public professor’s duty to reify State thought. Proceeding through the extraction of constants, Royal geopedagogy functions by tracing, reproducing an image of pedagogical life “above” the variations or singularities of a milieu. This form of geopedagogy, one that functions via the organization of potential becomings into recognizable and manageable forms, has a storied history in curriculum studies, extending from the “promise of order, organization . . . error correction . . . expertise, and progress” in Tyler (1949), and the ostensible political and


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ethical neutrality of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy (Cherryholmes, 1988, p. 26). Yet, the problematic of identitarian and State thought in education is not simply a historical one. As Davies (2005) avers, the reconceptualist movement occurring in many universities today functions to revive old hopes, ideals, identity politics, and images of pedagogical life under the guise of radical political change. For Davies, such reterritorialization marks the reactive tendency of contemporary education and the implicit desire to reinvigorate grand narratives under the guise of progressivism. The problematic introduced by contemporary education is not simply limited to the instrumental desire to halt difference according to the homogenizing machinery of Tyler’s structuralist rationale, Bloom’s taxonomic organization of the “real,” or Schwab’s (1970) practical treatise on the “correction” of the curriculum under the surveillance of external experts. Under neoliberalism, Royal geopedagogy is no longer solely fettered to structural overdetermination. Rather, the problematic of contemporary geopedagogy is introduced by way of its decoded recruitment into capitalist systems of exchange. Such a shift is figured in the move toward greater individual choice and responsibility, audit-driven surveillance and its intimate relation to funding, the corporate privatization of schools, and the smoothing of education through the requirement of permanent retraining and rhetorics of lifelong learning. While it is necessary that curriculum theory continue to labor against the structuralist legacy and reactive tendencies of pedagogical thought, contemporary curricularists must concomitantly avoid fixating on a structuralist foil that is increasingly disappearing. Insofar as it produces a holey space of tensionality between the strict codes of feudal society and the decoding of flows in capitalist society, Ghost Dog thinks the way modern society does and is caught between these two poles of desire, one paranoiac and the other, schizophrenic.9

Paranoiac Fixing and Schizophrenic Release: The Significance of Social Flows Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) argue that society subsists through the restriction or structuration of movements or flows. Such flows are not simply economic, that is, they do not exclusively pertain to the circulation and exchange of money and commodities particular to economics. Rather, the way social formation subsists through the restriction and structure of its flows might be seen at a variety of levels, from the movement of people and traffic in the city, the flow of words within a discourse, flows of information in the media, flows of genetic material in industrialized farming, and flows of matter in energy and manufacturing sectors (Roffe, 2005).

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As Deleuze and Guattari develop, the basic principal of precapitalist society is to restrict and structure such flows, hence producing particular, “coded” images of life. While giving stability to particular social organ-izations, the restriction of flows in precapitalist society concomitantly functions to constrict potential ways a life might go. However, such precapitalist processes of restriction and coding are critical insofar as they constitute the basis upon which to challenge State thought. Put differently, it is against the limiting codes of conduct, rules, regulations, and laws of an age that concepts might be mobilized to their greatest material affect. The necessary restriction and structuration of flows by a particular signifying regime is no less important for curriculum scholarship, which has productively mobilized a diverse array of alternative discourses in response to the overdeterminations of State thought. Curriculum theorizing has produced new codes for reterritorializing overdetermined social flows into new, and presumably less oppressive organ-izations. However, a tendency persists in curriculum scholarship to take as its fundamental antithesis the structuration and restriction of flows particular to precapitalist society. This tendency orbits a dubious double illusion. That is, it risks asserting a structuralist foundation for all social formations, assuming that organization is a transcendent formation beneath, behind, or beyond society. The error of this illusion lies in its separation of molar (arborescent) and molecular (rhizomatic) forces, or rather, the severance of actual from virtual forces. Such an illusion denies the immanent tension (tonos) of order “that at once moves toward fixation of thoughts, action and passions, and simultaneously dissolves this fixation, then becoming a structural principle of a different nature” (Fuglsang & Sorensen, 2006, p. 7). In Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, such tonos is sketched through the way the ordered “code” of Bushido enters into differential relation with other organizations (the mafia, the itinerant emcee, the dog pack), constituting a social order that is composed through the “machining” of unique lines (fuites) rather than immutable or universal points. Simply, the social organizations that mark the topography of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog are composed in a process of leakage10 and becoming. The death of Ghost Dog is hence neither the beginning nor the end, but rather, a line that grows from the middle of a new organizational becoming. Holey spaces continue to be carved from the milieu in a discontinuous series, preparing the ground for the emergence, delinkage, and linkage of new social forces. What the reification of a transcendent structuralism denies is the formation of a new social machine that no longer functions by way of coding social flows. That is, curriculum theorizing fettered to the habitual production of a structural foil risks disregarding the emergence of new organizations that eschew the overdetermination of social flows.


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Insofar as curriculum theory conflates the destruction of codes to either the freedom of the subject or commencement of a radical ethics, its project might produce a line of flight corollary to that of the capitalist apparatus. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), capitalism is no longer a regime that works by coding and overcoding the socius. While primitive social machines controlled flows of social desire through restriction, attributing specific meaning to social life, despotic regimes controlled social desire through overcoding, spiritualizing meaning via its conflation with the definition of the “good society.” The capitalist apparatus however, functions as an exception to both primitive and despotic regimes of coding. Simply, the capitalist apparatus works not qua coding but by deterritorializing social flows through practices of decoding. In this instance, decoding does not intimate practices of deciphering or perception, but the literal subtraction of the code itself (Buchanan, 2008a). In place of the code, capitalism mobilizes an axiomatic. In its mathematical definition, the axiom is an improvable statement, yet one that works to fix and implicitly define the organization of “basic elements.” Put differently, the axiom is a form of social organization, and more specifically, one that functions to organize and regulate social flows of desire. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop, the axiom is not a self-evident truth. Rather, the axiom is an effect of its models of realization. For example, as modern mathematicians have developed, Euclidian geometry is not a self-evident truth, but rather, a model of the axiom’s realization (the realization by which we “see” Euclid everywhere in the world). The capitalist axiomatic is produced through the model of the market, which seeks to accumulate instances of its realization in every sphere of the socius. More specifically, the realization of a capitalist axiomatic, that is, the realization of capitalism as a self-evident truth, is produced through the conjunction of social flows (use-value, taste, raw materials, labor-power, and technology, etc.) under the profit-motive model of the market. Indeed, the fundamental gesture of the capitalist axiomatic is realized in the modern conjoinment of a surplus labor force and “liquid wealth no longer embodied in landed property” (Holland, 1999, p. 67). Significantly, it is via the conjoinment or reterritorialization of decoded social flows upon the body of the market that the capitalist axiomatic is realized. Yet, the processes of conjoinment effected by the market retain flexibility through their erasure of the connection between symbolic social codes and their territory. The capitalist axiom is not only flexible, but is capable of displacing its external limits to accommodate new subject positions and forms of social organization. It is in this vein that the capitalist axiom has “multiple realizability,” emerging as the effect of such diverse models as American neoliberalism, the social

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democracy of France, socialist Yugoslavia, and the “anarcho-capitalism” of Pinochet’s Chile (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 58). While precapitalist regimes functioned to capture and recode deterritorialized flows, axiomatization empties social flows of their particular meanings and context, rendering them fluid and exchangeable. For example, the precapitalist coding of libidinal flows in the sanctioned circuits of marriage, the church, and morality, have been decoded in capitalist society (Roffe, 2005). Sex in capitalist society is tied to neither the coded rite of marriage or religious morality. Instead, sex has become diffuse and ambient, enabled by its decoding to enter into alternate figurations restricted by precapitalist regimes of coding. An educational corollary of this scenario is evident in the ways that knowledge, once coded within highly specialized apprenticeships and singularized markets, has become decoded across the World Wide Web. Through such decoding, once contextual or clandestine knowledge is made available in radically different locales, times, and spaces (Buchanan, 2006) . Further, while knowledge was tethered to its utilitarian purpose in precapitalist regimes, the capitalist apparatus functions to produce knowledge itself. No longer fettered to utilitarian use-value, contemporary practices of decoding have produced a knowledge society that works via massively complex and instantaneous clouds of information rather than coded or linear pathways of information exchange. In capitalism, the axiomatic functions by rendering social flows arbitrary and evacuating the symbolic or contextual significance of social practices, rituals, or rites. It is in this sense that capitalism suspends external limits insofar as limits intimate the function of codes upon the restriction and organization of social flows. Following, the capitalist axiomatic produces a law of general equivalence through the collapse of social flows with the realm of monetary valuation. Put differently, the commodification of social flows under capitalism requires that they become fluid through decoding. The commodification of sex for example, requires that its umbilical connection to social practices of courtship and marriage first be decoded. That is, sex cannot be commodified if fettered to particular social contexts or restrictive codes prescribing its availability and/or access. Instead, the axiomatization of sex under capitalism renders it equivalent to monetary valuation, priming conditions for the sale of sex as an ambient commodity. We are in the midst of a radical reconceptualization of the educational project under the law of general equivalency, where education becomes correlative to forms of monetary valuation. Such a law of generalized equivalency has infected the desire of much contemporary educational research, which finds its purpose increasingly fettered to its potential for monetary valuation through the conferral of grants and awards.


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The law of general equivalency leads to a critical insight on the function of contemporary capitalism. While eschewing the external limits that would restrict its fluid proliferation, capitalism maintains an internal limit in the axiom. More specifically, while social flows are released into a vertiginous cloud of exchange, the internal limit of such exchange is fettered to the nucleus of its filiative potential to produce capital. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) remark, the internal limit of capitalism is that which “maintains the energy of . . . flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialised, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other” (p. 267).

Give Me Freedom or Give Me Death: Paranoia, Schizophrenia11 and Education To understand the complex management, channeling, and production of social desire, Buchanan (2008a) avers, we must first understand how the economic social apparatus orchestrates the “new [arrangements] of filiation and alliance” figured in the law of general equivalency (p. 108). The analysis of social desire as a production of banking figures largely in the Freirean (2002, 2004) version of Marxism. Specifically, Freire’s banking concept of education critiques the organization of pedagogical life in the image of accumulation, deposit, manageability, and adaptation to prior social structures. In short, the Freirean (2002) critique extends from the reactive image of pedagogical life captured within the structuralist logic of banking. It is in this vein that Freire correlates educational oppression with the moribund limitation of social flows. For example, under the banking concept of education, Freire argues that the student becomes a passive depository for the reception and collection of institutionalized communiqué. In the banking model, flows of exchange are strictly circuited, emanating from a dominant minority, relayed via the teacher-as-bank-clerk and inscribed upon the body of the student. Such communiqué are in turn subject to strict regulation, hence ensuring that the knowledge-capital of the classroom accord to an image of life ascribed by a managerial elite. Simply, the banking concept of education is premised on the overdetermination of social flows. Freire dubs this image of pedagogical life both necrophilic and mechanical. Overdetermining desire through educative practices that demand the conformity of desire to restrictive circuits of production and exchange, Freire’s critique of the banking model marks a becomingreactive of education. It is against the banking concept of education articulated in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed that much antioppressive curriculum scholarship continues to locate its political task of liberation.

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To take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) emphasis on the production of desire, curriculum theory must also necessarily grapple with the social machinery being engendered by the capitalist apparatus. More specifically, curriculum theory must begin to unfold the significance of its project in relation to a social apparatus that no longer functions as a machine of coding or restriction. Put differently, the challenge of thinking a curricular life is not simply forestalled by the neodespotic powers of the State, but perhaps more significantly, perplexed by the production of decoded social flows under capitalism. Such perplexion is significant insofar as it parallels the task of much contemporary curriculum and arts-based theorizing. Specifically, while the production of artistic novelty, “rhizomes”,12 and deterritorialized sign systems function to ward against the formation of the despotic apparatus described by Freire, such strategies bear a peculiar fidelity to the desire of the capitalist social machine. Capitalism functions by eradicating external limits, requiring the novelty and invention produced through decoded social flows and deterritorialized chains of signification. As Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) write, the primary movement of capitalism is “one of destratification and deterritorialization: freeing desire from the social . . . codes which have been placed on it, and liberating it from the territorial . . . boundaries which have enclosed it” (p. 15). It is in this vein that capitalism thrives on the projects of crisis, contradiction, and complexity lauded in much “libratory” curriculum thought. Further, the valorization of incompleteness in much arts-based theorizing functions as an ideal corollary for a market economy no longer premised on enclosure, but rather, the production of interminable debt. The neoliberal capitalist apparatus does not fear difference, but rather, fears its cessation. “Social machines feed off ‘the contradictions they give rise to, on the crisis they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself ” (Deleuze & Guattari cited in Buchanan, 2008b, p. 30). Rather than curtailing differences that would feed mechanisms of production, the contemporary capitalist social apparatus operates as a “difference engine” poised to parasite and render consumable a trajectory of thinking oriented to the destruction of external or coded social flows. As Braidotti (2008) writes, “capitalism has . . . reduced all counter-cultures to objects of commodified consumption and re-established a conservative ethos that spells the death of all experimentations aimed at transformative changes” (p. 142). Contemporary society is caught between two poles. Born on the deterritorialized ruins of the despotic machine, society oscillates “between the Urstaat that [it] would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and


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reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that [carries it] toward an absolute threshold” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 282/309). In part, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is sketched in the fold of these social poles, drawn between the rigorous code of the Hagakure and decoded flows of identity, space, and time that compose “his” life. The mafia that appear in Ghost Dog are composed within a similar tensional fold, caught between their highly coded organizational order and their immanent displacement (deterritorialization) by rising capitalist forces and global criminal enterprise. It might be ventured that contemporary curriculum studies is also in the midst of grappling with this problematic. Specifically, the field continues to struggle with its highly coded and restricted formations through the creation of schizzes that release desire along productive lines of escape. Such movement inheres the curriculum reconceptualist movement of the 1970’s, which mobilized a series of schizzes against the overcoded (structuralist, instrumental, and inherently behavioral) image of the field (Schwab, 1983). Through the production of a complicated and multiperspectival curriculum conversation, the reconceptualists of the 1970’s worked to ward against the protraction of a despotic image, decoding the sedimented territories of the field along a myriad of discursive lines (Cherryholmes, 1988). While each of these lines ostensibly reterritorialized desire into a multiplicity of curricular orientations (autobiographical, Marxist, phenomenological, existential, etc.), emancipation from fascist overcoding persisted as their common political characteristic. It is in a similar vein that the postreconceptualist movement’s engagement with postmodernity, poststructuralism, and posthumanism has produced schizzes to ward the against the overdetermination of curriculum disciplinarity and the problematic of humanism in an age of proliferating media and machine-human interfaces. It is in this vein that the field of curriculum studies might be thought in a way that is continuously caught between paranoia (archaism and neoarchaism) and schizophrenia (futurism and exfuturism). This matrix is evident in much contemporary curriculum theory oriented to the paranoiac fabulation of stable codes or immutable organizations beneath or beyond the capitalist axiom; a paranoiac movement that in turn functions as a foil for the production of schizophrenic desiring-production. This tendency marks the project of the social justice agenda, which often begins with the production of a coded image of life that it seeks to redress. Such a movement should not be surprising, for schizzes assume their greatest disruptive potential when fulminated against the fixity of social codes (Holland, 1998). As Jackson (1980, 1981) articulated of the 1970’s reconceptualist movement, the “curriculum revolution” would emerge

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through the fabulation of curriculum studies as a moribund field exhibiting all the symptoms of a system on the brink of death. The “thanatotic fantasy” to which Jackson (1980) alludes marks the paranoiac pole of reconceptualism (pp. 174–175). That is, what Jackson unconsciously describes in his criticism of reconceptualism is the very condition in which modern society is caught. Specifically, the paranoiac image of the curriculum field as a hypertrophied and overcoded body is what allows the radical forces of schizophrenic desiring-production its most vital shock to thought. That is, by schizzing behavioral psychology, Fordian instrumentalism, and curricular “foundations,” curricularists were able to create links with new areas of inquiry, social problematics, and images of pedagogical life. Yet, such schizzes relied on the image of curriculum as a dead field and hence, the production of a paranoiac pole against which the reconceptualists would wage a war of vitality, that is, of releasing desiring-flows into organization with other theories, philosophies, and genealogies. Significantly, the reconceptualist movement of the 1970’s begins to dissipate at the very moment when the paranoiac pole of the “traditional curriculum” began to lo(o)se its cohesion. In the wake of this dispersed pole, the schizo-lines of the reconceptualist movement begin to reterritorialize, albeit never conclusively, into coded organizations. As Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (2000) write, in the wake of reconceptualism, the curriculum field began to coalesce around developmental, back-to-thebasics, standardized and behaviorist images of pedagogical life. Put differently, the desiring-flows released by the reconceptualist movement were entrapped within new forms of social coding, reterritorializing on the paranoiac pole of modernity and the assumption of stable organizations beneath schizophrenic desiring-production. Of course, such reterritorializations are never decisive, but function to ward against revolutionary schizz-flows by paranoically inscribing them within coded circuits of thought and organ-ization. Warding against the formation of an overcoded social body, schizophrenia produces a myriad of social flows ranging from the revolutionary (affirmative, untimely, vital) to the “dead-end” (suicidal, murderous, obliviated). The kinds of schizz-flows produced through the decoding of desire must, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advocate, be entered into carefully. For contemporary curricularists, such care must attend to the ways in which the attempt to produce schizzes might be parasited by the capitalist apparatus and realized in its model of labor-profit organization. Equally, contemporary curricularists should take care to “root out” those acts of desiring-production that simply occlude the stealthy reinstatement of paranoiac or overcoded images of life. This strategy pervades the


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so-called reconceptualization of the university, wherein the image of political and organizational progressivism functions to mask old ideals and habits of thought. While paranoia functions to produce stable social structures, codes, and restrictions, schizophrenic desiring-productions destratify territorialized codes through the production of lines of flight. Rather than conceptualizing the poles of paranoia and schizophrenia as an antagonistic binary pair however, Deleuze and Guattari develop a way of thinking practices of coding and decoding as symbiotic movements in global capitalism. As previously developed, capitalism substitutes an axiomatic in place of rigorous social codes, desiring the decoding of external limits in lieu of uninterrupted socioeconomic flows figured in the capitalist ideal of “a deterritorialized global marketplace.” However, while capitalism desires the decoding of external limits, it must maintain an internal limit that renders social flows equivalent to profitability and calculability for that profit. Simply, under capitalism, socials flows must be made equivalent to flows of money and profit. It is in this vein that while capitalism posits a revolutionary departure from despotic regimes, it is concomitantly “defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 373). In short, the violence of capitalism operates through a rigorous axiomatic that functions to submit desiring-flows to profit-value. Under despotic regimes, the subject is indebted to the sovereign with his or her life, submitting to the meanings that arise from the sovereign “because it is to him that all debt is owed” (Holland, 1998, p. 67). Capitalism, on the other hand, supplants the position of the sovereign without dispensing stable meaning or restricting social flows. “Capitalism is . . . owed an infinite debt, but what is owed is merely one’s work, one’s qualified laborpower rather than one’s life” (p. 67). This turn is palpable in contemporary education, where the student’s fidelity to the meanings produced by the teacher-as-master have been succeeded by the institutional demand for ceaseless production, giving rise to a “meaningless calculus” of hyperactive overproduction. In this scenario, pedagogical life becomes fettered to its capacity for stimulating interminable channels of production and consumption. Hence, the problematic of capitalism is not primarily, as Naomi Klein suggests, the restriction of rights to build our own schools and manage our communities, but rather, the way in which “the axiomatic is able to treat all forms of organization in its model of realisation” (Buchanan & Parr, 2006, p. 11). However, the capitalist axiomatic cannot circuit all desiring-flows to its profit-driven motive. That is, while capitalism works to schizz coded flows of social desire, the schizz concomitantly marks a threat to axiomatization.13

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The Threat of Schizophrenia Inhering the deterritorializing desire of capitalism is also the potential of its undoing. That is, capitalism does not succeed in submitting all desiringflows to its axiomatic profit-value. “In the process of multiplying flows of decoded desire, [capitalism] cannot help but also produce flows of desire that escape; flows which, instead of moving in line with capitalism, go against it, or run off in other direction” (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007, p. 15). It is in this event that capitalism requires the very apparatus it submits to practices of decoding. Against the escaping desires of revolutionary movements, madness, and terrorism, capitalism requires the coding machines of the State. It is in this vein that prisons, hospitals, schools, the media, and law capture those desiring-productions that bypass the internal axiomatic limit of capitalism, “turning revolutionaries into the criminal, the disorderly, the social outcast, the insane” (p. 16). For capitalism to submit schizophrenic desiring-production to its labor-profit-driven axiomatic, it must maintain the axiomatic as its internal limit. While decoding the limits of the socius, capitalism requires that its deterritorialized flows are brought into equivalence with capital itself. In turn, those schizz-flows which threaten to destabilize the rigorous internal axiomatic of capitalism are oedipalized, hence “neutralizing the threat of schizophrenia to the capitalist machine’s absolute limit” (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 116). Specific to curriculum theorizing and the Freirean inspired work of antioppressive educators, the Marxist law of the counteracting tendency might be contemporarily understood in terms of paranoia and schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). While the State apparatus persists in such highly organized forms as banking education, disciplinary “foundations,” and grassroots back-to-the-basics movements, such archaism has a “perfectly modern function,” working to establish a “neoterritoriality” against the threat of schizophrenia (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 115). Alternatively, it is against the neodespotic powers of the modern State figured in such coding apparati as the school that much contemporary curriculum theorizing is oriented to the production of an ex-futurity that wards against fascism. Vacillating between the poles of paranoia and schizophrenia however, the schizo-desires of neoliberalism is an equally “modern” movement that reterritorializes desire within particular, albeit flexible and differentiating models of realization. For example, while much libratory curriculum theorizing has sought to release subjectivity from oppressive models of organization, such movement often reterritorializes the subject within an axiomatic of identity, fettering potentials for becoming to the ostensibly diverse individual as a primary model of realization/possibility. Similarly, while the tyranny of racism, homophobia, and sexism continue to be


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critical topics in the curriculum field, their deterritorialization risks reterritorializing in molar categories of identity (white, black, male, female), effectively warding off a nonrepresentational and nonunitary schizoanalysis of race, gender, and genealogy.14 In other words, while practices of decoding might produce important diversities, multiplicities, and novelties, such practices must attend to their lines of flight and further, the modes of realization in which desiring-flows are recaptured. The contemporary conjunction of desiring-production with the axiom of new age spiritualism, sovereign individualism, and a priori gendered experience pose botched lines of escape already recaptured by a paranoiac belief in inherent universal meaning, insistent ontological models, and the anthropocentric conceptualization of life.

Between Terrorism and Nihilism A pedagogical caveat on desire not dissimilar from a contemporary consideration of paranoia and schizophrenia appears in the Daignault’s (1992) essay entitled Traces at Work from Different Places. In it, Daignault articulates a dual Western philosophical tendency that enters into relation with contemporary education. Daignault dubs this dual tendency terrorism and nihilism. For Daignault, terrorism is a corollary of coding that extends from the Platonic conceptualization of knowledge as a hunt. In education, terrorism is figured in the desire to know too soon and hence, to submit difference to identity. It is in this vein that terrorism enters into relation with the paranoiac desire to territorialize meaning. Overcoding desire within an identitarian image of thought, terrorism arranges desiring-flows into stable patterns easily submitted to practices of educational “delivery,” testing, and standardized outcomes. Perhaps a more insidious aspect of terrorism, however, is its paranoiac reinsertion of Truth persisting beyond difference. This movement effectively reinstates a transcendent philosophy in which the paranoiac arrangement of desire prevails over what occupies it (Deleuze, 2004). That is, within Daignault’s conceptualization of terrorism, the desiring-production immanent to a pedagogical life is reterritorialized upon prior coded flows, effectively rendering any deviation either accidental or different by degrees from an a priori image of how pedagogical life ought to go. It is in this vein that the overcoded character Daignault accords to philosophical and pedagogical terrorism is tantamount to murder. Put differently, as a corollary of the paranoiac desire to “fix” social flows according to rigorous codes, Daignault’s concept of terrorism functions to ward against heterodoxy and lines of escape, restricting such flows by tracing them upon the coded

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body of the socius. While terrorism works to capture desiring-flows within strict codes of regulation and limitation, Daignault’s conceptualization of philosophical and pedagogical nihilism describes a state in which desire is unhinged from particular meanings or ideals. While nihilism creates a line that moves in the opposite direction of representational terrorism, ultimately, this line reactively connects a life to an oblivion in which “anything goes” (Daignault, 1992). Mobilized against Daignault’s conceptualization of terrorism and nihilism is the potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) holey space, or rather, the schizzed space that “communicates” across both striated (coded) territory and smooth (decoded) flows. As a space of preparation that evades State surveillance, holey space has yet to be submitted to overcoding. Yet, holey space is neither a site of axiomatization, curtailing desiring-production to a law of general equivalency, relativism, or feckless pluralism. Rather, the relationship of holey space to curriculum theory is perhaps closer to Aoki’s (2005b) geopedagogical notion of curricular foundations without foundations.15 Analyzing the instrumental conceptualization of the curriculum and instruction landscape, Aoki implicitly argues that the people are missing. That is, the instrumental overcoding of the curriculum and instruction landscape prevents the preparation of new forces and bodies-in-becoming. Warding off the emergence of ANOMALous forces, the modernist conceptualization of the curriculum and instruction landscape functions as an architectonic “container” that fetters curricular thought to the heavily surveilled molar circuits of “curriculum supervision, curriculum development, curriculum implementation, and curriculum evaluation” (p. 199). In this modernist scenario, desire is mapped onto prior circuits of thought. This strategy not only functions to “contain” social flows, but further, to render them manageable, efficient, and surveillable. This situation is deeply untenable, repelling intelligent inquiry while concomitantly birthing a culture of institutional illness. Even the revolutionary forces being mobilized in the arts are at risk of becoming reduced to the neoliberal axiom of profitability. Contemporarily, the desire exists to tether the fine arts to the formation of a “creative economy” that not only serves to “legitimize” the work of artists but further, acts to buttress the neoliberal demand for flexible, novel, and pluralist thinking.16 Against these modes of capture, Aoki theorizes the emergence of a people from within the “vertical and the horizontal” spaces of the curriculum landscape (2005d, p. 429). Put differently, Aoki argues that the site of living pedagogy emerges between the representational and nonrepresentational, occupying terrain while deterritorializing its sedimented strata. Such a space might be dubbed holey insofar as it works to escape molar categories of thought while preparing new problems and challenges


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not yet anticipated by the prior organization of desiring-production into calcified circuits. Composing a space for a people yet to come, holey space enters into relation with the geopedagogical concept of curriculum foundations without foundations, a concept that avoids both the codification of desire (terrorism) or its trivial release upon dead-end lines of escape (Aoki, 2005b). It is in this vein that we might think the task of curriculum theory as the schizo-occupation of territorialized landscapes for the purpose of preparing new social forces and images of a pedagogical life. Such schizo-occupation conspires with the body of the Earth (the body without organs) to create a holey space that resists the murderous colonization of desire under sovereign power (despotism) and the nihilistic agitation of desire into general equivalency with the pluralistic any-desire-whatsoever of postmodern capitalism. Conceptualized in this manner, the composition of an untimely holey space produces a new problematic for the “field” of curriculum theorizing. Specifically, to take seriously the geopedagogical creation of curriculum foundations without foundations requires an approach to analysis that would enable the “machining” of heterodox social forces into productive assemblage. Put differently, a geopedagogy oriented to schizzing the stratified terrain of the curriculum and instruction landscape must begin to mobilize approaches adequate to thinking the revolution of prior foundations. In contemporary curriculum theory, the beginnings of such a revolution are conceptualized in Daignault’s notion of the “excluded third” (the “gap” that is the curriculum) and Aoki’s third space (the interrogative space between the curriculum-as-plan and the curriculum-as-lived). For both Daignault and Aoki, the conceptualization of “third space” is linked to the performative site between representation and nonrepresentation—between presence and imperceptibility. The curriculum, Daignault avers, is a gap, or rather, a process of composition that is both connected to “what is” and yet, does not reterritorialize in its image. Yet, a caveat on the notion of the in-between must be issued, since this term has too often come to signify the banal dialectical instantiation of a “third term.” That is, while a bisexual, reformed-addict, teacher-researcher ostensibly occupies a “third space,” this conceptualization remains both reliant and limited to binary relations (Malins, 2004). The danger of such an approach to the conceptualization of “in-between” space inheres its potential reduction of multiplicity to a dialectical trinity, the originary coordinates of which remain intact and supported by the third term. Against this all-too-human conceptualization of the “in-between,” Aoki evokes a corollary of “third space” in the figure of the opaque bar in Saussure’s relational diagram of signifier and signified. As the “gap” of representational correspondence, this bar becomes a potential site for the performative relaunch of how a pedagogical life might

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go. In Daignault’s (1989) words, the curriculum is not a thing but rather, a process of composition. As such, the “gap” to which both Daignault and Aoki point marks a site for resisting the reterritorialization of currere (the course of a pedagogical life) in an a priori, reactive image of life. As it is germane to this chapter, such a virtual site of composition might be thought in terms of its relation to holey space. Put differently, the “gap” between representational and nonrepresentational forces might otherwise be dubbed holey space insofar as the conceptualization of such space marks the fractal fold of both molar (representational) territories (what is) and molecular (nonrepresentational) flows (what is becoming). It is in the conceptualization and occupation of such a space that curriculum theorists might challenge “what is” through the creation of forces and lives (bodies-in-becoming) unanticipated by the desiring-machines of the State. Such punctuation is unequal to the banal instantiation of a tertiary term for thinking. Instead, following queer theory, the task to which the future of curriculum is intimately tied involves the freeing of molecular flows from molar overdetermination. Opposed to thinking the bisexual for example, we might instead think of a thousand tiny sexes. More broadly, the gap in which the curriculum is composed is not simply a site wherein the curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum are synthesized. Instead, it might be said that the gap herein dubbed holey space is rather the experimental site for the relaunch of desiring-production with the question of how a life might go, producing a thousand plateaus for thinking a life.

The Third Space Under Threat Daignault (1990, 1992) warns that third space is itself under constant threat of reterritorialization. “Even the middle attracts new people committed to reducing it to a matter of knowledge, to a new epistemological stake” (Daignault, 1991, p. 199). As Daignault avers, the concept of a third space is always under risk of being reterritorialized upon an old ideal, code, or habit of thought. However, curriculum theorists would do well to avoid locating the problem with reterritorialization “itself ” (under either code or designer axiomatic). Instead, the problem lies with trying to “understand how and why those reterritorializations were constructed in the first place” (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 121). Further, the task of curriculum theory might orient its project to the ways in which its reterritorializations constitute a symptomology for what it cannot bear to extricate. That is, contemporary curriculum theory requires a tactic for examining “the investments of unconscious desire in the social field” in a manner that does not simply devolve on the automatic interpretation machines of


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“classical” psychoanalysis or structuralism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 123). Contemporarily, what is required is not simply the creation of a tertiary space, but rather, the creation of “X” inverted plateaus or nondenumerable holey spaces. Put differently, if the conceptualization of third space simply functions to reinsert dialectical thinking as a “limit” or peripheral case for curricular thinking, it is ill prepared to conceptualize the preparation of untimely singularities or “mutant assemblage[s] of enunciation” (Guattari, 1995, p. 116). Rather, to conflate third space with dialectical thinking is to reterritorialize curriculum thought as a project of synthesis and identity. In this movement, virtual potentials and resources for relation are reduced to “actual” or “given” resources for integration. The concept of holey space might provide curriculum theorists with an alternative geopedagogical concept for rethinking sites of resistance. As Morris (2000) writes, it is within such mutant spaces that the next generation of curriculum workers are being prepared. Against synopical or identitarian resemblance, Morris advocates, curriculum studies must attend to the work of its outtakes, those fragments, peoples-in-becoming, and modes of thought spliced and omitted from the visual field of both surveillance and representation. It is with regard to such underdogs, Morris writes that “we must always already fight . . . otherwise all of our efforts are arrogant and pointless” (p. 5). Against another synoptic curriculum canon, Morris points to the emergence of outtake curricular projects figured in the analysis of queer, antidisciplinary, cyborgian, science fiction, and posthope images of pedagogical life. Rather than constituting a synoptic or dialectic image of curriculum life, such outtakes instead mark the begetting of multiple singularities “sown . . . on the . . . body, across the riverbed, in intellectual space” (Serres, 1997, p. 164). Yet, it must be added that the production of such singularities cannot be reduced to the offspring of heteronormative dialecticism (mommy/daddy/me-curriculum/teacher/ student). Instead, the singularities of which Morris and Serres speak might more productively be thought as the bastard offspring of untimely strange attractors. Put differently, those outtakes toiling “in the murkiness and dimness” of the pit do not divide up into a pure species with a common genealogy, operative question or task (Morris, 2000, p. 3). Rather, the bodies-in-becoming Morris attributes to the next generation of curriculum scholars might more adequately be understood as ANOMALs. Following, it might be ventured that the task of such underdogs is oriented to queering reactive images of pedagogical life, stealing back from those reactive images of the Curriculum the potential to fabulate a curricular life.17 It is a task, as Morris avers, of avoiding the desire to reterritorialize the field in the image of the good old days, the aura of celebrity scholars, or the resuscitation of that which we already

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know. However, such ANOMAL forces need not be simply be conflated with the young as Morris ostensibly asserts, but might more adequately be understood as those bodies-in-becoming poised to betray powers of overcoding, whether functioning overtly as a corollary of the State apparatus or as stealth agents reinvigorating old hegemonies under the banner of political or pedagogical progressivism. Yet, the ANOMAL must take equal care to avoid reterritorializing upon the law of general equivalency whereby it might deliver itself up, bound hand and foot, to the axiomatic of the market (Guattari, 1995). The question for revolutionary curriculum thought is caught herein. Put differently, how can curriculum theory think the creation of a life, an ANOMAL, or holey space that reterritorializes on neither the coded form interpolated by the State or the decoded axiom of capitalism? Further, how might the fabulation of a curricular life avoid capture in the neoconservative or counterrevolutionary image of a third space that reductively equates to the moderative dialectical integration of both coded and decoded tendencies. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) describe, such a definition of third space continues to be captured within the general problematic of modernity, and more specifically, a vacillation between paranoia and schizophrenia. In this vein, how might we think curriculum studies as an anticounterrevolutionary task? That is, what conceptual resources might curriculum studies mobilize to fabulate nonunitary holey spaces, ANOMAL lives, and untimely philosophical thinking? One such anticounterrevolutionary mode of thinking Deleuze and Guattari (1983) develop is that of schizoanalysis.

Schizoanalysis and the Creative Potential of the ANOMAL While capitalism desires the deterritorialization of social flows, its engagement with schizophrenic desiring-production is tenuous. More specifically, the deterritorialized flows unleashed by the capitalist machine require bounding upon the body of capital itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). It is in this vein that the deterritorialization effected by capitalism is only a relative expression of society’s limit, for it must substitute its rigorous axiomatic in place of restrictive social codes. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “capitalism only functions on condition that it . . . push back or displace [the absolute tendency of schizophrenia], by substituting for its own immanent relative limits. . . . [i]t axiomatizes on one hand what it decodes with the other” (p. 267). It is along this line of flight, however, that Deleuze and Guattari posit a potential revolutionary path, for the market cannot realize all decoded flows in the capitalist axiom. That is, capitalism cannot submit all lines of flight


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to its generalized law of economic valuation. Fragments of code, outtakes, and nonrepresentational cells compose leakages (fuites) that exceed axiomatic capture, hence posing a problematic for capitalism insofar as such ANOMALs point to a way of thinking not yet captured by either despotic or capitalist images of a life. A contemporary example of this ANOMAL is figured in the work of contemporary digital DJs, whose tactics of “textual poaching, [become] zero-paid, [become] no-logo, [become] brand X” (Miller, 2008, p. 13). The compositional tactics employed by many digital DJs reterritorialize fragments of musical code into assemblages that not only break from the musical tropes defined by the music industry, but further, affront neoliberal copyright and sampling laws, hence schizzing the usemonopoly of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) (Lethem, 2008). It is in a similar vein that graffiti artists have enacted an ANOMAL deterritorialization of the “concrete jungle” by drawing buildings and street corners into new territorial assemblages no longer organized by corporate logo-landmarks or GPS grid coordinates. As Baudrillard (1993) writes, “by tattooing walls, [graffiti taggers] free them from architecture”18 (p. 82). The “graffiti” tag is neither the identitarian representation of an a priori code or a process of recoding that can be strictly appropriated for its profit-potential. In this vein, both the digital DJ and graffiti tagger remain largely ANOMAL—their practices dubbed deviant, depraved, and criminal. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) plot a line of escape that avoids romanticizing despotic society as much as it repulses the notion of withdrawing from the world market “in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’” (Buchanan, 2008a, p. 116). Rather, Deleuze and Guattari compose a line of flight that moves in the direction of the market’s schizophrenic desire for decoding and deterritorialization. Yet, while capitalism marks the relative limit of society by maintaining the axiomatic as an internal limit, Deleuze and Guattari go further still, mobilizing schizophrenic desiring-production in displacement of both external and internal social horizons. It is in this vein that schizoanalysis composes an approach that reterritorializes on neither the body of the market nor the image of oedipus, ego, castration, and lack as the overcoded “private territory” of the subject. Instead, reterritorialization is itself the subject of schizoanalytic study. More specifically, schizoanalysis studies the production of perversion, or rather, territories of addiction constituted via the process of reterritorialization. However, such study does not simply take the form of asking “what does this territory mean?” or otherwise by submitting desire to a priori coordinates of categorization, interpretive framing, or transcendent organization. The question of schizoanalysis is rather a matter

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of asking how and why such reterritorializations are produced in the first place. Schizoanalysis is a task for which “What’s the point?” becomes a crucial question (Braidotti, 2006). That is, the task of schizoanalysis aims to register those processes whereby a line of flight fixates on a point. It is in this vein that schizoanalysis pertains to the analysis of “one’s” desiringmachines, or rather, the ways in which molecular particles of becoming are machined into territories of consistency. The task of schizoanalysis is in this sense crucial for those curricular bodies-in-becoming Morris dubs outtakes. For like the cinematic outtake, schizoanalysis is oriented to examining the arrangement of partial codes, movements, and fuites into territorial consistencies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Similarly, schizoanalysis becomes a way of thinking organizational leakages (fuites) that escape reterritorialization as distinct “beings,” molar identities, or representational forms. Schizoanalysis might be, in this way, a manner of releasing molecular elements from their territorial organizations in composition of ANOMAL identities like that of Jarmusch’s conceptual persona, Ghost Dog. Yet, even Ghost Dog’s mongrel identity is “pre-figured” by a perverse fidelity to paranoiac desire. In Jarmusch’s film, such paranoiac desire functions to rehabilitate Ghost Dog’s practices as a contract hitman upon the body of the law. That is, while born on a line of deterritorialization, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog continually reterritorializes in fidelity to mafia underboss Louie, and more specifically, to the coded edicts of the Bushido master-retainer contract. This reterritorialization ultimately ends with Ghost Dog’s willful death at the hands of his Mafioso master, laying bare the desiring-machine Ghost Dog is ultimately unable to deterritorialize. It is significant that even Ghost Dog’s becoming-animal finds itself well suited to reterritorialization within the samurai code. To the end, he remains a loyal canine. While Ghost Dog’s experimental composition of a life might not go far enough, it is the addictive reterritorialization of schizophrenic desiring-production upon the “dog-matic” master-retainer contract that ultimately marks the “black hole” beyond which “his” line of flight disintegrates. Such addiction, Braidotti (2006) asserts, “is not an opening-up, but a narrowing-down of the field of possible becomings . . . [increasing] the rigidity, not fluidity of the subject” (p. 141). It is Ghost Dog’s habitual reterritorialization upon this oedipalized image of life that ultimately prevents him from instantiating a new line of flight. In this respect, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might be thought as less a caution on the creation of an ANOMAL life than a caveat on the peril of a life that ultimately fails to go awry. At the point of his death for example, Ghost Dog suffers an excess of normality, going so far as


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to remark on the representational banality of the Wild West showdown mimed in the final scene. Striking down Louie’s mafia affiliates, Ghost Dog is starkly aware that fidelity to the Bushido code (his desiring-machine) necessitates his death. As the tagline of the film foreshadows, “Live by the code . . . Die by the code.” Ghost Dog’s life cannot be liberated unless it is first capable of dismantling the mechanism of social hierarchy in which it becomes “fatally” caught. Jarmusch’s implicit caveat on this point is equally significant for educational thinking that paranoically fetters desire under the command of socially authorized forms of power (God, the boss, the father, and the teacher) (Holland, 2008). In this model, education functions to reterritorialize desire within asymmetrical power relations limiting how a life might go, that is, how a life might be machined or assembled differently. The way in which flows are machined and invested in the desire of the social field hence requires careful scrutiny. Toward this, schizoanalysis becomes a crucial analytic tool, focusing on the “ambiguities, slippages, and fractures” inhering powerful patterns of molarity, identity, and representation (Reynolds, 1998, p. 206). Hence, to reduce Ghost Dog to the desiring-machine of the master-retainer code is to deny a basic positive task of schizoanalysis. Instead of proceeding by way of the synoptic or dialectic negation of difference, schizoanalysis articulates the coexistence of opposite modes of desire without counteracting or integrating either (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). “[S]chizoanalysis reformulate[s] the unconscious . . . and transforms it into an a-centered system, a machinic network, that cannot be reduced or incorporated according to a tree model” (Reynolds, 1998, p. 206). While Ghost Dog ultimately reterritorializes on the master-retainer contract, this focus on reterritorialization is not, in itself, sufficient to think Ghost Dog’s radical singularity. That is, while Ghost Dog’s addiction to the feudal code of Bushido unravels upon a line that ultimately leads to his death, this deadly line of flight is not the only line that composes Ghost Dog’s life. As I will attempt to develop, the Hagakure is as much a meditative line on the inevitability of death as it might be thought as an affirmation against death itself. To think Ghost Dog’s singularity or rather, his punctuation of the speculum mundi (the face of the world) requires instead a schizoanalytic approach capable of registering conflicting and unthinkable forces. A consideration of Ghost Dog’s desiring-machines must assemble with those schizophrenic impulses capable of “stuttering” the addictive processes of reterritorialization. Thinking the breakthrough, or rather, the holey space that unsettles the desire for stratification, the schizophrenic assemblage of conflicting desires sets territories back into flight, repelling the image of a unified subject or dialectical meaning upon which a life might be

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founded. Founded upon difference, the schizoanalytic registration of conflicting desires inassimilable under a grounding signifier might enable a way of thinking curriculum foundations without foundations. Put differently, foundations are only possible insofar as there exists an operative horizon of reterritorialization, an internal or external limit to what might be rightly thought. Yet, it is this very notion of common sense (orthodoxy) that is cracked by schizophrenic desiring-production and bifurcated into “X” senses or intensities for becoming. Schizzing the strata hence entails what Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) dub the affirmation of “lines of escaping desire . . . which carry their own potential, however small, for unraveling dominant modes of existence” (p. 16). The creation of such a schizz might not only be encountered Nietzsche’s aphoristic revolution of philosophical thought, but perhaps more radically, in the writing of Artaud, whose experimentation with the desiring-production of decoded, inhuman, and unthought logographical systems would practice a style of deconstructive thinking roughly two decades before Derrida. In each of these instances, desire escapes the image of philosophical writing and signification proper, hence mobilizing a new set of problems upon which the potential for difference might be thought. To begin, the text upon which Ghost Dog reterritorializes is itself marked by a schizo desire. That is, the way of the samurai is both a coded horizon that encompasses Ghost Dog’s actions and a doctrine of war historically overcoded by the emergence of unified State power during the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912). During this period, the samurai class was stripped of its traditional powers. In its place, the Meiji government focused its political and economic energies on the formation of a western-styled conscripted army. However, samurai collectives persisted throughout this period, rebelling against the formation of a State military apparatus. It is at this late moment (1877) in the history of the samurai that Bushido is drawn into relation with the formation of an itinerant war machine that functions to ward off the emergence of the State. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) write, the war machine cannot be reduced to war. More adequately, the war machine might be thought as the anarchic periphery “of the State’s field of order . . . warriors and herders who ground their being in an itinerant territory” (Marzek, 2001). The renegade cells of samurai that were mobilizing during the Meiji Restoration aimed to repel the deterritorialization of itinerant territories (major and minor regional clans) into a borderless territory of control (polis). In this sense, the war machine functions to repel “the State’s strategic aim of incorporating all available ‘open’ space into its territory” (Holland, 2008, p. 80). Put differently, the samurai uprising during the Meiji Revolution might be thought as a tactic of repulsion for staying State control over flows of power. In this


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vein, the formation of a samurai war machine was aimed at sustaining the segmentarity and dispersal of nomadic or itinerant groups. The sustainability of such itinerant territories is significant, for the State functions to interiorize or parasite such vagabond assemblages. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “the State has no war machine of its own” (p. 439). It must first conscript and reduce the complexity of strange bands or rebel subjects, deterritorializing them onto, or conscripting them into a military apparatus. This process of overcoding alters the very nature of the war machine. No longer oriented to creative tactical resistance, the interiorization of the war machine becomes one more way in which State power can further its political aims. That is, under State control, war becomes “the continuation of politics by other means” (von Clausewitz, cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 467). This basic principle undergoes a radical decoding in late capitalism, where the appropriation of the war machine becomes another means to accumulate capital (Holland, 2008). Opposed to this deterritorializing function, whereby itinerants and singularities are submitted under the State’s horizon of control, the war machine conserves territories. Yet, such territories should not be equated to the universal polis of the State, but rather, those “itinerant territories grounded in irreducible singularities” (Marzek, 2001). These territories are those of private thinkers or minoritarian subjects who work against the creation of a “common” identity, that “harmonious homogeneity that would mean the end of cultural creativity and positive social transformation” (Watson, 2008, p. 212). Today, the war machine emerges from the holey space of the urban milieu in “figures of unrest” (urban artists, terrorists, drug-dealers, delinquents, guerilla revolutionaries) for whom the reterritorialization of life upon the body of either State or capitalist apparatus marks the termination of vital difference.19 It is in this sense that we might think Ghost Dog’s affinity to Bushido. That is, while Ghost Dog reterritorializes on the coded edicts of Bushido, this reterritorialization does not simply reduce to an act of complicity with the State. Rather, as an untimely and schizoid ANOMAL identity, Ghost Dog’s reterritorialization upon the way of the samurai creates a war machine at the periphery of State control. In turn, this war machine functions to prevent the deterritorialization of the ancient tribes occupying the sediment of Jarmusch’s urban milieu, the very tribes Ghost Dog warns are under threat of extinction. For a time, Ghost Dog sustains a unique itinerant territory, preventing its deterritorialization under a single body of control or image of how a life should go. Hence, Ghost Dog’s creation of an itinerant territory might be thought as less a product of postmodern desire, which seeks to acquire, integrate, and smooth more territories. Nor should it be equated with a strictly paranoiac desire, which seeks to

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universalize singularities. Instead, Ghost Dog’s particular assemblage with the way of Bushido might be thought as an ethical tactic for sustaining the heterogeneity of a territory. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe, the war machine is “another species,” “another nature,” “another justice,” and “another origin” (pp. 352–354). The war machine hence enters into relation with the creativity of schizophrenic desiring-production as the task of producing new intensities for thinking a life. However, the risk of the war machine is not simply oriented to production. Rather, its task concomitantly functions to sustain the potential of intensities insofar as they remain capable of repelling degraded models of existence. Ghost Dog’s species is significantly vague (vagabond), varying from human to animal, from vague shape to imperceptible revenant. Innate or essential qualities are similarly unsettled. With the exception of a single occasion, Ghost Dog denies self-reflectivity and autobiography. More adequately, Ghost Dog’s “nature” might best be described in terms of prepersonal speeds and intensities. Opposed to reterritorializing Ghost Dog in an anthropocentric image of life, Jarmusch explores the body as a matrix of speed and slowness, of relaxed and focused intensities. As Wu-Tang Clan20 describe, Ghost Dog has more affinity to a “fast shadow” or rather, the formless and shapeless becoming-weapon of the body. It is in this vein that the intervention of the RZA’s filmic score works to deterritorialize the body of samurai by registering it along nonrepresentational coordinates of beats, lyrical runs, and sampled refrains. Along this line, Ghost Dog might be thought as becoming-music, affectively assembling with the variated pulsations, rhythms, and appropriated fragments (traditional and contemporary) composing the RZA’s soundtrack. As mafia boss Ray Vargo (Henry Silva) comments, Ghost Dog’s language is written in a foreign tongue. Emerging from the holey space of the urban milieu, hip-hop becomes the “poetry of war.” Ghost Dog’s justice, while tethered to a law, is not submitted to it. Put differently, Ghost Dog’s untimely relationship with Bushido is not impelled from above, but rather, is the law that Ghost Dog ostensibly gives himself.21 Ghost Dog’s justice is hence one “founded” in difference, or rather, sustains difference amidst the arrayment of forces set to extinguish or interiorize ANOMALous flows. Finally, through the assemblage of both untimely and contemporary resources, Ghost Dog schizzes “his” origins. Evoking multiple genealogies, yet reducible to none, Jarmusch composes the life of Ghost Dog as that of an original. Yet, the birthplace of this original is not to be located within any specific molar or representational image. More adequately, it might be ventured that Ghost Dog’s origins are intimately connected to the geopolitics of holey space. Such holey space can be thought as both the sustained refuge of itinerants as well as a tactical site for repelling parasitical modes


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of State and capitalist capture. In this conceptualization, the task of holey space is to render a line of flight “endurable, workable, thinkable,” neither “petrified” or swept along in capitalism’s unceasing production of novelty (Deleuze 1995, p. 111). Rather, the task of holey space is to prepare a war machine, or rather, a dissident assemblage not yet anticipated by the State or submitted to the capitalist law of general equivalency. As Deleuze and Guattari (1986) write, the war machine is formed through an incomprehensibility that is birthed into the world. In this vein, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog creates a way of thinking the ANOMALous as a force of cultural resistance and potential revolutionary action. Yet, Jarmusch’s creation of a war machine for repelling the powers of homogeneity (under the identity politic of the State or capitalist axiomatic) concludes with a caveat significant for the future of curriculum theory. The vitality of a life is intimate to its potentials for experimentation. Yet, such experimentation must be handled carefully, heedful of dead ends, suicidal flights, and the desire to reterritorialize. Put differently, the assemblage of a war machine must always work to repel the formation of new fascisms. While this caveat applies to the macrofascist or paranoiac tendencies of the State, it must also extend to the microfascist desires of the individual. As Foucault (1983) avers in the preface to Anti-Oedipus, the “adversary . . . is the fascist in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (p. xiii). All struggle and deterritorialization, Roy (2003) adds, “contain the potential of becoming new hegemonies” (p. 37). Digging a Hole for Curriculum Theory For curriculum theorists, Jarmusch’s film might be thought extratextually, suspending the common practice of textual commentary in lieu of asking how Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might be useful for thinking the challenges of contemporary curriculum theory. More specifically, Jarmusch’s experiment with the composition of an ANOMAL life enters into relation with the dual problematics of coding and decoding specific to the function of the State and capitalist apparatus, respectively. It is in this way that the schizoanalysis of reterritorialization and its desiring-machines must become an intimate aspect of what it means to do curriculum theorizing. This task is increasingly important as education continues to reterritorialize on the identity politics of State thinking. Perhaps more dangerously however, are the appeals to deterritorialization that function to reinsert old hegemonies under the guise of political progressivism, hence maintaining the investment of thought within preestablished circuits of power. It is

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in such a vein that curriculum theory must mobilize a mode of analysis capable of registering both the internal and external limits ascribed to pedagogical thinking. We must begin to attune our analysis to those plugs or blockages that reduce lines of flight to points. Put differently, the task of curriculum theory must begin to address what curriculum theory preserves and whether such territories are sufficient for the creation of a people yet to come. This question must also apply to the theorization of a conceptual third space, and equally, to those works that attest to occupying the borderline space between territories. While ostensibly libratory, such spaces that have come under the most focused forms of State and disciplinary surveillance, begging the question of whether they retain their sustainability or have been exhausted by practices of coding, militarization, or sheer theoretical popularity. Schizoanalytically, Jarmusch sets a new curricular cartography into motion. Specifically, Jarmusch begins the critical task of rethinking the landscape of the ANOMALs in an age when both striated (habitualized) and smooth (wandering) conceptualizations of space are under threat of capture. If the future of curriculum theory is connected to the task of creating a people yet to come, it must cultivate a kind of space irreducible to the vast territory of control desired by State thinking or the deterritorialization of borderlines particular to the logic of globalization. The fractal cartography plotted by Jarmusch marks such a space, populated by singularities that do not simply adapt but modify prior foundations of thought. Herein, such a space has been dubbed holey. Such foundations without foundations mark an experimental and itinerant territory for tactical resistance, repelling both State powers of coding and the desire to deterritorialize every flow into general equivalency. Holey space is, hence, not defined by the relativity of flows but more significantly, by its flows of relation, that is, the temporary machining of flows capable of fabulating a temporary territory for bodies-in-becoming. Put differently, holey space might be thought as a non-site (for holey space must work, in part, by becoming-imperceptible) for curricular work ignored by both ‘official’ and ‘popular’ curriculum foundations. Curriculum theorizing capable of creating a pedagogical life must begin to address the very notion of foundations, recognizing that this does not simply imply the canonical works of curriculum’s instrumentalist forefathers. An analysis of curriculum foundations might very well begin with those reterritorializations occurring contemporarily, asking what desiring-machines are, and continue to be at work in the production of images for how pedagogical life might go. It is this terrain that might in turn be made holey and stuttered beyond its own horizon of reterritorialization. It is in such an experimental mode that we might begin to ask whether the images of currere (the course of a


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life) being produced today are adequate to repel contemporary modes of capture. Further, curriculum theory must question how those reterritorializations going on today mobilize resources for thinking the unthought, that is, an encounter with virtual potentials for composing an ANOMAL life. Perhaps, like Ghost Dog, we have not yet gone far enough, reticent to abandon the paranoid pole of identitarian thought, transcendentalism, and microfascist desire that continue to haunt desiring-production. It is toward such a project that schizoanalysis provides a “foundation without foundations” for curricular work, ushering in a different form of desiringproduction that aims to push stratifications back into flight.


9

Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines

Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 151)

T

he contemporary curriculum theorizing of Livingston (2004) and Ferneding (2004) articulate two dominant images of technology in Western culture. The first pertains to the apocalyptic scenario prefigured in such doomsday science fiction narratives as James Cameron’s Terminator and the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, where intelligent machines rise up to tyrannize carbon-based life. For Livingston, the anxiety of this dystopic cyberpunk scenario is linked to the disappearance of the human, who will be superseded by the technological efficiency and endurance of hegemonic machine overlords. This dystopic image of human futurity is contrasted by techno-utopian narratives wherein machines are imagined as the benign medium for human progress and pleasure. This contemporary machine mythology carries a patriarchal belief in anthropocentric control fantasized via such pop culture narratives as Brian Forbes’ Stepford Wives and Ban-Dai’s Tamagotchi successor Digimon, a children’s program in which humans nurture, evolve, and battle “digital pets.” Such characterizations of domesticated machines serve to recirculate the techno-utopian metanarrative of progress articulated by Lyotard (1979), characterizing machines as an apolitical medium for the fulfillment of all-too-human desires. Techno-utopianism and its teratechnological inverse each have their educational corollaries. As Ferneding develops, the contemporary effort to draw technical machines into conjunction with pedagogy is wed to the fantasies of progress, efficiency, and manageability antedated in the vocationalist-based curriculum aims of Taylor (1911) and instrumental

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thinking of Ralph Tyler (1949). Yet, the vocational curriculum imaged by Taylor has today undergone a neoliberal metamorphoses. Today, students are being primed to take their place within a market increasingly organized and driven by information technologies, while teachers are impelled to realize their practices within the model of efficiency and manageability offered by emerging modes of digital delivery. This dual movement is symptomatic of education’s postindustrial revisioning, in which the need for an industrial labor force has long been surpassed by the market’s demand for flexible, technologically adept, and savvy “knowledge workers.” Driven by this obscene supplement, such national reform documents as Goals 2000, America 2000, and the No Child Left Behind Act valorize the conjunction of a technical machine with the educational apparatus as a remedy for students’ lack of technical adroitness as cited in Reagan’s A Nation at Risk (Ferneding, 2004). In each of these reports on the state of education, a prevailing ideal persists in the image of technology as the carefully controlled and domesticated medium of human progress. Of course, such idealism is wed to the realization of education in the model of the market and further, to the corporate colonization of techne. As political theorist Winner (1986) warns, “our instruments [have become] institutions in the making” (p. 54). Today, Winner’s caveat is exposed via the rhetoric of freedom and freechoice that have accompanied the proliferation of technology in the classroom. Following the schizo drives of the market, students are now “free” to choose from a litany of technological tools and expressive venues for their works, ostensibly liberated from the doldrums of the classroom and limits of instructor knowledge. Yet, such techno-utopian rhetoric obfuscates a staunch internal conservatism. While students are “free” to produce knowledge in a multitude of digital mediums, such production has yet to significantly engage with the creation of experimental affects and percepts. Instead, they have become new carriers for identitarian politics and representational thought. Such fidelity to representational thinking is apparent not only in the banal use of digital technologies to aestheticize student work or enhance familiar models of research writing, but further, in such digital communities as Facebook and Second Life, where users have continued to play out the identity politics of neoliberal capitalism (Bans, 2008). Conflating progressivism with the exponential increase and aesthetic visibility of institutional knowledge production, techno-idealism maintains a rigorous fidelity to the human agent who manages techne, submitting it to a priori social and institutional desire. While techno-idealism posits the insistence of a flexible user who efficiently manages and produces data under a banner of social progress, Livingston’s (2004) apocalyptic technological dystopia imagines a

STRANGE CONTRAPTIONS AND QUEER MACHINES

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scenario in which the user disappears. “One hundred years from now,” Livingston writes, “machines and humans will have merged . . . [t]here will be no distinction between humans and the machines they create” (p. 37). Pedagogically, Livingston’s cyberpunk scenario is figured by such harbingers as Saya, a humanoid robot teacher built by Tokyo University of Science professor Hiroshi Kobayashi, who has suggested that the gynoid could ultimately be used to fill labor shortages in teaching. This vision for the future of education is reciprocated by University of Memphis researcher Andrew Olney, whose ITS robotic interface, Guru, marks the promise of a future in which human teachers will be relegated to sheer bureaucratic positions, superseded by highly efficient and personalized information delivery systems. While humans insist in each of these scenarios, this particular image of the future is one in which pedagogical life becomes submitted to a model of increasing perfection and control. While such scientists as Kobayashi and Olney frame their constructions in the rhetoric of techno-idealism, it is this very image of the future that Livingston links to the apocalyptic vision forestalled by doomsday science fiction, in which human life will be terminated and replaced by a more easily maintained, efficient, and manageable labor force. As Ferneding and Livingston write, techno-idealism and its dystopic technological opposite point to a binary-machine that has yet to encounter difference. Devolving on the presence of a stable human subject and the metanarrative of progress, techno-idealism has yet to think the unthought potential of the machine for overcoming the fascism of identitarian thinking. Similarly, apocalyptic auguries on technology have yet to think the machine as a vital or affirmative force. More pointedly, techno-idealism and teratechnological dystopia have yet to create a way of thinking becoming, each anxiously attempting to maintain a distance between organism and machine. To think the unthought becomingmachine of both techno-idealist and teratechnological visions is hence to encounter an ontology that has only begun to emerge in curriculum theory (Livingston, 2004; Gogh, 2008). It is toward the creation of such an encounter, this chapter will argue, that curriculum theory might develop a more adequate way of conceptualizing process ontology. Toward this task, curricular thinking might begin to connect to the kinds of machinic thinking already-underway in music, cinema, and visual art. Such practices, this chapter will contend, unhinge techne from politeia (the conditions and rights ascribed to the governable citizen), instead creating a way of thinking techne as becoming, or rather, of deterritorializing the common face of humanity through the construction of the abstract machine Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a probe-head. Such a task is significant to curriculum theory, for it posits a way of thinking creativity as neither

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the transcendent emanation of God as a carry-over of the Renaissance tradition, or the province of the organism who, following the rhetoric of New Age Spiritualism, orchestrates their own transformation from an uncontaminated “within.” In contradistinction to this conceptualization and the techno-ideal/teratechnological binary-machine articulated at the onset of this essay, this chapter will consider the import of machinic thinking as a means of conceptualizing both “practical” philosophy and a relational, transhuman ethics. Escaping curriculum’s preoccupation with identitarian matters of epistemology, this chapter will also attempt to analyze how contemporary arts are mobilizing new affects and percepts as creative resources for thinking a life.

Cyberorganismic Thinking and Problems with the Posthuman The imaginary division of organism and machine was collapsed as early as 1960, when Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan Kline (1995) named the cyborg as the kind of subject required for the extraterrestrial survival of the human species. The ultimate astronaut, they posited, would require high-tech prosthetics in order to disconnect from the body of the Earth and subsist in the hostile environment of deep space. A year later, Yuri Gagarin’s automated, life-support controlled spaceflight aboard Vostok-1 would reiterate Clynes and Kline’s basic assertion on the inevitable necessity of the prosthesis. The question of human survivability would be conceptually answered by the cyborg as an “extended organizational complex functioning [unconsciously] as an integrated homeostatic system” (Clynes and Kline, 1995, p. 31). Contemporarily, Clynes and Kline’s answer persists in such pop culture fantasy sites as Bethesda’s (2007) postapocalyptic video game Fallout 3, 2K’s dystopic art nouveau nightmare Bioshock (2005), and Marvel’s motion picture sensation Iron Man. As these fantasy sights portend, the body’s ability to survive the hazards of a hostile future is entirely reliant on its potential supplementation by high-tech prosthetics. Yet, the cyborg is not merely an imaginary sight. As Baudrillard (2002) contends, Formula One racing is a material example of the human-cum-fast-moving-wheeled cyborg via the prosthetics of the race car. While Clynes and Kline’s conceptualization of the cyborg questions the fixed boundaries of the body while emancipating technics from conscious human control, it maintains a curious conservatism (Land, 2006). Such conservatism, Land argues, extends from Linneaus’ taxonomic categorization of the human as Homo sapien. For Land, Linneaus’ taxonomic division of man from animal overemphasizes the faculty of reason as the principal trait of the human being. Entering into fidelity with the all-too-human


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Cartesian image of life, reason in turn finds its seat within the brain, a conceptualization that renders the body superfluous. It is following this Cartesian image that the cyborg becomes conceptualized as a prosthetic body for the rational mind of man. For Clynes and Kline, the body was seen “as a mere housing for [reason], as something that could be surgically, chemically, and mechanically modified without damaging the essence of man” (Land, 2004, p. 113). Contemporarily, Clynes and Kline’s prosthetic logic is implicate in the work of Charles M. Higgins, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona. Realizing the cyberpunk fantasy of a jettisoned body, Higgins has developed a robot driven by the electrical impulses of a moth’s brain. Beyond its neuroscientific import however, Higgins’ experiment is phantasmatically significant, for the term superbug refers to the short-circuiting of an early supercomputer by none other than a moth (Genosko, 2006). Once and for all, Higgins’ experiment imagines cybernetics emancipated of Lepidoptarian threat, and more generally, the anxiety of the alien body, drawing the moth into homeostatic correspondence with the machine. In an anthropomorphic vein, Ian Pearson of British Telecom’s futurology unit has suggested that by 2050, it will be possible to download the human brain into supercomputer-driven communication networks. Such a scenario is recapitulated by artificial intelligence researcher Hans Moravec, who elides that an impending “postbiological” reality in which robotic life becomes more complex than its organic counterpart will enable humans to transfer their souls into robotic bodies, hence transgressing the limits of weak flesh. In this ex-futuristic posthuman fantasy, Homo sapien will endure as disembodied minds no longer hindered by the mortal condition. Despite its ostensible radicality, Clynes and Klines’ conceptualization of the cyborg remains politically conservative, playing out a prophylactic metaphysics in which Man insists “as the telos of creation, albeit in a cybernetically modified livery” (Land, 2004, p. 113). In this popular conceptualization, the prospect of human obsolescence posed by machines is answered through techne’s colonization in the all-toohuman image of technological rationality, immortality (as information), and optimal efficiency (the end of thermodynamic death). Constituting an ideal model for the highly modifiable and fluid body required by neoliberal capitalism, the cyborg supersedes the image of the body as a “fixed” or “monolithic” entity, becoming an optimized relay for receiving, managing, and incorporating the material and informational flows unleashed by the market economy. As Baudrillard (2002) contends, Madonna is the archetype of this new ideal in which the body is not other, but a moldable site for vertiginous expression. Despite the

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insistence of some curricularists, Clynes and Kline’s conceptualization of the cyborg scarcely constitutes the kind of abnormal body required for breaking with the fascist face of the human. Rather, this particular conceptualization of the cyborg marks the perfection of the body and the ultimate refinement of identity via its disappearance into capitalist models of technological perfectibility. Cultural critic Mark Dery (1997) argues that the fantasy of posthumanism is hinged to the kind of prosthetic logic theorized by Clynes and Kline. Characterizing late-twentieth-century posthumanism as a “theology of the ejector seat,” Dery parallels the posthuman ideal to the Gnostic image of the body as a prison to be escaped (p. 316). Far from the tactical disidentification of the body figured in the work of such artists as Francis Bacon and Antonin Artaud, the posthuman contempt for material life is figured in the aspiration to double the transcendent, permanent, and omniscient image of God. In posthumanism, Homo sapien becomes a little god. Failing as a revolutionary becoming, the technoeschatological ideal of posthumanism reterritorializes in the image of the perfect human, or rather, the rationalist dream of human perfectibility. As Land (2004) writes, posthumanism imagines the “ideal liberal-humanist subject . . . cut . . . free from its puppet strings to become a self-contained master” (p. 122). While this ostensible repudiation of the transcendent marks the potential for thinking life as a matter of practical or immanent creation, the eschatological aspiration of posthumanism hinges on doubling the transcendent via the spirit’s download into information networks or robotic bodies (Dery, 1997, p. 8). While birthed from the Cartesian imaginary, the desire of posthumanism concomitantly reiterates the neo-Darwinian spirit of evolutionary competition. Framed in terms of “fitness,” evolution becomes a matter of warding off or defending against the perceived threat of increasingly complex and efficient technologies (Ansell Pearson, 1997). For the posthuman, this means mutating into a more effective information-processing machine, valorizing this desire as the goal of both social evolution and anthropocentric perfection. Further, the neo-Darwinian mutation of such pop cultural figures as Robocop and The Six Million Dollar Man have cathected becoming-machine to the Friekorps fantasy of hypermasculine invulnerability and power. Conceptualized thus, techne is submitted to tracing an image of life in which the cyborg is realized qua human. Put differently, both Clynes and Kline’s cyborg and the ejector seat theology Dery ascribes to posthumanism have yet to confront the known world by bringing the unthinkable into representation. Far from a revolutionary figure, the conceptualization of the cyborg examined thus far remains all-too-human, reterritorializing back onto the face of Man (Land, 2006).


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The Inhuman Human The collapse of bios and technos reduces technics to anthropos, binding history and evolution to anthropomorphic ideals. As Ansell Pearson (1997) argues, what this particular conceptualization overlooks is that the genesis of the human is not simply a technogenesis, but a biotechnogenesis. For Ansell Pearson, such biotechnogenesis is most aptly figured via the phenomenon of symbiosis, a mode of relation that disrupts the arborescent analogy of the self-enclosed, taxonomically differenciated organism. As a way of thinking potentials for connection that transgress the Aristotelian categories of genus and species, symbiosis is rhizomatic. Symbiosis suggests that evolution was never a purely biological matter, but rather, a creative form of techne antedating the rise of Homo sapien. As Sagan and Margulis (1995) argue, biotechnogenesis predates the silicon age by at least three thousand million years, when bacterial metallurgists began to utilize magnetite as an internal compass. The diversification of life, Margulis argues, is neither the exclusive product of mutation or teleological involution. It is neither the unfolding of a brutal survival instinct. Instead, Margulis avers that the emergence of nucleated cells some 2.2 billion years ago was resultant of microbial coupling in which host bacteria developed a protective membrane, shielding vital DNA from oxygen producing cyanobacterial intruders. Archaebacteria would “marry” the oxygen producing “disease,” in turn forming the earliest kind of nucleated cell. It is hence symbiosis, and not linear evolution that begins to explain why both mitochondria and chloroplasts contain DNA separate of the nucleus. Margulis and Sagan (1986) extend this hypothesis to argue that the cellular development of motile flagella or cilia was effected through a varied feedback relationship between archaebacteria and fast-moving, corkscrew-shaped spirochete bacteria. In another form of multicellular symbiosis, Margulis speculates that microtubular spirochetes living within host cells developed into axons and dendrites, forming a primordial version of what would become the brain. Kropotkin (1945/1901) articulates this symbiotic tendency differently, challenging the neo-Darwinian presumption of evolutionary competition by supplanting it with an image of symbiotic cooperation and transversal territorial connection. “Those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest,” wrote an exiled Kropotkin (p. 12). Kropotkin’s notion of symbiosis would be extended by Bergson (1911), who argued that animals are inadequately known through informationally closed modes of categorization (genus, species, organs). Instead, both Kropotkin and Bergson argue for more adequate understanding of life via an analysis of the kinds of symbiotic assemblages (man-animal

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symbiosis, animal-animal symbiosis, plant-animal symbiosis, animalmineral symbiosis) into which the animal enters (Ansell Pearson, 1999). While speculation on the evolutionary import of symbiosis has become orthodox in the biological sciences, it continues to affront an awkward natural history that presumes anthropocentric determination while concomitantly revealing the hominid’s fear of “viroid” contamination. Such fear circulates contemporarily in such varied forms as the threat posed by the computer virus, weaponized biological viroids, and popularly, in the zombie horror film genre, wherein viroid contaminants render civilians into animalistic cannibals. Such anxiety is entwined with what Ansell Pearson calls the filthy lesson of symbiosis; “The human is an integrated colony of amoeboid beings, just as these amoeboid beings (protocists) are integrated colonies of bacteria . . . [l]ike it or not, your origins are in slime” (p. 182). It is this alien origin that is placed under erasure via the posthuman disappearance of the body into pure data. While the posthuman cyborg forms a symbiotic relationship with technical machines, these machines paradoxically reterritorialize back onto the all-toohuman image of anthropomorphic rationalism, evading a confrontation with what is already inhuman in humanity. Symbiosis suggests that we have never been humans proper, but instead, cyborg assemblages unthought by the a priori anthromorphic ideal of posthumanism. Perhaps more radically, symbiosis suggests that evolutionary becoming necessitates the inventive “outside thought” of techne. Put differently, to think becoming requires a way of attending to the machining of heterogeneous elements, or rather, to an “art” of assemblage. Such machinic thinking can be perceived in Kropotkin’s conceptualization of life as immanent to its symbiotic assemblages. With the instantiation of this percept, Kropotkin shifts away from the hylomorphic division of form (transcendent categories of genus, species, organs) and matter (immanent material causes) inherited from Aristotle. The irreducible necessity of symbiotic or machinic assemblage is elsewhere articulated via Colebrook’s (2002) example of a bicycle. On its own, Colebrook develops, the bicycle is nonfunctional. To achieve functionality, the bicycle requires connectivity with other machines. While the common assemblage of bicycle and rider gives the former meaning as a vehicle, the symbiotic potential of the bicycle is irreducible to this formation. As Duchamp demonstrated, the connection of bicycle and gallery renders the former artwork; bicycles connected to sites of trauma become memorials; the machinic connection of bicycles with household appliances renders the former into potential motors. The connection of the motorcycle’s exhaust system with a trumpet renders the combustion engine a musician. Demonstrating becoming as a process immanent to


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the material connection or symbiosis of heterodox elements, Colebrook echoes Kropotkin’s repudiation of the hylomorphic schema. Rather, Colebrook demonstrates that both Being (the meaning of a thing) and becoming are operationalized by machinic or symbiotic thinking. For a thing to have Being requires techne, or rather, a connective “outside thought” that already presumes becoming. The thing is hence never a closed system, even in the case of hylomophism, which relies on the naturalized connection of the body to transcendent taxonomic categories. Such naturalization is of course, troubled by a machinic thinking that suggests that we are always-already becoming-cyborg. Akin to the bicycle, the body is multiple, capable of differentiating through machinic connection. The body’s connection to a bicycle renders it a cyclist; to a prison, a potential prisoner; to drugs, a “tripper”; to a camera, an electric eye; to a turntable, a tactile motor. Alluding to the machinic character of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari refer to their philosophy of concept creation as a toolbox. Put differently, throughout their body of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari have created a litany of conceptual tools capable of machining together heterogeneous elements as a tactic for deterritorializing prior stratifications. Such a notion of machinic thinking, I contend, is helpful to rethink the cyborg.

The Transhuman Cyborg Deviating from the presumption of an anthropomorphic subject who territorializes techne in his image, the kind of cyborg produced via machinic symbiosis might more adequately be thought as transhuman, or rather, as a potential for overcoming the a priori image of the human via the deterritorialization of the anthropomorphic stratum. Contemporarily, such transhumanism has emerged in the work Motohiko Odani, whose sculptural and photographic work makes visible the symbiotic contamination of Homo sapien. For example, the performance video entitled “Rompers” depicts a surreal ecosystem in which a reptilian eyed girl catches bees with her tongue and communes with birds and frogs who are themselves the symbiotic hosts for grafted human organs. Such a tactic for thinking transhuman symbiosis minimally inheres the work of performance artist Orlan, who through surgical alteration has recoded her face as a probe-head for imaging the becoming-alien of the anthropomorphic ideal. The grotesque cyborgs of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle similarly reveal the inhuman face through prosthesis, machining an assemblage of figures that breakdown circuits of representational thinking. Eduardo Kac’s controversial transgenic artwork “GFB (green fluorescent protein) Bunny” produces a

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similar unthought species by machining a fluorescent protein producing jellyfish gene with an albino rabbit. While each of these examples bear their own particular controversies, they each mark a general repudiation of the ejector seat theology Dery ascribes to post-humanism. That is, each avoids the all-too-human aspiration of jettisoning the body in lieu of asking how the body might be constructed. While these examples begin to move in the direction of conceptualizing the transhuman, the question of whether the machines composed by Odani, Orlan, Barney, and Kac are not already seized by the capitalist social machine remains. That is, while each begins to compose a machine alien to anthropocentrism, such a desire is entwined with a particular kind of “cosmetic individuation” already enabled by designer capitalism.

Bacon’s Probe-Heads Perhaps a more radical cyborgian figure is antedated in the work of Francis Bacon, whose grotesque paintings push machinic thinking to their transhuman limits. As Deleuze (2002) writes, Bacon’s portraits pursue the peculiar project of dismantling the face. Rather than painting in terms of structure or hylomorphic form, Bacon rediscovers a Figure, or rather, a probe-head “beneath the face” (p. 19). Through the technique of local scrubbing, Deleuze writes, Bacon produces an indiscernible zone between man and animal, demonstrating their coupling in even the most isolated painted figures. In Bacon’s Man with Dog (1953) for example, an indiscernible anomal figure is machined to the degenerating shadow of man, coupling man and animal in what Deleuze calls “a latent bullfight” (p. 20). The machinic symbiote that Bacon reveals through the production of non-structural Figures is pushed to its limit in his 1944 Second Version of Triptych. In this series, Bacon explores the body as an assemblage of machined relations deviating from the kinds of connections desired by medical, psychological, and moral norms. The anus is a machine that shits, the mouth, a machine that imbibes, the face, a machine that represents. Re-machining these connections, Bacon’s Figures shit with their mouths, eat with their anuses, implode their facial machines into black holes, anomal shadows, and raw meat. Promulgating the question of how the body is constructed, Bacon’s Figures produce new affects through a schizoanalysis of the anthropomorphic body. Put differently, Bacon’s Figures schizoanalytically diagram the normalized image of the body as an effect of the “mechanical” overdetermination of the machine. Against this, Bacon steals back the machinic potential of the body from its frozen “mechanical” configuration, schizzing their


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a priori connections in the machining of new affective relations. As a confrontation with body’s frozen affective corridors however, the kinds of machinic connections produced by Bacon are those that much of contemporary society dub deviant. Under a normalized image of bodily connections for example, the schizzed oral machine of the bulimic, the short-circuited anal machine of the sodomist, and the flayed flesh of the masochist become pathologized. Stealing back a virtuality of machinic potentials inhering the actualized connections of the body as it is or should be, Bacon liberates the constantive flows of the body, creating a transhuman schizoanalytic machine for thinking the destratification of the anthropomorphic stratum. Bacon’s Figures illustrate a body bound up with technicity, or rather, a body that is already symbiotically contaminated by inhuman, alien, and anomal affects. Bacon’s Figures do not reterritorialize upon the face of Man, but rather, create meaty probe-heads for surveying unthought connections and conjoined species. As Deleuze (2002) writes, Bacon’s work diagrams the “emergence of another world . . . [born of] a-signifying traits” (p. 82). In part, this is accomplished through Bacon’s unique technics, which abandon preparatory sketches in lieu of working out “confused sensations” through “nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative” practices of local scrubbing (utilizing rags not brushes), thrown paint (utilizing rhythm in lieu of pure optics), and random marking (working out “zones” of tension between coded and decoded elements) (Deleuze, 2002, p. 82). Bacon’s painting diagrams the body as a product of its machinic relations, their particular connections (organs), zones of relation (symbiosis), and flows of desiring-production (the connection of such “little” machines as the mouth, the eye, the anus, etc). Illustrating becoming as the product of techne, Bacon’s machinic style liberates the body from anthropocentric overdetermination, allowing it to enter into experimental assemblages anathematic to instrumental thinking. In this vein, Bacon’s conjoinment of techne and becoming might help us to more adequately understand the significance of such contemporary arts as turntablism, wherein the DJ connects with the third arm of the phonograph, digital filmmaking, where human perspective is deterritorialized upon the digital recorder, and graffiti, wherein the fingertip becomes a fine tuned jet of color. Yet, before engaging with the symbio-technics of such artforms, the significance of machinic thinking in contradistinction to three popular images of the organism requires specific attention. The first of these images is that of the autopoeitic or self-generating organism, the second, the popularized figure of the hybrid, while the third, an examination of the reactionary rejection of the machine in contemporary thinking.

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Autopoeisis To begin, machinic thinking intervenes with the presumption of holistic “unity” and “balance,” introducing a kind of symbio-cyborgian thinking that postulates artifice at heart of Nature (Deleuze, 1988). As Ansell Pearson (1997) writes, holism and balance become possible only insofar as the organism displays a finality or self-organizing capability that reterritorializes on the image of an a priori “purposeness.” As a symbiote, the cyborg cannot be essentialized, for we do not yet know what its body might do, how it might connect, link, or assemble with other machines. Take for example the significance of such social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter (connecting machines) in the mobilization of flashmobs, activist groups machined into temporary performative action. Perhaps more radically, Guattari (1992) questions whether such demonstrations as the 1999 anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle” would have been possible if not for the internet’s viral potential to machine militant cells into symbiotic organization. Social machines symbiotically linked to technological machines in a manner not yet captured by State power. Such assemblages mark the deterritorialization of determined or pre-established parameters of life in lieu of thinking life as the kind of assemblage Ansell Pearson (1997) dubs “desire-engineering” (p. 197). The becoming assumed by such “desire-engineering” (the tactical connection of machines) is marked by the vital potential of techne, or rather, the productive collapse of machinic and animal life. Of course, to speak of such a collapse as contemporary is to obfuscate how such “desireengineering” is antedated in the figure of the tool-using chimpanzee and the weapon-bearing Neanderthal Man whose upper body, no longer required for locomotion, could be deterritorialized and connected up with other primitive machines. In either instance however, the collapse of machinic and animal life cannot simply be attributed to autopoeitic organization, or rather, an image of evolution born of internal perturbation. Such a definition remains inadequate insofar as autopoeisis maintains the privileged anthropocentric image of the closed and uncontaminated organism driven by a desire for autonomy. However, as Ansell Pearson (1997) warns, the purely autonomous organism would ultimately become frozen within an evolutionary stalemate, unable to produce connective relations with a material outside or virtual “outside thought.” In this vein, the “highly restricted [transformational] economy” of autopoeisis leaves two choices: “either entropy or perfect performance” (p. 196). Either the organism is thermodynamically broken down upon


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the body of other machines (a “turning toward” outside contaminants) or remains a closed and “stable” self-generating system. The former image persists in the reactionary rejection of economic industrialization and repudiation of emerging technologies, while the latter is evident in the vitalist, student centered, and self-organizing image of currere adopted from the explosion of “pop” complexity theory in the late 1980’s. Butler (1872/1970) diffuses this vitalist image of life in the anagrammatic Erewhon, where he argues that evolution is not only machinic from the outset, but further, that organisms share a fidelity to the sophisticated engineering and connective potentials of machines. In this dual move, Butler challenges the ostensible unity of the organism while destroying the “mechanical” image of the machine as an a priori structural unity. Contemporarily, Butler’s critique that vitality is bound to a viroid life continues to be met with anxiety, particularly in the case of computer hackers who utilize macros (cobbled fragments of code) as artificial viral agents to infiltrate firewall-contained computer networks. Such is the case of then 15-year-old computer hacker Mafia Boy (Michael Calce), who exposed the nonunitary and connective potential of the machine through the insertion of viral macros (packets of information) into ostensibly stable computer networks, in turn disabling the coded “purposeness” of such e-commerce giants as Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay, costing them upwards of a billion dollars in lost revenue. Through the release of viral agents into enclosed networks, hackers like Mafia Boy performatively release the potentials of the technical machine from under the social machinery of neoliberal capitalism. While the reactive rhetorical stance of e-commerce corporations might insist otherwise, the hacker does not simply expose or exploit flaws within networked systems. Rather, the hacker actualizes the machine’s potential for connective assemblage, producing a symbiotic force capable of pushing stable networks into far-from-equilibrium states of becoming. Such viroid symbiosis does not merely affect the technical machines involved, but as previously noted, infects the social machine through its production of commercial uncertainty, public apprehension, and sites of resistance. Moreover, the interiorization of philosophical reflection and desire for self-mastery promulgated throughout modernity is shattered by the virus as an insoluble “outside thought.” Despite the reactive recycling of 1960’s “organismic” thinking, the New Age rhetoric of the transparent, self-fulfilled person, or the spiritualized image of harmonious Being, the symbio-cyborg force of viroid life cannot be annihilated. As Ansell Pearson (1997) writes, “There are only insecurity systems from now on” (p. 181).

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Queering the Hybrid Perhaps as curriculum theorists, we have already come to grips with such insecurity systems. In much contemporary curriculum work for example, the figure of the hybrid has come to constitute a special, albeit increasingly common case for thinking the collapse of modernity’s binary machines. The platypus is the hybridic folding of mammal and reptile; the tangor is a hybrid of the mandarin and common orange; the donkey a hybrid of pony and horse; the rollerblade a hybrid of foot and vehicle, and so on. In some curriculum circles, the hybrid has been linked to the conceptualization of a “third space,” or rather, what has been touted as a heterodox “marginal space.” Conceptualized in this way however, the assumed radicality of hybrid space is marked by a particular conservatism that has yet to take seriously the import of symbiosis. Specifically, hybridic thought conserves the idea of originary elements prior to mixing and further, the ostensibly uncontaminated status of these generative sources (Ansell Pearson, 1999). Conceived in this way, hybridity is inadequate for the theorization of an interdisciplinary curriculum studies, since it continues to labor in the image of its generative disciplines (English, mathematics, art, etc.) as if they signified monolithic discursive fields. The failing of hybridic thinking extends equally to the conceptualization of an inter-generational or civilizational dialogue that extends from such a priori statistical categories as “youth,” “whites,” or Europeans. It is in this vein that hybridic thought only minimally deviates from arborescent schemas and dialectical thinking, remaining wed to structural points of origin rather than facilitating a transversal exchange between such points. Such transversal exchange marks the crystallization of originary points into an assemblage irreducible to given generative or genetic elements. More radically, transversality might be thought as the machinic potential that inheres the generative model “itself.” For example, the contemporary DJ is not simply the hybrid dialectic of playback device and human agent. Instead, the transversal desire-engineering of the DJ creates an assemblage wherein the playback device becomes a reco(r)ding machine while the human agent is rethought as a cybernetic tactile motor. The crystallization of the phonograph and player no longer represents either, but diagrams the virtual connective symbiosis of both. Neither human nor machine, but rather, their transversal becoming-DJ. In a less evident turn however, the connection of DJ and phonograph produces a viroid contamination in which the phonograph is materially rethought as a musical instrument. Moreover, the DJ demonstrates the non-unity of the human agent via the symbiotic deterritorialization of the human arm upon the mechanical limb and diamond needle of the turntable. Transversally, the unthought potentials of both


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phonograph and human agent are exposed by the DJ, whose “desireengineering” lays bear the nonunitary character of the DJ’s genetic coordinates. Neither the actualization of the phonograph as a playback device nor the human as an independent creative agent are “complete” pre-given forms. Instead, the transversal becoming of the DJ produces a way of perceiving the virtual difference of both the phonograph as a reproductive technology and the human as an organized whole. Against such a priori “mechanical” images, the DJ mobilizes a “block” of sensation, a “voodoo-tech somatics . . . [or] sonic metallurgy” machined from the deterritorialized flows of both phonograph and operator alike (MacKay, 1997, p. 254). That is, the DJ is not simply the hybridization of the phonograph and human agent (what is), but rather, the symbiotic machining (actualization) of their unthought (virtual) potentials for becoming (becoming-machine, becoming-music, becoming-monster).

Lo(o)sing Face The reactive rejection and overgeneralization of the “machine” in much contemporary thought has reduced the potential for thinking and practicing a machinic ontology. Yet, if we are to take seriously the claim that thinking and practice are themselves machinic, then the reactive rejection of such machines marks more than a renunciation of a style of praxis (Ansell Pearson 1997; Welchman, 1987). More severely, it marks a reduction in what might be properly thought. Such reactivity is based in three major assumptions, the first of which conflates “mechanics” and “mechanisms” with machines. As a closed system of component parts, the “mechanism” marks the machine in its most frozen state. Reduced to the “identitarian” function of its component parts, the “mechanism” becomes a corollary of instrumental thinking. A “mechanics” image of a car engine for example, might entail conceptualizing a spark plug, water pump, or fuel injector system in terms of its designed functionality. Extended to the mapping of the human genome and its systematic reengineering, “mechanics” marks a failure in thinking insofar as it overcodes its components (the car engine, the human genome) in a way that has yet to evoke the question of relation. Opposed to focusing on the design and remapping of component parts, machinic thinking questions “how” things are constructed in the first place. Such a question is contemporarily significant, for as a project of remapping a priori systems of design, “mechanics” falls easily into fascism, identity politics, and representational ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, the face of the human is bound to a eugenic and identitarian “mechanics” collapsing it into transcendent systems of design. Fashioning

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a Face in place of the kind of inhuman probe-head articulated in the paintings of Francis Bacon, “mechanics” marks the repression of a machinic thinking that might otherwise function to overcome a faciality “that is always colonial” (Land, 2006, p. 124). Such colonization is illustrated via a Facial overcoding that freezes the flows of sense and organ, producing the all-too-human conjunction of reasoning brain, surveilling eye, consuming mouth, passive ear, etc. Beyond these “mechanical” assemblages, the Face becomes a site of social recognition which reterritorializes the head as male or female. Yet, perhaps more significantly, the Face is always structured in a way that registers as distinctly human. It was not merely the decoded gender or ethnicity of Michael Jackson’s Face that shocked orthodox cultural sensibilities. Rather, the strangest aspect of Jackson’s transformation was via “his” technical creation of an unrecognizable, inhuman probehead. Perhaps not surprisingly, postmortem commentary on Michael Jackson has attempted to reterritorialize his mangled probe-head back upon an orthodox Face. Not only has the media attempted to halt Michael Jackson’s becoming-alien/ becoming-vampire/becoming-replicant upon the all-too-human face of Oedipus, but further, as evidenced in Jamie Foxx’s BET awards declaration, Jackson has been recaptured as essentially or “originally black.” Postmortem, Jackson’s inhuman or machinic head is recomposed as a human or “mechanical” Face, hence absorbing its deterritorialization of the ethnic, gendered, and racial categories of hylomorphic thought. Despite this reactive territorialization however, the Face of the human has already entered into its twilight. The proliferation of new communications technologies, web 2.0, and massively multiplayer online video games have increasingly destratified the anthropomorphic stratum in lieu of a machinic probe-head that can no longer be thought in “mechanical” terms. Indeed, the creation of a probe-head becomes a tactical war-machine against the fascism of the Face and further, from the anthropomorphic stratum in general. Despite the connotation of an autonomous human agent insisting at the heart of every Facebook and MySpace, the technological inter-Face (the conjoinment of human with its alien outside) produces a “complexcity” of relations that does not reterritorialize in the image of a human Face. As such complexcities portend, there are no longer individuals, but rather, crowds, swarms, and fuzzy machined collectives. This movement, Land (2006) contends, marks the upset of humanist romanticism and the unified subject who becomes “contaminated by the new technologies of communication” (p. 124). This shift necessitates a way of thinking the machine apart from its orthodox conceptualization as a system of lack, a conceptualization that once again stems from the orthodox conflation of “mechanics” with


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machines. “Mechanics” preserves the transcendent position of a designer, system, or map above and beyond the material connections of the machine. Without this transcendent outside, a “mechanism” would cease to function, since its very formative and motive power is deferred upon an external efficient cause (Welchman, 1997). This Kantian inheritance reiterates the anthropocentric bias of a subject who exists prior to the creation of a machinic assemblage. Such anthropomorphism continues to haunt the theorized encounter between self and other, since such an encounter assumes an uncontaminated agent prior to difference, or rather, a subject that then enters into a relational assemblage. Further, it is this particular image of “mechanics” that has dominated the instrumental modeling of schooling insofar as it conceptualizes curriculum as the emanation of a transcendent designer, system, or model. In this image, the curriculum becomes a site of lack remedied by the efficient cause of educational design and the purposiveness attributed to its moralizing, evaluative, instructional, and civilizing function. Conceptualized as a site of lack, currere becomes reduced to a “mechanical” object to be “worked on” from the position of a transcendent “outside.” In this vein of “mechanical” curricular thought, desire becomes fettered to lack. That is, the instrumental “mechanism” is always reliant upon a transcendent cause for its formative or motive functioning (Welchman, 1997). What such utilitarianism attempts to obfuscate is a fundamental antimony between the organism and machine, falling back into the anthropocentric bias of a human controller at the center of “mechanical” organization. This perspective is a corollary of a technoutopianism which understands the technical apparatus only in terms of its capacity to enhance human life. Yet, where the ostensible advancement of Homo sapien relies on technics for its becoming, the anthropomorphic stratum is already shifting.

Summerhill as a Nonmechanical War-machine Machinic ontology moves away from the component thinking of “mechanics” toward an analysis of “relations” and a schizoanalysis of their potential to function differently. For example, A.S. Neill’s (1993) Summerhill mobilizes an image of schooling that might be thought as a “stealing back” of machinics from the “mechanical” image of pedagogical life. Departing from an image of currere as emanating from a transcendent design or designer, Summerhill’s image of how a life might go is immanent to the desire-engineering of its students and not, as “mechanics” would assert, as an a priori remapping for how life ought to go. At Summerhill, students of all ages make operational and judicial decisions as equals to

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staff. Further, such decision making is immanent to particular cases and hence departs from universal or transcendent moral or disciplinary codes. In this sense, there are no bosses at Summerhill to dictate or coerce the action of the aggregate. Following Reich’s question on the all-too-human desire for its own fascism(s), Summerhill begins to disconnect from the micro-fascisms that schooling encourages in its students, machining an alternative organ-izational assemblage. For example, Summerhill students are not impelled to attend class nor is their delinquency fashioned into a pathological impetus for disciplinary response. Suspending the pressure of attending class for its own sake, students are able to select which lessons to attend and further, are able to pursue their own interests in lieu of attending class at all. Following, Summerhill is less a site of continual productive labor under a transcendent ideal than an experiment in the potentials of pedagogical counter-production. In such a vein, Summerhill begins to create a machinic probe-head for thinking a pedagogical life no longer reliant upon an assumed lack, composing instead a counterfascist site of desire-engineering capable of collapsing the hierarchical organ-ization of the “mechanical” school. It is hence not surprising that Summerhill’s future was threatened in the late 1990’s, when Tony Blair’s New Labour Government sought to reterritorialize Summerhill’s singularity back upon the State’s model of educational efficiency and production, hence reinscribing it within a “mechanical” model of lack. Of course, the New Labor model of education presumed the necessity of the State as a transcendent supervisory and regulative power. Against this, Summerhill might be thought as a project of releasing the machinic potentials of a pedagogical life from its identitarian or representational “mechanics.” Indeed, Summerhill was able to evade capture through the resistance of its proponents, who championed the necessity of its “anomality” in a culture overcoded by party bosses, organ-izational hierarchies, and the clichés of orthodox thinking (Guattari, 2000). Summerhill begins to imagine a strange pedagogical machine that queers, or rather, counter-actualizes the material repetitions that compose State images of schooling (Colebrook, 1996, 2009). It is, in this sense, a war-machine that mobilizes “other ways of perceiving the world,” creating “a new face on things, and even a turn of events” (Guattari, 1995, p. 97). A.S. Neills’ Summerhill would be part of a larger movement in the 1960’s focused on interrogating the relational ethics or machined connection of the institution. Owing much to the ideas of Célestin Freinet1 (1896–1966), Neill’s “turn” is also evident in Fernand Oury’s repudiation of 1960’s institutionalized schooling, a revolutionary project that deeply influenced the political pedagogy of Guattari (Genosko, 2008). Against the “mechanical” school, Guattari would characterize Oury’s Group for


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Therapeutic Education (Groupe d’éducation thérapeutics, GET) as a project for overcoming the encasernée scolaire (school-as-barracks). As Genosko (2008) documents, this would be accomplished through the creation of a “collectivity sensitive to heterogeneous components as well as local conditions that would otherwise be steamrolled if one arrived with prefabricated interpretive grids” (p. 66). Akin to Summerhill, the project of the Group for Therapeutic Education would be oriented to the analysis of institutional assemblages and their affects on subjectivity. Overturning the institutionally alienated individual and the asymmetrical teacher student dyad, Oury would recuperate Freinet’s use of a school journal (a collective correspondence within and between schools), a local printery (owned by students for the collective production and dissemination of texts), and an emphasis on cooperative council (the refining-machine of group organization led by the students themselves). Mobilizing the school journal, local printery, and cooperative council as a mediating techne, Oury would machine a pedagogical singularity oriented to the affirmation of collective autoproduction and the counter-actualization of institutional anguish and hopelessness. Extending Freinet, Guattari also would affirm the “technical and political choice” of the school printery as a “molecular revolutionary activity” for the creation, possession, and communication of collective enunciation freed from transcendent models (Genosko, 2008, p. 68). As with the mediating force of Summerhill’s communal meeting, Oury similarly argues for the necessity of techne in the production of a pedagogical singularity. As Genosko (2008) writes, what is original about Oury’s use of the printing press “is its role in mediation” and further, its creation of “a transversalizing space in which material hierarchy is restructured . . . and existing institutional structures at all levels from the classroom through the school board . . . are called into question” (pp. 67–68). What becomes evident in the counter-actualizing image of pedagogical life created by Neill and Oury is the crucial role that techne plays in the production of a singular life—a life that is no longer exclusively “human.” It is through Oury’s unconventional technical objects that the “mechanical school” is given back to machinic and revolutionary thought. Such machinic thinking not only mediates a less oppressive fabulation of social relations, but further, functions to augment the powers of the collective through the actualization of new forms of social responsibility, militancy, and subjectivity. It is in this vein that curriculum theory might begin to rethink the revolutionary role of techne as a force for releasing territories of institutional organ-ization from their mechanical overdetermination. That is, techne’s machinic creation of both social and transhuman connections marks the undoing of the organized or institutionally overcoded body (Colebrook, 2009). Put differently, it is via the inhuman force of

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techne that curriculum theorists might challenge the humanist plateaus of self-generation, holism, and hylomorphism upon which the image of currere (the course of a life) is being contemporarily thought. Across each of these tasks, techne enters into relation with the fabulation of a pedagogical war-machine, or rather, a “revolutionary instant [or] experimental surge” capable of dissimulating the orthodox image of how a pedagogical life ought to go (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 27). The composition of such a war-machine exposes a fact of becoming misapprehended in much curriculum theory, that is, the necessity of a mediating concept, object, or technology one might call techne. Put differently, it is via the machinic potential of techne that curriculum theory might best understand its project as a matter of creation rather than representation, of fabulation rather than identitity.

Turntablism and Drum-machinics The turn from “mechanical” thinking to the mobilization of a warmachine is being contemporary mobilized in underground music and cinema where, as Guattari (1995) writes, we find “some of the most important cells of resistance against the steam-roller of capitalist subjectivity – the subjectivity of one-dimensionality, generalized equivalence, segregation, and deafness to true alterity” (p. 91). It is in the arts, Guattari argues, that the vital link between techne and becoming is most productively exposed. Yet, such productivity does not labor in a prior image of identity or representation. Linking with techne, the “mechanical” image of the body is deterritorialized. This is exemplified in body of the turntablist who, deterritorializing on the technical object of the turntable, links up with its prosthetic arm. As Guins and Cruz (2006) argue, it is via this prosthetic connection that the turntablist is able to intervene with the disappearance of the worker’s hand in contemporary manufacturing, a historical movement that has fueled the apocalyptic image of human submission under technological domination. Against this, the turntablist’s hand enters into assemblage with the turntable as “a motor . . . while [the] arms [of both deejay and turntable] work together to mine beats from the black pits of the groove with a diamond drill” (p. 230). As previously developed, the assemblage of deejay and turntable machinically augments the powers of both. The deejay becomes a cyborgian decoding/recoding machine while the turntable is freed from its reproductive function as a musical instrument. In “turn,” this machinic linkage enables such mutant tactics as the “scratch,” a technique in which the conjoinment of the turntablists arm and turntable’s needle inventively actualize unthought


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fragments of (a)rhythmic noise by scratching new “grooves across the old” (p. 231). Contaminating the musical refrain (the coded block of music), the “scratch” produces an inhuman language that no longer territorializes back onto the recorded sound of the vinyl record itself. Unlike the remix, the sound produced by the scratch does not resemble its original source, but rather, becomes a machinic probe-head that explores the entire range of potentials in a given code. As an asignifying probe-head, the scratch might be thought as an tactile-auditory “writing machine” for a people yet-to-come (Attali, 1985, p. 11). In this vein, turntablism becomes a potential war-machine for thinking escape routes from under the laws of “usemonopoly,” the manipulation of popular taste by the music industry (where hip hop becomes hit pop), and the coded block of the musical refrain. Reclaiming techne as a force for machining new social relations, turntablism has become a “[schizoanalytic] technique . . . [for] scrambling coding systems, feeding intensificatory experimentation back into the strata” (Mackay, 1997, p. 267); As Public Enemy’s Chuck D raps in response to the presumed detachment of urban youth and technology: “[It’s] war at 33 1/3 / Haven’t you heard?”; It is via the combination of techne and the future (of black culture), Chuck D (2008) argues, that a counterattack might be waged “against the mass dumbing down of . . . culture” (p. 341). Turntablism’s technical machine produces a mutant subjectivity that no longer accords to identitarian thinking. It is through the turntable as a decoding-machine that minoritarian impulses might be stolen back from majoritarian thinking, reconfiguring the producer-consumer dyad, strict musical genealogies (via transversal mixing) while concomitantly executing the “slippage between the functions of the crowd, musician and machine, where sounds produce and execute their own evolutive pressures” (Mackay, 1997, 254).

(Re)Materializing the Revolutionary Force of Techne As a potential revolutionary force, techne poses a danger to the social machinery of the State. As Mackay (1997) develops, the colonization of Africa by the West included the significant destruction of tribal drums, the machinic instrument connecting the body of the individual to the collective and further, to the collective virtual history of the tribal assemblage. Against the productive force of techne, Western colonials intervened first to eradicate the machinic potential of the drum, marking one of the primary strategies underpinning the African slave trade. Upon the tatters of destroyed drums, colonials would subsequently claim that Africa was devoid of both historical memory or the means for its recording.

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It is against this history of violence that the drum has rematerialized, “erupting into Western music like a long-awaited revenge for its brutal silencing” (Mackay, 1997, p. 257). Like a force of contagion, the drum creates a contemporary body technology unthought by the Western world. More specifically, the drum returns as an asignifying “meme-grinder” (the repetition of discrete units or molecules of sound-intensity), deterritorializing the social machine via what Mackay dubs an inventive “becomingCreole” (p. 257). As Frith (1996) argues, “what makes music special . . . is that it defines a space without boundaries . . . [and] is thus the cultural form best able to cross borders . . . and to define places: in clubs, scenes, and raves” (p. 124–125). In this capacity of creation, the African drum returns to introduce viral affects into the material-flows of the social machine, deterritorializing the individual body across “the transitive voice of the drum” where accelerating beats-per-minute and the physicality of sub-bass traverse the body becoming-sound (Mackay, 1997, p. 256). Such a becoming, in which the body is driven and extended through inorganic Voodoo technics and the machining of diasporic flows coalesces in such microcultural chaosmotic forces as jungle, electronica, and drum and bass music. Becoming-sound, the Face of the human is deterritorialized upon a sonic probe-head that begins to survey the complexcity of affects that compose the “underground” sensorium of the city. Akin to the “street poetics of break dancing made possible by the ghetto blaster,” a people yet-to-come is being fabulated via the chaosmodic technics of electronica (Hemment, 2004, p. 81). As a site for the machining of new subjectivities and holey spaces, this musical “underground” is concomitantly a source of anxiety for State power. As Mackay (1997) writes, “sampled/sequenced music is the first form of music to have its performance specifically proscribed by an Act of Parliament” (p. 257). The Voodoo sonic phylum of jungle, electronica, and drum and bass are themselves machined via the technics of the synthesizer and digital sampler. It is via the plastic technics of the synthesizer/sequencer that rhythmic duration can be pushed to inhuman thresholds of speeds and slowness, rendering the metronomic function of the machine into a “pure” intensity (timestretching). The electronic drum machine would create a similar line of flight via its capacity to produce irregular metronomic patterns capable of pushing “four-to-the-floor” or 4/4 punctual systems to the point of sonic morphogenesis, or rather, the point where the expressive potentials of the musical refrain are “schizzed.” As Hemment (2008) writes, the creative power of the synthesizer extends not from is ability to represent human performance or instrumentation, but rather, to “fail” them. Intimate to the emergence of acid house music (pioneered by such artists as DJ Pierre, Spanky, and Herbert J), the Roland TB-303 was


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notoriously poor at reproducing the bass lines it was manufactured to reproduce. As Hemment writes, “the Roland TB-303...arose in an implicit way within a culture of misuse . . . its programming procedures were so complex that the operator’s intentions would become lost . . . [producing unexpected results] more interesting than what was intended” (p. 84). Failing as a instrument of reproduction, the Roland TB-303 would produce a new musical regime via its non-identitarian function. This “anomal” functionality would in turn create a passage for experimenting with the production of sensations escaping the intentions of design and overcoded aesthetic tastes. Against the aesthetic dictates of studio production Hemment calls “corporate sense data,” the inexpensive Roland TB-303 would give rise to the so-called bedroom producer and the further deterritorialization of corporate “sense” production. Not only would the Roland TB-303 steal back expressive potential from the social machinery of the studio and mainstream recording industry, it would concomitantly machine a new style of musical experimentation drawing the human sensorium into relation with hitherto unthought inhuman affects. Both this affective and stylistic becoming are intimately tied a techne that is not simply instrumental or representational. Instead, the synthesizer becomes a “strange contraption” in the creation of the countercultural war-machine dubbed acid house, a microcultural movement that would seek out alternative becomings via experimental composition, collective dance (rave culture), drug use (Special K or MDMA culture), and the subversion of copyright “usemonopolies” (via sampling). In this assemblage, techne (the synthesizer/sequencer/drum machine) is neither the harbinger of human evolution (techno-utopian) or cessation (technological apocalypse). Rather, techne might more adequately be thought in terms of how it opens new way of machining a life without falling back upon tyrannical images of how a life ought to go.

Building a Queer Machine for Curriculum Theorizing The difference between how a life might go and how a life ought to go is the difference between a machinic ethics and “mechanical morality.” While morality provides an instance for the appearance of the subject and its recognition under transcendent law, machinic thinking marks the ethical undoing of norms. That is, machinic thinking opens a passage for recognizing “what is” as a machined complex of relations that might have been assembled otherwise. While a mechanical morality already presupposes the “correct” connections between its coded elements, the plasticity of machinic thinking maintains a responsiveness to the unknown (Ansell

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Pearson, 1997, p. 211). We do not yet know what a body might do. To take seriously this question of becoming however, necessitates an attenuation toward the technical machines with which the body assembles and towards which particular social forces are attracted and linked. While the turntable and synthesizer mark two examples of machinery linking up with emergent youth forces, the toolbox of concepts mobilized by Deleuze and Guattari constitutes another technical force for thinking difference, for machining new social relations, and preparing spaces for a people unanticipated by molar or moral thought. If the task of curriculum studies is oriented to the creation of new concepts for thinking a pedagogical life, then by necessity, the curriculum project must take seriously the enjoinment of techne to becoming and in particular, its potentials for dissimulating “the image of the human” (Colebrook, 2009, p. 21). Without an ontological disposition toward machinic thinking, life becomes caught in the all-too-human Face of “what is,” an image of life which reifies the anthropocentric bias and the tyranny of representational thinking. Against this, machinic thought creates a passage for thinking the transhuman, or rather, a contaminated mutant subjectivity that is not limited to prior models of hylomorphic possibility. Instantiating the potential for thinking radical difference, machinic thought prepares a passage for the unknown relations of becoming-anomal, becoming-probe-head, becoming-sound, etc. Such zones of indiscernability do not fall back upon the metanarrative ideations of humanism, but rather, begin to diagram other times and spaces for living. This does not assume that such assemblages are good. As the underside of MDMA culture demonstrates, a line of experimentation can collapse into a black hole. The task of thinking or practicing difference should not be entered into haphazardly. Rather, one should take great care to avoid producing new forms of tyranny or microfascism. While newness is always accompanied by potentials for suffering, there concomitantly exists a great suffering that accompanies the eradication of newness. This overwhelming form of suffering has an extensive contemporary symptomology that includes nihilism, cynicism, resentment, and detachment. It is in this way that machinic thinking becomes a mode for the analysis and affirmation of virtual connective potentials that experiment, rather than presume, the course of a life. In this project, techne becomes more than a critical technology for thinking. Instead, as illustrated via the technical machinery of the turntable and synthesizer, techne becomes integral to the metallurgical creation of new subjectivities, spaces, and times of living. As Colebrook avers (2009), it is via technics that we are enabled to “perceive beyond the selves we already are” (p. 21). Fabulating a singular life from under the metastasized territories of orthodox thought, curriculum theory strikes an affinity with what might


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be called queer machinics. Queer machinics has nothing to do with a “reflection on what it means to be queer,” but rather, marks a change in the way that we might theorize (Colebrook, 2009, p. 11). If the task of curriculum theorizing is concept creation for thinking a pedagogical life, it must take seriously the schizoanalytics of machinic thought. This entails that the creation of concepts be understood not simply in terms of their accumulative or additive power (n+1), but rather, in relation to the kinds of forces they modify and unleash from material repetition (n–1). This tactic enters into affinity with a kind of queer theorizing that attempts “to deviate from, or pervert, that which appears self-evident, unquestionable or foundational” (p. 12). Taking seriously the preparation of a space for a people yet-to-come, curriculum theory might mobilize a queer machinics for the counter-actualization of “what is.” This task is intimate to what might be dubbed the ?curriculum, a concept that is both a problematic (producing the schizoanalytic question (?) of how the curriculum might be machined) and queer contraption (the foundational possibility of which is visually disrupted). The idea of ?curriculum theorizing suggests that concepts be thought as more than critical. More adequately, curriculum theorists must begin to think the concept as a metallurgical probe-head for creating, registering, and linking viroid lines of flight. In this way, the technics of the concept become intimate to the composition of a queer machine for stealing a life back from life in general. Put differently, it is via the experimental technics of the concept that “mechanical” images of life might be queered, giving thought back to its machinic potential. However, such a molecular revolution is never guaranteed. Indeed, some concepts fall into complicity with majoritarian thinking. Others, once radical, become overcoded and exhausted of their revolutionary force. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1993) demanded for philosophy, today, curriculum theory requires an excess of concepts that are not simply metaphors or catch-phrases, but active forces for creating a queer ?curriculum-machine. This task of creating of a queer machine for ?curriculum theory might otherwise be called symulation; that is, the machinic assemblage of heterodox forces (symbiosis) for the fabulation (positive simulation) of a molecular revolution in curricular thought. Let us “curricularists” become such symulators, ice-breakers, hackers, and ANOMALS, practitioners of desiring-production for a people yet-tocome. “Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find and advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there . . . have a small plot of new land at all times” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 161).


Notes

Preface 1. The assemblage “Deleuzeguattari” refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative productions.

Chapter 2 1. An extended discussion on the significance of the synthesizer and digital sampler appears in Chapter 9, where such modes of techne are linked to the conceptualization of the transhuman.

Chapter 4 1. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the body without organs is an egg akin to the full body of the earth. In Anti-Oedipus for example (1983), Deleuze and Guattari comment that “the body without organs . . . is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing upon these particular vectors” (p. 19). As embryology suggests, the egg is marked by such morphogenic movements as change across surfaces, the stretching of cellular layers, vagination, and cellular displacement (Deleuze, 1994). Throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the body without organs, such morphological augmentations are deployed against a biomechanical model of the body as divisible and reducible to organ-ized representations. The egg is a nonorganized field of intensities and flows, a plane of imminence prior to its extension (distance from the process of its production) and developmental stratification as an organism. 2. Jarmusch’s reference herein points to the grim and deathly factories depicted throughout the works of Charles Dickens. 3. It is important to note that the violence of Dead Man breaks cinematically with the “feel-good slaughterfests” of such filmmakers as Tarantino and Woo, whose works redeploy the aesthetics of Arthur Penn and Samuel Peckinpah (Rosenbaum, 2000). Dead Man’s violence is marked by a stark, awkward, and anesthetic quality.

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NOTES

4. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop, the rhizome is comprised of lines in which entry and exit points are always motile and open to further nonlinear outgrowths. Such lines are not to be confused with the lines of lineage attributed to arborescent models of development. In this manner, change is not the result of lineal accumulation, but rather, as the sudden intensification of life through dissipative outgrowths. 5. Amongst Dead Man’s commentators, there is much dispute regarding who exactly is the protagonist of the film. However, this debate does not consider the possibility of understanding Dead Man’s protagonist as less of an individual than a collective entity. 6. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the “cutting” power of molarity as the effect of a destructive ray telescope that defines broad outlines, binary systems, and absolute limits from the void. 7. I am using the contested term Indian as it appears in Jarmusch’s script. 8. This triple symbology is used at numerous points throughout Dead Man, though Jarmusch derails its common interpretation as a sign of synthesis (unity) through perversion. Blake and his Indian companion are constantly harried by trappers and bounty hunters in this triadic configuration, and might thus be seen as a disjunction of the unified whole. 9. The diagrammatic component constitutes an uncanny strange attractor for the structure of the film/text. The play of twists, pirouettes, and circularities throughout Dead Man constitute one diagrammatic component by which the film might be read. 10. Jarmusch’s subsequent film, Ghost Dog (1999), reiterates the story of nomadism evoked in Dead Man, drawing heavily upon the role of death in Samurai culture through Tsuneto’s Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves).

Chapter 5 1. Aoki’s (2005b) critique of the identitarian privilege in curriculum runs parallel to that promulgated by Bergson (2004). The very notion of multiple identities, multiple choices, or multiple meanings infers an extant object or thing subject to quantitative or positional extension. In this image, the curricular landscape becomes an object or thing recognizable by degrees of variation from an identitarian model, that is, from actual identities, meanings, and spatial positions. Yet, while the curriculum landscape might be populated by an extensive number of identities, meanings, or choices, this image has yet to encounter difference in kind. As Bergson develops, there is another kind of multiplicity irreducible to numerical or measurable difference. Amidst contemporary appeals for the multiplication of meaning and identity in curriculum theory, Deleuze issues a caveat. “Differences in degree,” Deleuze writes, “are the lowest degree of difference” (p. 93). It is this lowest degree of difference that is today reproduced in the field of curriculum via the rhetoric of the possible.

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Chapter 6 1. Rather than its literal English translation “to trace,” the notion of traceur in parkour is informed by the basilectal meaning “going fast,” implicating the role of intensity, flow, and force in movement. 2. From the Greek khoreia, meaning dance. This particular deployment of choreography is meant to implicate Kristeva’s (1990) notion of the semiotic chora and the extraction of the “body from its homogenous shell and turn it into a space linked to the outside” (p. 143). 3. Dismantling the stratified organism through “inventive self-destructions” requires a proclivity toward experimentation and the productive capacity of desire, where desire is not reducible to the psychoanalytic notion of lack, but is instead the decoding and deterritorializing force of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 160).

Chapter 7 1. Unlike the Oedipalized conflation of desire and lack, the Deleuzeguattarian desire is linked to three aspects of production. First, Deleuzeguattarian desire is connective and breaks flows of matter and energy; second, Deleuzeguattarian desiring production works by registration, creating unique and recognizable points of intensity or assemblage (Bonta & Protevi, 2004); and third, desire can become antiproductive, unfettering the expenditure of energy from utility. 2. The notion of individuation herein implies the process of how an individual comes to be. 3. In Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, a body without organs can be thought as a virtuality, that is, an arena in which the flows or circuits of the body undergo connective and selective experimentation. Subtracting desire from its homeostatic circuits and overregulated habits, a body without organs is the creation of assemblages and immanent relations that in turn produce new cartographies of the body (Bonta & Protevi, 2006). As a practice of creating a decentralized and dehabituated body, a body without organs moves the body from equilibrated states, “disturbing the organism . . . by disrupting the homeostatic feedback loops that maintain organismic patterns [of habit] (p. 63). 4. Like Foucault’s (1979) analysis of disciplinary normalization, molarizing social forces function by distributing bodies in space, and hence, by capturing their less probable states (molecular) in the image of increasingly equilibrated, homogenous, and probable ones (molar). As an example, Foucault comments that the modern educational apparatus is organized by the unit of rank. This unit does not organize the body by fixed position, but more insidiously, “distributes [it] and circulates them in a network of relations” (p. 146). After 1762, Foucault writes, the space of the classroom becomes increasingly oriented to the classificatory unit of “rank” as a distributive and molarizing strategy. As Foucault develops, the educational institution is organized by the rank of

192

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

NOTES

students in a given class, the attribution of rank at the culmination of each task and exam, the recording and economy of rank over time, the rank of students relative to their ages, to the difficulty of their subject studies, to their behavior, and performance. “The organization of serial space,” Foucault writes, “was one of the great technical mutations of . . . education . . . [for] it made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also a machine for supervising, hiearchizing, rewarding” (p. 147). Bill is both the “father” of the Deadly Viper Assassin Squad and the literal father of Beatrix Kiddo’s child. The figure of Bill, who had hitherto been largely portrayed through Carradine’s vocal performance, appears more prominently in Volume 2, wherein we learn that his own father, a pimp, took pleasure in cutting the bodies of prostitutes. In classic Oedipal fashion, Tarantino fetters Bill’s becoming to the image of his father, whose pleasure and pain he is destined to repeat. While Pei Mei refuses to teach Bill the deadly five-pointed-palm exploding heart technique, this knowledge is conferred to Kiddo, who ultimately draws upon this (the very thing that Bill lacks) in order to kill him. Kiddo’s body functions largely as a vehicle of negation. That is, its desire is organized around the termination of life, overdetermining the bodies of others through their destruction. It is significant that Bill cannot understand Superman as a multiplicity, for this would in turn create lines of flight for Beatrix Kiddo. For instance, Superman does not have superpowers at birth, but develops powers only once exposed to the yellow sun of our solar system. Perhaps the alter-ego Clark Kent is more a symptom of identitarian thought, or rather, an answer to the alien’s question of how one might become human. Significantly, Superman’s answer to this complex question is to become a normalized, biopolitical entity (Clark Kent). In Deleuzian (2003a) terms, the movement-image refers to a classic style of pre-WW2 filmmaking. Marked by its reliance on movement and action, the movement-image “finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film” (Totaro, 1999). Further, the character of the movement-image is positioned reactively relative to narrative events. That is, the character of the movement-image perceives, reacts, and takes action in causal and sometimes habitual relation to an unfolding plotline. In the movement-image, reality is typically perceived from a single perspective and according to the spatial events in which a character is inserted. While Bergson avers that an object can be divided in an infinite number of ways, he remarks that such quantifiable variety or difference in degree is “already visible in the image of the object” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 41). Difference by degree begins with the assumption of identity, or rather, the ontological bias of an underlying reality prior to difference. In this image, difference is oriented to the actual and objective. Bergson (2004) evokes the image of a flock of sheep to illustrate this idea. The flock is both quantitatively extensive and spatially organized. Each sheep occupies a space discontinuous from another. Further, the

NOTES

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

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flock is numerable insofar as there exists a particular homogeneity by which they might constitute a spatial “set.” For Bergson, quantitative multiplicity relies on each of these homogeneous and spatially discontinuous factors. I am following here Smith’s (2007) conceptualization of the future as the fundamental dimension of time rather than the past. As Hume (2006) articulates that it is both our “custom” and habit to organize discontinuous impressions in the illusory contractions of resemblance, continuity, and causality. These biases produce an image of the “self ” that insists despite the profound durational disjunctions and myriad affective impressions that traverse the body. In this vein, identity is posited in the place of diversity. Deleuze (2003a, 2003b) attributes neither positive nor negative characteristics to either the classic movement-image or the paradigmatically distinct time-image. Deleuze contends that both styles of thought are coexistent, and further, that each posits a conceptual “answer” to the problematics of matter (the movement-image) and memory (time-image). In this chapter, I follow a general argument advanced by Widder (2005) politicizing the movement- and time-image relative to the social and somatic potentials they enable. While I contend that the two styles of thought are very much coexistent, they require qualitative differentiation along the lines of what styles of thinking they might create for a cultural curriculum studies. Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Bob Dylan precludes the possibility of speaking in definitive molar categories of sex or gender. Haynes’ portrayal of Dylan instead advances the Deleuzeguattarian (1983) notion that “everyone has [at least] two different sexes” (p. 69) The “Bob Dylan” of I’m Not There is populated by conceptual persona, each of whom “embody not-Dylan . . . [with difference] and distance from the literal source” (Gross, 2007). While Gross fetters such difference and distance by degree from Dylan as a literal source, it might more adequately be theorized that the conceptual personas composing I’m Not There differ in kind from “Bob Dylan.” That is, the six conceptual personae populating Haynes’ film create a passage for thinking “Bob Dylan” unfettered from a durationally consistent personality. Instead, each persona is marked a durational difference through which “Bob Dylan” differs from himself. These remarks comprise two of Dylan-Rimbaud’s “Seven Simple Rules for Life in Hiding.” In the film, these rules are articulated less as a commentary on solipsism than a creative becoming-imperceptible when capture appears immanent. The portrayal of Dylan by both the African American Marcus Franklin and female Cate Blanchett create the most extreme cases of representational differentiation and threshold crossing in I’m Not There. Marcus Franklin’s Dylan-Guthrie is portrayed earlier in the film as a carnival sideshow “freak,” where he is billed as “The Tiny Troubadour.” Throughout his career, Woody Guthrie’s guitar was emblazoned with the slogan: “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

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Chapter 8 1. This process refers to the assemblage of the arrow upon the bow string, or rather, the “machining” of two things (a+b) into a relation that alters their potential. 2. Such a thinker is figured in the life of Spinoza, who declined the offer of a public professorship in lieu of working with an intimate circle of friends and students. 3. Jarmusch has been able to maintain exclusive creative control over his films as the sole owner of his film negatives. A notable exception to this is Jarmusch’s The Year of the Horse, a film made for and owned by Neil Young. 4. Ghost Dog is marked for death after being observed by mafia boss Ray Vargo’s (Henry Silva) daughter at the scene of her boyfriend’s (Frank) contract assassination. Fearing that his daughter might suspect the issuance of Frank’s contract from inside the organization, Vargo uses Ghost Dog as a scapegoat, declaring war on the Bushido despite Louie’s solemn reservations. 5. The significance of the fractal herein lies in its “complexification” of Euclidian representational unity. Specifically, the fractal introduces an enfolded “irregularity” irreducible to the numerical value of one-whole. Instead, the fractal is always greater or less than One. Further, the fractal no longer draws its model of representation from prior forms of geometrical thinking. While some fractal patterns recur, fractals are themselves highly “original,” or rather, nonrepresentational. 6. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that the biblical figure of Cain is not a sign of the soil, but a mark of the subsoil, since for surface-dwellers, holey space is conceived as a site of theft and betrayal. Insofar as the affective sign of the subsoil [sous-sol] is moored to Cain as a figure of theft and betrayal however, the galleries associated with holey space assume rogue characteristics. “The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign of the subsoil,” Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “passing through both the striated land of the sedentary space and the nomadic ground (sol) of smooth space without stopping at either one . . . [marking] the double theft and double betrayal of the metallurgist” (p. 414). Such betrayal is key to Jarmusch’s work. He comments, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination . . . And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what JeanLuc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take it.” 7. In Ghost Dog, the Hagakure becomes less a disciplinary code or methodology (the way life ought to go) than a way for thinking, connecting, and producing the perplexions of a life. Unlike curricular research that aspires to describe or array a prior people or discourse, Ghost Dog is instead composed through the unique assemblage of a Haitian ice-cream vendor, a boat atop an apartment complex, a stray dog, a game of chess, a copy of Rashomon, a line of selected passages from Tsunetomo’s Hagakure. Rather than representing synthesized

NOTES

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

195

wholes or unities, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might more be more adequately thought in terms of the particularities or points of intensity that compose it. In this way, Jarmusch’s film produces a way of thinking that intervenes with the contemporary desire to reterritorialize the curricular field into increasingly intensified theaters of representation and disciplinarity. Instead, Jarmusch composes a relic out of step with the equalization of difference in late capitalism. As an extension of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) name Royal science, Royal geography functions to extract constants from the variations of a milieu, in turn producing an axiomatic meant to “fix” or define the flows of “molecular elements.” Contemporarily, the figure of the Samurai often proffered in Hollywood cinema metonymyically offers the paranoaic an image of the body armored and protected by a thickened skin. This paranoiac imagining is counterposed in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which plays between the promise of a protected body and the body as a shattered ego dispersed along ANOMALous lines of flight. A curriculum (the course of a pedagogical life) that remains open to experimentation must not only risk the production of leakages, but must be worthy of the perplexions and connections created. That is, curriculum theory must be faithful to its potential (potentia) for encounters, its linkage of bodies and forces, and its “desire to become” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 134). This, following Braidotti, might begin to describe a pedagogical ethics. Yet, it is this very definition of ethics that is disavowed in the effort to sediment the curricular field. Curriculum theorists engaged in such strategies of sedimentation would, hence, do well to heed the pedagogy of the itinerant metallurgist. Producing the desedimentation of the ground through the production of provisional holes, the itinerant carves a space from established territories in order to sustain an ethical counterpoint against the freezing of potentia within the theater of biopolitical representation. This particular deployment of schizophrenia does not gesture to the pathological conceptualization of the schizophrenic in Western culture. Rather, schizophrenia is a mode for thinking the nonunitary subject, or rather, the illusion of the sovereign “I.” More significantly perhaps, schizophrenia introduces a mode of thinking and art-making antidotal to practices of accumulation, representation, and Being—hence constituting a foil for those processes of oedipalization onto which the subject is constantly being reterritorialized. As Gregoriou (2008) develops, the conceptualization of the rhizome in contemporary educational research has often produced a new binary machine that fails to adequately theorize the complex “knotting” of rhizomatic/ arborescent forces. It is this romanticized and “innately emancipatory” conceptualization of the “rhizome” that Gregoriou dubs “cut-and-paste Deleuzianism” (p. 101). In a sense, this threat figures in the current capitalist crash, wherein the vast virtual debt produced largely through the extension of subprime loans

196

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

NOTES

and credit extension was impossible to reterritorialize upon the body of the market. That is, due to a surplus in the hitherto scarce housing market, a vast number of subprime debtors lost equity in their homes. By March of 2008, an estimated 8.8 million people had zero-or-less percent equity in their homes. Unable to repay credit overallowances through refinancing, debtors began vacating from their homes, producing an upsurge in foreclosures and, hence, grossly depreciated creditor loan equity subsequently written off to the sum of $512 billion US dollars to date. Such a caveat on reterritorialization directly implicates the valorization of the social justice agenda as curriculum theory’s “cutting edge.” Specifically, much curriculum theorizing laboring under the banner of social justice continues to insist on the a priori reality of essentialized identitarian categories of thought (race, gender, and ethnicity). Further, while oriented to the production of antifascist images of life, social justice theorizing has yet to seriously interrogate the fascist image of the “individual” social agent or the highly anthropocentric image of social organization continually reterritorialized at the “heart” of its project. That is, while the social justice agenda focuses heavily on epistemological liberation, it has yet to theorize an encounter with the ontological fascisms that mark curriculum’s most reactive intellectual tendencies. While Aoki does not evoke a notion of geopedagogy per se, his allusion to a curriculum foundations without foundations enters into relationship with the molar/molecular tendancies of “holey space” developed in this chapter. See, for example, Robert Kelly’s (2008) conceptualization of a “creative economy” in Creative Expression, Creative Education. The “queering” of curriculum studies is a tactic for researching the ways in which heteronormative privilege circulates historically and contemporarily in the field—but further, acts as an opening in which new forms of subjectivity might begin to be fabulated. This two-fold tactic is crucial not only for the future of a curriculum studies devoted to the analysis of gender, sexuality, and more broadly, cultural heteronormativity and trangressivity, but further, for future generations of teachers whose students might selfidentify “alternatively.” This broad focus on queer theorizing might begin to help teachers and teacher-researchers conceptualize and make spaces for difference. I have replaced Baudrillard’s reference to two specific tags, SUPERSEX and SUPERCOOL with the more general “graffiti tag.” The work of the Critical Arts Ensemble, Guerillartivism cyberpunk collective, Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the ostensibly defunct Carbon Defence League meet this criteria. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was scored by Wu-Tang Clan member RZA. Assembling traditional Japanese instrumentation with hip-hop beats, the film’s score functions to articulate Ghost Dog in ways that exceed the scant dialogue afforded to the Whitaker. As such, to think Ghost Dog entails thinking the way in which the body of the urban Bushido is composed of musical refrains of varying intensities, speeds, cuts, and breaks.

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21. It is through the law that Ghost Dog gives himself that he is able to think the unthought. However, it is via this very experiment that Ghost Dog confronts (potential) death.

Chapter 9 1. Freinet’s first school, opened in 1935, was not organized around lessons, but rather, the mediating forces of the school printery and cooperative council.


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Index

?curriculum, 187 abnormality, 107, 168 active, 1–4, 7–9, 11, 25–28, 29, 32, 34, 37–41, 48, 50–51, 59, 64–65, 68–70, 72–75, 80, 82–84, 87–89, 91–93, 96–97, 112, 118, 128, 136, 187 actual, 30, 32–34, 38, 40, 108, 135–36, 138, 151, 190, 192 actual-virtual, 33–34, 40 affect, 23, 57, 97–98, 101, 119, 138, 175 all-too-human, 6, 100, 166–68, 170, 178, 186 amor fati, 27 ANOMAL, 123, 152–54, 157, 159, 161, 172–73, 185 anomaly, 51 anthropomorphism, 6, 12, 15, 60, 105–6, 158, 163, 167–74, 178–79, 186, 196 anthropos, 169 antibiopic, 114 antichaos, 66 anticounterrevolution, 152 antifascist pedagogy, 11 antihero, 128 antiproduction, 73, 75 any-desire-whatsoever, 149 arborescence, 11, 49–50, 56, 69, 73–74, 77, 79, 81, 105, 128, 133–34, 138, 169, 176, 190, 195 art, 8–10, 12, 16, 25–27, 35, 38–39, 41, 55, 58, 61, 88–90, 95–99, 103–4, 107, 110, 113, 119–20, 132, 165–66, 170, 176

art and politics, 98–99, 103–4, 107, 113, 119–20 Artaud, Antonin, 4, 56, 96–98, 156, 168 asceticism, 21–22, 27, 51, 95–96 asignification, 88, 183–84 assemblage, 4, 8, 11–12, 44, 46, 53, 56, 59, 69, 96–97, 99–100, 102, 115–16, 118–19, 127–29, 135, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157–59, 169,–76, 178–82, 185–87, 189, 191, 194 Auguries of Innocence, 55 autobiography, 105–7, 158 autopoiesis, 73, 173–74 axiomatization, 57, 139–41, 143, 148, 150, 152–53, 159, 195 Bacon, Francis, 168, 172–73, 178 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 67 bacterium, 169, 170 balance, 41, 174 banking model, 141, 146 Barney, Matthew, 171–72 becoming, 2, 7, 26, 33–36, 38–41, 43–45, 47–48, 50, 53, 56, 58–61, 63, 69, 72, 74–75, 78, 82, 84, 91, 93, 96–97, 101, 105, 110, 112, 115–16, 118, 124, 133, 136, 138, 146, 148, 150, 154, 156, 159, 165, 167–68, 170–71, 173–75, 177, 179, 182, 184–86, 192 becoming-animal, 154 becoming-death, 59 becoming-imperceptible, 93, 160, 193 becoming-minor, 44, 46, 54 becoming-multiple, 59 becoming-music, 10, 158, 177

212

INDEX

becoming-nomad, 10 becoming-other, 27, 48, 74, 90–91, 93, 123 becoming-sound, 184, 186 bedroom producer, 185 Being, 1, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 17–19, 21, 24–28, 31, 33, 35–36, 39–41, 43, 48, 53–54, 56, 58, 63–64, 66, 69–70, 74–75, 78–79, 98, 105–7, 110, 113, 116–18, 124–25, 135, 142, 148, 150–51, 156, 161, 164, 166, 171, 175, 182, 184, 194–95 betrayal, 12, 61, 101, 134, 194 binary, 6–8, 12, 15, 34, 47–48, 50–51, 55, 65, 75, 78, 83–84, 88, 91, 95, 135, 145, 149, 165–66, 176, 190, 195 biopolitics, 98, 108, 110–12, 192, 195 bios, 196 Bioshock, 166 biotechnogenesis, 169 blockages, 127, 160 Bloom, Benjamin, 137 Bobbitt, John Franklin, 5 bodies-in-becoming, 130–32, 148, 150–52, 154, 160 body without image, 97, 102, 107, 113–15, 117, 120 body without organs (BwO), 45, 55, 60, 97–98, 106, 189, 191 body (image of), 60, 91, 96–97, 102, 107–8, 112, 119, 168, 172, 195 Book of Thel, 51, 55 Bushido, 125, 131, 133–34, 136, 138, 154–58, 197 capital, 36, 43, 50, 58, 141, 146, 152, 157 capitalism, 15, 45, 70, 73, 85, 87, 139–42, 145–46, 149, 152–53, 157, 159, 164, 167, 172, 175, 195 Carroll, Lewis, 37 cartography, 41, 48, 53–54, 69, 99, 120, 127–28, 160 chaos, 3–5, 7, 65, 74, 79 chess, 80–84, 194 Church, 54–55, 59, 95, 140 circuit-breaker, 75, 124, 126

cliché, 102, 107–9, 111, 180 closed system, 30, 40, 171, 177 coding, 31, 50, 103, 138–40, 142, 144–47, 159, 160, 183 cogito, 4, 18, 20–21 colonialism, 43, 45, 55, 58, 60, 178, 183 Coltrane, John, 66 common sense, 19, 22, 96, 123, 135, 156–57 communication, 16, 23, 34, 120, 133–34, 136, 167, 178, 181 composition, 12, 21, 64, 66–67, 70–73, 75–76, 97, 99, 102–3, 112, 115–18, 120, 127–28, 131, 135–36, 149–50, 153–54, 159, 182, 185, 187 concept, 1–5, 7–13, 15–16, 18–21, 24–31, 34–38, 40–41, 44, 47–48, 51, 53–54, 58, 60, 64–65, 68, 71, 74, 76, 82, 83–85, 89–91, 93, 95, 102–4, 106–8, 110–21, 124–25, 127, 132–35, 137–38, 140–41, 143–45, 147–52, 154, 159, 160, 165–72, 176–79, 182, 186–87, 193, 195 correspondence, 19, 29–30, 149, 167, 181 countergaming, 87–88 counterharm, 56 Crichton, Michael, 35 crystal image, 8, 11, 108–10, 114, 116, 176 cultural curriculum theory, 95, 99, 102–4, 107, 110, 112–14, 120–21, 193 currere, 1–11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 25–41, 51, 63–84, 88–89, 91, 93, 97, 104, 108, 110–14, 118–21, 127, 135, 150, 161, 175, 179, 182 curriculum-as-code, 68, 70 curriculum-as-lived, 64, 67, 74, 149 curriculum-as-plan, 32, 48, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 89, 111, 127, 149–50 cyberpunk, 163, 165, 167, 196 cyborg, 151, 166–68, 170–72, 174–75, 182 Davis, Miles, 66 Dead Man, 10, 43–48, 50–53, 55–60, 189–90

INDEX

death, 40, 49–53, 55, 61, 64, 66–68, 75, 92–93, 100–101, 127, 138, 141–42, 144, 154–55, 167, 190, 194, 197 decoding, 45, 87, 137, 139–40, 143–47, 153, 157, 159, 182, 191 deconstruction, 114, 156 Deejay (DJ), 128, 153, 173, 176, 177, 182, 184 dehabituation, 8 Descartes, René, 4, 18, 22 desire, 5, 11, 16, 19–20, 22, 36, 40, 51, 59–61, 65, 67, 69–70, 81, 86–88, 91–93, 95–96, 98, 100–103, 106–7, 117–19, 125, 129, 132–33, 136–37, 139–61, 163, 168, 172, 174–77, 179–80, 191–92, 195 desire (as lack), 96, 100, 179–80, 191 desire-engineering, 174, 176, 179, 180 desiring-flows, 144, 145, 147–48 desiring-production, 16, 61, 67, 76, 95–96, 98, 101, 104, 107, 112, 118–19, 129, 143–44, 146–47, 149–50, 152–54, 156, 158, 161, 173, 187 despotic regime, 145 despotic society, 153 deterritorialization, 7–8, 12, 35, 39, 45–48, 56, 60, 65–66, 72, 74, 83–84, 87–91, 103, 132, 143, 147, 152–54, 156–57, 159, 174, 185, 187 diagram, 59, 98, 110, 113, 120, 126, 128, 132–33, 149, 172–73, 176, 186, 190 dialectic, 5, 16, 63–64, 104–7, 111, 115, 125–26, 149, 151–52, 155–56, 176 dialectical synthesis, 5, 63, 106 difference in degree, 113, 192 difference in kind, 106, 116–17, 190 Digimon, 163 disalienation, 73 disarticulation, 45 discipline, 1, 22, 27, 57, 74, 76, 79, 84–85, 176 discovery curriculum, 19, 54 disidentification, 168 disjunctive synthesis, 20, 46, 57, 71–73, 76, 90, 107, 111, 116

213

dividuality, 73, 83 dogmatic image of thought, 69 Donkey Kong, 85–86 doxa, 8, 54, 55, 117, 120, 135 drop out, 129 drum-machine, 184–85 duration, 109, 184 e-commerce, 175 Earth, 2, 129–30, 136, 149, 166, 189 economics, 16, 46, 105, 126, 137, 141, 153, 156, 175 ego, 59, 97, 119, 153, 195 élan vital, 91 Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, 86 electronica, 26, 184 emanation, 24–25, 98, 166, 179 epistemology, 18, 166 eternal return, 4, 9–10, 36–37, 40–41 ethics, 10, 19–20, 24, 27, 34, 36, 41, 46, 93, 134, 139, 166, 180, 185, 195 ethics of knowledge, 19–20, 27 Euclid, 8, 52, 72, 139, 194 eugenics, 177 event, 37, 48, 70, 73–74, 84, 89, 97, 115, 123–24, 131, 146 ex-futurity, 146, 167 exchange value, 31, 33, 36, 55, 72, 132, 137, 140–41, 176 excluded third, 149 experiment, 1–2, 8–13, 25, 34, 36, 40–41, 44–46, 58, 60–61, 63–64, 66, 91–93, 97, 99, 103, 107–8, 113–18, 120–21, 123–24, 126, 132–33, 142, 150, 154, 159–60, 164, 167, 173, 180, 182–83, 185–87, 191, 197 expression, 4–7, 9, 17–18, 21, 24–27, 33–40, 52–53, 66–67, 69, 71, 73–75, 80, 83–84, 88, 126, 152, 167, 196 exteriority, 19, 52, 56, 82, 88 fabulation, 127, 143–44, 152, 181–82 Facebook, 164, 174, 178 faciality, 178 Fallout, 166

214

INDEX

fascism, 95, 119, 146, 159, 165, 177–78, 180, 186 film, 8–9, 12, 25, 38, 43–45, 47, 51, 55, 100–101, 109, 114–19, 125–26, 128, 130, 134, 154–55, 159, 170, 190, 192–95 firewall, 175 fold, 143, 150 folk (music), 26, 118 Foucan, Sébastian, 90 foundation, 6, 12, 17, 19–20, 26, 28, 34, 74, 79, 84, 92, 110, 127, 138, 144, 146, 148–49, 156, 160–61, 187, 196 fractal, 130–31, 150, 160, 194 Freinet, Célestin, 180–81, 197 Freire, Paulo, 141–42, 146, 203 Freud, Sigmund, 15–16, 20 future, 8, 36–37, 39–40, 47, 49, 52, 79, 108–10, 124–25, 150, 159, 160, 165–66, 180, 183, 193, 196 fuzziness, 57, 64, 74, 76, 176 gaze, 77, 79, 85 genocide, 43, 46, 55, 60 geopedagogy, 135–37, 149 GFB Bunny, 171 Ghost Dog, 12, 124–31, 133–35, 137–38, 143, 154–61, 190, 194–97 Go (board game), 11, 82–84 graffiti, 129, 153, 173, 196 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 86 Godard, Jean–Luc, 119, 194 Group for Therapeutic Education, 180 habit, 6, 8–10, 26, 33, 40, 45, 51–52, 54, 58–59, 70, 75, 77, 79, 86, 88, 90, 93, 97–99, 102–3, 106, 108–14, 117, 120, 127–28, 132–33, 138, 145, 150, 154, 160, 169, 191–93 hacking, 11, 87–89, 92–93, 134 Hagakure, 124–25, 131, 133–34, 143, 155, 190, 194–95 harmony, 63–64, 68, 709, 73, 75 heavy metal (music), 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 106

heterogeneity, 4, 7, 11, 27, 39, 45, 69, 73–74, 81, 83–84, 89, 99, 102–3, 110, 112, 136, 158, 170–71, 181 history, 12, 20, 29, 44–45, 55, 58–60, 96, 99, 101, 112, 123–26, 136–37, 156, 169–70, 182–84, 196 holey space, 12, 127–38, 143, 148–52, 155, 157–60, 184, 194, 196 Homo sapien, 166–69, 171, 179 homogeneity, 69, 157, 159, 193 humanism, 15, 53, 106, 142, 186 hybrid, 131, 173, 176–77 hylomorphism, 13, 170–72, 178, 182, 186 hypercynicism, 32 hyperreal, 29–31 I’m Not There, 11, 95, 114–21, 193 identity, 3, 5–7, 10–11, 21, 27, 33, 40, 58–59, 64, 79–83, 86–87, 92, 96, 98–108, 110, 112–14, 116–18, 130, 133–34, 137, 146–47, 151, 154–55, 157, 159, 164, 168, 177, 182, 190, 192–93 identity politics, 11, 25, 59, 105, 111, 113, 116, 119, 133, 136–37, 159, 164, 177 idiolect, 45 image of life, 2–3, 9, 26, 32, 40, 60, 69, 80, 97, 112, 119, 141, 143, 150, 154, 158, 167, 175, 186 immanence, 4, 9, 15, 18, 21, 23–25, 27, 29, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 54–55, 65, 83, 191 improvisation, 4, 10, 26, 63, 66, 71–76, 91 individualization, 97, 108, 111 inhuman, 6, 26, 96, 109, 128, 156, 169–71, 173, 176, 181, 183–85 instrumentalism, 16, 26, 51, 53, 63, 111, 144, 160 integration, 63–64, 114, 151–52 interactivity, 32, 45, 68, 86 Internet, 85, 129, 132, 174 interpassive, 32, 86–87 interpretosis, 19

INDEX

Iron Man, 166 itinerancy, 132, 134, 138, 156–57, 159–60, 195 Jackson, Michael, 178 Jarmusch, Jim, 10, 12, 43–48, 51, 53, 124–28, 130–31, 133–34, 136, 138, 143, 154–55, 157–60, 189–90, 194–95 jazz, 26, 63, 66, 71–74, 118 jeu (play), 41, 93 Joyce, James, 37, 39 Jung, Carl, 20 jungle (music), 184 Jurassic Park, 35 Kac, Eduardo, 171–72 Kafka, Franz, 39 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 107, 179 Kill Bill (I and II), 99–103 kinetic art, 90 knowledge society, 140 Kropotkin, Peter, 169–71 labor-power, 139 language, 16, 23, 39, 45, 56, 63, 108, 158, 183 leakage, 120, 128–29, 138, 153–54, 195 libido, 20, 140 lines of flight, 8, 10, 33–34, 46, 49–50, 53, 60, 65, 67, 72–73, 80–81, 84, 90, 92, 99, 103, 112, 128, 145, 147, 153, 160, 187, 192, 195 Linneaus, Carl, 166 Little Big Man, 43 lived curriculum, 150 logos, 5, 19, 52, 66–67, 74–75, 79, 81–82, 129 loxos, 129–30 Lyotard, Jean, 27, 163 machinic, 12–13, 116, 138, 149, 155, 160, 165–66, 170–87, 194 Mafia Boy, 175, 194 majoritarian, 60, 113, 135, 183, 187 map, 10, 30, 34, 41, 54, 127–28, 179

215

Marker, Chris, 109, 184 Marx, Karl, 15–16, 20, 141, 143, 146 MDMA, 185–86 mechanism, 31, 70, 77–78, 109, 129, 132, 155, 177, 179 melancholy, 21, 93 Melville, Herman, 125 meshwork, 65, 73, 76, 82, 85, 119 metallurgy, 169, 177, 186–87, 194–95 metamorphosis, 9, 27, 45, 52, 56, 111, 164 metaphor, 27, 44–45, 106, 187 metaphysics, 5, 17–18, 21, 129, 167 method, 55, 99, 113, 126, 194 microfascism, 186 micromovement, 48 micropolitics, 46, 54 military apparatus, 156–57 minoritarian, 38–40, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 84, 117, 157, 183 model, 10, 13, 16, 19, 23, 28–31, 34–36, 40, 44, 50–52, 57, 60, 63, 69, 73, 77–78, 96, 103–4, 111–12, 125–26, 130, 133, 136, 139, 141, 144–47, 155, 158, 164–65, 167–68, 176, 179–81, 186, 189–90, 194 model (biomedical), 96–97 molar, 7–8, 10–11, 30, 46–54, 56–59, 61, 98–99, 101–6, 114–15, 117, 124, 130–31, 138, 147–48, 150, 154–55, 158, 186, 190–91, 193, 196 molecular, 46–52, 55, 59–60, 98–99, 103–4, 117, 138, 150, 154, 181, 187, 191, 196 monstrosity, 5, 26–27, 50, 60–61, 124–25, 134 morality, 17, 43, 59, 97, 140, 179, 185 movement-image, 104, 107–8, 111–14, 116, 119, 192, 193 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 67 multiplicity, 3, 25, 34, 36–38, 41, 51, 61, 64, 68, 71–72, 74–75, 80, 82, 84, 89, 96–99, 101–3, 109–11, 114–15, 118–20, 124, 135, 143, 149, 190, 192, 193, 199

216

INDEX

music, 8–12, 25–26, 35, 38, 63, 65–67, 69–75, 82, 88, 117, 129, 153, 165, 182–84 mutant, 50, 96, 103, 151, 182–83, 186 Muzak, 70 MySpace, 178 mythemes, 44 Neill, Alexander Sutherland, 179–81 neoliberalism, 85, 87, 125–26, 137, 139, 142, 146, 148, 153, 164, 167, 175 Neverwinter Nights, 86 New Ageism, 147, 166, 175 nihilism, 10, 22–23, 27, 31–32, 74, 81, 147, 148, 186 noise, 68, 72, 74, 183 nomadism, 7, 9–10, 12, 27, 45, 51–53, 56, 58–59, 66–67, 72, 81, 83–84, 93, 109, 115, 120, 128, 157, 190, 194 nomos, 7, 52, 74, 82–83 nonimage, 34, 64 nonrepresentational, 9, 11, 34–35, 147, 149–50, 153 noology, 7 Odani, Motohiko, 171–72 Oedipal, 11, 16, 20, 41, 59, 68, 95–98, 100–102, 113, 115, 118, 120, 146, 154, 191–92, 195 ontology, 4, 9–13, 15–21, 23–25, 27, 29, 31, 34–35, 43, 46, 52–53, 56, 58, 61, 64–65, 74, 91, 97–98, 104–7, 111–12, 117, 120–21, 124, 147, 165, 177, 179, 186, 192, 196 Orlan, 171–72 otaku, 39 Oury, Fernand, 180–81 outside thought, 126, 170, 174–75 overcoding, 7, 12, 37, 50, 69, 96, 103–4, 107, 129, 134, 139, 142–43, 147–48, 152, 157, 178 Pac-Man, 86 panopticon, 77–79, 82, 84, 86, 130

paranoia, 47, 103, 106, 137, 141, 143–47, 152, 154–55, 158–59, 161, 195 parasitism, 16, 32, 95–96, 103–4, 117, 120, 136, 142, 144, 157, 159 parkour, 11, 89, 90–93, 191 passwords, 85, 87, 132 pastiche, 102, 119 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 43 pedagogy, 5, 9, 18, 26, 35–41, 44, 51, 54, 71, 73, 77, 79, 112, 130, 132, 141, 148, 163, 180, 195 perplexion, 126, 142, 194–95 phenomenology, 15, 31, 143 philosophy, 1, 3–4, 10, 17–22, 24–27, 37, 41, 93, 113, 124, 147, 166, 171, 187 Phrygian mode, 63–64 plague, 77, 130 Plato, 4–5, 17–18, 20–21, 25, 29, 31, 34–36, 40, 63–65, 147 polis, 66–69, 74–75, 79, 81–83, 156–57 politeia, 165 polyphonic, 64–65, 91 possible, 59, 105–6, 156, 190 post-humanism, 12, 172 postmodernity, 40, 102, 143, 149, 157 poststructuralism, 143 private thinker, 126–27 probe-head, 165, 171–73, 178, 180, 183–84, 186–87 profit-value, 145–46 prosthetics, 12, 166–68, 171, 182 Proverbs of Hell, 55 psychoanalysis, 57, 96–97, 151, 191 Public Enemy, 183 public professor, 126, 136 queer theory, 150 Quintilian, 63–64, 72 Rashomon, 118, 131, 194 rationalism, 5, 26, 33–34, 81, 168, 170 reconceptualism (education), 140, 145 refrain, 4, 65–67, 71–73, 74–75, 128, 158, 183–84

INDEX

repetition, 10, 31, 35–37, 40, 47–48, 52, 56, 70–71, 73, 75–76, 109, 124, 184, 187 representation, 2–4, 6, 12, 26, 31, 34–35, 38–39, 41, 54, 60, 65, 67, 69–71, 79, 88, 97–99, 108, 114, 117, 120–21, 127, 149, 151, 153, 168, 182 revolution, 2, 9, 12, 46, 56, 103, 121, 143–44, 146, 148–49, 152, 156–57, 159, 168, 180–87, 187 rhizome, 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 49–51, 54, 59, 73–74, 84, 87–89, 99, 103, 115–116, 118, 128–29, 133–34, 138, 142, 169, 190, 195 Robocop, 168 root-tree, 69 Royal geopedagogy, 136–37 Royal science, 195 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16, 29, 149 schizo, 54, 57, 59, 72, 156, 164 schizoanalysis, 152–55, 159, 161, 172, 179 schizophrenia, 143, 145–47, 152, 195 science, 113, 165, 170, 195 science fiction, 151, 163, 165 Second Life, 164 self-reflection, 11, 103–4, 111, 116 self-refleXion, 113 self-resemblance, 11, 60 simulacrum, 10, 29–36, 38, 40–41, 83, 89 singularity, 37, 46, 50–51, 56, 61, 73–74, 126–127, 155, 181 Six Million Dollar Man, 168 smooth space, 12, 82, 87, 128, 131–33, 148, 157, 160, 194 smooth time, 110 society of control, 84–85, 132 speculum mundi, 127, 155 standardization, 6 State thought, 5, 7, 11, 67, 78, 84, 93, 98, 104, 136–38 Stepford Wives, 163

217

stratification, 8, 60, 67, 70, 99, 103, 127, 142, 155, 161, 171, 173, 178, 189, 191 striation, 12, 69–70, 77, 81–83, 86–87, 110, 128, 130–33, 148, 160, 194 structuralism, 15, 31, 138, 143, 151 stutter, 37, 47–49, 116, 119, 128, 135, 155, 160 style, 11–12, 26, 37, 47, 72, 74, 100, 112, 114, 117, 124, 127, 131, 156, 173, 177, 185, 192–193 subjectivity, 10, 18, 44, 57, 98, 102, 105, 116, 129–30, 146, 181–83, 186 subterranean, 7–8, 78, 81, 129 suffering, 21, 186 Summerhill School, 179, 180, 181 Super Mario Bros., 88 Superman, 101–2, 192 surveillance, 12, 77–78, 129–130, 132, 137, 148, 151, 160 symbiote, 103, 145, 169–77, 187 symulation, 187 synopticon, 84–85, 87, 132, 151, 155 synthesizer, 26, 106, 114, 119, 150, 184–86, 189, 195 Tamagotchi, 163 taxonomy, 30–31, 33, 137, 166, 169, 171 teacher-as-law, 68 techne, 12, 35, 164–65, 167–71, 173–74, 181–83, 185–86 techno-utopia, 163–65 technology, 12, 30, 71, 108, 139, 163–65, 177, 182–84, 186 teratology, 124, 134 terra cognita, 91 terratorialization, 6–8, 10, 35, 37, 40, 64–66, 74, 79, 82, 96, 178 terrorism, 146–149 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 55 The Matrix, 163 The RZA, 158 The Terminator, 163 The Wild Bunch, 43 theology, 172

218

INDEX

third space, 12, 65, 149–152, 160, 176 time-image, 11, 95, 104, 107–114, 116–121, 131, 193 trace, 16, 41, 47, 51, 68, 72, 89–91, 128–129, 136, 147, 191 traceur, 89–91, 191 transcendence, 3, 9, 15, 17–27 transcendent thought, 9–10, 17, 20–21, 24, 27 transference, 57 transhuman, 13, 100, 166, 171–173, 181, 186, 189 transversality, 45, 169, 176–177, 181, 183 turntablism, 173, 182–183 Ulzaana’s Raid, 43 unconscious, 16, 41, 45, 96, 101, 107, 144, 150, 166 univocity of being, 24–25, 35 untimely, 12, 44, 81, 89, 95, 110–12, 114, 118–19, 123–27, 131, 133–36, 144, 149, 151–52, 157–58 Urstaat, 142 use-value, 139, 140 usemonopoly, 153, 183 vagabond, 35, 93, 117, 132–33, 157–58 video, 9, 25, 38, 171

video games, 8, 85–88, 166, 178 virtual, 4, 27, 29, 32–40, 51, 54–55, 58, 60, 68, 71, 75, 89, 90, 93, 98–99, 109, 115–21, 123–24, 127, 135–36, 150–51, 161, 173–74, 176–77, 183, 186, 191, 196 virus, 170, 175 visibility, 86, 130 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 55 vitality, 47, 54, 73, 144, 159, 175 voice, 67–68, 73–74, 106, 114, 184 war-machine, 178–80, 182–83, 185 Warcraft, 86 watchwords, 38, 118 web 2.0, 178 Welles, Orson, 38 white, 45, 52, 60, 65, 99, 131, 147 will-to-nothingness, 22 will-to-power, 38 will-to-representation, 37 willing-death, 54 World Wide Web, 140 youth culture, 9, 11, 82, 93, 129, 131, 176, 183, 186 Zarathustra, 36–37 zoe, 32

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