This presentation outlines the notion of Educational life-forms. These life-forms run through educational practice. This presentation demonstrates how to use the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as pedagogy.

1. Educational life-forms: Deleuzian
teaching and learning practice
Dr. David R Cole
University of Technology, Sydney

2. New life-forms
An aesthetic-material approach

3. machines

4. Deleuzian teaching and learning practice
Deleuzian
teaching and
learning practice
Practice theory
Community learning
theory
(constructivism)
The educational
unconscious
(desire)
Relational
pedagogy
(affect)
Learning‐time
(virtuality)
Life‐forms epiphanies
(An)other space

5. A philosophy of life
• …A Life?...No one has described what a life is better
than Charles Dickens (Our Mutual friend) if we take the
indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A
disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by
everyone, is found dying. Suddenly, those taking care of
him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his
slightest sign of life. Everyone bustles about to save him,
to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man
himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating
him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his
saviours turn colder, and he becomes once again mean
and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a
moment that is only that of a life playing with death
(Deleuze, 2007, p. 391).

6. bergson
• Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves.
Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at
the level of problems (false problems are of 2 sorts, ‘non-
existent problems’ defined as problems whose very terms
contain a confusion of the more and the less; and ‘badly stated’
questions, so defined because their terms represent badly
analysed composites).
• Struggle against illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind
or articulations of the real (the real is not only that which is cut
out according to natural articulations or differences in kind; it is
also that which intersects again along paths converging toward
the same ideal or virtual point).
• State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of
space. (Deleuze, 1991, pp.15-31).

7. marx
The social pyramid

8. spinoza

9. nietzsche
• There are lives with prodigious difficulties; these are the lives of
the thinkers. And we must lend an ear to what we are told
about them, for here we discover possibilities of life the mere
story of which gives us joy and strength and sheds light on the
lives of their successors. There is much invention, reflection,
boldness, despair and hope here as in the voyages of great
navigators; and to tell the truth, these are also voyages of
exploration in the most distant and perilous domains of life.
What is surprising in these lives is that 2 opposed instincts,
which pull in opposite directions, seem to be forced to walk
under the same yolk: the instinct that leads to knowledge is
constantly constrained to abandon the ground where man
habitually lives and to throw itself into the uncertain, and the
instinct that wills life is forced to grope ceaselessly in the dark
for a new place to establish itself (Deleuze, 1983, p. 94).

10. normativity
• The penal system, which goes from the secrecy of
torture and the spectacle of executions to the refined
use of ‘model-prisons’ in which some may acquire
advanced university degrees, while others resort to
a contented life of tranquilizers, brings us back to
the ambiguous demands and perverse constraints of
a progressivism that is, however, unavoidable and
even beneficent (Blanchot, 1987, p. 83).

11. exams
• The substance reflects the form: this is not the arena for
risk. Thus the examination produces the familiar double-
bind: lurking in the shadows is the image of the brilliant
script, which is offered in terms not of a formal perfection
but a master-stroke, the single God-given answer which
will convince that here is a potential hero of a generation.
But this is, of course, not really possible, however much
candidates may brag afterwards: and thus the image of
the perfect answer to the all-consuming questions of the
State is continually withheld, proffered but out of reach,
confirming in advance the authority of the Board,
convincing the candidates that it is better to be safe than
to take the risk the effects of which, after all, nobody will
ever see (Punter, 1986, p. 269).

12. tasmania
An example of changing practice

13. epiphanies
• Definition A: [An Epiphany is] “a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a
memorable phase of the mind itself. It is for the man of letters
to record these epiphanies with extreme care, as they are the
most delicate and evanescent of moments. It is when the soul
of the commonest object…seems to us radiant,” (Joyce, 1944,
p. 213).
• Definition B: “Epiphanies are interactional moments and
experiences which leave marks on people’s lives. In them,
personal character is manifested. They are often moments of
crisis. They alter the fundamental meaning structures in a
person’s life,” (Denzin, 1989, p. 70).
• Denzin (1989) argues that there are four kinds of epiphanic
moment: 1) the major upheaval; 2) the cumulative; 3)
illuminative; 4) relived. Each meaning centres on the
problematic (p. 83) nature of the experience.

14. Eternal return
• Pierre Klossowski (1997) termed this linkage [of the
eternal return] as a “declarative mood” and one that
reveals the “tonality of the soul” (p. 100). The eternal
return makes things happen in that it is a bridging
mechanism between the conceptual resources that one
might bring to a problem, for example, a teacher working
through and questioning their reasons and methods of
engaging the students, and the practical consequences
of this situation, such as asking introspective questions
and making pedagogic changes in one’s teaching
methods. It is not the moral principles of the teacher that
are in the spotlight here, but the ethical codes that one
holds and practices, and the passion for the job that one
demonstrates in ‘the moment’.

15. Levels of experience
• Deleuzian teaching and learning practice [therefore]
contains a turbulent, yet creative base that often
sets values and beliefs against themselves through
epiphanies. The point here is not to apply Deleuze’s
philosophy in a meek and responsible way to
education, but to find the ruptures in teaching and
learning that might lead to (an)other manner in
which to teach. Deleuze’s philosophy of life therefore
puts into erasure assumptions about experience in
teaching and learning and creates alternate realities
through which penetrating questions may be asked.

16. The virtual
• The primary and yet malleable connection between the
construction of the virtual and learning that we may derive from
the philosophy of Deleuze (1994), lies in the conception and
deployment of multiplicities. Multiplicities may be conceived of
as abstract entities tied to reality through the agent or agents
transforming knowledge (Deleuze, 1994). The Deleuzian notion
of multiplicities responds to hybrid reasoning that is not
canonical or entirely original. Deleuze used Nietzschean
plurality to focus the ways in which multiplicities act through
duration (durée), that comes from the unconscious in Bergson.
The notion of Nietzschean force is never singular; it is always a
differential between other forces. This qualifies Nietzsche’s
interest in the ways in which schemes or perspectives “interact,
attract, convince, corrupt, and incorporate one another”
(Richardson, 1996, p. 264).

17. The cone of
memory
How to use memory

18. VR automata
• The reproduction of capitalism in schools makes the
necessity for virtual value, as it codifies the practises and
values of teachers and their interaction with the students
(most physicists and mathematicians now work for the
military). Capitalism in this sense interrupts the analogue
relationship between communities of learners, and
simultaneously produces singular instances of virtual
value that are disparate from the host communities.
Contained in these singular instances that are analogue,
yet teachable as digital through VR and the philosophical
virtual, are the diagrammatic representations of abstract
machines, which demonstrate the ways in which VR is
immanent without being prone to reproduction

19. The 2-role model of affect
1st role of
affect
2nd role of
affect

20. Talking with Unconscious-affect
• In the role of the analyst, Freud
took it on himself to name the
affect in the dreams, and to
discuss the various ways in which
the patients have articulated affect
in their monologues
• Freud’s point of introducing the Id,
Ego and Super-ego was a
distinctive layering in the analysis.
These factors are representative of
disunity that is a mode of
abundance that always exceeds
disciplinary regimes or any
discourses of control or limitation
such as definitions of the self

21. Spinozism
• Philosophers such as Lloyd have taken this idea to infuse
the mind with sexuality, as the Spinozist positioning of
affectus with power leads one away from desexed,
disembodied ideas…
• The coded language of teaching manuals and professional
practice reproduces the body-without-organs because they
may drain the sprightly sexual body of emergent life
through internalisation and the potential subjectification to
inflexible regulation…
• Erotic language-affects give us a way of talking about these
(educative) connections, and applying the two-role model of
affect to the transformations of the body in the education
system…

22. frankenstein

23. conclusion
• The various forms of education or ‘normalization’
imposed upon an individual consist in making him or
her change points of subjectification, always moving
towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity
with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of
subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a
function of a mental reality determined by that point.
Then from the subject of enunciation issues a
subject of the statement, in other words, a subject
bound to statements in conformity with a dominant
reality. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.129).

24. references
• Blanchot, M. (1987). Michel Foucault as I imagine him. New York: Zone Books.
• Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy, (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). New York: Columbia University
Press.
• Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonism, (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
• Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference & Repetition, (P. Patton, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
• Deleuze, G. (2007). Two Regimes of Madness (A. Hodges & M. Taormina Trans.). New York:
Semiotext(e).
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (B.
Massumi, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
• Denzin, N.K. (1989). Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, N.Y.: Sage Publications.
• Joyce, J. (1944). Stephen Hero, T. Spencer (Ed.). New York: New York Directions.
• Klossowski, P. (1997). Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (D.W. Smith, Trans.). Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
• Punter, D. (1986). Examinations. In: D. Punter (Ed.). Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies
(pp. 267-270). London: Longman.