Classroom flows and intensities
I’m in the Deleuze and Guattari labyrinth, and though it’s dark and tangled and I often feel lost, the experience of being disoriented, of having familiar bearings disappear, is quite exciting.
And I’m stumbling across interesting stuff in here.
This morning, for example, I came across the following in A Thousand Plateaus (18):
… the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.(18)
The first thing this made me thing of was my thesis, ‘Mating with the world’, an attempt to think through how to respond to a story told me by a student while I was working as a psychotherapist. I started (this was nearly 20 years ago) by asking myself ‘what does this story mean?’ and ended up much more interested in the question ‘what does this story do?’. Our therapeutic relationship, in the end, seemed much less to do with interpretation and much more to do with what D&G call ‘the production of the unconscious’. When the student told me his story, and as it produced affects in/on me, and my responses produced affects on him, what seemed to be going on was more to do with ‘new statements, different desires’ than with interpretation and signifying.
Then I thought about classrooms, and my current work as a teacher and researcher. It’s not easy to wriggle free of the notion that my teaching job is to do with skills and knowledge and my research work is to do with interpretation and communication. But what if my work is more to do with production of the unconscious ‘and with it new statements, different desires’? What might this mean?
I like this shift.
It focusses the attention on the lifeworlds of classrooms, on bodily affects. It gets at the central (but boringly explored) notion of motivation from quite a different direction. Instead of the focus being on classroom management models, teacher strategies and the intrapsychic ambitions and limitations of students, an emphasis on ‘the production of the unconscious’ asks us to think about the way classroom lifeworlds are produced as a result of the circulation of affect.
Not just ‘think about’; do. Not just interpret; produce.
The central question becomes: How can we, as teachers and scholars, increase the production of affect, open up flows and intensities of desire in a world (the classroom) of un-pin-down-able multiplicities?