634726

research-article2016

CSCXXX10.1177/1532708616634726Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol"></span> Critical MethodologiesLenz Taguchi

Article

The Concept as Method: Tracingand-mapping the Problem of the

Neuro(n) in the Field of Education

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

2016, Vol. 16(2) 213223
2016 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708616634726
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Hillevi Lenz Taguchi1

Abstract
For this article, I ask how it might be possible to study the encounter between the practices that involve the concept of
the Neuro(n) and educational practices of teaching and learning. The article aims to experiment by thinking the concept
as method. This entails the doubled and entangled movement of tracing-and-mapping the concept ofin this casethe
Neuro(n). I suggest that the contemporary obsession with the Neuro(n) in the field of education emerges from the desire
to know more about the learning subject, knowledge, and the problem of how something new comes into the world.
Keywords
concept as method, Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and Guattari, the Neuron, neurosciences and education

Introduction
This article enters onto a plane of thinking on which multiple institutionalized practices, social activities, and disciplines of knowledge production encounter and traverse each
other to become productive of various neuro-ontologies
(Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). In the academy, one discipline
after the other adds the prefix Neuro- from ancient Greek
- (neuro-) as a combining form of (neuron,
sinew, tendon, cord). By adding this cord or nervelike connection between rapidly growing neuroscientific
knowledge production and their own discipline, it is given
new stamina (sinew) and muscle (tendon): neuroeconomics, neuro-marketing, neuro-architecture, neuroeducation, neuro-psychology, and so on (Rose & AbiRached, 2013; Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013).
This phenomenon can be connected to what Deleuze and
Guattari (1994) write on how concepts and practices link up
with each other, support one another, coordinate their contours, articulate their respective problems (p. 18). Even if a
word from a discipline has a completely different history than
that of the concept of, in this case, the Neuro(n), there are, as
Deleuze and Guattari write, usually bits or components that
come from other concepts, which correspond to other problems and presuppose other planes of thinking and practicing1
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). In the case of my own academic
discipline, education, one example is how newer theories
of affect revitalize older psychological theories of attachment. In conjunction with recent findings from affectiveneuroscientific research, it now becomes possible to propose
specific educational practices stressing more consistent and

intimate teacherlearner relationships as well as connecting

this to the political problem of enhancing underprivileged
kids in inner-city schools (Cozolino, 2013; Siegel, 2012).
For this article, I ask myself what is produced in the cuts,
lines, and diagrammatic contours that emerge as new
becomings of, for example, neuro-education, neurodidactics, or educational-neurosciences. As the Neuro(n) is connected to other concepts, ways of thinking, and living, it
produces an enticing and multifaceted identity that by far
exceeds its scientific function as a linguistic representation
of a cell of the nervous system. Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
refer to such linguistic representations of scientific functions as functives to separate them from philosophical concepts. Rather than being a linguistic representation of a
separate material entity, the concept has an important pedagogical quality of shaping and enacting events of life and,
thus, reality itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).
This preliminary exercise suggests that the contemporary obsession with the Neuro(n) seems to emerge from the
desire to know more about the learning subject, knowledge,
and the problem of how something new comes into the
world. This suggestion is made in a close engagement with
Claire Colebrooks (2010, 2014a, 2014b) recent theorizing
1

Stockholm University, Sweden

Corresponding Author:
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Professor of Education and Child and Youth
Studies, Co-Director of the Division of Early Childhood Education,
Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Frescati
hagvg 16B, Stockholm 10691, Sweden.
Email: hillevi.lenz-taguchi@buv.su.se

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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(2)

214
that exposes the entangled relationship between the life sciences (especially the neurosciences) and the philosophical
problem of vitalism and, thus, how to make sense of the
principles of life, the arrival of being, and how (human) life
can be maintained in the face of extinction.

The Aim and Objective and Concept

as Method in a Nutshell
How might one study the intensive events of the contemporary encounter between education and the neurosciences?
What is produced in the connections between the neurosciences and disciplines such as cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind,2 social psychology, and education? In line
with the recent ontological turn to what has been labeled
New Materialisms and New Empiricisms in the humanities
and social sciences (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Lather
& St. Pierre, 2013), this article aims to experiment by thinking the concept as method, as suggested by Claire
Colebrook (2013) and taking the Neuro(n) as its example.
Hence, the objective of this article is to rethink qualitative
inquiry and methodology inspired by Colebrooks (2008,
2010, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and Deleuze and Guattaris
(1987, 1994) work.
What, then, sets New Empirical and Deleuzio-Guattarian
research apart from the critical and poststructural epistemologies from which they can be understood to have
evolved? In a nutshell, this kind of research, including my
present take on concept as method, can be described in
terms of a doubled and entangled action or movement of
tracing-and-mapping.3 On the one hand, this involves
extracting events, problems, and concepts from the chaos of
multiple realities. By tracing-and-mapping a concept
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), we can learn something about
how it has become extracted from particular events to capture or apprehend a particular problem, as Deleuze and
Guattari (1994, p. 158) write. On the other hand, this movement also involves setting up and creating new events, possibilities, problems, and concepts for a reality to come
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). The mapping aspect of tracingand-mapping involves connecting a concept to other concepts in other territories on the map. This can be done by
performing what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call asignifying ruptures. In the performance of this doubled movement
of tracing-and-mapping, differentiations can be created that
might deterritorialize the concept and accomplish reconfigurations with the purpose of resisting normalizing practices (cf. Lenz Taguchi, 2013; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer,
2014; Martin & Kamberelis, 2013).
Thus, the doubled movement of tracing-and-mapping is
not about performing a critical genealogy or discourse analysis to come to know how the present has become discursively normalized and inscribed with references to past
events and practices. It is rather a method of affirmative

micro-political resistance, aiming to be creative of yet

unknown potentialities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deleuze
and Guattari (1994) write that we need to beware of engaging exclusively in critique and rather give it [the concept]
the forces it needs to return to life (p. 28). This is why an
active experimentation that aims to make things differ
differentiationis crucial to their micro-politics (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987). The aim to achieve transformations of
the realities of disadvantaged people or other agents has
also been a key characteristic of the 1980s and 1990s critical and feminist poststructural theories from which the
presently emerging feminist New Empirical or New
Material theorizing and research has evolved (e.g., Barad,
2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 1988; Mol, 2002).

What Is a Concept and How Do You

Make the Concept Your Method?
When Claire Colebrook (2013)4 extends an invitation to a
collective of feminist educational researchers that we
might begin to think of concepts as methods, she does so
with the hope that researchers engaged in issues of pedagogy and education might reactivate their strong disciplinary connection to philosophy. For Colebrook, philosophy
can be seen as the modest task of a pedagogy of the concept (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 12). This can be envisioned as the pedagogical process of learning from and with
the concept, by tracing its conditions of creation in ways
that can transform those conditions, and make it possible
for us to create new concepts and subsequent materialsemiotic5 differing realities.
As a pedagogy, the concept no longer constitutes an
abstract signifier of a phenomenon with an agreed upon
meaning, but is itself an act, a verb, something created from
and physically lived on a specific plane of thinking (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1994). The concept captures a material-semiotic
event in an ongoing process of doing (sense making) and
becoming (differing) in its multiplicity of inseparable variations, write Deleuze and Guattari (1994). It is that temporary arrest of comprehensionas the event is taken in for
questioning if you willwhich might reconfigure the
event, the problem, and the concept itself. This is what
makes the concept as method possible.
Let me clarify by retelling bits of the example provided
by Deleuze and Guattari (1994) in the chapter What Is a
Concept? in their book What Is Philosophy? (pp. 15-34).
Deleuze and Guattari insist that thinking begins with the
creation of concepts. Philosophers, such as Descartes, construct concepts and set up their specific plane of thinking,
which can be understood as a horizon or an abstract
machine that has diagrammatic, graphic, or pictorial features. These diagrams or pictures are assemblages of
concepts with intensive features of desiring forces that correspond to a particular problem (cf. de Freitas, 2012). They

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Lenz Taguchi

The enactment of reconfigurations is what sets Deleuze

and Guattaris philosophy and, at best, New Empirical
research apart from research preoccupied with understanding, interpreting, representing, and critiquing (Dolphijn &
van der Tuin, 2012; Lenz Taguchi, 2013; St. Pierre et al.,
2016, in this issue. Philosophy and contemporary New
Empirical research needs to be preoccupied with reconfigurations of established concepts and norms and the creation
of new possible ways of thinking and doing to produce
events that might produce social change (cf. Martin &
Kamberelis, 2013).

The Construction of the Concept of

the Neuro(n)
Figure 1. The diagrammatic image of Descartes I
Source. http://www.arasite.org/whatisphil.html.

exemplify with perhaps the most common concept of philosophy and psychology, Descartes Cogito, and the concept of Self. When Descartes constructed this concept, it
would reconfigure some of the available definitions up to
that point. He posed the problem of how a certain type of
living relation, a relation of knowing or sensing, come to
appear and have a sense of itself (Colebrook, 2014b,
p. 62). He then constructed the diagrammatic image of the
I as a composition of other component concepts in the
form of the verbs doubting, thinking, and being:
I think therefore I amMyself who doubts, I think, I
am, I am a thinking thing (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.
25). Above is a copy of the diagrammatic image Deleuze
and Guattari provide in their book. The Cogito condensed at
point I, passing through and coinciding with its intensive
components: I (doubting), I(thinking), and I (being).
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 25).
This assemblage constructs the concept of Cogito/Self as
a subjective horizon for knowledge that always starts with
the subject and which we immediately recognize from theories of psychology and phenomenology. When Kant later
critiqued Descartes, he set up his own plane of thinking on
which the Cartesian Cogito does not work without being
reconfigured with the component of time (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994). What Deleuze and Guattari themselves
question as they set up their specific plane of thinking is
whether or not it is necessary to start from the point of view
of a subjective certainty and if thought as such be the verb
of an I? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 27). The Cartesian
Cogito is, however, not only the effect of a subjective I, write
Deleuze and Guattari (1994), but also the always-renewed
event of thought (p. 24). This is an aspect of Cartesianism
that will become a part of their own reconfiguration of the
subject as, instead, a process of series of individuations
(Colebrook, 2014b; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

In the present enactment of concept as method, the

Neuro(n) is invented, fabricated, or rather created as a
philosophical (and pedagogical) concept for thinking
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 5). In this section, I will show
how the scientific term, the neuronthe functiveis
brought out of its scientific realm to be recreated as what
Deleuze and Guattari consider a concept (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994). Whereas a functive is part of a system of
the internal logic of reference, a concept constitutes an
assemblage of different desiring forces that come together
as an abstract machine. As such, it regulates and stratifies
events such as institutionalized educational practices in a
machinic fashion that will have very concrete and material
consequences for the agents involved in those realities
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
This means that concepts and functives are different in
nature. Sometimes, however, they intersect to affect one
another, each according to its line and plane of thinking,
as Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 161) emphasize. They
have their own history and can thus be dated, signed, and
baptized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 8, 17-18). The
neuron as a function was scientifically baptized by
Heinrich Waldeyer-Hartz in 1891 when he published the
scientific proposition that several nerve-cells linked
together to form a functional unit should be given the
name of the neuron (Jacobson, 1993, p. 163). As I in this
article, in close engagement with Colebrooks (2010,
2014b) theorizing, construct the philosophical concept of
the Neuro(n), it should instead be known as an act of thought
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) that links together various
intensive components and material-semiotic practices of
different social, material, and semiotic kinds on a specific
socio-historical plane. This implies that the concept, as
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, may take as its components the functives of any possible function without thereby
having the least scientific value (p. 117). Hence, the scientific functive is in a specific sense highjacked and translated to fit into complex assemblages to form relations
with other components of the philosophical concept.6

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216

Tracing-and-mapping the Concept of

the Neuro(n)

Figure 2. Source. Drawing by Santiago Ramn y Cajal, 1899.

Neurona Purkinje. One of the largest neurons found in the
human brain.7

Another material component of the concept of the

Neuro(n) is the practice and materiality of neuro-imaging.
Every so often newspapers and web-pages publish neuroimages to support mindboggling research-findings of everything from a Hate-Circuit in the brain to show how your
brain will independently cast your political vote by your simply looking at photographs of politicians (Satel & Lilienfeld,
2013, p. xiii). What Satel and Lilienfeld (2013) refer to as
contemporary neuromania and seemingly mindless neuroscience (p. xii), have been made possible thanks to new
neuro-imaging techniques. However, the very first neuroimage was hand-drawn in the late 1890s by the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramn y Cajal. Cajal combined the
materialities and techniques of photography with his microscopic studies of animal brains and eye cells to produce the
most magnificent and scholastic drawings of neurons. Cajals
line-drawing of a neuron above is here proposed as what
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call the face of the concept.
Thereby, the function of the neuron as a nerve cell with
appendages, as Waldeyer-Hartz (1891) defines it, intersects
with what can be seen as a diagrammatic image (cf. de
Freitas, 2012) of the philosophical concept of the Neuro(n) in
the drawing above. The concept is expressed as a multiplicity
of various components as add-ons, adjuncts, assistants,
aides, secretaries, extras, appendages, or extremities forming an assemblage of a multiplicity of components.
In the upcoming tracing-and-mapping exercise, I will especially focus on four of these component concepts noted
above: embodiment, plasticity, rationality, and affect.

The first chapter of Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) book A

Thousand Plateaus presents the enactment of tracing-andmapping the rhizome. The rhizome constitutes their diagrammatic image of reality, not unlike the drawing of the
neuron by Cajal above, as a complex, almost chaotic root
system with multiple entryways and exits and root threads
shooting off in unexpected directions. The root threads that
escape the necessary stable and regulating but sometimes
problematically stratifying and normalizing molar lines
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call lines of flight (pp. 4-5).
Lines of flight are possible in any stratified territory in an
interdependent and co-constitutive relationship with the
striations.
Tracing-and-mapping is not about representing reality or
unraveling an explanatory logic of what is (really) going on
in this field of production. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) think of the map as a composition of different lines
as an acentred, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system
(p. 21). The rhizome operates simultaneously by capturing
and stabilizing conqueststerritorializationbut just as
often it operates by offshoots, variation, differing and
expansion, or by enabling a deterritorializing transformation of the concept and its material-semiotic practices.
Hence, the map does not concern itself with interpretation, meaning, and defining a bodys limitations or form
(Lenz Taguchi, 2013, p. 713). It concerns itself with the
investigation of forces and intensities in the events as the
different lines connect, intersect, or traverse each other and
become productive of differing (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer,
2014).
When tracing-and-mapping the Neuro(n), we lay out and
follow the lines of the rhizome on the plane of thinking
where the neurosciences connect in multiple ways to the
field of education. We trace the intensities of various lines
of articulation that sometimes converge in what Deleuze
and Guattari call (1987) circles of convergence (p. 11)
that make up those regulating segmentary molar lines.
However, it might also be possible to identify a line of flight
that escapes the molar line to make an offshoot and establish itself somewhere else. The line of flight connects the
concept in one territory to another, whereby a differentiation takes place. The concept is thus deterritorialized. In the
chapter of the Rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
describe the practice of tracing-and-mapping in the following diagrammatic image:
Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting
of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then
you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence
establish themselves with new points located outside the limits
and in other directions. (p. 11)

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Lenz Taguchi
Therefore, what are some of the desiring lines of articulation on this particular plane of thinking, and what are the
major battles fought over (cf. Colebrook, 2010)?

A Binary Regime of Signs: The Humanness

of the MindHumanness Reduced to Brain
Matter
On this particular surface where the Neuro(n) connects to education, tracing-and-mapping will expose a battle over some
fundamental requirements for educational practices: the problem of what humanness and the brain and mind might be.
These problems must be addressed before dealing with the
problem of how thinking and thus learning might be conceived. Using Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) language in this
tracing-and-mapping exercise, it is possible to spot two major
lines of exceptionally strong production of desiring force that
seem to swirl into their respective circles of convergence a
multiplicity of successive singularities. These two circles congregate a multiplicity of singular lines of thinking into two
strong opposing molar lines that have become productive of
an almost passionate power-producing binary regime operating in the contemporary humanities and social sciences.
What we can extract from our tracing is a binary with a
humanist metaphysics at one end, celebrating the unique
humanness of the mind and the self (Dennett, 2007;
Thompson, 2010), and a humanness reduced to brain
matter on the other (Clark, 2011). The former constitutes a
human bounded brain: the human is taken as the privileged
point from which life is known. The latter constitutes a
reductive materialist ontology of relations between the firing of transmitting neurons connecting and interacting with
each other and extending outside of the embodied brain
(Clark, 2011). The intensive force in the reductive account
is constituted by a desire to more or less erase the human
subject and humanness (Colebrook, 2014a; 2014b). A
reductive materialism converges the scientific disciplines of
biology, neurology, and physics as mind, brain, and thinking reduces the Neuro(n) to sheer matter. Another less radical version is simply putting brain, body, and the world
together again (Clark in Colebrook, 2014a, p. 14). This latter idea of the embodied brain with its millions of interacting neurons that transform in relation to a world of
perceptions, material conditions, and affects, refers to a
brain of plasticity and gene-expressions (epi-genetics).
Isabelle Stengers (2007) shows how these major lines of
articulation in fact constitute a very old Western conflict that
features dual idealist temptations: on one hand, a reductive
material eliminativism and, on the other hand, a reductive
humanist metaphysics. Cleverly, Stengers illustrates the
temptations of these dual desiring forces and connects them
to the problem of the construction of knowledge and learning
(epistemology) by telling the story about how the philosopher Denis Diderot asks the mathematician DAlembert a

question: Do you see this egg? With this you can topple
[overthrow] every theological theory, every church or temple
in the world. (p. 4). With this comment, he refers to both
religious and scientific convictions. He does not ask
DAlembert to observe the egg and turn that observation into
a mathematical formula, which would be an example of classic rational thinking. Instead, Diderot asks him to see the egg
following another line, aiming to a point in another direction,
outside the limits of mathematical logic. Stengers (2007)
notes that Diderot asks DAlembert to accept seeing the egg
using other sensesaffect and emotionand to imagine the
developing embryo and the small chicken that breaks the
shell and comes out. The storys epistemological problem
concerns whether learning is an effect of rational human
thinking or an effect of the human subjects affective senses.
As Stengers notes, choosing to think of learning as affective
and subjective perception risks getting stuck at the other side
of the binary. The point here is to not accept the distinction
that grounds the binary.
What have we put on the map so far? The Neuro(n) has
been traced and mapped to a problem of humanness and
whether or not the human brain, mind, and Cogito/Self in
contemporary neuro-philosophy is understood in terms of a
human and brain-centered ontology or a reductive material
eliminativism ontology of sheer brain matter. Central components of the Neuro(n) that can be exposed in this exercise are
the embodied mind/brain and plasticity in its interaction with
the environment. When Stengers story about Diderots egg is
added on and put on the map, it connects this ontological
binary to the problem of epistemology and the production of
knowledge and learning. The components of rationality and
affect as components of the Neuro(n) are hereby provided.
When we thus connect Stengers story about Diderots egg
to the ontological binary sketched above, the epistemological
binary of rationality (naturalism/positivism) vs. subjectivism
(phenomenology/constructivism) can be put on the map in
the territory that celebrates the unique humanness of the mind
and self rather than in the territory of reductive eliminativism
and a brain of sheer matter. We add to that territory the epistemological problem of how knowing for a human subject is
achieved as an effect of either rational thought and/or affect
as in emotional engagement (Dennett, 2007). However, as we
shall see below, something else will happen as we perform
the move of an asignifying rupture on the map when we make
another reading of Stengers story. Thereby, we follow
another line and desiring force that escapes both these segmentary molar lines and binary regimes.

Following the Lines of the Components

Embodiment, Plasticity, Rationality, and Affect
In the above tracing-and-mapping, the major components
of the concept of the Neuro(n) are embodiment, plasticity,
rationality, and affect. If we understand concepts as

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218
intensities and centers of vibrations (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994, p. 23), these four components will be seen
to resonate and interact closely with each other. In what follows, I will trace and map the lines of these components in
a singular text featuring what is called neurodidactics to
exemplify the collective enunciations and lines of articulations that form their respective circles of convergence on
the map.
When the Brain Gets to Decide (Olivestam & Ott, 2010)
is the title of this book that uses the prefix of the Neuro- to
outline how educational practices can be transformed into
better practice when embracing knowledge from the neurosciencesto enact neurodidactics. When reading this
book, it is possible to see what Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
mean when they write that the concept speaks the event
and is a function of a problem (p. 18); that is, when it does
the job of a particular problem. In this book, the concept of
the Neuro(n) zigzags rhizomatically on a plane of already
established educational theories to converge with them and
form a new stratified territory and new evidence-based
regimes of practice. When the neurosciences encounter
these educational theories and practices, already stratified
practices transform but are to be immediately re-stratified
into new normalizing didactics. This is the process that
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as reterritorialization.
Following the intensive force of desiring production in
this book (Olivestam & Ott, 2010), we learn that it is with
knowledge derived from the neurosciences that we have
finally attained the evidence of behaviorisms ideas about
the importance of rewards to achieve optimal learning in the
form of an embodied learning. However, because of the
brains plasticity, this evidence should be combined with
established knowledge from sociocultural theory about the
importance of educational artifacts and the environment in
learning. Olivestam and Ott (2010) note that sociocultural
theory is similarly affected by findings from neuroscientific
research. Cognitive theories have also been proven correct
by evidence-based neuroscience. The authors show how the
brain in a specific mode of rationality organizes and creates
patterns during the learning process (Olivestam & Ott,
2010). Finally, progressivisms idea about learning by
doing, whereby both rational reasons as to why something
is to be learned as well as the significance of emotional/
affective engagement in learning are components equally
supported by neuroscientific findings. The brain is embodied and the body is embedded, as these advocates of
Neurodidactics conclude (Edelman, 2006, in Olivestam &
Ott, 2010, p. 77). The validity of existing developmental
and educational theories are, in this way, not only confirmed
but also updated and given new stamina in their convergence with neuroscientific knowledge.
The theories of neurodidactics are clearly both materialist and reductive in character, but ontologically, they are
still explicitly human-centered (anthropocentric). Hence,

the component of plasticity refers only to the internal plasticity of the brain in this line of convergence. This means
that plasticity here is not understood in accordance with the
more radical materialist and reductive line of articulation
leaning towards the other side of the ontological binary
sketched above; that is, in terms of a brain extended outside
the human skull (e.g., Clark, 2011; Cutler & MacKenzie,
2011; Thompson, 2010). Instead, Olivestam and Ott (2010)
explicitly write that their neurodidactical approach to learning is specified as an intra-cranial field that extends the
brain only as to be affected by social relations to other students, the teacher and the learning-content (p. 111). In the
tracing-and-mapping of the desiring forces in the theory
and practices of neurodidactics, neuroscientific knowledge
can be understood as high jacked to converge with already
established educational practices to form new molar lines
and segmentary practices for teachers to abide by to be
successful.

The Problem of Vitalism and What Constitutes

Humanness and the Arrival of Being
As already stated in the introduction, the tracing-andmapping enacted for this article extracts a more comprehensive problem from which the Neuro(n) on this plane of
thinking can be said to emerge. This problem concerns
vitalism as the imperative of grounding, defending or
deriving principles and systems from life as it really is, to
use Colebrooks (2014b, p. 100) definition. For this article,
I will limit my focus to that aspect of vitalism that concerns
the becoming of the student as learner.
Vitalism can, according to Colebrook (2014b), be percived either as an active vitalism which assumes that life
refers to intentionally, acting, and organized bodies with
limits and identities or a passive force of vitalism as a differentiating field of powers without a preconceived image of
the living body.8 This passive power expresses itself in various forms of, for instance, genders, so that every gender is
an individual actualization of a genetic and sociocultural
potential for sexual differentiation of a singular event of
individuation (Colebrook, 2014b). Colebrook writes that a
body, as an effect of a passive vitalism, is formed through
the sensual forces it encounters. In other words; there
would be qualities or powers to be sensed from which something like a body that senses would emerge, a body being
formed from the sensual forces it encounters (Colebrook,
2014b, p. 101). The active vitalist force is constituted by a
synthesizing power of a human subject or a constructed system or idea that acts from a point of view or knowledge of
the world. Contrary to this, the passive vitalist force is but
does not (intentionally) act. Rather, it becomes productive in
its connections with other forces from a state of detachment
in relation to action (Colebrook, 2014b). Colebrook (2014b)
concludes: Whereas active vitalism would seek to return

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Lenz Taguchi
political processes to the will, intent and agency of individuals or subjects, passive vitalism is micropolitical: it attends
to those differences that we neither intend, nor perceive, nor
command (p. 106). With this in mind, let us return to the
tracing of the components of the neurodidactics example
above and trace its vitalizing forces.

The Student as a Becoming Man

Versus the Student as an Extended
Mind and Material Organism
Neurodidactics as an intra-cranial field perceives vitalism
and thus the arrival of being of the student as a becoming
(Hu)Man. This student must mature to learn how to think
and represent the world in interaction with his interacting
genetic and neurological properties. Until fully developed,
this is an incomplete and lacking human being. If we reconnect to Stengers (2007) binary of a reductive humanisms
metaphysics and a reductive material eliminativism, the
production of the student as a becoming (Hu)Man is to be
found in the territory on the map of an anthropocentric
humanism. It thus constitutes an active vitalism, because
the problem of how something new comes to the world
can only be answered via the (Hu)Man as the grounding
substance of knowing to whom the world is given
(Colebrook, 2014a, p. 17). That is, the world is there for a
human subject, and knowledge can only be produced by a
human subject (Lenz Taguchi, 2013).
Let us now instead put ourselves on the map in the territory of the other pole of the binarya material eliminativismto explore it a bit more. In this territory, it is possible to
trace the components of embodiment, plasticity, and affect to
an anti-cognitivist turn where the mind or the self is taken
to emerge from life rather than being the privileged (human)
point of view from which life is known (Colebrook, 2014b).
A line of articulation of a more radical dynamism of plasticity
suggest that we exist as the thinking beings we are, only
thanks to a baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural and
technological scaffolding and human thought and reason is
born out of looping interactions with material brains, material
bodies and complex cultural and technological environments (Clark as cited in Colebrook, 2011, p. 22). This is
what is sometimes referred to as anti-Cartesianism and a
brain of bodily interaction (Cutler & MacKenzie, 2011).
In post-Cartesian neuro-philosophy, the rejection of mind
eventually refers to a turning back to the body and the stuff
the world and we all are made of" (Colebrook, 2014a, p. 14).
It also refers to a world and a richer expansive life from
which [we] have become detached (ibid.). Thus, the components of the Neuro(n) converge in the sign of the world itself
as grounding, rather than man as the grounding substance
(Colebrook, 2014a). The world as grounding can, as
Colebrook (2014b) notes, be understood as part of a contemporary influential line of thinking in terms of an organic form

of vitalism (pp. 34, 156) that aims to take us back to the

meaning of life as part of one ecology and system of interconnected life from which we somehow forgot we emerged
(Colebrook, 2010, 2014a). Colebrook will, however, and perhaps shockingly, refer to this as ultra-humanism and even
hyper-Cartesianism. This is because Man, she says, has
always seen himself as an environmental being who affirms
himself through a material world as a sign of his proper and
profound otherness in being more than himself in this connection to the material world (Colebrook, 2014b). Moreover,
the grounding of life (despite the rejection of mind) can only
be discerned through human reflection. By the end of the day,
the world and the brain as matter is still determined for and by
a Hu(Man) to feel, live/perform, or linguistically determine
(Colebrook, 2014b).
How, then, does such ultra-humanism converge with
educational practices and to what kind of vitalism does this
ultra-humanism refer? With reference to findings from the
neurosciences, the problem of how something new comes
to the world is addressed from the point of view of the
emotional brain (Damasio, 2000) and the notion, In the
beginning is affect: an emotion that may or may not come to
consciousness. The self is the feeling of this event, which
is also to say that the self does not end with the borders of
the biological body" (Colebrook, 2014b, p. 12). In terms of
education, teaching practices, then, should be adapted to
accommodate and regulate students emotions.
The social-emotional force of learning is materialized as,
for instance, the widely promoted idea of social-emotional
learning (SEL) practices (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki,
Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Gormley, Phillips, Newmark,
Welti, & Adelstein, 2011). Such practices focus on the social
environment to understand how the brain is shaped by social
relations and how we, as a consequence, can actively shape
it: human connections shape neural connections as interpersonal neurobiology claims (Siegel, 2012, p. 3). These
practices engage schoolchildren in mindfulness meditation
and enhance childrens self-management of emotions (Yoder,
2014). In the context of the contemporary field of Danish
school policy reforms, Dorthe Stauns and Malou Juelskjr
have identified what they call a neuro-bio-affective management approach (Stauns, 2011). It is also materialized in new
forms of school architecture (Juelskjr, 2014) and new ways
of organizing teaching and learning in relation to the students bodily and neurological make-up (Stauns, 2011).
In terms of vitalism, we can see how an intentional synthesizing power of a human subject or a constructed system or idea
refers these practices to an active vitalism.

Putting to Work an Asignifying

Rupture
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain that to get hold of the
creative potentials that diverge from the segmentary molar

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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(2)

220
lines, the tracing-and-mapping exercise needs to include
enactments of asignifying ruptures. This means engaging in
a practice of estrangement by connecting to something different or to something omitted or silenced to get away from
taken-for-granted and common sense significations
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Let us reread Stengers (2007) example with Diderot
asking DAlembert to see the egg. When Diderot asks
DAlembert to activate a mode of estrangement and follow
what we call a line of flight, he asks that he give the egg the
power to challenge his well-defined categories, writes
Stengers (2007, p. 4). For Stengers, this constitutes a rupture in that it forces DAlembert to think outside or beyond
any already known categories (or temples) of thinking such
as rational scientific thinking or subjective affective relational sensing and knowing. Rather, this is a materialism
that follows a line of thinking that forces us to activate an
ethics of potentialities or political struggle by giving, in this
case, the materiality of the egg itself the power to challenge
us in unforeseen ways. With reference to Haraway (2008),
Stengers (Haraway, 2008) writes, accept seeing the egg and
accept grappling with the messiness of the world (p. 4).
Therefore, following the line of flight from this rupture,
what might that messiness be in relation to educational
practices and how can it be understood to emerge from the
problem of vitalism?

The Student as Becoming-Child

Thinking differently about being/becoming and difference
in line with Deleuze and Guattaris, Colebrooks, and New
Materialist and Empiricist thinking (Dolphijn & van der
Tuin, 2012; Lenz Taguchi, 2013) can help us think the student not in terms of a becoming (Hu)Man or as an
extended mind and material organism, but instead as a
multiplicity with a diverging character always in transformation and differentiation and becoming different in itself:
a becoming-child (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 232309). In Deleuze and Guattaris writing, the child, the feminine, and the animal constitute an instability in relation to
the stable, universal (male) subject. It is the very process of
thinking and becoming different from the norm (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987). Becoming-woman, becoming-child, or
becoming-animal is, thus, understood as a counter-active
thinking that has the power to transform societal and material realities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 109).
Let us return to the ontological problem of vitalism and
how the new comes to the world. In line with the idea of
the becoming-child, Colebrook suggests a queer vitalism
that constitutes an affirmative possibility for thinking the
world simultaneously without the taken-for-granted idea of
the (Hu)Man and in terms of new possible becomings with
and as an effect of the co-construction with yet unknown
potentialities (Colebrook, 2014, pp. 100-125). As Colebrook

repeatedly notes, a post-Cartesian move beyond man as an

isolated thinker must not simply constitute a move back
towards the body and the stuff we are already made of,
but can instead constitute a move forward to the inorganic
potentialities that exist now only in confused and all too
human composites (Deleuze in Colebrook, 2011, p. 26). A
queer vitalist position comprises a state which is not in lack
in relation to a higher truth or essence of an all-encompassing nature. Rather, this is a state where the student is always
in a state of differing, becoming different in herself or himself, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refers to as an
individuating process (that does not just concern human
beings). Colebrook concludes that we are nothing more
than potentiality (Colebrook, 2014a, p. 12) or as she writes,
No body fully knows its own powers, and can only become
joyful (or live) not by attaining the ideal it has of itselfbeing
who I really ambut by maximizing those potentialities in
ourselves which exceed the majoritarian, or which are not yet
actualized. (Colebrook, 2014b, p. 118)

As part of the doubled movement of thinking the concept as method, let us set up a new event on this plane of
thinking where the Neuro(n) connects to educational practices to reconfigure that plane and the problem of vitalism.
This example concerns the event of an interdisciplinary
research event on neuroplasticity showing evidence of differences in selective attention in children from different
socioeconomic backgrounds (Neville etal., 2013; Stevens,
Lauinger, & Neville, 2009). This research, a rare example
of a classical positivist experiment based on a hypothesis
with very strong social justice implications, makes this
event an enactment of an asignifying rupture in the present
tracing-and-mapping of the Neuron. It is by doing research
in this particular paradigm, not to primarily know more
about the brain, but with political hopes of an enactment of
the becoming-child that connects this research event to
the omitted, left out, and silenced (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 11); that is, children in North American underprivileged housing and schooling areas.
In this neuroscientific intervention study, preschool childrens auditory attention skills were measured with EEG
(electroencephalography) before and after a period of 8
weeks of social-emotional training and changes in their
school and home environments. Significant change was
seen as a result of changes in the brain due to its plasticity.
Changes were more significant in the children from the
groups with the lowest social economic status (Neville
etal., 2013; Stevens etal., 2009).
In this research, neuroscientists and educators collaborate
in unique and rare experiments performed in a micro-political
alliance with the concept of the Neuron to show the process
of differing in its very enactment. They do this byif only
provisionallyproviding children from underprivileged

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221

Lenz Taguchi
families social-emotionally safer educational and home
environments based on the hypothesis that this will increase
their attention abilities and help them learn better (Neville
etal., 2013; Stevens etal., 2009). As this research event is put
on the map and temporarily captured, we can apprehend and
make sense of these observed differences in the enactment of
a scientific experiment in terms of a performativity of differing. In these experimentations and enactments of new kinds
of learning-brains-environments, children from underprivileged communities increase their potentialities and exceed
what might otherwise be produced in their everyday and
taken-for-granted (unsafe) stratified spaces of educational
practices (Stevens etal., 2009; cf. Colebrook, 2014b).
Moreover, these educational and scientific experiments can,
if effectuated more widely, expose the becoming-child that
becomes different in herself or himself and can thus help
fight poverty and failing democracy as effects of educational
practices. Hence, a queer vitalism, as I understand Colebrook
(2014b, 2010), is neither completely passive nor completely
active. Rather, it transgresses such a binary thinking and
relies on a complex interdependence between active and passive vitalist forces.

Summing Up
Inspired by Colebrooks invitation to begin to think the
concept as method, I have tried to perform the doubled
movement of a tracing-and-mapping exercise of this particular field of desiring production where the neurosciences
connect to the philosophy of mind and educational practices. In this process, I have constructed the concept of the
Neuro(n) and extracted the problem of vitalism from which
this concept has emerged on this particular map that was
set up for this preliminary exercise. Moreover, I have performed an asignifying rupture on this map that has made it
possible for me to set up a new event, which has enabled me
to understand humanness and the learning student in a different way. In this new event, neuroscientific experiments
(Neville etal., 2013; Stevens etal., 2009) have been connected to the problem of vitalism in terms of a queer vitalism of a differential power that makes it possible for us to
think about childrens learning bodies as never striving
toward or taking on a complete or definite form or wholeness, but always being in a creative process of individuation
that might exceed any norm, normality, or majoritarian
form of existence (Colebrook, 2014b). It is my conviction
that this counter-active thinking about the learning subject
can open up and transform educational realities in decisive
ways.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. From translators preface of A Thousand Plateaus (1987),
The word plane designates both a plane in the geometrical
sense and a plan (p. xvii). The authors use it primarily in
the first sense. Where both meanings seem to be present (as
in discussions of the plan dorganisatori), plan(e) has been
used in the translation.
2. The philosophy of mind has, since Descartes, dealt with the
core question about the relationship between mind, brain, and
body and between the mental and the physical. This question
extends into contemporary explorations of artificial intelligence and trying to build a computer that might function as
the human brain. See Chalmers (2002).
3. Although the movements of tracing-and-mapping are dealt
with separately in Deleuze and Guattaris writing on rhizomatics and cartography strategies in A Thousand Plateaus,
I have chosen to construct the simplified, joint expression of
tracing-and-mapping to point to the simultaneity and avoid a
false impression of an antagonistic relationship between the
two. It is due to our tendency to get stuck in the mere critical
aspect of tracing that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explicitly
tell us, Make a map, not a tracing, as they outline the fifth
and sixth principles of rhizomatics: cartography (mapping)
and decalcomania (tracing; p. 12).
4. The expression of The Concept as Method was suggested by
Claire Colebrook (2013) at an invited conference-symposium
in Stockholm, Sweden in June 2013.
5. I am here using Haraways (1988) concept of the materialsemiotic because I think this expression best captures
the idea of that meaning, and matter, material, social, and
semiotic forces are always already entangled and co-constitutive of each other, central to New Materialisms and New
Empiricisms theorizing.
6. This is exactly what Karen Barad (2007) does with concepts
from physics. They are no longer concepts of physics in her
cultural studies and feminist philosophy/theorizing.
7. This image (or other media file) is in the public domain
because its copyright has expired. This applies to Australia,
the European Union, and those countries with a copyright
term of life of the author plus 70 years. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Purkinje_cell_by_Cajal.png?uselang=s.
8. Vitalism here relies on Colebrooks (2014b) definition as the
imperative of grounding, defending or deriving principles
and systems form life as it really is, (p. 100) also beyond
humans, which, writes Colebrook, is why also many posthuman and anti-biopolitical models can be vitalist. Vitalism can,
according to Colebrook, be divided in either an active vitalism,
which assumes that life refers to acting and organized bodies.
Poststructural and posthumanist accounts of vitalism can be
active because they refer to either a language system that constitutes bodies in particular ways according to, for instance, male
and female norms, or, in some posthuman accounts, the human
body is seen as part of a systemic organic whole. Referring to
a system or body, they remain at the level of the actual and of

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222
active human agents (Colebrook, 2014b, p. 101). Colebrook
writes on the Deleuzian idea of a passive vitalism, which refers
to life as virtual and thus a power without the image of the living body. Life as a differentiating field of powers, expresses
itself in various forms of, for instance, genders, so that every
gender is an individual actualization of a genetic and social/
cultural potential for sexual differentiation (Colebrook, 2014b).
However, as in all of Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, the
binaries they create are created to show their co-constitutive
nature and the co-dependence between them.

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Author Biography
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, PhD, (2001) Professor of Education and
Child and Youth Studies and co-director of the division of Early
Childhood Education, Department of Child and Youth Studies,
Stockholm University, Sweden.

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