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Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education

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D
Deleuze and Guattari: Politics
and Education
Matthew Carlin
CIESAS Sureste (Centro de Investigaciones y
Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social),
Chiapas, Mexico
Synonyms
Capture; Control; Deleuze and Guattari; Educa-
tion; Neoliberalism; Politics; The state; The war
machine
Introduction
The collaboration between French academic phi-
losopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst/activ-
ist Felix Guattari resulted in the production of a
wealth of material beginning in the 1970s and
lasting until the early 1990s. Although their col-
laboration produced a synergy that would result in
the proliferation of a range of powerful concepts
that continue to resonate with architects, painters,
writers, philosophers, social scientists, activists,
and psychoanalysts, and educators, among others,
their initial meeting and subsequent collaboration
was the result of fortuitous circumstances in
France during the late 1960s. It was the kind of
political singularity that marked 1968 in Paris,
France, where diverse sectors of society began to
# Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016
M.A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_372-2
collaborate and work together in previously
unforeseen ways that provided the opening in
which Deleuzes academic and Guattaris clini-
cal/political paths were rst to cross. Furthermore,
it was the events of 1968 political in Paris, France,
that served as the fuel for their rst theoretical
collaboration resulting in the publication of Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983)
a book that is, more than anything else, a work of
political philosophy. Together, with Anti-
Oedipus, they would write four books in total
including Kafka: A Minor Literature (1986), A
Thousand Plateaus: Volume II of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1987), and What is Philosophy
(1994). Although these books deal with a number
of different topics, what unies them as a collab-
orative project while also setting them apart from
Deleuzes previous philosophical works is their
overt political intentions.
Although the subject of education is rarely
directly discussed in any of their work, there is a
vast untapped potential to utilize the work of
Deleuze and Guattari to help politicize the subject
of education for teachers, students, and educa-
tional theorists and researchers in new ways
(Carlin and Wallin 2014). To speak of education
in the work of Deleuze and Guattari is necessarily
to consider it within the context of the political
spirit that brought them together. Consequently, a
politics of education conceived alongside the
work of Deleuze and Guattari emerges out of a
consideration of pedagogy within the prevailing
political themes found throughout their
2 Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education
collaborations: the concepts of capture and con-
trol that describe how contemporary forms of
exploitation operate within the context of neolib-
eral capitalism and a corresponding conceptual
invention in the form of the war machine that
they mobilize against such exploitation.
Capture and Control
For Deleuze and Guattari, it is act of capture that
composes the primary function of State societies
and the corresponding concept of control that
describes how the expanded presence of the
State makes its way into the interior of the socius
to work in the service of new forms of capitalist
accumulation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the State
operates by way of the dual workings of the ruler
who binds, serving as the source through which
the multitude become adherent to the One, and the
jurist who codies through the imposition of
treaties, laws, and contracts (1987, p. 351). This
dual aspect of the State is brought to bear on labor
power and the conditions for the creation of labor
power in order to produce surplus value. The
State, in this case, becomes the sole and tran-
scendent public-property owner, the master of
surplus or stock, the organiser of large-scale
works (surplus labour), the source of public func-
tions and bureaucracy (1987, p. 428).
In its neoliberal form, capitalism has become
informalized, making its way into all aspects of
everyday life and disengaging itself from its pre-
vious reliance on governmental institutions to
orchestrate the accumulation of surplus value.
What this indicates for Deleuze and Guattari is
that the State is no longer solely oriented toward
capturing those territories existing externally to
the socius in the form of what Marx famously
called primitive accumulation but it is now
oriented toward the capture of internal territories
(where primitive accumulation is also now
directed inward). As capital has become social
capital, the extraction of surplus value no longer
pertains to the work place, but to the entire interior
of the socius, including the capture of affects,
desires, and emotional energies. In other words,
instead of conceiving of these changes as an
indication that the State has become superuous,
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the new expan-
sive properties of capitalist accumulation simply
make the State indistinguishable from society. In
the face of the construction of new pathways to
extract prot from previously unforeseen internal
territories, the State has not been abolished, but
merely internalized.
As the State has been internalized in contem-
porary capitalism, and forms of potential accumu-
lation have expanded, social control for Deleuze
and Guattari has taken on new importance. As a
result both schooling and education have also
assumed new roles. No longer does the institution
of schooling serve as the specic sites from which
one goes to complete the necessary training to be a
productive citizen, but an institution that has
completely adopted the corporate model. Under
these circumstances, students are no longer con-
ned to fulll their necessary training, but set
free to actively and continuously participate in
consumption, the production of surplus value, and
never ending forms of training and education nec-
essary for both. Put differently, a person does not
go through life being molded in different institu-
tional arenas at different times of their life. They
are no longer solely expected to be in school from
ages 5 to 22, but now must be a part of constant
modulation and, in the case of schooling, in edu-
cation mode at all times. Education ceases to exist
as a specic and separate institution where one
goes and nally nishes to move onto other dis-
ciplinary spheres. Instead, educational training
begins to meld into the home and
workplace all places that are conceived as poten-
tial sites for the extraction of surplus value. This
corporate model of education demands a subject
that is always already in a process of seeking out
new tastes, sensibilities, and images (Carlin and
Wallin, p. xxii).
Consider one of the dominant mantras found in
educational rhetoric today, that of life-long learn-
ing. This mantra not only saturates educational
institutions, but serves a crucial role in opening up
the possibility for the advancement of continuing
education. Such education is oriented toward the
creation of exible entrepreneurs who are not only
prepared to move from one job to the next, but
Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education
also to participate in the kinds of never-ending
training necessary to effectively seek out new
means and pathways to extract prot from the
internal territories now being opened up through
the State/society/capital nexus and the full adop-
tion of the corporate model into every sphere of
life (Carlin and Wallin 2014). In accordance with
advancement of continual education and lifelong
learning, increasing forms of testing are utilized to
create statistical and representative formulations
of students as a way to measure their current and
potential to become such entrepreneurs. Within
this kind of conception of schooling, students are
also being prepared to participate in educational
training for the rest of their lives where their
success as students becomes increasingly depen-
dent upon the maintenance of their own educa-
tional incompleteness. To be a completed subject
in education where one would formally nish
schooling and education would stand in direct
confrontation with the neoliberal requisite of life-
long training to ensure that students are a contin-
ual source and generator of surplus value for their
entire lives.
The internalization of the State not only affects
the contemporary model and conceptualization of
schooling but also the way that students think. It is
what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as
State thought that describes an authoritarian,
arboreal model of thinking tied to rationality and
foundationalism that serves to tether all thought
expression to previous categories and concepts.
Such thought does not act to defend the State, but
. . .is already in conformity with a model that it
borrows from the State apparatus, and which
denes for it goals and paths, conduits, channels,
organs, an entire organon (1987, p. 374). In other
words, State thought is the acceptable form of
thought that is constituent of the kind of transcen-
dent, binary forms of thought that eliminate mul-
tiplicity and difference in favor of the One.
Opposed to the authoritarianism of State thought,
Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic thought
that eschews arboreal essences and growth in
favor of the wildness and unpredictability of the
root system of grass.
This neoliberal context requires a kind of polit-
ical intervention that is up to the task of trying to
3
escape the impasses of the regulation, clich, and
predetermination of how one can and should be
educated, as well as how one can think. For
Deleuze and Guattari, what needs to be done is
the creation of new tools both conceptual and
otherwise that might allow us to extricate a
genuine form of education, schooling, and
thought from the State of education today.
The War Machine
One of the key concepts that they mobilized in
their political philosophy against such exploita-
tion was that of the war machine an idea
indebted to the work of French anthropologist
and anarchist Pierre Clastres who spent years
working with the Guayaki, Guarani, and Yano-
mami tribes in Paraguay, Venezuela, and Brazil in
the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of his ethno-
graphic work, Clastres famously proclaimed that
primitive societies are essentially societies
without a State (1987; 2010). This was not the
result of situating these tribes on the bottom rung
of some teleological rendering of world history.
By contrast, Clastres recognized that primitive
peoples had created the kind of sociocultural
mechanisms necessary in order to avoid the emer-
gence and imposition of the State.
When the State is perfected, power resides in
the hands of the few, society is organized hierar-
chically, the legitimate use of violence is
monopolized, and those with power have the abil-
ity to forcibly extract prot/riches from the rest of
the populace. Such perfection culminates in the
emergence of the despot. While this ideal State
has been enacted to varying degrees of success,
despotism has served as the horizon of all that
the State desires to be. Those who have managed
to avoid such Ur-aspects of stateliness did so not
as a result of an accident, luck, or an
undeveloped form of socioeconomic organiza-
tion that predated the advent of capitalism and the
formation of the nation State but rather through a
form of sociocultural organization intentionally
designed to prohibit, or limit the possibility of,
the formation of the State. Why have primitive
peoples organized themselves around deterring
4 Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education
the formation of the State? It is precisely because
they are well aware of the consequences of its
emergence.
For Clastres, the way that primitive societies
avoid the State and the kind of capture and control
imminent to Stateliness is through the enactment
of war sometimes real and sometimes symbolic
in nature. This may seem counterintuitive. How-
ever, for Clastres war stands against sovereignty
and the associated consolidation of wealth and
power in the way that it acts as a form of rupture
and ight from such capture. It is not as if prim-
itive societies do not have leaders. Only that war
enacted by warriors is on the side of the socius in
order that leaders, while granted great respect and
prestige, lack any ability to consolidate power in
the hands of the few. Specically, it was the
mechanism of war that served this function, ensur-
ing both the dispersal and segmentarity of necessarily a reference to movement but a refer-
groups so that neither the consolidation of power
in the hands of the few nor the reication of
institutional life was possible (1987, p. 357).
For Deleuze and Guattari, Clastres work and
inherent critique of the teleological advancement
of the world that culminates in the formation of
the State and its associated institutions allowed
them to consider the concept of war as a source
from which to avoid capture. Similarly, it was
through the work of Clastres that Deleuze and
Guattari advanced the argument that the State is
not a recent invention nor a product of a particular
form of economic development as many Marxists
have advocated, but rather a social formation that
has always been in existence. Like Clastres,
Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the war
machine is not a reference to an armed and mili-
tarized group that engages in acts of violence. In
other words, the primary object of the war
machine is never war but another kind of violence
that allows for escape, or what Deleuze and
Guattari refer to as lines of ight from the
kinds of capture and control that dene the States
inuence over the social eld. Only when the
State appropriates the war machine does it come
to exist as a military institution incorporated into
the administrative and bureaucratic spatiotempo-
ral formation that pertains to the State. Set against
such control over the social eld, the war machine
for Deleuze and Guattari is that which mutates and
denes all forms of creativity. Such mutations can
be found individually or through group forma-
tions and can refer to either material practices or
acts of thought: to art, education, ecology, econ-
omy, philosophy, or politics. It is a concept that
refers to variable relations to war itself, innumer-
able creative potentialities, and as such to multiple
meanings (1987, p. 422).
Deleuze and Guattari develop this concept
through a reference to spatiality and movement.
In terms of space, it is the smooth space of the war
machine that enables lines of ight from the
grooved, predetermined, striated space of the
State that dictates how one is to live a life, think,
and be educated. In terms of movement, the war
machine is always intimately connected to what
they call the nomad. However, the nomad is not
ence to escape from the sedentarism engendered
by striated space that allows for the formation of
the State in all of its variants. Ultimately, for
Deleuze and Guattari, the war machine is irre-
ducible to the State apparatus. . .outside its sover-
eignty and prior to its law: it comes from
elsewhere (1987, p. 352) and as such the
nomad is always, in movement or in stillness,
that which is able to remain external to the appa-
ratus of the State.
An Education of the Outside
As always external to the State, the war machine
stands in opposition to the coded plane that func-
tions alongside the State/society/capital nexus. To
participate in a war machine is to participate in an
uncoded radical form of difference that evades the
establishment of any kind of stable identities. The
State can appear in an unlimited number of ways
within the context of schools including hierarchi-
cal centralized authority inherent in administra-
tive, teacher, student, and parent/teacher group
formation, as well as the kinds of transcendent,
identitarian, and representative forms of thought
that constitute legitimate knowledge throughout
all levels of schooling. However, the war machine
can similarly appear in unlimited social
Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education
formations, but is always oriented toward
undermining and/or escaping from the bureau-
cratic, administrative, and spatiotemporal forma-
tions of control that dominate any level of
education where the State has become internal-
ized. The war machine is the absolute outside to
the State. For Deleuze and Guattari, (T)he States
pretension to be a world order, and to root man.
The war machines relation to an outside is not
another model; it is an assemblage that makes
thought itself nomadic (1987, p. 24).
As a result, to enact the war machine in educa-
tion is to subvert the consolidation of power in any
of its forms while creating the eventual (sociocul-
tural, organizational, and political) mechanisms
that will inhibit its appearance again. To create
an education of the outside is to extract a genuine
form of education, schooling, and thought from
the State of things as it pertains to the corporate
model in operation today. An education inspired
by the war machine would coincide with a kind of
combat that would help us to evade the known
through problematizing our habitual comportment
and thought as it relates to how one is to teach,
how one is to learn, and how an education is to
proceed. Education inspired by the war machine
would instigate a kind of unlearning that would
work to disrupt common sense and constituted
knowledge, as well as the methods currently in
operation in schools today that determine the
ways that bodies are organized and groups are
formed.
Conclusion
For Deleuze and Guattari, concepts such as the
war machine should be conceived of as tools. In
this sense, the conceptual tool should not be mobi-
lized in order to label our experiences in education
so that multiplicity of difference is obscured
through the application of the concept, but to
create new connectivities that illuminate differ-
ence and complexity in previously unforeseen
ways. In other words, we should not consider the
use of a concept such as the war machine in terms
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5
of the way that we can bring it to bear on peda-
gogical or educational environments. To utilize
concepts as Deleuze and Guattari intended is not
to use concepts in a representative manner and
here we should think of the term representative in
its full political signicance where the multitude is
represented by and subsequently falls under the
control of the One. We can utilize terms such as
the war machine and others found in the work of
Deleuze and Guattari as ways to create new con-
nections within and between elds, ideas, and
situations, so that we might open up the potential
to extract a genuine form of education from the
preestablished realm of pedagogy in operation
today. In the politics of education inherent in the
work of Deleuze and Guattari, we are reminded
that education bound to prior categories of expres-
sion is antithetical to the promise of pedagogy
itself. In other words, by containing pedagogical
experiences within a series of predetermined con-
ceptual formations by always conning peda-
gogy to what has already been determined the
possibility of learning itself becomes foreclosed.
As such, an engagement with Deleuze and
Guattari would generate a politics of education
oriented toward the disruption of the State in all
of its forms.
References
Carlin, M., & Wallin, J. (2014). Deleuze and Guattari,
politics and education: For a people yet to
come. London/New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Clastres, P. (1987). Society against the state. New York:
Zone Books.
Clastres, P. (2010). Archeology of violence. New York:
Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capital-
ism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a minor
literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus:
Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy.
New York: Columbia University Press.