Turino, Thomas_Signs, Imagination, And Experience. a Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music
a Semiotic Theory of Learning
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Towards a semiotic theory of learning:Deleuze’s philosophy and educationalexperience
INNA SEMETSKY
Abstract
The paper examines Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor of rhizome as a new imageof thought. Multiple connections enabled by multidirectional rhizomatic
lines contribute to the creation of concepts. Deleuze’s potential contribution
to educational theory is specified in terms of the pedagogy of the concept.
The creation of concepts is a function of experience and is inseparable
from a¤ects and percepts. Deleuze’s method of a-signifying semiotics is pos-
ited as indispensable for interpreting and evaluating experience and creat-
ing new meanings. The paper contends that Deleuze’s semiotic approach
may be considered as representing a significant contribution to learning
theories, specifically in terms of becoming as learning from experience.
The paper concludes by suggesting that creativity and novelty become the
necessary outcomes of the learning process and as such may be considered
as educational objectives embedded in the transformational pragmatics of
sign-process.
Keywords: apprenticeship; a-signifying semiotics; becoming; diagram;
experience; meaning; multiplicity; rhizome.
1. Introduction
It was in 1998 when two philosophers of education — Mary Leach and
Megan Boler — called for exploring Gilles Deleuze’s work in order to ex-
amine the ‘potential of thinking di¤erently with respect to the public and
current scholarly debates around educational theory and practice’ (Leach
and Boler 1998: 150). Since then, the Deleuzian scholarship in education
has been slowly but steadily growing (Semetsky 2002, 2004). Several of
Deleuze’s philosophical works were written together with practicing psy-choanalyst Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 1994), such a col-
laboration representing an approach to knowledge as shared and situated,
Semiotica 164–1/4 (2007), 197–214 0037–1998/07/0164–0197
DOI 10.1515/SEM.2007.0aa 6 Walter de Gruyter
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and bringing theoretical thinking into closer contact with practical con-
cerns. In his editorial to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy
and Theory on Deleuze and education, Michael Peters (2004) pointed out
that the pedagogy of the concept constitutes a critical feature for educa-
tional philosophy. Deleuze’s philosophical method may be considered as
a kind of constructivism irreducible to propositional logic; rather, philo-
sophical thinking is presented as the geography of reason. A concept, as
an integral part of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy defined as a pro-
cess of concept creation, is a vehicle for expressing the particularities and
contingencies embedded in an experiential event, the latter bound to the
social and cultural milieu.
Deleuze and Guattari explicitly referred to their own philosophical
method as Geophilosophy, privileging geography over history and
stressing the value of the present-becoming , that is, a possibility for usbecoming-other in each and every present moment. For educators, the
very concept of becoming carries ‘an easy resonance’ (Peters 2004: 224).
The semiotic dimension in Deleuze’s philosophy (Semetsky 2005) and
as pertaining to educational context leaves much to exploration. In this
paper, I present an overview of Deleuze’s a-signifying semiotics and his
metaphor of rhizome as a new image of thought. Rhizome serves as an
example of the potential to think di¤erently. This metaphor, by being
used with regard to the question of sources of knowledge permits a shift
of focus from transmitting knowledge as a collection of given facts to the
dynamic process of knowing, with the latter’s having far-reaching impli-
cations for education as a developing and generative practice.
2. Thinking in rhizomes
Deleuze and Guattari have borrowed the notion of the rhizome from bi-
ology (cf. Schuh and Cunningham 2004). As a symbol for unlimited
growth through the multitude of its own transformations, rhizome is con-
trasted with a tree, the latter symbolizing the linear and sequential, abor-
escent reasoning rooted in finite knowledge. The tree metaphor accords
with the infamous tree of Porphyry, which is an example of the classifica-
tory system, or a hierarchical structure based on precise definitions that
serve as the foundation for the rationally demonstratable knowledge.
The tree of Porphyry incorporates an arborescent reasoning, that is, a
type of syllogistic logic based on the method of division to form a cata-
logue. The hierarchical structure precludes any interdependence, relation-ships, or harmony between ‘things’ located at the separate branches of the
sacramental tree. As for rhizome, it belongs to the mode of thinking
198 I. Semetsky
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whose central concept is what Deleuze called becoming . In contrast to
syllogistic reasoning of analytic philosophy grounded in the logic of ex-
cluded middle, the thought-process of philosophy-becoming ‘is more like
a grass than a tree’ (Deleuze 1995: 149). Deleuze called it the logic of
multiplicities. Any multiplicity, similar to the genuine sign in the Peircean
triad, always has a middle element, a third, that Deleuze and Guattari,
borrowing from Peirce, called a diagram. The importance of diagram-
matic reasoning lies in its ability to ‘depict thought’s very movement, its
processual character, in terms of interconnecting lines, schemes, figures,
abstract mappings’ (Merrell 1995: 51). The diagrammatic mode of ex-
pression demands the Deleuzian logic of multiplicities as the logic of
included middle equivalent to what Deleuze and Guattari qualified as
a-signifying semiotics. The rhizome becomes, or is becoming, at any mo-
ment of its own entry. It is an a-centered dynamic network of uncertainrelations comprising a ‘complex place’ (Deleuze 1990: xiv). The sign-
relations constitute a multiplicity and are regulated not by mechanical
laws but by organic growth: rhizome as a biological notion defies the pri-
macy of physics as a scientific model for all other discourses.
Deleuze uses some concepts from the theory of communication,
namely: how information is transmitted in a channel as a sign/signal sys-
tem. A meaningful signal is produced at the moment of what Deleuze and
Guattari called the transversal communication between the series of
events operating along di¤erent planes or levels. This does not mean that
‘something’ actually flows through the channel, just that a relation is be-
ing established. A relation is produced by virtue of a sign, and a sign as a
‘bit’ of information is Janus-faced: it provides a linkage, a bridge between
events without actually passing from one to another (cf. De Landa 2002:103). Only as transversal, communication can enable the construction of
concepts and the conferment of shared meanings. A diagrammatic mode
serves as a connective link along which all knowledge is produced: in
its ‘piloting’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142) role, a diagram forms ‘a
bridge, a transversality’ (Guattari 1995: 23) crossing over an a-signifying
gap by virtue of its own ‘extreme contiguity’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
173). A diagram is a necessary third in a semiotic communicative process,
a genuine sign. A diagram acts as a diagonal connection between the
planes, and its purpose is to ‘pursue the di¤erent series, to travel along the
di¤erent levels, and cross all thresholds; instead of simply displaying phe-
nomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must
form a transversal or mobile diagonal line’ (Deleuze 1988: 22). A diagram
has only ‘traits’ of content and expression, between which it establishes a con-
nection . . . The diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most
Towards a semiotic theory of learning 199
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deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them . . . The diagrammatic or
abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather
constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality . . . [O]n the diagram-
matic level . . . form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content.
The diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content
insofar as they are material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but
which draw one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorializa-
tion. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141–142)
The aforementioned ‘traits’ of content and expression are like memory
traces, always beyond the level of consciousness, therefore capable of
manifesting as feelings or a¤ects, not yet concepts, the latter to be in-
vented or created, according to Deleuze: . . . not to represent, but to con-
struct the real yet to (be)come . . . The concepts show themselves in a for-
mat of creative expression betraying a traditional sender-receiver modelof transmitting preconceived information and data (cf. Roy 2004). The
traits have no explicit content or meaning. The problematic of representa-
tion is a real problem in analytic philosophy, which generally adopts an
atomistic approach, that is, starting from taking representations for
granted, then separating language structure into two independent levels,
syntactic and semantic, without attempting to analyze how they may be in-
terdependent. Deleuze, however, posits the grammar of disequilibrium —
an a-signifying gap — as a precondition for the production of meanings,
that is, meanings are conferred not by reference to some external object
but by the relational, or rhizomatic, network constituting a sign-process.
As embedded in the perplexity of the situation, rhizome goes in diverse
directions instead of a single path, multiplying its own lines and establish-
ing the plurality of unpredictable connections in the open-ended, whatDeleuze called smooth space of its growth. In short, it lives. Rhizome
does not represent, but only maps our ways, paths, and movements. The
presentation in the mode of mapping does not assume this map’s repre-
senting the proverbial territory as given in the strict sense. Deleuze used
tracer (in French) to indicate the subtlety of what it means to draw a
map. The verb to draw means — rather than to copy — to create because
‘what is drawn . . . does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word
tracer captures it better: it has all the graphic connotations of ‘‘to draw’’
in English but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road’ (Massumi in
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvi).
3. Apprenticeship in signsThought is broader than knowledge representing true facts; it is a com-
plex process of knowing. The changed image of thought manifests itself
200 I. Semetsky
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in ‘new connections, new pathways, new synapses . . . [produced] not
through any external determinism but through a becoming that carries
the problems themselves along with it’ (Deleuze 1995: 149). Becomings
function in a mode of nomadic — movable and moving — distributions
that break down ‘the sedentary structures of representation’ (Deleuze
1994: 37). In his work Di¤erence and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) presents
a story of an athlete who learns to swim by means of becoming . The nov-
ice athlete struggles against the waves because she is facing the unknown
or what Deleuze called unthought. Not-yet-knowing-how-to swim, the
athlete’s movements do not resemble the movements of the wave. Nor
do they imitate the instructor’s movements given while not in the water
but on the shore. Theoretical knowledge is being transformed into practi-
cal apprenticeship: the swimmer is learning ‘by grasping [movements] in
practice as signs’ (Deleuze 1994: 23). For an athlete who finds herself ina novel situation, there is no solid foundation under her feet, and the
world that she has to face loses its reassuring power of familiar represen-
tations. To learn means to move together with this particular milieu. Del-
euze (1995) expands on this idea by referring to new sports like surfing,
windsurfing, and hang gliding that would have required one to enter into
an existing wave. The athlete has to invent a novel concept of what does
it mean to swim in the midst of the very encounter with the unknown
problem, via her own experience.
As noted by Brian Massumi (1992), Deleuze reinvents the concept of
semiotics in his di¤erent books: In Proust and Signs, Deleuze refers to
four di¤erently organized semiotic worlds. In Cinema-I , he presents six-
teen di¤erent types of cinematic signs. Deleuze (2000) discusses Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu as the story of the narrator’s apprenticeshipin signs (Bogue 2004), tracing the stages whereby young Marcel learns
that signs are to be apprehended in terms of neither objective nor subjec-
tive criteria, but solely in terms of their immanent problematic instances.
Deleuze suggests that genuine education proceeds through a deregulation
of the senses and a shock that compels thought against its will to go be-
yond its ordinary operations. For Deleuze, the theory of signs is meaning-
less without the relation between signs and the corresponding apprentice-
ship in practice. Reading Proust from the perspective of triadic semiotics,
Deleuze notices the dynamic character of signs, the contingency of truth,
and the necessity of interpretation. Acknowledging a particularly narrow
approach to education, Deleuze (1994) describes it as students’ discovery
of solutions to the problems posited by teachers. In this way pupils lack
power to constitute problems themselves, and the construction of prob-lems, for Deleuze, is tantamount to one’s sense of freedom. Only if
and when ‘thought is free, hence vital, nothing is compromised. When it
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ceases being so, all other oppressions are also possible’ ( Deleuze 1988: 4).
Deleuze asserts that problems should not be considered as given, that is,
requiring the Cartesian method as the infamous ‘search for the clear and
distinct’ (Deleuze 1994: 161) finite solution. Rather, learning is ‘infinite
. . . [and] of a di¤erent nature to knowledge’ ( Deleuze 1994: 192), but
that of the nature of a creative process as a method of invention or
concept-creation.
It is experience that provides conditions for our intellectual and moral
growth, however not at all as a property of hierarchical structuring;
Deleuze rejected ‘the principle of linear progressive ‘‘building up knowl-
edge’’’ (Deleuze 1995: 139) toward some fixed goal. Rather than dis-
covering the preexistent domain of truth(s), learning consists in the exper-
imental and heterogeneous production of meanings as the newly created
concepts. The making and remaking of concepts always proceeds alonga ‘moving horizon’ (Deleuze 1994: xxi) of the smooth space. The adjec-
tive smooth is contrasted with striated , both terms derived from di¤erent
musical forms: striated — as ordered by rigid schemata and point-to-
point connections ensuring a linear and fixed structure, and smooth —
as irregular, open and heterogeneous, dynamical structure of fluid forces,
‘field . . . wedded to nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities’ ( Del-
euze and Guattari 1987: 381). The problematic situation — that is, the
one requiring learning — is of the nature of real experience that forms
‘an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning’ (Deleuze 1994: 154).
Learning cannot take place as resemblance or representation: this would
be the reproduction of the same, denounced by Deleuze. For learning to
occur, the meaningful relation between a sign and a response must be es-
tablished, leading — via the encounter with otherness and indeterminacyinscribed in experience — to what Deleuze identified as the repetition of
the di¤erent. It is the di¤erence embedded in real experience that pre-
cludes any prior recognition; the particularity of an experiential situation
creates an experiment with the new in the unfamiliar and even strange
context, which would have resisted being recognized as something already
familiar. Reproduction of the same would amount to mimesis; the repeti-
tion of the di¤erent, however, shows itself in the play of semiosis. Deleuze
insists that:
we learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those
who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in hetero-
geneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce . . . When a body com-
bines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the prin-
ciple of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other —
involves di¤erence, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that
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di¤erence through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to
constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points
renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself.
(Deleuze 1994: 23)
Those who keep on telling us, do as I do, will be reproducing the same
and simply reinforcing the dogmatic tree-like image of thought based on
arborescent regularity. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze (1989)
adds to our sense of what an apprenticeship entails when he speaks of
Godard’s cinema in terms of what Bogue (2004) aptly calls the pedagogy
of images. A medium of Godard’s films, which embody concrete in-
stances of the general pedagogical process that Deleuze regards as typical
of Godard’s cinema, teaches us to see di¤erently. In his work on Leibniz,
Deleuze (1993) presents thinking as the unfolding of internal di¤erencethat continuously di¤erentiates itself thereby constituting an infinite
learning, apprendre in French, hence apprenticeship. New meanings and
concepts, for Deleuze, are artistic creations, like sounds in music and col-
ors in painting, or like cinematic images. They are not limited to linguistic
signs or uttered in the language of propositions, instead, they express
themselves in di¤erent regimes of extra-linguistic signs such as images.
Deleuze’s semiotics includes reading and interpretation of both visual
and subliminal — or subrepresentitive — signs. Stressing that the logic
of genuine learning is ‘extra-propositional or subrepresentative’ (Deleuze
1994: 192), Deleuze says:
Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular
points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape
or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and
unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems
which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? In short,
representation and knowledge are modeled entirely upon propositions of con-
sciousness, which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by them-
selves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instance which engenders them
as cases, and which they resolve or conclude. By contrast, the Idea and ‘learning’
express that extra-propositional or subrepresentative problematic instance: the
presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness. (Deleuze
1994: 192)
Rhizomatics, described as ‘a strategy of drawing lines of connections’
(Grossberg 1997: 84), becomes a method of thinking and learning, thecraft of making the unconscious conscious, or performing art of that spe-
cial sensibility and productivity, which creative artists, or even children
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for that matter, have in abundance. Leach and Boler (1998) notice in Del-
euze’s philosophy a subtle quality of ‘premonition: . . . he may be describ-
ing some of what has yet to come’ (1998: 152). That what has yet to come
is pre-reflective and subrepresentative, subsisting in a mode of the Deleu-
zian non-thought outside of the conscious awareness, and a set of condi-
tions constituting an experiential situation, is necessary for it becoming-
conscious. Thinking demands turning upon its own implicit assumptions
so as to be able to express them explicitly. Deleuze’s model of learning is
based on explication of extra-linguistic signs, such as involuntary memo-
ries (similar to those awakened by Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine),
images, or aesthetic and artistic signs as potential sources of meanings in
accord with the logic of sense (Deleuze 1990). Concepts cannot be given
a-priori : they have to be created as an outcome of a dynamic process and
as embedded in a triadic relationship with percepts and a¤ects. As such,concepts will be expressing events rather than representing essences. They
should be understood not in a traditional representational manner of an-
alytic philosophy, which would submit a line to a point, but as a creative
and multidirectional distribution of lines and planes.
4. Learning as creative becomings
The diagram as a mediatory ‘third’ (Deleuze 1987: 131) disturbs the bi-
nary opposition between signifiers and signifieds, or between words and
objects. Deleuze’s emphasis is on the dynamical and triadic nature of
signs, that is, their having an ‘increasingly intimate’ (Deleuze 2000: 88)
relation with their enfolded meanings so that truth becomes contingentand subordinate to interpretation. Meanings are never given but depend
on signs entering into ‘organization which ensures the resonance of two
series’ (Deleuze 1990: 104), the latter converging on a paradoxical di¤er-
entiator, which becomes ‘both word and object at once’ (Deleuze 1990:
51). In Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics, the logical copula is of analytic
philosophy is replaced with the radical conjunction and as a precondition
for resonance. Things begin precisely in the middle in accord with ‘a
theory and practice of relations, of the and ’ (Deleuze 1987: 15). The con-
junction and is what becomes a principal characteristic of a-signifying
(that is, irreducible to logical identity) semiotics, making any entity a
multiplicity, a sign. Multiplicities are ‘neither unities nor totalities’ (Dele-
uze 1987: vii); they are constituted by multiple sets of relations, and it is a
relation per se that maintains an ontological priority as compared to theterms that are related to each other by virtue of the said relations. Rela-
tions, as signs, are therefore external to their terms.
204 I. Semetsky
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By virtue of the relations, every multiplicity ‘grows from the middle’
(Deleuze 1987: viii) as if becoming-rhizome. The dynamics of becoming
is described by a process in which any given multiplicity ‘changes in na-
ture as it expand its connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8): this
change in nature entails its becoming-other. Relations that are external
to their terms are capable of constructing an unpredictable experiential
world that unfolds in a seemingly strange manner, resembling
a Harlequin’s jacket or patchwork, made up of solid parts and voids, blocs and
ruptures, attractions and divisions, nuances and bluntnesses, conjunctions and
separations, alternations and interweavings, additions which never reach a total
and subtractions whose remainder is never fixed . . . This geography of relations
is particularly important. ( Deleuze 1987: 55)
Such is the world as a pragmatic e¤ect of the relations, which put ‘toflight terms and sets’ (Deleuze 1987: 57); it continuously varies depending
on the latter and is therefore open-ended: relations a¤ect the world. We
learn by means of multiplying and intensifying connections, creating a
dynamic rhizome and not planting a static root. Experience is rendered
meaningful not by grounding empirical particulars in abstract universals
but by experimentation, that is, by treating any concept ‘as object of an
encounter, as a here-and-now, . . . from which emerge inexhaustibly ever
new, di¤erently distributed ‘‘heres’’ and ‘‘nows’’ . . . I make, remake and
unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered
center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and di¤erenci-
ate them’ ( Deleuze 1994: xx–xxi). Making and remaking of concepts con-
stitute a creative process, which is not reducible to a static recognition but
demands an experiential and experimental encounter that would have
forced us to think and learn, that is, to construct meaning for a particular
experience in terms of a symbolic bridge crossing over an a-signifying
rupture. Deleuze says:
we see the pieces of Japanese paper flower in the water, expanding or extending,
forming blossoms, houses and characters . . . Meaning itself is identified with this
development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of meaning.
So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two . . . [E]ssence
complicates the sign and the meaning; it holds them in complication.... It mea-
sures in each case their relation, their degree of distance or proximity, the degree
of their unity. (Deleuze 2000: 90)
Signs grow, develop, and acquire their meaning in the process of becoming-other; such an increase in complexity is what constitutes learn-
ing. As a result of multiple interpretations, signs move from one to
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another, they grow and engender other signs because the triadic logic leads
to signs always already becoming something else and something more,
contributing — in the process of their growth — to human development
and the evolution of knowledge. Deleuze, in his move against the Carte-
sian method, speaks of paideia stating that for Greeks thought is not
based on a premeditated decision to think: thinking is motivated by spe-
cific conditions in the real experience. Deleuze considered such a thought-
non-thought to be ‘the presentation of the unconscious, not the represen-
tation of consciousness’ (Deleuze 1994: 192) ultimately in a need of
interpretation and meaning making. Because of the symbolic conjunction
and , a constructive process enters into its own reorganization: each and is
a pure relation which, as a sign-event in its own in-between-ness, acts in
the mode of a distributed marker of ‘a new threshold, a new direction of
the zigzagging [rhizomatic] line, a new course for the border’ (Deleuze1995: 45). For Deleuze, the creation of concepts is impossible without
‘the laying out of a plane’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 36). To think
means to construct a plane — to actually show that it is there rather
than merely ‘to think’ it — so that to pragmatically ‘find one’s bearings
in thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37) by means of stretching, fold-
ing, unfolding, enfolding; that is, by multiple movements of this plane’s
diagrammatic features that may traverse the plane leading to the creation
of concepts. A diagram functions as a map that, rather than representing,
engenders the territory to which it is supposed to refer. Accordingly, a
static representation of the order of references gives way to a relational
dynamics of the order of meanings.
5. Experience as thought and un-thought
Empirical particulars constitute the very context of experience. Some-
thing in the experiential ‘world forces us to think. This something is an
object not of recognition but a fundamental ‘‘encounter’’ . . . It may be
grasped in a range of a¤ective tones’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). In fact, novel
concepts are to be invented or created in order to make sense out of sin-
gular experiences embedded in concrete situations and, ultimately, to af-
firm this sense. Experience is qualitative, multidimensional, and inclusive;
it includes ‘a draft, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a bat-
tle, an illness’ (Deleuze 1995: 141). An experiential event is as yet subject-
less because subjects are constituted within the multiplicity of events by
virtue of educational experience. We are made up of relations, says Dele-uze (2000), and events will make sense to us not if we understand them
theoretically but only when we experience in practice the very di¤erence
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that makes each singular event significant. The exteriority of relations
presents ‘a vital protest against principles’ (Deleuze 1987: 55) that would
have presented the universal reference point, the view from nowhere. The
di¤erence embodied in the here-and-now of each experiential situation
makes thought encounter a shock or crisis, which is embedded in the ob-
jective structure of an event per se, thereby transcending the faculties of
subjective perception beyond as if ‘given’ sense data. Deleuze considered
di¤erence to be not only existential but an ontological category too, ‘the
noumenon closest to phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1994: 222), which however
is never beyond experience because every phenomenon is in fact condi-
tioned by di¤erence. For Deleuze, thinking is not a natural exercise but
always a second power of thought, born under constraints of experience
as a material force. Thinking is, however, capable of transcending this
experience, that is, freeing it from the said constraints, hence paradoxi-cally complementing Deleuze’s empirical method with its transcendental
dimension. The primacy of relations makes the whole dualistic split be-
tween thought and world, the inside and the outside, invalid, and rela-
tional logic is the logic of experimentation not ‘subordinate to the verb
to be’ (Deleuze 1987: 57) that would have established the law of identity.
Instead, the logic of di¤erence, the relational logic as semiotics, is origi-
nated in experience: it is ‘empiricism [that] knows how to transcend the
experiential dimension of the visible’ (Deleuze 1990: 20) without the nec-
essary recourse to universal ideas.
The experiential world is folded, the fold being ‘the inside of the out-
side’ (Deleuze 1988: 96), where the outside is virtual yet real by virtue of
its pragmatics and e¤ects produced at the level of actual experiences. It
unfolds in an unpredictable manner, and it is impossible to know aheadof time what the body (both physical and mental) can do: life becomes
an experimental and experiential a¤air demanding — instead of invoking
the eternal Truth — practical wisdom by means of immanent evaluations
of experiential modes of existence. Experience is what a¤ects us and — as
a¤ective — it is as yet a-conceptual. Deleuze emphasizes the passionate
quality of such an experience: ‘perhaps passion, the state of passion, is
actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable . . . is about’
(Deleuze 1995: 116). Deleuze’s method enables the reading of signs, sym-
bols, and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience.
Experience cannot be limited to what is immediately perceived: the Dele-
uzian line of flight or becoming is real even if ‘we don’t see it, because it’s
the least perceptible of things’ (Deleuze 1995: 45). The Deleuzian object
of experience is presented only in its tendency to exist, or rather to sub-sist, in a virtual, sub-representative state: it is unthought, yet capable of
actualizing itself through multiple di¤erent/ciations. We are a¤ected by
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experience, and thinking enriched with a¤ect is always experimental, like
a process of trying, testing, and creating rather than discovering the
eternal Truth in some preexistent domain. Experience is future-oriented,
lengthened and enfolded, representing an experiment with what is new,
or coming into being, therefore becoming . Experience constitutes a com-
plex place, and our experimentation on ourselves is, for Deleuze, the only
reality. Thinking is a practical art: it has to do with vital, real-life, and
continuously encountered problems. For Deleuze, we are never separated
from the world: rhizomatic lines connect ‘the interior [as] a selected
exterior [and] the exterior, a projected interior’ (Deleuze 1988: 125). The
network of lines constituting the Deleuzian rhizome serves as a diverse
means to express the reciprocal ways in which signs can both a¤ect and
be a¤ected. A¤ective thinking, by definition, will be equivalent to ‘experi-
encing, experimenting . . . and what we experience, experiment with, is . . .what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape’ (Deleuze
1995: 104). Nothing should prevent both students and teachers from
such experimentation with the new and unthought in a classroom.
Deleuze called his philosophical method both critical and clinical, the
latter demanding the revaluation of experience by means of laying out
the rhizomatic process-structure: ‘which of the [rhizomatic] lines are
dead-ended or blocked, which cross voids, . . . and most importantly the
line of steepest gradient, how it draws in the rest, towards what destina-
tion’ (Deleuze 1987: 120). Learning as a process of growth takes place
only through multiple rhizomatic connections because the rhizome serves
as an example of an open system, and only an open-ended, that is, a rela-
tional system is capable of creating new concepts and meanings thus lib-
erating thinking from being confined to preestablished truth-conditions:such is Deleuze’s pedagogy of the concept. Picking up speed in its very
milieu, rhizome — by virtue of its own creative function — does not con-
form to ‘sedentary structure of representation’ (Deleuze 1994: 37) but is
oriented towards the future therefore making the creation of concepts an
outcome of an unfolded experience. Movement and process present the
plurality of problems rather than a single solution, and the coexistence
of moments that defy representation because a rhizomatic process enables
any single line to be potentially connected with any other line. Because
one never knows in advance, there is only exploration and experimenta-
tion. The process of rhizomatic inquiry into an unknown is not based on
any foundation, but is embedded in the experimentation with unpredict-
able conditions in the real experience. For Deleuze, learning is ‘infinite . . .
[and] of a di¤erent nature to knowledge’ (Deleuze 1994: 192) but that of a nature of creative process as a method of invention. Positioning the
‘origins’ of philosophical thinking at the level of practice, Deleuze brings
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thought into intimate relation with non-thought, or as yet unthought, un-
known, and unpredictable. Thinking without recognition operates as a
thought without (pre-given) image and is semiotic in its core: it interprets,
or evaluates, experience, and ‘beneath the generalities of habit . . . we re-
discover singular processes of learning’ (Deleuze 1994: 25). Signs demand
the ‘corresponding apprenticeship’ (Deleuze 2000: 92) in terms of the in-
terpretive process by other signs that would have been creating meanings
for the series of events. New meanings are capable of expressing them-
selves only as eventual outcomes of the total sign-process that produces
them; therefore meanings cannot be externally ‘given’ in a forceful man-
ner as the preexistent truth. It is the rhizomatic process-structure, which is
capable of producing something new ‘when it [thought] acceded to the in-
finite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and recon-
quers an immanent power of creation’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140).When an element of novelty — as unthought — is brought into rational
thinking, it makes the thinker a creative artist capable of thinking the un-
thinkable. The non-thought is not opposed to reason but is enfolded in it.
New concepts impose new meanings as revaluations of experience, and
for Deleuze no thinking is value-free. Because every newly created con-
cept must embody the situation as a whole, it ‘speaks the event, not the
essence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 21). Thoughts are events, or sign-
processes. Event is always an element of becoming, and the process of be-
coming, or semiosis, is unlimited. Thinking as an infinite learning process
replaces the Cartesian point of departure in the form of cogito, or ‘I
think.’ It is an event that ‘is,’ therefore the ‘I’ that thinks is constituted in
the relations involved in thinking process as revaluation of events. Think-
ing is ‘not just a theoretical matter. It [is] to do with life itself’ (Deleuze1995: 105) because of new ‘ways of living [and] possibilities of existence’
(Deleuze 1995: 143) implied by di¤erent regimes of signs.
6. Education as transformational pragmatics
For Deleuze, signs embedded in experience are ‘the symptoms of life
gashing forth or draining way . . . There is a profound link between signs,
events, life and vitalism’ (Deleuze 1995: 143). In terms of reading and in-
terpreting signs, the learning process is not limited to the fact of under-
standing a concept, or interpreting the meaning of a novel, or even grasp-
ing pictorial content of the work of art. The ethical task as a revaluation
or reconstruction of experience supplements critical thinking and under-standing with its clinical dimension. It is clinical not only by virtue of it
entailing as if a diagnosis of a particular mode of existence by means of
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assessing the latter’s symptoms, that is, reading them as the signs of the
present. Rather, an unfolding experience is a process of signs-events, the
dynamics of which include both the past and the future. It is the clinical
element that demands evaluation of the directions embedded in rhizome
as if anticipating some future possibilities. Deleuze wants to be able to
foresee which of the rhizomatic lines would be dead-ended or blocked,
which might cross some of the experiential voids, etc. However the most
important is what he called the line of flight, the line of the steepest gra-
dient, or of the infinite speed of movement. The line of this type is af-
forded a special place in Deleuze’s philosophy because it is along the line
of flight where all becomings take place. The most important question
posited is where this line might take us, ‘towards what destination’ (Del-
euze 1987: 120), the latter remaining presently as yet unthought of. It
is along the line of flight where novelty comes into being, or becomes.Novelty is created in experience when some paradoxical ‘non-localizable
connections . . . resonance and echoes’ ( Deleuze 1994: 83) meet each other
along the line of rhizomatic becoming. At the level of perception by regu-
lar senses, that is, prior to becoming a percept, such connections would
remain imperceptible. But learning by means of signs enables one’s per-
ception to vitally increase in power, thereby tending to becoming-percept,
that is, becoming able to perceive something previously imperceptible.
The process of what Deleuze and Guattari called transformational prag-
matics, consists in opening up to a new, diagrammatic and creative, func-
tion. ‘Connecting the dots’ in the multileveled rhizomatic network enables
one to make sense out of the disparate bits and pieces of information, that
is, destratify one’s old way of thinking by means of some novel interpre-
tation: such is transformational pragmatics of Deleuze’s philosophy.When positioned within the context of education, the transformational
pragmatics is oriented towards becoming-other, as regards both epistemol-
ogy and ethics. The pedagogy of the concept, then, aims towards tran-
scending or overcoming one’s old mode of knowledge and existence. A
new mode of existence would be characterized by ‘new percepts and new
a¤ects’ (Deleuze 1995: 164) as some new ways of thinking, feeling and
perceiving: Deleuze emphasized the triadic relationship based on the in-
separability of percepts, a¤ects, and concepts. In the process of stretching
beyond limits and inventing new concepts, the rhizomatic thinking acts in
a self-organizing manner so that concepts are ultimately self-referential,
that is, the concept — at the moment of creation — posits itself and its
object simultaneously. Concepts are invented, or created, as if reborn.
The concept stops being a logical proposition: ‘it does not belong to adiscursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept shows
itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140) due to the very transversality of
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communication, a semiotic bridge established by means of a regime of
signs. Rhizomatics traces the lines that connect diverse experiences as a
strategic means of making sense out of them. Such is Deleuze’s pedagogy
of the concept: an experiment with and on ourselves. The epistemic or
learning process understood as a semiotic inquiry always takes place ‘in
and through the unconscious’ (Deleuze 1994: 165) leading to the conjuga-
tion, which determines, as Deleuze says, the threshold of consciousness:
unconscious-becoming-conscious because of the folded and twisted rela-
tionship between the two. Learning implies an increase in knowledge via
the diagonal, or transversal, communication leading to the thought’s in-
crease in power. The increase in power is almost literal: if there were an
exponential growth inscribed in the learning process, than the transversal
communication would have carried an exponent towards its limit as if
crossing the otherwise asymptotic line, thus becoming a threshold pro-vided the particular situation meets the experiential conditions. For Dele-
uze, learning is not limited to events that are actually perceived: there
is also the level of the virtual (as yet unthought), which however in the
framework of his philosophy is no less real than any actual existence.
Thinking as di¤erent/ciation — in other words, the actualization of the
virtual — presupposes an intensive field of individuation, and it is because
of ‘the action of the field of individuation that such and such di¤erential
relations and such and such distinctive points . . . are actualized — in
other words are organized . . . along lines di¤erentiated in relation to
other lines’ (Deleuze 1994: 247). Events are impersonal and a-temporal:
as a multiplicity, an event is profoundly collective, therefore, ‘irreducible
to individual states of a¤airs, particular images, personal beliefs’ (Deleuze
1990: 19), or static truth-values. Deleuze’s epistemology is future-orientedand somewhat untimely. It makes an object as a newly created concept a
limit-case of the inquiry or the outcome of a learning process that goes
beyond recognition to a fundamental encounter with the unknown and
un-thought. It cannot be otherwise because it is an experiential situation
that forces us to face something not known in advance, and we will sim-
ply have to ‘invent new concepts for unknown lands’ (Deleuze 1995: 103).
Such is, let us repeat, Deleuze’s creative pedagogy of the concept. There-
fore novelty, creativity and becoming are implicit in the learning process,
provided of course the learning process itself is reconceptualized in semi-
otic terms. As such, they — and not the set of preexistent facts trans-
mitted from a generic instructor to a generic student — may be considered
to be educational objectives. The underground sprout of a rhizomatic
plant, rather than having a traditional root, has a stem, the oldest part of which dies o¤ while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the top. This met-
aphor is potent because it is precisely when the old is dying o¤ then the new
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may be created. At this critical point a rhizomatic line would zigzag, as
Deleuze would have said, into new direction therefore defying a linear pro-
gression towards some predetermined final end.
Experience is that what produces thinking, and the educational experi-
ence is the one, which instead of repetitively ‘displaying phenomena or
statement . . . [forms] a transversal or mobile diagonal line’ (Deleuze
1988: 22), the latter intervening as the semiotic thirdness. It is the trans-
versal line that enables one to potentially cross the threshold of one’s old
habitual thinking thereby expanding knowledge boundaries in terms of
intellectual and moral growth. Rather than a customary instruction, it is
an experiential and experimental situation — a semiotic event, a sign —
that constitutes learning and constructing of new knowledge. It makes
learning not a rationally deduced abstraction but a meaningful encounter
expressed in terms of students’ literally making sense out of their own ex-periences. Reflecting on his own pedagogical practice, Deleuze empha-
sized that students were not required to take in ‘everything, [yet] everyone
took what they needed or wanted, what they could use’ (Deleuze 1995:
139) indeed defying the necessity of some superior educational aim which
is imposed from without. The multiple rhizomatic connections produced
within each ‘here-and-now’ (Deleuze 1994: xx) of every single experiential
situation, themselves serve as a precondition for the emergence of new
and di¤erent ‘heres’ and ‘nows’ (Deleuze 1994: xxi): sure enough, signs
grow and become other signs. All one should ever do when teaching a
course, Deleuze says, is to explore a question, ‘play around with the
terms, add something, relate it to something else’ (Deleuze 1995: 139).
The rhizomatic method as a semiotic inquiry transforms thinking, as pos-
ited by Deleuze, into an open set of critical tools, ethical evaluations andartistic creations. This philosophy, itself implying possible ways of living
and meaningful modes of existence, is educational almost by definition as
derived from John Dewey’s famous lines: ‘What [one] gets and gives as a
human being . . . is . . . a widening and deepening of conscious life — a
more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings . . . And
education is not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life’
(Dewey 1924 [1916]: 417). To enable such a life in an actual classroom is
a challenge, as it would require reconstructing the classroom experience
in terms of creating an open-ended, smooth, pedagogical space devoted
to the creation of concepts. Because to ‘think is to create’ (Deleuze 1994:
94), to construct concepts, it presupposes the multiplicity of local integra-
tions embedded in the smooth space, which is constituted within ‘an infi-
nite succession of linkages and changes in directions’ (Deleuze and Guat-tari 1987: 494). Deleuze used to identify teaching and learning with the
research laboratory (Deleuze 1995: 139). The thinking process that takes
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place in a laboratory is in actu, and the pedagogical process, for Deleuze,
must be connected with one’s current research work: you will be giving
courses on what you are currently investigating and you will be inventing
novel concepts in this process. As Merrell (1997) pointed out, semiotics
alters the theory of meaning. Semiotics is ‘about meaning engendered
when signs are in their act of becoming signs, a becoming that includes
sign interpreters as participating agents in the very semiosic process of be-
coming’ (Merrell 1997: xi, quoted in Kehle and Cunningham 2002: 122).
The process of investigation or inquiry into an unknown is based on ex-
perimentation with conditions, parameters, variables, and interpreting the
outcomes of investigation. It is an experiential learning as creative that
contributes to the multiplication of rhizomatic lines, which thereby engen-
der the uncharted and unbounded territory of new knowledge and new
modes of existence. Thought itself becomes an experiment, and it is thetotality of experience that emits signs, which by necessity exceed any
given system of significations. According to Deleuze, sense — or meaning
— is always ‘produced . . . caused and derived’ ( Deleuze 1990: 95); and as
a relational activity, it requires work to be done. It is this creative work
that continuously ‘forces us to frame a new question’ (Deleuze 1995:
114), to proceed with a semiotic inquiry by being active participants in
the unlimited process of becoming.
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Inna Semetsky (b. 1948) is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Philosophy and
Bioethics at Monash University [email protected]. Her research inter-ests include semiotics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of education, and analytical psychol-
ogy. Her recent major publications include ‘Educating semiotic consciousness: Intuition as
pragmatic method’ (2002); ‘Memories of the past, memories of the Future: Semiotics and
the Tarot’ (2003); ‘The magician’s autopoietic action, or Eros contained and uncontained’
(2003); and ‘The role of intuition in thinking and learning: Deleuze and the pragmatic
legacy’ (2004).
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