All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, pp. 172–173).
Abstract
This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of faciality to analyse the teacher's face. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the teacher-face is a special type of face because it is an 'overcoded' face produced in specific landscapes. This paper suggests four limit-faces for teacher faciality that actualise different mixes of signifiance and subjectification in a classroom in which individualisation and massifications are affected. Understanding these limit-faces suggests new ways to conceive the affects actualised in the classroom that are subjected to increasing levels of surveillance from education policy makers. Through this ‘partial mapping’ new possibilities emerge to “escape the face”.
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Notes
In this paper we are using ‘affect’ as designating multiple forms. Firstly, it builds on Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza to mean “the ability to affect and be affected” as “two facets of the same event” (Massumi and McKim 2009, p. 1). Secondly, affect encompasses the idea that when bodies are affected, or move to a “diminished or augmented state of capacitation”, this transition is felt (Massumi and McKim 2009, p. 2). Thirdly, each body has a “lived past” that means that when bodies affect/are affected “there’s a reactivation of the past in passage toward a changed future” (Massumi and McKim 2009, p. 2). At one level, teacher-faces operate at the level of affect.
In this paper we are theorising teacher limit-faces and illustrating some of the ways that exchange occurs within those limits. To do this, we assume that in maximal white-wall or black-hole exchanges, student-faces reciprocate those flows. However, we acknowledge that there are multiple possibilities for how student faces affect black-hole flows and white-wall imprinting. For example, some student-faces may block black-hole flow by intensifying white-walls, asking for homework, to be told what to do, to refuse discovery learning. Within the limits of this paper the theorising of concrete student-faces is not possible, but does require further attention.
We use the term diagrammatic specifically to designate Guattari’s theorisation that there exists a machinic form of faciality that escapes the human, is rhizomatic in its application and represents “lines of flight carrying quanta of diagrammatic possibilities” (Guattari 2011 p. 102).
For more about Bentham and education, see Jones (1990).
This is a key question. There is an emerging body of work on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of nomadism and rhizomes that relate to curriculum and pedagogy (Cole 2008; Gough 2006; Roy 2003). The ontology of the teacher and/or teacher-faces has much to contribute to this theorisation of nomadism in our opinion.
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Greg Thompson is funded by the Australia Research Council.
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Thompson, G., Cook, I. Mapping Teacher-Faces. Stud Philos Educ 32, 379–395 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9335-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9335-2