Abstract
This essay juxtaposes concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with worlds imagined by Ursula Le Guin in a performance of ‘rhizosemiotic play’ that explores some possible ways of generating and sustaining what William Pinar calls ‘complicated conversation’ within the regime of signs that constitutes an increasingly internationalized curriculum field. Deleuze and Guattari analyze thinking as flows or movements across space. They argue, for example, that every mode of intellectual inquiry needs to account for the plane of immanence upon which it operates—the preconceptual field presupposed by the concepts that inquiry creates. Curriculum inquiry currently operates on numerous nationally distinctive planes of immanence. I argue that the internationalization of curriculum studies should not presume a singular transnational plane of immanence but, rather, envisage a process performed by curriculum scholars with the capacities and competencies to change planes—to move between one plane of immanence and another and/or to transform their own planes. My essay is a ‘narrative experiment’ that takes seriously Deleuze’s argument that a work of philosophy should be, in part, a kind of science fiction, and also takes inspiration from Le Guin’s science fictional stories of ‘changing planes’ to generate productive and disruptive transnational agendas in curriculum inquiry.
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Notes
Here Pinar et al. are not referring to all US curriculum scholars but to those who identified themselves as ‘reconceptualists’ (see Pinar 1975) in the wake of Schwab’s (1969, 1971, 1973) immensely influential series of papers on curriculum as a discipline of ‘the practical’. Reconceptualist curriculum scholars shifted the emphasis of curriculum studies from theorizing curriculum development towards generating theoretical frames for understanding curriculum.
See IAACS homepage at http://iaacs.org/ for details of conferences and links to its journal, Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (TCI). Curriculum Forge, an interactive wiki, is at http://curriculumforge.org/.
UNEP: United Nations Environment Programme.
See Gough (1997, pp. 17–20) for a succinct account of the early development of this program, which remained active until the late 1990s.
The experiences to which I refer are both direct (such as teaching or conducting research in these nations/regions) and vicarious (such as supervising or examining research conducted by doctoral students in these nations/regions).
For example, in a 1950 interview, the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock was asked: ‘Then you don’t actually have a preconceived image of a canvas in your mind?’ He replied: ‘Well, not exactly—no—because it hasn’t been created, you see. Something new—it’s quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them’ (quoted in Pinar 1994, p. 7). Richardson (2001) makes a parallel point about writing as research: ‘I was taught... as perhaps you were, too, not to write until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined. No surprise, this static writing model coheres with mechanistic scientism, quantitative research, and entombed scholarship’ (p. 35).
My narrative experiments have similar purposes to the ‘thought experiments’ conducted by quantum and relativity physicists in the early part of the twentieth century. Their purpose was not prediction (as is the goal of classical experimental science), but more defensible representations of present ‘realities’.
See, for example, the Burch/Cheswick map of the Internet as at 28 June 1999 at http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/isp-ss.gif accessed 3 August 2006.
See Gough (2004b, 2006, in press-a, 2006) for further examples of applying Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy to questions, problems and issues concerning (for example) ‘posthuman’ pedagogies, science education research (with particular reference to societies in transition), and quality imperialism in higher education.
This phrase has been attributed to the German poet Novalis (1772–1801, aka Friedrich von Hardenberg). The concept of defamiliarization is found among other Romantic theorists such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and is also closely associated with Surrealism. Russian formalist Shklovsky (1917/1965) introduced the concept of ostraneniye (literally ‘making strange’) to literary theory.
For a more detailed exploration of the significance of Turnbull’s research for transnational curriculum inquiry see Gough (2003).
Seeking the ‘productive conditions of transformative thinking’ clearly resonates with Pinar’s (2005) question of how to provide opportunities for ‘intellectual breakthrough’ in the internationalization of curriculum studies.
http://iaacs.org/
http://iaacs.org/
Another interpretation of ‘The Nna Mmoy Language’ is that it takes Derrida’s (1981) belief that language is so unstable that meaning is endlessly deferred to some sort of logical yet absurd extreme.
Jackson (2003a) comes closer to performing her concept of rhizovocality in her rejoinder to Pierce and others who provide responses to her initial paper.
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Gough, N. Changing planes: rhizosemiotic play in transnational curriculum inquiry. Stud Philos Educ 26, 279–294 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9034-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9034-6