A Schizoanalytical Pedagogical Praxis

• In Event: 69.049 - Critical Posthumanism and Diffractive Post-Qualitative Methodologies

Abstract

Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis productively intersects with critical posthumanism, the affective turn and the new materialisms, presenting radically new ways of crafting pedagogies that are relevant to the contemporary situation of the Anthropocene. My intention is to address some of the uncanny ethical, ontological, epistemological and affective implications of Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis for crafting socially and environmentally just pedagogies and the practice of such pedagogies in higher education.
I will begin by exploring how late postmodernism's celebration of artificiality and inauthenticity segues with what Mark Fisher (2009), Donna Haraway (2015) and Isabelle Stengers (2015) term 'capitalist realism;' a position that, according to these and other thinkers, is corrosive to pedagogical practices aimed at fostering social and environmental justice. Thereafter, I will demonstrate why it is more productive, in terms of eco-social pedagogical practices, to think in terms of the posthuman as opposed to the postmodern by referring to the combined and individual oeuvres of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus (1983) and its sequel A thousand plateaus (1987), these philosophers conceptualise ‘schizoanalysis’ as a critique of the normative models of industrial capitalist society. What they term ‘schizoanalysis’ can, as Iris van der Tuin (2014) observes, be read as a radically diffractive and affective critique of flawed socio-political and eco-social engagements of contemporary global capitalism. Simultaneously, I will investigate via the pedagogically-orientated work of Guattari in Chaosmosis (1995) and The Three Ecologies (2000), the potential application of schizoanalysis to productive teaching and learning strategies that are future orientated rather than caught up in what Badriotti (2006, 2013) describes as the erosive nostalgia and melancholy of postmodern discourse.
In this theoretical paper, I begin by asking what the relevance of a schizoanalytical approach could be to post-qualitative educational methodologies in general and to posthuman and new feminist approaches in specific. As Keith Ansell Pearson (1997), Rosi Braidotti (2006, 2013) and Elizabeth Grosz (2005) have pointed out, their collective neo-materialist project evinces a renewed concern for the corporeal structure of the subject whilst reconfiguring the extended span of the subject's possible becomings. Here it is necessary to consider the relevance of Donna Haraway's (2008) critique of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytical concept of 'becoming' by referring to the work of Williams (2009), Beaulieu (2011) and others. My intention is to show that there are, in fact, clear, obvious and productive resonances between Deleuze and Guattari and the non-anthropocentric diffractive posthuman epistemologies of thinkers like Haraway and Barad.
Concerned with how learned patterns of behavior are inherited from and promulgated unquestioningly by educational institutions and socio-political regimes, Deleuze and Guattari map an array of cognitive and affective processes and configurations, both at the level of the individual and at that of the social. Their work offers what Plant (1992) refers to as viable 'escape routes' from the often bleak relativism and mordant uncertainties of late capitalist scenarios. I will investigate how schizoanalysis can be used as a toolbox for crafting socially and environmentally just pedagogies across a broad array of subject fields spanning the Arts and Sciences.

Author

• Delphi Carstens