A Deleuzian Approach To Curriculum Essays On A Pedagogical Life (Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation)

A Deleuzian Approach to
Curriculum
Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation
Series Editors:
jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta

Mark Bracher, Kent State University
The purpose of this series is to develop and disseminate psychoanalytic knowledge that can
help educators in their pursuit of three core functions of education:
1) facilitating student learning

2) fostering students’ personal development, and
3) promoting prosocial attitudes, habits, and behaviors in students (i.e. those opposed to
violence, substance abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.).
Psychoanalysis can help educators realize these aims of education by providing them with
important insights into:
1) the emotional and cognitive capacities that are necessary for students to be able to learn,
develop, and engage in prosocial behavior
2) the motivations that drive such learning, development, and behaviors, and
3) the motivations that produce anti-social behaviors as well as resistance to learning and
development.
Such understanding can enable educators to develop pedagogical strategies and techniques
to help students overcome psychological impediments to learning and development, either
by identifying and removing the impediments or by helping students develop the ability to
overcome them. Moreover, by offering an understanding of the motivations that cause some
of our most severe social problems—including crime, violence, substance abuse, prejudice,
and inequality—together with knowledge of how such motivations can be altered, books
in this series will contribute to the reduction and prevention of such problems, a task that
education is increasingly being called upon to assume.
Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation

By Mark Bracher
Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: The Popular Holocaust and Social Change in
a Post 9/11 World
By Robert Samuels
Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia

By jan jagodzinski
Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education

By K. Daniel Cho
New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Automodernity
from Zizek to Lacalu
By Robert Samuels
Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye
By jan jagodzinski
A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life

By Jason J. Wallin
A Deleuzian Approach to
Curriculum
Essays on a Pedagogical Life
Jason J. Wallin
A DELEUZIAN APPROACH TO CURRICULUM
Copyright © Jason J. Wallin, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10010.
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ISBN: 978–0–230–10400–6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wallin, Jason J., 1975–

A Deleuzian approach to curriculum : essays on a pedagogical life / Jason
J. Wallin.
p. cm. — (Education, psychoanalysis, social transformation series)
ISBN 978–0–230–10400–6 (alk. paper)
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Education—Curricula. 3. Education—Philosophy. 4. Critical
pedagogy. I. Title.
B2430.D454W35 2010
370.1'2—dc22 2010015647
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company
First edition: December 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you
take them to.
Jean-Luc Godard
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface ix
1 The Conceptual Powers of Currere 1

2 The Illusion of Transcendence and the Ontology of Immanence 15
3 Powers of the False and the Problematics of the Simulacrum 29
4 Becoming-Nomad 43
5 Becoming-Music: Improvisation and Instrumentalism in
Curriculum Theory 63
6 Uncertain Games 77
7 I’m Not There: The Cinematic Time-Image, Cultural
Curriculum Studies, and the Political Arts of an
Untimely Subject 95
8 Making a Holey Curriculum: Untimeliness, Unhomeliness, and
the Schizophrenic Potential of the ANOMAL 123
9 Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines 163
Notes 189
References 199
Index 211
Preface
As it is deployed in the course of this book, the concept of currere marks

a departure from the autobiographical method pioneered by Grumet
(1976a, 1976b) and Pinar (1972, 1974). This book is not autobiographical,
nor is it oriented toward reflection. It is however, a work that approaches
currere as a concept for pedagogical thinking. It is a work that departs,
not merely from quantitative fetters, but from phenomenology, structur-
alism, and the dogmatic image of life Deleuze and Guattari (1983) call
“Oedipal.” More specifically, it is an exegesis on what currere wills to power.
Put differently, this book surveys the question of what currere does and
might do. In this vein, my mode of analysis might be conceived as a thought
experiment. More specifically, through the creation of artistic affects and
philosophical concepts, this book attempts to open new ways for thinking
the course of a pedagogical life. In this sense, the approach to the concept
of currere herein is intimate to the Deleuzian (2001a) notion of individua-
tion, or rather, the setting apart of pedagogy from pedagogy in general. Such
a mode of conceptualization does not appeal to any particular ontological
foundation or presumed image of reality and, hence, breaks from repre-
sentation and idealism. Following the philosophical challenge of Deleuze,
this book endeavors to mobilize a philosophical passage for thinking
pedagogical difference, in turn creating an excess of concepts for a people
yet to come.
In this “productive” desire, I attempt to avoid what Deleuze (1994)
has dubbed “the plague of philosophy,” or more specifically, the practice
of criticism without creation (p. 28). In other words, this work does not
aim to represent a specific image of the world, but rather, to affirm its
creative powers of becoming. For pedagogy to remain open to the future,
I assert that new ways of pedagogical thinking must be mobilized. As
Deleuze writes, “the search for a new means of . . . expression was begun
by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of
other certain arts” (1991, p. xxi). Against those “regimes of truth” opera-
tive within contemporary education, this book attempts to experiment
with the concept of currere to produce ways of thinking pedagogical dif-
ference unfettered by both popular opinion and common sense. In this vein,
x PREFACE
A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum attempts to mobilize the concept of

currere in a way that forces one to think about the curriculum as an encoun-
ter (recontre) of another kind or logic altogether.
Analyzing the ways in which modern institutions colonize desire and
produce dogmatic images of subjectivity, this work attempts to wage a
transformative critique on the discourses of representation that continue
to circulate in the field of curriculum theory and design. This book
will concomitantly seek to “root out” a legacy of transcendent thinking
in curriculum studies that continues to reduce potentials for thinking
new forms of subjective and social organization. In this task, I articulate
the rampant “rootedness” of a hierarchical, developmental, and situ-
ated thinking Deleuze and Guattari dub arboreal. This work argues that
such an arboreal image of pedagogy has given rise to the proliferation
of institutional nihilism, cynicism, and conservatism. In contrast, this
work seeks to intervene with such thought by developing an image of
pedagogy that is en fuit or “leaking,” an idea conceptualized throughout
the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, who mobilize a host of
“leakages” (rhizomatic, nomadic, and schizoanalytic) as weapons against
fascist thought.
Against the myriad control mechanisms of the institution, lines of pro-
ductive escape are constantly being prepared. This book is oriented to the
affirmation of such lines or micromovements rather than simply treating
them pejoratively. In this vein, this work is oriented to a productive way
of thinking organization and (dis)organization without dividing them into
two separate ontological substances. I argue that this approach allows for
the liberation of the subject, who is no longer cathected to preexistent
identity structures. This ontological approach is necessarily in a time of
political ambivalence and negativity, enabling a new orientation to theory
and practice no longer fettered to a primordial or final totality (teleology
or the dialectic).
Drawing on curriculum scholarship that is micropolitical, or in
Deleuzian terms minor, this book seeks to accomplish two tasks. The
first is to create a new lineage for the field of curriculum that is oriented
to the problem of difference and multiplicity. This will benefit scholars
for whom the “official” genealogy of the field is overcoded or moribund.
Additionally, it will encourage a way of navigating curriculum scholarship
that strikes new fidelities between hitherto unrelated scholars. This task
will enable academics to enter into the problematics of difference and
multiplicity with a new set of conceptual tools and theoretical lineages in
which their own work might participate.
Explicating the power of the arts to liberate productive desires and
potentials, this book draws from numerous artistic innovations to
PREFACE xi
consider the material ways in which the “arts” have opposed power,
affirmed difference, and dehabituated normalized discourses. This is bene-
ficial in that it suggests a way of thinking and a material practice upon
which subjectivity and social organization might be rethought. This book
asks what education might learn or use from such practices; Or rather,
what becomings are available to education if we take such artistic innova-
tions seriously. I argue that such artistic “deterritorializations” offer us a
way of thinking unfettered by both instrumentalism (which organizes or
colonizes desire in advance) and positivism (which posits a system of ideals
and morals insensitive to local conditions and immanence). This question
relates directly to the contemporary call for an end to experimentation in
the social sciences, and concomitantly, an institutional intolerance for the
kinds of desiring flows produced in the arts. In contrast to this, I attempt
to develop a toolbox of concepts for curriculum design that affirm, rather
than “capture” difference. Further, I aim to explicate the ways in which
teaching and learning are always already traversed by differences through
which they might be reorganized. Put differently, organization is already
a difference. In this way, my task is to return pedagogical thought to the
creative and productive difference from which it was “territorialized.” This
will provide educators and curriculum scholars a means of engaging the
contemporary problems facing education (nihilism, transcendence, over-
determination, instrumentalism) with a “new” criteria for assessing and
understanding “how a life might go.” This approach is not only focused on
thinking, but further, the dehabituation of behavior and affect contempo-
rarily cathected to an image of “how life should go.”
This book attempts to create unconventional images of pedagogy,
teaching, and learning. This task is approached, in part, through an analy-
sis of artistic forms that offer, albeit often obliquely, a means to imagine
the pedagogical relationship as a singularity, and not, as much theorizing
in the field today would presume, as the representation of a prior model
(Oedipal, humanistic, hierarchical). It is in this vein that I mobilize
examples from contemporary film, music, and other performative arts as
an experimental “plateau” for thinking how a life might go, that is, how the
time, space, and becoming of a life might be thought differently. Further,
this work attempts to articulate those dynamic practices in the arts that
reorganize conventional flows of knowledge, meaning, and significance.
In this task, I aim to highlight didactic examples that make “normalized”
pedagogical practices “strange.” This maneuver will allow educators/theo-
rists both imaginary and material examples of pedagogy irreducible to a
genus or the demand of some superegoic “meta-structure.” Instead, this
book endeavors to mobilize concepts for thinking and practicing curricu-
lum as a qualitative multiplicity (as a difference in kind). I argue that these
xii PREFACE
shifts in thinking will mark an innovative passage for many educators

and theorists constrained by conceptual models that reduce difference to
degrees of variation from established norms.
Each of these tactics for rethinking the field of curriculum studies draws
upon the philosophical work of Deleuze, Deleuzeguattari,1 and their mobi-
lization of a “bastard” philosophical lineage including Nietzsche, Bergson,
and Spinoza. In part, this work explicates the import of Deleuzeguattarian
philosophy for the contemporary problems facing education. Further,
it is via the mobilization of Deleuzian and Deleuzeguattarian thinking
that this book attempts to create lines of flight for political resistance and
social transformation. This work does not simply devolve on a “survey” of
what curriculum theory is, but rather, seeks to alter the way in which one
might do curriculum theorizing. This book does not simply explicate the
positions of the thinkers that populate its pages, but attempts to illustrate
what their thinking does, and further, what potentials such thought opens
for educators today. In this task, I argue that by decoding particular insti-
tutional flows (the colonization of desire), we might begin to create new
types of decentered subjects and social organizations no longer accounted
for by representational or identitarian thinking (Villani, 2006). This will
enable theorists and educators alike to approach curriculum as an act of
creation rather than reproduction.
1
The Conceptual Powers

of Currere
Every discipline creates its own illusion and hides behind its own
smokescreen
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 3)
F or Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a concept is more than simply a name

attached to a subject or object. A concept is a way of approaching the
world, or put differently, a way of creating a world through the active
extension of thinking the possible. Such extension is not simply ideal-
istic, but rather, an opening of experience to what it is not. In this way,
the concept extends experience through an affirmation of difference. In
Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, what a concept is is of less significance
than what it does. Rather than a tool that purports to reflect an a priori
reality, the active force of the concept creates connections across fluxes and
milieus, allowing us “to consider . . . a new way of conceiving being, the
world, or what there is” (May, 2005, p. 116). Concepts are thus not ready-
made or immutable structures beyond experience. Instead, Deleuze and
Guattari (1994) follow the task of philosophy set out by Nietzsche: “[we]
must no longer accept concepts as a gift, not merely purify and polish
them, but first make and create them” (p. 5). As an experimental endeavor,
the active force of the concept marks an engagement with thinking in its
most extreme artistic and philosophical forms. Throughout such extreme
encounters, the active creation of concepts creates an experimental inter-
face with new ways of thinking. Yet, because the concept actively extends
the field of experience, it also creates a plane for the exploration of new
artistic, political, and ethical praxis (Bogue, 2003).
In the incisive What is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari
assert that the purpose of philosophical inquiry is located not in its
2 A DELEUZIAN APPROACH TO CURRICULUM
characterization of the world as it appears, but rather, in its capacity to

create concepts. Such an orientation is practical rather than reflective,
productive rather than reactive. It suggests, following Nietzsche (1961),
that the active and connective powers of the concept to think about dif-
ference become emaciated when reduced to given objects of knowledge
or representation (Deleuze, 1991). Yet, it is crucial to reiterate that for
Deleuze and Guattari, “the concept is not given, it is created; it is to
be created” (p. 11). In this vein, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast
the active power of the concept against the reactive understanding
of the concept as simply a representation of knowledge ordered and
employed according to the faculties of its creation. The reactive treat-
ment of the concept reduces its complexity by grounding difference
within the presupposed limits of popular opinion and a priori image
of the world as it is.
As its etymology suggests, curriculum extends from the Latin currere,
meaning to run. This alone evokes a way of thinking where the curricu-
lum is an active conceptual force. In other words, to run implies that the
conceptual power of currere is intimate to its productive capacity to cre-
ate new flows, offshoots, and multiplicitous movements. For example, the
“running” roots of rhizomatic bulbs and tubers extend to create new inter-
faces with other organic and nonorganic bodies, extending the experience
of what a body can become (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Running flows
of volcanic magma create new courses along and through the ostensible
stability of the Earth’s mantle, articulating the immanent geomorphic
potential of territories to deterritorialize (Bonta & Protevi, 2004). A musi-
cal “run” creates a line of flight potentially incongruous with the codes that
structure it, overflowing, extending, and traversing tonal registers in the
production of new affects. In each of these examples, currere creates a line
of becoming that expands difference, implying experimentation, move-
ment, and creation. Along this line of flight, currere abolishes an image
of the world given dictatorially. As soon as an image of the world begin to
ossify, the active forces of currere plant a “seed of permanent revolution”
(Deleuze, 2004, p. 78).
While the concept of currere opens the course of life to active creation,
this conceptual approach to thinking the curriculum is sublimated by a
reactive image. In other words, the potential modes of becoming opened
by currere are reduced in complexity and difference through the transposi-
tion of an a priori image of life’s potential for becoming. The a priori image
in which the active potential of currere becomes territorialized is similarly
relational to its etymology. While the active concept of currere intimates
“running,” its reactive a priori image (cursus) refers to the ancient Grecian
“chariot track” or literal “course to be run.” Taking the chariot track as its
THE CONCEPTUAL POWERS OF CURRERE 3
image, the multiplicitous movements attributed earlier to currere become

captured, thereby reducing a “swarm” of potential movements to this most
common and calcified representational structure (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983). Just as the active conceptual force of currere creates an orienta-
tion for thinking, so does the image of life imprisoned within the closed
circuit of the racetrack. Contained in this manner, however, life might no
longer be understood as a creative maximization of its potential to become.
Rather, as a reactive structure, life is understood relative to the image of the
“course to be run,” an image that Western education has mistakenly taken
as an a priori reality.
For institutional education, the image of the track has come to con-
stitute a homogenizing territory. Taken as a transcendent ground for
experience, the course to be run constrains the potential becomings of
a pedagogical life. Instead of thinking through the active powers of cur-
rere to traverse boundaries, produce anomalies, and unfix identity, the
course to be run assumes the givenness of a well-tread path or course
of life. In Nietzschean (1961) terms, such reactivity is intimately con-
nected to a herd mentality that acquiesces to life given through popular
opinion. In what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) regard as a philosophi-
cal error of vast proportion, the “course” has mistakenly been taken as
the ground from which difference extends as a secondary movement.
In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) philosophy, the error of such a concep-
tualization lies in the assumed primacy of the a priori image. That is,
opposed to understanding the image as an abstraction from chaos, it is
taken as a fundamental representation of reality (Ansell Pearson, 1999).
The difference is crucial. If the course to be run is taken as a truth that
exists outside of experience, then the potential for thinking difference
is prone to become entwined or marginalized by this elevated external
power. Further, as a ground that exists beyond immediate experience,
the image of the track is closed to immanent transformation. As May
(2005) writes, “Transcendence freezes living, makes it coagulate and lose
its flow; it seeks to capture vital difference . . . and submit it to a single
perspective, a perspective that stands outside difference and gathers
it into manageable categories” (p. 27). Contrariwise, if the stabilized
image of currere is approached as an abstraction from a multiplicity
of “coursings,” then the conceptual force of difference maintains its
potency to create new ways of thinking “ungrounded” by transcendent
structures.
The impetus to create images of life is characteristic of the human spe-
cies. According to Deleuze (2004), it is inevitable. The concept creates a
plane amidst what Guattari (2000) has referred to as the “chaosmos.” It is
a territory sliced from chaos, a strata amidst geomorphic multiplicity or
refrain in the midst of musical improvisation. The concept creates a way

of thinking amongst an immanent virtuality. The concept is thus always
non-all. It cannot contain everything, for this would be akin to the chaos
from which it is an abstraction (Buchanan, 2000). Yet, an important dis-
tinction between the active force and reactive power of currere must be
made. While “force . . . breaks constraints and opens new vistas . . . power
build walls” (Massumi, 1987b, p. xiii). Put differently, currere’s active
conceptual force works to create a strata constituted by heterogeneous and
vital components. Its rhizomatic tubules create assemblages across unlikely
territories of relation. Recall Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) challenge: phi-
losophy has nothing to do with the representation of the world. Akin to
what we might call the philosophical work of filmmakers, painters, and
musicians, it is rather an exploration into the potentials of their respective
mediums and deviations from the “beaten path” (Massumi, 1987b). For
Massumi, the concept might be likened to the potential of a brick. It can
assemble with the arm (y z) to crash through established boundaries or
be combined with mortar in the construction of more resilient barriers
against difference (x x not y).
In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) thinking, the concept does not appear
ex nihilo. It is always intimate to a problematic(s). Without this rela-
tionship, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) assert that the concept has
no meaning. For example, Descartes’ concept of the cogito creates a
way of thinking the problem “What can be known without doubt?”
(ibid.). In the course of Descartes’ dream, he creates from the chaotic
whirlpool and firestorm a conceptual force for thinking the certainty
of Being (Descartes, 1998). In another instance, Plato’s Forms emerge
in intimate relation to the problematics of universality. Put differently,
Plato’s Forms conceptually rejoin the problematics of reality and illu-
sion. This is the lesson of Plato’s cave in The Republic (1992). Beyond
the shadowy illusions of worldly experience, Plato conceptualizes the
existence of pure archetypal structures that are everywhere mimicked
in the world. In other words, the Platonic Forms constitute a transcen-
dent reality that find expression in a myriad of worldly simulations.
The Platonic task is thus bound to the reflective process of identifying
which forms of simulacra best represent the pure Forms from which
they are generated.
For the lineage of bastard philosophers evoked by Deleuze (1987,
1994, 1997, 2001, 2003a, 2004) and Guattari, the concept is “created as
a function of . . . problems . . . thought to be badly understood or badly
posed” (p. 16). Spinoza’s ontology of immanence, Nietzsche’s eternal return,
and Artaud’s crowned anarchy each create an opening within the rigid ter-
ritories of “State philosophy,” or rather “the representational thinking
that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato” (Massumi, 1987b,

p. xi). They each create a way of thinking difference through the creation
of a conceptual brick hurled at the edifice of the State (logos). This is
what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) refer to as a pedagogy of the concept.
New concepts are constantly required where others have territorialized a
limit.
If we take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) concept as a “tool”
for understanding the problematics of life, then the question of what
problems the reactive concept of currere answers becomes crucial to its
continued opening. As illustrated above, currere’s reactive image is that
of the Grecian “chariot track.” Today, this strange attractor for the con-
ceptualization of curriculum has calcified in a myriad of institutional
forms. Dominated by disciplinary practices aimed at keeping students on
track, contemporary education impels a self-similarity between student
desire and an a priori image of the course to be run. Put differently, the
creative forces exerted by students are made to resemble the ordered and
prescribed course of currere’s track. Mutations, deviations, and monstrous
protrusions are reterritorialized in currere’s image of synthesis. That is,
the reactive image of currere is conceptualized as an organized whole
from which no lines or flows escape. Akin to Hegel’s dialectic, thesis and
antithesis (being and nonbeing) are brought into homogenous union.
In this conceptualization, the potential for radical disjunction is suspi-
ciously circumvented. For Deleuze (1994), the dialectical synthesis marks
the termination of difference wherein “identity [becomes] the sufficient
condition for difference to exist and be thought . . . the obscure is already
clarified from the outset” (p. 263). As an image of synthesis, the reactive
form of currere responds to the problematics of chaos and radical differ-
ence. It does so by establishing an a priori character of unity as the ground
of reality.
The Reactive Image of Currere
The stable and closed image of currere finds expression in the early
theoretical works of Bobbitt (1924) and Tyler (1949). In their Fordian
image, the student becomes the product of a vast mechanical apparatus
designed to instill the normative conditions of State thought in every
mind. The explicit pedagogical questions introduced throughout their
canon illustrate a preoccupation with the organization of educational
experience and the conformity of student behaviors to preestablished
norms (Tyler, 1949). The canon of the rationalists would similarly
answer the problematics of what to teach with the installation of a
teleology. In other words, the content of currere’s course is conceived

in terms of its alignment to a predestined image of Being. The student’s
preparedness to enter the workforce is thus signified by their self-
similarity to a priori ideals of development.
Is this not also the case for the pervasive use of standardized testing
in schools by which students are relentlessly tracked along normative
criteria and arranged hierarchically against an a priori image? Such
tracking is today intimate to the hysterical rhetoric of accountability and
efficiency through which students are only ever distributed by degrees
of variation from the norm. That is, the demands of standardization
suggest the homogenous treatment of the pedagogical course, which in
turn becomes distinguishable according to varying degrees and less radi-
cally in terms of kinds of currere. The primacy of student tracking and
standardization has today created a vile habitus in pedagogical thought.
It has constituted the most macabre territorialization of the “pedagogical
course” that fulfills itself by most closely resembling the image of learn-
ing proffered by the State. “It is through [such] boundaries . . . that
school is experienced in a certain way” (Roy, 2003, p. 12). In other words,
by habitually ascribing to a recognizable image of competency and intel-
ligence, the reactive image of currere appears as a foundational reality
rather than an illusion mobilized by a variety of disciplinary constella-
tions. Institutional recognizability becomes tethered to the homogeniz-
ing powers of the Same.
The territorialization of the pedagogical course is indicative of another
privilege central to its reactive image. That is, the reactive image of cur-
rere is distinctly humanistic, reducing life to its human-all-too-human
enframement. Potential ways of thinking a life are reduced to the image
that the world is “just like us,” and following, that the course to be run
finds full representation in the anthropocentric imaginary. The capacity
for thinking the inhuman potentials of currere are disallowed via the pre-
supposition of life as a distinctly human affair. Akin to the reactive image
of currere, the course of life finds expression in the most human of con-
structions. As a perfect analogue for the pace and habitus of contemporary
schooling, the racetrack is taken for the image of a life, circumventing
rhizomatic, amoebic, geomorphic, and a swarm of other ways to think
the course to be run. Such thinking is not simply the creation of a new
humanistic image, but a way of attaining a thought without image; after
all, as Daignault avers, the “curriculum does not exist, it happens” (cited
in Hwu, 2004, p. 183).
In this vein, currere’s reactive image is constituted through the
elevation of a binary system of identity. The interiority of the course
prescribes the limits of movement defined by State territorializations.
It suggests a rhetorical vision of education as an “ongoing” and “guided

process.” Yet, even the ostensibly neutral rhetoric of guidance can scarcely
obfuscate its proclivity to interpret every sign in advance, to “lead out”
(educare) along well-traveled paths. Today, there are guides everywhere,
but rarely do these force us to think. Contrariwise, they create an image
of thought that murders thinking (Daignault and Gaultier, 1982).
In much contemporary education for example, the guide has been lit-
eralized in the teaching manuals, textbooks, and ready-made course(s)
of pedagogical life. It is the course of this life that such literalized guides
overcode (surcodage), disallowing heterogeneity “in order to produce
[an immutable] substance” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 112). In relation
to this noology of currere, the “immutable” substance might be taken
to mean the pedagogical course itself. As Deleuze (1994) asserts, we
are often disposed to approaching life as if it were a homogenous mat-
ter or fixed territory. This is not simply a process of “teacher proofing”
but more radically, the creation of an image for thinking the course of
pedagogical life that maintains the normative and microfascist features
of State thought. Nomos, the tunneling or subterranean thinking that
subverts territorial overcoding is thus defined as nonidentical to currere
(x x not y). In this molar or binary system of identity politics, the
active force of currere becomes reduced to its most entrenched character
of recognizability, dogmatically limiting the ways in which the course of
a pedagogical life might be thought. In direct response to the problemat-
ics of subjective agency and heteronormativity, currere’s reactive image
wards against the dangers of nomadic thought that everywhere seek
expression through processes of creative deterritorialization.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) assert, the concept creates a world.
It organizes matter and mobilizes particular systems of relation from
a preconceptual “chaosmos” prior to the image of the world (Guattari,
1995). Simply, the image gives form to the chaos of life. The reactive
image of currere is thus not simply right or wrong, but rather, the cre-
ation of a strata for understanding the course of pedagogical life. It is
both an inevitable and perhaps necessary “beginning.” Yet, as discussed
earlier, it is not the only way of thinking the course of pedagogical life.
Currere’s overcoded territorialization requires new concepts and the
chaotic return of difference that pushes all systems toward creative
becoming. Despite the preeminent image of currere as a self-enclosed
and stable track, the active force of currere evokes a radically different
way of thinking the course to be run. Cross-cutting the reactive power
of currere with its active conceptual force is thus not simply a means to
describe the paradoxical character of currere’s etymology but, follow-
ing Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a way of doing something to currere
itself. Experimenting on the lines of flight created by an active concept

of currere becomes a way of transforming life and extending experience
beyond knowledge and opinion (doxa). Further, by creating a strata
upon which currere and its problematics are assembled, the generation
of more adequate problems and conceptual lines of flight might be posed
(Deleuze and Parnet, 2007).
While the formulation of currere’s paradoxical character is signifi-
cant, we have yet to fully explore what a body—a course of life—can
do (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984). In this vein, Deleuze (1991) suggests
that today, we desperately require an excess of concepts. This intimates
more than simply adding new words or images to an already engorged
academic lexicon. Rather, it is a challenge to not simply say what an artist
or philosopher has already said, but to do what they did, that is, “create
new concepts for the problems they posed” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994,
p. 28). This response emerges in part as an ethical intervention to the
error of reactivism. Enslaving the power of life, reactivism separates the
body from its future. The task of currere’s active force lies in exploring
the vital powers of a life, its lines, assemblages, and potentials for becom-
ing. Such becomings ward against reactive thinking. They cannot simply
be valued according to an a priori image that supports identitarian ways
of thinking. Reactive powers do not create becomings, they territorialize
Being from the perspective of reflective self-similarity (x x not y),
hence limiting potentials for thinking difference (Roy, 2003). To engage
with the vital and creative forces of difference, the Universal reactive
image of pedagogical life must first be explained. In other words, the
image conflated with reality, with what is, must be decrystallized and
opened to the flux from which its impression as a stable strata is sliced.
As Roy (2003) remarks, this task entails creating “an immanent place . . .
that would aid in dehabituating us from frozen ways of thinking about
the educational encounter itself [as it is bound to] a will-to-recognition
and a will-to-representation” (p. 9).
Contemporarily, lines of dehabituation proliferate. In film, music,
art, and video games, molar territories and identitarian thinking are
continually undergoing productive deterritorialization. Subterranean
movements everywhere push stratified systems toward points of rup-
ture. The processes of territorialization and deterritorialization are thus
not simply an antagonistic binary pair, but a mutual relation intimate
to the differentiating forces of vital systems. As Colebrook (2002) states,
“the very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what
it is (territorialize) can also allow it to become what it is not (deter-
ritorialize)” (p. xxii). Yet, as Deleuze (2004) articulates, “non-Euclidian
geometries don’t keep Euclid from being fundamental” (p. 141). That is,
just because the social field is alive with nomadic movements does not
preclude the habitual perpetuation of a unified image of life. Today, the
stable and closed form of currere maintains itself in a myriad of insti-
tutional practices and signifiers. The contemporary challenge is thus
to open what it means to think the course of life “adequate to what is
happening around us” (ibid., p. 138). It is, as Deleuze (2004) remarks,
to explore the potential forms of nonintegration and refusal alive in
challenges of art (1990; 2000), music (1987), film (2003a; 2003b),
video, and youth culture. “It must adopt as its own those revolutions
going on elsewhere, in other domains, or those that are being prepared”
(Deleuze, 2004, p. 138). In productive connection with such heteroge-
neous domains, this manuscript will explore the development of new
concepts for pedagogy in an age of schizo-capitalism. This inquiry will
be articulated as an artistic, political, and ethical attempt to transform
the normative limits ascribed to pedagogical Being. Opposed to defining
what currere is, the task of this work is oriented to the expression of
what its active conceptualization might do.
Experimenting on the line(s) of flight evoked by an active concep-
tualization of currere, this book will practice an arts-based research in
its most radical, nonrepresentational form. Critical to this work will be
its potential for thinking difference. In this vein, the second chapter of
this book will draw upon Deleuze’s (1988) reading of Spinoza as a way
of addressing the limiting powers of transcendence. Put simply, tran-
scendence establishes the privileged ideal “outside” of experience, sug-
gesting the primacy of identitarian thought prior to difference. Against
the legacy of transcendent thought in education, Chapter 2 will develop
a vector of productive escape through what Deleuze (1994), apropos
Spinoza, has referred to as immanence. Through the deployment of
Spinoza’s heretical critique of the transcendent, this chapter will deploy
the concept of immanence in relation to its ontological import for
thinking difference.
Chapter 3 will continue to develop the thinking of Deleuze’s (2004)
“broken lineage [of] explosive [and] volcanic” philosophers in its
creation of an artistically, politically, and ethically charged concept of
difference (p. 141). While Chapter 2 will primarily focus on the inter-
face of Deleuze and Spinoza, Chapter 3 will focus on the Deleuzian
(2006a) encounter with Nietzsche. More specifically, it will grapple
with the concept of difference via the eternal return, that is, the “posi-
tive simulation” that recurs in difference-to-itself. “If everything is a
mask” Deleuze (2004) writes, “ultimately, there is nothing except the
will to power, which is the power to metamorphose, to shape masks, to
interpret and evaluate . . . as a plastic force, as the highest power of art”
(p. 119). In this vein, Deleuze (2006) mobilizes what might be dubbed
the “positive simulacrum” in order to think the “powers of the false,”
or rather, to affirm the productive forces of art. No longer tethered to a
model upon which representational identity is reliant, the simulacrum
can be thought in a manner immanent to difference, and not, as the pri-
macy of transcendent thought in the West has presumed, as a degraded
copy of reality. In this vein, Chapter 3 will question the significance of
affirmation and the eternal return for the conceptualization of differ-
ence. Further, it will interrogate the nihilism of Baudrillard’s simula-
crum in an effort to rediscover the positive force of simulation for a
people yet to come.
The remainder of my proposed study will be developed across six
lines of flight. It is crucial to note that for Deleuze (1987), the line of
flight “escapes” in a constitutive rather than solipsistic sense. In this
vein, the line of flight assembles to bring something new into existence.
While the molar habit of capture particular to contemporary schooling
ontologically territorializes the curricular map as a tracing of routes/
roots already known, my first line of flight will consider pedagogical
possibility through the conceptual Deleuzeguattarian (1987) strategy
of becoming-nomad. Deploying the experimental force of Director
Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, this chapter attempts to engender a way of
thinking that is not merely representational, but rather, an invention of
pedagogical difference. This chapter will ask “What kinds of pedagogi-
cal ethics might be created by experimenting with Deleuzian nomadism?”
and further, “How might nomadic thought pose a challenge to Western
ontological presuppositions?”
The Deleuzeguattarian notion of music is not simply limited to the
discourse of musicology. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari deploy ways
of thinking about music as a noncanonical means of interrogating the
philosophical canon. In Deleuzeguattarian philosophy, music is both
an affective force and a means of empowering what affects and forces
music makes possible. Whereas popular music territorializes affective
potential through repetition and rigidity, such overdetermination does
not mark the limit case of musical potential. As in the previous line
of flight, becoming-music will deform the familiar contours of musical
territorialization by drawing upon improvised music as a passage for
thinking currere’s difference. This line of flight will continue to inter-
rogate both the political and creative power of the nomad while chal-
lenging the limits of subjectivity and authority. Specifically, this line of
flight will grapple with the question “How does improvisation create a
rupture in instrumental thought?,” and further, “How might the affective
forces of music be deterritorialized and redistributed to constitute new lines

of thought?”
Such “uncertain games” as Go (a traditional Chinese strategy game),
parkour (free running), and computer hacking provide a radically different
affective understanding of movement untethered from the hierarchies and
predestination of molar or stastical territories. In other words, the “rules”
of each aforementioned “game” posit an image of movement, relation, and
assemblage that begin to “escape” the logic of State controls. Chapter 6
will attempt to displace the molar organization of currere by detailing the
ways in which such uncertain games work to unhinge active thinking from
molar or arborescent fetters. The line of flight entitled uncertain games
will also consider the ways in which youth today are deterritorializing the
social terrain and limits of State authority. That is, while many institu-
tional settings have continued to consolidate the structuralist notion of
“the course” as a sedimented and transcendental form, this chapter begins
to expose such endeavors as anachronistic territorializations nostalgic for
a sense of teleological and ontological certainty. Against the lure of nos-
talgia, the vector of this chapter will ask “How do rhizomatic movements
create a way of thinking that productively deterritorialize the sediments of
State thought?”
I’m Not There advances a radical cinematic style for thinking an anti-
Oedipal, antifascist, and nonrepresentational subject. This chapter argues
that many of the ostensibly libratory images of life being mobilized in con-
temporary curriculum theorizing continue to be caught within an Oedipal
image that submits desire to the identity politics of self-resemblance and
self-reflection. Attempts within the field to dissimulate such identity poli-
tics have had varied success. For example, I’m Not There argues that the
lauded power of heterogeneity in much curriculum theorizing does not
necessarily equate to either creative resistance or the loosening of identi-
tarian (molar) thinking within the social field. Today, curriculum theory
requires new conceptual resources for thinking a life that does not fall back
on prior images of thought. This task, I’m Not There avers, is intimate to
what might be called the political-arts of curriculum theorizing. Toward
the conceptualization of such political-arts, I’m Not There mobilizes the
Deleuzian time-image (a cinematic style of thinking time as a crystalline,
irrational structure) in order to experiment with both somatic and social
organizations. Following this line of flight, curriculum theorists might
“think” the cinema not simply as an apparatus of interpretation or repre-
sentation, but more crucially, a vehicle for experimenting with how a life
might go. As the course of this chapter argues, the arts do not resemble the
world as it is, but how it might be.
While Chapter 7 develops a radical conceptualization of time for cur-

riculum theorizing, Chapter 8 promulgates an experimental approach
for thinking the curriculum as a holey space, or rather, a space capable
of communicating across both striated (organized) and smooth (or
deterritorialized/ nomadic) terrain. It is via such a conceptualization
of space that curricular thinking might escape the identitarian rheto-
ric of adaptation in favor of a commitment to the kinds of creative
modifications currently underway in hacker-culture, revolutionary
art-collectives, and underground music scenes. It is via the conceptu-
alization of such holey spaces that we might begin to prepare a site that
is not yet overdetermined by State powers of surveillance or capitalist
modes of capture. Such a conceptualization of space is desperately
needed as institutional laborers find it increasingly difficult to engage
in a style of thinking Deleuze and Guattari dub “private” or “untimely.”
For Deleuze and Guattari, holey space is the site of both historical and
contemporary betrayal, poised to break from powers of overcoding,
whether functioning overtly as a corollary of the State apparatus or as
stealth agents reinvigorating old hegemonies under the banner of politi-
cal or pedagogical progressivism. Making a holey curriculum attempts to
develop such betrayal as a tactic for affirming difference, creating a way
of thinking curricular foundations without foundations, and further, for
problematizing implicitly emancipatory conceptualizations of rhizomatics,
“borderline-work” and “third space” in contemporary curriculum theoriz-
ing and arts-based research. This caveat is fulminated via an extended
analysis of auteur Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
(1999), a film in which the difficult composition of an anomalous life is
most vigorously thought.
Against the binary conceptualization of technology as either a utopian
vehicle for human progress or the apocalyptic harbinger of humanity’s
end, Strange Contraptions and Queer Machines extends along two lines of
flight. In the first, I articulate the significance of techne for the theoriza-
tion of a process ontology capable of thinking a life that does not fall
back onto either humanist metanarrative ideals or an anthropocentric
image of the world. Such a “failure” at the level of representation is
already underway in contemporary music (via the prosthetic assemblage
of the turntablist), cinema (via the camera’s deterritorialization of the
human perspective), and visual art (via the experimental creation of a
post-human bestiary). To think the productive potential of such sym-
biosis from under the legacy of anthropomorphism and the “ejector-seat
theology” of posthumanism requires a mode of thought responsive to the
unknown. It is along this second line of flight that Strange Contraptions
and Queer Machines develops the Deleuzian idea of machinic thinking as
a resource for both ontological experimentation and artistic innovation

that does not fall back upon prior models of hylomorphic possibility.
Rather, it is via machinic thinking that this chapter explicates the signifi-
cance of what might be called the transhuman. In this vein, this chapter
begins to imagine a strange pedagogical machine that queers, or rather,
counteractualizes the material repetitions that compose orthodox images
of schooling. Folding back upon earlier developments, this advocacy reit-
erates a central premise of this book; that is, we do not yet know how a life
might be composed.
2
The Illusion of Transcendence

and the Ontology of
Immanence
T he “traditional” conceptualization of currere is marked by a transcen-

dent commitment. The a priori image of the world forged through
such discourses as structuralism and phenomenology presume a stable
ontological ground from which the course of pedagogical life emanates.
As Foucault (1972) avers, while structuralism was conceived as a means
to overcome the values of humanism, it nevertheless advanced an image
of life requiring universal structuration. That is, structuralist approaches
to currere would assert the a priori image of an underlying system or
universal grammar prior to difference. Put differently, the structualist
legacy in curriculum theory posits a transcendent point or structural
ground beneath structure. It is such a legacy that inheres in the Marxist,
Saussurian, and Freudian coordinates of curriculum theory.
Political theorist Bowers (1980) has argued that Marxist curriculum
theorists “have been [unsuccessful] in avoiding a thought process that
organizes reality into rigid categories and linear causal relationships”
(p. 278). In the Marxian curriculum analysis of Apple, Bowles and Gintis
for example, Bowers observes the rigid structural framing of socialism
and capitalism within the dualist logic of right/wrong, truth/illusion,
and salvation/perdition. Further, Bowers would admonish the politics
of curriculum theory for its structural adherence to “deep” binary
structures, its image of “atomistic . . . individualism” and its latent
anthropocentrism (p. 282). Analyzing the self-professed radicalism of
early curriculum theory, Bowers would perceive an ongoing commit-
ment to conservatism. Further, he would detect a transcendent image of
pedagogical life that would presuppose a limited and privileged onto-
logical ground for social transformation. In Marxian thought, one such
“ground” is constituted by the economic infrastructure of production.

For Marx and Marxian curriculum scholars, the infrastructure of pro-
duction emanates the ideological superstructures of education, religion,
law, politics, art, etc. The ontological ground of production is hence
imagined as an unconscious structuring power that creates ideological
relations in the world.
Another example of the structuralist legacy in curriculum theory
comes from Roy’s (2004) analysis of “pedagogic communication.”
As Roy asserts, the instrumentalist conception of “clear communica-
tion” advances a “tripartite structure of designation” that presumes the
presence of a unified subject (manifestation), unified object (designa-
tion), and unified Idea (signification) (p. 311). This image of pedagogic
communication privileges the conviction that a subjective agent and
stable milieu can be assumed a priori, that signification is politically neu-
tral, and that language can be brought under rational mastery. Further,
it suggests that pedagogic communication is representational, or rather,
an articulation of life as it actually is. Inhering the traditional sender-
receiver model of pedagogic transmission, this representational ideal
assumes the correspondent stability of signifier and signified inherited
via Saussure. It is in this sense that curriculum theories privileging the
contextualization of the subject begin from the image of an organized,
or dialectical whole. Yet, as Roy argues, such a model can only be “willed
into existence by denying the stubborn messiness of everyday life”
(p. 299). For Roy, such a model ultimately degenerates into a nihilistic
resolution, utterances of which do not effectuate reality but simply
reflect stable relations of signification given in advance. Put differently,
in the traditional pedagogic model of transmission, language is not seen
as politically or affectively charged. Rather, it is conceived as a transpar-
ent medium supported by the universal structures of subject, context,
and “reliable” signification.
A third structural legacy that inheres curriculum theory is that of
Freud’s Oedipus, the trace of which might similarly be perceived in the
hierarchical structure and subject politics of the traditional educational
apparatus. Behind the signifiers of everyday classroom life is imagined
the implicate familial model of mommy-daddy-and me. Put differently,
the Oedipal drama constitutes in many conceptualizations of education a
fixed template or automatic interpretation machine for the psychical rela-
tions of the classroom. Working parasitically on the intentions of student
and teacher, the “unconscious” structure of the Oedipal drama transposes
desire upon the a priori psychical dynamics of the family, positing an
image of classroom life in which desiring-production becomes implicitly
dangerous. Negatively defined, desire impels the disciplinary prohibitions
THE ILLUSION OF TRANSCENDENCE 17
of the Symbolic apparatus, which functions to maintain the privileged

edicts of common morality and Law.
The Transcendent Error
The structuralist image of currere asserts that difference is relative to a

foundational context or milieu. Thus, in structuralist terms, difference
can only be conceived by degrees of variation from a universal, underlying
image of reality. This underlying image marks a philosophical commit-
ment to transcendence. Following Spinoza, Nietzsche (2000) remarks on
the “four great errors” of Western philosophical thought. Before all others,
there is first the illusion of transcendence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).
As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aver, the Western metaphysical tradi-
tion presupposes the existence of a substance above and beyond empiri-
cal space, power or ontological being. In Nietzsche (1969), the primary
example of transcendence is that of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
God transcends not only the world of experience, but the world itself. “He”
exists above and beyond our capacity to conceive of him. Yet, while the
Judeo-Christian God forms the most insistent legacy of transcendence in
the Western philosophical canon, it is not the singular case (May, 2005).
The Platonic Forms that predate Christianity constitute another legacy
of transcendent thought in Western philosophy. Like the Christian God,
Plato’s Forms exist above and beyond experience. They eclipse the mate-
rial world. In this manner, the Platonic Forms find worldly expression only
as copies of an a priori Ideal. As Plato’s (1992) lesson in the cave teaches,
material experience is but the shadow of a deeper reality that can scarcely
be perceived. While worldly objects are mutable and imperfect, Plato
(1992) asserts that they are expressions correspondent to unchanging and
perfect a priori Forms.
Drawing from Socrates’ Meno, Plato (1992) wages an argument on the
transcendent Idea of Equality. While Equality might not empirically exist
in the world, Plato argues the Idea of an essential Equality exists beyond
empirical means of capture. Two people of ostensibly the same weight or
height might be differentiated when subjected to intensified scrutiny. In the
world, Plato asserts, a perfect Equality is impossible, as difference might
always be discovered. Yet, in Platonic thought, the perception of imperfec-
tion intimates the existence of a perfect Form. Covered over in empirical
life, the Idea points to a deeper reality. Beyond the imperfect forms of the
world, Plato suggests a pure essence, a stable and unchanging Universal.
It is toward this deep reality that the full expression of life aspires. Beauty,
goodness, and truth are only thus according to the immutable Forms of
Beauty, Goodness, and Truth given a priori. In Platonism, reality can thus
be grasped only by bringing worldly experience in alignment with tran-
scendent Forms. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, this task befalls
the philosopher king, who is charged with understanding and recreating
the world in resemblance to the a priori Ideas. All relations issue from the
substance of the Forms, which in turn constitute the “correct categories” of
thought. In the tradition of Western metaphysics, we are given the founda-
tion of Being as a transcendent, immutable, and stable power outside of
experience.
A similar stability grounds the transcendent legacy of subjectivity in
Western metaphysics. Therein, the transcendent subject finds its great-
est expression in Descartes’ (1998) “I think” (cogito). In the Cartesian
formula, the subject is located in a position external to material experi-
ence. Beyond doubt exists the subject and its capacity to doubt. Above the
possibility that the world is an illusion exists the subject and its capacity
to think thus. The Cartesian cogito elides epistemology with the certainty
of Being. Exceeding error and the possibility of deception, the subject is
conceptualized as a transcendent ground. In the libratory project of criti-
cal pedagogy, the transcendent image of the subject is often presumed as
the most “basic” social unit in “which we locate the source of freedom
and rationality” (Bowers, 1987, p. 2). In this manner, the subject consti-
tutes a “limit case” or transcendent ground for social transformation and
educational reform. Yet, the birth of the cogito is mired in difficulty. For
the transcendent subject to be established, Descartes must rely upon the
power of God. That is, to ensure the reality of the thinking self, Descartes
evokes the power of God as a guarantor of the cogito’s ontological legiti-
macy. Descartes (1998) writes, “It follows that [the idea of truth, clarity
and distinctness] is innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me”
(p. 42). This innate image of a pure subjectivity to which Descartes alludes
is not an immanent creation. Rather, it is through the transcendent power
of God that the ontological certainty of the stable subject is given. This
ontological move marks a dual transcendence at the heart of the Cartesian
project.
Cartesian reliance on a transcendent God is ultimately eclipsed. The
human subject comes to usurp God’s place on the transcendent plane.
Philosophy from Kant to Sartre becomes enthralled with the image of the
subject’s control over material reality (May, 2005). The post-Kantians, for
example, attribute the creation of concepts to a pure subjectivity rather
than a transcendent God (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). “Kant discovers the
modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence
of a Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation),
but that of a subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed
by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself

(reflection)” (ibid. p. 46). While ontological shifts populate the transcen-
dent plane, the legacy of transcendence remains intact. Behind the flux
of worldly life, the Idea of a True reality remains intimate to the image
of Western thought (Foucault, 1972). In this vein, much twentieth and
twenty-first century theory maintains the transcendent status of the
subject. While we might define the subject along degrees of class, gender,
and culture, the presupposition of a transcendent subject continues to be
assumed. Today, this conceptualization extends far beyond philosophy
in popular culture, popular opinion, and common sense. We act as if
the world were experienced by discreet observing subjects and further,
presume that such subjects are representations of a relatively stable and
transcendent self.
Foucault (1972) defines his own philosophical project as breaking with
a “subjection to transcendence” (p. 203). The image of Western thought
and institutional power, he claims, is always oriented to some foundational
“exteriority” that can be interpreted, discovered, or unequivocally known.
For Foucault, exteriority captures desire by establishing “an ethics of
knowledge.” As Foucault avers, an “ethics of knowledge” presupposes that
by subscribing to some hierarchical “exteriority,” we might know the world
as it Truly is. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) have described such subjection
to transcendence as “interpretosis,” or rather, the diseased will to imagine
some deeper reality to be revealed or discovered in every phenomenon. As
Deleuze (2004) writes, this will is alive in a litany of institutional settings.
In traditional psychiatry, the logos of the clinician crushes the pathos of the
patient, presupposing all thought to a sensible order of causes and symp-
toms. In education, the desire of the student becomes captured in the logos
of currere’s course. In this vein, the pedagogical task is not oriented to the
creation of concepts, but the discovery of images for thought installed a
priori (Doll, 1993). As Doll remarks, the “discovery curriculum” functions
instrumentally to align the presumptions of both educator and student to
prior outcomes. In this model, the representational correspondence of the
curricular blueprint with its actualization in the classroom confirms the
transcendent ideal of currere. The creation of a blueprint for the organi-
zation of pedagogical form constitutes a restricted set of singularities for
a body and thus operates “as a plane of transcendence” (Bonta & Protevi,
2004, p. 162). Akin to the philosophical project, the reactive image of cur-
rere is based on the “premeditated decision” that life is naturally oriented
to seek the Truth (Deleuze, 1994, p. 94). This is the image of thought that
subjection and interpretosis maintain by privileging a transcendent reality.
Be it God, Truth, Goodness, or Being, a foundational exterior is erected
against the material flows of a life. Put differently, rather than seeing the
immanently productive relations between our actions and the world, we

imagine that some underlying Truth exists to be uncovered beyond such
immediate and material experience. This covering of life’s intensive forces
by extensive powers constitutes for Deleuze (1995) the greatest erasure
enacted by the transcendental illusion.
The Judeo-Christian God, the Platonic forms, the Cartesian cogito,
and Foucault’s “ethics of knowledge” are but four brief examples of the
transcendent legacy in Western thought. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994),
such transcendent forms are not simply wrong, but rather, attest to the
profound creative potential of thought. Only the most productive and
creative powers of thought, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) remark, could
enslave life to an external image. By approaching transcendence as an act
of creation, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) posit a way of surveying history
by observing all of the “thousand plateaus” of transcendence humans have
created. Yet, they are not apologists for a transcendent image of the world.
If anything, Deleuze and Guattari take up Nietzsche’s admonishment of
transcendence as the great error of Western philosophy. Today, education is
enslaved to a litany of a priori images, including those informed by the leg-
acy of Marxian, Saussurian, and Freudian thought in curriculum scholar-
ship. While each of these educational plateaus mark a way of thinking the
world, they concomitantly restrict the ways the world might be thought.
The Jungian objection to Freud’s reduction of the complex libidinal
economy marks one example of this restriction (Roy, 2004). For Jung,
Freud’s error extends from his reduction of psychosexual development to
the dogmatic image of the Oedipal template. In the transferential relation-
ship, Jung argues, the analyst often appears to the analysand as a “devil . . .
god . . . or sorcerer” (Jung cited in Roy, p. 303). Jung suggests that there are a
litany of ways in which the analysand or student might “see” the analyst or
teacher disjunctive of the familial template. The reduction of the psychical
life of the classroom to the Oedipal template thus covers over a swarm of
ways in which the pedagogical relationship might be understood. Further,
Freud’s privileged image of the family contravenes the productive powers
of the foreign to open new ways of thinking the qualities and values of
relation. The result of this dogmatic image of pedagogical life is a “narcis-
sism that shepherds diverse experience toward the reflection of a unity
that can then be easily placed within a preexisting hierarchized system of
values” (ibid., p. 303). In this vein, Freud not only cements the negative
conceptualization of desire, but the foundation of subjective development
as a direct extension of the familial image. A “swarm” of potential becom-
ings or relations are thus “captured” in this ontological move to the tran-
scendent Same. Overturning such transcendent thought is, for Deleuze
and Guattari, critical to the conceptualization of difference. In this task,
Deleuze (1997; 1988) turns to the philosophical works of Spinoza and the
concept of immanence.
The philosophy of transcendence relies on two basic commitments.
First, transcendence requires the conceptualization of two ontological
substances. If God, the Platonic Forms, or Cartesian subject is thought to
transcend the world, then its composition must necessarily be of another
kind. Put differently, if God were composed of the same substance as the
world, the two would be akin. The transcendent substance would become
the mirror of a mutable, unstable, and limited world. In this formulation,
“God might be elsewhere in space and time, but he would not be beyond”
(May, 2005, p. 28). Without the presence of two ontological substances,
the conceptualization of a transcendent beyond would be impossible. In
the legacy of Western philosophy, the transcendent is not an analogue of
earthly substance, but rather, immutable, stable, and certain, acting upon
the world from a position unfettered by the morphologies of material
reality. The philosophical concept of the cogito for example, acts to give
an image to an otherwise inert and characterless world. The image of tran-
scendence is thus not simply that of a colonizing power, but a liberating
authority that confers its superiority through the expression of an image
of the transcended world’s greatest capacity for Being.
The first commitment of transcendence is to the conceptualization of
at least two ontological substances without which there could be no plane
beyond the material. The second is to the hierarchical ordering of the
substances in terms of power and value (May, 2005). While transcendence
requires at least two ontological substances in its constitution of an exteri-
ority, it requires further the privileging of one substance over another. In
the metaphysical tradition, for example, the transcendent is incommensu-
rate with the chaotic flows of material life. This ontological requirement is
pivotal if the transcendent is upheld as a deeper reality worth seeking. Put
differently, the presupposition of transcendent thought is oriented beyond
material life. Without a higher order, no such beyond could be sought. The
transcendent image of the world is thus predicated on the privileging of
particular substances while degrading others. The Medieval conception of
God, the Platonic Forms, and the Cartesian cogito each constitute superior
ontological substances not of this world. In the transcendent tradition,
the privileged ontological substance is conflated with the “nonphysical,
the unlimited, and the unity of a self-identity” (p. 31). Nonidentitarian,
chaotic, and material forces become, in the legacy of transcendence, sub-
stances to overcome.
For Nietzsche (1966), the commitments of transcendence give us the
ascetic priest. This priest, Nietzsche writes, proffers the curative powers
of a transcendent ideal to the unhappy, the suffering, and melancholic.
In brief, the ascetic priest comforts the masses with the image of an
unchanging transcendent power above the difficulties and temptations of
living. Nietzsche (1968) refers to this turn as the “will-to-nothingness,”
that is, the acquiescence to a utopic plane of immutability and certitude.
In this vein, the ascetic “teachers of the beyond” are “of the same origin
[as] the pessimists, nihilists, romantics of pity, criminals, [and] vice
addicts,” for each posits salvation in some transcendent form, be it Truth,
God, Love or Justice (p. 71). “The human will,” Nietzsche (2000) writes,
would “rather will nothingness than not will” (p. 533). Against the horror
of a vacuum (horror vacui), the ascetic priest produces a goal for the will
in the image of the transcendent. Inverting the ressentiment of the masses
back upon themselves, Nietzsche’s priest avers: do not blame the other for
your ills, blame yourself! Intimately tied to the rhetoric of self-discipline
and repression of productive desire, asceticism enjoins the subject to a
higher set of values beyond the immediate and visceral materiality of life.
The ascetic priest thus entreats the subject to overcome itself by taking
the image of transcendence as its immutable law. While material reality
may by chaotic and mutable, the transcendent ideals of Truth, God, and
subject affirm a stable image that preserves one from the abyss (Descartes,
1641/1998).
Ascetic ideals, Nietzsche (2000) writes, are erected against the degen-
erating forces of life, “as an artifice for the preservation of life” (p. 556).
The transcended world, while appearing as an affirmation of life, actively
denounces its immanent and creative forces. Put differently, the transcen-
dent affirms the power of life by limiting its powers of difference. The
productive potential of desire is morally reduced to an indulgence, the
immanent overcoming of negative affects dubbed delusional. It is in this
way that Nietzsche regards the transcendent ideals of the ascetic priest a
means of enslaving the masses according to the “common sense” of the
herd (p. 456). Nietzsche rebukes, “[the priest] combats only the suffer-
ing itself, the comfiture of the sufferer, not its cause, not the real sickness:
this must be our most fundamental objection to priestly medication”
(p. 566).
As Nietzsche (2000) writes, the outcome of ascetic reactivity in Western
philosophy is nihilism. Asceticism purports that some greater power or
value exists beyond material life, and that as disciplined subjects, we must
renounce our desires in submission to their a priori image. In the image
of a transcended world, the will aspires to a stable and immutable world
beyond the material flow of reality. Yet, because this world does not exist,
one ultimately realizes that it is ungraspable. That is, because there is no
graspable reality beyond the flux of life, we are given to feelings of despair,
abjection, and despondency. For Nietzsche (2000), the realization that no
ultimate truth exists leads to nihilism and ressentiment. The transcendent

image of the world is thus the very idea that ultimately leads to nihilism.
That is, if no superior ontological substance exists to confer meaning upon
the subordinate substance of material life, then life is necessarily unintel-
ligible. The legacy of transcendence collapses into cynicism. For Nietzsche
then, nihilism is counterpart to the philosophical error of transcendence,
constituting in part the real sickness that inheres the legacy of reactivity in
Western thought.
Roy (2004) argues that the traditional model of pedagogic transmis-
sion similarly lapses into nihilism. In Saussurian linguistics for example,
the description of the world is conceived as an ostensibly neutral process.
Such neutrality not only assumes the transparency of communication, but
further, the general neutrality of the word as the reflection of a stable, ref-
erential reality. In this image, language is regarded in terms of it’s a priori
Form or communicative ideal. Against, this, Roy argues for a formative or
expressive approach to language that introduces foreignness into the rep-
resentational ideal. Put differently, Roy asserts that language should aspire
less to the approximation of fixed meaning and discursive norms, both of
which lead to a form of nihilism that resolves the unproductive nature of
communication. Instead, Roy introduces the Deleuzian notion of order-
words, constitutive speech-acts or commands that carry transformative
affects. Language is hence not simply communicative, but performative,
capable of altering relations, introducing hemorrhages in the Symbolic
system, and opening new worlds of meaning. Performative order-words
interrupt the idea of language as a code, for as Roy asserts, “A code is the
condition of possibility for all explanation” (p. 305). Further, Deleuzian
order-words or performative language make it impossible to differentiate
between semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics. The speech act traverses
each by introducing an enfolded performative affect. In a related sense,
“the meaning of language can no longer be defined independently of the
[speech act]” (p. 305). That is, the speech act affects meaning as to pre-
clude its advanced signification. As Roy deterritorializes, language might
be understood not simply in terms of its homogeneous Form, but rather,
as an expressive formation. Such an approach creates a wedge against the
representational model of language. Language does not simply describe
things in the world, it does things.
Spinoza and the Plane of Immanence
Nietzsche’s commentary on the nihilistic collapse of Western thought

is intimate to the ontological problem of substances. This problem is
confronted directly in the philosophy of Spinoza (Deleuze, 1997). While

the God of Spinoza’s time was conceptualized as a substance of greater
value and power, Spinoza (1951) remarks that “there can be, or be con-
ceived, no other substance but God” (p. 39). The Spinozian critique is
thus railed against the differentiation of substances, and further, against
the distinction of the mind and body. For Spinoza, the thinking (mind)
and extended (body) are in fact not different substances, but rather,
different expressions or modes of substance (Deleuze, 1997). Conceived
thus, Spinoza repudiates transcendence in favor of the concept of
expression.
While the image of a transcended world relies on ontological com-
mitments, it is haunted by a single question. That is, if transcendent
thought relies on the presence of at least two ontological substances, what
is the character of their interaction? For Spinoza (1951), the relationship
between what exists and transcendent substance is one of emanation.
“By substance,” Spinoza remarks, “I mean that which is in itself, and is
conceived through itself ” (1951, p. 45). Spinozian emanation is unlike the
creative process of production ex nihilo. Dissimilar to the story of pure
creation in Genesis, emanation suggests that something is created from the
substance of its creator, who “[produces] while remaining in themselves”
(Deleuze, 1997, p. 171). In emanation, there is only one substance from
which all creations issue. Yet, while emanation challenges the conceptual
power of transcendence, it retains its hierarchical character. That is, the
concept of emanation reasserts the ontological distinction between creator
and created. In this manner, it fulfills a key commitment to transcendence.
In fulfillment of the other, the creator is privileged above its creations. The
immanent character implied in emanation, that is, emanation’s capacity to
“self-generate,” is thus covered over via its dual ontological commitment
to transcendence.
Spinoza’s ontology does not cease with emanation. Rather, he seeks to
redress the error of transcendence via an ontology of immanence. In a deeply
heretical maneuver against transcendent thought, Spinoza conceptualizes
the univocity of being. While transcendence relies upon the perpetuation of
an ontological gap between creator and created, the concept of univocity
destroys its hierarchical commitment. Put differently, Spinoza’s univocity
of being collapses the difference between ontological substances into a sin-
gle plane. In proposition thirteen of The Ethics, Spinoza writes: “Substance
absolutely infinite is indivisible” (1951, p. 54). As Spinoza argues, the
cessation infinite through division is absurd. Hence, for Spinoza, God is
no longer composed of some ontologically varied substance, but rather,
of one indivisible substance. As Spinoza writes in proposition fourteen:
“God is one, that is . . . only one substance can be granted in the universe,
and that substance is absolutely infinite” (p. 55). Spinoza’s univocal Being
is not simply a new ground for Being, but rather, an open Whole or “pure
variation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 39–41). That is, the ontology
of immanence conceptualized by Spinoza is not the emanation of some
stable ground or transcendent power, but an infinite and uncoded cha-
osmos prior to organization. For Deleuze (1997), Spinoza’s ontology
of immanence frees expression from the tyranny of causality, from the
powers of a higher being, and from the dictates of a fascist Other. Unlike
emanation or creation, immanence is not reduced to the notions of follow-
ing, subordinating, or resembling (May, 2005). In this manner, Spinozian
immanence becomes open to difference. In other words, because the plane
of immanence has no transcendent image or identitarian politics dictating
its potential for expression, currere (the course of a life) becomes an open
plane for experimentation.
Yet, if the repudiation of the transcendent division of ontological sub-
stance is predicated on univocity, how could this possibly be an affirma-
tion of difference? With univocity, are we not left with a uniform plane
that denies difference in its conceptualization of a single substance? It
is here that Deleuze (1997) returns to Spinoza’s concept of expression.
Without falling back into the trap of transcendence, Deleuze remarks that
in Spinoza, the substance of being finds expression in attributes which
in turn find expression through modulation or modes. The attributes of
substance accessible to human consciousness include thought and exten-
sion, both of which Deleuze conceptualizes as an unlimited finity (Deleuze,
1997). Attributes, Deleuze remarks, are active and dynamic. They are not
attributed, that is, given to substance by some transcendent figure, but
rather, attributive—immanent of the substance itself. Put differently, ema-
nation suggests that attributes are given by some greater ontological value
or power. Behind the attribute, the legacy of transcendent philosophy sug-
gests an immutable substance, such as God, the Platonic Forms, Truth, or
the subject who creates its attributes in the material world. Contrariwise,
immanence conceptualizes the attribute as an expression of substance.
That is, the attribute is not attributed by a transcendent substance, but is
rather one of an infinite number of attributive ways a substance might be
expressed. Apropos Deleuze, this concept might be thought through the
elementary example of Japanese origami (paper folding). While origami
takes a single piece of paper as its substance, its attributive or immanent
potential might be expressed through a multiplicity of folds and differen-
tial configurations.
It is in this vein that art, music, film, and video play a significant
role in articulating the active force of currere. At their most significant,
each explores the immanent expressiveness of substance. In turn, the
attributive force of art finds further qualitative differentiation in the

expressiveness of its modes. In music, for example, we not only have the
varied attributive expressions of such music styles as jazz, heavy-metal,
and drum and bass electronica, but the vital difference of their respec-
tive modulations in improvisation, folk inspiration, and the genera-
tive potentials of such inhuman technologies as the phonograph, the
synthesizer, and digital sampler.1 Life strives to intensify its expressive
potentials for becoming. This, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
is the ethical challenge of art and philosophy. Put differently, the tyran-
nical image of what life is becomes, through art and philosophy, both
what it is not as well as what it might become. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) remark, art is monumental. It stands alone without resembling
the world. That is, art produces affects that are not enjoined to an a
priori image, but are instead affirmations of life’s expressive potential
(Massumi, 1995). It is in this vein that we might think currere’s active
force as less a matter of representation than an expression of what a
pedagogical life might do.
In the tradition of educational theorizing, such a conceptualization of
currere might be regarded as strange. Indeed, the political orientations of
such grassroots movements as “back to the basics” posit an image of what
life is stripped of its expressive excesses and monstrous births. In place of
such expressive potential, a stable transcendent ground functions to terri-
torialize thought and action (extension). Such territorializing movements
arrest the flow of difference by reducing currere to an a priori image of life
(x x not y). For example, the impoverished image of currere offered by
“traditionalist movements” creates rigid segmentations between the disci-
plines, privileging the elevation of foundational knowledge while correlat-
ing the quality of pedagogy to its representational parallel in standardized
examinations. Such movements remain intimate to the commitments of
transcendence by enjoining pedagogical life to a static image of Being. Put
differently, currere becomes a fixed territory bound by a political claim to
what is “basic” to pedagogy. This a priori image of life attributes to thought
and action, reactively organizing pedagogical life according to the habits
of representation.
The reactive image of currere limits the expressive forces of thought
and extension. In this image there is a failure to see the potential for phi-
losophy and art to exceed what life is in lieu of what it might become. In
traditional schooling, this line of flight is counter-intuitive. According to
rationalist educational discourses for example, the object of pedagogy is
not only oriented to the definition of what is, but further, to what is as
an a priori given. The legacy of instrumentalism in education correlates
the value of concepts to their ability to accurately represent phenomena.
Contrariwise, the Deleuzian challenge is an ethical impetus against the

world given in advance. In this vein, the creation of affects in art and
concepts in philosophy are expressions of the active force of currere. They
are attributive rather than attributed, not metaphorical, but metamorphic.
Spinoza’s ontology of immanence is thus of significant import to the ways
in which we approach currere. As Adorno (1966) writes, “Closed systems
are bound to be finished” (p. 35).
Adorno’s forecast is evident in the epidemic cynicism of contempo-
rary culture. As Nietzsche (2000) writes, at limits of transcendence and
ascetic self-discipline, thought collapses into nihilism. As an ungraspable
utopia, the founding image of a superior ontological substance miscar-
ries, leaving no stable ground from which the world might emanate
(Lyotard, 1979). Marking the cessation of thinking as a transformative
and productive force, nihilism produces the negative affects of res-
sentiment. The response to such ressentiment, Nietzsche (2000) avers,
is not in the founding of some new truth or transcendent ground for
Being. Put differently, the cessation of transcendent thought does not
beg the installation of a new, or more stable ground for reality. Rather,
for Nietzsche (1969), it is in the repudiation of all transcendent truths
that an ethics of amor fati might be created. Amor fati, or a love of “what
is,” does not presuppose a transcendent image of Being. What is is not
some superior ontological substance that assures identity or “ethics of
knowledge” (Foucault, 1972). Rather, Nietzsche insists that an ethics of
amor fati is intimate to the affirmation of expression and the innovative
character of life. For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati becomes
the ethical impetus for philosophy and art. It is not enough to simply
reveal the transcendent image of the world as an illusion, nor to displace
its naturalized image by revealing it as a cultural construction. What is
required, Deleuze (1994) insists, is an affirmation of the powers of think-
ing to liberate, to create, and produce new ways for thinking. Amidst
the transcendent legacy of Western philosophy is thus, for Deleuze, an
affirmation of thinking that is profoundly expressive. Philosophy cannot
simply be a practice of critique. It must also affirm the productive or
expressive potential of thinking difference.
Philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is not merely about becom-
ing (genesis), but becoming-other (heterogenesis). Waging a nomadic war
on transcendent thought, Deleuze and Guattari birth the monstrous
challenge of transcendental empiricism. There is no world “x” that then
differentiates, folds, divides, mutates, distorts, etc. This is the illusion
of transcendence forewarned by Nietzsche (1969). The world “x” is, for
Deleuze (1994), an expression of the ontology of immanence. Put dif-
ferently, it is a “slice” or “strata” amongst a swarm of virtual potentials,
a concept that cannot be foundational because it is already a response to a

problematic. Following, if there is no transcendent ground for Being, then
we might begin to think about relations in terms of productive encounters
(and . . . and . . . and). This conceptualization is contrasted by the tran-
scendent model of relations (and, because, or) that equate to being (is)
(Colebrook, 2002). This describes respectively, the active force of currere
to its reactive image.
3
Powers of the False and

the Problematics of the
Simulacrum
W ith postindustrialization and the rise of consumer culture, the status

of the model as a transcendent ontological substance has disap-
peared (Baudrillard, 2002). Signs are detached from their symbolic obliga-
tions to “float” in a sea of ambient consumerism. Akin to Deleuze (1983),
Baudrillard cites in this movement the collapse of the dualist model/copy
hierarchy promulgated by Plato (1992). The transcendent model as the
deep actuality from which material life is thought to emanate is evacuated.
What remains in lieu of such ontological certitude is a pure virtuality or
simulacrum. In Deleuzian (1994) terms, this virtuality is the ontology of
immanence. For Baudrillard (1983), what remains is the “more real than
real,” the hyperreal unhinged from a transcendent model. In hyperreality,
the transcendent image of currere is jettisoned. Yet, the problematics of the
simulacrum for an active concept of currere remain to be explored. This
exploratory task will form the trajectory of this chapter.
Baudrillard’s Lament
Baudrillard’s (1993, 1994) apocalyptic augury of the simulacrum is a

lament on the disappeared authenticity of symbolic reality. Conflated
with the loss of subjective agency, the fetishization of the image, and
the dislocation of history awash in a sea of “floating” signifiers, his
theory of the simulacrum poses an inconsolable challenge to the reactive
image of currere (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2000). To begin,
Baudrillard’s rereading of Saussure produces the detachment of signifier
and signified. The correspondence of a signifier, a word or image, and
its signified concept is not simply the effect of a natural correspondence.

As Baudrillard (1994) avers, the assumed consonance of signifier and
signified is motivated. The signifier currere for example, does not arbi-
trarily correspond to the signified concept of a closed system, but rather,
is restricted to such correspondence through the identitarian formula
x x not y. This contention usurps the assumption of ideological
and political neutrality undergirding the curriculum theory of such
rational and instrumental curriculum theorists as Tyler and Schwab
(Cherryholmes, 1988).
In Tyler for example, curriculum design not only defines and regulates
currere’s course, but “constitute[s] its reality” (p. 25). “Every simulation”
Massumi (1987a) writes, “takes as its point of departure a regular-
ized world [of] stable identities of territories” (p. 3). In his curriculum
rationale, Tyler assigns currere a linear image, an a priori condition for
transformation, and an identitarian matrix ensconced within the molar
orders of organization/disorganization, purposeful/purposeless, and
continuity/discontinuity (Cherryholmes, 1988). In this vein, Tyler’s
curricular simulacrum constitutes a map that exists prior to lived car-
tography, constituting a readymade matrix for pedagogical design. In
Baudrillard’s (1994) terms, such hyperreal design functions as a code that
constrains the potential expressions of a life. In this sense, life is reduced
to the tracing or “running” of a coded course. While such a course is no
longer determined according to an a priori transcendent ground, the
“ambient” code of Baudrillard’s simulacrum virally infects the potentials
of the immanent or virtual plane. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is a
nefarious matrix in which the image of reality becomes overdetermined,
immobilizing difference by reducing life to an object of social and instru-
mental organization. Within Baudrillard’s (1994) negative simulacrum
then, life is liquidated of its vital forces. It is overdetermined and ulti-
mately “passified” (p. 106).
In hyperreality, there are only fictions of reality that in turn “stand
for nothing except themselves” (Massumi, 1987a, p. 3). Following
Baudrillard, taxonomic and developmental curricular discourses do not
illustrate an actual ground or truth, but rather, form a technology that
is transposed upon the subject. What appears as a deeper reality then,
is nothing but the function of a homogenizing sign correspondence
(x x not y) or a priori mapping. In the simulacrum, Baudrillard
(1975) writes, “[o]nly affiliation to the model has any meaning . . . the
‘signifier of reference,’ functioning as a foregone, and the only credible
conclusion” (p. 56). The code of the simulacrum constitutes an “auto-
matic interpretation machine” that overdetermines thought by reducing
it to a homogenous appearance (Deleuze, 2004, p. 275). In educational
POWERS OF THE FALSE 31
discourse, the negative simulacrum or ambient code inheres within both

developmental and taxonomic thought. That is, the subject, its classifi-
cations, limits, and potentials are mapped via the institution’s complex
coding machines. From diagnostic testing, the differentiation of behav-
iors, linear imaging of the subject, and ordered perspective of pedagogi-
cal sequence, the simulacrum functions as a reproductive mechanism,
recreating the world in its self-same image. While such transpositional
mapping circulates with the appearance of neutrality, Baudrillard’s
abandonment of the structuralist sign as a self-enclosed entity posits that
such claims to reality are themselves fictional images of currere. Indeed,
in both Baudrillard and Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, there is
no deeper reality or stable ontological ground upon which an unequivo-
cal sense of Being can be anchored. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write
“modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of
identities, and of the discovery . . . that all identities are only simulated,
produced as an optical effect by the more profound game of difference
and repetition” (p. xix). Overturning the neo-Platonic model/copy dual-
ism, “reality” collapses with the simulacrum.
With hyperreality, meaning implodes in the ecstatic exchange and
pleasureless orgy of minimally differentiated signs (Massumi, 1987a).
Today, such a dystopic scenario aptly characterizes the image of insti-
tutional education. Bound to the commercial circularity of exchange
value, institutional labor is “efficient” only insofar as it evokes the signs
of labor. Put differently, signs of institutional productivity have eclipsed
the problematics to which the reactive image of currere constitutes a
conceptual response. While there is always an overabundance of work for
students to accomplish, the frenetic pace impelled by such tasks are often
undertaken with marked discontent. While repudiating the transcendent
image lauded in structuralism and phenomenology, the Baudrillardian
simulacrum ultimately engenders yet another form of nihilism. The
demand to access, process, and know more has become a maxim of
contemporary education. Overburdened by the constant circulation of
information, Baudrillard’s individual is reduced to an institutional ser-
vomechanism, a feedback nodule that accesses and reproduces informa-
tion. This image of currere inheres the project of “traditional schooling,”
wherein the student is ideally conceived as a reproductive servomotor of
dominant culture.
The image of the student as an institutional servomechanism is
anachronistic with the contemporary rhetoric of educational choice. As
Aoki (2005d) avers, the curriculum and instruction landscape “suggests
a diversity of offerings” (p. 417). However, a caveat must be advanced
on the illusion of diversity promulgated by the institutional rhetoric
of “free choice.” “[T]he seeming . . . diversity [of the curriculum] is

an illusion because ‘they’ are manifestations of a [single] meaning of
curriculum: the curriculum-as-plan” (p. 417). It is in this vein that the
ostensible freedoms of the student are coded in advance by an a priori
image of pedagogical life. The student’s relationship to curriculum is
not simply interactive or passive, but interpassive. Whereas interactivity
connotes the incompleteness of currere, requiring in turn the efforts
of an active subject, interpassivity expresses the individual’s relation-
ship to a system that is already more-than-complete. In interpassivity, an
agent is relieved from the active demands of creation (Pfaller, 2003). For
example, in currere’s reactive image, the subject no longer has to face the
demands of creating new ways of thinking. The image of life projected
by currere’s reactive power establishes particular ways of thinking for
them. As May (2005) writes, “[f]or the dogmatic image of thought, there
are already constituted identities, each with its qualities, which are to
be represented by thought” (p. 120). In this dogmatic image, “‘teaching’
becomes ‘implementation’ and ‘instruction’ becomes in-structuring
students in the image of the given” (Aoki, 2005d, p. 418). The “choices”
available to the individual, however dilated, are already constituted.
Interpassively, the individual takes them to be his or her own without
having to risk thinking difference. The task thus becomes representing
in one’s own thought that which comes a priori. Both the passive and
interpassive individual is recapitulated in curriculum theory, wherein the
simulacrum is conflated with the obliteration of vital innovation (zoe)
by the acculturating forces of commercial media (Habermas, 1990; Pinar,
Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2000; Postman, 1993). “Energized” or
vital expressions of the plane of immanence are neutralized amidst the
“mass entropy of the silent majority” (Massumi, 1987a).
While Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum repudiates the transcen-
dent ground of modernity, its effect creates a new condition for nihilism.
The “real” is evacuated and replaced by signs of the real, provoking a
hypercynical approach that embraces a moribund fatalism. Baudrillard’s
theory of the simulacrum constrains the potential force of immanence
advanced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Either we regress into a naïve
representational realism that assumes an underlying reality, or we become
sponge-like neuroreceptors in a vast parasitic matrix of images (Massumi,
1987a). Put differently, Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum mourns
the loss of symbolic reality, recapitulating the differentiation of actual and
virtual life. In the feudal period, Baudrillard (1993) asserts, signs were
bound to social position, traditional usage, and ritual. Baudrillard thus
proposes a reality prior to the postindustrial virtualization of the social
sphere. Against the differentiation and the nihilistic collapse of reality and
virtuality, Deleuze and Guattari advance what Massumi has referred to as

a third way of theorizing the simulacrum.
Deleuze’s Affirmation
Baudrillard evades the question of whether simulacra replaces a preexist-

ing reality or precludes it (Massumi, 1987a). For Deleuze and Guattari
(1983), the answer to both questions is an affirmative “yes.” For Deleuze
(1990), the simulacrum is not secondary to life, but rather, is life itself.
There is no “real” world supplemented by its unreal virtual image. For
Deleuze (1983), reality is actual-virtual. That is, the actual is already
an image. The human Being, for example, is actualized in part through
taxonomic and developmental images. There must be an image of the
human—its limits, features, and differences—for it to be recognizable
as such. Yet, for Deleuze (1983), such actuality is produced through the
potential becomings of a virtual or immanent plane. In other words, there
is no “real” human that then becomes what it is not, but rather, a virtual-
ity or swarm of potentials that are territorialized in the representational
image of the human. This does not suggest that the actual is simply an
effect of the virtual, but rather, that the actual inheres a virtual potential.
Put differently, as territorializations of the plane of immanence, the actual
is not an immutable a priori, but rather, an affirmation of the forces
of becoming. Actualization is not simply what is, but an expression of
becoming. The human, for example, can become a filmic image, a pho-
tograph, an idol, monster, or vegetable. The human might become more
than, or less a human (Colebrook, 2009).
A similar case might be made regarding the reactive image of cur-
rere. For currere to be thought in instrumental or rationalist terms,
one must have an image of the course to be run. There must be some
design that allows for the recognizability of teaching and learning as a
process of exchange, habitualization, and order. Baudrillard’s negative
simulacrum posits such an image as a sign of the real that has effec-
tively replaced reality, standardizing the actions of what a body might
do (Massumi, 1987a). As Massumi writes, “What bodies do depends
on where they land in an abstract grid of miraculated identities that
are in practice only a bundle of normalized and basically reproduc-
tive functions” (p. 4). This reactive image currere is figured, much like
the image of the racetrack, within its own circumlocutionary negative
feedback loop. In practice, this negative feedback system confirms its
identity (x x not y) by establishing specific parameters of control
that discontinue virtual deterritorializations or rogue lines of flight.
The map or image as the antecedent of an active currere thus functions

to territorialize the course to be run as foundational actuality. In this
vein, the rationalist or instrumental design maintains itself as a stable
ontological territory. Yet, to return to Deleuze, this ontological terri-
tory is but one of many.
For Deleuze (1983), reality is neither expressly actual or virtual in
the Platonic sense of the model and its copy. Rather, reality is both
actual and virtual simultaneously (actual-virtual), capable of constitut-
ing both stable territories and new, deterritorializing lines of flight. For
Deleuze, the power of the virtual is the productive or affirmative quality
of the simulacrum. Contrary to Baudrillard’s (1994) negative virtuality,
Deleuze approaches the virtual as a creative force for thinking difference.
Repudiating the duality of the model and copy, Deleuze approaches the
simulacrum as an ethics of the virtual. Such an ethics suggests that there is
no a priori image or model of currere that exists prior to the simulacrum.
Put differently, there is no natural, politically or ideologically neutral
course of life that then differentiates, undergoes reform, or reconcep-
tualization. The simulacrum is life, or rather, the potential to relate and
create images of what life might be. In this vein, the active expression of
currere is intimately bound to its virtual powers. That is, currere’s active
force is an expression of immanent difference that creates new ways of
thinking. It is in this way that the actual and virtual are wed. What is
“actual” is only such because of its virtual potentials for becoming. What
is virtual is imperceptible except to the extent that it might be witnessed
in new thoughts, actions, or conceptual experiments that engender new
potentials for thought and action.
Thinking new philosophical concepts or artistic affects is to engage the
expressive forces of the immanent or virtual plane. While such concepts or
affects might create new strata or territories for thinking, the actual and
virtual do not constitute a binary pair. Rather, they are mutual processes
intimate to any active concept of currere. That is, the Deleuzeguattarian
(1987) philosophical project is not simply oriented to the question of
“what can we know?” nor to the identitarian inquiry of whether the
images we have of the world accurately reflect the world. Put differently,
the challenge to thinking issued by Deleuze (2004) does not devolve on
the representation or recognition of some actuality. Contrariwise, the
Deleuzian challenge to thinking is oriented to the creation of a virtual
nonimage of currere, that is, a nonrepresentational currere that main-
tains the immanent unfoldment of difference. This nonimage similarly
suspends the transparent communication of the sign by returning the
concept to its virtual power to create a multiplicity of potential passages
for thinking.
Block (1998) posits such an approach to currere in his concept of a

vagabond pedagogy. In Block’s nonrepresentational expression of currere,
there is no path, no “exercise of power” determining the way in advance
(p. 335). While a new strata or territory for thinking might be constituted
through concepts or affective forces, the Deleuzian ontology of univocity
asserts that such actualizations are never formally divided from the plane
of immanence. “[Territorialization] is not the enemy to be overcome . . .
it only becomes the enemy when we become blind to [the virtual force]
of deterritorialization” (May, 2005, p. 139). When a territory is severed
from its virtual immanent powers of becoming, it becomes reactive
and dogmatic. The actualization of currere in a reactive image marks
the territorialized selection of a certain course to be run amidst a swarm
of virtual potentialities. The powers of territorialization figured in the
“will-to-recognition and . . . representation” conceal the virtual forces of
the Deleuzian simulacrum, positing the existence of a transcendent or
encoded model (Roy, 2003, p. 9).
Similar to Massumi (1987a), Baudrillard and Deleuze describe two
modes of the simulacrum. While both reject the neo-Platonic model/
copy dualism, and hence the tyrannical powers of the transcendent,
Baudrillard’s negative simulacrum is conceptualized as a repressive
and regularizing matrix. In Baudrillard’s simulacrum “it is not a ques-
tion of Platonic copies,” Massumi writes, “but of human replicants”
(p. 4). In this conceptualization, currere remains bound by the regu-
lated limits of the code. In this vein, the Spinozian (1985) challenge of
what a body can do becomes overdetermined by repressive categories
of thought. The other mode of simulation, Massumi observes, “turns
against the entire system of resemblance and replication” (p. 5). Rather
than limiting the regulatory selection of only certain properties or
modes for Being, the Deleuzian simulacrum selects a virtual multiplic-
ity of potential becomings. For Deleuze (1983), there is no replication
without difference, no actuality without the vital intervention of the
virtual. Beings emerge from virtual processes of doubling, imaging,
and simulation. Not simply the product of a mass replicating appara-
tus, such Beings are expressions of the virtual powers of differentiation.
Genes are copied from one generation to the next, but unfold with vital
difference. Music assembles with the differential qualities of its venue
and technologies (techne) of production to produce a unique differ-
ence. Pop art similarly breaks with Platonic dualism, illustrating how
reproduction inheres a vital difference that allows for the emergence
of unique, nonentropic singularities. Like the dinosaurs of Michael
Crichton’s Jurassic Park, repetition creates new mutagenic directions
and becomings.
Preserving the Passage of Difference
In the curriculum scholarship of Daignault (1992), currere marks the

“passage” of thinking untrapped by either the “nihilistic” abandonment
of experimental risk-taking nor the “terroristic” powers of actualization.
He writes, “thinking happens only between suicide and murder” (p. 199).
Between the reactive murder of thinking and the nihilistic abandonment
of an ethics of potentiality, difference inheres. Such a passage cannot
be maintained in Baudrillard’s negative simulacrum. First, Baudrillard
(1975) conceptualizes the simulacrum as the succor of capital. All signs
are co-opted and inserted into the capital logic of positive, rational, and
exchangeable circulation. In the negative simulacrum, the sign is thus an
accomplice of murder. It reduces and constricts meaning into an a priori
actuality that impels reality. In the Baudrillardian simulacrum, reality is an
effect of the sign drained of its virtual power. Hence, virtuality becomes
for Baudrillard not only the “eternal repetition of the Same,” but concomi-
tantly, the negative desire for perfection, the “perfect crime . . . the finishing
off of the world, for which we now have to undergo a process of mourn-
ing” (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 200).
In the Deleuzian concept of the simulacrum, mourning is eclipsed by
affirmation. The dogmatic image of currere is habilitated to its virtual
powers for becoming. The repudiation of the Platonic model/copy dualism
avows the constitutive powers of the virtual. Further, the negative simula-
crum is reimaged along an ethics of potentiality that do not unequivocally
constrain what a body might do. Deleuze (1991) writes, “[m]odern life is
such that, confronted with the most mechanical, most stereotypical repeti-
tions, within and without, we endlessly extract from them little differences,
variations and modifications” (p. xix). Where Baudrillard posits the termi-
nation of difference through the repetition of the Same, Deleuze perceives
the expression of a vital difference via the conceptual force of Nietzsche’s
eternal return. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1969), the concept of the eter-
nal return suggests the cycling back of the same things over time. Yet,
for Nietzsche, the eternal return is not the “same,” but “a thought of the
absolutely different” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 46). As Deleuze remarks, “return
is the being of that which becomes” (p. 24). Open to the multiplicity of the
future, being is no longer simply itself, but a differentiating potential for
becoming. In other words, the eternal return is for Deleuze the affirmative
and constitutive power of the future.
As May (2005) writes, the future is an overflowing “unactualized differ-
ence” that “comes to meet us with no pregiven identities [or] preserving
constants” (p. 61). Analogous to the challenge of the eternal return for
contemporary pedagogy, the affirmation of the future is the most difficult
task for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1969). The challenge of the eternal return
lies in its willing affirmation of the future as a multiplicity. To affirm the
eternal return is to repudiate both the image of identitarian thought and
the will-to-representation. It gives up on the faithful attempt to represent
an actualized image of the world. Instead, the eternal return embraces the
power of life to differ in the creation new passages for thinking and action.
Herein lies the pedagogical import for the active concept of currere. It
must not simply say yes to the future, but to risk the difference of the eter-
nal return without knowing in advance how the dice will fall back.
The eternal return avows the emergence of a unique style that assumes
a life of its own. Deleuze remarks in this vein on the affirmative powers of
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Daignault on Joyce’s Riverrun. Neither work
claims to represent a given reality. Yet, each work mobilizes the virtual force
of reality to overrun the reactive image of the world. Nietzsche does some-
thing similar with the introduction of poetic and aphoristic forms into
philosophy. His style, or stutter, breaks from a territorialized line, “[imply-
ing] a new conception of philosophy, a new image of the thinker and of
thought” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 65). Daignault’s pedagogy, like Deleuzian phi-
losophy and Nietzsche’s countercultural gesture, affirms the singularity of
a life, that is, life composed of “virtualities [and] events . . . not . . . lacking
in reality” (Deleuze, 2002, p. 31). Put differently, the affirmation of the
virtual in Wonderland, Riverrun, and Nietzsche’s philosophical style multi-
plies the expressive potentials of reality. Each does something to the frozen
territories of thought by opening them to the multiplicity of the future.
This is neither the murder of thinking forewarned by Daignault, nor the
nihilistic treatment of the future as an empty vacuum. Rather, the eternal
return marks the passage between the consolidation of a reactive actuality
in educational thought and the instrumental manipulation of the peda-
gogical process. In other words, the overcoding powers of territorialization
are destroyed through their differential repetition. Likewise, the techni-
cal control of currere is subverted through the dice throw of the eternal
return. Against the reactive or monist image of the course to be run, the
active expression of currere affirms the difference that inheres repetition.
Daignault’s pedagogical project of preserving the passage of difference
might thus be conceived as enjoined to the Nietzschean eternal return, the
affirmation of immanence amidst the overdetermination of reality.
Powers of the False
In Nietzschean terms (1967), the concept of the eternal return is a will-to-

power. It is an affirmative power of joy, liberation, and creation. Deleuze
(2006a) writes, “Nietzsche’s practical teaching is that difference is happy;

that multiplicity, becoming and chance are adequate objects of joy by
themselves” (p. 190). Nietzsche’s will-to-power is alternatively described
by Deleuze as a “[power] of the false” (p. 89). In the Deleuzian positive
simulacrum of virtual immanence and difference, the powers of the false
mark the creation of counteractualities. These counteractualities bear no
resemblance to the reactive image severed from its virtual powers. Rather,
the powers of the false are an affirmation of reality’s virtual powers for
imagining the multiplication of life’s expressive potentials. This affirma-
tion of the virtual in turn increases the expressive powers of life. Indeed, if
the simulacrum is life, then the powers of the false play with life’s potential
for becoming. As Massumi (1987a) writes, the powers of the false might
be constituted as a working simulation injected into a society. Baudrillard
(1990) refers to these powers as seductive. As Baudrillard details, moder-
nity is an era in which the Law espouses a transcendent truth that under-
lies reality. To achieve an understanding of the truth in the era of the Law,
Baudrillard avers that one must continually be productive. One must
continually materialize “reality,” make it visible, and allow it to enter into
commodified circulation. Against the linear progression and “determinate
finality” of meaning in the era of the Law, seduction plays a deadly role
(p. 132). That is, while the Law espouses a perspective on reality that is
“irreversible” and steeped in the “recurrence of conventional procedures,”
seduction decenters signs from their productive or truthful “reality”
(p. 139). Put differently, seduction can be evidenced when life does not
aim at the representation of reality, but produces real effects through play
and artifice. Like the simulations orchestrated by Orson Welles, the will-
to-deception creates new actualities that traverse the official meanings or
images of the Law/State. Traditionally, stage illusionists have practiced the
will-to-deception or seductive powers of the false, playing with the virtual
potentials of the positive simulacrum to create new truth affects. Such a
deception is not simply illusory, for as I have attempted to describe, reality
inheres both actual and virtual expressions. In this vein, the counteractu-
alities imagined by artists and philosophers are no less real. It follows that
powers of the false might create new ways of conceptualizing the active
expression of currere.
The question of what significance film, music, art, and video have
for pedagogy is tied to the Deleuzian concept of the will-to-deception
or powers of the false. As Bogue (1999) asserts, the powers of the
false mobilize minoritarian perspectives. While the Deleuzeguattarian
(1987) concept of the minor shares allegiances with racial and ethnic
groups, it is extended beyond this definition to affirm the virtual qual-
ity of art and culture. Against the monolith of sanctioned or restrained
State forms, minoritarian thought is imbued with a “high coefficient of

deterritorialization . . . everything in it is political” (p. 115). Put differ-
ently, the powers of the false subvert the towering figure of tradition in the
expression of another possible community, a “people yet to come.” Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) refer here to both Kafka and Joyce. Both authors inter-
ject a minor literature or language no longer bound to an identitarian or
representational image of the world. Each deterritorializes the decorum of
language, Kafka by destabilizing, affecting, and exaggerating the tenden-
cies of Prague German, Joyce by breaking with any a priori standards of
writing through “the power [of affirming] all the heterogeneous series”
(Deleuze, 1990, p. 260). The minoritarian lines opened by Kafka and Joyce
posit a belief in the future of the future, opening up a space for a people
not yet seen or a people in the process of becoming. In this manner, the
minoritarian powers of the false have significant import for the active con-
ceptualization of currere. As the minoritarian works of Kafka and Joyce
deterritorialize the decorum of language, so too the active force of currere
must draw upon its minor powers in affirmation of its virtual potential
for becoming. Such becoming, in turn, opens space(s) for a people not yet
seen, a pedagogy for a people yet to come.
Introducing a problematics into identitarian thought, the powers of
the false “[work] by pushing systems to their intensive states in order
to follow traits . . . to reveal their virtual structures or multiplicities”
(Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 114). In this manner, minor art and culture
are not additive, but multiplicitous expressions of what a body of art
might do. In this vein, the powers of the false productively engender a
foreignness in the familiar, problematizing representation through het-
erogeneity and variation. For example, the manga industry of Japan has
recently observed an upsurge in the appropriation of copyrighted char-
acters by individual and collective artists. Japanese otaku (culture design-
ers) have begun to recreate the narratives and characters of mainstream
manga, mutating them into unfamiliar genres and reterritorializing them
into hidden, taboo, or unrealized storylines. The virtual powers of the
false have created novel narrative actualities that have drawn an entirely
new fanbase, usurping the popularity of mainstream manga narratives.
Further, their virtual powers have explicitly altered the ways in which
cultural production is being thought in contemporary Japanese culture.
Japanese publishing conglomerates are now overlooking their character
copyrights, allowing the otaku to recast their creations into a myriad of
morphological affects. The powers of the false might be understood in this
way as intimately connected to the enjoinment of the individual to politi-
cal immediacy (Bogue, 1999). That is, through the works of minor art and
culture, the territorial is deterritorialized, thereby rendering the familiar
foreign in a line of becoming open to the future and a people yet to come.
The powers of the false practice the eternal return by affirming the most
radical difference that inheres repetition.
Currere and the Positive Simulacrum
The powers of the Deleuzian (1983) simulacrum are significant for the
active conceptualization of currere. First, the positive simulacrum concep-
tualized by Deleuze constitutes an ethical orientation to the chance and
necessity of experimentation. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), experi-
mentation overturns the a priori image of life advanced by neo-Platonism.
Yet, experimentation is more than simply the renunciation of stability.
This is where a vast number of postmodern curricular discourses termi-
nate their inquiry. What is maintained in the appeal to pure flow is the
a priori commitment to flow. Contrariwise, the Deleuzeguattarian chal-
lenge of experimentation abjures all a priori or reactive principals. Only
then can one “see what a body can do” (p. 251). Sometimes more stability
is what is required. Other times, “a little more flow . . . or escape . . . is
needed to shake up an overly rigid system” (Bonta & Protevi, 1004, p. 83).
As Deleuze (1983) asserts, reality is actual-virtual. Thinking the actual and
virtual as dualistic thus constitutes a philosophical error that lapses back
into Platonic reactivity.
Second, the positive and creative force of the Deleuzian simulacrum is
oriented to the affirmation of life. The will-to-deception, the powers of the
false, and minoritarian production respectively escape the closed system
of currere’s reactive image. Following Deleuze, curriculum theory that
imagines currere as an entropic death-drive or “moribund” replication of
the Same fails to think through the virtual powers of the eternal return.
Put differently, the entropic image of currere becomes caught in a “frozen
futurism” that forecloses on the future. The articulation of a “moribund”
curriculum and its dead agent of delivery collapses back into identitarian
thought. As Ansell Pearson (1999) writes, the desire for death “assumes
that there is an original model of death to be returned to . . . [as] such,
the death-drive is a desire for identity” (p. 118). As it is severed from the
powers of the eternal return, the image of a dead curriculum is an articu-
lation of Being in its most static and fixed figuration. Such a fixed image
of Being is similarly evidenced in the pedagogical compulsion to repeat.
Through the habitual repetition of territorialization without becoming,
the question of what a pedagogical life can do becomes overdetermined.
Such compulsive-repetition is aptly characterized via the symptomatic
reproduction of currere’s closed image. The active expression of currere
is thus a turn against “forms of representation that reduce it to the Same”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. xix). Through the powers of the false mobi-
lized by artists and philosophers, the active conceptualization of currere is
an attempt to interject the powers of difference into pedagogical thinking
(Roy, 2003, p. 21). In this vein, the Deleuzian challenge shifts from the
passivity of the moribund simulacrum to the active force of currere to
differ. Put differently, Deleuze shifts the emphasis from what is (Being),
to what might become. Yet, it is crucial to reiterate that becoming is not a
passive process. Becomings are the active creations, powers of the false, and
chance productions of play (jeu) that deterritorialize assignable identities
(je). Following, the power of art and philosophy for pedagogy germinates
from such powers of becoming and the experimental ethics of the eternal
return.
Third, the positive simulacrum affirms the creation of new affects and
territories. In curriculum terms, the powers of the false refute the act of
tracing, that is, of following a map or guide set out in advance. Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) eschew the logic of reproduction presumed by the act
of tracing, the goal of which “is to describe a de facto state, to maintain
balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is
already there from the start” (p. 13). In contrast, the powers of the false
emphatically affirm the cartography of new topographical terrains. The
active force of currere is thus not a theater where Being is “staged” in the
image of such a priori frames as that of the familial Oedipal drama. Rather,
the active conceptualization of currere might be better construed as a
factory, a production machine that is immanent and hence, continuously
unfolding a multiplicity of potentials for becoming (Lorraine, 1999). The
Deleuzian powers of the false in this way challenge pedagogy to create new
maps rather than compulsively trace old routes.
4
Becoming-Nomad
The Western is the American cinema’s pride and joy as well as its good
will ambassador . . . even during the heyday of the “anti-Western” . . .
there was nothing as bluntly dismissive of the United States of America’s
very existence as Jarmusch’s cinematic poem of embitterment.
(Jones, 1996, p. 45)
S ubsequent to its 1995 Cannes premier, writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s

Dead Man was met with mixed and perplexed reviews. Breaking with
the conventional tropes of the Western movie genre, Dead Man, alongside
it’s filmic predecessors The Wild Bunch (1962), Little Big Man (1970),
Ulzaana’s Raid (1972), and the 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, mobilized
a political direction that was distinctly post-Western. Deterritorializing the
traditional codes of the Western film, Dead Man recaptured the night-
marish trajectories of colonial genocide, environmental ruination, capital
ascension, and the spread of Christian morality normalized by the genre
between 1930 and 1960 (Jones, 1996; Levich, 1996; Rickman, 1999). The
teleological ideal of progress, the ontological certainty of Eurocentric
masculine being, and privileged status of Western rationality were ren-
dered “strange” by Dead Man. As a transgressive line of flight “escaping”
the regulative containments of the genre, Jarmusch, along with his film,
became an outlaw. As influential movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his
damning assessment, “Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I
don’t have a clue what it is . . . Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding
movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than
with meaning” (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com).
There is something distinctly pedagogical haunting Roger’s admoni-
tion. In his derisive analysis of Dead Man as strange, slow, and disconcert-
ing, Roger posits a qualitative condition through which new meanings,
relations, and modes of evaluation might be created. That is, as Dead Man
renders the familiar coordinates of the Western genre strange, a becoming
is underway. Following Deleuze, this notion of “becoming” is an involution,

an involvement that “runs its own line ‘between’ . . . and beneath assign-
able relations” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 238–239). Complicating
the Master narratives of the Western, Jarmusch’s Dead Man creates a new
experience of the West. This account is not simply the teleological evolu-
tion of the genre, but a new assemblage of its immanent components. It is
in this respect that the strange yet creative trajectories inhering Jarmusch’s
film constitute a pedagogy of ethical experimentation. While foreign to the
project of Western education, Dead Man’s pedagogy recaptures the West
in a manner productively incommensurate with its dominant mythemes.
As I will attempt to explicate, Dead Man is not simply a metaphor for an
ethical pedagogy of experimentation, but rather an experimental pedagogy
that opens new relations of history and subjectivity. Jarmusch’s film posits
“looking at the same thing in different ways—or looking at different things
the same way” (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 13). In Deleuzian terms (1987), Dead
Man is a becoming-minor of the Western. Resisting mimesis, Dead Man
enunciates new patterns of relation and assemblage across unlikely het-
erogeneous milieus, altering the dominant cultural terrain while mapping
another. For Pinar (2004), the task of curriculum theory is similarly the
“creation of untimely concepts . . . acting counter to our time, and thereby
on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (p. 22). In
this vein, the untimely character of Jarmusch’s Dead Man marks a signifi-
cant (albeit uncanny) pedagogical hallmark of curriculum theorizing.
The “Deal Breaker”: Becoming-minor in Dead Man
As a demythologization of Western archetypes and outlaw of over-

coded genre tropes, Dead Man constitutes something of a “deal breaker”
(Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 7). Not only would Dead Man’s Cannes premier sig-
nify the end of Jarmusch’s celebrated status as a savvy arthouse raconteur,
it would pose an interminable challenge to the profit-driven machine of
the corporate film industry. As an outlaw of major motion picture studios,
Jarmusch is one of a few independent auteurs who retains ownership of
his film negatives. Whereas such venues as Sundance have redefined the
success of independent films by their appropriative purchase or backing
by major studios, Jarmusch has retained creative control over his develop-
ments from the point of their conception to their final cut. This degree of
independent control is anomalous in the shifting climate of contempo-
rary filmmaking, wherein the notion of the “independent” film has been
territorialized by business models and marketing agendas. Breaking the
implicit ideal of corporate filmmaking, Jarmusch retains a nonalienated
ethical stance toward his labor.
BECOMING-NOMAD 45
Jarmusch’s Dead Man would emerge as a film with distinct political

immediacy. Not only does the film assume a First Nations audience, it
portrays the underside of Western colonial influence, offering “one of the
ugliest portrayals of white American capitalism to be found in American
movies” (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 18). It is from this noncanonical, “minor”
perspective that the film unfolds. As a “minor” film, Dead Man is an efface-
ment of the power relations traditionally espoused in the Western genre,
one that has historically portrayed First Nations’ people as either hedo-
nistic cannibals or noble, mythic savages. Experimenting with the “defor-
mation of the institution, codes, mechanisms and practices,” Dead Man
marks what Deleuze and Guattari have described as a deterritorialization,
“the decoding of flows on the periphery . . . by means of ‘disarticulation’
that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors” (Bogue, 2005, p. 116; Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983, p. 232). Dead Man is in this vein distinctly peripheral,
and from this peripheral or “minor” perspective the film exposes the
traditional tropes of racism, capitalism, and colonialism that are interred
in the territorialized codes of the Western metanarrative. Such a process
of deterritorialization is not simply anarchic, but rather opens new tra-
jectories for creative experimentation and political action along “existing
vectors of force actualized through various patterns of discursive practice”
(Bogue, 2004, p. 72).
The “Acid” Western
Constituted by sociolects and idiolects, the poetic body of Dead Man devi-
ates from a standard filmic syntax, thereby deterritorializing the language
of the Western. Such deterritorialization detaches the traditional syntax of
the film “from its clearly delineated, regularly gridded territory of conven-
tions, codes, labels, and markers” (Bogue, 2005, pp. 111–112). In this vein,
Rosenbaum (2000) forwards the epithet “acid western” in his description
of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The “acid” or “peripheral” Western is a narrative
body “open” to peyote visions and hallucinogenic experiences. It is a body
that assembles with heterogeneous components and synaesthetic modes
of perception. Obscuring the delineated lines between imagination and
reality, conscious and unconscious, self and other, Dead Man is “more like
a ghostly burnt-out shell of a Western,” a nonhabitual Deleuzeguattarian
(1987) Body without Organs (BwO)1 (Martin, 1996). The surreal nomadic
journey of Jarmusch’s Dead Man is a narrative of transversal becomings
that are not simply metaphoric but metamorphic. Altering the relations of
its components, Dead Man posits the historicity of the West as a variable,
interactive, negotiable, and contestable story of becoming rather than a
metanarrative fixed by asymmetrical relations of power (Bogue, 2005).
The minor is always both personal and political, mobilizing peripheral

elements beyond current identities and images of the West/Western. In
Dead Man, this process of becoming-minor marks an ethical engagement
with political and aesthetic difference. Such difference is an interminable
practice or set of practices replete with immanent pedagogical trajectories
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Jarmusch’s disposition toward creative agency, syntactical experimenta-
tion, and the deterritorialization of the canon each marks a pedagogical
ethics of singularity. The becoming-minor or deterritorializing force of
Dead Man suggests a practice of personal experimentation that is con-
comitantly a political action and performative act. Returning the night-
mare landscapes of destruction and genocide to the Western, Dead Man
overthrows traditional systems of judgment and relations organizing the
filmic code. As “major” or dominant codes of text are deterritorialized via
the assemblage of peripheral forces, new lines of revolutionary or libratory
flight are potentially realized via Dead Man’s pedagogical ethics of experi-
mentation. Following Vähämäki and Virtanen (2006), “thought can move,
extend and connect only after the [mutation] of meaning . . . only then can
thought effect a disequilibrium” (p. 209). Jarmusch’s filmic act is pedagogi-
cal insofar as it engenders complex patterns of relation untethered from
a priori ontological or teleological ideals. Disengaged from “the task of
representing the world,” such deterritorializations “assemble a new type of
reality” without according to a fixed actuality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 343/280). Yet, the forms of friction and abrasion mobilized in Dead Man
emerge from a productive conflict that effect the “material and sensible”
territories of discourse (Vähämäki & Virtanen, 2006, p. 209). Eliciting the
difficult questions of economic violence, the absence of the other, and the
founding violence of the Western frontier, Dead Man inaugurates an ethics
through dissymmetrical/disjunctive micropolitical (molecular) action.
Cartographic Lines
The journey of Dead Man’s focal character, William “Bill” Blake, is marked
by a deterritorialization that opens a series of immanent lines of flight.
Yet, a line of flight can be a dangerous thing, and Blake exists along-two
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). First, there is a contiguity of territory “on
which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of
a segment, the passage from one segment to another” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 195). We learn that Blake is an accountant from Cleveland, a well-
educated and cultured individual. His life is segmented by molar codes
of class, profession, manner, and intellectual cultivation. Blake’s journey
is conceived as two points, Cleveland at its beginning and the frontier
BECOMING-NOMAD 47
town of Machine at its terminus. Early into the film, Blake’s journey is
measured by the passing time of his pocket watch, while the written Word
of Dickinson2 signifies the confirmation of his position at the metalworks.
His journey to Machine might thus be conceived as “a future but no
becoming” (p. 195). Tracing a molar line West, Blake’s lifeline is semioti-
cally constructed via the repetitive churning of steam engine wheels and
the limit-cycle swaying of a kerosene lamp affixed to the coach ceiling. The
molar line fabricated by Jarmusch repeats itself in a self-enclosed loop.
Nothing seems to live in the midst of this repetition, and yet nothing dies.
Blake’s symbolic position might be defined similarly. While his education,
clothing, and mannerisms provide him with a privileged position in the
world, his life is frozen as it traces an a priori molar path. While molar lines
confer a life in the Symbolic order, Blake is devoid of vitality.
The second line or supple segmentation in this opening sequence
escapes the molar ordering of the rigid, calculable segment (Albrecht-
Crane, 2005). This second line is particularly apparent in the stuttering
style of Jarmusch’s prologue to Dead Man. Ruptured by a series of fades,
the constancy of the molar segment is positioned upon a chasm cross-
cut by “secret lines of disorientation or deterritorialization” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 196). Molar territories are not simply fixed or perma-
nent, but undergo molecular or supple change. While the familiar trope
of the steam engine becomes relational to Blake’s aspirations for a new life
in Machine, the supple or molecular line of Dead Man’s opening sequence
interrupts this journey of prosperity. Against the molar certainty of his
contractual letter of employment (the Word), the engine’s fireman cau-
tions, “You’re just as likely to find your grave.” Early into his trip, he is
admired by the coach passengers, each time he awakens from the stutter-
ing, impersonal time of the journey, his privileged position and hierar-
chical status is decoded. Waking each time to a new set of relations with
his co-passengers and surroundings, Blake changes from the erect and
aloof intellectual to the semiparanoid milksop cowering behind a leather
satchel. Blake’s body, a mirror of Dead Man’s opening title shot, begins to
disperse. As Blake travels into the deterritorialized and wild landscapes of
the West, the terms of his molar segmentation markedly mutate. His new
world becomes painted on his flesh (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
The stuttering prologue to Dead Man is an immanent molecular line
within the rigid molar segmentation. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
write, “There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering,
reacting upon each other, introducing into each other either a current
of suppleness or a point of rigidity” (p. 196). The pedagogical import
of these two intersecting lines exists in the molecular or supple seg-
ment. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) avoid the binary conceptualization of
molar/molecular and rigid/supple by conceptualizing how these lines

are irremediably knotted. The interspersion of molar and molecular lines
“open” the way in which we might understand Blake’s journey West.
Territories are not established a priori, nor are they immutable structures.
Rather, territories/territorializations are immanently in/de/formed by dis-
tributive micromovements.
The prologue of Dead Man follows the pulse of such imperceptible
micromovements, punctuating the ostensible monotony of the journey
with a “stuttering” of deterritorializations. The rigid character of Blake’s
body is “opened” via such micromovements to new patterns of relation
and perception. Indeed, throughout Jarmusch’s opening scenes, the seden-
tary Blake is becoming-other, though we have yet to grasp what he might be
capable of becoming. This is as much a political as it is a perceptual affair.
Politically, rigid segmentarities (break lines) create patterns of interfer-
ence with supple segmentarities (crack lines) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Within overcoded discursive structures are submerged immanent lines of
molecularity (details in details), roller coasters of possibility, “tiny move-
ments that have not yet reached the edge,” and “segments that move by
jerks” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 201).
Pedagogical life is cartographically crosscut by such molar and
molecular lines. While molar lines break things up into definable seg-
ments, vast outlines, and binary structures, molecular lines can crack
open molar segmentations, leading to new patterns and nonbinary
distributions. What we might take for the curriculum-as-plan is not a
fixed territory. Rather, the cartography of the curricular plan is crosscut
by molecular lines, potential paths of negotiation that undercut the
illusion of curriculum implementation as a molar tracing rather than a
cartographical map-making. In this image, pedagogical life is reduced to
an effect of preestablished functions rather than an “imaginative map-
ping” of potentials (Gough, 2004, p. 254). That is, while the broad molar
segment of the curriculum prescribes nondeviant repetition, immanent
molecular lines conceive unique passages untethered from the reactive
plan-as-tracing. These personally political molecular lines of negotia-
tion have the capacity to push pedagogical conditions toward produc-
tive deterritorialization. Indeed, the significant classroom “event” is
often punctuated by an active molecular line of flight that acts like a
wedge, allowing for creative “escapes” (Aoki, 2005d). Rather than route/
root tracing, the molecular line supposes the immanent cartographi-
cal creation of curricular maps. As Aoki advocates, “[i]f . . . being and
becoming . . . matters in education, it behooves us to transform [the
ways we think] of school life such that multiple meanings of the word
curriculum can prevail” (p. 420).
BECOMING-NOMAD 49
Lines of Flight: Molar (Arborescent) and Molecular

(Rhizomatics) Cartographies
Machine, that’s the end of the line . . . What is it that you expect to find out
there . . . out there in Hell?
Blake’s future at Dickinson’s Metalworks is haunted by the molecular

“stutter” of his disorienting journey West. As he enters the town of
Machine, Blake’s backdrop is permeated by grizzly harbingers of death.
Animal skulls, newly built caskets, and plumes of ethereal smoke from
Dickenson’s Metalworks bisect his languorous walk down the town’s
main street. His foreignness and naivety are marked by his amusement
at a horse pissing in the street and surprise at the sight of a prosti-
tute performing oral sex in an alley. Entering the office of Dickinson’s
Metalworks, Blake is dealt another jarring molar break: his promised
position is already filled. Nearly penniless, Blake informs the office clerk
(John Hurt) that he wishes to speak to Dickinson (Robert Mitchum)
directly. Erupting into mocking laughter, the clerk ominously confirms
Blake’s request, granting him access to the boss’ office. A human skull,
animal bones, a taxidermy bear, and pile of money semiotically construct
Dickinson who appears in a hitherto empty chair with a loaded double-
barrel shotgun pointed directly at Blake. “The only job you’re gonna get
in here is pushing up daisies from a pine box,” Dickinson deadpans. As
Blake swiftly leaves the Metalworks, he becomes lost in the labyrinthine
corridors of the factory.
With a last few coins, Blake visits Machine’s saloon where he meets
Thel (Mili Avatel), a paper flower producer-seller with whom he becomes
instantly enamored. Returning to Thel’s hotel room, the scene is cut by
another secretive black out, whereupon she and Blake lie together in bed.
Reaching under one of the pillows, Blake produces a gun, “Why do you
have this?” he queries. “Because this is America,” Thel responds, taking the
gun from Blake’s hand. Suddenly, Thel’s ex-lover Charlie (Gabriel Byrne)
appears through the chamber doorway. Incensed by Thel’s revoked love,
Charlie draws his pistol, training its site upon Blake. As he fires, Thel
shields his body, dying instantly.3 A shocked Blake produces Thel’s pistol,
awkwardly firing two errant rounds into the hotel wall before inglori-
ously shooting Charlie in the neck. Nearly passing out, Blake realizes that
Charlie’s bullet has passed through Thel and entered his chest. Fleeing the
hotel via the window, Blake “falls” hard to the ground. Against the star
speckled night sky, an errant meteor suddenly streaks across the heavens.
This meteor is Blake, a rogue unfixed object in the night, blazing without
destination or reason. Gathering the last of his strength, Blake rides from
Machine on a stolen horse, becoming a chaosmodic outlaw figure against

the night sky.
When the fireman warns in Dead Man’s prologue that Machine is
the end of the line, he suggests something of Blake’s immanent line of
escape. Blazing in tension with the limits of the atmosphere’s threshold,
Blake is driven beyond the interiority of Machine’s capital forces. As
molar lines dissolve, Blake begins to live an unlife outside of the rigid
segmentarity interpelled by the capital apparatus. The quanta of his
molecular lines run-off in rhizomatic, multiplicitous disorganization,
producing new offshoots and patterns of relation. Yet, death need not be
the unproductive black hole of Machine, the site of Dickinson’s central-
ized, destructive power (Braidotti, 2006); Nor need it be the “end” as
conferred by the rigidity of the hierarchical (quantitative) arborescent4
line (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Entwined with State codes of accumu-
lative vertical progress and development, the model of arborescence
functions “on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis,
something that comes ready-made” (p. 12). The arborescent line is alone
a deadly force overcoding the singularity of a life, a factory-machine that
systematically territorializes its components into organized, static struc-
tures. Lives are conceived along this arborescent line, and indeed, one
might imagine accountant Bill Blake as its sedentary, anxious ideal. As
Deleuze and Guattari write, “we are always afraid of losing . . . the great
molar organizations that [sustain] us, the arborescences we cling to, the
binary machines that give us a well defined status . . . the system of over-
coding that dominates us” (p. 227). What happens outside the interiority
of the arborescent model is uncertain, and hence, we cling to the rigid
molar segments that territorialize immanent lines of flight, resignifying
exactly who, where, and what we are. Nothing escapes this arborescent
model that is not dubbed mutant. Yet, the active pedagogical lesson of
Dead Man comes from such mutant or monstrous flows. Crosscutting
the arborescent codes inscribed upon the flesh of the organism are
often imperceptible lines that germinate from the middle (rhizomati-
cally), crossing molar thresholds and borders. It is via such horizontal
movement that we might crack open “the shield of tedium and predict-
ability in which we wrap ourselves up in order to get through the day”
(Braidotti, 2006, p. 215). Of such cracks, Dead Man is an extreme, yet
instructional example.
As Braidotti (2006) suggests, death can become a “point in a creative
synthesis of flows, energies, and becomings . . . removed from the meta-
physics of finitude, it is neither the significant closure, nor the defining
border of human existence” (p. 235). While the arborescent model posits
death as a finality, the molecular or rhizomatic line has yet to reach its
BECOMING-NOMAD 51
definitive limit point. The rhizomatic line grows intermezzo, shattering the
linearity of the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In the early scenes of
Dead Man, the narrative extends from its middle to form connections out-
side of its textual body. Jarmusch’s early allusion to poet William Blake’s
Book of Thel (1789/2006) cross-cuts the self-contained body of the film.
In Blake’s eight-plate book, Thel is a wandering nomad, consumed with
the question of springtime’s waning and the end of all things. Plagued by
the question of death, Thel consults a cloud, a worm, and clod of clay for
clear answers, and yet, is uncomforted. The cloud avers that while things
appear to disappear, they imperceptibly remain, the clay that one must live
not for oneself, but in openness to others. Accountant Bill Blake’s line of
flight intersects with that of Thel as his lifeline is nomadically opened to
otherness.
Implicate within reactive molar lines, an imperceptible multitude of
virtual lines vegetate. Such multiplicity is different from sheer multiplica-
tion, which is, after all, an anagram of accumulation. Multiplicity might
rather be understood as means of opening to nonresemblant, heteroge-
neous, mutagenic elements (Marks, 1999). Rather than the accumulation
of such tropes as the ascetic hypermasculine hero of the Western, Dead
Man opens new passages of thinking the Western/West. Blake is not the
macho stranger of the prototypical Western, nor the grandiose hero of
“major” texts.5 Instead, he is a bumbling, awkward, and apprehensive crea-
ture of habit. This is neither to say that Blake is an archetypal “everyman,”
certainly, his commonness is dispersed as he becomes an anomaly during
the course of his journey West. Whereas multiplication might accrue self-
same meanings as to reterritorialize familiar tropes, outlines, and binary
codes, multiplicity carries the potential of morphologically altering the
familiar operative conditions upon which structure unfolds. In this vein,
the pedagogical molar overdetermination of the organism is deterritorial-
ized by the implicate order of the singularity, the vital life that springs in
the midst of decay and morbidity.
While informed by molar codes, pedagogical life might more accurately
be described as a singularity. Like the rhizomatic connections of Jarmusch’s
film, currere’s active force deterritorializes the often debilitating illusion of
the curriculum as a self-enclosed document or route/root to be traced. In
such tracings, the productive desires of the classroom are territorialized
along the projected image of the molar line that proceeds incrementally
from one point to the next toward its teleological terminus. It is this image
of curriculum that today requires new concepts for thinking difference. As
Aoki (2005d) writes, “the word curriculum . . . feels choked, out of breath,
caught in a landscape . . . [of] splendid instrumentalism” (p. 423). In
this impoverished model of pedagogy, lines of molecular escape become
terrible rem(a)inders of the molar orders’ nonunified structure, the very

excess it means to control. Dead Man becomes an important example in
this respect. Exterior to centralizing molar powers, a life of vital creativity
and political action might be constituted.
At the periphery of logos, a nomadic (nomos) “exteriority . . . very dif-
ferent from the ‘law’ . . . [exists] in its own metamorphoses” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 360). A pedagogical life is necessarily a vital line
that assembles with productive elements outside of “itself,” undergoing
metamorphic mutations of “another species, of another nature, of another
origin” (p. 354). In the midst of the reactive curricular molar line that “we
habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of
thinking,” molecular flashes open broad connections of relation or assem-
blage that require a cartographical orientation to curriculum map-making
(p. 354). Yet, the cartographical borders of a life have yet to be drawn, for
no Euclidian edge can be signified without the destructive cutting force of
the molar line.6 Perhaps the greatest degree of ruination occurs when the
opportunity for molecular movement is redistributed along habitual and
modeled lines of thinking. Such redistribution of the Same marks a non-
vital death drive that wards off death through compulsion and habitual
repetition. It is an ontological error to assume this is what curriculum
documents demand of pedagogical practice. As Deleuze and Guattari aver,
molar lines and molecular lines are knotted. Too much time on either line
could spell disaster.
Recapturing the Nomad
Blake regains consciousness somewhere along the periphery of Machine

as a lone Indian7 (Gary Farmer) attempts to cut the bullet from his chest.
“There’s White Man’s metal next to your heart,” the Indian informs a
struggling Blake, “I tried to cut it out, but it’s too deep inside. The knife
could cut your heart and release the spirit from within . . . stupid fucking
white man.” Meanwhile, Charlie’s father turns out to be none other than
the patriarchal figure of Dickenson. Vengeful over the death of his son,
Dickinson deploys three bounty hunters to hunt down the outlaw Blake.8
As they take flight into the nowhere lands surrounding Machine, Blake
appears without a future, condemned to a struggle against the State appa-
ratus that is lost from the start (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). “Did you kill
the white man who killed you?” the Indian queries. “I’m not dead,” Blake
replies coyly as the Indian looks upon him with a grave expression. After a
punctuating silence, the Indian asks “What name were you given at birth,
stupid white man?” Blake is ignorant to his symbolic death, an outlaw to
BECOMING-NOMAD 53
the sovereign order, which now seeks his capture and reterritorialization.
This is of course the tendency of molar ordering, to recapture and recode
anomalous growths and outlaw lines of flight.
Jarmusch’s original screenplay includes a scene in which a nearly inco-
herent Blake asks his Indian friend why he is helping him (Rosenbaum,
2000). “A bird told me,” the Indian replies. In the original script, this scene
refers to the indigo bunting, a rare psychedelic bird with iridescent plum-
age. When the Indian first encounters Blake’s body, the bird is drinking
blood from his bullet wound. Thereafter, the indigo bunting flies in a
straight line toward the Western horizon. Yet, this is not simply a “sign.”
It is in connection with the indigo bunting that “an alliance with another
human group” is created (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 247). A bloodied
yet beautiful bird projected along the molar line of the West, Blake passes
through his humanistic character and becomes-animal. Through their
mutual affinity with the indigo bunting, Blake and the nomadic Indian
become bound in a new tribal assemblage. Breaking with the established
norms of Western rationality, the boundaries between man/animal, and
privileged clarity of the Word are deterritorialized, creating new border-
lines of alliance that are neither those of the family or the State (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983). Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, this new alli-
ance is an expression of a minoritarian group, a group that is “oppressed,
prohibited . . . or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups
all the more secret for being extrinsic, accompanied . . . by a rupture with
the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become
established” (p. 247).
As Bill Blake becomes exteriorized, his line of flight risks the pursuit
of the State apparatus and institutional recoding. Yet, passing through the
strange mediating forces not unlike the indigo bunting of Dead Man, a
singular cartography is created. Such passages are not simply traumatic,
but potentially morphogenic, mutating the traditional borderlines of
instrumentalism and humanism that code the molar curriculum line.
Such mutation elicits the question of what it means to live pedagogically.
In this vein, May (2005) proposes, “if living is a matter of the unfolding of
vital difference, then the one that lives can either be less or more or other
than a person” (p. 24). As practiced in Dead Man, the curriculum might
be conceptualized as a process of becoming. In other words, there is no
transcendental pedagogical prescription upon which we might rely: Teach
thus (May, 2005)!
Nietzsche’s pronouncement of God’s death is an ontological provoca-
tion. It enjoins one to a life without deferral to transcendental authori-
ties. Indeed, the Nietzsche-Deleuzian question is distinctly ontological, a
challenge concerning “the creation of concepts of difference . . . [through
which] we may find a variety of understandings of ourselves, and this vari-

ety of understandings may open up a variety of futures to be lived” (May,
2005, p. 24). In this manner, the curriculum might be conceptualized as a
BwO, a plane of immanence or virtuality from which elements have yet to
be actualized. Separating us from habitual thinking, and yet, raising us to
action, the realization of the virtual plane might be immanently creative
and unique. Like the rhizome, the plane of immanence is micropolitical
in its tendency to “escape” habitual molar tracings and the dogmatism of
opinion (doxa). Yet, such “escapes” are constitutive rather than solipsistic.
They assemble to bring something new into existence, a phoenix from
cinnamon ash. Irreducible to the play of creative imagination, this com-
mitment to making a strange curriculum cartography is a consideration
that “the world (or, since the concept of the world is too narrow, things or
being or what there is) outruns any of the categories we might seek to use
to capture it” (May, 2005, p. 81). The molar habit of capture underscores
the project of much contemporary schooling, which epistemologically ter-
ritorializes the curricular map as a tracing of what is already known and
what everyone already knows.
The willing-death alluded by Zourabichvili (1996) purports a dif-
ferent way of proceeding pedagogically. It suggests an ethical stance of
negotiating the curriculum with difference, of snatching vitality back
from habitual modes of practice and thought. In this Spinozian turn, we
have yet to realize what a curricular body can do. As Deleuze remarks of
the philosophical endeavor, pedagogy is the work of “forming, inventing,
and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2). This is neither
the discovery curriculum of which Doll (1993) warns, nor the humanistic
closed loop of creation for its own sake. Indeed, even the most exploratory
works can emerge in deep conformism to established categories of opin-
ion (doxa) and representation. Such a pedagogy simply rediscovers the
“State,” the “Church,” and the values of a transcendent object through an
orthopedic reliance upon dogmatic images of thought. As Deleuze (1994)
writes, “how could [one] not be isolated when they deny what “everybody
knows”?” (p. 130). Such becoming-minor is in-part the price of non-
conformism to representational forms that are already possessed by the
State and doxa of popular culture. It is a question, Deleuze continues, “of
someone—if only one—with the necessary modesty [of] not managing to
know what everybody [already] knows” (p. 130).
The Schizo: Who/Where is William “Bill” Blake?
When Blake reveals his name, his Indian benefactor flies into a rage. “Is
this a lie, or a White man’s trick?” he challenges. As Blake assures him that
BECOMING-NOMAD 55
he is indeed who he says, the Indian replies, “Then you are a Dead Man.”
Blake admits his confusion. “But I understand, William Blake,” the Indian
recounts, “you are a poet, and a painter, and now you are a killer of White
men.” In this exchange, the conventions of the Western are ruptured. The
exchange between the Blake and the Indian is unhinged from the asym-
metrical power relation of the one who knows against the ignorant savage.
It is instead the Indian who is versed in the romantic poetry of William
Blake, and Blake himself who is oblivious to its meaning. “Every night, and
every morn, some to misery are born,” the Indian recites from memory,
“every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight . . . some are
born to endless night.” This recitation from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence
(1757) does not simply invert the binary power relations of the traditional
Western film. Rather, it marks the stain of colonial influence in the West
perpetuated by the State educational apparatus. Yet, the way such influence
is taken up in Dead Man might be more profound than its simply repres-
sive interpretation would allow.
The aphoristic poetry of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are captured by the
Indian and made his own. Following the death of a transcendent God,
the words of an author invariably take on idiosyncratic and singular
meanings to their users. Even the most ostensibly territorialized modes of
speech can become idiolectical. While this does not negate the haunt of
genocide interred in the Indian’s story, it does suggest the capacity for one
to assemble with molecular elements interring within the State apparatus.
As Rosenbaum (2001) writes, “Some of the Blake adages [the Indian]
quotes . . . sound like [First Nation’s] sayings to Blake and to us, and
conversely, some of [the Indian’s] own pronouncements sound like the
poetry of Blake” (p. 74). As it coincides with the historical context of Dead
Man, the publication of Blake’s poetry and art was largely considered the
work of madness, informed as it was by hallucinations and conversations
with Old Testament prophets. Hostile toward the established Church,
Blake developed his own religion articulated in such prophetic books as
The Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).
Anomalous in his time, Blake’s works defied categorical recognition,
escaping the doxa of the State and Church apparatus. Rosenbaum’s (2001)
assessment of Dead Man as an acid Western is recapitulated in the art-
works of Blake, who etched via the “infernal method” of corroding plates
with acid. As Blake avers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), this
practice melts away apparent surfaces, revealing the “infinite” that was hid.
Blake’s “infernal method” is apparent in Dead Man, wherein the strange
journey of accountant Bill Blake is concomitantly the creation of a BwO
or uncoded body without organs. This plane of immanence is “infinite”
insofar as it is a virtuality prior to distribution.
Deterritorializing the Body-Machine
Producing the gun used to shoot Charlie, the Indian asks if Blake knows
how to use the weapon. “Not really,” says Blake resignedly, in contrast
to the gun-slinging hero of the traditional Western. “That weapon will
replace your tongue,” the Indian instructs, “you will learn to speak
through it, and your poetry will now be written with blood.” The organ-
ized, overcoded body is deterritorialized as new assemblages are created.
The gun becomes Blake’s tongue, his speech a nomadic idiolect aimed at
pursuing agents of capture. In this deterritorialization of the coded body,
poetry becomes a revolutionary power against sovereignty, a language of
war “in the position of betraying everything” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 354). Called to action through an ontological metamorphoses of being,
Cleveland accountant Bill Blake is no longer one, but multiple. That is,
as he assembles with elements of the natural landscape, with the poetry
of his namesake, and weapons of war, he can no longer be thought of as
a unified Being. Rather than points on a linear, arborescent line, Blake
develops “peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of
singularities impossible to universalize” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 378).
Blake’s becoming does not occur in isolation, but in relationship to
his new tribal assemblage. Through creative pedagogical misrecogni-
tion, Blake is enabled to embark on a quest of becoming that cracks
his sedentary life. The quantitative framing of Blake as an accountant is
opened to immanent qualitative directions. In this vein, his becoming
is not simply additive (n+1), but qualitatively transformative, extend-
ing in directions that vitalize through productive increases in agency.
Both the poetry of William Blake and the gun that deterritorializes the
tongue posit a productive pathos (an antilogos and antimythos). Against
the moribund subject determined by language, Dead Man creates new
modes of speaking. First, through the differential repetition of a Blake’s
aphoristic thought and second, through the deterritorialization of the
tongue in place of a weapon. Following Artaud, Deleuze asks, “What is a
thought which harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else?” (1994,
p. 135). Nomadic speech is a dangerous thing, its poetry written in the
vitalizing medium of blood. Yet, in the deterritorialization of Blake’s
tongue and the creation of an idiolect, a form of counterharm emerges.
Blake’s encounter with the “minor” language of nomadism mobilizes
an immanent singularity. Untethered from alienating molar discourses,
Blake’s “minoritarian” speech is an opening into which he becomes,
inaugurating a new condition for life dispossessed by the petrifying
imposition of language. The privileged discursive coordinates of clarity
BECOMING-NOMAD 57
demanded by the molar order are supplemented by Blake’s deterritorial-

ized affective speech. Instead of the self-contained, rational text, Blake’s
poetry becomes an affect that “sweeps [one] away . . . [such that] no sub-
jective interiority remains” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 356). “Affects
transpierce the body like arrows,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “they are
weapons of war” (p. 256).
Moral transcendent values and the patriarchal father figure of Dickinson
(the Law) are transformed by Blake’s Indian benefactor. The Indian is not
the great teacher or master that one might have expected. Indeed, their
aggregate relationship is marked by a distinct absence of hierarchy. That is,
one cannot tell who is teaching whom. Blake appears to ruminate deeply
on the very axioms the Indian attributes to Blake (“the eagle never lost
so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow”). There is a
pedagogical relation herein that does not easily accord to contemporary
teaching and learning or models of psychoanalytic transference. Instead,
Blake and the Indian are nonhierarchically knotted, an aggregate “tribe in
the desert” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 379). No great teacher emerges
with the lesson to be learned, and for as much as he seems to listen, Blake
learns nothing, betraying the traditional pedagogical moment (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987).
As Dead Man emerges as a filmic “deal breaker,” so too might minori-
tarian curricular thought break with the established molar coordinates of
clarity, unity, and subjectivity that are its hallmarks. Curriculum theory
continues to develop vital minoritarian lines. As a “fuzzy aggregate,” the
field exhibits desubjectivized schizo tendencies. That is, its discursive
cartographies are not unified but disjunctive, not one, but multiple. The
field extends outside of any compartmental limits, traversed by the errant
tendencies of myriad disciplines. Assembling minoritarian, peripheral
positions, the claim to an interiorized self-evidence is deterritorialized.
In Dead Man, the strange aphorisms of William Blake and deterritorial-
ization of the tongue enable a constitutive line of escape from sedentary
life. For curricular thinkers and cartographers, this practice of taking up
the arrows left by other thinkers is instructive. Yet, such arrows need not
proceed along readymade trajectories. Indeed, if we are to take Deleuze
seriously, curriculum theorizing must perform a kind of buggery (encu-
lage) whereby the works of others are reproduced with difference in lieu
of blind conformism. Such conformism is marked by a “refusal to think,
to act, to live in accordance with a difference that is always there, always
subsisting within the world that is presented to us” (p. 170). The practice
of difference articulated in Dead Man bespeaks a way of living a pedagogi-
cal life, “living [as] a matter of the actualization of difference” (May, 2005,
p. 170).
The Colonial Haunt
“What is your name?” Blake eventually asks his companion. “My name is
Nobody,” the Indian replies. As a child of mixed blood, Nobody articu-
lates his marginalization by both the Apsaalooke (Crow) and Amskaapi
Pikanii (Blackfoot) tribes of his father and mother. “This mixture was
not respected,” Nobody admits. Between the accepted genealogical blood-
lines of his parents, Nobody exists with Blake at the periphery of the
Law. Captured by a deployment of English troops as a child, Nobody was
imprisoned, and subsequently sent to the courts of Europe as a “savage”
curiosity. Yet, as Nobody learned to mimic his European captors, his nov-
elty as an alien other quickly grew tiresome. No longer a rogue line to be
recaptured, Nobody was integrated into mainstream English schooling,
wherein he became enraptured by the poetry and art of William Blake.
Escaping his imperial captors, Nobody returns to the tribes from which he
was ostracized as a child. Believing his tale of great adventure will finally
procure him social recognition amongst his peoples, his account is con-
versely met with spiteful laughter and dismissed as lies. Dispossessed to the
abject limit of both American Indian and European cultures, Nobody is
renamed Xebeche, “He who talks loud, says nothing.” “I prefer being called
Nobody,” he confesses to Blake.
The emphasis on ontological experimentation and the creation for new
conditions for living ostensibly evades the influence of history and histori-
cal forces. However, history is not irrelevant. The strange journey of Dead
Man, while deterritorializing the ontological categories of conventional
identity, are significantly entwined with historical processes, “the virtual
character of the past as it inhabits the present” (May, 2005, p. 115). The
story of Nobody exemplifies the historical character of colonization, the
fetishization of the “savage” and the subsumption of alternative lifelines
under the universalizing values of the colonials. Nobody’s preferred name
marks not only his nomadic becoming, but the erasure of First Nations’
people under the ostensibly benign banners of progress, capital and
religious prosperity. In Dead Man, the aboriginal population is literally
erased from the landscape of the Western frontier. Yet, Nobody’s story is
not entirely the product of historical forces of colonization in the Western.
This is not to say that his lifeline is not irremediably entwined with molar
forces of organization and oppression, rather that such molar lines are
populated by fields of difference. The conceptualization of the subject as
wholly constructed via sociohistorical forces is itself a denial of vital dif-
ference and an appeal to “the dogmatic image of thought [wherein] there
are already constituted [stable] identities” (p. 120). May (2006) writes,
“[h]istory is the folding and unfolding of particular swarms of difference
BECOMING-NOMAD 59
in particular relationships” (p. 115). Our present situation is inhabited

by realms of difference, molecular lines that interrupt and crosscut the
molar. This is not to say that anything is possible, but rather under the
right conditions, we do not yet know what is possible (May, 2005). Lines
of difference populate the historical field. In its creation of frontier life as
a space of possibility amidst oppressive molar forces, Dead Man emerges
from such a differential historical plane. The acid Western is thus not a
creation separate from the “official history” of the West, but a differential
assemblage indwelling the Western historical project.
Nobody produces connections rather than searches for rediscovery
along the established lines of the State and Church apparatus. In this
way, Nobody escapes the closed identity politics that would render him
a recognizable, and hence governable subject. Nobody is unbound by the
moral or structural edicts of any one belief, and like his luminary William
Blake, creates a new line of religious and spiritual flight untethered by the
deep structures of orthodox dogmatism. In this sense, no transcendent
figure or morality is transposed upon the identity of Nobody. Producing
connections opposed to pursuing “deep” needs, Nobody is in a process of
becoming through the development of a unique idiolect and orientation
to the world. When Blake’s life is later threatened by three trappers enact-
ing a perverse rendition of the Oedipal triangle, Nobody becomes a bolt
of lighting, appearing instantly, and slicing the throat of Blake’s antagonist.
In a later scene, Nobody ingests peyote and has a sacred vision of Blake
becoming-death. Each of these rhizomatic connections, becomings of dif-
ferent intensities and durations, arise from Nobody’s immanent relation-
ships opposed to transcendent structures. For the nomadic Nobody, there
is no organizing matrix “that imposes specific modes of connections from
outside or above” (May, 2005, p. 126). Rather, Nobody practices a kind of
productive desire through which new conditions for how one might live
arise.
Passing Through the Mirror: Diagrammatic9 Components
Throughout Dead Man, there is an active schizo doubling at work: The

overcoded mills of Machine at the “beginning” and the Makah village at
the “end,” the molar sojourn on the train and the chaosmodic voyage in
the sea canoe, the unified ego of Blake and his schizo becoming-multiple.
“Punctuated by losses of consciousness and fade-outs,” actuality is crosscut
by deterritorializing, multiplicitous potentials (Rosenbaum, 2000, p. 76).
The nomadic movement of Nobody and Blake cannot be pinned down
or attributed to a line marked by definitive beginnings and ends, points
of view, or positions of moral privilege. The doubling effect of the acid
Western is in part marked by its perspectival shift from that of “White”

anthropocentrism to the peripheral perspective of non-Whites (Indians,
animals, environments). Similarly, the acid Western moves from majoritar-
ian models of capture to minoritarian peripheral practices of constitutive
escape. As I have asserted, Dead Man is a performative, minoritarian work
in its creation of a revisionist West, one that does not elide the nightmar-
ish history of religious, industrial, and colonial genocide. Against nihilistic
cynicism, “a thin but fabulous hope” emerges in such movements: “that of
becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making”
(Massumi, 1987a).
The Deleuzian challenge of experimental deterritorialization is intimate
to a pedagogical life of our own making. It is, as Massumi avers, a thin and
fabulous hope. Its success is not guaranteed, and akin to the story of Dead
Man, might ultimately prove too much, enveloping us entirely. This is,
of course, the risk of journeying out on molecular lines. Yet, curriculum
theory must continue to posit such experimental lines of flight, passing
through the mirror of its own self-resemblances and representations. As
Buchanan (2004) suggests, “stratification is secondary” (p. 14). As such, it
is spurious to take deterritorialization as a process whereby something is
removed from an a priori unified entity (ibid.). To understand deterrito-
rialization as primary intimates that the limits attributed to pedagogical
practices are effects of sedimentation. Following, we must question the
territorializations of the field in terms of what they do, how they capture
desire, and form an image of life’s limits. “We are always quelconque—we are
and remain ‘anybodies’ before we become ‘somebodies’” (Rajchman, 2001,
p. 14). Such an approach suggests a “making strange” the field of curricu-
lum theory in such a way as to open new passages for the conceptualiza-
tion of teaching and learning. An opportunity for thinking differently
about the “in-structured” body of the student also emerges in the making
strange of curriculum theory (Aoki, 2005d, p. 423). Against the a priori
organ-ization of the body along developmental and regulatory images,
we might begin to think the body “outside any determined state, poised
for any action in its reparatory . . . the body from the point of view of its
potential, or virtuality” (Massumi, 1992, p. 70). In this vein, the creation
of a body without organs is conceived as a virtual opening for the emer-
gence of the new, having “nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or
with an image of the body. It is the body without an image” (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1983, p. 8). The body without organs is therefore the opposite
of the body image, that is, the representation of the body as a genetically
encoded, biochemically constituted, or State-controlled organism.
The challenge of experimentation is also a provocation to comman-
deer the field for the obscure purposes of unhinging the mythologies and
BECOMING-NOMAD 61
ontology of the West. To do anything less would claim satisfaction with the
molar segment and acquiesce: There is nothing more than what is already
present! Perhaps such experimentation is unavoidable so long as desire
is understood as constitutive (desiring-production) and not negative. As
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, becomings must first be created. Yet,
there is an “art of caution” that must be cast into play when one proceeds
experimentally, “[y]ou don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very
fine file” (p. 160). In the creation of monstrous contagions and minoritar-
ian performative acts, a productive deal-breaking is engendered. This is
not simply a cynical tactic of causing trouble for its own sake. It is rather
an approach to the world that suggests other ways of proceeding. Such
an approach might very well require the radical betrayal of obese intel-
lectual territories, “deep” structures, and accumulated egoic profits. It is a
practice, as Rosenbaum writes, of “looking at the same thing in different
ways—or looking at different things the same way” (p. 13). This double
movement concomitantly bespeaks a practice of nonbinarized multiplicity
and singularity, the multiplicitous potentialities of a life. To engage in life
as an experimental endeavor of multiplicitous becomings, we risk a form
of Symbolic death if nothing but to create a new way of proceeding post-
humously.10 Such is not the finite death of the body, but its morphological
transformation along exploratory lines.
5
Becoming-Music: Improvisation
and Instrumentalism in
Curriculum Theory
I n Aoki’s (2005a) curriculum seminar featuring jazz trumpeter Bobby

Shew, the question of music’s import to curriculum theorizing is explic-
itly posed. Toward this question, Shew’s performance addresses two lines
of inquiry. First, “When does an instrument cease to be an instrument?”
and second, “What is improvisation?” (p. 367). These lines of inquiry
remain significant to the contemporary field of curriculum theorizing as a
way of exploring the potentials of what a curricular body can do. As Aoki
avers, Shew’s performance would intersect the instrumental image of ped-
agogical life captured in the language of goals, objectives, production, and
achievement. Under the hold of “technocratic rationality,” Aoki remarks
to Shew, “a way to do, has become the way to do, indifferent to differences
in the lived world of teachers and students” (p. 368). Territorialized in the
image of a closed, overdetermined model, currere is severed from its con-
stitutive powers of becoming.
By Aoki’s admission, his inquiry with Bobby Shew seeks “a way out” of
instrumental thinking (p. 368). What is being escaped in Aoki’s thought
experiment but the Platonic Form of Unity, the “integrated totality” in
which the reactive image of an “integrated” curriculum is territorialized?
(p. 370). The ideal of Platonic Harmony, Aoki writes, suggests a “fit-
ting together, a con-c(h)ord, and integration of sounds” (p. 370). In the
Western world, such an ideal image of dialectical synthesis has been con-
flated with moral goodness and truth. The Roman orator Quintilian for
example, lectured on a fictional legal case in which a musician is charged
with manslaughter for playing in the wrong mode during a sacrifice. By
playing in the Phrygian mode, Quintilian argues, a piper causes an offici-
ating priest to hurl himself over a cliff in a fit of madness (Walser, 1993).
By way of its unique chord structure, it is significant that the Phrygian

mode produces an unstable and ominous tone, in turn creating the
uncanny effect of a shadow, or looming second timbre. Hence, the caveat
issued in Quintilian’s case cautions against a multiplicity of expressions
in lieu of a more integrated tonal register. Perhaps more significantly,
Quintilian’s rhetorical case counsels on the powerful affective force of
musical modulation, the way it assembles with the body and comes into
conflict with the powers of the law.
In his inquiry of musicological forces, Aoki cautions on the privileged
rhetoric of harmony and integration. Shifting away from the common
valuation of harmony, Aoki advances the mediation of Zen scholar
Daisetz Suzuki: “To seek harmony is to kill nature, to stop its pulsations,
and to embrace the dead corpse that is left behind” (p. 371). Advocates
of harmony and integration are, following Suzuki’s insight, exponents
of death, emissaries of entropy that cling to the overdetermined body of
currere. Against the reactive territorialization of difference, the manner of
Aoki’s escape draws upon the active transformative potentials of currere.
Through the improvisational forces of sonare, Aoki experiments with the
concept of a polyphonic curriculum. This nonimage of currere destroys
the transcendent ideal of harmony and dialectical fidelity championed by
Plato. Further, it mobilizes a multiplicity of ways a pedagogical life might
unfold as a difference of kind rather than degree. Aoki does not simply
advocate for what might amount to a new composition in the familiar
mode. Such a move would simply appeal to an image of the world given a
priori, or rather, to reduce the concept of multiplicity to that of multiple
identities (Aoki, 2005b).1
As Aoki argues apropos Deleuze, the reduction of multiplicity to mul-
tiple identities risks presuming the presence of a superior ontological
substance from which identity emanates: “Identity [is] not so much . . .
something already present, but rather a production, in the throes of being
constituted as we live in place of difference” (p. 205). In Aoki’s terms,
such difference inheres the lived or immanent space between the cur-
riculum-as-plan (currere’s reactive image) and curriculum-as-lived. It is
from this middle, the Deleuzian “fuzzy locus” of difference, that the active
force of currere deterritorializes the dogmatic image or “chiseled motif ”
of representational thinking in the curriculum field (p. 204). In this vein,
the transformative spirit of sonare extends by shifting the mode of expres-
sion, repeating familiar curriculum territories with difference, in turn
rendering them foreign to themselves. It is in the multiple modulations or
mutations of sonare that new kinds of passages for thinking are created.
Such passages—of which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write there are
thousands—are not representational. Rather, they ruin the claim to
BECOMING-MUSIC 65
representation through the creative force of an active and constitutive

currere. It is in this vein that Aoki’s escape is not of the transcendent
variety, but rather, an opposite action of approaching the lived production
of a pedagogical life. These tensions speak to the problematics faced by
the field of curriculum theorizing. Should we integrate the lines of flight
born of an active currere into a “sonic unity . . . [or] allow the strands to
sing polyphonically and pray that, on occasion, they glow white hot from
within?” (p. 371). Are the productive desires of currere to be territorialized
in the neo-Platonic image of Unity or conceived rather as an immanent
pedagogical force for thinking difference?
Assigning either a territorialized or deterritorialized status to peda-
gogic thought neglects Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) analysis of the plane
of immanence. That is, territorialization, deterritorialization, and the
Deleuzeguattarian tertiary concept of reterritorialization are not move-
ments in a successive evolution. Rather, “[t]hey are three aspects of the
same thing” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 312). While an unproductive
misreading of Aoki’s concepts might summon the image of a dualism,
Aoki posits a third space in which the curriculum-as-plan and cur-
riculum-as-lived intersect as a meshwork. This “zone of between” is the
meshwork of “two horizons,” the curriculum-as-plan and the curriculum-
as-lived (Aoki, 2005b, p. 161). Against the image of pedagogical thought as
either a “plan” or “lived,” Aoki posits the two forces interacting, modulat-
ing, and interfering one another. In this vein, the reactive and active forces
of currere might be thought not simply as a binary pair, but mutations
or expressions of flow. While the reactive powers of currere arrest flow,
its active forcefields unleash flow into new patterns of relation. As such, it
is not that the world is either reactive, active, or engaging a line of flight
between two, but rather, a continuous modulation among all three aspects.
For Deleuze and Guattari, aspects of territorialization, deterritorialization,
and reterritorialization are thus not ontologically distinct substances. They
are each aspects of the concept of the Refrain (ritournelle).
Deleuze and Guattari write that singing plays a pivotal role in the for-
mation of territories. That is, a song can create a sense of stability against
tumult. To exemplify this, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) evoke the image
of a child walking home in the dark. Frightened, the child comforts him-
self with a song beneath his breath, creating a shelter in the midst of the
unknown. “The song is like a rough sketch,” Deleuze and Guattari write,
“of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos”
(p. 311). The song is a “skip,” jumping from chaos to order amidst the
threat of breaking apart at any moment. The child’s song creates a home,
Deleuze and Guattari write, “but home does not preexist: it was necessary
to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a
limited space” (p. 311). Like the blaring headphones that mark territories
on public transit, the laborer that whistles to lighten the task, and the
“housewife [who] sings . . . as she marshals the antichaos forces of her
work,” each keeps forces of danger at bay (p. 311). The sonorous expres-
sion creates a territory that defends against anxieties, fears, and pressures.
While it does not simply dispel them, it gives them a different form that
creates a barrier sheltering against the immanent forces of deterritorializa-
tion (Buchanan, 2004).
As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, the content and expression of
music is concerned with death: “[A] child dies, a child plays, a woman is
born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off . . . these are not acci-
dental themes in music . . . they are something essential” (p. 299). Against
the territory or repeated refrain, Deleuze and Guattari remark that there is
a “danger” in lines of escape and deterritorialization. This danger extends
from the possibility that while creative lines of deterritorialization might
engender new ways of thinking or acting in the world, they might also
lead toward destruction and abolition. “This is why,” Buchanan (2004)
writes, “the refrain is the content proper to music: the refrain is our means
of erecting, hastily if needs be, a portable territory that can secure us in
troubled situations” (p. 16). The expression of the refrain or repeated
block of content “proper” to music is thus a way to confront death without
giving oneself over to its potentially disastrous powers. It is a territorial-
ization that wards against experimental lines of deterritorializing flight
and the question of what a body might do. In this vein, the territorializing
aspect of the refrain functions to stabilize Being, warding off the forces of
transformation.
Orchestrating and Conducting Currere
Today, ubiquitous talk of curriculum orchestration and composition sug-

gest a transpositional affinity between currere and musicology. In this
sense, the territorializing powers of the refrain might tell us something
significant about the image of thought as it is ascribed to pedagogical life.
As the territorialization of a milieu (a noncoded space), the refrain might
be distinguished from the nomadic lines of improvisation characteristic
of such jazz musicians as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. A contrasting or
“orchestrated” expression of currere might hence be associated with both
the Greek terms polis and logos. As Holland (2004) writes, polis refers to
the interior space behind city walls, while logos, the Law of the State. Each
is an expression of fidelity toward territorialization. Polis designates the
enclosed and regulated space of the city while logos expresses the rational
BECOMING-MUSIC 67
center around which State thought is territorialized. Against the nomadic

“outside” or line of escape, the territorializing connotations of both polis
and logos are musically akin to the stratified image of classical symphonic
orchestration.
Analogous to the image of the racetrack connoted by the curricu-
lum-as-plan, the orchestral concert is organized to “regulate the energy
of all its parts, to channel . . . collective desiring-production into the
linear simplicity of the harmonically stratified, monophonic melodic
line of the symphony” (Gilbert, 2004, p. 128). In this reactive mode, the
desires of the symphony are territorialized in the a priori image of “the
course to be run.” Put differently, the multiplicitous potential for musi-
cal expression is Unified according to the transcendent ideal ascribed by
the embodiment of the orchestral score in the figure of the conductor.
The simultaneity and sequence of the score embodied by the conductor
thus becomes the law according to which the score is reproduced without
difference. As Canetti (1962) writes, “the music the conductor evokes is
thought to be the only thing that counts . . . he has the power of life and
death over the voices of the instrument” (pp. 394–395). Hence, both the
code of the orchestral score and bourgeois figure of the conductor func-
tion to militate against deterritorializing lines of flight. Indeed, within
the orchestral composition, a renegade line of flight could bring about
a deadly abolition.
The pedagogic image of the curriculum-as-plan or reactive image
of currere runs parallel to the classical orchestral performance. Against
the threat of a line of potentially disastrous flight, the compositional
score, or curriculum-as-plan, becomes a song in the night. It arranges
a priori the course of the composition, creating a territory that actively
wards against difference. As Holland (2004) elucidates, the logic of
the classical orchestral score is reproductive. That is, it captures
difference within the logics of tracing and representation. The orches-
tra is not challenged to create something nomadic or improvisational,
but rather, to reproduce the score-as-code with fidelity to the conduc-
tor-as-law. Parallel to the ossification of pedagogical life under the
reactive powers of currere, the orchestra is impelled to represent the
transcendent image of the a priori course to be run. In both classical
orchestration and the reactive image of currere, this a priori course
constitutes a transcendent ideal above and beyond the immanent
expressions of the curriculum-as-lived.
Like the classical orchestrations of Bach and Mozart, the reactive
powers of currere create a refrain, a coded block of antichaos that does
not simply reflect social relations, but rather, creates them (Attali, 1985).
As Holland (2004) argues apropos Attali, the classical orchestra produces
the nonmusical division of the social milieu. Put differently, the orches-
tral score and reactive image of currere each territorialize spatial rela-
tions (polis) through the striating, hierarchical, and delimiting powers of
the State. In classical orchestration for example, a spacio-political
hierarchy is established between the composer and orchestra. As Canetti
(1962) suggests, the conductor and score exert powers of life and
death over the “voices” of the symphony. The conductor and score
guarantee coordination, but at the cost of the orchestra’s assent to an a
priori image of what a (musical) body might do. The players become, in
this social division of labor, obedient to the composer as a transcendent
figure of authority. In Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, the player becomes
Oedipalized, that is, overcoded by the representational logic of the
State. In this image, the orchestral members passively trace the dictates
of the conductor, indeed, the valuation of the orchestral player is
predicated on this doing.
Attali comments that the image of social relations advanced by the
classical symphonic orchestra parallels the bourgeois ideal of harmony,
that very concept Aoki (2005a) linked to the death of life’s vital force.
Indeed, the harmonious image of the sociopolitical sphere heralded by
classical orchestration is oriented to the generation of a stable image of
life amidst the virtual multiplicity of chaotic noise. Yet, such structural
organization of the social field does not terminate in the hierarchical sub-
ordination of the player beneath the composer. As Canetti (1962) argues,
the classical symphony introduces an additional hierarchy between the
composer and the audience, whose bodily obedience is demanded during
the performance. The audience “is under the compulsion to keep still,”
Canetti writes, “and as soon as [the conductor] finishes, [the audience]
must applaud” (p. 395). The social organization of composer and score
above both orchestral player and audience is analogous to the hierarchical
organization of many contemporary classrooms.
Under the letter of the curriculum and its embodiment in the instruc-
tor, students are impelled to “trace” the course to be run. Through the tract
set out by the curriculum-as-code and teacher-as-law, the homogenous
“unity” of the class is assured. Yet, such unity is predicated on a dogmatic
social division of labor. Teachers embody the curriculum-as-code that
students passively or perhaps interactively iterate. In other words, while
the orchestral player engages with the score as a sign, this engagement is
not active. Rather, it demands that the player follow the score with fidel-
ity. In turn, while the bodily energies of the player are ostensibly engaged,
this engagement is cathected in a system of signification established in
advance. Put differently, while students might very well be engaged in an
interactive relationship to their work, there is always a danger that such
BECOMING-MUSIC 69
interactions simply reproduce a dogmatic image of thought. Ensconced

in this logic of representation, pedagogical life becomes reactive, fettering
student desire to the monotonous sensibilities of the herd.
The Arborescent Image of Currere
In Deleuzeguattarian terms, the reactive course is striated, that is,

hierarchical and arborescent. As Aoki (2005b) elucidates, an arborescent
image also inheres the ways we think and talk about the curriculum. He
writes, “[F]or many of us, curriculum, in spite of its inherent indefinite-
ness, has become definitive, so much so that we speak with ease of the cur-
riculum . . . and when we so speak, we seem heedless of the way we have
been drawn into a curricular landscape where in privileged aplomb stands,
a tree does, a single curriculum” (p. 204). The arborescent image of cur-
riculum that Aoki apprehends at the heart of much curriculum discourse
is for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the model of homogeneity that inheres
Western philosophical thought. The arborescent “root-tree” image of
the world describes the linear and unified organization of Western Being
(p. 6).
Akin to classical symphonic orchestration, the curriculum-as-plan
instrumentally creates a linear or developmentally sequenced image of life
that proceeds from one “fixed” point to another. In this instance, the “root-
tree” is an expression of the segmentarity of the social field, or rather, its
subjugation to the hierarchical powers of State organization. Entwined
with State codes of accumulative vertical progress and phallic power, the
model of arborescence functions “on the basis of an overcoding struc-
ture or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 12). The arborescent line is in this sense a deadly
force overcoding the singularities of a life, a factory-machine that sys-
tematically territorializes its components into organized, hierarchical,
and static structures. Instrumentally, the striated curriculum-as-plan
moves from beginning to end, from a seed to the teleological image of its
mature Form. What the curriculum-as-plan can do or produce is known
a priori. In this vein, the potentials for unanticipated heterogeneous
assemblages or qualitative connections are precluded, reducing a multi-
plicity of curricular becomings to the monological image of the curricu-
lum. This arboreal landscape marks for Aoki (2005b) the primary image
of thought adopted by the field of curriculum and instruction (p. 204).
Yet, the landscape that Aoki describes is not produced via the active forces
of curriculum cartography, but rather, is mapped via the logics of tracing
and representation.
Representation, Repetition, and Compositional Curreres
The mode of representational tracing performed in classical symphonic

orchestration characterizes for Attali (1985) a phase of musical produc-
tion intimate to early modern society. In Attali’s age of representation,
music functions to inspire belief in social harmony under the auspices of
a leader and plan. Its power is to make people believe that social unity is
requisite upon the stratification of the social order and the enjoinment of
individual desire to State power. The curriculum-as-plan functions simi-
larly to striate the productive powers of the individual toward a unified,
harmonious, and linear image of pedagogic Being.
While Attali’s age of representation orients people to believe in the
benevolent social function of the leader, the capitalist age of repetition
functions to silence the masses through music designed to distract, cap-
ture, and satisfy consumer appetite. As Holland (2004) avers, the age of
repetition is characterized by commodified “elevator and grocery store . . .
Muzak; top-40 hit parades and the record industry in general” (p. 28).
Against the image of broader social cohesion under State power, con-
sumers are now encouraged to participate in the solipsistic act of endless
and silent listening (Holland, 2004). Such practices function to territori-
alize social space at microsocial levels of organization, creating a depo-
liticized space occupied by passive, alienated, and overly territorialized
xenophobes.
It might be conjectured that while the curriculum-as-plan emerged
from the age of representation, it has been sustained, albeit differently,
in the capitalist phase of repetition. In its repetitive phase, the curricu-
lum and instruction landscape is no longer oriented to the creation of a
unified society, but rather, the mimetic repetition of the consumer rhetoric
of demand, desire, and satisfaction. The curriculum-as-code becomes, in
the repetitive phase, a ready-made commodity object. Rendered teacher-
proof, the curriculum is imaged in its most reactive sense, reducing the
pedagogical event to a mechanism for the delivery of someone else’s
mail. Akin to grocery store Muzak, the curriculum in the repetitive
age becomes anesthetized, designed to preoccupy and territorialize the
consumer within the readymade course of currere. As Attali avers, the
age of repetition functions to induce forgetfulness. In the mimetic
habitus induced through repetition, we are oriented to forget that the
curriculum is a curriculum. Further, as one is increasingly oriented to a
particular image of pedagogical life, the active exploratory forces of cur-
rere are covered over by the inevitable flood of content and hyperactive
demands of institutional life. As a corollary of capitalism, the repetitive
function of currere motivates the alienating segmentation of social and
BECOMING-MUSIC 71
mental space, making institutional life increasingly atomistic, difficult,

and joyless.
For Attali (1985), the age of repetition is followed by a final stage:
the age of composition. While the age of representation emerged from
the “technology of printing (musical scores)” and repetition from new
reproductive technologies, such as CD-ROMs and MP3s, the age of
composition is marked by the invention of new musical instruments,
codes, and genres (Holland, 2004, p. 29). Attali’s age of composition is thus
not preoccupied with the reproduction of an a priori code nor solipsistic
listening restricted to one’s territory. Rather, it is deterritorializing, actively
producing new topographies through disjunction. While connective syn-
thesis might create a circuit linking pedagogical life to the reactive image
of currere, the disjunctive synthesis surveys and “records” the excluded
expressions of this process. For example, while the connective synthesis
of the classical symphony creates a circuit organizing the drives of the
orchestral player to the representation of the score-as-code, the disjunctive
synthesis enfolds a multiplicity of courses for the expression of the musi-
cal course. In Deleuzeguattarian (1983) terms, the disjunctive synthesis is
virtual, hence, not coded as a territory or refrain. The connective synthesis
functions similarly in education, wherein the drives of curriculum writers
and policy makers are circuited to the instrumental or reactive image of
pedagogy. This circuiting is apparent throughout Aoki’s (2005b) critique,
wherein the disjunctive multiplicity of curricular expressions are cathected
to the reactive illusion that only one curriculum exists.
The age of composition might be regarded as a disjunctive synthesis,
a circuit-breaking force that maps new musicological terrain. As musical
forces are harbingers of social conditions and divisions of labor, the age
of composition is marked by the creation of new power relations and
passages for thinking difference. Attali’s “composition” functions to deter-
ritorialize the refrain of modern representation and capitalist repetition.
In this vein, Attali’s concept of “composition” might be exemplified by the
improvisational forces of jazz. Herein we return to Aoki’s (2005a) ques-
tion on the significance of improvisation to the field of curriculum and
instruction. Put differently, how might the dominant circuits in educa-
tion be deterritorialized through the disjunctive forces of improvisation?
Following, through what new concepts might pedagogy be thought?
Jazz and an Improvisational Currere
As Holland (2004) develops, improvisational jazz is both nonrepresen-

tational and nonrepetitive. It does not reproduce a score, but creates it.
Such creative force is intentional. The jazz ensemble actively deviates

from any notion of an a priori course (score) in mapping new terrain.
Rather than iterative, improvisational jazz is itinerative. It does not trace,
but travels, employing a multiplicity of tempos, keys, and styles. Often,
improvised jazz will feature the use of numerous tempos, keys, and
styles simultaneously. In this vein, the jazz composition is not Unitary,
but schizo, breaking apart circuits of exchange while eluding capture by
representational or repetitive powers. It is, in Deleuzeguattarian (1987)
terms, nomadic.
Improvisational jazz plays across the three aspects of the Deleuzeguattarian
refrain. Not only does improvisational jazz create “blocks of content” or
repeated riffs, it also plays with the degeneration of the refrain into
noise. From such noise, recognizable riffs once again assemble to create
new, reterritorialized refrains. In this way, jazz demonstrates both the
structuring and destructuring powers of the refrain. The recognizable
world is thus never the world a priori, but a temporary refrain or plateau
inhering the immanent forces of deterritorialization. In Quintilian’s rhe-
torical example, the deterritorializing force intimate to music is also its
danger to State rule. Simply, if territories can be shifted through creative
practices, such practices in turn become political.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) three aspects of the refrain also apply to
the production of social relations in improvisational jazz. The jazz ensem-
ble is often marked by the absence of a formal leader. Instead, each player
exerts influence in the creation of the musicological terrain independent
of a transcendent ideal or authority. In this way, the jazz composition
is immanent to the desiring-improvisation of the collective. Unlike the
classical symphonic orchestration in which the drive of the player is
circuited to the reproduction of the score, improvisational jazz becomes
open to disjunctive lines of flight from within. The “fiction of sameness”
that defines the curriculum-as-plan and organizes the pedagogic drive
might be similarly opened by the active forces of currere (Aoki, 2005c, p.
161). When we meet the curriculum-as-plan in the mode of improvisa-
tion, the immanent flows of classroom life deform, stretch, and contort it
in singular ways. As improvisational jazz exemplifies, the active coursings
of currere are plastic, capable of assuming non-Euclidean forms. Such
immanent morphologies are not those of an artificial life circuited to a
transcendent ideal, but those of a life in the process of becoming. Akin to
jazz improvisation, the active powers of currere are prepared to follow, not
iteratively, but itineratively. In this active sense of currere, order is created
in the middle of things, that is, between the reactive image of the curricu-
lum and the disjunctive recording of what such an image of pedagogical
life excludes.
BECOMING-MUSIC 73
Such an active image of pedagogy requires another deterritorializa-

tion intimate to improvisational jazz. Improvisation does not demand a
repetition of the Same, but is rather a repetitive expression that differs.
Against the technological repetition of the musical form in capitalism
then, the improvisational jazz performance is in each expressive instance
a singularity. It is in this immanent sense that jazz has become most
notable as a live musicological expression (Holland, 2004). Against the
devitalizing powers of harmony and unity forewarned by Aoki, impro-
visation creates a disjunctive event. It does something to the course to
be run, imbuing currere with a vital and active sense of creation.
This sense of vitality is operative in the live jazz performance, in which
the messages and codes of each player are no longer atomistic, but
rather, function as a meshwork of productive interactions. Whereas
Attali’s age of repetition is marked by solitary listening, jazz improvisation
bears the character of collectivity unfettered by the score-as-code or the
conductor-as-law. Improvisational production “disalienates” the atom-
ized individual by drawing them into productive collaboration. Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) contrast this to the enterprise of antiproduction
impelled by the law of the composer. In improvisation, it is not simply
the individual that affects the course of the composition, but rather,
the interacting forces and flows of the improvisational collective. This
collaboration is for Deleuze and Guattari an example of the dividual, that
is, “a collectivity that cannot be reduced to the individuality of its members
or to some leviathan meta-subject which encompasses them all in a per-
fect unity” (Gilbert, 2004, pp. 124–125). The Deleuzeguattarian dividual
breaks down the unified image of the subject. In contrast to the externally
organized and composer-centered symphony, this sense of dividuality
is apparent in improvisational jazz, wherein the collective functions as
an autopoietic, self-organizing force.
The forces of expression mobilized by improvisational jazz usher
forth a radically different way of thinking about currere. Contrary to the
arborescent image that has come to characterize the field of curriculum
and instruction, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advance the active idea
of the rhizome: “Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many
‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning the very codes that
structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its rup-
tures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome” (pp. 11–12).
Different from the ordered perspective of the arboreal model, the rhizome
is heterogeneous, that its, capable of making connections other-than-itself.
For example, the jazz performance is not overdetermined by a code the
player must follow. Rather, its improvisational expression emerges from
the affective connections made between the various heterogenic “voices”
of its players. Further, the improvisational praxis of itinerative follow-

ing intimate to jazz creates a multiplicity of lines that escape reactive
entrapment. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “a rhizome or
multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has an available
supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines” (p. 9).
Put differently, there is no foundational code that might be grafted upon
the jazz improvisation, as its function works by productive escape rather
than iterative tracing. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), such movements
break with the immutable image of Being and mobilize potential lines of
becoming-other.
Like the rhizome, the improvisational event is marked by flows
that create, destroy, and reconstitute the refrain with difference. In this
sense, improvisation does not simply perform the powers of the multiple,
but actively creates them. Currere’s active expression might be thought
to create similar conditions of escape, deforming the power relations
between the curriculum (score) and student (player) and the student
and teacher (composer). The rhizome advances an image of currere as
a vital and creative singularity. To “engage” the curriculum is thus not
simply to accord to the arborescent codes of institutional life (the
curriculum), but to actively survey the question of what a (curricular)
body can do. Such a task might be approached via the active concept of
currere, which does not take the curriculum as an a priori course to be
run. To think currere in this way necessitates overturning the image of an
arborescent ground foundational to education. Further, the rhizomatic
expression of currere must risk assembling across heterogeneous power
structures, disciplines (such as music), and concepts for thinking differ-
ence. In such movement, the ontology of Being (polis, logos) is opened to
the albeit dangerous movements of becoming (nomos). Yet, such becom-
ing, despite its dangers to State thinking, might break from deadly circuit
of passivity and the solipsistic nihilism that is engendered through itera-
tive following.
Rhizomatic becoming emerges in the middle of things, in the
“fuzzy” space between the reactive and chaotic, between the score-as-
code and the absolute deterritorialization of music qua noise. In Aoki
(2005c), it is in the similar “space between” that the curriculum-
as-plan and curriculum-as-lived mesh to create a vital life. Akin to the
Deleuzeguattarian refrain, a pedagogical life is not birthed in opposi-
tion to the territorialization of the curriculum or the chaos of its abso-
lute deterritorialization. The active concept of currere requires chaos
to open new passages for thinking and exploration. This is apparent in
jazz improvisation when an instrumental “voice” escapes through a
modulation of key, tempo, or style. Only by breaking with the refrain,
BECOMING-MUSIC 75
the territorialized block of repeated content, does music open to its

powers of becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “To
improvise is to join with the world, or meld with it” (p. 311). That is,
to improvise connects one to flows of difference that are constantly
being composed and decomposed. This vital approach to improvisa-
tion suggests that a pedagogical life both composes and decomposes
the curriculum in the course of its running. In the “space between” the
transcendent image and virtual multiplicity, a curriculum territory is
created. Yet, this creation deterritorializes currere in its reactive sense.
Attali (1985) writes, “to improvise, to compose, is thus related to the
assumption of differences, of the discovering and blossoming of the
body . . . it is . . . laden with risk, disquieting, an unstable challenging,
an anarchic and ominous festival, like a Carnival with an unpredictable
outcome” (p. 143). In this vein, the active force of currere maps new
terrain through the decomposition of the course to be run. As Attali
asserts, this is a dangerous task, forcing us out of field and from the
shelter of our territorialized spaces and habits of thought. It asks of
pedagogues how one might “perform an atypical expression capable
of diverting [territorializations] . . . into rebecoming” (Massumi, 2002,
p. xxvi). The active forces of improvisation constitute one way of
thinking about currere that invokes the reterritorialization of both
social space (polis) and the image of thought (logos). As Gilbert (2004)
writes, we must learn how to take such improvisation seriously, “impro-
visation in music is . . . a gesture with which to refuse the whole
system of meanings and affects which the [hierarchy of the orchestra
and twentieth-century recording industry] reproduce” (pp. 127–128).
Thinking about the course of a pedagogical life as improvisational
thus provides a circuit breaker against the overdetermination of the cur-
ricular refrain, that is, the reproduction and repetition of the course to
be run. As there is danger associated with the praxis of improvisation, so
too do Deleuze and Guattari (1987) issue a caveat on the territorial aspect
of the Refrain. “The refrain,” they write, “is a means of preventing music,
warding it off, forgoing it” (p. 300). Like the harmony and unity demanded
by the conductor of the classical symphony, the reactive refrain of currere
terminates its vital potentials. As Aoki (2005a) argues, to court harmony
and unity is to invite death.
Like improvisation, the active expression of currere is a double
articulation, neither exclusively territorial or deterritorializing. In this
vein, the active expression of currere breaks the binary circuit of creation
or destruction. More aptly, it might be said that like improvisation, the
active force of currere destroys as it creates. Against the “antiproduction”
demanded by the classical conductor, improvisation produces its own
code, engaging the desiring-production of the collective. In the “fuzzy”

space between the curriculum and its disjunctive synthesis inheres such
a collective. Itineratively following the concept of improvisation, the
meshwork of a vital classroom life might similarly produce its own
composition, and in this desiring-production, transform the social condi-
tions that would seek to reduce currere to a unified “act” of reproduction
or repetition.
6
Uncertain Games
T he curriculum theorizing of Alan Block (1998) posits an approach

to curriculum that dislocates currere from its homogeneous course.
Yet, such dislocation is for Block the exception rather than the rule of
contemporary pedagogy. Education, Block argues, is “centered” on the
notion of homecoming, that is, the continual reproduction of habitual
thought and behavior. Like the path of shiny pebbles left by Hansel in the
Brothers Grimm tale, the educational project is “devised to keep students
and teachers on track, in place, observed by [a] ceaseless . . . body of knowl-
edge and methods” (p. 325). Akin to the arborescent model critiqued by
Aoki (2005b), the pebbles left by Hansel tether peripheral movements to
a stable center. This image of pedagogy thus does not depart from the
reactive image of currere, but rather, functions to reproduce the idea that
all pedagogical movements accord to the control mechanisms of a pan-
optic nucleus (Foucault, 1979). In this reactive image, all “lines out” are
governed by the territorializing powers of the center. Within this represen-
tational or arboreal logic, the reactive image of currere is projected upon
all anomalies and differences, reproducing the illusion of a transcendent
point from which life is eminently surveyed.
The Panopticon
Like the striated image of the arborescent model, the panoptic structure
analyzed by Foucault (1979) works by segmenting space and fixing the
positions of individuals through recording, assessment and supervision.
As a disciplinary mechanism of the seventeenth century, Foucault analyses
how State powers of supervision functioned to partition the social space of
plague-ridden cities. From guard posts and sentry towers, plague-infested
areas were placed under surveillance. Subjected to the ubiquitous gaze
of State authorities, civilian movements were hence controlled through
the sheer possibility of observation. Foucault writes, “[S]urveillance is

permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (p. 201).
That is, the very possibility of being watched impelled the subject to move,
behave, and relate to others in accordance with State regulations. At the
heart of such discipline Foucault writes, “was . . . a political dream . . . [of]
strict divisions . . . the penetration of regulation into the smallest details of
everyday life . . . the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary function-
ing of power . . . the assignment of each individual of his ‘true’ name, his
‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease” (1979, p. 198). The political
dream of panopticism is in this sense reactive, oriented to the overde-
termination of what a body can do. Following, the disciplinary power of
the panopticon ossifies Being in the image advanced by the State, hence
severing the subject’s powers of becoming. Surveyed panoptically, the
subject becomes encoded according to a priori evaluative and identitarian
categories.
Contra the darkness of the subterranean dungeon, the panopticon
functions through the production of a clearing. For the power of the
panopticon to exert its control, the subject must be visible in both spatial
and identitarian terms. That is, the subject must be mapped, and hence
rendered recognizable according to an a priori image of Being. Alienating
and atypical expressions foreign to State thought are domesticated under
the surveillance mechanisms of the institution. As Foucault (1979) writes,
the panopticon functions to isolate deviations from the “normal” case, cre-
ating a litany of binary divisions and individuating differences that func-
tion to segment the social field. The categorical divisions of the social field
recorded through constant surveillance work to distinguish the healthy
from the sick, the sane from the mad, and the harmless from the danger-
ous. Under the disciplinary powers of panoptic surveillance, life’s vital
forces of difference are coded relative to a model of normalcy. From such a
model, deviations, deformations, and mutations are reactively categorized,
disciplined, and brought “in line” with the course to be run. In this reactive
mode, life is defined by what it is not, limiting otherness by subjecting it to
strict disciplinary power. “What does education do?” Thoreau writes, but
make “a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook” (cited in Block,
p. 326). In this reactive sense, currere becomes a mechanism of adaptation
and regulation, bringing its subjects in representational proximity to the
institutional norm.
Reproducing the image of currere as a mechanism of adaptation and
regulation, teaching and learning that “follow[s] the path home” ulti-
mately does or harms nothing (Block, 1998, p. 335). As Deleuze (2000)
avers apropos Proust, “thought is nothing without something that forces
and does violence to it” (p. 95). In the panoptic structure, the forces
UNCERTAIN GAMES 79
of difference, of transformation, and chaos are forestalled through the

territorialization of space (polis) and thought (logos). It is thus not surpris-
ing that in Hansel and Gretel, it is the father, the figure of State authority,
who teaches the son the practice of homecoming. Without the return
of his children, Block comments, the father has no one to subjugate. In
Deleuzeguattarian (1983) terms, repression always requires a subject that
can be assigned. As it is surveyed by the gaze of the State, the panopticon
produces a subjected individual, or rather, a subject born of a “system of
permanent registration” (Foucault, 1979, p. 196). Analogously, without the
stability of an arboreal ground to which we might pedagogically return, we
risk the dangers of the periphery. This is, or course, a key didactic lesson in
the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel.
In contemporary education, Block avers, the panopticon functions
similarly by ensuring that students are not only visible, but that each
is accorded his “true” place within the apparatus. “We are always to be
found,” Block observes, “by our position on the well-traveled, well-lit,
and heavily-marked path which is the curriculum” (p. 327). Fixing
the individual within the a priori social relations of the institution,
pedagogy becomes reactive, bound to the logic of representation and the
dictates of a transcendent authority. In this vein, the exertion of panop-
tic power requires that the individual become subject to the surveilling
mechanisms of the institution. The subject “inscribes himself in the
power relation in which he simultaneously . . . becomes the principal
of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1979, p. 203). That is, the subject
internalizes the disciplinary powers of the State as a means of shoring
up his institutional identity. It is in this sense that power is not simply
repressive, but invites participation. By inscribing oneself within the
disciplinary powers of the panopticon, the individual is ushered into a
social and subjective Unity. This is the homecoming that Block asserts
is operative in contemporary pedagogical life. Yet, its political agenda
is hardly new. The intent of education in the seventeenth century,
for example, “was . . . to ‘fortify,’ to ‘develop the body,’ to prepare the
child ‘for a future in some mechanical work,’ to give him ‘an observant
eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’” (Foucault, 1979, p. 211).
The institutional beginnings of education are predicated on the powers
of discipline to bring about a “functional” subject from a “docile
body.” That is, through adaptation to the regulatory course of education,
the individual is brought in alignment with his greatest potential for
State-defined Being. In this image, the foundations of institutional
education are reactive, advancing the notion that through submission to
State authority and the a priori image of currere, an “ideal” self or society
is engendered.
Games of State
Analyzing the potentials of currere through games theory, we might posit

that the image of pedagogical life sketched by Block corresponds to the
Deleuzeguattarian (1987) game of State: chess. Analogous to currere’s
reactive subjugation of the individual, chess pieces are coded in advance.
They are accorded intrinsic properties and internal nature from which
their movements are derived. For example, the movements of the “knight”
accord to an intrinsic code from which its potential situations and
confrontations proceed. The intrinsic qualities of the piece determine its
movements, and further, differentiate them against those of other pieces;
a knight is a knight, a castle a castle, and a pawn a pawn. Against the
Spinozian (1985) assertion that we do not yet know what a body might
do, each piece in the game of chess carries a certain identity that defines
in advance what it is capable of doing. It is in this vein that Deleuze
and Guattari write that the functionality of the chess piece is structural,
“[entertaining] biunivocal relations with one another, and with the
adversary’s pieces” (p. 353).
The biunivocal relations of the chess piece function to enforce
categorical distinctions and contravene the multiplicity of ways in which
forces might interact and connect. In chess, such connective relations
become antagonistic and subject to negation. One piece always dominates
over another, connecting through nullification rather than connection
or disjunction. The reactive image of life advanced by the courtly game
of chess is also figured in the field of curriculum and instruction. In the
contemporary field, Block (1998) writes, “control is maintained by the
nature of the path and the impossibility—indeed, unthinkability—of
deviation from it” (p. 326). In game theory, Block’s reactive image of cur-
rere finds expression in the fixed identity structures of chess pieces. For
Deleuze (2001), “what characterizes reactive [powers is] their tendency to
limit the other: in them, negation comes first . . . [e]verywhere we see the
victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action” (pp. 74–75). Like the reac-
tive image of currere that functions by negating active lines of flight, the
chess game is premised upon the negation of potentials and ultimately, the
entropy of the gridded game board. Put differently, the coded qualities of
the game pieces make particular deviations unthinkable. Like the reactive
image of currere that designs in advance how pedagogical life will proceed,
otherness is negated. Conceived thus, education reactively proceeds on the
assertion of a “No,” that is, the covering over of a multiplicity of coursings
by the homogeneous image of the curriculum.
As Block (2003) describes, the reactive image of currere has col-
lapsed with disciplinary powers of the institution. Students are no
UNCERTAIN GAMES 81
longer “engaged . . . with the struggle of understanding curriculum but

the technique of managing it-they will never be required to interrogate
what it—the curriculum—might be and if it might be different . . . our
students have been taught to desire only to be told what to do” (p. 37).
For Nietzsche (1968), the victory of intellectual negation and reactivity
described in Block’s critique marks the triumph of nihilism. In this vein,
the indefinite and singular qualities of a pedagogical life are obfuscated
in lieu of the stable and controllable image of currere. In this reactive
image, belief in the potentials of a life, of disparity and chance, are lost
(Rajchman, 2001).
Chess, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “[arranges] a closed space”
(p. 353). It is a war, but one that is institutionalized, coded, and regulated.
Pieces move from one point to another, “occupying the maximum num-
ber of squares with the minimum number of pieces” (p. 353). Like the
arboreal image of the curriculum, the State game of chess creates a
“striated” space in which battle lines are clearly demarcated. In this
reactive image, the object of chess is to territorialize an unbreakable
and closed space, to determine absolute values for each of its compo-
nents, and install a priori points of entry and exit. The reactive image of
currere creates a similarly “striated” space in which relations of power,
institutional identities, and codes of movement are overdetermined. In
this image, movement and identity do not actively constitute themselves
through difference, but rather, by reactively tracing the path home, for-
tifying themselves behind territorialized walls (polis) and instrumental,
rationalist thought (logos). Each of these homecomings wards against the
dangers of an untimely and unhomely “outside.”
Nomadic Games
The panoptic or centralized system of disciplinary power analyzed by

Foucault finds an analogue in both the reactive image of currere and the
State game of chess. This image of identity, movement, and social relation
constitutes the limit case of indoctrination. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) write, the panoptic segmentation of the social field is traversed
by subterranean flows of difference. These nomadic lines of flight upset
the sediment borderlines and a priori codes from which the potential for
thought and movement are actualized. That is, nomadism betrays the rage
for control by creating an open, heterogenic, and constitutive space of
affirmation rather than negation. We do not yet know what a body might
do, and in this vein, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the courtly game
of chess with that of Go.
Go has seen a recent insurgence in popularity as a result of Hikaru no

go, a Japanese manga featuring the game as a central facet of its narrative.
Yet, perhaps increasing youth interest in Go might be affirmed as less a
fad than a way in which the young are today negotiating social terrain
and institutional structures. As Pinar and Grumet (1976) advocate, the
field of curriculum theory must “transfer [its] attention . . . to the ways
in which a student uses . . . and moves through [institutional forms]”
(p. 2). Following Attali’s thesis on music (1985), one might conjecture that
games are not simply a response to ideology, but rather, advance a way of
thinking the world. In this vein, the difference between Go and chess mark
radically different ways of conceptualizing currere. While chess accords
to the panoptic territorialization of space (polis) and thought (logos), Go
unleashes the forces of difference (nomos) in the reterritorialization of the
course to be run.
Whereas chess pieces are accorded a priori qualities of movement and
distinction, Go pieces have only an “anonymous, collective, or third per-
son function” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 352). As Deleuze and Guattari
write, the pieces in Go are not imbued with a priori properties. Instead,
their function is situational. While the potential movements and confron-
tations of the chess piece are coded as qualities proper to their interior
identity, the Go piece functions in a milieu of exteriority. That is, the Go
piece functions by way of creating “constellations” or “nebulas” of relation.
Through such relations, functions of bordering, encircling, or shattering
are situationally and not universally actualized. How the Go piece assem-
bles or becomes is hence not dictated by their interior of transcendent
quality. Rather, the way a Go piece relates to its exterior “constellation” is
immanent. Hence, Go breaks with reactive thought, affirming instead a
multiplicity of identities and ways of populating, expressing, or deform-
ing a territory. In a radical sense, Go posits an image of currere that has
no a priori identity or quality of movement. Akin to the active or lived
sense of currere, Go unfolds situationally, immanent to the ways in which
its pieces assemble into networks of broad, interconnected meshworks. In
this sense, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that while chess “striates”
space, ordering it hierarchically, Go creates a “smooth” or dynamic space
of transformation and becoming.
In Block’s (1998) repudiation of pedagogical homecomings, he advances
an image of currere analogous to Go. Unfettered from the “path already
defined and marked,” currere functions as an immanent constellation
or nebula of coursings that unfold, like the game board of Go, through
extrinsic relations (p. 339). In this vein, currere becomes active through
the conceptual forces of connecting, linking, and syntagmatics. Opposed
to the transcendent and centralized powers of the panopticon, the active
UNCERTAIN GAMES 83
force of currere unfolds from the constellation of concepts that populate

its plane of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Put differently, the
creative action of currere organizes in relation to the “nebula” of inter-
acting concepts that are cast into play. “The concept of a bird” Deleuze
and Guattari (1994) write, “is not to be found in its genus or species but
in the composition of its postures, colours, and songs . . . a concept is
heterogenesis-that is to say, an ordering of its components by zones of
neighborhood” (p. 20).
The performative expression of the concept, the overturning of the
transcendent ideal, and the positive powers of the simulacrum are but
three concepts that form the “constellation” of currere’s active force.
Currere’s active expression is hence not a “readymade” projection panop-
tically surveyed upon the world, but a conceptual approach born imma-
nently through the resonance of its neighboring concepts, each concerned
with the problematic of thinking difference. The active forces of currere
do not simply mark an engagement with the world, as such a conceptual-
ization would merely reproduce the panoptic or transcendent powers of
reactivity. Rather, currere’s active powers immanently birth the world
through the resonance of its myriad conceptual forces. In chess, we are
given the a priori identity of the piece, which in turn structures its relation
to the striated space of the board. Hence, the identity of the chess piece
becomes paramount. In contrast, the active force of currere unfolds in
relation with the features of its milieu. Individuality becomes dividual.
The relations of Go pieces are not organized hierarchically, hence
delimitating what a body might do. Rather, Go is as much a game of ter-
ritorialization as it is of immanent deterritorialization. It is a war, Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) write, “without battle lines, with neither confronta-
tion nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy whereas chess is a
semiology” (p. 353). In this vein, the organization of space in Go deviates
significantly from the closed space or coded territory of chess. In Go, the
pieces are arrayed in open space, maintaining the possibility of immanent
deterritorialization from within. Whereas chess creates a closed space
delineating the linear lines of advance, retreat and segmented borderlines,
Go is played in the open, extending nomadically by way of deterritorial-
ization and reterritorialization. Go might hence be analogous to currere’s
active expression in that it advances a way of thinking that abdicates the
identitarian, linear, and coded relations of power inhering the reactive
image of the curriculum.
While chess establishes an interiority (polis) antagonistic to “outside”
forces (nomos), Go radically deforms this binary by positing the poten-
tial of immanent transformation. An analogue of this movement is
evident in Jardine’s (1996) regard for the deterritorializing force of the
“pedagogical event.” Making the educational topography foreign to itself,

such deterritorialization is not a power exerted transcendently. Rather,
it unfolds in the “roil” or sediment of pedagogical space, deforming the
battle lines of institutional meaning through the birth of something
unusual, minoritarian, or circuit breaking. While the reactive powers of
currere hierarchically project an image of the course to be run, currere’s
active expression connects vertically (rhizomatically) with the forces of
its milieu, deterritorializing the spatial binary by continuously travers-
ing and redefining its topographical contours. Currere’s active forces, like
the pieces of Go, operate in the open, connecting with heterogenic
elements and patterns in an unfolding process of becoming. In this
sense, Block’s (1998) caveat on the stultifying character of “home” is
decentered. As Go illustrates, one’s arrayment in open space precludes
the certainty of territorial boarders. Home is always in a process of
deconstituting and reconstituting itself differently. As Leibniz said,
“I thought I had reached port; but . . . I seemed to be cast back again into
the open sea” (cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 22).
In Go, as in the active expression of currere, home is indiscernible,
always shifting in connection with a multiplicity of emergent forces.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aver, the indiscernability of such
foundations are evident in the work of philosophers who recast and
change their concepts, adding points of detail, withdrawing components,
forgetting conclusions. Such transformations are not simply ideational,
but mobilize new ways of creating a life. As Block observes of Thoreau’s
life at Walden, “the single path he had worn to the pond for his morn-
ing ablutions supervised and determined his way . . . [he then knew
he would have to leave] . . . for [he] had other lives to live” (p. 330).
The nomadic lines created by Thoreau are hence not analogous to the
movements of chess, whereby a piece moves from one fixed point to
another. Instead, akin to Go, such nomadic lines of flight are perpetual.
One might deterritorialize his own territory by going elsewhere, creating
a line of escape unfettered by the disciplinary powers of State thought
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 353).
The Synopticon
The nomadic character of Go and active expression of currere break with

the centralizing powers of the panopticon, yet they evoke a contempo-
rary problematic to which I will now turn. The society of control, Deleuze
(1992) argues, is replacing disciplinary society. New forces of societal
control no longer discipline the movement of the individual from one
UNCERTAIN GAMES 85
closed or assignable space to another. Rather, as a corollary to neoliberal

capitalism, the subject is encouraged to circulate and consume “freely.”
Such circulation in turn constitutes the illusion of “freedom.” That is, in
control society, the subject’s circulation is continually monitored, checked,
and recorded (Deleuze, 1992). In this vein, the caveat on “homecoming”
articulated by Block (1998) has become increasingly complex. That is,
if neoliberal society requires the differential movement of the subject,
then practices of “wandering” and “lostness” are under the threat of
appropriation by the new system of control (p. 323). While disciplin-
ary society worked to contain its subject within a spatial or identitarian
mold, control society works by modulation, deforming as to continu-
ally record atypical movements in the social field. Put differently, under
panoptic discipline, the subject was fixed by the gaze of a centralized,
albeit discontinuous authority. Contrariwise, in control society, the image
of the subject is constituted through such informational gateways as
the Internet, banking records, credit ratings, and academic transcripts.
The subject’s social movement is in turn constituted in the form of a
digital double.
Disciplinary watchwords, prearranged replies or orders, are replaced
in control society by passwords. As Deleuze remarks, such passwords
provide access to information or reject it. While the closed space of
disciplinary society contained the subject, control society is designed
as a meshwork of permeable thresholds. These thresholds are in turn
controlled by passwords, passports, degrees, PIN numbers, etc. Whereas
the Althussarian (2001) conceptualization of disciplinary power is
predicated upon the interpolating power of the policeman’s hail,
Massumi (2002b) suggests that today, the power of capitalism hinges
on “gatekeeping” functions. As Massumi elaborates, “It’s all about
checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re
buying checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller,
the PIN number on your card checks you into your account” (p. 9).
These checkpoints do not restrict the mobility of the subject nor do they
interpolate the subject’s activities. Such checkpoints are not repressive
in the sense of “controlling from above,” but as Massumi suggests, are
activated by our coming to them.
From Panoptic to Synoptic Games
The society of control is aptly characterized in the departure of contem-

porary video game design from the more mechanical, disciplined games of
the 1980’s. Notoriously overcoded, such early arcade successes as Donkey
Kong (1981) and Pac-Man (1982) were dictated by the strict delimitation
of screened space. Their interface was dominated by clearly demarcated
avatar identities and objectives. Early games functioned through the
segmented succession of the avatar from one enclosed level to another,
wherein points of departure and arrival were clearly defined. Panoptically,
early video games were designed so that players could survey the field of
action. Such game space was exposed, made transparent and largely static
in its orientation. What the avatar’s body could do was also strictly coded,
reducing the interactive circuit between player and avatar to a disciplin-
ary, structural relationship. In this disciplinary circuit, player desire was
cathected to the a priori course to be run. This disciplinary relationship
was thus not simply interactive, but rather, interpassive (Pfaller cited in jag-
odzinski, 2008). In this vein, the game plays the user, not simply at the level
of a conscious narrative, but more significantly, as an affective relation that
codes the body along particular contours of space, territory, and habits of
response. Following, in Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, early video games
are “straited.” That is, they are constituted hierarchically, designed in terms
of levels, absolute objectives, points of departure and arrival. Their space
is limited and confined, clearly demarcated and seemingly impossible to
eclipse.
In contrast, such contemporary games as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
(2006) and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) rethink the screened space.
In such “free roaming” games, the player’s avatar is liberated from the
path to be run. In unparalleled complexity, games like Oblivion allow
the avatar to assume a myriad roles and routes to completing, or deferring
the completion of the game. Contrary to the arcade games of the 1980’s,
contemporary console-based games work not by confinement, but by
dilating the potentials for avatar movement. In this synchronic opening
of screened space, positions of departure and arrival become ambigu-
ous and opened to multiple paths. The same shifting relation inheres the
creation of the player’s avatar. No longer designated a priori, avatar cre-
ation in games like Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights (2002), and Warcraft
(1994) is elastic and variable. Following, contemporary gaming avatars
are individuated in a manner that is designed to differentiate the player’s
gaming experience.
While breaking with the “striated” design of earlier generations, the
ostensible freedom of contemporary gaming works by a different system
of control. Whereas the disciplinary powers of the panopticon centered
on visibility, the rigid segmentation of space and identity, control society
functions through the invisibility of the code. In video gaming, avatars
no longer ascend from one hierarchical level to another, but through
invisible thresholds that record the player’s progress while rendering
UNCERTAIN GAMES 87
imminent encounters and environments. Exposing the desires of neoliberal

capitalism, contemporary games are predicated on the “free choice” of the
player. Yet, amidst the most complex gaming scenarios, “choice” continues
to be determined by the a priori code. That is, no matter how complex
the gaming engine, movement and identity is nevertheless constrained
by the parameters of the program. Synoptically, while the avatar is
encouraged to roam freely, to indulge its desires, and create its own
experience of the gaming world, what a body might do is nevertheless
anticipated in advance. The player, while freed from earlier structural
constraints, continues to be interpassive. In the gaming experience,
space is thus never deterritorialized in the Deleuzeguattarian sense.
The player is not permitted to wander out of field. Rather, movement
becomes caught in a cycle of decoding and recoding. An avatar’s actions
hence do not radically transform the gaming space, but rather, create
seemingly unique pathways through myriad preexisting circuits.
Deleuze (1992) agues that the character of a society is expressed
through the machines it creates. While sovereign society was dominated
by simple machines, such as levers and pulleys, disciplinary society
created machines involving the use of energy. In contrast, control society
is figured in the computer as a device that functions via passwords
to record and anticipate social movement. Yet, as Deleuze argues, the
computer is distinguished as much by its powers of control as by its passive
and active dangers. Deleuze argues that the passive danger of the computer
is figured in freezing, while its active danger is expressed in its potential
for piracy, viral infection, and hacking. It is in the active danger of the
computer that we might begin to deterritorialize the coded limits of
control society (Daignault, 2005).
Hacking (Un)certain Games
Artists such as Alex Galloway and Corey Arcangel play with the active
dangers of the computer to deterritorialize its coded limits. Hacking first
generation video games with uncanny results, Arcangel and Galloway
make the gaming experience foreign to itself. Their praxis is not simply
interested in running the readymade course of the game, but in produc-
ing something new and unanticipated by dissembling the game’s coded
pathways. That is, Galloway and Arcangel radically alter the course to be
run in the active deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the game.
Against the “striated” character of early games, Galloway and Arcangel
think about video as a “smooth” space. This “smooth” space is for Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) a synonym of rhizomatic thinking. Hacking games
like the linear, goal oriented, and hierarchical Super Mario Bros.(1985),
Galloway and Arcangel produce strange, asignifying systems that no longer
represent conventional video game protocols. The game space becomes
radically deterritorialized, populated by mutated avatars and environ-
ments unintended by original programmers. In these unhomely game
spaces, there are no aims or objectives, but rather, the affective expres-
sion of colors, frame rates, music, and text. As the linear algorithm of the
game is destroyed, the affective qualities of the game are exposed.
That is, the affects populating the game space are revealed through
the noncircuited sounds, colors, and movements of the hacked game.
In this scenario, both player and avatar enter into a new albeit unusual
relationship no longer organized in advance or toward an a priori objec-
tive or assignable character. In the midst of the program’s code, Galloway
and Arcangel posit a different way of understanding space, territory,
and the immanent forces of difference.
Galloway (2006) argues that the technical is political. Following,
the kind of ethical hacking advocated by Arcangel and Galloway is less
oriented to destruction than a praxological intervention on the over-
determined state of media today. That is, the hack intervenes with State
thinking, troubling high-tech proprietary rights through the low-tech
transmutation of digital content into art. In the active sense of currere,
hacking exposes the potential for deterritorialization that inheres every
territory (Hwu, 2004). Galloway and Arcangel mobilize an approach
to media that is not simply reactive, reproductive or repetitive. Instead,
they create the unusual conditions in which preestablished code is repro-
duced with vital difference, creating an entirely new gaming topography
that deviates from all manner of habit and cathected desire.
Assembling their own desire with the computer code, Galloway and
Arcangel produce a unique pedagogical offshoot, the kind of rhizomatic
wandering root championed by Block. In the midst of overdetermined
space, Galloway and Arcangel create (hack) a life, deforming the binary
differentiation of interior and exterior. As Roy (2005) remarks, the cre-
ation of a life “does not restrict itself to outlines or borders and therefore
to recognition, representation or recovery of things or objects” (p. 33).
Thoreau’s cabin at Walden was thought in a similar manner. As Arsic
(2005) writes, “he tried to build . . . the house without a clear distinction
between its interiority and exteriority, as a house without a stable form”
(p. 131). In Galloway and Arcangel’s hacking, as in Thoreau’s praxis of
building, the immanent deterritorializing potential of a territory to break
apart and coalesce into something new is activated.
The active expression of hacking escapes the entrapment of State
thought through the production of forces not yet recorded or coded.
UNCERTAIN GAMES 89
In turn, the ethical hacking advocated by Galloway and Arcangel produces

new ways of thinking and living currere. Pedagogically, the active forces
created through hacking are those that decenter the transcendent ideal of
homecoming. More specifically, the hack immanently illustrates that home
was only ever a contingent circuit, a secondary process of actualization
crosscut by a multiplicity of virtual potentials. Akin to the computer code,
an active approach to the curriculum-as-plan might similarly be expressed
via the concept of hacking. In this vein, hacking might become the positive
practice of transformation situated immanently. Akin to the concept of the
pedagogical event, the hack disrupts the common circuits of institutional
thought and behavior. Lines of escape are thus not transcendent, but
relative “to the critical point at which it is connected with the . . . milieu”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 100). Mobilizing the positive powers of the
simulacrum, the concept of hacking interjects heterogenic aspects into the
dominant code with untimely and unexpected results. Such untimeliness
is significant if currere is to open space for a people yet to come. Put dif-
ferently, the deterritorialization of the code practiced by hacking creates a
passage for rethinking and practically engaging the course of life. “To the
extent that . . . thought is made of different relations . . . it always delin-
eates a new space” (Arsic, 2005, p. 127). In this vein, currere shifts from a
“straited” or reactive perception of space to the “smooth” or active space of
the rhizome. In this transformation, the concept of currere changes from
optic to the haptic, that is, from panoptic distance to tactile and intense
spatial experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is in this haptic or intense
relation to space that I turn to one final “game” that questions what cur-
rere can do.
Deterritorializing currere: Parkour
Parkour is less an orthodox “sport” than a form of artistic movement

by which the body relates to, and traverses its environment in creative
and emergent ways. The kind of movement inspirited by parkour
includes the uninterrupted flow of the body over, under, through, and
around a variety of environmental “obstacles.” In this manner, park-
our is often practiced in urban settings due to the variety of forms and
challenges that might emerge in interaction with walls, rails, buildings,
gaps, and a litany of other “obstacles” populating the city space. Yet,
the term “obstacle” is not entirely appropriate in consideration of
parkour as a bodily art form. Parkour practitioners (a traceur1) think
the urban space as populated by multiple potentialities, intensities, and
lines of movement. As parkour founder David Bell avers, “We know
what it’s like at ground level, we’ve been walking the same paths for years.
But no-one has ever taken this route” (p. 1). The “obstacles” involved in
parkour thus undergo a productive recoding, delivering them from their
overdetermined functionality and relationship to the body. Instead, the
urban “obstacles” of parkour become passages for movement with differ-
ence. That is, the territorialized “obstacle” becomes a genetic cite of virtual
movement, or rather, of what movement might be. In this regard, parkour
suggests the deterritorialization of both the urban milieu and conventional
lines of movement through the imaginative negotiation of territorialized
space. It is in this deterritorializing movement of the body that parkour
becomes a form of kinetic art through which new lines of movement and
“flow” are explored and created. In this vein, the relationship between a
traceur and the urban milieu might be understood as an emergent dance
in which neither traceur or environment is privileged, but rather, consti-
tute a virtual, multiplicitous (khoreia2)graphy. It is through the virtual,
potential relations of the traceur to the parkour milieu that movement
is actualized. Akin to a dance, such actualizations are marked by becom-
ing as a ‘flow’ of intensities, of speeds, rates, and trajectories. This notion
is explicated by such traceurs as Sébastian Foucan, who suggest that in
parkour, the body becomes like the flow of water. Not only is the physi-
cal space deterritorialized through the movement of the traceur, but the
body also undergoes a transcoding through the virtual passage of physical
space. Against a territorialized notion of the body as traversing readymade
urban corridors, parkour poses a way of thinking “the course to be run”
as a virtual passage of differentiation. In the traceur’s deterritorialization
of urban space, the body similarly undergoes a process of becoming-other.
While the body of conventional, structural movement becomes rigid, lin-
ear, and somnambulistic, the traceur’s body is distinctly poststructural and
imaginatively wakeful.
While inhabiting familiar urban milieu, parkour thinks the embodied
negotiation of such spaces in profoundly creative and singular ways. The
name parkour, from the French “parcours” translates literally as “course.”
Yet, this “course” is neither the coded conceptual form of structuralist
thought, or the image of a track demarcated by boundaries and rules of
bodily relation that organize and determine the developments of move-
ment. The movement of the body in parkour is not organized in advance,
nor does the “course” have an a priori or teleological image to which
actualized movement accords. The artistic beauty of parkour emerges
via the imaginative and disjunctive actualized movement of the body
through space. That is, of all virtual lines of flight, the traceur actualizes
one, producing by way of a disjunctive synthesis a singular trajectory. Such
movement, because of its disjunctive actualization, is acutely original.
UNCERTAIN GAMES 91
Each traceur negotiates their relationship to space differently, based not

singularly on skill or athleticism, but the actualization of a multiplicitous
potential for bodily movement.
Irreducible to the binary subject/object distinction, the relationship of
the traceur to the parkour milieu is closer to a “flow,” described earlier as a
dance in which both body and environment are deterritorialized through
an active process of transcoding or becoming-other. Parkour collapses
the stable distinction of self/other via deterritorializing force through
which both self/other become what they are not. In this manner, founder
David Belle suggests that the notions of “escape” and “reach” are pivotal
to both a philosophical and practical approach to parkour. Herein, escape
intimates the necessity of a deterritorialized understanding of movement,
freed from both physical and conceptual organ-ization. It is against the
overdetermined image of the body, the ostensibly immutable rules that
frame the potential for its movement, and the conceptual signification of
the “course” that parkour perform a creative and artful escape. Such escape
carries an anarchic force, a desire that “reaches” in difference to the limits
of the territorialized body’s demarcated reach. This understanding of the
“course” is capitulated by Aoki (2005b), who suggests that pedagogical
reaching might similarly be understood as a mode of becoming or “mul-
tiplicity growing in the middle” (p. 211). In pedagogical reaching, currere
becomes closer to the dance of parkour in its improvisational approach
to movement and relationship. Rather than the implementation of the
“course to be run,” Aoki postulates the idea of “curricular improvisation”
as deterritorialization “vitalizing [a] possibility that causes our whole body
to beat a new and different rhythm” (2005a, p. 369). Aoki’s polyphonic
notion of “curricular improvisation” suggest the importance of both
imminence and movement(s) with difference. This too is the élan vital of
parkour, that is, the improvised “course” to which no a priori image of the
course accords. Embodied in such improvised movement is a pedagogical
reaching or experimental dis-position of deterritorialization which rend
territories porous, deformed, and again, vital.
In parkour, reaching intimates the force of desire as crucial to a mode of
becoming. Rather than the cite of lack interpolated by an other,3 Deleuze
(1983) thinks desire as a productive, creative force which destabilizes com-
mon sense and the organ-izations of everyday life (Colebrook, 2002). This
notion of desire as a productive force is performed in parkour through the
traceur’s multiplicitous relation to the “course to be run.” The traceur’s
line of flight is marked by a desire that thinks movement in ways that
deform terra cognita, and concomitantly, stable ontological organ-izations.
Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that the deterritorialization
of the body is orchestrated through such experimental practices as parkour,
in which desire is understood as a noncoded, unrestricted flow of affective

intensity. The “course” of parkour is thus not an imagistic track installed
in advance, but rather, a flow of desire through which potential lines of flight
are productively actualized. In this way, desire becomes an active staging
point for the creative negotiation of new relations between the body and
the “course to be run.” Through the development of such new relations,
thinking becomes more than an additive aimed toward an immutable
image of “reality,” definitive theory of life or teleological end. Contrariwise,
as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) aver, the development of new passages of
thinking act no less than to transform “the course of life.”
Thinking Leaving
Thoreau’s writing at Walden creates the possibility for thinking leaving

(Block, 1998). As he conceives it, Thoreau escapes the sentimentality com-
monly associated with departure. Further, he avoids the imaginary trap
of mythologizing a “better” world (Arsic, 2005). Yet, in thinking leaving,
Thoreau leaves us with a pedagogical paradox. “For was it not Thoreau
who enforced the . . . desire of humans to be protected by building wall
after wall after wall?” (Arsic, 2005, p. 128). That is, does Thoreau not epito-
mize the common desire to territorialize oneself through escape, isolation,
and the multiplication of self-identity through journaling? Yet, as Arsic
asks apropos Cavell, why would anyone build a house as Thoreau did at
Walden “only in order to leave it after it was built?” (p. 129). In the midst
of Thoreau’s day-to-day life at Walden, why is it that he suddenly departs,
into the forest and into imperceptibility? The answer, Arsic contends, is not
to be found in death, but in teaching how one might leave to (be)come.
Thoreau’s home at Walden is not simply the static structure that consti-
tutes the foil of Block’s theory on the necessity of pedagogical departure.
Akin to the experimental processes of hacking and parkour, Thoreau
dubbed his process at Walden a “deliberate building.” Yet, his active cre-
ation of a home did not accord to a plan or calculation. As Arsic writes,
“building becomes the process of . . . [thinking] in a new way” (p. 134).
The design of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden for example, had neither a base-
ment nor substructure. That is, it had no formal foundation upon which it
was constructed. Further, Thoreau’s cabin was designed without an upper
floor, the site of self-surveillance and panoptic power. As previously noted,
Thoreau’s cabin was designed to be permeable and open to the outside.
The cabin at Walden was thus less “structural” than a way of thinking the
space between descendancy/ascendancy, higher/lower, inner/outer, etc. As
Thoreau (1962) wrote, the house reacts to the movements of those things
UNCERTAIN GAMES 93
and people that inhabit it. Rather than fixed and static, Thoreau esoteri-
cally writes that the house is as light as a cloud, a territory traversed by a
myriad of deterritorializing lines.
The pedagogical interventions on State thought advanced by hacking
and parkour are tied to an ethics of nomadism. That is, they do not fixate
on the powers of death, but rather, the joyous affirmation of life that comes
with departure, bifurcation, and experimentation. Thoreau’s experiment
in leaving, Arsic writes, “had as its single goal . . . the possibility of building
a house that one could joyously leave” (p. 131). In his philosophy of peda-
gogical vagabondage, Block similarly contends that by leaving the reactive
path, one joyously affirms the creative powers of difference. Against the
melancholic lament over lost objects, joyous departure necessitates that
we become, like Thoreau, imperceptible, altering the limits of identitarian
thought by becoming-other. Put differently, the Deleuzeguattarian (1987)
concept of becoming-imperceptible disorients je (identitarian thought) in
favor of jeu (play, gambling, the Nietzschean dice-throw), “[exploring] the
virtual without knowing what it will yield” (May, 2005, p. 172). In such
becoming, a new space is created in which one must “learn how to invent
new motions, emotions, thoughts, languages and (even if for a day) how
to build a new house” (Arsic, 2005, p. 130). This is the work of currere’s
active force, to create, in the middle of territorialized space and thought,
new ways of thinking and taking action. It is in this way that old habits of
thought, cathected desires, and patterns of behavior are deterritorialized
through the active creation of a new social space for a people yet to come.
In this vein, such youth practices as hacking and parkour are harbingers
of a new way of thinking that actively engages the virtual powers of
difference.
7
I’m Not There: The Cinematic

Time-Image, Cultural
Curriculum Studies, and
the Political Arts of an
Untimely Subject
I n his introduction to Anti-Oedipus (1983), Foucault writes that Deleuze

and Guattari’s work “can best be read as an ‘art’” (p. xii). For Foucault,
the “art” of Anti-Oedipus is deployed in three transitive forms: ars erotica
(an erotic-art), ars theoretica (an art-theory), and ars politica (a politi-
cal art). Each mobilized by the Deleuzeguattarian concept of desiring-
production,1 Foucault plots the “artistic” problematic of Anti-Oedipus
thus: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into
action . . . How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political
domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the estab-
lished order?” (p. xii). In Deleuzeguattarian terms, desire is not a passive
or parasitical force enjoined to lack, but rather, a somatic and social
process of linkage and relinkage, of forming (reterritorializing) and
breaking (deterritorializing) flows. The “arts” of desiring-production are
mobilized in this manner as a weapon against oedipalization, attacking
“what is all-too-human in mankind” (Seem, 1983, p. xvi).
The human, all-too-human is epitomized by the man of ressentiment,
who seeks at every turn to render desire into a fascism, to subjugate desire
under such Oedipal territorialities as the Family, the Church, the School,
the Nation, and the Party (Foucault, 1983). Foucault elaborates further on
the opponents of Anti-Oedipus, implicating three emissaries of oedipal-
ization. The first Foucault dubs the “political [ascetic], the sad [militant],
[and] the terrorists of theory,” those who reterritorialize difference in the
totalized image of the Truth (p. xii); second, Foucault juxtaposes the “art”
of Anti-Oedipus against the “poor technicians of desire,” those structural
and psychoanalytic discourses that seek to “subjugate the multiplicity
of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack” (pp. xii–xiii). Finally,
Foucault posits the greatest enemy to desiring-production in the figure of
the fascist. Herein, Foucault inculpates both the historical organization of
desire by Hitler and Mussolini, and further, the common and everyday will
to cling to rigid transcendent identities adapted to prior social production
networks.
The sickness that Anti-Oedipus seeks to diagnose is none other than the
Oedipal cure, the all-too-human image of the identitarian and individual-
ized body. In Nietzschean (2000) terms, what constitutes both our histori-
cal trajectory and contemporary sickness is the becoming reactive of the
body; that is, the image of the body severed from its active potentials, or
rather, from that which is inhuman, mutant, and anomalous in (wo)man.
In this Oedipal model of reactivity, “alien and rogue . . . assemblages” are
captured and organized by myriad transcendent powers of organ-ization
(Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 147).
Repressed by the totalizing narratives of the “political ascetic,” the “poor
technicians of desire” and the fascist champions of identity, desiring-
production is submitted to the cruelty of overcoding (Foucault, 1983,
pp. xii–xiii). In this sense, the “coextension of the social field and desire”
is subjugated under a reactive image that functions to repress produc-
tive forces of difference (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). For example, the image of
rational man marks the territorialization of bodily drives symptomatic
of oedipalization. “Dominated by the head of reason, expressed through
the eyes of the soul and the demeanor of the face, and sexualized through
the private genital organs,” our experience of the modern self is marked
by the violent overdetermination of the organ-ism (Colebrook, 2006,
p. 145). Yet, such organ-ization belies the more insidious fascist “demand
that war be carried into the body itself” (Guattari cited in Alliez, 2006,
p. 159). For the body to be fully politicized, its overcoded image requires
internalization. Such internalization occurs in classic psychoanalysis,
when we “learn” to treat desire as reactively cathected to prior circuits of
interpretation (the Oedipal drama, the family, lack, etc.). In this sense,
consciousness is no longer seen as pressured or parasited by unconscious
desire. Rather, in Deleuzeguattarian terms (1983), it is consciousness that
pressures the unconscious, demanding that it conform to normalized
images of life. A similar violence is critiqued by Nietzsche (1968), who
decries the overdetermination of desire by the transcendent morals of
Christianity and further, in Artaud’s (1976) assessment of the diseased
body promulgated by the Western biomedical model. Captured in the
I’M NOT THERE 97
image advanced by prior circuits of such oedipalizing structures, the body

becomes sedimented and submitted to a time, space, and reality mea-
sured in advance. Subjugated to the automatic interpretation machines
of psychoanalysis, Christian morality, and biomedical symptomology, the
potentials of the body become bound by the signifying violence of identi-
tarian representation (Artaud, 1976).
Anti-Oedipus (1983) posits the body as a contemporary problematic.
Toward the articulation of this problem, Deleuze and Guattari approach
the reactive image of the body as a failure to think the body’s active or
experimental potentials. As Deleuze (1988) affirms apropos Spinoza,
we do not yet know what a body can do. In contrast to the territorialized
(oedipalized) individual, Deleuze (2003a) posits that the body must be
given back to thought. It is in this sense that the ars erotica, ars theoretica,
and ars politica of Anti-Oedipus are waged against the ego (the “me”) and
further, the image of life captured and overcoded by the automatic inter-
pretation machines of the State. Towards this, Deleuze and Guattari affirm
an ontology of becoming, “which never cease[s] to undo the sedimentation
of identities” (Alliez, 2006, p. 156). Deleuzeguattarian process ontology
hence approaches the body as a potentiality, or rather, a multiplicity prior
to reactive processes of individualization.2 Put differently, Deleuze and
Guattari do not presume a transcendent subject that subsequently changes,
nor do they presuppose an inherently human condition from whence life
naturally unfolds. Instead, Deleuzeguattarian process ontology affirms
Artaud’s politics of sensation dubbed the body without organs (BwO)3
(Alliez, 2006).
Against the “strongly patterned body” of oedipalization (the institu-
tional image of the body), Artaud’s body without organs is a provocation
to experiment with the compositional assemblage of a “body without
image” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). In other words, a body without organs is the
deterritorialized or non-organismic body dehabituated from prior habits
and circuits. Hence, the body without image might be thought as a prac-
tice of creating affects, experimenting with the potentials of what a body
can do and undergo. As an experimentation with the body’s potentials to
affect and be affected, to connect and interrupt flows, the body without
organs is less an image than an event. That is, the body without organs
may be able to exceed the oedipal territories of contemporary thought “by
functioning as a fulcrum for a processural relaunch . . . between art and
life” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). In this manner, the “art” of Anti-Oedipus might
be thought as an “art of the self,” wherein the body is given back to the
question of how individuals are constructed in the first place (p. 156). This
question is significant for the problematic of currere, that is, the question
of how a life might go.
The root of the subject is habit (Buchanan, 2008b). Through habit, the
virtual multiplicity of perceptions immanent to the body without organs
are actualized into stable patterns marked by determinate connections.
Such patterns and determinate connections organize the fluxes of the body
into what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as molar aggregates. That
is, molarizing social forces4 organize the body in the image of a statistical
standard from which deviations might be measured. For Deleuze and
Guattari (1987), molar powers and their counterpart molecular forces can
be distinguished by two kinds of movement. While molar powers organize
systems in increasingly homogenous, equilibrated, and normalized states,
molecular forces move toward less probable, nonnormal and deviant
thresholds. It is in this sense that the body is immediately political, for the
State apparatus requires a subject that can be represented, recorded, and
surveyed according to statistical norms, or rather, such molar aggregates as
sex, gender, ethnicity, race, age, etc. The habitual or molar body is in this
respect the ideal biopolitical entity, enjoined to the subjectivized positions
of State thought.
The dangers of molar thinking, Buchanan (1999) advances, are inexo-
rably linked to the presupposition of the subject as given. That is, if the
subject is simply the emanation or representation of a molar image,
then its potential to affect or be affected by the social order is repressed.
Put differently, if we begin with the assumption of a molar, equilibrated,
or totalized identity, then we have already stifled the potential for think-
ing desiring-production as coextensive of social production. Simply,
the molar aim of desire is representational, not inventive. In contrast to
the immanent forces of Artaud’s body without organs, the molar subject
is oriented to constitutive forces that exist outside of itself. In the image
of a normal person, a rational animal, or human Being, the desire of
the molarized subject is cathected to the representation of a prior iden-
tity. It is in this image of ontological impoverishment that the body
becomes overcoded, hence reducing its potentials to instantiate new ways
of living.
What is required today is, hence, a way of thinking subjectivity as both
the product of social mechanisms (molar powers) and forces capable of
manipulating such social mechanisms in the creation of a life (molecular
forces). As Deleuze (2001b) challenges, “there is only a practical subject”
(p. 104). While the body is subjectivized through molar powers of organ-
ization, it remains immanent to molecular forces through which it might
become, or rather, be recreated. Against the putrification of life imaged
by the gross statistical categories of sex, gender, and race, we must today
begin to diagram other ways of living beyond the condition of identity.
This entails the affirmation of an anti-Oedipal political art (ars politica),
I’M NOT THERE 99
or rather, an art of the self dedicated to the experimental creation of a body

without image.
Tarantinian Thinking in Curriculum Theory
In Cultural Curriculum Studies, Multiplicity, and Cinematic-Machines

(2006), Reynolds advances a way of thinking a curricular body with-
out image. In modern cinema, Reynolds locates a potential site for the
resistance of stratification and the molar aggregation of the curriculum
field. Toward this, Reynolds illustrates the “complicated conversation”
created in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes One and Two (p. 42). Citing the
events of Kill Bill Volume One, Reynolds briefly argues that the filmic
interspersion of “Japanese anime, black and white scenes, surrealistic
gore, severed body parts, and a Japanese rock band” constitutes an origi-
nal multiplicity through which we might begin to rethink the curricular
body differently (p. 49). That is, Reynolds imagines a desedimented cur-
ricular body through the rhizomatic assemblage of heterogeneous forces:
“Schools and sitcoms, fast food and faculty, science fiction and science
curriculum, math and movies, accountability and AC/DC, bricolage and
biology, French and fusion cuisine . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . ”
(p. 47). Against the aggregation of the curricular field into compartmental-
ized subject areas and instrumental methodologies, Reynolds approaches
the curricular field as a matter of invention rather than representation,
a cartography (calques) rather than a tracing (cartes). Following this
line of flight, Reynolds avers that the compositional multiplicity of Kill
Bill creates productive lines of flight along which the virtual elements of
a somatic or social body might be rethought. Put differently, the stylistic
multiplicity of Kill Bill constitutes for Reynolds an original way of think-
ing a life unfettered by the habits of molar thought. In this vein, he advo-
cates a kind of cultural curriculum theorizing oriented to the deliberate
creation of heterogeneous assemblages. It is through such assemblages,
Reynolds theorizes, that the field of curriculum studies might begin
to subtract molecular forces from identitarian or molar powers of oedi-
palization. “Our present historical moment is one of control,” Reynolds
argues, “[stressing] identity over difference and disciplinary over interdis-
ciplinarity” (p. 52).
Killing Bill and the Persistence of Identitarian Thought
In order to mobilize the political art of the cinema toward a transfor-

mation of social and somatic life, we might first question how it is that
identity perseveres. Along this line, while Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2004a,
2004b) is composed of heterodox styles and unique assemblages linking
kung-fu, blaxploitation, spaghetti western, and anime, are these assem-
blages not still overcoded in the image of Oedipus? That is, does Kill Bill
not reterritorialize in the very Oedipal image that a contemporary cultural
curriculum studies might seek to desediment? While replete with hetero-
geneous cultural references, does the very premise of Kill Bill not overcode
the subversive potential of such variegated influences in an all-too-human
image of thought?
I assert that Tarantino’s Kill Bill is haunted by the image of Oedipus.
To begin, Tarantino organizes his narrative around the father figure
Bill5 (David Carradine), who functions as the object-cause of Tarantino’s
revenge drama. That is, Kill Bill unfolds as the overbearing father figure
(Bill) tenaciously attempts to restrict access to the maternal body of
Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman). At each juncture of the film, Bill and his
vassals attempt to capture and sediment Kiddo’s desire. Against this, the
desire of Tarantino’s heroine is teleologically oriented to the destruction
of this sublimating power. In this vein, is Tarantino’s film not tantamount
to a death wish, or rather, an Oedipal wish figured in the title of the film
itself? Bill must die such that the mother can love another. This Oedipal
scenario is mobilized throughout Kill Bill Volume One, wherein Bill’s
object of desire (the pregnant Beatrix Kiddo) is prevented from marriage
by Bill’s assassin squad, The Deadly Vipers. In Tarantinian style, The Deadly
Vipers execute Kiddo’s wedding party in an aesthetic spectacle of cartoon-
ish gore and slow motion deaths. In the culmination of this scene, Bill
shoots Kiddo in the head, hence organizing the film around the exclusivity
of her love. From the perspective of the Oedipal father Bill: if I can’t have
her, no one can.
Tarantino’s Oedipal revenge scenario is further developed in Volume
Two, wherein the hitherto godlike figure of Bill is humanized and
weakened.6 The superegoic figure of Bill is rendered fallible and super-
seded by the cruel kung-fu master Pei-Mei (Gordon Liu), who teaches
Kiddo the secret technique that Bill lacks.7 Significantly, it is at this
juncture that Bill can finally be killed. Prior to the culmination of the
Kill Bill revenge drama, however, Tarantino melodramatically stages an
idealized image of the Oedipal triad (mommy-daddy-and me), reunit-
ing Kiddo with the daughter Bill abducted while she lay comatose in a
hospital. Yet, Tarantino’s nostalgic reunion of the nuclear family is brief,
for the teleological course of Kill Bill is locked in the a priori death wish
of the Oedipal complex. The father figure in Tarantino’s revenge narra-
tive must die, a teleological course guaranteed by the promise of the film’s
title.
I’M NOT THERE 101
The Oedipal image is perhaps nowhere as apparent in Kill Bill as in its

orientation to identity and personal history. That is, through the father
figures of Bill and later, Pie Mei, Beatrix Kiddo discovers her true poten-
tial. Yet, Kiddo’s identity and desire are already fettered to the teleological
death wish of Tarantino’s film: Bill must be killed. In this vein, Kiddo’s
becoming is not that of invention. Rather, Kiddo’s desiring-production is
already sedimented within patterns of ressentiment and revenge. It within
this pattern of revenge that Kiddo’s desire orbits as she systematically
hunts and dispatches each member of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination
Squad. The unusual perceptual and somatic states that affect Kiddo’s body,
including comatic unconsciousness, paralysis, and exhaustion, are treated
as becomings to overcome. That is, the multiplicity of ways that a body
might affect and be affected are from the outset of Tarantino’s film already
determined.8 Kiddo’s desire is caught in the identitarian production of a
past self. Captured within the patterns of revenge and resentment, Kiddo
identifies in the image of her former Deadly Viper alter-ego, Black Mamba.
It is in this past image or reactive memory that Kiddo is reterritorialized.
This Oedipal or identitarian turn gives way to another at the conclusion
of Volume 2, when Kiddo confides to Bill that she can identify with no
other image than that of a warrior, expect perhaps, the molar identity of
a mother.
A final example of identitarian thought inhering Kill Bill might be
drawn from Bill’s closing monologue, wherein he employs a popular cul-
ture analogy to convince Kiddo of her true nature. “As you know, I am quite
keen on comic books,” Bill avers, “especially the ones about superheroes . . .
I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating” (Bender
and Tarantino, 2004b). Following, Bill differentiates between the super-
heroic persona and her/his alter-ego: “Batman is actually Bruce Wayne,
Spiderman is actually Peter Parker,” he argues. Yet, for Bill, Superman poses
a compelling exception. As an alien from the planet Krypton, Superman
is always Superman.9 That is, while Batman and Spiderman become
their superheroic personas by donning their costumes, Bill argues that
Superman’s costume is in fact the alter-egoic persona Clark Kent. “[T]he
glasses, the business suit . . . that’s the costume Superman wears to blend in
with us” (Bender and Tarantino, 2004b). In this vein, Bill asserts that Clark
Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race, characterized by insecurity,
cowardice, and weakness.10 Bill’s analogy runs parallel to the central con-
flict of Kiddo’s character. That is, he asserts that Kiddo is a natural born
killer, and that her conflicting desires are in fact, betrayals of this unavoid-
able truth: “You were born Beatrix Kiddo . . . and every morning when you
woke up, you’d still be Beatrix Kiddo . . . a natural born killer . . . you always
have and you always will be.” For Kiddo to become anything other than a
killer, she is forced to play out the very identitarian role impelled by Bill.
Put differently, the Tarantinian father figure Bill overcodes Kiddo’s desire,
requiring her to identify with the immutable and stable image of a true self
given in advance. While we might think of Superman’s subjectivity as split,
indefinite, and complex, Kiddo’s subjectivity is externally subordinated to
habit, playing out a deadly Oedipal tale of “bloody revenge” (Bender and
Tarantino, 2004b).
While Reynolds (2004, 2006) urges the conceptualization of cur-
riculum theorizing through the unique assemblage of heterogenic cultural
elements, this tactic does not necessarily loosen molar or oedipalizing ten-
dencies at work in the social field. Put differently, one cannot presume that
the creation of complex referential assemblages will by necessity produce
sociopolitical sites of creative resistance. Kill Bill is a case in point. While
the two volumes of Kill Bill are undoubtedly composed of myriad pop
culture references, these elements are put to work in the image of Oedipus.
That is, they are mobilized toward the production of an oedipalizing
image that territorializes, rather than desediments, identitarian or all-too-
human thinking. In this vein, Tarantino’s Kill Bill does not yet create a new
image for thinking, as the multiplicity it mobilizes is already overcoded in
the transcendent image of how a life will go. In Deleuzian terms, what
Tarantino produces is indeed a multiplicity. Yet, I assert that the character
of Tarantino’s multiplicity is largely quantitative, differing only by degree,
that lowest degree of difference (Deleuze, 1991).
The myriad references composing Kill Bill are territorialized as a reac-
tionary variation of clichéd movements well-worn within the track of our
thinking. While Kill Bill does engage with the filmic creation of temporal
discontinuities, postmodern pastiche, and the problematics of consumer-
ism, these trajectories insist on clinging to identity, to teleology, and res-
sentiment. In other words, the unique Tarantinian devices used in Kill Bill
are not oriented to the production of a political body without image, but
rather, function to shore up identity through the composition of a narra-
tive unity, or rather, an image of the body. It is in reference to this image of
the body that hooks (1994) remarks on the “cool cynicism” of Tarantinian
films. For hooks, Tarantino’s films implicitly assert that nothing is going
to change, “’cause the real deal is that ‘domination is here to stay’” (p. 47).
The domination hooks critiques in Tarantino might be seen in the ways
that Kill Bill remains caught in the complex of molar determination (one
goal, one genealogy, one desire, one true identity), an image that poses a
problematic for the creation of a body without image, and further, a politi-
cal cultural curriculum studies.
As Reynolds (2006) avers, the creation of a cultural curriculum studies
might indeed be a matter of making a multiplicity. Yet, this multiplicity
I’M NOT THERE 103
cannot be measurable in relation to a model, wherein plurality is conceived

as a variation organ-ized by a prior image of thought. Such a conceptual-
ization of difference is demonstrated in Kill Bill, wherein Tarantino’s chic
narrative is overcoded by conservative and ultimately conformist images
of identity and desire. Rather than experimenting with the creation of a
destratified subject, quantitative multiplicity reproduces the properties of
stratified bodies by mapping them according to prior attributes. In this
sense, multiple subject positions, multiple genres, and multiple pop cul-
ture references are not, by necessity of their construction, revolutionary.
Multiplicities might too become parasited by “transcendent organizing
[metrics]” (Bonta & Protevi, 2006, p. 117).
While heterogeneous, a multiplicity might still be unified, halting dis-
junctive lines of flight by overcoding them in particular organ-izations of
identity, desire, or teleology. Despite the composition of unique heteroge-
neities, such variegations are susceptible to capture by transcendent over-
coding. In this sense, hooks (1994) comments that while the character of
Tarantino’s films, “titillate with subversive possibility . . . everything kinda
comes right back to normal” (p. 48). Perhaps this return to normal marks
the paranoid-fascist pole of Deleuzeguattarian (1983) desire, through
which subjects are rendered whole by clinging to coded (true and natu-
ral) identities. Opposed to the creation of an experimental anti-flesh, this
identitarian pole of desire has yet to break from the habit of self-reflection,
in the image of which difference is reduced to the difference or variation
of a prior thing.
This is not to say that every multiplicity becomes subject to overcod-
ing. Indeed, such multiplicities as packs, nomads, mutants, rhizomes, and
symbiotes create lines of flight that might escape molar coding, producing
qualitative changes or becomings that push equilibrated systems to thresh-
olds of productive deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is in
this vein that the conceptualization of multiplicity in curriculum studies
must continue to approach its composition as a political art oriented to
the mobilization of transformations in both somatic and social milieus.
Put differently, the political significance of a cultural curriculum studies
requires that it be the work (an ars politica) of invention rather than rep-
resentation. Toward this, one must begin to discern a molar tendency at
work in contemporary cultural production, a tendency that functions by
harnessing molecular forces and putting them to work in the reproduction
of prior identities (Bogue, 1996). This entails that a cultural curriculum
theorizing begin to experiment with the creation of a multiplicity no
longer fettered to a transcendent image or prior identity. Instead, a
cultural curriculum studies oriented to the creation of new social and
somatic life might work to release intensities from prior circuits and
patterns of organ-ization. In part, this political maneuver presupposes that

the organization of life into “various forms . . . could always have been
otherwise” (Lorraine, 1999, p. 168).
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) affirm that experimentation with the
potential becomings of a life entails “taking apart egos and their presup-
positions . . . liberating the . . . singularities they enclose and repress”
(p. 362). In the creation of a body not yet overcoded by molar or State
thinking, cultural curriculum studies must begin to think of a difference in
kind, that is, an immanent difference that is not immanent to some prior
model of life. It is toward such a conceptualization of difference that this
chapter is oriented to the political art of the Deleuzian time-image. Further,
it is via a consideration of the Deleuzian time-image that a cultural
curriculum studies might begin to consider a change in somatic and social
organization demanded by the political arts of desiring-production.
Before developing an image of a cultural curriculum studies through
the Deleuzian concept of the time-image, it is important that we first
recognize how the field of curriculum theory remains haunted, even in its
most progressive figurations, to identitarian thinking, and more specifi-
cally, to the Deleuzian notion of the movement-image11 (a concept I return
to more fully in a later section). As an implicit concept in curriculum the-
ory, the movement-image might be understood as intimate to the notion
of self-reflection and the image of memory upon which it territorializes.
It is in this self-reflective vein that life is organized as an endeavor that
aspires to synthesis and the dialectical activity of self-remembrance. As
Reynolds (2002) develops, the reterritorialization of life in the image of
“unity, identity, security, [and] popularity” marks an attempt to sediment
desiring or molecular flows in the organ-ized circuits of State thought (p.
46). This image of capture is critical to an understanding of currere, for it
suggests that reactionary powers function by parasitically overdetermining
how a life might go. One example of such overcoding, Reynolds argues,
is manifest in the process whereby a life is captured in the image of a
universal self.
The Clockwork of Person Constructing
The explosion of biographical and autobiographical scholarship in the

curriculum field has been heralded as both a transformative and political
project (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2000). Yet, much auto-
biographical research remains cathected to the transcendent image of an
ontological unity. In other words, while the orientation of much autobio-
graphical research is aimed at differentiating subjective experience from the
I’M NOT THERE 105
gross statistical categories under with it is often overcoded, it paradoxically

remains organ-ized by prior ontological presumptions regarding the unity
of identity, the dialectics of subjectivity, and the synthesis of subject and
situation. Herein, the transformative possibility of autobiography often
proceeds by degrees of difference. That is, while autobiographical modes
of research might seek to reconstruct the subject through an analysis of
their molar political, economic, ethnic, and gendered organ-izations, such
reconstruction often reterritorializes the subject within an equally harm-
ful identity politics. In Nietzschean (1986) terms, such reterritorializations
are harmful insofar as they cathect life to its most racist character, that is,
the anthropocentric images of human Being, human nature, and human
experience. It is our failure to think, May (2005) writes, that purports that
“there was only one way [that a life might go] and that it was a human
one” (p. 24). While autobiography might be oriented to the political and
social transformation of its subject, it often continues to participate in the
reproduction of an essential tyranny that presupposes in advance how a
life might go, how it will divide, and in what image it will appear recogniz-
able. In the appeal to human nature for example, much autobiographical
research already assumes that we divide up into a pure species and that
this division constitutes an ontological fact. Yet, as Bryant (2008) contends,
“the subject is not ontologically primitive” (p. 178). In this vein, if we are
to insist on the transcendent image of the human and the coherence of
identity it connotes, then we will produce nothing new, in turn putrefy-
ing life’s potential for radical becoming. The question of creative action,
Nietzsche (1986) writes, is “whether it is at all possible . . . to suspend the
clockwork of . . . [the] person-constructing, person-inventing drive even
for a moment” (p. 219).
A reproductive tendency also inheres the contemporary trend to mul-
tiply identity. While a relevant innovation on the immutable self promul-
gated throughout modernity, the multiplication of identity continues to
labor under a transcendent image by which its multiple variations are ren-
dered different only by degree. That is, even in its most extreme figuration,
the pluralization of identity reterritorializes in the image of arborescence.
While identity might be multiplied and variegated, such multiplication
continues to presuppose identity as the center of Being. In this vein, iden-
tity is presented as a transcendent image prior to difference, “so that any
solution that is sought will be a solution on the scale of the individual”
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 189). It is in this image of thought that
difference always relates to the primacy of identity and is hence reduced to
a secondary movement or degraded aftereffect.
While curricular research might produce a plurality of identities or
subject positions, this plurality remains monocentric when fettered to the
transcendent category of identitarian Being by which its variations remain

recognizable, domesticated, and ultimately molarized. The illusion upheld
by this transcendent maneuver insists that the subject is the ultimate
ground of an individualized world (Bryant, 2008). While one might think
in terms of multiple identities, insofar as such identity is treated as a tran-
scendent image that precludes difference, it remains in the orbit of oedi-
palization, and in particular, the fascist-paranoiac pole of desire wherein
the body is habitually reterritorialized as an identity. While molar powers
constituting the individual might be interrogated, “what is essential hasn’t
changed” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 71). The domain of the rational individual
remains intact. As May (2005) writes, the error of humanism in which this
image participates is the “error of believing that the proper perspective
for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human
subject” (p. 24). While a frequent viewpoint for the political project of
autobiography, such anthropocentrism must be understood as only one
way that a life might go. It is against this notion of difference in kind that
much autobiographical research privileges the synthesis of identity from
the start (Widder, 2006). In this Hegelian vein, the self is constituted via a
process of negation. Put differently, the dialectical synthesis of the subject
is produced by defining it against everything it is not. It is in this sense
that the dialectical synthesis of the human subject is possible insofar at it
reflects the a priori image of how a life ought to go, how it should divide
up, and how the flows of its memory should be organized.
Autobiographical curricular research oriented to the discovery of iden-
tifiable entities continues to participate in the ontological articulation of
an essence that persists as the ground of difference. In this vein, the often
heralded metaphor of finding (oneself, one’s voice, one’s identity) must
first answer how it is that one finds or discovers some thing essential to
itself. That is, the essential character of millions of people must first be
explained. Toward this, May (2005) writes, “in order for something to have
an identity, it must have characteristics that can be identified over time”
(p. 18). While such characteristics do not presuppose the stability of an
identity, May argues that stability inheres the concepts by which identity
is mapped. Human nature, the dialectically synthesized self, and the pre-
supposition of life as a chronological unity stabilize identity through the
creation of an essential ontological ground. It is by mapping these prior
images of thought onto the presubjective or body without organs that such
images circulate as the a priori possibility of life. The Oedipus complex
functions similarly by contending that the nature of human development
can be located in the tension between one’s formative and present relation-
ships. While May contends that there “is no particular way of solving these
tensions . . . essential to human unfolding” the identity of human beings
I’M NOT THERE 107
are nevertheless caught in the organ-izing matrix of such tensions (p. 18).
In this instance, while identity might be unstable, such instability remains
fettered to a stable ontological ground in the image of which difference is
tethered. The presumption of an identifiable entity can proceed only by
difference in degree12 from prior indexes, codes, or symbols. This assumes
that difference, as the “cauldron” of the unconscious, is immanent to a
prior ontological reality, such as the human Being, the synthesis of iden-
tity, or the dialectics of self. In this image of identitarian conformity, the
potential of radically thinking the future13 becomes apolitical, reduced to
cliché images of how life ought to go. As Land (2006) cautions, “We should
be wary . . . of calls to a return to human values when they seek to arrest
change and development, returning to a facial and fascistic overcoding
in the name of the father” (p. 126). When desire becomes tethered to the
particular norms, tendencies, and organ-izations of what it means to be
normal human beings, abnormality can only be understood as the fail-
ure to become fully human (May, 2005). If thinking entails “discovering,
inventing, new possibilities of life,” then the degraded status of abnormality
marks the radical failure of thought (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 101). In this vein,
the desire of autobiography might already be cathected to the reproduc-
tion of an image of the body as opposed to the experimental creation of a
body without image.
Time is Out of Joint: The Deleuzian Time-Image and

the Body Without Image
Reynolds (2006) remarks, albeit briefly, on the significance of the Deleuzian

time-image to the conceptualization of a cultural curriculum studies. It is
in this concept that the field might begin to think ontological difference.
Further, it is in the Deleuzian time-image that a weapon against the iden-
titarian and self-resemblant presumptions of the movement-image or
image of the body prior to radical difference might be mobilized. Put dif-
ferently, the Deleuzian time-image might be deployed as a political art that
affirms the coextension of desiring-production and the social field.
The Deleuzian time-image marks a philosophical shift in self-
perception. Inaugurated by Kant’s reversal of movement and time in
the Critique of Pure Reason (1998/1781), “time is no longer related to
the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time
which conditions it” (Deleuze, 1984, p. viii). Deleuze (2003a, 2003b)
broadly articulates this perceptual shift in Cinema 1: The Movement
Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. “Time constitutes the self,” Deleuze
writes, “but it does so in a disjunctive way, because time is the form of
interiority that constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a

splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end” (p. ix).
This particular philosophical approach posits a radically different orienta-
tion to the problem of currere.
A pedagogical life territorialized in the movement-image remains teth-
ered to the representation of identity over time, hence reterritorializing the
future in the image of the past present.14 In this manner, we “skip over the
diversity” of differences, attributing to objects disguises of “self, substance,
unity, and identity” (Olkowski, 1999, 108). Put differently, so long as time
is subordinated to the movement-image (the image of the body), thought
remains captured in the normalizing processes of individualization, pro-
ducing in turn the very biopolitical entities required by the State.15 As
Crockett (2005) developes, the movement-image overcodes potential dif-
ference by tethering potentias (the immanent potentials inhering life) to
potestas (the actual power of the State apparatus). “One way to think about
the Deleuzian distinction between the time-image and the movement-
image,” Crockett contends, “is to read the time-image as referring directly
to potentia whereas the movement-image necessarily concerns potestas”
(p. 188). The Deleuzian time-image intervenes in this circuit of potentia
and potestas, releasing the body from reactive patterns of sense, perception,
and action. Alliez (2006) argues that this circuit-breaking force requires an
artistic intervention oriented to invention rather than representation.
The movement-image is the “first sign of the cinema” (Crockett, 2005,
p. 179). Its function is based solely on the speed of the image, forming
movement-linkages that instantiate the impression of chronological cau-
sality. Crockett contends that much of contemporary cinema, particularly
the action genre, continues to be dominated by the movement-image,
producing habitual sensory-motor linkages that “eventually deteriorate
to the level of clichés” (p. 179). The movement-image also inheres con-
ceptualization of cinema as a “narrative code structured like a language”
(Rajchman, 2000, p. 123). As Rajchman argues, the organization of cinema
as narrative marks the triumphant formation of the movement-image. It is
in paradigmatic contrast to this image of thought that Deleuze mobilizes
the time-image as a technology for thinking unfettered from the submis-
sion of time to movement. Freed from the habitual sensorimotor linkages
of the movement-image, cinema becomes a tool for experimenting with
both somatic and social organ-izations. As Rajchman writes, “the break
with . . . narrative is . . . to be understood in terms of the emergence of a
new kind of cinematic ‘image’” (p. 123).
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze (2001b) employs the concept
of the crystal to describe a nonchronological time out of joint. “The crys-
tal refers . . . to the splitting of time as it unfolds” Deleuze writes (p. 81).
I’M NOT THERE 109
No longer fettered by the measure of movement or sensorimotor habits,

“the interval is set free, the interstice . . . stands on its own” (p. 277). This
philosophical shift is promulgated by the cinematic time-image, which
produces intervals no longer fettered to the habitual reproduction of
movement. “The interval is no longer a rational cut,” Crockett (2005)
writes, “but appears as irrational, or at least set free from any particular
constraints of rational standards defined in terms of movement, such as
a ruler or canon” (p. 180). In the cinema, the time-image registers the
nomadic mind unlinked from clichéd movements of thought and action.
In one particular case of the time-image, the interval creates a disjunc-
tion between what is aurally perceived and what is seen on the screen.
That is, while aural and visual information are sensed concomitantly, they
are separated by an interval that produces a disjunction. Rodowick (1997)
articulates another example of the time-image from Chris Marker’s La
Jetée. Lying motionless on a cell floor, a prisoner relates another time, free-
ing himself from the “thread of chronology where past, present, and future
are aligned on a continuum” (p. 4). In Rodowick’s example, time is no
longer subordinated to the sensorimotor mechanism, constituting instead
another way of perceiving how a life might go. The work of Powell (2005)
articulates the ways in which the horror film genre is populated with such
transpersonal, transtemporal, and nonchronological ways of thinking
time beyond movement. Powell draws one example from the geographic
setting of the 1963 horror film, The Haunting. The spatial presence of The
Haunting’s Hill House, Powell argues, is subordinated to duration. “The
house is in duration” Powell writes, “and forces the characters to live there
too” (p. 166). Hill House itself has a virtual memory actualized by the
researchers investigating its strange phenomenon. The film unfolds, not
through the spatial movements or actions of the researchers toward their
goal, but via the inhuman time of Hill House. In this image of time out of
joint, the lives of the researchers are barred from achieving a durational or
chronological consistency. That is, the research team is constantly drawn
into the demented time of Hill House, and in this particular case, into a
virtual memory out of joint with the present.
The cinematic time-image creates a way that we can begin to both think
and experience time of another kind. That is, the crystalline structure of
the time-image posits a qualitative multiplicity of duration that ceases to
carry the illusion of identitarian consistency or narrative unity. It is in this
sense that the time-image is inherently futural. Yet, this future does not
reterritorialize in the image of the past. While the future repeats, its repeti-
tion is not identitarian, but rather, the repetition of difference. Following
Bergson (2007), time does not unfold upon a single course, but rather,
explodes along multiple trajectories of linkage, relinkage, and creative
evolution. “Time . . . splits into two asymmetrical jets, one of which make
the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past . . . [w]e see in
the crystal the perpetual foundation of time” (Deleuze, 2003b, p. 81).
Via this concept of the crystal, Deleuze argues that time is out of joint,
launched towards the future while falling into the past. Composed within
time and yet not a measure of it, the self is also out of joint. As Widder
(2006) contends, the “I” becomes “a multiplicity of subjects living differ-
ent temporalities within the same, not so unified Being” (Widder, 2006,
p. 411). Repudiating the reactive philosophical tendency for durational
continuity, Deleuze’s time-image might be postulated as the affirmation
of the affirmation of becoming.
An Untimely Currere: The Body to Come in Cultural

Curriculum Studies
The creative interval of the time-image is intimately linked to the political

import of the cinema (Crockett, 2005). “The political task of the cinema,”
Crockett writes, “is to contribute to the invention of a people, and the
time-image is what enables this possibility, because it allows for linkages
and relinkages among ideas, images and bodies, not merely for the sake
of a movement or territory, but for the purpose of . . . creating a people”
(p. 187). In Deleuzian (2003b) terms, the people are missing. That is, we
have yet to think the complicated time or qualitative difference of a people
yet to come. Overcoded by the identitarian-chronological image of how a
life ought to go, our resources for thinking life unfettered from substan-
tial, statistical categories of Being are reduced. It is in this vein that the
time-image might be mobilized as an affirmative political force of differ-
ence. Via the time-image, we might begin to diagram other durations of
human, nonhuman, and transhuman life. Such an expansion of percep-
tion is, according to Deleuze (2006a), the ultimate aim of art. Creating
a way of thinking no longer fettered to either sensorimotor habits or the
actualization of the future in the image of the past present, the Deleuzian
time-image “dismantles the very basis of our perception and its con-
formity to the speed-body of the state with its spectacular images and
dissimulative strategies of biopolitical control” (Widder, 2005, p. 186).
What Deleuze dubs “smooth or non-pulsed space-time” detaches from
striated or organ-ized space-time, allowing “the identification of the
variation, or individuations without identity” (pp. 296–297).
The Deleuzian time-image is significant to the conceptualization of a
cultural curriculum studies, for it mobilizes a heterogeneous approach
to thinking that no longer orbits the habitual linkages of identitarian
I’M NOT THERE 111
thought. The Deleuzian time-image creates a passage for thinking the

course of pedagogical life (currere) unhinged from the movement-image,
constituting a manner of deterritorializing the overcoded body. Whereas
the pedagogical models of modernity defined individuals relative to gross
statistical categories and prescribed social positions, the time-image
requires rethinking the “self ” at the edge of individualization. That is, the
time-image creates a passage for thinking durational difference (differ-
ence in kind) in which the subject becomes qualitatively metamorphic, “a
cracked self in a world of multiplicity” (Widder, 2005, p. 413).
The time-image hence intervenes with the implicit movement-image
underpinning the concept of currere. Derived from the image of the
Grecian racetrack, currere (the course to be run) presumes an image of
time already submitted to circuited movement. While intensities and
speeds of movement might vary along the circuited course, movement
continues to persist as time’s measure. Put differently, the jointed image of
the racetrack composes a chronological time in which difference proceeds
only by degree from a prior, in this case circular, course. It is in this sense
that currere’s movement-image provides a conceptual ground for identi-
tarian thought in curriculum theorizing. It is this very identitarian agenda
that remains complicit with the State task of biopolitical control. That is,
so long as time remains submitted to movement, curricular thought will
continue to labor under the clichés of representational thinking, unable
to produce a complicated conceptualization of time out of joint with prior
memory-habits. Riveted to the movement-image, currere might continue
to reterritorialize upon a dialectical rather than disjunctive image of time.
This ontological tendency would in turn maintain the conditions for
identitarian thinking, self-reflection, and the reification of difference as
a matter of degree rather than kind. In this way, curriculum theory fails
to instantiate the kind of untimely thinking that Pinar (2004) suggests is
gravely needed today.
Evoking the Deleuzian time-image, Pinar (2004) argues that contem-
porary curriculum theory requires interceders out of joint with the image
of thought ascribed to “our time” (p. 22). This political task is not simply
oriented to the instantiation of the “new.” Rather, Pinar’s advocacy for
the untimely is mobilized against the identitarian politics of the move-
ment-image. It is only by inverting the primacy of the movement-image
that the curriculum field can begin thinking a time to come unfettered
from the past present. Thinking currere no longer submitted to the move-
ment-image would enable curriculum theorists a strategy against the
overdetermination of pedagogical life figured in such conceptualizations
as the curriculum-as-plan (Aoki, 2005a). Further, the inventive difference
of the time-image marks a political intervention with instrumentalism
and the ostensible inevitability that pedagogy reterritorializes in the image

of what others “[declare] to be worth learning” (Pinar, 2004, p. 209). It is
in this vein that the untimely intercession of the time-image is not simply
a disavowal of the present. Rather, the time-image is the affirmation of dif-
ference that exceeds the present, producing lines of flight out of joint with
strategies of biopolitical control intimate to the representational politics
of the movement-image.
As an affirmation of the affirmation of becoming, the time-image cre-
ates a new line of time that disallows the complete identity of pedagogical
life. It is in this way that the time-image is an inventive vehicle for think-
ing currere as an active or inventive task enjoined to desiring-production.
Calling upon an original regime of images and signs out of joint with
the identitarian habits impelled by the movement-image, the time-image
contributes to the creation of a curricular body without prior image. That
is, by inverting the primacy of the movement-image, curriculum theory is
forced to think in a way no longer conditioned by an image of the body
persisting in time. As Pinar (1994) avers, such a strategy is critical in a time
of “pervasive anti-intellectualism” promulgated by “academic philosophers
in uncritical service to the State” (p. 22). It is in this vein that curriculum’s
complicated conversation requires first the search for new weapons against
the dissimulative strategy of control galvanized by the movement-image.
The untimely interceders of the time-image constitute one such weapon.
The time-image constitutes a heterogeneous passage for thinking a
culture out of joint. That is, the political significance of the cinematic time-
image is oriented to the composition of a people yet to come, “the emer-
gence of something new and singular, which precedes us and requires us to
‘invent’ ourselves as another people” (Rajchman, 2000, pp. 122–123). The
question that Deleuze poses via the time-image is intimately linked to the
problematic of representing the masses, insofar as the time-image fabulates
a style of ontological thinking unequal to the statistical and identitarian
image of life advanced by the State. As Rajchman articulates, the subject
of the time-image is “a kind of as yet indefinite or inchoate ‘multitude,’
prior to the ‘constitution’ of societies, singular, unformed, without myths
or ‘majority’ models or histories, yet to be invented” (p. 29).
The complicated time of a culture out of joint is critical to the political
conceptualization of a cultural curriculum studies. Unfettered from an
oedipalized image of currere, a cultural curriculum studies might begin
by creating a body that is no longer prefigured as a hindrance to thought.
Put differently, if cultural curriculum studies is approached as a project of
invention, then its task should be oriented to the creation of a body with-
out image, that is, a life not yet overdetermined in the image of Oedipal
identities or oedipalizing powers. The body prefigures the unthought,
I’M NOT THERE 113
“[forcing] us to think, and [forcing] us to think what is concealed from

thought [and] life” (Deleuze, 2003b, p. 189). It is toward the creation of
such a complicated and original body that Reynolds (2006) theorizes the
task of cultural curriculum study. Cultural curriculum studies, Reynolds
writes, shares with such fields as philosophy, art, cinema, and science the
“activity of creation” (p. 47). It is in this image that Reynolds articulates a
cultural curriculum studies oriented to “think[ing] something new, some-
thing original, to create” (p. 47).
As a task oriented to the desedimentation of identitarian thinking as a
condition of the new, the political import of cultural curriculum studies
cannot draw solely from the movement-image as a point of conceptual
reference. Smith (2007) succinctly articulates that “if identity (A is A) were
the primary principle . . . there would in principle be no production of
the new (no new differences)” (p. 1). Instead, a cultural curriculum stud-
ies aimed at the creation of a complicated time for a people yet to come
might more adequately draw upon the time-image as a tool for thinking
a body irreducible to prior images of thought. This move necessitates a
conceptual turn from difference in degree to a durational difference in
kind. That is, a cultural curriculum studies oriented to the invention of a
body without image can no longer be enslaved to the technics (methods)
of the movement-image. Instead, we must begin to think of currere (the
course of how a life might go) as the task of diagramming other times, and
hence, kinds of living. It is in this way that a cultural curriculum studies
might begin to release the body from reactive patterns, producing instead
the creation of new lines of time out of joint with transcendent and appro-
priative categories of Being.
This philosophical impetus is mobilized by the nonphilosophical arts
of the cinema. That is, the experimental art of postwar cinema creates a
way of thinking an anti-Oedipal ars politica (political art). It is this politi-
cal art that is today required in an effort to rethink the body from under
the burden of its bureaucratic overdetermination. In this effort, we might
begin to think currere (the course of how a life might go) as a nonrepre-
sentational art, that is, an art aimed at releasing vitalism from identitarian
modes of capture. The cinematic time-image is hence one tool for think-
ing a life beyond the power of identitarian movement and its control.
Marking a conceptual tool for thinking currere as a political activity aimed
at the desedimentation of majoritarian structures, the time-image releases
potentials for thinking repressed by identitarian politics, in turn mobiliz-
ing a “processural relaunch between art and life” (Alliez, 2006, p. 158). This
movement posits a significant challenge for curriculum theory, suggesting
the necessity of self-refleXion (the creation of a new time out of joint
with the movement-image) as a political refutation of the self-reflective
movement-image (jagodzinski, 2008). Such a tactic might be one way for

cultural curriculum studies to give identity back to difference and fur-
ther, to produce an experimental body without image. It is through such
experimental production that cultural curriculum studies might become
adequate to the creation of an indefinite life for a people yet to come. One
such example for thinking an indefinite life is created in Todd Haynes’ Bob
Dylan antibiopic, I’m Not There (2007).
I’m Not There: The Complicated Time of the Untimely Subject
I’m Not There is composed through the crystalline structure of the time-
image, producing a “drastically collective, a-chronological, and non-
psychological” life irreducible to representational politics or the dura-
tional stability of the movement-image (Gross, 2007). Departing from
the chronological trope of the biopic, the “Bob Dylan” of I’m Not There
is portrayed by six actors. In this vein, Haynes’ Bob Dylan is neither a dia-
lectical or synthesized subject. Collectively composed across six conceptual
persona, the Bob Dylan of I’m Not There is instead created as a complex
and complicated multiplicity. As an opening voice-over elides, Dylan
involutes as a “poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity . . . even the
ghost was more than one person” (Haynes, 2007). This tactical political-
aesthetic approach affirms a passage for thinking currere as the task of
releasing a life from the tyranny of overdetermination.
In the course of I’m Not There, the body of Bob Dylan is approached
as a practical matter of creation. In this vein, Haynes rebukes the tra-
ditional style of the biopic. That is, Haynes’ film tasks itself with the
creative invention rather than representation of a life. As Gross writes,
“Haynes isn’t interested in supplying a convincing representation of
the events of Dylan’s life, nor some conclusive, coherent, emotionally
rewarding interpretation of those events.” Yet, Haynes’ approach to I’m
Not There is neither concerned with the criticism or deconstruction
of “anecdotal [or] pathos driven narrative structures” (Gross, 2007).
Drawing from the time-image as a political-aesthetic concept for invent-
ing a life, Haynes joyously unhinges the cinematic brain from its move-
ment driven structure. In this manner, Haynes creates a passage for
thinking life out of joint, that is, no longer submitted to the monolithic
molar categories of identity, integration, or unity. Put differently, Haynes
invention of Bob Dylan creates a way of thinking identity as a multiplic-
ity unfettered from either a personal past or habitual recollection-image.
This tactic is germane to the creation of a life not yet captured by a prior
image of thought. Further, it is this very tactic that is mobilized by Bob
I’M NOT THERE 115
Dylan’s conceptual personas as a form of resistance against State powers

of oedipalization.
It would be inadequate to theorize Haynes’ Bob Dylan in terms of either
dialectical thinking or transcendent categories of molar organization.
Instead, I’m Not There is a film that aims at portraying Dylan as an event
(Gross, 2007). That is, the film composes Dylan as a process of productive
linkage and relinkage with such conceptual persona as Woody Guthrie,
Arthur Rimbaud, Billy-the-Kid, and a film star cast to play Bob Dylan in
a film within the film. It is in this vein that the structure of Haynes film is
distinctly rhizomatic, a decentered multiplicity that experiments at com-
posing a body without image. This experimentation is pertinent to the
political force of the film. As the forces of oedipalization descend to banal-
ize and capture Dylan, the film moves out of joint, producing complex
assemblages that affirm nomadic over identitarian thought.
Haynes’ creative approach to the composition of a life might be dubbed
schizoanalytic, that is, an experimentation with assemblages, rhizomes,
and a time out of joint with narrative unity and egoic insistence. Rather
than reducing a life to its psychological experiences, I’m Not There releases
Dylan’s life to a virtuality of lives not lived. In the course of the film,
Dylan is schizoanalytically portrayed as an indeterminate body without
image. More specifically, Haynes’ composition of Dylan’s life is assembled
through 10-year-old African-American Marcus Franklin, who portrays
the conceptual assemblage of Dylan-Guthrie, Richard Gere, who por-
trays a Dylan-Billy-the-Kid assemblage, Ben Wishaw as Dylan’s becoming
Rimbaud, Heath Ledger, an actor decentered through his experience of
playing Dylan in a film, Christian Bale as an early incarnation of Dylan,
and Cate Blanchett as Dylan during the years of Blonde on Blonde (1966)
and Pennebaker’s Documentary, Don’t Look Back (1968). As Ben Wishaw’s
conceptual Rimbaud-Dylan persona remarks early in the film, “je est un
autre”; the I is an other. “Individuals find a real name for themselves . . .
only through the harshest exercise of depersonalization, by opening them-
selves to the multiplicities running everywhere within them, to the inten-
sities running through them” (Deleuze & Guattari cited in Gross, 2007).
It is through Dylan’s depersonalization across six conceptual becomings
that one begins to make out the multiplicity of connections, escapes, and
reconnections populating Haynes’ Dylan-event, an event in which Dylan is
literally not there. That is, Dylan’s name is not only absent from the course
of the film, but his “true” image appears only in the final moment of the
antibiopic, when his image is captured in coordination with the literal end
of the film.
Creating a passage for thinking Bob Dylan without speaking “his”16
name, Haynes demonstrates how relations are external to their terms.
As Dylan-becoming-Rimbaud avers early in the film “a song is something

that walks by itself.” Akin to Haynes’ Dylan, a song detaches, connects,
and reconnects with other forces. The Dylan of I’m Not There is found in
the assemblage and not, as common logic would demand, in the image
of an individualized identity. The political power of I’m Not There is, in
part, created through this tactic. Haynes implicitly avers how one might
speak of a life without reducing its modes of being and becoming to prior
forms of representational thinking. Rather, Haynes treats the “self ” as a
partial object with machinic tendencies to link and relink with other ideas,
images, and bodies. Via the conceptual tool of the time-image, I’m Not
There creates a line of flight for how one might conceive of our ethos, our
modes of being, in a manner no longer hinged to the identitarian politics
of the movement-image.
It is through the composition of a rhizomatic brain that Haynes cre-
ates a passage for thinking difference in kind. I’m Not There experiments
with an image of time and subjectivity no longer overdetermined by
such movement-image devices as the montage, the contiguous edit, nor
the durational consistency of actors and plotlines as its germinal point
of reference.17 Rather, the point of reference for I’m Not There might
more adequately be understood as difference itself. That is, the Dylan
of I’m Not There is a less insistent personality than an indefinite life
that creates new lines of time and genealogical lineages at the very point
when the movement-image begins to intervene as a power of overdetermi-
nation. As Dylan-Rimbaud narrates over a scene in which Billy-the-Kid-
Dylan is greeted differently by the townspeople of Riddle County, “never
give your real name . . . if ever told to look at yourself . . . never look.”18
Dylan-Rimbaud’s caveat on self-reflection is intimate to the way in which
Haynes (2007) wanted to think about Dylan’s life. Haynes (2007) writes,
“[T]he minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he
was. He’s like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you’ll surely
get burned . . . [he] is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating,
and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.”
Yet, the identificatory process on which Haynes remarks is not that of the
movement-image. One does not identify with the Dylan of I’m Not There
as an image of egoic insistence and durational consistency. Instead, Haynes
implicitly suggests that what is identifiable in Dylan is the complicated
virtuality that one might will for “itself.”
The Dylan of I’m Not There is not the production of self-reflection
but rather the invention of the crystal time-image. Put differently, the
creative invention of Haynes’ Dylan requires a time out of joint from
the political and cultural powers of capture intimate to the movement-
image. Not only is I’m Not There punctuated by a disjunctive stuttering
I’M NOT THERE 117
that shatters the chronological conceit of Hollywood filmmaking, it fur-

ther invents an image of a life that moves in difference from the determi-
nations of habit, memory, routine, and the practices of identification in
which the individual is often caught. In this sense, Haynes not only creates
a cinematic brain for thinking difference in kind, but further, produces a
complex and original body no longer based on the image of any substantial
or overcoded identity. I’m Not There is marked by the creation of an “origi-
nal” life brought together in new times and spaces of interrelation. Haynes
hence provides the viewer with a way of thinking ontology unhinged from
identity. Mobilizing the time-image as a conceptual tool for thinking the
body without image, Haynes also engages with the political task of cinema
by creating a passage for a people yet to come.
The body without image invented throughout I’m Not There is mobi-
lized against the parasitic desire of both State and popular opinion
(doxa). In Deleuzian terms, I’m Not There releases the virtual potentials
inhering the overorganized image of Dylan, inventing a molecular sub-
ject that bifurcates, crosses molar thresholds19 and reterritorializes upon
new attractors. Put differently, through the conceptual force of the time-
image, the Dylan of I’m Not There is able to move out of joint with the
molarizing powers of the State, in turn experimenting with the political
composition of a life. As Gross (2007) writes, “[A]t any given point in
the film [Dylan] is constantly attempting to outrun . . . the phenomenon
of celebrity, journalistic analysis, or cinematic representation itself—and
always at risk of being cannibalized by a relentless, never-ending process
of idolatry, imitation, and interpretation.” This tension is aptly articulated
through Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the conceptual persona of Dylan in
the early 1960’s, whose minoritarian songs are captured and banalized by
both the music industry and liberal political nostalgia for an earlier time
(Gross, 2007).
At this juncture, the film itself bifurcates, and through the time-image,
Dylan is relinked through Marcus Franklin’s Dylan-becoming-Woody
Guthrie.20 Traveling by railcar at night, Dylan-Guthrie is awoken by three
vagabonds who attempt to steal his guitar. Narrowly escaping their attack,
Dylan-Guthrie jumps from the train, plummeting into a river below. In a
subsequent time-image, Jude Griffin (Cate Blanchett), Dylan’s late 1960’s
conceptual persona, betrays his fans and supporters by inventing an origi-
nal sound and style. As Dylan-Rimbaud narrates across this transforma-
tion: “me . . . I was in a ditch, up a cliff, out of step, ready to quit. I wrote the
kind of stuff you write when you have no place to live and you’re wrapped
up in the fire pump . . . and then I wrote it. It was like swimming in lava . . .
skipping, kicking, catching a nail with your foot” (Haynes, 2007).
This transformation is phantasmatically articulated as Jude and “his” band
produce submachine guns from their guitar cases and assault a crowd at
the New England jazz and folk festival. Like the epitaph that appears on
the guitar case of Dylan-Guthrie,21 Jude’s musical transformation kills
fascists. That is, Jude Griffin’s creation of a new line of time engineers
an original assemblage railed against the overdetermination of identity
and sedimentation of desiring-production. Escaping from the confines
of Rollins’ identitarian image through the production of a radical musi-
cal and political disjunction, Jude is harried by fans and reporters who
seek to reconcile this slippage into a narrative continuity, and further, to
recapture the desire of Dylan in a previous identitarian form. Amidst this
popular and media fervor, the time-image creates a connection from Jude
to Billy-the-Kid-Dylan, a nomad outlaw we subsequently learn is “on the
run from the inevitable encroachment of 20th century capitalist forces”
(Gross, 2007).
It is via the rhizomatic temporal logic of the time-image that the Dylan
of I’m Not There is able to creatively escape the oedipalizing powers of
psychologization, interpretation, and idolatry that seek to hinge “his”
becoming to an identitarian image. As Dylan’s Billy-the-Kid persona warns
later in the film, “People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live
a certain way, without being kicked around. Course, the more you live a
certain way, the less it feel like freedom” (Haynes, 2007). It is in this sense
that Haynes’ experimental time-image unhinges life from one particular
course, creating instead an active currere immanent to a virtuality of lives
and times not lived. Through the conceptual tool of the time-image, I’m
Not There is able to break from the colonizing powers of the movement-
image, releasing desiring-production from the circuits of subjugation.
Following Gross (2007), it is crucial to differentiate I’m Not There from
a filmic structure akin to that of Kurosawa’s Rashomon or Welles’ Citizen
Kane. Unlike Rashomon and Citizen Kane, I’m Not There is not a variation
on the modernist theme of multiple perspectives or the “anxiety of repre-
senting a Self ” (Gross, 2007). Rather, I’m Not There might more adequately
be thought as a joyful experimentation in depersonalization. Breaking
apart the numerous yet insistent positionality of multiple agents, I’m Not
There is first an affirmation of identity’s untimely invention. In this vein,
Dylan’s multiplicity is not reducible to a plurality of perspectives, for “his”
becomings are borne of impersonal linkages that constantly detach from
located, spatial, perceptual vantages. This is the very logic of the deperson-
alizing camera in I’m Not There. Rather than shifting from one personal
vantage to another, tethering character to plot action, the cinematic brain
of I’m Not There is uniquely compositional. That is, through its disjunc-
tive cuts and rhizomatic connections, the camera documents an assem-
blage in the process of composing itself. Bypassing the modernist theme
I’M NOT THERE 119
of multiple perspectives by breaking from the movement-image, I’m Not

There uses the time-image to create a meshwork of perspective(s) irreduc-
ible to either a quantitative multiplicity of agents or consistent object-event
of contemplation. Instead, Haynes mobilizes a qualitative multiplicity
that “celebrates the impersonal freedom of art” (Gross, 2007). Through
this, he surpasses the movement-image by producing perspectival
breakthroughs, flows, and schizzes. The conceptual creation of a Dylan-
Rimbaud assemblage is significant in this respect, given Rimbaud’s poetic
desire to “disorder . . . all the senses,” releasing affect from overdeter-
mined circuits of interpretation and organization (Marks, 1999, p. 75).
Apropos Rimbaud, Marks (1999) writes that “to speak in the form of
the subject I, we must synthesize time, and yet the ego is constantly
changing through time. The subject becomes an ‘infinite modulation’
rather than a mould” (p. 74). As an articulation of this “infinite modula-
tion,” I’m Not There is irreducible to the play of difference by degree. In
Haynes’ film, everything is made to stutter and break through, “no longer
[belonging] to any [one] time, any milieu, any school” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983, p. 69).
In this vein, I’m Not There is significant as a work of desiring-pro-
duction. In a key scene during which Robbie (Heath Ledger) and Claire
(Charlotte Gainsborough) watch a biopic on the life of Jack Rollins
(featuring Robbie in the starring role), Haynes (2007) adopts a passage
from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine-Féminin: “It wasn’t the film we had
dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to
make and, secretly, wanted to live.” Godard’s quote, itself drawn from
Perec’s (1990/1965) novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, is deployed as a
counterpoint to the image of Rollins’ life captured by the mainstream
movie industry. At its best, I’m Not There practices this very counterpoint,
composing a life via a political art of desiring-production. In other words,
I’m Not There functions as the very form of tactical resistance required
for thinking a life not yet overdetermined by a prior image of the body.
Dylan is instead composed as an indefinite life. Immanent to a virtuality of
conceptual resources such as the untimely lives of others, Haynes “Dylan-
effect” is itself a tactic against the sedimented image of life arraigned by
Godard. Not simply a work composed of savvy references, pastiche, and
allusion, I’m Not There puts its concepts to work in the creation of a cin-
ematic brain and new image of currere. In this respect, Haynes composes
an image of how a life might go through the inventive mobilization of the
time-image. Out of joint with the power of movement and chronology,
Haynes’ image of a life redresses the morbid powers of fascism, resent-
ment, and depression intimate to identitarian politics. It is in this sense
that I’m Not There intervenes with Godard’s admonition of Hollywood
cinema and the parasitical powers of the State, promulgating the question
of whether or not we still want to live, and if so, how?
Creating a complicated time for a people yet to come, I’m Not There
produces a currere that has yet to be mobilized as a tool for conceptual-
izing the field of cultural curriculum studies (Pinar, 2006). Implicating
the ways in which we think ontology, memory, multiplicity, and resis-
tance, the cinematic time-image is itself a political art (ars politica). As an
experimental practice, the time-image becomes one way in which cultural
curriculum studies might begin composing a life that no longer functions
in service of a prior circuit of thought or habit. Rather than asking what
knowledge is of most worth, a cultural curriculum studies aimed at the
production of a complicated time must first ask how a life might go when
representation is no longer adequate to the creation of a people. It is in this
vein that a cultural curriculum studies aimed at invention might begin to
orient itself to the practical matter of creation rather than representation,
invention rather than communication. In this aim, a cultural curriculum
studies might be judged by its ability to create new lines of time and con-
ceptual events (such as the experimental use of the cinematic time-image)
that allow for the unique actualization of life’s virtual resources. The task
of cultural curriculum studies hence amounts to more than an analysis of
popular culture as it informs our understanding of education both within
and outside of the school. Rather, one might begin to conceptualize cultural
curriculum studies as the task of mobilizing virtual potentials for thinking
qualitative difference, to create and connect with social deterritorializa-
tions already underway (Buchanan, 1999). In this task, cultural curriculum
studies might become more adequate to a society that is already en fuite,
“leaking” decoded flows across sedimented terrain. Yet, against the often
reactionary powers of popular culture (doxa), a cultural curriculum stud-
ies oriented to experimentalism might be the very weapon necessary for
the intensification and cartography of such fuites (leakages), diagramming
other times of living contrapuntal to gross statistical categories, automatic
interpretation machines, and the sad passions of oedipalization.
“Any work of art points a way through life, finds a way through the
cracks” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 143). If cultural curriculum studies approaches
cinema as a political task, it must begin to mobilize the cinematic arts
as a creative tactic for producing and intensifying passages of resistance
and productive escape. The cinematic composition of the time-image
is in this sense pedagogical. Not only does the Deleuzian (2003b) time-
image instantiate new lines of time capable of departing from teleological
and genealogical determinations, it perhaps more significantly diagrams
the nomadic mind and the potential creation of a body without image.
Put differently, the time-image creates a trajectory for thinking a process
I’M NOT THERE 121
ontology immanent to a virtuality of potential life courses. In this vein,

the time-image becomes a vital conceptual tool for thinking currere no
longer enslaved to an image of who we are or should be. Following this
line of flight, the cinema is not simply an apparatus of interpretation or
representation, but more crucially, a vehicle for experimenting with how a
life might go; The arts do not resemble the world as it is, but how it might
be (Pisters, 2003). This task necessitates that cultural curriculum studies
becomes more than critical. Rather, as Rajchman (2000) advocates, we
must begin to see the positive and revolutionary side of invention.
8
Making a Holey Curriculum:

Untimeliness, Unhomeliness,
and the Schizophrenic
Potential of the ANOMAL
Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have

discovered, but simply think, “This is not enough.”
(Tsunetomo, 1979, p. 37)
N ietzsche contends that the philosopher is neither eternal nor exclu-

sively historical. Rather, a philosopher is always untimely (Deleuze,
1983). Like an arrow launched along a particular trajectory or fired upon
a target, a thinker is mobilized toward the challenges and problems of a
particular place and time. Yet, an arrow might be taken up from where it
falls and fired in a new direction, at a different target, along a new line of
flight. As Guattari (1995) writes, “Who knows what will be taken up by
others, for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead to!” (p. 126).
Untimeliness is in this way a potential for redisposing thought to the
creation of new events or becomings. It is to mobilize the event in a way
that exceeds the historical, or rather, to make visible the virtual powers of
thought that exceed historical actualization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). It
is in this way that the untimely might catalyze new problems and oppor-
tunities for experimentation unequal to the conditions for action and
common sense established by the fait accompli of history (Vähämäki &
Virtanen, 2006). Put differently, the force of a thinker might arise from his-
tory without merging with it, “arising only to leave it” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994, p. 112).
The untimely is neither an instant of the present, that which we are
and are already ceasing to be, but an event for our becoming-other. That a
thinker might take up and deploy the ideas left by another hence marks an
experimental tactic against an expectation that the future will reterritori-
alize in the image of the present (Mengue, 2006). While experimentation
without history would be “indeterminate and unconditioned . . . experi-
mentation is not historical” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 111). Rather,
experimentation necessitates the philosophical preparation of concepts
for the benefit of a future that is neither historical nor utopian, but the
difference between the present and that which “we are in the process of
becoming” (p. 112). While a philosopher’s concepts might dovetail with
a particular political-historical milieu, they never return to it completely.
Put differently, while an idea might be found in time, it might concomi-
tantly work against time. In this way, the untimely might be thought as a
repetition which fecundates the present, incompleting both the present and
past present moment (Baross, 2006).
By intensifying the concepts of past thinkers through the creation of
new linkages and interactions, the untimely departs from representational
fidelity to present conditions, engaging a way of studying “past [philoso-
phies] to discover what is still new in them” (Rajchman, 2000, p. 39). In
this task, Deleuze’s (1988, 1983) untimely philosophical lineage of volcanic
thinkers is deployed against the limitation of life, subtracting thought
from its historical overdetermination. In Deleuzian (1995) terms, such
pedagogical buggery (enculage) works to birth a philosopher’s monstrous
offspring through processes of slipping, dislocation, and releasing “hidden
emissions.” Put differently, the untimely might be thought as a peda-
gogical teratology through which molar identities are given back to their
virtual potentials of differentiation. Where one might find satisfaction in
submitting to the questions and answers posed by another, the import of
the untimely posits another course for a pedagogical life (Vähämäki &
Virtanen, 2006). For example, in a letter to critic Michele Cressole, Deleuze
(1995) writes that his encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy forced him to
abandon a style of writing proper to historical philosophy. The untimely
forces Deleuze encountered in Nietzsche required a new style of writing
organized less by codes than fluxes. It is in this way that the untimely might
be thought as an event or encounter capable of replacing an ontology of
Being, constituting a circuit breaker superseding the verb “to be” with
potentials for becoming.
Becoming-Samurai: The Hagakure as an Untimely

Shock-to-Thought
Jim Jarmusch’s (1999) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a filmic work
populated by a multiplicity of untimely influences. Perhaps foremost of
MAKING A HOLEY CURRICULUM 125
these influences is Tsunemoto’s Hagakure, a text that circulates through-

out Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog as an untimely shock to thought. Subtracted
from the determinations of history, the eponymous Ghost Dog (Forest
Whitaker) lives a life assembling eighteenth-century Bushido and the
twentieth-century urban milieu. While Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
bears genetic resemblance to the filmic works of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi,
Kobayashi, and Melville, it is perhaps best understood as a monstrous
birth. As Lanzagorta (2002) and Otomo (2000) have argued, Ghost Dog
fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre. Perhaps more radically,
the adaptive failure of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is redoubled
within the film through an emphasis on the potential extinction of the
untimely itself. That is, the “ancient tribe” to which Ghost Dog espouses
fidelity is by “his” own admission vanishing. However, the problem inau-
gurated by Ghost Dog does not simply devolve on a failure at the level of
adaptation.
Inadequate to the conceptual force of the untimely, adaptation
presumes the dialectic as an optimal model for the judgment of life.
In other words, the concept of adaptation takes the antiproductive image
of synthesis as its exemplary case, territorializing difference in accord
with prior conditions for how a life might go. Adaptation as such is inad-
equate for the theorization of becomings “for the benefit of . . . a future”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 112). That is, the concept of adaptation is
ill suited to the creation of the unanticipated or untimely, insofar as it
already presumes the submission of potential becomings to prior states
of Being. Rife in institutional schooling, the concept of adaptation is a
corollary of reactivism in that it presumes how a pedagogical life will
unfold. As Davies (2005) asserts, contemporary neoliberal regimes require
a highly adaptable subject, yet such adaptability becomes horrific when
“we realize that we cannot afford to stop” (p. 9). In this reactive image of
pedagogical life, students learn to adapt their desires to those of the school,
in turn adopting the ready-made desiring-machines of the institution for
themselves.
The problematic introduced by Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai is not simply one in which the untimely figure of the twentieth-
century African-American Bushido fails to adapt to contemporary
cultural conditions. Indeed, Ghost Dog is a resilient and inventive
conceptual persona perfectly adapted to urban survival. Rather, Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai prepares the question of how adaptive
failure is concomitantly the affirmation of a creative modification that
escapes from prior circuits of thought. As a monstrous birth, Jarmusch’s
Ghost Dog might fail as an adaptation, but this failure is only the beginning
of its pedagogical import. Ghost Dog’s unsuccessful translation of the
samurai genre signals its inauguration of an untimely life irreducible

to a dialectics of adaptation. That is, while Jarmusch samples from the
politico-historical significance of the samurai film, Ghost Dog does not fall
back into history. Jarmusch nocks1 the samurai film like an arrow, firing
it along a new trajectory and into a new series of perplexions. In this vein,
Jarmusch experiments with the creation of an untimely life that introduces
a “dead time” or singularity into the present. Developing peripherally and
by way of a central breakdown, this life begins to diagram the emergence
of a potential war machine aimed against the strategies of limitation
particular to both State thinking and neoliberal economics (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1986).
Private and Public Thinkers
In an era of rapacious anti-intellectualism, the untimely assumes political

force. The untimely, Pinar (2004) conjectures, is characteristic of the kind
of scholar required in the field of curriculum theory today. Jettisoning
the conceit of an intellectual vanguard who knows better, and decrying
the thinker who labors in uncritical fidelity to the State, Pinar evokes
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) notion of the curriculum philosopher as
a private thinker. Opposed to the public professor who unquestioningly
adapts to the desiring-machines of the State, and hence ceases to think,
the private thinker confronts thought with counterthoughts “violent in
their acts, discontinuous in their appearance, and . . . mobile in history”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, p. 44). Yet, by Deleuze and Guattari’s own
admission, the private thinker is a poor expression. That is, while the
idea of privacy attests to solitude, the mode of solitude that Deleuze and
Guattari seek to evoke is populous and “interlaced with a people to come”
(p. 44). Against an image of the philosopher as a figure of pure interiority
then, the question posed by the private thinker is one of outside thought,
or rather, of placing thought in relation to the forces of the outside.2 In
this task, the private thinker does not aspire to adapt to the world as it is.
Rather, it might be said that the task of the private thinker is to mobilize
an experimental outside thought that allows one to pose the question of
how a life might go. It is in this vein that the private thinker mobilizes a
war machine (a circuit breaker) against the very models and images meant
to think on our behalf (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). The work of Deleuze is
significant in this manner, for the Deleuzian gesture is one that works to
ward off the formation of “schools” and their “methods.” Throughout his
work, Deleuze would neither belong to any particular school or found one,
insisting instead as an outside to encyclopedic thinking.
Jim Jarmusch is not, in any formal sense, a curriculum scholar. As

a private thinker,3 however, his work composes an untimely style for
thinking contemporary curriculum theory. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai, this untimely style begins with the question of death, or rather,
of how one might live once representational logic becomes inadequate
to the fabrication/fabulation of new social forces. Jarmusch’s answer, by
way of Ghost Dog, is to replace the problem of representation with the
Deleuzeguattarian (1987) notion of singularity. That is, Jarmusch’s Ghost
Dog no longer relies on a representational mirror image in its composition
of a life. Instead, his untimely compositional assemblage of eighteenth-
century feudal Japan and twentieth-century urban America fails to
conform to the figure of the speculum mundi or reflected face of the world.
In lieu of the mirror, the notion of singularity evokes the cartographic
registration of previously unthinkable forms. As Conley (2005) devel-
ops, fifteenth-century oceanic exploration of the Indies and Caribbean
led European explorers to abandon prior representations of the world.
Unable to think the diversity of encountered space through a prior image,
cosmographers shifted their practices to account and record “new shapes
of alterity and difference” (p. 252). In this vein, the cartographic regis-
tration of islands as unique points of variation became a corollary for
the recommencement of thought. Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai might be thought as one such island.
As a tactic for the conceptualization of currere (the course of a life) at
the end of the age of representation, Jarmusch’s filmic cartography is of
significant import for the field of curriculum theory. Dominated by the
epistemic topology of University Faculties, curricular categories, and the
continued reading of education philosophers in a certain way (curricular
foundations), the curriculum landscape has become the stratified site for
intensive practices of tracing (Gregoriou, 2008). That is, the curricu-
lum landscape has become in its most impoverished image just that—a
habitual image abstracted from a virtuality of potential cartographic
connections. Counterposed to mapping, tracing works by selection and
isolation, reproducing only the blockages, points of structuration, and
redundancies of the map itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In educational
circles, we continue to produce ourselves on the basis of movements and
circuits of organization that no longer correspond to our unique problems
(Deleuze, 1988). Rather, we continuously find ourselves working on the a
priori problems of the curriculum-as-plan. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai, however, Jarmusch is able to transpose tracings back onto the
map, composing a plane for an analysis of the potentials, unique points,
and blockages affecting a life.
Such a tactic is important for contemporary curriculum theory, for

it not only enables us to think the relationship of territories (tracings)
to their leakages (fuites), but further, allows tracings to enter into new
forms of relation that no longer fall back into habit. The task, Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) argue, “is to connect the roots or trees back up with the
rhizome . . . impasses must always be resituated upon the map, thereby
opening them up to possible lines of flight” (p. 14). Against the opposi-
tion of arborescence (tracing) and rhizomatics (an active mapping), the
two might be drawn into tactical assemblage such that tracing might be
made to stutter, or rather, to repeat with difference. Ostensibly, such a tac-
tic is intimate to the compositional plane of deejay turntablists, who plot
cartographic variations across the habitual grooves of vinyl records in the
production of original refrains.
The Unhomeliness of HΠoΠlΠeΠy Space
It is along such a cartographical plane of “stuttering” that Ghost Dog is

introduced. Through the inhuman perspective of a carrier pigeon, the film
opens with a sweeping diagram of the urban milieu. Floating across ship-
ping yards, power stations, subway lines, and highway junctions, the open-
ing scenes of Ghost Dog compose the urban milieu as both arborescent
(tracing) and rhizomatic (cartography). Put differently, the urban space
composed through the inhuman perspective of the carrier pigeon registers
the circuited routes of urban movement, those pathways of habitual trac-
ing that have come to stand in for the map itself. Yet, the becoming-pigeon
of the camera’s eye performs a registration of another kind. Creating a
plane of composition that assembles the traceable routes of urban move-
ment with the immanent potentials of the map, Ghost Dog’s germinal
scenes begin to diagram what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as holey
space, a space that communicates across both striated (organized) and
smooth (or deterritorialized/nomadic) spaces.
As the becoming-pigeon of the camera comes to rest at a rooftop
shanty, we learn that this is the holey space of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog. That
is, while Ghost Dog inhabits a dwelling within the striated corridors of the
urban milieu, this space is concomitantly off-the-grid, a superterranean
hole or gap punched from coded space. Yet, Ghost Dog’s composition of
holey space is perhaps more adequately sketched through “his” impercep-
tible movements under the protective cover of shadowed streets, derelict
housing projects and abandoned alleyways. In one significant opening
sequence, a hooded Ghost Dog utilizes such holey space in order to avoid
police detection. In a later scene, Jarmusch’s antihero utilizes the cover of
the forest as a staging point for his attack on an arm of the Italian mafia.4
It is in this vein that Ghost Dog enters into assemblage with a particular
use of holey space employed by guerilla armies and cyberspace hackers.
Utilizing the holey space of the forest and Internet respectively, such
underground movements mobilize gaps, voids, and protective cover in
order to evade the surveillance and military strategies of the State. It is in
a similar vein that the student drop out has become an anxious preoccupa-
tion of educational organizations, for in part, the drop out deflects the very
mechanisms of surveillance and permanent registration meant to work
upon and prefigure the subjectivity of the student(’s) body.
Holey space might hence be thought along two modes of liaison: one
rhizomatic, with its subterranean passages, gaps, and openings, and one
that is coded, traceable, and plugged (Swiboda, 2004). That is, while holey
space inheres in coded space, it concomitantly exploits all manner of
rhizomatic openings to sustain its underground becomings. Such under-
ground becomings are, in turn, “only imperfectly controlled by the state”
(Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 96). It is little surprise then to note the relation-
ship of youth dance, music (rave), and graffiti (bombing) movements with
such holey spaces as abandoned warehouses, subway tunnels, clandestine
radio, and Internet sites. While a threat to the State, the assemblage of such
spaces with various underground youth movements is a corollary of the
desire to escape the networks of surveillance that trace and capture social
leakages (fuites).
Against the metaphysics of presence particular to the Western logos,
holey space is closer to logocentrism’s ancient twin, loxos (a place of
ambush). Hidden from heaven (the transcendent powers of Ouranos),
loxos constitutes the staging point for the emergence of a “new race of
barbarians” set to arise to evacuate Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 217).
Significantly, loxos appears in Hesiod’s creation myth Theogeny, in which
the defilement of the Earth (Gaia) by Heaven (Ouranos) ends with Kronos
leaping from a place of ambush (loxos), castrating the unwelcome suitor
and separating Heaven from the body of the Earth (Lambert, 2005).
In this sense, loxos marks a conspiracy with the Earth to ward against
overcoding from above, a problematic Lambert gives contemporary
urgency when one considers “a new Heaven in the obese figure of global-
ization . . . who lies a little too heavily on the Earth and which internalizes
all desiring-production within its ever expanding body” (p. 224).
It is perhaps not surprising that Foucault’s (1979) genealogy on state
surveillance begins with the abandonment of the subterranean dungeon
in favor of the panoptic plane and public character of disciplinary surveil-
lance. “The panoptic mechanism,” Foucault writes, “reverses the principle
of the dungeon . . . to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide . . . [v]isibility
is a trap” (p. 200). The genealogy of surveillance begins with the formation
of a social machine that attempts to plug holey space (loxos) by bringing
bodies into the light and into a “small theater . . . in which each actor is . . .
constantly visible” and immediately recognizable (p. 200). As Foucault
(1979) documents, the problematic emergence of the plague during the
seventeenth century was met with a new social apparatus of ceaseless
investigation and permanent registration that in turn proliferated into the
disciplinary machinery of the prison, the hospital, the factory, and school.
Such disciplinary machinery, figured in the generalizable model of the
panopticon, functions by making hypervisible the behavior, movements,
and distributions of inmates, interns, workers, and students. “He who is
subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it . . . becomes principle of
his own subjection” (p. 203). It is in this sense that holey space enters into
antimony with the geopolitically striated space of the school—a space that
functions largely through processes of evaluative surveillance and record-
ing. A pedagogical life subtracted from pedagogy in general might hence
require the creation of holey space, that is, a conspiracy with the BwO of
the Earth that wards against the intervention of panoptic power while
preparing an antihouse (an anti-Oedipus) for an unanticipated body or
bodies-in-becoming.
Put differently, the task of creating a pedagogical life is not that of occu-
pying a ready-made plane or territorializing a new space in one’s name.
Rather, the task of creating a life might be thought as one whereby we learn
to occupy a plane in order to make it holey, that is, to introduce fractal5
contours upon its striated form, preparing the ground for the emergence
of a people yet to come. It is through the creation of a fractal social space
for example, that the life of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is able to emerge as a
productively nonnormal subjectivity, that is, a subject no longer denu-
merable along established patterns of signification. The problematic of
nondenumerability, or rather, Ghost Dog’s production of a countersignify-
ing regime is given expressive force throughout Jarmusch’s film. In one
particular scene, the Mafioso tasked with killing the hitherto impercep-
tible Ghost Dog anxiously speculate on his possible appearance, haplessly
depending on categories of molar identification (big and black) to profile
their mark. Following, the Mafioso strain to assign a recognizable identity
to a man that may or may not be Ghost Dog: “Yo, what the hell are you?”
one gangster queries, gun raised. “Cayuga” the man (Gary Farmer) rejoins.
“Cayuga, what the fuck is Cayuga?” the mobster spits with manifest con-
fusion. Significantly, the problem of nondenumerability introduced by
Ghost Dog leads the Mafiosi to perform a series of violent acts. Through
this, Jarmusch exposes the violent structure of molar (statistical) thought
and its inadequacy for the creation or explanation of a singular life. Put
differently, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai reveals the failure of iden-
titarian politics to think difference, and further, connect this failure to the
murder of difference itself. Jarmusch aptly conveys this in a scene wherein
Ghost Dog confronts two bear poachers who disclose their pleasure in kill-
ing such a “rare” animal. Jarmusch’s composition has its corollary in cur-
riculum studies, persisting in a form of institutional violence that seeks to
transform variations and ANOMALies into what exists or what we believe
it ought to be (Hwu, 1993).
The geopolitics of Ghost Dog emerge in the fractal space that commu-
nicates across both surveilled (striated) and derelict (smooth) urban space,
coded (streets, gated houses) and open space (public parks, the sky), and
identitarian (the closed ethnic space of the mafia) and nonidentitarian
space (figured through the hybrid ethnicity of Ghost Dog). Holey space
also figures in the fractal memory of Ghost Dog, who becomes-samurai
through the untimely writings of the Hagakure, affectively constituting a
fractal reality assembled from coded maxims of eighteenth-century Bushido
and the freestyle flows of hip-hop culture. Elsewhere the contour of fractal
memory is introduced by way of an allusion to the multiple percepts that
compose the events of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. In a time-image reveal-
ing the event precipitating Ghost Dog’s vow of fidelity to Mafioso Louie
(John Tormey), the audience is drawn into two differing recollection-
images. Evoking a brutal physical assault suffered in his youth, Ghost Dog
recalls Louie’s timely intervention, shooting the white assailants moments
prior to their would-be murder of Ghost Dog. In Louie’s recollection how-
ever, the assailants turn their weapons on the mobster, who guns them
down in self-defense.
The preparation of holey space in Ghost Dog creates a breach in the
world as it is, producing what Massumi (1992) calls “shreds of futu-
rity” (p. 105). That is, holey space is a preparatory zone for all kinds of
bodies-in-becoming. Breaking through by rendering striated space into
a slice of Swiss cheese, “holey space promises a way of welcoming, and
not evading, what Deleuze . . . calls ‘ . . . a life’” (Frichot, 2007, p. 170).
The challenge of creating a life is articulated by Frichot as the question
of how one might “pass on the inside as part of the striated, molar
organization, at the same time as maintaining a derelict or holey space
upon which the dominant order is not able to enforce its repressions
absolutely” (p. 176). Following Agamben (1998, 1999), it is a ques-
tion of how creative powers might be mobilized to allay the exertion
of biopower over life. This is a crucial question facing contemporary
curriculum theory in that it suggests that task of private curriculum
thinkers be oriented to creative practices of hollowing out or preparing
“regions of escape” (Frichot, 2007, p. 175).
Such practices might be seen in the pedagogical experiments of the

post-Situationist Institute for Applied Autonomy, Critical Arts Ensemble,
or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, each of which detour though other
fields of study in order to overcome false problems and introduce new ones.
That is, each punches a hole through the traditional plane of disciplinary
thought in order to produce mobile workshops for guerilla art practices.
For example, the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee project plots the
positions of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTC) throughout New
York, diagramming holey spaces of “least urban surveillance.” It is in this
vein that a curriculum theory oriented to the preparation of spaces for
bodies-in-becoming must desire the production of derelict cartographies
that aspire to neither the striation of space nor its absolute smoothing.
After all, even the smoothest spaces of desert and sea can be contemporar-
ily mapped by State satellites and spy planes. Instead, a pedagogical life
might be thought in a manner enjoined to the Deleuzeguattarian concept
of holey space as a conceptual force for thinking the itinerant’s creation of
temporary shelter.
Caveats on the Potential Dangers of Smooth (Uncoded) Space
The creation of holey space lies at the edge of Block’s (1998) vagabond
pedagogy insofar as it no longer submits to habitual practices of trac-
ing. While the vagabond might occupy striated space, “its” occupancy is
oriented to making such space flee, or rather, to the creation of a smooth
space for escape. However, a caveat on the vagabond’s engagement with the
absolute limit of deterritorialization must be posed. In the contemporary
geopolitical order, resistance via practices of wandering and lostness have
entered into conjunction with State mechanisms of control. As Deleuze
(1992) develops, such synoptic modes of surveillance as the closed-circuit
camera, bank card, internet tracking software, and satellite mapping function
to capture social wandering. “The conception of a control mechanism, giv-
ing the position of any element within an open environment at any given
instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an
electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction” (p. 7).
Such a shift extends to the educational institution, the organization
of which is no longer predicated on the strict segmentation of sites or
practices. Today, the educational apparatus has been smoothed through the
introduction of an economy of transfer credits, transferable degrees, and the
creation of University entrance programs at the high school level. Perfectly
adapted for a society of control, the exchange values of such institutional
passwords effectively produce new forms of educational organization that
collapse with the forces of market economy. Cut-off from the arboreal
telos of graduation as its ostensible “root,” contemporary education is
revisioned within the market’s model of flexibility, incompleteness, and
modulation (Gregoriou, 2008). Within this model, “education mutates
into an open system . . . of training . . . where one is always in debt in the
sense that one is never finished with anything” (p. 102). It is in this way
that the commodification of education is itself rhizomatic (smooth). That
is, the commodification of contemporary education is characterized by the
often-valorized notions of perpetual becoming, interminable prolongation,
and recommencement. It is along such lines that institutional education has
been reterritorialized as a project of lifelong learning, permanent retrain-
ing, and ongoing evaluative and performative registration aptly organized
within the interminable pedagogical project of “learning how to learn.” As
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert, the production of smooth or decoded
spaces do not have innate libratory qualities. Ostensibly, the commodifica-
tion of education desires both to attract and produce vagabonds, subjects
constantly on the move for whom new forms of flexible training and reg-
istration (educational “services”) can be continuously mobilized.
Under threat of capture, vagabond practices must be made to resonate
with both striated and rhizomatic space. This point of resonance might be
figured in the shelter of holey space, one that constitutes a temporary tacti-
cal site for resistance. Artist cells like the para-academic O(rphan)d(rift>),
underground ®™ark collective, and such noninstitutional academic
“concept engineers” as Sadie Plant’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
begin to diagram such holey space. In these instances, holey space takes
on another dimension as a tactical staging point for the punctuation of
habitual thought and action, plotting lines of escape against “the necrotic
side of [thought]” and powers of “institutional lockdown” that inspired
Plant to recreate herself as a freelance academic (Eshun and Plant as cited
in Reynolds, 2008, p. 178).
A Holey Space for Ghosts, Dogs, and other ANOMALs
The question mobilized in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog extends from the

Deleuzeguattarian concept of holey space. Specifically, Ghost Dog: The Way
of the Samurai experiments with the creation of a life resonant with both
striated and rhizomatic forces. This experiment is most profoundly fig-
ured in Ghost Dog’s communication with Tsunemoto’s Hagakure. Through
the Hagakure, Ghost Dog enters into relation with the strict feudal precepts
of Bushido, creating an untimely way of life out of step with contempo-
rary identity politics. Becoming-samurai, Ghost Dog performs ritualized
meditation, trains in martial warfare, and practices the maxims of the

Hagakure in his itinerant work as retainer for mafia capo, Louie (John
Tormey). However, while in communication with the coded maxims of the
Hagakure and the martial ways of Bushido, Ghost Dog is concomitantly a
proficient code-breaker.
Early in the film, Ghost Dog uses an electronic device for hacking car
alarms and ignition assemblies. In a later scene, he purloins a suit, swaps
the license plates of his stolen vehicle, and impersonates a real estate
agent in order to gain access to the mafia’s country hideout. Elsewhere,
Ghost Dog is portrayed as breaking from the semiotic code of both Bloods
(reds) and Crips (blues), producing untimely affiliations that escape the
production of an enemy necessary for the function of the State mili-
tary apparatus. Instead, Ghost Dog’s radicalism stems in part from “his”
ability to “communicate” across oppositional forces in the production
of relations not predicated upon the necessity of either friends (strong
affiliations) or enemies (overcoding). Significantly, Ghost Dog and his best
friend, Raymond the Haitian ice-cream vendor (Issach de Bankolé), can-
not understand a word each other say. That is, their relationship does not
devolve on the privileged status of “intelligible” or representational modes
of communication.
Such incidents of code-breaking are not separate from the strict mar-
tial code of Bushido, but instead, are unique to Ghost Dog’s practice of
the Hagakure itself. For example, Ghost Dog’s use of social and envi-
ronmental camouflage is precipitated by Tsunetomo’s (1979) maxim:
“It may happen that when one is sobering up or waking from sleep,
his complexion may be poor. At such a time it is good to take out and
apply some powdered rouge” (p. 75). Tsunetomo’s instruction on the
obfuscation of one’s appearance is mobilized by Ghost Dog in order to
hack identity and gain proximity to the mob’s fortified hideout. In another
scene, Tsunetomo’s teaching that one should live as though already
dead precipitates Ghost Dog’s spectral urban movements. Throughout
the course of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, the coded maxims of Hagakure
are brought into relation with their code-breaking potentials, hence
disrupting the oppositional conceptualization of coded (arborescent)
and noncoded (rhizomatic) forces. Instead, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog creates
a holey space that communicates with the maxims of Hagakure while
concomitantly producing its teratological difference. Giving Tsunetomo’s
Hagakure a monstrous birth within a new milieu, Jarmusch practices
what might be called an ethics of betrayal,6 giving that which can only
be stolen (Deleuze, 1990). As Derrida (2003) contends, fidelity to either
a thinker or thought has nothing to do with tracing or following. Rather,
to follow “in the most demanding and authentic way . . . implies the
‘anacol,’ the ‘not-following,’ the break in the following, in the company so

to speak” (p. 7).
The Untimely and Unhomely: Toward the geopedagogical

creation of a life
Ghost Dog emphases the composition of a currere through the assem-

blage of remarkable or unique,7 rather than general or global, points.
Such an assemblage might be dubbed geopedagogical, a concept intimate
to Deleuze’s (2004) notion of the problem. As Deleuze writes, we have
been led to believe that problems emerge ready-made, only to disappear
through the formulation of responses or solutions. This illusion, Deleuze
avers, is evident in “the grotesque image of culture we find in examina-
tions and government referenda,” where we are consoled or distracted
into the belief that “we have won simply by being able to respond”
(p. 197). In this infantalizing scenario, we are continually caught working
on problems that come from elsewhere, set by a master who accreditates
our solutions as true or false. Deleuze reverses the flow of this problem-
solution binary rampant in educational thought. “[E]very solution poses
a problem,” Deleuze recounters (p. 215). Following, the actualization of
a solution does not exterminate the problem, or in the case of geopeda-
gogy, the potential for a people to both possess and determine the value
of problems. It is in this vein that the concept of geopedagogy might be
thought as a site for the fabrication of problems unequal those prejudged
important by the State, media, or common sense of the public (doxa).
Yet, as previously stated, such problems cannot simply be reduced to the
actual, to solutions, or responses. For example, while the problem of how a
life might go marks an “indispensible [challenge] without which no solu-
tion would ever exist,” the problem remains irreducable to any particular
solution (p. 215). Simply put, problems do not resemble their solutions.
As such, the challenge for curriculum theory is to think the geopedagogi-
cal as a compositional holey space that remains immanent to the virtual
problem of how a pedagogical life might go (currere). Put differently,
the geopedagogical composition of holey space might be thought as a
slice, unequally linked, yet resonant with the problematic of currere—a
problematic that cannot be fully represented, grasped, or registered in
its multiplicity. It is in relation to this multiplicity however, that the
geopedagogical character of holey space becomes a way of imagining the
problem of how a life might go, actualizing singular assemblages capable
of stuttering or “perplexing” those majoritarian images of life composed
by “Royal geography.”
While Royal geographers8 or State-sponsored researchers trace the “the

boundaries of empires, revealing the best ways to colonize and educate,
to establish transportation and communication networks, and to wage
wars,” such minor geographers as Krapotkin and Reclus worked for the
creation of a new earth (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 91). Such movements
might be traced in contemporary curriculum scholarship, revealing the
work of a “Royal geopedagogy” oriented to the broad mapping of dis-
ciplinary boarders, the organization of the field into warring territories,
and the tracing of heavily surveilled historical and philosophical passages.
Such Royal geography is of little interest to Jarmusch, whose filmic work
takes seriously a minor geography sensitive to both local and translocal
potentials. By extension, what might be called the geopedagogical force
of Jarmusch’s work is oriented to that which is overlooked or disregarded
by the State. It is in this vein that Jarmusch’s composition of the untimely
urban Bushido, the anachronistic organizations that multiply within the
city, and the antimodernism of feudal thought constitute a geopedagogy
that prepares a new Earth, that is, new potentials for creation and creative
action (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The kinds of minor geographies pro-
duced by Jarmusch offer “numerous solutions to complex problems that
the apparatus of capture of the State, or transnational development orga-
nizations, [tend] to interfere with or parasitize more than improve upon”
(Bonta & Protevi, 2004, pp. 91–92). Hence, an active geopedagogy might
be linked with the formation of holey space or heterogenic galleries, the
very minor geographies overlooked by the desiring-machines of the Royal
geopedagogue, whose project is fettered to practices of tracing, striating
the disciplinary field into strict determinations, and severing the actual
from its virtual potentials for becoming.
Borrowing from Holland (2006), the distinction between Royal and
minor geopedagogy might be put differently. As a corollary of the Fordian
influence upon educational thought, Royal geopedagogy is oriented not
only to a certain constancy of design, but further, to the conformity of
its elements to a priori models of organization. In other words, Royal
geopedagogy might be thought as the reactive desire to fetter pedagogi-
cal life to prior circuits of design, whether specified disciplinary borders,
identitarian politics, or the public professor’s duty to reify State thought.
Proceeding through the extraction of constants, Royal geopedagogy func-
tions by tracing, reproducing an image of pedagogical life “above” the
variations or singularities of a milieu. This form of geopedagogy, one
that functions via the organization of potential becomings into recogniz-
able and manageable forms, has a storied history in curriculum studies,
extending from the “promise of order, organization . . . error correction . . .
expertise, and progress” in Tyler (1949), and the ostensible political and
ethical neutrality of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy (Cherryholmes, 1988, p. 26).

Yet, the problematic of identitarian and State thought in education is not
simply a historical one. As Davies (2005) avers, the reconceptualist move-
ment occurring in many universities today functions to revive old hopes,
ideals, identity politics, and images of pedagogical life under the guise
of radical political change. For Davies, such reterritorialization marks
the reactive tendency of contemporary education and the implicit desire
to reinvigorate grand narratives under the guise of progressivism.
The problematic introduced by contemporary education is not sim-
ply limited to the instrumental desire to halt difference according to
the homogenizing machinery of Tyler’s structuralist rationale, Bloom’s
taxonomic organization of the “real,” or Schwab’s (1970) practical treatise
on the “correction” of the curriculum under the surveillance of external
experts. Under neoliberalism, Royal geopedagogy is no longer solely fet-
tered to structural overdetermination. Rather, the problematic of contem-
porary geopedagogy is introduced by way of its decoded recruitment into
capitalist systems of exchange. Such a shift is figured in the move toward
greater individual choice and responsibility, audit-driven surveillance and
its intimate relation to funding, the corporate privatization of schools,
and the smoothing of education through the requirement of permanent
retraining and rhetorics of lifelong learning. While it is necessary that cur-
riculum theory continue to labor against the structuralist legacy and reac-
tive tendencies of pedagogical thought, contemporary curricularists must
concomitantly avoid fixating on a structuralist foil that is increasingly
disappearing. Insofar as it produces a holey space of tensionality between
the strict codes of feudal society and the decoding of flows in capitalist society,
Ghost Dog thinks the way modern society does and is caught between these
two poles of desire, one paranoiac and the other, schizophrenic.9
Paranoiac Fixing and Schizophrenic Release:

The Significance of Social Flows
Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) argue that society subsists through the
restriction or structuration of movements or flows. Such flows are not
simply economic, that is, they do not exclusively pertain to the circulation
and exchange of money and commodities particular to economics. Rather,
the way social formation subsists through the restriction and structure of
its flows might be seen at a variety of levels, from the movement of people
and traffic in the city, the flow of words within a discourse, flows of infor-
mation in the media, flows of genetic material in industrialized farming,
and flows of matter in energy and manufacturing sectors (Roffe, 2005).
As Deleuze and Guattari develop, the basic principal of precapitalist society

is to restrict and structure such flows, hence producing particular, “coded”
images of life. While giving stability to particular social organ-izations,
the restriction of flows in precapitalist society concomitantly functions to
constrict potential ways a life might go. However, such precapitalist pro-
cesses of restriction and coding are critical insofar as they constitute the
basis upon which to challenge State thought. Put differently, it is against
the limiting codes of conduct, rules, regulations, and laws of an age that
concepts might be mobilized to their greatest material affect.
The necessary restriction and structuration of flows by a particular sig-
nifying regime is no less important for curriculum scholarship, which has
productively mobilized a diverse array of alternative discourses in response
to the overdeterminations of State thought. Curriculum theorizing has
produced new codes for reterritorializing overdetermined social flows into
new, and presumably less oppressive organ-izations. However, a tendency
persists in curriculum scholarship to take as its fundamental antithesis the
structuration and restriction of flows particular to precapitalist society.
This tendency orbits a dubious double illusion. That is, it risks asserting
a structuralist foundation for all social formations, assuming that orga-
nization is a transcendent formation beneath, behind, or beyond society.
The error of this illusion lies in its separation of molar (arborescent) and
molecular (rhizomatic) forces, or rather, the severance of actual from vir-
tual forces. Such an illusion denies the immanent tension (tonos) of order
“that at once moves toward fixation of thoughts, action and passions, and
simultaneously dissolves this fixation, then becoming a structural prin-
ciple of a different nature” (Fuglsang & Sorensen, 2006, p. 7).
In Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, such tonos is sketched through the way the
ordered “code” of Bushido enters into differential relation with other
organizations (the mafia, the itinerant emcee, the dog pack), constituting
a social order that is composed through the “machining” of unique lines
(fuites) rather than immutable or universal points. Simply, the social orga-
nizations that mark the topography of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog are composed
in a process of leakage10 and becoming. The death of Ghost Dog is hence
neither the beginning nor the end, but rather, a line that grows from the
middle of a new organizational becoming. Holey spaces continue to be
carved from the milieu in a discontinuous series, preparing the ground for
the emergence, delinkage, and linkage of new social forces.
What the reification of a transcendent structuralism denies is the
formation of a new social machine that no longer functions by way
of coding social flows. That is, curriculum theorizing fettered to the
habitual production of a structural foil risks disregarding the emergence
of new organizations that eschew the overdetermination of social flows.
Insofar as curriculum theory conflates the destruction of codes to either

the freedom of the subject or commencement of a radical ethics, its
project might produce a line of flight corollary to that of the capital-
ist apparatus. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), capitalism
is no longer a regime that works by coding and overcoding the socius.
While primitive social machines controlled flows of social desire through
restriction, attributing specific meaning to social life, despotic regimes
controlled social desire through overcoding, spiritualizing meaning via
its conflation with the definition of the “good society.” The capitalist
apparatus however, functions as an exception to both primitive and des-
potic regimes of coding. Simply, the capitalist apparatus works not qua
coding but by deterritorializing social flows through practices of decod-
ing. In this instance, decoding does not intimate practices of deciphering
or perception, but the literal subtraction of the code itself (Buchanan,
2008a). In place of the code, capitalism mobilizes an axiomatic. In its
mathematical definition, the axiom is an improvable statement, yet
one that works to fix and implicitly define the organization of “basic
elements.” Put differently, the axiom is a form of social organization,
and more specifically, one that functions to organize and regulate social
flows of desire. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop, the axiom
is not a self-evident truth. Rather, the axiom is an effect of its models
of realization. For example, as modern mathematicians have developed,
Euclidian geometry is not a self-evident truth, but rather, a model of the
axiom’s realization (the realization by which we “see” Euclid everywhere
in the world). The capitalist axiomatic is produced through the model
of the market, which seeks to accumulate instances of its realization in
every sphere of the socius. More specifically, the realization of a capitalist
axiomatic, that is, the realization of capitalism as a self-evident truth, is
produced through the conjunction of social flows (use-value, taste, raw
materials, labor-power, and technology, etc.) under the profit-motive
model of the market. Indeed, the fundamental gesture of the capitalist
axiomatic is realized in the modern conjoinment of a surplus labor force
and “liquid wealth no longer embodied in landed property” (Holland,
1999, p. 67). Significantly, it is via the conjoinment or reterritorialization
of decoded social flows upon the body of the market that the capitalist
axiomatic is realized. Yet, the processes of conjoinment effected by the
market retain flexibility through their erasure of the connection between
symbolic social codes and their territory. The capitalist axiom is not
only flexible, but is capable of displacing its external limits to accom-
modate new subject positions and forms of social organization. It is in
this vein that the capitalist axiom has “multiple realizability,” emerging
as the effect of such diverse models as American neoliberalism, the social
democracy of France, socialist Yugoslavia, and the “anarcho-capitalism”

of Pinochet’s Chile (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 58).
While precapitalist regimes functioned to capture and recode deter-
ritorialized flows, axiomatization empties social flows of their particular
meanings and context, rendering them fluid and exchangeable. For exam-
ple, the precapitalist coding of libidinal flows in the sanctioned circuits of
marriage, the church, and morality, have been decoded in capitalist society
(Roffe, 2005). Sex in capitalist society is tied to neither the coded rite of
marriage or religious morality. Instead, sex has become diffuse and ambi-
ent, enabled by its decoding to enter into alternate figurations restricted by
precapitalist regimes of coding. An educational corollary of this scenario is
evident in the ways that knowledge, once coded within highly specialized
apprenticeships and singularized markets, has become decoded across the
World Wide Web. Through such decoding, once contextual or clandestine
knowledge is made available in radically different locales, times, and spaces
(Buchanan, 2006) . Further, while knowledge was tethered to its utilitar-
ian purpose in precapitalist regimes, the capitalist apparatus functions
to produce knowledge itself. No longer fettered to utilitarian use-value,
contemporary practices of decoding have produced a knowledge society
that works via massively complex and instantaneous clouds of information
rather than coded or linear pathways of information exchange.
In capitalism, the axiomatic functions by rendering social flows arbi-
trary and evacuating the symbolic or contextual significance of social
practices, rituals, or rites. It is in this sense that capitalism suspends exter-
nal limits insofar as limits intimate the function of codes upon the restric-
tion and organization of social flows. Following, the capitalist axiomatic
produces a law of general equivalence through the collapse of social flows
with the realm of monetary valuation. Put differently, the commodifi-
cation of social flows under capitalism requires that they become fluid
through decoding. The commodification of sex for example, requires that
its umbilical connection to social practices of courtship and marriage first
be decoded. That is, sex cannot be commodified if fettered to particular
social contexts or restrictive codes prescribing its availability and/or access.
Instead, the axiomatization of sex under capitalism renders it equivalent to
monetary valuation, priming conditions for the sale of sex as an ambient
commodity.
We are in the midst of a radical reconceptualization of the educational
project under the law of general equivalency, where education becomes
correlative to forms of monetary valuation. Such a law of generalized
equivalency has infected the desire of much contemporary educational
research, which finds its purpose increasingly fettered to its potential
for monetary valuation through the conferral of grants and awards.
The law of general equivalency leads to a critical insight on the function of

contemporary capitalism. While eschewing the external limits that would
restrict its fluid proliferation, capitalism maintains an internal limit in the
axiom. More specifically, while social flows are released into a vertiginous
cloud of exchange, the internal limit of such exchange is fettered to the
nucleus of its filiative potential to produce capital. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1983) remark, the internal limit of capitalism is that which “maintains
the energy of . . . flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius
that is deterritorialised, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any
other” (p. 267).
Give Me Freedom or Give Me Death: Paranoia,

Schizophrenia11 and Education
To understand the complex management, channeling, and production of

social desire, Buchanan (2008a) avers, we must first understand how the
economic social apparatus orchestrates the “new [arrangements] of filia-
tion and alliance” figured in the law of general equivalency (p. 108). The
analysis of social desire as a production of banking figures largely in the
Freirean (2002, 2004) version of Marxism. Specifically, Freire’s banking
concept of education critiques the organization of pedagogical life in the
image of accumulation, deposit, manageability, and adaptation to prior
social structures. In short, the Freirean (2002) critique extends from the
reactive image of pedagogical life captured within the structuralist logic of
banking. It is in this vein that Freire correlates educational oppression with
the moribund limitation of social flows. For example, under the banking
concept of education, Freire argues that the student becomes a passive
depository for the reception and collection of institutionalized communi-
qué. In the banking model, flows of exchange are strictly circuited, emanat-
ing from a dominant minority, relayed via the teacher-as-bank-clerk and
inscribed upon the body of the student. Such communiqué are in turn sub-
ject to strict regulation, hence ensuring that the knowledge-capital of the
classroom accord to an image of life ascribed by a managerial elite. Simply,
the banking concept of education is premised on the overdetermination
of social flows. Freire dubs this image of pedagogical life both necrophilic
and mechanical. Overdetermining desire through educative practices that
demand the conformity of desire to restrictive circuits of production
and exchange, Freire’s critique of the banking model marks a becoming-
reactive of education. It is against the banking concept of education
articulated in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed that much antioppressive
curriculum scholarship continues to locate its political task of liberation.
To take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) emphasis on the pro-

duction of desire, curriculum theory must also necessarily grapple with
the social machinery being engendered by the capitalist apparatus. More
specifically, curriculum theory must begin to unfold the significance of
its project in relation to a social apparatus that no longer functions as a
machine of coding or restriction. Put differently, the challenge of think-
ing a curricular life is not simply forestalled by the neodespotic powers
of the State, but perhaps more significantly, perplexed by the production
of decoded social flows under capitalism. Such perplexion is significant
insofar as it parallels the task of much contemporary curriculum and
arts-based theorizing. Specifically, while the production of artistic novelty,
“rhizomes”,12 and deterritorialized sign systems function to ward against
the formation of the despotic apparatus described by Freire, such strate-
gies bear a peculiar fidelity to the desire of the capitalist social machine.
Capitalism functions by eradicating external limits, requiring the novelty
and invention produced through decoded social flows and deterritorial-
ized chains of signification. As Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) write,
the primary movement of capitalism is “one of destratification and deter-
ritorialization: freeing desire from the social . . . codes which have been
placed on it, and liberating it from the territorial . . . boundaries which
have enclosed it” (p. 15). It is in this vein that capitalism thrives on the
projects of crisis, contradiction, and complexity lauded in much “libra-
tory” curriculum thought. Further, the valorization of incompleteness in
much arts-based theorizing functions as an ideal corollary for a market
economy no longer premised on enclosure, but rather, the production of
interminable debt.
The neoliberal capitalist apparatus does not fear difference, but rather,
fears its cessation. “Social machines feed off ‘the contradictions they give
rise to, on the crisis they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on
the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and
has ceased doubting itself ” (Deleuze & Guattari cited in Buchanan, 2008b,
p. 30). Rather than curtailing differences that would feed mechanisms of
production, the contemporary capitalist social apparatus operates as a
“difference engine” poised to parasite and render consumable a trajectory
of thinking oriented to the destruction of external or coded social flows.
As Braidotti (2008) writes, “capitalism has . . . reduced all counter-cultures
to objects of commodified consumption and re-established a conservative
ethos that spells the death of all experimentations aimed at transformative
changes” (p. 142).
Contemporary society is caught between two poles. Born on the
deterritorialized ruins of the despotic machine, society oscillates “between
the Urstaat that [it] would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and
reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that [carries it] toward
an absolute threshold” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 282/309). In part,
Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is sketched in the fold of these social poles, drawn
between the rigorous code of the Hagakure and decoded flows of iden-
tity, space, and time that compose “his” life. The mafia that appear in
Ghost Dog are composed within a similar tensional fold, caught between
their highly coded organizational order and their immanent displace-
ment (deterritorialization) by rising capitalist forces and global criminal
enterprise.
It might be ventured that contemporary curriculum studies is also in
the midst of grappling with this problematic. Specifically, the field con-
tinues to struggle with its highly coded and restricted formations through
the creation of schizzes that release desire along productive lines of escape.
Such movement inheres the curriculum reconceptualist movement of
the 1970’s, which mobilized a series of schizzes against the overcoded
(structuralist, instrumental, and inherently behavioral) image of the field
(Schwab, 1983). Through the production of a complicated and multi-
perspectival curriculum conversation, the reconceptualists of the 1970’s
worked to ward against the protraction of a despotic image, decoding
the sedimented territories of the field along a myriad of discursive lines
(Cherryholmes, 1988). While each of these lines ostensibly reterritorial-
ized desire into a multiplicity of curricular orientations (autobiographical,
Marxist, phenomenological, existential, etc.), emancipation from fascist
overcoding persisted as their common political characteristic. It is in a
similar vein that the postreconceptualist movement’s engagement with
postmodernity, poststructuralism, and posthumanism has produced schiz-
zes to ward the against the overdetermination of curriculum disciplinarity
and the problematic of humanism in an age of proliferating media and
machine-human interfaces.
It is in this vein that the field of curriculum studies might be thought
in a way that is continuously caught between paranoia (archaism and
neoarchaism) and schizophrenia (futurism and exfuturism). This matrix
is evident in much contemporary curriculum theory oriented to the
paranoiac fabulation of stable codes or immutable organizations beneath
or beyond the capitalist axiom; a paranoiac movement that in turn
functions as a foil for the production of schizophrenic desiring-production.
This tendency marks the project of the social justice agenda, which often
begins with the production of a coded image of life that it seeks to redress.
Such a movement should not be surprising, for schizzes assume their
greatest disruptive potential when fulminated against the fixity of social
codes (Holland, 1998). As Jackson (1980, 1981) articulated of the 1970’s
reconceptualist movement, the “curriculum revolution” would emerge
through the fabulation of curriculum studies as a moribund field exhibit-

ing all the symptoms of a system on the brink of death.
The “thanatotic fantasy” to which Jackson (1980) alludes marks the
paranoiac pole of reconceptualism (pp. 174–175). That is, what Jackson
unconsciously describes in his criticism of reconceptualism is the very
condition in which modern society is caught. Specifically, the paranoiac
image of the curriculum field as a hypertrophied and overcoded body is
what allows the radical forces of schizophrenic desiring-production its
most vital shock to thought. That is, by schizzing behavioral psychology,
Fordian instrumentalism, and curricular “foundations,” curricularists
were able to create links with new areas of inquiry, social problematics,
and images of pedagogical life. Yet, such schizzes relied on the image of
curriculum as a dead field and hence, the production of a paranoiac pole
against which the reconceptualists would wage a war of vitality, that is, of
releasing desiring-flows into organization with other theories, philoso-
phies, and genealogies.
Significantly, the reconceptualist movement of the 1970’s begins to dis-
sipate at the very moment when the paranoiac pole of the “traditional cur-
riculum” began to lo(o)se its cohesion. In the wake of this dispersed pole,
the schizo-lines of the reconceptualist movement begin to reterritorialize,
albeit never conclusively, into coded organizations. As Pinar, Reynolds,
Slattery, and Taubman (2000) write, in the wake of reconceptualism, the
curriculum field began to coalesce around developmental, back-to-the-
basics, standardized and behaviorist images of pedagogical life. Put differ-
ently, the desiring-flows released by the reconceptualist movement were
entrapped within new forms of social coding, reterritorializing on the
paranoiac pole of modernity and the assumption of stable organizations
beneath schizophrenic desiring-production. Of course, such reterritori-
alizations are never decisive, but function to ward against revolutionary
schizz-flows by paranoically inscribing them within coded circuits of
thought and organ-ization.
Warding against the formation of an overcoded social body, schizo-
phrenia produces a myriad of social flows ranging from the revolution-
ary (affirmative, untimely, vital) to the “dead-end” (suicidal, murderous,
obliviated). The kinds of schizz-flows produced through the decoding of
desire must, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advocate, be entered into
carefully. For contemporary curricularists, such care must attend to the
ways in which the attempt to produce schizzes might be parasited by the
capitalist apparatus and realized in its model of labor-profit organization.
Equally, contemporary curricularists should take care to “root out” those
acts of desiring-production that simply occlude the stealthy reinstate-
ment of paranoiac or overcoded images of life. This strategy pervades the
so-called reconceptualization of the university, wherein the image of

political and organizational progressivism functions to mask old ideals
and habits of thought.
While paranoia functions to produce stable social structures, codes, and
restrictions, schizophrenic desiring-productions destratify territorialized
codes through the production of lines of flight. Rather than conceptual-
izing the poles of paranoia and schizophrenia as an antagonistic binary
pair however, Deleuze and Guattari develop a way of thinking practices
of coding and decoding as symbiotic movements in global capitalism.
As previously developed, capitalism substitutes an axiomatic in place of
rigorous social codes, desiring the decoding of external limits in lieu of
uninterrupted socioeconomic flows figured in the capitalist ideal of “a
deterritorialized global marketplace.” However, while capitalism desires
the decoding of external limits, it must maintain an internal limit that ren-
ders social flows equivalent to profitability and calculability for that profit.
Simply, under capitalism, socials flows must be made equivalent to flows
of money and profit. It is in this vein that while capitalism posits a revolu-
tionary departure from despotic regimes, it is concomitantly “defined by a
cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror
having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983, p. 373). In short, the violence of capitalism operates through a rig-
orous axiomatic that functions to submit desiring-flows to profit-value.
Under despotic regimes, the subject is indebted to the sovereign with his or
her life, submitting to the meanings that arise from the sovereign “because
it is to him that all debt is owed” (Holland, 1998, p. 67). Capitalism, on
the other hand, supplants the position of the sovereign without dispens-
ing stable meaning or restricting social flows. “Capitalism is . . . owed an
infinite debt, but what is owed is merely one’s work, one’s qualified labor-
power rather than one’s life” (p. 67).
This turn is palpable in contemporary education, where the student’s
fidelity to the meanings produced by the teacher-as-master have been suc-
ceeded by the institutional demand for ceaseless production, giving rise to
a “meaningless calculus” of hyperactive overproduction. In this scenario,
pedagogical life becomes fettered to its capacity for stimulating intermi-
nable channels of production and consumption. Hence, the problematic
of capitalism is not primarily, as Naomi Klein suggests, the restriction of
rights to build our own schools and manage our communities, but rather,
the way in which “the axiomatic is able to treat all forms of organization
in its model of realisation” (Buchanan & Parr, 2006, p. 11). However, the
capitalist axiomatic cannot circuit all desiring-flows to its profit-driven
motive. That is, while capitalism works to schizz coded flows of social
desire, the schizz concomitantly marks a threat to axiomatization.13
The Threat of Schizophrenia
Inhering the deterritorializing desire of capitalism is also the potential of

its undoing. That is, capitalism does not succeed in submitting all desiring-
flows to its axiomatic profit-value. “In the process of multiplying flows of
decoded desire, [capitalism] cannot help but also produce flows of desire
that escape; flows which, instead of moving in line with capitalism, go
against it, or run off in other direction” (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007,
p. 15). It is in this event that capitalism requires the very apparatus it sub-
mits to practices of decoding. Against the escaping desires of revolution-
ary movements, madness, and terrorism, capitalism requires the coding
machines of the State. It is in this vein that prisons, hospitals, schools, the
media, and law capture those desiring-productions that bypass the internal
axiomatic limit of capitalism, “turning revolutionaries into the criminal,
the disorderly, the social outcast, the insane” (p. 16). For capitalism to sub-
mit schizophrenic desiring-production to its labor-profit-driven axiom-
atic, it must maintain the axiomatic as its internal limit. While decoding
the limits of the socius, capitalism requires that its deterritorialized flows
are brought into equivalence with capital itself. In turn, those schizz-flows
which threaten to destabilize the rigorous internal axiomatic of capital-
ism are oedipalized, hence “neutralizing the threat of schizophrenia to the
capitalist machine’s absolute limit” (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 116).
Specific to curriculum theorizing and the Freirean inspired work of
antioppressive educators, the Marxist law of the counteracting tendency
might be contemporarily understood in terms of paranoia and schizophre-
nia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). While the State apparatus persists in such
highly organized forms as banking education, disciplinary “foundations,”
and grassroots back-to-the-basics movements, such archaism has a “per-
fectly modern function,” working to establish a “neoterritoriality” against
the threat of schizophrenia (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 115). Alternatively, it is
against the neodespotic powers of the modern State figured in such cod-
ing apparati as the school that much contemporary curriculum theorizing
is oriented to the production of an ex-futurity that wards against fascism.
Vacillating between the poles of paranoia and schizophrenia however,
the schizo-desires of neoliberalism is an equally “modern” movement that
reterritorializes desire within particular, albeit flexible and differentiat-
ing models of realization. For example, while much libratory curriculum
theorizing has sought to release subjectivity from oppressive models of
organization, such movement often reterritorializes the subject within an
axiomatic of identity, fettering potentials for becoming to the ostensibly
diverse individual as a primary model of realization/possibility. Similarly,
while the tyranny of racism, homophobia, and sexism continue to be
critical topics in the curriculum field, their deterritorialization risks reter-

ritorializing in molar categories of identity (white, black, male, female),
effectively warding off a nonrepresentational and nonunitary schizo-
analysis of race, gender, and genealogy.14 In other words, while practices
of decoding might produce important diversities, multiplicities, and
novelties, such practices must attend to their lines of flight and further,
the modes of realization in which desiring-flows are recaptured. The con-
temporary conjunction of desiring-production with the axiom of new age
spiritualism, sovereign individualism, and a priori gendered experience
pose botched lines of escape already recaptured by a paranoiac belief in
inherent universal meaning, insistent ontological models, and the anthro-
pocentric conceptualization of life.
Between Terrorism and Nihilism
A pedagogical caveat on desire not dissimilar from a contemporary

consideration of paranoia and schizophrenia appears in the Daignault’s
(1992) essay entitled Traces at Work from Different Places. In it, Daignault
articulates a dual Western philosophical tendency that enters into rela-
tion with contemporary education. Daignault dubs this dual tendency
terrorism and nihilism. For Daignault, terrorism is a corollary of coding
that extends from the Platonic conceptualization of knowledge as a hunt.
In education, terrorism is figured in the desire to know too soon and
hence, to submit difference to identity. It is in this vein that terrorism
enters into relation with the paranoiac desire to territorialize meaning.
Overcoding desire within an identitarian image of thought, terrorism
arranges desiring-flows into stable patterns easily submitted to practices
of educational “delivery,” testing, and standardized outcomes. Perhaps a
more insidious aspect of terrorism, however, is its paranoiac reinsertion
of Truth persisting beyond difference. This movement effectively reinstates
a transcendent philosophy in which the paranoiac arrangement of desire
prevails over what occupies it (Deleuze, 2004). That is, within Daignault’s
conceptualization of terrorism, the desiring-production immanent to
a pedagogical life is reterritorialized upon prior coded flows, effectively
rendering any deviation either accidental or different by degrees from an
a priori image of how pedagogical life ought to go. It is in this vein that
the overcoded character Daignault accords to philosophical and peda-
gogical terrorism is tantamount to murder. Put differently, as a corollary
of the paranoiac desire to “fix” social flows according to rigorous codes,
Daignault’s concept of terrorism functions to ward against heterodoxy
and lines of escape, restricting such flows by tracing them upon the coded
body of the socius. While terrorism works to capture desiring-flows within

strict codes of regulation and limitation, Daignault’s conceptualization of
philosophical and pedagogical nihilism describes a state in which desire is
unhinged from particular meanings or ideals. While nihilism creates a line
that moves in the opposite direction of representational terrorism, ulti-
mately, this line reactively connects a life to an oblivion in which “anything
goes” (Daignault, 1992).
Mobilized against Daignault’s conceptualization of terrorism and nihil-
ism is the potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) holey space, or rather,
the schizzed space that “communicates” across both striated (coded) ter-
ritory and smooth (decoded) flows. As a space of preparation that evades
State surveillance, holey space has yet to be submitted to overcoding. Yet,
holey space is neither a site of axiomatization, curtailing desiring-pro-
duction to a law of general equivalency, relativism, or feckless pluralism.
Rather, the relationship of holey space to curriculum theory is perhaps
closer to Aoki’s (2005b) geopedagogical notion of curricular foundations
without foundations.15 Analyzing the instrumental conceptualization of
the curriculum and instruction landscape, Aoki implicitly argues that the
people are missing. That is, the instrumental overcoding of the curriculum
and instruction landscape prevents the preparation of new forces and
bodies-in-becoming. Warding off the emergence of ANOMALous forces,
the modernist conceptualization of the curriculum and instruction land-
scape functions as an architectonic “container” that fetters curricular
thought to the heavily surveilled molar circuits of “curriculum supervision,
curriculum development, curriculum implementation, and curriculum
evaluation” (p. 199). In this modernist scenario, desire is mapped onto
prior circuits of thought. This strategy not only functions to “contain”
social flows, but further, to render them manageable, efficient, and
surveillable. This situation is deeply untenable, repelling intelligent inquiry
while concomitantly birthing a culture of institutional illness. Even the
revolutionary forces being mobilized in the arts are at risk of becoming
reduced to the neoliberal axiom of profitability. Contemporarily, the desire
exists to tether the fine arts to the formation of a “creative economy” that
not only serves to “legitimize” the work of artists but further, acts to but-
tress the neoliberal demand for flexible, novel, and pluralist thinking.16
Against these modes of capture, Aoki theorizes the emergence of a
people from within the “vertical and the horizontal” spaces of the cur-
riculum landscape (2005d, p. 429). Put differently, Aoki argues that the
site of living pedagogy emerges between the representational and non-
representational, occupying terrain while deterritorializing its sedimented
strata. Such a space might be dubbed holey insofar as it works to escape
molar categories of thought while preparing new problems and challenges
not yet anticipated by the prior organization of desiring-production into

calcified circuits. Composing a space for a people yet to come, holey space
enters into relation with the geopedagogical concept of curriculum foun-
dations without foundations, a concept that avoids both the codification
of desire (terrorism) or its trivial release upon dead-end lines of escape
(Aoki, 2005b). It is in this vein that we might think the task of curriculum
theory as the schizo-occupation of territorialized landscapes for the pur-
pose of preparing new social forces and images of a pedagogical life. Such
schizo-occupation conspires with the body of the Earth (the body without
organs) to create a holey space that resists the murderous colonization of
desire under sovereign power (despotism) and the nihilistic agitation of
desire into general equivalency with the pluralistic any-desire-whatsoever
of postmodern capitalism.
Conceptualized in this manner, the composition of an untimely holey
space produces a new problematic for the “field” of curriculum theorizing.
Specifically, to take seriously the geopedagogical creation of curriculum
foundations without foundations requires an approach to analysis that
would enable the “machining” of heterodox social forces into productive
assemblage. Put differently, a geopedagogy oriented to schizzing the strati-
fied terrain of the curriculum and instruction landscape must begin to
mobilize approaches adequate to thinking the revolution of prior founda-
tions. In contemporary curriculum theory, the beginnings of such a revo-
lution are conceptualized in Daignault’s notion of the “excluded third” (the
“gap” that is the curriculum) and Aoki’s third space (the interrogative space
between the curriculum-as-plan and the curriculum-as-lived). For both
Daignault and Aoki, the conceptualization of “third space” is linked to the
performative site between representation and nonrepresentation—between
presence and imperceptibility. The curriculum, Daignault avers, is a gap,
or rather, a process of composition that is both connected to “what is” and
yet, does not reterritorialize in its image. Yet, a caveat on the notion of the
in-between must be issued, since this term has too often come to signify the
banal dialectical instantiation of a “third term.” That is, while a bisexual,
reformed-addict, teacher-researcher ostensibly occupies a “third space,” this
conceptualization remains both reliant and limited to binary relations
(Malins, 2004). The danger of such an approach to the conceptualization
of “in-between” space inheres its potential reduction of multiplicity to a
dialectical trinity, the originary coordinates of which remain intact and
supported by the third term. Against this all-too-human conceptualization
of the “in-between,” Aoki evokes a corollary of “third space” in the figure
of the opaque bar in Saussure’s relational diagram of signifier and signi-
fied. As the “gap” of representational correspondence, this bar becomes a
potential site for the performative relaunch of how a pedagogical life might
go. In Daignault’s (1989) words, the curriculum is not a thing but rather,
a process of composition. As such, the “gap” to which both Daignault and
Aoki point marks a site for resisting the reterritorialization of currere
(the course of a pedagogical life) in an a priori, reactive image of life. As
it is germane to this chapter, such a virtual site of composition might be
thought in terms of its relation to holey space. Put differently, the “gap”
between representational and nonrepresentational forces might otherwise
be dubbed holey space insofar as the conceptualization of such space
marks the fractal fold of both molar (representational) territories (what
is) and molecular (nonrepresentational) flows (what is becoming). It is
in the conceptualization and occupation of such a space that curriculum
theorists might challenge “what is” through the creation of forces and
lives (bodies-in-becoming) unanticipated by the desiring-machines of the
State. Such punctuation is unequal to the banal instantiation of a tertiary
term for thinking. Instead, following queer theory, the task to which the
future of curriculum is intimately tied involves the freeing of molecular
flows from molar overdetermination. Opposed to thinking the bisexual for
example, we might instead think of a thousand tiny sexes. More broadly, the
gap in which the curriculum is composed is not simply a site wherein the
curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum are synthesized. Instead, it might
be said that the gap herein dubbed holey space is rather the experimental
site for the relaunch of desiring-production with the question of how a life
might go, producing a thousand plateaus for thinking a life.
The Third Space Under Threat
Daignault (1990, 1992) warns that third space is itself under constant
threat of reterritorialization. “Even the middle attracts new people com-
mitted to reducing it to a matter of knowledge, to a new epistemological
stake” (Daignault, 1991, p. 199). As Daignault avers, the concept of a third
space is always under risk of being reterritorialized upon an old ideal,
code, or habit of thought. However, curriculum theorists would do well
to avoid locating the problem with reterritorialization “itself ” (under
either code or designer axiomatic). Instead, the problem lies with trying to
“understand how and why those reterritorializations were constructed in
the first place” (Buchanan, 2008b, p. 121). Further, the task of curriculum
theory might orient its project to the ways in which its reterritorializa-
tions constitute a symptomology for what it cannot bear to extricate.
That is, contemporary curriculum theory requires a tactic for examining
“the investments of unconscious desire in the social field” in a manner
that does not simply devolve on the automatic interpretation machines of
“classical” psychoanalysis or structuralism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983,

p. 123). Contemporarily, what is required is not simply the creation of a
tertiary space, but rather, the creation of “X” inverted plateaus or non-
denumerable holey spaces. Put differently, if the conceptualization of
third space simply functions to reinsert dialectical thinking as a “limit” or
peripheral case for curricular thinking, it is ill prepared to conceptualize
the preparation of untimely singularities or “mutant assemblage[s] of
enunciation” (Guattari, 1995, p. 116). Rather, to conflate third space with
dialectical thinking is to reterritorialize curriculum thought as a project of
synthesis and identity. In this movement, virtual potentials and resources
for relation are reduced to “actual” or “given” resources for integration.
The concept of holey space might provide curriculum theorists with
an alternative geopedagogical concept for rethinking sites of resistance.
As Morris (2000) writes, it is within such mutant spaces that the next
generation of curriculum workers are being prepared. Against synopical
or identitarian resemblance, Morris advocates, curriculum studies must
attend to the work of its outtakes, those fragments, peoples-in-becoming,
and modes of thought spliced and omitted from the visual field of both
surveillance and representation. It is with regard to such underdogs, Morris
writes that “we must always already fight . . . otherwise all of our efforts are
arrogant and pointless” (p. 5). Against another synoptic curriculum canon,
Morris points to the emergence of outtake curricular projects figured
in the analysis of queer, antidisciplinary, cyborgian, science fiction, and
posthope images of pedagogical life. Rather than constituting a synoptic or
dialectic image of curriculum life, such outtakes instead mark the begetting
of multiple singularities “sown . . . on the . . . body, across the riverbed,
in intellectual space” (Serres, 1997, p. 164). Yet, it must be added that
the production of such singularities cannot be reduced to the offspring
of heteronormative dialecticism (mommy/daddy/me-curriculum/teacher/
student). Instead, the singularities of which Morris and Serres speak
might more productively be thought as the bastard offspring of untimely
strange attractors. Put differently, those outtakes toiling “in the murki-
ness and dimness” of the pit do not divide up into a pure species with a
common genealogy, operative question or task (Morris, 2000, p. 3).
Rather, the bodies-in-becoming Morris attributes to the next generation
of curriculum scholars might more adequately be understood as
ANOMALs. Following, it might be ventured that the task of such
underdogs is oriented to queering reactive images of pedagogical life,
stealing back from those reactive images of the Curriculum the potential
to fabulate a curricular life.17 It is a task, as Morris avers, of avoiding
the desire to reterritorialize the field in the image of the good old days, the
aura of celebrity scholars, or the resuscitation of that which we already
know. However, such ANOMAL forces need not be simply be conflated

with the young as Morris ostensibly asserts, but might more adequately
be understood as those bodies-in-becoming poised to betray powers of
overcoding, whether functioning overtly as a corollary of the State appa-
ratus or as stealth agents reinvigorating old hegemonies under the banner
of political or pedagogical progressivism. Yet, the ANOMAL must take
equal care to avoid reterritorializing upon the law of general equivalency
whereby it might deliver itself up, bound hand and foot, to the axiomatic
of the market (Guattari, 1995).
The question for revolutionary curriculum thought is caught herein.
Put differently, how can curriculum theory think the creation of a life, an
ANOMAL, or holey space that reterritorializes on neither the coded form
interpolated by the State or the decoded axiom of capitalism? Further, how
might the fabulation of a curricular life avoid capture in the neoconserva-
tive or counterrevolutionary image of a third space that reductively equates
to the moderative dialectical integration of both coded and decoded ten-
dencies. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) describe, such a definition of third
space continues to be captured within the general problematic of modernity,
and more specifically, a vacillation between paranoia and schizophrenia.
In this vein, how might we think curriculum studies as an anticounter-
revolutionary task? That is, what conceptual resources might curriculum
studies mobilize to fabulate nonunitary holey spaces, ANOMAL lives, and
untimely philosophical thinking? One such anticounterrevolutionary mode
of thinking Deleuze and Guattari (1983) develop is that of schizoanalysis.
Schizoanalysis and the Creative Potential of the ANOMAL
While capitalism desires the deterritorialization of social flows, its

engagement with schizophrenic desiring-production is tenuous.
More specifically, the deterritorialized flows unleashed by the capital-
ist machine require bounding upon the body of capital itself (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983). It is in this vein that the deterritorialization effected
by capitalism is only a relative expression of society’s limit, for it must
substitute its rigorous axiomatic in place of restrictive social codes.
As Deleuze and Guattari write, “capitalism only functions on condition
that it . . . push back or displace [the absolute tendency of schizophre-
nia], by substituting for its own immanent relative limits. . . . [i]t axi-
omatizes on one hand what it decodes with the other” (p. 267). It is along
this line of flight, however, that Deleuze and Guattari posit a potential
revolutionary path, for the market cannot realize all decoded flows in
the capitalist axiom. That is, capitalism cannot submit all lines of flight
to its generalized law of economic valuation. Fragments of code, out-

takes, and nonrepresentational cells compose leakages (fuites) that exceed
axiomatic capture, hence posing a problematic for capitalism insofar as
such ANOMALs point to a way of thinking not yet captured by either
despotic or capitalist images of a life. A contemporary example of this
ANOMAL is figured in the work of contemporary digital DJs, whose
tactics of “textual poaching, [become] zero-paid, [become] no-logo,
[become] brand X” (Miller, 2008, p. 13). The compositional tactics
employed by many digital DJs reterritorialize fragments of musical code
into assemblages that not only break from the musical tropes defined by
the music industry, but further, affront neoliberal copyright and sam-
pling laws, hence schizzing the usemonopoly of the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) and American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) (Lethem, 2008). It is in a similar vein
that graffiti artists have enacted an ANOMAL deterritorialization of the
“concrete jungle” by drawing buildings and street corners into new territo-
rial assemblages no longer organized by corporate logo-landmarks or GPS
grid coordinates. As Baudrillard (1993) writes, “by tattooing walls, [graffiti
taggers] free them from architecture”18 (p. 82). The “graffiti” tag is neither
the identitarian representation of an a priori code or a process of recoding
that can be strictly appropriated for its profit-potential. In this vein, both
the digital DJ and graffiti tagger remain largely ANOMAL—their practices
dubbed deviant, depraved, and criminal.
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) plot a line of escape that avoids romanti-
cizing despotic society as much as it repulses the notion of withdrawing
from the world market “in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solu-
tion’” (Buchanan, 2008a, p. 116). Rather, Deleuze and Guattari compose
a line of flight that moves in the direction of the market’s schizophrenic
desire for decoding and deterritorialization. Yet, while capitalism marks
the relative limit of society by maintaining the axiomatic as an internal
limit, Deleuze and Guattari go further still, mobilizing schizophrenic
desiring-production in displacement of both external and internal social
horizons. It is in this vein that schizoanalysis composes an approach that
reterritorializes on neither the body of the market nor the image of oedi-
pus, ego, castration, and lack as the overcoded “private territory” of the
subject. Instead, reterritorialization is itself the subject of schizoanalytic
study. More specifically, schizoanalysis studies the production of per-
version, or rather, territories of addiction constituted via the process of
reterritorialization. However, such study does not simply take the form of
asking “what does this territory mean?” or otherwise by submitting desire
to a priori coordinates of categorization, interpretive framing, or tran-
scendent organization. The question of schizoanalysis is rather a matter
of asking how and why such reterritorializations are produced in the first
place. Schizoanalysis is a task for which “What’s the point?” becomes a
crucial question (Braidotti, 2006). That is, the task of schizoanalysis aims
to register those processes whereby a line of flight fixates on a point. It is
in this vein that schizoanalysis pertains to the analysis of “one’s” desiring-
machines, or rather, the ways in which molecular particles of becoming are
machined into territories of consistency.
The task of schizoanalysis is in this sense crucial for those curricular
bodies-in-becoming Morris dubs outtakes. For like the cinematic outtake,
schizoanalysis is oriented to examining the arrangement of partial codes,
movements, and fuites into territorial consistencies (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983). Similarly, schizoanalysis becomes a way of thinking organizational
leakages (fuites) that escape reterritorialization as distinct “beings,” molar
identities, or representational forms. Schizoanalysis might be, in this way,
a manner of releasing molecular elements from their territorial organ-
izations in composition of ANOMAL identities like that of Jarmusch’s
conceptual persona, Ghost Dog.
Yet, even Ghost Dog’s mongrel identity is “pre-figured” by a perverse
fidelity to paranoiac desire. In Jarmusch’s film, such paranoiac desire
functions to rehabilitate Ghost Dog’s practices as a contract hitman upon
the body of the law. That is, while born on a line of deterritorialization,
Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog continually reterritorializes in fidelity to mafia
underboss Louie, and more specifically, to the coded edicts of the Bushido
master-retainer contract. This reterritorialization ultimately ends with
Ghost Dog’s willful death at the hands of his Mafioso master, laying bare
the desiring-machine Ghost Dog is ultimately unable to deterritorialize. It
is significant that even Ghost Dog’s becoming-animal finds itself well suited
to reterritorialization within the samurai code. To the end, he remains a
loyal canine.
While Ghost Dog’s experimental composition of a life might not
go far enough, it is the addictive reterritorialization of schizophrenic
desiring-production upon the “dog-matic” master-retainer contract
that ultimately marks the “black hole” beyond which “his” line of flight
disintegrates. Such addiction, Braidotti (2006) asserts, “is not an open-
ing-up, but a narrowing-down of the field of possible becomings . . .
[increasing] the rigidity, not fluidity of the subject” (p. 141). It is Ghost
Dog’s habitual reterritorialization upon this oedipalized image of life that
ultimately prevents him from instantiating a new line of flight. In this
respect, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might be thought
as less a caution on the creation of an ANOMAL life than a caveat on the
peril of a life that ultimately fails to go awry. At the point of his death
for example, Ghost Dog suffers an excess of normality, going so far as
to remark on the representational banality of the Wild West showdown

mimed in the final scene.
Striking down Louie’s mafia affiliates, Ghost Dog is starkly aware that
fidelity to the Bushido code (his desiring-machine) necessitates his death.
As the tagline of the film foreshadows, “Live by the code . . . Die by the
code.” Ghost Dog’s life cannot be liberated unless it is first capable of dis-
mantling the mechanism of social hierarchy in which it becomes “fatally”
caught. Jarmusch’s implicit caveat on this point is equally significant for
educational thinking that paranoically fetters desire under the command
of socially authorized forms of power (God, the boss, the father, and the
teacher) (Holland, 2008). In this model, education functions to reterritori-
alize desire within asymmetrical power relations limiting how a life might
go, that is, how a life might be machined or assembled differently.
The way in which flows are machined and invested in the desire of the
social field hence requires careful scrutiny. Toward this, schizoanalysis
becomes a crucial analytic tool, focusing on the “ambiguities, slippages,
and fractures” inhering powerful patterns of molarity, identity, and rep-
resentation (Reynolds, 1998, p. 206). Hence, to reduce Ghost Dog to the
desiring-machine of the master-retainer code is to deny a basic positive
task of schizoanalysis. Instead of proceeding by way of the synoptic or
dialectic negation of difference, schizoanalysis articulates the coexistence
of opposite modes of desire without counteracting or integrating either
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). “[S]chizoanalysis reformulate[s] the uncon-
scious . . . and transforms it into an a-centered system, a machinic net-
work, that cannot be reduced or incorporated according to a tree model”
(Reynolds, 1998, p. 206). While Ghost Dog ultimately reterritorializes on
the master-retainer contract, this focus on reterritorialization is not, in
itself, sufficient to think Ghost Dog’s radical singularity. That is, while
Ghost Dog’s addiction to the feudal code of Bushido unravels upon a
line that ultimately leads to his death, this deadly line of flight is not the
only line that composes Ghost Dog’s life. As I will attempt to develop, the
Hagakure is as much a meditative line on the inevitability of death as it
might be thought as an affirmation against death itself.
To think Ghost Dog’s singularity or rather, his punctuation of the
speculum mundi (the face of the world) requires instead a schizoanalytic
approach capable of registering conflicting and unthinkable forces. A
consideration of Ghost Dog’s desiring-machines must assemble with those
schizophrenic impulses capable of “stuttering” the addictive processes of
reterritorialization. Thinking the breakthrough, or rather, the holey space
that unsettles the desire for stratification, the schizophrenic assemblage
of conflicting desires sets territories back into flight, repelling the image
of a unified subject or dialectical meaning upon which a life might be
founded. Founded upon difference, the schizoanalytic registration of

conflicting desires inassimilable under a grounding signifier might enable
a way of thinking curriculum foundations without foundations. Put dif-
ferently, foundations are only possible insofar as there exists an operative
horizon of reterritorialization, an internal or external limit to what might
be rightly thought. Yet, it is this very notion of common sense (orthodoxy)
that is cracked by schizophrenic desiring-production and bifurcated into
“X” senses or intensities for becoming. Schizzing the strata hence entails
what Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) dub the affirmation of “lines of
escaping desire . . . which carry their own potential, however small, for
unraveling dominant modes of existence” (p. 16). The creation of such
a schizz might not only be encountered Nietzsche’s aphoristic revolution
of philosophical thought, but perhaps more radically, in the writing of
Artaud, whose experimentation with the desiring-production of decoded,
inhuman, and unthought logographical systems would practice a style
of deconstructive thinking roughly two decades before Derrida. In each
of these instances, desire escapes the image of philosophical writing and
signification proper, hence mobilizing a new set of problems upon which
the potential for difference might be thought.
To begin, the text upon which Ghost Dog reterritorializes is itself
marked by a schizo desire. That is, the way of the samurai is both a coded
horizon that encompasses Ghost Dog’s actions and a doctrine of war
historically overcoded by the emergence of unified State power during
the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912). During this period, the samurai class
was stripped of its traditional powers. In its place, the Meiji govern-
ment focused its political and economic energies on the formation of a
western-styled conscripted army. However, samurai collectives persisted
throughout this period, rebelling against the formation of a State military
apparatus. It is at this late moment (1877) in the history of the samurai
that Bushido is drawn into relation with the formation of an itinerant
war machine that functions to ward off the emergence of the State. Yet, as
Deleuze and Guattari (1986) write, the war machine cannot be reduced to
war. More adequately, the war machine might be thought as the anarchic
periphery “of the State’s field of order . . . warriors and herders who ground
their being in an itinerant territory” (Marzek, 2001). The renegade cells of
samurai that were mobilizing during the Meiji Restoration aimed to repel
the deterritorialization of itinerant territories (major and minor regional
clans) into a borderless territory of control (polis). In this sense, the war
machine functions to repel “the State’s strategic aim of incorporating all
available ‘open’ space into its territory” (Holland, 2008, p. 80). Put differ-
ently, the samurai uprising during the Meiji Revolution might be thought
as a tactic of repulsion for staying State control over flows of power. In this
vein, the formation of a samurai war machine was aimed at sustaining the
segmentarity and dispersal of nomadic or itinerant groups.
The sustainability of such itinerant territories is significant, for the
State functions to interiorize or parasite such vagabond assemblages. As
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “the State has no war machine of its
own” (p. 439). It must first conscript and reduce the complexity of strange
bands or rebel subjects, deterritorializing them onto, or conscripting them
into a military apparatus. This process of overcoding alters the very nature
of the war machine. No longer oriented to creative tactical resistance,
the interiorization of the war machine becomes one more way in which
State power can further its political aims. That is, under State control, war
becomes “the continuation of politics by other means” (von Clausewitz,
cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 467). This basic principle undergoes
a radical decoding in late capitalism, where the appropriation of the war
machine becomes another means to accumulate capital (Holland, 2008).
Opposed to this deterritorializing function, whereby itinerants and
singularities are submitted under the State’s horizon of control, the war
machine conserves territories. Yet, such territories should not be equated
to the universal polis of the State, but rather, those “itinerant territories
grounded in irreducible singularities” (Marzek, 2001). These territories
are those of private thinkers or minoritarian subjects who work against
the creation of a “common” identity, that “harmonious homogeneity that
would mean the end of cultural creativity and positive social transfor-
mation” (Watson, 2008, p. 212). Today, the war machine emerges from
the holey space of the urban milieu in “figures of unrest” (urban artists,
terrorists, drug-dealers, delinquents, guerilla revolutionaries) for whom
the reterritorialization of life upon the body of either State or capitalist
apparatus marks the termination of vital difference.19
It is in this sense that we might think Ghost Dog’s affinity to Bushido.
That is, while Ghost Dog reterritorializes on the coded edicts of Bushido,
this reterritorialization does not simply reduce to an act of complicity
with the State. Rather, as an untimely and schizoid ANOMAL identity,
Ghost Dog’s reterritorialization upon the way of the samurai creates a war
machine at the periphery of State control. In turn, this war machine func-
tions to prevent the deterritorialization of the ancient tribes occupying
the sediment of Jarmusch’s urban milieu, the very tribes Ghost Dog warns
are under threat of extinction. For a time, Ghost Dog sustains a unique
itinerant territory, preventing its deterritorialization under a single body
of control or image of how a life should go. Hence, Ghost Dog’s creation of
an itinerant territory might be thought as less a product of postmodern
desire, which seeks to acquire, integrate, and smooth more territories.
Nor should it be equated with a strictly paranoiac desire, which seeks to
universalize singularities. Instead, Ghost Dog’s particular assemblage with

the way of Bushido might be thought as an ethical tactic for sustaining the
heterogeneity of a territory. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe, the
war machine is “another species,” “another nature,” “another justice,” and
“another origin” (pp. 352–354).
The war machine hence enters into relation with the creativity of
schizophrenic desiring-production as the task of producing new intensi-
ties for thinking a life. However, the risk of the war machine is not simply
oriented to production. Rather, its task concomitantly functions to sustain
the potential of intensities insofar as they remain capable of repelling
degraded models of existence. Ghost Dog’s species is significantly vague
(vagabond), varying from human to animal, from vague shape to imper-
ceptible revenant. Innate or essential qualities are similarly unsettled.
With the exception of a single occasion, Ghost Dog denies self-reflectivity
and autobiography. More adequately, Ghost Dog’s “nature” might best
be described in terms of prepersonal speeds and intensities. Opposed to
reterritorializing Ghost Dog in an anthropocentric image of life, Jarmusch
explores the body as a matrix of speed and slowness, of relaxed and focused
intensities. As Wu-Tang Clan20 describe, Ghost Dog has more affinity to a
“fast shadow” or rather, the formless and shapeless becoming-weapon of
the body. It is in this vein that the intervention of the RZA’s filmic score
works to deterritorialize the body of samurai by registering it along non-
representational coordinates of beats, lyrical runs, and sampled refrains.
Along this line, Ghost Dog might be thought as becoming-music, affectively
assembling with the variated pulsations, rhythms, and appropriated frag-
ments (traditional and contemporary) composing the RZA’s soundtrack.
As mafia boss Ray Vargo (Henry Silva) comments, Ghost Dog’s language
is written in a foreign tongue. Emerging from the holey space of the
urban milieu, hip-hop becomes the “poetry of war.” Ghost Dog’s justice,
while tethered to a law, is not submitted to it. Put differently, Ghost Dog’s
untimely relationship with Bushido is not impelled from above, but rather,
is the law that Ghost Dog ostensibly gives himself.21 Ghost Dog’s justice is
hence one “founded” in difference, or rather, sustains difference amidst
the arrayment of forces set to extinguish or interiorize ANOMALous
flows. Finally, through the assemblage of both untimely and contemporary
resources, Ghost Dog schizzes “his” origins. Evoking multiple genealogies,
yet reducible to none, Jarmusch composes the life of Ghost Dog as that of
an original. Yet, the birthplace of this original is not to be located within
any specific molar or representational image. More adequately, it might be
ventured that Ghost Dog’s origins are intimately connected to the geopoli-
tics of holey space. Such holey space can be thought as both the sustained
refuge of itinerants as well as a tactical site for repelling parasitical modes
of State and capitalist capture. In this conceptualization, the task of holey

space is to render a line of flight “endurable, workable, thinkable,” neither
“petrified” or swept along in capitalism’s unceasing production of novelty
(Deleuze 1995, p. 111). Rather, the task of holey space is to prepare a war
machine, or rather, a dissident assemblage not yet anticipated by the State
or submitted to the capitalist law of general equivalency. As Deleuze and
Guattari (1986) write, the war machine is formed through an incompre-
hensibility that is birthed into the world. In this vein, Jarmusch’s Ghost
Dog creates a way of thinking the ANOMALous as a force of cultural
resistance and potential revolutionary action. Yet, Jarmusch’s creation of a
war machine for repelling the powers of homogeneity (under the identity
politic of the State or capitalist axiomatic) concludes with a caveat signifi-
cant for the future of curriculum theory.
The vitality of a life is intimate to its potentials for experimentation.
Yet, such experimentation must be handled carefully, heedful of dead
ends, suicidal flights, and the desire to reterritorialize. Put differently, the
assemblage of a war machine must always work to repel the formation of
new fascisms. While this caveat applies to the macrofascist or paranoiac
tendencies of the State, it must also extend to the microfascist desires of
the individual. As Foucault (1983) avers in the preface to Anti-Oedipus,
the “adversary . . . is the fascist in us all, in our heads and in our everyday
behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing
that dominates and exploits us” (p. xiii). All struggle and deterritorializa-
tion, Roy (2003) adds, “contain the potential of becoming new hegemo-
nies” (p. 37).
Digging a Hole for Curriculum Theory
For curriculum theorists, Jarmusch’s film might be thought extratextu-

ally, suspending the common practice of textual commentary in lieu of
asking how Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might be useful for think-
ing the challenges of contemporary curriculum theory. More specifically,
Jarmusch’s experiment with the composition of an ANOMAL life enters
into relation with the dual problematics of coding and decoding specific to
the function of the State and capitalist apparatus, respectively. It is in this
way that the schizoanalysis of reterritorialization and its desiring-machines
must become an intimate aspect of what it means to do curriculum theoriz-
ing. This task is increasingly important as education continues to reterrito-
rialize on the identity politics of State thinking. Perhaps more dangerously
however, are the appeals to deterritorialization that function to reinsert old
hegemonies under the guise of political progressivism, hence maintaining
the investment of thought within preestablished circuits of power. It is
in such a vein that curriculum theory must mobilize a mode of analysis

capable of registering both the internal and external limits ascribed to
pedagogical thinking. We must begin to attune our analysis to those plugs
or blockages that reduce lines of flight to points. Put differently, the task of
curriculum theory must begin to address what curriculum theory preserves
and whether such territories are sufficient for the creation of a people yet
to come. This question must also apply to the theorization of a conceptual
third space, and equally, to those works that attest to occupying the bor-
derline space between territories. While ostensibly libratory, such spaces
that have come under the most focused forms of State and disciplinary
surveillance, begging the question of whether they retain their sustainabil-
ity or have been exhausted by practices of coding, militarization, or sheer
theoretical popularity.
Schizoanalytically, Jarmusch sets a new curricular cartography into
motion. Specifically, Jarmusch begins the critical task of rethinking the
landscape of the ANOMALs in an age when both striated (habitualized)
and smooth (wandering) conceptualizations of space are under threat
of capture. If the future of curriculum theory is connected to the task of
creating a people yet to come, it must cultivate a kind of space irreducible
to the vast territory of control desired by State thinking or the deter-
ritorialization of borderlines particular to the logic of globalization. The
fractal cartography plotted by Jarmusch marks such a space, populated
by singularities that do not simply adapt but modify prior foundations of
thought. Herein, such a space has been dubbed holey. Such foundations
without foundations mark an experimental and itinerant territory for
tactical resistance, repelling both State powers of coding and the desire to
deterritorialize every flow into general equivalency. Holey space is, hence,
not defined by the relativity of flows but more significantly, by its flows
of relation, that is, the temporary machining of flows capable of fabulat-
ing a temporary territory for bodies-in-becoming. Put differently, holey
space might be thought as a non-site (for holey space must work, in part,
by becoming-imperceptible) for curricular work ignored by both ‘official’
and ‘popular’ curriculum foundations. Curriculum theorizing capable of
creating a pedagogical life must begin to address the very notion of foun-
dations, recognizing that this does not simply imply the canonical works
of curriculum’s instrumentalist forefathers. An analysis of curriculum
foundations might very well begin with those reterritorializations occur-
ring contemporarily, asking what desiring-machines are, and continue to
be at work in the production of images for how pedagogical life might go.
It is this terrain that might in turn be made holey and stuttered beyond
its own horizon of reterritorialization. It is in such an experimental mode
that we might begin to ask whether the images of currere (the course of a
life) being produced today are adequate to repel contemporary modes of

capture. Further, curriculum theory must question how those reterritori-
alizations going on today mobilize resources for thinking the unthought,
that is, an encounter with virtual potentials for composing an ANOMAL
life. Perhaps, like Ghost Dog, we have not yet gone far enough, reticent to
abandon the paranoid pole of identitarian thought, transcendentalism,
and microfascist desire that continue to haunt desiring-production. It is
toward such a project that schizoanalysis provides a “foundation without
foundations” for curricular work, ushering in a different form of desiring-
production that aims to push stratifications back into flight.
9
Strange Contraptions and

Queer Machines
Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your
skin, breathe with your belly?
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 151)
T he contemporary curriculum theorizing of Livingston (2004) and

Ferneding (2004) articulate two dominant images of technology in
Western culture. The first pertains to the apocalyptic scenario prefigured in
such doomsday science fiction narratives as James Cameron’s Terminator
and the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, where intelligent machines
rise up to tyrannize carbon-based life. For Livingston, the anxiety of this
dystopic cyberpunk scenario is linked to the disappearance of the human,
who will be superseded by the technological efficiency and endurance of
hegemonic machine overlords. This dystopic image of human futurity is
contrasted by techno-utopian narratives wherein machines are imagined
as the benign medium for human progress and pleasure. This contempo-
rary machine mythology carries a patriarchal belief in anthropocentric
control fantasized via such pop culture narratives as Brian Forbes’ Stepford
Wives and Ban-Dai’s Tamagotchi successor Digimon, a children’s program
in which humans nurture, evolve, and battle “digital pets.” Such character-
izations of domesticated machines serve to recirculate the techno-utopian
metanarrative of progress articulated by Lyotard (1979), characterizing
machines as an apolitical medium for the fulfillment of all-too-human
desires.
Techno-utopianism and its teratechnological inverse each have their
educational corollaries. As Ferneding develops, the contemporary effort
to draw technical machines into conjunction with pedagogy is wed to
the fantasies of progress, efficiency, and manageability antedated in the
vocationalist-based curriculum aims of Taylor (1911) and instrumental
thinking of Ralph Tyler (1949). Yet, the vocational curriculum imaged by

Taylor has today undergone a neoliberal metamorphoses. Today, students
are being primed to take their place within a market increasingly orga-
nized and driven by information technologies, while teachers are impelled
to realize their practices within the model of efficiency and manageability
offered by emerging modes of digital delivery. This dual movement is
symptomatic of education’s postindustrial revisioning, in which the need
for an industrial labor force has long been surpassed by the market’s
demand for flexible, technologically adept, and savvy “knowledge work-
ers.” Driven by this obscene supplement, such national reform documents
as Goals 2000, America 2000, and the No Child Left Behind Act valorize
the conjunction of a technical machine with the educational apparatus
as a remedy for students’ lack of technical adroitness as cited in Reagan’s
A Nation at Risk (Ferneding, 2004). In each of these reports on the state
of education, a prevailing ideal persists in the image of technology as the
carefully controlled and domesticated medium of human progress. Of
course, such idealism is wed to the realization of education in the model of
the market and further, to the corporate colonization of techne. As political
theorist Winner (1986) warns, “our instruments [have become] institu-
tions in the making” (p. 54).
Today, Winner’s caveat is exposed via the rhetoric of freedom and free-
choice that have accompanied the proliferation of technology in the class-
room. Following the schizo drives of the market, students are now “free”
to choose from a litany of technological tools and expressive venues for
their works, ostensibly liberated from the doldrums of the classroom and
limits of instructor knowledge. Yet, such techno-utopian rhetoric obfus-
cates a staunch internal conservatism. While students are “free” to produce
knowledge in a multitude of digital mediums, such production has yet to
significantly engage with the creation of experimental affects and percepts.
Instead, they have become new carriers for identitarian politics and repre-
sentational thought. Such fidelity to representational thinking is apparent
not only in the banal use of digital technologies to aestheticize student
work or enhance familiar models of research writing, but further, in such
digital communities as Facebook and Second Life, where users have contin-
ued to play out the identity politics of neoliberal capitalism (Bans, 2008).
Conflating progressivism with the exponential increase and aesthetic vis-
ibility of institutional knowledge production, techno-idealism maintains
a rigorous fidelity to the human agent who manages techne, submitting it
to a priori social and institutional desire.
While techno-idealism posits the insistence of a flexible user who
efficiently manages and produces data under a banner of social prog-
ress, Livingston’s (2004) apocalyptic technological dystopia imagines a
STRANGE CONTRAPTIONS AND QUEER MACHINES 165
scenario in which the user disappears. “One hundred years from now,”
Livingston writes, “machines and humans will have merged . . . [t]here
will be no distinction between humans and the machines they create”
(p. 37). Pedagogically, Livingston’s cyberpunk scenario is figured by such
harbingers as Saya, a humanoid robot teacher built by Tokyo University of
Science professor Hiroshi Kobayashi, who has suggested that the gynoid
could ultimately be used to fill labor shortages in teaching. This vision
for the future of education is reciprocated by University of Memphis
researcher Andrew Olney, whose ITS robotic interface, Guru, marks the
promise of a future in which human teachers will be relegated to sheer
bureaucratic positions, superseded by highly efficient and personalized
information delivery systems. While humans insist in each of these sce-
narios, this particular image of the future is one in which pedagogical
life becomes submitted to a model of increasing perfection and control.
While such scientists as Kobayashi and Olney frame their constructions
in the rhetoric of techno-idealism, it is this very image of the future that
Livingston links to the apocalyptic vision forestalled by doomsday science
fiction, in which human life will be terminated and replaced by a more eas-
ily maintained, efficient, and manageable labor force.
As Ferneding and Livingston write, techno-idealism and its dys-
topic technological opposite point to a binary-machine that has yet to
encounter difference. Devolving on the presence of a stable human sub-
ject and the metanarrative of progress, techno-idealism has yet to think
the unthought potential of the machine for overcoming the fascism of
identitarian thinking. Similarly, apocalyptic auguries on technology have
yet to think the machine as a vital or affirmative force. More pointedly,
techno-idealism and teratechnological dystopia have yet to create a way
of thinking becoming, each anxiously attempting to maintain a distance
between organism and machine. To think the unthought becoming-
machine of both techno-idealist and teratechnological visions is hence
to encounter an ontology that has only begun to emerge in curriculum
theory (Livingston, 2004; Gogh, 2008). It is toward the creation of such an
encounter, this chapter will argue, that curriculum theory might develop
a more adequate way of conceptualizing process ontology. Toward this
task, curricular thinking might begin to connect to the kinds of machinic
thinking already-underway in music, cinema, and visual art. Such prac-
tices, this chapter will contend, unhinge techne from politeia (the condi-
tions and rights ascribed to the governable citizen), instead creating a way
of thinking techne as becoming, or rather, of deterritorializing the com-
mon face of humanity through the construction of the abstract machine
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a probe-head. Such a task is significant
to curriculum theory, for it posits a way of thinking creativity as neither
the transcendent emanation of God as a carry-over of the Renaissance

tradition, or the province of the organism who, following the rhetoric
of New Age Spiritualism, orchestrates their own transformation from an
uncontaminated “within.” In contradistinction to this conceptualization
and the techno-ideal/teratechnological binary-machine articulated at
the onset of this essay, this chapter will consider the import of machinic
thinking as a means of conceptualizing both “practical” philosophy and a
relational, transhuman ethics. Escaping curriculum’s preoccupation with
identitarian matters of epistemology, this chapter will also attempt to
analyze how contemporary arts are mobilizing new affects and percepts
as creative resources for thinking a life.
Cyberorganismic Thinking and Problems with the Posthuman
The imaginary division of organism and machine was collapsed as early

as 1960, when Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan Kline (1995) named the
cyborg as the kind of subject required for the extraterrestrial survival of
the human species. The ultimate astronaut, they posited, would require
high-tech prosthetics in order to disconnect from the body of the Earth
and subsist in the hostile environment of deep space. A year later, Yuri
Gagarin’s automated, life-support controlled spaceflight aboard Vostok-1
would reiterate Clynes and Kline’s basic assertion on the inevitable neces-
sity of the prosthesis. The question of human survivability would be con-
ceptually answered by the cyborg as an “extended organizational complex
functioning [unconsciously] as an integrated homeostatic system” (Clynes
and Kline, 1995, p. 31). Contemporarily, Clynes and Kline’s answer persists
in such pop culture fantasy sites as Bethesda’s (2007) postapocalyptic video
game Fallout 3, 2K’s dystopic art nouveau nightmare Bioshock (2005), and
Marvel’s motion picture sensation Iron Man. As these fantasy sights portend,
the body’s ability to survive the hazards of a hostile future is entirely reliant
on its potential supplementation by high-tech prosthetics. Yet, the cyborg
is not merely an imaginary sight. As Baudrillard (2002) contends, Formula
One racing is a material example of the human-cum-fast-moving-wheeled
cyborg via the prosthetics of the race car.
While Clynes and Kline’s conceptualization of the cyborg questions the
fixed boundaries of the body while emancipating technics from conscious
human control, it maintains a curious conservatism (Land, 2006). Such
conservatism, Land argues, extends from Linneaus’ taxonomic categoriza-
tion of the human as Homo sapien. For Land, Linneaus’ taxonomic division
of man from animal overemphasizes the faculty of reason as the principal
trait of the human being. Entering into fidelity with the all-too-human
Cartesian image of life, reason in turn finds its seat within the brain, a
conceptualization that renders the body superfluous. It is following this
Cartesian image that the cyborg becomes conceptualized as a prosthetic
body for the rational mind of man. For Clynes and Kline, the body was
seen “as a mere housing for [reason], as something that could be surgically,
chemically, and mechanically modified without damaging the essence of
man” (Land, 2004, p. 113).
Contemporarily, Clynes and Kline’s prosthetic logic is implicate in the
work of Charles M. Higgins, professor of electrical and computer engi-
neering at the University of Arizona. Realizing the cyberpunk fantasy of
a jettisoned body, Higgins has developed a robot driven by the electrical
impulses of a moth’s brain. Beyond its neuroscientific import however,
Higgins’ experiment is phantasmatically significant, for the term superbug
refers to the short-circuiting of an early supercomputer by none other
than a moth (Genosko, 2006). Once and for all, Higgins’ experiment
imagines cybernetics emancipated of Lepidoptarian threat, and more
generally, the anxiety of the alien body, drawing the moth into homeo-
static correspondence with the machine. In an anthropomorphic vein, Ian
Pearson of British Telecom’s futurology unit has suggested that by 2050, it
will be possible to download the human brain into supercomputer-driven
communication networks. Such a scenario is recapitulated by artificial
intelligence researcher Hans Moravec, who elides that an impending “post-
biological” reality in which robotic life becomes more complex than its
organic counterpart will enable humans to transfer their souls into robotic
bodies, hence transgressing the limits of weak flesh. In this ex-futuristic
posthuman fantasy, Homo sapien will endure as disembodied minds no
longer hindered by the mortal condition.
Despite its ostensible radicality, Clynes and Klines’ conceptualiza-
tion of the cyborg remains politically conservative, playing out a pro-
phylactic metaphysics in which Man insists “as the telos of creation,
albeit in a cybernetically modified livery” (Land, 2004, p. 113). In this
popular conceptualization, the prospect of human obsolescence posed
by machines is answered through techne’s colonization in the all-too-
human image of technological rationality, immortality (as informa-
tion), and optimal efficiency (the end of thermodynamic death).
Constituting an ideal model for the highly modifiable and fluid body
required by neoliberal capitalism, the cyborg supersedes the image of
the body as a “fixed” or “monolithic” entity, becoming an optimized
relay for receiving, managing, and incorporating the material and infor-
mational flows unleashed by the market economy. As Baudrillard (2002)
contends, Madonna is the archetype of this new ideal in which the body
is not other, but a moldable site for vertiginous expression. Despite the
insistence of some curricularists, Clynes and Kline’s conceptualization

of the cyborg scarcely constitutes the kind of abnormal body required
for breaking with the fascist face of the human. Rather, this particular
conceptualization of the cyborg marks the perfection of the body and
the ultimate refinement of identity via its disappearance into capitalist
models of technological perfectibility.
Cultural critic Mark Dery (1997) argues that the fantasy of posthu-
manism is hinged to the kind of prosthetic logic theorized by Clynes
and Kline. Characterizing late-twentieth-century posthumanism as a
“theology of the ejector seat,” Dery parallels the posthuman ideal to the
Gnostic image of the body as a prison to be escaped (p. 316). Far from
the tactical disidentification of the body figured in the work of such art-
ists as Francis Bacon and Antonin Artaud, the posthuman contempt for
material life is figured in the aspiration to double the transcendent, per-
manent, and omniscient image of God. In posthumanism, Homo sapien
becomes a little god. Failing as a revolutionary becoming, the techno-
eschatological ideal of posthumanism reterritorializes in the image of the
perfect human, or rather, the rationalist dream of human perfectibility. As
Land (2004) writes, posthumanism imagines the “ideal liberal-humanist
subject . . . cut . . . free from its puppet strings to become a self-contained
master” (p. 122). While this ostensible repudiation of the transcendent
marks the potential for thinking life as a matter of practical or imma-
nent creation, the eschatological aspiration of posthumanism hinges on
doubling the transcendent via the spirit’s download into information
networks or robotic bodies (Dery, 1997, p. 8). While birthed from the
Cartesian imaginary, the desire of posthumanism concomitantly reiter-
ates the neo-Darwinian spirit of evolutionary competition. Framed in
terms of “fitness,” evolution becomes a matter of warding off or defend-
ing against the perceived threat of increasingly complex and efficient
technologies (Ansell Pearson, 1997). For the posthuman, this means
mutating into a more effective information-processing machine, valoriz-
ing this desire as the goal of both social evolution and anthropocentric
perfection. Further, the neo-Darwinian mutation of such pop cultural
figures as Robocop and The Six Million Dollar Man have cathected becom-
ing-machine to the Friekorps fantasy of hypermasculine invulnerability
and power. Conceptualized thus, techne is submitted to tracing an image
of life in which the cyborg is realized qua human. Put differently, both
Clynes and Kline’s cyborg and the ejector seat theology Dery ascribes to
posthumanism have yet to confront the known world by bringing the
unthinkable into representation. Far from a revolutionary figure, the con-
ceptualization of the cyborg examined thus far remains all-too-human,
reterritorializing back onto the face of Man (Land, 2006).
The Inhuman Human
The collapse of bios and technos reduces technics to anthropos, bind-

ing history and evolution to anthropomorphic ideals. As Ansell Pearson
(1997) argues, what this particular conceptualization overlooks is that
the genesis of the human is not simply a technogenesis, but a biotechno-
genesis. For Ansell Pearson, such biotechnogenesis is most aptly figured
via the phenomenon of symbiosis, a mode of relation that disrupts the
arborescent analogy of the self-enclosed, taxonomically differenciated
organism. As a way of thinking potentials for connection that transgress
the Aristotelian categories of genus and species, symbiosis is rhizomatic.
Symbiosis suggests that evolution was never a purely biological matter, but
rather, a creative form of techne antedating the rise of Homo sapien. As
Sagan and Margulis (1995) argue, biotechnogenesis predates the silicon
age by at least three thousand million years, when bacterial metallurgists
began to utilize magnetite as an internal compass. The diversification of
life, Margulis argues, is neither the exclusive product of mutation or teleo-
logical involution. It is neither the unfolding of a brutal survival instinct.
Instead, Margulis avers that the emergence of nucleated cells some 2.2
billion years ago was resultant of microbial coupling in which host bac-
teria developed a protective membrane, shielding vital DNA from oxygen
producing cyanobacterial intruders. Archaebacteria would “marry” the
oxygen producing “disease,” in turn forming the earliest kind of nucleated
cell. It is hence symbiosis, and not linear evolution that begins to explain
why both mitochondria and chloroplasts contain DNA separate of the
nucleus. Margulis and Sagan (1986) extend this hypothesis to argue that
the cellular development of motile flagella or cilia was effected through
a varied feedback relationship between archaebacteria and fast-moving,
corkscrew-shaped spirochete bacteria. In another form of multicellular
symbiosis, Margulis speculates that microtubular spirochetes living within
host cells developed into axons and dendrites, forming a primordial ver-
sion of what would become the brain.
Kropotkin (1945/1901) articulates this symbiotic tendency differently,
challenging the neo-Darwinian presumption of evolutionary competi-
tion by supplanting it with an image of symbiotic cooperation and
transversal territorial connection. “Those animals which acquire habits of
mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest,” wrote an exiled Kropotkin (p. 12).
Kropotkin’s notion of symbiosis would be extended by Bergson (1911),
who argued that animals are inadequately known through information-
ally closed modes of categorization (genus, species, organs). Instead,
both Kropotkin and Bergson argue for more adequate understanding of
life via an analysis of the kinds of symbiotic assemblages (man-animal
symbiosis, animal-animal symbiosis, plant-animal symbiosis, animal-

mineral symbiosis) into which the animal enters (Ansell Pearson, 1999).
While speculation on the evolutionary import of symbiosis has become
orthodox in the biological sciences, it continues to affront an awkward
natural history that presumes anthropocentric determination while con-
comitantly revealing the hominid’s fear of “viroid” contamination. Such
fear circulates contemporarily in such varied forms as the threat posed by
the computer virus, weaponized biological viroids, and popularly, in the
zombie horror film genre, wherein viroid contaminants render civilians
into animalistic cannibals. Such anxiety is entwined with what Ansell
Pearson calls the filthy lesson of symbiosis; “The human is an integrated
colony of amoeboid beings, just as these amoeboid beings (protocists)
are integrated colonies of bacteria . . . [l]ike it or not, your origins are in
slime” (p. 182). It is this alien origin that is placed under erasure via the
posthuman disappearance of the body into pure data. While the post-
human cyborg forms a symbiotic relationship with technical machines,
these machines paradoxically reterritorialize back onto the all-too-
human image of anthropomorphic rationalism, evading a confrontation
with what is already inhuman in humanity.
Symbiosis suggests that we have never been humans proper, but
instead, cyborg assemblages unthought by the a priori anthromorphic
ideal of posthumanism. Perhaps more radically, symbiosis suggests that
evolutionary becoming necessitates the inventive “outside thought” of
techne. Put differently, to think becoming requires a way of attending
to the machining of heterogeneous elements, or rather, to an “art” of
assemblage. Such machinic thinking can be perceived in Kropotkin’s
conceptualization of life as immanent to its symbiotic assemblages.
With the instantiation of this percept, Kropotkin shifts away from the
hylomorphic division of form (transcendent categories of genus, species,
organs) and matter (immanent material causes) inherited from Aristotle.
The irreducible necessity of symbiotic or machinic assemblage is else-
where articulated via Colebrook’s (2002) example of a bicycle. On its
own, Colebrook develops, the bicycle is nonfunctional. To achieve func-
tionality, the bicycle requires connectivity with other machines. While
the common assemblage of bicycle and rider gives the former meaning
as a vehicle, the symbiotic potential of the bicycle is irreducible to this
formation. As Duchamp demonstrated, the connection of bicycle and
gallery renders the former artwork; bicycles connected to sites of trauma
become memorials; the machinic connection of bicycles with household
appliances renders the former into potential motors. The connection of
the motorcycle’s exhaust system with a trumpet renders the combustion
engine a musician. Demonstrating becoming as a process immanent to
the material connection or symbiosis of heterodox elements, Colebrook

echoes Kropotkin’s repudiation of the hylomorphic schema. Rather,
Colebrook demonstrates that both Being (the meaning of a thing) and
becoming are operationalized by machinic or symbiotic thinking. For
a thing to have Being requires techne, or rather, a connective “outside
thought” that already presumes becoming. The thing is hence never a
closed system, even in the case of hylomophism, which relies on the
naturalized connection of the body to transcendent taxonomic categories.
Such naturalization is of course, troubled by a machinic thinking that
suggests that we are always-already becoming-cyborg. Akin to the bicycle,
the body is multiple, capable of differentiating through machinic connec-
tion. The body’s connection to a bicycle renders it a cyclist; to a prison, a
potential prisoner; to drugs, a “tripper”; to a camera, an electric eye; to a
turntable, a tactile motor. Alluding to the machinic character of becom-
ing, Deleuze and Guattari refer to their philosophy of concept creation as
a toolbox. Put differently, throughout their body of philosophy, Deleuze
and Guattari have created a litany of conceptual tools capable of machin-
ing together heterogeneous elements as a tactic for deterritorializing prior
stratifications. Such a notion of machinic thinking, I contend, is helpful
to rethink the cyborg.
The Transhuman Cyborg
Deviating from the presumption of an anthropomorphic subject who ter-

ritorializes techne in his image, the kind of cyborg produced via machinic
symbiosis might more adequately be thought as transhuman, or rather, as
a potential for overcoming the a priori image of the human via the deter-
ritorialization of the anthropomorphic stratum. Contemporarily, such
transhumanism has emerged in the work Motohiko Odani, whose sculp-
tural and photographic work makes visible the symbiotic contamination
of Homo sapien. For example, the performance video entitled “Rompers”
depicts a surreal ecosystem in which a reptilian eyed girl catches bees with
her tongue and communes with birds and frogs who are themselves the
symbiotic hosts for grafted human organs. Such a tactic for thinking trans-
human symbiosis minimally inheres the work of performance artist Orlan,
who through surgical alteration has recoded her face as a probe-head for
imaging the becoming-alien of the anthropomorphic ideal. The grotesque
cyborgs of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle similarly reveal the inhuman
face through prosthesis, machining an assemblage of figures that break-
down circuits of representational thinking. Eduardo Kac’s controversial
transgenic artwork “GFB (green fluorescent protein) Bunny” produces a
similar unthought species by machining a fluorescent protein producing

jellyfish gene with an albino rabbit. While each of these examples bear
their own particular controversies, they each mark a general repudiation
of the ejector seat theology Dery ascribes to post-humanism. That is, each
avoids the all-too-human aspiration of jettisoning the body in lieu of ask-
ing how the body might be constructed. While these examples begin to
move in the direction of conceptualizing the transhuman, the question of
whether the machines composed by Odani, Orlan, Barney, and Kac are not
already seized by the capitalist social machine remains. That is, while each
begins to compose a machine alien to anthropocentrism, such a desire
is entwined with a particular kind of “cosmetic individuation” already
enabled by designer capitalism.
Bacon’s Probe-Heads
Perhaps a more radical cyborgian figure is antedated in the work of

Francis Bacon, whose grotesque paintings push machinic thinking to
their transhuman limits. As Deleuze (2002) writes, Bacon’s portraits pur-
sue the peculiar project of dismantling the face. Rather than painting in
terms of structure or hylomorphic form, Bacon rediscovers a Figure, or
rather, a probe-head “beneath the face” (p. 19). Through the technique
of local scrubbing, Deleuze writes, Bacon produces an indiscernible zone
between man and animal, demonstrating their coupling in even the most
isolated painted figures. In Bacon’s Man with Dog (1953) for example, an
indiscernible anomal figure is machined to the degenerating shadow of
man, coupling man and animal in what Deleuze calls “a latent bullfight”
(p. 20). The machinic symbiote that Bacon reveals through the pro-
duction of non-structural Figures is pushed to its limit in his 1944
Second Version of Triptych. In this series, Bacon explores the body as an
assemblage of machined relations deviating from the kinds of connec-
tions desired by medical, psychological, and moral norms. The anus
is a machine that shits, the mouth, a machine that imbibes, the face,
a machine that represents. Re-machining these connections, Bacon’s
Figures shit with their mouths, eat with their anuses, implode their facial
machines into black holes, anomal shadows, and raw meat. Promulgating
the question of how the body is constructed, Bacon’s Figures produce
new affects through a schizoanalysis of the anthropomorphic body. Put
differently, Bacon’s Figures schizoanalytically diagram the normalized
image of the body as an effect of the “mechanical” overdetermination
of the machine. Against this, Bacon steals back the machinic potential
of the body from its frozen “mechanical” configuration, schizzing their
a priori connections in the machining of new affective relations. As a

confrontation with body’s frozen affective corridors however, the kinds
of machinic connections produced by Bacon are those that much of
contemporary society dub deviant. Under a normalized image of bodily
connections for example, the schizzed oral machine of the bulimic, the
short-circuited anal machine of the sodomist, and the flayed flesh of the
masochist become pathologized. Stealing back a virtuality of machinic
potentials inhering the actualized connections of the body as it is or
should be, Bacon liberates the constantive flows of the body, creating a
transhuman schizoanalytic machine for thinking the destratification of
the anthropomorphic stratum.
Bacon’s Figures illustrate a body bound up with technicity, or rather, a
body that is already symbiotically contaminated by inhuman, alien, and
anomal affects. Bacon’s Figures do not reterritorialize upon the face of
Man, but rather, create meaty probe-heads for surveying unthought con-
nections and conjoined species. As Deleuze (2002) writes, Bacon’s work
diagrams the “emergence of another world . . . [born of] a-signifying
traits” (p. 82). In part, this is accomplished through Bacon’s unique
technics, which abandon preparatory sketches in lieu of working out
“confused sensations” through “nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, non-
narrative” practices of local scrubbing (utilizing rags not brushes), thrown
paint (utilizing rhythm in lieu of pure optics), and random marking
(working out “zones” of tension between coded and decoded elements)
(Deleuze, 2002, p. 82). Bacon’s painting diagrams the body as a product
of its machinic relations, their particular connections (organs), zones of
relation (symbiosis), and flows of desiring-production (the connection
of such “little” machines as the mouth, the eye, the anus, etc). Illustrating
becoming as the product of techne, Bacon’s machinic style liberates the
body from anthropocentric overdetermination, allowing it to enter into
experimental assemblages anathematic to instrumental thinking. In this
vein, Bacon’s conjoinment of techne and becoming might help us to
more adequately understand the significance of such contemporary arts
as turntablism, wherein the DJ connects with the third arm of the phono-
graph, digital filmmaking, where human perspective is deterritorialized
upon the digital recorder, and graffiti, wherein the fingertip becomes a
fine tuned jet of color. Yet, before engaging with the symbio-technics of
such artforms, the significance of machinic thinking in contradistinction
to three popular images of the organism requires specific attention. The
first of these images is that of the autopoeitic or self-generating organ-
ism, the second, the popularized figure of the hybrid, while the third, an
examination of the reactionary rejection of the machine in contemporary
thinking.
Autopoeisis
To begin, machinic thinking intervenes with the presumption of holistic

“unity” and “balance,” introducing a kind of symbio-cyborgian think-
ing that postulates artifice at heart of Nature (Deleuze, 1988). As Ansell
Pearson (1997) writes, holism and balance become possible only insofar
as the organism displays a finality or self-organizing capability that
reterritorializes on the image of an a priori “purposeness.” As a sym-
biote, the cyborg cannot be essentialized, for we do not yet know what
its body might do, how it might connect, link, or assemble with other
machines. Take for example the significance of such social networking
sites as Facebook and Twitter (connecting machines) in the mobiliza-
tion of flashmobs, activist groups machined into temporary performa-
tive action. Perhaps more radically, Guattari (1992) questions whether
such demonstrations as the 1999 anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle” would
have been possible if not for the internet’s viral potential to machine
militant cells into symbiotic organization. Social machines symbiotically
linked to technological machines in a manner not yet captured by State
power. Such assemblages mark the deterritorialization of determined or
pre-established parameters of life in lieu of thinking life as the kind of
assemblage Ansell Pearson (1997) dubs “desire-engineering” (p. 197).
The becoming assumed by such “desire-engineering” (the tactical con-
nection of machines) is marked by the vital potential of techne, or rather,
the productive collapse of machinic and animal life. Of course, to speak
of such a collapse as contemporary is to obfuscate how such “desire-
engineering” is antedated in the figure of the tool-using chimpanzee
and the weapon-bearing Neanderthal Man whose upper body, no longer
required for locomotion, could be deterritorialized and connected up
with other primitive machines.
In either instance however, the collapse of machinic and animal life
cannot simply be attributed to autopoeitic organization, or rather, an
image of evolution born of internal perturbation. Such a definition
remains inadequate insofar as autopoeisis maintains the privileged
anthropocentric image of the closed and uncontaminated organism
driven by a desire for autonomy. However, as Ansell Pearson (1997)
warns, the purely autonomous organism would ultimately become
frozen within an evolutionary stalemate, unable to produce connec-
tive relations with a material outside or virtual “outside thought.”
In this vein, the “highly restricted [transformational] economy” of
autopoeisis leaves two choices: “either entropy or perfect performance”
(p. 196). Either the organism is thermodynamically broken down upon
the body of other machines (a “turning toward” outside contaminants)

or remains a closed and “stable” self-generating system. The former
image persists in the reactionary rejection of economic industrial-
ization and repudiation of emerging technologies, while the latter is
evident in the vitalist, student centered, and self-organizing image
of currere adopted from the explosion of “pop” complexity theory in
the late 1980’s. Butler (1872/1970) diffuses this vitalist image of life
in the anagrammatic Erewhon, where he argues that evolution is not
only machinic from the outset, but further, that organisms share a
fidelity to the sophisticated engineering and connective potentials of
machines. In this dual move, Butler challenges the ostensible unity of
the organism while destroying the “mechanical” image of the machine
as an a priori structural unity.
Contemporarily, Butler’s critique that vitality is bound to a viroid life
continues to be met with anxiety, particularly in the case of computer
hackers who utilize macros (cobbled fragments of code) as artificial viral
agents to infiltrate firewall-contained computer networks. Such is the case
of then 15-year-old computer hacker Mafia Boy (Michael Calce), who
exposed the nonunitary and connective potential of the machine through
the insertion of viral macros (packets of information) into ostensibly stable
computer networks, in turn disabling the coded “purposeness” of such
e-commerce giants as Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay, costing them upwards
of a billion dollars in lost revenue. Through the release of viral agents
into enclosed networks, hackers like Mafia Boy performatively release the
potentials of the technical machine from under the social machinery of
neoliberal capitalism. While the reactive rhetorical stance of e-commerce
corporations might insist otherwise, the hacker does not simply expose
or exploit flaws within networked systems. Rather, the hacker actualizes
the machine’s potential for connective assemblage, producing a symbiotic
force capable of pushing stable networks into far-from-equilibrium states
of becoming. Such viroid symbiosis does not merely affect the technical
machines involved, but as previously noted, infects the social machine
through its production of commercial uncertainty, public apprehension,
and sites of resistance. Moreover, the interiorization of philosophical
reflection and desire for self-mastery promulgated throughout modernity
is shattered by the virus as an insoluble “outside thought.” Despite the
reactive recycling of 1960’s “organismic” thinking, the New Age rhetoric of
the transparent, self-fulfilled person, or the spiritualized image of harmo-
nious Being, the symbio-cyborg force of viroid life cannot be annihilated.
As Ansell Pearson (1997) writes, “There are only insecurity systems from
now on” (p. 181).
Queering the Hybrid
Perhaps as curriculum theorists, we have already come to grips with such

insecurity systems. In much contemporary curriculum work for example,
the figure of the hybrid has come to constitute a special, albeit increasingly
common case for thinking the collapse of modernity’s binary machines.
The platypus is the hybridic folding of mammal and reptile; the tangor is a
hybrid of the mandarin and common orange; the donkey a hybrid of pony
and horse; the rollerblade a hybrid of foot and vehicle, and so on. In some
curriculum circles, the hybrid has been linked to the conceptualization of
a “third space,” or rather, what has been touted as a heterodox “marginal
space.” Conceptualized in this way however, the assumed radicality of
hybrid space is marked by a particular conservatism that has yet to take
seriously the import of symbiosis. Specifically, hybridic thought conserves
the idea of originary elements prior to mixing and further, the ostensibly
uncontaminated status of these generative sources (Ansell Pearson, 1999).
Conceived in this way, hybridity is inadequate for the theorization of an
interdisciplinary curriculum studies, since it continues to labor in the
image of its generative disciplines (English, mathematics, art, etc.) as if
they signified monolithic discursive fields. The failing of hybridic think-
ing extends equally to the conceptualization of an inter-generational or
civilizational dialogue that extends from such a priori statistical categories
as “youth,” “whites,” or Europeans. It is in this vein that hybridic thought
only minimally deviates from arborescent schemas and dialectical think-
ing, remaining wed to structural points of origin rather than facilitating
a transversal exchange between such points. Such transversal exchange
marks the crystallization of originary points into an assemblage irreduc-
ible to given generative or genetic elements. More radically, transversality
might be thought as the machinic potential that inheres the generative
model “itself.” For example, the contemporary DJ is not simply the hybrid
dialectic of playback device and human agent. Instead, the transversal
desire-engineering of the DJ creates an assemblage wherein the playback
device becomes a reco(r)ding machine while the human agent is rethought
as a cybernetic tactile motor. The crystallization of the phonograph and
player no longer represents either, but diagrams the virtual connective
symbiosis of both. Neither human nor machine, but rather, their trans-
versal becoming-DJ. In a less evident turn however, the connection of DJ
and phonograph produces a viroid contamination in which the phono-
graph is materially rethought as a musical instrument. Moreover, the DJ
demonstrates the non-unity of the human agent via the symbiotic deter-
ritorialization of the human arm upon the mechanical limb and diamond
needle of the turntable. Transversally, the unthought potentials of both
phonograph and human agent are exposed by the DJ, whose “desire-
engineering” lays bear the nonunitary character of the DJ’s genetic
coordinates. Neither the actualization of the phonograph as a playback
device nor the human as an independent creative agent are “complete”
pre-given forms. Instead, the transversal becoming of the DJ produces
a way of perceiving the virtual difference of both the phonograph as a
reproductive technology and the human as an organized whole. Against
such a priori “mechanical” images, the DJ mobilizes a “block” of sensation,
a “voodoo-tech somatics . . . [or] sonic metallurgy” machined from the
deterritorialized flows of both phonograph and operator alike (MacKay,
1997, p. 254). That is, the DJ is not simply the hybridization of the pho-
nograph and human agent (what is), but rather, the symbiotic machin-
ing (actualization) of their unthought (virtual) potentials for becoming
(becoming-machine, becoming-music, becoming-monster).
Lo(o)sing Face
The reactive rejection and overgeneralization of the “machine” in much

contemporary thought has reduced the potential for thinking and practic-
ing a machinic ontology. Yet, if we are to take seriously the claim that think-
ing and practice are themselves machinic, then the reactive rejection of
such machines marks more than a renunciation of a style of praxis (Ansell
Pearson 1997; Welchman, 1987). More severely, it marks a reduction in
what might be properly thought. Such reactivity is based in three major
assumptions, the first of which conflates “mechanics” and “mechanisms”
with machines. As a closed system of component parts, the “mechanism”
marks the machine in its most frozen state. Reduced to the “identitarian”
function of its component parts, the “mechanism” becomes a corollary of
instrumental thinking. A “mechanics” image of a car engine for example,
might entail conceptualizing a spark plug, water pump, or fuel injector
system in terms of its designed functionality. Extended to the mapping of
the human genome and its systematic reengineering, “mechanics” marks a
failure in thinking insofar as it overcodes its components (the car engine,
the human genome) in a way that has yet to evoke the question of rela-
tion. Opposed to focusing on the design and remapping of component
parts, machinic thinking questions “how” things are constructed in the
first place. Such a question is contemporarily significant, for as a project of
remapping a priori systems of design, “mechanics” falls easily into fascism,
identity politics, and representational ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) argue, the face of the human is bound to a eugenic and identitarian
“mechanics” collapsing it into transcendent systems of design. Fashioning
a Face in place of the kind of inhuman probe-head articulated in the paint-

ings of Francis Bacon, “mechanics” marks the repression of a machinic
thinking that might otherwise function to overcome a faciality “that is
always colonial” (Land, 2006, p. 124). Such colonization is illustrated via a
Facial overcoding that freezes the flows of sense and organ, producing the
all-too-human conjunction of reasoning brain, surveilling eye, consuming
mouth, passive ear, etc. Beyond these “mechanical” assemblages, the Face
becomes a site of social recognition which reterritorializes the head as male
or female. Yet, perhaps more significantly, the Face is always structured in
a way that registers as distinctly human. It was not merely the decoded
gender or ethnicity of Michael Jackson’s Face that shocked orthodox cul-
tural sensibilities. Rather, the strangest aspect of Jackson’s transformation
was via “his” technical creation of an unrecognizable, inhuman probe-
head. Perhaps not surprisingly, postmortem commentary on Michael
Jackson has attempted to reterritorialize his mangled probe-head back
upon an orthodox Face. Not only has the media attempted to halt Michael
Jackson’s becoming-alien/ becoming-vampire/becoming-replicant upon
the all-too-human face of Oedipus, but further, as evidenced in Jamie
Foxx’s BET awards declaration, Jackson has been recaptured as essentially
or “originally black.” Postmortem, Jackson’s inhuman or machinic head is
recomposed as a human or “mechanical” Face, hence absorbing its deterri-
torialization of the ethnic, gendered, and racial categories of hylomorphic
thought.
Despite this reactive territorialization however, the Face of the human
has already entered into its twilight. The proliferation of new commu-
nications technologies, web 2.0, and massively multiplayer online video
games have increasingly destratified the anthropomorphic stratum in lieu
of a machinic probe-head that can no longer be thought in “mechani-
cal” terms. Indeed, the creation of a probe-head becomes a tactical
war-machine against the fascism of the Face and further, from the anthro-
pomorphic stratum in general. Despite the connotation of an autonomous
human agent insisting at the heart of every Facebook and MySpace, the
technological inter-Face (the conjoinment of human with its alien outside)
produces a “complexcity” of relations that does not reterritorialize in the
image of a human Face. As such complexcities portend, there are no longer
individuals, but rather, crowds, swarms, and fuzzy machined collectives.
This movement, Land (2006) contends, marks the upset of humanist
romanticism and the unified subject who becomes “contaminated by the
new technologies of communication” (p. 124).
This shift necessitates a way of thinking the machine apart from its
orthodox conceptualization as a system of lack, a conceptualization that
once again stems from the orthodox conflation of “mechanics” with
machines. “Mechanics” preserves the transcendent position of a designer,

system, or map above and beyond the material connections of the
machine. Without this transcendent outside, a “mechanism” would cease
to function, since its very formative and motive power is deferred upon an
external efficient cause (Welchman, 1997). This Kantian inheritance reiter-
ates the anthropocentric bias of a subject who exists prior to the creation
of a machinic assemblage. Such anthropomorphism continues to haunt
the theorized encounter between self and other, since such an encounter
assumes an uncontaminated agent prior to difference, or rather, a subject
that then enters into a relational assemblage. Further, it is this particular
image of “mechanics” that has dominated the instrumental modeling of
schooling insofar as it conceptualizes curriculum as the emanation of a
transcendent designer, system, or model. In this image, the curriculum
becomes a site of lack remedied by the efficient cause of educational design
and the purposiveness attributed to its moralizing, evaluative, instructional,
and civilizing function. Conceptualized as a site of lack, currere becomes
reduced to a “mechanical” object to be “worked on” from the position of
a transcendent “outside.” In this vein of “mechanical” curricular thought,
desire becomes fettered to lack. That is, the instrumental “mechanism” is
always reliant upon a transcendent cause for its formative or motive func-
tioning (Welchman, 1997). What such utilitarianism attempts to obfuscate
is a fundamental antimony between the organism and machine, falling
back into the anthropocentric bias of a human controller at the center of
“mechanical” organization. This perspective is a corollary of a techno-
utopianism which understands the technical apparatus only in terms of
its capacity to enhance human life. Yet, where the ostensible advancement
of Homo sapien relies on technics for its becoming, the anthropomorphic
stratum is already shifting.
Summerhill as a Nonmechanical War-machine
Machinic ontology moves away from the component thinking of “mechan-

ics” toward an analysis of “relations” and a schizoanalysis of their poten-
tial to function differently. For example, A.S. Neill’s (1993) Summerhill
mobilizes an image of schooling that might be thought as a “stealing
back” of machinics from the “mechanical” image of pedagogical life.
Departing from an image of currere as emanating from a transcendent
design or designer, Summerhill’s image of how a life might go is immanent
to the desire-engineering of its students and not, as “mechanics” would
assert, as an a priori remapping for how life ought to go. At Summerhill,
students of all ages make operational and judicial decisions as equals to
staff. Further, such decision making is immanent to particular cases and

hence departs from universal or transcendent moral or disciplinary codes.
In this sense, there are no bosses at Summerhill to dictate or coerce the
action of the aggregate. Following Reich’s question on the all-too-human
desire for its own fascism(s), Summerhill begins to disconnect from the
micro-fascisms that schooling encourages in its students, machining an
alternative organ-izational assemblage. For example, Summerhill students
are not impelled to attend class nor is their delinquency fashioned into a
pathological impetus for disciplinary response. Suspending the pressure
of attending class for its own sake, students are able to select which les-
sons to attend and further, are able to pursue their own interests in lieu
of attending class at all. Following, Summerhill is less a site of continual
productive labor under a transcendent ideal than an experiment in the
potentials of pedagogical counter-production. In such a vein, Summerhill
begins to create a machinic probe-head for thinking a pedagogical life
no longer reliant upon an assumed lack, composing instead a counter-
fascist site of desire-engineering capable of collapsing the hierarchical
organ-ization of the “mechanical” school. It is hence not surprising that
Summerhill’s future was threatened in the late 1990’s, when Tony Blair’s
New Labour Government sought to reterritorialize Summerhill’s singular-
ity back upon the State’s model of educational efficiency and production,
hence reinscribing it within a “mechanical” model of lack. Of course, the
New Labor model of education presumed the necessity of the State as a
transcendent supervisory and regulative power. Against this, Summerhill
might be thought as a project of releasing the machinic potentials of a
pedagogical life from its identitarian or representational “mechanics.”
Indeed, Summerhill was able to evade capture through the resistance of its
proponents, who championed the necessity of its “anomality” in a culture
overcoded by party bosses, organ-izational hierarchies, and the clichés of
orthodox thinking (Guattari, 2000).
Summerhill begins to imagine a strange pedagogical machine that
queers, or rather, counter-actualizes the material repetitions that compose
State images of schooling (Colebrook, 1996, 2009). It is, in this sense, a
war-machine that mobilizes “other ways of perceiving the world,” creat-
ing “a new face on things, and even a turn of events” (Guattari, 1995, p.
97). A.S. Neills’ Summerhill would be part of a larger movement in the
1960’s focused on interrogating the relational ethics or machined con-
nection of the institution. Owing much to the ideas of Célestin Freinet1
(1896–1966), Neill’s “turn” is also evident in Fernand Oury’s repudiation
of 1960’s institutionalized schooling, a revolutionary project that deeply
influenced the political pedagogy of Guattari (Genosko, 2008). Against
the “mechanical” school, Guattari would characterize Oury’s Group for
Therapeutic Education (Groupe d’éducation thérapeutics, GET) as a project

for overcoming the encasernée scolaire (school-as-barracks). As Genosko
(2008) documents, this would be accomplished through the creation
of a “collectivity sensitive to heterogeneous components as well as local
conditions that would otherwise be steamrolled if one arrived with pre-
fabricated interpretive grids” (p. 66). Akin to Summerhill, the project of
the Group for Therapeutic Education would be oriented to the analysis of
institutional assemblages and their affects on subjectivity. Overturning the
institutionally alienated individual and the asymmetrical teacher student
dyad, Oury would recuperate Freinet’s use of a school journal (a collective
correspondence within and between schools), a local printery (owned by
students for the collective production and dissemination of texts), and an
emphasis on cooperative council (the refining-machine of group organiza-
tion led by the students themselves). Mobilizing the school journal, local
printery, and cooperative council as a mediating techne, Oury would
machine a pedagogical singularity oriented to the affirmation of collective
autoproduction and the counter-actualization of institutional anguish and
hopelessness. Extending Freinet, Guattari also would affirm the “technical
and political choice” of the school printery as a “molecular revolutionary
activity” for the creation, possession, and communication of collective
enunciation freed from transcendent models (Genosko, 2008, p. 68). As
with the mediating force of Summerhill’s communal meeting, Oury simi-
larly argues for the necessity of techne in the production of a pedagogical
singularity. As Genosko (2008) writes, what is original about Oury’s use of
the printing press “is its role in mediation” and further, its creation of “a
transversalizing space in which material hierarchy is restructured . . . and
existing institutional structures at all levels from the classroom through
the school board . . . are called into question” (pp. 67–68). What becomes
evident in the counter-actualizing image of pedagogical life created by
Neill and Oury is the crucial role that techne plays in the production of a
singular life—a life that is no longer exclusively “human.”
It is through Oury’s unconventional technical objects that the “mechan-
ical school” is given back to machinic and revolutionary thought. Such
machinic thinking not only mediates a less oppressive fabulation of social
relations, but further, functions to augment the powers of the collective
through the actualization of new forms of social responsibility, militancy,
and subjectivity. It is in this vein that curriculum theory might begin to
rethink the revolutionary role of techne as a force for releasing territories
of institutional organ-ization from their mechanical overdetermination.
That is, techne’s machinic creation of both social and transhuman con-
nections marks the undoing of the organized or institutionally overcoded
body (Colebrook, 2009). Put differently, it is via the inhuman force of
techne that curriculum theorists might challenge the humanist plateaus

of self-generation, holism, and hylomorphism upon which the image of
currere (the course of a life) is being contemporarily thought. Across each
of these tasks, techne enters into relation with the fabulation of a peda-
gogical war-machine, or rather, a “revolutionary instant [or] experimental
surge” capable of dissimulating the orthodox image of how a pedagogical
life ought to go (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 27). The composition of
such a war-machine exposes a fact of becoming misapprehended in much
curriculum theory, that is, the necessity of a mediating concept, object, or
technology one might call techne. Put differently, it is via the machinic
potential of techne that curriculum theory might best understand its
project as a matter of creation rather than representation, of fabulation
rather than identitity.
Turntablism and Drum-machinics
The turn from “mechanical” thinking to the mobilization of a war-

machine is being contemporary mobilized in underground music and
cinema where, as Guattari (1995) writes, we find “some of the most
important cells of resistance against the steam-roller of capitalist subjec-
tivity – the subjectivity of one-dimensionality, generalized equivalence,
segregation, and deafness to true alterity” (p. 91). It is in the arts, Guattari
argues, that the vital link between techne and becoming is most produc-
tively exposed. Yet, such productivity does not labor in a prior image of
identity or representation. Linking with techne, the “mechanical” image
of the body is deterritorialized. This is exemplified in body of the turnta-
blist who, deterritorializing on the technical object of the turntable, links
up with its prosthetic arm. As Guins and Cruz (2006) argue, it is via this
prosthetic connection that the turntablist is able to intervene with the
disappearance of the worker’s hand in contemporary manufacturing,
a historical movement that has fueled the apocalyptic image of human
submission under technological domination. Against this, the turntablist’s
hand enters into assemblage with the turntable as “a motor . . . while [the]
arms [of both deejay and turntable] work together to mine beats from
the black pits of the groove with a diamond drill” (p. 230). As previously
developed, the assemblage of deejay and turntable machinically augments
the powers of both. The deejay becomes a cyborgian decoding/recoding
machine while the turntable is freed from its reproductive function as a
musical instrument. In “turn,” this machinic linkage enables such mutant
tactics as the “scratch,” a technique in which the conjoinment of the
turntablists arm and turntable’s needle inventively actualize unthought
fragments of (a)rhythmic noise by scratching new “grooves across the old”

(p. 231). Contaminating the musical refrain (the coded block of music),
the “scratch” produces an inhuman language that no longer territorializes
back onto the recorded sound of the vinyl record itself. Unlike the remix,
the sound produced by the scratch does not resemble its original source,
but rather, becomes a machinic probe-head that explores the entire range
of potentials in a given code. As an asignifying probe-head, the scratch
might be thought as an tactile-auditory “writing machine” for a people
yet-to-come (Attali, 1985, p. 11). In this vein, turntablism becomes a
potential war-machine for thinking escape routes from under the laws of
“usemonopoly,” the manipulation of popular taste by the music industry
(where hip hop becomes hit pop), and the coded block of the musical
refrain. Reclaiming techne as a force for machining new social relations,
turntablism has become a “[schizoanalytic] technique . . . [for] scrambling
coding systems, feeding intensificatory experimentation back into the
strata” (Mackay, 1997, p. 267); As Public Enemy’s Chuck D raps in response
to the presumed detachment of urban youth and technology: “[It’s] war
at 33 1/3 / Haven’t you heard?”; It is via the combination of techne and
the future (of black culture), Chuck D (2008) argues, that a counterat-
tack might be waged “against the mass dumbing down of . . . culture”
(p. 341). Turntablism’s technical machine produces a mutant subjectivity
that no longer accords to identitarian thinking. It is through the turntable
as a decoding-machine that minoritarian impulses might be stolen back
from majoritarian thinking, reconfiguring the producer-consumer dyad,
strict musical genealogies (via transversal mixing) while concomitantly
executing the “slippage between the functions of the crowd, musician and
machine, where sounds produce and execute their own evolutive pres-
sures” (Mackay, 1997, 254).
(Re)Materializing the Revolutionary Force of Techne
As a potential revolutionary force, techne poses a danger to the social

machinery of the State. As Mackay (1997) develops, the colonization of
Africa by the West included the significant destruction of tribal drums,
the machinic instrument connecting the body of the individual to the
collective and further, to the collective virtual history of the tribal assem-
blage. Against the productive force of techne, Western colonials intervened
first to eradicate the machinic potential of the drum, marking one of the
primary strategies underpinning the African slave trade. Upon the tatters
of destroyed drums, colonials would subsequently claim that Africa was
devoid of both historical memory or the means for its recording.
It is against this history of violence that the drum has rematerialized,

“erupting into Western music like a long-awaited revenge for its brutal
silencing” (Mackay, 1997, p. 257). Like a force of contagion, the drum cre-
ates a contemporary body technology unthought by the Western world.
More specifically, the drum returns as an asignifying “meme-grinder” (the
repetition of discrete units or molecules of sound-intensity), deterritorial-
izing the social machine via what Mackay dubs an inventive “becoming-
Creole” (p. 257). As Frith (1996) argues, “what makes music special . . . is
that it defines a space without boundaries . . . [and] is thus the cultural
form best able to cross borders . . . and to define places: in clubs, scenes,
and raves” (p. 124–125). In this capacity of creation, the African drum
returns to introduce viral affects into the material-flows of the social
machine, deterritorializing the individual body across “the transitive voice
of the drum” where accelerating beats-per-minute and the physicality of
sub-bass traverse the body becoming-sound (Mackay, 1997, p. 256). Such
a becoming, in which the body is driven and extended through inorganic
Voodoo technics and the machining of diasporic flows coalesces in such
microcultural chaosmotic forces as jungle, electronica, and drum and bass
music. Becoming-sound, the Face of the human is deterritorialized upon a
sonic probe-head that begins to survey the complexcity of affects that com-
pose the “underground” sensorium of the city. Akin to the “street poetics
of break dancing made possible by the ghetto blaster,” a people yet-to-come
is being fabulated via the chaosmodic technics of electronica (Hemment,
2004, p. 81). As a site for the machining of new subjectivities and holey
spaces, this musical “underground” is concomitantly a source of anxiety
for State power. As Mackay (1997) writes, “sampled/sequenced music is
the first form of music to have its performance specifically proscribed by
an Act of Parliament” (p. 257).
The Voodoo sonic phylum of jungle, electronica, and drum and bass
are themselves machined via the technics of the synthesizer and digital
sampler. It is via the plastic technics of the synthesizer/sequencer that
rhythmic duration can be pushed to inhuman thresholds of speeds and
slowness, rendering the metronomic function of the machine into a “pure”
intensity (timestretching). The electronic drum machine would create
a similar line of flight via its capacity to produce irregular metronomic
patterns capable of pushing “four-to-the-floor” or 4/4 punctual systems
to the point of sonic morphogenesis, or rather, the point where the
expressive potentials of the musical refrain are “schizzed.” As Hemment
(2008) writes, the creative power of the synthesizer extends not from is
ability to represent human performance or instrumentation, but rather, to
“fail” them. Intimate to the emergence of acid house music (pioneered by
such artists as DJ Pierre, Spanky, and Herbert J), the Roland TB-303 was
notoriously poor at reproducing the bass lines it was manufactured to

reproduce. As Hemment writes, “the Roland TB-303...arose in an implicit
way within a culture of misuse . . . its programming procedures were
so complex that the operator’s intentions would become lost . . . [pro-
ducing unexpected results] more interesting than what was intended”
(p. 84). Failing as a instrument of reproduction, the Roland TB-303 would
produce a new musical regime via its non-identitarian function. This
“anomal” functionality would in turn create a passage for experiment-
ing with the production of sensations escaping the intentions of design
and overcoded aesthetic tastes. Against the aesthetic dictates of studio
production Hemment calls “corporate sense data,” the inexpensive Roland
TB-303 would give rise to the so-called bedroom producer and the further
deterritorialization of corporate “sense” production. Not only would the
Roland TB-303 steal back expressive potential from the social machinery
of the studio and mainstream recording industry, it would concomitantly
machine a new style of musical experimentation drawing the human
sensorium into relation with hitherto unthought inhuman affects. Both
this affective and stylistic becoming are intimately tied a techne that is not
simply instrumental or representational. Instead, the synthesizer becomes
a “strange contraption” in the creation of the countercultural war-machine
dubbed acid house, a microcultural movement that would seek out alter-
native becomings via experimental composition, collective dance (rave
culture), drug use (Special K or MDMA culture), and the subversion of
copyright “usemonopolies” (via sampling). In this assemblage, techne
(the synthesizer/sequencer/drum machine) is neither the harbinger of
human evolution (techno-utopian) or cessation (technological apoca-
lypse). Rather, techne might more adequately be thought in terms of how
it opens new way of machining a life without falling back upon tyrannical
images of how a life ought to go.
Building a Queer Machine for Curriculum Theorizing
The difference between how a life might go and how a life ought to go
is the difference between a machinic ethics and “mechanical morality.”
While morality provides an instance for the appearance of the subject
and its recognition under transcendent law, machinic thinking marks the
ethical undoing of norms. That is, machinic thinking opens a passage for
recognizing “what is” as a machined complex of relations that might have
been assembled otherwise. While a mechanical morality already presup-
poses the “correct” connections between its coded elements, the plasticity
of machinic thinking maintains a responsiveness to the unknown (Ansell
Pearson, 1997, p. 211). We do not yet know what a body might do. To
take seriously this question of becoming however, necessitates an attenu-
ation toward the technical machines with which the body assembles and
towards which particular social forces are attracted and linked. While the
turntable and synthesizer mark two examples of machinery linking up
with emergent youth forces, the toolbox of concepts mobilized by Deleuze
and Guattari constitutes another technical force for thinking difference,
for machining new social relations, and preparing spaces for a people
unanticipated by molar or moral thought. If the task of curriculum stud-
ies is oriented to the creation of new concepts for thinking a pedagogical
life, then by necessity, the curriculum project must take seriously the
enjoinment of techne to becoming and in particular, its potentials for dis-
simulating “the image of the human” (Colebrook, 2009, p. 21). Without
an ontological disposition toward machinic thinking, life becomes caught
in the all-too-human Face of “what is,” an image of life which reifies the
anthropocentric bias and the tyranny of representational thinking. Against
this, machinic thought creates a passage for thinking the transhuman, or
rather, a contaminated mutant subjectivity that is not limited to prior
models of hylomorphic possibility. Instantiating the potential for thinking
radical difference, machinic thought prepares a passage for the unknown
relations of becoming-anomal, becoming-probe-head, becoming-sound, etc.
Such zones of indiscernability do not fall back upon the metanarrative ide-
ations of humanism, but rather, begin to diagram other times and spaces
for living. This does not assume that such assemblages are good. As the
underside of MDMA culture demonstrates, a line of experimentation can
collapse into a black hole. The task of thinking or practicing difference
should not be entered into haphazardly. Rather, one should take great care
to avoid producing new forms of tyranny or microfascism. While newness
is always accompanied by potentials for suffering, there concomitantly
exists a great suffering that accompanies the eradication of newness. This
overwhelming form of suffering has an extensive contemporary sympto-
mology that includes nihilism, cynicism, resentment, and detachment. It
is in this way that machinic thinking becomes a mode for the analysis and
affirmation of virtual connective potentials that experiment, rather than
presume, the course of a life. In this project, techne becomes more than
a critical technology for thinking. Instead, as illustrated via the technical
machinery of the turntable and synthesizer, techne becomes integral to the
metallurgical creation of new subjectivities, spaces, and times of living. As
Colebrook avers (2009), it is via technics that we are enabled to “perceive
beyond the selves we already are” (p. 21).
Fabulating a singular life from under the metastasized territories of
orthodox thought, curriculum theory strikes an affinity with what might
be called queer machinics. Queer machinics has nothing to do with a

“reflection on what it means to be queer,” but rather, marks a change in the
way that we might theorize (Colebrook, 2009, p. 11). If the task of curricu-
lum theorizing is concept creation for thinking a pedagogical life, it must
take seriously the schizoanalytics of machinic thought. This entails that the
creation of concepts be understood not simply in terms of their accumula-
tive or additive power (n+1), but rather, in relation to the kinds of forces
they modify and unleash from material repetition (n–1). This tactic enters
into affinity with a kind of queer theorizing that attempts “to deviate
from, or pervert, that which appears self-evident, unquestionable or foun-
dational” (p. 12). Taking seriously the preparation of a space for a people
yet-to-come, curriculum theory might mobilize a queer machinics for the
counter-actualization of “what is.” This task is intimate to what might be
dubbed the ?curriculum, a concept that is both a problematic (producing
the schizoanalytic question (?) of how the curriculum might be machined)
and queer contraption (the foundational possibility of which is visually
disrupted). The idea of ?curriculum theorizing suggests that concepts be
thought as more than critical. More adequately, curriculum theorists must
begin to think the concept as a metallurgical probe-head for creating, reg-
istering, and linking viroid lines of flight. In this way, the technics of the
concept become intimate to the composition of a queer machine for steal-
ing a life back from life in general. Put differently, it is via the experimental
technics of the concept that “mechanical” images of life might be queered,
giving thought back to its machinic potential. However, such a molecular
revolution is never guaranteed. Indeed, some concepts fall into complicity
with majoritarian thinking. Others, once radical, become overcoded and
exhausted of their revolutionary force. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1993)
demanded for philosophy, today, curriculum theory requires an excess of
concepts that are not simply metaphors or catch-phrases, but active forces
for creating a queer ?curriculum-machine. This task of creating of a queer
machine for ?curriculum theory might otherwise be called symulation; that
is, the machinic assemblage of heterodox forces (symbiosis) for the fabula-
tion (positive simulation) of a molecular revolution in curricular thought.
Let us “curricularists” become such symulators, ice-breakers, hackers, and
ANOMALS, practitioners of desiring-production for a people yet-to-
come. “Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities
it offers, find and advantageous place on it, find potential movements of
deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow
conjunctions here and there . . . have a small plot of new land at all times”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 161).
Notes
Preface
1. The assemblage “Deleuzeguattari” refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative

productions.
Chapter 2
1. An extended discussion on the significance of the synthesizer and digital sam-

pler appears in Chapter 9, where such modes of techne are linked to the concep-
tualization of the transhuman.
Chapter 4
1. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the body without organs is an egg akin to
the full body of the earth. In Anti-Oedipus for example (1983), Deleuze and
Guattari comment that “the body without organs . . . is crisscrossed with axes
and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by
gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the
subject developing upon these particular vectors” (p. 19). As embryology sug-
gests, the egg is marked by such morphogenic movements as change across
surfaces, the stretching of cellular layers, vagination, and cellular displacement
(Deleuze, 1994). Throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the body
without organs, such morphological augmentations are deployed against a
biomechanical model of the body as divisible and reducible to organ-ized rep-
resentations. The egg is a nonorganized field of intensities and flows, a plane of
imminence prior to its extension (distance from the process of its production)
and developmental stratification as an organism.
2. Jarmusch’s reference herein points to the grim and deathly factories depicted
throughout the works of Charles Dickens.
3. It is important to note that the violence of Dead Man breaks cinematically
with the “feel-good slaughterfests” of such filmmakers as Tarantino and Woo,
whose works redeploy the aesthetics of Arthur Penn and Samuel Peckinpah
(Rosenbaum, 2000). Dead Man’s violence is marked by a stark, awkward, and
anesthetic quality.
190 NOTES
4. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop, the rhizome is comprised of lines in

which entry and exit points are always motile and open to further nonlinear
outgrowths. Such lines are not to be confused with the lines of lineage attrib-
uted to arborescent models of development. In this manner, change is not the
result of lineal accumulation, but rather, as the sudden intensification of life
through dissipative outgrowths.
5. Amongst Dead Man’s commentators, there is much dispute regarding who
exactly is the protagonist of the film. However, this debate does not consider
the possibility of understanding Dead Man’s protagonist as less of an indi-
vidual than a collective entity.
6. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the “cutting” power of molarity as the
effect of a destructive ray telescope that defines broad outlines, binary systems,
and absolute limits from the void.
7. I am using the contested term Indian as it appears in Jarmusch’s script.
8. This triple symbology is used at numerous points throughout Dead Man,
though Jarmusch derails its common interpretation as a sign of synthesis
(unity) through perversion. Blake and his Indian companion are constantly
harried by trappers and bounty hunters in this triadic configuration, and
might thus be seen as a disjunction of the unified whole.
9. The diagrammatic component constitutes an uncanny strange attractor for
the structure of the film/text. The play of twists, pirouettes, and circularities
throughout Dead Man constitute one diagrammatic component by which the
film might be read.
10. Jarmusch’s subsequent film, Ghost Dog (1999), reiterates the story of
nomadism evoked in Dead Man, drawing heavily upon the role of death in
Samurai culture through Tsuneto’s Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves).
Chapter 5
1. Aoki’s (2005b) critique of the identitarian privilege in curriculum runs paral-

lel to that promulgated by Bergson (2004). The very notion of multiple iden-
tities, multiple choices, or multiple meanings infers an extant object or thing
subject to quantitative or positional extension. In this image, the curricular
landscape becomes an object or thing recognizable by degrees of variation
from an identitarian model, that is, from actual identities, meanings, and
spatial positions. Yet, while the curriculum landscape might be populated by
an extensive number of identities, meanings, or choices, this image has yet
to encounter difference in kind. As Bergson develops, there is another kind
of multiplicity irreducible to numerical or measurable difference. Amidst
contemporary appeals for the multiplication of meaning and identity in
curriculum theory, Deleuze issues a caveat. “Differences in degree,” Deleuze
writes, “are the lowest degree of difference” (p. 93). It is this lowest degree of
difference that is today reproduced in the field of curriculum via the rhetoric
of the possible.
NOTES 191
Chapter 6
1. Rather than its literal English translation “to trace,” the notion of traceur in
parkour is informed by the basilectal meaning “going fast,” implicating the role
of intensity, flow, and force in movement.
2. From the Greek khoreia, meaning dance. This particular deployment of cho-
reography is meant to implicate Kristeva’s (1990) notion of the semiotic chora
and the extraction of the “body from its homogenous shell and turn it into a
space linked to the outside” (p. 143).
3. Dismantling the stratified organism through “inventive self-destructions”
requires a proclivity toward experimentation and the productive capacity of
desire, where desire is not reducible to the psychoanalytic notion of lack, but
is instead the decoding and deterritorializing force of immanence (Deleuze &
Guattari 1987, p. 160).
Chapter 7
1. Unlike the Oedipalized conflation of desire and lack, the Deleuzeguattarian

desire is linked to three aspects of production. First, Deleuzeguattarian desire
is connective and breaks flows of matter and energy; second, Deleuzeguattarian
desiring production works by registration, creating unique and recognizable
points of intensity or assemblage (Bonta & Protevi, 2004); and third, desire can
become antiproductive, unfettering the expenditure of energy from utility.
2. The notion of individuation herein implies the process of how an individual
comes to be.
3. In Deleuzeguattarian (1987) terms, a body without organs can be thought as a
virtuality, that is, an arena in which the flows or circuits of the body undergo
connective and selective experimentation. Subtracting desire from its homeo-
static circuits and overregulated habits, a body without organs is the creation
of assemblages and immanent relations that in turn produce new cartogra-
phies of the body (Bonta & Protevi, 2006). As a practice of creating a decen-
tralized and dehabituated body, a body without organs moves the body from
equilibrated states, “disturbing the organism . . . by disrupting the homeostatic
feedback loops that maintain organismic patterns [of habit] (p. 63).
4. Like Foucault’s (1979) analysis of disciplinary normalization, molarizing social
forces function by distributing bodies in space, and hence, by capturing their
less probable states (molecular) in the image of increasingly equilibrated,
homogenous, and probable ones (molar). As an example, Foucault comments
that the modern educational apparatus is organized by the unit of rank. This
unit does not organize the body by fixed position, but more insidiously, “dis-
tributes [it] and circulates them in a network of relations” (p. 146). After 1762,
Foucault writes, the space of the classroom becomes increasingly oriented
to the classificatory unit of “rank” as a distributive and molarizing strategy.
As Foucault develops, the educational institution is organized by the rank of
192 NOTES
students in a given class, the attribution of rank at the culmination of each

task and exam, the recording and economy of rank over time, the rank of
students relative to their ages, to the difficulty of their subject studies, to their
behavior, and performance. “The organization of serial space,” Foucault writes,
“was one of the great technical mutations of . . . education . . . [for] it made
the educational space function like a learning machine, but also a machine for
supervising, hiearchizing, rewarding” (p. 147).
5. Bill is both the “father” of the Deadly Viper Assassin Squad and the literal father
of Beatrix Kiddo’s child.
6. The figure of Bill, who had hitherto been largely portrayed through Carradine’s
vocal performance, appears more prominently in Volume 2, wherein we learn
that his own father, a pimp, took pleasure in cutting the bodies of prostitutes.
In classic Oedipal fashion, Tarantino fetters Bill’s becoming to the image of his
father, whose pleasure and pain he is destined to repeat.
7. While Pei Mei refuses to teach Bill the deadly five-pointed-palm exploding heart
technique, this knowledge is conferred to Kiddo, who ultimately draws upon
this (the very thing that Bill lacks) in order to kill him.
8. Kiddo’s body functions largely as a vehicle of negation. That is, its desire is
organized around the termination of life, overdetermining the bodies of others
through their destruction.
9. It is significant that Bill cannot understand Superman as a multiplicity, for this
would in turn create lines of flight for Beatrix Kiddo. For instance, Superman
does not have superpowers at birth, but develops powers only once exposed to
the yellow sun of our solar system.
10. Perhaps the alter-ego Clark Kent is more a symptom of identitarian thought,
or rather, an answer to the alien’s question of how one might become human.
Significantly, Superman’s answer to this complex question is to become a
normalized, biopolitical entity (Clark Kent).
11. In Deleuzian (2003a) terms, the movement-image refers to a classic style of
pre-WW2 filmmaking. Marked by its reliance on movement and action, the
movement-image “finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film” (Totaro,
1999). Further, the character of the movement-image is positioned reactively
relative to narrative events. That is, the character of the movement-image per-
ceives, reacts, and takes action in causal and sometimes habitual relation to an
unfolding plotline. In the movement-image, reality is typically perceived from
a single perspective and according to the spatial events in which a character is
inserted.
12. While Bergson avers that an object can be divided in an infinite number
of ways, he remarks that such quantifiable variety or difference in degree is
“already visible in the image of the object” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 41). Difference by
degree begins with the assumption of identity, or rather, the ontological bias of
an underlying reality prior to difference. In this image, difference is oriented to
the actual and objective. Bergson (2004) evokes the image of a flock of sheep to
illustrate this idea. The flock is both quantitatively extensive and spatially orga-
nized. Each sheep occupies a space discontinuous from another. Further, the
NOTES 193
flock is numerable insofar as there exists a particular homogeneity by which

they might constitute a spatial “set.” For Bergson, quantitative multiplicity
relies on each of these homogeneous and spatially discontinuous factors.
13. I am following here Smith’s (2007) conceptualization of the future as the fun-
damental dimension of time rather than the past.
14. As Hume (2006) articulates that it is both our “custom” and habit to orga-
nize discontinuous impressions in the illusory contractions of resemblance,
continuity, and causality. These biases produce an image of the “self ” that
insists despite the profound durational disjunctions and myriad affective
impressions that traverse the body. In this vein, identity is posited in the place
of diversity.
15. Deleuze (2003a, 2003b) attributes neither positive nor negative character-
istics to either the classic movement-image or the paradigmatically distinct
time-image. Deleuze contends that both styles of thought are coexistent, and
further, that each posits a conceptual “answer” to the problematics of matter
(the movement-image) and memory (time-image). In this chapter, I follow a
general argument advanced by Widder (2005) politicizing the movement- and
time-image relative to the social and somatic potentials they enable. While
I contend that the two styles of thought are very much coexistent, they require
qualitative differentiation along the lines of what styles of thinking they might
create for a cultural curriculum studies.
16. Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Bob Dylan precludes the possibility of speaking
in definitive molar categories of sex or gender. Haynes’ portrayal of Dylan
instead advances the Deleuzeguattarian (1983) notion that “everyone has [at
least] two different sexes” (p. 69)
17. The “Bob Dylan” of I’m Not There is populated by conceptual persona, each of
whom “embody not-Dylan . . . [with difference] and distance from the literal
source” (Gross, 2007). While Gross fetters such difference and distance by
degree from Dylan as a literal source, it might more adequately be theorized
that the conceptual personas composing I’m Not There differ in kind from
“Bob Dylan.” That is, the six conceptual personae populating Haynes’ film
create a passage for thinking “Bob Dylan” unfettered from a durationally
consistent personality. Instead, each persona is marked a durational difference
through which “Bob Dylan” differs from himself.
18. These remarks comprise two of Dylan-Rimbaud’s “Seven Simple Rules for
Life in Hiding.” In the film, these rules are articulated less as a commentary
on solipsism than a creative becoming-imperceptible when capture appears
immanent.
19. The portrayal of Dylan by both the African American Marcus Franklin and
female Cate Blanchett create the most extreme cases of representational dif-
ferentiation and threshold crossing in I’m Not There.
20. Marcus Franklin’s Dylan-Guthrie is portrayed earlier in the film as a carnival
sideshow “freak,” where he is billed as “The Tiny Troubadour.”
21. Throughout his career, Woody Guthrie’s guitar was emblazoned with the
slogan: “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
194 NOTES
Chapter 8
1. This process refers to the assemblage of the arrow upon the bow string, or
rather, the “machining” of two things (a+b) into a relation that alters their
potential.
2. Such a thinker is figured in the life of Spinoza, who declined the offer of a
public professorship in lieu of working with an intimate circle of friends and
students.
3. Jarmusch has been able to maintain exclusive creative control over his films as
the sole owner of his film negatives. A notable exception to this is Jarmusch’s
The Year of the Horse, a film made for and owned by Neil Young.
4. Ghost Dog is marked for death after being observed by mafia boss Ray
Vargo’s (Henry Silva) daughter at the scene of her boyfriend’s (Frank)
contract assassination. Fearing that his daughter might suspect the issu-
ance of Frank’s contract from inside the organization, Vargo uses Ghost
Dog as a scapegoat, declaring war on the Bushido despite Louie’s solemn
reservations.
5. The significance of the fractal herein lies in its “complexification” of Euclidian
representational unity. Specifically, the fractal introduces an enfolded “irregu-
larity” irreducible to the numerical value of one-whole. Instead, the fractal is
always greater or less than One. Further, the fractal no longer draws its model
of representation from prior forms of geometrical thinking. While some frac-
tal patterns recur, fractals are themselves highly “original,” or rather, nonrep-
resentational.
6. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that the biblical figure of Cain is not a
sign of the soil, but a mark of the subsoil, since for surface-dwellers, holey
space is conceived as a site of theft and betrayal. Insofar as the affective
sign of the subsoil [sous-sol] is moored to Cain as a figure of theft and
betrayal however, the galleries associated with holey space assume rogue
characteristics. “The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign of the
subsoil,” Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “passing through both the stri-
ated land of the sedentary space and the nomadic ground (sol) of smooth
space without stopping at either one . . . [marking] the double theft and double
betrayal of the metallurgist” (p. 414). Such betrayal is key to Jarmusch’s work.
He comments, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with
inspiration or fuels your imagination . . . And don’t bother concealing your
thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-
Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take it.”
7. In Ghost Dog, the Hagakure becomes less a disciplinary code or methodology
(the way life ought to go) than a way for thinking, connecting, and producing
the perplexions of a life. Unlike curricular research that aspires to describe or
array a prior people or discourse, Ghost Dog is instead composed through the
unique assemblage of a Haitian ice-cream vendor, a boat atop an apartment
complex, a stray dog, a game of chess, a copy of Rashomon, a line of selected
passages from Tsunetomo’s Hagakure. Rather than representing synthesized
NOTES 195
wholes or unities, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai might more be more
adequately thought in terms of the particularities or points of intensity that
compose it. In this way, Jarmusch’s film produces a way of thinking that inter-
venes with the contemporary desire to reterritorialize the curricular field into
increasingly intensified theaters of representation and disciplinarity. Instead,
Jarmusch composes a relic out of step with the equalization of difference in
late capitalism.
8. As an extension of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) name Royal science,
Royal geography functions to extract constants from the variations of a milieu,
in turn producing an axiomatic meant to “fix” or define the flows of “molecu-
lar elements.”
9. Contemporarily, the figure of the Samurai often proffered in Hollywood cin-
ema metonymyically offers the paranoaic an image of the body armored and
protected by a thickened skin. This paranoiac imagining is counterposed in
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which plays between the promise of a
protected body and the body as a shattered ego dispersed along ANOMALous
lines of flight.
10. A curriculum (the course of a pedagogical life) that remains open to experi-
mentation must not only risk the production of leakages, but must be worthy
of the perplexions and connections created. That is, curriculum theory must
be faithful to its potential (potentia) for encounters, its linkage of bodies
and forces, and its “desire to become” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 134). This, follow-
ing Braidotti, might begin to describe a pedagogical ethics. Yet, it is this very
definition of ethics that is disavowed in the effort to sediment the curricular
field. Curriculum theorists engaged in such strategies of sedimentation would,
hence, do well to heed the pedagogy of the itinerant metallurgist. Producing
the desedimentation of the ground through the production of provisional
holes, the itinerant carves a space from established territories in order to sus-
tain an ethical counterpoint against the freezing of potentia within the theater
of biopolitical representation.
11. This particular deployment of schizophrenia does not gesture to the patho-
logical conceptualization of the schizophrenic in Western culture. Rather,
schizophrenia is a mode for thinking the nonunitary subject, or rather, the illu-
sion of the sovereign “I.” More significantly perhaps, schizophrenia introduces
a mode of thinking and art-making antidotal to practices of accumulation,
representation, and Being—hence constituting a foil for those processes of
oedipalization onto which the subject is constantly being reterritorialized.
12. As Gregoriou (2008) develops, the conceptualization of the rhizome in
contemporary educational research has often produced a new binary machine
that fails to adequately theorize the complex “knotting” of rhizomatic/
arborescent forces. It is this romanticized and “innately emancipatory”
conceptualization of the “rhizome” that Gregoriou dubs “cut-and-paste
Deleuzianism” (p. 101).
13. In a sense, this threat figures in the current capitalist crash, wherein the
vast virtual debt produced largely through the extension of subprime loans
196 NOTES
and credit extension was impossible to reterritorialize upon the body of the
market. That is, due to a surplus in the hitherto scarce housing market, a vast
number of subprime debtors lost equity in their homes. By March of 2008, an
estimated 8.8 million people had zero-or-less percent equity in their homes.
Unable to repay credit overallowances through refinancing, debtors began
vacating from their homes, producing an upsurge in foreclosures and, hence,
grossly depreciated creditor loan equity subsequently written off to the sum of
$512 billion US dollars to date.
14. Such a caveat on reterritorialization directly implicates the valorization of the
social justice agenda as curriculum theory’s “cutting edge.” Specifically, much
curriculum theorizing laboring under the banner of social justice continues to
insist on the a priori reality of essentialized identitarian categories of thought
(race, gender, and ethnicity). Further, while oriented to the production of anti-
fascist images of life, social justice theorizing has yet to seriously interrogate
the fascist image of the “individual” social agent or the highly anthropocentric
image of social organization continually reterritorialized at the “heart” of its
project. That is, while the social justice agenda focuses heavily on epistemo-
logical liberation, it has yet to theorize an encounter with the ontological fas-
cisms that mark curriculum’s most reactive intellectual tendencies.
15. While Aoki does not evoke a notion of geopedagogy per se, his allusion to a
curriculum foundations without foundations enters into relationship with the
molar/molecular tendancies of “holey space” developed in this chapter.
16. See, for example, Robert Kelly’s (2008) conceptualization of a “creative
economy” in Creative Expression, Creative Education.
17. The “queering” of curriculum studies is a tactic for researching the ways in
which heteronormative privilege circulates historically and contemporarily
in the field—but further, acts as an opening in which new forms of subjec-
tivity might begin to be fabulated. This two-fold tactic is crucial not only
for the future of a curriculum studies devoted to the analysis of gender,
sexuality, and more broadly, cultural heteronormativity and trangressivity,
but further, for future generations of teachers whose students might self-
identify “alternatively.” This broad focus on queer theorizing might begin
to help teachers and teacher-researchers conceptualize and make spaces for
difference.
18. I have replaced Baudrillard’s reference to two specific tags, SUPERSEX and
SUPERCOOL with the more general “graffiti tag.”
19. The work of the Critical Arts Ensemble, Guerillartivism cyberpunk collective,
Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the ostensibly defunct Carbon Defence
League meet this criteria.
20. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was scored by Wu-Tang Clan member
RZA. Assembling traditional Japanese instrumentation with hip-hop beats,
the film’s score functions to articulate Ghost Dog in ways that exceed the
scant dialogue afforded to the Whitaker. As such, to think Ghost Dog entails
thinking the way in which the body of the urban Bushido is composed of
musical refrains of varying intensities, speeds, cuts, and breaks.
NOTES 197
21. It is through the law that Ghost Dog gives himself that he is able to think the
unthought. However, it is via this very experiment that Ghost Dog confronts
(potential) death.
Chapter 9
1. Freinet’s first school, opened in 1935, was not organized around lessons, but
rather, the mediating forces of the school printery and cooperative council.
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Index
?curriculum, 187 art and politics, 98–99, 103–4, 107,

113, 119–20
abnormality, 107, 168 Artaud, Antonin, 4, 56, 96–98, 156, 168
active, 1–4, 7–9, 11, 25–28, 29, 32, 34, asceticism, 21–22, 27, 51, 95–96
37–41, 48, 50–51, 59, 64–65, 68–70, asignification, 88, 183–84
72–75, 80, 82–84, 87–89, 91–93, assemblage, 4, 8, 11–12, 44, 46, 53, 56,
96–97, 112, 118, 128, 136, 187 59, 69, 96–97, 99–100, 102, 115–16,
actual, 30, 32–34, 38, 40, 108, 135–36, 118–19, 127–29, 135, 149, 151,
138, 151, 190, 192 153, 155, 157–59, 169,–76, 178–82,
actual-virtual, 33–34, 40 185–87, 189, 191, 194
affect, 23, 57, 97–98, 101, 119, 138, 175 Auguries of Innocence, 55
all-too-human, 6, 100, 166–68, 170, autobiography, 105–7, 158
178, 186 autopoiesis, 73, 173–74
amor fati, 27 axiomatization, 57, 139–41, 143, 148,
ANOMAL, 123, 152–54, 157, 159, 161, 150, 152–53, 159, 195
172–73, 185
anomaly, 51 Bacon, Francis, 168, 172–73, 178
anthropomorphism, 6, 12, 15, 60, Bach, Johann Sebastian, 67
105–6, 158, 163, 167–74, 178–79, bacterium, 169, 170
186, 196 balance, 41, 174
anthropos, 169 banking model, 141, 146
antibiopic, 114 Barney, Matthew, 171–72
antichaos, 66 becoming, 2, 7, 26, 33–36, 38–41, 43–45,
anticounterrevolution, 152 47–48, 50, 53, 56, 58–61, 63, 69, 72,
antifascist pedagogy, 11 74–75, 78, 82, 84, 91, 93, 96–97, 101,
antihero, 128 105, 110, 112, 115–16, 118, 124, 133,
antiproduction, 73, 75 136, 138, 146, 148, 150, 154, 156, 159,
any-desire-whatsoever, 149 165, 167–68, 170–71, 173–75, 177,
arborescence, 11, 49–50, 56, 69, 73–74, 179, 182, 184–86, 192
77, 79, 81, 105, 128, 133–34, 138, becoming-animal, 154
169, 176, 190, 195 becoming-death, 59
art, 8–10, 12, 16, 25–27, 35, 38–39, 41, becoming-imperceptible, 93, 160, 193
55, 58, 61, 88–90, 95–99, 103–4, 107, becoming-minor, 44, 46, 54
110, 113, 119–20, 132, 165–66, 170, becoming-multiple, 59
176 becoming-music, 10, 158, 177
212 INDEX
becoming-nomad, 10 cliché, 102, 107–9, 111, 180

becoming-other, 27, 48, 74, 90–91, 93, closed system, 30, 40, 171, 177
123 coding, 31, 50, 103, 138–40, 142,
becoming-sound, 184, 186 144–47, 159, 160, 183
bedroom producer, 185 cogito, 4, 18, 20–21
Being, 1, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 17–19, 21, colonialism, 43, 45, 55, 58, 60, 178, 183
24–28, 31, 33, 35–36, 39–41, 43, 48, Coltrane, John, 66
53–54, 56, 58, 63–64, 66, 69–70, common sense, 19, 22, 96, 123, 135,
74–75, 78–79, 98, 105–7, 110, 113, 156–57
116–18, 124–25, 135, 142, 148, communication, 16, 23, 34, 120,
150–51, 156, 161, 164, 166, 171, 175, 133–34, 136, 167, 178, 181
182, 184, 194–95 composition, 12, 21, 64, 66–67, 70–73,
betrayal, 12, 61, 101, 134, 194 75–76, 97, 99, 102–3, 112, 115–18,
binary, 6–8, 12, 15, 34, 47–48, 50–51, 120, 127–28, 131, 135–36, 149–50,
55, 65, 75, 78, 83–84, 88, 91, 95, 135, 153–54, 159, 182, 185, 187
145, 149, 165–66, 176, 190, 195 concept, 1–5, 7–13, 15–16, 18–21,
biopolitics, 98, 108, 110–12, 192, 195 24–31, 34–38, 40–41, 44, 47–48,
bios, 196 51, 53–54, 58, 60, 64–65, 68, 71, 74,
Bioshock, 166 76, 82, 83–85, 89–91, 93, 95, 102–4,
biotechnogenesis, 169 106–8, 110–21, 124–25, 127, 132–35,
blockages, 127, 160 137–38, 140–41, 143–45, 147–52,
Bloom, Benjamin, 137 154, 159, 160, 165–72, 176–79, 182,
Bobbitt, John Franklin, 5 186–87, 193, 195
bodies-in-becoming, 130–32, 148, correspondence, 19, 29–30, 149, 167, 181
150–52, 154, 160 countergaming, 87–88
body without image, 97, 102, 107, counterharm, 56
113–15, 117, 120 Crichton, Michael, 35
body without organs (BwO), 45, 55, crystal image, 8, 11, 108–10, 114, 116,
60, 97–98, 106, 189, 191 176
body (image of), 60, 91, 96–97, 102, cultural curriculum theory, 95, 99,
107–8, 112, 119, 168, 172, 195 102–4, 107, 110, 112–14, 120–21, 193
Book of Thel, 51, 55 currere, 1–11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 25–41, 51,
Bushido, 125, 131, 133–34, 136, 138, 63–84, 88–89, 91, 93, 97, 104, 108,
154–58, 197 110–14, 118–21, 127, 135, 150, 161,
175, 179, 182
capital, 36, 43, 50, 58, 141, 146, 152, 157 curriculum-as-code, 68, 70
capitalism, 15, 45, 70, 73, 85, 87, curriculum-as-lived, 64, 67, 74, 149
139–42, 145–46, 149, 152–53, 157, curriculum-as-plan, 32, 48, 65, 67,
159, 164, 167, 172, 175, 195 69–70, 72, 89, 111, 127, 149–50
Carroll, Lewis, 37 cyberpunk, 163, 165, 167, 196
cartography, 41, 48, 53–54, 69, 99, 120, cyborg, 151, 166–68, 170–72, 174–75,
127–28, 160 182
chaos, 3–5, 7, 65, 74, 79
chess, 80–84, 194 Davis, Miles, 66
Church, 54–55, 59, 95, 140 Dead Man, 10, 43–48, 50–53, 55–60,
circuit-breaker, 75, 124, 126 189–90
INDEX 213
death, 40, 49–53, 55, 61, 64, 66–68, 75, dividuality, 73, 83
92–93, 100–101, 127, 138, 141–42, dogmatic image of thought, 69
144, 154–55, 167, 190, 194, 197 Donkey Kong, 85–86
decoding, 45, 87, 137, 139–40, 143–47, doxa, 8, 54, 55, 117, 120, 135
153, 157, 159, 182, 191 drop out, 129
deconstruction, 114, 156 drum-machine, 184–85
Deejay (DJ), 128, 153, 173, 176, 177, duration, 109, 184
182, 184
dehabituation, 8 e-commerce, 175
Descartes, René, 4, 18, 22 Earth, 2, 129–30, 136, 149, 166, 189
desire, 5, 11, 16, 19–20, 22, 36, 40, 51, economics, 16, 46, 105, 126, 137, 141,
59–61, 65, 67, 69–70, 81, 86–88, 153, 156, 175
91–93, 95–96, 98, 100–103, 106–7, ego, 59, 97, 119, 153, 195
117–19, 125, 129, 132–33, 136–37, élan vital, 91
139–61, 163, 168, 172, 174–77, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, 86
179–80, 191–92, 195 electronica, 26, 184
desire (as lack), 96, 100, 179–80, 191 emanation, 24–25, 98, 166, 179
desire-engineering, 174, 176, 179, 180 epistemology, 18, 166
desiring-flows, 144, 145, 147–48 eternal return, 4, 9–10, 36–37, 40–41
desiring-production, 16, 61, 67, 76, ethics, 10, 19–20, 24, 27, 34, 36, 41, 46,
95–96, 98, 101, 104, 107, 112, 93, 134, 139, 166, 180, 185, 195
118–19, 129, 143–44, 146–47, ethics of knowledge, 19–20, 27
149–50, 152–54, 156, 158, 161, 173, Euclid, 8, 52, 72, 139, 194
187 eugenics, 177
despotic regime, 145 event, 37, 48, 70, 73–74, 84, 89, 97, 115,
despotic society, 153 123–24, 131, 146
deterritorialization, 7–8, 12, 35, 39, ex-futurity, 146, 167
45–48, 56, 60, 65–66, 72, 74, 83–84, exchange value, 31, 33, 36, 55, 72, 132,
87–91, 103, 132, 143, 147, 152–54, 137, 140–41, 176
156–57, 159, 174, 185, 187 excluded third, 149
diagram, 59, 98, 110, 113, 120, 126, 128, experiment, 1–2, 8–13, 25, 34, 36,
132–33, 149, 172–73, 176, 186, 190 40–41, 44–46, 58, 60–61, 63–64, 66,
dialectic, 5, 16, 63–64, 104–7, 111, 115, 91–93, 97, 99, 103, 107–8, 113–18,
125–26, 149, 151–52, 155–56, 176 120–21, 123–24, 126, 132–33, 142,
dialectical synthesis, 5, 63, 106 150, 154, 159–60, 164, 167, 173, 180,
difference in degree, 113, 192 182–83, 185–87, 191, 197
difference in kind, 106, 116–17, 190 expression, 4–7, 9, 17–18, 21, 24–27,
Digimon, 163 33–40, 52–53, 66–67, 69, 71,
disalienation, 73 73–75, 80, 83–84, 88, 126, 152,
disarticulation, 45 167, 196
discipline, 1, 22, 27, 57, 74, 76, 79, exteriority, 19, 52, 56, 82, 88
84–85, 176
discovery curriculum, 19, 54 fabulation, 127, 143–44, 152, 181–82
disidentification, 168 Facebook, 164, 174, 178
disjunctive synthesis, 20, 46, 57, 71–73, faciality, 178
76, 90, 107, 111, 116 Fallout, 166
214 INDEX
fascism, 95, 119, 146, 159, 165, 177–78, heterogeneity, 4, 7, 11, 27, 39, 45, 69,
180, 186 73–74, 81, 83–84, 89, 99, 102–3, 110,
film, 8–9, 12, 25, 38, 43–45, 47, 51, 112, 136, 158, 170–71, 181
55, 100–101, 109, 114–19, 125–26, history, 12, 20, 29, 44–45, 55, 58–60,
128, 130, 134, 154–55, 159, 170, 190, 96, 99, 101, 112, 123–26, 136–37,
192–95 156, 169–70, 182–84, 196
firewall, 175 holey space, 12, 127–38, 143, 148–52,
fold, 143, 150 155, 157–60, 184, 194, 196
folk (music), 26, 118 Homo sapien, 166–69, 171, 179
Foucan, Sébastian, 90 homogeneity, 69, 157, 159, 193
foundation, 6, 12, 17, 19–20, 26, 28, humanism, 15, 53, 106, 142, 186
34, 74, 79, 84, 92, 110, 127, 138, 144, hybrid, 131, 173, 176–77
146, 148–49, 156, 160–61, 187, 196 hylomorphism, 13, 170–72, 178, 182,
fractal, 130–31, 150, 160, 194 186
Freinet, Célestin, 180–81, 197 hypercynicism, 32
Freire, Paulo, 141–42, 146, 203 hyperreal, 29–31
Freud, Sigmund, 15–16, 20
future, 8, 36–37, 39–40, 47, 49, 52, I’m Not There, 11, 95, 114–21, 193
79, 108–10, 124–25, 150, 159, 160, identity, 3, 5–7, 10–11, 21, 27, 33, 40,
165–66, 180, 183, 193, 196 58–59, 64, 79–83, 86–87, 92, 96,
fuzziness, 57, 64, 74, 76, 176 98–108, 110, 112–14, 116–18, 130,
133–34, 137, 146–47, 151, 154–55,
gaze, 77, 79, 85 157, 159, 164, 168, 177, 182, 190,
genocide, 43, 46, 55, 60 192–93
geopedagogy, 135–37, 149 identity politics, 11, 25, 59, 105, 111,
GFB Bunny, 171 113, 116, 119, 133, 136–37, 159, 164,
Ghost Dog, 12, 124–31, 133–35, 177
137–38, 143, 154–61, 190, 194–97 idiolect, 45
Go (board game), 11, 82–84 image of life, 2–3, 9, 26, 32, 40, 60, 69,
graffiti, 129, 153, 173, 196 80, 97, 112, 119, 141, 143, 150, 154,
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 86 158, 167, 175, 186
Godard, Jean–Luc, 119, 194 immanence, 4, 9, 15, 18, 21, 23–25, 27,
Group for Therapeutic Education, 180 29, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 54–55, 65, 83,
191
habit, 6, 8–10, 26, 33, 40, 45, 51–52, 54, improvisation, 4, 10, 26, 63, 66, 71–76,
58–59, 70, 75, 77, 79, 86, 88, 90, 93, 91
97–99, 102–3, 106, 108–14, 117, 120, individualization, 97, 108, 111
127–28, 132–33, 138, 145, 150, 154, inhuman, 6, 26, 96, 109, 128, 156,
160, 169, 191–93 169–71, 173, 176, 181, 183–85
hacking, 11, 87–89, 92–93, 134 instrumentalism, 16, 26, 51, 53, 63,
Hagakure, 124–25, 131, 133–34, 143, 111, 144, 160
155, 190, 194–95 integration, 63–64, 114, 151–52
harmony, 63–64, 68, 709, 73, 75 interactivity, 32, 45, 68, 86
heavy metal (music), 26 Internet, 85, 129, 132, 174
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, interpassive, 32, 86–87
106 interpretosis, 19
INDEX 215
Iron Man, 166 Marker, Chris, 109, 184

itinerancy, 132, 134, 138, 156–57, Marx, Karl, 15–16, 20, 141, 143, 146
159–60, 195 MDMA, 185–86
mechanism, 31, 70, 77–78, 109, 129,
Jackson, Michael, 178 132, 155, 177, 179
Jarmusch, Jim, 10, 12, 43–48, 51, melancholy, 21, 93
53, 124–28, 130–31, 133–34, 136, Melville, Herman, 125
138, 143, 154–55, 157–60, 189–90, meshwork, 65, 73, 76, 82, 85, 119
194–95 metallurgy, 169, 177, 186–87, 194–95
jazz, 26, 63, 66, 71–74, 118 metamorphosis, 9, 27, 45, 52, 56, 111,
jeu (play), 41, 93 164
Joyce, James, 37, 39 metaphor, 27, 44–45, 106, 187
Jung, Carl, 20 metaphysics, 5, 17–18, 21, 129, 167
jungle (music), 184 method, 55, 99, 113, 126, 194
Jurassic Park, 35 microfascism, 186
micromovement, 48
Kac, Eduardo, 171–72 micropolitics, 46, 54
Kafka, Franz, 39 military apparatus, 156–57
Kant, Immanuel, 18, 107, 179 minoritarian, 38–40, 53, 56–57, 60–61,
Kill Bill (I and II), 99–103 84, 117, 157, 183
kinetic art, 90 model, 10, 13, 16, 19, 23, 28–31,
knowledge society, 140 34–36, 40, 44, 50–52, 57, 60, 63,
Kropotkin, Peter, 169–71 69, 73, 77–78, 96, 103–4, 111–12,
125–26, 130, 133, 136, 139, 141,
labor-power, 139 144–47, 155, 158, 164–65, 167–68,
language, 16, 23, 39, 45, 56, 63, 108, 176, 179–81, 186, 189–90, 194
158, 183 model (biomedical), 96–97
leakage, 120, 128–29, 138, 153–54, 195 molar, 7–8, 10–11, 30, 46–54, 56–59,
libido, 20, 140 61, 98–99, 101–6, 114–15, 117, 124,
lines of flight, 8, 10, 33–34, 46, 49–50, 130–31, 138, 147–48, 150, 154–55,
53, 60, 65, 67, 72–73, 80–81, 84, 90, 158, 186, 190–91, 193, 196
92, 99, 103, 112, 128, 145, 147, 153, molecular, 46–52, 55, 59–60, 98–99,
160, 187, 192, 195 103–4, 117, 138, 150, 154, 181, 187,
Linneaus, Carl, 166 191, 196
Little Big Man, 43 monstrosity, 5, 26–27, 50, 60–61,
lived curriculum, 150 124–25, 134
logos, 5, 19, 52, 66–67, 74–75, 79, morality, 17, 43, 59, 97, 140, 179,
81–82, 129 185
loxos, 129–30 movement-image, 104, 107–8, 111–14,
Lyotard, Jean, 27, 163 116, 119, 192, 193
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 67
machinic, 12–13, 116, 138, 149, 155, multiplicity, 3, 25, 34, 36–38, 41, 51,
160, 165–66, 170–87, 194 61, 64, 68, 71–72, 74–75, 80, 82, 84,
Mafia Boy, 175, 194 89, 96–99, 101–3, 109–11, 114–15,
majoritarian, 60, 113, 135, 183, 187 118–20, 124, 135, 143, 149, 190, 192,
map, 10, 30, 34, 41, 54, 127–28, 179 193, 199
216 INDEX
music, 8–12, 25–26, 35, 38, 63, 65–67, paranoia, 47, 103, 106, 137, 141,
69–75, 82, 88, 117, 129, 153, 165, 143–47, 152, 154–55, 158–59, 161,
182–84 195
mutant, 50, 96, 103, 151, 182–83, 186 parasitism, 16, 32, 95–96, 103–4, 117,
Muzak, 70 120, 136, 142, 144, 157, 159
MySpace, 178 parkour, 11, 89, 90–93, 191
mythemes, 44 passwords, 85, 87, 132
pastiche, 102, 119
Neill, Alexander Sutherland, 179–81 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 43
neoliberalism, 85, 87, 125–26, 137, pedagogy, 5, 9, 18, 26, 35–41, 44, 51,
139, 142, 146, 148, 153, 164, 167, 54, 71, 73, 77, 79, 112, 130, 132, 141,
175 148, 163, 180, 195
Neverwinter Nights, 86 perplexion, 126, 142, 194–95
New Ageism, 147, 166, 175 phenomenology, 15, 31, 143
nihilism, 10, 22–23, 27, 31–32, 74, 81, philosophy, 1, 3–4, 10, 17–22, 24–27,
147, 148, 186 37, 41, 93, 113, 124, 147, 166, 171,
noise, 68, 72, 74, 183 187
nomadism, 7, 9–10, 12, 27, 45, 51–53, Phrygian mode, 63–64
56, 58–59, 66–67, 72, 81, 83–84, plague, 77, 130
93, 109, 115, 120, 128, 157, 190, Plato, 4–5, 17–18, 20–21, 25, 29, 31,
194 34–36, 40, 63–65, 147
nomos, 7, 52, 74, 82–83 polis, 66–69, 74–75, 79, 81–83, 156–57
nonimage, 34, 64 politeia, 165
nonrepresentational, 9, 11, 34–35, 147, polyphonic, 64–65, 91
149–50, 153 possible, 59, 105–6, 156, 190
noology, 7 post-humanism, 12, 172
postmodernity, 40, 102, 143, 149, 157
Odani, Motohiko, 171–72 poststructuralism, 143
Oedipal, 11, 16, 20, 41, 59, 68, 95–98, private thinker, 126–27
100–102, 113, 115, 118, 120, 146, probe-head, 165, 171–73, 178, 180,
154, 191–92, 195 183–84, 186–87
ontology, 4, 9–13, 15–21, 23–25, 27, 29, profit-value, 145–46
31, 34–35, 43, 46, 52–53, 56, 58, 61, prosthetics, 12, 166–68, 171, 182
64–65, 74, 91, 97–98, 104–7, 111–12, Proverbs of Hell, 55
117, 120–21, 124, 147, 165, 177, 179, psychoanalysis, 57, 96–97, 151, 191
186, 192, 196 Public Enemy, 183
Orlan, 171–72 public professor, 126, 136
otaku, 39
Oury, Fernand, 180–81 queer theory, 150
outside thought, 126, 170, 174–75 Quintilian, 63–64, 72
overcoding, 7, 12, 37, 50, 69, 96, 103–4,
107, 129, 134, 139, 142–43, 147–48, Rashomon, 118, 131, 194
152, 157, 178 rationalism, 5, 26, 33–34, 81, 168, 170
reconceptualism (education), 140, 145
Pac-Man, 86 refrain, 4, 65–67, 71–73, 74–75, 128,
panopticon, 77–79, 82, 84, 86, 130 158, 183–84
INDEX 217
repetition, 10, 31, 35–37, 40, 47–48, stratification, 8, 60, 67, 70, 99, 103,
52, 56, 70–71, 73, 75–76, 109, 124, 127, 142, 155, 161, 171, 173, 178,
184, 187 189, 191
representation, 2–4, 6, 12, 26, 31, striation, 12, 69–70, 77, 81–83, 86–87,
34–35, 38–39, 41, 54, 60, 65, 67, 110, 128, 130–33, 148, 160, 194
69–71, 79, 88, 97–99, 108, 114, 117, structuralism, 15, 31, 138, 143, 151
120–21, 127, 149, 151, 153, 168, stutter, 37, 47–49, 116, 119, 128, 135,
182 155, 160
revolution, 2, 9, 12, 46, 56, 103, 121, style, 11–12, 26, 37, 47, 72, 74, 100,
143–44, 146, 148–49, 152, 156–57, 112, 114, 117, 124, 127, 131, 156,
159, 168, 180–87, 187 173, 177, 185, 192–193
rhizome, 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 49–51, 54, 59, subjectivity, 10, 18, 44, 57, 98, 102, 105,
73–74, 84, 87–89, 99, 103, 115–116, 116, 129–30, 146, 181–83, 186
118, 128–29, 133–34, 138, 142, 169, subterranean, 7–8, 78, 81, 129
190, 195 suffering, 21, 186
Robocop, 168 Summerhill School, 179, 180, 181
root-tree, 69 Super Mario Bros., 88
Royal geopedagogy, 136–37 Superman, 101–2, 192
Royal science, 195 surveillance, 12, 77–78, 129–130, 132,
137, 148, 151, 160
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18 symbiote, 103, 145, 169–77, 187
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16, 29, 149 symulation, 187
schizo, 54, 57, 59, 72, 156, 164 synopticon, 84–85, 87, 132, 151, 155
schizoanalysis, 152–55, 159, 161, 172, synthesizer, 26, 106, 114, 119, 150,
179 184–86, 189, 195
schizophrenia, 143, 145–47, 152, 195
science, 113, 165, 170, 195 Tamagotchi, 163
science fiction, 151, 163, 165 taxonomy, 30–31, 33, 137, 166, 169,
Second Life, 164 171
self-reflection, 11, 103–4, 111, 116 teacher-as-law, 68
self-refleXion, 113 techne, 12, 35, 164–65, 167–71, 173–74,
self-resemblance, 11, 60 181–83, 185–86
simulacrum, 10, 29–36, 38, 40–41, 83, techno-utopia, 163–65
89 technology, 12, 30, 71, 108, 139,
singularity, 37, 46, 50–51, 56, 61, 163–65, 177, 182–84, 186
73–74, 126–127, 155, 181 teratology, 124, 134
Six Million Dollar Man, 168 terra cognita, 91
smooth space, 12, 82, 87, 128, 131–33, terratorialization, 6–8, 10, 35, 37, 40,
148, 157, 160, 194 64–66, 74, 79, 82, 96, 178
smooth time, 110 terrorism, 146–149
society of control, 84–85, 132 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 55
speculum mundi, 127, 155 The Matrix, 163
standardization, 6 The RZA, 158
State thought, 5, 7, 11, 67, 78, 84, 93, The Terminator, 163
98, 104, 136–38 The Wild Bunch, 43
Stepford Wives, 163 theology, 172
218 INDEX
third space, 12, 65, 149–152, 160, 176 video games, 8, 85–88, 166, 178
time-image, 11, 95, 104, 107–114, virtual, 4, 27, 29, 32–40, 51, 54–55,
116–121, 131, 193 58, 60, 68, 71, 75, 89, 90, 93, 98–99,
trace, 16, 41, 47, 51, 68, 72, 89–91, 109, 115–21, 123–24, 127, 135–36,
128–129, 136, 147, 191 150–51, 161, 173–74, 176–77, 183,
traceur, 89–91, 191 186, 191, 196
transcendence, 3, 9, 15, 17–27 virus, 170, 175
transcendent thought, 9–10, 17, 20–21, visibility, 86, 130
24, 27 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 55
transference, 57 vitality, 47, 54, 73, 144, 159, 175
transhuman, 13, 100, 166, 171–173, voice, 67–68, 73–74, 106, 114, 184
181, 186, 189
transversality, 45, 169, 176–177, 181, war-machine, 178–80, 182–83, 185
183 Warcraft, 86
turntablism, 173, 182–183 watchwords, 38, 118
web 2.0, 178
Ulzaana’s Raid, 43 Welles, Orson, 38
unconscious, 16, 41, 45, 96, 101, 107, white, 45, 52, 60, 65, 99, 131, 147
144, 150, 166 will-to-nothingness, 22
univocity of being, 24–25, 35 will-to-power, 38
untimely, 12, 44, 81, 89, 95, 110–12, will-to-representation, 37
114, 118–19, 123–27, 131, 133–36, willing-death, 54
144, 149, 151–52, 157–58 World Wide Web, 140
Urstaat, 142
use-value, 139, 140 youth culture, 9, 11, 82, 93, 129, 131,
usemonopoly, 153, 183 176, 183, 186
vagabond, 35, 93, 117, 132–33, 157–58 Zarathustra, 36–37

video, 9, 25, 38, 171 zoe, 32

A Deleuzian Approach To Curriculum Essays On A Pedagogical Life (Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation)

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A Deleuzian Approach to

jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta

1) facilitating student learning

Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation

Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia

Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education

A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life

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First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallin, Jason J., 1975–

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company

First edition: December 2010

Printed in the United States of America.

1 The Conceptual Powers of Currere 1

As it is deployed in the course of this book, the concept of currere marks

A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum attempts to mobilize the concept of

shifts in thinking will mark an innovative passage for many educators

The Conceptual Powers

F or Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a concept is more than simply a name

characterization of the world as it appears, but rather, in its capacity to

image, the multiplicitous movements attributed earlier to currere become

refrain in the midst of musical improvisation. The concept creates a way

that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato” (Massumi, 1987b,

The Reactive Image of Currere

teleology. In other words, the content of currere’s course is conceived

It suggests a rhetorical vision of education as an “ongoing” and “guided

itself. Experimenting on the lines of flight created by an active concept

forces of music be deterritorialized and redistributed to constitute new lines

While Chapter 7 develops a radical conceptualization of time for cur-

a resource for both ontological experimentation and artistic innovation

The Illusion of Transcendence

T he “traditional” conceptualization of currere is marked by a transcen-

“ground” is constituted by the economic infrastructure of production.

of the Symbolic apparatus, which functions to maintain the privileged

The Transcendent Error

The structuralist image of currere asserts that difference is relative to a

by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself

immanently productive relations between our actions and the world, we

ultimate truth exists leads to nihilism and ressentiment. The transcendent

Spinoza and the Plane of Immanence

Nietzsche’s commentary on the nihilistic collapse of Western thought

confronted directly in the philosophy of Spinoza (Deleuze, 1997). While

attributive force of art finds further qualitative differentiation in the

Contrariwise, the Deleuzian challenge is an ethical impetus against the

a concept that cannot be foundational because it is already a response to a

Powers of the False and

W ith postindustrialization and the rise of consumer culture, the status

Baudrillard’s (1993, 1994) apocalyptic augury of the simulacrum is a

its signified concept is not simply the effect of a natural correspondence.

discourse, the negative simulacrum or ambient code inheres within both

of “free choice.” “[T]he seeming . . . diversity [of the curriculum] is

virtuality, Deleuze and Guattari advance what Massumi has referred to as

Baudrillard evades the question of whether simulacra replaces a preexist-

The map or image as the antecedent of an active currere thus functions

Block (1998) posits such an approach to currere in his concept of a

Preserving the Passage of Difference

In the curriculum scholarship of Daignault (1992), currere marks the

Powers of the False

In Nietzschean terms (1967), the concept of the eternal return is a will-to-