The SAGE Handbook of Learning

Deleuze and Learning

Contributors: David R. Cole

Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Learning
Chapter Title: "Deleuze and Learning"
Pub. Date: 2015
Access Date: April 2, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Print ISBN: 9781446287569
Online ISBN: 9781473915213
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473915213.n7
Print pages: 73-82
© 2015 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
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Deleuze and Learning

David R. Cole

INTRODUCTION
This chapter will examine the philosophical and intellectual oeuvre of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.
The work that this chapter attempts to do is to give access to the learning theory of Deleuze without overly
simplifying or unnecessarily reducing the complexity of his ideas. Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a philoso-
pher who worked for the majority of his life as an intellectual and university academic. He was propelled into
the public eye in 1972, after the success of his first collaborative work with Félix Guattari, called Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze did not write a book on learning, or specifically on education as such, so we must piece together his
ideas on learning from comments interspersed from within his oeuvre. Despite this apparent lack of direct in-
formation and analysis of learning, Deleuze's ideas have recently begun to gain traction in many educational
and creative circles (see Cole, 2011a). Perhaps this is because Deleuze provides what he described as ‘a
conceptual toolbox’ (Deleuze, 1980: 17), which can be readily applied to other areas such as education in
terms of a philosophical framing and theoretical base that resists dogmatism and encourages the novel and
imaginative (re)creation of theory and practice. In this chapter, I will argue that this conceptual toolbox does
not represent a free-for-all in terms of an anything-goes learning and educational theory, but, on the contrary,
the Deleuzian toolbox is in many ways deliberately hard to accept and necessarily challenging to put into ac-
tion.

Deleuze's most direct statements with respect to learning come in his book on Difference and Repetition. In
it, he says: ‘… “learning” always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond
of a profound complicity between nature and mind’ (Deleuze, 1994: 165). This is the last sentence of a para-
graph on problematic ideas, and an explanation of how we learn to swim with respect to the idea of the sea.
Deleuze's argument is that we learn to swim in the sea not by opposing the sea in dialectical fashion nor by
deconstructing it, still less by imposing a person's will upon the waves in a mythological, Cnut style. According
to Deleuze, we learn through an apprenticeship with signs, education is ‘amorous yet fatal’ (Deleuze, 1994:
23), in the case of swimming in the sea, the swimmer is able to cope with the waves and the currents of the
seas, not by copying or repeating their existence and forms, or through any processes of familiarisation or
thoughts about being a ‘natural sea swimmer', but by becoming attuned over time to the way in which one has
to swim in the seas in order to survive and stay afloat. Deleuze (1994: 23) states that we learn from teachers
who say ‘do with me’ and not from teachers who say ‘do as I do'; in other words, learning is a necessari-
ly complex and relational process (including elements of non-relation), which makes questioning of accept-
ed knowledge an imperative and working together communally around knowledge problems essential. Inna
Semetsky (2009) has suggested that Deleuze's approach to learning solves Plato's paradox in Meno about
learning in that the production of new knowledge according to Socrates is merely the function of memory
or recollection. Plato surmised that all knowledge is locked in the unconscious, so that we don't learn at all,
but recollect what we already know through the recognition of truths through argumentation and Socratic di-
alogue. Deleuze (1994) turns this formulation around in Difference and Repetition, in that the unconscious is
no longer a passive receiver of knowledge and the memory the active disseminator of knowledge. Contrari-
wise, the unconscious does profoundly synthetic and positive, i.e. paradoxically conscious, work according
to Deleuze, through the clashing of affect and the playing with chaotic material processes through, for exam-
ple, creative experimentation. The unconscious is in the Deleuzian frame a creative and vital cauldron of new
thought. However, to get to this new vision of the unconscious as the place that learning fundamentally hap-
pens, one has to first attend to issues concerning philosophy and the image of thought that it has projected
over time.

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PHILOSOPHY AND LEARNING

Deleuze executed a number of philosophical studies during his career, specifically focusing on the philoso-
phies of David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Benedictus de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Michel
Foucault and Gottfried Leibniz. However, these books do not constitute a history of philosophy as such, nor
do they provide straightforward commentaries on the philosophy of these named thinkers. Rather, one could
argue that Deleuze executed these studies to come up with new thought, in order to question the classical or
accepted image of thought, and to ultimately produce a philosophical system that promotes learning through
the unconscious and nature, and questions knowledge as given. One could argue that every philosophy pro-
duces an image of thought, even Deleuze's project to come up with a new image of thought and to return the
thought of the philosophers to learning. Deleuze's project is to enable an image of thought that may be infi-
nitely divisible or possible to be differentiated in-itself, until thought and learning themselves become apparent
to the thinker and learner. In terms of western metaphysics, one could argue that the dominant and most far
reaching ‘image of thought’ comes from Plato in terms of what constitutes metaphysics. Deleuze (1994) could
be positioned as one of many thinkers who have tried to overcome Plato's image of thought, yet the approach
that he takes in Difference and Repetition is distinguished from many others in that the eight postulates that
he proposes in order to question the dogmatic image of thought suggest an ultimate escape route from rep-
resentation as the basis for metaphysics in general into learning per se, and not only with reference to Plato.

The eight postulates from Difference and Repetition (see below) constitute a framing of the dogmatic image
of thought that specifically attempts to dismantle the manner in which thought has been created and recreat-
ed more recently through thinkers such as Kant and Heidegger. According to Deleuze, Kant and Heidegger
create dogmatic images of thought because their systems for thought must be understood before any new
thought can happen. The eight postulates signify a means to fully examine such images of thoughts, and to
allow for unthoughts, non-thoughts and, importantly given the context of this chapter, learning through the
unconscious and nature to make its way into a new arena for thought. One could argue that everything that
Deleuze writes after the ‘Image of Thought’ section of Difference and Repetition during his career relates to
these postulates in some way, and is an attempt to create thought without an image that makes philosophy
more democratic and fully open to novel reinterpretation. One could argue that this proposition is perhaps
most fully realised in the rhizomatics of 1000 Plateaus, because the ‘rhizomic text’ and multiple conceptual
elements of 1000 Plateaus attempt to fully engage with the notion of immanence, including how immanence
relates to time, power and the fluctuations present in everyday life (see, for example, Cole, 2013). Immanence
is for Deleuze the great levelling concept, which makes new thought accessible beyond a philosophical spe-
cialism, seen, for example, in Kant or Heidegger, and learning in the moment becomes apparent. The eight
Deleuzian postulates, that a new image of thought and any consequent learning from Deleuze rest upon, are:

THE EIGHT POSTULATES: from Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994: 167)

1. The Postulate of the Principle, or the Cogitatio Natural Universalis: the good will of the
thinker and the good nature of thought.
2. The Postulate of the Ideal, or Common Sense: common sense as the concordia faculta-
tum and good sense as the distribution that guarantees this accord.
3. The Postulate of the Model, or of Recognition: recognition presupposes the harmonious
exercise of our faculties on an object that is supposedly identical for each of these facul-
ties, and the consequent possibility of error in the distribution when one faculty confuses
one of its objects with a different object of another faculty.
4. The Postulate of the Element, or Representation: difference is subordinated to the com-
plementary dimensions of the same and the similar, the analogous and the opposed.
5. The Postulate of the Negative, or of Error: error expresses everything that can go wrong
in thought, but only as a product of external mechanisms.
6. The Postulate of the Logical Function, or the Proposition: designation or denotation [the-
ory of reference] is taken to be the locus of truth, sense being no more than a neutralised

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double or the infinite doubling of the proposition.

7. The Postulate of the Modality, or Solutions: problems are materially traced from proposi-
tions, or are formally defined by the possibility of them being solved.
8. The Postulate of the End or the Result, or the Postulate of Knowledge: the subordination
of learning to knowledge, and of culture [or paideia] to method.

These eight postulates from Difference and Repetition work on the level of problematising and questioning
the image of thought. The first two postulates refer to the ways in which philosophers have made implicit
agreements between themselves about what thought is and what thought should be. These agreements
might jeopardise learning according to Deleuze. Likewise, postulates three and four refer to the ways in which
philosophical systems have produced models and represented the image of thought as the ‘self-same'. The
philosophical systems of Kant and Heidegger are good examples of these types of thinking models or modes
of representation that require thinking through their tenets before any new thought or learning can happen.
Postulate five is a reference to the Hegelian system of thought that prioritises negation in thought to create
difference (see Somers-Hall, 2012), therefore making learning dependent on the negation of, for example,
the thought of nature and the unconscious, which is exactly what Deleuze wants learning to connect with.
Postulates six and seven refer to propositional logic and how the definition of the image of thought in these
terms can produce thought that excludes problems that do not fit with the strictures of propositional logic, i.e.
irrational and illogical thought. Learning itself would also be trammelled along the lines of propositional logic
according to these postulates. Postulate eight refers to the ways in which knowledge can dominate learning
and create methods that intercede and take away from the force of culture. Deleuze wants to return thought
to learning and culture, and not to a set of pre-defined methods or sets of instructions that can take away from
the impact and veracity of new thought.

One needs to systematically go through the postulates from Difference and Repetition to arrive at the last
postulate, number eight, that directly relates to learning, and is the starting point for a new metaphysics of
learning from Deleuze that disavows representation in thought, i.e. gets back to learning qua learning and not
the thought of learning. Deleuze (1994: 167) in Difference and Repetition immediately qualifies and questions
the eight postulates and says that they function best in silence. How can we make sense of the notion that
the thought that escapes the dogmatic image of thought through the eight postulates returns us to a state
of learning, and hence helps to reverse the traditionally philosophical or classical ‘image of thought’ and its
accompanying dogmas, and is born ‘in thought’ (Deleuze, 1994: 167)? In terms of philosophical analysis, the
genesis of ‘the image of thought’ and the consequent critique of the image of thought through the eight pos-
tulates comes from Deleuze's earlier (1983) book, Nietzsche and Philosophy.

Here, Deleuze begins his eventual yet sustained move away from the tenets of representative thought, and
looks to understand how Nietzschean forces may power thought, such as the contrast between reactive
(moral) forces and life affirming forces. One could argue that according to Nietzsche, paramount amongst the
forces of reaction and affirmation is the force of now, which congeals everyday forces from a contemporary
perspective that may work to corrupt and subjugate the mobility of thought. In Nietzschean terms, the power
of the philosopher is derived from the ability to think (and learn) outside of the prejudices, clichés and ba-
nalities contained in the social forces of the contemporary situation. This is why Nietzsche refined his writing
technique to such an extent in order to come up with a new form of aphoristic writing that attempted to pierce
the bubble of contemporary values and thought, and that could execute a powerful critique on the image
of thought connected to ‘now’ and to reconnect thinking with learning. In consequence, Nietzsche teaches
us to be wary of contemporary fashion and to exercise our critical and affective energies when approaching
thought, which might turn out to be merely reactive or responding to moral, narrow-minded, reproductive or
power-based dictates. This is one of the reasons why Deleuze qualifies his eight postulates with silence and
with their birth ‘in thought', which means they are precisely designed to escape the clamour of the contem-
porary moment, and in order to connect to learning, the unconscious and to nature. The concern to make
Deleuze's postulates receptive to and part of an exploration of the unconscious predominantly comes from
his examination of the formulation of the drives for thinking in Nietzsche and in the writing processes of Proust
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in Proust and Signs.

In Proust and Signs the section on ‘the image of thought’ concerns the ways in which the thinking of the
philosopher can miss out on specific types of knowledge, aesthetic sensitivities, the learning that comes from
the heart, and the thought processes contained in Proust's writing style. Proust's In Search of Lost Time sets
up a wholly different image of thought to the philosophical image of thought, and it is through understanding
the processes contained in the writing of this book that one is able to go beyond the rational, historic and com-
munal assumptions of the philosophers as listed by the eight postulates. Deleuze's argument in Proust and
Signs is that the writing of Proust adds to the endeavours and insights of the philosophers, and that Proust is
himself philosophical, precisely because he out-manoeuvres what Plato calls, ‘simultaneously contrary per-
ceptions’ (Deleuze, 2000: 101). In other words, Proust has the ability to write around such perceptions, and
to make art of them, or to touch upon ‘sensations common to 2 places, to 2 moments’ (2000: 101). Proust is
a Deleuzian exemplar of a writer who is able to deal with involuntary signs in a creative way and in a manner
which forces us to think and learn.

Parallel to Nietzsche, who is a thinker out of time (as exemplified by Zarathustra), Proust is a thinker of time.
Proust creates an image of thought that does not represent the tropes of our time, but gets inside the mech-
anisms of time to encounter fleeting affects, an apprenticeship in signs and the delayed action in thought and
learning. In Proust's writing, obvious and scenic or exterior imagery is substituted for the time dimension to
produce what Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 380) describe in A Thousand Plateaus in a parallel manner, and
with reference to nomadism, as: ‘(a)ll of thought is a becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of
a Subject and the representation of a Whole'. For Deleuze, Proust and Nietzsche allow for and give mobility to
thought through their art and hence show us what the image of thought is through learning, the unconscious
and nature. As has been noted above, and in contrast to, for example, Kant and Heidegger, whose intellectu-
al comprehension requires steadfast study of the structural aspects of their thought before new thought can
happen, i.e. with respect to Being, the faculties of thought and the possibility of experience, according to the
approach of Deleuze, Proust and Nietzsche have injected freedom into the construction of thought and into
the consequent image of thought with respect to how new thought and learning happens.

However, if we accept Deleuze's notion of thinking and learning and how it proceeds empirically, we must be
able to configure these processes in the world in some way. This point comes about not because Deleuze's
transcendental empiricism as he names this approach in Difference and Repetition requires any extra-senso-
ry or universal validity; but because the ways in which we can make sense of the eight postulates, learning
and the image of thought that they refer to must relate in some way to practice. This is because it is in prac-
tice that the Deleuzian postulates can reach their tipping points and any breakthrough in the image of thought
towards learning can be realised; i.e. immanently, and in tandem with a concern for power. However, to get to
this juncture in ‘learning practice’ (see Cole and Hager, 2010), one must first pass through Deleuze's two most
powerful and well-known collaborations with the French anti-psychiatrist, Félix Guattari, called Anti-Oedipus
and A Thousand Plateaus.

SCHIZOPHRENIA, CAPITALISM AND LEARNING

Gilles Deleuze is perhaps best known for his dual writing projects with the French theorist and activist, Félix
Guattari, which resulted in two extraordinary books that focused on the relationships between schizophrenia
and capitalism. These works are almost impossible to summarise and deserve multiple readings before one
comes close to understanding their range and importance. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I will
attempt to make a connection between the theme of this writing, i.e. Deleuze's notion of learning and the mul-
tifarious aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on capitalism and schizophrenia. Firstly, a coherent line of
argumentation appears if we follow the ‘image of thought’ discussion that was raised by Deleuze in Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Proust and Signs and in Difference and Repetition and applied to the Capitalism and Schizo-

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phrenia texts. The basic argument taken from Deleuze's early texts with respect to learning and in relation to
the ‘image of thought', is that if one questions the image of thought as it has appeared in philosophical texts
such as those of Kant and Heidegger, Hegel or Schopenhauer, one is able to come closer to thought qua
learning as a form of transcendental empiricism (Deleuze, 1994).

Learning can henceforth be achieved because one is able to effectively critique the ‘difference as difference’
of these texts and the repetitions in thought set up by the philosophers as dogma. In consequence, one is
able to make wider and more profound connections through thought, i.e. via the unconscious and with nature.
The wider connections, that Deleuze and Guattari are interested in Anti-Oedipus and 1000 Plateaus, concern
capitalism and schizophrenia, which are taken as two poles in the contemporary, fluctuating situation. The
point of analysis here is not that we are all becoming more schizophrenic due to capitalism or that schizo-
phrenia is directly caused by capitalism. The analysis that is given by Deleuze and Guattari (1984) subtends
towards the processes invoked by capitalism that can have long-term psychoanalytic effects which could be
bracketed and organised through the rubric of schizophrenia.

Deleuze changes the name of his philosophical approach in Difference and Repetition, which he termed as
‘transcendental empiricism', to ‘transcendental materialism’ in Anti-Oedipus. However, the transcendental as-
pect of the approach advocated by Deleuze in both texts is not transcendent, i.e. leading to a type of explo-
ration of the conditions for experience or of ‘I', and as we find, for example, in Kant. Rather, the transcendental
in Difference and Repetition refers to the difference and repetition of empirical events and thought embod-
ied as partial objects and through learning. In Anti-Oedipus, the transcendental refers to the material flow of
things that pass through the (de)centred subject in a parallel manner to Whitehead's (1929) panpsychism,
which lends mind to objects in the world through process.

In the case of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, a dizzying array of conceptual and intellectual units,
methods and ideas are invented and made apparent that link schizophrenia with capitalism such as: (re-) and
(de-)territorialisation, coding, decoding and over-coding, rhizomatics, desire and desiring-machines, assem-
blage, the Body-without-Organs or BwO, the war machine, abstract machines, the plane of immanence and
schizoanalysis. Rather than trying to futilely and half-heartedly explain this rich array of theoretical construc-
tions from the two capitalism and schizophrenia volumes, I will relate these ideas to learning in order to dis-
cern the manner in which we learn in the current social and psychological situation according to the approach
that can be gleaned from Deleuze and Guattari's two most famous books.

Deleuze and Guattari's aim in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia books is to understand the underlying psy-
chic, cognitive and affective processes that pass through us and to an extent determine and play with our be-
ings and becomings as we live through the dictates of capitalist social life. For example, Deleuze and Guattari
(1984: 190) take the fact of debt and how the reality of debt has expanded and broadened beyond the con-
fines of straightforward, flesh-to-debt relationships that one finds, for example, in pre-modern societies that
literally mark the body of the debtors. Today, the reality of debt is pan-global and complex as the lines of credit
have been extended from small communities of inter-dependents and the overlords of their land and territory.
The identifiable overlord figure has been replaced by a mixture of banking systems, mortgage-credit-finance
packages, as were exposed during the 2008 global financial crisis, state systems and their taxation, bond
and monetary systems, interest rates, student loans, corporate finance systems and consumer debt arrange-
ments.

In sum, the relationship between learning and debt has complexified, as the notion of debt itself has gone
from a recognisable bodily practice of power exemplified by marking and scarring, to an omnipresent form of
financial control and submission. In many countries, debt now accompanies most college- or university-level
study and learning, and reaches down into the education system as a whole through private education. Un-
less one is literally able to pay the study fees upfront (i.e. one comes from a privileged, previously capitalised
position), one is caught in the web of debt over time, as soon as one goes to university and starts to study and
learn. Of course, this new global reality of unrestrained and global finance capitalism has consequences for

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what one learns and how one learns, as the debt incessantly mounts up and repayments incur interest. Under
these conditions, one inevitably plays it safe and chooses a subject to study that should lead to a high-earn-
ing career, which will facilitate the repayment of the debt as quickly as possible. Moreover, these conditions
of debt have effects on the body and mind as well as practical lifestyle and career choices.

Deleuze and Guattari's (1984, 1988) complex interlinked arguments about capitalism and schizophrenia im-
portantly include the incursion of machines into the frame about what it is like to live, think and learn in the
contemporary capitalist situation. Machines are not a metaphor for the way we think and learn under the pre-
sent conditions, but machines termed as ‘the machinic’ are a literal means to grasp the effects on desire that
being in debt for the whole of your life can have, as can be expressed through the conjunction ‘desiring-ma-
chines'. Importantly, the insertion of the machine is not a categorical or projective stance taken by Deleuze
and Guattari (1984, 1988) to replace the human self with something less comforting, but opens up, for exam-
ple, a passage to understand how debt can disturb the way one learns and thinks. As one goes ever further
into debt – which is ironically often framed by metaphors of freedom and self-reliance – the necessity to make
up the time of repayment becomes an imperative. A type of restlessness and agitation overwhelms the agent
as the reality of the financial interest rates and the timeframe of debt looms, and this psychic disturbance may
be interpreted through forms of mental disease such as depression, neurosis, psychosis or schizophrenia.
The agent ultimately incorporates debt into themselves as a dead part of his or her being. One could say that
debt is a machinic form of non-becoming that doesn't change other than as a number or percentage, and
is an anathema to the chaos of the natural world, or the creativity of the unconscious imagination – further-
more, debt importantly affects the desire of the agent. The desires of the agent becomes embroiled by debt
as ‘machinic-desire', and as a form of the death-drive or as constant repetitions of financial repayments that
(re)figure life as a tunnel with financial salvation at the end of that tunnel, and the only possible light coming
from inheritance or from receiving some great windfall from an unexpected source.

Clearly, under these conditions, one does not learn in the way that Deleuze states in Difference and Repeti-
tion, i.e. in contact with nature and through the creativity of the unconscious. On the contrary, one could argue
that the way one learns under capitalism is funnelled through debt repayment and having the means to make
these instalments. However, Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1988) do not give a simple, moralistic interpretation
of the capitalised situation, and attribute all evil or wrongdoing to the beneficiaries and elites of capitalism.
Rather, they offer a sophisticated analysis of how the present situation has been arrived at, and how we can
diagnose and explore the symptoms of what capitalism can do to us. Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1988) show
that the question of the precise effects of capitalism on the contemporary psyche is a complicated and con-
voluted one, that it is based in non-linear history and in developments in the ways in which we socialise and
produce collectives, and, furthermore, these processes have developed significantly since the time of their
two major publications. It is clear that children now learn through online environments and social media such
as Facebook as well as at school or in informal face-to face situations (see Cole and Pullen, 2010).

The online environments are often fully connected to commercial interests, and this pressure to accept com-
mercial dictates as norms has therefore intensified since the specific time of Deleuze and Guattari's opus
maxima during the 1970s. One can read Deleuze and Guattari's work on capitalism and schizophrenia as a
sophisticated extension of Guy Debord's (1994) analysis of the Society of the Spectacle in that: ‘[i]n societies
where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spec-
tacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’ (Debord, 1994: 3). In Deleuze
and Guattari (1984), the representation of life and learning is enacted by the three synthesises of capitalism
(connective-disjunctive-conjunctive), and these cannot be directly opposed, but only followed as flows and
diverted through intense thought and a new mode of learning if we take Deleuze at his word.

IMPLICATIONS OF ‘DELEUZIAN LEARNING’ FOR EDUCA-

TIONAL PRACTICE
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The most direct question with respect to the perspective that one may derive from Deleuze and that pertains
to learning is: What is the point of articulating the Deleuzian perspective on learning? In an attempt to answer
this question, I will list the possible ways in which Deleuze's philosophy may be taken up by educational prac-
titioners and researchers:

1. The eight postulates as listed above in the philosophy and learning section of this chapter
can be used for what could be termed Deleuzian critical-thinking-practice. This practice
involves examining texts and the representation of thought, e.g. cinema, in order to un-
derstand the image of thought on offer and the assumptions and dogmas inherent in
those thoughts.
2. The application of ‘Deleuzian learning’ to literacy learning opens up the field away from
border control work around illiteracy and (re)introduces other multiple literacies that could
be overlooked in the everyday life of the classroom (see Masny and Cole, 2009).
3. The nature of schools as sedentary markers in society, and therefore schooling as such,
and the conditioning processes in schooling, e.g. institutionalisation, are put under pres-
sure due to the application of Deleuzian learning as a practice.
4. The value of the end processes of learning such as final examinations is seriously ques-
tioned according to the Deleuzian approach to learning. Deleuze and Guattari would ap-
plaud formative types of assessment as well as quality feedback and the playing with the
authority of having the ‘right’ answer or even reframing the question. Of paramount im-
portance to Deleuzian learning is the process of thinking as has been described above.
5. Deleuzian learning puts emphasis on experimentation, role playing and the questioning
of global power games. At the heart of this practice would be an affinity with environmen-
tal concerns and the nonhuman world and the subversion of commercial culture as a ba-
nal imposition on what one learns. For example, many ‘innovations’ in educational prac-
tice are merely attempts by educational software designers to sell their new products.
6. The unconscious is not an inaccessible other, but at the centre of Deleuzian learning. This
means that exercises designed to stimulate the unconscious are important markers with
respect to what one should do as an educator influenced by Deleuze. For example, one
should be able to act spontaneously and in the moment following unexpected cracks in
the set curriculum according to Deleuze.
7. Deleuzian learning indicates a move away from right-wing, market-based influences in
education, often described under the rubric of ‘neoliberalism'. This point of Deleuzian
learning is not to head for a utopic, anarchic, communist or agrarian state, but to create a
space wherein other forms of socialisation may become apparent in the future through
education.
8. Educational policy and curriculum design may be complexified and made more respon-
sive to context and change if the principles of Deleuzian learning were applied.

Lastly, Deleuzian learning rests on affect, and the ways in which affect circulates in life. Hence, affect needs
to be recognised as a major component in all educational contexts (see Cole, 2011b).

CONCLUSION
If one compares Deleuze's ideas on learning with, for example, John Hattie's (2009) recent book called Visible
Learning, one could state that many of Deleuze's thoughts on learning describe a form of ‘invisible learn-
ing'. Deleuze designates pre-personal, fluctuating grounds for learning that can seem to be worlds apart from
the systematic analysis of the factors and strategies for improving the efficiency of learning environments as
analysed statistically by Hattie (2009). However, if one digs deeper into the two approaches to learning rep-
resented by Deleuze and Hattie, one can realise that the two positions are not so far apart. Deleuze is not

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averse to scientific and mathematical explanation of phenomena; in fact he deploys such means frequently in
his writing with respect to, for example, ‘singularities’ and ‘the virtual'.

The difference in the two approaches to learning is that Hattie (2009) stops at the ‘effect size’ of every strategy
or factor in learning from the more than 800 meta-analyses that he appropriates, which enables him to be
able to produce a ranking of the effects sizes. In contrast, Deleuze has analysed philosophy, literature, cin-
ema, capitalism, science and history to come up with his notion of learning. Certainly, one could argue that
Deleuze's notion of learning requires evidence-based studies of the type that Hattie (2009) has used in his
ranking of the effects sizes of factors and strategies to enhance learning. I believe that this is a task for future
educators and future education researchers that have been influenced by the work of Deleuze to attend to, as
they work together to make changes in mainstream educational provision. Deleuze's philosophical and intel-
lectual approach to learning has the capacity to radically alter the course of educational practice beyond the
short term, and to make a difference in terms of the measurable ‘effect sizes’ as calculated by Hattie (2009)
in the close analysis of educational provision.

References
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Cole, D. (2013) Traffic-jams: Analysing Everyday Life through the Immanent Materialism of Deleuze and
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