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Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning

Inna Semetsky a a The University of Newcastle, Institute of Advanced Study for Humanity, Australia Online Publication Date: 01 July 2009

To cite this Article Semetsky, Inna(2009)'Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning',The

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The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 443456, 2009

Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning

INNA SEMETSKY

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ABSTRACT This essay addresses Gilles Deleuzes pedagogy of the concept as grounded in the triadic relation between percepts, affects, and concepts. Philosophical thinking based on the logic of affects necessarily leads to the creation of novel concepts in/for experience. Still, new concepts are themselves informed by the physicality of affects thus bridging the dualistic gap of the Cartesian subject. Deleuzes neorealist position considers the objects of real experience to be both actual and virtual. Experience exceeds private sense-data; it is a milieu providing an ability to affect and be affected. The essay presents Deleuzes virtual ontology as an unorthodox foundation for knowledge under the provision that the affective conditions in real experience for the actualization of the virtual will have been fulfilled. Deleuzes practical philosophy is used here to offer a model for solving the learning paradox that has been haunting us since the days of Socrates.

INTRODUCTION
The French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (19251995) considered the narrow and limited approach to education problematic; he called for an education of the senses by exploring the faculties of perception above and beyond the data of sense impressions. His was the pedagogy of the concept that posited a triadic relation encompassing percepts, affects, and concepts, so that novel concepts could be invented or created as a function of real experience. For Deleuze, knowledge is irreducible to a static body of facts but constitutes a dynamic process of inquiry as an experimental and practical art embedded in experience. Thus experience is not confined to a personal Cogito of a Cartesian subject but represents an experiment with the environing world: we can, and should, learn from experience. Experience is that quasi-objective milieu which provides us with the capacity to affect and to be affected; it is a-subjective and pre-personal. Deleuzes position is neorealist as regards both ontology and epistemology,1 that is, the objects of experience are real but their reality exceeds what is actually given to senses in experience; it involves the virtual, the actualisation of which represents spatio-temporal dynamisms as objective processes of individuation. The process of becoming pertains to subjects and

The University of Newcastle, Inna.Semetsky@newcastle.edu.au

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for

Humanity,

Australia.

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ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/04044314 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770902999534

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objects alike; or, rather, subjects and objects are themselves temporary outcomes of an underlying process based on the ontological difference as that by which the given is given.2 In his move against the Cartesian method as the search for clear and distinct ideas, Deleuze speaks of paideia, stating that for the Greeks, thought was not based on a premeditated decision to think. Instead, thought thinks by virtue of the forces that are exercised on it in order to constrain it to think . . . . Thinking, like activity, is always a second power of thought, [and] not the natural exercise of a faculty . . . . A power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active.3 Deleuze considered such unorthodox thinking to be first of all the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness and ultimately in need of the integration of that which is still unconscious in and of itself.4 The difference embedded in real experience makes thought encounter a shock or crisis, which is not reduced to Cartesian doubt but is embedded in the objective structure of an event per se, thereby by necessity transcending the faculties of perception beyond supposedly given sense-data. Experience is rendered meaningful not just by grounding empirical particulars in abstract universals but by experimentation, that is, by treating any concept as an object of an encounter, as a here-and-now . . . from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed heres and nows . . . . I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them.5 The making and remaking of concepts constitutes a creative process, which is irreducible to a static recognition, but demands an experiential and experimental encounter that would force us to think and learn, that is, to create a singular meaning for a particular experience (still un-thought-of and lacking sense). Grounded in Deleuzes practical philosophy, this essay reconceptualizes education as a process of learning from and evaluating experience, inventing concepts in practice, and creating novel meanings. The problematic of learning from experience, howeverif experience exceeds the private subjective worldinevitably leads to the so called learning paradox, first posited by Socrates in his famous dialogue with Meno. After briefly examining Kierkegaards classical solution to the Socratic paradox in terms of the necessity of the decisive moment, this essay suggests that, contrary to Kierkegaard, no miraculous knowledge takes place. This assertion is supported by the analysis of Deleuzes philosophical method of transcendental empiricism and the process of nomadic inquiry into the as-yet-unknown. Philosophical thinking based on the triadic logic of affects necessarily leads to the creation of novel concepts; still, these new concepts are themselves informed by the very physicality of affects bridging therefore the dualistic gap in which the Cartesian subject is situated. Affective knowledge serves as the necessary condition for effective learning, defined as the creation of concepts and assigning meaning to experience. Deleuzes ontology of the virtual lays down an unorthodox foundation for knowledge, provided the affective conditions in real experience for the actualization of the virtual will have been met. The essay concludes by suggesting a model for the cognitive structure that would (dis)solve the learning paradox by incorporating Deleuzes relational dynamics of experience and his triad of affects-percepts-concepts.

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THE LEARNING PARADOX

In a famous dialogue, Socrates claims that we cannot acquire new knowledge by learning. Meno is puzzled by what Socrates means when he provocatively says that there cannot be any new knowledge and that what is called learning is pretty much a process of recollection. This leads to the learning paradox that first surfaced in Platos Meno; in the guise of the problem of being as first known (ens primum cognitum) it was later formulated by Thomas Aquinas. Plato states the paradox in the following way:
Men. And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you know not? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is what you did not know? Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man can not inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for he knows, and therefore has no need to inquire about thatnor about that which he does not know; for he does not know that about which he is to inquire.6

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Are we facing an absurdity? It appears that either one knows a priori what it is one is looking for, or one does not know what one is looking for and therefore one cannot have prior expectations of finding anything According to Plato, the theory of recollection states that we always already possess all the knowledge unconsciously and simply recognize the given truths. However, if any new knowledge is incompatible with prior learningthe latter being a precondition for understanding the newthere is no foundation on which to build such new knowledge. Socrates in fact argues that to learn something means to discover a previously unknown truth; it is clear, however, that we would not be able to recognize it anyway. After the lengthy dialogue with the slave boy, Socrates concludes that it is not possible to acquire any new knowledge that would not have been already possessed by a learner. Thus, we do not learn but must have all possible truths within ourselves. We either learn what we always already knew, in which case the concept of learning is meaningless, or we are in the dark anyway because it is impossible to recognize this new knowledge even as we are trying to learn something new. Such is the Socratic paradox that has rendered itself to explanation in terms of the Platonic theory of recollection. Several educational studies have inquired into possible solutions to the learning paradox, mainly as regards science education and students conceptual change; some have ingeniously brought into the conversation the legacy of American pragmatism and Deweys logic as the theory of inquiry.7 The classical philosophical attempt to solve the learning paradox belongs to Sren Kierkegaard, who agreed with the seriousness of the problem of new knowledge, but proposed to resolve it in a quite unique manner.8 Contrary to Platos positing that we have all knowledge within ourselves, Kierkegaard suggests that there is no prior knowledge. The impossibility of recognizing any new truth still holds, unlessand here lies Kierkegaards ingenious solutionan extremely strange occurrence takes place. At the very moment of acquiring true knowledge, says Kierkegaard, a learner becomes so different as to be capable of distinguishing true knowledge from false, even if prior to this moment the learner was in a state of total ignorance. What happens is a moment of enlightenment, which, by some miracle, makes

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the learner knowledgeable rather than leaving her ignorant. New knowledge is miraculous because it is otherwise impossible to explain a learners sudden transformation, or the presence of such a decisive moment in her life. For Kierkegaard, it is the decisive moment that brings forth eternal, true, and certain knowledge: the learner is enlightened by an act of God.

THE PLANE

OF IMMANENCE

What would be the solution to the Socratic paradox in the framework of Deleuzes philosophy? Even if Deleuze addressed the problem of learning only indirectly, a careful reading of his many works offers an alternative figuration to the problematic of new knowledge. Affirming a fundamental encounter with the new against prior recognition, Deleuze posits the task of philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts. For Deleuze and Guattari, the creation of concepts is impossible without the laying out of a plane. Thinking and learning presuppose constructing the plane of immanence so as to pragmatically find ones bearings in thought.9 Thinking proceeds by means of stretching, folding, unfolding, enfolding, that is, by multiple movements of this planes diagrammatic features that may eventually traverse it so that concepts would appear in the guise of the planes intensive features. What is significant is desire: a concept inhabits the empirical happening; it is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, a living concept, and it is desire, which is irreducible to either magical thinking or conscious will, that will have propelled an event into becoming. This creative desire cannot be reduced to some incomprehensible link connecting subject and object. Such Romantic conceptualization would be incomplete; it would make the subject forever split and in search of an object that remains forever out of reach, the infamous obscure object of desire. Desire constitutes a process of laying out the plane of immanence that is to be crisscrossed by particles and fluxes which break free from subject and object alike. Desire cannot be considered internal to the subject, because an experiential event itself is as yet subject-less (experience, as noted earlier, being a-subjective and pre-personal). Nor does it belong to the object: for Deleuze, it is immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist. To elucidate this, Deleuze refers to music, where the principle of composition is not given in a directly perceptible, audible, relation with what it provides. It is therefore a plane of transcendence, a kind of design, in the mind of man or in the mind of God, even when it is accorded a maximum of immanence by plunging it into the depth of Nature, or of the Unconscious.10 Desire is a positive, active, and creative force rather than just a reactive one, passively responding to some negativity or lack. The subject does not possess desire a priori; just the opposite, it is desire that produces reality in the guise of new objects of knowledge for the subject of experience, for which novel concepts are to be invented, making a human subject per se also an event in a series as becoming-other.11 An immanent desire constructs a plane: immanence, for Deleuze, is equivalent to constructivism. Yet, such an immanent construction defies the currently popular social constructivist approach that aligns with essentialists in considering the objective world as inert, amorphous matter, which is subjugated to the power of human categorization.12 Rather, we ourselves are embedded in the realm of virtual reality, which is capable of divergent actualizations.13

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The unconscious desire, then, would perhaps be what Nietzsche called the will to power; according to Deleuze, however, there are other names for it. For example, grace.14 Wherein the plane of immanence is being constructed, the spiritual and the material [as] two distinct yet indiscernible sides of the same fold do meet.15 The plane of immanence therefore always presupposes an extra dimension, as though inhabited by grace and, being supplementary to the plane per se, it constitutes a manifold, a complex place16 as to be demonstrated further below in Figs. 1 and 2. The plane of immanence is enfolded, analogous to Baroque art that expresses the harmonious multiplicity of the folds. According to Deleuze, knowledge will be, in fact, known only where it is folded

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Figure 1. The complex plane

Figure 2. The resultant vector

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and Being itself is Fold. Similar to the drapes in fabric, things themselves, for Deleuze, are wrapped up in nature. As for ideas, they are often so enveloped or enfolded in the soul that we cant always unfold or develop them17 as based solely on subjective rationality or ones conscious will, unless experience itself presented conditions for their unfolding For Deleuze, all desires come from . . . the Outside [and we] can always call it plane of Nature, in order to underline its immanence.18 Pointing out that it was Spinoza who conceived the plane in this manner, Deleuze is adamant that it is an immanent process of desire that fills itself up, thus constituting a process called joy. Only being filled with immanence means becoming fulfilled! Historically, philosophy has identified selffulfilment not with personal physical values like, for example, ones biological or physiological needs, nor even with social and communitarian values, but with values considered spiritual and, hence, ideal. Deleuzes philosophy, importantly, does not set apart the ideal from the real. Platonism is turned upside down. In Deleuzes radically empirical philosophy everything is real, including that which is not yet actual, but as yet virtual. What is traditionally called a mystical experience is, for Deleuze, an existential practice of sorts, taking place at the level between discursive and nondiscursive formations: it becomes an experiential and experimental art of perceiving the otherwise imperceptible. In his analysis of cinematic images, Deleuze posits mysticism in terms of a sudden actualization of potentialities, that is, an awakening of sense-perception, such as seeing and hearing, by raising them to a new power of enhanced perception or a futureoriented perception as becoming in the dynamics of experience.19 Such a vision and a voice . . . would have remained virtual,20 unless some specific conditions in experience, necessary for the actualization of the virtual, will have been established. In terms of Deleuzes ontology of the virtual21 what we usually call soul and spirit will be pure events constituting virtual reality. The realm of the virtual exceeds the possible: the possible can be realized, and the real thing exists in the image and likeness, as the saying goes, of the possible thing. But the virtual is always already realeven without being the actual! It actualizes itself within the process of what Deleuze dubbed different/ciation (with both t and c as the double movement), so that the actual does not resemble the virtual. The two are not related mimetically; they are different, and it cannot be otherwise because the virtual is posited just as a tendency, therefore as a no-thing. Virtual tendencies, or no-things, become actualized, or embodied, in actual things, in the guise of new objects, experiences, and states of affairs. The nuance is significant: it is from virtuals [that] we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other.22 For Deleuze, the virtual realm, inhabited by problematic ideas, must be exteriorised and explored by setting up problems that would have addressed their spatio-temporal distribution and traced the processes constituting the dynamics of the plane of immanence. The processes directions . . . are fractal in nature.23 To describe intuitions populating the plane, Deleuze uses the image of crossing and zigzagging lines: a set of various interacting lines.24 But why intuitions? A fundamental encounter with the new, in the paradoxical absence of any recognition of the latter, demands the creation of new concepts under the conditions that we will speak directly and intuitively in pure percepts. Percept is a perception in becoming; therefore it means perceiving something that is not given. New concepts will have been created when ones perception undergoes a transformation into becoming-percept; or increases in power as a necessary condition for the creation of

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concepts. The very passage between the two, percept and concept, is what Deleuze terms affect. Bringing a creative element of art into the rational domain of philosophy, Deleuze says that we need all three [affect, percept, and concept] to get things moving.25 Deleuzes philosophy of the virtual frees thinking from common sense: for him, it is life, or experience, that activates thought, and it is thought that affirms life. If, as Deleuze says, immanence is life26 then it appears that miracles may indeed happen.

DELEUZES TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM

But are we not back to Kierkegaards miraculous moments? Not at all! In the dynamic and open-ended world described by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of becoming, these moments should not be called miracles after all: as pure events, they belong to the realm of virtual reality. A virtual event has the potential of becoming-actual, that is, assuming its actual existence, and Deleuzian different/ciation as involving the process for actualization is compatible with Bergsons intuition, or what qualifies as the pragmatic way of knowing.27 It is embedded in Deleuzes practical method of transcendental empiricism, which he described as both wild and powerful.28 His method is empirical by virtue of the object of inquiry regarded as belonging to real albeit sub-representative experience, yet transcendental because the very foundations for the empirical principles are left outside the common faculties of perception. The Deleuzian object of experience is considered to be given only in its tendency to existor, rather, to subsistin a virtual, as yet nonrepresentative form. These subsisting objects are not physically extended, as Descartes would have them, but are just signs or intensive multiplicities. Philosophers therefore become semioticians who must read, interpret, and create signs abound in experience. The philosophical process of deterritorialization marks the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriorly.29 The process of flattening implies projection on the plane or flat surface (as per Fig. 2 further below). While not all virtualities may become actualized in the present, they are nevertheless real. Michael Hardt points to the subtle connection of Deleuzes thought to Scholastic ontology.30 In Scholastic terminology virtual means the ideal or transcendental, but not in any way abstract or just possible: it is maximally real, ens realissimum. What is striving to become the actual is that which is in virtu, only waiting for conditions in real experience to come forward. Without affects entering a zone of indiscernibility with percepts, a percept per se would never undergo deterritorialization along what Deleuze called a line of flight in order to reterritorialize, to enter the new territory of a concept. The relationship between the virtual and the actual does not make one less real than the other. The Deleuzian Outside as an ontological category is an overcoded virtual space that possesses a full reality by itself . . . it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced. 31However, in order for the virtual to become the actual it must create its own terms of actualisation. The difference between the virtual and the actual is what requires that the process of actualisation be a creation . . . . Without the blueprint of order, the creative process of organization is always an art.32 That is why we can no longer posit a fundamental distinction between subrepresentative, unconscious and aconceptual ideas/intensities and the conscious conceptual representation of common sense.33 The presupposed

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distinction becomes moot during the very process of the actualization of the virtual or, in other words, when the unconscious becomes available to consciousness in the guise of novel concepts, new knowledge. Such is a zone of proximity or copresence, which constitutes an imperceptible, that is, a molecular (because ordinarily perception would operate solely at the molar level), creative, becoming.34 Rather than being a blueprint, a transcendental field is an immanent and enfolded abstract drawing.35 Virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming actual when unfolded through differentiations of an initially undifferentiated field either under the action of exterior surroundings or under the influence of internal forces that are directive, directional.36 The affective forces are arrows or lines that traverse ones old universe of knowledge and enable an unknown universe to appear seemingly from nowhere, as though out of the shadow.37 As directional, these forces can be represented by vectors (see Fig. 2). Even as this unknown universe of knowledge appears to be akin to a somewhat hidden variable, the new knowledge is genuinely new: Deleuzes method of transcendental empiricism implies not a reproduction of the same but a repetition of the different.38 Learning, for Deleuze, always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind.39 Nature is broad, open-ended, and includes its own virtual (potential or quantum) dimension, which is however never beyond experience. Any object of experience contains potentialities as virtual or implicit meanings, even if they are not yet actualized or made explicit. Says Deleuze: Nature is contingent, excessive, and mystical essentially.40 Mind is not limited to the self-conscious Cogito, but is also excessive and includes the unconscious, affective, dimension. While immanent in the unconscious, the affective knowledge is by necessity self-transcending because of Deleuzes virtual ontology. It arises, or becomes, in the conjugation, which determines the threshold of consciousness: unconscious-becoming-conscious and, in this very process of becoming, traversing the immanent-transcendent divide. It is ones expanded perception in/of becoming (and becoming is affect by definition) that constitutes an intuitive epistemic access to that which would be otherwise inaccessible. At the level of percepts, it is on the newly constructed surface that experience gets organized, and the construction of the plane (or surface) is paramount. Maximilian de Gaynesford relates Deleuzes philosophy to the theologians of the fourthto-fifth century and notices a similar kind of approach to the incarnation made recently by some philosophers of religion.41 For Deleuze, it is the surface as the locus of sense that becomes a plane for novel concepts.42 Concepts are forever fuzzy and never completely determined: they are born from intuitions and impulses. As Deleuze says, there exist forces constraining experience and imposing impulses that compel one to think: it is learning from a singular experience, which is not representative but affective, that brings forth a shock to thought and produces becoming as a form of intuition. These forces belong to the virtual, somewhat tacit and implicit, but nonetheless real field of knowledge. Different/ciation presupposes an intense field of individuation, and it is because of the action of the field of individuation that such and such differential relations and such and such distinctive points . . . are actualisedin other words are organized within intuition along lines differentiated in relation to other lines.43 The meeting of the old and the new, of repetition and difference, is made possible by means of the transversal line crossing over levels and thresholds. It is the line of flight that is transversal to both

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inside and outside; it is by virtue of the transversal line that the inside and the outside are enfolded; and it is the presence of the transversal communication that is a unique feature of Deleuzes method of transcendental empiricism. Perception would not turn into a futureoriented becoming-percept without the enfolded relation between the old and the new represented by the fold between the inside and the outside. Sure enough, the fold in the ontological sense is precisely the inside of the outside or, to repeat, Being as Fold.44 An inquiry into the as yet unknown is nomadic. The nomad metaphor carries a topological nuance, the fate of place.45 Indeed, the whole philosophy of place is exemplified in Deleuze and Guattaris explicitly naming their approach Geophilosophy.46 It, sure enough, implies the significance of a direction but simultaneously affirms the multiplicity of paths that nomadic tribes wander along in their movement in what Deleuze, following composer Pierre Boulez, called smooth space.47 The epistemic process understood as a nomadic inquiry is experiential and experimental; the nomads way is an immanent trajectory, and thats where you have to get to work . . . . As though [there] are so many twists in the path of something moving through space like a whirlwind that can materialize at any point, creating novelty at the moment of the actual emergence as a symbol of becoming. Nomads always transmute and reappear in the lines of flight of some social field.48 But because for Deleuze social and psychic dimensions interpenetrate, nomadic ideas would be, from the epistemological perspective, intensive multiplicities distributed in smooth space. It is the space of the unconscious that is smooth; and it is an unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness.49 Here the adjective smooth is contrasted with striated, both terms defining different musical forms: striatedas ordered by rigid schemata and point-to-point connections ensuring a linear and fixed structure, and smoothas an irregular, open and heterogeneous, dynamical structure of fluid forces, a field . . . wedded to nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities.50 This space is filled with the polyvocality of directions based on the affective logic of the included middle. It is this particular logic as the basis for Deleuze and Guattaris a-signifying semiotics51 that engenders yet another solution for the learning paradox. While paradox per se cannot be overcome, the very existence of what common sense considers a paradox is a feature of triadic semiotics encompassing affects, percepts, and concepts. Deleuzes method of transcendental empiricism aims to bring into being that which does not yet exist.52 It is intuition that lays out on the plane, or surface, the dynamical structure of experience; and it is the reading of signs, which are encountered in experience, that engenders knowledge: an apprenticeship in signs.53. As Deleuze states:
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental encounter . . . . It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.54

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MODELLING AFFECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

Affective thinking seems like a paradox, indeed. Thinking of this sort constitutes the supreme act and art of philosophy: rather than simply thinking the plane of immanence,

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one must show that it is there by means of somewhat striating the smooth place in the process of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriorly.55 This, by the way, satisfies Deleuze and Guattaris positing a condition of the complementary relationship between the two: while all becomings indeed take place in smooth space, progress can only be made up and in striated space.56 To literally show the plane of consistency, I suggest the diagram as a graphic representation constructed on the complex plane (Fig. 1).57 It is a grid, sure enough, though non-Cartesian. The two coordinate axes are located on a Gauss (or Argand) plane and marked with imaginary numbers on the vertical axis and real numbers on the horizontal axis. An imaginary number i is the square root of minus one. Descartes had a rather derogatory attitude towards imaginaries: it was he who first coined the name. There was no place for them in Newtons mechanistic philosophy either: he considered them plainly impossible. The true metaphysics of imaginary numbers was elusive even for Gauss. He however agreed that their geometrical or diagrammatic representation establishes their meaning. It was Leibniz who recognized their intermediary character and positioned them at the ontological level between being and non-being, that is, at the level of becoming, as Deleuze would have said. Hence, it is on the complex plane formed by both imaginary and real axes that becoming (or affect) takes place, or is literally shown. Percepts are modeled on the real axis, in the physical world of real numbers, and are complemented by intuition as the line of flight along the imaginary axis. The two directional forces converge, using Deleuzes term, onto the resultant vector r on the complex plane (Fig. 2). This resultant vector may be considered to mark new knowledge in the form of a created concept that, sure enough, is inseparable from affects and percepts: together they constitute a triadic, a-signifying or indirect, relationship, a genuine sign. According to the diagram on the complex plane, the dynamic process of becoming and concept-creation expresses itselfin agreement with Deleuzes figurationsin the form of an intensive multiplicity of singular points a+bi on the complex plane (Fig. 2). A vector, by definition, has both magnitude and direction, that is, it can be described in principle both by a mathematical quantity and a physical property. Vectors model natural entities, the lines of forces. A vectorial diagram, therefore, represents the dynamics inherent in abstract structure: it is an organisational pattern or a process-structure and as such it is what determines the structures causal power. Yet, the triangular causal structure closes as if on itself in total agreement with Deleuzes positing so-called reverse causalities. The laws of vectors addition and projective geometry employed here in order to conceptualize the model for solving the learning paradox, as per Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, agree with Deleuze stating that signs subsisting in their virtual state are bound, when projected, to undergo transformations that convey the projection, on external space, of internal spaces defined by hidden parameters and variables of singularities of potential.58 It is a diagonal transversal line r that enables coming into being (be-coming) of new objects of knowledge as newly created concepts by virtue of the genesis of intuition in intelligence.59 What takes place is the resonance of two series, along the vertical and horizontal directions, which enter into the surface organization in the process of concept-creation.60

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CONCLUSION
According to Deleuze, the depth of the psyche is capable of making sense only when it, having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width, and the meaning of events encountered in experience all the more profound since [an event] occurs on the surface, constructing any given multiplicity . . . like one area on a plane.61 It is the triadic relation between affects, percepts, and concepts that engenders the second power [of thought] which grasps that which can only be sensed.62 The fact that the triangle in Fig. 2 closes on itself makes the total cognitive structure (which includes the affective, virtual, unconscious, dimension) genuinely self-referential, reflexive, even as we traverse the different levels of knowledge on the complex plane. The newly created concept has no reference outside itself, that is, at the moment of creation, it posits itself and its object simultaneously. Concepts, for Deleuze, are invented, or created, as if reborn in experience. The concept stops being a logical proposition: it does not belong to a discursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept shows itself, indeed.63 Reflexive knowledge was characterized in the early Greek scheme as dia  noia or proper thinking (as a step away from mere opinion), which enables us to realize that sensible things are particular reflections of those universals residing in the intelligible realm. But first a premise is to be generated or created by virtue of the Deleuzian affective becoming along the line of flight. This line is objectively real; it is in fact always out there, in the world, even if usually we dont see it, because its the least perceptible of things.64 The least perceptible things (or rather, nothings) appear to be hidden somewhere in the realm of Platonic Ideas, which are intelligible but not sensible, hence invisible or imperceptible, unless our perception increases in power (under the condition of encountering the shock to thought in experience) and enables affective, intuitive, access to the virtual ideas within the very process of creating novel concepts, that is, understanding the meaning of this singular experience. Platos famous division, first presented as the Line in the Republic IV (509e511e), was an indication of his indeed envisioning the multiplicity of levels of knowledge even if he lacked the mathematical tools, available to us today, to fully describe them. Without Deleuzes triad of affects, percepts, and concepts the realm of knowledge would have remained limited to pale Platonic shadows projected on the walls of his infamous Cave. Plato urging us not to rely solely on sense-data, but to use the power of reason to examine the intelligible world, perhaps anticipated the thoughts increase in valence, a veritable becoming . . . [a] transversal communication,65 enabled by means of the diagonal resultant vector in Fig. 2. The self-referential structure closes off the Platonic gap between the sensible and the intelligible in the process of creative becoming. In this sense, actualization or differentiation is always a genuine creation . . . . For a potential or virtual object, to be actualized is to create divergent lines which correspond to . . . a virtual multiplicity. The virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved.66 In this semiotic, communicative, and informative process (in Latin informare literally means giving material form or body), the sensible world becomes intelligible while affording a degree of sensibility to the intelligible world. The mathematics of the analytic geometry on the complex plane not only solves the learning paradox by means of embodying the logic of the included middle on which

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a-signifying semiotics is founded, but also confirms Platos insight regarding what he dubbed mathematicals as the necessary intermediaries between universal Ideas and sensible particulars. According to our model, as shown in Fig. 2, and, importantly, without any recourse to either conscious recollection or miraculous moment, the slave boy in Platos Meno should become capable of lifting each faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise,67 when he starts to effectively learn by means of apprehending signs, embedded in his very experience, while able to ground his learning on the complexvirtual yet realDeleuzian unorthodox foundation for knowledge.

NOTES
An early version of this article under the title Affective knowledge/Effective Learning: Applying Deleuzes philosophy to Educational Theory was presented at the international conference, Education, Economy and Society, Paris, 1719 July 2008. 1. Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World, in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2941. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222. 3. Gilles Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 108 (original emphasis). 4. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 192. 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xxxxi. 6. The Essential Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, intro. Alain de Botton (Book of the Month Club, 1999), 442. 7. C. Bereiter, Towards a Solution of the Learning Paradox, Review of Educational Research 55.2 (1985): 20126; Graham Hendry, Conceptual Change Theory: A Recapitulation or Resolution of the Learning Paradox? Paper presented at the AARE/NZARE 1992 Joint Conference, Deakin University, Geelong, Vic. Australia, http://www.aare.edu.au/92pap/hendg92139.txt; Richard S. Prawat, Dewey, Peirce and the Learning Paradox, American Educational Research Journal 36.1 (1999): 4776. For a sympathetic critique of Prawats approach, see Nel Noddings, Comments on Dewey, Peirce and the Learning Paradox, American Educational Research Journal 36.1 (1999): 8385; and Inna Semetsky, The Role of Intuition in Thinking and Learning: Deleuze and the Pragmatic Legacy, Educational Philosophy and Theory 36.4 (2004): 43354. 8. Nigel Tubbs, Philosophy of the Teacher, Journal of Philosophy of Education 39.2 (2005): 184420. Tubbs analyses Kierkegaards philosophy of the teacher in detail, locating the presence of the third partner within a philosophical pedagogy (404) and addresses the important notion of indirect communication. As shown in Fig. 2, Deleuzes transversal is represented by the included third of the diagonal line; hence it is as an example of indirect communication. The difference between direct and indirect modes of communication relates to Deleuze positing a movement across different plateaus or levels; respectively, we can consider the actualization of the virtual (ontologically) or becoming-aware of the unconscious traits in experience (epistemologically) as representing examples of such transversal, indirect, communication. The necessity of the third partner is thus both logical (as compatible with Charles S. Peirces triadic logic as semiotics), and ontological (akin to Peirces modes of being). See Inna Semetsky, The Role of Intuition and Learning by Abduction: A Geometrical Interpretation, SEMIOTICA 157.14 (2005): 199212. It is the Deleuzian becoming, or affect, as the passage between percept and concept that performs the role of the third partner.

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

See also Inna Semetsky, The Complexity of Individuation, The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1.4 (2004): 324346. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36, 37. Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (with Claire Parnet), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 89, 91. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 30. See DeLanda, Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-ended Becoming of the World. Deleuze borrowed this idea from Henri Bergson. Deleuze, Dialogues, 91. Michael Goddard, The Scattering of Time-Crystals: Deleuze, Mysticism and Cinema, in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 62. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), xiv. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 49. Deleuze Dialogues, 9798. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Goddard, The Scattering of Time-Crystals, 54. Cf. Constantin Boundas, Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual, in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 86106; Todd May and Inna Semetsky, Deleuze, Ethical Education, and the Unconscious, in Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Inna Semetsky (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008), 143158. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 160. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 40. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 19721990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press 1995), 33. Deleuze, Negotiations, 165 (original emphasis). Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001). See Semetsky, The Role of Intuition. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 211. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze,18. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), 59. Deleuze. and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 273. Deleuze, Dialogues, 93. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 10. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 66. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 98. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57. In Bodily Organs and Organization Maximilian de Gaynesford cites Don Cupitt who says that we may think of the surface of the human body as the primal surface [where] desire and culture [or experience] meet, as the bodys feeling-expression is converted by culture into the common world of signs. Maximilian de Gaynesford, Bodily Organs and Organization, in Bryden, Deleuze and Religion, 98.

456 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

INNA SEMETSKY Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 104 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 247. Deleuze, Foucault, 96. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 371. Deleuze, Negotiations, 161, 153. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 95. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 381. See Inna Semetsky, Semiotics, in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 24244. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 147. Ronald Bogue, Search, Swim and See: Deleuzes Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images, in Semetsky, Nomadic Education, 116. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 481. First suggested in Semetsky, The Role of Intuition. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 16. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 111. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 104. Deleuze, Negotiations, 9, 10, 146. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 140 (my emphasis). Deleuze, Negotiations, 45. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1011. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 212. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165.

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