a semiotic theory of learning

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Towards a semiotic theory of learning:Deleuze’s philosophy and educationalexperience

INNA SEMETSKY

Abstract

The paper examines Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor of rhizome as a new imageof thought. Multiple connections enabled by multidirectional rhizomatic

lines contribute to the creation of concepts. Deleuze’s potential contribution

to educational theory is specified in terms of the pedagogy of the concept.

The creation of concepts is a function of experience and is inseparable

from a¤ects and percepts. Deleuze’s method of a-signifying semiotics is pos-

ited as indispensable for interpreting and evaluating experience and creat-

ing new meanings. The paper contends that Deleuze’s semiotic approach

may be considered as representing a significant contribution to learning

theories, specifically in terms of becoming as learning from experience.

The paper concludes by suggesting that creativity and novelty become the

necessary outcomes of the learning process and as such may be considered

as educational objectives embedded in the transformational pragmatics of

sign-process.

Keywords: apprenticeship; a-signifying semiotics; becoming; diagram;

experience; meaning; multiplicity; rhizome.

1. Introduction

It was in 1998 when two philosophers of education — Mary Leach and

Megan Boler — called for exploring Gilles Deleuze’s work in order to ex-

amine the ‘potential of thinking di¤erently with respect to the public and

current scholarly debates around educational theory and practice’ (Leach

and Boler 1998: 150). Since then, the Deleuzian scholarship in education

has been slowly but steadily growing (Semetsky 2002, 2004). Several of

Deleuze’s philosophical works were written together with practicing psy-choanalyst Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 1994), such a col-

laboration representing an approach to knowledge as shared and situated,

Semiotica 164–1/4 (2007), 197–214 0037–1998/07/0164–0197

DOI 10.1515/SEM.2007.0aa 6 Walter de Gruyter

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and bringing theoretical thinking into closer contact with practical con-

cerns. In his editorial to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy

and Theory on Deleuze and education, Michael Peters (2004) pointed out

that the pedagogy of the concept constitutes a critical feature for educa-

tional philosophy. Deleuze’s philosophical method may be considered as

a kind of constructivism irreducible to propositional logic; rather, philo-

sophical thinking is presented as the geography of reason. A concept, as

an integral part of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy defined as a pro-

cess of concept creation, is a vehicle for expressing the particularities and

contingencies embedded in an experiential event, the latter bound to the

social and cultural milieu.

Deleuze and Guattari explicitly referred to their own philosophical

method as Geophilosophy, privileging geography over history and

stressing the value of the present-becoming , that is, a possibility for usbecoming-other in each and every present moment. For educators, the

very concept of becoming carries ‘an easy resonance’ (Peters 2004: 224).

The semiotic dimension in Deleuze’s philosophy (Semetsky 2005) and

as pertaining to educational context leaves much to exploration. In this

paper, I present an overview of Deleuze’s a-signifying semiotics and his

metaphor of rhizome as a new image of thought. Rhizome serves as an

example of the potential to think di¤erently. This metaphor, by being

used with regard to the question of sources of knowledge permits a shift

of focus from transmitting knowledge as a collection of given facts to the

dynamic process of knowing, with the latter’s having far-reaching impli-

cations for education as a developing and generative practice.

2. Thinking in rhizomes

Deleuze and Guattari have borrowed the notion of the rhizome from bi-

ology (cf. Schuh and Cunningham 2004). As a symbol for unlimited

growth through the multitude of its own transformations, rhizome is con-

trasted with a tree, the latter symbolizing the linear and sequential, abor-

escent reasoning rooted in finite knowledge. The tree metaphor accords

with the infamous tree of Porphyry, which is an example of the classifica-

tory system, or a hierarchical structure based on precise definitions that

serve as the foundation for the rationally demonstratable knowledge.

The tree of Porphyry incorporates an arborescent reasoning, that is, a

type of syllogistic logic based on the method of division to form a cata-

logue. The hierarchical structure precludes any interdependence, relation-ships, or harmony between ‘things’ located at the separate branches of the

sacramental tree. As for rhizome, it belongs to the mode of thinking

198 I. Semetsky

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whose central concept is what Deleuze called becoming . In contrast to

syllogistic reasoning of analytic philosophy grounded in the logic of ex-

cluded middle, the thought-process of philosophy-becoming ‘is more like

a grass than a tree’ (Deleuze 1995: 149). Deleuze called it the logic of

multiplicities. Any multiplicity, similar to the genuine sign in the Peircean

triad, always has a middle element, a third, that Deleuze and Guattari,

borrowing from Peirce, called a diagram. The importance of diagram-

matic reasoning lies in its ability to ‘depict thought’s very movement, its

processual character, in terms of interconnecting lines, schemes, figures,

abstract mappings’ (Merrell 1995: 51). The diagrammatic mode of ex-

pression demands the Deleuzian logic of multiplicities as the logic of

included middle equivalent to what Deleuze and Guattari qualified as

a-signifying semiotics. The rhizome becomes, or is becoming, at any mo-

ment of its own entry. It is an a-centered dynamic network of uncertainrelations comprising a ‘complex place’ (Deleuze 1990: xiv). The sign-

relations constitute a multiplicity and are regulated not by mechanical

laws but by organic growth: rhizome as a biological notion defies the pri-

macy of physics as a scientific model for all other discourses.

Deleuze uses some concepts from the theory of communication,

namely: how information is transmitted in a channel as a sign/signal sys-

tem. A meaningful signal is produced at the moment of what Deleuze and

Guattari called the transversal communication between the series of

events operating along di¤erent planes or levels. This does not mean that

‘something’ actually flows through the channel, just that a relation is be-

ing established. A relation is produced by virtue of a sign, and a sign as a

‘bit’ of information is Janus-faced: it provides a linkage, a bridge between

events without actually passing from one to another (cf. De Landa 2002:103). Only as transversal, communication can enable the construction of

concepts and the conferment of shared meanings. A diagrammatic mode

serves as a connective link along which all knowledge is produced: in

its ‘piloting’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142) role, a diagram forms ‘a

bridge, a transversality’ (Guattari 1995: 23) crossing over an a-signifying

gap by virtue of its own ‘extreme contiguity’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994:

173). A diagram is a necessary third in a semiotic communicative process,

a genuine sign. A diagram acts as a diagonal connection between the

planes, and its purpose is to ‘pursue the di¤erent series, to travel along the

di¤erent levels, and cross all thresholds; instead of simply displaying phe-

nomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must

form a transversal or mobile diagonal line’ (Deleuze 1988: 22). A diagram

has only ‘traits’ of content and expression, between which it establishes a con-

nection . . . The diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most

Towards a semiotic theory of learning 199

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deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them . . . The diagrammatic or

abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather

constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality . . . [O]n the diagram-

matic level . . . form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content.

The diagram knows only traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content

insofar as they are material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but

which draw one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorializa-

tion. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141–142)

The aforementioned ‘traits’ of content and expression are like memory

traces, always beyond the level of consciousness, therefore capable of

manifesting as feelings or a¤ects, not yet concepts, the latter to be in-

vented or created, according to Deleuze: . . . not to represent, but to con-

struct the real yet to (be)come . . . The concepts show themselves in a for-

mat of creative expression betraying a traditional sender-receiver modelof transmitting preconceived information and data (cf. Roy 2004). The

traits have no explicit content or meaning. The problematic of representa-

tion is a real problem in analytic philosophy, which generally adopts an

atomistic approach, that is, starting from taking representations for

granted, then separating language structure into two independent levels,

syntactic and semantic, without attempting to analyze how they may be in-

terdependent. Deleuze, however, posits the grammar of disequilibrium —

an a-signifying gap — as a precondition for the production of meanings,

that is, meanings are conferred not by reference to some external object

but by the relational, or rhizomatic, network constituting a sign-process.

As embedded in the perplexity of the situation, rhizome goes in diverse

directions instead of a single path, multiplying its own lines and establish-

ing the plurality of unpredictable connections in the open-ended, whatDeleuze called smooth space of its growth. In short, it lives. Rhizome

does not represent, but only maps our ways, paths, and movements. The

presentation in the mode of mapping does not assume this map’s repre-

senting the proverbial territory as given in the strict sense. Deleuze used

tracer (in French) to indicate the subtlety of what it means to draw a

map. The verb to draw means — rather than to copy — to create because

‘what is drawn . . . does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word

tracer captures it better: it has all the graphic connotations of ‘‘to draw’’

in English but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road’ (Massumi in

Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvi).

3. Apprenticeship in signsThought is broader than knowledge representing true facts; it is a com-

plex process of knowing. The changed image of thought manifests itself

200 I. Semetsky

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in ‘new connections, new pathways, new synapses . . . [produced] not

through any external determinism but through a becoming that carries

the problems themselves along with it’ (Deleuze 1995: 149). Becomings

function in a mode of nomadic — movable and moving — distributions

that break down ‘the sedentary structures of representation’ (Deleuze

1994: 37). In his work Di¤erence and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) presents

a story of an athlete who learns to swim by means of becoming . The nov-

ice athlete struggles against the waves because she is facing the unknown

or what Deleuze called unthought. Not-yet-knowing-how-to swim, the

athlete’s movements do not resemble the movements of the wave. Nor

do they imitate the instructor’s movements given while not in the water

but on the shore. Theoretical knowledge is being transformed into practi-

cal apprenticeship: the swimmer is learning ‘by grasping [movements] in

practice as signs’ (Deleuze 1994: 23). For an athlete who finds herself ina novel situation, there is no solid foundation under her feet, and the

world that she has to face loses its reassuring power of familiar represen-

tations. To learn means to move together with this particular milieu. Del-

euze (1995) expands on this idea by referring to new sports like surfing,

windsurfing, and hang gliding that would have required one to enter into

an existing wave. The athlete has to invent a novel concept of what does

it mean to swim in the midst of the very encounter with the unknown

problem, via her own experience.

As noted by Brian Massumi (1992), Deleuze reinvents the concept of

semiotics in his di¤erent books: In Proust and Signs, Deleuze refers to

four di¤erently organized semiotic worlds. In Cinema-I , he presents six-

teen di¤erent types of cinematic signs. Deleuze (2000) discusses Proust’s

A la recherche du temps perdu as the story of the narrator’s apprenticeshipin signs (Bogue 2004), tracing the stages whereby young Marcel learns

that signs are to be apprehended in terms of neither objective nor subjec-

tive criteria, but solely in terms of their immanent problematic instances.

Deleuze suggests that genuine education proceeds through a deregulation

of the senses and a shock that compels thought against its will to go be-

yond its ordinary operations. For Deleuze, the theory of signs is meaning-

less without the relation between signs and the corresponding apprentice-

ship in practice. Reading Proust from the perspective of triadic semiotics,

Deleuze notices the dynamic character of signs, the contingency of truth,

and the necessity of interpretation. Acknowledging a particularly narrow

approach to education, Deleuze (1994) describes it as students’ discovery

of solutions to the problems posited by teachers. In this way pupils lack

power to constitute problems themselves, and the construction of prob-lems, for Deleuze, is tantamount to one’s sense of freedom. Only if

and when ‘thought is free, hence vital, nothing is compromised. When it


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ceases being so, all other oppressions are also possible’ ( Deleuze 1988: 4).

Deleuze asserts that problems should not be considered as given, that is,

requiring the Cartesian method as the infamous ‘search for the clear and

distinct’ (Deleuze 1994: 161) finite solution. Rather, learning is ‘infinite

. . . [and] of a di¤erent nature to knowledge’ ( Deleuze 1994: 192), but

that of the nature of a creative process as a method of invention or

concept-creation.

It is experience that provides conditions for our intellectual and moral

growth, however not at all as a property of hierarchical structuring;

Deleuze rejected ‘the principle of linear progressive ‘‘building up knowl-

edge’’’ (Deleuze 1995: 139) toward some fixed goal. Rather than dis-

covering the preexistent domain of truth(s), learning consists in the exper-

imental and heterogeneous production of meanings as the newly created

concepts. The making and remaking of concepts always proceeds alonga ‘moving horizon’ (Deleuze 1994: xxi) of the smooth space. The adjec-

tive smooth is contrasted with striated , both terms derived from di¤erent

musical forms: striated — as ordered by rigid schemata and point-to-

point connections ensuring a linear and fixed structure, and smooth —

as irregular, open and heterogeneous, dynamical structure of fluid forces,

‘field . . . wedded to nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities’ ( Del-

euze and Guattari 1987: 381). The problematic situation — that is, the

one requiring learning — is of the nature of real experience that forms

‘an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning’ (Deleuze 1994: 154).

Learning cannot take place as resemblance or representation: this would

be the reproduction of the same, denounced by Deleuze. For learning to

occur, the meaningful relation between a sign and a response must be es-

tablished, leading — via the encounter with otherness and indeterminacyinscribed in experience — to what Deleuze identified as the repetition of

the di¤erent. It is the di¤erence embedded in real experience that pre-

cludes any prior recognition; the particularity of an experiential situation

creates an experiment with the new in the unfamiliar and even strange

context, which would have resisted being recognized as something already

familiar. Reproduction of the same would amount to mimesis; the repeti-

tion of the di¤erent, however, shows itself in the play of semiosis. Deleuze

insists that:

we learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those

who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in hetero-

geneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce . . . When a body com-

bines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the prin-

ciple of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other —

involves di¤erence, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that

202 I. Semetsky

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di¤erence through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to

constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points

renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself.

(Deleuze 1994: 23)

Those who keep on telling us, do as I do, will be reproducing the same

and simply reinforcing the dogmatic tree-like image of thought based on

arborescent regularity. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze (1989)

adds to our sense of what an apprenticeship entails when he speaks of

Godard’s cinema in terms of what Bogue (2004) aptly calls the pedagogy

of images. A medium of Godard’s films, which embody concrete in-

stances of the general pedagogical process that Deleuze regards as typical

of Godard’s cinema, teaches us to see di¤erently. In his work on Leibniz,

Deleuze (1993) presents thinking as the unfolding of internal di¤erencethat continuously di¤erentiates itself thereby constituting an infinite

learning, apprendre in French, hence apprenticeship. New meanings and

concepts, for Deleuze, are artistic creations, like sounds in music and col-

ors in painting, or like cinematic images. They are not limited to linguistic

signs or uttered in the language of propositions, instead, they express

themselves in di¤erent regimes of extra-linguistic signs such as images.

Deleuze’s semiotics includes reading and interpretation of both visual

and subliminal — or subrepresentitive — signs. Stressing that the logic

of genuine learning is ‘extra-propositional or subrepresentative’ (Deleuze

1994: 192), Deleuze says:

Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular

points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape

or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and

unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems

which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? In short,

representation and knowledge are modeled entirely upon propositions of con-

sciousness, which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by them-

selves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instance which engenders them

as cases, and which they resolve or conclude. By contrast, the Idea and ‘learning’

express that extra-propositional or subrepresentative problematic instance: the

presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness. (Deleuze

1994: 192)

Rhizomatics, described as ‘a strategy of drawing lines of connections’

(Grossberg 1997: 84), becomes a method of thinking and learning, thecraft of making the unconscious conscious, or performing art of that spe-

cial sensibility and productivity, which creative artists, or even children


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for that matter, have in abundance. Leach and Boler (1998) notice in Del-

euze’s philosophy a subtle quality of ‘premonition: . . . he may be describ-

ing some of what has yet to come’ (1998: 152). That what has yet to come

is pre-reflective and subrepresentative, subsisting in a mode of the Deleu-

zian non-thought outside of the conscious awareness, and a set of condi-

tions constituting an experiential situation, is necessary for it becoming-

conscious. Thinking demands turning upon its own implicit assumptions

so as to be able to express them explicitly. Deleuze’s model of learning is

based on explication of extra-linguistic signs, such as involuntary memo-

ries (similar to those awakened by Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine),

images, or aesthetic and artistic signs as potential sources of meanings in

accord with the logic of sense (Deleuze 1990). Concepts cannot be given

a-priori : they have to be created as an outcome of a dynamic process and

as embedded in a triadic relationship with percepts and a¤ects. As such,concepts will be expressing events rather than representing essences. They

should be understood not in a traditional representational manner of an-

alytic philosophy, which would submit a line to a point, but as a creative

and multidirectional distribution of lines and planes.

4. Learning as creative becomings

The diagram as a mediatory ‘third’ (Deleuze 1987: 131) disturbs the bi-

nary opposition between signifiers and signifieds, or between words and

objects. Deleuze’s emphasis is on the dynamical and triadic nature of

signs, that is, their having an ‘increasingly intimate’ (Deleuze 2000: 88)

relation with their enfolded meanings so that truth becomes contingentand subordinate to interpretation. Meanings are never given but depend

on signs entering into ‘organization which ensures the resonance of two

series’ (Deleuze 1990: 104), the latter converging on a paradoxical di¤er-

entiator, which becomes ‘both word and object at once’ (Deleuze 1990:

51). In Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics, the logical copula is of analytic

philosophy is replaced with the radical conjunction and as a precondition

for resonance. Things begin precisely in the middle in accord with ‘a

theory and practice of relations, of the and ’ (Deleuze 1987: 15). The con-

junction and is what becomes a principal characteristic of a-signifying

(that is, irreducible to logical identity) semiotics, making any entity a

multiplicity, a sign. Multiplicities are ‘neither unities nor totalities’ (Dele-

uze 1987: vii); they are constituted by multiple sets of relations, and it is a

relation per se that maintains an ontological priority as compared to theterms that are related to each other by virtue of the said relations. Rela-

tions, as signs, are therefore external to their terms.

204 I. Semetsky

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By virtue of the relations, every multiplicity ‘grows from the middle’

(Deleuze 1987: viii) as if becoming-rhizome. The dynamics of becoming

is described by a process in which any given multiplicity ‘changes in na-

ture as it expand its connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8): this

change in nature entails its becoming-other. Relations that are external

to their terms are capable of constructing an unpredictable experiential

world that unfolds in a seemingly strange manner, resembling

a Harlequin’s jacket or patchwork, made up of solid parts and voids, blocs and

ruptures, attractions and divisions, nuances and bluntnesses, conjunctions and

separations, alternations and interweavings, additions which never reach a total

and subtractions whose remainder is never fixed . . . This geography of relations

is particularly important. ( Deleuze 1987: 55)

Such is the world as a pragmatic e¤ect of the relations, which put ‘toflight terms and sets’ (Deleuze 1987: 57); it continuously varies depending

on the latter and is therefore open-ended: relations a¤ect the world. We

learn by means of multiplying and intensifying connections, creating a

dynamic rhizome and not planting a static root. Experience is rendered

meaningful not by grounding empirical particulars in abstract universals

but by experimentation, that is, by treating any concept ‘as object of an

encounter, as a here-and-now, . . . from which emerge inexhaustibly ever

new, di¤erently 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 di¤erenci-

ate them’ ( Deleuze 1994: xx–xxi). Making and remaking of concepts con-

stitute a creative process, which is not reducible to a static recognition but

demands an experiential and experimental encounter that would have

forced us to think and learn, that is, to construct meaning for a particular

experience in terms of a symbolic bridge crossing over an a-signifying

rupture. Deleuze says:

we see the pieces of Japanese paper flower in the water, expanding or extending,

forming blossoms, houses and characters . . . Meaning itself is identified with this

development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of meaning.

So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two . . . [E]ssence

complicates the sign and the meaning; it holds them in complication.... It mea-

sures in each case their relation, their degree of distance or proximity, the degree

of their unity. (Deleuze 2000: 90)

Signs grow, develop, and acquire their meaning in the process of becoming-other; such an increase in complexity is what constitutes learn-

ing. As a result of multiple interpretations, signs move from one to


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another, they grow and engender other signs because the triadic logic leads

to signs always already becoming something else and something more,

contributing — in the process of their growth — to human development

and the evolution of knowledge. Deleuze, in his move against the Carte-

sian method, speaks of paideia stating that for Greeks thought is not

based on a premeditated decision to think: thinking is motivated by spe-

cific conditions in the real experience. Deleuze considered such a thought-

non-thought to be ‘the presentation of the unconscious, not the represen-

tation of consciousness’ (Deleuze 1994: 192) ultimately in a need of

interpretation and meaning making. Because of the symbolic conjunction

and , a constructive process enters into its own reorganization: each and is

a pure relation which, as a sign-event in its own in-between-ness, acts in

the mode of a distributed marker of ‘a new threshold, a new direction of

the zigzagging [rhizomatic] line, a new course for the border’ (Deleuze1995: 45). For Deleuze, the creation of concepts is impossible without

‘the laying out of a plane’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 36). To think

means to construct a plane — to actually show that it is there rather

than merely ‘to think’ it — so that to pragmatically ‘find one’s bearings

in thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37) by means of stretching, fold-

ing, unfolding, enfolding; that is, by multiple movements of this plane’s

diagrammatic features that may traverse the plane leading to the creation

of concepts. A diagram functions as a map that, rather than representing,

engenders the territory to which it is supposed to refer. Accordingly, a

static representation of the order of references gives way to a relational

dynamics of the order of meanings.

5. Experience as thought and un-thought

Empirical particulars constitute the very context of experience. Some-

thing in the experiential ‘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 a¤ective tones’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). In fact, novel

concepts are to be invented or created in order to make sense out of sin-

gular experiences embedded in concrete situations and, ultimately, to af-

firm this sense. Experience is qualitative, multidimensional, and inclusive;

it includes ‘a draft, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a bat-

tle, an illness’ (Deleuze 1995: 141). An experiential event is as yet subject-

less because subjects are constituted within the multiplicity of events by

virtue of educational experience. We are made up of relations, says Dele-uze (2000), and events will make sense to us not if we understand them

theoretically but only when we experience in practice the very di¤erence

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that makes each singular event significant. The exteriority of relations

presents ‘a vital protest against principles’ (Deleuze 1987: 55) that would

have presented the universal reference point, the view from nowhere. The

di¤erence embodied in the here-and-now of each experiential situation

makes thought encounter a shock or crisis, which is embedded in the ob-

jective structure of an event per se, thereby transcending the faculties of

subjective perception beyond as if ‘given’ sense data. Deleuze considered

di¤erence to be not only existential but an ontological category too, ‘the

noumenon closest to phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1994: 222), which however

is never beyond experience because every phenomenon is in fact condi-

tioned by di¤erence. For Deleuze, thinking is not a natural exercise but

always a second power of thought, born under constraints of experience

as a material force. Thinking is, however, capable of transcending this

experience, that is, freeing it from the said constraints, hence paradoxi-cally complementing Deleuze’s empirical method with its transcendental

dimension. The primacy of relations makes the whole dualistic split be-

tween thought and world, the inside and the outside, invalid, and rela-

tional logic is the logic of experimentation not ‘subordinate to the verb

to be’ (Deleuze 1987: 57) that would have established the law of identity.

Instead, the logic of di¤erence, the relational logic as semiotics, is origi-

nated in experience: it is ‘empiricism [that] knows how to transcend the

experiential dimension of the visible’ (Deleuze 1990: 20) without the nec-

essary recourse to universal ideas.

The experiential world is folded, the fold being ‘the inside of the out-

side’ (Deleuze 1988: 96), where the outside is virtual yet real by virtue of

its pragmatics and e¤ects produced at the level of actual experiences. It

unfolds in an unpredictable manner, and it is impossible to know aheadof time what the body (both physical and mental) can do: life becomes

an experimental and experiential a¤air demanding — instead of invoking

the eternal Truth — practical wisdom by means of immanent evaluations

of experiential modes of existence. Experience is what a¤ects us and — as

a¤ective — it is as yet a-conceptual. Deleuze emphasizes the passionate

quality of such an experience: ‘perhaps passion, the state of passion, is

actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable . . . is about’

(Deleuze 1995: 116). Deleuze’s method enables the reading of signs, sym-

bols, and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience.

Experience cannot be limited to what is immediately perceived: the Dele-

uzian line of flight or becoming is real even if ‘we don’t see it, because it’s

the least perceptible of things’ (Deleuze 1995: 45). The Deleuzian object

of experience is presented only in its tendency to exist, or rather to sub-sist, in a virtual, sub-representative state: it is unthought, yet capable of

actualizing itself through multiple di¤erent/ciations. We are a¤ected by


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experience, and thinking enriched with a¤ect is always experimental, like

a process of trying, testing, and creating rather than discovering the

eternal Truth in some preexistent domain. Experience is future-oriented,

lengthened and enfolded, representing an experiment with what is new,

or coming into being, therefore becoming . Experience constitutes a com-

plex place, and our experimentation on ourselves is, for Deleuze, the only

reality. Thinking is a practical art: it has to do with vital, real-life, and

continuously encountered problems. For Deleuze, we are never separated

from the world: rhizomatic lines connect ‘the interior [as] a selected

exterior [and] the exterior, a projected interior’ (Deleuze 1988: 125). The

network of lines constituting the Deleuzian rhizome serves as a diverse

means to express the reciprocal ways in which signs can both a¤ect and

be a¤ected. A¤ective thinking, by definition, will be equivalent to ‘experi-

encing, experimenting . . . and what we experience, experiment with, is . . .what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape’ (Deleuze

1995: 104). Nothing should prevent both students and teachers from

such experimentation with the new and unthought in a classroom.

Deleuze called his philosophical method both critical and clinical, the

latter demanding the revaluation of experience by means of laying out

the rhizomatic process-structure: ‘which of the [rhizomatic] lines are

dead-ended or blocked, which cross voids, . . . and most importantly the

line of steepest gradient, how it draws in the rest, towards what destina-

tion’ (Deleuze 1987: 120). Learning as a process of growth takes place

only through multiple rhizomatic connections because the rhizome serves

as an example of an open system, and only an open-ended, that is, a rela-

tional system is capable of creating new concepts and meanings thus lib-

erating thinking from being confined to preestablished truth-conditions:such is Deleuze’s pedagogy of the concept. Picking up speed in its very

milieu, rhizome — by virtue of its own creative function — does not con-

form to ‘sedentary structure of representation’ (Deleuze 1994: 37) but is

oriented towards the future therefore making the creation of concepts an

outcome of an unfolded experience. Movement and process present the

plurality of problems rather than a single solution, and the coexistence

of moments that defy representation because a rhizomatic process enables

any single line to be potentially connected with any other line. Because

one never knows in advance, there is only exploration and experimenta-

tion. The process of rhizomatic inquiry into an unknown is not based on

any foundation, but is embedded in the experimentation with unpredict-

able conditions in the real experience. For Deleuze, learning is ‘infinite . . .

[and] of a di¤erent nature to knowledge’ (Deleuze 1994: 192) but that of a nature of creative process as a method of invention. Positioning the

‘origins’ of philosophical thinking at the level of practice, Deleuze brings

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thought into intimate relation with non-thought, or as yet unthought, un-

known, and unpredictable. Thinking without recognition operates as a

thought without (pre-given) image and is semiotic in its core: it interprets,

or evaluates, experience, and ‘beneath the generalities of habit . . . we re-

discover singular processes of learning’ (Deleuze 1994: 25). Signs demand

the ‘corresponding apprenticeship’ (Deleuze 2000: 92) in terms of the in-

terpretive process by other signs that would have been creating meanings

for the series of events. New meanings are capable of expressing them-

selves only as eventual outcomes of the total sign-process that produces

them; therefore meanings cannot be externally ‘given’ in a forceful man-

ner as the preexistent truth. It is the rhizomatic process-structure, which is

capable of producing something new ‘when it [thought] acceded to the in-

finite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and recon-

quers an immanent power of creation’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140).When an element of novelty — as unthought — is brought into rational

thinking, it makes the thinker a creative artist capable of thinking the un-

thinkable. The non-thought is not opposed to reason but is enfolded in it.

New concepts impose new meanings as revaluations of experience, and

for Deleuze no thinking is value-free. Because every newly created con-

cept must embody the situation as a whole, it ‘speaks the event, not the

essence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 21). Thoughts are events, or sign-

processes. Event is always an element of becoming, and the process of be-

coming, or semiosis, is unlimited. Thinking as an infinite learning process

replaces the Cartesian point of departure in the form of cogito, or ‘I

think.’ It is an event that ‘is,’ therefore the ‘I’ that thinks is constituted in

the relations involved in thinking process as revaluation of events. Think-

ing is ‘not just a theoretical matter. It [is] to do with life itself’ (Deleuze1995: 105) because of new ‘ways of living [and] possibilities of existence’

(Deleuze 1995: 143) implied by di¤erent regimes of signs.

6. Education as transformational pragmatics

For Deleuze, signs embedded in experience are ‘the symptoms of life

gashing forth or draining way . . . There is a profound link between signs,

events, life and vitalism’ (Deleuze 1995: 143). In terms of reading and in-

terpreting signs, the learning process is not limited to the fact of under-

standing a concept, or interpreting the meaning of a novel, or even grasp-

ing pictorial content of the work of art. The ethical task as a revaluation

or reconstruction of experience supplements critical thinking and under-standing with its clinical dimension. It is clinical not only by virtue of it

entailing as if a diagnosis of a particular mode of existence by means of


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assessing the latter’s symptoms, that is, reading them as the signs of the

present. Rather, an unfolding experience is a process of signs-events, the

dynamics of which include both the past and the future. It is the clinical

element that demands evaluation of the directions embedded in rhizome

as if anticipating some future possibilities. Deleuze wants to be able to

foresee which of the rhizomatic lines would be dead-ended or blocked,

which might cross some of the experiential voids, etc. However the most

important is what he called the line of flight, the line of the steepest gra-

dient, or of the infinite speed of movement. The line of this type is af-

forded a special place in Deleuze’s philosophy because it is along the line

of flight where all becomings take place. The most important question

posited is where this line might take us, ‘towards what destination’ (Del-

euze 1987: 120), the latter remaining presently as yet unthought of. It

is along the line of flight where novelty comes into being, or becomes.Novelty is created in experience when some paradoxical ‘non-localizable

connections . . . resonance and echoes’ ( Deleuze 1994: 83) meet each other

along the line of rhizomatic becoming. At the level of perception by regu-

lar senses, that is, prior to becoming a percept, such connections would

remain imperceptible. But learning by means of signs enables one’s per-

ception to vitally increase in power, thereby tending to becoming-percept,

that is, becoming able to perceive something previously imperceptible.

The process of what Deleuze and Guattari called transformational prag-

matics, consists in opening up to a new, diagrammatic and creative, func-

tion. ‘Connecting the dots’ in the multileveled rhizomatic network enables

one to make sense out of the disparate bits and pieces of information, that

is, destratify one’s old way of thinking by means of some novel interpre-

tation: such is transformational pragmatics of Deleuze’s philosophy.When positioned within the context of education, the transformational

pragmatics is oriented towards becoming-other, as regards both epistemol-

ogy and ethics. The pedagogy of the concept, then, aims towards tran-

scending or overcoming one’s old mode of knowledge and existence. A

new mode of existence would be characterized by ‘new percepts and new

a¤ects’ (Deleuze 1995: 164) as some new ways of thinking, feeling and

perceiving: Deleuze emphasized the triadic relationship based on the in-

separability of percepts, a¤ects, and concepts. In the process of stretching

beyond limits and inventing new concepts, the rhizomatic thinking acts in

a self-organizing manner so that concepts are ultimately self-referential,

that is, the concept — at the moment of creation — posits itself and its

object simultaneously. Concepts are invented, or created, as if reborn.

The concept stops being a logical proposition: ‘it does not belong to adiscursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept shows

itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140) due to the very transversality of

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communication, a semiotic bridge established by means of a regime of

signs. Rhizomatics traces the lines that connect diverse experiences as a

strategic means of making sense out of them. Such is Deleuze’s pedagogy

of the concept: an experiment with and on ourselves. The epistemic or

learning process understood as a semiotic inquiry always takes place ‘in

and through the unconscious’ (Deleuze 1994: 165) leading to the conjuga-

tion, which determines, as Deleuze says, the threshold of consciousness:

unconscious-becoming-conscious because of the folded and twisted rela-

tionship between the two. Learning implies an increase in knowledge via

the diagonal, or transversal, communication leading to the thought’s in-

crease in power. The increase in power is almost literal: if there were an

exponential growth inscribed in the learning process, than the transversal

communication would have carried an exponent towards its limit as if

crossing the otherwise asymptotic line, thus becoming a threshold pro-vided the particular situation meets the experiential conditions. For Dele-

uze, learning is not limited to events that are actually perceived: there

is also the level of the virtual (as yet unthought), which however in the

framework of his philosophy is no less real than any actual existence.

Thinking as di¤erent/ciation — in other words, the actualization of the

virtual — presupposes an intensive field of individuation, and it is because

of ‘the action of the field of individuation that such and such di¤erential

relations and such and such distinctive points . . . are actualized — in

other words are organized . . . along lines di¤erentiated in relation to

other lines’ (Deleuze 1994: 247). Events are impersonal and a-temporal:

as a multiplicity, an event is profoundly collective, therefore, ‘irreducible

to individual states of a¤airs, particular images, personal beliefs’ (Deleuze

1990: 19), or static truth-values. Deleuze’s epistemology is future-orientedand somewhat untimely. It makes an object as a newly created concept a

limit-case of the inquiry or the outcome of a learning process that goes

beyond recognition to a fundamental encounter with the unknown and

un-thought. It cannot be otherwise because it is an experiential situation

that forces us to face something not known in advance, and we will sim-

ply have to ‘invent new concepts for unknown lands’ (Deleuze 1995: 103).

Such is, let us repeat, Deleuze’s creative pedagogy of the concept. There-

fore novelty, creativity and becoming are implicit in the learning process,

provided of course the learning process itself is reconceptualized in semi-

otic terms. As such, they — and not the set of preexistent facts trans-

mitted from a generic instructor to a generic student — may be considered

to be educational objectives. The underground sprout of a rhizomatic

plant, rather than having a traditional root, has a stem, the oldest part of which dies o¤ while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the top. This met-

aphor is potent because it is precisely when the old is dying o¤ then the new


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may be created. At this critical point a rhizomatic line would zigzag, as

Deleuze would have said, into new direction therefore defying a linear pro-

gression towards some predetermined final end.

Experience is that what produces thinking, and the educational experi-

ence is the one, which instead of repetitively ‘displaying phenomena or

statement . . . [forms] a transversal or mobile diagonal line’ (Deleuze

1988: 22), the latter intervening as the semiotic thirdness. It is the trans-

versal line that enables one to potentially cross the threshold of one’s old

habitual thinking thereby expanding knowledge boundaries in terms of

intellectual and moral growth. Rather than a customary instruction, it is

an experiential and experimental situation — a semiotic event, a sign —

that constitutes learning and constructing of new knowledge. It makes

learning not a rationally deduced abstraction but a meaningful encounter

expressed in terms of students’ literally making sense out of their own ex-periences. Reflecting on his own pedagogical practice, Deleuze empha-

sized that students were not required to take in ‘everything, [yet] everyone

took what they needed or wanted, what they could use’ (Deleuze 1995:

139) indeed defying the necessity of some superior educational aim which

is imposed from without. The multiple rhizomatic connections produced

within each ‘here-and-now’ (Deleuze 1994: xx) of every single experiential

situation, themselves serve as a precondition for the emergence of new

and di¤erent ‘heres’ and ‘nows’ (Deleuze 1994: xxi): sure enough, signs

grow and become other signs. All one should ever do when teaching a

course, Deleuze says, is to explore a question, ‘play around with the

terms, add something, relate it to something else’ (Deleuze 1995: 139).

The rhizomatic method as a semiotic inquiry transforms thinking, as pos-

ited by Deleuze, into an open set of critical tools, ethical evaluations andartistic creations. This philosophy, itself implying possible ways of living

and meaningful modes of existence, is educational almost by definition as

derived from John Dewey’s famous lines: ‘What [one] gets and gives as a

human being . . . is . . . a widening and deepening of conscious life — a

more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings . . . And

education is not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life’

(Dewey 1924 [1916]: 417). To enable such a life in an actual classroom is

a challenge, as it would require reconstructing the classroom experience

in terms of creating an open-ended, smooth, pedagogical space devoted

to the creation of concepts. Because to ‘think is to create’ (Deleuze 1994:

94), to construct concepts, it presupposes the multiplicity of local integra-

tions embedded in the smooth space, which is constituted within ‘an infi-

nite succession of linkages and changes in directions’ (Deleuze and Guat-tari 1987: 494). Deleuze used to identify teaching and learning with the

research laboratory (Deleuze 1995: 139). The thinking process that takes

212 I. Semetsky

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place in a laboratory is in actu, and the pedagogical process, for Deleuze,

must be connected with one’s current research work: you will be giving

courses on what you are currently investigating and you will be inventing

novel concepts in this process. As Merrell (1997) pointed out, semiotics

alters the theory of meaning. Semiotics is ‘about meaning engendered

when signs are in their act of becoming signs, a becoming that includes

sign interpreters as participating agents in the very semiosic process of be-

coming’ (Merrell 1997: xi, quoted in Kehle and Cunningham 2002: 122).

The process of investigation or inquiry into an unknown is based on ex-

perimentation with conditions, parameters, variables, and interpreting the

outcomes of investigation. It is an experiential learning as creative that

contributes to the multiplication of rhizomatic lines, which thereby engen-

der the uncharted and unbounded territory of new knowledge and new

modes of existence. Thought itself becomes an experiment, and it is thetotality of experience that emits signs, which by necessity exceed any

given system of significations. According to Deleuze, sense — or meaning

— is always ‘produced . . . caused and derived’ ( Deleuze 1990: 95); and as

a relational activity, it requires work to be done. It is this creative work

that continuously ‘forces us to frame a new question’ (Deleuze 1995:

114), to proceed with a semiotic inquiry by being active participants in

the unlimited process of becoming.

References

Bogue, Ronald (2004). Search, swim, and see: Deleuze’s apprenticeship in signs and peda-

gogy of the images. Educational Philosophy and Theory 36 (3), 327–342.Deleuze, Gilles (1987). Dialogues (with Clair Parnet), H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam

(trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

— (1988). Foucault, Sean Hand (trans.). Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press.

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University of Minnesota Press.

— (1990). The Logic of Sense, M. Lester, (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

— (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley (trans.). Minnesota: University of

Minneapolis Press.

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Press.

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sity Press.

— (2000). Proust and Signs: The Complete Text (¼ Theory out of Bounds 17), R. Howard

(trans.). Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-nia, Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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De Landa, Manuel (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.

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Grossberg, Lawrence (1997). Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Dur-

ham: Duke University Press.

Guattari, Felix (1995). Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, Paul Bains and J. Pefanis

(trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kehle, Paul E. and Donald J. Cunningham (2002). Semiotics and mathematical modeling.

International Journal of Applied Semiotics 3 (1), 119–135.

Leach, Mary and Boler, Megan (1998). Gilles Deleuze: Practicing education through flight

and gossip. In Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, Michael Peters (ed.),

149–172. Westport: Bergin and Carvey.

Massumi, Brian (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from

Deleuze and Guattari . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Merrell, Floyd (1995). Peirce’s Semiotics Now: A Primer. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’

Press.

— (1997). Peirce, Signs, and Meaning . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Peters, Michael (ed.) (1998). Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education. West-port: Bergin and Carvey.

— (2004). Geophilosophy, education, and the pedagogy of the concept. Educational Philoso-

phy and Theory 36 (3), 219–226.

Roy, Kaustuv (2004). Overcoming nihilism: From communication to Deleuzian expression.

Educational Philosophy and Theory 36 (3), 297–312.

Schuh, Kathy and Cunningham, Donald J. (2004). Rhizome and the mind: Describing the

metaphor. Semiotica 149 (1/4), 325–342.

Semetsky, Inna (2002). Continuities, discontinuities, interactions: Gilles Deleuze and the

Deweyan legacy. PhD dissertation, Columbia University.

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inburgh University Press.

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Inna Semetsky (b. 1948) is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Philosophy and

Bioethics at Monash University [email protected]. Her research inter-ests include semiotics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of education, and analytical psychol-

ogy. Her recent major publications include ‘Educating semiotic consciousness: Intuition as

pragmatic method’ (2002); ‘Memories of the past, memories of the Future: Semiotics and

the Tarot’ (2003); ‘The magician’s autopoietic action, or Eros contained and uncontained’

(2003); and ‘The role of intuition in thinking and learning: Deleuze and the pragmatic

legacy’ (2004).

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