Abstract
What is ?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is ?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is ?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual (what is) and the virtual (what is not-yet).
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Notes
The scope of this paper will explore the import of the possible, the real, the actual, and the virtual for curriculum theory.
I argue throughout this essay that in much of educational theory and practice, the image of structurality finds expression in the privilege notion of curriculum-as-plan, and further, in a reactive image of pedagogy that determines in advance what students will know, how such knowledge will be delivered, and ultimately, how it will be made recognizable through assessment.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the active power of the concept against the reactive understanding of the concept as simply a representation of knowledge ordered and employed according to the faculties of its creation. The reactive treatment of the concept reduces its complexity by grounding difference within the presupposed limits of popular opinion and a priori images of the world as it is.
Bergson’s vitalism is rethought in Essay 11 through the significance of techne for the theorization of process ontology.
Deleuze uses the term perplexion to signify the “multiple and virtual state of Ideas”, hence bypassing the connotation of “astonishment, doubt, or hesitation” association with the term “problem” (http://www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/).
Opposed to a process of addition whereby higher dimensions are added to prior structures, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advocate for the subtraction of “the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted” (p. 6). Deleuze and Guattari aver that a rhizome might be made by way of subtraction (n-1), releasing set structural points into productive flight.
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Wallin, J.J. What is ?Curriculum Theorizing: for a People Yet to Come. Stud Philos Educ 30, 285–301 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9210-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9210-y