As a social work professor it is part of my responsibility to help students think about subjective interventions in the life of those persons who have been marginalized. My concern is that by the time the students have graduated as ‘helping professionals’ they are aware of how both privilege and prejudice influence their professional judgements. Whenever the nature of subjective engagement is introduced in the classroom—whether it is tied to identities defined by race, class, ability, or sexuality—many students react emotionally. Students from a wide variety of racial, sexual and class backgrounds react in this manner.
I have sometimes felt this reaction has been overwrought. That is, I imagine that students are overreacting to the discussion relative to the real consequences for them as students. Most students are likely to pass the course. In fact, many students who engage in the discussion will receive a good grade. At times, I have felt that students are reluctant to convert their prejudices; other times, I have pointed out to the students that they are struggling because their manner of conceptualizing relationships has been challenged. However, these interpretations are not adequate to understand the depth of their reactions. From a structural perspective, I could argue that the students are complicit in the ongoing recreation of dominant structures; from a personality perspective, I could argue that some students are simply too narcissistic and proud to consider the concerns of others. Yet these interpretations also are not adequate to explain the student affect. This visceral reaction to certain topics tied to identity within the social work classroom has been a focus of much of my study over the past few years. I have also been interested in technocratic reductive measures of human worth in capitalist settingsI believe some of the affective response is tied to the nature of the classroom in Western capitalism..
The following article is directed to professors who teach at formal academic settings. I help us theorize our ‘taken for granted’ assumptions and actions within the classroom. Through a theoretical lens, that includes the thought of Deleuze, Guattari and Butler, we are able to understand better how professors are complicit in power relations as they play out in university settings. By focusing on the act of grading I attempt to reveal the troubling nature of the network of relations within the classroom and the university. Also, it is hoped that through reconsidering the act of grading some university students will take comfort in developing a fuller consciousness of the social dynamics to which they are exposed as students.
In this article I argue that students are in the double bind of expressing desire in a classroom context that produces lacking. The coding of desire through the act of grading is part of the play of capitalist relations within the classroom setting. Capitalist relations are about the harnessing of productive social change through constructing persons as ‘productive’ as well as ‘wanting’ or ‘lacking’. I make thae case that the professor need explore means of eliciting desire outside the play of capitalist forces through being conscious of the pervasive capitalist influence in our classrooms. I begin by discussing student desire in a social work classroom and the professor’s role in coding the desire through grading students worth. The professor (agent of capital) manipulates this measure (grading) for the purposes of capitalist enterprise. I discuss how lacking is actively constructed in the classroom setting with particular concern for the uneven distribution of lacking among students who have been marginalized through race, class sexuality and gender. The expression of desire, the manipulation of desire by grades and finally the creation of lacking in the classroom create an untenable situation for social work students. Students are caught in the contradiction of being encouraged to express desire while the signifiers (grades) of student worth manipulate desire at best or make it invisible at worst. The encouragement of productive subjectivity becomes a central task of the professor in hopes of creating territories of desire that exist outside of capitalist coding. Throughout the article I use the example of a student who wishes to challenge her grade as a means to imagine the abstract concepts that influence everyday academic practice. The seemingly innocuous, routine exchange between student and professor is reconsidered as an expression of desire.
In the book Anti Oedipus (1983), Deleuze and Guattari argue that one of Freud’s most profound discoveries was his treatment of desire. According to the authors, Freud defined desire as abstract and subjective psychic energy. This concept of desire allows one to imagine it as “a flow of forces that produces relations” (Colebrook 2002:xvii). Desire produces connections with elements of reality, be they natural, social, linguistic, technological, or mechanical (Schroeder 2005). Desire, expressed as a variety of energetic conversions, can flow in many directions and create surprising connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). According to Schroeder, Deleuze defines desire as
a productive outpouring of energy, infusing and intensifying desire’s object. He (Deleuze) rejects that desire expresses lack or emptiness, which must then be compensated by consumption or action. (Schroeder 2005:289).
At the same time that Deleuze and Guattari (1983) draw upon Freud’s concept of desire as an abstract and subjective energy, they critique Freud for tying desire solely to sexuality. They argue that Freud shackles the understanding of desire to mythologies about the family, such as the Oedipal complex, and therefore does not allow for the multiple expression of desire, but rather codes and signifies the nature of desire. This type of recoding results in neutralisation and mortification (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
When desire is freed from Freud’s concepts of the Oedipal complex and the familial triangle of mother, father and child, it has multiple means of escape. Desire can be understood both as more specific and broader than our taken-for-granted codes that associate desire to the body and sexuality. Although desire may be understood sexually, it need not be tied to the body or to sexuality, nor defined by gender attractions. Desire operates at a specific or “molecular” level with a very particular intensity; it also operates at a broader or “molar” level tied to the networks of human, social and technical relationships (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987).
The molecular and molar expressions of desire are interconnected. Desire is inseparable from
complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microinformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered set up rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:215).
Rather than existing as a separate essence or principle, desire is experienced through personal interactions, collective social relations and a whole series of assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
When freed from our commonly accepted beliefs and codes, desire operates as a force for social and political possibilities, and even revolutionary change. Conversely, when desire is unexamined or ignored, it can contribute to troubling or dangerous personal and collective political forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
Judith Butler (2004) also ties desire to a network of relations while acknowledging its abstract quality. Based on the thought of Spinoza, Butler defines desire as the endeavour to persist in one’s own being. While endeavouring to persist, the desirous person also seeks recognition of his or her existence. Recognition is necessary for a person to maintain existence and ensure a viable life:
the being desires not only to persist in its own being but to live in a world of representations that reflect the possibility of that persistence, and finally to live in a world in which it both reflects the value of other’s lives as well as its own (Butler 2004:235).
One of the most intense expressions of desire I experience as a professor is when a student is challenging me over her grade. Her challenge, tied to a desire for success and recognition, is experienced through a series of minute expressions. The student who speaks about her desire for success expresses desire with a particular intensity. This intensity or energetic conversion, based in desire, is not necessarily tied to the body as a whole, since it is experienced through the many molecular expressions of intensity. The intensity may be expressed through tears in her eyes, low voice, clenched fists, or a rigid body. It is a partial object, not yet fully understood by me or completely comprehensible in terms of our interpersonal relationship.
Desire for success is not necessarily good or bad when experienced in this manner. This particular desire, expressed through the seeking of a grade change, is not necessarily about the student’s personality traits such as ambition, greed or narcissism, nor can it be fully understood as the student’s complicity in capitalist notions of success based on competition.
Through a differing lens provided by Deleuze, Guattari and Butler, the desire for a grade change can be viewed as an immediate intensity at the molar level. It can perhaps be best understood as desire expressed within the confines of technical assemblages, namely, measures of worth such as grading, financial merit systems and computer coding. These assemblages are inherent in the classroom and the capitalist context within which it exists. From this point of view, the desire is probably not understood completely by either of us. Since the desire is not fully understood, but is defined by the student seeking recognizable representations that allow her to maintain existence, the issue is whether the student and I can work together to explore the desire as expressed through intensity. This manner of framing the task stands in contrast to a professor seeking to understand the student’s actions through essentialist concepts that tie desire to personality traits. It also requires getting beyond the association of capitalism only with broad structures, since doing so could only narrow the means of understanding her actions. These could only be understood as being derived from her conscious choice to be complicit in those broad structures of capitalism. Desire as the seeking of recognition and/or desire as an expression of connective forces make a much more ambivalent affair out of the seemingly straightforward action of considering a grade change.
Unfortunately, the struggle between student and professor usually focuses primarily on the grade, and is often resolved by a grade change that frees both the student and the professor from engaging in further interpretive work. The technical grade change makes the local struggle less meaningful, since it acts as a code for the expression of desire.
While the network of expressions and relations is being created, a capitalist process coexists that deterritorializes desire. Deterritorialization of desire involves freeing the expression of desire from a particular territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). Although deterritorialization in all its expressions is not necessarily bad, when it involves the misrepresentation of desire and disciplining of local connections, it becomes problematic (Haver 1997).
Capitalism, based on the deterritorialization of desire, breaks through the local references of connective forces. Having contributed to releasing the flow of desire from local networks, the capitalist process recodes desire with signifiers and images. At times, coded images have no reference to the reality of expressed intensity, desire, or productivity. Desires, and the intensities associated with those desires, are recoded in a manner congruent with the governing principles of capitalism, such as the individual defined according to private property and the surplus value of labour, which are made operational through codes (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The persons’ desires are coded as objects ready for manipulation within a chain of signifiers of value. Just as Freud recoded desire to contain it, so too the capitalist enterprise recodes desire to represent it in a contained manner.
There are many forms of coding that serve a regulatory purpose (Pinar 1997). Within Western capitalism, codes are reconstructed through imagery, tying desire to consumerism. This type of coding reconstructs desire in a banal form so that it is linked to the consumption and acquisition of private property and goods. These codes are not restricted to, but can be seen in, the images present on video billboards, in television advertisements, and in movies(Giroux 2000; Kristeva 1995; Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
Another form of coding is tied to financial and monetary systems. Capitalist enterprise re-inscribes local connections and local production to serve its own logic of the meaning of value:
Currently we are experiencing a form of filiative capital. Capital becomes filiative when money begets money, or value a surplus value- value in process, money in process and as such, capital… Value… suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own... instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now… into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:227: Italics mine for emphasis).
Through the technical redefinition of the local forces, surplus labour and human productivity are redefined so that they can be measured and manipulated through abstract, reductive measures of human worth and well-being or rabattu (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). These measures reduce the complexity of interpretation, attempting to control for externalities (Moffatt 2001). At the same time, reductive measures function as an indicator of worth within an abstract field (Franklin 1992). Under these conditions, capital becomes the immanent field defined by the various forms of rabattu in differential relation to one another (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
The process of measuring capital through reductive codes, which are in turn measured against each other, serves a political purpose. Since every human endeavour can be measured through reductive measures, every space in which people coexist is potentially a capitalist space.
In the Western capitalist context, human struggle and productive forces are abstracted to a reductive marker. Desires in the local context are deterritorialized and redefined so that they are congruent with a space based on abstraction (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In the capitalist classroom, grades function as the reductive measure that serves the purpose of coding desire.
The reductive marker—the grading system—creates a separate reality that allows agents (professors) to play with forces of human desire and productivity. The moment a professor creates and manipulates a grading system, the powerful forces of capitalism are at play. The procedures for assigning and calculating grades are defined by the linear logic that is similar to other processes of capitalism. Students are categorized and coded as separate, unlinked realities devoid of their original expression of desire. The professor makes judgements about the students’ processes of desire by means of grades, so the students’ relationship to meaning ultimately becomes a relationship to the abstract, quantifiable methodology of grading systems. The grades themselves reduce student productivity and intensities to a quantifiable measure that can be constituted within the immanent field of capitalism where rabattu are given differential value to each other (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
In addition, grades serve the purpose of categorizing and sorting students according to class and category (Irving 2004). The agent, or professor, takes the synthetic experience of people and categorizes those experiences with a table of separations. The professor plays with the surface reality of grades while sorting students into categories. Any potential for revolutionary group activity becomes subsumed within the mystified power of the professor (Deleuze and Guatarri 1983; Derrida 1998).
Furthermore, the process of grading goes against the expression and experience of difference. The table of grades and its comparative nature work against diversity within the classroom. The grading system creates an overriding explanation of each person’s subjectivity in relation to the others The combination of grades can deny or obscure difference by creating a totality within which each measure must be located (Derrida 1998). When we structure our thought in order to create a correspondence between people, the thought process “aims to efface all these differences” (Derrida 1998; Derrida 1991a:302). We are “quick to rush to such judgements” in a manner that avoids the experience of difference (Derrida 1998; Derrida 1991a; Rajchman 2003). Furthermore, by subjecting student productivity to a reductive measure and then combining the measures, the students are joined together as a “molar aggregate.” The aggregate of student grades imposes a structural unity on student productivity (Deleuze and Guatarri 1983:306).
The combination of rabattu used to construct overriding interpretations of reality and of the manipulation of rabattu to create molar aggregates that measure relative worth disrupts the productive existential flow of human desire (Chambon 1999; Irving 2004; Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In the next section, I argue that the structural unity of the grading system can only appear through the lacking of local, personal productive forces. This concept of lacking is distributed unevenly among social work students according to their social position within the classroom.
It is often assumed that the goal of capitalism is the widest development of production for all persons. In other words, capitalist enterprise is thought to replace unproductive forces with productive ones. However, this assumption regarding production cannot be presumed to exist at the local level (McGrath et al. 1999). In fact, the reliance on lack or anti-production is one of the strangest and most pervasive qualities of capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
The lacking within the capitalist system is tied to the exercise of creating reductive measures (rabattu). Absence of productivity is integral to the concept of reductive measures:
Every time that production, rather than being apprehended in its originality, in its reality, becomes reduced (rabattu) in this manner to a representational space, it can no longer have value except by its own absence, and it appears as a lack in this space. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:306; italics in original text)
The lacking at the heart of capitalist enterprise is present in the classroom. All persons within the capitalist academic system experience a sense of lacking or, at least, the risk of being signified as lacking. The university classroom is a place where desire is expressed. The desire is coded through reductive measures (grades) that are manipulated in abstract matrixes. These reductive measures appropriate the productive flow of students so that all students experience lacking (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). All students’ productive effort is reduced to a lacking through grades. The grades become part of a capitalist field where value is measured against itself. Each grade has the potential to express surplus value in relation to other grades.
The comparative coding of students creates a structural unity imposed on the multiple subjectivities (Derrida 1991a) within the classroom. Since reductive measures can only represent students and their desires as partial objects, this unity is made possible through that which is not represented in the coding (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:306). It is impossible to represent fully the subjectivity of each student within an abstracted matrix.
The grading system is structured to ignore and avoid the disruption of individual student productivity in all its complexity as well as the productive interplay between participants within the classroom (Irving and Moffatt 2002). The system of grades functions as one of many regulatory systems. The regulatory state relies on many forms of social regulation:
social organs of decision, administration, reaction, inscription: a technocracy that cannot be reduced to the operation of technical machines. In short, the conjunction of the decoded flows, differential relations and their multiple schizzes or breaks require a whole apparatus of regulation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:252)
At the same time, lacking in the classroom is constructed in terms of a limited number of students who will be successful. The success of some students is based on perception of lacking in other students. Someone must illustrate their lacking so that the successful students enjoy surplus value. The surplus value of the successful student is monitored and collected through data that the professor tallies. In this case, the surplus labour value of the successful student is measured against the perception of non-value or non-production of the weak student (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). For example, literacy—which is at the heart of the academic enterprise—is defined by its opposite: illiteracy. Those students who are defined as literate are defined in opposition to the illiterate, who are considered lacking (English 2003).
While professors often assume that we are engaged in new growth through the development of student intellect, in fact, as educators we are involved in a complicated play of forces that include both production and anti-production, and which lays at the heart of capitalism. The lacking inherent in the capitalist dynamic ensures the capitalist ethos of striving and competition is present. Students strive to avoid being characterized as illiterate or weak. As professors, we are not passive observers of the academic worth of our students. We are actively engaged as agents of capitalism in creating the strong and the weak student, as well as the literate and illiterate student
Grades serve a regulatory purpose to ensure that capitalism is present in the classroom. Grades also serve to constrain both the desire and the productive interplay of students in the classroom. Furthermore, the subjective judgement of the professor may affect those students or community of persons who have traditionally been marginalized in academic settings so that they are characterised as lacking. In this manner, the students’ experience in the classroom is uneven depending on race, gender, sexuality and class (Pinar 1997, 2000; Fook 2002).
The propensity to represent students in minority positions as lacking is tied to the experience of lack by all. Students with identities outside of certain normative prescriptions need to be present in their physical silence and their epistemological lacking to help obscure the terrible culture within which all are caught and to avoid visibility of lacking:
the greater the lack on the inside, the greater the need for an outside to contain and to defuse it, for without that outside, the lack on the inside would become all too visible (Fuss 1991:3).
Some of those persons who have been defined as outsiders in the academic context include women, sexual minorities, and persons of color (Steinberg 2001).
Carol Anne Tyler (1991) notes a form of misogyny that assigns women to “the place of lack.” The woman is thought of as a mirror to maleness; the female gender is assumed to be the negative representation of maleness so that men can experience themselves as whole. In order to secure a masculine identity, the man requires the opposite—the lack—of the woman. The male keeps a clear distance from the female, since she represents nothingness. At the same time, the woman is the repressed person who ensures the functioning of a broader social structure. She needs to exist as a non-presence in order to maintain categorical genders of maleness and femaleness (Lorber 2000).
The Freudian theoretical construct of women contributes to the idea of women as lacking. Freud’s thought
is permeated by the bizarre notion that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine, is defined as a lack, an absence (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:294).
The relationship of lesbians and members of other sexual minorities within this system of lacking is as troubling as women’s role in general:
the homo, then, is always something less and something more than a supplement—something less in that it signifies a lack rather than an addition, and something more in that it signifies an addition to a lack, a lack which, importantly, may not be its own (Fuss 1991:3).
The heterosexual person therefore needs the definition of the homosexual as lacking in order to define him or herself. Women and sexual minorities are characterized in a manner that helps construct dominant identity groups such as the male and the heterosexual.
In line with the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, Walcott (2003) argues that blackness is perceived either as lacking or as an absence, since the expression of social desire associated with the experience of blackness is perceived to be too disruptive. Black persons in North America are “ an absented presence, always under erasure,” since Canadian blackness is a “bubbling brew of desire for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile (Walcott 2003:27).” When the black person is assumed to be lacking, a series of productive desires that may seem frightening and unsettling is avoided (Walcott 2003). The desires are multiple and subversive since, once released, they may not be easily coded.
One of the strategies for refusing to recognise students in marginalized positions and their difference is to perceive the difference as nothing, as lacking. This characterization of women does not allow for a proud subjectivity ( Tyler 1991). At the same time, the proud subjectivity of the queer person disrupts the experience of heterosexual wholeness and certainty. Since the identity of heterosexual wholeness relies on the lacking and the attendant silence or absence of the queer person, then a queer person’s proud subjectivity would call the heterosexual identity into question. Allowing for a proud subjectivity of black persons within the classroom comes with attendant risks of disruptions in taken-for-granted relations. As with women and sexual minorities, racial minorities are required to be lacking in order to obscure relations of lacking for all. Minority groups need to be considered absent or under erasure in order to avoid the schizzes, breaks and disruptions to an assumed social code, that would occur with the expression of their desire for recognition.
I will now return to the imagined case of the student who is appealing a grade. This student, who desires a change in the coding (grading), may be a woman of colour. Her desire may be influenced by her awareness of being treated as a person who lacks presence and ability. Her desire for success might be a desire for change in the arrangement of personal relations and technologies (assemblages) that represent her as lacking as a woman and as a person of colour. The challenge to the grade may also be tied to a desire to create different assemblages in order to disrupt the process of capitalist coding. In this manner, distribution of grades may be perceived as representing an inequitable distribution of justice.
At the same time, grading can become a form of false consciousness for both this student and me. We are reassured when we know the students have been successfully coded. The student who desires success may measure her success according to her grade-point average and become complicit in the capitalist reductive measures of worth. She engages in the pursuit of a measure that creates the absence of her experiential learning. At worst, she is pursuing a measure that puts her under erasure. She engages in the pursuit of measuring her own surplus value relative to other students in a system that constructs her as lacking.
In less enlightened moments. I have caught myself reassuring strong students who seek success that my method of teaching does not mean that more people succeed in my classroom. I might tell these students that I desire to help all students achieve their greatest potential. Instead, I have reassured students that I maintain a rigid line between those students who are successful and those who are lacking. Such scripts within academia are powerful and difficult to avoid. When I reassure a student in this manner, I am also reassuring her that knowledge is a form of private property, that she is defined as an individual and that the processes of capitalist coding to which we are so accustomed are in place. We take false comfort in knowing that productive flows do not disrupt our taken-for-granted codes. We take quiet comfort in avoiding the confusion and fear of being proud subjects.
In progressive schools of social work, the message to students is confusing. The students are encouraged to take emotionally laden stands on politics and social inequity, as well as to struggle against oppression and prejudice (Fook 2002; Ife 1997; Irving and Moffatt 2002). Furthermore, social work students are expected to reveal their humane side as part of their professional selves. The faulty premises are the assumptions that all students can be present in the same manner in the classroom, and that professors can fully capture the productive presence of students through our coding. The notion that the student can take on the role of subjective agent and/or humane being assumes that the social relations within the classroom support a presence for all students. In other words, our progressive social work approaches are based on the assumption that students can be fully present in the classroom.
Social work students can be placed in an untenable position due to the creation of rabattu in the classroom. Social work students are caught in reductive measures of worth through the process of grading, while being part of process that reconstructs their productivity as a form of lacking. Female students are invited to participate in the social work classroom by engaging in progressive causes, through political involvement and the expression of the personal self. She is expected to engage in subjective relations and express desire. The professor’s invitation to subjectivity is sometimes stated explicitly, and at other times is a veiled expectation poorly expressed by the professor. The professor demands that the student express desire and productivity in many ways, such as encouraging her to engage in clinical discussions, or expecting that she claim herself as an agent of social change. However, as I have discussed above, the realm of the subjective and the productive (student as desiring agent) is ultimately absent in the reductive measures (grades). It is simply impossible for the professor to capture the subjective realm and the productive flow of forces through reduction.
This lacking at the center of our classroom culture might explain why the student seeking success might become suspicious of me as a professor. No matter how much I endeavour to construct my relationship with her as one based on good will and trust, I am also the manipulator of grades and the person who encodes her desire. The student needs to be distrustful of me, since it is I who watch her express her productivity and then make a judgement as to whether she is illiterate or literate, failing or passing. In fact, it is not surprising to note that a student once asked me whether professors meet in clinical consultation to discuss the students’ ability to appropriately express commitment, concern, and desire.
Social workers have spoken of marginalization to understand the mistreatment of persons and communities within our institutions (George et al. 2004; Lee et al. 2002). Concepts such as marginalization may not be adequate to explain how people are treated as agents within capitalist classrooms. Although useful, the concept of marginalization may not address a system based on presumption of lack, that distributes the absence and lack non-uniformly. The metaphor for marginalization is a chessboard with people being moved from the center or being conquered through strategic moves. For some classroom participants, the experience may be closer to erasure than marginalization. The concept of marginalization may be further considered inadequate in that it does not address the facts that all experience lack created through reductive measures, but that certain populations are constructed as nothingness so that the omnipresence of lacking within the system is veiled.
Unfortunately, we, the professors, code or inscribe flows (Deleuze and Guatarri 1983) in the form of grades. The ultimate capitalist co-opting occurs when the professor acts as the agent of capital, reinterpreting the students’ productive flow using reductive measures, namely, the grade for the course. The student has to adopt the very language that co-opts her personal productivity, which is to be measured as surplus value within a comparative table of reductive measures. She must choose the correct words and express the correct ideas in order to be a participant within economies of capitalism. She must be adept in its logic and expression, which demand personal subjective claims, desires and political commitments, while reducing the force of those claims. She is, paradoxically, drawn into the process of erasing her own desires when she is expected to express them openly in the classroom.
Why, then, do students react so strongly to these discussions of subjective identity and marginalization in the classroom? Their reactions are not surprising when one considers that they may or may not be consciously aware that, in participating in these discussions, they run the risk of erasing that very identity (or, at least, of being treated hypocritically). They are encouraged to be subjective agents, to act in a productive manner and to put that expression at risk of erasure all at once.
We imagine that capitalism works to create new opportunities in non-productive settings or among non-productive people. Instead, what actually occurs is that we construct lack through coding even as we construct possibility in our classrooms. Our challenge as educators is to discover how students can be encouraged to be agents of their own learning, based on their own experience, in a system that intentionally disrupts and codes the students’ productive flows of desire. How can they express a proud subjectivity?
We can take hope as educators that as desires are expressed, a network of expressions is created. A series of connections or connective tissues create a territory. New terrain or territories are created because of differing desires expressed through multiple intensities (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The territories are sites of possibility expressed through contact rather than fully integrated coherent cultures (Bhabha, 1996; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Khayatt 1997; Sedgwick 2003). In spite of clashes that occur in the classroom, a series of connections is created by the presence of diversity, as well as by diverse desires within the same space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Haver 1997; Sedgwick 2003).
Deterritorialization can occur when the representation of desire breaks ‘taken for granted’ codes and pushes beyond the signifiers. In this manner, the freeing of desire can be a positive break from unimaginative codes for living, as the expression of deterritorialized intensity creates new possible human, social and technical combinations (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). This is a potentially hopeful process, as those students and professors who have been constrained by certain codes experience new possibilities (Pon 2004; Sedgwick 2003).
My reaction to the student seeking a grade change is tied to my own desires as an educator. Her desire and my desire create the possibility of connections as well as tensions and clashes with each other (Haver 1997; Irving and Moffatt 2002; Kristeva 2002). The interaction can be tense, emotional and difficult, but can also contribute to the creation of a territory since we remain connected. If there is a struggle between the two of us, the student preoccupied with success might come to understand success in a manner that is tied to the connective forces she experiences in the classroom.
I assume, as a professor, that it is my role to engage my students in the realm of the subjective—the political, personal claims, the experienced intensities—in spite of the risks of distorting those desires. My tasks are to remind the students that comparing themselves to each other is not the primary purpose of the classroom, and to ensure that the erasure of difference is not a primary function of the classroom. I will encourage proud subjectivity, and help create a space in which persons recognize the possibility of the persistence of their being ( Butler, 2004). I have to ensure that representations that reflect that possibility exist in the classroom. It is my challenge as a professor to imagine both the students’ and my own subjective, productive forces beyond the realm of categorization and grading, to imagine connective relations that exist beyond the realm of capitalist signifiers.
AcknowledgementsThe author thanks Hannah Fowlie for her research assistance. Thank you also to Allan Irving, Professor, University of Western Ontario, and Hannah Fowlie, Research Assistant, Ryerson University for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article,
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