Ronald Bogue

Search, Swim and See: Deleuze's apprenticeship in signs and pedagogy of images

© 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK EPAT ducational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857 2 04 Phi osop y of Education S ciety of Australasia 36riginal Article Search, Sw m and See Ronald B g e Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s apprenticeship in signs and pedagogy of images

Apology for nomadology

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘nomadic’ remains a concept that is frequently misunderstood. Their ‘nomadism’ is what some would call a ‘bastard concept’, one that sits astride standard categories and confuses seemingly distinct classifications. Deleuze and Guattari apparently take the ‘nomadic’ to be that which is peripatetic, set adrift, and, in this regard, their social model seems to be that of all individuals, groups, and societies in a relatively constant state of movement. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s object is not to systematize received anthropological taxonomies, but to articulate two abstract tendencies – the nomadic and the sedentary. Essential here is the differentiation of observations de facto and de jure, a distinction of long standing in scholastic philosophy and the philosophy of natural law. Bergson revives this at several points in his thought and Deleuze returns to it frequently. De jure distinctions for Bergson are ‘pure differences in kind’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of nomadic and sedentary is one such de jure distinction. Deleuze and Guattari are not troubled by the frequent observation that no mobile populations wander randomly, since every population manifests a mixture of sedentary and nomadic qualities. The de jure distinction between the nomadic and the sedentary is useful for Deleuze and Guattari in at least three ways: characteristics striking in one mobile population can be shown to be faintly present in another in an illuminatingly modified form; occasional nomadic practices and experiential qualities may be isolated and extracted from heterogeneous contexts and shown to have a certain cohesion across varying populations; and aesthetic objects and social practices may be assessed in terms of common tendencies within various social spheres without reducing any one of those spheres to the status of an epiphenomenal projection of another.

The Companion Cyborg: Technics and Domestication

Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, first published in the Socialist Review in 1985, is by far her best-known work.1 Her proposal to displace the feminist myth of the goddess with that of the cyborg, ‘a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (1991: 149), signaled her commitment to a socialist-feminism that is neither technophilic nor technophobic but fully engaged with the problematics of the interpenetration of nature and culture in such diverse realms as biology, ecology, cybernetics, economics, politics and ethics. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), which included a revised version of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, and in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997), Haraway continued her exploration of these issues in rhetorical terms largely consonant with those of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’. In 2003, however, she adopted a new master trope and discursive idiom in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, upon which she expanded in her 2008 study, When Species Meet. In these last two books, her focus is not on cyborgs but on dogs, and specifically her passionate participation in ‘the doghuman sport called agility’ (2008: 26).

Speranza, the Wandering Island

Michel Tourniers novel Friday is the subject of an important essay of Deleuzes, in which he presents the concept of the ‘a priori Other’. Alice Jardine and Peter Hallward have offered critiques of Deleuze via readings of this essay, but neither takes into consideration the full significance of Tourniers novel or Deleuzes commentary. Jardine and Hallward provide divergent and only partial perspectives on Deleuze. If there are several Deleuzes, each defined by a critical point of view, there is also a single Deleuzian problem that informs the Tournier essay and Deleuzes thought as a whole.