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ERIC Number: EJ980333
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Jul
Pages: 16
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0013-1857
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Overcoming Nihilism: From Communication to Deleuzian Expression
Roy, Kaustuv
Educational Philosophy and Theory, v36 n3 p297-312 Jul 2004
Based on the semiological pragmatics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper explores the possibility of rethinking pedagogic communication along lines that might help individuals to escape the grip of nihilism that has seized education today with its overriding concern for instrumentality, effectiveness, skills, competencies, standardization, and other means of leveling nuance and banishing irreconcilables. The assumption of the logics of mechanistic exactitude and transparency is codified in the very idea of communication that is central to education. The author attempts to join efforts in finding an alternative terrain to the instrumental barrenness that results when ambiguity and irreconcilability are denied in the process of exchange. The author argues that it is expression rather than communication that will allow individuals to challenge and rethink the assumed correspondences that have settled as tradition upon them locking them into nihilistic modes, and with the help of such a reconceptualization educators might resist the systematic hollowing out of the educational experience. To do this, the author draws upon three main sources--Foucault's (1972) notion of discourse, and the social and semiological theories of Gilles Deleuze (1990a, 1990b, 1994) and Felix Guattari (1995). The author argues that given their thoroughgoing critique, pedagogic communication must move from a transcendent to an immanent mode: that is, from communication to what can be called "immanication"--a ripple in an immanent field of percepts, concepts, and matter-thought conglomerates that can organically embrace the "messiness" of knowledge and life in general and counter the threat of nihilism.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A