Abstract
One of the main tasks confronting contemporary educators, is to maintain optimism and hope and be pro-actively creative amidst the bureaucracy and perfunctory processes of the university. Despite expectations to conform to institutional prescriptions, pedagogical tactics can be invoked, which can operate to repurpose the strategies and established practices of the learning environment. To develop this argument, the chapter will adapt and develop a range of concepts as pedagogic possibilities, associated with Gilles Deleuze (The Fold), Deleuze and Guattari (the Rhizome), Benoit Mandelbrot (Fractality) and Michel de Certeau (tactics). In so doing, the chapter will invite educators to investigate and facilitate the possibility of fostering alternative and ultimately creative and hopeful learning approaches (also incorporating bell hooks), that incorporate the unpredictable emergence and heterogeneous ruptures and Folds of individual learners. Through the development and suggested application of these concepts, the chapter will argue that beyond established curriculum and pedagogy, untapped spaces of collaborative hope and possibility can be recognised and embraced. In challenging and short-circuiting boredom-inducing prescriptions and closed-system learning environments, a more open-system and ‘process’ of knowledge-fluidity and nonlinearity can emerge. The possibility of uncovering and adapting dynamic learning spaces, with hopeful pedagogical tactics, means that flexible and creative practices can incite inner-worlds of unpredictable rhythm and articulation to emerge.
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Notes
- 1.
Deleuze notes that the, ‘Outside, more distant than any exterior, is “twisted”, “folded” and “doubled” by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior’ (Deleuze 2006b, p. 110).
- 2.
Importantly, Deleuze does not continue the epistemological approach established by Transcendental Philosophy; instead, Deleuze develops the Inside notion of metaphysics and Being as an ontology, a shifting, creative and dynamic nomadism of becoming. As he notes in Difference and Repetition (2001), ‘Being (what Plato calls the Idea) “corresponds” to the essence of the problem … It is as though there were an “opening”, a “gap”, an ontological “fold” which relates being and the question to one another. In this relation, being is difference itself’ (Deleuze 2001, p. 64).
- 3.
Again Deleuze notes here that ‘the monad draws its accords from its own depths … the soul sings of itself and is the basis of self-enjoyment. The line of the world is inscribed vertically upon the unitary and inner surface of the monad, that then extracts the accords that are superimposed. That is why it can be said that harmony is a vertical writing that conveys the horizontal line of the world’ (Deleuze 2006a, pp. 151–152).
- 4.
Deleuze and Guattari explain that their definition of the ‘philosophical’ rhizome consists of six different though interconnected elements: The first two principles of the rhizome are connection and heterogeneity; as they explain, these elements identify that, ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, pp. 7–8). The third principle of the rhizome is that of multiplicity, which reveals that it ‘necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 8). The fourth principle is that of asignifying rupture, which means that a, ‘rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 9). The final two principles of the rhizome are those of cartography and decalcomania, which suggest that, as a map, the rhizome, ‘is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 12).
- 5.
As Deleuze and Guattari note, Benoit Mandelbrot’s “fractals” seem to be rhizomatic, in that, ‘Fractals are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction … [M]otion, turbulence, and the sky are “fractals” of this kind. Perhaps this provides us with another way of defining fuzzy aggregates’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, pp. 486–487). Furthermore, they note that rhizomatics and fractality characterise a, ‘fundamental heterogeneity: felt or patchwork rather than weaving, rhythmic values rather than harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than Euclidean space—a continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 488).
- 6.
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Hammond, C.A. (2019). Folds, Fractals and Bricolages for Hope: Some Conceptual and Pedagogical Tactics for a Creative Higher Education. In: Gibbs, P., Peterson, A. (eds) Higher Education and Hope. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_7
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