Learning from Experience: Dewey, Deleuze, and 'becoming-child'

Chapter 5 Learning trom Experience: Dewey, Deleuze and “Becoming-Chila” INNA SEMETSKY N S LONG AGO aS 1925 John Dewey, in his Experience and Nature, noted that to call someone spiritual does not mean to invoke “a mysterious non-natural entity” (1925/1958: 293). A particular person who, according to Dewey, is endowed with a soul, has in marked degrees qualities of sensitive, rich and coordinated participation in all the situations of life. ... When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative . . . it is spirit .. . Soul is form, spirit informs. ... Perhaps the words soul and spirit are so heavily laden with . . . mythology . . . that they must be surrendered; it may be impossible to recover for them in science and philosophy the realities designated in idiomatic speech. But the realities are there, by whatever names they are called. (Dewey 1925/1958: 294) How should we, as educators, understand Dewey’s words in our current postmodern, “inform-ation” age? This paper addresses Dewey’s notion of continuity in terms of its being “the intimate, delicate and subtle interdependence of all organic structures and processes with one another” (Dewey 1925/1958: 295). Rather than aiming toward building any unified theory, I intend to tell a story that describes “a procedure in actual practice which demonstrates this continuity” (Dewey 1925/1958: 299). The Structure of this chapter is twofold. The power of “stories lives tell” (Witherell and Noddings 1991) cannot be underestimated, and first 1 will Present an excerpt from the semiautobiographical short story written by a Russian-Jewish émigré to Israel, Julia Schmookler. In 1975 Dewey, DELEUZE AND “BECOMING-CHILD” the Russian-language edition appeared in print in Israel, and I took the liberty of translating a part of it into English for the purpose of inclusion in this chapter. second, I will focus on the notion of percept as described by Gilles Deleuze and will connect it with Dewey’s account of a qualitative whole. Percept, which has been related by Deleuze to Spinoza-type singularity, allows a lesson in becoming, specifically, as Deleuze called it, becoming-child. I will conclude by suggesting that if, as Dewey said, spirit informs, then a little girl — the story’s protagonist — has received, without any direct or explicit instruction, a lesson of vital education that is, according to Deleuze, an immanent mode of existence, and one “created vitally ... through the forces it is able to harness” (Deleuze 1997: 135). Below is the abbreviated excerpt in my translation from the story by schmookler entitled "The Miracle.”! Its narrator is a four-year-old girl in Russia, whose father has been taken to the Gulag by authorities and whose mother struggles to support the family. The girl, surrounded by politically correct (meaning cold and uncaring) teachers in her preschool, feels estranged and lonely. But one day a miracle happens: They didn't like me in that preschool. Somehow I was different and seemed strange; the kids teased me and did not let me play with them; all games were taking place without me. And I lost all my vigor and forgot all the lovely songs and all the poems and lovely tales that I used to know by heart. And all day long I would sit by myself on a stool, making up an imaginary dialogue, and the never-ending story was always full of really good events. ... Once when I was sitting on my stool, the teacher came in. She was holding a book, and I recognized the cover of the book in her hands. It was one of those books that mama and papa used to read to me in that previous life and I knew all of those books by heart. And in a sudden inspiration I knew what I was supposed to do. My head started spinning; my heart started pumping — and then stopped — and at that very moment I got up from my seat of shame. “I can READ this book,” I said very firmly, and I felt complete freedom and total weightlessness during this grandiose lie. Everyone looked at me — nobody among us four-year-olds could read, or even dream of reading, of performing this magical act —and here Lam, the last becoming the first! Even the teacher looked sort of kind and amazed — and then it happened: all the children sat around me on their little white chairs, and I was put in the center, and I read those poems one after another, turning pages where necessary, because I knew all the pictures and knew what was written under each one of them, and everything turned out just right; one would not wish for more. Teachers praised me and set me up as an example, and all day long I played with many popular children, and they chose me in some games. . . . The next day the INNA SEMETSKY same scene took place; the teacher brought another book, and again I knew it, and I read it by heart... My future seemed settled. . . That's why on the third day when I once more was called up to read, and everyone was taking a seat, and I, like some very important person, went calmly and with dignity to the teacher to pick up the book, the world suddenly collapsed! I had never seen I HIS book. All the chairs were already in a circle, and mine was specif- ically in the center, as usual, and I knew that THAT WAS IT, fate just decided to kill me in one swift stroke, and I would be better off if I were really dead or simply if Thad never been born. The walls were rotating in a milky fog, my head was spinning, my throat became dry, my soul, hit by the thunder, became silent. My body, meanwhile, was holding on to the book and continued moving toward the central chair. “What for?” I thought, “I'd better tell the truth and do it right now before everything becomes even worse.” But my body, separated from my mind, was still moving. Then it sat down. ”What for?” I thought, or did I think this thought before? ... Time was shifting and very rapidly indeed — my hands were already opening the front page. “God,” I remembered, “God... Certainly I knew very well that God did not exist, but there was no time left to make the right choice. I opened my mouth to confess everything and repent and end the terrible torture at once, but my eyes fell on the page, and suddenly I heard my voice, which was quietly and rhythmically saying those words that were printed on the page. One half of me was reading, and the other was listening in sublime horror, and white trembling light was slowly spreading around. I was reading page after page as if in a dream, and no one knew that it was a miracle, and simultaneously I was seeing the text all at once and the very black letters and the very bright pictures and myself as well, surrounded by all the kids. I was saved, it was a miracle, and it was terrifying, too, to speak as if someone were putting words in my mouth. At last the book ended. The light disappeared, the kids left, and I sat by myself, my feet cotton-like, I sat alone and totally empty like an abandoned dwelling, and as for the new knowledge, it was too much. I felt its weight as if it were putting itself on shelves in my head... At home, in bed, all of a sudden I got scared that I’d forgotten how to read, and | jumped out of bed and ran to the bookshelf to pick up one of mama’s books. I opened it in the middle and clearly saw the phrase “her right breast was naked.” I read it but did not understand. What does it mean, “right breast” or “left breast”? A person has one breast, and I looked at mine, which was represented by a piece of veneer unevenly covered with goose bumps. In amazement, and happy that the ability to read had not left me, I fell asleep quietly knowing that I was protected and would be saved if there was a need. Let us pause. The purpose of philosophy, for Deleuze, is, apart from creating novel concepts, radically ethical in a manner of being worthy of what is to come into existence, to become. In fact, novel concepts are created so as to make sense of experiential events and, ultimately, to Dewey, DELEUZE AND “BECOMING-CHILD”™ affirm this sense. For Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the major message of their philosophy is “to become worthy of the event” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160). The desire propelling an event into becoming is not some magical thinking or one’s strong will. A concept inhabits the empirical happening; it is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, a living concept, but the ethical work consists in the will itself being transformed into affirmation so as “to set up,... to extract” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160) an event in this living concept. Desire constructs a plane — immanence, for Deleuze, is constructivism — and because desire is impersonal, therefore subjectless, it is attained, indeed affirmed, at the very instant of desperation in which “someone is deprived of the power of saying ‘I’ (Deleuze 1987: 89), like the little girl in the story. Such desire would perhaps be called the will to power by Nietzsche. According to Deleuze, however, “there are other names for it. For example, ‘grace’” (Deleuze 1987: 91). For Deleuze, “all desires come from... the Outside... [and] we can always call it [the] plane of Nature, in order to underline its immanence” (Deleuze 1987: 97-8). Noticing that Spinoza was the one who conceived of the plane in this manner, Deleuze is adamant that it is the immanent process of desire that fills itself up, thus constituting a process called joy. On the other hand, and as applied to social psychology, self-fulfill- ment has traditionally been identified not with personal physical demands like, for example, one’s biological or physiological needs, nor even with social and communitarian values, but with values identified as spiritual and considered ideal. But Deleuze’s philosophy does not set apart the ideal from the real. In his radically empirical philosophy everything is real, including the virtual, which, however, is not actual. As for Dewey, when he assigns an ideal status to the state of being beyond good and evil, he implies that this state “is an impossibility for man.” Yet as long as “the good signifies only that which is... rewarded, and the evil that whichis ...condemned..., the ideal factors of morality are always and everywhere beyond good and evil” (Dewey 1934/1980: 349). According to Dewey, going beyond good and evil, especially under certain oppressive circumstances, is equivalent to “going beyond the actual to the possible” (Garrison 1997: 136-7). It seems, however, that to Deleuze, the state of being beyond good and evil and the one of going beyond the actual to the possible, albeit denoting the same, would appear to have slightly different connotations. Let us try to elucidate this very subtle and seemingly almost indiscernible difference. Only creative art, for Dewey, is capable of possessing such a moral potency as going beyond good and evil, and one of the reasons for this is that art is “wholly innocent of ideas derived from praise and blame” INNA SEMETSKY (Dewey 1934/1980: 349). Innocence seems to be the key word here. Deleuze's so-called ontology of the virtual frees thinking from common sense. Life itself, for Deleuze, is what activates thought, and thought affirms life. If, as Deleuze asserted, immanence is a life, then miracles may happen. In the world described by Deleuze and Guattari as becoming-world, however, the latter may not be called miracles after all; they belong to pure events constituting virtual reality. Accordingly, becoming-child — a child by definition embodying the concept of innocence — is the factor that, as it seems, Dewey would have described as ideal, beyond good and evil. Yet Deleuze would not equate the latter with going beyond the actual to the possible. The possible can be realized, and the real thing is to exist in the image and likeness, as the saying goes, of the possible thing. But the virtual is real even without being actual and only actualizes itself via multiple different/ciations (see Deleuze 1994), so the actual does not resemble the virtual; itis different from it, and it cannot be otherwise because the virtual is just a tendency, therefore no-thing. Virtual tendencies, nothings, become actualized, that is, embodied in the actual things, objects, experiences, states of affairs. Deleuze’s ontology becomes reinforced by Dewey’s naturalistic logic in which “there is no breach of continuity between operations of inquiry and biological ...and physical operations. ‘Continuity’ ... means that rational operations grow out of organic activities, without being identical with that from which they emerge” (Dewey 1938: 166). Becoming-actual means manifesting the actual existence and Deleuze’s concept of different/ciation describing the method for actualization is intuition — or the pragmatic way of knowing described by Deleuze (1994) as transcendental empiricism. What is striving to become actual is that which is in virtu and is only waiting for conditions in the real, not merely possible, experience to come forward. This real becoming-life, as any becoming, takes place within what Deleuze called a zone of indiscernibility as the instance of connection or, In Dewey's world, the “meeting of the old and new” (Dewey 1934/1980: 266). At such a meeting the connection is properly assigned the name intuition not only by Deleuze, but by Dewey too, even if Dewey puts the word per se in quotation marks to emphasize its nontraditional Sense: “Intuition” is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long and slow incubation. Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of DEWEY, DELEUZE AND “BECOMING-CHILD” pain. ... {T]he background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation | from the obscure into the clear and. luminous. (Dewey 1934/1980: 266) The meeting of the old and the new, of repetition and difference, is possible through their “jump together,” that is, by means of a transversal link crossing levels and thresholds. The image of spark used by both Deleuze and Dewey — “old and new jump together like sparks when poles are adjusted” (Dewey 1934/1980: 266) - implies a sense of connection that is established via relation rather than by an immediate contact. The dynamic forces affecting selection and assemblages do bring the “mind .. in contact with the world” (Dewey 1934/ 1980: 267), yet such a contact is what in contemporary physics would be called a non-local connection. Ihe contact in question would be described by means of “non-localizable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions” (Deleuze 1994: 83). The contact manifests by its material embodiment in the form of the artifact or the new knowledge which, sure enough, seems to the little girl as being too much: “As for the new knowledge, it was too much, | felt its weight.” Something that was virtual and as yet disembodied — like spirit that, as Dewey says, informs but by itself is not a form—became actualized in the uniqueness of experience and, as a consequence of the latter, was “marked by individuality” (Dewey 1934/1980: 266). Therefore, this real becoming-life, the meeting of the old and the new, can be described as an impersonal and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. ... This is a haecceity, which is no longer an individuation, but a singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil. (Deleuze 1997: xiv) And, for that matter, beyond truth and lie, or right and wrong, that is, beyond the dual opposites that, incidentally, came into existence in the first place as a result of the symbolic loss of innocence. Again innocence seems to be a key word, a situational variable of sorts, which by virtue of itself being embedded in the dynamic process creates the conditions in real experience for the production of meanings. As becoming, it is imperceptible, unless perception vitally increases in power, which is the characteristic of Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism. What Deleuze calls percept is the future-oriented perception in becoming. Through organic resonances enacted by trans- INNA SEMETSKY versal communication, the continuity is carried further toward the ultimate “unity of sense and impulse, of brain and eye and ear” (Dewey 1934/1980: 22-3), overcoming the otherwise ineliminable dualisms. That unity may become manifest, by means of actualization of potentialities, through breaks in continuity, the latter therefore appearing to be, at the level of concrete experiences, discontinuous and abrupt. The little girl’s seemingly miraculous experience is Deleuze’s atemporal pure event which nevertheless is, from the point of view of experience itself, “the focal culmination of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in a sudden discrete instant of climax” (Dewey 1934/1980: 23-4). The increase in power is taken almost literally; there is an exponential growth there, but the transversal communication carries an exponent towards its limit as if crossing the otherwise asymptotic line, thus becoming a threshold provided the situation meets the conditions for actualization. Deleuze notices that such an element of vitality is manifest in newborn infants who embody the very passage of life. The actualization of the set of virtualities refers to attaining a consistency. It seems that what Deleuze implies here is that a baby would still have the virtual presence of the umbilical cord as a sign of symbiosis with his or her mother. Such is a “zone of proximity or copresence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1967: 273) that constitutes an imperceptible becoming. Hence for Deleuze and Guattari, “the child [does] not become; it is becoming itself that is a child” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277). When the little girl was reading the new text, she could not possibly speak from the viewpoint of concepts but rather had to “speak directly and intuitively in pure percepts” (Deleuze 1995: 165). Such is, as Deleuze notices, the paradoxical style of Spinoza, who - while remaining, for Deleuze, the most philosophical of philosophers whose Ethics presents axioms and propositions in abundance — nevertheless brings forward an intense non-philosophical understanding. For the little girl, the concept of reading is yet unknown, and her perception undergoes transformation or increase in power into becoming-percept, which is necessary for the creation of novel concepts. The very passage between the two is what Deleuze calls affect, inseparable from percept and concept alike. An affect is what a body can do or, in Dewey’s words, this body’s “enhancement of the qualities . . . [and] intensified -.. appreciation” (Dewey 1916/1924: 278-9) of an experience. The body’ Ss newly acquired power to read “must liberate joys, vectorial signs of the augmentation of power, and ward off sadness, signs of diminution” (Deleuze 1997: 144), thus bringing healing to the situation that would otherwise remain traumatic. Although such an experience indeed may seem to be too much, and the little girl feels overwhelmed, her situation has been changed. It has DEWEY, DELEUZE AND “BECOMING-CHILD” been transformed “into one so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (Dewey 1938: 171). Speaking in percepts as a form of intuition is therefore, as we said earlier citing Dewey, the meeting of the old and the new. Perception would not become a percept without the two-way communication, or Dewey's transaction. In this respect in-tuition always contains a numinous, religious element, especially if we read re-ligio etymologically as the linking back- ward to the origin, that is, literally self-referentiality: learning from within. Learning implies an increase in complexity via an asymmetrical, connection, yet the role of re-ligio is to restore the broken symmetry and unity. A unified whole is, however, never the same because of its (self)organizing principle expressed in what Deleuze called the repetition of the different, embedded in his philosophical method of transcendental empiricism. Not least important is this new different part that entered the integral whole, this little girl. As Dewey emphasized, the unification of the self through the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers and achieves cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe. (Dewey 1934: 407) The newly acquired skill of reading, by means of breaking out of the old habit, means that the little girl is undergoing “a modification through an experience . . . to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future” (Dewey 1916/1924: 395). The ability to read becomes a new habit for the little girl in her becoming-other. Acquiring is always preceded by “the act of inquiring. It is seeking . . . for something that is not at hand” (Dewey 1916/1924: 173). That which is not actually at hand must, as Deleuze would have said, subsist in its virtual state, thereby affording empiricism its transcen- dental quality. Learning, for Deleuze, always takes place “in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (Deleuze 1994: 165), leading to the conjugation that determines, as Deleuze says, the threshold of consciousness: unconscious-becoming-conscious. This is the aforementioned unity of sense and impulse, posited by Dewey, or “the readjustment .. . in every form of consciousness” (Dewey 1934/1980: 266), when that which is still obscure or unconscious becomes transformed into the clear and luminous. Trans-formation presupposes in-formation, and if, as Dewey says, spirit informs, then the little girl has indeed learned without any direct or explicit instruction but INNA SEMETSKY by means of the natural interaction between herself and the whole of the environment that has generated an “intelligence in operation” (Dewey 1934: 410). She became an apprentice, capable of raising “each faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise, .. . [in her] attempts to give birth to that second power which grasps that which can only be sensed” (Deleuze 1994: 165). Dewey insisted that the role of the teacher should not consist solely in what customarily is called instruction, with its emphasis on what has been specified by Nel Noddings as the “forced feedings of theories” (Noddings 1993: 15). Dewey identified an impulse as “the large and generous blending of interests . .. in the meeting of mind and universe” (Dewey 1934/1980: 267). Such is the learning space created by the little girl; she has literally undergone learning from experience when trying to give birth to something new. Indeed, no instruction appears to be necessary because, to “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy and suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world ...; the undergoing becomes instruction discovery of the connection of things. (Dewey 1916/1924: 164) Dewey describes such a learning remaining at the existential level of actual experience. Deleuze takes it to the level of the virtual, which is no less real than any actual existence. Different/ciation, for Deleuze, presupposes an intense field of individuation, the Dewey qualitative whole of sorts. [t is because of “the action of the field of individuation that such and such differential relations and such and such distinctive points... are actualized —in other words are organized within intuition along lines differentiated in relation to other lines” (Deleuze 1994: 247). Jim Garrison (2000), addressing the possibilities of spiritual education, reminds us that for Dewey the idea of God is the active relation between ideal and actual. The active striving, what Spinoza called conatus, to unite the two belongs, according to Garrison, to “potentially spiritual acts” (Garrison 2000: 114). The situation itself acquires a tone that can be “designated by an adjective” (Dewey 1934: 402), the religious. [he reconstruction always occurs in the direction of “security and stability” (Dewey 1934: 405). Indeed, as the little girl said, ”I fell asleep quietly knowing that I was protected .. .” is calling something into existence and creation, in accord with “Dewey's testimony, the supreme act of numinous spirit” (Garrison 2000: 116), or is it the prerogative of mundane matter — the latter, not passive and inert but radically active and capable of self organization? Or should we, rather than dwelling in metaphysical questions, just try DEWEY, DELEUZE AND “BECOMING-CHILD” to do our best to modify conditions so they are altered up to the point at which something new and good would be produced? Isn’t this exactly what Dewey's laboratory method would call for? For Dewey, the lesson of the latter is precisely the one of altering conditions, and such is also “the lesson which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the conditions under which labor may become intellectually fruitful” (Dewey 1916/1924: 322). Deleuze too has identified teaching and learning with the “research laboratory” (Deleuze 1995: 139). The thinking process that takes place in a laboratory is in actu; thought itself becomes an experiment, and “that’s where you have to get to work ... As though there are so many twists in the path of something moving through space like a whirlwind that can materialize at any point” (Deleuze 1995: 161). The novelty may be created precisely at such a critical point, “at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world ... When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world,” even if clothed “by the inertia of habit” (Dewey 1934/1980: 267-8) so they are disguised under the name of miracle. Note 1 All possible efforts have been made to locate Julia Schmookler with regard to copyright permission. References Deleuze, G. 1987: Dialogues (with Claire Parnet). H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1994: Difference and Repetition. P. Patton (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1995: Negotiations 1972-1990. M. Joughin (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1997: Essays Critical and Clinical. D. W. Smith and M. Greco (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— and Guattari, F. 1987: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. B. Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— and Guattari, F. 1994: What Is Philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Dewey, J. 1916/1924: Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan Company. —— 1925/1958: Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications. —— 1934/1980: Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books. —— 1934: Religion versus the Religious. In A Common Faith. See Hickman and Alexander: 1998, vol. 1. ——— 1938: The Problem of Logical Subject-Matter (From Logic: The Theory of Inquiry). In L. Hickman and T. Alexander (eds.), 1998: vol. 2. ——— 1938: The Pattern of Inquiry (From Logic: The Theory of Inquiry). In L. INNA SEMETSKY Hickman and T. Alexander (eds.), The Essential Dewey, 1998, Vol. 2. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Garrison, J. 1997: Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. New York and London: Teachers College Press. __ 2000: Assaying the Possibilities of Spiritual Education as Poetic Creation. In M. O'Loughlin (ed.), Philosophy of Education in the New Millennium. Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Conference of the ] International Network ot Philosophers of Education. 18-21 August, 2000. The University of Sydney, Australia. Hickman, L. and T. Alexander (eds.). 1998: The Essential Dewey, vols. 1 and 2. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Noddings, N. 1993: Excellence asa Guide to Educational Conversation. nh’ Alexander (ed), Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society. Urbana, TWhinois. Schmookler, J. 1975: Uhodim iz Rossii. I. Semetsky (trans.). Biblioteka ALIA, Israel. Witherell, C. and Noddings, N. (eds.) 1991: Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education. New York and London: Teachers College, Columbia University.