Representation and the Straightjacketing of Curriculum's Complicated Conversation: The pedagogy of Pontypool's minor language

Abstract

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes.

Learning, Becoming, and the Unknowable: Conceptualizations, Mechanisms, and Process in Public Pedagogy Literature

“…The glimpses into becoming‐other that are provided through the various monstrous and posthuman pedagogies that we have described thus contain a strong ethical dimension—that is, they provide insight into reimagining the world in ways other than it currently is, toward an “ethical engagement with political and aesthetic difference” (Wallin, , p. 380). This kind of ethical commitment involves decentering the kinds of attachments to and investments in divisions and boundaries that have been established within the symbolic order to control and categorize.…”

“…As the characters in the film strive to uncouple communication from a priori understandings, they begin to restructure what it means to be human. Wallin () writes that the film's director “produces an image of the human‐becoming‐insect (swarming and chattering), becoming‐signal (stuttering radio waves), and becoming‐cannibal”—lines of flight that “gesture to the way in which language overflows the categories and images it is meant to corroborate” (p. 14). Providing another example of how language, and especially its radically uncultured excess that exists at the intersection of language and body, can be reconceptualized toward productive creativity and previously unthought possibilities, Wallin () explains:

… language might be mobilized in a way as to carve new trajectories for thinking about a life.

…”

“…This kind of ethical commitment involves decentering the kinds of attachments to and investments in divisions and boundaries that have been established within the symbolic order to control and categorize. Calling into question the productive potential of thinking “identity,” Wallin () asks whether new ways of sociopolitical organization “capable of creating less oppressive and limiting ways of living” (p. 383) can possibly emerge when we continue to see and analyze the world in terms of identitarian categories of class, gender, race, or species.…”

“…This strand embraces the monstrous , suggesting that crucial pedagogical moments occur within encounters with the radical other—that which ruptures the capacities of identity, language, and image and that threatens, in no small way, to undo the fundamental idea of self developed throughout Western thought and practice. Researchers in this strand (Carey, ; Kahn, , ; Lewis & Kahn, ; Wallin, , , , , ) explore public pedagogies whose ends largely do not serve humanistic ideals of personal or social spaces, but rather these pedagogies work to inform understandings that call attention to the arbitrary nature of human ideological and material structures. Further, as examples of public pedagogy in practice , we describe how contemporary social movements, most notably the global Occupy protests and The Invisible Committee's () manifesto, The Coming Insurrection , which can be said to have influenced these protests, have taken up antirationalist, antipositional stances that embody posthumanist ethics at the practical level.…”

To Event: Toward a Post‐Constructivist of Theorizing and Researching the Living Curriculum as Event*‐in‐the‐Making1

“…The minimum unit of theorizing is a unit of change ( Figure 1b). This unit of change, which is non-self-identical, undermines the "identitarian logic" that underlies present-day curriculum theorizing (Roth, 2008;Wallin, 2012b). It requires us to think in terms of a future-to-come, which means "allowing the adventure or the event of the entirely other to come" (Derrida, 2007, p. 46).…”