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Affective Teaching for EffectiveLearning: A Deleuzian pedagogy for the(corporate era and) Chinese contextDavid H. Fleminga

a International Communications, University of Nottingham, NingboPublished online: 14 Jun 2013.

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Affective Teaching for Effective Learning:

A Deleuzian pedagogy for the (corporate

era and) Chinese context

DAVID H. FLEMING

International Communications, University of Nottingham Ningbo

Abstract

In this article I explore the pedagogical value of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philo-

sophical concepts for helping make an ‘event’ of thought, with a view towards fostering deep

learning in Chinese students’ learning theory and criticism in a second language. Paying

attention to the qualitative role of bodies, humour and creativity alongside an expanded

trans-personal concept of ‘educational life forms’ that stretches out to include an affective

assemblage of inhuman elements (such as art and technology), I explore how Deleuze and

Guattari’s philosophical models provide a ethical alternative to corporate, Confucian and

Cartesian models otherwise inhibiting students and teachers in the modern Sino-international

university context.

Keywords: Deleuze, Guattari, Chinese students, affective teaching, second

language learning, body, intersubjective

Introduction

Teaching in mainland China can be challenging for foreign staff more familiar with,

or accustomed to, the ‘Western’ education system and university model. Indeed,

Chinese students bring with them a unique set of demands very different from those

typically encountered in the UK or the USA (to use but two examples familiar to

me). One particularly pressing problem involves how to effectively teach complex

theory and criticism to students of varying abilities learning in a second language. A

further overlapping and interfacing problem stems from teaching students who have

come from a completely different educational and cultural background, have very dif-

ferent experiences of what teaching and learning is, and therefore bring different

expectations of their teachers to the teaching encounter. Roger G. Tweed and Darrin

R. Lehman (2002) argue that these cultural differences are essentially related to

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014

Vol. 46, No. 10, 1160–1173, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.803239

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different epistemological and pedagogical traditions growing out of Socratic and

Confucian approaches to knowledge and teaching. In short, Western models tradi-

tionally place more emphasis on questioning received wisdom and self-learning. In

the East Asian context, however, a residual sage-like Confucianism still appears to

dominate. Here, the teacher is considered a bastion of knowledge, and learning prac-

tices are founded upon a one-way top–down transmission of facts. Those undertaking

learning are also encouraged to partake in group study and indulge in rote learning.

We can broadly characterize the East Asian teacher as formulating a hierarchical ‘sage

on the stage’, whereas the Western teacher functions more like a pastoral ‘guide on

the side’ for his or her apprentices (promoting an apprenticeship in learning through

critical discourse and dialogue).

Ai Zhang (2004), amongst many others, began addressing and cataloguing some

of the problems facing Western teachers working with Chinese students, and has

made significant inroads towards providing pragmatic solutions for overcoming the

different practices and expectations that staff and students bring to the teaching–

learning encounter. Although such works are useful and illuminating, and no doubt

provide effective measures for teaching Chinese students, they rarely touch upon or

engage with the power and effectiveness of ‘affective’ modes of teaching, which for

me are key to helping Chinese students to break free of their preference for habitual

study patterns that do not necessarily serve them well within a Western higher educa-

tion system. I argue that micropolitical experimentation in the classroom is one of the

most beneficial approaches for helping Chinese students to free themselves from their

desire to undertake rote learning and thoughtlessly commit predigested and pre-exist-

ing facts to memory——as they have become accustomed to through their primary and

secondary education system, particularly during the build-up to their Imperial Gao

Kao (High Exam). In attempting to break down these thought and behavioural

patterns and foster a critical method instead (as favoured by international higher

education institutions), I advocate the use of a creative and affective approach to

thought and teaching. But what exactly is meant by affective teaching? To answer this

we must begin by outlining what it is not.

I concede that professionalism (qua Western professional development) and plan-

ning play an important role in being an effective modern teacher; for its self-reinforc-

ing axioms of excellence and quality unquestionably ensure a certain standard(ization)

of professional practice. As module conveners, for example, we are increasingly told

to adopt a fractal approach towards course planning and teaching; which is to say,

paying attention to patterns simultaneously playing out and operating across a macro-

and a microlevel. Teachers are rightly encouraged to pay attention to how the module

fits into the larger degree programme, and conceive of the elements that will best

serve students in their future courses, degrees or employment. New staff are taught

how to plan a course by breaking it down into a tautological trajectory that will

adequately build, promote, foster and achieve the core objectives over a period of

around 12 weeks. Professional development seminars are also useful for reminding

faculty that lectures need to have their own clear individual goals and agendas, which

must likewise be broken down into smaller digestible components. It is useful to think

about planning lectures and seminars in tandem, we are advised, and working from a

Affective Teaching for Effective Learning 1161

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textbook with a view to assessment. Then we can make decisions about using white-

boards, projectors, handouts and PowerPoint, as well as the style, form and content

of each. In away-days we are given strategies and exercises for engineering effective

and pleasing dynamics within class. Increasingly, we are also informed how to make

sure students know what is expected and how to prepare and perform well in their

examinations, as well as how to grade them and generate sufficient positive feedback.

Teaching for the test becomes a good way to ensure that data sets reflect the success

of these very systems and also generate satisfactory reviews from those actors taking

the course. And yet, even if one pays exhaustive attention to all of this and more, this

in no way guarantees that one is perceived as a good teacher. You are simply a good

administrator.

Problematically, great teaching is hard to discuss or critique in written form. It is

incredibly difficult to categorize or convey what a great teacher actually does with

their voice, face, arms, hands or body during a particularly inspiring lecture, say. But

we all instinctively know good teaching when we see it. This amounts to saying that what

distinguishes a good teacher from a poor one may lie outside professionalism and may

not be easy to measure or quantify. Indeed, I would argue that it is better understood

in terms of qualia: a psychologically lived experience related to a style at once imma-

nent, intensive and affective. Here, perhaps the work of Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and

Taubman (2000) can help us to begin to touch upon and distinguish what we mean

when we discuss a difference between effective and affective modes of teaching. They

ask:

After the curriculum has been developed, that is, after the phases of policy,

planning, design, implementation, embodiment in material form (including

in print and/or technological forms), then supervised and evaluated, what is

still missing in the effort to understand curriculum as institutional text? It is

the experience of teaching and learning. (Pinar et al., 2000, p. 744)

To get to the core of what makes a good or even great teacher, then, first means

delving into the realms of the real lived experience of teaching. For me, all great

teachers are linked by one important and key factor. They help to ‘make an event of

thought’ (MacKenzie & Porter, 2011). And this, at its core, is what affective teaching

is all about. It is also, I argue, the most important and difficult thing to try to achieve

in (both the corporate era and) the Chinese context, for it is nothing short of inspiring

students to create knowledge for themselves. Some of the most exciting work emerging

today that engages with these affective and intensive (read qualitative) dimensions of

teaching take inspiration from the concepts created and devised by the philosopher

Gilles Deleuze and practising psychiatrist-cum-philosopher Felix Guattari. For me,

these are hugely important thinkers, and the pedagogical works emerging in the wake

of their evental thought reflect some of my own experiences and intuitions about what

constitutes a good teacher (in both the Western and Chinese context). In the

remainder of this article I will unpack and explore how these affective models can be

useful for good praxis in the modern Chinese context.

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Affective Measures

Affective teaching offers an alternative ethical approach to teaching in China for

foreigners, I argue, that can help to bridge and overcome a disjunctive culture gap by

encouraging students to participate in and enjoy the learning process. In short, this

amounts to providing an affective dramatization of thought that coaxes the ‘creation’

of knowledge in the student. These ideas and practices have recently been opened up

by a variety of scholars and teachers who have sought to engineer a productive

encounter between existing pedagogical practices and the radical concepts of Deleuze

and Guattari (including, but not limited to Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2004a, 1980/

2004b, 1991/2011). Following a recent formulation offered by Ian MacKenzie and

Robert Porter (2011), this can be outlined as a pedagogical Deleuzo–Guattarian

attempt to ‘make an event of thought’. This growing trend can be evidenced by a litany

of recent works that include Inna Semetsky’s edited collection Nomadic education:

Variations on a theme by Deleuze and Guattari (2008), David R. Cole’s Educational life

forms: Deleuzian teaching and learning practice (2011), as well as the special editions of

International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education (2010) and Educational Philoso-

phy and Theory (2004) that examine different ways in which Deleuzian theory opens

up new potentials for qualitative research and pedagogy more generally within higher

education. Noel Gough has also produced a litany of original and stimulating articles

by engineering an exciting encounter between actor-network theory and Deleuzo–

Guattarian models of the rhizome (which he terms rhizomANTics), as well as investi-

gating how Deleuzian theory can more generally help to change the way in which the

fundamental tasks of education are perceived (e.g. Gough, 2004, 2008).

Being somewhat emblematic of this diverse trend, Cole (2011, p. 11) points out

that because Deleuze ‘was against making a conformist herd formation around his

ideas’, his concepts must always be considered and reconsidered in relation to specific

ethical teaching practices. Which is to say, the process of ‘deterritorializing’ existing

teaching practices through an creative encounter with Deleuze and Guattari’s work

should never amount to a ‘slavish and regulated implementation of homogenised

directives’ (Cole, 2011, p. 11), but rather must always stem from an engagement with

real challenges to thought lurking in concrete situations and within specific educa-

tional milieux. Cole further argues that one of the main advantages in deploying Dele-

uze in relation to education is that:

one does not become embroiled in futile system building. The notion of a

‘one size fits all’ conceptual framing for education is immediately withdrawn

through Deleuze. In the place of theoretical framing, one has to be sensitive

to context, able to invent concepts, flexible and creative in one’s use of lan-

guage, conscious that theory and practice are constructed, and, above all,

be responsible for the consequences of one’s writing. (Cole, 2011, p. 11)

Taken together, this growing body of work and practice makes for an interesting and

stimulating collection that can help us to think about affective and ethical dimensions in

both teaching and learning, and allow us to approach Chinese students’ learning within

a transnational European corporation in a creative, albeit experiential manner.

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Although these approaches may seem to depart from easily measurable analytical

and scientific paradigms of modern teaching assessment, it does not mean we should

shy away from (or fear) embracing these alternative affective and intensive approaches

to teaching. Far from it, for contrary to common belief, extensive (‘Western’) analyti-

cal approaches based on (soft) scientific methods do not on the whole offer much to

the study of teaching. In fact, one could argue to the contrary, pointing to how they

generally produce yet another form of disjunction: by privileging epistemological

enquiry and statistics divorced from the actual classroom encounter in order to feed

the ‘Stalinist bureaucratic’ demands of neoliberal corporational and governmental

logic (e.g. Whitty, 1997, Boxley, 2003; Davies & Bansel, 2005, 2007; Hill 2004a,

2004b, 2006; Tonna, 2007; Dahlstrom, 2008; Davies, 2008; Deleuze, 1997; Read-

ings, 1997; Fisher, 2009; Thompson & Cook, 2012). These serialization and mea-

surement systems should be viewed as the modulating control measures they are, with

targets being generated and created by the overcoding and decoding of statistics

gleaned from endless assessment weighed against projected results.

Writing in 1990, Deleuze already saw schools and universities gradually coming to

operate under a new corporate model or diagram, which he saw progressively overlay-

ing their traditional (Foucauldian) function as enclosed disciplinary sites tasked with

moulding docile bodies and minds. Over 20 years later, Thompson and Cook (2012)

highlight how education has been fully ‘seduced’ by this abstracted business rational-

ity, with an insidious ‘performance’ culture placing ever greater (political) emphasis

upon the vagaries of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘quality’. The desire for such criteria marks a

shift in traditional pedagogical models of surveillance and evaluation which increas-

ingly move farther away from the actual space–time of the classroom. Consequently,

teaching becomes viewed in terms of abstracted business-like transactions ‘that must

be measured to ensure efficiency and accountability’ (Thompson & Cook, 2012,

p. 577). Thompson and Cook consequently observe the language of modern

education, with its insatiable desire for ever more data sets, shifting away from that of

pastoral ‘care’ towards one of marketable ‘codes’. Accordingly, the ‘ethics of care for

the teacher and the ethic of care for the uniqueness of students’ (Thompson & Cook,

2012, p. 580) have now become overwritten by newer forms of ‘dividualizing’ data

narrative.

In following the neoliberal logic of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009), the modern

university’s perception of students and teachers is now directly invested by what it

desires; which is to say, that which it is able to quantify or market. Modern discourses

(and marketing strategies) surrounding the effectiveness and quality of teaching serve

to abstract the institutions, classrooms, teachers and students alike, transforming them

into reams of modulating code and data designed to help measure and quantify per-

formances rather than instil deep learning (Thompson & Cook, 2012, pp. 575–580).

The price of this change? That ‘which can’t be quantified or numerically evaluated’

becomes difficult to value or sell, and is in danger of disappearing ‘from the lexicon

of education’ forever (Thompson & Cook, p. 576). Deleuze and Guattari also saw

this coming, and in What is philosophy? (1991/2011) appear to offer a form of solu-

tion. There, the authors argue that there have been three distinct eras of teaching or

the concept, which formulate the encyclopaedia, pedagogy and commercial

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professional training. Witnessing the latter advance in lockstep with new modulating

forms of control society (associated with late capitalism), they argued that only peda-

gogy ‘can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of

the third’, which marks ‘an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might

be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/

2011, p. 12).

Although it may be impossible to decommission the rapacious desires of the macro-

political control machine, an ethical approach to teaching must strive to seek an alter-

native philosophical (read arts and humanities) model based upon a more ‘worthy’

evaluation of the teaching practice, and preferably grounded in context, knowledge

and experience. For indeed, statistical science and corporate logic are not the only,

nor indeed the best model for explanation and knowledge with regard to good peda-

gogical practice or ‘performance’. A Deleuzo–Guattarian approach to pedagogy offers

a valuable and ethical alternative, I argue, for it is primarily concerned with issues of

sense, meaning, creativity and expression that are not empirical in the quantifiable

sense of the term. What is demanded instead is not yet another abstract model

designed to test the truth and error of teaching results, but rather a micropolitical

approach that can engage the ‘rightness’ of pedagogical practice as it is related to real

experience and human sense. Tying in to this idea, and in a manner reminiscent of

Deleuze and Guattari’s call for affirmative and joyful expression as the true portal to

deep learning, Bernie Schein (2008, p. 2) retroactively reflects upon his lifetime in

teaching, and asserts that ‘contrary to traditional educational theory and practice the

true liberators of love, creativity and intelligence are emotion, not rationality, the

heart and soul, not the brain, feelings rather than thought, personality and character

rather than IQ tests and standardized test scores. Further, love, creativity, and intelli-

gence are naturally inseparable, indivisible, and intertwined’. In relation to such

insights, we must explore how affection and affect can be harnessed and co-opted into

teaching practices, and applied as a more productive and ethical mode of learning for

Chinese students learning in a second language and adapting to different teaching

expectations and demands.

A ‘Revolutionary’ Micropolitics of Creative Affect

If I earlier suggested that there were explicit benefits and value in taking a professional

development approach to teaching and learning, I also implicitly hinted that there

were inherent problems with these models. These can be specifically related to their

apparent blindness of (and to) a micropolitical level of pedagogical affect, which can-

not be easily measured or marketed. By ignoring such micropolitical dimensions,

institutions ultimately run the risk of collectively tending towards a kind of mass stan-

dardization of pedagogy that reduces teaching and learning to an endlessly repeatable

soulless transaction (reminiscent of the Chinese Gao Kao model) that is neither desir-

able nor enriching for the student or teacher involved. By instead suggesting that we

adopt a revolutionary micropolitics of pedagogical affect, however, I am in no way

suggesting that we set ourselves up against any superinstitutional macropolitics. For

indeed, Brian Massumi (2008) reminds us that macropolitics (in this case

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institutional) and micropolitics (here the work of the individual affective teacher) are

not opposed to each other, but rather can be understood to be operating as ‘processu-

al reciprocals’, which fit together in an empowering assemblage. For any success at

the macropolitical level is ‘at best partial without a complementary micropolitical

flourishing’, and must take assurance in the fact that any new ‘potentials produced at

the micropolitical level feed up, climbing the slope that macropolitics descends’

(Massumi, 2008, p. 19).

An affective Deleuzian pedagogy of micropolitical affect should embrace creative

variation and experimentation, then, which are always driven towards the creation of

new forms. Following Massumi, we must understand that this would be neither pro-

grammatic nor concerned with imposing a global solution that could be farmed out or

implemented in a top–down fashion. For when ‘macrostructures miniaturize them-

selves and work to usurp the ground of the micropolitical with scaled-down versions

of the dominant generalities, that is fascism’, but when ‘micropolitical flourishings

proliferate to produce a singularity, in the sense of a systemic tipping point, that’s rev-

olution’ (Massumi, 2008, p. 20). For Chinese students, a creative and affective expe-

rience of teaching and learning can be a revolutionary experience, with all the

necessary violent destruction and creation that such events demand.

Affective learning can take many forms, and can be applied or used for effective

teaching during lectures, seminars and screenings in different ways. To take one anec-

dotal example worth thinking about, when I first arrived in China I began asking my

students about their favourite or best teachers at university. Many discussed one tea-

cher in particular, and when I asked why, they often mentioned her expressive body

language. When they singled her out as a particularly good lecturer, the students

began mimicking and performing her body gestures as I listened. What was interesting

was that their joyful mirroring of her expressive body language arrived (literally) hand

in hand with the ideas and notions she had been lecturing them on the previous week.

To paraphrase their experiences: they told me that this embodied physical expressive-

ness helped them to understand and follow what was being said. When I followed up

on this, some mentioned that body language was ‘a universal language’ and aided

their understanding and comprehension.

We can perhaps here co-opt Deleuze’s concept of corporeal flexion to help explain

this phenomenon. Deleuze relates flexion to the body being able to communicate via

gestures and postures like a language. It can be understood as a form of pantomime

stretching of the body’s expressive capabilities wherein gestures transgress language

through a kind of mimesis. In an engagement with the work of Pierre Klossowski,

Deleuze illuminates how corporeal flexion appears for itself, at once divided and

split in two, whilst liberated from everything that conceals it (Deleuze, 1969/2004, pp.

326–327). MacKenzie and Porter (2011, pp. 77–79) introduce an interesting discus-

sion of British students mimicking their lecturers for humorous effect in their Deleuz-

ian approach to Dramatizing the political, although they point to the advantage of this

mimicry for the students learning rather than seeing it as an insult or rebellious act akin

to ‘taking the piss’. These ideas clearly point to the important role that performance,

delivery and dramatization have upon student audiences, as well as the powerful role

that bodies and geste play in tandem with language during lecturing and teaching.

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Recent Deleuzian studies into the communicative and affective powers of bodies

have been picked up and developed by Patricia Pisters (2006) and Elena del Rıo

(2008) in specific relation to the realms of theatre and film. But these are also worth

considering here, I argue, because they help to expose the direct affective power that

body movement and gesture have upon viewers. Pisters’ exploration into these issues

incorporates functional magnetic resonance imaging research into the brain’s so-called

‘mirror neuron’ phenomenon to expand upon and reify Deleuze’s philosophical mod-

els of affect in a materialistic sense. This research highlights how the viewing of

another’s movement (whether on screen or in reality) literally affects the perceiver in

an embodied molecular fashion: with perceived movements, expressions and actions

triggering a series of mirror neurons that pass through the viewer’s own neural net-

works and body plexus. Here, the distinctions between self and other, inside and out-

side radically dissolve. Del Rıo describes similar affects/effects in a more traditional

aesthetic fashion by investigating a performing body as an affective intensity. She first

distinguishes between representational and affective–performative registers via Dele-

uze’s ‘cinema of action’ and ‘cinema of the body’ categories. Predominantly focusing

upon the latter, she describes the performing body of a performer as a ‘shockwave’ of

pure affect, which becomes an expression-event that ‘makes affect a visible and

palpable materiality’ (del Rıo, 2008, pp. 10–16).

Incorporating Deleuzo–Guattarian models of the assemblage, such qualitative mod-

els describe the performing body entering into composition with a multiplicity of

other bodies within and beyond the stage or screen, and serve to restore an intensive

dimension to performance typically lost when reading or evaluating it through exten-

sive or representational paradigms (del Rıo, 2008, p. 3). For both Pisters and del Rıo,

then, the performing body should be understood as a dynamic energy force with an

inherent potential to affect and transform other brains and bodies. These approaches

radically erode the traditional Cartesian boundaries of self and other, inside and out-

side, and demonstrate not only that viewers experience what they view from the

inside, but also that the bodies they watch literally make them feel, think and act

differently. This element, I believe, should also be paid attention to when teaching

students in a second language, and can be thought of as a horizontal or direct form of

passing on information or ideas. Indeed, I would argue that in the Chinese context

teachers should strive to become hyperexpressive and deliberately affective, using

corporeal flexion in the same manner we do when acting–talking to young humans

when they are first learning their own mother tongue.

Such factors can also be intimately linked to popular ideas surrounding teaching

and learning being about building strong relationships based on trust and respect

between teacher and student. Cole’s Deleuzian work adds to these notions by intro-

ducing the concept of affect into pedagogy, ‘which has been latterly discussed in the

educational literature as constituting a form of ethology (e.g. Zembylas, 2007) or

relational nexus from Spinoza’ (Cole, 2011, p. 10). Cole here proposes and invents a

‘2-role model’ of affect which functions as a double articulation of teaching and learn-

ing in relation to what he calls ‘educational life-forms’ (Cole, p. 10). The first affec-

tive role is predominantly related to classroom management, exploring the manner in

which language itself purports to carry or transmit ‘the truth’ through what Deleuze

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and Guattari call ‘order-words’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, pp. 83–123). The second

exploits the sociocultural consequences of using language in pedagogy, and highlights

how teaching and learning are always already related to a milieu and ‘group subject’.

These consideration of a ‘subject-group’ or ‘groupuscle’ become most suggestive of a

Guattarian interface in Cole’s work (e.g. Guattari, 1989/2010). Although Guattari

practised in another form of (psychiatric) pedagogical institution, Paul Sutton and Ian

Pindar (2010) point out that he was a radical experimenter in group relations and

institutional trans-subjective dynamics, and became fascinated by ‘non-human aspects

of subjectivity’ that operated at a prepersonal and preindividual level. Qua Michel

Foucault, these can be related to transhuman or non-human architectonic structures

that ‘invisibly’ secrete power and control in the material organization of bricks and

mortar(boards), seats and stage, and the arrangement and flows of bodies. Immanent

buildings and virtual institutions (branded Western university education) and their

incumbent ideologies are activated and maintained by real spatial relations.1

To this consideration of atmospheric forces that influence group dynamics, we

could also add the intersubjective atmosphere fostered by the presence of a bored or

sleeping student, say, a class clown, an overly talkative class member, phones going

off during discussion, the teacher’s exhausted demeanour that day, a perceived lack of

respect from other faculty members, the broken air conditioning, a wasp in the class-

room, and so on. Gough further incorporates a Deleuzo–Guattarian concept of

‘becoming-cyborg’ into these models, by paying attention to the various ways in which

non-human technologies come into play, or are utilized and incorporated into the

teaching assemblage for learning purposes (e.g. Gough, 2004a, 2004b). I will return

to these later dimensions in relation to affective transmedia dimension in my own

teaching practices below and in relation to cinematic and artistic elements incorpo-

rated into lecturing and seminars, respectively. All this amounts to saying that a con-

sideration of ‘student interiority’ must move beyond that of the enclosed hermetical

(Western) Cartesian cogito and be remapped as ‘a crossroads where several compo-

nents of subjectification meet to make up who we think we are’ (Pindar & Sutton,

2010, p. 8).

For Cole, good teachers must be able to deploy different forms of affect, and by so

doing increase the opportunity to foster strong relationships between student and tea-

cher that can be beneficial to their learning. If Cole limits his analysis to two forms of

affect, however, I would want to add to his list the physiological affective dimension

discussed above, and the affective potentialities locked within a becoming-cyborg of

student and teacher through the incorporation of other media and technology. Apro-

pos Deleuze, the affect of humour can also be understood to play a huge role in affec-

tive learning, breaking down barriers and forcing new thought into being (think Bill

Hicks, Lenny Bruce or Ben Elton). MacKenzie and Porter go a long way to showing

how an interplay between the heights and depths of irony alongside the direct laugh-

ter of the ridiculous can cause a shock to thought and force thinking into being.

Although humour may be considered one of the hardest things to translate between

cultures, it is an affective and emotionally direct means of teaching that is worth

exploring in the Chinese context. Although these dimensions may appear difficult to

quantify or even record, their relevance is to me key to creating productive and ethical

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pedagogical learning as well as for reflecting upon what it actually is we do when we

practise good teaching.

By adopting and paying attention to affective pedagogical models, teachers (working

in China or otherwise) can find creative escape routes from the residual cultural strait-

jacket associated with institutionalized capitalism, Cartesianism or Confucianism

bound within the material–ideological teaching methods and practices. But once we slip

out of these confinements what should we become? In offering a good starting point to

answering this question, Marcus Bussey (2008) notes that good teachers should be an

‘authentic embodiment’ of what they teach. Teaching Chinese students about critical

thought, art and creativity (something sadly neglected in their high-school education),

for example, involves becoming a creative and dramatic teacher who challenges the stu-

dents to practise what their teacher preaches. Part of this can be achieved by incorporat-

ing creative potential and problem-solving exercises into the seminars and coursework.

Or better still, we can encourage our students to become creative artists and critical

thinkers with regard to practical projects. During more traditional methods of teaching

such as lectures, affective jolts to thought can also be fostered by creating stimulating

handouts that use form as well as content to provoke thought; that is, do not follow the

same old corporate orthodoxies related to logos, branding and designs. In addition, one

can use particularly thought-provoking and difficult examples of film or audiovisual

media (typically not seen before in China or not usually talked about) within lectures,

or during screenings running alongside courses, to cause a shock to habitual modes of

‘thought’ (qua non-thought) and force thinking into being.

And there is the rub. For what we are concerned with is asking students to embrace

creation that feeds off violent destruction. Deleuze again: ‘once one steps outside

what’s been thought before, once more ventures outside what’s familiar and reassur-

ing, once one has to invest new concepts from unknown lands, then methods and

moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a “perilous

act”, a violence whose first victim is oneself’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 103). Above and

beyond this, and in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s larger body of work on the sen-

sational affect of art and aesthetics, I also advocate exploring and incorporating other

affective measures, such as the use of film clips in the lecture environment alongside

other stimulating or provoking photographs and ‘shocking’ images that challenge stu-

dents to think and engage with what is being taught or explored. To a similar end, in

an exploration of the pedagogical role that film can play in teaching, Bogue (2004)

points out that Deleuze unfolds a different concept of what an educational apprentice-

ship might entail in Cinema 2 by describing Jean Luc Godard’s cinema in terms of a

‘pedagogy of images’. There, cinema creates and trades in signs that are in no way

transparent to the communication of information: ‘Rather, they are hieroglyphs,

enigmas that point beyond themselves to something hidden’ (Bogue, p. 327).

Cinema offers itself as a powerful pedagogical tool in the Chinese context which

can be harnessed to advance a different form of learning and indeed thinking.

Namely, ‘genuine thought must be forced into action through the disruption of ordin-

ary habits and notions. That which is new is not orthodox but paradoxical, and hence

its sense seems nonsense, not good sense’ (Bogue, 2004, p. 333). To varying degrees

of success, I often employ cinema to generate exactly such effects, and often

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incorporate one or two extracurricular film screenings per week into my modules to

help introduce students to, and think through, the various concepts and theories being

explored each week. Qua Bogue, this involves using films in a way that foregrounds

and challenges students to encounter the unfamiliar and shocking, forcing them to

‘undergo the disorienting jolt of something new, different, truly other, and then to

explicate those signs, to unfold the differences they enfold’ (Bogue, p. 341). Such

modes become a good tactic to help Chinese students, in particular, to think the new,

or alternatively, as well as broaden and expand their (limited) experience of the out-

side world and other cultures (or even non-official domestic views of their own). For

as Bogue (p. 341) points out, one cannot hope to ‘teach the truly new in its newness,

but one can attempt to induce an encounter with the new by emitting signs, by creat-

ing problematic objects, experiences or concepts’.2

Similar affective models have recently been opened up and explored by Todd May

and Inna Semetsky in their essay ‘Deleuze, ethical education, and the unconscious’

(2008). There, they explore an alternative ethicopedagogical approach to teaching

inspired by Deleuze’s unorthodox practical epistemology. Somewhat counter-intui-

tively, they argue that it becomes what is not known, as opposed to what is, that

becomes the most significant factor with regard to positive educational experiences

and long-term (read deep) learning. Following Deleuze and Guattari, learning here is

again related to experimentation and the creation of thought rather than rote learning,

thoughtlessly consuming predigested facts, or undergoing dry transactions based on

the transmission of pre-existing knowledge; which is to say, exactly what Chinese

students are used to and traditionally encounter in their primary and secondary

education. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari find a parallel with Socratic modes of

pedagogy: ‘I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think’. One fruit-

ful way of getting round this can be the promotion of practical projects and creative

exercises that force students to create concepts and solutions themselves, before or

after consulting dense or difficult theory. Again, this is something I explore by advo-

cating practical exercises in film-making in order to help my students to learn and/or

reflect upon difficult theory and criticism.

Following Deleuzian thought models, teacher and student alike must embrace the

role of artist, and coax or cultivate creation as part of the route to knowledge or

thought. Rather problematically for annual performance review forms, the teacher is

not there to teach ‘how to do’ according to preordained rules established in advance.

When I first teach Chinese students film studies, for example, I show one or two films

a week alongside the lectures, and keep pointing out how each film-maker ostensibly

reinvents the language each time for themselves and in relation to the story or themes

being explored. This not only helps me to problematize my own lecture on approach-

ing film as a language, but also gives me recourse when asked by students ‘exactly’

how to do something (a question commonly fielded in the Chinese context). Instead

of saying do this or that, a Deleuzian approach would turn the question back around,

while a Guattarian approach to a seminar context would be to ask another group how

they would do it, and then another group (or maybe a cleaner or a security guard).

And then, ‘Are there any more solutions anyone could think of?’ and ‘Is there a

wrong way to do it?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What would Hitchcock do?’ and ‘What about

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Lucifer Valentine?’ and ‘What are the advantages of that approach over another?’ and

so on. This is what I feel is a positive exercise in self-learning and guiding groups to

think without relying on a hierarchical pillar. In my experience, often the students

learn by trial and error, or through the process of making a film itself. Visiting or

revisiting theory and criticism in the wake of such events empowers the students and

gives them hermeneutical experience to draw upon to think though the concepts. This

alternative form of learning values above all else what Deleuze terms the conquest of the

unconscious, whereby ‘the process of thinking and learning is both cognitive and corpo-

real, therefore by necessity having its unusual origin in practice and not in theory’

(May & Semetsky 2008, p. 157). As Bogue (2004, p. 337) points out, ‘it would seem

that for Deleuze the best teachers can do is to invite their students to participate

along with them in an activity rather than show them what to do or how to do it’. Or

as Deleuze himself renders it, ‘We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do”.

Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to

be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce’ (Del-

euze, 1968/1994, p. 23). This is the true key to deep or long-term learning.

In taking inspiration from Deleuze, we come to realize that to teach is to learn,

since ‘genuine teaching and learning are simply names for genuine thought. The goal

of teaching and learning is to think otherwise, to engage the force of that which is

other, different and new’ (Bogue, 2004, p. 341). What is more, from such a perspec-

tive, this form of ‘ethical education would involve not just our minds but our whole

lives’ (Semetsky, 2008, p. xvii). This, in turn, opens up yet another affective dimen-

sion with regard to teaching that we can understand as a practical sensorimotor event

in the life of the student, wherein the real process of thinking and acting (alone or as

part of a group) to make a creative product or project aids learning from a reverse or

non-abstract route. This is a positive exercise and immanent example of how to make

an event of thought, and to affectively inspire deep learning and critical thinking in

students from China, or any other pedagogical space whatever.

Notes

1. Take the lecture theatre, for instance, and its being arranged and arrayed in such a way as

to promote a certain hierarchical one-way relationship through its spatial organization.

Here, an ‘exceptional individual’ is designed to stand at the front while everyone else sits in

a subject(ed) position geared towards listening in silence and granting the lecturer their full

attention.

2. Because of my own disciplinary background and influences I predominantly favour the use

of audiovisual media as an affective force in my own teaching environments, and this is

duly reflected in my rather limited focus upon other affective media on this outing. This

lack of consideration is in no way intended to suggest that cinema is the best affective mode

or medium available to a teacher, and I would encourage harnessing the disruptive sensory

potentials of many other ‘image’ forms (such as soundimages or hapticimages). Indeed, I

would argue that approaches that affectively target other sensory organs may even contrib-

ute to creating unplanned and untapped patterns of learning by stimulating different ways

of interacting with the world and knowledge.

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