Turning into Polyvocality; Or, My Take on a Literature Review

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Plateau II Experiencing the World with Deleuze and Guattari

In the beginning is the scream. We scream… When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream…It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason…The dissonance can take many shapes…An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration… Our dissonance comes from our experience, but that experience varies…There are so many ways of bouncing our scream back against us, of looking at us and asking why we scream… Do we not know that it is unscientific to scream?… And a strange thing happens. The more we study society, the more our negativity is dissipated or sidelined as being irrelevant. There is no room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that: academic study provides us with a language and a way of thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express our scream. The scream, if it appears at all, appears as something to be explained, not as something to be articulated. (Holloway, 2010, pp1, 2 & 3).

My Scream

This research started with a scream. A scream that was directed at what I perceived to be a homogenizing12, neo-liberal industry of language learning. With this statement I do not attempt to challenge the position of Canaragajah (1999) with regard to the appropriation of English in postcolonial contexts such as found in the case of South Africa. I fully agree that TESOL is always political. Furthermore, as cultural practice that occurs within a cultural space of the English language classroom it will always consists of various agendas that are continuously contested and negotiated. In line with the processual turn that reflects a tendency towards an enhanced awareness of language use as contextual and interactional (Canagarajah, 2007), I also understand English language use as variable, emergent and subject to change (Sewell, 2013). The statement that English language learning is a homogenising, neo-liberal industry arose from my perceptions of the field of TESOL in the Republic of Korea whilst working as a teacher. My experiences have led me to agree with Denzin (2009) that current “cultural and education practices contribute to the construction of neoliberal conceptions of identity, citizenship, and agency” (p. 381) through employing “discourses of privatization, consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the new disciplinary techniques of surveillance” (Giroux & Giroux, 2006, p. 28).
Are we not “turning education into business” through “the widespread progressive introduction of a new system of domination” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 182)? Similarly, Cole (2009a) argues that the objectives of education are determined by government and business because it has become fixed to economic parameters. In doing this research I wanted to cause a stir; I wanted to bring about change. But in wanting to write another-discourse, would I not merely replace one Sameness with another? Would the envisioned contribution not become just one more discourse to be replaced by another scream, another-discourse? The more I read, the more I started to view what I attempted to accomplish differently. My belief of another-discourse was being chipped away at by a slowly emerging understanding that there exists nothing but Difference. Instances of pure singularity. But if there is only difference, what could I hope to achieve through conducting this research? What possibilities to think about peace and violence as experienced in a TESOL context exist? In short, what could this study possibly offer?
In this plateau I provide the theoretical framework that underlies the study. I cannot help but hold onto the initial anger of what I perceived to be a homogenizing, neo-liberal industry of language learning which prompted me to pursue this study. But what could I do with this anger? Is anger ever admissible in bringing about change and how should it be dealt with? Should one follow Ghandi and transform anger into principled nonviolence, satyagraha? Or is the Fanonian route better in which anger drives militant activism in which violence is not only acceptable but also required? In thinking about how I should relate to and possibly use this anger I turn to Peters’s (2012) positive rehabilitation of anger which stresses the channelling of anger into accepted forms of protest. For him nonviolence constitutes such a form. Peters further highlights that establishing cooperative relationships is fundamental to nonviolence. Although writing in a different context,Peters draws on Konstan’s (2006) interpretation of Aristotle’s understanding of emotions, such as anger, to explore the “psychopathology for democracy” (Peters, 2012, par. 15). According to Aristotle to know what an emotion is about you need “to know what people engaged in the relevant transaction are thinking” (Peters, 2012, par. 16). For me then, to explore my anger as it relates to the field of English language teaching, I also need to engage with others to hear their stories; some of which may or may not be rooted in anger. Through sharing our anger could we produce a positive rehabilitation of anger to transform it into an energy directed towards change? My understanding of how I can give voice to this energy has shifted considerably since I started this research. I think it is important to briefly sketch how I draw on Critical Applied Linguistics (CALx) in order to situate my entry point into the TESOL-peace education rhizome. This I do before introducing the (non)philosophy of Deleuze and his work with Guattari. In the final section I show how the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy has been taken up in Multiple Literacies Theory.

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Declaration
Ethics clearance certificate
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Table of contents
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
1. Plateau I – Entering a Rhizome
1.1. Situating Myself
1.2. Situating the Field
1.3. Starting a Map
1.4. Writing a Rhizome
2. Plateau II – Experiencing the World with Deleuze and Guattari
2.1. My Scream
2.2. Entering a Rhizome
2.3. A Brief Encounter with Critical Applied Linguistics
2.4. Deleuze, Guattari and an Army of Concepts
2.4.1. Transcendental Empiricism
2.4.2. Difference
2.4.3. Arborescent and Rhizomatic Thinking
2.4.4. Philosophical Concepts
2.5. The Deleuzo-Guattarian Concept Machine
2.5.1. Considering Concepts
2.6. Connecting the Deleuzo-Guattarian Concept Machine with Literacies
2.6.1. Multiliteracies and New Literacies Studies
2.6.2. Multiple Literacies Theory
2.7. Viewing a Plateau
3. Plateau III – Turning into Polyvocality; Or, My Take on a Literature Review
3.1. The Literature Review as Intensive and Immanent
3.2. Tracing Literacies on Peace, Violence and Nonviolence
3.2.1. Peace(s)
3.2.2. And Violence?
3.2.3. What is in a Name? Nonviolence
3.3. Tracing Literacies on Peace Education
3.3.1. A Multitude of Peace Education(s)
3.3.2. Tracing Peace Education(s) in TESOL
3.3.2.1. Literacies and peace education
3.3.2.2. Peace education and TESOL
3.4. Thinking Peace, Violence and Nonviolence Differently
3.5. Viewing a Plateau
4. Plateau IV – Situating Doing
4.1. Where I Find Myself
4.2. Ethical Encounters and Becoming-Other
4.3. Research Site and Participants
4.3.1. The Research Site
4.3.2. The Research Participants
4.4. On-site Research Actions
4.4.1. Semi-structured and Open-ended Individual Interviews
4.4.2. Classroom Observations
4.4.3. Artefact Collection
4.4.4. Participant Journal
4.4.5. Research Journal and Autoethnographical Entries
4.5. Thinking about Data with Deleuze and Guattari
4.5.1. The Wonder of Data and Rhizomatic Analysis
4.5.2. Situating My Analysis
4.5.3. Mappings and Musings
4.5.3.1. Cartography and decalcomania
4.5.3.2. Vignettes
4.5.3.3. Narrative experiments
4.6. Research and Paradigmatic Consistency
4.7. Viewing a Plateau
5. Plateau V – Creating, Tracing and Reading a Map
5.1. Unfolding a Map
5.2. Micro Space: Experiences of Learning English and Understandings of Peace and Violence
5.2.1. Abdoulaye
5.2.2. Marco
5.2.3. Gao
5.2.4. Steven
5.2.5. Ercilia
5.2.6. Agnes
5.2.7. Helen
5.3. Connecting Spaces
5.4. Meso Space: Becoming Peace and Violence in the TESOL Classroom
5.4.1. De/re/territorialising Peace Literacies
5.4.1.1. Multiculturalism literacies
5.4.1.2. Anti-racist literacies
5.5. Viewing a Plateau
6. Plateau VI – Becoming-Research(er)
6.1. Macro Space: The Ethics of Exteriority
6.2. Tracing a Map
6.3. Considerations for TESOL in the South African Context
6.4. Theoretical Contribution
6.5. Pedagogical Contribution
6.5.1. Communo-rhizocurriculum
6.5.1.1. Community as mass-pack hybrid
6.5.1.2. Curriculum as rhizomatic experiment
6.6. Lines of Flight Toward Future Research
6.7. Reflections on Becoming Research(er)
References
Appendix A: Information letter and letter of consent for the language centre coordinator
Appendix B: Recruitment poster
Appendix C: Information letter to research participants
Appendix D: Letter of informed consent for the research participants
Appendix E: Research participant journal information sheet
Appendix F: Interview schedules