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A geophilosophical appraisal
Noel Gough
La Trobe University
Australia
n.gough@latrobe.edu.au
Abstract (revised/abridged)
• My paper explores some ways in which Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s poststructuralist geophilosophy might be used to appraise
concepts such as ESD in contemporary contexts of globalisation and
international collaboration. I use their concept of mots d’ordre (order-
words) to appraise three recent texts (from Australia, North America,
and the UK) which explore sustainability in the context of three
different discourses-practices: (lifelong) learning, (educational)
leadership and (environmental) law. The texts are:
William Scott & Stephen Gough (2004) Sustainable Development
and Learning: Framing the Issues
Andy Hargreaves & Dean Fink (2006) Sustainable Leadership
Mark Halsey (2006) Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence
of the Text
Outline
• Background (not in paper): why a
‘geophilosophical’ appraisal?
• Sustainable development: is definition
necessary?
• Sustainable leadership: deploying
sustainability as a moral imperative
• Textual violence: sustainable development
and environmental law
Why a geophilosophical appraisal?
• In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
map the ‘geography of reason’ from pre-Socratic
times to the present
• Their geophilosophy describes relations between
particular spatial configurations and locations and the
philosophical formations that arise in them
• They created a new critical language for analysing
thinking as flows or movements across space
• Concepts such as assemblage, deterritorialisation,
lines of flight, nomadology, rhizome/rhizomatics –
refer to spatial relationships
Geophilosophy
• distinguishes a ‘sedentary point of view’ from a
nomadic subjectivity that allows thought to move
across conventional categories and move against
‘settled’ concepts and theories
• distinguishes ‘rhizomatic’ thinking from
‘arborescent’ conceptions of knowledge
• ‘the rhizome is so constructed that every path can be
connected with every other one. It has no center, no
periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite.
The space of conjecture is a rhizome space’ (Umberto
Eco 1984)
Rhizomes and research
• The space of educational research can be
understood as a ‘rhizome space’
• Rhizome is to a tree as the Internet is to a letter –
networking that echoes the hyper-connectivity of
the Internet
• The material and informational structure of a tree
and a letter is relatively simple: a trunk connecting
two points through or over a mapped surface
• But rhizomes and the Internet are infinitely and
continually complicating
Rhizomes and global EE research
Correspondence: n.gough@latrobe.edu.au