Student voice, desire, and power with Deleuze and Guattari

This encyclopaedia entry considers what Deleuze and Guattari’s desire adds to considerations of power in student voice work, extending previous analyses that mobilise Michel Foucault’s conception of power as circulating, diffuse and productive (e.g. Bragg, 2007). For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is affirmative and productive – force and capacity seeking connection in mundane everyday processes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987, p. 229). Desire ‘is always assembled’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987, p. 229) – that is, always in machinic process, never existing in a free and unbounded state. At times imperceptible, desire is revolutionary; ‘capable of calling into question the established order of society’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 116). While desire has the potential to form relations between heterogeneous terms, changing connections and relations, social processes (such as education) re-code desire in terms of lack – for example, the student who ‘lacks’ the linguistic capacities or ‘diplomacy’ to ‘express’ themselves in student voice work. Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in how desire is made to desire its own repression (1983, p. 29) becomes a generative entry point to an analysis of habitual pedagogic patterns: why do students, teachers and schools continue to reproduce particular modes of relating, even as they purport to resist them? This encyclopaedia entry also considers how desire may be blocked or redirected in social relations in relation to student voice work: a student’s repression or redirection of his/ her speech and energies is firstly a social and psychic relation before it is a conscious decision. Desire and student voice are also connected to the logics of capitalism – particularly in the current popularity of student voice as a mechanism for school ‘improvement’.