” The human subject is not really observing the world from a perspective outside existence. ” Teachers tend to forget they are part of the class, teachers are part of the social structure of the school, together with students.
“The observer is not a unified and coherent agent whose various faculties operate in concert to produce a re-presentation of the present observed phenomenon ” . The observer is part of a chaotic rhizomatic world and the “representation” is emerging in a unknown way from this chaotic rhizome. ” Dealing with change seems to require a paradigm that goes beyond representation altogether”. According to Deleuze objectivity in observation is almost impossible because of the observer not being a simple mind but a chaos of different faculties.
As education is a very complex matter, this view on the metaphysics of science could be an improvement. Deleuze calls difference (change) the most important perspective (and not identity). We often say “this is …”, Deleuze would say “this becomes …”
Deleuze wants to give ‘change’ a place in ontology. The Ideas of Plato prevent us from giving ‘change’ a place in classic ontology because only ‘being’ does fit.
” The empiricism of the actual is concerned with distinct identities, the empiricism of the virtual is concerned with the complex connections and potentialities hidden in every distinct phenomenon. ” The actual and the virtual are dimensions of the existence. (the intensive is the third dimension).
Reading Complexity and the philosophy of becoming” David R. Weinbaum (Weaver)
See also deleuze-and-abundant-information-change11 on this weblog.
Now Further reading: Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze “Intensive Science And Virtual Philosophy “
Questions 
Hi Jaap; Do you have any ideas or links on how this all fits in with Heidegger and his views on Being?
Hi Glenyan, I am not a Heidegger fan, I do not know. I did try to read Sein und Zeit, but his style did hide and lock the content.
Inside existence we create and agree on reality and from there move on to agreeing on meaning. Nothing but trouble in the world of philosophy.
“We must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system.”
Francisco Varela et al “The Embodied Mind” MIT Press 1991p 140
“The rejection of representation and of information as being relevant to the process of knowing are both difficult to accept, because we use both concepts constantly. The symbols of our language, both spoken and written, are representations of things and ideas, and in our daily lives we consider facts such as the time of day, the date, the weather report, or the telephone number of a friend as pieces of information that are relevant to us. In fact, our whole era has often been called the “information age.” So how can Maturana and Varda claim [Santiago theory] there is no information in the process of cognition?
“To understand that seemingly puzzling assertion, we must remember that for human beings cognition involves language, abstract thinking, and symbolic concepts that are not available to other species. The ability to abstract is a key characteristic of the human consciousness…and because of that ability we can and do use mental representations, symbols, and information. However, these are not characteristics of the general process of cognition to all living systems. Although human beings frequently use mental representations and information, our cognitive process is not based on them.”
Fritjoe Capra “The Web of Life: a new scientific understanding of living systems”Random House 1996 p 272
Scott
Hi Scott, very impressive, I like your comment on representation in literature. Makes me think.
Representation is a tool for thinking and we use representations without awareness of the implications of our kind of representations.
The representation as it mostly is used is static. In our language it is difficult to imply change in our representations.
We talk about children as ‘being’ behind or having no social skills or ‘being’ rejected, but we really want to say something about their history and future and the process of their becoming.
In using static representations we answer questions, and we do not think about it as questions any more. The answer has become a fact, where the question, if we left it as a question, would help more. Because questions make us think. Dave Cormier has a story about that..
When writing scrips for video or TV, I had to learn to think in movements and in changing scenes. This requires a change in mind. Our eyes and minds do like change and movements, we are attracted to moving pictures. But a great part of our thinking, our philosophy and scientific language is like comic-strips, only static representations in a row.
In therapy patients do have weird representations of their environment or of themselves. The art of therapy is making these representations change. And that is very hard because we learn (?) to think in static representations.
Jaap
Hi Jaap,
Can’t take credit for the words in my reply. They belong to two authors I’m struggling to read. Dave Cormier and Oscar made a great video. Questions leading to further questions, so different form the way we teach in well structured pathways with known (in fact already decided} outcomes.
Thanks for the link.
Scott