Deleuze and the subversion(s) of 'the real' : pragmatics in education

This paper puts Deleuze to work in education. The field of educational studies is open to new ways of understanding and conceptualising knowledge, such as those that we derive from Deleuze, to the extent that this new knowledge can be used for educative purposes. However, this statement of educative intent means that humanism and morality could immediately take us away from the focus of investigation (see Denzin, 2003); because new knowledge in education is subject to the duality of questions about application. The point of this study is to push the empirical nature of the work done to the limit, and beyond applicative dualisms; in order to understand what is happening to two Sudanese families in Australia, as they start their new lives on a new continent and as part of a different society. In this writing, two Sudanese families are examined for their notion of the real as a part of their everyday lives in Australia. I have located the notion of the real as being of critical importance to this process of examination, as within the 'field of the real' lies the sometimes dormant forces and factors that determine the possibilities of the truth. As Jeffery Bell (20 11) has argued: "For Deleuze, the real is to be associated with processes that constitute the givenness of objects rather than with the constituted, identifiable objects and categories themselves," (p. 4). This statement means that there are elements within what is happening to the Sudanese families that act as markers or portals to the real of the Sudanese, and these can be reformulated as empirical evidence for claims about how to help with their education in Australia. The real, in this sense, is not the perspective or viewpoint of the Sudanese in Australia, but a multi-layered construct that includes the thoughts of everything that has happened to them before they arrived in Australia. One might cogently argue that to state the empirical facts of the dislocation, refugee status and resettlement of the Sudanese according to the humanitarian programme in Australia is an expression of lack. The truth of 'the real' for the Sudanese families from a Deleuzian perspective lies in their thought processes and multiple creation(s) of new, unstable mechanisms for coping with displacement. The field of inquiry is open and includes the anomalous, exceptional or extraordinary, which may or may not be directly expressed in words and artefacts. This study signals a Deleuzian inspired take on ethnography that is 'unethnographic' in the sense that the Sudanese families are not considered to be marginalised or 'ethnographic others' to the mainstream, or representative of a purely qualitative study of Sudanese family life in Australia. Rather, the given ness of their lives is opened up and explored through this work, with the aim of discovering an unknown point in empirical investigation, where the Sudanese-Australian real is emergent and the incipient learning may be understood in terms of multiple literacies and pragmatism in education.