Teacher-Education-Desiring-Machines

In this article, the authors argue that the notion of a teacher and the coexisting teacher education processes are being progressively emptied out, and replaced by the model of a corporate worker, serving the needs of a post-industrial financial capitalist society. They assert that teachers have had their identities stripped of their previous roles as guardians and proponents of civil society, or as the keepers of an essential knowledge to live a good life. Instead their roles have become merged with the over-riding concerns of financial capitalism, which primarily works from the perspective of the profit motive, and that reduces all activity under its aegis to calculable economic values representable as numerical, parallel to the multitude of companies on the stock exchange. The authors look for concrete routes out of the current situation, which escape the ways in which subjectivity is captured and turned into something else, ready to be demarcated as a flow in the financial capitalist setup. They draw upon concepts invented by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) that emphasize movement and interconnection, flows and blockages, in complex, unpredictable and contradictory contexts such as capitalism. They suggest that schizoanalysis, an approach from Deleuze and Guattari (1983) that focuses on mapping the contradictory productions and flows of desire across multiple scales, allows the analyst to move between the micro and macro, and to consider fragments, moments and events, and is a potent methodology to resist the capture of subjectivity by capital, and to reconceive the processes of teacher education.