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Swimming: in an interesting passage in Difference and Repetition (1994) Deleuze considers what is involved in learning to swim. The general point of this passage is that learning to swim should not be understood as simply the passive reception of knowledge from an expert. None of us, after all, would expect to be able to swim after taking some classes by the side of the pool. Rather, learning to swim is a process that requires the engagement of one’s own body with a body of water. From the outset, we can say that there are at least two bodies involved. But in what sense do these bodies interact with each other in the process of learning? To understand this interaction we must fi rst grasp that a person’s body and a body of water, according to Deleuze, are composed of both universal and singular aspects. Each body has a universal aspect to the extent that it is constituted by a system of differential relations – relations of height, depth, limits and turbulences, for example – such that we can talk of how a human body embodies these relations as opposed to the manner in which these relations are embodied within a body of water. Deleuze refers to the system of differential relations that constitute bodies as the objective Idea of the body. None the less, every body (be it of a person or of water) is composed of particular varia-tions within the system of relavaria-tions that constitute the objective idea (as when we say, for example, that the shallow end stops here, for me, but not someone else). To learn how to swim is to bring the singularities of one’s own body into contact with the particular depths, waves and eddies of the body of water that one enters. It is only when this happens that the problem of learning how to swim can be properly formed. As Deleuze puts it: ‘[t]o learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic fi eld’ (1994: 165). Already we can see that Deleuze understands learning as a very bodily activity.

The bodily nature of learning how to swim, however, highlights that learning is not just an interaction of two different bodies: human and water. After all, while we learn through engagement, we do none the less come to know how to swim. We must consider, therefore, how this view of learning as bodily engagement impacts upon what we think of as knowledge. In the example of swimming, knowledge is expressed through the person of the swimming instructor and it is certainly the case that this knowledge can be very useful. (It helps to know that one is swimming in water rather than wet cement, which would have rather dif-ferent qualities and, therefore, the problem of learning how to swim in it would be differently constituted.) We can now say, indeed, that there are always at least three bodies involved – the body of the learner, the body of water and the body of knowledge. Moreover, the swimming instruc-tor embodies knowledge to the extent that she or he has an approach to the problem of learning how to swim. In other words, the body of knowledge is made manifest in the body of the instructor by way of the method of instruction. Method presumes that knowledge of swimming can be transmitted through the regulation of the learning process and it is premised upon the idea that every learner learns the same way.

In modern societies (and, in an important sense, this is a criterion for the modernity or not of a society), the body of knowledge as expressed through regulative method determines the relationship between the three bodies involved in learning. In all manner of modern learning environ-ments, one learns the correct method in order to know what the instruc-tor knows (to be the same as the instrucinstruc-tor). If learners do not adopt the appropriate method, then they will be disciplined by the instructor on the grounds that they are not really learning (but merely doing the doggy-paddle, for instance). This understanding of the dominant place of knowledge culminates in the claim that one stops learning when one knows (how to swim). Learning, it is assumed, is a process which cul-minates in an end we call knowledge. Deleuze argues that this assump-tion constitutes one of the eight ‘postulates’ that underpin the dogmatic image of thought, albeit a privileged one in that it ‘incorporates and recapitulates all the others’: ‘the postulate of knowledge’ (1994: 167).

Simply put, this postulate assumes that knowledge is superior to learn-ing. In other words, it is presumed that the process is subordinate to the result and that what Deleuze calls a culture of learning is subordinate to a method for the attainment of knowledge. This dual subordination constitutes a form of dogmatism in the sense that it ‘profoundly betrays what it means to think’ (1994: 167). Clearly, without learning there would be no knowledge and, more importantly, learning is not the same

as knowing. One of the tasks, therefore, of taking thought beyond this dogmatic image, according to Deleuze, is to think about learning as distinct from its modern subordination to knowledge.

Is it really legitimate, however, to discuss learning as a process of bodily engagement and to elide this with claims about the postulate of knowledge underpinning the dogmatic image of thought? In other words, in what sense is the third body – the body of knowledge – related to the other bodies? Perhaps we have strayed away from very literal renderings of the human body and the body of water to the metaphori-cal notion of a body of knowledge? Two Deleuzian responses can be made to these concerns. The fi rst is that by body we mean an extended and relatively closed system of differential relations where ‘relatively’

denotes a degree of distance from the chaos of pure difference but also that bodies are never fully closed off from that chaos. With this defi ni-tion in hand, there is not a category mistake involved in treating human bodies, bodies of water and bodies of knowledge as all forms of body.

As Deleuze puts it: ‘a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (1988: 127). As Deleuze and Guattari succinctly express the same point: ‘[t]he “body”. . . is not . . . the special fi eld of biology’

(1994: 123). Of course, it is equally clear that these three bodies are dif-ferent. The difference, for Deleuze and Guattari, is to be found in the ways in which each body is individuated as an extended and relatively closed system; or, to invoke one of their most famous borrowings (from Antonin Artaud), the difference resides in the way each body is organ-ised (1988: 149–66). The second response, therefore, speaks to one of the ways we commonly express the difference in organisation between a physical body (of a person or of water) and an ideational body (of knowledge); namely, it is usually assumed that the latter is organised by way of conscious conceptual construction whereas the former are the result of unconscious, physical processes. Moreover, this difference is thought to establish a qualitative and unbreachable distinction between knowledge of the body and knowledge as a body. It is a distinction that Deleuze does not accept. Indeed, it is a principal feature of the dogmatic image of thought that knowledge is conceptualised as the product of ‘a

“premeditated decision” by the thinker’ (1994: 165). Installing learning, rather than knowledge, as a transcendental condition of thought requires that we treat learning, fi rst and foremost, as ‘an involuntary adventure’

(1994: 165). Learning is an operation on the preconscious activity of the learner by way of a process of bodily engagement. Williams captures this well as he sums up the same discussion:

[w]e do not learn consciously since learning must go beyond our conscious faculties (If I knew how to swim, I’d do it!). Instead, we have to experiment in ways that connect to the unconscious processes that relate us to water or any other thing that we must enter into a new relation to. (2003: 137) Learning is the formation of bodily habits and in the activity of learning we form knowledge in our bodies. This subsequently becomes conscious to us as a body of knowledge.

This account works well when thinking of animal learning, or even the learning that takes place on the organic plane more generally; the rat learns its way around the maze and the fl ower learns to lean into the sun. Considering human learning, though, it seems counter-intuitive to describe it as merely the acquisition of bodily habits when we typically think of learning as an activity that goes on in the mind of the learner.

Of course, and as noted above, it is precisely this image of the knower consciously acquiring knowledge and then passing on knowledge to one that does not know that Deleuze is seeking to undermine with his critique of the postulate of knowledge. Yet, there is still a sense that an important aspect of human learning is missing if we overemphasise the unconscious, bodily acquisition of habits against the conscious activity of learning. But what could we possibly mean by the conscious activity of learning if not that there is a subject actively synthesising its world?

In one sense, this concern is easily resolved by simply extending the notion of acquired bodily habits to include ‘habits of mind’. Indeed, this is one way of expressing the relationship between Deleuze’s (1991) early work on Hume and the main concerns of Difference and Repetition. In what ways are we able to move away from the dogmatic (Kantian) image that the world is synthesised actively by a human subject that transcends this world? How can repetition be for itself and not just for a subject?

How can we conceive of Ideas ‘objectively’ rather than subjectively? In what ways are we able to sense ‘objective Ideas’ if it is merely a case of bodies acting upon bodies? Deleuze’s guiding intuition in response to these, and related, questions is that human subjects synthesise the world that they inhabit passively. Deleuze argues that in order to avoid the dogmatic image of thought we must not conceptualise human learning as the activity of a subject but the subject as the result of a process of learning that is in itself characterised by passivity: the passive synthesis of the sensible. This provides a compelling counterweight to the subjec-tivism lurking within most accounts of learning. There is, none the less, a danger in overemphasising passivity. To acknowledge and address this danger is to follow two lines of inquiry within Deleuze (and Guattari’s) philosophical labours. One leads us to a further specifi cation of their

philosophical understanding of the organic body (though we will discuss this with particular reference to the human body); the other takes us into their remarks on the brain in the conclusion to What is Philosophy?

After noting the former, it is the latter trajectory that gives direction to the rest of our discussion.

First, if we simply stop at the claim that humans learn by way of non-consciously acquired bodily habits it is not clear that the organisational specifi city of human bodies is addressed. This specifi city arises from the fact that as bodies we are defi ned by ‘what affects us’, but what affects us, as living bodies, is not just our ability to extend our body (raise our arm in response to water’s extension as a wave of a certain height).

Rather, human bodies are able to intensify affects and thereby intensify the system of relations that constitute our body. This process of inten-sifi cation is not a subjective one in that it does not presuppose a subject that intends to intensify a bodily affect; rather, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, our capacity for intensifi cation as living bodies is that we are able to ‘proceed by differentiation’ (1994: 123). Becoming a swimmer is not primarily about adding extension to our bodies, even though we may come to stretch our arms and legs a little further in the process; it is to differentiate a set of relations within our bodies that come into play when one interacts with the body of water. That is, there is the crea-tion of new relacrea-tions ‘internal’ to our biological bodies that condicrea-tion the ‘external’ interaction with the physical body of water (though we use ‘internal’ and ‘external’ here only provisionally as this is a binary opposition that much of the literature on the body, rightly in our view, has called into question). It is this process of internal differentiation that conditions our sense of having learnt something new. This experience is subjectively rendered when we say, ‘I can swim now (when before I could not),’ though it is not necessary to conceive of this as the conscious acquisition of knowledge by an already formed subject. It is, as Deleuze (1991) found in Hume, simply the habit we have acquired of saying

‘I’ when in fact the ‘I’ in question is itself the result of bodily acquired habits; ‘I, the swimmer’. As such, from this perspective, the acquisition of new bodily habits that we call learning also marks a change in one’s internal sense of oneself. In this way, we can account for the sensation we have of being conscious and active learners, without undermining the transcendental priority of ‘passive’ learning.

Although this provides a way of accounting for the sensation of an active consciousness at work within the learning process, it does so retrospectively: that is, still at a distance from the sense that we have as regards the subject’s active role in the learning process. The experience

of being a body that is capable of actively learning new things still seems under-theorised. Is it possible to address this experience of active learning without compromising the requirement for passive learning as a transcendental condition of thought? Is it possible to articulate a non-subjective account of what we call active learning without reinstat-ing the postulate of knowledge? These questions lead us to trace a line of inquiry within the work of Deleuze and Guattari that none the less takes us beyond their own tracings of this line. It is to follow the second trajectory towards acknowledging and addressing the experience of activity that seems to be a hallmark of human learning. The challenge is to conjugate the passive and the active registers of learning without compromising Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of subjectivism.

That this does not mark a radical departure or break from Deleuze and Guattari, is evident from their last collaborative work together, What is Philosophy? In ‘Conclusion: From Chaos to the Brain’ we fi nd the claim that guides the rest of our discussion:

If the mental objects of philosophy, art and science (that is to say, vital ideas) have a place, it will be in the deepest of the synaptic fi ssures, in the hiatuses, intervals and the meantimes of a nonobjectifi able brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create. (1994: 209)

But in order to unpack what is at stake in this claim we must look to develop it in regard to the three bodies that we have so far discussed: the (organic, human, lived) body, the (physical) bodies in the world, and the bodies of knowledge that emerge from the engagement of the fi rst two.

As we have already argued, though, this requires that we maintain the priority of learning as a condition of thought if we are to avoid postulat-ing the end of knowledge as that which binds the human to the world.

At this point we can generalise everything we have already established about learning to swim and apply it to the three forms of knowledge about the world that we call philosophy, art and science. Each disci-pline, while tending towards specialised knowledge based on regulative method, establishes bodies of knowledge that themselves presuppose prior relationships that we can call bodies of learning. Learning to phi-losophise is not the process of simply acquiring philosophical knowledge;

learning to be an artist is not simply a matter of absorbing the canon of previous artistic creations; learning to think scientifi cally is not simply a matter of employing the correct method. Rather it is an engagement with ‘forms of thought or creation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 208).

As such, they are not bodies of expert knowledge, already established or progressing on the basis of what is already known. Rather, philosophy,

art and science are creative disciplines, themselves bodies of learning, defi ned as processes of engagement with what Deleuze and Guattari call

‘vital ideas’. The vitality of these ideas derives from the fact that they are

‘those that must be created’ to become known (1994: 207) and, as we will discuss below, the ‘place’ of learning (the place where the vital ideas of philosophy, art and science are created) is the nonobjectifi able brain.

The primary aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim, in our view, is that we will not fi nd this place of learning simply by ‘looking at’, by coming to know through simple observation or modelling, this nonobjectifi able brain. Rather, the place of learning will only be ‘found’ if we go in search of the nonobjectifi able brain by creating new relationships between the three bodies involved in the learning process: organic bodies, physical bodies and bodies of knowledge. We will argue that embedded within this claim is the link between the active and the passive sides of learning in Deleuze and Guattari; the body that learns to engage actively with the world is that which creates new bodies of learning in the world through this engagement. It is only this sense of ‘active learning’ that maintains learning as a transcendental condition of what it means to think.

The remainder of our discussion will unpack these claims. In the next section we provide an overview of some of the problems that persist in contemporary conceptualisations of the body and the brain; these conceptualisations are problematic, we will argue, to the extent that they retain the dominance of knowledge over the bodily processes of learning. We go on to argue that aspects of contemporary neuroscience provide a route out of these problems consonant with Deleuze’s under-standing of the transcendental priority of learning over knowledge. With this established, the concluding section will return to the problem of what is meant by an active, yet non-subjective, approach to the learning process.