The introduction of post-structural narrative theory into the classroom, underwrites the dominance of a singular or unified meta narrative approach. This means that minor, disruptive and localised narrative formats may sit together to produce generalised effects, ambience or Stimmung. In this analysis, I shall take the narrative elements of the Book Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, and place them with the experiences of supply teaching in England and educational theory. The generalised effect of this analysis is one in which learning may be thought of as happening in time due to a number of emergent parameters. The objective of this style of narrative is to approach the way in which learning happens without appeal to the constrictive or power related concerns.

The eminent German judge and educationalist Schreber went to school, but what did he learn? Perhaps it was schizophrenia as a machinic process? Or how to deceive society with his will to power? The cruel front of a respectable judge, sitting in the correct manner to laud over the citizens, masked the processes of transformation that were at work within him. He was, in fact, developing the body without organs, which is an absolutely antithetical position to the one deemed correct for him to assume. Within the regime of an educational discipline instigated and enacted by his father, which was upheld by his family and wife; the judge and teacher started to become woman, rays of light were shining from his arse-hole, every tentacle of his calcified existence was beginning to spread into a cosmic communication system with God, and with all that which was beyond his direct reality.

Locking the body without organs into a straight jacket, only intensifies its dysfunctionalism, for example, prison and mental institutions serve as useful "meat" on which it feeds. Trying to threaten the breakdown of institutional Oedipal mechanisms with the rebuke of blame, violence and solitary confinement, increases the pressure to become other; the subject enacts such events, the interruptions, the violations, as if they were the only meaningful interactions to pass over the body. Education becomes caught in such cycles, as, for example, the desperate search for discipline, dissolves into an attraction and repulsion machine, continually coercing the irregular into straight lines, constantly jostling with knowledge and learning, as if they were the weapons of crusading knights, as if there was some kind of final truth. Of course knowledge and learning have become fixed to economic parameters, they are tied to objectives laid out by higher forces, to a socio-political organisation taking us headlong into an unknown future.

The bells ring. Management shuffle paper around the staffroom, the ever mounting number of teachers absent is remarked upon, the dates for the ofsted inspection are clarified, a meeting with parents to decide about the future of the school is arranged. The staff force out jokes, they remain rooted in their sanctuary away from the outside. Stress related disease is a plague akin to the more widespread medieval horrors. The only problem is that it doesn’t kill you outright, but it slowly eats away at the subject, it disables expression, it replaces calm words with the need to shout, it attacks physiological stability with the pain of continual reaction, with constant monitoring and control. The teachers clutch their papers and march to their pre-defined locations, for their hour of contact with the pupils. The playground is a wasteland, given over to bright and dull shades, which will soon be present in the confined space of the classroom. The shades amble inside, they are armoured and protected against the stress disease which will pour forth from their teachers. The duller shades merge into the dishevelled rows of tables and chairs; they already have their books, they are ready to watch the spectacle. The brighter points cannot accept the lack of focus and signature; this isn’t television, or football, or a night-club, they are expected to slide effortlessly into place, into the classroom, into the curriculum; but why should they? Who is this teacher? Why can’t he just chill out or go away?

Desire cannot be interpreted as a lack. It is not a need attempting to replace something, which isn’t there, something absent. The post-structural figure of the unconscious, is of something which is full. It is an energy or drive which is not sublimated or siphoned off into various strata which disable its potentia. That is to say, we cannot align reason or the sensible against the unconscious; the terror of the primitive socius, cannot be diluted into civil society. This is not to suggest that Enlightenment thought is without precedence, the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham or the surveillance devices in LA as described by Mike Davis in the City of Quartz, are themselves movements of the unconscious. The point is that desire becomes something else. There is nothing static within desire, desire knows nothing but the breaking of bonds, it also knows the reformation of stronger ties, yet merely to feel the rush of release from them, perhaps this is characteristic of the movement of desire - as Foucault put it, "we desire our own repression".

The emptiness of boredom remains. Teachers attempt perilously to assign meaningless tasks to their disruptive classes in order to achieve the passing of the contact hour without serious conflict. The copying out of diagrams, the design of a poster for your favourite film, the answering of irrelevant questions, based on sections of words plucked from tired textbooks, still basking in the fervour of learnt information. It doesn’t take a genius to see through the activity, the leading students soon find more amusing past-times, perhaps the baiting of the teacher, perhaps localised action, humiliation, laughter, sharp oral games, fighting, eroticism, the use of projectiles to communicate something more meaningful than the previously designated task. The class is crossing-over, becoming other, taking on board the movement of desire and turning the allotted space into landscapes of action which are not controlled from above. The teacher attempts to enforce the authority assigned to his or her position through the socio-political complex resourcing the school. Shouting has no effect, the pupils shout back, or do not hear the stressed out screeching from the front of the class. Threats and rebukes dissolve aimlessly into the livelier and less directed atmosphere of the crowd. The teacher is abstracted and isolated in his or her educational goals, at best the teacher is reduced to a policing role, in order to determine whether or not any serious laws are being broken during the lesson.

Deleuze and Guattari have introduced the concept of segmentation. At school we are told: - "you are not at home anymore", in the army you are told, "you are not at school anymore". The shuffling between classrooms, the breaks, the sounding of bells composes the anatomy of a school day, and continually interrupts time as duration. Marshall McLuhan famously noted that the modern classroom was akin to a feudal dungeon, it can no longer function as an isolated space, or without recognising the language of forms in the outside media environment. Perhaps his envisaged media education, is the last throw of the educational establishment, yet the surveillance which enhanced media coverage allows, cannot dispel the immanent procedures which are rupturing them from within. The forecast PC revolution in educational practice, does nothing to dispel the moment of segmentation, which has already mutated desire into a cancerous languidity, and an obstreperous debasement of authority. Anti-Oedipus, which is the questioning of familial reproduction through machinic assembly, does not give us solutions to the formation of schizophrenics, madmen and avatars, but in many ways, examines the acceleration in the process of their formation.

Jean Genet, locked in his prison cell, created a fantasy world of princes and kings. He saw in the foulness of dreaming and hell, gardens of saintliness, where he could worship the rims of petals, the mossy thorns and insect holes. William Burroughs similarly effected by the delirium of the modern world, yet unable or unwilling to create such artificial environments in which to act out his pulsions, sought bodily deformation as the only escape from nameless bureaux and demented scientists. The All American De-anxieted Man, is presented at the International Conference of Technological Psychiatry, where the Lobotomy Kid sells his creation to the awaiting audience of esteemed guests. The man turns into a black centipede, through viscid, transparent jelly, emitting a lung wrenching stench; he is a monster of decay and mutation, setting the scene into chaos, producing new and unheard of diseases. Elsewhere in the Naked Lunch, Burroughs restates the body in terms of an all-purpose blob, the organs are replaced by a hole, (it is the man who taught his arse-hole to talk), efficiency is augmented and undifferentiated tissue can grow into any type of flesh. The resulting society is cancerous and its power mechanisms are a vast bureaucracy, which variously set into motion schemes such as Program empty body, (the replacement of humans with exact viral copies), the liquefaction program, (the merging of everyone into One Man by the process of protoplasmic absorption), and the Divisionist programme, (where tiny pieces of flesh are cut off and grown into exact replicas of themselves in embryo jelly, making one person with millions of separate bodies). Burroughs sees the working of society as a machine, whatever we feed into it, it will process, so feed in, "dismantle yourself".

The teachers are already dismantled, they are cyborgs plugged into stress software from central office: goals, achievement records, objectives, inspection, educational values, these are all part of the cybernetic functioning of an ideally co-ordinated meta-body. I walk across the playground, a hunched senior teacher with a marked stare, dressed in a rough tweed suit comes up to me and offers some advice. "I’ll tell you something for free, to survive in this place, you have to act like Attila the Hun". He marches to his next lesson, he is a processional figure, a clown caught in a communal hallucination from a New Orleans Mardi Gras, forced into teaching quadratic equations, integration and the use of cosine. I begin to see the theatre of the situation. Antonin Artaud used the idea of the Theatre of Cruelty to relay the workings of society in the wake of his annihilation on the plane of social success. Arthur Rimbaud wrote about the mad twisted parade, which jostled noisily down the street as he lived it up in nineteenth century Paris. At a certain level, the dysfunctional daily reality of education, could be understood as a sick joke. It is a game of hide and seek, with the body slinking into ever weirder formations to avoid the rigorous torture of knowledge and learning, the game enacted on a stage set of societal concern and LEA funding. Yet the rules serve only to replicate themselves, it is a game which cannot be won or lost.

Deleuze and Guattari express this in terms of the plane of immanence. Society is characterised by two movements, one towards schizophrenia, the other capitalism. Both are organised and maintained by the State, fulfilling its need to become-immanent and cause generalised decoding and the replacement of coding and overcoding with its own axiomatics. At the base of this complex process, is the sterility of anti-production, the fixed points in society including conventions, institutions and impulses that provide a framework for possible social relations, but are themselves unaffected by whatever happens according to these relations. Anti-production permeates the capitalist complex, because of the universal history of debt as described by Nietzsche; it sits within the notion of the schizophrenic because of the Oedipal analysis, which takes as given the psycho-analytic concept of repression, and does not produce new figures to follow the fluctuations of schizophrenic desire in whatever direction they might be taken. Anti-Oedipus attempts to conjoin capitalism with schizophrenia. The generalised coding of social activity by capital, produces a plane of immanence or smooth space, where dysfunctional action is required to enable the development and exploitation of surplus value. The tedium of the working day, with its breaks, interruptions and repetition, is rehearsed and played out through our schools, it is the development of the schizophrenic necessity of capital, the foundation of capitalist political economy on the abstract subjective essence of wealth as theorised by Marx. Production becomes an end in itself; it is a cosmopolitan, universal energy, which overthrows every restriction and bond, yet encounters limits and barriers which are interior and immanent to itself, these limits and barriers are reproduced on a larger scale, they involve police states, the vigilance of the citizens, perhaps even war. Capitalism doesn’t work without expansion, it creates schizophrenic flows of sign-signifiers, checked and regulated by the despotism of paranoiac overcoding, continually attempting to designate some unity, or as Deleuze and Guattari put it:- "what modern State, whether it is democratic, liberal, fascistic or socialist, is not haunted by the Asiatic model of the Urstaat?".

Education may be examined from this perspective. On the one hand, the obsession with the markets, economic consideration and efficiency creates an environment of production, where the pupils are streamed and encouraged to excel to the limits of their ability, achieving qualifications, skills and knowledge. On the other, the functioning of such a machine of production, can only focus the ability of society as a whole to develop stringent and impossible criteria for the judgement of pupils. Deleuze and Guattari do not prioritise one movement over the other, they conceptualise the connection between the two. The temptation to perceive educational failure in terms of psycho-analytic concepts such as the Oedipus complex, with its repressions and catharsis, or stable categories such as schizophrenia, psychosis or neurosis, are in their terms the working of anti-production. Instead of looking at the flow of desire, which might possibly exceed and dissolve the regulatory expectations which have been determined for the pupil at that particular state of development; the irregular behaviour is pinpointed and characterised as being in need of attention by specialists. Resources, expertise and educational research are poured into the characterisation of irregularity, which, once understood, has attention withdrawn from it, and the pupils are reintroduced into mainstream, nationally regulated education. Education oscillates in this economically determined environment, and suffers from the stagnation of anti-production, which permeates its whole body with resentment, antipathy and repetition.

A different teacher approaches as I saunter into the staffroom. He wears his white lab coat proudly, and speaks in an excruciatingly loud voice. He tells of the lack of academic success which the school has recently achieved, very few pupils are reaching GCSE standard; he describes the routine misbehaviour of fights, swearing and criminal activity. Teaching for him is a holding mechanism until the pupils are forced into taking jobs; they come to school because it is more interesting than walking around on the streets, and in many ways it is safer for them to be inside the school system. On the outside their behaviour would not be tolerated, outside they will be up against the Law. Yet the school is not a sanctuary where the Law does not intervene. During that day the police are called because of something which happens in the playground, apparently a gang has attacked another gang, this involved youths from outside the establishment. It is clear that there is no narrowly defined educational space, where the parameters of restricted action, according to the liberal dictums of fair play and the value of learning may work effectively. The threat of violence and incarceration, has been internalised by the population to such an extent that the drama of its execution is enacted regularly, it gives a brief adrenaline rush and the liberation from monotony. The teacher was wrong to suggest that unruly behaviour will be treated differently on the outside. The memory of transgression is carried around by us at all times, and acts as a double bind in the formation of cultural activity in the form of Law breaking and the internalisation of the Laws which are being broken. The only difference is that teachers have not been directly handed the badge of authority which the police have come to wield. Perhaps that will come.

The school building is a run down piece of pre-fabricated design. The windows are too large, supposedly to enable clear observation of the interior of the classrooms from any angle. Yet the impression created is of rectangular goldfish bowls, irregularly fitting together at odd yet mathematically determined intersections. Small metal staircases wind up between the classes, creating multi-level environments where pupils may easily hide and congregate between lessons. Some of the buildings have already been abandoned, the others wait for dereliction and demolition as the only escape from the enforced torture of rampaging students. The school environment reinforces the resigned perceptive of the teachers, it enhances the division between them and the pupils. It functions to provide a suitable space for graffiti, it provides opportunities to escape and be found, a social meeting place amid the ruins of organised society.

Johnny Rotten said, "I don’t work, I just speed, that’s all I need". His characteristic slouch defied the encroachment of impending forces to neutralise the efficacy of punk music in the early eighties. The rigorous body politics of education, failed to leave its mark on a transient generation of punk rockers, tribalised and exhilarated around outlandish hairstyles, bondage clothing and amphetamine sulphate. The fusion of musical tribalism latterly translated and transmuted into electronic rave culture, which exploded towards the end of the eighties and through the nineties. Now, a hybrid mix of rave, dance, punk, reggae, hip-hop, techno, space-hop, trance, drum & bass and jungle animates the youth in accelerated subterranean activity. It is becoming less plausible to isolate and decry this cultural production as being the definite mark of alienation, or any suburban rebellion or reaction towards the tedium of capitalist endeavour, the two are intrinsically and irrevocably interwoven. The social scientist, Michel Maffesoli, spoke of the creation of an electronic palaver. These are groups of complex networks of association and affiliation, which respond to impersonal forces, and bubble and effervesce with a Dionysian multiplicity, unholy in the eyes of the Apollonian God. Maffesoli pointed to the study of ambience or Stimmung, as being the only way to characterise this palaver, and as he terms it, "the twilight of organisational models and their ways of thinking in the world".

The point is to stop the continual organisation of education from above. The age of grand designs of educational excellence, which are supposed to be universally implemented across the board, without any regard for the nature of the specific contact between pupil and teacher, or particular situations must come to an end. Some teachers do genuinely relish the patriarchal discipline which they have to impose to get these abstract and universal schemes of learning pragmatically into place. Others seek more subtle strategies, making friends of the pupils or encouraging their popularity in the school community, which enhances the chance of getting the lessons across without serious disruption. Yet the clever manipulation of the emotions of the students, or the rigid adherence to absolute control, does not address the fundamental malaise which is sweeping through education. That is that the bulk of the exercises which are set for the pupils are irrelevant or demeaning; the genuinely useful activities are swamped by reams of gap filling, the pupils becoming experts in excuses or pretending to be occupied, the teachers passing the time in the hope that there will not be another flare up during their time in the classroom. Inspection by Government hit squads provides the school with the opportunity to congregate the least disruptive pupils in a classroom for rigorously prepared lessons. This does nothing to tackle the real problems which are deep rooted, societal and profound.

Deleuze and Guattari have formulated the notion of schizo-analysis through the writing of Anti-Oedipus. The unconscious is invested in the social field. This realisation of desire comes about by the conjunction of flows, which is also the linking of intensities such as those which are produced in the first stages of familial reproduction. Psycho-analysis stops here, taking the infants familial intensities as the origination of the unconscious investment, and augmenting the process of familial reproduction as the means to understanding the struggle for domination involving the adult drives to make it as ego. Deleuze and Guattari extend the investment of the unconscious, or molecular unconscious as they term it, to render it able to represent the deterritorialisation of the full body of the earth, or the body without organs, or capital. Schizo-analysis is working everywhere in the production of desire. It escapes the oedipal mechanisms of repression by producing moments of universal history, that are limit thoughts, unable to be familiarly reproduced. These flows of production are exterior to the socius of capital, they cannot be reterritorialised or overcoded by despotic signifiers. The criteria for schizo-analysis are strictly immanent, they do not conform to models or stable categories, in recognition of the fundamental instability inherent within unconscious desire. In the later opus, A Thousand Plateaus, schizo-analysis is refigured in terms of rhizomatics. The rhizome characterises elements which ceaselessly vary and alter their relations with respect to others. They are multiplicities which are indivisible or relatively indivisible, they cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in nature, they are aligned with intensive qualities and libidinal motion. They feature the unrecognisable, unconscious, intensive, they are constantly dismantling and constructing, communicating, crossing over, continuous non-organizable multiplicities. The social relations produced according to rhizomatics, appear to be subterranean, nomadic and fickle from the perspective of social stratification, or the socius of sedentary capital possession.

Is it possible for the serious educationalist to utilise schizo-analysis or rhizomatics for the purposes of learning? This is perhaps not the correct question to ask. The point at stake is the activity which we now call education. It is caught in an inflexible, hierarchical structure, which serves to destroy the lives of the teachers and pupils, and produces a massive gulf between the pragmatics of the daily existence of schools, and the idealistic rhetoric which is broadcast from central office. Schizo-analysis and rhizomatics cannot be hermetically sealed into curriculum structures of learnt knowledge or pertinent analytic tools, yet they might help to give some insight into what is going on.

I wander slowly in thought to my final two lessons of the school day. In the playground, I pass through groups of girls sporting the latest in club fashion, boys leaning against the pre-fabrication, hands in pockets, sharply aware. I am suddenly caught up from behind by a frantic looking man, with large eyes on stalks below a smooth bald head. His eyebrows undulate like the rocking of a boat at sea, he wants to march ahead, though he slows to my pace as he wants to talk. He says that he will be giving his lessons in the room next to mine; he has a deep Irish accent, tinged with paranoia and regret. In my class the pupils arrive intermittently, though with no real fuss. I do not impose the imbecilic task that has been set by the usual teacher, however, some pupils do get on with it, others sit and chat, others still talk to me, the lesson passes calmly and uneventfully. Suddenly from the cavernous vaults from which screams originate, a bellowing can be heard from next-door. My door opens, and the Irish teacher lurches in, demanding that I come to his room to see to his class. He points exaggeratedly to a small laughing girl and remonstrates that according to the 1988 Education Act, he has the right not to teach any pupil he wants, and that he does not want to teach her. I soon rejoin my class, and the lesson next door passes painfully with an organised banging of desks, the calling of senior teachers, the expulsion of half the class. The next lesson is not much better, and as I try to swiftly avoid anymore contact with this ruffled educationalist, he catches me on the stairs and orders me to tell the headmistress that he is keeping his class for half an hour after school for serious misbehaviour. Needless to say I got straight into my car and drove home, listening to techno music, wondering about schizo-analysis.