Our affective resistance in this round utilizes a pedagogy of biopolitical reason to challenge structural biopower and hegemonic structures of power. That interpretation uniquely informs praxis---debate as an educational institution is hegemonic but can be deterritorialized through speech acts and inform rebellious movements.

Resources of the commons, such as free education, are continually renewable. If we read a text, offer an interpretation, discern a new truth in science, this by no means limits anyone else in doing the same. On the contrary, interpretations and new science proliferate when people are encouraged to build off the exchange of ideas, affects and interpretations. This on its own should be a justification for offering free K–12 and higher education! The logic of consumption distorts our view of the commons. For example, we are not running out of fossil fuels, in fact, there are too many deposits, and they should be left in the ground. Education should promote a fundamental shift in the logic of production from utter con- sumption of the commons to the proliferation of the commons (p. 300).

In Canada, Latin America, and New Zealand indigenous curricula and pedagogies that promote non-exploitative relationships and communal living are gaining ground thanks to community and indigenous activism. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista movement led to the establishment of autonomous education for indigenous Tzetsal youth in which children learn, alongside literacy and numeracy, skills for political resistance, col- lective democratic engagement, caring for land, gender equality and the revolutionary role of women, etc. (Barronet and Ortega Brena, 2008). In Canada, aboriginal communities have engaged in democratic politics through dissensus in the name of equality (Rancière and Corcoran, 2010; Bazzul, 2015). Indigenous political actions break down artiicial dichoto- mies between natural and social commons. The Idle No More movement advocates a view of rivers, lakes, and non-humans, as part of the same commons and deserving of equal consideration—something unthinkable to a modern juridical mindset. Such activist movements are alter-futures (much like Hardt and Negri’s concept of altermodernity), a combina- tion of democratic thinking and communal forms of life. Idle No More employed social media to (re)produce commons resources, understand- ings, and labor needed to ight for just futures. Educators whose aim is to produce a common livable world must challenge colonial discourses and ontologies, where land is viewed only as a ‘natural resource’ for human consumption rather than that which we are ecologically embedded within and part of (Barad, 2007; Watts, 2013). As we shall see in the next section assemblage thinking can help educators and students envision something new. Education for the commons recognizes that the long-term project is one of (re)production, something continually (re)made:

The common is thus in a paradoxical position as being a ground or a pre- supposition that is also the result of the process. Our analysis, then, from this point on in our research should be aimed not at ‘being common’ but ‘making the common.’ (Hardt and Negri, p. 123)

Emancipatory education and social struggles have their basis in the common, not simply as a ‘resource’, but ‘an inexhaustible source of innovation and creativity’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, pp. 111–112). The commons consists of a multitude of singularities, subjectivities formed along the lines of sex/gender, race, culture, class, spirituality and beyond.3 Engagement with the commons is therefore an engagement with alter- ity, as the commons sets the stage for interactions with singularities and becoming. Encountering alterity begins a critique of what we have taken for granted as other or self, as well as processes of becoming autonomous that arise from the production of a shared commons (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 122; Slater and Griggs, 2015).

A pedagogy of the commons employs (bio)political reason to intervene in the controlling forces of biopower that employ education as a way to maintain a White/Eurocentric/global capitalist/neocolonial vision of the world (Bazzul, 2014; Tolbert and Schindel Dimick, in press). Engaging biopolitically means (re)working forces of biopower from below toward different forms of eco-social relations—life in the service of the commons (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 125). Whereas the traditional notion poses the common as a natural world outside of society, the biopolitical conception of the common permeates equally all spheres of life .... We might call this an ‘ecology of the common—an ecol- ogy focused equally on nature and society, on humans and the non-human world in a dynamic of interdependence, care, and mutual transformation.’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 171)

The struggle over subjectivity is integral to the commons, and therefore biopolitical in that forms of life (subjectivities) come together in cooperation to (re)produce the commons.

The Metropolis is an extremely important site for (bio)political strug- gle and producing the commons today, as cities are ideal locations for interactions of the multitude and immaterial labor. Facing down neolib- eral restructuring of public schooling through coalitions of teachers, students, and parents is also a form of building the commons. Such coalitions create spaces where common interests, knowledges, relationships, and forms of life grow. At the same time the commons are a creative entity always in danger of enclosure—sometimes for purported social or ecologi- cal good. Figure 4.1 diagrams some enclosures of the commons through the privatization of life (e.g. genetic, educational). Biopolitical struggle is inherent to all ields of education including science education, where the (re)production of biotechnological labor is often in conlict with science for the common good (Bazzul, 2012; Bencze and Carter, 2011; Pierce, 2013). If scientiic knowledge is produced in-common and belongs to all, why should it be appropriated, enclosed by companies such as NovartisTM and MonsantoTM, and not just along global capital lines, but along those of nationality, gender, and race (Shiva, 2000).

Developing education for the commons, may involve developing more qualitative indicators of both growth (and corruption) of the commons, since it exceeds the use of metrics (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Education for the commons must move away from reproducing what Hardt and Negri (2009, p. 159) identify as corrupt forms of the common—systems of organization geared to the needs of certain individuals and not what is common to all. Some examples of this corruption are nepotistic practices, the chauvinist (nationalist) nation state and its blind adherence to mythic natural origins, the rule of private property, ethnocentrisms, racisms, het- eronormativity, and the corporation—a parasite of the commons for the accumulation of (bio)capital. The following educational goals are relevant for fostering the biopolitical production of the commons:

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Maximizing Free Accessibility of Knowledge—Education must facili- tate access to knowledge and give all students the competencies and tools to access this knowledge.

• Flattening Hierarchies—Education for the commons involves tearing down structural and pedagogical hierarchies (see Freire, 1972; hooks, 1994; Hardt, 2011).

• Preservation of the ‘Natural’ Commons—Education must employ rationalities toward the service of life, ecology and relations between humans and non-humans.

• Trouble the ‘Expert’—Educational communities must de-privilege the voices of experts who tell us we have no alternative (like the ‘TINA’ rhetoric of neoliberalism).

• Inclusiveness—Radical inclusion should engage subjectivities at the precarious edges of politics as they have the greatest knowledge of, and ability to challenge, practices of biopower.

Education for the commons employs the power of the commons, which is greater than imperial or corporate power. Classroom communities can envision assemblages of the commons to help forge an escape from privat interests and state institutions that would contain/exploit the commons. Figure 4.1 lays out some dimensions of biopolitical engagement within the commons, including the role of cities, privatization, and collectivist practices.

Neither private interests nor state power can fully contain the commons because the commons belongs to the multitude of singularities that comprise it. What is common goes beyond any force trying to control it—its productive form is rhizomatic, rebellious, and unwieldy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

The ‘multitude’ can be thought of as an assemblage of human and non-human forms of life along with abiotic factors that make life possible. Through the expansion and interaction of the multitudes a myriad of possibilities emerge. At the same time, hierarchies, walls, and relations of power that would co-opt and capture this expansion are also parts of assemblages. This is not to say that struggles to produce and maintain the commons are not organized, nor are they separate from modes of economic production. Quite the contrary, social and economic (re)production ultimately stems from the commons—which is why it must be the center of educational life and pedagogies of love and collective being (Freire, 1972; Hardt and Negri, 2009). The next section introduces the concept of assemblages as a way for students and teachers to elucidate the commons as the product of a multitude of singularities, along with its biopolitical character.

Part 2: (re)drawing the Commons with deleuze and guattari’s assemblages

Conceiving of the commons as complex assemblages helps provide a critical, ontological dimension to transformative research and pedagogy. Deleuze (1988) describes diagrams as machines of discursive and non-discursive content simultaneously. They either help others create or understand—or they fail. Diagrams can offer a visual representation of the natural and social commons for critical, and politically engaged, pedagogy. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) emphasis on ontology fuses the actual with the virtual—what does exist with what could exist—in order to imagine new animal/plant/non-human/human relationships.4 Noel Gough (2004) encourages educators to re-imagine education as a material-semiotic assemblage caught up in socio-technological networks, where connecting with these assemblages means taking into account non- organic, non-human entities. Assemblages, expressed here as diagram- matics, merge materialities, practices, discourses, ecological dependencies, and institutional arrangements as an assembly of intra-acting5 parts, as well as relations of force that stabilize an arrangement or direct it toward a certain purpose. Diagramming assemblages is a way to palpitate, or tease out, multiplicities, imagine modes of becoming, trace rigid structures, and open possibilities for different actors and networks. This chapter offers three diagrammatic assemblages as a way of imagining (bio)political engagement and the commons: a Topology of the Commons (Fig. 4.1); Lines of Flight (Fig. 4.2); and the Tar Sands Struggle (Fig. 4.3).

Assemblages describe how parts of a system relate and co-constitute each other, as well as ways of knowing and doing (Barad, 2007; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Immanent becoming is the terrain of the assem- blage; and diagramming assemblages clears space for different thoughts and forms of collective action (Ford, 2014). The parts or entities of an assemblage have various histories: social, material, cultural, ecological, bio- logical, physical, ideological, ictional, mythological etc., that provide a socio-material account of the interplay between plants, animals, peoples (privileged and oppressed), institutions, relations of power, and geologic and evolutionary forces. This point of historicity means that assemblages

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are simultaneously discursive and social, biological, and material. As Karen Barad (2007) asks, ‘If biological forces are in some sense always already historical ones, could it be that there is also some important sense in which historical forces are always already biological’ (p. 65)?

Educational institutions, networks, and practices figure into assem- blages both as mechanisms of control and (bio)political intervention. Assemblages consist of material and discursive parts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and can be ‘free-lowing’ (deterritorialized) or ‘bound-up’ (reter- ritorialized) and discursively over-coded with various coding systems such as laws, speech acts, DNA. Figure 4.2 demonstrates the concepts of reter- ritorialization, deterritorialization, lines of light, and overcoding in rela- tion to the commons. In addition, the differences between arborescent structures and rhizomatic lines of light can be made visible as forces of control, subversion and becoming.

The part to whole relationship is vital to understanding assemblages. Parts of an assemblage, for example, a classroom or body of water have contextually speciic capacities, and when they intra-act they have emer- gent properties that cannot be attributed to the individual parts (see Bazzul and Kayumova, 2015; Delanda, 2006). The intra-action between entities in assemblages separates them from collections. Parts can be separated fromone assemblage and ‘plugged’ into another resulting in new capacities and emergent properties. In this way, performativity is inherent in assemblages, where the semblance of a uniied whole is actually a performance of inter- acting capacities that change depending on how parts are itted together. Assemblages are irreducible in that they can’t be reduced to the sum of their parts, yet decomposable in that they can be broken apart and reformed into different assemblages with different emergent properties, performing dif- ferent functions. Assemblages trouble totalities like ‘society’ and ‘humanity’ (Delanda, 2006). The intra-actions of the parts of an assemblage (multiplic- ities) enact processes, including processes of making the social and natural commons. Diagramming assemblages can help locate both what is con- straining and enabling to these processes.6 Figure 4.3 is an example of the political problem of the Tar Sands, diagrammed as an assemblage.

Diagramming assemblages allows educators to consider forces that appropriate and exploit the commons, including the labor and subjec- tivities of the multitude. For example, when thinking about the socio- political context of charter schools in the United States, the language, affects, and capital, operationalized by arborescent structures such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, can be diagrammed and visualized. In Fig. 4.3, forces, peoples, and institutions that keep the Tar Sands operat- ing at the expense of communities as well as productive forces that ight against enclosure of the commons via resource extraction can be related together. Assemblages allow educational communities to determine lines of light, or modes of deterritorialization, away from rigid, authoritarian, and destructive structures. These lines of light are vital to political movements, because as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it: ‘there is always something that lows or lees, that escapes binary organization, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a change of values, the youth, women, the mad and so on’ (p. 216).

What Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue for in A Thousand Plateaus is a focus on the ontological production of social life: unhinging the ixity of things to imagine how they can be re-materially assembled, disassembled, or altered. What we are also seeking through the use of assemblages are alternative forms of subjectivity—to imagine alternative powers. If we say that the ‘subject’ of an assemblage is multiple, as all subjectivities are, we must acknowledge at least three points:

1. The subject exists only in relation to other entities,

2. The subject is a location of multiplicity since the term ‘subject’ itself is understood to be a linguistic construction and an effect of power, and3. An individual’s complete subjectivity can never be truly ‘captured’

(Foucault, 1977; Butler, 1997).

Working with assemblages helps facilitate a reconstitution of parts/ entities to bring about (bio)political, queer events—new monsters on the horizon. Desire as a creative, revolutionary force immanent to assem- blages can challenge the existing social order (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Styhre, 2002). The problem is that the social order can arrange communally harmful interests that act as a capture for desire. An impor- tant goal of education should be to refocus desire toward the produc- tion and preservation of the commons. Assemblages of the natural and social commons—bird populations, community gardens, a university—all embody particular conigurations of desire. Diagramming assemblages can involve outlining how desire is invested in certain consumerist interests at the expense of environmental justice, as well as, how communities can harness desire for making and protecting the commons. Deterritorializing from the capitalist structures and arrangements meant to capture and harness our desire will come from heterogeneous, plural, and collective modes of thought and action (Gough and Price, 2009).

Finally, if assemblages afford new ways of being, questions of ethics emerge. Karen Barad (2007) articulates the ethics of intra-connectivity, as providing the ability for entities, ecosystems, and organisms to respond, that is, an allowance of becoming. However this ethos is even more enliv- ened when we conceive of being in assemblages as an ethico-political problem of the commons. Assemblages of the common would not only allow entities to respond with forms of self-determination, but insist that responses allow the commons to grow by providing the material conditions of becoming for all. Assemblages without emancipatory political considerations are more likely to embody an ethos of continued destruc- tion and inequality—especially if controlling forces of modernity, private property, colonialism, and white supremacy envelop all forms of life.