A.N. Other, B.N. Other (eds.), Title of Book, 00–00. © 2007 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. DAVID R. COLE A MINOR PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1 Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. Franz Kafka INTRODUCTION When we approach contemporary philosophy of education we might feel like Kafka tackling the bureaucratic structures of 20th century European civilization. Where should we start? How can we make sense of governmental interference in education and societal concerns that are manipulated by politicians in order to get more votes? This chapter proposes a synthesis of the mode of poststructuralism put forward by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1986) in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, so that it is applicable to the qualitative analysis of educational data. In particular, this approach to using Deleuze & Guattari’s method for literary analysis links power with language and action. The language of teachers and students in the many folds of the educational machine of liberal democracies, gives insights into the structures and the relationships that they are speaking about. These perceptions are manifold, and they may be described with reference to the desires and fears of the occupants of the system and a minor philosophy. Philip Goodchild (1996) has described the minor philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari as possessing three characteristics: 1. The concepts involved have crossed a threshold of absolute deterritorialization. This means that the relationships with language, meaning and implementation are fluid and interchangeable. 2. Everything takes on a collective meaning. 3. Power concerns that are inimical to articulation are henceforth reversed. This connects language with expression and subjectivity; in that when an individual talks through the spectrum of this philosophy, the desires that are portrayed are not personal (pp. 56-58). Poststructuralism is in this context a guiding light that may help to reverse the dominance of instrumental reason by allowing the very words and desires of the individuals caught up in the machinic processing of the West to be drawn forth and live as links between the qualitative unconscious or the linguistic imaginary in education, and the general principles of control that act to regulate the system 2 . This approach takes away the binding pressure to generalise or to quantify or to find qualitative principles that may define limited or redundant aspects of the already reduced and educated self. In fact, this aspect of educational