Post-Identitarian Postgraduate Pedagogy: Deleuzian Mediation and Resistance to ‘Measuring Up’

’Measuring up’ in postgraduate education implies correctness, correspondence and conformity to institutional and governmental imperatives. Following Deleuze, such imperatives are conceptualised in this article as neoliberal striation of educational space. Two corollaries of the marketisation of higher education and neoliberal instrumentalism are fearful compliance and a lexicon in which truth or freedom has no place. The authors explore the affective dimension of learning which neoliberal educational discourse renders invisible. Deleuze, like Foucault, defines truth as unhiddenness or the making visible of things that would otherwise remain hidden. Deleuzian truth-telling is the production of a problem that must be recognised as such and mediation is an essential feature of praxis as resistance. The authors explain the role of mediators using examples drawn from their own academic and teaching practices. Going beyond critique is an important theme of this article. The authors problematise a recent implicit suggestion that teacher educators disregard fearful compliance and instead prioritise the conceptualisation of the joy in learning in the present. A later characterisation of good academic research, as research which shows us that we are freer than we think we are, is endorsed as it mediates transgression of neopositivist orthodoxies. Mediation implies a field of sub-personal intensities in which, following Foucault, being oneself no longer makes sense or, following Deleuze, subjectivity is paradoxically both collective and individual.