PRISM Journal PRISM Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.24377/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302202 https://doi.org/10.24377/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302202 21 © 2021 PRISM, ISSN: 2514-5347 White Man face, order words and deviance detectors: A Deleuzoguattarian analysis of fundamental British values Francis Farrell Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK (farrellf@edgehill.ac.uk.ac.uk) Received: 14/10/2020 Accepted for publication: 18/02/2021 Published: 27/04/2021 Abstract This article is a critical discussion of the requirement placed upon teachers by the United Kingdom (UK) government to promote fundamental British values. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the White Man face, I argue that fundamental British values operate as a racial deviance detector whose purpose is to discipline, reform and reintegrate student and teacher subjects who do not conform to the norms of state sanctioned British identity fundamental British values define. To dismantle the British values policy assemblage, the article calls for experimental anti- racist educational alliances that question and reveal the power structures that give rise to the racial politics of the White Man face. Keywords: Fundamental British values, Deleuze and Guattari, Civic nationalism, White Man face. 1. The ‘Mission of Integration’ In her 2018 speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, Amanda Spielman, HM Chief Inspector of Education in England, stated that the teaching of the British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect are at the heart of the UK government’s strategy to promote integration and a common vision. Young people in Britain, she argues, are vulnerable to exploitation by extremists and therefore require the teaching of British values, because ‘if we leave these topics to the likes of the EDL and BNP on the one hand and Islamists on the other, then the mission of integration will fail’ (Spielman, 2018). In her 2019 speech at the Wellington Festival of Education, she reiterated this message stating that ‘it is so important that all these values are taught, understood and lived’ and that ‘school is how and where we make sure that every young British citizen ends up with the same level of understanding’ (Spielman, 2019). Viewed from an uncritical perspective, British values are simply the reassertion of liberal values in the face of an extreme terror threat. However, I argue that British values are the culmination of a discursive shift in education policy from multiculturalism (Runnymede, 1985) and post war discourses of equal opportunity (Favell, A. 2001), to a ‘new integrationism’ (Kundnani, 2007). Fundamental British values (FBVs) were formally introduced to British education policy and practice in https://doi.org/10.24377/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302202 https://doi.org/10.24377/10.24377/prism.ljmu.0302202 https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/prism/ mailto:farrellf@edgehill.ac.uk.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0733-2572 PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 22 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) 2012 as a requirement of the teachers’ professional standards, but they have their origins in a wider political discourse that emerged in response to the 9/11 Al- Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre, the 2001 riots in northern British towns, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2005 7/7 terror attacks in London. They are part of a broader governmental narrative that argues ‘that a national story of Britishness must be promoted in order to bind the nation together around a set of core values, to which minorities must assimilate’ (Kundnani, 2007, p. 24). However, Britain has no written constitution. FBVs were not formulated through democratic parliamentary debate, instead, they originate in Prevent, the UK government’s counter terror strategy. FBVs are the end point of a policy journey from the liberal pluralism of the Swann report (Runnymede, 1985) to a defensive form of twenty-first century governmental civic nationalism. Civic nationalism, as defined by Michael Ignatieff, envisages ‘the nation as a community of equal, rights- bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’ (Ignatieff, 1994, pp. 3-4). However, the civic nationalism of FBVs places those who adhere to national civic values in opposition to those it positions as culturally different. It is a paradoxical liberalism, which requires Ofsted inspectors to question female Muslim primary school children about the Muslim veil and warns that religious minorities cannot expect ‘cultural entitlements’ (Spielman as cited in Weale, 2018) whilst simultaneously espousing religious tolerance (DfE, 2014). Viewed from the critical perspective of this paper, ‘the mission of integration’ takes on a disciplinary meaning, laden with anti- Muslim messages, ‘it is their cultural difference which needs limits placed on it; it is they who must declare their allegiance to (ill-defined) British values’ (Kundnani, 2007, p. 26). 2. Aims of the paper With a specific focus on FBVs, I aim to problematise the civic nationalist turn in UK education policy by using Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of racism as tools to examine its discursive power effects on student and teacher subjectivity. To provide context, I begin with a critical genealogy of the British values discourse outlining a policy journey from integration to securitization. In the sections which follow, I explore Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the racial representationalism operating through difference-by- degree and the White Man face, their image for hegemonic whiteness. Drawing from a range of critical literature and empirical interview material, I argue that the FBVs requirement functions through language and symbolism to form a racial deviance detector whose purpose is to discipline, reform and reintegrate student and teacher bodies who do not conform to the norms of state-sanctioned British identity. Unlike dialectical accounts of racism that focus on its Othering effects, Deleuze and Guattari argue that racism functions through difference-by-degree, by determining the extent to which a person deviates from the racial norm they refer to as the White Man face by reintegrating those it has marked as racial deviants: ‘From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p.208). In place of structural linguistics which understands language as informational and communicative, Deleuze and Guattari propose pragmatics, a critical ‘politics of language’ which interprets policy discourse as ‘action, a way of doing things in words’ (St Pierre, 2016, p. 1085). Through an original application of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory this paper aims to demonstrate and reveal what FBV policy does to student and teacher subjects. The article concludes with a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s micro politics and calls for experimental anti-racist educational alliances that question and reveal the power structures that give rise to the racial politics of the White Man face. 3. From integration to securitization In this section I examine the history behind the unprecedented levels of regulation and surveillance introduced through the FBVs policy assemblage. Vociferous debates about multiculturalism, belonging and British identity have been a feature of British education policy since the late 1960s but in 2001 a series of riots took place in northern towns and cities PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 23 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) (Burnley, Bradford, Leeds, Oldham and Stoke-on-Trent) which led to a new government strategy called ‘community cohesion’ (Worley, 2005). The report, commissioned in the aftermath of the riots and chaired by Ted Cantle, Associate Director of the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government, referred to communities of primarily Asian Muslim origin as living ‘parallel lives’ (Cantle, 2001). Instead of asking how society excludes Muslims the report asked why it was that Muslims were refusing to integrate (Kundnani, 2007). 4. New Labour, Britishness and Christianity In its recommendations, the Cantle report argued for common values and shared civic culture (Cantle, 2001). The notion of shared values was pivotal to New Labour education policy. Home secretary David Blunkett stated that he was weary of ‘unbridled multiculturalism which privileges difference over community cohesion’ (Blunkett in Mathieu, 2018, 47) and Church schools were singled out by both Prime Minister Tony Blair and David Blunkett as exemplary in the promotion of shared values. In 2001, in a speech to the Christian Socialist movement, Blair stated that ‘Church schools are a true partnership between the churches and the government’ and ‘a pillar of our national education system’ (Blair in Jivraj, 2013, p. 324). Blunkett stated that Church schools had an ethos that he wanted to ‘bottle’, thus privileging a type of Christianity closely identified with shared national values (Jivraj, 2013). The events of the 9/11 al Qaeda terror attacks and the 7/7 attacks in the UK added another dimension to the integrationist shared values discourse: security. The response of New Labour was the implementation of Prevent (DCLG, 2007), a strand of the government’s counter terror strategy CONTEST (Home Office, 2003). Prevent involved funding local authorities in areas with high Muslim populations through engagement projects such as youth work. However, extensive police involvement led to criticism of the strategy for securitizing British Muslims (Thomas, 2016; Kundnani, 2007). 5. Muscular British values New Labour left office in 2010 and the Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition formed, led by Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron. In February 2011 Cameron delivered a speech to the Munich Security Council denouncing ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism’ (Cameron, 2011a) asserting national values in defence of ‘our way of life’ (Cameron, 2011a). Cameron proposed ‘muscular liberalism’ in place of multiculturalism. In December he made a speech to Church of England clergy to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible declaring that ‘We [Britain] are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so’ (Cameron, 2011b). Cameron stated that a return to Christian values was necessary to counter Islamic extremism and moral collapse. He equated Christian values with British values claiming that the Bible provided, ‘a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today’ (Cameron, 2011b). Soon after the speech the Coalition government sent every school in the country a copy of the King James Bible which contained a foreword by education secretary, Michael Gove. Cameron’s speeches utilize Anglican Christianity and British values as the standard to which all must conform, but this Christian underpinning of universal values, ‘circulates as a discourse of good citizenship’, conceals a raced hierarchy, ‘and orientalist configurations about non-Christianness’ (Jivraj, 2013, p. 333). In 2012 British values, framed as ‘fundamental British values’, officially entered the statutory professional frameworks of the DfE teachers’ standards which outline the minimum level of professional practice required of teachers working in the state sector. FBVs were introduced as a requirement placed upon teachers ‘not to undermine fundamental British values’, defined as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and respect for faiths (DfE, 2014). The definition was taken from Prevent which defines extremism as ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ (Prevent, 2019). PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 24 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) In 2014, the Sunday Times reported on an anonymous letter received by Birmingham City Council making allegations of a plot by ultra conservative Muslims to infiltrate the governing bodies of several Birmingham Academy schools. The plot became known as the Trojan horse affair. The letter was exposed as a hoax, but it had significant implications for British values policy. In response, Michael Gove, Education secretary, initiated a full investigation of the schools in question led by the former head of the Metropolitan police counter–terrorism unit. Nationally, schools were threatened by no-notice Ofsted inspections to monitor Islamic extremism in the classroom. The requirement not to undermine and to uphold FBV was strengthened by additional government guidance that required schools to ‘actively promote fundamental British values’ (DfE, 2014, p. 4) through cross-curricular spiritual, moral, social and cultural education (SMSC). In 2015 the Counter Terrorism and Security Act was passed which placed the Prevent duty upon schools and colleges to ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ (Great Britain Parliament, 2015). High-stakes school inspections now include consideration of how settings promote FBV and the Prevent duty. Failure to do so leads to a judgement of ‘inadequate’ and to school closure. This genealogy traces an intensification of the State’s gaze upon suspect communities targeted for regulation and intervention. FBVs are the culmination of a policy narrative that regards ‘a plurality of values’, as ‘problematic’ and asserts that ‘an absence of social cohesion is the product of an absence of core values’ (Revell and Bryan, 2018, p. 28). From the perspective of this paper, FBVs mask a disciplinary security agenda within the language of democracy and tolerance. There is disingenuity in the way in which Britishness has been mobilized for political purposes when ideas of nation are deeply entwined with race (Parekh, 2000; Clarke & Garner, 2009). As Vincent argues, what appears to be the state asserting a benign universalism is in fact a form of polarised identity politics and an attempt to integrate others, especially Muslim others (Vincent, 2018). This is a contradictory intolerant tolerance that asserts that no polity can be stable unless all its members share a common national identity. 6. Critical literature Miah (2017) notes that the problematics of race, security and education have received relatively limited attention by scholars working in the sociology of race. Studies in race and education which adopt a Deleuzean approach are even rarer. This paper aims to advance the contribution of Deleuzoguattarian theory to critical education scholarship by applying Deleuze’s critical theoretical ‘tools’ (Deleuze, as cited in Lotringer, 1996, p 76) to FBV, but firstly consideration will be given to the wider literature and key themes it identifies. The earliest studies highlight the assimilationist discourse of new Labour community cohesion policy (Jerome & Clemitshaw, 2012). Keddie (2014) found evidence of support for FBV amongst some teachers who believed it would promote social cohesion. Smith’s investigation of teacher views (Smith 2016) found that FBV reinforced ‘us and them’ ways of thinking, reflecting Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that racism works through binarisation (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b). Panjwani’s study (2016) investigated Muslim teachers’ views of FBV, revealing concerns that Prevent would transform them into government watchdogs. Similarly, Elton-Chalcraft et al (2016, p. 1) concluded that FBV positions teachers as instruments of state surveillance. Other studies have drawn upon Foucault’s concepts of discipline and governmentality (Farrell, 2016; Farrell & Lander, 2019; Bryan, 2017), racist nativism (Smith, 2016), policy enactment theory (Bamber et al. 2019) and Baumann’s concept of liquid modernity (Revell and Bryan, 2018) to theorise teacher enactments of FBVs. Winter and Mills (2018) emphasise the ways in which FBVs operate through a neoliberal tactic of political amnesia and disavowal of the legacies of colonialism. Vincent (2018) argues that a de- theologised post-secular Christianity shapes civic values in education policy, reflecting Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the relationship between Christianity and Western racism. Of the small body of literature on learner identity and FBVs, dominant themes focus on the ways in which security policy in education constructs young Muslims as vulnerable and in need of correction (Coppock, 2014; Green, 2017; Pihlaja, 2017; PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 25 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) Thomas, 2011). These studies align to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the processes of ‘subjectification’ at work in racial policy assemblages. Miah (2017) describes these processes as constitutive of the ‘Muslim problematic’ and Shain (2011) outlines how young male Muslims have been pathologized as the new ‘folk devils’. Drawing from UK and Australian examples, Rowe argues that hegemonic Whiteness operates to define shared values, with the result that Muslims are cast ‘as problems that need to be addressed’ (Rowe, 2020, p.57). As this review has shown, a Deleuzoguattarian analysis complements much of the critical scholarship on FBV, but it also offers new ways of thinking about race as difference-in-itself and for problematizing the technologies that neoliberal state racism uses to reform and assimilate bodies it has marked as deviant. 7. Deleuze, Guattari and fundamental British values Deleuze described his theories as ‘tools’ to reveal and undermine the effects of power at its most insidious and invisible (Deleuze in Lotringer, 1996, p.76). The following section begins with a discussion of ‘difference’, leading into a detailed exposition of the concept of the White Man face and the ways in which racialised norms are mobilized through discourse as ‘order words’. a. Difference Speaking to journalists in 2012, Eric Pickles, Coalition Communities Secretary, challenged, ‘those who want to disown the traditions of the majority, including the Christian faith and the English language’ (Walford, 2012). His words mirror Deleuze and Guattari’s description of assimilatory racism that follows the logics of ‘difference-by-degree’ and asserts that ‘there are only people who should be like us’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). From the point of view of difference-by- degree someone or something is different to the extent that they differ from some standard or universal point of reference. In the case of FBV, difference-by-degree operates by determining the extent to which students and teachers deviate from the racial standard signified by the adjective British. In contrast to difference-by- degrees, Deleuze proposes a theory of positive difference, ‘difference-in-itself’ (Deleuze, 2014), internal to all things, an, ‘irreducible affirmative difference within being itself’ (Secor, 205, p. 299). However, in the securitised context of the post 9/11 world diversity as difference-in-itself ‘no longer commands respect because ‘it has become conditional on a new duty to integrate at the level of shared values’ (McGhee as cited in Habib, 2018, p. 13). FBVs operates according to the logic of difference-by-degrees by functioning as a normative standard that all must conform to. Deleuze and Guattari refer to these sorts of policy enactments as ‘social machines’ that code, discipline and produce subjectivities. The type of machine at work in the FBV/Prevent policy assemblage is a system that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘faciality’, the White Man face. The function of faciality is the production of normality. At one level, faciality operates through and produces actual ‘concrete’ faces, literal visages which can be seen in the way capitalist society imposes a certain appearance upon bodies. Posters, advertising imagery and social media such as Instagram and Facebook besiege users with psychic and physical clichés in the form of ‘faces’ that come as, ‘ready-made perceptions’ (Deleuze as cited in Harper & Savat, 2016, p. 51) that users can ‘slide into’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 207). When internalized, these social messages produce subjectivity providing ‘the co- ordinates and contours that allow the signifying subject to emerge’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 311). Language is key to this process of subject formation. For Deleuze and Guattari language is illocutionary and performative, constituting the objects of which it speaks through a process of interpellation they call ‘signifiance’. Ultimately, as will be demonstrated, this analysis has critical implications for the ways in which student and teacher subjects are positioned in the web of signifiance mobilized by FBV. b. White Man face In the faciality chapter of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b), Deleuze and Guattari use racism as an example of the faciality social machine. The faciality ‘plateau’ is entitled Year Zero, ‘the year zero of PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 26 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) Christ and the historical development of the White Man’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 196). This racial standard of the White Man face is inextricably linked to the global dominance of white European culture, imperialism, and ‘the semiotic of capitalism’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). Deleuze and Guattari are referring to the ways in which Christianity and colonialism have operated in ideological and theological concert to justify racism and slavery (Saldanha, as cited in Saldanha & Adams, 2013, p. 18). The power of the white man is symbolized by the face of Christ. The standard ‘face’ is Christian, white, rational, civilizing, ‘it is Christ…the typical European’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 206). Just as the face of Christ in orthodox iconography looks out in judgement (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 216), the racist faciality system functions through a process of judgement Deleuze and Guattari (2013b) call, ‘the computation of normalities’ (p. 208). The White Man face is the raced norm, the ‘transcendental signifier’ that allows judgement to operate according to difference-by- degrees by judging the degree to which those who pass under its gaze deviate or conform to its racial standard. It is key to note that the political rhetoric accompanying British values draws upon Anglican Christianity as an expression of the disciplinary forces of the White Man face in operation. British identity is saturated with racial meanings (Clarke & Garner, 2009), therefore in FBV policy Britishness operates as the White Man face, ‘the identity through which all other identities are ranked and organised’ (Revell & Bryan, 2018, p. 28). To convey the visceral power of ‘signifiance’ to define, delimit and construct subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari use the image of a white wall or screen. As a theoretical device this image works at the level of abstraction, the virtual, but of course this abstract system of representation becomes concrete when it is mobilized through racism, ‘the faces are virtual whereas the experiences are actual’ (Rushton as cited in Harper & Savat, 2016, p. 40). The white wall of signifiance operates through language to code and normalise subjectivities but in doing so it produces subject positions Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘redundancies’ or ‘black holes.’ Like a literal black hole, these redundancies are occlusions that restrict agency or ‘becomings’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013 b, p. 318). Baker et al. (2013) detailed a 143-million-word corpus analysis of the representation of Muslims in the British press between 1998 and 2009 to demonstrate the way news media construct Muslims as a homogeneous group at odds with Western values. The cumulative effect of these representations is to legitimise an essentialist racialized view that imposes a restrictive wall like limit on Muslim identity, reflecting Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the normalising force of the White Man face: ‘You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the black hole’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013 b, p. 212). This process of subject formation is called subjectification. As a racial and social sorting machine White Man face detects difference through the ‘computation of normalities’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). Human subjects are categorized according to biunivocal relationships, ‘an x or a y’, man/woman, rich/poor, white or black’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 207), and in the case of FBV, British or un-British: ‘Given a concrete face, the machine judges whether it passes or not…at every moment, the machine rejects faces that do not conform, or seem suspicious…at any rate you’ve been recognized, the abstract machine has you inscribed in its overall grid…as deviance detector’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). Empirical studies have shown how young Muslims, endure the constant dissonance entailed by pressure to conform to racial norms (Farrell & Lander, 2019; Green 2017; Mythen, 2009; Pihlaja, 2017; Shazhadi, 2018; Thomas, 2016). They are aware of the deviance detectors at work in the media, for example, Mythen et al. (2009) found that the effects of binarizing media discourses compelled their participants to constantly qualify their allegiances, exemplified by the response ‘I’m a Muslim, but I’m not a terrorist’ (p. 743). Similarly, Green’s study of young Muslims in Tower Hamlets reveals a strong identification with a Britishness which contrasts with their daily experiences of living with media misrepresentations of Islam, routine micro- PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 27 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) aggressions, pressure to secularise and Ofsted ‘camped out’ in their multi-cultural college. c. ‘Be like us’ A key feature of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the White Man face is their description of the ways in which the white wall of signifiance continuously expands in a manner that reflects the soft disciplinary power at work through policies such as FBVs. Because ‘the white wall is always expanding’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208), it operates as an apparatus of capture by assimilating anybody that it cannot initially compute. There are ways to be an admissible Muslim subject, but only if one conforms to the standards set by the White Man face. The White Man face judges the extent to which a racialised subject deviates from its norm and then endeavours to reintegrate the ‘deviant’ subject into the majoritarian racial order. Racism functions by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White Man face, which endeavours to integrate non-conforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto…. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). This assimilatory process is evident in discourses of community cohesion such as Prevent, which ‘judges’ communities targeted as suspect and invests resources into their reintegration (Thomas, 2016). The racism of the British values assemblage propagates ‘waves of sameness’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). Post 9/11 civic and ethnic nationalist discourse sends a message to Muslim citizens that you are welcome only if you set your, ‘differences-clothing, identity, and beliefs- aside’ (Monshipouri, as cited in Cesari, 2010, p. 47). FBVs are codes for meanings other than the tolerance they espouse, their function is primarily that of ‘capture’ as, ‘strategies by which those at risk from radicalisation can be reintegrated back into liberal society’ (Revell & Bryan, 2018, p. 56). The message of FBVs is ‘be like us’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208). FBVs espouse ‘tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’ but this is a tactic masking their assimilatory purpose. Neoliberal multiculturalism is a socio-political tool that is used to manage and control difference in which the state sets the terms. The paradoxical state form of multiculturalism operating through policy permits minority groups to be included so long as they follow rules about how this is to be undertaken. Only allowing ‘acceptable’ forms of…non-Christian religion’ (Jivraj, 2013, p. 6) enables government to be seen as the ‘defender of difference for those ‘reasonable’ Muslims who fit within the limits of British tolerance’ (Jivraj, 2013, p. 13). In contrast to dialectical theories which place emphasis upon the Othering processes at work in racism, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of racism as assimilation that ‘never abides alterity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 208) can also be seen in the ways in which community cohesion policy operates by singling out certain Muslim organisations as acceptable, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, ‘Government has particularly sought to marginalise those Muslims who are more vociferous in their political beliefs and instead embarked on a mission to create, promote and fund groups whose version of Islam is more in tune with the Government’s own beliefs’ (House of Commons, 2010, p. 35). A further example can be found in the way Prevent has been used to regulate the granting of charitable status to Mosques. For Jivraj this amounts to a form of state-sanctioned ‘Anglican’ Islam (Jivraj, 2013, p.12). d. Order words Discourse, Deleuze and Guattari argue, has profound material effects, it transforms bodies. The primary purpose of assemblies, lessons and school policies on FBV is not to transmit information or allow communication, rather, they issue ‘mots d ’order’ (order words) and enforce social obligations by imposing the ‘semiotic coordinates’ of state-sanctioned British identity upon both teacher and student. Language is, therefore, both performative and objectifying: ‘The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine- feminine…) (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013 b, p. 88). And, ‘The elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order word… Language is made not to be believed but PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 28 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) to be obeyed, and to compel obedience’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013 b, p. 88). When a teacher issues statements about FBVs which are then adopted and repeated by students, a politicised truth regime about what counts as an admissible existence as a young British subject comes into play. The requirement to actively promote FBVs translates to a discursive ‘speech act’ in which students are judged and repositioned according to the degree to which they deviate from the racial standards mobilized by FBVs. To illustrate how FBVs operate as order words I will use two examples from my empirical research on teachers’ views of the FBV requirement (Farrell & Lander, 2019). The first example concerns a group interview conducted with secondary teachers of religious education in 2016. One of the teachers, Maryam, provided a stark account of the ways in which the ‘speech acts’ of her Principal transformed her Muslim students into the deviant subjects of the British values discourse (Farrell & Lander, 2019, p. 473). In an assembly on FBV the students were presented with an image of the twin towers as the Principal outlined the FBVs: Now the Asian children they walked in and they were like right, from what we’ve heard about this assembly, ‘this is targeted at us’… she was trying to address everyone but at the same time she was saying ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘them Muslims’, ‘they did this’… that’s where the divisions are going to be created (Farrell & Lander, 2019, p. 477). Maryam’s students knew that FBVs were being used to judge and discipline them. As young Muslims, they were aware of their positioning as suspect, but the message from their Principal is clear, they must conform to the standards of FBVs, they must ‘be like us’ and reintegrate into the majoritarian racial order. The normalizing racism of the White Man face operates through assimilation, firstly by determining the degree of deviation from the norm and then through absorption of difference through the soft power of the disciplinary techniques the state has at its disposal, ranging from FBVs to Channel referrals. The following example provides another instance in which a troubled adolescent is transformed into a racialised suspect by the order words operating through the FBV and Prevent discourse. In an interview about British values, a secondary teacher described a scenario in which a 16-year Muslim female student was referred to her because she had become withdrawn (Farrell & Lander, 2019, p. 477). Rather than interpreting this as teenage anxiety, the teacher was advised that the student was, ‘One to watch’ and, ‘You need to be careful because I can imagine her on TV after trying to get to Syria’ (Farrell & Lander, 2019, p. 477). The student had been transformed by policy discourse from anxious teenager to radicalised run away. In both examples, the order words and speech acts of the FBV assemblage of enunciation affect what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘incorporeal transformations’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 93) which in turn alter the relationship between teachers and students. Where teachers are concerned, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis reflects their chameleon like existence as they enact policies to remain professionally compliant. Such transformations are made easier if they are already white majoritarian subjects who may even extract some form of surplus, in the form of career capital by finding a way of making the requirement work. In turn this allows policy makers to double their return, as docile governmental subjects become its willing agents. The British values discourse is expressed not only through the speech acts of the classroom, it also finds material expression in the proliferation of British values displays, notice boards and motivational ‘resilience’ building slogans, that can be found in schools and colleges across the UK (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019). In their analysis of 27 primary school FBV display boards they found that ‘almost all images of cultural (British) icons are white British people in positions of power’ (Moncrieffe & Moncrieffe, 2019, p. 61). The overbearing white-British imagery and mono cultural faces that populate British values displays indicate another site for the reproduction of majoritarian PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 29 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) national identity, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘The face is a politics’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 212). 8. How do you get out of a black hole? This essay has sought to demonstrate the critical value of an application of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory to FBV with reference to the concept of the White Man face. The examples I have referred to have been chosen to demonstrate that the White Man Face is more than just a philosophical conceit. For minority students and teachers, the White Man face is an instrument of symbolic violence which questions their legitimacy as British citizens and positions them as suspect, as ‘one to watch’ (Farrell & Lander, 2019). Deleuze and Guattari address this dilemma and ask ‘how do you dismantle the face? And, how do you get out of a black hole?’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 218). Dismantling the ‘face’ requires researchers to confront a racial assemblage of considerable power because it operates through a liberal discourse of shared national values that appear ‘both normal and natural’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998). This is no easy task. Smith’s (2016) investigation of student teachers’ uncritical engagement with FBVs shows that there is a persuasive common-sense appeal to FBVs for many educational professionals shaped by a colour-blind neoliberal discourse of community cohesion. More recently, Yildiz (2019) highlights how some education scholars (e.g. Hildebrand, 2016; Struchers, 2016; Vanderbreck & Johnson, 2016) are uncritically appropriating FBV ‘as a tool to teach human rights, LGBT rights and cosmopolitanism’ (Yildiz, 2019, p. 263). Similarly, Busher et al (2017) research on teachers’ views of FBV demonstrates the multiple ways in which policy is enacted by teachers, often as a benign requirement, as an opportunity to talk about values, reflecting Vincent’s work on the ways FBVs are ‘re- packaged’ and ‘re-located’ in the curriculum (Vincent, 2019). However, from the critical perspective of this analysis, these examples simply demonstrate the pernicious ways in which the dominant significations operating through FBVs act on teacher and student subjectivities through an educational system where whiteness as the racial standard is normative, ‘so much absorbed and naturalised that it is not aberrant any more’ (Ibrahim, 2015, p. 19). As a first step towards problematising signifying regimes Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of racism offers critical educators, students and activists, tools that reveal how civic nationalist assemblages produce racially coded norms such as FBVs. But if it is to work, theory must enable and inform practical action (Deleuze in Lotringer, 1996). Action might consist of undertaking critical participatory research with minority students and teachers most affected by the logics at work in the White Man face machine of FBVs, those who are disciplined and computed by its gaze. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Bignall argues that dismantling restrictive and oppressive structures is a creative ‘technique of desire’ that can lead to the formation of ‘new associations’ that contest the ‘fixed categories of identity and difference- upon which racist structures rely’ (Bignall, as cited in Saldanha & Adams, 2013, p. 89). Calls for critical anti-racist, ‘new’ associations between poststructuralist and critical race theory can be found in the work of Chadderton (2013) and Ibrahim (2015). Deleuze and Guattari, like critical race theory scholars, are interested in micro politics and the ‘minor’ narratives of subjugated groups. There is considerable scope for theoretical action through collaboration between these frames, indeed there are several theoretical parallels that offer potential for further exploration such as the relationship between the hegemonic White Man face and David Gillborn’s work on systemic White supremacy as the routine privileging of White interests in British education (Gillborn, 2005). 9. Lines of flight By creating spaces of criticality and deconstruction through theory and practice, critical scholars can expose the symbolic violence at work in the semiotic regimes of the civic nationalist education policy assemblage. In this sense they become what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as probe heads, ‘guidance devices’, that is active subjects who recognise the restrictive white walls and imposed subject positions, the redundant black holes of the White Man face. Probe heads dismantle the strata, ‘break the walls of PRISM Farrell (2021) PRISM 30 Volume 3, Issue 2 (2021) signifiance’ and ‘steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 222). Lines of flight are those thought-movements that ‘creatively evolve…to produce new ways of thinking’ (Lorraine, as cited in Parr, 2005, p. 145). This essay is, therefore, conceptualised as a component of a wider project of research and educational activism that will draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s critical pragmatics and rhizomatic non- hierarchical method to become a line of flight, ‘Only a trickle to begin with’ but evidence too that, ‘there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, and the overcoding machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 252). Such a project is both ethical and political, a gesture towards the anti-fascist life (Foucault, as cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 2013 a, p. xiii), but it is a task whose demands should not be underestimated. It requires a belief in the future, a non-stupid optimism, and a Deleuzean affirmation that through critical dialogue, education can set free what lives from the incorrigible binaries of the ‘mission of integration’ to create new values and realms of possibility. As Deleuze and Guattari state, ‘the white wall of the signifier, the black hole of subjectivity…we are born into them’, but ‘it is there where we must stand battle’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013b, p. 221). 10. Disclosure statement The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 11. Acknowledgements Does the author (do the authors) wish to identify any acknowledgements – if not, delete this section (and renumber)? 12. Open Access Policy This journal provides immediate open access to its content with no submission or publications fees. This journal article is published under the following Creative Commons Licence: This licence allows others to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to this article (and other works in this journal), and/or to use them for any other lawful purpose in accordance with the licence. PRISM is also indexed in the world largest open- access database: DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals). DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. 13. References Baker, P., Costas, G. & McEnery, T. (2013). Sketching Muslims: A Corpus Driven Analysis of Representations Around the Word ‘Muslim’ in the British Press 1998-2009. Applied Linguistics 34(3): 255-278. Bamber, P., Bullivant, A., Clarke, A. & Lundie, D. (2019). 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