This paper analyses Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology of education – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor representationalist but genuinely other than the modernist discourse with which the discipline began and grew up. This work is concerned with the impression that the most of sociology operates with stable Hegelian (Marxist) concepts. Even when poststructuralist sociologies of education are considered, with their use of concepts like discourse, subjectivity and dispositif, they seem to operate within modernist categories and ontologies. Deleuze’s process philosophy, in this respect, can be viewed as an attempt to take seriously these problems: starting from the early 1962 book ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’, it spells out an implicit criticism of modern sociology and its stable, essentialist, epistemological foundationalist and representationalist categorical concepts, over and above a deep inversion of the labour of the dialectic. Albeit he is very different on Marx and Freud, also Foucault used Nietzsche to revitalise thought, putting at work the attempt to de-centre the subject in order to let the ‘man’ go out the scene and the ‘Übermensch’ come on stage. Hence, this paper aims to make useful for sociological inquiry a Deleuzian Foucault derived from a Deleuzian Nietzsche: it builds up a conceptual framework, rooted in a coherent ontology, through which it becomes possible to re-think the basic vocabulary employed in educational social research. First of all, it addresses the opposition between methodological individualism and holism, declined following three dimensions: the object of sociology, its main observational unit and its perspective. One way to escape this is to completely re-define the ontology of sociality, following Foucault in his attempt of building up a complex three-figures-ontology: the shifting in the concerning with reality from ontology to epistemology; the contact between seeing and speaking ensured in the strategic domain of power; and the ontological fold of the Being, with the creation of the Self within the man. Secondly, it addresses the opposition (or integration) between comprehension and explanation. To escape this, the anti-dialectical crusade of Nietzschean thought has to be acknowledged, leading towards a new pluralist methodology that displaces the dialectical ‘why?’ with the ‘who?’, opening up a space for a simptomatology that moves on a typology and permits to pose the properly genealogical-topological question ‘How?’. Finally, it addresses the ends of sociology and the position of the researcher towards the object of inquiry. What is at stake is the role of knowledge in relation to life. Only rediscovering the multiplicity of truth, the critique of knowledge itself becomes reachable, as the expression of ‘new forces capable of giving thought another [affirmative] sense’. In this frame, the sociologist, moving himself inside the events he is studying, should have the eminent function of supporting those who are conducting political struggles by giving them specific analytical instruments. By this way, social inquiry and its methods become productive and gain a political role: to locally diffract the power and interfere with the dispersed games of truth that happens everywhere, taking a partisan role in the politics of subjectivation and contributing ‘to invent new forms of life’.

After a brief historiography of sociology in order to broach the relationship between Deleuze and Foucault, we focus on Deleuze’s book on Foucault as a means of moving ‘from the archive to the diagram’ and to a topology of ‘thinking otherwise’. In particular, trying to continue the train of thought initiated in the sociology of post-industrialism – which follows loosely a Marxist tendency in the examination of new forms of capitalism, such as: deep learning, intelligent capitalism and algorithmic capitalism – some theoretical concerns emerges as relevant for a ‘postmodern sociology’. They regards the twin forces that are shaping humanity: information and biology. Unfortunately, they do not rule out the methods or approaches of classical sociology although they might question the continuance of modernist themes and embedded motifs. They demand approaches to different problems like the disappearance of labour as a factor of production in new intelligent systems of capitalism, and new approaches to the history of liberalism, the return of Fascism, new forms of authoritarianism, and the shift of the centre of economic from the Atlantic relationship to economies of the Pacific Rim including the rise of China and East Asian capitalism. Modern Western sociology has not readily adapted to this new rising set of sociological problems. One way of pursuing these themes is through a new sociology: new in that it is not based on modernist categories – fixed, based on essences, stable, and ultimately behoven to liberalism or its critique (e.g.: the liberal concept of power, the autonomous self, the Kantian concept of law and morality) but rather draws upon the concept of systems of thought organised mathematically, the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged, in terms of a topology that functions as rhizomatic networks like computers where the arrangement of the elements such as links and nodes acts as a model of a communication network. This is Deleuze’s accommodation of Foucault’s concept of the history of systems of thought. So, some concepts will be introduced drawing from the Deleuzian reading of Foucault and Nietzsche. It will be argued that these concepts should be useful for re-framing sociological vocabulary. This point will be particularly marked through mounting each one of these concepts starting from the current debate in sociological methodology. Further, each concept is supplemented with a brief exposition of the philosophical move that is required in order to gain it.

Drawing on Foucauldian ontology, firstly, it is possible to read social phenomena not as reasons or relations, but as the stratified, which is composed by two kinds of small bricks: enunciabilities and visibilities. Then, this requires to change the main observational unit of sociology: instead of actions or practices, concrete assemblages are looked, understood as the way through which the small bricks are related, giving birth to a multiplicity of games of truth. Consequently, the perspective of sociology should be de-centred from any kind of ‘homo’, sociologicus or oeconomicus, by putting it in a different position and in a different ‘duration’: instead of a constitutive and unitary being, it becomes a long-lasting process of subjectivation. Drawing on Nietzschean anti-dialectic, it is gained a second set of concepts: the diagram and the autonomous subjectivation. To translate the sociological explanation in terms of diagrammatic means to look no more at the ‘[dialectical] development of the uninterpreted symbols’, but at the differential transformations that are possible in a non-Euclidean space. Moving to the concept of autonomous subjectivation, it could stand for the one of comprehension: it looks at the ways in which subjects try to detach themselves from the power of the diagram. Drawing on the ends of knowledge and the internal position of the sociologist, sociology have to concern with the very crucial site of the Foucauldian struggle between freedom and power: the process of subjectivation. Sociology could find its usefulness in the practice of critique, witnessing the continuous and dispersed emergence of these processes.

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