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needs – that create so-called social demands. These social demands are
not the cause of the institution but its direct result. 2 Hence schools are
not created because there is a need for knowledge, jails are not created
because there is a need to punish, psychiatric asylums are not created to
‘heal’ the insane. These institutions are a means to code, to normalize, to
limit and to suppress as well as to exclude what Deleuze and Guattari
call ‘free social energy‘ – in other words not under the control of some
other person or some arbitrary power following the Webster dictionary.
So there is no social Subject to whom the traditionally called ‘social
needs’ are dedicated.’ 3
So, identity is really nothing more than a constructed territory, or a written map of
a life. This map changes over time and history. It is a constant process of de- and
re- territorialization, or a de- and re- construction/writing of maps of identity.
According to Deleuze, science is at the core of this production of maps and territories.
In his writings Deleuze makes it clear to us that the scientific thinking
that makes possible the notion of identity as a natural feature has its origins in the
bi-furcated subject, an ‘I’, thinking about and acting upon, a ‘Me’. When Descartes
formulates ’Cogito ergo sum’, he claims to do away with all objective presuppositions,
and to begin from a kind of ‘pure subject’. But according to Deleuze
there are still subjective presuppositions. For example, the I is never questioned
as a natural feature, neither what it means to think, or to be. 4 In the light of this
argument the pure subject or the natural identity is just an illusion. Around this
illusion, then, science has been highly productive in creating knowledge about
identity. Through the development of science and its construction of knowledge
about the individual, we have come to believe certain things about ourselves to
be true. A certain type of scientific knowledge about ourselves defines a certain
identity. Each identity has certain dispositions: child and curious, young and
foolish, old and wise. All identities also have their counterpart. The bi-furcated
subject is the mother and father of all dualisms; man-woman, white-black, saneinsane,
intelligent-stupid, strong-weak, stubborn-flexible etc. So from this, we
can conclude that, identity as a natural feature is a construction, and that with
the birth of the bi-furcated subject, is also born science’s ambition to draw maps
over the territory of identity. 5
the naturally developing child, an individual child
In the practices of the field of early childhood education, this scientific knowledge
production about identity has, according to Gunilla Dahlberg produced
two dominating images, or maps, of the pre-school child’s identity ; ’the child as
nature’ and ’the child as reproducer of culture and knowledge’. 6 ’The child as
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