Oxymoroning Education: A Poem about Actualizing Affect for Public Good

Abstract

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words as in Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) line from his satirical epic poem Don Juan; “melancholy merriment”, An oxymoron is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect, often revealing paradox. The effect I aim for here is the actualization of affect; affect made relevant and useful for education as a public good. Oxymoroning as an immediate edging of knowledge into experience, hence a way to access a proto subjective level of the affective power of X. The prefix proto indicating the first, original or earliest. I ask how we can become materially identifiable subjects for one another and what would it take to move from a mechanistic approach to education to a more machinic one. It is a view of change that does not steal my powers or affective force away. Furthermore, are the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination abstract enough? I aim for expansions in our educational rationales for social and natural sustainability. It implies an educational philosophy of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of organization and pedagogies and simultaneously counteract predetermined and controlling pluralism of organization and pedagogies. The overarching contribution of this poem is political, pragmatic and ethical and concerns the constitution of subjectivity for education in inter- and intra-generational perspectives through taking part in polysemantic ambiguity, envisioning a modest view to the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. Ultimately, a view of the child is our primary measurement indicator for educational quality. The competence most important to develop for educators is impression tenderness in order to meet the expressions of the child.

1. Introducing Eternal Immediation

• It is an awful topic—but ‘t is not
• My cue for any time to be terrific:
• For checker’d as is seen our human lot
• With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
• Of melancholy merriment, to quote
• Too much of one sort would be soporific; —
• Without, or with, offence to friends or foes,
• I sketch your world exactly as it goes.
Don Juan (George Gordon, Lord Byron)

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words, as in Lord Byron’s line above from Don Juan: “Of melancholy merriment”, to quote. It is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect often revealing paradox. However, while a paradox might seem to be contradictory to common sense but still be true, oxymoron is considered only as a “condensed” paradox including just a couple of contradictory words that are paired together rather than a full statement of ideas. Oxymoronic phrases can thus be figuratively true but not literally true, such as in true fiction, unbiased opinion, guest host, historical present, impossible solution, joyful sadness, minor miracle and virtual reality, and hence they keep things going. It is a view of change as the normal, therefore not stealing my powers away. It is a constitution of subjectivities, that is, through taking part in polysemantic ambiguity.

The effect I here aim for is the actualization of affect; affect made relevant and useful for education as a public good. Affect as a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act [1] (p. xvii). I assert that there are insights to be drawn from children’s, pupils’ and students’ capacity to cooperate through affect, an insight that has the potentiality to profoundly influence contents, organisation and educational philosophy, hence, policies. Affect theory thus re-ontologizes the real, potentializes the other. I aim for expansions in our educational rationales for social and natural sustainability. The competence most important to develop for educators is thus impression tenderness in order to meet the expressions of the child. A tenderness in which language oxymoronically implies a simultaneous use of language and concepts and breaking up with the same language and concepts. Language and words constantly living and dying. Ultimately, a view of language as methodologized matter and the child as our primary measurement indicator for educational quality. What about a child’s silent screams or uninterested activity, a teacher’s imperceptible engagement as care? I seek to situate a rich and complex view of education moving from centred views of learning focused on identity and individuality, to a decentred view with focus on collective interactionalist ontologies and becomings: education justifiable in its own right and constantly in the making of forwarding pedagogical practices that cannot be placed in any discourse.

There is no commonly used verb form of the word oxymoron, therefore, I invent one: oxymoroning. It is in the gerund to be dynamic and non-finite. It is in the gerund to describe an immediacy of sensation locating the event of immediated experience in everyday life. Oxymoroning expresses an immediate edging of knowledge into experience, hence a way to access this proto-subjective [2] level of the affective power of X, where knowing meets unknowing and emerges as agitations and as a possibilizing or potentializing affective force. It decenters the subject and delineates the immediacy of the real-time sign as signal processes, fostering the immediacy of ‘‘liveness’’ of interactive educative engagements. Oxymoroning hence describes and highlights the immediacy with which educative processes enhance or delimit perception and affect through directly shaping experiences. I ask how we can become materially identifiable subjects for one another, acquiring some form(s) of agency, and what it would take to move from a mechanistic approach to education to a more machinic one. For me, that implies movements turning educational grief into love as an ethics, turning from stasis into action. Furthermore, I ask, are the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination abstract enough and what might our so called “lifeworlds” become through oxymoroning? The problem—to put it bluntly—in education and educational philosophy and research is traditional phenomenological notions of “data” as interpretive. It makes identity policies and notions of the centred subject, hence individualizing either/or processes and thinking difficult to escape; it makes it difficult to escape the subject/object, individual/collective, nature/culture and ultimately conscious /unconscious divides in our educational systems and programs. To be absolutely clear: The approach to education that I advocate for here expands on constructivist theories of learning, being and doing, dominated by thoughts on knowledge creation, rational goal-oriented meaning-making and visible learning theories (none mentioned, none forgotten), asking, ultimately, how we can think adequately about the relation between ontology and language in societies that are governed by algorithmic (digital) systems and objects endowed with agency?

I aim for an eternal immediation of education through the actualizing affect, eschewing such dichotomous thinking using oxymoroning as my device. I associate the concept of eternal to consciousness. I associate immediation to processes and practices of mattering. Oxymoroning simultaneously becoming both method and means for bringing us to the paradoxical “lifeword” truth that unambiguous truths do not exist, ultimately leading us into landscapes where truth instead shows a face of multiplicity, plasticity and transformation. In that sense, my article and poem, articlepoem [3,4], is a virtual realist foresight and return of knowledge after critiquing for education and learning, a foresight or speculative ethics as love, a genremix between an article and a poem and hence a constant processes of potentializing learning, creating something new with what empirically is through situating oneself in the middle and moving (me/it/you/X) further. A move from representation to performativity, process, emergence, materiality and embodiment. A move towards constant rephilosophizing and policies of inclusiveness and justice: A foresight as a type of fugitive planning that is “mostly […] about reaching out to find connection; […] about making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, […] that will, despite all, remain broken because this articlepoem (Book in the original.) is not a prescription for repair” [5] (p. 5).

These are immanent post-positivist oxymoroning knowledge practices comprising friction zones between actual multiplicities and virtual multiplicities that replace positioning, interests, linearity and top-down control with enfoldedness, relations between bodies and becomings. Processes of staying political, keeping knowing in play and the importance of theory (and/or philosophy), politically and ethically. I conceive of it, and of love, as a chaosmosis [2], in which our problematic of chaosmosis and the schizoananlytic escape from the prison of signification is directed—[…]—towards a necessary a-signifying deconstruction of their discursivity and towards placing their ontological efficacity into a pragmatic perspective [2] (p. 87). It includes my decentred, distributed and dispersed subjectivity, the knowledgeable rightfulness of us all: education as a meta-designed space through oxymoroning.

I will continue with more about this move beyond the known and eternal immediation. A constant rebirth of language through escaping—or, again, a breaking up with language, so to speak, hence discourse. Through an immanent oxymoronic evaluation of experience, language—as already indicated above—becomes matter. Paraphrasing Guattari [2] (pp. 119–135), ultimately, his conceptualization of what he calls the ecosophic object implies a view of language and speech as simultaneously embedded and embodied in ecosystems and containing ecosystems in its interior, being therefore part of general ecology and being ecology in itself. All ecosystems include humans, and ecology includes language and molecular intra-interactions, read messaging. All messaging, through this, becomes part of chaosmic affects and ecosystems. The body through this is hence defined by its capacities, its abilities to affect and be affected, permeable and molecular, always in exchange—messaging—with the world [6].

Second and intra-interdependent, I will write about the knowing child and the constitution of subjectivity and time, the child ultimately presented as Aion (time) knowing affect, hence materially identifiable through presence; agentic, hence always political. (The ancient Greeks had three conceptions time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion. Chronos refers to chronological or sequential time. Kairos signifies a proper or opportune time for action, meaning the right, critical or opportune moment. While Chronos is quantitative, Kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos retrieved 7 August 2020). Aion (Greek: Aἰών) is a Hellenistic deity associated with time, the orb or circle encompassing the universe, and the zodiac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aion retrieved 6 August 2020). In the past, we had social and cultural mechanisms by which to bring Aion into Chronos, via Kairos. That is, to bring the sacred into the profane with the cultivated present. This is fundamentally the role which rituals play because in a proper ritual, you are repeating a sacred cyclical action in the profane linear time, which, when the time is right, creates a bridge to the holy thing beyond our mundane experience).

Through this, affect is made relevant for/in education, potentially—and, again, turning grief into love as a speculative sort of ethics. A love and performative ethics that can endure resistance, fears and wants. A love and ethics that preserves my subjectivity and power. A love and ethics that does not suffocate its environment, wipe out the sound of tears. The sound of both child, pupil, student and teacher. Perhaps the sound of us all: With good, and bad, and worse, alike… growing smaller… Ultimately asking what the dissolution of order can teach us about what kind of qualities and abilities educators need to be equipped with? Furthermore, rhetorically asking if time is what we lack in education? Eternal immediation, impression tenderness and language brokering through oxymoroning. I see you not now, live pedagogies, pedagogies live.

I will end (or continue) with a discussion about fugitive planning and the importance of educational philosophy and implications, influences on contents, organisation, educational policies and programs, the objective of this articlepoem ultimately being about rephilosophizing sustainable learning processes and events through exploring affective aspects of education and learning in addition to the more traditional cognitive and social ones, shaping inclusive learning spaces. Difference in what is same, blind seeing you… The focus on affect is radically changing how experiences are sensed; revealing how learning is transindividual and plugged into the environment. This is, therefore, all in all, an articlepoem about educators as philosophers and researchers that are learning as they/we work to understand; a poem and an article about educators as philosophers and researchers realizing that it is the cracks in our philosophical and pedagogical constructions and systems themselves that possibilize learning and change, the human and the transgressive both. Guattari [2] writes:

Engagement in innovative social, aesthetic and analytical practices is thus correlative to crossing the threshold of intensity of speculative imagination, coming not only from specialised theoreticians, but also from assemblages of enunciation confronted with the chaosmic transversality proper to the complexity of ecosophic objects. And opening up ethico-political options that relate as much to the microscopic aspects of the psyche and socius as to the global destiny of the biosphere and mecanosphere from now on calls for a permanent reappraisal of the ontological foundations of existing modes of valorisation in every domain.

(p. 127)

2. Moving beyond the Known and Eternal Immediation; Education as a Metadesigned Space

This year, it is 162 years since the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was born. He is considered to be the founder of Phenomenology, and his influence on current philosophy and science—albeit, in a reactive sense—was, and is, epoch-making. The “impact” of Husserl’s work being erratic, he contributed profoundly to the so called critique of positivism and opened up for the works of, e.g., Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995) and, relevant for this article and poem in particular ultimately due to various perspectives of deconstructing Husserlian phenomenology, Jacques Derrida (1030–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Bruno Latour (1947–), Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari (1930–1992). Husserl also impacted the field of semiotics or semiology, hence the works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). These are shoulders Paolo Virno (1952–) also stand on. Furthermore, we can draw lines between Husserl to Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) and, subsequently, feminist phenomenology, not to mention the growing importance and impact of critical, posthuman and new materialist feminist scholars and philosophers. I think of Simone Weil (1909–1943), Iris Murdoch (1919–1999), Julia Kristeva (1941–), Luce Irigary (1930–), Helene Cixous (1938–), Judith Butler (1956–), Donna Haraway (1944–), Karen Barad (1956–), Rosi Braidotti (1954–), Lucy Suchman, Martha Nussbaum (1945–) and Isabelle Stengers (1949–), just to mention a few.

Going back in time and space with Husserl and outlining a rather broad picture, Europe had, according to Husserl, forgotten the social and ethical foundation of science and was fascinated by science and its outputs as a tool. Science had therefore lost its “lifeworld” foundation, so to speak, thus confused the phenomena of causality and motivation: Science abstracts idealize and formulate laws that, to a large extent, explain the world. However, this explanatory force covers, again according to Husserl, the transcendental subjectivity, which is the source of all meaning structures: The abstractions thus led to science losing contact with the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) that made it possible in the first place (Svendsen, Lars Fredrik Händler: Edmund Husserl i Store norske leksikon på snl.no https://snl.no/Edmund_Husserl, retrieved 12 May 2021). Ontological, epistemological, teleological and axiological aspects of science therefore became pivotal to bring to the attention and rethink, and Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how we, through ways of being intentionally directed toward them, constitute them. Objects are thus internalized and become a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or “type”.

Re: the subject–object relationship, Husserl was more interested in knowing what was thinking within us than in who was thinking about what. The little word “us” is important, and in Husserl’s view, mankind is united via the essence of our consciousness; every human being is therefore characterized by an immediate experience of presence. Thinking always being pervasively social, consciousness therefore is always consciousness about something. To be is to be of worth, hence, value, Husserl therefore claimed, and through this, he laid the foundation of a Phenomenology of Value and Ethics both. Husserl wrestled with issues of intersubjectivity, claiming that the concept of “rationality” itself needed a radical transformation: intersubjectivity as both irreducible and conditional for (thinking) other. His work could therefore be said to be an exploration of the essence—and importance—of solidarity and what he conceptualized as society’s lost recognition of the conditional function of solidarity for a common culturality («Om jeg ikke kan oppnå klarhet, kan jeg heller ikke leve» (khrono.no) (Transl: If I cannot reach clarity, I cannot live)). A form of solidarity as love as the ultimate form of intersubjective relations.

In deep respect, keeping on critiquing positivism, I turn to the speculative ontological—or process philosophy of primarily Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [1,7]. Furthermore, philosopher and semiologist Paolo Virno’s [8] work on issues of bio-politics and of the affective nature of language exchanges and political involvement, hence, reflections on the politics of language; the materialist “revelation” and moment when the word becomes flesh through oxymoron’s virtues (p. 173). Virno’s linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. I ask whether Husserl’s radical transformation are radical enough and, ultimately, whether the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination are abstract enough. Deleuze, Guattari and Virno all stand on the shoulders of Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989), his work on the objectile or the virtuality of any object and processes of individuation. Individuation characterized as collective or transindividual processes of individuation of transductive difference [9] and that of Deleuze, as we shall see, iterative and intensive difference [10]. We need a further radicalization and rethinking of phenomenology; the explanatory force of science abstracts; the works, nature and effects of language; traditional conceptualisations of hermeneutic processes of internalized meaning making through constitutive interpretation. A rethinking of what is thinking within us, that is, the evaluation and importance of experience, materially attempting to eschew dualisms and dichotomous notions of subject and object, conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, real and virtual and, subsequently, body and mind, nature and culture, human and animal. The whole issue of essence cracked open. Every concept killed and revived again and again.

The challenge through this is to engage theory within actual experiences and articulate learnings as preliminary meanings, hence as questions or issues. The challenge is also to articulate concerns or meanings of certain experiences as performances, any findings communicating meanings of experiences or embodiments that resist finite conclusions. Every word or concept contains zones of friction or swirling organizations that produce the positive as the absence of negative, the right as the absence of wrong. There are exterior multiplicities of conscious ordering, measuring, differentiating and extensiveness associated with predetermined knowledges. There are interior multiplicities of unconscious, intensive, libidinal and impulsive evolvements associated with novelty. This implies processes of conceptualization as thinking and doing of both positive and negative, right and wrong at the same time. Rethinking, thinking new, thinking other, innovation and change are thus seen as open-ended processes of constantly intensifying something without directing it to a certain place or centre, read identity. Rather, frictions continue where the actualization of the virtual and the virtualization of the actual are going on. Opposing any conviction that any fundamental condition that determines the facts and state of affairs punctuating our lives never appear as facts or state of affairs, Virno [8] asserts that

the conditions making experience possible are themselves the object of an immediate experience, that trancendental presuppositions manifest themselves as such in several common empirical occurrences, and that ontological foundations are humbly placed withing the world of appearances. […] taking stock of the different occasions when the background comes to the fore, assuming the role of facts among facts. In other words, there ar occasions when human nature knows its own full revelation. Exempt from all theological flirtation, this term refers simply to the entirely empirical visibility of what we wrongly believed inaccessible to direct perception.

(p. 17)

Virno further suggest that the categories intra- and interdependently most apt to think this material “revelation”, hence, the affective nature of language exchanges and political involvement, are those of the following:

(1)

linguistically absolute performative operating at the limits of every form of life, without constituting the essence of any of them (p. 90);

(2)

the anthropogenetic repetition through the making and the unmaking of self-consciousness: Presence through loss of presence or moments of transcendence of infinite oscillations so frequent and rapid that the two poles are almost indiscernible. Recessions and restoration are not only interdependent, but are juxtaposed to the point of seeming co-extensive and concomitant (p. 106);

(3)

A second-degree sensorialism as a non-semiotic enjoyment of the sensible through which we can recognize a radically antitheological understanding of the “incarnation of the word” (p. 134, brackets in the original), hence as close as we can get to words becoming flesh.

(4)

Reification, ultimately, the way I see this, iterative and intensive difference as life’s method and education;

(5)

Natural history through oxymoron’s virtues, freeing both the name and the adjective of natural history from their metaphorical residue. Virno (2015) writes:

we need to bring the heterogeneity to its limit, and to try and connect the antipodes as such. What really counts is the immediate relation between the distinctive traits of the Homo sapiens as species and the most fleeting cultural dispositions, the biological “always already” of biology and the social “right now”, the innate dispositions for language and a political decision dictated by exceptional circumstances. Neither metaphorical, nor allegorical, the expression of “natural history” might share the virtues of the oxymoron: that is, it postulates an electric spark resulting from the connection of two clearly contrasting elements.

(p. 173)

An electric spark and materialist revelation through oxymoroning, that is, words becoming flesh, to follow up on Virno’s own words above. Natural history as a semiotics, as a materialist revelation, hence the phenomenon as revelatory and a politics [8] (p. 2009). It is a rigorously atheistic version of the theological Revelation (Ibid. p. 2012), the revelatory phenomenon bringing the background to the fore, (they) make extrinsic what was intrinsic and the implicit explicit, [they are] transcendental and transindividual (Ibid. p. 2018). Revelatory phenomena, hence, natural history, as such does not found or support any politics. What the revelatory phenomenon does is give political relevance to what seemed an obscure metahistorical premise: the linguistic faculty (potential and biological), the non-specialization of the human animal, neoteny and the difference between “world” and “environment” (Ibid, p. 2018 quotation marks in the original). This brings me to the machinic unconscious, the machine itself being produced by its productions, and the chaosmic ecosophy of Felix Guattari [11] when he states:

Language is everywhere, but it does not have any domain of its own. There is no language in itself. What specifies human language is precisely that it never refers back to itself, that it always remains open to all the other modes of semiotization.

(p. 27, italics in the original)

Furthermore, when he states:

There is no universality of language nor is there a universality of speech acts. Every sequence of linguistic expression is associated with a network of various semiotic links (perceptive, mimetic, gestural, imagistic thought, etc…). Every signifying statement crystallizes a mute dance of intensities that is simultaneously played out on the social body and the individuated body. From language to glossolalia, all the transitions are possible.

(p. 32)

Both Virno’s electric spark through oxymoroning and the Guattarian [11] image of dancing intensities and crystallizing glossolalia, ultimately ungluing the intensities of desire from their ancient territories, [hence receiving] their polarity of subject and object through the exhaustion of such designs (p. 39), bring me to even further theorizations about such escaping designs of—simultaneously from—language, breaking up with language or here the Deleuzian rebirth of language [12] (p. 190) at the frontiers of understanding and connectivity through intensive difference and affective force through Aion, and through this, the actualization of affect. The concept of difference is conceptualized as an internal difference that lies at the heart of difference in itself [12] (p. 94), a difference that is iterative and all there is always. Affect as that which express our innermost intense and as yet a-conceptual feelings.

Affect is ultimately thought of as an act of thinking embodied in the maximum intensity of experience as a power to affect itself, an affect of self on self [13] (p. 101). Affect through which the double affirmation of becoming and the being of becoming occurs [14] (p. 23). In affect, we are therefore never alone. Affect ultimately turned into a modal and collective concept, ultimately relevant and useful to expand on philosophies of education and educational designs. Every act of language or conceptualization involving an expression of affect. Ultimately, a way to cultivate complex thinking.

Deleuze describes the Aion as the milieu of surface effects or events, to trace a frontier between things and propositions: […] The Aion thus traces frontier with its entire straight line […] rendering language possible by the frontier which separates it from things and from bodies. […] Further that without the Aion sounds would fall back on bodies, and propositions themselves would not be “possible” […] [12] (p. 190 quotation marks in the original): The entire line of the Aion is run through by the Instant, which is endlessly displaced on this line and is always missing from its own place, an atopen place, a place without place [12] (Deleuze, p. 190). Here, Deleuze continues to speak of a paradoxical instance of an aleatory point, a pure moment of abstraction whose role is to divide and subdivide every present in into past–future upon the line of Aion: The instant extracts singularities from the present as singular points twice projected that is- once into the future and once into the past—forming by this double equation the constitutive element of the pure event [12] (p. 190). Finally, Deleuze asserts:

the straight line which extends simultaneously in two different directions traces the frontier between bodies and language, states of affairs and propositions. Language, or the systems of propositions would not exist without this frontier which renders it possible. Language therefore is endlessly born, in the future direction of the Aion where it is established and, somehow, anticipated; and although it must also say the past, it says it as the past of states of affairs which go on appearing and disappearing in the other direction. In short the, the straight line is now related to its two environs; and while it separates them, at also articulates the one and the other as two series which are capable of being developed.

[12] (p. 190)

Through Aion, every word or concept is moved from the function of being forces of explanations to devices for thinking. Our “lifeworlds” consisting of languages endlessly born. Contrary to making positivism-induced retrograde movements, concepts are seen as inherently experimental and open to yet-unknown territories of thought. It implies a move beyond the known overcoming paradox and movement in flows of information. The concepts of both the “the phenomenon” and “data” are opened up. This is also what Deleuze and Guattari [15] call the pedagogy of the concept (p. 16), possibilizing the becoming of a conceptual personea through philosophy (Ibid. p. 76). Concepts become prospective ahead, retrospective backwards, constant guessings or messagings of the now, hence the performative and methodological. All knowing through affect becomes a process of connecting, experimentation and speculative thought. I prefer to envision this as processes of oxymoroning and interpretation of data as processes of eternal immediation, ultimately, education, and educational design turned into metadesigned spaces shaped through the actualization of affect through constant rebirthing, ultimately, the access to and of language through experience. Virno [8] writes: The access to language is not an inaugural, transient event, but a constant way of experiencing language [8] (p. 194). The actualizing of affect contributes to the actual formation of inclusive learning spaces. Access to language for education as a state of love, a state of mind as a practice of care for learning. I claim that oxymoroning education, education as a metadesigned space, to be more realistic, more real, more honest than before through affect, ultimately helping children to integrate agency into his/her own worlds. Thinking, making, acting through affect. Affect as a source of agency and ultimately as a source to self-power and even perhaps happiness. As we approach the part about the constitution of subjectivity, listen to Guattari [11] again when he calls the ungluing process a crystallization of power in the linguistic field (p. 35):

Power is not something that simply concerns well defined social ensembles. Power formations do not engage in “human communications”. Consequently, they imply a whole complex of “extra semiotic” machines. […] The stability of a “state of language” corresponds to a balance between these diverse levels of power.

(p. 35, Quotation marks in the original)

3. The Knowing Child and the Constitution of Subjectivity

The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchange between individual-group-machine.

[2] (p. 7)

This implies a decentring of the subject and creating transitions between subjects and objects, between nouns and verbs, between substances and processes. Rather, creating variations of the object or making the object into an objectile [9] so that it—the object—becomes an event influencing the subject, influencing forward-looking processes of subjectification. Sensations not being the endpoint. Objects and materiality, however, tend to dominate, and the role of the child, the educator, pedagogue or teacher therefore diminishes. With reference also to Whitehead [16,17], Deleuze therefore claims that rather than dealing with subjects, we must deal with superjects: Just as the object becomes objectile, the subject becomes a superject [18] (p. 21); influencing processes of subjectivation as individuating processes of connecting, dis-connecting, re-connecting, multiplies, starting up on an old line, creating new lines, taking up different speeds. Processes of constant modification of transformation and change, not pre-existing, always carrying bits and pieces of each other, human and non-human others. For Deleuze, intensity is therefore a basic principle of his ontological approach, the force and power of affect potentializing other. Affect is seen as a threshold experience going beyond emotions and beliefs, hence beyond factual power struggles over authority. Simondon, however, thinks of intensity as something that informs or that tells us something about how processes work. Either way, the affective aspects are those that involve the non-linguistic ways in which entities (people, objects) take each other up in the world. Through this, the concept and impact of experience in bridging theory–practice relations is put into play, opening up new individual but also possible collective learning trajectories.

For Deleuze, affect is this something/it/X that goes through the body without necessarily leading to any specific meaning. It makes us responsive, vulnerable perhaps, but in a productive way. It urges us to proceed by inquiry, and our attention and readiness is directed towards that which emerges and in turn contributes to an awareness of the situated meaning and value of knowledge. It possibilizes an activist production of importance of knowledge sensed there and then. This way, our subjectivities dissolve and identity become a collective in which we de facto create our own knowledgeable lifeworlds. Transindividual process of individuation move beyond registers of experience: limitless and in multiple directions. All of us growing major through minor, acquiring agency through affective thinking difference within. Guattari [2] continues:

These complexities actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystalized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm.

(p. 7)

It implies a non-dialectical politics and values of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and simultaneously counteract predetermined and controlling pluralism of educational organization, counteracting reductionist approaches to subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari ultimately treat agency and agents as collective subjects of ongoing events, meaning that agents never act in first person but rather as a collectively immanent third person [15] (pp. 64–65). It implies an aesthetic that is artistic as poetic and ethical. An aesthetic paradigm in which intersubjectivity is turned into an in-phenomenological accelerating and real non-teleological life—giving insecurity and resistance. An aesthetic that is speculative and an ethics as love as oxymoronic eternal immediation through which together our lifeworlds become. Making unmaking self together, thinking within us…

I speak of producing subjects creating polyconsensus learning spaces, institutions and organizations in which we recreate ourselves and our pedagogies, policies and systems, research and sciences, again and again, not to lose force to create on the basis of knowledge. Subjects as/of emergent educative processes and pedagogies produced through the imperceptible tendencies and potentialities, the unavailable plasticity and immaterial aspects of worlding formation. Embodied and embedded processes being simultaneously immanent, relational, affective and situated. Learning taking place within a person and between persons interacting in and with social and material realities. Worlding seen as relations between precepts, affects and concepts leading to novel concepts in/for experience. Subjects that let upcoming or emergent concepts, meanings and ideas act instead of silencing that which is not in line with predefined organizational or pedagogical goals. There is therefore nothing about us that is without us. The essence of solidarity being that there is no essence. No essence as a state of access being becoming love. It is demanding and intense; lifegiving movements in minor perceptions as Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibres […] [1] (p. 179), ultimately constituting subjectivity within transformation as a machinic eternal immediation, ultimately, the machinic importance of theory for inclusion for sustainability… for quality. A speculative ethics of love as that of remaining attuned to the differential at the heart of event-based propositions [19] (p. 121). The sound of us all. As far as judgment is concerned, and unlike external judgements acting upon us with influences from the outside, such assessments are interior, hence, productions of affects at work in our relations. This unpredictable change is therefore a multiplicity of virtual organization, relational, unconscious and irrevocably experienced, rather than predetermined, conscious and measurable. This something as/of X, ultimately, as a coming to terms with the values we want. Not thinking that one can ever be unbiased, but always asking about values and what kind of paradigm of values we move towards. Guattari [2] writes:

The activity of cartography and ecosophic metamodelisation, where being becomes the ultimate object of a heterogenesis under the aegis of a new aesthetic paradigm, should be at the same time more modest and more audacious than the conceptual productions to which the University has accustomed us. More modest in renouncing any pretension to durability or eternal scientific authority, and more audacious in taking sides in the extraordinary sprint currently occurring between machinic mutations and their subjective “capitalisation”.

(p. 127, quotation marks in the original)

Finally, I turn to the rhetorical question about time and if time is what we do not have enough of in our educational systems and pedagogies and what we should ask from our educational philosophies and policies. Sometimes it seems that way. Through time predominantly conceptualized as linear chronological time or Chronos, everything seems to be speeding up, ultimately blurring notions of quantity and quality. In Norway, this discussion can be seen in polarized notions of what is conceptualized as superficial learning processes and deep learning processes, resulting in a whole new school reform. The evaluation of the previous reform showed us that being positive to reforms is not enough to change practices, that foundational perspectives of reforms tend to disappear in the daily work, that the change of cultures cannot be planned as such, and, eventually, that goal management and too many goals resulted in superficial learning and less deep learning for students (Evaluering av Kunnskapsløftet (udir.no) Evaluering av Kunnskapsløftet (udir.no)). What we do not have enough of is reconfigurations of time. Reconfigurations that allow us to critically engage in performative affective and material experiences where we can experience notions of acquiring some forms of agency. Questioning attitudes, political sense of events, experiences and love for others. The concept of, e.g., quality forming the hub of our explorations. Ultimately, the child is our primary measurement indicator for educational quality.

Consider this example. I title it: When concepts and education are not oxymoroned and how language therefore can do the opposite of what we want. Karen is 10 years old. She has Downs Syndrome. She attends fifth grade in a regular group or class of so-called normal pupils. One day, the pupils were assigned task that they were supposed to work with in groups of five. Suddenly Karen said, “In my group I am the only one who is included” (Fieldnotes 22 September 2021). The child knows! This poem is about actualizing affect for public good. I try.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy [14], the child is presented as Aion, knowing affect. Envisioning a view to the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. What is crucial in education is an ambition to consider children, pupils and students as stakeholders within and across domains. Becoming materially identifiable subjects. Being knowledgeable and knowing something, regardless of age. Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoc (1919–1999) wrote about curiously “knowing” children. In The Sandcastle [20], for example, Felicity and Donald Mor complicate, intervene or comment on the plot, which bluntly speaking is about restrictions of traditional gender roles, social class, their parents’ having grown out of love and subsequent grief and love affairs—or not. Felicity, by believing to be psychic and a witch, and Donald, by being in rebellion against the career his family has chosen for him. Through Aion, knowing is disconnected or dissolved from both time and space, age and generations. That includes time represented by both Chronos and Kairos.

Time and space, age and generation become ambivalent about boundaries, so being a part of a time and a place, being of a certain age, means being in dynamic and nomadic relationships with both. Knowing is no longer reserved for or connected to, e.g., those who have lived the longest. The “time” represented by Aion is unbounded, dynamic, insurgent and a more cyclical time of becoming or flux. Continuity between the present and the actual activates multiple genealogical lines of resonance and connectivity. Sameness and otherness coincide. Applied to reform policies and change, competence building and knowledge creating practices, Chronos—generally speaking—tends to support mainstream, majority and protocol-bound reform/science/knowledge processes, however, Aion, on the other hand, produces ‘minor’ […] science/knowledge, which is, […], ethically transformative and politically empowering. […]—is nomadic and defines the research process as the creation of new concepts [21] (p. 17). I add education and learning as the expansion of concepts and creation of new concepts as change. Change as/of futures that are open and fugitive.

Repudiating the idea that life can be lived romantically, and in line with Virno [8], again, when he states that the “multiplicity” and the “many” of contemporary forms of life has nothing idyllic about it (they characterize them both positively and negatively, promoting servility as well as conflict (p. 222 quotation marks in the original)), Murdoc [22] writes stories of the redemptive power of love:

Amo amas amatamamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit … Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.

(p. 328)

4. Fugitive Planning and Another Rationale for Education

I started by asking how we can become materially identifiable subjects for one another, acquiring some form(s) of agency, and what it would take to move from a mechanistic approach to education to a more machinic one. Furthermore, I asked if the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination are abstract enough and what might our so called “lifeworlds” become through oxymoroning. My answer is that we need another rationale for education and fugitive planning, another conceptualization of the power, position and function of language in and for learning, meaning making and change. It implies a critique of discursive productions of educational policies and subsequent programs; current features and push in education of continuous assessment for continuous improvement; education and learning as personalized; growth mindsets as a policy mandate; the discursive moves that facilitate this push. Rather, I ascertain that education and learning need an affective component to work and that experience surpasses knowledge. Language and education both oxymoroned, Husserlian phenomenology is oxymoroned. It is a sort of educative hyperbolic simplicity. The most important thing for an educator being openness, creativity, fantasy and imagination. The ability to imagine possible (other) futures and an impression tenderness sensing the other—the child—in. The most important thing about a kindergarten or school being that which is sensed. That which is sensed and affect surpasses knowledge fostering knowing. It is a constant reconfiguration of what a kindergarten and school can be for the child, with the child. I speculate towards deep learning. Learning being a collective process. It is an ethics, an individuated collective creativity, an invitation and a challenge. A speculative ethics and/of mental flexibility, educators that can hold the double(d) idea of concepts. Educators that can stand in their/our own force. Educators that can bloom with own potentials with the child.

The strength of the philosophy and perspectives I have presented thus lies between presence and foresight. It is another rationale for education. It is a move away from identity policies, commodification and compartmentalization towards a readiness for procedurality and mobilisation of knowledges through maintaining focus on procedurality itself. How to keep learning processes open to avoid management and teaching by objectives too quickly, ultimately showing the machinic importance of theory for our educational futures and change? Fostering learning as we work to understand. Our habits known by no one. Fugitive planning at a wild place, a place beyond, continuously producing its own unregulated wildness [5] (p. 7). That being the common ground and public good of our educational inclusive metadesigns, hence, method, producing common grounds in/by motion. It is a defense and fight for educators who can appreciate potential based in difference, one that will not uncritically harmonize to include but one who realizes that it is the cracks in our philosophical and pedagogical constructions, systems and programs themselves that possibilize the human and the transgressive both. Indirectly, it is also a call for us all to pay attention and resist unintentional productions of exclusion and all colonizing processes that include superior knowledge. The dissolution of order teaches us that the kind of qualities and abilities teachers or professionals need to be equipped with are those that enable them to conquer the educative moment so to speak, the raw Aionic moment of materialized revelation so that words become flesh. Oxymoroning as a metadesign and paradoxical model for preserving the value of knowledge. Knowledges gaining importance through being experienced. To stop a de facto demotion or devaluation of education and learning. Making through this our “lifeworlds” abstract enough and escaping repetitive impasses. Securing professionals the paradoxical right and ability to subjective multi-professional judgement. Then, we might speak again of the nature and importance of solidarity. Affective pedagogies in the language of love and/as complex thinking.

Ending where I started with Lord Byron’s poem about Don Juan: The education of Juan became the primary interest of his mother according to Byron’s poem. She saw to it that he received a thorough training in the arts and sciences but took great care that he should learn nothing about the basic facts of life. The poem has scope, a variety of human types and experiences, common sense, much matter for laughter, clever and witty observation, ease and fluency. It may not reveal a wealth of learning and a depth of thought and insight, but it does reveal a wide range of experience derived from books and from life.