The A/Un/grammatical Child/hood/s and Writing

Introducing the Translocal Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and/as a Writing Organization

In this article, I explore translocality as/in a posthuman and affective research perspective and/as writing thus as a break with essentializing notions of spatially bounded territorial units and contents. Traditionally, the term is used in connection with the dynamics of mobility, migration, and sociospatial interconnectedness and insights from transnationalism while, however, attempting to overcome some of the limitations of this long-established research perspective. As such, translocality is used to describe sociospatial dynamics, processes of simultaneity and identity formation that transcend boundaries—including but also extending beyond—those of nation states (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013).

Using the term in a posthuman and affective research connection and/as writing, I try to extend and expand on the use of the term even further, and explore the potentialities of its—the way I see this, underlying notions of onto-epistemological queering—or both mental and physical mobilities, flexibilities, multiplicities, betweens and perhapses, movements, networks, flows, technologies, knowledges, intensities, desires, signs, symbols, colors, agents/agencies, and places in aporetic deterritorialized— thus ungrammatical and vitalist time/space/mattering processes and/or virtual dimensions beyond the boundaries of our educational institutions and/or organizations, hence the term writing organization. I thus use notions of translocal assemblages and/or the DeleuzeoGuattarian (1987) “rhizome” as a means of grasping the complexity, dense dynamics, and diffractive and inter-/intrarelationality of translocal connectedness in ECECs and schools, and through this trying to reconceptualize notions of locally bounded development and pedagogical change.

Writing thus simultaneously seen as a methodological tool and nomadic transgressive practice presented not as a means of making claims to what we know but as deauthorized knowledge creation processes (Derrida, 1967/1976; Spivak, 1993) of space/time/tool/territory and/or pedagogies through which to open up possibilities of the unknowability of that which is constantly to come and in the making: our machinic and liberated desires and enthusiasms. Writing ultimately seen as experimenting and doing with texts to foster patterns of becoming, thus affirming the positive structure of difference: Writing as opening the self up to possible encounters with affective outsides, collapsing divides in me and simultaneously possibilizing child/hood/s as (a) matrix of becoming—constantly troubling the concept of enactment and enacting (real) fictions. Or as Braidotti (2013, p. 188) puts it, “The posthuman nomadic subject is materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded—it is firmly located somewhere.”

The way I use or rather work with it, the term translocality therefore serves as a fruitful starting point from which to challenge dichotomous conceptions. It is a long time since early childhood education and professionalism first was deconstructed with an interest to increase acceptance and opportunities for all children (Cannella, 1997). Through the years after this work has continued (Cannella, 2015; Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999; Jones & Osgood, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2010), still, however, curricula and policy for professionals of all kinds tend to continue to build on simplistic models making efforts of resisting concepts of, for example, professionalism as individual, disembodied, and dematerialized pivotal and hub to continue explorations in changing times. Second, it enhances explicit discussion of the temporal dynamics, path dependencies and time–space inter-/intraconnections of discursive material entanglements, and dynamics offering nuanced perspectives on differentiated forces in flows and movements. Third, the shift away from a primary concern with place directs attention to alternative cartographies of pedagogies. Fourth, it highlights the importance of (networked) places as third space semiotics. Fifth, it facilitates research on virtual mobilities. By addressing flows and circulations of ideas, thoughts, symbols, intensities, feelings, knowledges, and so on, it offers a stimulating perspective from which to engage with identity, ultimately subjectivity and collectivity, or rather the collective in the individual such as the impact of a globalizing world, and the coproduction of earthly connectedness. And through this creating—or at least possibilizing—new ontologisations of sustainable child/hood/s and/as exceeding forms of debt/gift complexity contracts between generations.

Finally, by placing an explicit emphasis on local conditions, translocality also draws attention to transformations of the material, physical, and natural environment. In so doing, translocal research can engage in the discussion on global environmental change, and strengthen the importance of mobility, concepts, and resources within the real/virtual debate. The tasks becoming that of building in a willingness to confirm rather than reject insecurity, disagreements, dilemmas, and paradoxes, and thus simultaneously avoiding crippling thoughts about a need for a pedagogical consensus that might prevent professional development and action. Ultimately—and what I write about—turning early childhood and care institutions and schools into postdiagnosis localities or places of transition, their main task becomes that of not passing on traditions but to prepare for future contingent events. Teaching children—and me—to act in disagreement that is and drivers of processes and change through creating better—as in minor—languages for being and doing differently together.

And to underline, I thus write through the machinic “edusemiotic” (Semetsky, 2013) potentials in and with postconstructivist and/or posthumanist and multiparadigmatic theories of embodiment and matter: “The embodiment of the mind and the embrainment of the body” (Marks, 1998, quoted in Braidotti, 2013, p. 86). This includes affective theories in combination with DeleuzeoGuattarian-inspired theoretical analysis reframing problematics of the world and transversal thinking, ultimately moving beyond “regimes of signs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and collapsing nature–culture divides. To think transversally is to think through the movement and intensity of evolving processes. In this sense, processes opposing structures or systems and seen rather as the capture of existence in the moment of its constitution, delimitation, and deterritorialization. Making the virtual field material rather than immaterial, the sign or signifiers are material entities in this virtual field, arena, or medium. Transforming nothingness into being and here: eco-chaos-ophy . . . Desire is allowing us to think differently about any concept, ultimately creating my/methods. Such word exploding, nonlinguistically coded affirmation of an affectivity whose degree, speed, extension, and intensity are porous and floating can only be measured materially and pragmatically, case by case: the ungrammatical becoming the new normal—my wonderings are thus always stronger than my assertions. It is a politics of freedom and a view of, the way I see this, sustainability as universal solidarity.

We believe in desire as the irrational of every form of rationality, and not because it is a lack, a thirst, or an aspiration, but because it is the production of desire: desire that produces—real desire, or the real in itself. (Deleuze & Guattari (2004, p. 414)

This is, however, not easy. Such creations are both conditioned by—and imply troubling—or rather exploring the ontological positioning of data, contents, knowledges, and the researcher/s, and the transformations we undergo in the processes of research: troubling and exploring what data as event can do to traditional educational research methodologies that still hold onto the constant desire to represent data as an unmediated capture. The “event” as that what Deleuze (1990) introduced in The Logic of Sense to describe instantaneous productions intrinsic to interactions between various kinds of forces but also characterized loosely in terms consonant with the Stoic concept of lekta: “as incorporeal transformations that subsist over and above the spatio-temporal world, but are expressible in language nonetheless” (Stagoll, 2012, p. 90). It implies troubling and exploring what the researcher— and here ECEC professionals are participants and included as researchers with own practices—can do to traditional conceptualizations of learning organizations, contents and knowledges as events and in motion: sustainability events to come.

And to be clear: The body of theories working the structure and lived experience of learning organizations, competence building strategies, and local development and change is huge but often inflated and normative. Constructivist sociocultural approaches (which influence both local and global political and policy agendas) have provided the dominating discourses, leaving us with conceptualizations of reflection, reflective practitioners, human relations, best practice, and dialogue as both conditions and tools privileging individuality and certainty of practice. This is something else. This is an attempt to engage in eco-chaos-ophical languages in the intersection of the environment, society, and subjectivity open toward freedom rather than the capture or recapture of its potentials by the big Other of, ultimately, neoliberalism. It is an attempt to engage in continuous activist experimentations merging research and advocacy. I think of the Earth as our middle and common ground and about living the political—or always being connected to a political immediacy. It is a constant qualia becoming quality. This term is used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience: the taste of wine, the greenness of green, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. Green completion . . .

Together, we thus consider the possibility of more active roles for data and contents: data content doings and discursive/material connections of data and contents. We consider data as alive, uncapturable, and unimaginable, ultimately moving toward “data driven pragmatic pedagogies and research” (Reinertsen, 2014b) or what we might call “performing or activist methodologies” (Reinertsen & Otterstad, 2015). Instead of participant action research and learning organizations, I call it “inspiraction research” (Reinertsen, 2012) and, again, “writing organizations” (Reinertsen, 2015a, 2015b; Rhodes, 2001) as territories in which sustainability as various assemblages are enacted—data/contents and/as action/s or (a) writing with both content and data.

It is “researchcreation” (Manning, 2015). It resonates with a “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8#t=42) in a space of formal negations containing something to give. It resonates with notions of moving toward “a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability” (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Life-sustaining webs of iteration and/or movement, and the constitutive force and beauty of togetherness. The haunting question, however, is that of grammatical liberation: the immanent critique practices I/we want. And as we shall see, the without is all there is.

I here draw on piloting a research project called Becoming Earthlings: collaborative interspecies ethnographies—collapsing nature/culture divides aiming at contributing to and developing research-based Early Childhood Education for a sustainable future. Sustainability not in terms of a fixed state of affairs but referring to processes of thinking/feeling that are pluralistic, nourishing, and restorative, all in all, as continuing processes of change that imply authentic, positive, or healthy contemporary becomings nomadically created and recreated over time. It includes perspectives, ideas, and visions of the future, based in narratives of the past but constructed in the present. Entangling with and weaving facts into moving and meaningful narratives of being part of—not separate from—nature. Supersmall powers and hyperawareness monism . . .

Deleuze and Guattari (2007) continue,

We have seen that the regime of debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt, creates for man a memory of words (paroles). It is alliance that represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelist mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it—and the inscriptions themselves—into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 202)

Performing Iterative Methodologies and the Practicality of Research

“The Question”—a poem—remains a testimony, in a dream, to the ghostliness of the present: a poem can no more be a gift, perhaps, than can a dream. But for just this reason the poem and the dream become privileged figures for trying to think about the gift. (Derrida, 1998 in Royle, 2003, p. 140)

Three experienced ECEC professionals participated in the pilot in June 2015. I call them Holly, Tia, and Susan. In addition to onsite intense discussions, they had been introduced to posthuman research approaches and theory through participating in a 2-day workshop sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council the week before (see http://www.hioa.no/Hva-skjer/Performing-Methodologies-In-The-Early-Years-a-two-day-workshop). We sat together for 8 hr. Some of the questions that we worked with were the following: What can count as data, and how do we recognize them when we see or sense them? Is there agency in data? Can data set things in motion? How can responsibility and data be connected and/or create productive tensions? What can be data beyond presence—for example, data as an illusion, a vision, a dream, hope, silence, no data, resistance, a moment, or an absence? Furthermore, what can be data that exceed our capacity to know them? If we choose not to simply “interpret,” what else can we do with data, and what do they do to us? How then can we, through critiquing, put data together and/or “plug” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) theory into data and data into theory? What is a result, and how to repeal it thus continue plugging in? This is all to secure constant openness and questioning: propelling the self out of its isolation, dispersing it into myriads of data imprints, and hopefully inducing better practices and environmental communication. The larger the number of perhaps/es, the more sustaining the fun/ction.

And to be clear again: In the project, traditional conceptualizations of data as “raw” material for the interpretive work of (human) analysts are challenged. Both what we consider to be data and the coconstitutive force of that data in the process of knowledge production are changed. Through a sense of climate data as event and/as action, data are seen as vibrant (texts) and something primarily to theorize and/or think with and getting to “work,” thus as an opportunity to imagine constantly complex, creative, and critical engagements with (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) data (and content) in the conduct of research and becomings and/or processes of “becoming with data” (Reinertsen, 2014a). All research fields are thus seen as shifting and data as driving the research processes continuously. Outcomes are heterogeneous and seen as multimodal text creations and/or intertextual representations only, inspiring new questions and new research.

These are “‘stretching’ exercises for qualitative researchers” (Janesick, 2016). I am attempting to create performing—out-of-joint—prosthetic epistemologies and prosthetic ontologies “as embodied knowing and being in the world to challenge the disabling, oppressive prosthetics of . . . academic, institutional, and corporate assumptions and sedimentations” (Garoian, 2015, p. 488). Every relation a relation to difference therefore what is a close or distant relation cannot be determined. They are provocations, improvisations, and experimentations aiming to exceed what we know: disrupting, changing, and writing forward. They are encounters between sciences, arts, contents, and multiple qualquant research approaches pushing the limits of critical inquiry as a mapping and multiplying of forces having powers to transform or reconfigure reality, thus creating new processes for life. Any shared spaces narrated only as a coincidental event.

With the two terms translocality and writing resting in the background, six interrelated and interdependent experiments with data were facilitated and recorded. The order was random, and the discussions crossed. Each experiment was organized as encounters with different data and possible implications for own practices, thus forcing movements of a body/child/hood through subjectivity as a desiring machine, actualizing new modes of affective interaction asserting the potency of expression: (a) theory as data, (b) language as data, (c) the self as data, (d) material impact as data, (e) substance as data, and last (f) virtuality as data.

The first thing we did was to individually choose a chunk of theory/text and put it through a ruination and/or rumination process of questioning its authority and our thinking habits. The participants got a list of sentences containing suggestions as to how to create more and other. Here are some of the sentences:

Find a place where you are stuck. Cut it out and read it again

Find a weak spot. Shout it and see if something changes. Whisper it

Find a dichotomy

Read in the dark

Read it again tomorrow

Find the protagonist

Create a plot

Write a song or a poem from it

Dream it

Take away the first sentence

Gather comments

Write a sentence giving yourself possibilities

Identify your categories

Talk to your ghost

Find transitions in the text

Create a credo or manifest

What do you like about the text? Change that

Gather all the questions in the text

Find notes in the text

What do you want? Do other

Kill your text and write a eulogy

Create keywords, keycolors and keysounds

Write an apology to data

Write an interpretation

Read the text backward

Write a letter to whom/what you are preoccupied with the most

The list is long. Make it longer. Afterward we read aloud for one another:

This time accompanied by the sculpture by Issac Cordal in Berlin called “Politicians discussing global warming.” The ultimate questions being: What are data in situations of disagreements, and is it possible to think sustainability nondichotomously? Or how to make data from UN climate reports work in/through/with disagreement? This is a global issue but simultaneously also an issue for translocal ECECs and children as drivers of change.

After a long discussion about posthuman research approaches and data only as particles perhaps, as minor, as between/ness, as an unknown, and as black holes and black matter; nothing as data thus data and beings without, Susan laughs: “This gets worse and worse better and better. The climate crisis is solved in nothingness because nothing is data.” We continue talking about an “it” and formal negations and what we don’t know and what the “non” implies, and that creating alternatives or teaching about other alternatives are not an alternative because it would only represent another dichotomy. Thus a need perhaps of engaging in a machinic climate debate through becoming fond of ants, worms, and flies, and the Hundred Acre Wood is/as the way to being doing. Data are thus never lost, only degraded in our immersive messianic not onsite/life practical realities. The human/insect language we use becoming data. Thinking/feelings about sustainability becoming data or virtuality becoming real: Saving the Earth through nothing . . .

We wrote nature/culture poems.

The Postintentional Society Sustaining Fun(ctions)

Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalizing, but of plugging into the same plane of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire. (http://darkecologies.com/2015/07/04/felix-guattari-on-liberated-desire/)

Something is happening here. Data and contents, research and researchers are moving dissolving solving. It therefore does not show what but ways . . . Notions of translocality and writing allow new and other ways of speaking of data, content, and research(ers) as change and as curating. They allow navigating in, ontologically speaking, third rooms. This is not about our words per se therefore but our dispositions and possible new life processes. Ultimately asking questions about what, when, where, and whose knowledges apply. We constantly need new types of data (without), thus new types of methodologies. It is the way I see this, a democratization of the research process ultimately an increase of its relevance.

It is a theorizing as data becoming alive thus about virtual/immersive realities and onsite/life non-intentional consciousness-without-a-subject-machineries. It is (a) writing through the body and the land: a body/land writing enlarging the boundaries of community to include soils, waters, plants, and/in/me, and animals, or here collectively, the earth. It gives me sustainable child/hood/s hopes. I write—I/am change not—inscribe/d. I look forward to eco-chaos-ophy continuing with these guys.