Poetry/Moments of Educational Justice and Research: Pedagogical Encounters and the Production of New Worldly Collectivities

Beyond the Numbers: Transcorporal Living Thinking Learning With Inequality

New materialist and/or posthumanist thinking begins not with the notion that matter and discourse are entangled and co-constitutive and that neither is foundational. Instead, matter and/as language is conceptualized as agentic and all sorts of bodies, not just human bodies, are recognized as having agency. Such thinking thus causes us to reflect differently about what is beyond human control. . . .—our professionalisms and pedagogies and more; always and and and. This means that I/we strive to develop alternative understandings of subjectivity, time, place, knowledge, agents, and relationality beyond anthropocentric limitations—beyond our numbers and words. Hence, developing machinic and constant understandings of learning and justice beyond dichotomous thinking about human or non- or the more—than—human, actual or virtual, body or mind, good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative, known, unknown, conscious or unconscious, silent, sensed, or not. It is a move from hermeneutic to immanent (see below and endnote) and affirmative theories of assessment and/as learning ¹¹ : a self-organized criticality and brake with dichotomous thinking normalizing critique and decision making ultimately—and here ironically making it less dangerous to learn something new.

Furthermore, it is a move from normative (see above) to complex as in complete transparency scientific analysis in both education and research: Natural, human, and social sciences and research are embodied read embrained or process-ontologically written together. It is a move away from preoccupation with concepts of identity and culture toward particularity and commonality as in a transcorporal or corpovirtual walking withness for both teaching and learning . . . and research . . .—incorporeal transformations that subsist over and above the spatio-temporal world, but are expressible in language nonetheless. It is the beginning of a new science and a basis for everything (see http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/2277379).

Drawing, in one way or the other, on the immanent ¹¹ philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Felix Guattari (1930-1992), the work of Donna Haraway (1992, 2011, 2015), Karen Barad (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014), Rosi Braidotti (2013), and others lends itself to experimental encounters involving “walking with theory” as encounters with objects, bodies, and spaces. And the way I see this, a transcorporal subatomic negative energy walking with words—his words and mine—and walking words producing “a nonlocalized something” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 318) right now, right there. Read the two citations above again and simultaneously. “Becoming is an antimemory” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 324) and learning.

And again, these are affective theoretical and research approaches opening up for simultaneously affecting and being affected. Affect is seen as necessary to collaborative production of knowledge and production of new subjectivities, new notions of the learning self, and expansions: My thinking my forces my affective tones. ¹² And to be clear, this does not mean that there is a lack of reality, only that something is happening in actualization processes. Qualia moments of my learning self-naked realisms perhaps . . . Learning ultimately happening from movement of knowledges, movement of limbs, from dexterity, proficiencies, and skills associations: learning, living, thinking knowledge is thus movement internalized (Reinertsen, 2016a). Or rather, ideally teacher and a student becoming “a motif for each other, both embedded in a transcoded passage” (Semetsky, 2013, p. 229) ultimately going through a “shared deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 324). The teacher, the boy, a girl, you, and I are all singular as particular and the (learning) community we make matter. And as we already have seen, will see, the monstrosity of it (if) not.

Striving to develop alternative understandings of educational justice and social contacts with new materialist approaches offers a space for productive teaching and learning intra-intergenerational entanglements: Stratification as becoming through chaos (read complexity and constant diffractions): Becoming rhizome ¹³ researchers/teachers. ¹⁴ Hopefully futuring practices of “decolonizing, responsive attentiveness” (Haraway, 2011, p. 100). And the way I see this, speaking learning (Piketty, 2014) and/as justice (Reinertsen, 2015). Piketty ultimately calls for data on daily life. It is a call for understanding that there are significant and multidimensional impacts of inequality on individuals, families, and communities. This leads me, and also building on Sugrue (2015), to contend that capital in the 21st century must be understood, analyzed, and managed as more than income and wealth. Economic inequality can be said to ripple through the lives of those on the short end of the stick—with economic inequality comes a dearth of knowledge, social, political, epistemic, educational, linguistic, cultural, and material capitals. This situation/context, in turn, exacerbates and reinforces growing economic inequalities that are thought to be insurmountable. What I propose here then is to focus on education which is an important public policy arena, not on the economic inequality as an end point. It is one arena as space I hope/think is possible to open up for inclusive attentive responsive compassions.

And a moment

The World Bank operates with a limit of earning US$1 a day as the absolute poverty line. Imagine giving birth in a hospital charging money for every clean towel and bed linen. You have already five children at home. Spending money on clean sheets? Three women giving birth in the same bed . . . blood, fluids . . . spreading of bacteria, viruses, diseases . . . we motif each other. You are me, I am you. We are. Systemic inequality is indicative of a broken social contract. We have moved from shared accountability and responsibility to one of individual locus of control for which we are paying a high price.

Piketty provides in minute detail, the statistical and theoretical evidence for the growing inequalities we find in developed nations as well as globally. He warns that democratic societies cannot be sustained with such endemic inequality:

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based. (Piketty, 2014, p. 1)

In my view, Piketty thus provides a basis for a pre-eminent status for new materialist theoretical approaches and methods in the study of not just monetary poverty and inequality but also what I choose to call living thinking learning with inequality and equity and therefore the urgency of reconceptualizing and expanding on notions of the learning self. We learn nonstop also prerationally. New information is immediately always checked by the limbic system—the evaluation system of our brain that supports the learning of things that are new, good, and important for us and rejects information that creates bad feelings (Roth, 2009, in Sabitzer, 2011): Measuring the ways in which we experience educative systems in movement and duration. Important can be bad . . . And thinking about the boy again, it might produce a type of experienced micropolitical poverty as marginalization and silencing further producing realities which make, for example, education irrelevant, not worthwhile, and unjust, ultimately, if we believe in education and knowledge, unsustainable for us all.

Although sociologists are driven to understand the causes and effects of inequality and educators to be unknotting prerequisites for learning and school readiness, new materialists are driven to provide vibrating vitalist activist deepen and expanded diffractive analyses beyond cause and effect, delving into the subtle often hidden consequences of inequality for everyday life and learning, learning life. Creating live (Piketty)data and data coming alive is pivotal. Read endnote on immanence again. What I ultimately aim at is to provide a fuller story of inequality. Opening up a view of reality as expanding just as we know our universe is. It gives us more to think with and becoming together.

Piketty (2014) notes,

There are a thousand and one ways to do social science research, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me all the social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurements, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off. (p. 577)

He turns to Austen and Balzac to make his point:

Both novelists were intimately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in their respective societies. They grasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their martial strategies and personal hopes and disappointments. These and other novelists depicted the effects of inequality with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match. (Piketty, 2014, p. 2)

I, as you now know, turn to new materialisms and reading poetry and Piketty with love and the boy—a girl—and I. Aristotle argued that poetry is truer than history, and ever since, writers have been using poetry to depict life as we experience it. Poetry may capture the miraculous, the monstrous, the surprising, and the “essence” of a moment of everyday life, and we can use poetry to represent data, enhance and strengthen our analysis of data and the stories we tell from and with our data. Poetry allows participation in ideas, feelings, as moments of reality and thoughts on so-called values. Poetry invites, the way I see this, to engagement and activism. It challenges traditional ways of thinking and is able to jar us into new directions. Poetry maximizes meaning. It creates poetic senses. I hope to create a Piketty/poetic/justice sense. Poetry shuts out the excess and the noise. It inspires respect and awareness of other person’s stories. It may illuminate a situation, a context, and a series of positive or negative events. Poetry has an elegant history first through spoken words then written words then both. Walking words heard and seen . . .

Through creating poeticizing ¹⁵ pedagogical and research practices through animating Piketty and his or my data as Pikettydata, and in studying what emerges, is an “understanding” of how mental and social structure thus educational policies, as well as economic, social, political, research, and educational institutions shape the everyday realities and lived experiences of society’s most vulnerable, but not individualized but with me as teacher/researcher thus indirectly expanding on notions of the social contract for living, learning, and justice. The concepts of justice and equality ultimately resting, the way I see this, on three principles: a recognition of people’s singularity or rather particularity (as opposed to individualism and identity), the organization of reciprocity (in the relation of citizens to one another), and the constitution of commonality (for the community as a whole). This articlepoem again is Pikettydata and what I poetry/moment/qualia/expansions try. Rebelwritingdeleuzeandguattari. There is more to follow.

The Learning Self Slow Poetry Writing Walking Staying Alive

Postulate 55. When the mind imagines its own weakness it necessarily sorrows. (Spinosa, 1996, Ethics, p. 99—part III)

And to theory/walk/encounter/poeticize some more, I think I/we need to grapple head-on with the tensions and hidden contours in/between our visions. Through rethinking with monsters, monstrosities, trolls, or the Scandinavian tomtes as Cixous (2005, p. 121) refers to, I, therefore, try to engage with the kind of awkwardness that might otherwise be avoided as too complex, wrong even, too difficult, uncomfortable, or irrelevant. Awkward encounters thus productively helping us to rethink the boundaries and relations between X and to find new ways of understanding our here, our educative places, and agencies. I ask myself: Why it is that sometimes I do not believe something before I see it, while oftentimes I believe something not seeing anything at all? How come that in seven out of 10 cases of manslaughter in close family relations (the majority of cases being men killing their female partners) the victim has been in contact with either the police or other social and/or health services to ask for help several times but nothing is done and no help is given? I am/they/we are the professionals (see http://www.dagbladet.no/2015/04/16/kultur/meninger/kronikk/debatt/vold_mot_kvinner/38705695/). What is belief here and believing . . . in oneself and others and in knowledge? What is subjective judgment? How to make encounters matter and mattering pedagogies? I want to be able to see/say more and other avoiding silencing. There are silences that kill . . . He did end up on the streets ultimately allowing him (self) to be abused again and again.

Positivist science has worked to delineate, categorize, compartmentalize, segregate, and hierarchialize our ways of understanding and engaging with/in our worlds. This onto-epistemology has also underpinned and rationalized the oppression of women, children, and peoples of colors other than White (Cannella, 2015). Furthermore, the self-identified human is privileged over the more-than-human Other, and we have become reduced to, and seduced by, monocultures of both fields and minds (Potts & Haraway, 2010; Shiva, 2012). Unleashing a/un/grammatical or “mad” elements in language through utopic theorizing or poeticalization is therefore seen as both a political and ethical imperative and method activating differences building in perhapses and never “is-ness” constantly possibilizing becoming and/as learning and justice, ultimately making science and knowledges affectively—viable and relevant. I want to open up both research and our pedagogical gazes for multiple social realities hopefully contributing to increased mental mobility creating corpovirtual postanthropocentric ways of being, knowing, doing, and relating: Justice in learning. And finally: Corpovirtuality implies an aporetic loss of self because we lean and/or lend ourselves to the other. It is a looking toward the future fabulation anchored in vulnerability, response-ability, and commonality bringing in, as already mentioned, an intergenerationality time perspective in our work. It is a plane of noncontradiction of only relations of movements speed and slowness between unformed elements tied to an abstract design and hot/cold/longitudes/latitudes involution (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, pp. 293-294). “Norwegian omelette” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 288).

It reminds me to keep the invisible to see. The two citations I started with are my thinking with infra-empirical (MacLure, 2011) knowledge movement findings, my site from where I story and sparking my work. My work on empowerment by consciousness or awareness realization: my work on response-ability and philosophical hunger—my work on contextual diffractive pedagogies through thinking with monsters. It is a walking seeing slowly as event ¹⁶ and ethics as justice in pedagogy and research: a quality as in qualia-moment. ¹⁷ And again, the term qualia is referring to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. It derives from the Latin adverb quālis meaning “what sort” or “what kind.” It is a “becoming quality” or as I prefer—again qualia becoming becoming: The taste of an apple, the warmth of another place than home not wanting to leave, or the perceived bliss or bleakness of school . . . (see https://tv.nrk.no/program/koid28003415/fra-barn-til-borger; Translation from Norwegian: From Child to Citizen).

I ask, how might the monstrous, humorous, burlesque, and/or carnivalesque help one think and imagine the world differently? How might the monster help unsettle and rethink traditional ontology, epistemology, and ethics? It might be thought of as processes of thinking the worst to do the best. Monsters for poetry or rather, writing as slow walking and seeing through wicked and uncomfortable topics and what they might produce: Vulnerable knowing storied matter and subjective professionalisms of polyvocality, heterogeneity, and even heterodoxy. Monsters are presenting an opportunity to question existing knowledge-understandings or practices bringing forth complexity and ambiguousness as strength and a force in our practices. Thus, these are moments of force and realisms: Moments of possibilizing educational justice and research. There are perceptions, sensations, and cognitions enjoying fleeting quality life for moments. There are languages below languages releasing one/me/you from meaning allowing that which means nothing in itself . . . the potential for possibility . . . montages of multiplicities . . . Our plasticity brains recognizing and generating patterns and rules themselves if we let them. It is a brain network mechanics. Stakes are high. I ask again: What do you think he learned and why don’t I see?

And this?

The ECEC professional brings a camera to film and document outdoor skiing activities. After some time the children come over to her to watch the film and she sits down and watches with them. “Oh no,” Mikkel suddenly exclaims, “You need to delete it.” He looks at the professional and repeats that she needs to delete it. The professional looks at him and ask him why he says what he says? “You ski so well, you have even done a high jump there.” Mikkel does not answer and watches the film again. “I did not mean it,” he said in a low voice. “I was going to say sorry.” Now the professional discovers what the film also shows. After Mikkel has stopped at the lower end of the hill, he kicks Said with his skis and he laughs when doing it before he turns his back to him and walks away (Interpretation from Lafton, 2014).

And to be perfectly clear, this is about more than teacher or researcher blind-spots, not listening, not seeing, or observation. It is a radical move away from preoccupation with neoliberal concepts of identity and culture toward particularity and commonality as in a walking withness for teaching and learning. A worldly longing to be part of—not separate from . . . I simultaneously introduce both methodological and epistemological concerns into expectations of certainty and knowing hopefully toppling taken for granted and relied upon policies, processes, and precepts hierarchies, selective application, linearity, and rationality in traditional pedagogy. I rhetorically ask: What is produced when thoughts we have not thought are materialized? What is the taken for granted and relied upon? How strong is the normative power in taken for granted notions? Natural, human, and social sciences and research are here articlepoetically and/or system and process-ontologically written together opening up for emergent corpovirtual and intra-intergenerational collectivities futuring conceptual, theoretical, and methodological innovation.

And to sum up a bit so far: What I try here then is to be mapping material-discursive research entanglements with monsters and poeticalization—reconfiguring the possibilities for researcher, teacher/professional, child constant, in moving bodies in the making thus in the service of the moment—describing possible strategies and methods of new materialist pedagogies. This is therefore a diffractive rhizomatic text. Even the different quotes are not used as they seem to fit with what I think: The moment being the only bearing structure, communicating X: the structural aspects not of linguistic activities. The goal is not to become a success or a center of pedagogical power. Pedagogy in itself is the goal and to hear/see that the students are successful. Daring to show my own vulnerability to students makes learning easier for both. The students and I affectively share this world this school these systems. We are man and nature storied together. The moment demands hard word—walking—work every day every second.

Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: “OK, OK, let’s go on to something else.” Objections have never contributed anything. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 223).

In the Service of the Moment

I believe in the moment, as a mine containing all the world’s knowledges like hidden metal waiting for the dawn of light. (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009, p. 67, author’s translation)

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 17) ¹⁸

Monsters and the monstrous might be said to lurk as images of crisis, death, dread, and terror in politics, and figures of thought within academia. As shadows of the past, present, and future, they re/appear as the potential educational, ecological, and of cause, biotechnological realities of today. They roam the in-between, making borders and boundaries tremble and shatter, whether these are borders of nation states or bodies, or categories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, anomalies, class, self, and other. In this sense, the monster seems to embody a promise of disturbances and change, as Donna Haraway argued in her 1992 text “The Promises of Monsters” which heralds the 1990s increase in academic engagement with figures of ghosts and monsters, the spectral and the monstrous, encompassing publications such as Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx pointing to strange temporalities and disturbing messages of the figure of the monster as it haunts the margins of reality and human subjecthood. I bring it/them with me to my 21st century posthuman and new materialist thinking. Monsters offer nontrivial question for the enquiring bodymind, and the sort of stuff that might hopefully shunt us outside the box to review everything that we think we understand about the workings of our theories and practices. The concepts, criteria, or rules through which ultimately quality (read professionalism) is assessed are thus turned into non/categories categories offering other possibilities through constant other ways of speaking and thinking: categories, rules, and/or quality criteria but not. I am “Trapped in oxygen but free to breathe” (Schrattenholz, 2015).

I try to zoom in and out, widen on the without: noology something in deleuzeoguattarian Body without Organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) simultaneity, betweenness, immanence, and life diffractive complexity: X factors are eroding, sculpturing, possibilizing every/anything always. The without and perhapses are all there is. I try researching as experimenting with order and disorder in which provisional and partial taxonomies are formed, but are always subject to change and metamorphosis, as new connections spark among words, bodies, objects, and ideas. It is a resistance to dominant narratives and sense/nonsense, distance/closeness, inside/outside, body/mind complexities, and what thinking other—new onthologizations—would take—mean—and make future—helping professions matter . . . And to be direct: It is a Body without Organs rhizomatic scizoanalysis ¹⁹ attuning to child and adult a-grammatical sense/making/censoring capacities. Becoming more attentive to troublesome moments as indicators of the potential for creation: “Rebel becomings” that “insist in language, opening it onto the new” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 4): Trying seeing differently the other face of order and pattern replacing the current reality with one I truly want.

Below is another mode as moments, contingent captures. Already you have had more. Quality/qualia ²⁰ are forwarded as an intensity and force in a moment only. In a deleuzeoguattarian way, it might be called an ethics of the event. There is no thing/object without the events that define it as that particular, constituting its potential for change and rate of change. An event is unrelated to any material content, being without fixed structure, position, temporality, or property, and without beginning or end. Walk them. But before you go, I’ll walk the event a bit more: The event is a sign of its genesis, and the expression of the productive potential of the forces from which it arose, high-lightening the momentary uniqueness of the nexus of forces while preserving a place for discontinuity. The event is hence seen as machinations of production and the productive potential inherent in forces of all kinds representing a moment at which new forces might be brought to bear. Thinking and creating thus constituted simultaneously. Thinking ultimately turned into its own event by embracing the rich chaos of life and the uniqueness and potential of each moment: Connecting and building relationships with body, matter, technology, nature, and animals . . .

And a moment . . .

Rachel is an author and artist. She arranges writing workshops for pupils in schools. She has been doing it for more than 3 years. She asks them to write about school, being young, their lives, attending school, dropping out etc. etc. She has collected thousands of texts:

I cry in the car after workshops because I am so exhausted from respecting them all. Much of my enthusiasm comes from that. It is a learning with/in joy and definitely narcissist. Or rather, it is hard work with texts and a physical bodily joy over the hard work of learning to respect all. What I do with their texts afterwards is wishing them well, that they will somehow cope. Honest being in classrooms is what I think is universal here and what others can get or take from me. I try to be a vibrant human being not an adult. ²¹ (Interview, August 11, 2016)

Poeticizing Grasswriting X-Factor Complexitycrying ²² Practices and Expanded Social Contracts

And to touch base: This articlepoem is an attempt to bring into focuses the lived and thought experience of inequality—it aims at forcing each of us to confront the stark realities of systemic (read also grammatical or onto-epistemological) inequality. By moving the analysis of inequality from numbers and words to the everyday lived and thought experiences, I hope to confront the naked consequences of endemic (educational) inequalities. Through complexity self-learning thinking, I hope to confront the often taken for granted conceptualizations or notions of and beliefs in, for example, self-regulation as basis for autonomy and learning. Important as they are, they must be brought to life and thought—walked—with—Piketty—constantly and again and again for justice as that which ultimately conditions sound or sustainable social contracts.

A perusal of some, the greatest sociological writings of the 20th century (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, G. H. Mead, Gregory Bateson, Michel Foucault . . .) as well as a cursory reading of Alexis de Tocqueville or Thorstein Veblen, for example, underscores that addressing the structural and social dimensions of inequality requires a robust understanding of how the lives of individuals, and therefore societies, are shaped and defined by systemic inequality. This includes, the way I see this, a critical philosophical understanding of epistemological and ontological conditions for creating and sustaining such systems, the materiality of structure, the discursive blind-spots we create, the silencing of voices, abortion of thoughts, and the sometimes taken for granted notions and mechanisms of how we think and how our lives are thought of by ourselves and others: The micropolitics of self-making and the devastating possibility of peoples’ lives not being seen or thought of at all and also estrangement.

Indirectly again, I ultimately speak of onto-epistemological conditions for change or rather innovation. I want a new educational language and make poetry and literature from evolutionary learning her-/his-/tories. I want immanent learning and assessment theories filling up with perhapses. ²³ Learning in an onto-epistemological perspective happens or takes place as we live and perform our pedagogical practices. These moments possibilize—or with these moments—we possibilize justice (or not). Children learn own lives and becomings. And nonsense is not the opposite but the confederate of sense.

A nonsense moment you think of . . .

In his treatise on capitalism and inequality in the 21st century, Thomas Piketty reminds readers that the numbers and statistical data do not tell the full story. To fully grasp the social significance of statistical or theoretical analyses of wealth and inequality, Piketty directs us, as we have already seen, to read the descriptions of how people actually live. He notes that if we are to grasp the true consequences of inequality, we must turn to the data that reveal how people actually live and think their lives when their choices and opportunities are circumscribed by the ubiquitous presence of inequality.

Living/thinking lives and seeing the boy’s slow walking thoughts are, the way I suggest, one way and one of the conditions for change and thinking anew about equality. It is a livingthinking lives that are able/enables us to think oneself together with others and community; a livingthinking one another; a livingthinking walking with oneanother: re-conceptualizing conditions for participation and creativity becoming the hub in/of our thinking of innovation and sustainability—this thinking about both ourselves and others, ourselves with others, our response/bilities for one another and social contracts.

And yet another monstrosity moment again

I was at a dinner party the other day. The man sitting beside me started speaking about the current refugee situation in Europe. He argued very strongly for sending everybody home:

Their world is so different. We do help already, but you know if a mother is committed into hospital in some of these countries to give birth to a child, she will probably not eat the food she is offered to recover and gain strength after the childbirth. She would probably save the food for the 9 year old that she already has at home because he is worth more than the new baby.

I had nothing to say. Silences that . . .

What Piketty advocates, without actually calling for it, is that the “stuff”—including the hidden contours . . . of qualitative research be fully embraced and put at the epicenter of any and all discussions of and actions on inequality. In short, analyzing the lived experiences of people, and how we (epistemologically and ontologically) think about our lives and those of others and how people think/learn about themselves, is necessary if we are to illustrate and better understand the consequences of inequality and therefore find motivation and real world justification for rectifying endemic inequalities.

Historically, and with some variations, Western liberal democratic societies have understood the social contract to be an agreement of shared responsibility and accountability. This contract was a requirement for working toward creating and sustaining a fair and equitable social order. The inter- and intragroup inequalities that have taken hold are, the way I see this, indicative of a broken contact. The social contract should reflect the shared attitudes of a society. Endemic inequality, however, undercuts the very process by which shared societal attitudes take hold.

The greater the structural inter- and intragroup inequality the more likely it is that those sharing dissimilar experiences and worldviews will not interact, at least not in any meaningful manner. One can simply not imagine and think those lives. These are thus lives not thought. This social distancing between and among people whom are economically dissimilar from one’s self almost guarantees that there will be no reflective understanding or attitude taking of the other. One will not be able to come to a shared understanding about social norms, values, or attitudes if are not able to interact with those who are dissimilar. This leads to norms and shared attitudes being found not among a wide swath of society but only among similar experienced and like-minded individuals. This in turn creates chasms in a society. The more inequality and distance among members of a society, Mead would contend, the greater the divide in values and attitudes. We find this today in Western neoliberal societies’ paradoxical move toward regulations, control, and accountability but through rhetoric of freedom resulting in a simultaneous and seemingly fading importance of structural inequalities in the minds of policymakers.

G. H. Mead (1863-1931) notes that shared attitudes shaping behaviors are the product of coordinated activities taken by individuals who are able to reflexively take the attitude of the other. Taking the view of the other (and I hurry to deconstruct it) requires interaction, co-mingling, and an understanding of how the other lives—all eroded or erased when the norm is endemic inequality. Not taking the attitude of the other whose life experiences are different from mine, not understanding the lived experiences of those from whom we differ creates almost insurmountable barriers to taking the perspective of the other reflexively. And without the ability to take that perspective building shared attitudes is next to impossible. Without shared attitudes, what wants is the social and/or political will to change or alter structural arrangements that create and sustain inequalities and inequities. Hence, without shared attitudes built on self reflexively taking the attitude of the other a community or a society creates a social order based on inequalities. Through complexity rethinking the other, the boy, myself—basically everything always—I try to make a case for poetic and poetizing practices and social contracts. It is grasswriting X-factor complexitycrying and/as attentive compassion and compassionate education systems for withness and wellness vibrating with joy (to cite Rachel—and Spinosa again) ultimately a view of values as ethics as performance. It induces a type of realisms in education, research, and policymaking calling for theoretical, conceptual, and practical innovations in the fields of learning and what I try. YOU?

A moment . . .

Withness and Wellness for Teaching and Learning

Postulate 53. When the mind considers itself and its power of acting, it rejoices, and does so the more, the more distinctly it imagines itself and its power of acting. (Spinosa, 1996, Ethics, p. 99—part III)

These are my embodied words and rhizomatic writings full of contradictions, uncertainties, anxieties, desires, and disturbances haunting the/our shifting landscapes of monsters, and explorations of junctures of human and more than human or nonhumans and politics. Human and nonhuman entities constituted together and in constant inter-intraaction with each other, ultimately increasing his or our value to more than we can see.

My body is (a) thinking territory and process quality being/doing becoming now. I try to door attentive compassion withness, in/as both education and research and academic analysis and assessment, forwarding a constant curiosity new worldly collectivism as a form of life and complexity self-learning thinking, ultimately compassion for expanding and expanded social contracts and justice. I focus on the possibility of tackling ongoing economical and identity-political crises ²⁴ as well as on new kinds of educational and organizational experiments, both for academics, policymakers, and activists: Withness and wellness for joyous teaching and learning.

Children strongly co-construct their learning. A warm stone—a warm tone—might become a warm friend in a child’s cold hands. The same stone might be pained and turned into a doll to play with—a tone to lean on . . . I memory think with the boy again and his walking crying for help . . . connections in the becoming of knowledges. It might be called activist philosophy and speculative politics or the other way around. I suggest increased focus on system/process-quality. I suggest increased focus on ecosophy/sustainability and collectivity. I suggest semiotic/research and methodological expansions in/as this new form of capitalisms . . . perhaps . . . because he is/all/we are worth it . . .