Inhuman hands and missing child: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish primary school

Abstract

This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. We adopt Tsing’s (2015) art of noticing and present four ‘unruly’ encounters, touching surprising entanglements that e/merge when learning to ‘look around rather than ahead’. We notice entanglements of hand/writing, snow, flows of capitalism, mobile phones and a cardboard representation for our rethinking of literacies without assuming development and progress. Based on our analysis, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices.

Keywords

Posthuman literacies inhuman touching hand missing child

Grasping early literacies

Holding pencils,

drawing heart figures to mark how much the writers love football and Messi

the footballer

Holding a smart device, maybe an iPad,

with fingers typing Greek words in Google translator

Hands that have travelled all the way from the womb, Somalia and Iraq

to snowy Northern Finland (geographically proximate to the Arctic Circle)

holding objects that assemble global production lines of earth minerals

Hands connecting with the meaning and mattering

of intra-acting with a strange new language.

We tend not to foreground the hand in literacy research. In Finnish, spoken by five million people in Northern Europe, the word ‘käsi’ (meaning hand) is etymologically one of the oldest proto-Uralic words and thousands of years old. A similar line of development as in many other languages has taken place for the Finnish verb ‘käsi/ttää’: it is common that verbs meaning ‘grasping’, ‘holding’ and ‘capturing’ by hand have come to mean understanding. In Dutch, the verb ‘begrijpen’ is used for ‘understanding’ as well as the noun ‘begrip’ – ‘Begriff’ in German is (interestingly) translated as ‘concept’ in English. A linguistic explanation for this development is that understanding is similar to holding something in the hand, being mentally in control (Aapala, 2019; Kamppi, 2016). According to the Oxford Latin dictionary, the verb comprehendere means ‘to seize in the hand’ and the verb capere ‘to take into the hand, take hold of’. But ‘be-grijpen’ also has colonising embodied connotations, as the verb ‘grijpen’ means in English ‘grabbing’, ‘seizing’, ‘catching’ and ‘snatching’ (of land or ideas, for example).

We critically engage with the idea that what a hand is can be defined by what ‘it’ does as a human body part existing in Newtonian space and time. We problematise the idea that understanding and making meaning is devoid of the political and the ethical, and supposedly a mere epistemological issue to help children acquire neutral literacy skills, for example. We will explore how making meaning is ontologically already entangled with/in matter, thereby queering Cartesian binary thinking (concrete/abstract, body/mind/brain) in literacy practices (Barad, 2007; Kuby et al., 2019). Massumi (2015: 84) proposes that:

In order to think of relation as primary, we need a different kind of logic, because the traditional logic is one of separation. --- It starts with exclusion and ends in sameness. --- What we often like to separate out as physical as opposed to mental --- always criss-cross, they always envelop each other — they are always complexly mutually including.

The hand is the means for humans to use tools (e.g. in handwriting) and to symbolise, but how the hand works materially as (a body) part of learning has only recently become the focus of (posthuman) literacy research – we ‘normally’ tend to use transcripts of the language used by research participants and their written word. Instead, we explore how a posthuman reading of visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson experiments with hands being in touch with different spacetime materialities.¹ The obstacles to thinking differently about the role of the hand in research are multiple and philosophically complex, including disrupting unilinear time as we will explain below through the paradigm shift of the ontological turn. The main aim of the paper is to explore what early literacies might look like without assuming progress with the help of Anna Tsing’s (2015) ‘arts of noticing’, which involves needing ‘to watch unruly edges’ (p. 20). Tsing points out that when dreams of modernisation no longer hold, the arts of noticing emerge from learning ‘to look around rather than ahead’ (p. 22). This means paying attention to seemingly trivial matters, being vulnerable to others and accepting the indeterminacy of not being in control but rather existing as equal participants in shifting human and nonhuman assemblages (p. 20). We present four such ‘unruly’ encounters and think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. The focus of our analysis is not only on disrupting anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism (Braidotti, 2019), but also on the ‘missing child’. For a critical posthumanist, theories are performative practices – a touching of the world (Barad, 2012: 2).

We notice how posthumanism works to reconfigure touching – the touching of the world with/in the hand and the touching with/in the camera. It complexifies our reading of the literacy event in a Finnish classroom in several educationally and politically salient ways. Through our four unruly encounters we touch some ‘unruly edges’, entanglements that surprise us. Through inhuman, dis/embodied entanglements of hand/writing, flows of capitalism, snow, mobile phones and a cardboard representation of a body, we reconfigure literacies without assuming telos, development and progress, and we connect literacies with a less habitual way of worlding-with/in-texts. By decentring the hand as a human body part (although also important), we disrupt a metaphysics of presence and the temporality of progress and binary logic, and reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon always already assembled in human and more-than-human company and as such rendered capable (Haraway, 2016). We also notice the many missing child bodies of colour as a result of the politics of Finnish immigration policies and the teacher gently touching, stroking and holding the children and sitting on the floor with them.

Touched by Karen Barad’s agential realism and lured by the idea of learning as a worlding process, the ontological move in our paper brings us in touch with a more egalitarian relationality in-between teacher and learner. Accepting the in/determinacy of not being in control but rather existing as equal participants in shifting human and nonhuman entanglements involves being vulnerable to others (human and nonhuman) – engendering a sense of response-ability. The political difference this makes is that the child as a phenomenon is an ontological move away from identity and judging children on their individual autonomous achievements according to standardised benchmarks that are external from the learning process itself. Since the major challenge of our contemporary planet is that ‘progress stopped making sense’ (Tsing 2015: 25), there is an urgent need to unravel our deeply embedded notions of mastery. Literacy education is a good place to start with its disciplining of the hands, making room for the notion of inhuman literacy as we move away from focusing on the hand as human, infinitely intra-acting, entangling and becoming with/in the world.

Unruly encounter 1

Touching the unruly edge of the dreams of modernity in hand/writing curricula

In the 1925–1939 compulsory education curricula of the small Paavola town in Northern Finland, the disciplining of hands gained a lot of attention. Saara Tuomaala’s thorough analysis in the field of history research, ‘From working hands to clean and writing hands’ (2004), foregrounds how the embodied training of hands exercised in rural schools was a systematic means of producing modernisation in reading and writing Finnishness. The meticulous process of controlling the movement of agrarian hands learning to write was standardised, aiming for hygienic, clean, obedient, efficient mastery. ‘Progress felt great; there was always something better ahead’, Anna Tsing writes (2015: 24) about dreams of modernisation.

The ethos of progress, development and mastery still plays a prominent role in literacy education, which can be discerned in Dinehart’s (2015) examination of handwriting in early childhood settings in the context of the US from a cognitive literacy research standpoint. In her review, she pays attention to fine motor writing skills and the notion of ‘school readiness’ (p. 97), the association between handwriting and academic achievement (p. 98), legibility and speed as central elements of quality handwriting (p. 98), immature grasp compared to older children (p. 99), MRI scans showing how writing letters by hand activates areas of a child’s brain identified as the ‘reading circuit’ (p. 106, reference made to James and Engelhardt, 2012), and poor handwriting in the population of individuals with ADHD as a possible early indicator of cognitive concerns (p. 108). Dinehart’s thorough review comprises the conventional developmentalist approach to studying the work of ‘hand’ in literacy research.

There is constant negotiation around the human hand about the limits of appropriate and non-appropriate. There is the unpredictable risk of dirt, infection, mess and contamination of normality that might come along, hiding in the palm or underneath the fingernails. Without control of education, there could always be the risk of literacies following the unruly lines of flight of typing fingers, enforcing resistance, entangling with revolution, pressing the launch button of global disasters.

‘[P]rogress is embedded in what it means to be human” (Tsing, 2015: 21), but since the ‘problem is that progress stopped making sense’ (p. 25), a completely different and emergent theory is needed, one that asks what else is going on and ‘stresses ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories’ (p. 61). An inhuman understanding is needed.

The ontological turn – a paradigm shift for literacy research

Resistance to including means of meaning-making other than language in research that matters is not just an issues of power, it is metaphysical (and of course the two are entangled). Friedrich Nietzsche did warn us not to take grammar too seriously (Barad, 2007: 133). Deleuze and Guattari (2014) also write:

When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body, when a drop of wine falls into the water, there is an intermingling of bodies; but the statements, “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am eating,” “The water is turning red,” express incorporeal transformations of an entirely different nature (events). (p.86)

Quantum physicist and queer theorist Karen Barad (2007: 133) argues persuasively that language has been granted excessive power in determining what is real, and has instilled a deep mistrust of matter, figuring it as mute, passive, immutable. Instead of an ‘intermingling of bodies’ (quote above), humans have installed a grammatical word-thing and sign-signified relationship, an ontology that has shaped what counts as true knowledge of a human-independent world. By doing so, we claim that language and discourse have positioned us, humanimals, as thinkers above or outside the (material) world, and with that same ontological move have distanced us, ‘fully-human’ adults, from both matter and child (and other so-called ‘illiterates’) (Murris, 2016; Murris and Haynes, 2018). In the case of the signifier ‘hand’, the signified is the human body part that gives the word ‘hand’ meaning.

This paper commits to doing justice to the way in which our hands, and what they touch, are always already part of material-discursive entanglements. It is the researcher’s response-ability to trace some of these in/finite entanglements, e.g. children’s hands holding objects in literacy practices, as part of a Baradian phenomenon that includes the exploitative mining of minerals, such as coltan from Congo, global production lines and capitalist desires (cf. Fuchs, 2014; Paakkari and Rautio, 2018) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Children’s hands-holding-objects as part of a Baradian phenomenon.

Inspired by Niels Bohr, Barad (2011: 142) provides scientific evidence that a phenomenon expresses the entanglement and inseparability of object and apparatus, observer and observed and this includes the concepts that underpin all research. Barad’s agential realism assumes a ‘quantum ontology’ that is ‘based on the existence of phenomena, rather than independently existing things’ (Barad, 2011: 147). Hence, agency is always relational and ‘cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit and is no longer aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity’ (Barad, 2007: 177). But let us not go too fast. The complexity of the matter demands a slowing down, a kind of slow scholarship motivated by trying to do justice to the material we are working with. This also demands explaining why it matters to read literacy events posthumanly.

E/mergent inhuman literacies

Literacy education and research have been dominated by skills-based, progress-oriented and hierarchical approaches and we wonder what will happen when we plug into more complex circuits when reading print screen images of video footage (Baradian ‘agential cuts’²). The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on literacies as nonrepresentational and sociomaterially entangled (Anders et al., 2016; Boldt and Leander, 2017; Burnett et al., 2014; Burnett and Merchant, 2016; Kuby, 2017; Kuby and Rowsell, 2017; Lenters, 2016; Somerville, 2013; Thiel, 2015; Thiel and Jones, 2017; Wohlwend et al., 2017).

The ethics of our work is located in a critical posthuman ontology and epistemology that demands ‘an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then’ – an ‘ethics of worlding’ (Barad, 2007: 394, 392; our emphasis). The significance for such literacy research is poignantly articulated by Kuby et al. (2019: 14):

Our theories of emancipation and equality, of man as master of the universe, have not worked out so well for huge swaths of our planet. For literacy, mastery hasn’t worked so well either. In place of human mastery over a narrowly construed literacy terrain, posthuman theories provide lines of flight, ways to disrupt and break from the narrowness of rutted paths and plug into more complex circuits.

In their influential re-reading of New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies manifesto, Leander and Boldt (2013) point out how the work of NLG is ‘very much an Enlightenment document that expresses the wish that using research, technique, and pedagogy grounded in expert knowledge will enlighten us with the means to create a better social future’ (p. 34). In contrast, posthumanists disrupt the expert/novice binary, developmentalism (Murris, 2019) and unilinear time the NLG’s approach assumes. For example, Leander and Boldt propose an e/mergent, nonrepresentational, embodied and affective alternative to literacy research. Truman (2019: 11) proposes inhuman literacies as gestures that disrupt how literacy practices operate within the dominant narrative of schooling as ‘a humanizing project that rehabilitates those who are “illiterate” into the project of becoming literate’. Instead, inhuman literacies carry the ‘potential to rupture humanism from within’ through ‘jamming the system, telling another story or refusing to engage with the (dominant) system altogether’ (p. 1). We join these aims.

Hackett and Somerville (2017) foreground movement and sound as young children’s communicative practices. Their examination of drumming, marching and wooden sticks is inspiring and thought-provoking, but in our inhuman analysis we trace other elements and dimensions of the event through four unruly encounters. Limited by space, we focus on disrupting what the human eye sees by playing and experimenting with the concepts of ‘hand’ and ‘touch’. Of interest for our analysis of hands in literacy practices, Merchant (2017) explores the notion of ‘handiness’ and ‘handy devices’ in young children’s iPad use. He draws a typology of stabilising, controlling and deictic movements of human hands (p. 250). However, unlike Merchant, we move away from focusing on the hand as human and reconfigure the hand as inhuman, infinitely intra-acting, entangling and becoming with/in the world.

Assembling the inhuman hand

In order to start our thinking with the hand as not singular, but multiple and inhuman, we first encounter the anatomic hand: the joints, the muscles, the skin, and how we perceive the hand with our human senses. The anatomic hand is categorised as belonging to an individual human. In Finnish, the biological category of ‘primates’ translates as ‘kädelliset’, meaning ‘the ones with hands’. According to Wikipedia, it is distinctive for primates to have a thumb that bends in another direction than the rest of the fingers, enabling grasping. However, in a phenomenological understanding, ‘the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp’ (Heidegger quoted in Pallasmaa, 2017: 98).

Finnish architect and phenomenologist Pallasmaa (2005) claims that tactile sense is ontologically prior to all the other senses, including vision. In knowledge construction there is a bias towards human vision at the expense of the other senses. Drawing on Montagu, Pallasmaa (2005: 11) proposes that humans see by their skin – as humans we are literally in touch with the world through the layer of skin that overlays the transparent cornea of the eye. His influential ideas on experiencing, designing and teaching architecture disrupt the dominance of human vision since Ancient Greek philosophy and science. Vision, visibility and ocular metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) structure what humans have decided is real and what counts as truth and certain knowledge (a metaphysics of ‘presence’). In contrast, Pallasmaa (2005: 11) writes, that ‘[t]ouch is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with that of ourselves’. Not vision, he claims, but my body is the ‘navel of my world’ and ‘remembers who I am and where I am located’ (Pallasmaa, 2005: 11).

We take Pallasmaa’s ideas about the human body as the navel of the world as our ‘starting point’ and diffract³ through Baradian insights about the dominance of human vision – the eye – in determining what is real (human exceptionalism), and the damaging effects of regarding the human body as an individualised human ‘I’ (human individualism). Although for phenomenologists, embodiment and subjectivity are relational in the sense that human bodies are not autonomous and individuated with a blurring of bodily boundaries when these bodies intimately touch and intermingle (‘skinship’), they are still an expression of the notion of ‘interaction’. In contrast, the influential Baradian neologism of ‘intra-action’ does not involve an ontology that assumes the pre-existence of discrete entities before they come together in relationships (Barad, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2017). Disrupting both the metaphysics of presence and the metaphysics of individualism, intra-action expresses mutual relationality: the idea that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are never ‘pure’, are never unaffected by each other, but are always in relation (Barad, 2007: 152).

The natural and social sciences are built on this basic dualist structure of an ‘I’ (‘culture’) at an ontological distance from the world (‘nature’) that is perceived with the human eye. As for example is the case when scientists categorise body parts, such as hands, using the natural sciences (see above). Pedersen (2010: Ch1) poignantly observes that scientific classifications separate, identify, delimit and fix things relative to other things, and as such they structure a particular way of value-laden thinking about them, despite sciences’ claim of neutrality. One could argue that, in Figure 2, what is visually expressed is how hands are, as a biological ‘matter of fact’, but in that case the power-producing nature/culture binary is firmly held in place. For posthumanists, nature cannot be reduced to a mere object of human knowledge. Nature does not exist ‘out there’, passively, to be discovered by humans thinking about or experimenting on ‘it’.

Figure 2.

Assembling inhuman intra-acting hand as becoming-with/in-the-world.⁵

Critically important for the teaching of literacy, Barad’s agential realism troubles the idea that language can define or describe nature, and that a word or sign like ‘hand’ represents an individualised entity, the object hand, in the world.

Unlike phenomenologists, posthuman researchers are not only disrupting what an object is, but also disrupting human-centred conceptualisations of the subject (anthropocentrism) and human exceptionalism: locating knowledge, intelligence and meaning-making in the individualised subject, and in the human subject only (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). Posthumanism invites researchers to pay attention to the ontological dimensions of their scientific practices (Barad, 2007: 42); and as will become clear when we analyse the visual images below, these agential cuts are specific intra-actions and as such boundary-making practices, because they include and exclude and therefore matter both politically and ethically.

Unruly encounter 2

Touching the unruly edge of coltan and the flows of global capitalism

According to Google Maps, there are 11,034 kilometers between the physical bodies of Päivi and Karin as we video call on Skype, and the picture on screen is a little blurred. The computer speaker produces Karin’s voice, a bit scratchy, the sound waves travelling online in seconds, momentarily as though moving closer and then at a distance again. What is there and what is not there; ‘what is neither seen nor understood but is nevertheless perfectly present’, as Deleuze (1986: 16) writes about the out-of-field in Cinema 1, we ask as we read and re-read the classroom literacy event. Issues of ‘justice-to-come’ keep arising in our conversation.

In one version of our thinking-with-hand documents, Karin has written how even though it has been illegal since 1997 to slap children in South Africa, the use of the hand for corporal punishment is still common. Päivi has been thinking about child labour in coltan mining in Congo as part of the processes of raw material production for electronic devices that are then used in ‘multiliteracies’ practices with children in the global North. This is how the entanglements of global capitalism work: our fingers right here and now, there and then, typing a literacy paper on the laptop keyboard and occasionally checking WhatsApp messages on our smartphones to read each other’s messages – connecting with devices made out of earth minerals extracted under conditions of high exploitation and violence. ‘Most of the slaves who extract these minerals have never owned a computer or laptop’, Fuchs (2014: 155) writes.

Many children participating in instruction preparing for basic education have refugee or asylum-seeking backgrounds, and throughout the school year, children come and go. Karin asks about border politics in Finland and about who is allowed in the country and who is not. Päivi tells her that Soviet history has long had an impact on immigration policies, and that since the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, the asylum-seeker policy has become even more strict. Karin makes Päivi think about all the children who could have been pupils of the preparatory group and participants of these data, were their families allowed inside the country.

Meanwhile, Finland is ranked the world’s most literate nations (Miller and McKenna, 2016). Literacy benchmarking and rampant standardisation aim at constant improvement and success to produce ever more economic growth by academically high-achieving and active consumer-citizens. Braidotti (2010: 215) writes about omnivorous capitalism that ‘will not stop at anything in order to fulfil its aim: profit’, until it ultimately eats the future itself. This is the urgent motivation for embedding this literacy paper in producing an inhuman, response-able understanding of literacies. Part of this passionate pursuit for a justice-to-come is troubling the notion of ‘human’ and who counts as fully human.

Touching the inhuman missing child

The focus of our analysis is not only on disrupting anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, but also on the ‘missing child’. For Barad (2012: 2), theories are performative practices – a touching of the world. They are not only material, but also discursive intra-actions and always entangled with our figurations of child and childhood. And here, posthuman researchers in early years education (e.g. Giorza, 2018; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Murris, 2016) have something ‘new’ to offer the field, with the latter’s exclusive focus on the adult human and the more-than-human, which is salient when analysing pedagogical practices. Even in critical posthumanist literature, the child is (still) absent and feminist scholars are curiously silent about age as a category of exclusion as to what tends to count as ‘human’. At the same time, Barad (2012: 8) reminds us that the point of posthumanism is not ‘to widen the bounds of inclusion to let everyone and everything in’. She proposes to sense the ‘abyss, the edges of the limits of “inclusion” and “exclusion” before the binary of inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, mattering/not-mattering can be seriously troubled’ (Barad, 2012: 8; our emphasis). Kromidas (2014: 426–427) puts it beautifully in the context of childhood:

Rather than argue for extending the boundaries of the human to encompass those children presumably waiting at its gates, posthumanism encourages us to rethink the human itself through the child, and recuperate the human’s remainder into a new vision of the human being in the world.

Braidotti (2013) argues that the ‘human’ is clearly a political category – white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied, although interestingly and of concern, age is not included (yet) (Murris, 2016). In contrast, youth is understood by Braidotti (2009: 526) as an ideal, like health, whiteness, masculinity and normality on which the metaphysics of otherness rests. But she must have meant with ‘young’, ‘young people in their teens’, because since orality was replaced by literacy and the printed word, the child has become (like Indigenous peoples) an outsider to western adult culture – an ontological ‘other’ (Kennedy, 2010: 6). Braidotti is a strong voice in the so-called ontological or posthuman turn and the invisibility of age as category of exclusion positions the child as an outsider of the posthuman project. But rather than the writing child into the posthuman project, we agree with Barad (2012: 8) that the ‘really hard work’ of researchers is to take account of and become sensitive to the ‘inhuman – the liminality of no/thingness – in all its aliveness/liveliness … ’. The inhuman, she writes, ‘is threaded through and lived through us’, and that is what we must face living responsibly and just (Barad, 2012: 10). At the same time being in touch with in/determinacy and the ‘inhuman we are’ is an affirmation and a recognition of the ‘inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depts of what responsibility entails’ (Barad, 2012: 9; italics in the original).

Importantly, embracing the inhuman is not an erasure of the difference between adult and child, or a flattening of the boundaries between human and more-than-human or ‘extending the boundaries of the human’ (quote above), but signals ‘a transformation of humanism from within’ (Truman, 2019: 5). Thinking with/in the inhuman ‘points to the violence that the category of the human contains within itself” (Luciano and Chen quoted in Truman, 2019: 5), but importantly falls beyond the limits of human knowledge production (Truman, 2019: 4). So where does this leave the posthuman literacies researcher?

Reading differently with/in sympoietic touch

We touch the inhuman by showing how a primary school literacy event can be read differently by adopting critical posthumanism as a navigational tool. We notice the shouts, movements, atmosphere, laughs and cries, and sense the distress, of ‘an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings diffracted though different spacetimes, the nothingness, is always already within us, or rather, it lives through us. We cannot shut it out. We cannot control it’ (Barad, 2012: 9).

In response to the narrowing down of what counts as literacy by governments globally, in an effort to reimagine literacy education, we foreground the missing child through the notion of ‘hand touching’ as relational and part of child as a phenomenon and not a separate entity in the world. In a ‘world without teleology’ (Tsing, 2015: 20), there is an urgent need to offer literacy education, curriculum construction and policies without the colonising Western capitalist notions of progress and development – as a Baradian phenomenon or what Haraway calls a sympoietic system. Sympoiesis, Haraway (2016: 58) explains, ‘is a simple word; it means “making-with”’, a ‘thinking-with’ and implies that human and nonhuman bodies are always ‘on the move’, dispersed and diffracted through time and being. The posthuman ontology of a sympoietic system disrupts the pervasive (adult) conception of temporality that takes development and progress as inevitable. As an entangled and unbounded sympoietic system, posthumanism reconfigures the child (and adult) as a phenomenon and as always already in human and more-than-human company: ‘cells, atoms, wind, fibers, dust, metal, skin, ant legs, soil, paper, government, concepts, policies, language, touch, atmosphere, and so forth’.⁴

Barad’s posthumanism invites researchers to sense the force of imaginings and to be in touch with virtuality on the edge of being and no/thingness; it is an appeal to embrace the openness of the world’s becoming in its materiality. Disrupting a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, we invite the reader to be touched by the multiple temporalities diffracted through the images below and to witness ‘multiple different pasts in the present, some more distant than others’ (Barad, 2017: 34). We will trace some of the entanglements in our analysis.

Unruly encounter 3

Touching the unruly edge of snow, Nokia mobile phones and identity categories

The days of the first snow in Northern Finland, usually near the end of October, are the days when winter clothes enter the school building, the polyamide fabric making swishing sounds accompanying children’s dashing steps. It is a lively rhythmic noise, a habituated annual refrain of the season changing. Ingold (2015: 53–54) connects the weather with ‘the curling movement of your hand in drawing a circle, and the trace it leaves’. Drawing on meteorology, Ingold writes about the movements of a storm, the whirl of an organism, the forces of winding and unwinding (p. 54, 57).

When using a hand video camera in ethnography, it turned out that the camera would have some programming of its own to record and strengthen certain sounds (see Jokinen and Nordstrom, forthcoming). The swish-swash volume of the winter trousers jumps out of the video when analysing it back and forth, zooming in and out of the human and nonhuman literacy participants. Reviewing the data recordings going over six years back in linear time, what has changed the most since then is mobile phones. The shell-form Nokia phones that were coded by information technology engineers for the specific literacy learning use in our ethnographic classroom context now look ancient and out-of-date. The flows of global capitalism are hard to ignore with/in the assemblage.

During the ethnographic school year, Päivi entered the research classroom having thoroughly studied the New London Group (1996) multiliteracies manifesto and discursive identity theories. Her gaze, trained within individualism and anthropocentrism, paid attention to categorical matters, such as age and language background of the moving, running, twirling, giggling children. She would think about which children would fit the analysis of early childhood education and about suitable pseudonyms, googling gendered Greek, Somali and Russian first names. But six years later, from the middle of our posthuman-inhuman data analysis, Karin points out on Skype that ‘identities are not given, but performed’ (Barad, 2011: 140).

So where does the first snow end and the 37-metre-long school corridor begin; where does the video camera lens touch the light waves and photons transmitting the child’s skin on the digital recorder; where do the cognitive neural pathways (‘the reading circle’, see Dinehart, 2015: 106) end and the fingertips touching the alphabet book letter page begin?

‘Touching’ as a concept and as a method

Through a dis/continuous returning to the images, and not as a mere backdrop to what is ‘really’ going on, we think with/in Baradian ‘touching’ as a concept and as a method of analysis. We have been experimenting with Tsing’s (2015) ‘arts of noticing’ throughout the paper to foreground the diffractive and emergent nature of our scrutiny. Following Deleuze et al.’s (2013: 7) elaborate methodology as a relation, concepts are creative and inventive; concepts do things (pp. 7–8). Jackson and Mazzei (2012: 5) work with ‘unstable concepts-on-the-move’ to explore what analytical questions make possible. Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre (2017: 643) suggest the Deleuzoguattarian concept as a method for ‘an act of thought’. We adopt touching as a concept and method in our analysis.

The study in question took place in northern Finland, geographically proximate to the Arctic Circle. Päivi participated as an ethnographer in a school-year-long project carried out in a primary school in 2012–2013. Instruction preparing for basic education targets children from migrant backgrounds and especially focuses on supporting the acquisition of Finnish as a second language, but also literacies and other school subjects. The aim of the Future School Research project was to create a ‘new literacies’ learning environment using different technologies (e.g. iPads, laptop computers, digital cameras) and specially developed mobile phone games applying near-field communication (NFC) technology for learning literacies and Finnish vocabulary. For this analysis, hand video camera recordings, digital photographs, field notes and research diary writings were used. The print screen figures of video data, presented as part of the analysis, are an agential cut into a literacy event that took place at the research school on 31 October 2012 and 1 November 2012, and which we are still entangled with/in. The visual figures are a way of unfolding the interrelatedness of the inhuman participation within this agential cut.

In Figure 3, we have traced some of the human and nonhuman participants of our analysis.

Figure 3.

Tracing some human and nonhuman participants in the analysis.

All knowledge-making practices, including the use of technological apparatuses such as photography and video, are ‘material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomenon we describe’ (Barad, 2007: 32). In other words, the ethnographic recordings at the research school do not simply record objectively what is happening, because the distinction between objective and subjective is blurred. Problematising the ‘integral role of the hand “for the human condition” in the evolution and different manifestations of human intelligence and processes of thought’ (Pallasmaa, 2017: 98), we see the lens of the camera (like the skin of the human eye) in touch with other human and more-than-human bodies as part of the world. Disrupting human exceptionalism, we ask what touching with the hand or the camera, held by the children’s hands and the researcher, could possibly mean in a ‘quantum ontology’ without ‘independently existing things’, only phenomena (Barad, 2011: 147).

Experimenting with ‘touching’ as a concept and method, the following questions e/merge during this writing process: How does the ontological turn reconfigure touching (with the hand and/or the camera) and how would it complexify our reading of this literacy event? In what ways can the posthuman touching of bodies make us think differently about literacies? What might literacies look like without telos, and experienced from with/in unruly edges?

‘KÄSI! KÄDET!’ [Hand! Hands!]: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish classroom

There is a multitude of hands swarming around the brown cardboard body that the teacher has crafted for this Finnish (as a second language) event. Päivi is sitting behind the video camera, filming the event, the fluttering children who have gathered to sit on the floor around the cardboard body following the teacher’s instructions. Ariadne recently arrived in Finland, a couple of weeks ago from Greece, with her family.⁶ She has just started speaking her very first words in Finnish. Now, studying body part vocabulary and learning to spell them, all the words are new to her. Dahir is worried about the brown cardboard body that is still missing its arms. ‘We have to take the hand!!’, he is telling the teacher. ‘Yes, someone else will attach the hands,’ the teacher answers and continues: ‘Now sit down!’ The cardboard body and participating hands are presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4.

‘Assemblages are open-ended gatherings’ (Tsing, 2015: 22). The cardboard body and the concrete floor participating in the literacy event.

Ariadne is following Dahir’s example and fooling around, performing the position of the cardboard body, hands close by her own body, grinning. The camera is zooming in on her hand but then continues its focus on the child currently attaching a game tag to the cardboard body. ‘Sit down’, the teacher tells Dahir who keeps moving around restlessly. He starts to look at Päivi intensely and lifts his hands: ‘I put hands?’ he asks and smiles at Päivi, inducing. He wants Päivi to hand over the camera to him. The camera turns around, bouncing, shows a glimpse of her. Päivi agrees. The camera zooms deep into the navel of the cardboard body, back and forth, zig-zagging. In Figure 5, it can be seen how movement cannot be stilled in the active confederation of inseparable human and nonhuman participants.

Figure 5.

Inhuman living, throbbing, jelling.

‘A material cluster of charged parts that have affiliated’ (Bennett, 2010: 24). A Nokia tune plays in the hands of five children as they switch on the mobile phones that have been personally named for them. ‘Mine come one bit faster,’ Dahir and Temen compare their phones after touching the game boards to upload the NFC literacy game application. Päivi calls Ariadne to touch the game board but she misses it. She switches her phone on but then decides to go for assistance to Eleni, who helps Ariadne get the game started by touching the NFC board on behalf of Ariadne. While waiting for his own turn to pick a tag mediating a body part word, Dahir presses and taps the phone against his mouth. ‘Dahir, you help Temen!’ the teacher says, since Temen does not know where to place his word RINTA, ‘chest’. To explain the word to the children, the teacher begins to drum her chest by her fist, simultaneously making a rhythmically resonating noise. The children join the chorus, all of them beating their chest and making a rhythmic noise, finally bursting into laughter, Ariadne even covers her mouth with both hands. ‘The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering of these rhythms, as they result from world-making projects, human and not human’ (Tsing, 2015: 24).

It is snowing outside, winter clothes are hanging on coat racks. Dahir has picked the word PEUKALO, ‘thumb’, on his mobile phone and the camera has followed his steps to the corridor. The algorithm has been switched on: ‘FIND THE LETTERS,’ the phone recites, giving instructions. ‘Try another! Keep searching!’ the phone says aloud in the voice of the teacher when the child does not pick the correct letter to spell the word. The letters have been placed on the corridor walls in alphabetical order and, moving from letter to letter, the children spell the body part word they have picked. ‘Pah. Pah. Pah,’ Dahir is repeating in his mouth and his face almost encounters the camera as he comes to Päivi for advice. ‘Peh-ooo,’ Päivi pronounces in Finnish. ‘Listen.’ And off he runs again, flashing, skipping, in search of the next letter. As presented in Figure 6 of the literacy event, the inhuman touching becomes an encounter of meaning and mattering.

Figure 6.

Inhuman bodies worlding with language. ‘Ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’ (Bennett, 2010: 23).

When offered a little bit of encouragement, Khalid recognises the letters of the word he is writing with the phone. He is so carefully pronouncing each syllable and sound that his whole face and body become an ‘AH, AH, AH’ back vowel with his big brown eyes wide and round and his whole mouth open, repeating and tasting the sound. And once convinced about what to search for, the boy spins on his heels and dashes to find the next tag. ‘Brilliant! Yippii!’ the phone recites when he touches ‘A’ with the phone. Ariadne and Eleni are not in need of support but fluently run, roll, skip in pirouettes on the way to each tag.

Dahir is getting frustrated with not finding the next correct tag that he has been searching for for a while already. ‘Päivi! Päivi! Look PEUKALO did!’ he runs to Päivi, pushing his face close to the video camera again. He stretches his hand and shows Päivi his phone screen. He has spelt ‘PEUK’ and is still confusing ‘AH’ and ‘OH’ sounds. ‘Ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee,’ somebody is humming a refrain and jogging past us in the corridor. Dahir is bouncing and stamping his foot. We begin to slide the syllables in our mouths together. ‘Kah-Loh, Loh-Oh.’ He runs off after Päivi finally whispers the correct letter to him to help him get on with the task.

Unruly encounter 4

Touching the unruly edge of the concrete floor and the cardboard representation

The concrete classroom floor, covered in red vinyl, is meeting humans in a way that makes a difference as the teacher of the group sits down on the floor together with the children, leaning on the floor with her hand. The humans have gathered around a representation of the human body made of cardboard, laid out on the floor, to learn Finnish, reading and writing. During our Skype meeting, Karin asks Päivi why language is taught as representation. The instruction preparing for basic education is a special form of education targeted at children with migrant backgrounds taking their first steps in learning Finnish. Being situated in a South African educational context, Karin has paid attention to the impression of equality in the teacher’s manner of connecting with the pupils physically by not staying at a distance in her positioning. Yet she has figured out, listening to the learner-Finnish video soundscape, how ‘sit down!’, ‘do not gibber’ and ‘calm down’ still persist in the disciplinary briefing of the pupils by the teacher. In Finnish as a second language curricula (Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE), 2009, 2014, 2015), the objectives and core contents are defined as representations of the world based on hierarchical skill levels, rather than intra-active entanglement of meaning and mattering, direct engagement with the world. The Finnish names of body parts, such as ‘käsi’ meaning ‘hand’, were selected or the mobile phone literacy game applications due to these representative objectives. Teaching should (FNBE, 2015: 7) ‘provide pupils with the capabilities required for them to transfer to basic education’. ‘Illiterate pupils’ have their own chapter in the 2009 curriculum (FNBE, 2009: 6). The teacher is positioned as mastering literacies and language and guiding the children towards already-known goals of becoming capable of functioning within the school system.

MacLure (2013: 659) claims that post-qualitative research ‘rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation’ which, referring to Deleuze, is ‘“sedentary”, categorical and judgmental’. Trying to move beyond anthropocentric and indivi/dualist perception, we follow all the things going around on the video, all the touching in-between human and nonhuman hands, connecting with strange words, the ambiguity of boundaries when in contact between each other. Inspired by Spinoza, Massumi (2015: 177) asks what a hand can do when intra-acting with other hands, throbbing and jelling in the connections, moving around as inhuman swarms of hands, performing a literacy choreography of NFC literacy game algorithms in singular and plural forms of ‘Käsi!’ and ‘Kädet!’. The moving body is material but always already also non-cognitive non-conscious (Blackman, 2012: 4). The moving inhuman body is free from the binary logic of words representing a separate real world; the inhuman literacy body is set to alter habituated understandings of learning language and literacies. The inhuman literacy body moves criss-cross between mentality and physicality constantly enveloping each other, within the included middle (Massumi, 2015: 188).

Touching, some ‘after’ thoughts to re-turn to

Re-turning to the questions that e/merged in our entangled writing of this paper, we notice how posthumanism worked to reconfigure touching – the touching of the world with/in the hand and the touching with/in the camera. It complexified our reading of the literacy event in a Finnish classroom in several educationally and politically salient ways. Through our four unruly encounters we touched some ‘unruly edges’, entanglements that surprised us when looking ‘around rather than ahead’ (Tsing, 2015: 22). Through inhuman, dis/embodied entanglements of hand/writing, flows of capitalism, snow, mobile phones and a cardboard representation of a body, we reconfigured literacies without assuming telos, development and progress. Disrupting and unraveling habitual progress and skill-based ways of understanding literacies as controlling, categorising (with/in its discourse of mastery) and cognitive ‘grasping’ (‘käsi/ttää’), we connected literacies with a less habitual way of worlding-with/in-texts. By decentring the hand as a human body part (although also important), we disrupted a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, and reconfigured the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We also noticed the (politically correct) use of brown tinted cardboard, which drew our attention to the many missing child bodies of colour as a result of the politics of Finnish immigration policies. We also noticed the teacher gently touching, stroking and holding the children and sitting on the floor with them – so unusual in South African mainstream education.

‘Theory as a living and breathing reconfiguring and touching of the world lures researchers to be curious, surprised and to wonder’ (Barad, 2012: 2). We have allowed ourselves to be touched by Barad’s agential realism and to be lured by the idea that learning is not mediated but already a worlding process, queering nature/culture, mind/body, expert/novice, adult/child binaries. This ontological move brought us in touch with a more egalitarian relationality in-between teacher and learner. Accepting the in/determinacy of not being in control but rather existing as equal participants in shifting human and nonhuman entanglements involves being vulnerable to others (human and nonhuman) – engendering a sense of response-ability. As a result, the child is neither an ontological other (as in humanism) nor conceptually missing (as in posthumanism), but part of a sympoietic system and as such rendered capable (Haraway, 2016).

The child as a phenomenon is an ontological move away from identity and judging children on their individual autonomous achievements according to standardised benchmarks that are external from the learning process itself. Posthuman literacies are not just about human-cognitive abilities, but also involve movement, affect, intensities, bodies – mattering (Murris and Haynes, 2018: 125–126), and reimagining the role of the teacher. Moving away from ‘normal’ notions of agency, causality and responsibility, the teacher is no longer positioned as the mediator (Culture) to help progress the illiterate not-yet-fully-human (Nature) into literate adulthood. A new kind of ‘we’ emerges as a subject of literacy: a ‘we’ that is not human-centred, and not fixed; a ‘we’ that is exposed to constant boundary-making forces but never fully bounded. As entangled be(come)ings, we are not just looking for ‘justice abstractly or deconstructing injustice’s effects’ (Ehret et al., 2016: 374).

Since the major challenge of our contemporary planet is that ‘progress stopped making sense’ (Tsing, 2015: 25), there is an urgent need to unravel our deeply embedded notions of mastery. Singh (2018: 1–2) troubles the practices of mastery as corporeal, linguistic and intellectual – even though ‘mastery appears inescapable’. When studying the ephemeral, indeterminate and serendipitous ways of be(come)ing-with/in-texts, we might find ways to manage life on this ruined planet ‘here and now, amidst the trouble’ where ‘many beginnings lie in wait’ (Tsing, 2015: 255). Exemplified by data created with/in a Finnish classroom, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on their individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices. The notion of inhuman hands ruptures humanism from within and refuses to engage with the dominant system of teaching literacies altogether.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the research school teachers as well as the participating children and their parents. Research permits have been carefully collected with translators’ help.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research has been funded by European Social Fund based Future School Research Second Wave project. The writing has been funded by the University of Oulu Graduate School, Eudaimonia Human Sciences doctoral programme. This writing is based on the research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant number 98992).

ORCID iD

Päivi Jokinen

Notes

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