Body as Profession or What Is It With Irma?

Material Eco/Edu/Criticism and Dense Dynamics From the Start

I owe it to poet Hans Børli (1918-1989)

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)

Putting wings on a stone

trying to follow the traces after a bird

in the air . . .

Dipping my finger in heaven

writing earth

Critical thinking and critique in new materialist perspectives is all without and diffractive: POST/modern/structural/human/humusist/anthropocene and PANpsychic/semiotic. They are therefore nondebunking and deauthorized immanent critique practices as the/an art of formal negation, curating and dosage opening for new and clinical practices, and quality is seen as tendencies at the origin of forces regardless of the complex that derives from them. They are working/s and writing/s with and beyond the subject: Inner outer always eroding but creative dimensions of life only relationally super-, supra-positioned until something comes to matter, makes happen, and/or decision making. Learning, action, and change beyond assumptions and post-accountability thus fiction as method and school of thought: Method is/as a bridge to philosophy and here my profession entrance. I call it material eco/edu/criticism. It is of a minor type. It is a bi/lingual criticism beyond representation, stumbling between major neoliberal and minor mine languages as in major and minor literatures (Deleuze, 1986) “restoring life to primary life” (p. 108). I ultimately argue for applying philosophy and inter-intrasemiotic thinking to foster and build educational cultures of innovation conceptually, methodologically, and theoretically, social innovation and social enterprise.

Such critique practices could Derridean perhaps, also be called “pedagogies of concepts” (Reinertsen, 2015a) and/or “the concept as method” (Lenz Taguchi, 2016. Concepts seen as means by which we move beyond experiences to think anew. It implies a constant confused frenetic natureculture rethinking of myself and you and our entangled togetherness. And as you will see, there are therefore different modalities in this publication. Messy, poetic, deleuzeoguattarian, and hyperbolic languages: triadic and iterative forming and changing going beyond: Triadic semiotics or more precisely un-coded or a-signifying semiotic diffractions diffractioning diffracting differently thus “putting—together—apart” (Barad, 2014). I try to do what I think this might look like. Sensations, touches, and dizziness . . . ; care and recklessness confusion . . . ; polyphone multi identities . . .; text layers upon text layers . . . ; the messages in the mess of critiquing, teaching, sciencing, researching . . . ; recompositions with bodies and galleries of presences not interventions . . . ; mapping and tracing . . . ; ontological insecurities: Diagrammatic methodologies of constant ruminations producing meaning and promoting transformative practices. Complex encounters of/as micropolitical actions privileging risk. This is my silent activism auto-ethnographic exploding matter/linguistics space travel and about what to do with what post-pan-eco/edu/criticism does and quality measurement. Ultimately unwrapping the concept of learning reconceptualizing advocacy as inclusive education: Minor assessment literacies-mine-must.

The PAN and Expanded Semiotic Thinking

And to say a bit more, the pan-aspects are referring to properties’ microscopic entities existing at scales far below, above, and/or beyond that where specifically biological, physical, chemical, sociological, psychological, cultural, pedagogical activities generally take place. This is thus a perspective trying to take seriously the politics of sensing and experimenting with questions of attending and attuning to difference, contestation, nomadism, rhizomatics, relationality, and permeability in sensing. It is about producing empirical knowledge that comes from the senses and about emotions for producing knowledge, hopefully creating conditions of possibilities for the event of learning and everyday living democracy. Tasting, touching, speaking, hearing, seeing, and feeling liberation. And what is the/a smell of quality? I am invited.

Through the notion of “haptic spaces distinguished from optical space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 p. 492) and movement in bodies as physical processes as senses, I therefore try not to give privilege to sight above other senses, placing hearing a distant second and touch, taste, and smell among the so-called “lower senses.” I thus try to topple such hierarchies of the senses . . . and any other hierarchies . . . and avoid any ocularcentric biases hopefully contributing to both the exploring and revalidation of the hitherto marginalized senses of touch, smell, and taste, as well as the proliferation of multi-sensory and synesthetic regimes of communication and experience. Therefore this interest in inter-intra-post-pan-sensory semiotics at the crossroad of natural, cognitive, cultural and social semiotics, sensory modalities (proprioception, thermoception, nociception, mechanoreception . . . you go on . . .), different forms of multi-sensorial and multi-modal interactions, emotional economies and embodied subjectivities, world-making and sense-making in multi-modal-medial and multi-sensorial semiosis and environments.

The way I see this, such expanded semiotic thinking and such, at least for me, mind-boggling inter-intrasemiotic growth of translation into whirlpools of excitement in transduction is in the service of innovation. Transduction is the process of converting one form of energy—read also force—into another. Relating to psychology, transduction refers to changing physical energy into electrical signals (neural impulses) that can make their way to the brain. For example, your ears receive energy (sound waves) and transduce (or convert) this energy into neural messages that make their way to your brain and are processed as sounds (http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Transduction#ixzz3tehtE8pW). The sound of quality . . . The relatively coded phenomenon of translation thus transfigured into Peirce’s (1839-1914) free and un-coded activity of transduction, and further, here into the/a a-signifying deleuzeoguattarian noology. Through inter-intrasemiotic thinking, we can discover fresh spaces for innovation and can arrive at productive and unforeseen alternatives. Constantly reconceptualizing and moving beyond practices that tame the researcher, the educator, and the student and through this cultivating muchness, newness, and communities of acceptance: Cultivating dispositions conducive to life-sustaining innovative entanglements infusing more perspectives from margins; politics of the cracks. They/we are intangible aspects as objects and/in the vibrancy of multiple vectors, intersecting forces and lines of flights and assemblages creating climates of possibilities imaginaries for action.

The embrained body of a child and I

A neurodidactics

Cosmic mildness and pink lights

Singing peace and grace

Pulling my song out of the sun

Shining for all and none

My graffiti

Spaces Humans Share With Other Species–Short Version

The more than human—becoming “molecular” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and the “molar” applied on “political bodies” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 6): “Natureculture” relationships and/or natureculture inseparability (Haraway, 1988) and Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015) drawing on the resources of science fiction as much as science facts, speculative feminism as much as speculative fabulation: The “fullness of a dance of attention” Manning and Massumi (2014) is paying attention to the more than human:

Minor critique practices

Assessment as learning

Never did a bird write a song

about the stars and the wind

Desires put wings of fire

on the mountain in the sunset

Learning to love wait

Minor sophism

Indirectly asking questions to neoliberal linear learning trajectories and entangled in a post-accountability becoming bi/lingual inviting materiality, I am interested in investigating diverse ways of conceptualizing human and more than human politics. What is conceptually possible and what would this imply on a practical level? What would the conditions of possibility be? What theoretical requirements would need to be fulfilled to be able to propose, for example, a new concept and fully explore its potentials? Is for example a certain amount of anthropocentrism unavoidable? And if that is the case; to what extent are we willing to accept a limited form of anthropocentrism and basing on what grounds? Furthermore, and in my view the most important here: What new meanings can we infuse into the words compassion and quality when the Other–Self division has been discarded? Think with it. I post-pan—distorted clarity—try to do and Irma. Without for-ness she walks through a door and micropolitical matters.

Fiction as Method: I Method Fiction You

What marks off the “self” is method; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who found the method; we really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us. (Weil, 1959, pp. 73-4)

This is an impossible re/search for what we do not yet know. I am writing toward onto-onto-epistemological thus deauthorized and double(d) or n^x perspectives of teaching, learning, assessing, sciencing, and research in education through a sciencepoetical language and all without. And to figure out the concepts-, words or rather “worlds” that we want to build, we therefore need to grapple head-on with the tensions in/between our visions. I am you are affect/affecting thus method. No either or, no for or against and no yes to all and everything, but the/a development of policies to achieve results at the actual place here and now, and just as much despite of—as on the basis of. While the concept of dilemma has connotations to solutions, the concept of paradox draws us to notions of openness, undecidability, hesitancy, possibility, difficulty, but simultaneously some kind of notion or feelings of something valuable and lasting . . . entertaining expressibility on own accounts . . . I try listening to the silences, the whizzing in the brain, and the methods and hesitancy of my body. Awkward encounters productively helping me/us to rethink the boundaries—and relations between X and to find new ways of understanding our here and now; our educative places (institutions and organizations . . .), our collective social body . . . our professions. The whispers of the blood, the prayers of the bones . . . My body as profession and method I am question. Mine is therefore just an example for recycling.

Professionalism being about what we want to bring with us and further and what we think is important. And about ways we can qualia do things to make it work and results now. Our lives in the eco/nomical/logical-edu/cational/semiotic-machines and with a hope for a generative generationality between students and educators: Decision making in the insecure creating possibilizing voices full of determination and power wanting more. It is a politics of desiring nonsense, serious folly perhaps embodying cyborgs.

The pan is there for (unity of) consciousness issues avoiding accusations of only apparently embracing plurality and diversity. I remain in stoic monism not. Preceding theorypractice and all is always only strangely familiar: Our loves are complexities of deterritoriealization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). My body is as rhizomes and as (a) thinking territory and process quality being/doing becoming now. My activism is/as my methodology building bridges over phantom divides perhaps and a virtual essay full of contradictions, uncertainties, anxieties, desires, and disturbances haunting the/our shifting landscapes, and explorations of junctures of human and more-than-human or nonhumans and politics.

And to elaborate, I consider material/pan/psychic/semiotics as a technique (a skill, a method, a body, or an art) such as to emphasize the operationality or practicality of post-structural and post-human theories through—and simply speaking and again; concepts as methods. Beyond “regimes of signs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) thus beyond symbols, facts, and fears, desire and aporetic urgency (Derrida, 1983) is allowing us to think differently about any thing and any concept: Concepts thus seen as working as events and actions and as experimentations with bodily affects and sensing movements, thus as forceful troubling vibrating, swinging, pan-edusemiotic–ecophilosophic desiring machines and what I/we therefore must. I must word. I must concept. I must materiallanguage.

Edusemiotic is referring to a semiotics intersecting with educational theory and philosophy of education aiming at innovation regarding theoretical foundations for education. Its defining characteristics are process ontology, the logic of the included middle, relational ethics, existential and post-human dimensions, the role of practical experience, the emphasis on interpretation (and not merely facts or evidence), the conception of language understood broadly in terms of various semiotic structures exceeding analytic philosophy’s direct representation, embodied cognition, and the problematic of self-formation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edusemiotics). The eco- as you already have seen, is referring to both ecological and economical sustainability. And because I love it; concepts through this becoming mattering moments of “grace” (Weil, 1959). I am word. I am method. I am body. I word I method I body.

I ask: Is it possible to think eco/edu/criticism forward or forwarding giving permission? Steering away from perspectives of lack and failure, using words that work not as predefined categories and definitions? Eco/edu/criticism ultimately seen as a reconfiguring of a theme, an issue or x again, and a creating of spaces and/or encouraging halting conversations about x that transmute and reconstitute irreducible details along lines of continuation, interruption, and reformulation. The way I see this, it is a minor eco/edu/criticism language and about the imperceptible beingness of engagement (Reinertsen, 2015b). What can a teacher—a body do? What is it with Irma? This imperceptible political beingbody language critique practice and quality through events, force, our senses, and qualia engagement . . . , and a teacher and a student becoming “a motif for each other, both embedded in a transcoded passage” (Semetsky, 2013, p. 229). And as Allan (2013) writes, “Minor literatures that have been created in major languages by minorities offer great possibilities for the articulation of new political subjectivities” (p. 39). Event/force/senses/qualia theory needed:

Society is not exchangist, the socius is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 202)

An event, referring to the Stoic (again) doctrine of lekta (Sayables), is an actualization or an instantaneous production intrinsic to inter-intra-actions between various kinds of forces, but unrelated to any material content, being without fixed structure, position, temporality, or property, and without beginning or end. It is the potential immanent within a particular confluence of forces. There is therefore no thing/object without the event that defines it as that particular, constituting its potential for change and rate of change: Something made actual in the state or happening. The state is being constituted by events “underlying” it, marking every moment of the state as a transformation. It thus signifies the internal dynamics of their interactions and incorporeal transformations that subsist over and above the spatio-temporal world, but are expressible in language nonetheless (Deleuze, 1990). They are 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. This is thus a multi-sensory exploration where nothing in the event can be separated. All parts and particles are at work involving ongoing molecular connections. The event is thus 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 thus sense itself, and as MacLure (2013) outlines, “. . . events are actualized within us, they wait for us and invite us in. We must be invited in” (p. 662). We cannot therefore master sense, or the event just qualia becoming. Qualia as this term used in philosophy to refer 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 qualia becoming becoming.

I have worked with ECEC professionals for more than 20 years. When I see them in the kitchen, they dance their profession. They move smoothly and give space to others. They go about with what they do without speaking. Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they drop things on the floor and pick it up. They move together and allow others to move. In formal meetings the same bodies just sit there. I wish they would kitchendance. (Eid, 2016, p. 1)

Body as Profession and Embodied Teaching

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 257)

Nameless happiness

From unreleased things

-a here and now wonder

You liberate through your heart/mind

These are my actions and affect body. My connections with the world take place in flows of simultaneity and entanglements becoming educator. Some call it phronesis building on Aristotle, the Kantian sublime, or würde perhaps, practical wisdom, clinical deep knowledge or pedagogical content knowledge, an epiphany . . . quality . . . process quality . . . process ontology . . . ethicality. Unnamed, unspoken, signless . . . Being analytic not normative: we don’t exactly know what it is, but we often say that we recognize it when we see it with/in experienced practitioners. I say she bodies a pedagogical moment: the concept of profession. She concepts and/or she words, she worlds her own profession and firmness. She presences, she does, and enacts. She embodies profession without intention. She attention kitchen dances. She walks through the door . . . something . . . it happens . . . something micropolitically happens . . .—her enacting encounters in practice; her body possibilizing recompositions inviting invites invited.

And to theorize a bit more: Building on Karen Barad (2003) on post-human performativity, agentical cuts and all bodies coming to matter in its becoming, I try to create new and useful critical utopian spaces of collective imagination and bodily nature and quality. I try to see language and matter differently and step away of controlling situations. Doing research on the not yet known and the everyday. Trying to adapt and sensitively indulge in own semiotics, matter, pragmatics, metalinguistics, to be aware of the possible consequences they might enact politically, socially, natureculturally . . . auto-ethnographically beyond. It is a teaching, a science and a research that is diffuse, never completed and open-ended, decentralized, and serendipitous. A science that is open to self and social reflection, and hopefully therefore capable of pushing further boundaries of both our personal and collective imaginations and struggles against injustices, wars . . . wherever they might be.

It might be seen as a reconfiguring bricolage and 3D sculpturing or crafting of critique practices through becoming (science) fiction writers, hyperawareness, and post-/panpsychic/-semiotic micromaterialities. And this writing is real. I wrestle with everything after: It is a writing wrestling forwarding beyond. Fiction is seen as a fertile and stimulating ground for the imagining of advances; hesitancy and doubt are/as operative motor and ethical practice. Hopefully progressing human compassion through jolting animations; becoming the analytic voice of everyday educational life . . . One could as stated above choose to think with not only monstrosities, humor, and so forth, but also cloning, prosthetics, beauty again, and rejuvenation. One could think with alternative ideals of values, learning, life, health, and well-being; exploring the eco/edu/bio/technoscientific imaginary: the natureculturally embedded imagining and inspiring of futures enabled by eco/edu/bio/technoscientific innovation . . . What is action in fiction, inspire/action criticism? They are Deleuzian cohabitation of theory and practice fabulations and détournement pedagogies of the moment thus a wonder and event. They are heterarhic, dynamic, and chaotic understandings of knowledge and knowledge creation and a move from hermeneutic to immanent views on learning. Pulsating with multiple conceptions of what it is to be a human and alive. Every piece of data thus seen as events of difference and something coming toward me in being together becoming play. They are flows of affects and researchevents and every time . . . thinking begins again. To learn and to know in a process ontology is therefore not hierarchical or linear (Reinertsen, 2016), neither is a professional’s performance separated from earth, from the present. This can ultimately be envisioned as the pedagogical process of learning from and with the concept, by tracing its conditions of creation in ways that can transform those conditions and make it possible for us to create new concepts and subsequent material-semiotic realities. Thus, the pedagogy of the concept constitutes a complex pedagogical process, which in short can be summarized as learning in the process of “tracing,” and “mapping” in the process of reconfiguration and creation (Lenz Taguchi, in press).

Every little thing of urgency and joy

Is worth your life, your bitter death.

So we do know . . . or what if we don’t? Perhaps we don’t, but still something . . . fiction perhaps? Or rather, what does it smell, sound, taste, and . . . look like? And what is it to trust the body? They are processes of thinking, being/doing and creating constituted/ing simultaneously: Quality as event and/as qualia. Not primarily solution-oriented; rather result-oriented and through de-/re-territorialized thought. Read on . . . and here is a metaperspective break: In a major—not minor—language, this article is about improving process quality in our educational institutions, organizations, . . . professions. It is about creating awareness about what signifies human beings and more: making choices and taking responsibility for that which is good. Compassion . . . companions . . . quality . . . The beauty we want to protect . . . Inviting invited I am method and I fiction. I method fiction you, and what post-pan-eco/edu/criticism does and quality measurement: Unwrapping wrapping unwrapping inclusive education: Minor assessment literacies-mine-must.

And to briefly pre-post-pan-theorize a bit more: Our journey and writings toward . . . quality, is lifelong. They are writings as rhizomes understood as complexities intra-acting/intra-acted and emerging as assemblages. Discourses and matter are always mutually constituted/-ing in the production of unknowing beingknowing. Matter perceived theoretically and practically as active and agentical. Humans always recognized as products and producers thus participants of their/our material, discursive and historical positions. It includes the nonhuman and the more-than-human and virtuality: Human and more than human experiences meshing with institutional policies and public life. Writings therefore attempting to go beyond the binaries, dualisms, instrumentalist criteria, and so forth, and also to supply pre-post-pan-third space conceptions of agency not tied to human action alone, but rather to examine relational assemblages of affecting and being affected.

They are not easily found. They are infra-empirical poetic, paradoxical, visible, invisible, tangible, intangible, timeless, and killed but not again and again. Choice turned into a basic component of the material-semiotic processes in complex systems. Providing a stable infrastructure for the openness of complex systems, where potentiality emerges as a powerful force for adaptation, evolution, always more always other and quality seen as the fundamental force in the universe stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality. My body is/as process quality. I hence sing psalms and post-theorize Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Dewey, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and and and. They are with me embedded I am and informed. Any practices, sciences, theory, and theorizing, even the posts— . . . are simultaneously pushing and being pushed by other practices, sciences, and theories. Even post-perspectives might therefore become mainstream and normal, ultimately demanding us to be constantly nagging about notions of perfectibility, principles, and breaks. Political correctness, taboo cultures, and diagnostic systems that are fooling us/being fooled by . . . again and again and again. Come Thomas . . . Kuhn (1922-1996) . . .

The personnel were gathered to discuss the wellbeing of a particular child. The lively conversation between colleagues ended with a decision about specific interventions for this child. I, the leader of the department, looked down in my papers and said,—more to myself than to the others: “Yes, it is important to doubt!” They all stopped talking and thoughtful, bemused gazes went in my direction. (Bjørnbet, 2015, p. 1)

These are thus psalms from an educator speculating on educative actions capable of destabilizing models of education . . . critique . . . with their built-in mechanisms of predictability, certainty, and accountability, or steps educators can take to remove borders and transform learning spaces so students are allowed complexity and authentic expression of identity and communities of acceptance are created. Leaving the paradigm of hermeneutics subsequently phenomenology behind, I try to move toward a practicality of teaching and critique ultimately research, making science capable of redefining the possible again and again: Following contours of the world that allows for and pays particular attention to things that do not fit into normative patterns; the ungrammatical becoming coming and Irma.

Listening life from the winds

Dreaming songs up in your heart

Words lightening up in your eyes

Words my hands thought

Words bringing life to death

The everyday is a king in exile

Full Circle or New Start

Material eco/edu/criticism thus offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing eco/edu/criticism closer to the material turn focuses on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives, and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected. I ultimately think of it as a move from the information society to the creativitysociety for innovation and sustainability.

I am writing with no lacuna not knowing and hesitancy; my force and what drives me; my desire. I try to qualia do, perform, and being precise about not being precise. It is my practicality performative subjective professionalism storying; mystory. Hopefully, you see this as a joyful cacophony offering playful, earnest, always aporetic, challenging, and hopeful versions of our collective future in the form of nonfiction, fiction, and more. Signaling new directions in our educational debates. To help you as reader to associate with this, I start with telling you about Irma, or about Mary who told me about Irma, or about some master’s students and me trying to grapple with different theories of sciences, different views on knowledge(s) and knowledge creation, reality, and different views on the human. You decide. I am found. Mary emailed this to me after having passed her master’s degree in pedagogy. She is a musician and rhythm pedagogue having worked in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions for approximately 30 years. I suggest starting right there.

ECEC students are encouraged to be very critical to the professional field and practices they are entering. I have seen many examples. Surely . . . critique is necessary, but the students do not seem to get any help to appreciate the knowledge which is actually there with experienced ECEC teachers. They don’t see that when Irma (62) is entering the room, the children start playing together. They just hear that Irma on one occasion said to a little girl that she had a nice dress. (And if one does that, one is really out of the game today!)