Art as Ecological Practice: A Curriculum of Movement for Teacher Education Methods by VALERIE TRIGGS B.Ed., University of Regina, 1993 M.Ed., The University of British Columbia, 2004 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Curriculum and Instruction) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2012 © Valerie Triggs, 2012 ii Abstract This a/r/tographic research investigates the partially accessible forces of movement that engender and co-substantiate experience. It renders an image of a vital socio-geologic ecology consisting of feelings of the energies of movement of all bodies made through struggles of rendering manifest the fullness of experience in its every example. In regards to teacher education methods, this is both an ecological and aesthetic issue. Feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting generate potential for more of reality. Rather than attempting to separate, unqualified feelings emerging within affects’ temporal events add qualities with an existence and energy of their own. Increasing standardization, accountability schemes and attempted control of quality pose problems for the ecological significance of feelings of capacity to vary. This research addresses methods rather than just the subjects engaged in them to generate an image of a more tightly imbricated ecology that also includes the affects of our practices. It seeks educational experiences where subjects of all kinds subsist only to the extent that they resonate with feelings of capacity for being moved and for moving within this ecology. Each chapter offers concepts that convey experience’s simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity, but as communicable only to the extent of re-posing the issue. Aesthetic practice and art-making are needed for feelings that precede cognition and for more repeated availability for making determinations within experience which are not simply opportunities for direct exchange but rather tokens of trust for future experience. Drawing concepts from a variety of disciplines, each chapter re-poses educational experience in ways that do not put methods in charge but rather, through aesthetic experience, reconnect them to the world by opening to the non-human world of which we are a part. Tending towards teacher education as currere1, a living curriculum, this study generates possibility for three qualities of assessment: availability, arrival, and the analog. 1 Pinar, 1994; Pinar and Grumet, 1976 iii Through initiating and proliferating creative practices, a/r/tographic methodology in teacher education is encouraged to draw on art rather than necessarily on other disciplinary methods. Repeated affective engagement in creative practice is suggested towards augmenting and sustaining a more inhabitable present and future. iv Preface Chapter Two: The City of Richgate is published as: The City of Richgate: Multiplicity of Movement in Nature, Culture and Public Pedagogy: Triggs, V., Irwin, R., Beer, R., Grauer, K., Springgay, S., Xiong, G., Sameshima, P. (2011). The City of Richgate: Multiplicity of Movement in Nature, Culture and Public Pedagogy. In C. McLean, R. Kelly (Eds.), Creative Arts in Research for Community and Cultural Change. Calgary, AB: ©Detselig Enterprises Ltd. (Used with permission. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint please contact Brush Education) Certificate of approval from The University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board , #H04-80482. Portion of authorship: 98% ……………….. Chapter Three: A/r/tographic criteria for contemporary practice is a version of a book chapter in press: Triggs, V., Irwin, R. L. & O’Donoghue, D. (in press). Based on Following A/r/tography in Practice: From Possibility to Potential. In K. Miraglia & C. Smilan (Eds.), Inquiry in Action: Paradigms, Methodologies, and Perspectives in Art Education Research. In Press. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. ©National Art Education Association. Used with permission. Certificate of approval from The University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board, #H08-01464. Portion of authorship: 97% ……………….. Chapter Seven: Features of Place Making Curriculum is a published journal article: Triggs, V. (2011). Features of place making curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry 41(1), 156-160. (©Curriculum Inquiry, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education [OISE] and Blackwell Publishing. Used with permission). ……………….. v Table of Contents Abstract ..........................................................................................................................ii Preface .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... v List of Figures .............................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... viii Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ix Prologue .........................................................................................................................x Chapter One Introduction ...........................................................................................1 Background ..................................................................................................................................... 7 Method.............................................................................................................................................. 8 Recommendations......................................................................................................................... 18 Chapter Two The City of Richgate ............................................................................ 38 A/r/tography .................................................................................................................................. 39 Public pedagogy ............................................................................................................................ 41 Time as creative ............................................................................................................................ 44 Foregrounding exchange over categories ................................................................................. 46 Productivity of relations .............................................................................................................. 48 Rendering parties active, changing and changeable ............................................................... 50 Goals and ends arising from within activity............................................................................. 53 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter Three A/r/tographic Criteria for Contemporary Practice .......................... 59 Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 62 Identities ......................................................................................................................................... 68 Becoming........................................................................................................................................ 70 Discussion....................................................................................................................................... 72 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 75 Chapter Four The Colour of Secrets ........................................................................ 78 Chapter Five Research as a Quality of Light ........................................................... 92 Introduction................................................................................................................................... 92 Part I ............................................................................................................................................... 96 Part II ........................................................................................................................................... 109 vi Chapter Six Narcissistic Experience, Vagrant Affects ............................................ 124 Summarizing ............................................................................................................................... 129 Continuing ................................................................................................................................... 135 Anticipating ................................................................................................................................. 137 Becoming...................................................................................................................................... 141 Satisfying...................................................................................................................................... 145 Identifying.................................................................................................................................... 147 Reflecting ..................................................................................................................................... 150 Concluding................................................................................................................................... 153 Chapter Seven Features of Place Making Curriculum ........................................... 156 Chapter Eight Entangled: Moving Bodies, Moving World..................................... 164 Entanglement .............................................................................................................................. 167 Part I ............................................................................................................................................. 168 Part II ........................................................................................................................................... 185 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 192 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................... 196 References .................................................................................................................. 210 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Untitled ...................................................................................................................................................x Figure 2. What is the inquiry of a day? ..............................................................................................................37 Figure 3. Richmond, Island City .........................................................................................................................39 Figure 4. Richmond's dynamic geography .........................................................................................................43 Figure 5. The Principle of Uniformitarianism ...................................................................................................44 Figure 6. Sameshima Side by Side, Artists: R Beer, G. Xiong, K. Grauer, R. L. Irwin, S. Springgay, B. Bickel, 2007 ..........................................................................................................................................................45 Figure 7. Increasing interactions are transformative........................................................................................47 Figure 8. Stimulating connections ......................................................................................................................48 Figure 9. Generative compositions .....................................................................................................................49 Figure 10. New arrangements.............................................................................................................................49 Figure 11. Continuous creative tendency ...........................................................................................................51 Figure 12. Yang Gates, Artists: G. Xiong, R. Beer, K. Grauer, R. L. Irwin, S Springgay, B. Bickel, 2005...52 Figure 13. Choosing interaction .........................................................................................................................54 Figure 14. Where did my eyes leave that horizon?............................................................................................58 Figure 15. A Summerhill text becoming contemporary.....................................................................................68 Figure 16. Teacher candidates selecting portions of the Summerhill text .......................................................69 Figure 17. Summerhill Senior's Residence in North Vancouver.......................................................................72 Figure 18. Where is the rest of a day?................................................................................................................77 Figure 19. Untitled...............................................................................................................................................88 Figure 20. How might a day become? ................................................................................................................91 Figure 21. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 .......................................................................................93 Figure 22. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 .......................................................................................93 Figure 23. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 .......................................................................................94 Figure 24. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 .......................................................................................94 Figure 25. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 .......................................................................................95 Figure 26. The feel of the forest ........................................................................................................................116 Figure 27. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 .....................................................117 Figure 28. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 .....................................................117 Figure 29. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 .....................................................118 Figure 30. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 .....................................................118 Figure 31. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 .....................................................119 Figure 32. What else can a day do?..................................................................................................................123 Figure 33. How can a day make truth? ............................................................................................................155 Figure 34. Sandhills at night .............................................................................................................................156 Figure 35. How is the day valid? ......................................................................................................................163 Figure 36. How does a day feel?.......................................................................................................................195 viii Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the generous funding by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in relation to the research in Chapters Two and Three. Special thanks to Zsuzsi Huebsch for her patience in responding to my endless questions about formatting. I extend sincere thanks to my committee members, Rita L. Irwin, William Pinar, and Anthony Clarke for your support and guidance. Thank you especially for your friendship that I hope we will nurture into the future. Rita, you are an amazing mentor. I feel particularly blessed for having had the opportunity to work with you through these years. I have greatly appreciated the many opportunities in which you have involved me, supported me and believed in my capacity to succeed. I have learned much from participation in the wide range of events that you have made possible for me. I have also learned much from your manner of graciousness with others in every situation, for your enthusiasm for working collaboratively, your willingness to reposition in new openness, and the sincerity of your interest in the success of others. Thank you for being so open-handed with your art, your research, your teaching, and your time. Thank you Bill for your warmth and hospitableness. I have appreciated the generosity in which you have shared your ideas, your time and your work. You have taught me much through astute questions that shift everything for me, through your interest in personal histories that feel for more than themselves, through your eloquence in speech and in life, and your vast scholarship with which I have barely begun to engage. Thank you for the many occasions to visit over coffee or lunch. Tony, you have treated me as a colleague and it has meant so much to me. Thank you for including me in your research projects and for providing opportunities in which to work alongside you. Thank you for coming to my rescue when I needed words, or had too many and needed someone to listen to them. Thank you for your genuine care about my life and the successful completion of my work. Thank you for the many cuppas, and thanks to both you and Gillian for the dinners and the laughter and the encouragement. ……………….. A special acknowledgement to Elizabeth Ellsworth for opening a university class to the outdoors and for bringing the world into my education. Thanks for believing that we can make something shareable for others before having words for everything. Thanks to both you and Jamie Kruse for your interest in the windswept prairies as a place of learning. Your collaborative work is an inspiration to my own. I very much appreciate our ongoing friendship and am looking forward to ways in which we might yet conspire in times ahead. Thanks also to the Monday Night Group who set me on a journey to struggle in making grace, love, faith, forgiveness and friendship matter in every place. And finally, I want to acknowledge friends and family, fellow journeyers, some newly arrived, some having just gone. Your beautiful qualities light my days. ix Dedication For the struggle x Prologue Where I had stood transfixed by the gloss on the surface of living… called forward… into a world populated by those who live their lives in the shadow of necessary fictions. Richard Wagamese, 1997. Figure 1. Untitled Have you ever experienced déjà vu of something that never happened to you? Felt a raw chill of loneliness that seemed to come to you from somewhere else? On a down and out day have you plunged your face into your coffee cup, felt joy riding each ephemeral twist of the steam penetrating your pores? While waiting on a curb at a bus depot watching a swirl of leaves and dirt chase each other, have you felt the wind do its part in redistributing sorrow? Have you looked at Canadian Cree artist, Michael Lonechild2’s paintings in a picture book and felt suddenly shaken with the utter unknowability of the realization that you were there with Sky Running and his people as they looked for buffalo herds in a prairie autumn of some earlier world? Maybe you can recall a time when the rim of the earth at the reach of the horizon communicated the vulnerability of your relation to the universe. While passing a forest, your eyes search for a place of shelter, forgetting you do not need to do so. Perhaps, driving home late from work, a useless strip of cassette tape gyrating over the frozen highway catches the evening sun, shining momentarily golden and you are stunned, your insides choked on the absolute beauty of its glimmer. You shift in your seat, swallow hard, clear your throat. Invisible, incomprehensible, almost unbearably close; a world pulsing with something unmanageable, terrible and magnificent, an abundance of variety of strangeness. Whether 2 Wiebe, R. (2003). Hidden Buffalo, (M. Lonechild, Artist). Red Deer Press, Alberta. xi it felt freaky or reassuring, an impression of the movement of other movement definitely offers the sense that we are not alone in the world, that at the peripheries of our awareness, there is more. Alfred North Whitehead (1929/1978) writes that as the world presses in on us, “we are left with the vague feelings of influences from vague things around us” (p. 178). We are here and now in fellowship with all that has shared in the agreement of the white-hot vitality of movement. Even the geological forces of the colours, textures and substances that we co-habitate and co-exist with, are from former worlds that existed millions of years ago (Kruse and Ellsworth, 2010) in an ecology that includes even realities that remain unactualized, lingering only as potential. As directly as the movement of how all things evolve and change themselves displaces, it also becomes, Brian Massumi (2002) argues, a feeling that transduces back into the materiality of energy “before reemerging as organic movement at a new body site” (p. 117). Following Whitehead, Massumi explains that feeling takes place before we have words for it. Furthermore, feelings have “a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably” (2002, p. 1). Movement thus complicates our relation with the familiar because it includes as Massumi (2002) argues, resonating levels of both what is past and what is future, yet it is a past that is filled with expectancy ready to flood in on present perception and it is a future that exists in the past as potential. Movement generates a feeling that is difficult to express and more of a full-bodied sensation rather than already determined emotion. It is part of the intelligence of the world but relying on art and aesthetic methods that move in accordance with its self- differentiating passion, rather than on rational and linguistic concepts. After the chill or the thrill of wonder amidst “a dynamic midst” (Massumi, p. 79), which Massumi claims is the aesthetic, things go on mostly the same, but just a little bit differently. Not only in the sense of a change in your position, but rather more of the singular completion of a moment through the unraveling of its limits. It’s a small movement, but it is the same repositioning that moves the world. 1 Chapter One Introduction This research focuses on feelings of capacity for being affected by the world’s creative sociality of its metabolic, electromagnetic and fundamentally unknowable movement, and of sensing a capacity to participate. This work investigates a reality that is more than what is actualized and does not seem to exist independently of ideas or methods or place but is rather, the energy produced by and through them. The energy made by and through the world’s bodies is what anthropologist Gastón Gordillo (2011) describes as resonance, “the most immanent, physical, taken-for-granted dimensions of social life: bodies and space, modulated by the same temporal pulsation” (06.02.2011, para.3), entailing our most primary sociality. These are intensities of feelings that can only be felt as one moves into what they are not. They involve a body’s becoming what is other, in its process of adding to the world’s availabilities for energies towards further movement. In terms of education, this is a continual question of “how”, in relation to revitalizing a course of study through the re-familiarizing of bodies with creative practice. This work allies with art practice as research (Irwin & Springgay, in Springgay, Irwin, Leggo & Gouzouasis, 2008; Sullivan, 2005) but lifts off in another direction towards putting into question most intensely the epistemological paradigms of art, pedagogy and inquiry that involve studies of how we come to know. In this research, I claim art practice as an ecological inquiry through which we experience the ways in which we do not know, and in which the qualities of our re-positioning are themselves materialities that generate energy and open or diminish potential for the future. I stress what art does, which is the aesthetic, the feel of the openness of closed form, the feeling of which, beckons form’s becoming. Art offers access points already underway, portals to “our world experienced differently” (O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 128). By opening teacher education methods to a fascination with the vital material world, “the wild” (Thoreau, in Bennett, 2004), that “has the power to addle and rearrange thoughts and perceptions” (p. 348), art practice may foster greater recognition towards the world’s dense web of the vitality of all things. Its ecological inquiry through art making and aesthetic practice may generate the sustenance for making more of this vital reality, and may augment the inhabitable feel of 2 the planet through continual qualitative repositioning in contemporary experience. Initiating and proliferating creative practices might remind bodies of the familiarity of their embeddedness in creative movement already underway in a world of abundance. The questions guiding my inquiry are as follows: 1. How might art and aesthetic experience move within teacher education methods to contribute to the intensity of living in a particular time and place? 2. How might teacher education methods come to feel capacities for being affected and for affecting the world’s ecological sociality? How does attending to the reality of movement resituate educational methods and experience? 3. How might initiating and proliferating art practices remind bodies of the aesthetics of creative practices already underway, which augment capacities for belonging to a life and to the planet? 4. By drawing more fully on a/r/tography’s transformational movement of art, how might aesthetics shift a methodology beyond traditional conceptions of epistemology? Could stronger claims for art’s autonomy in research and pedagogy, towards an expanded empiricism including the non-relations of relation and the situating of art as a vital material force, situate teacher education as an ecological and contemporary concern? Because art opens things to a world experienced differently, might its repeated engagement in teacher education induce a stronger ecological sense? How might this counter the ecological risks evident in increasing standardizing abstractions of educational methods and qualitative difference? 5. Engaging in a variety of teacher educating methods in an a/r/tographic methodology, what qualities of curriculum might I map retrospectively to extend the reach and relevancy of the field of teacher education? In the chapters that follow, I investigate a variety of teacher educating situations for the ways in which methods for research and pedagogy might sense a capacity for feeling their entanglement in movement and for repositioning in response. Movement has a method and it involves the repeated pragmatic work of transforming self and other 3 through its structures that feel for movement. I invite the reader to think broadly in terms of methods to include practices, routines, processes, technologies, strategies, conversations and plans that not only address research but also pedagogy. In several chapters (Two, Three, and Five) I directly address the methodology of a/r/tography in implicating its capacities for feelings of capacity to affect and for being affected. I note the differentiation between methods and methodology with sociology educator, Raymond Morrow’s (in Sullivan, 2010) definition of methodology (see Chapter Three) as an overarching concern that links what is currently visible and understood to historic and contemporary vectors of thought. In an attempt at finding movement in this definition of methodology, I extend Morrow’s definition to an interpolating trajectory rendering all time contemporary time in which time is in relation with itself. This is an understanding of contemporary that is not just a mark that distinguishes the now. Instead, past events and assessments including the ephemeral, projects that are unachieved, and things that seem oddly out of sync with the present, affect us in ongoing ways. Historic and futuric sensation come together in a contemporary methodology, providing a tensile and receptive academic core in which methods might feel potential for locating themselves in the world in ways that are livable now, and which make the world inhabitable for the future. Art is needed however, for repeated methods that offer opportunity in which we can experience a belonging to more than what is actualized. The work of educational research is thus situated in the feel of the world’s availabilities rather than in crises of reconnecting difference with difference. This shift to working with the criteria of potential before possibility in the methodology of a/r/tography is described in detail in Chapter Two where I investigate the aesthetic for an expanding epistemology, endowing a/r/tography autonomy that does not need to necessarily rely on methodologies from the social sciences and humanities. Although my focus in this research is towards capacities of feeling the world’s movement, I attempt, in most of my research, to address teacher education methods, rather than human subjects, though they perform together. I hope, in this way, to follow Jane Bennett (2004, 2010) to convey a more drastically ecological sense, in which things 4 are individuated but are also located within relationships with other things and furthermore, are brought about in events of light and location. Addressing methods rather than those with whom they are engaged may prove less likelihood of reducing methods to the contexts in which humans position them and perhaps even less likely consideration of them being in the control of human agency. Perhaps it will challenge teacher education methods towards Spinoza’s (in Massumi, 2002; Beasley-Murray, 2011; Bennett, 2010) interest in what a body might be able to do, in repositioning towards the difficult and complex issues that challenge our ecological futures. Furthermore, situating human subjects in composition with methods repositions polarities, however briefly, as tensional and within the same self-differentiating reality. In compositions of method, subjects, light, and earth, there are movements in at least two directions at once. Things slip away at the horizon in degrees of unknowability, while something else is already just coming to light. Although this work re-situates somewhat, the primacy of humans, it is also an attempt to accompany Bennett’s (2004) focus on the vitality of the nonhuman dimension of things and its capacity to “move, threaten, inspire, and animate” (p. 358) things called human. Addressing the always-fleeting and ephemeral sense of the reality of what is other requires a sense of naïve realism. It is naïve realism with a twist, however: one that recognizes the unmediated encounter of forces that are yet, always enculturated by human design, all the way down. Bennett (2004) argues that a receptive mode with a moment of naiveté is a useful counter to “a tendency to conclude the biography of an object by showing how it, like everything, is socially constituted” (p. 358). Becoming substantiated in interaction with other is generally thought of as involving only human enculturation. Although we always bring something of ourselves to the shape of an event, this work asserts affective movement to the more than human world and therefore considers sociality in ecological terms of co-substantiality of bodies of all kinds, in movement towards their own change. An enhanced sense of the extent to which all things are spun together in a dense web beyond human design and control is evident in the work of a variety of contemporary 5 artists/educators/researchers such as Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth (2012) who are adding new layers of meaning and sensation to an expanded understanding of the world’s sociality. Their focus on the geologic considers not only the energies of colours, textures and substances that existed millions of years ago as a contemporary force of everyday living, but also argues that the real energies of the ways in which we take up places, promises, decisions and assessments made in the past, enculturated by other interaction, go on into the future. They accentuate the meaning of the contemporary in which the present is not the height of all progress and not the culmination of all decisions, but rather a situation in which art might offer generative learning experiences. The work of Kruse and Ellsworth (2010) is an example of an attempt to artistically work beyond polarized thinking and away from sole focus on skills of preparedness, towards becoming familiar with the feel of creative practice in such a way that generates a sense of capacity in “where to go from here” (06.30.2011, para. 14) or how to move forward in unfamiliar terrain. This is a changing ecology with new appreciations for the human mingling with the nonhuman, and our increasing entanglement. A review of some current shifts in understanding ecology is offered in Chapter Eight. Following on philosophers such as Massumi and Bennett, as well as Timothy Morton, Tim Ingold, among others, it appears that what connects us is not our similarities, nor is it our differences. Rather, it is the feel of difference itself: the sense that difference is irreducible to any particular thing or any particular body and the resonating, capture, and conversion, of these feelings–one with another. What connects us is the feel of the partially accessible fullness of the world’s simmering energies made through time by the movement of all bodies, the feel of a world pulsing with an abundance of variety and strangeness and a body’s capacities to affect it. Working interdisciplinarily not only in a growing body of aesthetic work, the feel of the earth’s forces is also a burgeoning interest in fields ranging from media studies to geography. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010) describe them as affects: Vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in 6 neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability (p. 1). In Chapter Six, I look at a variety of thinkers who posit experience in terms of its dual dimensions: feelings of capacities to be affected and to affect. Although I often resort to using the word feeling to describe these capacities, please note that I do not intend feeling to refer to an already determined emotion but rather an embodied, peripheral sensation of something else already underway. One of the difficulties, but an important quality of affect is that it comes temporally before bodies, inhabits them and is affected by them. It comes before experience and it runs on past experience and when one is in the midst of an experience, the feel of other is what is already making current experience. Without the feel of the world’s energy, without a sense of what is other than us now, there would be no movement nor would there be any thing. In other words, one cannot just read about the experimental atmosphere that accompanies every thing; it is what bodies are. Because the sensation of the earth’s vitality adds to reality and is a becoming of the world that is reciprocally a becoming of every thing, many philosophers consider it an expanded empiricism. At the possible indignation of science, affect renders an expanded reality, one that Massumi describes as resonating between actual qualitative expression and unquantifiable potential, running also through science’s domain of movement from recognizability to reproducibility and carrying on beyond, to affect’s supernumerary additive quality of expression jumping from one overfull context into another (Massumi, 2002). When we experience the ways in which we do not know something, we participate in this expanded empiricism, one that is of sensing one’s own aliveness, rather than of sense perception in traditional empiricism where things do not exist outside of any particular perception. In this bigger empiricism, the world is real not because it can be observed and verified but because in movement, things are always immediately some thing else. Empiricism matters because, in teacher education research, it is how things are accomplished in a real world3. 3 I make this concession based on Clough’s (2009) argument that qualitative methodology privileges empiricism as much as methodological positivism does. She claims that qualitative methodologies often 7 Background Feeling brought me to movement. I was too young to remember of course, but I was walking already at nine months of age, and my mother writes that I was “noisy and impulsive and determined to get attention immediately” (Willms, 2010, p. 405). It seems my impatient tendencies started early. I have struggled with restrictive situations, tidy assessments, foregone conclusions, minimal methods, classrooms that have held me too long from the light and its wind, for ungenerous examples that miss outside coming in. I have been demanding of life for feeling, for living in ways that brought the world in hard, seemingly needing the struggle. Feeling is the world’s connective tissue: it is teeming with life and it often finds me leaning windward. I am trying to learn to not imagine that I own the feelings, to attend to intensity in the incompleteness of their process, and yet in the fullnesses of the varieties of life’s multiplicity, even though attending to feeling makes me inattentive to certainty, imprecise in my speech. I thought that age or at least a PhD would make me more articulate, yet movement continues to deal its patient impatience, always bringing senses of having been other places and other places yet to come, into every situation, Maybe it was the extensive childhood time outdoors where movement saturated me, that now draws me repeatedly to solace in the varieties of a world in motion. In the midst of the struggle of living, hearing the wind reminds me on some level, of movement’s already and its not yet. Finding the limits of responding and not responding to movement set a body up for a life of believing in it, believing in its work of transformation, feeling that another moment is on its way and we will experience it. To belong to this life, we accept in each moment, the invitation of movement in varying degrees of struggle towards refusal or acceptance. Belonging means we are committed to the method of movement; we trust it. We cannot move without bodies and with every move, there is feeling. Feelings of movement sometimes feel negative or frightening or trivial. It seems easier to protect ourselves by moving towards what we already know, rather than giving our selves away in new assume empirical realty is only meaningful through interpretive processes which are obtained through naturalistic observation, that also presumes the independence of the empirical world from interpretation. I have found Clough’s analysis accurate in recent research co-reviewing 456 papers of teacher education research (see Clarke, Triggs & Nielsen, in process). 8 openness. We are right to feel that way; the costs of responding to movement are appalling, yet responding gives us life. That is why feeling is connected to the struggle of everyday movement, the struggle in making something singular from something plural, the struggle to fight against the personal feel of loss and emptiness to turn again to find the world full. We ourselves are examples of feeling movement’s capacities to affect and to be affected, a coming together and a coming undone with no intermediaries between us and what is entirely other than us. Movement is real and it finds its fullness in the midst of aesthetic struggle, in the feel of what might be made of a particular moment in the light of our world. Perhaps it is prairie light. The kind that makes you feel that a method is mostly about the light: “the qualities of which are endless”, and “our entire lives are immersed in them” (Wagamese, 1997, p.4). Each stabilization of light is a struggle to make the world inhabitable, to make space and time matter as place. Method To render manifest the feeling of the ever-changing material vitality of the world requires research methods that are available to explore all dimensions of the present while both accumulating and dispersing impressions; its form must sense an intensity of its locatedness in its trajectory. It must emphasize the radical openness of any example that emerges from itself and re-position in relation to its own emergence, transforming both itself and others. As a teacher education method, it must matter in the everyday work of teachers. Many of the following chapters involve examples of a/r/tographic research. A/r/tography is a hybrid methodology (Irwin, 2006), a form of practice-based research within the arts and education (Irwin, in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). I have analyzed extensively what the reality of movement might mean to a/r/tography’s overarching methodological concerns as well as the diversity of its practices and methods. I have taken great artistic liberty in my textual analysis and composition, because of a/r/tography’s deliberate situatedness in the experimentality of art, not as a theme but rather towards activating responses that recalibrate other creative practices. 9 As a significant part of my research, I have been engaged in a variety of creative practices through which I have uprooted my own body and method and experimented with art’s transductive process of engaging in a moving struggle of making them matter in what is just coming to be. Creative practices include walking as art practice, of which there is a long history (see Triggs, Irwin & Leggo, forthcoming), yoga, photography, playing tennis, autobiographical writing, academic writing and reading.4 Throughout my study, I have also been drawn repeatedly to making photographic images of horizon lines5, demarcations of prairie and sky that have affected and been affected by the ideas studied and experimented with. Although I no longer live on the prairie, images that express the feel of its contours and the illusive edges of its contrasts, sometimes ostentatious in their exhibition and at other times almost entirely obscured by qualities of movement have been a significant part of my research on movement. These images are interspersed in the transition sections that I have included between each chapter. The images and text are intended to convey some of the texture they offered me within the conceptual and aesthetic endeavour of the following chapters as well as offer for the reader, another example of re-positing the issue of how a singularity can add to the sum 4 Here I must acknowledge the tremendous influence that Brian Massumi has been in my work. I have returned to Parables for the Virtual countless times in the past six years. Granting me a new sense of academic freedom, I have accepted Massumi’s invitations to let examples burgeon in my writing, to be unafraid to look silly in my struggles of making something from the work of others. He has taught me to find examples of movement which can be studied towards making a sort of theoretical framework, and then to continue to run other examples through the framework, in a way that changes both. I have begun to think rather broadly about what constitutes creative practice in my everyday living (see Vision as practice—J. Kruse (2004) What has been especially helpful in this process has been accepting his advice of always re-focusing on movement rather than on its examples. His work has helped me think repeatedly, the socio-ecological life of educational methods through everyday human existence and through the fact of movement and creative practice. I have wholeheartedly appreciated his recommendations for poaching. Less impressed with metaphor, he advocates shameless poaching from the sciences for the humanities in such a way that the scientific concept carries its connectibility and its affects, and in the two-way struggle, a creative tension emerges where terms continually have to renegotiate their relations. This plays itself out in a number of ways, making literal difference, he argues, in the humanities. I do not know if my methods are entirely what he intended and I shiver at the thought of his possible indignation at my echoings of him, but I have engaged in this very process of poaching, probably most extensively from Massumi himself. 5 All horizon images between chapters as well as within chapters were made by me. 10 of available reality. The transition sections also provide some explanation towards next chapters and perhaps even towards further work beyond this manuscript. Significance of art in an educational methodology If every body, literally every thing, including cultural constructs and decisions made, has a materiality and an energy (for example: Bennett, 2004; 2010; Massumi, 2002; Kruse & Ellsworth, 2012; Morton, 2007; 2011), then is it not unreasonable to claim this also for art. Art however, seems to have an autonomy of its own (O’Sullivan, 2001), a way of taking movement within and living it. Art is not only an object; it wraps itself around movement, exemplifies movement, is an analog of movement. It occasions actual individuations of two-sided movement, one side in the autonomy of movement’s method of transformation through matter where it can vibrate between states of reality, and the other side in the functional limitations of what the event’s feelings for capacity are, while operating relationally at the same time or in conjunction with other situations. Art is its own immediate self-complication, accounting for the formations of whole variations of movement and for difference made en route, as well as for what is never actualized by adding the feeling of movement that can only be felt in terms of capacities and connectibilities for other movement. It is a way of attending not only to the feel of relational potential of every thing, but also adheres in the resonations between qualities of movement by making visible what is inaccessible to the senses but what is felt in the reverberations of its affects. Art cannot represent something already given nor can its underlying substance or principle be identified with chronological data, because art exists as something that projects forward, as in not yet having been given. Yet it is also a history of movement always already in the giving, despite its particular variety not having yet happened. It is a method that has the potential to engage affect by what Bennett (2004) notes “rendering manifest” does which is to both “receive and participate in the shape given to that which is received” (p. 358). It brings something of methods and selves and qualities of movement to the transformative experience from which there is no outside to what art makes of the world. 11 I consider art practice in a/r/tographic teacher education research as a possible response to Deborah Britzman (2000) who advocates for a view of teacher education that can tolerate “existential and ontological difficulties, psychical complexities and learning from history” (p. 200), a teacher education that comes to notice that “the world matters” (p. 204). I have taken the liberty of reworking her questions towards my own central concern in thinking about how education might assume some responsibility for the feeling of the world’s movement6. Britzman (2000) writes, Indeed, the intimate problem of how one becomes affected by knowledge, by the experiences of strangers, and by histories that are not our own, not in terms of its application for others but in terms of our own capacities to believe and be touched by knowledge, remains one of the grand paradoxes of our century (p. 201). I sense that she is asking how we can feel in a way that is more sensorimotor than visual or theoretical, how educators can feel belonging to the infinite difference of the world in the midst of feeling one’s own loss and gain. I imagine that she is not interested in an understanding that is a change in perspective but rather, in a deep sense of a body’s capacitation to be touched in a way that actually moves it to make something new of its own and others’ knowledge and then, to do it again, not just to apply newly-acquired capacity towards application, but to actually generate qualities of moving and living with openness to repositioning. In light of the enormous forces that affect global social, political and environmental methods and the necessity of educational methods offering repeated opportunity for increased capacities for movement, Britzman’s call for noticing that the world matters has seemed to me to be an understatement that shows tremendous reserve. Since when, however, is education interested in the materiality of invisibility? Is it not enough to deal with what is more readily accessible in the midst of so much existing 6 Britzman addresses these questions very differently than I do and she does so from her many years of psychoanalytic and educational research. At the risk of constricting her insights, I summarize her perspective in which crisis inaugurates the work of education. Through self-knowledge and the profound sense of loss in acknowledging what is most difficult about ourselves, she argues that subjective difference can be made whereas I am following Massumi in shifting focus to the inseparability of matters of transformation from manners or methods of transformation. 12 variety and ambiguity? Must education be assigned yet another responsibility beyond accounting for observable, measurable objectives and outcomes? Why re-invent the wheel, so to speak, every time a method is engaged? These are legitimate questions in a field continually besieged. Aesthetic struggle does not align well with notions of best practice in which there is slim opportunity for experimentation and much less for failure. Britzman notes that amidst questions about the “adequacy of its structures, teacher education has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making” (p. 200). Sociologist Patricia Ticineto Clough (2009) argues that nothing unnerves the foundations of methods more than unqualified feeling. Rather than an extra task to attend to, however, affect shifts teacher education methods towards the pragmatics of feeling the relational potential of a world that is unactualized but real, available and abundant, in its taking charge of the coming together of the present, making something that matters now and for the future. In other words, affect connects us to the earth, re-establishes our belonging as it refuses disengagement with the real energies of issues and qualities already in existence and with those just emerging. It continually shifts and re-poses matters through spatial and temporal struggle in the making of place. Although limitations often appear daunting, Bennett (2004) argues that feelings of capacity to affect and to be affected persist “even inside the ubiquitous framing of human thought and perception” (p. 366) It is generally agreed that new technologies and scientific practices contribute to the shaping of the environment. For example, some “claim nothing less than the restructuring of matter from the bottom up” (see Last, 2010, p. 5, on nanotechnologies). It is more difficult, however, to shift educational methods, long associated with application of scientific methods for developing the profession and used to gain efficiencies in established routines, towards entanglements within an ecology that includes what is mostly invisible, intangible and incomprehensible. I am not advocating for knowing away unknowability which paradoxically renders every thing even more drastically unknowable (see Chapter Eight), but rather for an acknowledgement of the materiality of reality’s unknowability and an attempt to feel its energies and actualize its partial 13 accessibility with art and aesthetic practice. This requires a method that responds to the capacity or force of resonation, taking empirical precedence over form, temporal at the edges of spatial, rather than one that attempts to make exchanges between differences. In methods that assume that movement is a simple reciprocity, there is a lack of faith in movement. For example, a method of teaching that assumes learning or imagines knowledge strictly in terms of how it can be directly applied to others, Britzman (2000) calls “a form of compliance with the knowledge and with the tacit cultural value that knowledge must be useable” (p. 204). She asks how teacher education methods “induce compliance in the form of our students quickly taking techniques to their classrooms” (p. 204). This image of how the world works positions human movement in too easy of a slide towards feeling that it can get something without giving anything. Thrift becomes miserly. Desire for a life subject to human control over a life of vulnerable trust in the unseen intensifies. Assuming that the feel of the world’s movement is not so much free standing as it is haunting, affect often gets assigned to biological or psychological processes that make humans victims of process, which religion commentator Phyllis Tickle (2004) argues in relation to sin, is individualizing and isolating. As an explanatory abstraction, affect quickly loses its relation to qualities of materiality, rendering methods as fixed and featureless. Unity is imposed through sameness and not through struggle. Degrees of removal of qualitative difference from the immediate physicality of affect slip into a long list of images relating to human control of movement by abstracting, including securing of opportunity for all students to arrive efficiently at logical, universally valued propositions, standards of quality, neo-conservative reform agendas, large-scale assessments, accountability, and compliance. Amongst reference to other images and films, Tickle (2004) reminds us of Otto Dix’s 1933 condemnation of Nazi morality caricaturing Hitler as envy which, she claims caught the “growing popular sense of greed as someone else’s sin and/or as the sin of the oppressor” (p. 42). Used as condemnation of past horrors in history, Dix’s image 14 resonates currently with one of our primary art forms, which according to Tickle, is economics. She views both as artifacts that she argues our great-great-grandchildren will understand us by, discovering in them… citizens disenfranchised by greed” (p. 43). Current images often only appeal to reason and miss the struggle of a method making the world matter. Affects are presented as removed and at a distance, somebody else’s issue. Karen Ferneding (2003) also addresses education’s discourse of inevitability in technical rationalism and its accompanying apoliticalness. She claims inevitability creates a void into which can then be inserted a fix, an answer or a best practice. She argues that the silence arising from a constant state of crisis and its feelings of inevitability negates the messy political act of pluralistic debate (See Triggs, 2008). When methods premise physical cause and effect as our source of movement, they rob themselves of the “energizing and focusing dignity of struggle” (Tickle, p. 35) and of faith in the eventual benevolence of how things are becoming. Cause and effect maintain a taken-for-granted assumption of a divide between the structure of the world and the structure of the subject in the world. Britzman (2000) argues that “we have made great strides in emptying the curriculum from debating itself” (p. 200); the symptoms for her include “camera surveillance, weapon detectors, and corporate ID tags for students and teachers”, and “the stultifying dream of uniting the nation through a common curriculum made safe from any controversy” (p. 200). Human control of methods situates us at a distance where the world’s materialities no longer participate in creating the world. A tacit adoption of the acceptability of this position plays out in the ways in which we encounter the social and the environment. This tragedy of circumstance is evident in the cynicism William Chaloupka (1999) sees popping up everywhere as “a description of our society’s problem” (p. 5), and evidenced by skepticism pervading economic images, films, books and media. Cynicism assumes that things are not arranged for our benefit. Rowan Williams (2007) describes the deep- seated mistrust that is connected with a sense of not being in control, in terms of feeling that we are being undermined while whatever is other than us has a hidden advantage. Williams argues that the effect of continual suspicion of something hostile going on is 15 humiliating and immobilizing. Cynicism is what body and world are when all possibilities seem exhausted. Chaloupka’s work resonates with what Ferneding (2003) describes as the most disturbing findings of her research with educators from two American elementary schools. Teachers explained their outlook of the future as getting progressively more troubling, a view that emerges, Ferneding claims, from their own narrowing opportunities for learning and for effecting change with significant impact. Methods that assume fixed, featureless conditions keep us from the intensity of the world’s feeling of something coming, and from feelings for a capacity to reposition in making something of it. Rather than methods that bring us back to an equilibrium of reciprocity however, this research argues for a move away from cause and effect, following an alternative vector where affect is a presence rather than an immaterial abstraction, towards movement that gives what cannot be earned, which is qualitative transformation. This does not materialize without a struggle which for Tickle (2004) seems to be the human struggle: what I would describe as the struggle against the removal of qualitative difference from the immediately physical. The conflict is in the enormous aesthetic work of responding to feeling in turning to open instead of turning away changed only to be the same again. George Grant (in Christian & Grant, 1998) observes that, “Openness requires daily the enormous discipline of dealing with our own closedness…” (p. 101). Tickle employs another image to offer a sense of what a method’s resistance to closedness might feel like in its dying. She describes the work of Mario Donizetti whose work teaches that “destruction of the past leads to silence” (in Tickle, p. 47). Struggling for years to effect new chromatism, a method of pastel appropriate for expressing the contracted affects of sin7 according to contemporary social imagination, Tickle (2004) explains his fundamental modifications to both the traditional structure and the method of 7 Although both Tickle and Donizetti are referring to greed, Tickle is expansive in her analysis, considering it as capable of prodding us “into well-being as well as destruction” (p. 11). Without the affects described as sin we would not be human. Tickle finds the interchangeability of evil with sin an inelegant one that blurs the line between what is universally human and the practice or quality of an example that in and of itself does not need to be. I find both Tickle’s and Donizetti’s images helpful in discussing affects and the degrees of their removal from body movement. 16 pastel. Donizetti changed the flexibility of paper to a new firmness by attaching it securely to board. By using hours of boiling steam he then fixed the pastel pigment to this new canvas so completely that the resulting bonded surface may be glazed repeatedly with no change in the qualities of the painting or canvas. Using his new method in Seven Deadly Sins Donizetti (1999) situates avarice in the middle of the suite of images. Tickle writes that when looking at avarice, there is no sense of someone other; we sense that her eyes are us and we feel drawn into her. Behind, there is no geographic landscape, only a nonlocative background. Tickle claims that Donizetti’s avarice has “crossed out of life and begun to shrink into herself” (p. 50). Where the battle for the feel of qualitative difference dies, Tickle finds only a trembling frailty and claims that looking at avarice’s stark agony, is to ache. Disconnecting method from transformation through matter does not recapture the past but rather loses the future. It is the cynicism of “a way of life against belief or after its exhaustion” (Chaloupka, 1999, p. 14). Britzman (2000) argues that teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory that can deal with disregard, violence, fractures, devastations. While my research will not solve these issues, it will attempt to situate education elsewhere than in preparation for them or in response to their having already occurred or as occurring in ways that do not matter. This work attempts to situate these issues within the struggle of continual aesthetic practice in the everyday movement of methods in teacher education. Rather than putting the burden for disregard, violence, fractures and devastations on the people or methods we write about, these issues are instead, issues of degree or intensity in every situation. Rather than believing that methods can evidence the reality of a situation, it is the spark of danger or the crisis of coming undone in the feel of the more of reality that opens out history and ways of experiencing it. This is where all sorts of fantastic things can happen to a method. Because all time is contemporary time, things are bound to fail or fade. Today is not the pinnacle of progress but an opportunity to feel the inhabitability of the world and to make the world feel inhabitable. Rather than situating crisis as inaugurating the work of education towards preparation, teacher education might involve sensitizing towards the reality of being in the middle of creative movement already underway. 17 Rather than learning about crisis, an educational method might be capable of surviving the shock of environmental changes or displacement of individuals or routines (see Kruse & Ellsworth, 2010) by initiating and proliferating creative practices. Necessitating precognitive decision-making with every movement, recalibration and posture translates into “muscular memory of relationality” (Massumi, 2002, p. 59). Creative movement’s repeated transposing of what is other than it into the “lure for unity” (Massumi, p. 64) defines a force for fracture, violence and devastations between a method and what it aims to accomplish or between an understanding and its attempt to facilitate the change that is perceived as necessary. This research argues for creative practices that engage Britzman’s list of issues at the microscale of everyday practice, as a contribution towards what it means to think of educational methods as part of the world, how knowledge of the feel of the planet might “extend the capacity to expand the reach and relevancy of the field of education” (Britzman, p. 201) as well as to “go beyond the frames of individual disciplines and create new expressions” (Bill Gilbert, in Ellsworth, Kruse & Laybourne, 2007, Web exhibition: Art and Environment [Experience the Field], para. 3). There is a need for educational methods that are better suited to the realities of twenty-first-century life with its increasing acknowledgement of its vulnerabilities and our dwelling together. Furthermore, being prepared has its limits. Kruse & Ellsworth (2010) argue, “we cannot be prepared for every scenario that takes place at the convergence of the human and the geologic” (06.30.2011). The extraordinary complexity of the world’s movement maintains that a more nimble approach is necessary in which methods function with movement, ready to move “quickly and responsively in relation to monumental forces when they arrive” (06.30.2011). They suggest that rigid structures, which I extrapolate to methods that take us from one fixed position to another, do not provide more safety than those methods that are responsive, indeterminate, flexible and immaterial. Their questions of how methods might create opportunity for energy made in and through bodies to be sensed as a “tangible, material—and perhaps even “living” force in our lives” (08.15.2011, para. 4, quotations in original) is a central theme to this research. This 18 work attempts to enjoin feelings of reality with their own replenishing phase of partial accessibility. Methods and bodies are not meant to be pulled out of the reality of the world but to feel the world coming in. Instead of imagining the feel of the world’s movement as something to overcome or be avoided, we need “vitally responsive” (Kruse and Ellsworth, 2010, FOP, 06.30.2011, para. 10) methods that recognize the magnitude of the earth’s movement and “attempt to move in relation to [its] force” (para. 10) by imaging or offering in our methods the feel of a capacity to engage in “where to go from here” (para. 16). Kruse and Ellsworth suggest that such a “cultural disposition might be the most vital resource humans have” (FOP, 06.30.2011, para. 16). A method that is open feels availabilities for movement and finds those feelings everywhere. This is an opportunity for a new era for educational methods to become the atmosphere in which education lives. Kruse and Ellsworth call the focus on the earth’s movement the “geologic turn”. Our actions according to Morton (2007) reflect all life on the planet and ultimately, living without the feeling of what is more than we know, is unsustainable. Recommendations This brings me to my two-part recommendations. In Part I, I suggest three qualities of assessment for a teacher education curriculum of movement that is disposed towards sustainability and ecological inquiry: availability, arrival and the analog. These are not distinctly separate qualities; the reader will find continuous overlaps. By qualities, I mean qualities as “the how” of methods as they transport themselves towards their own taking place; qualities are entities themselves through which the transformational work of art also moves. Qualities, like any body or thing, must remain of this world, attentive first and foremost to the feel of movement through their own movement. I explore qualities in more detail in Chapter Five. By assessment, I refer to all of the recalibrations made en route in a practice as well as at junctures where a method actually shifts into something entirely different. Within the description of each quality of assessment, I offer a brief overview of the chapter from which these qualities have arisen as possibility. 19 In Part II, I reiterate a stronger claim for the work of art in a/r/tography and for a/r/tography’s methodological autonomy in terms of educational research. Recommendation Part I A teacher education curriculum for ecological inquiry Availability A curriculum of ecological inquiry is one that is increasingly reminded by the world, of the impossibility of complete preparation. Rather than endeavours at learning to manage qualitative difference or conceive of its proliferation as a crisis, this curriculum’s attempts to sidestep situations in which human ideas take precedence over the world’s unknowabilites and are instead, sensitized to availability. Availability requires sustenance through rooting into a space and time, what we might call the making of place, however briefly in order to feel its lift onward. This teacher education curriculum seeks to augment the attitude of availability subsisting in all matter, as the material energy of art in its methods. Availability has a feel for the world coming in, for what is on the horizon, for what is simmering or barely emerging. It is a mode of capacity for being willing to commit to the not-yet, an invitation to experiment and to explore, to not only respond to crisis but able to survive its displacement. Availability is exactly what it is to have a body or to be some thing in the world; it is a method of abiding time and transformation through its feel for movement that moves within and onward but also sometimes waits. Every minute event brings together contrasts that generate another quality that stands out from what was, an addition to what is already known, which Massumi (2002) calls a quality of excess. Qualities run through their own containment, refuse to remain themselves and their excess affects other emerging qualities in ways that necessitate a receptivity of information or impressions en route, rather than waiting until one understands fully or can articulate things with words. Continuing in openness to incoming stimulus registered as distance, not yet difference, affects feel, argues Massumi (1997) that there is a vague sense that there is something here that matters to me; although I do not know where it came from or how, I feel an availability to reach out and 20 touch it, or, to ignore it and walk away. With subtle shifts of experimental re-positioning, the inhabitation of a place is temporarily sustained, giving a method’s sense of capacity for committing to a next shift in that series of varieties of qualitative difference, or when a method feels it can no longer hold with the small series of shifts, it feels a capacity of where to go from here8 Availability is explored more extensively in Chapter Two, where I locate this research study in terms of the availabilities of a/r/tographic research art products and processes to reflect dynamic images of the geologic movement of their geographic location in hopes of doubling the research project’s feelings of capacities for moving and being moved. Drawing on David Lusted’s (1986) definition of pedagogy, I describe an a/r/tographic research project of public pedagogy that inquired through collaborative art practice into the lives of eight in-migrating families to the City of Richmond, British Columbia, who were engaged in grappling with change and adaptation. The main premise of the chapter is an analysis of the risks and benefits inherent in situating cities, lives and methods and methodologies in movement, and of attending to methods that move with the earth’s forces and look as Kruse and Ellsworth (2012) argue, “to the geologic as a co-designer” (vimeo.com38025229, 03.06.2012). Moving with the earth’s forces means situating ourselves on the same side as the geologic and taking up its force for self-transformation in our methods. Looking to the geologic as a co-designer involves inquiry that asks what qualities are available to support a method’s movement and how might it design with those qualities. How can a method root itself into a place’s qualities to feel what availabilities are offered? In Chapter Three, I co-author research on qualities of availability. This chapter is intended to convey for a graduate student textbook, how a/r/tography differs from other arts-based research. As an example for this discussion, I report on an a/r/tographic 8 An interesting example that gives a sort of visceral sense of this might be Parkour (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeqHj3Nj2c&feature=player_detailpage#t=14s) which is called an art of movement, a way of engaging obstacles and a way of moving with the city. This kind of moment by moment recalibration in regards to incoming stimuli as well as the complex supplemental effects as one stimulus affects another, all before conscious recognition, is something the body learns through creative practices, not just one, but many. 21 research project called Summerhill, undertaken with visiting artists, researchers, teachers and teacher candidates in a preservice teacher education program. I engage Massumi’s differentiation between four “P” words: plausibility, probability, possibility and potential to study the ways in which the project’s methods align with a/r/tographic methodology and pedagogy. Extending art educator Graeme Sullivan’s (2010) criteria for arts based research from possibility to potential which is never exhausted in actualization, situates the work of arts practice-based educational research in availabilities rather than within differences already possible. Possibility is rendered instead, from working in the realm of the im-possible. The discussion about potential is important in highlighting a/r/tography’s commitment to being a living practice of inquiry (Irwin, in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004), engaged in a living curriculum. Describing practice as “living” means that it is not fully intentional. No matter how practiced the practice, the result remains as much involuntary as it is elicited (Massumi, 2002). To make that point, this chapter describes Summerhill’s methods of feeling the resonating availabilities of the energies of Summerhill’s historic education decisions and undertakings, their capacity to point elsewhere and then, their resituating in a variety of places. The Summerhill project resulted not only in art, research and pedagogical objects as well as an exhibition but was also opportunity for teacher candidates to embody contemporary art practice, and an occasion for researchers to reinvigorate a/r/tographic methodology. To understand how a singular example of a/r/tography can create a new generality, we have to neutralize traditional philosophical oppositions such as form and content or universal and particular, as Italian philosopher and political theorist, Giorgio Agamben (2009) argues we must. The relation is tensional rather than oppositional: it produces a field of polar tensions which tend to form a zone of undecideabilty, which Agamben claims neutralizes every rigid opposition. Following on this, our paper argues that what makes a/r/tography credible is each research exhibition of a/r/tography’s potential that refuses pre-established criteria and comes into being through an ongoing process. The 22 qualities with which a/r/tography appears are unlimited and cannot be known in advance. This means that each event is always able to surprise us. Arrival Arrival cannot really be separated from availability. We do not feel a sense of belonging in places that are barricaded from other places and it is only at the instant in which we feel availability for what is other that we feel a connection to a place. My yoga teacher, Angie Inglis9, says that in general, we do not know how to arrive because we do not feel the availabilities nor the stillnesses. We are too busy thinking about the next thing and we abstract ourselves beyond our bodies, missing the intensity of availability, of becoming, in this place. Arrival is an inquiry into the quality that resides there just at the moment in which it feels for more. Arrival is not a finality nor a beginning, but the repetition of the singularity of a quality. In its arrival, Agamben (2009) claims that each moment has a paradoxical staying power to not be what prevailing conditions prescribe. Agamben (in Massumi, 1998) argues that qualities have a staying power for something else. This renders each moment an added reality and amplifies the realization that we cannot just step beyond movement and the becoming of everything in an easy cynicism. The longer a method is exposed to the inquiry of a creative practice, the more populated it becomes, as Kruse and Ellsworth (2012) note, with human interests, natural forces, human histories and contemporary interests, offering an ever-more-drastically-collective ecology of being increasingly-different together. We miss becoming because we do not experiment with re-positioning to the potential in which we are in; the series of qualities we generate are often situated towards connecting one already-identified difference with another, losing the feel of capacity for affecting and for being affected. Arrival is instead, a beat of availability towards another beat (Massumi, 1998), an open-ended time form that cycles between permanence and reception. Considered in terms of method, its repositioning in small adjustments is what makes a method livable, however briefly, able to survive displacement. Each 9 I would like to acknowledge the significance of Inglis’ teaching to this research. Several years of weekly guidance and practice has had tremendous impact for me in experiencing how body movement and creative practice generate feelings of capacity to affect and be affected, feelings one can take with them to engage and experiment with anywhere. 23 repositioning can generate radical transformation; each moment is a product of qualitative transformation. Qualitative transformation itself is imperceptible by nature and pragmatically, this means it emerges from the struggle of aesthetic practice which draws on all aspects of the investigating method’s sensibilities. A method feels in movement, as it inquires into how to receive information in transit in a way that does not abstract movement from transformation through the body. The degree to which the beat of a method repositions is also the degree to which it is revitalized by the intensity of its time and place10. Arrival is the underlying theme in Chapter Four. Using American curriculum scholar William Pinar’s (1994) method of currere as a framework, I examine the self, my self, in relation to understanding my educational experience. Secrets, so often inquired into in autobiographical work, are found in this paper in a self as a “quality of excess” (Massumi, 2002, p. 249), a quality that feels not for another difference but towards the feel of openness to the world’s ever-expanding storehouse of difference. I discuss what seems to be a more primary indexing than that of cultural positioning which is markings or recalibrations of self in the feelings of the energies of a material dynamic world. The self, as a quality of excess, generated in its availabilities, is the secret in the aesthetic struggle of sensing capacities for affecting and for being affected by what is other. 10 A quality of arrival through struggle, through a felt intensity for place and the adding to the world of qualitative difference resonates with a recent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery called Beat Nation: http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/exhibit_beat_nation.html. Beat Nation includes art by Aboriginal artists who use hip hop and other forms of popular culture to create “surprising new cultural hybrids, in painting, sculpture installation, performance and video that reflect the changing demographics of Aboriginal people today” (VAG website). These artists are not turning away from cultural traditions as much as sinking deeply into this place and time, searching for new ways of arriving into traditions. What is most striking about the work, according to the producer Glen Alteen (2012) is how much of it embraces the traditional As signifiers of Aboriginal identity and culture continue to shift and transform and older traditions find renewed meaning in new forms of expression, some things remain constant: a commitment to politics, to storytelling, to Aboriginal languages, to the land and rights, whether it be with dram skins or turntables, natural pigments or spray paint, ceremonial dancing or break dancing. (Artist statement). These artists are working through the middle, towards a principle of creativity that “neither copies the actual, nor prefigures it” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 37). 24 This chapter inquires into how we tear experience out from itself to find its fullness in the intensity of a place. History is not found in shared concepts nor shared times but in the energies made in continual relations, felt intensities generated in places where we gather sustenance to reposition yet again. Feeling or listening to the world and its ambience offers a softening at the edges of our selves and methods while yet feeling the sustenance of body connecting to unqualified belonging in the earth’s brewing ecological sociality. In terms of teacher education methods and curriculum, this chapter challenges methods to seek not to expose secrets but to be unafraid of positioning themselves in potential, including its capacities for violence and failure, knowing that they are part of the energy of joy needed to feel capacities for being affected and for affecting. Joy, according to Bennett, 2004 is the source of energy required for the juncture of this movement. She describes it as an “animating energy generated in part by affection for a material world experienced as vital and alive” (p. 363). According to Massumi, (in Zournazi, 2002), joy is different from happiness. It is an assuming of the body of its potentials in a way that feels the reality of its openness, which also involves pain. The chapter’s image of orange horizon is my photographic work out of which this chapter emerged. Arrival is also addressed in Chapter Five, which focuses on qualities of movement in relation to a research project I engaged in as a graduate teacher education student with my supervising mentor, Rita L. Irwin. The situation for this work involved our separate experiences of walking as an aesthetic practice and Irwin’s creation of a series of images called Liminal Lights. She invited me to work into her art as an extension of my own walking practice and I accepted the invitation in an a/r/tographic inquiry that considered Irwin’s claims in image and text, for the liminality of light and for a need for teacher educators to embody liminal practices and engage in liminal communities of learning. The first half of Chapter Five explores differences between understandings of liminality as an inbetween or as an ongoing giving of the feel of movement in pulses of arrival. In the second half, quality is explored in terms of actualities that are abstracted from the world for easy reproduction in a variety of ways, or experienced as products of 25 entanglement in a moving world. In terms of teacher education, this chapter claims that art practice reminds the body of its liminality and its capacity to reposition in qualitative response. Art practice augments and generates feelings for experimental arrival into them in a way that offers sustenance for next qualities of liminality. Liminality is really a better way to describe the event of feeling that repositions bodies and methods than separating as I have done, into availability and arrival because liminality refers to the feel of the out side as one is already moving across its threshold. It is the feeling of being carried beyond ourselves to re-fuse the world and our selves in it. Analog An analog quality of curriculum relates to a continuously varying momentum. This is not the analog in the everyday sense of a variation of a model; rather I use the analog according to Massumi who claims it is not of any particular thing. Analog is a process self-referenced to its own variation. It resembles nothing outside itself. Massumi claims that the analog is a general method for how we know, not what we know, in that it is two- sided: one in the autonomy of affect and the other in a functional limitation. The literal is always analogical, appreciating both longevity and the everyday in the same breath. Things reposition in events of feeling capacity for being affected and for affecting. I draw most extensively on Massumi in this chapter, but also on several philosophers who consider in varying ways that experience is essentially affect: both existence itself and also what is needed for any thing to have an experience or to be experienced. I also engage the parable in this chapter, attempting to move it out of discursive frameworks and into the pragmatics of its method of reposing problems rather than necessarily solving them and doing so, through aesthetics rather than epistemology. The newness that is vaguely sensed or side-perceived is, as Massumi (2002) describes, old: the accumulation of analog effects that increasingly resonate and disrupt the persisting effects of bodies that caused them. Each event or experience is an embodied analog of that unexpressed effecting. Every experience is also what could be said of art: a parable: one irreplaceable singularity that already tends towards what is other. Massumi describes what emerges from the feel of movement as: “parallelisms of mutual exteriorities” (Massumi, 2002, p. 38) or according to Spinoza, parallel attributes of an indivisible 26 substance, a “multiplicity that evolves situationally” (in Massumi, p. 216). Problems posed by the feel of the world’s forces cannot be solved, only exhausted in any particular series of repositioning, or transformed in an unexpected jump to a new series. One of the most important concepts that arise in this chapter in regards to understanding experience as analog lies in the ways in which the various thinkers consider causality. In traditional empiricism, effects come after causes. In an expanded empiricism however, the effects or bodies that emerge, have an incorporeal “conversion or unfolding of the body contemporary to its every move”, (Massumi, 2002, p. 5). Steven Shaviro (2009) describes this as generative conditions becoming the reason for the very processes that physically produce them: quasi-causality is the term for a creative practice that adds surplus quality of response, to classical causality that is considered in terms of stimulus- response. Shaviro describes quasi-cause as that which arrives and loiters around whatever emerges, making products productive, or bodies dynamic, or experiences experimental. Quasi-cause is a thing’s potential that springs forth on arrival of a thing. In this way, each arrival registers movement, which is the world’s persistence in renewing itself. Feeling this renewal does not necessarily mean that things will now be okay or be better but is simply a register that they will repeat, differently. In addition to being a continuously variable impulse, the analog can, according to Massumi (2002), “cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain. Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in” (p. 135, italics in original). At any and every particular conjunction, the analog recalibrates its incompleteness, towards its continuity of openness. The analog’s openness is towards its own becoming before which there does not exist a “calculable co-presence of already- possibilities” (Massumi, p. 226), but rather objective indeterminacy; this is the realm of both effects in the causal sense, but also “sonorous, optical and linguistic effects” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 36), bodily effects separated from their causes and unrestricted in their affecting of each other. Although quasi-cause can be repeatedly induced in terms of the 27 energy output of the actual feeling its potential, Massumi (2002) notes, it cannot be “faithfully reproduced” (p. 225). Part of the significance of the analog in relation to teacher education and ecological inquiry in this chapter is in its cautioning against methods that imagine one to one correspondences by extracting simplicities from complex experiences. Methods that assume relational exchange narrow corresponding effects from a much more encompassing empirical asymmetry of capacities for experience and for experiencing. I recommend a teacher education curriculum in which methods feel for the incorporeal in everyday movement, a reality that is inaccessible but must continue to be felt as the “practically impossible” (Massumi, p. 241). Through inquiring into what qualities exist in any situation, that we might enjoin to make our movement feel livable, it might be possible to “live the life of inquiry in the liminal spaces” (Irwin, 2006, p. 79). As bodies and methods assemble with qualities to make more qualities there is opportunity to feel the nonhuman becoming of body and method; perhaps becoming generous or becoming replenishing and at least, becoming excess. I suggest that initiating and proliferating a variety of everyday creative practices will enable body memory of new ways, in which it is already familiar, of accessing potential for making qualitative difference. This might involve participatory and collective and personal contemporary art practices of artmaking and aesthetic experience in which there is continual repeated opportunity for assessment of feelings and qualities in the midst of the interference of other feelings and qualities, all before conscious recognition. Furthermore, creative practice that runs through every method and body could be amplified and augmented with encouragement of continual inquiry. For example, in such a seemingly easy-to-solve issue as a method of professional attire for teacher candidates, demanding choice between adherence to rules or removal of oneself from the program might instead involve the inquiry of where body and method feel difficulty in the situation, what other qualities can be found to exist in that situation that might offer support or revitalization, how an existing quality within this situation 28 lures movement in a particular direction, how feeling for the softening at the edges of this method already becoming something else offers potential, and how the method might be resituated, to make it feel inhabitable, however briefly. Some experimental repositioning might ultimately shift a body completely out of the method, or the program, but at least it will not have resulted from extracting a simplicity from an opportunity to experience the fullness of reality and one’s feelings of capacities for being affected and for affecting and it will have given the method opportunity to repeat, differently. If bodies or educational methods no longer believe in radical change, it does not mean that things will carry on the same in education and elsewhere. Losing that faith is an ecological loss—a loss in the capacities for making the world inhabitable. Availability, Arrival, Analog In Chapter Seven qualities of availability, arrival and the analog are brought together in an example called EarthShapes that might be engaged in a teacher-educating situation or by teachers with their students. Created by Ellsworth and Kruse, Earthshapes engages participants in creative practices of inquiry in making images and text of places that matter to them, extending the work to collaborate and create with others, and then looking to what has now been rendered possible in terms of formal curriculum. This differs from education methods that seek to connect one difference to another through inquiry situated in the crisis of distance between. EarthShapes’ steps shift methods beyond differences to involve the transformational work of art. Participants look for creative movement already underway in terms of past memories whose edges are already vibrating in becoming affected with the present. In making something shareable, the new creation moves between feeling its capacity to be affected, into feeling its capacity to affect. It connects difference to potential, asking along the lines of Whitehead: If red is found in the paint on that old barn that is coming to memory, what else is there? The barn is uprooted from its previous connections and inserted into now, to make it matter in this place, reactivating its paths of becoming with a new art form. 29 The process is then repeated except that in the next phase, participants work collaboratively with their newly created art objects and experiment by engaging potential in connecting quality of excess to quality of excess. Art mingles with art; potential with potential; feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected are brought into relation with other feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected. In generating qualities and then creatively bringing them together, there is opportunity to experiment with these qualities towards what might yet be coming: what qualities are yet emerging, what is on the horizon but not yet totally accessible. What happens if we now move together in this way or that, to again, create something shareable? The EarthShapes example offers opportunities for education to be at work beyond knowledge and designs that are already known. Re-positioning in relation to affect, participants engage in one of humanity’s oldest creative practices of orientation in which structures were built to stabilize the movement of the sun in connection to the stability of the horizon (Careri, Pla, Piccolo & Hammond, 2002; also see Triggs, Irwin & Leggo, forthcoming). The creative struggle to stabilize movement however briefly, is a way of making the world feel inhabitable; it is the making of place. According to Massumi, (2002), place is the only way to measure both speed and location, or difference and distance at once. Every quality of that struggle is inseparable from its entanglement in the matter and energy of light. In terms of sustainability, making stabilizations, recalibrations decisions or assessments is the making of place, or at least a beat of a feeling of the world’s inhabitability. Pragmatically this involves the how of the making in terms of tending towards other place and next movement. Stabilizations are tokens of trust towards the future, ways of making the world feel inhabitable, or not, for now and for the future. The last step in the EarthShapes example asks what now exists as potential in curricular expectations as a result of newly places. Moving in the spiraling of creative practice underway, the edges of curriculum aims and objectives may already be vibrating in a zone of undecidability. 30 Chapter Eight is intended to be a concluding chapter in which I review a variety of contemporary understandings of ecology and engage them in arguing for the necessity of the feel of movement in educational methods rather than schemes that usurp or preempt the struggle of making quality matter in a singular place and time. Assessments of quality must preserve feelings of capacity to affect and to be affect if they are to remain of and for this world. Asking how a method feels might thus become an earnest salutation that initiates continual ecological inquiry. The chapter concludes with an emerging image of ecology for teacher education methods. Recommendation Part II A/r/tography A/r/tography has sometimes been addressed from the point of view that its practice of inquiry is similar to what colleagues do in the humanities and in the social and physical sciences. Situating it within methodologies from these disciplines has often been considered as strengthening a/r/tographic research. In this research I am offering an encouraging argument for a/r/tography to be its own methodology whose overarching concern is uniquely premised on becoming, potential as creating its conditions (Irwin, 2012) and its purpose to generate intensities through emerging qualities of its events. In a variety of recent a/r/tographic research projects focused on becoming pedagogical (see Irwin & Springgay, in Springgay et al., 2008; Irwin in Springgay et al, 2008), Triggs, Irwin & O’Donoghue, in press; see also Chapter Three in this text), there has been an increasing interest in learning and research in Art education/Teacher education that is not about a change in perspective that is an imaginary bridging of theory and practice, or an acquiring of knowledge, but rather as a way of becoming sensitized to moments of encounter, other ways of knowing and not knowing the world, and of committing to ways of living and working that create and offer generative experiences for others. I am offering what I hope is an encouraging argument for a/r/tography’s capacities as a contemporary methodology that embodies art’s material and vibratory resonances in recalibrating teacher education methods in research and pedagogy. Rather than only seeking to create more creative artists, researchers or teachers, a/r/tography might 31 consider its overarching concern linking past and future in terms of its increasing emphasis on becoming. By doing so, it offers a methodology that begins to restructure current understandings of epistemology, such as knowledge being the product of sensory perception, evident even in qualitative methods including varieties of arts based work. Premising becoming, which is to acknowledge art’s dynamic force, shifts epistemology beyond judgments of true and false towards catching criteria of objectivity, subjectivity and even interobjectivity up into becoming’s flow of transformational movement. For example, in most epistemological methodologies, possibility arises beforehand, for a better after, as Massumi (2002) describes. Epistemologies generally ask how one can develop models or generalities that are better than competing models. This works for the most part, Massumi explains, by abstracting the past to affect what the future comes to be through a presentation of possible alternatives available to the senses. Said differently, past recalibrations, conjunctions, decisions or assessments are generalized from the singularity of their events and then projected into the future in the form of a set of functional alternatives to choose from. For example, in studying preservice teachers’ orientations to integrating art into their plans, lessons would be analyzed and subsequently coded, and findings might offer three emerging orientations with particular qualities that could be measured for their fit within those categories. Possibility is projected into the future. When becoming is the foremost concern, however, Massumi (2002) argues that possibility is available only in its pastness. In other words, possibilities result from a series of events after the movement they concern has exhausted them, rather than conditioning the series. The continual embodied measurement recurring in creative practice counteracts generality and packs the body’s uniqueness into its receptivity of what is already underway. Future possibilities result from practice rather than conditioning practice. In this understanding, the work of education is situated in the incorporeal but real, experimental fringe of every thing: just where synthesis feels intensity in the potential emerging as things self-differentiate. 32 Becoming also establishes a/r/tography as a contemporary methodology. While becoming is not a novel concept in education, premising it within methods may perhaps be viewed as radical. Something that is becoming exceeds historical conditions and always remains new. Although the world is an irreversible one, its movement is not linear movement from past to future but rather contemporary, in terms of Agamben’s (2011) understanding in which every body and method is a transducer of quality. He includes in the contemporary: Those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity… The contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him (p. 14). With these thoughts in mind, a contemporary methodology might seriously extend teacher education’s impact ecologically, in terms of doing more than structuring for the “historically positioned here and now” (Massumi, (2012, p. 198). Instead, many decisions already made in the past will require capacities and designs that do not yet exist (Kruse & Ellsworth, 2010)11. The present, Kruse and Ellsworth (2012) argue, is not the culmination of all time, but rather, all time is contemporary time which is “flowing in the present as middle”, “remixed by geologic forces that are unfolding right now as product, limits and affordances” (vimeo.com38025229, 03.06.2012) that actively shape our daily lives. When working with potential, things move in two directions at once (see Chapter Eight), out from the actual, as past and into the actual as future, as Massumi describes. He explains that a body looks forward into its own past and sees its past in the future, which falls out of sight in the totality of its unknowability. Furthermore, in becoming, functions as well as meanings are material dynamics. In movement, there is no method or quality that can measure without participating on the same side as every thing’s self-differentiating reality. Instead, the ways in which we are 11 One of the examples that Ellsworth and Kruse (2012) offer are nuclear storage waste sites, the results of which will shape life and earth into the future. They argue that we have “ensured for ourselves a future that will compel us to develop new cognitive capacities and designs that are as yet unimaginable, to “design specifications to contain and maintain vigilance over materials whose realities mean we have to maintain these depositories for millions of years” (vimeo.com38025229, 06.03.2012). 33 taking up the products of the geologic past today go from here, into the future. Once experienced, the limits function as resonation chambers and both what is actualized and what is not, are realities that run on to be affected by other effects, steaming up as the world’s repository of supersaturated abundance. Rather than remaining tethered to traditional epistemologies and methodologies, a/r/tography does not need to minimize the potency of its art core which offers in its openness of closed form, both the feel of the world touching its edges and its movement into touching the world, a lambency vibrating in many directions at once. Why not situate a/r/tography at the limits of educational/ecological inquiry and render it inventive? Inventiveness, over transmitted aims and habits of already-determined knowledge, may be the most significant resource needed for ensuing generations. Transduction seems an adequate concept for an attempt at thinking art’s process: it is what philosopher Gilbert Simondon (in Massumi, 2002), calls the openness of the system of virtuality (the world’s reservoir of qualitative difference) in taking charge of the system of actuality (the coming together of the present) by creating another system of interconnections: stability and change bound up with one another. He calls it “invention” (in Massumi, p. 40). Massumi explains transduction as “ a local organization of forces” (p. 104), that responds to and transformatively prolong another force: availability prolonging arrival in analog. In reference to the transductive method of the body, any entity, Massumi claims that the “measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into that of another” (p. 35) and bodies continue transduction just for the feel of more of life. Every kind of body, according to Spinoza has conatus, the will to live and expand life by multiplying and transforming itself through matter. Art is transductive grappling, every miniscule movement an inquiry into the else that its method can do. Looking more closely at this struggle offers a short sequence of inquiry: • Finding creative movement already underway. 34 • When one quality emerges, inquiring into it, re-positioning to notice it in more ways and to notice what other qualities might be arriving. • Experiment in making something shareable even before full understanding or finding words to adequately explain what will only have arrived after its exhibit. • Making something of what is only just coming negotiates both feeling capacities for being affected and for affecting and requires sensing the movement at the edges of things where they are already pulsating in their contrast to the present. A practice necessitates a sensitivity and ongoing availability towards repositioning in response to what continues to come in the midst of movement already underway. • Holding contrasts together offers openings through which things will slip away unknowable and the present will just now be coming together. • Each re-positioning re-inserts variation into a new situation. While maintaining its vibrating connectibilities, it invites deviant sprouting, unfolding, resonation, and openness to qualitative change at a new test-site in the world. • What emerges now makes possible what was previously unthought. What emerges is already tending in more than one direction, towards what it is not and what it is becoming as well as what is unknowable. • Following emerging effects into another sensory mode: like heat into colour or today into tomorrow. • Let effects mingle and shift. • Re-insert new qualities elsewhere where movement is shimmering at the edges of something else as you create another event that is shareable. Shaviro (2006) offers three basic observations regarding Simondon’s argument for transduction and they both extend an analysis of transduction in art’s process and also offer a shift towards thinking of art’s method in connection to teacher education methods of research and pedagogy. One is that what individuates (an individual or a collective—or an image) is “never given in advance; it must be produced, it must coagulate, or come into being, in the course of an ongoing process.” (Shaviro, January 16, 2006, para. 3). In other words its process of coming is not enclosed and determined; it is becoming. Rather 35 than a code, the method of transduction is a “set of potentials which can unfold in various directions and which do not attain form except in the actual process of unfolding” (Shaviro, January 16, 2006, para. 3, italics in original). Secondly, transduction must refuse classification of things by means of established criteria emphasizing the radical openness and coming in any entity. Affect shifts us from any criteria but that of potential (see Chapter Three). In the absence of mediation the only values are aesthetic ones with which each example evaluates the world. This means any example is both a one-time event and it makes all the difference in the world. Thirdly, The movement before an individuation is not a state in which identity is lacking— not an undifferentiated chaos—but rather what is more than unity and more than identity, more than singular and more than plural, a state of radical potentiality, of excess or supersaturation, rather than one of negativity (Shaviro, 16.01.2006, para. 3). It is this pre-individual field of feeling or affect that is what makes individuation possible. The activation of the new operates through the sensitization of a method to the feeling of the fullness of the world’s forces. Therefore, what emerges from methods and their compositions of qualities and degrees of feelings of capacity for movement, are never final and this is where the method of art is again already underway finding creative movement ongoing now. Transduction adds further explanation to the creative practices that have been engaged in this research towards methods that feel capacities for affecting and being affected by movement and are examples of movement. To inquire into how art teaches the expanded reality of dynamic form, the following chapters carry transduction along in their engagement of a variety of logics of creative practices including affect, a/r/tographic research and methodology, geologic forces, curriculum as currere, liminality, and entanglement. 36 In conclusion, this dissertation argues for an a/r/tographic teacher education curriculum whose methodology initiates and proliferates creative practices through which methods/bodies remember the feel of what they have already been engaged in and what their bodies are familiar with but have forgotten in the rush for generalities. Bodies forget, perhaps because of too many situations in which knowledge defines and regulates. We are quick to return, according to Agamben (2009) to what we already understand. In addition, Massumi (May, 2007) argues, “everyday experience foregrounds the object- oriented, action-reaction instrumental pole” (p. 7). We need art, Massumi (2008) claims, to bring out the fact that “all form is necessarily dynamic form” (p. 7). Creative practice in art, research and teaching shift teacher education towards greater recognition of the activity and force of all things, greater awareness of the drastic collectivity of the earth’s ecological connections and perhaps a more cautious and intelligent approach for methods that listen to the earth’s vibrant forces that are capable of instructing contemporary life. The next chapter offers attends to several trajectories of ecological dynamics in the context of teacher educating and research in a project of art and public pedagogy. 37 ………………. Studio note, October 2006 Figure 2. What is the inquiry of a day? There is a two-sidedness to that horizon: as one arises from, it returns to an other. The day comes together and it comes apart: not from movement or from something or somebody, but from one place to another. In place, distance and difference, speed and location are manifest at once. There is an “abstract holding together” and a “concrete holding apart” (Massumi, 2002, p.288). The world’s vivacious charge of indeterminacy recedes into the unperceived from which it kindles its two-faced feelings for all days in this day. The following chapter addresses a research project of public pedagogy undertaken by teacher educators in their roles as artists, researchers and teachers with in-migrating families. The methodology of a/r/tography was the framework within which creative practices of pedagogy, inquiry, and contemporary art included gathering over meals to share stories, having tea while recounting memories through old photographs and wandering together through the everyday places of people’s lives. The collaborative artmaking was later offered by the involved communities in several public exhibitions. The research project is broadened in this rendering of the contrasts of the city’s geologic forces alongside public pedagogy as a creative practice and the a/r/tographic methodology from which the project initiated. The chapter expresses availabilities towards movement in research that works in multiple layers in horizon zones of socio-geologic active margins: the context of every day’s riskiness and richness. Modes of availability for this curriculum of teacher educating involve finding creative movement already underway and augmenting and proliferating other relational practices that generate the ecological realities of feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting. 38 Chapter Two The City of Richgate Humans are the descendants of explorers. Four hundred million years ago, our distant ancestors forsook the aquatic environment in which they had evolved to explore and colonize the alien world above the shoreline. It is remarkable when you think about it— sacrificing the security of the waters for the hazards of the land…On land it is possible to build fires. On land it is possible to see stars. Robert Zubrin, 2007 The City of Richgate is a recent community-engaged research and creation longitudinal interdisciplinary project12 using the methodology of a/r/tography. In this chapter, I explain a/r/tography and feature its research issues in time’s reverberating movement that is historical, futural and present. Rather than attending only to cognitive theories of learning, this research situates the complexity of movement as found already in the world, as well as in each variety of itself. In this chapter, I engage overlapping layers of movement including the seismically active location in which the research is situated, to acknowledge the importance of attending to educational issues by more than one level of attention. Of equal importance, is an attempt in this paper to ensure that the transphenomenality of movement does not make one process metaphoric of an other. Rather, movement is already happening and it can be found everywhere. The project of The City of Richgate aimed to explore, inquire, and offer pedagogic opportunities through artmaking in relation to the intergenerational, living experience of people as they grapple with issues of identity and belonging. While the flux of human movement is a global issue, individual stories are profoundly related to the physicality of place. This study was located specifically within the particular environmental and socio- cultural/historical landscapes of the island city of Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, a city poised on the Pacific Rim, on the edge of both a country and a continent. It is a place in which people are well acquainted with movement. The Pacific Ocean delivers itself at the city’s edges with rhythmic regularity. Geologic activities, while usually 12 We acknowledge the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for this project. 39 imperceptible, make Richmond the most seismically active location in Canada, according to Geological Survey of Canada geologists John Cassidy and Garry Rogers (2004). Richmond residents are also familiar with the historical movement of cultural migration beginning with the displacement in the islands’ past, of the Musqueam Aboriginal people who, according to archaeological records (City of Richmond 2010) were in continuous occupation there for at least nine thousand years, and including the history of European settlement beginning in 1860 following the railway built by Chinese immigrants, as well as the more recent immigration of people from non-European cultures. Currently, one of every five people is new to the city (City of Richmond, 2010), having arrived in the last ten years, predominantly from Asia, but also from Eastern and Western Europe, South Africa and India. Using the translated Chinese and Japanese names for the city, Richmond is rendered, The City of Rich Gate, from which we created our project name. Figure 3. Richmond, Island City © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. A/r/tography The Richgate project inquires a/r/tographically into the lives of several families in Richmond as they grapple with continual change and adaptation. To be engaged in the practice of a/r/tography is to inquire into ongoing movement through a continuous process of artmaking and writing, while acknowledging both one’s divided yet overlapping, sometimes accumulated and sometimes novel responsibilities of artist [a], researcher [r], and teacher [t]. In this research, visual13 and textual processes and products are interconnected and overlapping. A/r/tographic research inquires through artistic means as opposed to conducting research about an artistic project or phenomena. It initiates and works alongside and within dynamics of socio-cultural 13 We emphasize the visual arts in the Richgate project but a/r/tography may involve all artsforms. 40 change. Transformational qualities of everyday living are the central topics in the interaction with participants and sources of inspiration for collaboration in making art images. A/r/tographic inquiry attempts to add to socio-ecological experience by finding the movement of experience already in the world, for example, in geologic processes or families in transition, processes that are one and the same self-differentiating movement. A/r/tography seeks to reflect back to the world its diversity and liveliness, by creating arrangements in which people can relate to one another in ways that are not already determined. Our team of researchers on the Richgate project included artists, teachers, graduate students, and actively involved eight intergenerational, in-migrating families14 that have been lured, during different historical periods to Richmond from China, Estonia, Japan, South Africa, Western Europe and India. Richgate’s four-year project consisted of a/r/tographers working with participating families through interviews, collaboratively designed works of art, and public exhibitions focused on issues of identity and belonging. The participating families originally came together when the local art gallery held a symposium on art, immigration, and the environment. At this event, several of the authors gave academic presentations on their work. At the end of the event, an invitation was extended to local in-migrating families wishing to participate in an intergenerational project focused on collecting and creating visual and textual narratives of migrating experiences. Through this public invitation, families that chose to participate knew they were being given an opportunity to contribute within a small community of people willing to explore notions of home and away. In this particular rendering of the project, we offer examples of some of Richgate’s art images as well as particular text images of the city’s geologic processes over time in the shaded boxes interspersed throughout. Through the resonating fluxes of image and text, 14 We would like to extend our appreciation to the participating families: 1) Mei Lin, Tam Wang, and Crane Wang; 2) Bob Duan, Linda Gu and Ying Duan, 3) Yuzhang Wang, Hong Wang, and Steven Wang; 4) Gu Xiong, Ge Ni, and Gu Ye; 5) Gabriele and Brian Ailey; 6) Kit Grauer and Carl Grauer; 7) Margaret, Pauline, Mike, Cameo, and Madison Sameshima; 8) Betty and Charan Gill. 41 cultural and geologic connected and separated through movement, we seek in this paper, to offer unusual insights into time’s overlapping and multidirectional movement in both nature and culture and subsequently, to stimulate imagination for ways in which education in public places might respond. Public pedagogy Pedagogy is an appropriate term to use in research that is meant to offer interdisciplinary learning experiences in public places because as Lusted (1986) argues, it “foregrounds exchange between and over categories, it recognizes the productivity of the relations, and it renders the parties within them as active, changing and changeable agencies” (p. 2). Furthermore, he defines pedagogy in terms of goals and ends arising from within activity rather than being set prior to activity. Instead of taking people from “here to there”, meaning from one fixed location to another, pedagogy anticipates engagement with a moving world. This is in sharp contrast with contemporary mainstream schooling where the testing industry demands proof of education before its time, which as Britzman (2006) notes, “contributes to an instrumental, repressive orientation to knowledge. The procedures of content, comprehension, and skills dominate pedagogical interactions, and there is hardly time for curiosity into the mysteries of being” (p. 66-67). What follows is a belief that people somehow live outside of time, history, and the ecosystem of the planet. Consistent with Lusted’s four-stranded definition of pedagogy, Richgate’s research project commenced foregrounding exchange over categories by considering the in- migrating movement of difference as continuous creative tendency. Time spent together extended potential for revising conceptual associations about cultures and identities thereby enlarging cultural capacity for change. Within each doubling over of particular story with broader anticipation, what slips in with varying measure, is the infinity of imagination. Secondly, as Lusted argues pedagogy does, Richgate’s public pedagogy found productivity in relations, beginning with the immediate reflective work of time that movement always carries within itself. The separate practices of artist, researcher, and teacher push up against and spill over into each other, and the particularities within each 42 traditional role continually double over the abstractions or generalities in each field of study. Thirdly, Lusted claims that pedagogy finds its parties active, changing and changeable. Just as the Richgate project began with people’s lives already in motion, this paper extends and elaborates the work of the Richgate’s public pedagogy by inquiring into the place in which the research occurred and in particular the location’s geologic forces that involve stability but also fracture, erosion and transformation. Exploring Richmond’s physical structure and substance, its history, and the processes that act on it assist in this paper’s argument that reflection occurs within the infinitely changing ground of artistic practice and unseparated from the moving ground of nature. Ground seems basic, and foundational but it is really movement that is fundamental. Rather than metaphorically bridging ideas of changing earth and changing cultures and lives, public pedagogy is more transformational if opportunity is offered in which to take up movement’s deepest dimension, which is becoming. In becoming, the past is never remembered by matching anything to it, but is instead its own self-differentiating reality coloured by emerging qualities of movement. To offer becoming as pedagogical opportunity, time must be considered an active ingredient, necessary for creative possibilities and through which, realities undergo qualitative transformation in encountering each other. Time’s activity resonates with the physicality of the world’s movement in which things are always immediately different. In the time we write or attempt to copy or reflect change, it is again open to change, already and immediately a new experience; reflection built right into the reverberation of past, present and future potential. Lusted’s fourth claim regards goals and ends arising from within the activity of pedagogy, rather than being set prior to its activity. Certainty is not the whole picture of our reality and it must be countered by a pedagogy that teaches a trust in feelings of capacity for affecting and being affected by the difference and richness carried by the motion of change. Because stability is often perceived as external to processes of 43 movement even in the physical world, the complex unities of human beings also appear to be stable patterns. As a result, Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara and Rebecca Luce-Kapler (2008), argue that these perceived stabilities give rise to the illusion of stable identities and fixed boundaries. To some degree, this is a necessary situation. For example, people do have to hold to a certain part of the illusion about the stability of islands in order to live on them, “as though the battle between land and sea is over” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 9). Figure 4. Richmond's dynamic geography. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. There is a need for belief in stability yet as William Doll (1993) argues, strictly stable- state assumptions lead to a specific kind of pedagogy in which knowledge exists independently of the knower and subsequently, can then be discovered and validated and thereby controlled. We observe with Doll, that nature consists of flexible order in which stability, erosion, fracture, disarticulation and accumulation are not diametrically and irrevocably opposed. Though we are simply too complex to take in everything about ourselves at once, drawing relationships among ideas and across an ecology of movement can help to understand change and stability as anticipatory and generative of each other. Referring throughout the paper to the geomorphology of the city of Richmond provides an event of knowledge about the material world that makes both the Richgate project and The city of Richmond consists of seventeen islands whose beginnings emerged millions of years ago from fracture, disarticulation, erosion and accumulation. According to geological theory, a rift occurred between the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian plate, eventually creating the Atlantic Ocean and subsequently setting the North American plate on its journey westward. In moving, the North American plate collided with the Pacific Oceanic plate, which because of its more solid and less buoyant makeup, began subducting beneath the continental plate. Geologist John Clague and research scientist Bob Turner (2003) explains how the oceanic plate continues to pass under the sharp leading edge of the North American plate. Pieces of the top layer of rock are repeatedly being skimmed off, adding to several kilometres worth of accumulated sediment from the ocean floor. These scrapings continually settle and shift, changing the continent and driving the Coast Mountains up ever higher, at a rate of “a few millimetres every year” (Clague and Turner, 2003, p. 19). 44 the lives it engages possible. It is included as the study of the ‘ground’ on which thought or material existence operates and into which it reaches to transform its concepts – as theoretically and practically important as any cognitive science field of research. By finding movement already in the world, it is possible to transpose reflection to a whole other concept to which an intuition might never otherwise entertain. As artists, a/r/tographers naturally provoke attention to forces that emerge as resonance or impact, not seeking to make specific cognitive connections but instead, leaving those personal connections for others to make. As educational researchers, a/r/tographers seek to understand and imagine the ways people grapple with change. As teachers, a/r/tographers are concerned with providing enough artistic and interdisciplinary variation with which others might experience the ways in which they do not know as well as make connections between things. This is a curriculum in which pedagogy is concerned with augmenting the momentum of making qualities through which people feel connected to the world. Figure 5. The Principle of Uniformitarianism. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Time as creative The Richgate project involved the making of many works of public art including a series titled “Side by Side” which consist of historical images that participating families chose Over the past ten thousand years, with the melting of the glaciers, Clague and Turner (2003) describe changes in sea levels, additional excess sediment has accumulated as delta islands where the Fraser River now flows into the Strait of Georgia. These low- lying plains that are separated from the rest of the mainland have survived the absorption of the sea that at one time contained them. As a result the islands are, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2004) describes, not products, but instead, the movement that already was. What is new is built, literally, on the old. Modern geology refers to this anomaly as the Principle of Uniformitarianism (Clague and Turner; Hutton, 1785) which argues that the present is key to the past and the physical processes at play on Earth are the same as those that have shaped it during the past. As beings with similar iterative processes – both biological and social, Deleuze challenges us to give back to islands, dynamic images of themselves, consciousnesses of the movements that form islands. In doing so, he claims we will come to encounter our own conditions for creative alterability or difference and by extension, individual and collective capacity for change. 45 from their past experiences either in the city of Richmond or in another country, alongside more recent images taken specifically in the city of Richmond. Richgate’s Side by Side series are six images that are 4ft. by 6ft. photographic art pieces on foam core. The a/r/tographers working on the project spent time interviewing participants, listening to stories and collaboratively that would share some of the changes in the families’ lives. At first glance, the Side by Side series might look like binary depictions of past and present, here and there, but with closer examination, it is apparent that the changes are not only about external changes in location but include the differences that have occurred within people or places and the many directions in which past experiences creatively followed gestures, words, feelings or qualities of the landscape into what, until each moment, had not heretofore been imagined. The Side by Side series is just one of several series of Richgate’s productions that were exhibited in various public venues in Richmond as well as in universities in Chongqing and Beijing, China. Figure 6. Sameshima Side by Side, Artists: R Beer, G. Xiong, K. Grauer, R. L. Irwin, S. Springgay, B. Bickel, 2007. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, Deleuze (2004) explains that one of time’s directions solidifies or congeals into a product the very same movement of difference that interrupts products. The other direction of movement turns back and retraces the steps, rediscovering in a product the difference from which it resulted. So, we remake in one half of a moment, the movement from which the moment resulted and which is still present as the most contracted degree of our past. In this way, remembering is not about 46 representing something that was. Instead, we put ourselves into the past in order to reimagine ourselves. The Side by Side images make sense of Deleuze’s (2004) philosophy of time in which “the present is double in two directions, one toward the past, the other toward the future” (p. 31). Time is the difference at each instant with which we negotiate our own change. We use the past to be in the present (Cilliers, 2006) and Deleuze argues that in fact, they are contemporaneous with one another and form the same world. Just as the immediate of physical earth systems and forms simultaneously preserves, rejects and transforms the past, Richgate foregrounded a process of exchange in its public pedagogy. To revisit and expand on Lusted’s definition of pedagogy, we discuss in the following sections, his four main points while a/r/tographically attending to the deep meaning of a resonating local and physical world already in motion. Foregrounding exchange over categories In the Richgate project many evenings of exchanging stories around large tables in Richmond restaurants brought the participants together. Enjoyment over revisiting and sharing stories of movement and what it is to be attached to the complexities and textures of places, were opportunities in which participants expressed home, place and location as a multiplicity of creative movements. Lulu Island is Richmond’s biggest island and the one on which most people in Richmond live. It is also the Fraser River’s floodplain. After the disappearance of glaciers in British Columbia’s lowlands and the ice in the Fraser Canyon, the Fraser River rapidly established its present course. Clague and Turner (2003) describe a seaway previously extending through the Fraser Valley to Abbotsford filled with silt, sand and gravel that were washed into the flow of the newly formed Fraser River drainage. This early westward advance of the Fraser River occurred while the land was still rising, bouncing back after shedding its glacial weight. Later, when the sea began to rise, the river began building up delta islands, filling in part of the seaway lying in its path. The Richmond islands were built from the movement of the water even while retaining the possibilities of their particular tendency for movement within their structures of the sediment. Today, where the Fraser River slows at the mouth of the river, it continues to drop its load of silt and sand on to the tidal flats. Over time, this sediment builds up at the mouth of the river where much of it is regularly dredged in order to 47 maintain an open shipping channel from New Westminster (Clague and Turner 2003). During the summer, the Fraser River’s brown stream of clay and silt is clearly evident from the air as it extends far out into the Strait of Georgia (see satellite image in Clague and Turner, p. 65). The amount of sediment carried each year is astounding. According to biologist, Robert Butler (2003), it deposits more than 13 million cubic meters of sediment a year. He describes it as equivalent to a “one meter (39 inches) by one meter pathway stretching from Vancouver to London, England (p. 131). Figure 7. Increasing interactions are transformative. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. The practice of a/r/tography acknowledges the productivity of relations in its process of interrelationality that inquires into the world while simultaneously inquiring into the multiplicity of possibilities that are materially present to one another in various, fluid and overlapping identities. A/r/tography includes the creation of images and texts not just to put them in conversation with each other; John Rajchman (2000) concludes that we already have too much communication. Instead it delves deeply into aspects that other methodologies do not, particularly pedagogy. Moving on the specific entities of artist, researcher and teacher, a/r/tography works as practitioners do, with thresholds that lie at the invisible limit between personal and global (Kuehne in Doll, 1993) and as artists do, experimenting at the limits of landscape and social imagination. The forward slashes in the word a/r/tography indicate the importance of working with the rich histories of each tradition of artist, researcher and teacher as well as at their limits as contiguous thresholds tending towards each other. Artist, research and teacher are articulated together to retain the ecology and materiality of everyday living; not irrevocably opposed but like the past and present sharing different directions of the same movement. In framing time as more than linear and cumulative the Richgate project acknowledged it as a necessary ingredient in change. Over time, and as interactions increase, transformations occur. 48 Figure 8. Stimulating connections. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Before European settlement, Clague and Turner (2003) describe the untamed Fraser River as regularly spilling over its banks, covering the delta and then retreating, continually leaving more silt and clay on the tidal flats. Butler (2003) writes that the first humans arrived on the west coast between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and that there were other visitors from China and Japan long before European settlers arrived and sought protection from the river. Beginning in the late 1800s, dykes were built around Lulu Island by the European settlers, providing a sense of security as they protected property and life (Clague and Turner). The dykes delineated the edges of the island, an attempt to fix both the land and the water, shutting down undesired exchange. Although necessary for protecting settlements when they were built, dykes disconnect the natural tendency of a river that establishes all kinds of connections to its surroundings, “critical habitat for aquatic plants and animals and a source of vital nutrients to the river” (Clague & Turner 2003, p. 71). Dyking decisions made many years ago have played in the loss of most of the Fraser River delta’s saltmarshes, the most productive ecosystems in the world, yet which so little is known about. Similar situations have occurred with other west coast salt marshes and as a result, much of the knowledge about plants and animals able to straddle both marine and land lifestyles has been lost (Butler 2003). The Fraser River marshes recycle and trap nutrients that provide critical elements for plant and animal life and provide a safe place for salmon to adapt from seawater to freshwater before swimming upstream to spawn. Dykes also prevent the natural regeneration of the floodplain. Clague and Turner (2003) describe regular depositions of silt and clay by flooding on Richmond’s delta plains before the construction of river dykes. As a result of the dykes, the delta plain no longer receives new sediments from the river and since the land surface is slowly compacting and subsiding, much of it is already below highest tide limits. With new understanding for the exchange that is so vital for the river ecosystem, some connections have now been restored by allowing water to flow through the dykes at the mouths of small streams, and floodplain zoning is being considered as a better way of dealing with flooding. Productivity of relations Categorizing, dividing, and separating are sometimes desirable and at other times unavoidable in the face of economic, political or institutional forces, or even because we can only respond to so much of the world’s movement at one time. Therefore, re- establishing opportunity for connection is also the work of public pedagogy in which we strive to make boundaries porous. Author Stephen Bates (2006) critiques social science’s history of explaining time as an either/or basis–relating either to experience or to a linear or cyclical progression. He argues instead that the social sciences need to break from the assumption that there are borders between the natural and the social realms. It is important to understand what he calls the ‘rhythmicity’ that relates and links the natural 49 and human worlds. He concurs with Deleuze that “continuity and change are always present within the same moment” (Bates, 159). Every moment is both separate from other moments and also part of them not through shared concepts nor through a shared time but in the felt intensities of their places. Figure 9. Generative compositions. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Ellsworth (2005) explains pedagogy’s difficulty in connecting continuity and change. Since pedagogy often deals with knowledge conceived as something already made, it ends up repeating and perpetuating entrenched beliefs and practices. This runs the risk of fixing the new and not yet thought of, to what is already known. She writes, “our sensations of time and space are crucial to what we make of history, people or events” (p. 18). They are crucial because they are the way in which creativity or imagination is present in those who are receiving it. Sensations are where people creatively move in local action that affects potential for movement more broadly. Ellsworth notes that being given a route in which we can inhabit self- experimentation leads to contiguous and multiple avenues of choice. Conceiving of pedagogy as interpretation, explanation or information-giving is to offer too little. She argues instead, that “the educational component of a pedagogy is knowable to us only in our response” (p. 23). Immediately west of the islands of Richmond, the small Juan de Fuca tectonic plate has further fractured into two additional plates: Explorer and Gorda. All three are in motion between the large Pacific and North American plates as underwater volcanic ridge systems on their eastern edges add new crust to both the Pacific plate and the three Juan de Fuca plates. These plates are consequently spreading apart at a rate of 60 mm a year (Potter, 2007). Geologist Brian Wernicke (2003) estimates, “for every kilometre that two plates move apart, a one-km wide, five km thick batch of molten rock rises up from the mantle, cools, and solidifies to form new ocean crust” (p. 2). As new crust is created, old crust is pushed under the North American plate, and used to extend Richmond steadily westward, at a rate of about four and a half centimetres a year. Figure 10. New arrangements. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Situated in the delta in the middle of the Fraser River, Richmond is a city shaped by the river, rooted in fishing and shipping. As a result of the generative alluvial soil the river delivers, Richmond agricultural land supports some of the richest diversity in Canada. 50 Public art as pedagogy does not exist to cause learners to change perceptions in certain pre-specified ways but rather to complicate things, to create more complex nervous systems (Rajchman, 2000) that show and release the possibilities of time, to sever us from subservience to “the debilitating effects of clichés, to show and release the possibilities of a life” (p. 138). The role of public pedagogy is about pushing sensation to crack the conceptual boundaries that constrain what we know of the present with the movement of difference that resides in them, where it evolves into “a matter of belief not in another world but in other possibilities in this one” (Rajchman, p. 139). The pedagogical work is grounded in potential for redefining experiences and landscapes as dynamic processes. Instead of reflecting back new or old or blended cultures, artmaking reflects qualities of movement—the rhythmicity of the past hurling itself into newness. Richgate was an opportunity to keeping pedagogy in motion—reflecting back Richmond’s island process by engaging in experimentation of selves in creative practice. Rendering parties active, changing and changeable If participants in pedagogy are considered active, changing and changeable, then time must be made available for that educational movement to take place. In the Richgate project, much time was spent looking through pictures with the participating families listening to bits and pieces of stories of past experience often guided by photographs or objects of significance to the participants. Members of the families took the research team on walks through their neighbourhoods, sharing details of their everyday lives at coffeeshops, offices, grocery stores, places of worship, the library and bus stops. The structure of memory’s network of relationships is not cumulative and can only develop Paul Cilliers (2006) argues, if parts of the network are not preserved. This is work that takes time to nurture. Cilliers describes how modernism has co-ordinated our actions, sacrificing subjective experience of time in order to generate a universal time in which we can function more efficiently. Attempts at pedagogies that address people as static entities aim to make the future more knowable. Cilliers notes that anticipation of the future always tries to find some way of leaping from the past to that which has to be coped with next. In order for 51 more choices to be available in a society’s anticipation of the future, there must be a rich and deep memory. He argues that the only way for this significant memory to be formed is for the method of remembering to be slower than its environment. Richgate’s intensive four year commitment to meeting with participating families, sharing and recording stories and pictures and creating art was part of the pedagogical slowness that the research team felt was important in developing the potential of the city of Richmond’s collective memory. Longitudinal creative practice is a way of prolonging a public awareness of the past in the present, not rushing development, but looking to the past at the same time as it is exceeded. When basic restructuring, major shifts, or radical transformation do occur, it is often after a surplus of interactions over time and then, instead of linear cumulative change, shifts occur in bursts, gaps and fractures. In the ever-emerging new crust on the ocean floor the newly forming rock contains mineral grains called magnetite which align themselves parallel to the earth’s magnetic field at the time of cooling. Every few hundred or thousand years the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south interchange, influencing the cooling rock to be aligned differently and creating the broad, striated ocean floor stripes that appear in maps created using Global Positioning System and multibeam sonar (NASA, 29.12.2003). Each bit of new crust along the ridge carries a record of the direction of the magnetic field at the time it formed, helping geologists map how two plates on either side of a ridge moved apart through time in relation to each other. The potential direction of the cooling rock’s movement comes partially from within its own tendencies but is also oriented to whatever potential has been generated in its situation. According to geological theory regarding tectonic plates, the earth’s crust embodies its past yet is not entirely determined by it. The crust is separated into plates that float on the hot, plastic layer of outer mantle each in motion relative to each other. Although constantly in flux, some plates move more slowly and so appear to remain unchanged for millions of years. Most, however, are noticeably growing or shrinking in size, stimulated but not determined, by movement from beneath and within, as well as at their limits. Figure 11. Continuous creative tendency. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. In addition to the Side by Side images, several other series emerged from the Richgate project intuiting the passage of time. One of these is a series of eight “Gates”, large gallery-space fabric gates, created from family photographs, narratives and interviews 52 with the eight families. The Gates show people and places relating to themselves, time phase after time phase—the movement of pathways as series of snapshots, no chronological order, yet moment after moment after moment. Figure 12. Yang Gates, Artists: G. Xiong, R. Beer, K. Grauer, R. L. Irwin, S Springgay, B. Bickel, 2005. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Biological thinking teaches that learning is due to evolving structures of agents in dynamic contexts – it involves the ability to continually adapt. Jean Piaget (in Doll 1993) argues that knowing is a perpetual construction or reconstruction made by exchanges between an organism and its environment. Doll claims, however, that Piaget did not intend this argument to translate into simply a ‘hands-on’ pedagogy but instead a pedagogy that is about intellectual restructuring and transforming of reality. This does not account entirely for the dynamics of reality that continuously occur and which cannot all be attended to, but a moment of restructuring of reality does seems evident in the expression of a student (G. Xiong, Trans.) attending the 2004 Richgate installation in Chongqing, China, in regards to the Gates: I came through half of those gates now [ ] but just while I stood there, I looked at the back of the gate. [ ] When you walk through the door at first you receive that information from outside the door, but when you walk out of the door you start to receive the information from the back of the door. We have something or nothing at the same time. In order to walk into a door you have to give up something to have that kind of experience after walking, right? When I look at the 53 back of these images, they become like historical photos compared from the front. I find that very interesting. Making the Gates with the participating families involved rediscovering changes over time. These are actual structural differences as Piaget might note, in who is, or what are shown from one picture to the next. They also involve feelings of capacities for affecting and being affected that move beyond anticipating future events. Through the artmaking, changes are again recreated, to new meanings and new ways of relating to one another and to the places called home. Goals and ends arising from within activity Arts-based methodologies have been transforming the representational form of research communication for several decades with most using creative processes to fully engage in the contexts of surrounding human experience (Sullivan, 2010). A/r/tography’s focus on public pedagogy, however, deals specifically with the dynamics of social, cultural and physical movement that provoke the practices of artmaking, teaching and inquiring. Embodied understandings and exchanges between a/r/tographic texts and the roles of artist/researcher/teacher and viewer/reader do not solely necessitate facts or procedures. Irwin (in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004) explains, “theory is not limited to but includes textual discussion and analysis set within and/or alongside visual imagery of educational phenomena and/or performance” (p. 32). Instead, the materiality and energy of these practices are intended to move each other as opportunities for taking up research and culture in fresh ways, just as Rajchman (2000) describes art as doing: To respond to what in life as in thought is not already determined–to those unforeseen moments in what happens in us and to us that open up onto new histories in history, new pathways in the ‘complication’ of our ways of being” (p. 61). Irwin (in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004) speculates that it is in the making that the many seeming oppositions of life and living create opportunity for new forms of theoretical practice: knowing, making and doing. 54 The Richgate project did not seek to lessen the fractures between past and present, nor between here and there, or home and away. What is important is the addressing of lives lived in relation to present circumstances as well as to the creativity of their own pasts, offering the potential for patterns not usually apparent. The art both inquired into and responded to evidence of learning bodies and learning places, finding that in every moment, there are multiple movements each infused with degrees of imagination and creativity. This is not research that seeks to control the future, which as Cilliers (2006) observes, would mean making it knowable and which could only be possible if the future resembles the present. Instead, following both the movement of the city of Richmond’s cultural transformations and hybridizations and its physical geography’s dynamic tensions, the research project is both site-specific and an example of global significance. Although the islands of Richmond are considered some of the best farmland in Canada, there is risk in living on them. The dangers of the offshore subduction zone slipping, as well as the constant grinding of the Pacific plate against the Juan de Fuca plate and between the fracture zones now within the Juan de Fuca plate, involve a buildup of stress which may potentially lead to a sudden displacement of rocks along a fault which will then send shockwaves outward from the source (Potter, 2007). The compact layers of surface soil in Richmond cover less compact sand, highly susceptible to liquefaction in the event of a large earthquake. In choosing to live in Richmond, residents must be willing to base their future in relation to a present grounded on continually shifting products of the past. This volatility is precisely what creates the specific natural, cultural and economic riches that draw Richmond’s multiethnic population. Figure 13. Choosing interaction. © 2011, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., used with permission. Dealing with transformational dynamics of social and cultural change and movement in educational ways means to seek to engage singularities of experience that contain experience in its movement, add to experience, but do not presuppose all experience. Doll (1993) writes that how we handle this creative development is not clear but is a “problematic that we need to live with for generations. Only through intimate contact of living with this idea though, will we be able to frame the issues” (p. 148, italics in original). The problematics are essential. Doll posits that it is the “richness of the quality of curriculum” (p. 148), that is most important, instead of the exactness with which it reaches predetermined goals. Although no process or system is reducible to another, 55 realizing that order is not pre-set in the natural world compels us to redefine public pedagogy as transformational, opening a multiplicity of pathways and arrangements for living change. In resonating response to the city of Richmond’s landscape where glaciers have come and gone leaving glacial till and where the river continually brings generative alluvial soil, Richgate’s public art, including the Gates and the Side by Sides series, reconfigure social and cultural conversations and actions. They offer an excitement, a riskiness of being at the center of life in all its motion and uncertainty—neighbouring interactions that create the richness of silt. Ellsworth (2005) describes public pedagogy as “the force through which we come to have the surprising, incomplete knowings, ideas, and sensations that undo us and set us in motion toward an open future” (p. 18). There are risks of course. Paraphrasing Ellsworth (2005), there is a risk involved in the uncertainty of finding out that others are not exactly who we thought they were; it may mean that we cannot be who we thought we were either, and ultimately that there must be other options for relating to one another. Art as public pedagogy designs public spaces where difference can rub up against other difference: varieties of disciplinary traditions, cultures, daily rituals. No occurrence, however, of one difference rubbing against another involves rigid boundaries. The strike/slip relationship that is ongoing between the North American Plate and the Juan de Fuca plates does not only involve rigid edges colliding. Instead, each plate gives a little; each absorbs a little; something manifests. There are breaks here and there and each of the fault lines take up some of the movement. At the edges, things slip away in unknowabilities while at the same edge, something else is already coming. The future emerges from active participation in the present, influenced but not determined by the past; enough ‘play’ in the present allows for a multiplicity of movement. It is anticipated that in-migrating families will create new ways of living and relating but Richgate’s pedagogy does not offer predictable outcomes of that movement. 56 When viewing the 2005 Richgate installation in Chongqing, China, the brother of one of Richgate’s participants (Gu Xiong, Trans.) observed with surprise, his impression of the project’s Gates: After I walked through the doors [gates] and read the statements I found Canada to be a really interesting place and very unique for each of the families [ ]. Here in China, if something is good, then there will be many copies made from the good things so that every house would look similar. Similarity is everywhere. Richgate’s pedagogy addresses this kind of public logic in its art by teaching that because of time, one does not equal itself, an observation that Deleuze (2004) maintains. He explains that every complex system including that of the individual is a particular field of qualities and characteristics constructed on a series of inconsistent or disparate boundaries. Massumi (2002) explains that without considering the relational modulations of contexts or without philosophy as the “potential injecting transconnective flow, history would only be able to repeat its own bare fact…it would be self identical” (p. 240). Conclusion The Richgate project is an example of a/r/tographic public pedagogy whose reconception of time rejects concepts of fixed knowledge or of one best method or practice, responding instead, to multiple resonating movements. The geomorphology of Richmond’s islands evidence the Principle of Uniformitarianism in which the present is moving, inescapably interrelated with past motion but full of potential for what is yet unknown. Locating the movement of difference as a creative force that time carries offers new socio-ecological vision in which cultural relationships are redefined to seek both inwards and beyond our personal selves to the local landscape and ecosystems in which we live as well as to stories from the past that provide springboards for alternative futures. The City of Richgate’s artworks as finished products have plenty to offer pedagogically to the City of Richmond. However, much more of the movement and evolution of the methodology of a/r/tography is not completely apparent to the public in one project. In emerging community-engaged arts-based research methodologies, a/r/tography has gathered leadership. Over the last few years, groups of artist-researcher-teachers (faculty members and graduate students) have worked together to conceptualize, reconceptualize 57 and participate in a/r/tographic research15, With varying relations and places in each project, a/r/tography continually changes through the art practices that fuel it. There is riskiness of course, in bringing together different roles, diverse peoples, varieties of perspectives and interests but the richness of the interaction is worth it. There is also riskiness in not refining and fixing a methodology to detailed specifics. Yet immobility results in missing surplus-giving relations. As Irwin and Springgay explain (in Springgay et al., 2008), “A/r/tography has grown out of a fluid and constantly evolving community” (p. xix) and the tension evoked from its constant motion is important, they claim “to the evolution of the methodology and to the substantive features of the inquiry itself” (p.xix). As a/r/tographic projects are initiated in a variety of ways, real qualitative difference is generated. Insisting that a/r/tography not be rigidly defined and that the movement of the world be repeatedly followed and reflected yet again, ensures the reliability and validity of the methodology’s ongoing constructive and creative rigour. Through participation in a/r/tographic projects, teams of artists, researchers and teachers encounter the qualitative excess of feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting, filling and overspilling every certain, bounded role and expression. By working with interested participants in Richmond, a/r/tography is understood in the Richgate project as an opportunity for pedagogy that cares more about relational sustenance than fixing categories, considers the richness of relations over time, renders all parties active, changing and changeable and finds goals and ends arising from within the inquiry of artmaking. The City of Richgate was a public pedagogy attempt to engage the city of Richmond with the élan that reflects movement back to itself, the very movement that produces islands. 15 Though this is not an exhaustive list, see for example: (Triggs, Irwin, R. L., Beer, R., Grauer, K., Springgay, S. & Xiong, G. (in J. A. Sandlin, B. O. Schultz and J. Burdick, 2010); Triggs and Irwin, 2009; Triggs, Irwin, Beer, Grauer, Springgay, and Xiong, 2009; Irwin, R.L., Bickel, B., Triggs, V., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Grauer, K., Gu, X., Sameshima, P. (2009). Sameshima and Irwin, 2008; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, and Gouzouasis, 2008; Bickel, Triggs, Springgay, Irwin, Grauer, Xiong, and Sameshima, 2007; Sinner, Leggo, Irwin, Gouzouasis and Grauer, 2006, Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, and Bickel, 2006; Springgay, Irwin and Wilson Kind (2005); Irwin 2004; Irwin and de Cosson 2004; Irwin, 2003). 58 ……………….. Studio note, May 2007 Figure 14. Where did my eyes leave that horizon? Movement seems to pivot on the threshold of that imaginary line. We never get to know “what it is like”; we never get to know it. It is always active, never sitting around waiting to be analyzed. Instead, we get a body that moves, one that makes it possible for that movement to feel, actually, for that movement to be real. We discover in movement what movement is, or at least what it wants, which is to move us, to give what it is to what it is not. The next chapter involves an inquiry into a/r/tography as a methodology in the context of a research project in a preservice teacher education program. It involves visiting artists who initiate an inquiry into availabilities engendered from an historic and pedagogic text by offering a variety of ways in which we do not know pedagogy. The chapter is about the conditions and means in and through which we come to know and not know, focusing on pedagogy’s capacities to address realities in excess of understanding. By uprooting bodies and concepts and reinserting them into novel situations, teacher candidates and their instructors were engaged in several creative practices. The chapter aims to explain a/r/tography in terms of research projects that contain the very form that is to be defined, which is art transforming self, other and a/r/tography. 59 Chapter Three A/r/tographic Criteria for Contemporary Practice I walked into poesis. Rita L. Irwin, 2006, p. 79 A/r/tography is an educational practice-based research methodology in which knowing, learning and making are not opposed to each other, but instead, encompassed within the sensation and movement of art practice. It is an affirmative approach to research. Rather than seeking to uncover something that is hidden, it acknowledges that with every move, every change, there is new reality added to the world. Adding new reality to the world necessitates a persistence beyond general, across-the-board application and legitimation, requiring criteria that involve un-coerced response in non-conceptual ways. In this chapter contemporary art practice is examined for its dynamic participatory encounters that are focused on their indeterminate potential to differ. In this chapter, I once again seek art, inquiry and pedagogical examples that attempt to catch movement where it matters, literally, in feeling that adds to reality by generating qualities of excess. A/r/tography is explored as a methodology that is necessarily deeply embedded in the world, continually open to revision, invention, speculation and experimentation in its perseverance beyond dualities. This is best described as a contemporary practice, engaging Agamben’s (2011) understanding of contemporary as a “certain quality of being out-of-phase or out-of-date, in which one’s relevance includes within itself a part of what lies outside of itself, a shade of démodé, of being out of fashion” (p. 16, italics in original). Agamben emphasizes that tying ourselves too tightly to our epoch denies the contemporary. Instead, a contemporary methodology is one that is able to see past and future beyond what is readily observable as well as into the obscurity of the shadows of the present. That which is more than what is known never ceases to engage the contemporary. 60 Now in its third year, this chapter’s a/r/tographic research example called Becoming Pedagogical involves teacher candidates and teacher educators in a Canadian Faculty of Education Teacher Education program investigating how art practice might contribute to becoming a teacher over time, in particular situations and locations, and in relation to one’s own and others’ practices of research and art making. The Becoming Pedagogical project was engaged with awareness of what appears to be an emerging pedagogic turning in art practice (Podesva, 2007; Rogoff, 2008). An exploration of pedagogy in contemporary art practice, from an a/r/tographic understanding, does not premise artists in place of art teachers but instead, augments the practice of teaching, and its potential for generating inventive (as opposed to critical) engagements with processes of social change. One aspect of the Becoming Pedagogical project involves a currently out of print 1960s classic book about a still-functioning school in England called Summerhill which is run by children and established in 1921 by educator and founder of Summerhill School, A. S. Neill. The mission of the school is to focus on emotion over intellect as the guiding force that shapes learning and it strives to resituate what it means to learn, with activities led by the inquisitive bodies and minds of children. We do not delve too deeply into the school’s historic and ongoing controversy about refusal to adhere to already determined criteria, both political and educational, nor to educational researcher, Ian Stronach’s (2005) reporting of its current status as the most inspected school in England. Instead, this chapter explains Summerhill’s radical method as an example that evokes practices that can be engaged beyond its original situation. In a contemporary a/r/tographic engagement in a university teacher education program called Becoming Pedagogical16 we have put into play Summerhill’s creative potential for other connections. In one portion of the Becoming Pedagogical project, two Portland-based artists, Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed were invited to participate as artists-in-residence. They joined the team of researchers, teachers, and artists who were interested in emphasizing work 16 We acknowledge the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for this project. 61 that happens in everyday practice as well as practice that engages communities. This chapter presents one of the events that they initiated with teacher candidates called the Summerhill event (see also Irwin & O’Donoghue, 2012). We recompose this event in this chapter as a variation of a/r/tographic research as it is played out in a particular place and time and we explain a/r/tography’s uniqueness as precisely both the situatedness and open-endedness of its a/r/tographic methodology. A/r/tography seeks to kindle practices in which there is opportunity to “transform the effects of one sensory mode into that of another” (p. 35) which is what Massumi (2002) claimed is “the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions” (p. 35). These transductive practices are methods that people can take with them involving feelings of capacities for being affected and for affecting. Instead of attempting to capture the full interconnectedness of the Summerhill experience, this contribution seeks to offer an image with openings for more interconnections, for unleashing transient forces of relationality, for making additions, and for augmenting relational practices of artists/ researchers/ teachers. By imagining research as extending beyond theories of probability, plausibility and possibility to potentiality, all of which are explained in this chapter, Summerhill’s data is more interested in adding something to the generativity of the world than in evaluating its components. This marks a significant attentiveness to the singular immeasurability and open-endedness of qualities in qualitative research. It also marks an alignment with notions of the contemporary that can only be felt as methods reposition to “perceive the light that strives to reach us but cannot” (Agamben, 2011, p. 14). We can only live the contemporary by responding to what we cannot perceive. Teacher candidates and three instructors participated in the Summerhill event as part of their regular secondary art teacher education class work in two courses: Principles of Teaching and Communication Skills in Teaching course work. Forty used copies of the original Summerhill text were purchased for the teacher candidates, artists, instructors and researchers. Notes scratched in the margins of these old books became sites for discussion and elaboration. Both text and marginalia were used as catalysts to point elsewhere, including towards other “field trip” experiences the teacher candidates would 62 be engaged in. An investigation ensued regarding every place in the broad metropolitan area of Vancouver’s lower mainland that had the name Summerhill, to which the teacher candidates could visit in field trip events and where discussion and ideas could be generated while walking. The search for other Summerhills intimated an underlying movement that both acknowledged and left behind Summerhill’s originating practices and concepts to participate in their “second comings”. Summerhill turned out to be the name of a local winery, a senior’s home, and a crescent- shaped residential street, among other locations. In relation to their explorations in the various Summerhills, teacher candidates were encouraged to read the marginalia in the second-hand books and to respond by adding their own markings. The artists, Jickling and Reed, viewed the Summerhill event not only as a pedagogical engagement for the teacher candidates, but also viewed it as a project with a reworked and perfect-bound, annotated Summerhill text, a sequel to the first text that they would collaboratively exhibit in a gallery space later in the school year. During and after the Summerhill event, teacher candidates were interviewed in groups, not necessarily to find specific answers for what they learned but more importantly, to foster communities of artistic, pedagogic, and inquiry practice: sharing ideas, questioning, listening and being open to each other: commitments that Irwin (in Springgay, et al., 2008) has observed in many a/r/tographic practices. Audiotapes of the group interviews were returned to those teacher candidates who requested them and the recordings were transcribed in order to preserve emerging impressions regarding pedagogy, regarding becoming a teacher, and regarding identities and practices of themselves as artists, researchers and teachers. The discussion to follow attempts to convey a sense of how others might engage in a/r/tography’s contemporary art-practice based methodology, including how data is conceived and how the integrity of qualitative research is nurtured. Methodology Rethinking the concept of methodology as a “living practice” (Irwin, in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004, p. 34), was integral when a/r/tography was first conceived at The 63 University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Describing practice as “living” means that it is not fully intentional. No matter how practiced the practice, the result remains as much involuntary as it is elicited. Living, according to Massumi (2002) is not prefigured, but rather continually re-fused. The body is always becoming, he explains: “feeding on habits, memories and tropisms. The living body’s 'ultimate' innards are the proprioceptive habits on a level with muscle fiber. They are the microsocial skills on a level with a single visual neuron” (p. 205). The living of the body cannot be understood without reference to its immediate movement away from its own originating point; it is a paradox of concrete abstractness. Movement running in more than one direction is what life is humming with. Morrow (as cited in Sullivan, 2010) differentiated between methods and methodologies, seeing methodology as a system of theory and practice: The term methods refers more specifically to individual techniques (e.g. surveys, participant observation), whereas methodology can be construed broadly to suggest both the presuppositions of methods, as well as their link to theory and implications for society. Methodology, in short, more clearly implies a concern, an overall strategy of constructing specific types of knowledge and is justified by a variety of metatheoretical assumptions. (p. 35, emphasis in original). A methodology is often associated with structures and organizations that prove or disprove hypotheses and often seeks generalizable answers. Morrow (1994) noted however, that a methodology is more of a concern that links what is currently visible and understood and makes connections to historic and contemporary vectors of thought. Rather than being justified by metatheoretical assumptions meaning theories about theories, a/r/tography finds its theoretical framework within its methodology, which is artistic practice. A/r/tography as an academic disciplinary practice is concerned with past and current knowledge but extends the concept of a methodology to a broader conception of inquiry, including that which is not already known. Linking a methodology to notions of a living curriculum admits it cannot be contained and its methods must engage the world in nourishing its becoming. Whatever is already known immediately diverges in art 64 practice. Each shift generates different difference, adding to what is currently possible, as well as generating new potential. In Art Practice as Research, Sullivan (2010) explains theorizing as a basic procedure and core element of research. Sullivan traces contrasts between ways to gain new knowledge as described by a range of probable theory, plausible theory and possible theory. Probable theory considers an objective world that is separate from experience and in which differences are expressed largely in terms of degree or quantity and in comparison to things we know. Probability is the criteria that most quantitative studies feature. Art practice, however, teaches that we cannot stand outside of practice and apply it. Rather than an autonomous process of molding dumb matter it involves experimental modifications, alterations and refinements. The artist’s activity becomes one of the variations of a particular co-emergence of a singular variation, different every time, each carrying its own innate, unfolding expressions. Art practice is a creative practice because it modulates an actual emergence rather than a “finding” or a subject who finally “gets it”. The artist and the particular place and time in which she or he works, function as the indetermination needed for the deep, full resonation that delinearizes a research notion of cause and effect in order to “relinearize it with a change of direction” (Massumi, 2002, p. 37) as Massumi notes relation does. In qualitative studies, on the other hand, plausibility is most often the criterion that is valued where what is seen in one circumstance may have relevance in a similar context. New form, however, is always emerging and as Massumi (2008) claims “art is part and parcel of that process” (p. 37). Artist and educator, Simon O’Sullivan (2001) argues that “art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of” (p. 128). Plausible theory, as Sullivan (2010) notes, is interested in the rich complexity of people and cultures and therefore, in order to dig deep into human experience, surrounds problems rather than solving them and finds local and particular differences in kind rather than degree. Relying on an acceptance that observations of real world actions, events and artifacts can be interpreted, plausibility, as evident in phenomenology for example, offers a method that holds tightly to what the world is. Art practice, on the other hand, is less 65 involved in making sense of the world but rather, as O’Sullivan (2001) claims in reference to aesthetics, more engaged in “pushing forward the boundaries” (p. 130) of what a method can do: less about shielding method from transforming and more about augmenting its capacity for re-positioning. A/r/tography recognizes both people and methods as becoming forms, making themselves what they are not and becoming “a portal to a world experienced differently” (O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 128) by moving beyond the already-familiar to affirm the actuality of what is yet unknown. Instead of probability or plausibility, Sullivan (2010) prefers the theory of possibility in the way it explores and expands what we know. He observes that much arts-based education research is an attempt to “bridge perceived disconnects between quantitative and qualitative traditions of research” (p. 56) but that the quantitative/qualitative divide becomes irrelevant in the face of a living practice’s nature to generate knowledge instead of to search for it. Possibility theory in qualitative and quantitative research is interested in the capacity to generate new knowledge but believes there is a finite set of knowledge and that all subsets are in some way, measurable. Possibility is not quite as revolutionary a method as a/r/tography challenges it to be. The art in a/r/tography can do more. Whatever is actualized in a specific a/r/tographic research composition of connections is never quite removed from its potential for infinite other connections. Rather than finding a solution in possibility, Massumi (2002) argues that possibility maintains the divide and is still limiting. Probability and plausibility are simply forms that possibility’s qualitative expression can take. Possibility can be approached quantitatively as weightings of possibilities, according to the regularity with which they might be expected to appear. In noting how art practice takes the lead in the impetus of creative direction effecting changes in culture and technology, we suggest, with Massumi, that potential may offer more helpful criteria for research objectives that do not want to narrow results to what is reproducible or to the bounds of what is possible. Although probability approximates potential because it approaches possibilities as a group and as all together, Massumi 66 argues that modes of inactuality are still stubbornly qualitative and quantifying always leaves a qualitative remainder. Furthermore, probability only targets the general and does not apply to any particular event. According to Massumi (2002) potential does not apply to the event either. Instead, it makes it. Potential is a technical term borrowed from physics and historically acknowledged by Aristotle (1939) as something all natural things actualize without exhausting, though he himself did not situate the abstractness of movement within the body. Massumi (2002) offers an articulate contrast of potential with possibility: Rather than possibility, which is a variation that is implicit in what something can be said to be when it is idealized, potential is the immanence in a process that is “the still indeterminate variation, under way” (p. 9). It is the remaining within of the elements of something to their own continual modulation; it is their becoming. Potential situates everything as secondary to the movement of practice and a living practice moves in more than one direction at a time. Practice is no longer derived knowledge but rather, the feel of new forms of vitality. Potential divides time into not again and not yet, capable of the tying together that is the work of the contemporary, revitalizing a present, Agamben (2011) asserts, in which we have never been. Accessing the still indeterminate variation always already happening requires the artist to submit to potential’s movement, to the living of practice, to becoming one of potential’s variations. In art practice, the artist yields to the self-activity of experience; Massumi (2002) argues form cannot be separated from color, illumination, and space-time. We engage the term potential rather than potentiality because it is not an ability for potential that we want to emphasize, but potential’s actual reality contemporary to every move of the body. Engaging potential in a research methodology constitutes an order that follows different rules of arrangement that is broader in bandwidth, more complexly woven than any possible combination of methods that might be extracted from it with theories of what is probable, plausible, or possible. Potential is inexhaustible and once submitted to, Massumi (2002) describes it as striking like a force in a momentum that drives an unfolding series of events. By situating education in the experimentation of potential’s 67 availabilities, possibility emerges at the end of the series of events rather than the beginning. It is the inventive availability of potential that the Summerhill event in our Becoming Pedagogical teacher education research addresses. Two of the central concerns for our research and pedagogical interests in the Summerhill event involve ways in which identities and practices of artist, research and teacher impact how teacher candidates learn to learn within a program of teacher education that has historically been focused on learning to teach. The overarching Becoming Pedagogical research project seeks to address the very observations that some teacher candidates report from practicum experience in which a cooperating classroom teacher announces, “This is what I do; this is what I am going to do; this is what the students will receive; this is what I want your response to look like”. By tightly controlling his or her pedagogy, this teacher ensures she or he does not change from one context to another. The survival technique of constructing boundaries when feeling under pressure or attack is not the pedagogy we hope for new teachers. Secondly and in connection with the first concern, the participating university artists, researchers and teachers are interested in how contemporary practices of art and inquiry affect and constitute understandings of pedagogy. Although concepts of identity and becoming initially seem at odds with each other, locating them in the transformative nature of contemporary art practice helps to open up traditional definitions of static positionings. The “contemporary” is addressed by Agamben (2011), as that which divides and interpolates time, transforming it and putting it into relation with other times. The movement of the contemporary is exactly the movement of art: an immediate disjunction of every thing and every feeling. He writes in relation to the identity of artist: “ The poet, insofar as he is contemporary, is this fracture, is at once that which impedes time from composing itself” (p. 12, italics in original). The intensity that the artist experiences from participating in compositions that include what is other add to the availabilities of qualitative difference from which to generate the self, again. 68 Figure 15. A Summerhill text becoming contemporary Photograph by Rita L. Irwin Identities Identities often define the body by beginning and end points of its change. Self-identifying with a group that is distinct from other groups can provide a boost in self esteem yet can cause some to feel marginalized and seek to travel between different groups and self- identifications. Identity can also deny any transformation, as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next while ideals prefigure the end of any “becoming”. What a/r/tography deems important, however, are neither the facts nor the profitabilities of the identities of artist, teacher and research, but their relation, and the energy of their interconnecting, associating practices. These identities might be better expressed as subjects: artist subjects, researcher subjects, teacher subjects, because subjects involve so much more than how they are identified. In practice, we are involved in a situation in its midst. Separately recognizable identities come into definition only retrospectively. Massumi (2002) explains that in their coming together in an event, identities are inseparable from the immediacy of the relation. In an event’s coming together, belonging is the limit expression, or the identity of what a human shares with everything it is not. Belonging together in the same event of global qualitative change is what offers sustenance for discrete identities. Rather than mediating already identified knowledge, a/r/tographic methods are directed more towards modulating opportunity for the transmission of potential inventiveness for the ongoing stabilizations that generate different qualities of living. As one part of the artist-in-residency’s engagement in art practice and inquiry, teacher candidates responded to the used Summerhill texts and preexisting marginalia by adding their own markings. Each teacher candidate selected a certain section of the book in 69 which to respond. Marking adds relation rather than informing about the book’s properties; qualities of relation are pressed against qualities of relation in feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected. Adding markings to the text was a way of making it contemporary, enabling the transition of one thing to the other, radically modifying, displacing and positioning within a new network of pragmatic and aesthetic relations. The marks in the margins of the used books indicated activities of other humans. Rather than fixing meaning, they offered a zone of uncertainty with potential for new situation and for whatever the teacher candidates wanted to reinvigorate. Teacher candidates did not necessarily offer the understandings of the marginalia event as we have just described them. For many of them, it appeared to be an assignment that they simply had to get done. As we work a/r/tographically with constructing this chapter, we must admit, that perhaps we already had in mind something of what we wanted the teacher candidates to say during our interviews with them. Subconsciously we may have been continuing a popular conception that contemporary art practice conveys secret specific messages. By asking particular questions that sought connection between pedagogy and art as social practice, we may very well have perpetuated a common response of “I don’t get it” to contemporary art practice. Further interviews later in this school year will provide opportunity for us to re-engage in our own artistic, pedagogic and research practices and to try to control them less so that we can sense potential more. These may be moments in which we ponder missed meaning along with educational theorist, Alice Pitt (2003) as “the surprise that subverts meaning and the meaning-maker” (p. 10), the surprise that augments the ongoing of practice and compels a/r/tography towards a next event. Figure 16. Teacher candidates selecting portions of the Summerhill text Photograph by Rita L. Irwin 70 Artists are familiar with the absolutely singular event of a practice experience. Each event is a relational whole, yet the whole of practice never actually exists in any one event. Instead, practice is always receding away towards a horizon that lures us. In art practice, identities of artist, researcher and teacher are embedded in situational relation, which Massumi (2002) might describe as the real potential to be exactly what each identity will have effectively become, when an event will have run its course. Although chances are that each identity may be much the same, there will be the difference at least, that they are what they are—again. The artist/researcher/teacher methodological assemblage is an ecology of practices. Each sphere harbors many processes of transition that coexist, co-adapt and mutually influence one another. After participating in the artist-in-residency event, one of the participating teacher candidates exclaimed that the identities of teacher, student, and student teacher are not as defined as she had once thought. She previously considered becoming a teacher to be a destination and now felt that her understanding had flipped into recognizing its embeddedness in practice. Becoming In the creative movement of all three practices, art runs through each event, its extra activity overspills each identity, linking embodied practices together in continuity, a continuous disjunctive to everyday life. This excess is the perpetual becoming, feelings that are not ownable by any one person or event, but which re-inject unpredictability into future contexts. Massumi (2002) describes the “unbiddeness of qualitative overspill” as “situation”, “event”, “anomaly”, and “jilted expectations” (p. 218). In terms of methodological rigor, we premise it as an invitation for thoroughness that other research might call error. Becoming is ever on the move from situation to situation, always retaining a sense of openness, always willing to surprise. After the Summerhill field trips and marginalia artmaking events were over and at a discussion relating the event to teaching practice, one teacher candidate explained that as artists, “we should be thinking more openly than anyone within society”. This is the concern of becoming that was identified in Becoming 71 Pedagogical’s initial proposal where the a/r/tographic team expressed a desire that teacher candidates shift the embodied movement of their practice to attune to society and world in order to claim the relevance of practice in relation to the horizon of what is not already known. In recent legal negotiations, the original Summerhill school in the UK under threat of closure, reached an agreement with educational policy makers (see Lather, 2010) with the assistance of human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC, who allowed the school’s future to be identified with a special educational philosophy and thus to be evaluated with special criteria. In speculation, these special criteria might be called potential. While Summerhill as a radical pedagogy was premised in this event, it was also offered as a current radical impetus for practice in a university teacher education program. A school run by children and in which children are engaged by their openness to the world, letting feelings propel their wandering is utterly inconsistent with conceptions of pedagogy based on an instrumental rationality of a business administration framework with obsessions for speed and control, nor a developmental infrastructure in which learning is already charted. A teacher education class in which teacher candidates learn by making imaginative connections, leaving the bounds of set curriculum, time and place, in order to explore is also inconsistent with current reform discourse that narrows the range of possibility. There is almost a sense of absurdity in movement that is freed from already established reference yet aimlessness or the feel of potential seems to be what fuels movement. While none of the Summerhill experiences necessarily represented educational models of potential they instead, worked in the realm of potential. Potential is what structured, rather than what assessed them. Summerhill’s a/r/tographic pedagogy was defined less by already established structures than by the potentializing relay that brought the various Summerhill situations into dynamic unity across the intervals that would normally separate them. As such, we do not hold Summerhill up as a model but rather as a springboard that offers sustenance for other creative practice. 72 The teacher candidates involved in their own Summerhill event felt somewhat lost at times, reporting simply that art practice is “another art form that should be addressed in the classroom.” One teacher candidate confessed, “I’m not sure how pedagogical it was, but then, does it have to be?”, and another, that he had asked himself at one point: “This is what I’m paying tuition for?” The multiple re-posings of a Summerhill practice in varying convergences of other Summerhills freed it from established, regularized, tried and true cause and effect circuits preventing any full-fledged return to analysis. Rather than culminating in mastery over a situation, there were feelings of pleasure and frustration at the range and unpredictability of the various responsive engagements. One student noted that pedagogies “can happen anywhere”. Figure 17. Summerhill Senior's Residence in North Vancouver Photograph by Rita L. Irwin Discussion A/r/tographic projects are always qualitatively different from one another. Some a/r/tographers have preferred to associate more closely with established social science and humanities methodologies in insisting on tacit assumptions of a divide between subject and object, singular and plural, thereby needing the senses to bring the two together to reinforce a fit between the two. Teacher candidates reflected some of these understandings in questions regarding how to apply the Summerhill event in other disciplines. One mused that the project would be “hard to justify with parents, but is a good experience” and another, that it was “a great way to keep students interested and engaged.” Others engaged a wider response, discovering that pedagogy is not just seeking connections from what one knows to what one does not know, but an embodied exploration of what is not yet known: the project “got me to be more creative and excited, 73 to be different”, “A very big part of teaching is being open to a lot of ideas”, and, “We learned to question the way I am being taught to teach.” A variety of other a/r/tographic projects over time have resulted in rich and new understandings. Many of these have added and extended the space of what is artistically, educationally and academically possible, qualitatively interpreting and seeking understanding, while other projects actually seek to transform reality. By insisting on the centrality of art practice, all of these projects may yet evolve in ways not currently anticipated. For example, only in hindsight are we able to trace what seems to be emerging along a vector of a/r/tography’s movement: a movement that emphasizes a continuity of practice that includes self-differentiating realities rather than holding them apart, a continuity that is complete only in its openness. In reading previous a/r/tographic accounts, it is evident that a/r/tography has changed a/r/tography. In its exhibit, each example of a/r/tography no longer belongs to a/r/tography. Instead of remaining in any of the events or projects, it exists in its potential. Like art, its entirety cannot be pointed to in any particular project but rather as how each feels capacities for affecting and for being affected. Perhaps a/r/tography will someday become entirely unrecognizable to itself. Offering student quotations in relation to the Summerhill event are not included in this chapter solely for the purpose of helping the reader better understand its methodology and any subsequent “findings”. Instead, the writing of this chapter as the first of perhaps many and divergent papers on the event is a continuation of the practices of artmaking, researching and pedagogy to find capacities for affecting and for being affected, asking what we as a research team expected, what it was we wanted from our own participation, from the interviews, from a/r/tography, from change’s own becoming? Most importantly, what does this work now make possible? We ask ourselves, “How can we continue the thrust of immediate divergence articulated even in the word a/r/tography?” “How can our practice add to the definitive openness of identity’s liminality, only complete in its openness and its continuing?” Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas (2008) describes liminality’s character realized as: “the event of approach or withdrawal or in the 74 transitory places in which that [approaching or withdrawing] occurs” (p. 1) neither inside nor outside, and at once: general, abstract, temporal and material. In previous a/r/tographic writing, we have appreciated a/r/tography’s movement as rhizomatic. Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to describe research that is “always in the middle” (p. 25) between things. It is based on how certain plants spread or multiply. Rather than having firm centers and linear, hierarchical structures that divide into smaller and less significant outgrowth, in rhizomatic movement these plants can be separated to start entirely new plants. It does not matter where the division originates. This is a radical explanation for methodological change because it interrogates binaries of every kind, seeking not to eliminate but to fortify their continuity and in a/r/tographic practice this manifests itself in a variety of ways. However, as Massumi (2002) notes, even rhizomatic movement may too tightly spatialize a methodology that is both concrete and abstract, that is only always just coming into everything that came before it and only just breaking away from everything it comes to be. Rhizomatic movement cannot be diagrammed without stilling practice’s continuous transformation17. To understand the thrust of becoming in practice, nothing can be referenced outside of a practice’s own variation except a momentum that crosses from one qualitatively different medium into another. Its force of potential drives serial unfoldings of a/r/tographic events, each augmenting, doubling and redoubling themselves. Rather than an activity of mediation that links practice with theory, or the critical with the social, art’s materiality and energy offer capacities for operating socio-ecologically, directly on a level with matter. Pre-conscious perception or what Massumi (2002) describes as micro-perceptions modulate conscious awareness, offering as much value in the feel of other, the feel of the world coming in, as there might be in months of rational analysis. There is no possibility of raw experience in practice as it registers quality 17 Every shift makes a marking of place around which, immediately gathers potential which is real but abstract, actual but only partially accessible to sensation. Each repositioning generates qualities that augment or diminish other qualities, even cycling back into how and what the present event will become in its openness to potential, when it re-situates in generating other qualities. 75 directly as movement and there is nothing to bracket or deconstruct since past perception is not only impression but also a composite of past and future, feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected. What is most important is the feel of the margin of undecidability accompanying every perception: that there are things in the world that matter to us and that we feel we can go places and do things in relation to them. In a recent interdisciplinary reflection on method, Agamben (2009) describes a necessary vigilance for research that is a persistent return to, and even invention of, a method attuned to a “world supported by a thick plot of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences” (p. 57). He uses the term method in a similar broad understanding as a/r/tography’s methodology. He explains that when tradition becomes master, when knowledge defines and regulates, we forget, always returning to what we already understand. What we forget seems to be our own becoming because there is no access beyond tradition without putting into question historical identities of teacher, researcher or artist. We cannot sense potential if we are too controlled. In practice, there is never the emergence of new knowledge without the co-emergence of the newly knowing self. Conclusion Finally, what practice-based a/r/tography puts in question most intensely are the epistemological paradigms of art, pedagogy and inquiry that involve studies of how we come to know. What concerns a/r/tography more than the epistemological work of distinguishing truth from opinion or the linking of what is currently visible to generalities already known, is the making of generative experience in which the ongoing of practice generates the ways of how we do not know. Rather than attempting to do away with other methodologies or fix its own, a/r/tography recognizes with Massumi (2002) that no single logic or theoretical framework is flexible enough to encompass the concrete abstractness of experience. Instead, practice coincides with its potential: never all and only what practice is. It is continually coming out of what it is just ceasing to be, into what it will already have become by the time it registers that something has happened. If this were not so, where would the methodology of practice find its change? Each practice requires participation 76 in order to immerse in an entire wedge of the world’s resonation of movement and stability. In a/r/tography, art changes, research changes, teaching changes, change changes. A/r/tography finds its Summerhills everywhere, none the “right” situation but each one unfolding with its own situational feel, simultaneously real presentations of lived relations, together with a vivacity of context always on the move. As we write, we are currently anticipating the project’s first art installation18 organized by the visiting artists. Teacher candidates will reconvene and come together again for more discussion at that time as well as after they finish their extended practicum experience. In the meantime, as we enjoy and discuss the variety and depth of understanding that emerges in our interview/discussion groups, we wonder about the direction in which these teacher candidates will take their futures of practices and how we might be prepared to respond. How might we reposition our own practice as researchers, teachers and artists to participate in what we do not understand ourselves, to what we might not recognize? How might it be that we ensure the horizon of the world’s movement is nurtured at the centre of a/r/tographic practice? To meet Agamben’s challenge for being contemporary, a/r/tography might attend to its methodology as a creative practice that both saves and transforms itself by catching movement at the crossroads where it matters— in feeling that transforms its work. 18 (http://www.vaarc.ca/summerhill-revised/; http://www.akimbo.ca/exhibitions/?id=22924) 77 ……………….. Studio note, November, 2008 Figure 18. Where is the rest of a day? Matter. Energy. Light. Such paltry expressions for so much. What does a day do when it is only revealed as a vista? It moves, seeks through the middle for something else, feels thirsty, and small. It picks up density, colour, texture, speed: actualizes in making itself beautifully singular for the inhabitation of its own passage. It is useless to ask where it is going; its survival involves how. The degree to which it is composed through feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected is the extent of the day’s intensity, its sense of belonging to what is other than itself. In the next chapter I a/r/tographically engage Pinar’s creative practice of curriculum’s moving form, currere (Pinar, 1978) which offers a framework for autobiographical reflection on educational experience. The method of currere is regressive: it returns to the past; progressive: it feels for the future; analytical: it feels capacities for affecting and for being affected; and it is synthetical: it brings distance and difference together in the place of the present. Autobiographical writing extends a site of resistance that insists on the body being as immediately abstract as it is concrete, as much fiction as truth, “an additive space of utter receptivity” (Massumi, 2002, p. 57), its edges waiting to be defined by the felt reality of relation that Donald Winnicott (in Ellsworth, 2005) describes as a certain sense of aliveness that is the most important work of a life. This sense of aliveness gains intensity from its intimate access to the world, the extent to which we participate in composing something from what might first appear as incompatibilities. 78 Chapter Four The Colour of Secrets In a magazine I see a picture of the grasslands at night. I choke on the sudden rush of tears, uncertain where the intensity of desire comes from. The orange of the horizon seeps gradually into the ever- darkening blue of mid-evening. The horizontal line of the land stretches broad and open. Though I’m living now on the coast, I’m reminded how the warm nights release the heady fragrance of dirt and growth and decay, how the grain dust still lingers in the air. I walked home this morning from my monthly writing-group meeting, feeling down. The opening flowers and the stillness of the spring air only seemed like wide gray sadness. Today, everything feels like ashes. It was my turn to share something, simply because in my year of attending, I have never done so. I read the paper that I wrote for the autobiographical research course that I am taking. Halfway through reading, I felt foolish. The words fill up too much space; they invite unspoken questions that miss what is meaningful; they take the place of others’ words. They trample too much on the moment by not offering the fictional forthrightness that allows others to get on with their own lives. I walk home hating myself. I am tired, headachy. Today, everything feels like not enough. I am almost too tired to shift through the relentless analysis of why I do what. Why had I felt so pleased about the ability of words to share experience? I feel that I am guilty; I must have secrets to share that fit forms that are more established, and they must have qualities with which I can claim identification in order to accommodate others more hospitably. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write that secrets are invented by societies. They lurk in the spaces between what Massumi (2002) calls the “cultural grid” where everyone is assigned a peg or a form, and movement between positions is subordinated entirely to already determined identities. The content of a secret, however, is too big for its form. It is a sensual assembling of human and nonhuman elements into a colour machine. The secret smears and smudges; if it is not continually becoming a secret, it would no longer be a secret. Instead, it secretes out of forms leaving them behind to be taken up by other processes. The secret is an intensity that rages around the edges of attempts to reduce experience. Although the secret seeks to be imperceptible, my awareness of it is also the secret of the secret—full of both turbulence and jubilation. The world is addressing me to 79 respond to its own movement by constantly constituting my humanity and its sensation of everything around. I realize foolishly that my secret is participating in this secret and knowing that I cannot escape the excess of my responsiveness to movement itself. I grew up slightly off Massumi’s cultural grid. As a child from immigrant families, I felt I never quite fit into popular culture, just as I never quite fit into the clothes I was supposed to grow into. I existed outside of gender and rarely thought about being a girl or a boy. Although lovingly cared for, I was an unrestrained transpiration fueled by wildness, an unexplainable relentlessness. I wanted to feel what it was to live experience intensely. How to tear it out from itself, find its fullness and then—to do it again. Outdoor places were where I was able to experience a world in motion—the brush of the wind, the changing seasons, the smell of the cycles of decay and growth. These wild parents responded to me differently each time, addressing me as someone in motion myself. They showed me that there was always more in the fringes beyond borderlines, past the edges of the woods or the fields or the horizon. Alternating, they held me, ignored me, pushed back on me, imprinted themselves on my life. When I was nine, my father came looking for me one evening at dusk. I had spent the entire day with a friend at the slough, just west of the town where we lived. I knew I was late in going home but I’d been unable to leave and instead lay in an area flattened by my body, in which I could lie surrounded on all sides by marsh grass. From this angle there were only walls of grass surrounding me and a big, open space of sky gradually changing colour. Silenced by the smell of musky sweetness, I lay in the simple intensity of twilight’s colour fields. When I heard my father call, I scrambled to get up from the place where I’d sprawled in the tall grass. I was embarrassed, felt fleetingly naked, guilty. I had forgotten about the boy who sprang up from his own secret place nearby. There was an intimate physicality, an infatuation that had nothing to do with my friend and everything to do with the land, that I was unable to share with my father and did not want to. I sensed his flash of displaced awareness of the moment’s intensity but I could only take his hand and head for home. 80 My childhood unfolded in little environments of the wild outdoors: empty lots, hiding places under the lilac hedges, un-mowed alleys, school playgrounds, abandoned fair grounds, wooded marshes, on a bicycle seat with the wind in my ears and my heart full of the surge of summer. How can it be that I feel such belonging to the world? Where does the world end and I begin? Where is my subjectivity? Does it consist in the translation of these physical sensations or emerge in the constructed character that I create when I tell stories about myself? What are my secrets that Pinar’s (1994) autobiographical methodology of currere can unravel, so that I can reimagine future ways of relating to others? Currere is a creative practice in which one reactivates the past and imagines the future by reconstructing oneself in relation to a present situation. Currere situates one’s mobilization for engaged pedagogic action from within the feel of the fullness of experience: grasping it just where it slips away and anticipating just as it comes. Massumi (2002) suggests that we need to classify differently than subjectivity versus objectivity. They always come together in context and instead, the true duality in experience is between continuity and discontinuity. If we situate our experience as divisible, we are only considering one dimension of reality, one in which the boundaries that we set and the classifications that we function by are habitual. They are secrets that do not know themselves but as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain, are nonetheless deadly and alive, continual; instead of questions or explanations, there are silences, and flashes of insinuation. The secret, like colour, inhabits its own passage, reconstituting continuity despite education’s constant captures of it. Massumi (2002) describes a 1910 experiment done by German researcher, David Katz, who asked a participant to match the particular blue of a certain friend’s eyes, the particular red of their lips, the particular black of their jacket and so on. Although the purpose of the research was to test the effect of memory for the constancy of colour, what resulted was a test of the co-functioning of emotion with memory, since the objects were intimate everyday things filled with layers of meaning and sentiment. Language played a 81 standardizing function used to match or mismatch and guarantee a standard of comparison in order to test a response against it. However, the researcher and his participant did not have the same relation to blue for example, and so language played a standardizing function only for the experimenter and for the subject, it operated instead, like a trigger for emotion and memory. The subject in Katz’s experiment could not make the match because memory always remembered the colour as more than the colours that were shown—as too-blue or too-red or too-black. Because Katz believed the colour matching could be a one to one correspondence, he extracted a simplicity from a complex experience. He tried to separate a narrow corresponding effect from a much more encompassing asymmetry. Massumi (2002) explains that the blue in this situation was both constructed by the context which was largely language-determined and yet also insisted or persisted outside of language. Colour is both constructed and self-standing—which we could call both subjective and objective. Yet, the secret of blue leaks out of both. As trans-situational, it continues across its own contextual capture. Massumi describes this excess of experience as not so much a quality of feeling that remains uncaptured, but instead, more of the surprising way blue always precedes itself into the context. The experiment showed the way in which an ownable feeling or subjectivity precedes context and does not have to do with having too much feeling but rather with a certain quality of feeling that is larger than any quantity of personal feeling. If I am understanding Massumi’s argument, it is colour’s objectivity and subjectivity that both supersede, precede, succeed and change context. The ‘too’ in too-blue is collectively contextualized as a content of a personal life. It has warmth and coolness, translucence and opacity. Yet, as excess and as impersonal, it continues; it runs through containment, jumping to the next context. The excess of colour is the quality of continuing activity by which the classificational object of blue escapes its contextual containment through its objectivity. 82 Massumi writes further that the excess of blue not only precedes context, it is also retrospectively through language that the ‘too’ of too blue comes to be a collective, contextual artifact. The meaning of colour is already underway—I join in, to my own secret’s inheritance whose flow of colour is already muddied, filled with shadows and highlights and preceded by a perception of the secret that yet seeks to be imperceptible. Colour’s continuity stands in contrast to discontinuity, relating only to itself. Although the personal and the impersonal like the ‘too’ in too blue is ever always- already, in process, Janet Miller (2005) observes that current uses of autobiography in educational research work against the notion of permanent openness or performativity of identity. Instead, its use has become codified, adapted to the cultural grid. Others feel disdain for not hearing the secrets of one’s life, the easily peggable forms that they’ve already assumed for another. There is narcissism in wanting to know, a desire to see reflected what we love or hate most about ourselves, an impatience, a violence. Christopher Lasch (1984) defines narcissism as “a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires” (p. 33). Miller explains that using our stories in this way reinforces classroom representations of a “knowable, always accessible self who ‘progresses’ with the help of autobiographical inquiry from ignorance to knowledge of self, other and best pedagogical and curricular practices” (p. 219). Autobiography in this way conceives of the secret as having only two terms–remaining secret or being disclosed. Autobiography in this conception already knows the secret. Although Miller writes that autobiographical writing encourages “all kinds of closet doors to open” (p. 219), she also addresses the gaps and silences in uses of auotobiography that replicate the self as “rational, coherent, autonomous, unified, fixed and given” (p. 219). Used with teachers this perpetuates categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teachers. Instead, Miller points to the work of educators involved in the reconceptualization of the curriculum field such as Pinar’s autobiographical method of currere and Pinar and Grumet’s (1976) work to elaborate it as a way and form of curriculum theorizing. Their advancement “challenges humanist educational research 83 practices that normalize the desire to sum up one’s self, one’s learning and the other as directly, developmentally, and inclusively knowable, identifiable, natural” (Miller, p. 222). Massumi’s (2002) ideas also help to expand categorical identities by moving them out of the language of ‘inbetween’ spaces, which still acknowledge the always-already positioned and instead, into allying with the movement of change. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) believe that we do not form a secret that runs its line outside of assignable relations without having a fascination for plurality, or perhaps, multiplicity fascinates us already because of its dwelling already within us. In Katz’s early 20th century experiment, the participants involved were not able to match the colours. In order to make the investigation verifiable, Massumi argues that the scientist would have had to have more controlled variables. He would have had to find ways to make memory and colour perception approach the physiological limit of bare brain functioning, treating everything in the universe as direct narcissistic representations of our own categorizations. Experience and movement would have to be taken out of both the language, the colour, the secret of previous stories. In order to find experiences and movement in my own high school curriculum, I resorted to reading other stories behind my textbooks, searching for the world in characters who lived intensely and deeply, or at the raw limits of experience, outside of ready-made representations. Bernard Ricca (2008) seems to note education’s lack of interest in experimental inquiry in his claim that in education, we don’t know how to tell stories, we only know how to do introductions—and introductions amount to nothing more than labels. Our plurality, however, evolves situationally and cannot contain its overspillage. This idea is dangerous to some, dangerous to those who work very hard at purity of categories. Part of me is annoyed, disappointed, another deeply troubled at the imposition and darkness of qualities of violence that do not need to be actualized. Yet the fervor of intensity is not unfamiliar to me. When I was small and stayed sometimes with my grandmother, she gave me used envelopes as scrap paper and I coloured on them with crayons. When I coloured everything furiously black, she suspected I was tired and would tell me it was time to 84 take a nap with her. I did not want to because her bedroom smelled like age and it was closed up and felt suffocating. In her bed, the chirping of the birds outside sounded muffled and so very far away. Despite resisting, I always fell asleep beside her, waking up to find her already rested and back in the kitchen. At a very young age, I sensed a capacity for openness to a force for almost anything, including a rage for injustice that gaped its immeasurable potential and unknowable extremes at the edges of my world. I felt extraordinarily loved but aggression had a mark on our history. There were accounts of violence in my father’s stories, horrifying details of enduring and fleeing Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. Our ancestors were victims, yet not—rather always strangely self-sufficient, always resilient, always thankful. Yet they lived out that harshness in frugality and self-discipline. Nothing was more exciting to my father than free public events such as parades, car shows and church services in the park. Simple, material things like food and clothing and weather were very important. He loved evenings picking berries, or digging up garden plots that nobody else was using. These intense passions for the physicality of living, reminded me of my distance from those who lived more ordinary lives, those who when playing TV tag could shout the names of popular television shows I had never watched. Like the immigrant stories that I was repeatedly told, and the Bible verses in King James English that I had to memorize—I was intensely from this place and yet from another place and sometimes the two were hard to tell apart—an odd mix of distance and yet an intimate ache for humanity. My grandmother could speak very few words in English; we were never really able to have a conversation. She did, however, have a routine for addressing me and it was always “Be strong”. Although it was many years after she died that I found that my name comes from a Latin word that means ‘to be strong’, I had always felt a fortitude that believed it was only temporarily that I could be held in the will of another. Despite the fantasies of others, I was not to be stilled. There was a world in motion calling to me and I would be responding. In the kindergarten that was held in the basement of a church, I 85 frequently had to stand in the boiler room in the dark, though I cannot exactly remember why. I felt a surge of power in knowing that the teacher wanted me to cry and that I would not be crying. I slept without a pillow and went barefoot all summer, made myself do things that I was afraid to do, always pushing for uncommon ways to test my own endurance. In his later post-war writing, Freud (in Ngai, 2005) insists that aggression is a drive that is established parallel to, rather than secondary to sexual instincts. This reformulation of bold determination enables Freud to introduce subject formation in which the subject is neither necessarily marked by, nor entirely produced in gender difference suggesting a possibility for why I was able to move beneath these constructs. I felt that I needed to protect my parents against any inability they might have to adapt to what was too much for them; mostly I loved to hear them laugh. Perhaps aggression felt so palpable because of its inseparability from defense. I felt guilty about the sheer force that came with feeling the unknowabilities of the world, and this secret spilled over my boundaries. I was both blurred into others with it, and yet situated in my mind at a far distance from others. I began to push my body to extremes just to feel what else it could do, projecting it across the gymnastics floor or down the racetrack. I tried to avoid the violence of reading others too completely, perhaps wanting to protect myself from losing interest as a result of the narrowness of my own assessments. I sensed I had to protect others from my own intensity. Sometimes I was called a tomboy, but I imagined differently; I was someone from the stories I read: a warrior, a wild thing, a drifter. I had places to go and things to do. At 27, I was divorced after a ten-year marriage that had begun with a high school pregnancy. With three amazing kids, I was finally able to make my own decisions and choices, and live in a variety of directions at once. As Pinar (1994) describes his own life at 26, “My life was light: unattached, meandering, unstable” (p. 147). At last unattached, I felt the most possibility for the most connection. My torn edges seemed to make it easier to connect with the experiences of people at all kinds of places in their lives. I took out a student loan, received the gift of low-income housing and began an undergraduate education degree. I worked six part time jobs and felt incredibly and intensely alive, 86 despite being continually exhausted. Sometimes I fell asleep on the deck above the pool during my son’s swim club practices, while my young daughters pilfered sugar from the cafeteria as though they were never fed. The children developed a fervent care for each other, and an openness to exploring the world around them. Their early school pictures reflected a parent who was gone in the mornings before they woke up, leaving them to attempt to comb each other’s hair and make their own meals. I cared less about the numbers on their report cards and more about the section reporting their treatment of others. I was childish and unyielding in my demands of them. My parenting methods sometimes transgressed on their opportunities for struggling to make things matter in their own lives, the very intensities that kindled my own life. Their school despised the child in me that could not seem to keep up with the attempts to maintain a stream of paper communication and could not find time to fill out the many forms that were sent home. Their teachers were unimpressed with the organization of the family around the university calendar, the camping trips taken whenever possible and bringing the kids back to school late in the fall. Some summer evenings when I wasn’t bartending, I would play hide and seek with not only my own kids but also others in the neighbourhood. My favourite secret place was behind the neighbour’s garage in the tall grass. None of the children could find me there because I was hidden on the one side by a row of tall lilac bushes. There was a sweetness about those moments that simultaneously brought me back to the touch of the earth and took me away from the reality of the everyday, where I felt a surge of excitement about everything that was unknown. With my back against the wall of the garage, tall weeds rising upwards from around my legs, I could smell the moistness of the dirt beneath the grass, faint wafts of lilac. I could hear kids laughing and calling from a distance. For a few minutes, time was all time, in the changing gradations of coloured sky—yellow to orange to blue dusk. Eventually, I would feel guilty for indulging myself so long, give in and run for home-free or make enough noise that someone would triumphantly find me. Other nights I would drag home the 16 mm projector from the public library because we did not own a VCR. In the dark, we would project films onto the outside of the house for 87 all of the kids in the neighbourhood. We would lie on the grass as it gathered its evening dew and watch the images flicker on the stucco. Becoming a parent added to my fascination with the multiplicity of existence—my own and others and university gave me an opportunity to interact with interesting people from everywhere. Some days in university classes, I was almost overcome with an intensity of happiness that came from nowhere and threatened to explode from within, simply from the thrill of living. Other days, more seldom, the ache of rejection and confusion and aloneness almost brought me to my knees. At university, I rarely mentioned my kids— they were secrets that made my life incredibly rich but I was conscious of protecting others from excessive exposure to stories that would eventually tire them. I still feel a need to set others at ease, accept unneeded advice, explanations on how I can be more certain, more definite. I want to give others a space to be themselves, find their own ethics about how to relate to me and others. “Take all the advice you can get” my father advises; “then make up your own mind”. If there is a dishonesty in defining a self, perhaps it is in the secret of lingering a second too long in a world in motion before making a decision, or enduring too long while I or others trespass on the moment with well-intended certainties. Recently, a musician asked me if I thought in images. I felt pressured for words, telling him yes, in music, lyrics, images. We were interrupted, thankfully and I was able to turn away from my lies. It seemed I was unable to find words to tell him anything accurate and so I just released the last unprocessed words that came to me. Later, I continued to return to the conversation. Perhaps it is colour in which I think: shapes, shadows, lights, smudges, simplicities, intensities, overwhelmingnesses, unknowns that come out of the world and catch my insides, squeezing lungs and heart. Perhaps I do not think at all. I just feel: deeply, intensely, blood vessels narrowing, breath running shallow, nosebleeds, pain I have not had, stories I do not know, happiness I cannot own. I am angry at my limits, at the limits of others. I am lured, pulled by the world’s passion, into an intensity beyond myself, beyond my chest that aches. I am weak in the knees, wrenched in opposing directions. For just a moment I am pulled too far. The world releases and I snap as far 88 back, into the futility over the smallness of my ability to do anything beautiful in the restrictions of such shortness of life. I am deeply angry and deeply peaceful; there is too much for too little, too little for too much. This secret potential for good and evil is an intensity like colour, that doesn’t match any of the standard expectations. Erin Manning (in Losier, 2005) suggests that “the most dangerous violence of all is in that split second of indecision in which we decide our course of action” (para. 3). Within every encounter with the unknowable there is the “reminder of that very difference that prevents me from being subsumed into the self- same” (Manning, 2007, p. 56-57). I suspect that we do not use aggression and lightwaves and landscapes for identification because we are afraid of their unpredictability, embarrassed at their deepness and automaticity and impurity. Figure 19. Untitled There is an orangeness about this – somewhere in the flow between red passion of living, the yellow of sunshine, its midnight blue of evening, always with an edge that slips daily away from visible light where the absence of colour becomes the fullness of darkness. Sasho Lambevski (2005) describes the human body as “erotically potentialized by the entire extensive world that infolds and unfolds around it” (p. 582, italics in original). For him, the body re-engineers itself from technical machines, substances, buildings, images, words, sounds, smells, textures, colours, materials, landscapes, oceans, rocks, animals and plants – all bits of the gigantic machine that regulates the flows of life. He writes: I am no man, no woman, not anything in between. I am an evanescent spacecraft… I desire the whole world as it unfolds in the movement between my 89 imagination and the extensive reality in front of me. My desire feeds on yours, and your desire feeds on his/her desire, and so on and so forth (p. 582). Back at university yet again, I am finding authors that compel me beyond my own experience. In describing the autobiographical method of currere and its importance in curriculum theory, Pinar (1994) writes about our seemingly biographic disposition describing it as a “prepublic, pre-categorical pressing of libido” (p. 47). At the beginning that is indeterminately already there, this self-activity seems to push in from the outside, a continuity already in motion. Simultaneously, as Pinar argues, “it is the flow of unconscious energy or libido outward that accounts in no small part for the vitality of the individual” (p. 38). The secret of vivacity is an unrestrained story, a trans-situational context, beyond subjectivity and objectivity. Massumi (in Zournazi, 2002) too, has a description that seems adequate for the continuity of aliveness that continually overwhelms me. He calls it joy. For him, joy is not the same as happiness. Joy can be disruptive and even painful. Joy is an “assuming of the body of its potentials” (Massumi, in Zournazi, p. 241), the taking-on of a posture that intensifies the body’s powers of existence. “The moment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of a bodily becoming (p. 241). Although the experience can overcome a person, it is a way of responding to Deleuze’s challenge to believe in the world again. Massumi interprets this phrase by Deleuze by saying that we have to “live our immersion in the world, really experience our belonging to this world, which is the same thing as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there is no room to doubt the reality of it” (in Zournazi, p. 241). Living intensity means pushing against my own limits and desires that continually impose the violence of constraint and discontinuity, and trying to let go of the disdain for the conventions and pettiness of that violence that swirls around me. It means finding the aggression first of all outside of form, feeling the intense joy or the co-presence of potential sometimes experienced as the guilt of inadequacy. This wariness that Freud pondered, in reducing aggression to only desire or identification results in producing its own ethics. As Lambevski writes, 90 This is a transsensual, transsignified… sexuality where ‘inputs from all five senses meet [well below ideology as a script for subjecting oneself to the usual erotic power games we tend to call sexuality] across subsensate excitation and become flesh. It is a flow…that belongs ‘neither to the subject nor world exclusively’. As such, it is not ownable, qualifiable, recognizable, or amenable to critique (p. 584, italics and brackets in original). This is the continuity of the secret that is beneath, beyond, before, and after personal and impersonal, subjective and objective. Missing its flow adds to habitual and narcissistic reflections losing the sensations of our deeply implicated immersion in the magnificent rush of the world. Autobiographical writing asks how the flow of the secret can be extracted from its momentary nexus of experience and inserted into other experiences, variationally, repeatedly. Jane Flax (in Miller 2005) writes that “only multiple and fluid subjects can develop a strong enough aversion to domination, to struggle against its always present and endlessly seductive and endless variable temptations” (p. 185). I am still guilty of the uncertain story but it is the only honest story that I can imagine. Its movement holds potential for changing our “ever present fear of the outside” (p. 158) as we begin to find it within. Our secrets smudge reflections. Emmanuel Levinas (in Shaviro, 2006) correlates with Lasch (1998) in arguing that it is not the other that we fear but instead, these spirited reflections of ourselves as guilty. My own inadequacy is in the struggle of making the world inhabitable while it in turn, is inhabiting me. This is what brings me back to sorting through, yet again, how to relate to others by finding my limits inadequate, turning to find the world full instead of taking it apart. Richard Van Camp (2008) emphasizes that keeping our secrets—the sacred ones, the special ones—are like medicine. They warm us from inside. Keeping our secrets, gives us a responsibility to struggle with, a vibrancy to live out, and an unconnectedness available for connecting. The creative struggle of living currere resides in feeling the secret orangeness of potential. We want closure and we need openness: the secret cuts both ways, with joy lingering in the landscape. 91 ……………….. Studio note, February 2009 Figure 20. How might a day become? The horizon is not a matter of consent and negotiation but rather, one of nonrelation, an incompatibility between processes of capture and feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected. Although exhibiting its fullness, the comings and goings of sunset and sunrise underwrite the day and its claim to sovereignty. Other days are imaginable. In the place where distance meets difference, evidence is left on the land. A mark is made, a token of trust towards the incongruities of an inhabitable earth. The next chapter involves a mentor/teacher and me, as a graduate student in a teacher educating situation. The inquiry examines qualities as markings of place, emergent characteristics of movement that is liminal: present in more than one direction. A variety of understandings of quality in terms of education are reviewed. The chapter argues for qualities to be regenerated through matter and movement rather than abstracting qualities for purposes of standardization. If qualities are not regenerated through bodily re- positionings, subjects and methods increasingly lose feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected. This work explores the ecological necessity of qualities entangled with light and born of the struggle of creative practices in which the aesthetics of finding evidence of previous interaction generate opportunity for revitalization of past and future with new art forms. 92 Chapter Five Research as a Quality of Light We are born into a world of light. Every motion of our lives, every memory, is colored by the degree of its intensity or shaded by the weight of its absence. Richard Wagamese19, 1997 Introduction Artists have always used the power of light to lure us beyond the shimmer existing on the surface of experience and towards its streaming into an event. In this paper, I investigate the art series Liminal Lights in its ongoing work of transformation where movement offers the “potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its reception and production” (Lyotard, in O’Sullivan, 2001). Liminal Lights is a series of images created by Rita L. Irwin20 while walking in the forest near her home. Using her camera as a brush to explore her surroundings through motion she writes that she is exploring the liminality of experience, letting the inward and outward movement of breath move the image. Some of the images in this series offer a discernable forest seemingly in motion, perhaps blurred by the artist’s rush, perhaps vibrant on its own. Others of the series are further-reaching abstractions, qualities of light and darkness, dynamic resonations of energy and matter. Irwin with Leggo21 (2006) writes, Liminal spaces are dynamic spaces of possibility where individuals and cultures come in contact with one another creating interstitial conditions for new communities of learning. For educators there is a need to understand what liminal practices might look like, how teachers may embody liminal practices and how liminal communities might be created. Irwin is especially interested in how art-practice in a teacher education program might contribute to the liminality of becoming a teacher over time, in particular situations and 19 Richard Wagamese is an Ojibway Canadian author, but I always think of him as a visual artist because of the images his writing has evoked for me. Many of the ideas in this paper have coalesced for me from a decade of living with his words and their images of light. 20 I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Rita L. Irwin for her consent in the use of her images in this work. 21 One of Rita L. Irwin’s exhibits of the Liminal Lights series was done in collaboration with Carl Leggo who responded to Irwin’s images with poetry. 93 locations and in relation to one’s own and others’ practices of research and artmaking. I include below the five images from Irwin’s series with which this research engages. Figure 21. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 . Figure 22. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 94 Figure 23. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 Figure 24. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 95 Figure 25. Liminal Lights series, Rita L. Irwin, 2006 Referring specifically to teacher education, Britzman (2000) argues that one of the grand paradoxes of our century is “how one becomes affected by knowledge, by the experience of others, by histories not our own, not in terms of its application for others, but in terms of our own capacities to believe and be touched by knowledge” (p. 19). Perhaps contributing factors to this paradox include events drawn off from general-particular spaces of expression with nothing to connect one quality to another. Massumi (2002) claims that belonging has emerged as a “problem of global proportions. Perhaps the planetary problem” (p. 88, italics in original). This chapter reports on an a/r/tographic project of an art-making collaboration that explores art’s potential for finding the world’s liminality in the very process of our bodies, including the creativity of moment-by- moment perception. The chapter describes how art evokes the body’s familiarity with liminality, how prevalent understandings of quality endanger humanity’s potentiality and vitality and in conclusion offers two propositions for teacher education methods and practice. As with the other chapters, this is an attempt at research-creation that activates what film and cultural studies theorist, Alanna Thain (2008) suggests are essays not as objects but as “images of thought, themselves eventful—as essaying, or trying, an activity that always contains within itself the (productive) possibility of failure” (Unthought experiments, para. 1, brackets in original). 96 Section Two of this paper explains the proposition that served what Whitehead (1929/1978) would describe as a “lure for feeling” (p. 185), linking the potential for this chapter’s study to its actualization in image and text. Section Three situates liminality with body movement based largely on the work of Massumi who according to Ellsworth (2005) challenges educators to “shift how we make bodies matter in pedagogy” (p. 17). Section Four describes perception’s almost-unnoticed familiarity with liminality, how bodily capacity for making space/time/selves of reality connects qualities to complete events, and emerges from particular places in the universe. Section Five challenges the influence of various theories of quality in qualitative educational practices, and the conclusion contributes three propositions for teacher education methods and practice regarding quality’s inseparability from its own movement, it’s entanglement with other bodies, art’s amplification of quality and image-making. Part I Situation After several exhibitions, Irwin’s images were hung in her many-windowed workspace in the Teaching Education Office at The University of British Columbia. I thought perhaps it was because she noticed that while working as her research assistant, the images often caught me up in their movement, pulling me beyond the meetings around her office table, that she proposed I add to her art, working directly into and on top of the images. Accepting this invitation for inquiry confronted me with memories of forest: wild fragrance of skunk cabbage, black bog beneath fallen cedar, the sound of chickadees and the sun’s warmth. I was pulled into the realities of movement of bodies in places, how art practices’ relations to a moving world might matter in educational methods and practice, how and where I, as a teacher, new scholar, and insecure artist might contribute. I had frequently attended to Liminal Lights when they hung in Professor Irwin’s office but had given less consideration to her writing about them. My omission must be common since Deleuze (1981/2003) argues we do not listen enough to the words of artists. He claims their texts act differently than their paintings by penetrating their practices in ways images do not. Talking about their work entices artists to regenerate 97 their terms and their cohesion to each other at each step in thinking through their experience. Although their words have great force, artists often have a severity towards themselves. As a result, Deleuze finds their texts beginning points for inventions of others, rather than definitive statements about their work. John Dewey (1934) writes that although language comes “infinitely short of paralleling the variegated surface of nature” (p. 224), and although attempting to duplicate the infinite variety of individualized qualities that exist is undesirable and unneeded, words can still serve art’s purpose in the degree to which they “summon and evoke into active operation the vital responses that are present whenever we experience qualities” (p. 224). The propositions artists offer alongside their art are not offered in the logical sense, but in the sense of an invitation to a limit. Whitehead prefers to speak of propositions rather than judgments because he insists that at some point in the entertainment of a proposition, “judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight” (In Shaviro, 2009, p. 185). American cultural critic, Steven Shaviro notes that sometimes it is aesthetic repulsion rather than delight but in any case the proposition points towards a potentiality and enters into the “construction of that very perspective as a possible route of actualization or a vector of nondeterministic change” (p. 3). As a route or space unseparated from time, the primary roles of propositions are lures proposed for feeling and when admitted into feeling they constitute what is felt. After one of her photographic exploratory walks in the woods where she herself appears to have been propositioned by feeling, Irwin (in Irwin, Leggo & Triggs, 2010) writes, “qualities of colour, sound, fragrance, touch, pattern, rhythm, become meditative places for moving to create new understandings in a community of creators” (p. 11). Irwin does not say she made Liminal Lights to show what a forest setting is like, but rather to explore its potential, the “liminality of experience within forest walks” (p. 11). Walking faster, walking slower: how does it change my perception? Using my camera as if it were a paintbrush, I stroke the air… Curious, I try different qualities of stroking the air. What lies in between this time and space? (p. 5). 98 Irwin does not directly sense the pull of the world and yet is unable to not sense it. She seeks to respond with her movements and art practice as she considers her work as an artist, teacher and researcher in teacher education. It was not until I actively began my own exploration of availabilities in experimentally adding layers to her art while at the same time, carefully considering Professor Irwin’s writing about liminality, qualities of light and the feeling of being touched by the world, that I began to explore liminality’s significance in relation to discussions of quality in qualitative educational research, especially in connection to teacher education. In the midst of this aesthetic practice, I realized that re-engagement of the work reopened her work to a propositional field rather than allowing it to end in a particular solution after running its course in exhibitions. Irwin was letting art do what it does best which is transform itself and others by offering a place in which one moves to encounter something unexpected, an event that offers access to a world of impermanence and interpenetration, the world of creative forces already in motion and a way for me to discover the ways in which I do not know. Liminality Liminality is often addressed in terms of the in-between, based on anthropological theories of ritual as posited in the 1960s by Arnold van Gennep and also by Victor Turner. This view of liminality takes an intersubjective approach involving the inbetween of already constituted structures of form. For example, a teacher education program might be considered a liminal space between student-teaching and teaching profession, and effort might then be given to the apprenticeship of student teachers as they transition from student to teacher. Alternatively, in this paper I follow Massumi (2002) by situating liminality more closely with displacements of the body moving in modes of availability in relation to being affected and affecting the world it encounters. Liminality is movement that is both a part of and separate from itself, never separable from its bodily examples, never presupposed by its examples but instead, residing in them and moving from one to the next, emerging in newness every time. Important assumptions guiding my inquiry involve intrinsic connection between movement, sensation, and the 99 impossibility of considering bodies without them. Massumi argues that bodies move and we feel with them in every experience, each miniscule movement convoking qualitative difference. In this view, liminality is movement that explores experience’s character and texture, as well as the way in which we register what experience gives in transition. The Latin etymology of liminality is limen, meaning threshold. Rather than another thing added to a limit, the threshold is that which is experienced in transit; the unsettling déjà vu “experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside” (Agamben, 1993/2005, p. 68, italics in original). To be liminal, an experience must border not on a limit that has no outside edges but a limit that is instead, the out side which is life vitalism loosened off of one’s own event and literally, “on the loose” (see Bennett, 2010, p. 3). Agamben describes a threshold as a “point of contact with an external space that must remain empty” (p. 68), a beyond already underway but utterly unknowable and full of potential. In writing about the Australian art exhibition Liminality (Langridge, C. curator, 2008), Malpas (2008) speculates that every threshold carries inextricable movement: a sense of opening up towards or closing away from. Liminality and teacher education Educators James Gibson and Jennifer Rotigel (2007) maintain that considering the cohort experience in teacher education in terms of liminality is a fertile place for inquiry into techniques, modalities and methods that enable students to fully engage in liminality’s transformative process. Situating liminality as an inbetween of student teacher and teacher, Gibson and Rotigel adopted Turner’s (1969) emphasis on its extraordinary creativity and McWhinney and Markos’ (2003) theory of its potential for deep impressions and its time of vulnerability to sudden changes. Gibson and Rotigel sought to create liminal spaces where a curriculum of diversity negotiated particular moments, places and lives lived. They focused on self-regulation in community-building strategies claiming that successful cohort programs “allow the possibility of experimenting with novel and untried self images” (p. 188). Guided by Turner, Gibson and Rotigel observed and responded to series of successive events included counter-movement against academic structures at the same time as laughter, quasi-risk-taking, personal transformation, more developed social consciences, feelings of separation/vulnerability 100 and feelings of community. They expected students would “push the limits of structure, thought, original and creative use of language, symbol, music, and movement” (Kathleen Manning in Gibson & Rotigel). They claim that places of liminality allow participants to “grow individually, form new relationships and work for social change” (p. 188). This noteworthy cohort experience and the student teachers’ eventual incorporation into the teaching profession demonstrates one of the problems with the liminal: its refusal to be separated out. To experience the liminal is to encounter the threshold, the fullness of an edge, not fully having entered, nor having fully departed, yet in the meantime, the experience is “already in withdrawal, always already fading” (Malpas, 2008, p. 3) into a fullness that cannot be experienced. Using sunrise and sunset as one example of threshold, Malpas describes the opening and closing of the day as already moving across its liminality. For example, each gradation of light lacks sharp demarcation and runs instead into a multidimensional fading to infinity. Considering liminality as inbetween already designated structures misses the potential for becoming. Furthermore, as Malpas argues, the “experiential and emotional power of the liminal readily directs our attention away from the experience of liminality as such and onto its emotional and experiential effects” (p. 2). At the end of the teacher education program, the cohort experience withdraws in favour of teaching practice’s immediacy where stated or unstated, already determined expectations are emphasized. The evocative experience of liminality withdraws in favour of immediate experience, past experience, and emotion as personal response, where activity is directed towards certain ends and where it is less likely to inquire into the in and out of the world’s movement. Liminality and art Liminality considered as inbetween does not make the most of enhancing student teachers’ capacities for repositioning to the world’s propositions. Developing art and aesthetic practices is one way of provoking attention to the persistent potential of methods themselves, as methods that escape their own fixation by repeating. This paper argues that creative practices in a teacher education program offer opportunity for bodies to be unseparated from the images of their own movement and how this same movement 101 can be augmented in pedagogical and research practice. Gibson and Rotigel (2007) acknowledge that liminality generates “myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art” (p. 189). Taken beyond points of return in art, propositions and suppositions gain relationships with surrounding practices. In like-mindedness with Sameshima and Irwin (2008), Malpas (1999) claims art has always been preoccupied with liminality, not only in the sense of uncertainty between the ordinary and something else but also in the way it explores the very character of liminality including its own liminal status and how it augments access of quality to quality. He argues the liminal be viewed as constituting that which unifies art as well as the topic of art. It is the focus of artistic practice and also the place in which such practice is located. The liminal and the artistic are bound together in the openness of closed form. Massumi (2002) also discusses the liminal in relation to art: art as an autonomous process of resituating a whole variation, the whole of which always slips away. We cannot experience the entirety of the world’s difference, yet its entirety continually runs into and out of experience. Massumi argues that art and everyday perception are in continuity with one another but with different emphases. Art foregrounds dynamic, ongoing relational thresholds and everyday experience foregrounds object-oriented, action-reaction instrumental thresholds. Art foregrounds form as necessarily dynamic, a resonating force of lived experience. Art is the method or practice for making perceptible the fact that qualitative perception is “as much about life itself as it is about the things we live by” (Massumi, 2008, p. 6). In other words, we live as much by the degrees of potential for changing selves in a qualitative world as we do by quality’s singular events. Unless reality continues to be fed by diversity of quality, neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás (2001) cautions, the true boundaries defining reality will disappear into a dangerously homogenous society. He argues that chances are high that we are on this planet because universal laws make it likely “to the point of inevitability” rather than because predetermined events in the distant past formed the universe so that we could become. In 102 other words, the world we are continuously interacting with changes as well. If, as Dewey (1934) notes, a quality is purposely separated out from other qualities, “cultivated for special reasons” (p. 129), it becomes an indulgence for the sake of “immediate excitement of sensation” (p. 129), entering into a feedback loop of homogenization of thought cycling in an implosive fashion. Based on a long career in cell physiology, Llinás argues for the importance of incoming stimuli that are not cleansed of the elements that generated them. His speculation offers further substance for Irwin’s interest in art and the creation of liminal places in regards to teacher education and it seems likely that engagement in art practice could be the qualitative movement that generates feeling for histories and experiences that are not our own. Accessing what is normally outside ourselves, is not, O’Sullivan (2001) claims, just stuff we read about. Instead it is something we make of our bodies. We cannot ever entirely know what is other than us but we can follow its process in repositioning bodies. Massumi (2002) argues that any assumption of fixed form is as much an assumption about the body and perception as it is an assumption about art. Bypassing everyday attention to object-oriented, action-reaction instrumental movement through liminality’s creative movement actually happens all the time. We are, in fact, these very processes of liminality. Art lures us to the feel of our moving forms, to the ways in which the world makes itself beautiful to us. It repositions us to receive in passing, “that single quality of light that defines us” (Wagamese, 1997). Liminality and perception Seeing double Sunrise and sunset are satisfying examples of liminality because their movement is accessible to the senses involving: “the visual appearance of the sky, but also, when one is physically present, the shifts in sound and air” (Malpas, 2008, p.1). The liminality of seasons likewise arouses emotions and memories. Finding liminality in perception is, however, a less comfortable notion. It is difficult and probably advantageous that we do not constantly remember that in seeing, we never register only what is in front of our eyes. With every sight, however, we see much more than objects; we also see imperceptible potential, lived relation, life dynamic. For example, as Massumi (2008) 103 explains when we see an object, we see volume. We do not just see surface. Instead of inferring or deducing volume we see an object. The perceived shape of any object is the abstract experience of volume which is not visible yet we see it in the form of the object. In another example from psychological literature, Albert Michotte (in Massumi, 2002, p. 282) was the first to bring to scientific investigation the observation that we view objects partially occluded by other objects, yet we experience them as complete. Michotte describes how perception fills itself in as “amodal completion” and claims it is the very mechanism of object perception. Amodal completion is not so much an illusion as a “functional mode of hallucination” (Massumi, 2002, p. 282). This movement is both real and abstract. Massumi describes actual form and its abstract dynamic as two sides of the same experience; inseparable, fused dimensions of the same reality. For example, Irwin’s images swirl and cascade. Irwin (in Irwin, Leggo & Triggs, 2010) talks of dragging the light, the camera itself a contributory factory in the impact of the images. She explains how, in making the series, she waits, letting the movement of breathing in the world reposition her body. Her movements have added blur to her images and lines of movement are visible. Observers however, already see the doubling of movement in the image because in perception, every sight is an event, full of real movement in which the body is relationally activated. Massumi (2008) might say, we are “seeing double” (p. 3). The reality of the abstraction does not replace what is actually there but instead, supplements it. We see with the images and we see through the actual form. We cannot see movement without images; the real and the abstract take flight from actual form and are liminally the same experience. Massumi (2008) quips, “if we are not seeing what is not actually visible, we are not seeing objectively” (p. 5) because seeing an object is seeing through to the movement of its qualities. The activity of seeing double extends an object to an event. Llinás (2001) describes this as “simultaneity of activation” (p. 250) which is the way organisms become capable of more complicated movement. By binding in time fractured elements of internal and external reality we receive perceptual unity so that everything in one moment seems as 104 one event, occurring right now. This sense of aliveness of our body relating to the world at a particular moment has a shape or feel, a singular quality; Matthew Lipman (1967) calls it a self. A body and its self are its perceivings. Separately, there is “no action, no analysis, no anticipation, no thing, no body” (Massumi, 2002, p. 95). Every perception is a liminal place; each is accompanied by a sense of aliveness in which we sense ourselves alive and we perceive through the aliveness. Perception’s liminality structures the way we think and act in pervasive and fundamental ways. Simultaneous to the brain’s incorporation and use of simultaneity of activation is abstraction, which Llinás (2001) argues, “tightens the communicative fabric that binds society together in the sense of consensual truth of information” (p. 251). This communicative fabric is not only about delivering messages but, a quality of movement, the variety and proliferation of which unites selves to the material world. Humans are the best example of the way the totality of every moment is held in suspension as we fill it with resonating qualities and binding of segmental functions into a composite. Llinás describes abstraction as kinesthetically imaging an organism as a whole to itself, in other words making something new of the world coming in, thus affording it the ability to place itself in the context of the external world. Movement does not congeal in the image, instead the image adds to movement that loosens itself from the image and runs on. These abstractions escape into the external world, asserts Llinás, extending the range of potential available for further movement. It is essential that these abstractions or qualities escape so that humans are able to make images of self and can override the way reflexes group into synergies creating fixed action patterns. Seeing as more than visual Seeing requires our bodies rather than just our field of vision. While the optical apparatus may be isolated in anatomical dissection, it never functions in isolation22. Qualities come to us, Dewey (1934) argues, by means of the optical apparatus simultaneously bound up 22 Recent scientific research (Provencio, 2011) indicates that we feel light rather than sense it. Specialized ganglion cells are necessary for nonvisual responses to light but have potential to either sense a quality of light or relay information about nonvisual light from the retina’s rods and cones, or they can do both. Even humans who lack rods and cones can still unconsciously adapt their circadian rhythms with occasional exposure to blue light. Other organisms, according to Ignacio Provencio, have nonvisual light receptors elsewhere in the body. Sparrows, for example, sense light through their feathers, skin and bones. 105 with objects through activity that entangles them. The potential we see in an object is the quality or method our body has of relating to the particular place in the world that we happen to find ourselves at a particular moment. Irwin (in Irwin, Leggo & Triggs, 2010) writes about her experience of place while walking and photographing. She considers the multidimensional involvement of the body: Walking has heightened my sensitivity to the aurality of physical spaces. We experience the qualities of space not only by seeing but also by listening. Perception is not something accomplished with our eyes or ears or any specific sense organ; it is a full bodied, multisensory experience. We hear the cathedral- like height of the trees, the deep spaces between the trees, and the movement of the trees on a still day. The audible attributes of walking in the forest reach beyond a predisposition for seeing and enlarge the experience through attentive listening, through mindfulness. Irwin sees beyond motion’s instrumentality because she is an artist. This is not so much about being wide awake but of seeing double. Sensing the liminality of movement is how Irwin lives (see Irwin, 2006). Looking deeply, she maintains, takes us outside of ourselves (2006) in a spiritual and aesthetic currere, an active form of curriculum that is an inquiry into the meanings of self that are simultaneously being “present in the moment” (p. 78) and alive with “surprise, imagination, creativity, and the sense of the sacred” (p. 78). Massumi (2008) claims this liminality is the way vision can relay into the kinesthetics of a sense of movement and “how kinesthesia can relay into touch” (p. 4). To see, therefore, is also to enfold the body’s feeling of the abstraction of potential. Seeing as liminal Even adhering within traditional empiricism, the total field of perception called the Ganzfeld and referring to psychology research done between the 1920s and mid 1960s demonstrates, according to philosopher Larry Hardin (1988), advocates the dominance of change over uniformity in the visual field. Ganzfeld research speculated whether physical and physiological conditions of vision at its purest, simplest and fullest could be isolated by using the simultaneous presentation of the full spectrum of colour striking the retina uniformly. It was thought, Massumi (2002) explains, that one stable form of visual 106 perception could be discovered from which one could then “successively build in levels of complexity until you had reconstituted the entire range of vision” (p. 144). As it turned out, Massumi observes, the total field of vision was not conducive to reduction and reconstitution. Volunteers had difficulty expressing what they saw. Within a few minutes, colour faded completely from view. Subjects reported vision blanking out, resulting in a total absence of seeing. Afterwards, participants appeared intoxicated, reported difficulty maintaining balance, having no sense of time and even, “temporary states of depersonalization” (Cohen, in Massumi, 2002, p. 145). Massumi surmises that under purest empirical conditions, “vision either fails to achieve itself or falls away from itself–and from the self” (p. 145), indicating that visual perception of light, for example is a complete quality of that experience but not an experience of light’s totality. Supporting his argument regarding the total field of vision as not a field of experience, Massumi (2002) refers to the 1932 work of Marius von Senden regarding perception of space and shape in the congenitally blind before and after an operation to restore sight. Massumi reports that Von Senden’s collected accounts of patients’ first visual sensation offer experiments of the only naturally occurring “pure” field of vision. Von Senden’s newly-visioned patients saw only vaguely enfolding surface arrangements not objects, shapes or distance. Objects they would have been able to touch with their tongue or feel with their hands and name correctly, were with vision, entirely unfamiliar. Some saw a pandemonium of colour, just “variations of brightness, nonqualified intensities” (Massumi, 2002, p. 156) as spatial arrangements which they tried to walk between. Even after three weeks’ experience of seeing space, patients still could not gauge distance between themselves and objects, did not know a larger object could cover a smaller object, or that a hidden object could be present even when unseen. Constant objects and depths began to emerge “when patients learned to focus on fusions between vision and other senses, especially touch and hearing, which they had already indexed to movement”. They explained, “I see it move because I hear it”. Von Senden’s experiments suggest that perception involves more than figure-ground relations in which 107 seeing depends on the orientation to which borders between objects is assigned. As the body shifts to re-open itself to light, continually emerging qualities of the full infinitival spectrum of light from pain to colour begin to resonate. Form, Massumi (2008) notes, is full of “all sorts of things that are not actually visible” (p. 4); basically, he extrapolates, it is full of potential. This is quite different from seeing only what we need to function in the world. Not only are we moving bodies, we are entangled in a moving world. The delay in which perception lags behind itself to create simultaneity of activation is not just a quantitative detainment. Massumi (2002) describes its deeper complexity: at every instant there is some kind of stimulus arriving through one sense channel or another, each modulating an earlier stimulus before it becomes “what it will have been” (p. 196). The “recursive durations” meld together, “a relational time- smudge” (p. 196). With no defining point of inception, there is only “an infinite multiplication of recursively durational emergent awarenesses, madly smudging each other” (p. 196). Perception does not involve composing actually existing wholes whose movement is purely functional or towards equilibrium. Instead, the conditions of perception are considered to be nonfigurative, concerning movement and liminal places more than any kind of centering for further construction of meaning. The whole of visual perception is purely liminal and its movement is towards an edge, Massumi argues, far from balanced. Llinás (2001) explains that according to his understanding of neuronal integration and synaptic transmission, knowledge of self arises only if individuals are allowed to interact in a motor sense with the image or quality that their body makes. If unable to move, there is no access beyond selves, no escape from particular compositions of qualities. Our ability as humans to break or modify constraining operations of our senses’ fixed action patterns is the very ability, according to Llinás to make choices. Qualities are that image of movement that relates back to us. From a neuroscience point of view, we simply cannot operate without qualities and Llinás claims they are humans’ ultimate predictive vectors that continually re-cycle and re-enter the self as liminal processes. 108 Multiplying expressions of quality is also art’s work, rendering liminality visible if only in its movement into a unity of separation of selves. This is particularly evident in a series like Liminal Lights which plays out in a run of difference, showing how potential struck like a force, rippling into an array of variation. We need images in order to see movement. This view of art does not coincide well with deconstruction that is any kind of ideological critique because it “disavows its own inventiveness” (Massumi, 2002, p. 12), seeing itself as “uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world” (p. 12). Regardless of critique, art continues producing qualities. O’Sullivan (2001) reminds us that “life goes on” (p. 126). Massumi argues that prolonging the liminality of thought-movement requires that “techniques of negative critique be used sparingly” (p. 12). He adds that it is difficult to critique when things are already otherwise. Additionally, when busy debunking, less time is given to augmenting. Llinás (2001) cautions that as mass media’s speed and volume of information flow perpetuates a tyranny of large numbers and self-selected public opinion, our capacity for movement will be diminished and inertia will be fed by limited qualities. Similarly Agamben (1993/2005) claims that if tradition is master, or when knowledge defines and regulates, we forget, returning instead to what we already understand. Irwin (2006) stresses that it is important in teacher education to “live the life of inquiry in the liminal spaces” (p. 79), to attend to qualities in every day experience in the two-sidedness of “knowing and unknowing” (p. 77). In very practical ways, if we are too controlled by knowledge, the potential the world offers cannot be sensed. With too much control, we are not touched by places that matter to us; we do not feel a qualitative belonging with the histories and experiences of others. In the next section, I offer a short review of current understandings of quality. 109 Part II Quality Irwin senses the relation of qualities as distinctive characteristics of the liminal. She finds a sense of stillness in the rush of the forest where qualities of artmaking offer a self that is other than an instrument for a particular purpose: Movement propels another kind of experience within our environment. By slowing down and paying attention to the particular in my forest walks I was able to reimagine how changing my movement in the forest might allow me to see beyond that which I had taken for granted, seeing another perspective of my experience (Irwin in Irwin, Leggo & Triggs, 2010). Adding qualities to the world is not what science educator Douglas Roberts (1996) defines as qualitative research’s purpose. Instead, he argues its purpose is seeking knowledge building of the kind that is “strong on the side of scope than precision” (p. 246). Linking quality with knowledge seems an inevitability. He explains, however, that to preserve the acknowledged elusiveness of quality, attempts have been made to hold the research community’s search for judging quality at a distance. Clive Seale (1999) outlines how Yvonne Lincoln and Egon Guba’s influential 1985 paradigms for qualitative research shifted away from positivist criteria, to protect quality by substituting interpretivist alternatives such as credibility for truth-value, transferability for applicability, dependability for consistency and reflexivity for neutrality. According to Seale (1999), when Lincoln and Guba later realized the nihilistic implications of relativism, they imported political versions of the value of qualitative knowledge such as empathy, fairness, empowerment and stimulation of people to action. They started to account for qualitative events by introducing action but without introducing anything physical, no connection to the materiality of moving bodies and moving earth, missing “the body, emotions, inconstancy and change, the radical contingency of all perspectives and all formulations” (Shaviro, 2009, p. ix). Where then, we might ask, are qualities in qualitative research methods? 110 Historically there have been many and varied philosophical arguments regarding physical existence of quality or alternatively, debates about its alignment with subject or object in addition to variations on these two major perspectives. I use a large portion of this paper to address quality because of its influence in teacher education research and context. I appreciate Llinás’ preface in his book on neuroscience aimed at a general audience, in which he explains what he calls his reckless behaviour of addressing research to orders of magnitude above and beneath his particular area of focus. He acknowledges risk of failure in attempting such a dynamic range, as the price of synthesis without which “there are only fields of dismembered parts” (p. viii). This is the risk and benefit of any work of transdisciplinarity. Jumping in as I am, in a beginning exposure to a vast and fascinating philosophical body of literature about quality, my intention is to hold open a space for further work rather than do injustice to all that I do not understand. From this rim of considering quality, I suggest that qualitative educational research’s everyday sense of quality is often rendered in one of several common ways: as an abstract ideal, as property attributable to an object or as something subjective that can be personally contained and therefore functional or representational, as that which can be interpreted in a variety of ways, as neurological or as liminal, although these positions certainly do not exhaust the diversity, complexity and particularity of arguments about quality. In the pages that follow, I offer a short introduction to each of these approaches before returning to the images and the teacher educating situation of artmaking in which this study is situated. Quality as an ideal If qualities are only ideas, separated from lived reality and considered to evolve from within culture as convention, they become persuasive and pervasive to such an extent that it is difficult to view the world without them. An example in the art world is linear perspective which for a time, not only attached artists to rules, but also implied the “unfolding of the entire world around the all-knowing view of the spectator”, the “view of man as the centre of all things and the world as an unfolding of human consciousness” (Kissick, 1996, p, 33). Qualities as designated values can be important components in both art and life as they provide opportunity to create edges and set up boundaries, devices that mimic the way we think we see the world and help us function. They disregard, however, the force and aliveness implicit in movement. 111 Quality as functional or representational Currently pervasive in education theory, research and practice, is quality as an attribute of products or services. This concept of quality assumes possibility of universal and objective norms based on expert knowledge. Qualities result as direct property of perceived objects or as dispositional tendencies of certain objects to cause certain kinds of experiences in perceivers. These theories draw heavily on philosophy that argues that quality can be understood in terms of a causal role (for example, D. Dennett, 1991), in other words its functionalism, in which all mental processes are useful to an organism in adapting to its environment. Arthur Danto banters that functionalism is an attractive idea to philosophers because it exempts them from having to know something. He claims functionalism does not care “what the skull is stuff with as long as we have similarity of input and output” (in Hardin, 1988, p. xii, italics in original). Functionalism in this sense denies that qualities have qualitative natures of their own. Instead, qualitative events represent qualities without having them and qualities can be completely understood in terms of their representation. If quality is considered as instrumentally functional or representational, the problem becomes management: how can quality be discovered, measured, assured and improved, what goals will enhance quality of performance according to how it conforms to predefined, normative outcomes, which educators Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss (2008) argue, “are usually developmental goals or simple learning goals”. Quality in this respect offers a compelling narrative for current discourse on educational reform that is caught up within larger structures of global and market economy. Dahlberg and Moss describe the functionality of quality in educational contexts as a constructed concept, valued for “universality objectivity, certainty, stability, closure; and premises an autonomous observer able to make a decontextualised and objective statement of fact. It deploys certain methods, based on applying templates to particular settings [e.g. rating scales, checklists, standardized inspection procedures]” p. 22, parentheses in original). Quality as functional strives for agreement, eliminates various perspectives, assumes autonomous and objective observers and offers consumer parents information about their product child. While quality as representational is sometimes required for recognizing, 112 categorizing or reconstructing knowledge that is already known, it is misleading to think of it as something that stands apart from what it represents; it is instead a temporal additive assessment that has feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected. Quality as interpretational Another take on quality might be described as “a child of its time and place” (Dahlberg & Moss, p. 23). In opposition to a functionalist characterization of quality, this position involves the notion of quality as a mental process of representing features of the physical world. Knowledge is in this perspective is thus theorized as a cooperative venture. For example the blue of the sky has no physical layer that can be measured and is instead, what blue feels like for me, in a particular instant. Although we all sense and perceive blue differently, we all behave as if we do not. If we did not, there would never be any minimal overlap of interpretations that allow any discernment of edges. Dahlberg and Moss (2008) define quality in this regard as meaning-making: “contextualized interpretations of actual practices and actual environments” (p. 23-24), schooling as “public forum and collective workshops, places of encounter and potential” (p. 24) for an infinite range of possibilities, some expected, some not. They note that quality in terms of meaning-making draws heavily from critical perspectives valuing complexity, multiplicity, subjectivity, context, provisionality and uncertainty. This concept assumes that evaluation of quality is a participatory process requiring a collective and democratic process of interpretation, critique, judgment, dialogue, argumentation, listening and reflection from which knowledge is deepened and broadened. Consistent with this view, Marvin Minsky (2010) argues that qualities are not more than what we collectively make of them: As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what ‘hurting’ is – and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple ‘essence’ of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources” (p. 4). Roberts (1996), as well, expresses an interpretivist perspective by finding the role for qualitative research as a different kind of research contribution called “backing” (p. 245), 113 supporting already established knowledge, rather than building it. Drawing on impressions of quality as phenomenological, he finds qualitative research to occupy a fragile niche, still looking for points, utilization, presentations and discussions of appropriate conceptual frameworks in order to “deserve journal space” (p. 248). Roberts’ opinion of qualitative research is that it is subjective, often uncertain, provisional and contextual. Locating quality too tightly with subjects, however, misses body movement’s liminality as immediate abstraction, always in motion through places that affect us. Conscious reflection on what something is like for a person doubles an idea over on itself but quality has, in fact, already been removed once by the body itself, using the effect of its continually emerging difference. There is no sameness of quality, just always-already qualitative difference even in the same event. Similarly, locating quality with the intersubjective leads to problems in which the inbetween is of subjects that are already constituted or pregiven structures of forms, missing their slipping away into decay or change and missing the possibility of quality as its own experience and also of its contributions to what is made of the future. Massumi (2008) argues that the subject emerges from a “field of conditions which are not that subject yet, where it is just coming into itself” (p. 3). That place of liminality, or as I extrapolate in this paper, of quality, is not “intentional in the sense of already carrying a subject-object polarity. It’s a brewing, the world stirring” (p. 3). Although they prefer the interpretive understanding of quality, Dahlberg and Moss (2008) are not arguing for one particular way of addressing quality in education. Rather they advocate for a recognition in which alternatives to education’s dominant language of evaluation can exist. At issue for them is the language of inevitability that prorogues other perspectives and does not acknowledge judgments of value regarding quality, from which flow “enormous implications in terms of theory and practice” (p. 25). In an inquiry into electronic technologies and educational reform, Ferneding (2003) raises a similar concern where she argues it is not the messy political act of debate between purposes of 114 public education for building a democratic society or pragmatics interests of serving national and economic needs. Rather, troubling both Dahlberg, Moss and Ferneding is the “lack of pluralistic dialogue—a silence that arises from the assumption of ‘certain inevitabilities” (Ferneding, 2003, p. 6) in descriptions of educational crisis. Quality as neurological Recent neurological blends of theories regarding quality describe it as functional, a physical response essential for an organism’s survival and also as a product of neuronal oscillation. For example, neuroscientist, Llinás (2001) argues that quality represents a significant and influential drive throughout evolution, enriching sense organs to capacitate forward movement. As individual sense organs become richer in their capability to monitor the external world, the neural centers associated specialize to perform rapid predictive decision-making which Llinás claims is the ultimate and most pervasive of all brain functions and is in fact, what comprises a self. For Llinás however, even more fundamental than predictive decision-making capacitating movement is quality’s moving response to the world coming in as it serves to contextualize and arouse the unity of sensory activation into one global functional state “something akin to ‘I feel’ that acts to mediate decision making” (p. 204, quotations in original). Without living qualities hospitable to feeling, Bennett (2010) argues there would be “no greening of the economy, no redistribution of wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights” (p. xii). Quality is body repositioning on which amodal completion, simultaneity of activation and an entire kinematics of place turns on. Llinás speculates that the more one learns about what we are the more we will feel a part, not of something we possess, but of something we understand, and the more we will respect and love each other. This understanding, according to Llinás is towards what is most fundamentally reliable among elements in brain capability: their unreliability. This means, for something to be totally reliable it must be made up of unreliable or varied parts. Our body’s belonging to what is necessary unreliability also generates the necessity for a knowledge of self. Llinás (2001) situates a knowledge of self as inextricably related to a capacity for physically moving oneself to adjust to being addressed by the world. 115 Based on his research with neuronal networks, he claims everything comes from movement and that there must be a kind of structure that invites movement into selves that also moves again forward to the very movement that “selved”. Quality as an event of liminality Massumi (2002) describes quality as a property of experience: its shape, existing in flows and figurations. When a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation, this transition is governed by feelings of powers to affect and to be affected and quality is one of those affects. If quality is considered liminal, it becomes an affair of relation, a force of coming and going reflecting C.I. Lewis’ (in Rosenthal, 2007) belief that experience is a rich, primal and transactional unity reflecting both the responses we bring and the pervasive textures of the independently real qualitative world. Qualities, as described by Agamben (1993/2005), are the “being-such of each thing”, “its torture and its source–its limit” (p. 98-99). Rather than being owned or not owned, they are limits exposing places of movement toward our own movement, towards images of self in the images of all that is not self. The liminality of the world is insistent. It continually finds a way to proposition us. Rather than cherishing immediate forms in order to better manipulate them, art shifts our register, opens us to qualities that determine the very possibility of what renders image to feeling. Qualities are no longer secondary characteristics of form; they are new form added to the feel of making an inhabitable qualitative world. Massumi (2002) describes qualities as “world glue made visible” (p. 221). Offering me opportunity to add to her Liminal Lights series indicated to me Irwin’s awareness that even though propositioned in a particular place, quality cannot be fastened to any particular place. In order for its dynamic to continue to affect and be affected, quality must remain autonomous enough to be offered again for the re-marks of others for a next actual presentation of lived relation, even if it is only in subtle shifts of perception. Method After picking up the images, I was unsure of how to respond to the propositional field offered to me; I was still thinking of the liminal as in-between, yet the abstracted qualities 116 of trees and light seemed to exist in both sky and earth. I felt momentarily exhausted. What do I know in passing? What sense can I make of the temporality of moving bodies and moving earth? At last, rather than striving to maintain a relationship with ignorance as Agamben (2011) notes knowledge does, I attended to the “zone of nonknowledge” (p. 114): movement already underway. Letting the image’s tangibility address me instead of anxiously wondering where to begin, I returned to the forest while considering the future image that I wanted to make. Seeking to find in the forest what was already invigorating itself for me, I collected leaves and dirt hoping to transduce the smells and sounds of the forest into the feel of an image. At home, I put skunk cabbage, fern, pine needle, and moss into the blender and felt a bit violent as I started the motor. After blending, the mixture sounded alive; it simmered, full of noise as oxygen was released in little explosions. I felt a moment of fear for what I’d done. Figure 26. The feel of the forest With the edgy fragrance of earth and the smell of green in my apartment, I began making marks with a brush but eventually had to use my hands because the brush kept me too far from the work. I was a bit dissatisfied with the colour qualities: they were pale and vague after the markings dried. I wanted to add a bit of distinction to the blur, some particles of light but I wanted them to spill out from the image without controlling their placement too much. To do so, I cut shapes from a paper, placed it on the image, filling in the openings with white pastel without looking beneath the template as I worked. The movement from shape to shape calmed me. Pastel felt more satisfying in the way it stuck to the image but I preferred the encounter of squeezing colour of the world, smudging the materiality of qualities against each other. In adding the markings of my forest walk, I endeavoured to 117 add qualities that might augment the significance of Irwin’s work and also revitalize it towards new possibility. The reworked images are included on the next pages. Figure 27. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 Figure 28. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 118 Figure 29. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 Figure 30. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 119 Figure 31. Liminal Lights series II, Rita L Irwin & Valerie Triggs, 2011 Concluding discussion Liminal Lights and its movement registers with teacher education qualitative methods and pedagogies in three important ways: The world’s qualities compel selves to feel belonging to what they do not know and therefore qualities cannot be barricaded by standards. Art practice is a way of reminding the body of the world summoning and of the body’s capacity to reposition in qualitative response. Thirdly, qualities carry an open- ended sociality that reaches through and beyond the limitations of experimentation with the human body’s structure and organization, to the continuity of life itself. Not knowing A significant shift for teacher education research and practice will be away from quality as instrumental, functional, representational or interpretive, and towards evidencing potential in qualities that contain the form that is to be defined, exploring them as realities sustaining their own movement. Attempting to reduce and then reconstitute quality’s liminality does not work because bodily structures of all kinds necessitate liminal movement in their co-functioning. Instead, beginning in movement already underway loosens any in-between of pregiven structures. Furthermore, tying quality back to ideas or subjects or barricading qualities with standards diminishes selves that feel a continuity with themselves and feel for the histories and experiences of others. 120 Creative practices offer opportunity for feeling capacities for repositioning towards that which holds everything together, which is the not yet of inquiry of what a body can do, whether it is becoming a teacher, a series of images, a pedagogical strategy, a theoretical framework or a research method. Agamben (2011) argues that a contemporary understanding of what has theologically been called the glorious body, is not another body but the body itself, at the moment when it slips beyond functionality in its openness to new possible uses. In the abstraction of body movement, there is no instrumental competence for teacher education, just an essential liveliness that can be amplified or constricted. Reminding Art reminds the body of the world inciting us to recreate ourselves and of the body’s capacity to reposition in response. Qualities are images of vitality effects with which images almost merge but yet run on from. We need images to see movement and we make images of self as the world’s movement lures us. These are practices that art amplifies. Seeking to cultivate art practices, teacher education methods might forefront sensitivities to forces in the world that work through and beyond the human body. Art images are themselves eventful. Art involves elements of “a composition of forces”, striving for “precision of feeling without making claim to exhaustive meaning” (Thain, 2008, Here/now, para. 1). There is also potential in artists’ words and writing. The landscape too, is filled with marks of interaction with moving forces of change, dense with story, myth and feeling. Beginning in the midst of movement, art reminds methods to reposition to meet the rigor of being at least as complex, flexible and multifaceted as either moving bodies or moving world. Learning to feel “what liminal practices might look like, how teachers may embody liminal practices and how liminal communities might be created” (Irwin & Leggo, 2006) can also begin with repositioning to what is already happening in terms of the practice of research-creation (Thain, 2008). The experience that art intensifies and amplifies does not exist solely inside ourselves nor in relations apart from the material world. Instead, as Dewey (1934) argues, the self is re-fused in fullest intercourse with the environment. We are carried out beyond ourselves 121 to find ourselves in the movement of qualities that augment our sense of self. Quality compels us to continually repose the propositioning of the world and what a body can do, not as a problem, but with anticipation that movement of all bodies, even nonhuman bodies and bodies of forces, correspond in some way. Engagement with art is suggested not only to make more creative teachers, researchers or artists but rather for learning to find creative movement everywhere and to respond to it in every educational act that we do. Open-ended sociality In conclusion, Professor Irwin’s offering of Liminal Lights for re-marking put images into relation with other qualities of movement. The catalysis of quality that bodies add to the world is more particular than context and its affects linger; each carries bits of the feel of the earth and perhaps the forest, places that matter to us. Massumi (2002) writes that experience’s actualizations are left with “movement residue” (p. 7): futural anticipation. He explains experience leaves as much past as future, past that does not pass because it is coming as future, able to reignite movement through feeling. Rather than any simplicity of opposition, quality calls to quality, their recursive durations meld together, modulate each other. At any point there is opportunity for re-education, each element of Irwin’s images is open to change, to additions, to taking its lines elsewhere, to transforming its colours. Extending movement to other bodies such as bodies of educational disciplines, research and practice offers revitalization as qualities enter into composition with other qualities. No logic alone is flexible enough or abstract enough to address movement’s movement and as Dewey notes, nothing is exclusively human. Bennett (2010) invokes Spinoza’s idea of bodies as conative, striving to enhance their power of movement in relation to other bodies. She shares his faith that everything in the universe is made of the same liminal substance. Can this faith be lived alone? In attending to Irwin’s texts, it seems not; references to community appear throughout Irwin’s writing: Making our practices daily practice, that is, artmaking, teaching and learning for both ourselves and others is about inquiring and creating daily movements into liminal places that evoke ideas and images. Qualities of colour, sound, fragrance, 122 touch, pattern, rhythm, become meditative places for moving to create new understandings in a community of creators. Finding the feel of potential in that quality of light that revitalizes her, Irwin shares that she is moved, “longing for more” (in Irwin, Leggo & Triggs, 2010, p. 6), for renewal, for a connection to the spiritual, and through the abstractness of the image that she is exploring, “the concreteness of the breath of life…within my body creating the image” (2010, p. 5). The liminality of quality resounding with quality is a key concept of our shared belonging to the planet. Teacher education methods and practices are not meant to stop the world’s movement nor give final word in its controversies, but to inspire and stimulate its potential of associations that overflow purpose or expectation. Through art practices, teacher education has the potential for liminal communities that reposition selves as artists, researchers and teachers in the dynamic resonations of the world’s light, to the feeling of other, to relationality outside its terms, where we are touched by our capacities for belief in being affected and for affecting more than our selves and our methods. 123 ……………….. Studio note, January 2010 Figure 32. What else can a day do? Repeat. Differently. Every day is perfection. A singular day stands equally for all days, makes the threshold over which it passes and defines the understandability of all days of which it is a part and which at the same time it creates. This is not metaphoric thinking but analogic logic. Rather than confirming a certain sensible likeness the day produces a likeness by means of a method, one that is always at play at its threshold where a glow is just now being added to perfection. The glow comes with the day’s two-sided unraveling. At the moment where the day exhausts itself in undecidability, possibility emerges. The next chapter inquires into how feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting are the site of production that generates constituted reality and which in turn are partially generated by the actual. These feelings are the vast silent adhesives of our shared ecology needing both sustenance in their decoherence, and autonomy in their coherences. Always necessarily aside from what appears, art and aesthetic practice offer opportunity for re-positioning in new openness. This chapter engages the parable beyond its traditional literary form to reposing the paradox of repeatedly resituating contrasts, with philosophers who find experience in the movement of feelings of capacity to affect and to be affected. It inquires into the necessary sustenance for experience to proliferate. The inquiry is intended for preliminary appreciation regarding educational experience that does not have a solely human face but rather, is experience in one of its manifest operations. 124 Chapter Six Narcissistic Experience, Vagrant Affects In the well-known Greek myth, the beautiful boy was wrongly named Narcissus. Told as such, it missed the story of salvation, of making pleasurable aesthetics and instead, taught morals, ideas less interesting. The name of the boy might have been Ovid or Augustus or Photius but not Narcissus. Narcissus was instead, experience itself. The river in the sunlight adapts to the way Narcissus apprehends, to the way Narcissus finds his image in them beautiful. The light on the water is not beautiful for itself, only for Narcissus, and maybe also for us. Narcissus lures the river and moves the boy, while remaining indifferent. Narcissus touches the river but the river cannot grasp or lay hold of Narcissus or make the moment last. The moment of the encounter cannot be recovered once it is gone, only born again in another event. Experience is a yellow and blue planet in relation to sunlight from another time. In general, in comparison to larger catastrophic changes, not too much happens in its everyday matters; but in particular, things are always about to happen or have already happened. The planet is always already rustling at its edges towards tomorrow and yesterday has already slipped away. What matters most is the movement-slip, the smudging at the edges of things. This does not seem a separate faculty or power but rather what is passing away or just now coming in a singularity of conditions adapting themselves to the pushiness of outer impressions. The movement of experience is real but does not begin or end at any particular or locatable points in traditionally empirical space. It comes first because it makes the qualitative world where situations come to light. Experience is not the kind of abstraction with which values might be assessed or distinct strategies employed, but rather, a force of polarized reflection that includes the inseparability and contemporaneousness of experience’s disjunctive dimensions. Massumi (2002) argues that linguistic models of automatic pattern recognition, literary frameworks in which an author controls reference determination, and assumptions of experience as discursively constructed and entirely mediated, are not broad enough, nor abstract enough to convey a semiotics that is willing to engage in the duality of continuity and contingency of the imaginary. The educational query in this paper asks how we might address experience as something generative, 125 something that happens too fast to be actual, (which is what Massumi [2002] calls the virtual), and yet is produced out of actual occasions. The particular authors whom I have engaged in this study are significant in what might be called a century-old “affective turning” in philosophies and methods where the movement of experience is located in a force closely related to sensation but not restricted to subjective emotion, direct intention, nor biological or historical determination. I refer to these authors in attempting a contribution to accounts of locating the movement of experience in affect. Affects are feelings of capacities for being affected and for affecting. They are objective inheritances from the past that re-enact feelings felt, though in subtly different ways, precisely to the extent that the subject feels capacity for being affected by and able to affect inheritance from the past, as well as the additional relational factors in the universe in their futural coming together of the present. Affects are relational, absolutes (not parts of wholes), and also infinite. This is a functional distinction that means that affects continually include experience’s movement of distance from itself, meaning that experience continually emerges. This distinction is important because it that eliminates many unfounded gaps, including those conjectured between everyday matters and larger systemic change, between subject and object, or between theory and practice. Polarities, instead, are found together in experience, as contrasts, both on the same side of their own capacities for becoming unknowable and also for becoming more than they were. Rekindling the custom of the parable in this research, I explore the jouissance of experience’s nature through a variety of thinkers that in similarity to the parable, speculate imaginatively enough to trace experience’s movement as external, yet never separate; irreducible to history or social structures, yet needing both. Benjamin’s theory of experience for example and indeed his own fragments of uncompleted projects, negate a view of a developmental history of affect but instead suggest ways in which every remembered scent or quality evoked, reverberates between scraps of past and their torn- edged sense of a more that might have been, more that might yet be. 126 My writing revisits memories of growing up on “object lessons” in which the paradoxes of eternity were found in the aesthetics of the everyday. Most memorable were small booklets titled, Our Daily Bread23. These monthly publications, offered little analogies, simplistic parables, metaphoric references that were meant to engage thoughts and actions, toward habits that would glorify God. At breakfast, my parents faithfully insisted on reading aloud the ascribed daily writing as well as the Biblical reference that was included. Other mornings, the instructional booklet was abandoned for the maxims of wisdom found in the book known as Proverbs, thought to be written largely by Solomon seven hundred years before Aristotle and Plato, or the parables of Jesus, which seemed to express both the multiplicity of the absolute, the education of infinity yet also the boundaries of moral expectation. Despite frequent impatience with this routine as a teen, the repetitions of parabolic thinking are still qualities of my living and moving in the world. Herbert Lockyer (1963) explains that in parables, “an image is borrowed from the visible world and is accompanied by a truth from the invisible or spiritual world” (p. 17). They are not the same as allegories according to Lockyer, which bring teaching out of the past with a literal interpretation told by a figurative one. Allegories, as defined by Fredric Jameson (2001) always arise from a crisis of representation regarding a particular historical issue and a need to tell the narrative of a solution. Allegories carry less of the hidden and mysterious, and instead represent or imply that one thing is the other. Parables, on the other hand, attract, stir up, excite affectations, arrest and hold attention. Lockyer (1963) believes they even leave something with the careless or the childish, to interpret and understand later. Although either term might actually be suitable, I use the term parable rather than allegory, in hopes that it might better indicate experience as absolute, yet limited to just one instance, in the sense that each encounter of experience is something entirely new, rather than another reality running alongside other realities and rather than insinuating a 23 RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. 127 generality from a particularity. My use of the parable seeks an image, an art form for something that is incommunicable, something that can only be followed in body- movement rather than immediately understood. Furthermore, I retain my sense of the parable from biblical stories that in childhood, carried an other-wordliness into the everyday for me, and through which I am optimistic about the parable’s conveyance of the aesthetics of experience at its fringes. In graduate studies, I have been intrigued by writers who separate themselves from forceful moral lessons, writing in ways that are indirect and aesthetic, as does Massumi, for example, finding subjective importance in both the concreteness and abstractness of subjects and relations as well as in the practicality of how the body moves, senses, feels, and who are willing to imagine what is not included in what is included. I am drawn to writers who find the polarities of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic historical debate within the movement of bodies and who propose powerful philosophical syntheses about the reception of sensation in ways which add notions of the Absolute, even verging on the theological. Immanuel Kant’s (in Shaviro, 2009) radical epistemological turn towards understanding the conditions of possible experience ask what it is to have an experience as if from outside of it. His speculation asks what we should know, do, hope. The philosophers that have engaged me have transformed Kant’s transcendental idealism to transcendental empiricism, asking questions instead, from within experience, such as how can it be that there is—always, something new and how do we newly live this newness? They ask about the world’s persistence in perpetually renewing itself, rather than identifying it as static—about its continual becoming other, rather than wiping away its generativity in believing it as fixed. They tend towards a faith that there is more to experience than subjective ownership of it. These thinkers follow Galileo-like, the parabolic curves of projectile experience under the influence of attraction. Alfred North Whitehead (largely from Shaviro, 2009), Herbert George Mead, William James, Walter Benjamin (in Caygill, 1998), Alicia Juarrero (1999/2002), and Brian Massumi, in various transdisciplinary ways, turn idealism and empiricism into concrete pragmatics and yet in general, consider abstraction as the unleashing of real potential 128 rather than a subtraction from what is already actualized. Experience for these authors is deemed for other experience rather than solely for the grafting of an object or a human. Howard Caygill (1998) interprets Benjamin in writing that strategic experience has been shown to be untrue by the experience of war, economy, hunger and morals. Humanity’s relationship with all of nature is connected to the ways in which we imagine experience as mechanical, based on the motion of objects as perceived by a subject, or as a technology of creativity. To render understandings of a world in which we are inextricably connected to the simultaneous concreteness and abstractness of nonhuman entities, there is a need for current images of pragmatic technologies that like the parable or the analogy, transmit continuously variable physical quantities, rather than only those with deconstructable parts that work together in machines to perform certain pre- designated tasks, or through digital technologies whose weaknesses are their abilities to actualize without generating anything truly different. The work of these writers is not directly patched into each other nor do I fully extrapolate the complexities and nuances of their arguments or extensively analyze the scope of how one differs from that of another. Their work does not necessarily fit into conventional disciplinary boundaries, but each offer, I think, a reconstruction of the nature and wonder of experience beyond a traditional epistemology. As a beginning scholar with a background in art rather than eloquence, now engaged in what is an intimidatingly long and well-established tradition of thought and exchange, this work will only indicate a beginning of finding a place within it. I hope, as I compare and add to forerunning ideas, to make something that might augment experience in virtue of its technologies and which might, at any juncture, offer to educational research, impetus for an aesthetics of experience that augments and adds to the sociality of our ecological connectedness. At the risk of generating impatience by reducing vast and brilliant philosophical viewpoints, I begin by providing short synopses of what I think are the selected authors’ general convictions about experience from their own work as well as from interpretations of their work. Subsequently, I look across emergent themes to 129 explore the nature of experience more fully and in conclusion, consider briefly how educational research might benefit from these speculations. Summarizing May you, with equal success… burst the bonds of any synthesis which would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional tendencies are our only avenues of approach. William James, 1897/2006, p. 133 I cannot pretend, as William James discourages anyway, that I will not leave out much of the following thinkers’ accounts of relations of reality, but will instead, attempt to summarize some of their important insights regarding experience in terms of its affects. William James (1912/2003) describes experience as “a process in time whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others” (p. 33). His thesis (1912/2003) is that experience is the only primal material in the world and it is what everything is composed of. There is however, “no general stuff of which experience at large is made” (p. 14) but rather “as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced” (p. 14, emphasis in original). James argues, “one bit of pure experience is always made up of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not” (p. 14), experience is “plain, unqualified actuality… a simple that” (p. 12). This primal material, however, moves in two directions at once. James explains that every piece of experience has a fundamental duality in that it can exist as itself in the singularity of its qualities as well as in other experiences embedded within each of its details in endless multiplicity. Yet each occasion also moves in relation to other experience and enters into infinitely varied relations with one another. Thus, much of experience comes as “an insufficient and consists of process and transition” (p. 37), in which relations relate, always coloured by a “more” that continuously develops. Experience’s ‘colours’ then become generative conditions for the very processes that produced them. 130 James writes that experience is feeling or sensation but only as felt and it can be felt in many ways at once but it is not felt by itself. Experience is instead, “an affair of relations” (p. 6) and the “objective nucleus” (p. 34) of everyone’s experience is their body which is a continuous perception. Ralph Perry (1911) in his study of James concurs: The individualized self is thus a peculiar assemblage or field of elements, which comes at all times with our body at its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest… The body is the storm centre, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles around it, and is felt from its [body’s] point of view (p. 7). The body’s experience of feeling is described by James (1909/1996) as a fringe, an intensity felt by the body, what Massumi (2002) and Shaviro (2009) might call an immediate set of potentials that emerge within each actualization. James also describes each experience as having its own subjective fringe of potential before consciousness which can never be entirely knowable to the consciousness of another. Consciousness, itself, makes another experience in its further assessment of selection and rejection, emerging with another set of potentials. Each actualization or repetition of self that selects from a plurality of worldly impressions is a function of experience that is a product of the degrees of reception of capacities for being affected and of affecting. They are part of what James describes as the world’s “vast analogical series” (1909/1996, p. 156). Furthermore, argues James, “equally continuous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves” (1912/2003, p. 34, parentheses in original). Each experience cannot be separated out from its locatedness in the world. While James (in Shaviro, 2009) describes emotion as one sort of experience, Whitehead argues that the basis of all experience is emotion: the “affective tone is the form through which the experience constitutes itself” (in Shaviro, 2009, p. 4). “How we feel is more fundamental than the epistemological and hermeneutical questions that are the focus of most philosophy and criticism” (Whitehead, in Shaviro, 2009, p. 47). Shaviro, like Whitehead, uses the terms affect and feelings interchangeably, assigning their interchangeability according to Massumi’s explanation of affect which is “primary, 131 nonconscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifiying, unqualified and intensive whereas emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a content that can be attributed to an already constituted subject” (in Shaviro, 2009, p. 47). Although emotion is contextual, affect inhabits the passages of precontext and postcontext. Whitehead, like James, believes that there is nothing outside of experience and no experience without a subject; the whole universe consists of “elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects” (in Shaviro, p. 11). The basic condition of experience as feeling is, “intrinsic to the very course of any experience in space and time” (Whitehead, in Shaviro, p. 53) opening the way to an affect based account of experience in which experience inhabits its own change. Everything that happens in the universe is in some sense an episode of feeling and phenomena are always felt and grasped as “modes of feeling” before they can be cognized and categorized, “conditions for understanding” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 56). Benjamin replaced the primacy of Kant’s time and space with colour which like feeling, as feeling, enfolds forces outside the visible spectrum or range of categories, forces too small, too large, too subtle, or simply too differently difficult. Both colour and feeling offer a particular inexhaustible complexity oriented to selection from their singular multiplicities; both offer perceptions outside of any particular perception. Neither involves just the particular and as Massumi (2002) notes, this “singularly sense[s] the multiplicity of the potential for perceptions it connectively envelopes” (p. 93). The subject is important to Whitehead but his broad scope of thought also includes as subject, that which is not necessarily human. While commending Kant’s brilliance in introducing experience as a constructive functioning, Whitehead (in Shaviro, 2009) corrects what he calls Kant’s “excess of subjectivity” (p. 11) in Kant’s idea of the world emerging from the subject (the self) and insists instead that the subject emerges from the world which implies that there is a world of experience already underway, apart from any particular subject. Everything has experiences and “being affected” is the experience of experience. Every experience, every feeling, is simultaneously “an inheritance from the past and a fresh creation” (p. 61) and both of these dimensions are captured within an 132 “open affectivity” (2009, p. 65). Although affect might be hard to fathom in terms of rocks for example, Whitehead considers that they also experience: for example, in being affected by the earth’s dynamics in terms of gravity and they likewise affect the earth in terms of soil types, or air currents and climate. George Herbert Mead (1938) speculates that human experience has evolved from earlier achievement of the technologies of the physical object and that experience is a process of constantly assuming new form and yet remaining the same process of a changing process. Experiences are not aspects of absolute reality of which parts are restricted or imperfect copies but instead experience is “a complete slab or stratification of nature within a certain duration or temporal spread” (p. 330). An experience does not last but out of it arises that which does last which is the continuity of movement in passage across completed events that only appear retrospectively. Benjamin (in Caygill, 1998) situated experience between memory of the past and anticipation of the future. Through initiating a series of reflections on rainbows, he developed a form for experience that could contain both: the present wrapped in inexplicable ways with pasts that were never actualized and with futures of pure potential. In this way, Benjamin’s experience is not only tradition, wisdom that passed from one generation to the next but is also, the imagination of infinity. He describes experience as in itself, “beautiful, the harmony in which canon and work are the same” (p. 12). Totality is immanent to experience and defines Benjamin’s all-at-once conception of experience which contains the elements that exceed it. Distance is built right in. From his study of rainbows, Benjamin understood that, experience, like colour, is not form but, “an image of eternity” (p. 59). Experience is folded into and exceeds the particular exterior readability of an event, allowing Benjamin to conceive of a double infinity: Any particular experience is but one of the infinite perceptions possible within a set of conditions of possible experience, which is then supplemented by being “but one of an infinite set of possible surfaces or conditions of experience” (p. 4). 133 Massumi’s (2002) understanding of experience also acknowledges its two-sided varieties of movement. He asserts the exteriority of experience to the terms of its relation. Experience is constructed by a particular context which is in part language-determined and yet insists or persists outside of linguistic specification. Experience, for Massumi, is a “lived topological event” (p. 206); “it is the event of experience folding back on itself for its own furtherance, its continuing becoming” (p. 206). Every event of experience is always double. Feelings of capacities to affect have to be experienced with something that has the capacity to be affected. For example a knife has a capacity (a feeling or an affect) to cut but is experienced with something that has the capacity to be cut (to be affected). Otherwise, capacity (affect) cannot be experienced. Furthermore, one side of experience is the autonomy of a qualitative world, a co-motion (commotion) of mutual nonexclusion” (p. 213), and the other is in the functional limitation of the actual, one side just now coming and another just now slipping away. Benjamin (in Caygill, 1998) describes experience as immanent absolute, capable of containing the elements that exceed it. Juarrero (1999/2002) describes its complex network as “structured structuring structures” (p. 141), a combination of Spinoza’s “naturing nature as an inexhaustible impersonal reserve of giving self-activity” (in Massumi, 2002, p. 238). Whitehead sees God as that inexhaustible impersonal reserve of giving: “at once, a creature of creativity and a condition for creativity. It [God] shares this double character with all creatures” (in Shaviro, 2009, p. 23). For Whitehead, God is experience as self-cause, both product and process of experience. Affect is a shorthand term for experience that moves in opposing directions and runs on feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting. Although Juarrero (1999/2002) writes about action theory and is referring only to intentional behaviour, it seems reasonable that she would describe experience as she does action, as a complex dynamical system. For her, an action (and I extend this to experience just as she correlates Kantian ideas about experience to action theory) has two parts: intention and movement. She argues that complex adaptive systems are essentially historical. They embody in their structure, the conditions under which they were created, 134 including the chance events around which each self-organized stage reorganizes. “Each new step in a sequence of evolving dissipative structures represents a qualitative change in the system’s organization” (Juarrero, 1999/2002, p. 124). The system is a structure of process, not something concrete yet, “their interlevel relationships, however tangled, are real, not just epistemological” (p. 129). Instead of situating experience explicitly in time as Benjamin, she uses vertical terminology such as hierarchy, in which interlevel causal relations flow in both directions: top-down and bottom-up. Juarrero claims that action theory needs an account of “how the content of an intention, as meaningful, can inform and flow into behavior such that action actualizes the content of that intention” (p. 5). It seems that in studying the dynamics of action, she explores how the movement of experience works, although action according to Massumi (2002) is only one aspect of the infinite levels of resonating play within experience including “language, expectation and suspense, body depth and epidermis, past and future, action and reaction, happiness and sadness, quiescence and arousal, passivity and activity” (p. 33). Despite appearing to reduce somewhat, the complexity of experience, Juarrero’s complex systems arguments have much to offer to this discussion on experience in terms of its plausibility for understanding experience in purely physicalist terms. In my contemplation of these writers, whom, aside from Juarrero, I will call affect philosophers, I have not correlated each of their perspectives in every way, either within their own work nor when considered side by side. Because I have not directed attention to analyses of entire lifetimes of speculative philosophy nor attempted to fully invent a new speculative philosophy I am relieved to read Perry’s (1911) belief that even in an historical period when networks of ideas filled lifetimes of theorizing and reasoning, “every philosophical system suffers from accidental emphasis due to the temporal order of production and to the exigencies of controversy” (p. 1). The following sections articulate, in order: the continuity of experience, its anticipatory luring of desire, the deep dimension of its becoming, the satisfactions that increase 135 intensity, the identifying of a subject, the imaginative work of reflection, and finally, a short conclusion in terms of education. Continuing The island is what the sea surrounds and what we travel around… is as though the island had pushed its desert outside. What is deserted is the ocean around it. It is by virtue of circumstance, for other reasons than the principle on which the island depends, that ships pass in the distance and never come ashore. Gilles Deleuze, 2004, p. 11 It seems that we are forever indebted to something that escapes us. The loop of experience, as Massumi imagines, is strangely open, continually bringing something new and unexpected yet which often seems vaguely familiar. Experience complicates our relation with the familiar because it includes what is already past, yet a past which is filled with expectancy, ready to flood in on present perception. As far back as we go, James (1912/2003) argues, the flux of experience is that of things conjunct and separate. Experience comes and fills itself with emphases, becomes “identified and fixed and abstracted” (p. 94) and what he calls pure experience continues through these discontinuities to “the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies” (p. 94). James writes, In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously (p. 49). Massumi (2002) describes experience as open-endedly social, prior to any of the many distinctions but also of the distinctions. Descriptions of experience as everyday existence, process, passage (Shaviro, 2009), continuous and ongoing, absolutely primal (James, 1912/2003), occur coincidentally with descriptions of experience as actuality (James, 1904), something radically new (Shaviro, 2009), all at once (Benjamin, in Caygill, 1998). Affect thinkers do not seem reluctant to address the discrepancy of experience as both the transformational rush of the world, and also as actualization, each anticipating one another. 136 James (in Massumi, 2002) explains that every experience as experienced, introduces something new to the world: “Reality [experience] snowballs” (p. 12). The English language does not seem to have a word for the continuum of both continuity and discontinuity, for the inseparability of each within the transformation of the other, for becoming what one has not yet become and may yet never be. Whitehead (1929/1978) sketches it as follows: In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence (p. 338) Shaviro writes (2006) that for Whitehead, everything is subject to the rule of “perpetual perishing”: no thinker thinks twice; and, even more generally, no subject experiences twice” (Whitehead/Levinas, 08.11.2009, para. 5). “Death and resurrection are banal occurrences; and concern is not an epochal encounter, but an everyday experience” (para. 5). Mead sees a need to clarify for Whitehead’s (in Shaviro, 2009, p. 19) merging of content in experience in which actual occasions24 “only become and perish” (p. 110) subsisting only as raw material anticipating transformation within new experience. Mead argues that they are more than unbroken instantaneous acts but rather a divergence of different motions. Mead (1938) explains, “at the future edge of experience things pass. Their characters change and they go to pieces” (p. 344). As a process that lasts, experience is the “actual future” (p. 349). Also in clarification, James writes that we do not necessarily sense the passing from one moment to another, James writes that “the sameness of object and interest is unbroken since both earlier and later experiences are directly lived; there is no break felt in this continuity of experience. James (1912/2003) urges his contemporaries towards understanding: Its [Experience’s] unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It comes unbroken as that…as a singular which I 24 P. 17 Shaviro (2009) summarizes Whitehead’s differentiating of occasion and event in which occasion is “the process by which anything becomes” (p. 18), and event is a series or a nexus or society of such occasions or an “enduring object” (p. 18). It is possible that an event might be just one particular occasion. 137 encounter; they come broken as those takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity and separateness are strictly co-ordinate” (p. 49 italics in original). They come together like the parable. Rather than separateness of experience being secondary coagulations, they are experience’s unity. Although singularities of experience approach experience in endless fashion, experience never reaches its form that experience’s encounters continually co-substantiate. In order to be truly continuous, Massumi (2002) argues that experience must be an insensible body: its unity of movement and feeling purely virtual, running alongside the body as its incorporeal phase. When movement is in process, it cannot be indexed to anything outside itself, only to its own potential to vary; what it will be has not yet been made known. In moving it withdraws into an all-encompassing reflective relation with what it will be. Experience is, as Whitehead (in Shaviro) believes, altogether virtual potential yet it cannot sustain itself in its exteriority, needing continually to be born again through actualizations of embodiment. Anticipating Anticipation is making me late. Carly Simon, 1971 Once experience happens, it is already over, leaving change to mark its event. Massumi (2002) argues that one of the dimensions of experience is that it is open-endedly social. It is located purely in relation which pertains to “the openness of the interaction rather than to the interaction per se or to its discrete ingredients” (p. 225, italics in original). Caygill (1998) in his study of Benjamin adds: “for Benjamin [the] transformation of experience is already in train, and every option, whether compensatory, affirmative or destructive and negative expresses a decision taken with respect to it” (p. 32). No actuality can be fully imaged since it rather, “emerges from, projects into and recedes into inactuality” (Massumi, p. 136). Once the con-found (found together [p.172]) is over, the terms in experience’s actualizations are left with what Massumi calls “movement residue” (p.7): futural anticipation. He explains that the activity experience leaves, is as much past as future: past that does not pass because it is coming as future. 138 Anticipation is described by Whitehead (in Shaviro, 2009) as a body readying itself for experience, the doubling of actual experience in which there is felt capacity for being affected and for affecting. This is, for Whitehead, the space of passion whose elementary units are degrees of intensity, or what might be said to be felt degrees of future tending. Anticipatory behaviour is not an answer to how desire gets actualized but rather, for Whitehead, how actual experiences adapt themselves to potential relations. Shaviro (2009) explains the difference between desire and passion based on his study of Kant who postulated that desire produces the real: “Desire is active and expressive: it comes out of the subject and legislates for the world” (p. 8), a mobilization of force that bears evidence of the expectation of form even if not successfully attaining it. Empirical actions never fully conform to authoritative forms of reason however, and thus, Shaviro differentiates desire from passion: [Passion] emerges out of the world and approaches, or proposes itself to, the subject…the subject is not so much acted upon as it is incited to re-create itself. Desire is how the self projects itself into, and remakes, the world; aesthetic feelings is how the world projects itself into, and remakes, the self (p. 9) Although passion is “superfluous and supplemental” (Shaviro, p. 7), it is yet inescapable. Passion is utterly gratuitous, according to Massumi (2002) and has nothing to do with our needs which consequently renders us both historical and accidental, both ongoing and one of a kind: universal and singular. Massumi claims that passion is one of the dimensions entirely left out of consideration by cognitive psychology. Although passion coming out of the world is its own experience, it is difficult to conceive of by itself without the empirical temporal entities of nature that they inform. We might think of it as the world’s storehouse of qualitative energy consisting for example of thermal, sonorous, phantasmic, optical, and linguistic effects, of futurity combined with past, where products of experience co-exist, coalesce, connect and interfere. These are the energies made by the movements of all bodies. Organized differently than actual events of experience, they enter into relations with each other and impinge on previously constituted subjects, moving them, driving them, taking possession of them, but always remaining apart from them and outside of any complete control. Appearing only on the 139 horizon, they are already near, always anticipating a chance to spiral back in to actual occasions. Juarrero (1999/2002) is also concerned with anticipation in experience but for her, it is of meaning, how semantic meaning is embodied by humans in experience. She explains that humans as complex dynamic systems “recalibrate in response to persistent interactions” (p. 166) with the environment. In other words, she wonders how affects are embodied. Engaging a strictly naturalistic explanation for experience, Juarrero (1999/2002) discusses a hierarchical system in which layers of input or output units connect to other layers of units as well as units within units and so on. In analyzing the neural network of the brain, she claims connections include not only those between units within certain neurological layers but also connections back to earlier units in other layers creating a “recurrent network” (p. 166). Juarrero argues that even if input is incomplete or unclear, feedback (recurrence) from recurrent connections in other layers allow the network to function properly in repeating the connection, creating attractors which gradually, after persistence and many adjustments, eventually settle into a characteristic pattern. She believes that this establishes an embodied semantic meaning because the emergent properties embody a word’s meaning or sense in the way in which the relationships are organized. In other words, the human anticipates a representation and later or higher levels or layers of complex units interact with the connection to attract and constrain it. Basically, if a human understands at body level that which affects it, it then responds. Juarrero’s terminology for human action as an autopoietic complex systems often sounds as though it does not transcend actual occasions of experience, something that Mead (1938) was at one time worried about in regards to the arguments of James and Whitehead. Based on the abstractness of experience’s concreteness, Juarrero’s astute arguments might benefit if positioned more solidly on a continuity-discontinuity-place- to-place-future-past continuum in which entities coincide with their potential which is the future, yet return to the past to pull out their thread of presence again. Massumi (2002) 140 refers to this in the oxymoronic terms of “future-past” (p. 64). Mead (1938) offers an example of the impersonal of future past in his frequent use of the phrase “the future edge of experience” in which, for example, a plant is already reaching out to receive the sunshine that it will change itself for, lured by the virtual abstract storage of particulars previously responded to. He writes What does characterize it is its appearance in the absence of the objects to which it refers. Its recognized dependence upon past experience, i.e., its relation to objects that were present, in some sense removes this difference, but it brings out the nature of the image as the continued presence of the content of an object which is no longer present. It evidently belongs to that phase of the object which is dependent upon the individual in the situation within which the object appears. (p. 224) Mead is concerned with the surface flow of experience. In Massumi’s arguments (2002) it appears to be already underway. Although Juarrero does not elaborate on qualities and relations as being complexities themselves, Massumi writes that affect is a qualitative surplus over any quantity of personal feeling and that descriptions and qualities are their own experience. In their conveyance to present experience as potential, they smudge past and future (Massumi, 2002). Although the world’s affects do not belong to any particular subject, they must be described as subjective so that there is an understanding that they are produced by feelings. Ascribing objectivity to them would indicate instead that if a body acted in a certain way, specifiable experiences would eventuate. Juarrero’s (1999/2002) argument for intentional experience might be understood as an organism in the process of becoming, sensing from its potential to select whatever satisfies surface tension and requires the least amount of struggle in an exchange of matter and energy. This account does not seem to sufficiently recognize experience’s impersonal subjectivities, their relentless repositioning in self-love, nor the necessity of affect’s vagrant differences through which experience offers degrees of intensity which are discussed later in this paper. I am perhaps missing much of the deeper understanding that she offers, yet I wonder if the complexity model is missing a parable; one in which experience is becoming what it is not. 141 Becoming So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all. Joni Mitchell, 1970. Experience, according to Whitehead (1929/1978) is not one of the qualities of something, rather qualities are themselves experiences. Thoughts and things, for James as well, are made of the same stuff. In other words, an actual experience is everything that is said about that experience even when what is said differs, leaving us to feel, of course, that we never really know anything. Completions of actual experiences are in fact, misleading because completion is already always fulfilled at every bend. Eternal change is not a very helpful description when one is trying to find some fixed meaning. Kant complained about the meaninglessness of describing an active world as “mere restless zigzag movement” (in James, 1912/2003, p. 85). Yet, affect thinkers argue that becoming is experience’s deepest dimension and is found in each unit of experience. Because of the proposition of becoming, affect thinkers in general do not seek causes and reasons for experience’s continual transformation, finding any preceding chain of causality to be part of experience and therefore not counting as the origin of it. Juarrero (2002), however, attempts to reconceptualize how the content of an intention as meaningful informs and flows into behavior that actualizes that content in complex dynamic systems. Her argument for complexity thinking within a classic causality framework25 is important to include because it strives to find an empirical source for meaningful action which is one aspect of experience’s becoming. Juarrero (2002) traces the loss of formal cause by the time of the 17th century as a result of Newtonian mechanics in which wholes became considered byproducts of component 25 Juarrero explains how modern understanding of cause came to be, by revisiting Aristotle’s four causes: final cause (the goal or purpose towards which something moves, part of the explanation such as building a house for the purpose of shelter), formal cause (that pattern that makes something its particular form as in the blueprint or explanation of a house), material cause (the source of the beginning of change or the stuff out of which something is made, such as the materials that an artist uses in their work), and lastly, efficient cause (the force that brings something into being, such as the carpenters who build a house). 142 parts. Relational qualities between things were dismissed as purely subjective and therefore secondary to essential properties which were internal to objects and could be exhibited quantitatively anytime, anywhere, such as density and mass. Juarrero (2002) explains that although Aristotle claimed that nothing moved itself, he was able to use all four causes in combination to explain self-motion as one part of an organism causing another passive part to move or change, for example the frontal cortex or free will. When Aristotle’s ban on self-cause was combined with a Newtonian rejection of formal and final cause, Juarrero claims that one of the results is imagining that human existence is somehow outside of experience and that it can be had at will, and perhaps—without even being affected. Juarrero claims that causality is essential in countering reification that favors “concrete things over processes and relations, substances over properties” (p. 129). Mead (1925) disagrees, claiming that consciousness has claimed priority for some time now, in answering to processes, qualities and meaning at the same time as physical science rejected sensing and thinking from its hypothetical objects. Nonetheless, Juarrero argues effectively that complex systems are a form of self-cause, not in the sense of Aristotle’s traditional formal cause as one part forcefully impressing upon another but instead by the systems’ internal mutualist dynamics that amplify the particular space and time fluctuation, around which each unique experience situates. Complex systems are structures that are embedded in an environment that both influences and is influenced by complex systems. Complex systems dissipate into themselves in continual adaptive reorganization and do not seem committed enough to movement to turn from their focus on the organism to the fullness of what sustains it. Massumi (2002) and Shaviro (2009) are vocal in their rejection of full causality and any desire for reproduction. Believing that causes have the power to generate or prevent their effects diminishes for Whitehead, Shaviro argues, the complication and ambiguity of the movement of experience, as well as the value of experiences that do not produce what is already anticipated. Massumi (2002) considers embodied meaning to involve regularities rather than regulations of cause. They each refer to Leibniz’s term, quasi-causality which 143 is experience’s own doubled effect: “looking forward, it induces the process of actualization: looking backward, it is an expression of that process” (p. 37). It is movement’s condition of novelty or singularity operating on the coming together of experience and its unity. Part of its self-generating capacity involves affects that it holds in potential but are always more than any singular event. Quasi-cause operates directly on the coming together; it is about openness rather than determinism and dynamic unities rather than parts. It runs through containment as the quality of continuing activity through which objects of experience escape contextual containment. Affect or feeling is the continuation, invested only in ongoing continuity: its own. Affect or feeling is the self-continuity of experience. Massumi (2002) writes that it is “the invisible glue that holds the world together” (p. 217). According to Massumi, the complex self-continuity of putting into relation of movement to itself, self-relation, immediately summons feeling. James (1912/2003) argues “real, effectual causation….is just what we feel it to be” (p. 85). It seems at first glance that quasi-causality might connect to Juarrero’s (1999/2002) determination of self-organization in an autopoietic system, whose structure of process exerts active power on its parts in such a way that the overall system is maintained and enhanced. For Ezequiel Di Paulo (2005), however, autopoiesis does not fully articulate how organisms monitor and generate responses nor the significance of the way in which adaptivity allows the system to appreciate its own death in a “graded and relational manner while it is still alive” (p. 10). Autopoiesis may not fully convey experience’s potential for more than self-preservation and self-reproduction, or for the creation of something truly other. Considering self-organization, Shaviro (2009) describes quasi-causality as “a principle of creativity that transcendentally neither copies the actual nor prefigures it” (p. 37). Quasi- causality has to do with effects that relate to other effects and may not be only actual but also as Deleuze imagines: “incorporeal, ideational, fictive working not to constrain things to a predetermined destiny but to assure the full autonomy of the effect” (in Shaviro, p. 144 85). It is a transmission between and including both corporeal and incorporeal qualities. Splitting the causal relation in a quasi-causality preserves or grounds freedom for experience by not necessitating full causality. Although experience is partially causally determined, it retains its movement to the extent that it doubles the actualization with a counter-actualization, the duality of affect. This is an aesthetic process that Shaviro (2009) defines as “adverbial rather than substantive” (p. 37); it is a process most concerned with the how’s of relation, the qualities. Affects are what make the world experience-able, inhabitable and when they are augmented, there is more potential for their reality through actualization. In other words, the potency of experience is sustained by the how’s of its relational feeling that affects in both directions. Doubling actualization with counter-actualization is not simply the repeatability of actualized experiences but rather, as Massumi (2002) argues, an immanent, immediate doubling over of dynamic abstraction on itself, even before conscious reflection. He considers that there is a movement-slip between activity and passivity. All of the decisions that were already made in the past or that could have been made but were not, or may still be made of the quasi-causality of a particular experience, slip in beside as potential. Potentiality is a real affect that is more than can be observed, which is included in an event of experience and which continues on, existing virtually. Juarrero (1999/2002) refrains from appealing to any “mysterious élan vital” (p. 131) in describing the empiricism of experience. However, Massumi describes that in the very movement of experience, the empirical or “experiential” conditions fall away and by the time actualized experience falls out fully formed, its remaindered conditions of emergence have already mysteriously reverberated in all directions. This double movement makes it impossible to tell the “superempirical from the infraempirical” (p. 152) making attempts to add to reality more significant than considering it already knowable. Whitehead (1920/2007) calls for an expanded empiricism that includes relation as quasi- cause. He claims, “The real question is, When red is found in nature, what else is found 145 there also? Namely, we are asking for an analysis of the accompaniments in nature of the discovery of red in nature” (1920/2007, p. 41, capitalization in original). Whitehead is referring to effects that can only be explained relationally, rather than causally, ascribing to experience a spatiality that is beyond current perception. Catherine Keller (2002) explains “Whitehead thawed out the metaphysical tradition of the West, melting the unchanging, eternal Reality of its Being into the turbulent flow of an endless Becoming” (p. 10). Kant’s opposition between form and content that limit each other are subsumed in experience’s continuum of becoming. Benjamin (in Caygill, 1998) argues that because of the permeation of technological organization of both bodies and nature in general, there is no place outside of the technological organization of the body from which to impose form on content since both are already technically organized. Juxtapositions between oppositions are shifted instead to contrasts, affirming a discrepant multiplicity. As Benjamin notes, totality is instead, immanent, always presented in oblique, distorted and fabulated forms. Whitehead (in Shaviro, 2009) believes that God both emerges from experience and also facilitates the passage between limitless potentiality and concrete existence of actual experience. God is quasi-cause, stimulating decisions made to complete experiences, as well as registering decisions as ones completed. Instead of referring all causes and reasons to God, Whitehead sees God as the “result… of all finite entities” (p. 25), created purely for experience’s transformation. For Whitehead, experience and God are both moved by passion, lured by love of what they are becoming. Satisfying Come on, hold my hand; I want to contact the living. Not sure I understand, this role I’ve been given. I sit and talk to god. And he just laughs at my plans. My head speaks a language I don’t understand. I’ve got too much life, running through my veins, going to waste. I need to feel real love and a life ever after. I cannot get enough. Robbie Williams, 2007. Shaviro (2009) writes that, for Whitehead, the purpose of experience is to both increase intensity and to achieve satisfaction and achieving satisfaction is possible for any entity. There are twists, however. It is not intensity that yields satisfaction but rather the other 146 way around. For Whitehead, satisfaction is the culmination of experience once passion has elicited desire and experience has become what it is not. Culminating an experience sets it at a distance rather than drawing it near which is necessary for an intensity because experience needs resonating movement for continual evolution. According to Shaviro (2009) it is by the receptive infolding of intensity, registered in each degree of transition, that location in time and space is possible. Without intensity, we do not feel capacities for affecting or for being affected by the inhabitability of the planet. Intensity is not in oppositional difference but rather in the immediacy of difference, vibrating most spiritedly in compositions of seeming incompatibles. Particular patterns of completion reiterate and when approached by the world, attract their own change. Massumi (2002) proposes that intensity is in the body’s infolding of contexts: the beginning of a selection still outside expectation and outside meaningful sequencing or even narrative form. If something does not feel like it will work, then merely its glimmer will have been sufficient. The continual achievement of satisfaction in experience yields greater or lesser degrees of intensity which fill bodies with strange possibilities. Massumi (in Zournazi, 2002) describes intensity as the “assuming of the body of its potentials” (p. 241) in a way that feels the reality of its openness. This involves the full spectrum of the intensifications of experience which can be both liberating and unbearable. Juarrero’s (1999/2002) understanding of satisfaction is one of recovering limits. Her emphasis on satisfaction involves complex dynamic systems that embody their own meaning; the system’s limits function as both constraints and attractors. In experience, space is reorganized and the attractors get reconfigured until they reach a new organizational tipping point. A sudden phase change then transitions to a reorganized neurological space embodying meaning. Juarrero emphasizes the importance of the complex system’s decision-making that constrain in order to preserve the system’s overall organization. She establishes the importance of the self in that the completion of a particular experience is “actively based on the organization’s own internal requirements for satisfaction, not the environment’s” (p. 126). Her emphasis seems to be on the workings out of what is already prefigured and envisioned as possible. Possibility 147 according to Massumi is “a variation implicit in what a thing can be said to be when it is on target” (p. 9) and as an end goal for satisfaction, yields less intensity. Shaviro (2009) situates Whitehead’s requirements for satisfaction somewhat differently than Juarrero, in which the actual world is selectively appropriated according to the particular transient affects which attach integrally to every experience: perhaps distaste, perhaps hostility, perhaps a shade of green or a quality of slowness. Though they are real, they exist only in constituting real feelings to some actual entity, but have no fixed address. The virtual realm of affects is “a field of energies that have not yet been expended, or a reservoir of potentialities that have not yet been tapped” (p. 35). Shaviro is emphasizing experience in which each actual entity manifests itself as something new without precedence or resemblance, “something that has never existed in the universe in quite that way before” (p. 35). This then, allows for the possibility of repetition—though never of the very same because satisfaction both outruns any actuality and emerges in what occurs. Identifying I’m in love with the world through the eyes of a girl who’s still around the morning after. Elliott Smith, 1997. Affect theorists do not eliminate the subject. The affective tone of experience is the subject form, through which the subject constitutes itself. Affect is what saves the subject from itself; its continual creation is what makes its reality actual. Affect is the lure which Shaviro describes as impinging on “a previously constituted subject, and forcibly ejects it from its self-constituting, and self-confirming orbit” (p. 7). Experience is “both a producer and a bearer of novelty… that expires in the very movement by which it comes into being” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 97). Shaviro explains that all entities that make decisions and are determined by those decisions perpetually perish, fading away before they can be caught in the chains of deterministic causality. Juarrero (1999/2002) argues from within a possibility framework, that understanding selves as human relational action has to begin from the assumption that people are 148 “dynamical entities” (p. 221). Shaviro writes that we don’t have feelings, but rather, our existence is suspended upon these feelings. Humans are “abstract-real processual dimensions of experience” (Massumi, 2002, p. 205) and the subject is best described as the integration or end of the dynamics of physical feelings, the satisfaction engendered by experience’s potential, that produce qualities that add to the qualitative world already underway. Massumi, following Whitehead, finds the experience of the subject reflects both the complexity of a relational self as well as the complexity of affect that Massumi considers impersonal virtual subjectivities. Shaviro (2009) describes the production of the subject by its being affected bodily through sense-perception, responding by feeling and eventually identifying or cognizing what was felt. He argues that the process of cognizing is an artistic one, “involving selection, patterning, intensification of sensory data” (p. 68). Consciousness is not needed for being affected. What makes a subject instead, is an essential unity at a decisive, indivisible instant: birth, rebirth, and its perishing again. In every moment of actualization, “a subject is entirely, irreducibly singular” (p. 13). In a critique of modern culture, Christopher Lasch (1984) laments the loss of selfhood, as part of what he terms the current culture of human narcissism. Lasch condemns the coping mechanisms for survival that he finds pervasive in society: “apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and future, a determination to live one day at a time” (p. 57). Lasch mourns for definable selves and protests what he sees as the “weakening of the distinction between the self and its surroundings” (p. 153). In terms of the theorists I have engaged in this paper, it is possible that Lasch’s “minimal selves” experience satisfactions with minimal degrees of intensity. Intensity is felt to the extent of separation that experience affords and is achieved to the degree of the strength or duration with which incompatibles are brought together. When experience is already determined by an established range of possibility, there is less availability with which to compose difference. When affect is not granted its vagrant nature, it only becomes more unknowable and more strange, too distant too register as potential (see Chapter Eight; Vedral, 2011). Furthermore, the incompatibilities that are brought together in an experience must involve the subject in its own event of becoming 149 what it is not. Massumi (2002) reminds us of the duality of experience. On the one hand we do not usually burst out of our subjectivity and for this he uses the term, mirror vision where movement is barely glimpsed in “ongoing reciprocal determinations” (p. 50). We are less familiar with “movement vision” (p. 50) however, in which we are instantly unrecognizable to ourselves. This self-distancing is absolute rather than relative which means that it is comparable only to itself rather than owing to a “shared submission to standards of comparison” (Massumi, 2002, p. 164). Shaviro (2009) claims that cognitive theories of learning miss experience as a constructive functioning when they restrict attention to overcoming a state of ignorance to come to know what has already been constructed. When experience has minimal feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected by what is other, the subject loses its soft, responsive fringes and its sensitivities to potential qualities of re-positioning; it hardens its edges to protect its minimal capacities against what seems too different. Referring to affects, James (1904) argues that there are actual forces beyond those that traditional empiricism acknowledges, that tend over time, to make the unity of the self stronger. Self-identity or subjectivity is “the manner in which I relate to myself, the expression of such an inheritance, the process by which I receive it, reflect on it, and transform it again and again” (p. 56). The subject is continually engendered from its own style, reception, and reflection; its novelty “a function of manner, rather than essence” (Shaviro, p. 56). The subject sustains itself only to the extent that it is satisfied with the feelings inspired by an experience. “Feelings cannot be separated from the subject for whom they exist – yet the subject can only be said to exist “by virtue of these feelings, and in relation to them” (p. 13) and the feelings of capacity that bodies live in and through can only continue if they escape their subjects. Furthermore, bodies need excess in their becoming and if not achieving sufficient intensity from everyday experience, availabilities direct toward more readily tangible substances, missing the movement in which their own experiences make the very inhabitability of the world that they cannot distinguish themselves from. Instead, repeated engagement in relational re-positioning of experience’s two-sided, self-transforming 150 movement makes a subject that is toned and flexible, ready to move with change rather than one that waits until external forces finally crack its hardened shell. Lasch’s (1984) discerning entreatment searches not only for a continuous self, but also for “a meaningful world….that holds a future that extends beyond the incomplete personal life of the individual” (p. 75). Although Lasch returns to a different school of thought than addressed by this paper, his urge and his observations resonate with this research. He proposes humility or at least a sense of hesitation regarding experience. Whitehead, as well, does not assume any priority of the subject in experience but rather traces its emergence running alongside that of the world, a lyric that that does not grant the human nor the rational any advantage. Every one and every thing is in the process of becoming affected and affecting. As experience loses itself and is reborn within its own taking place, what emerges are selves and impersonal subjectivities, feelings that cannot entirely be owned personally, since they emerge from and return to a qualitative world. Although we are entire experiences, our experiences are never the entirety of experience. No subject can completely control experience nor merge with experience, only repeatedly re-position within it. The identifying characteristic of a subject in terms of experience is experience itself which means its potential to vary; its feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting. Reflecting As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1942. Reflection for the purposes of education, beginning with Dewey (1933), has embraced a wide range of concepts and strategies to effect change, all of which take consciousness for granted. Mead (1906) argues however, that there are no direct and reproductive elements in what we call consciousness that do not involve stronger or weaker affective reactions. In other words, we become aware of a situation in its midst, already actively engaged in it. Whitehead (in Shaviro, 2009) argues that affect precedes cognition and has a much wider scope. James claims that consciousness as a function of knowing is explained in relations; our awareness, Massumi (2002) explains, is “always of an already 151 ongoing participation in an unfolding relation” (p. 231). Perry (1911) in his reading of James supposes that at first glance we find some particular idea or quality such as blue or round but neither are consciousness, only an experience that transports these ideas towards their own taking-place, towards a quality of blue or a quality of rough. Benjamin (in Caygill, 1998) as well, speculates that in experience, infinity informs a space and can only offer reflections of infinity which cannot be translated. In reflection, the distinction between the self and its reflection in its surroundings offers a distance that can be “crossed but not bridged” as Massumi notes, (2002, p. 48). Experience does not maintain that separation and instead generates another variation of the fullness of itself. In being apprehended by itself as an object, the subject responds by occupying both its place and the object’s, thereby departing from itself, breaking the self and other symmetry of mirror vision, to become a self as yet unknown. This is the duality of feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected. To clarify, James explains that “we do not run because we are afraid but we are afraid because we run” (in Massumi, 2002, p. 231). Experience does not just stand back and observe. Instead it takes the movement inside, becomes else in its transductive process of self-transformation. Massumi expects that conscious reflection happens only when the idea of being affected is “doubled by an idea of the idea” (p. 31). This is a self-recursion of the idea. He presumes that the idea receives or wraps itself around the affection, once by a body that infolds the effect and is automatically doubled by the repeatable form of the encounter that now exists virtually as possibility. Conscious self-reflection is a way of bringing out the idea, of its “inclusion in matter, its belonging in the same self-referential material world of which every being unfolds” (p. 128). The spontaneity with which this occurs is however, always slightly delayed. Massumi explains that Benjamin Libet’s 1970s’ studies demonstrate there is a half second delay between the onset of brain activity and conscious awareness. What happens in the delay is a fiction: awareness is anachronized so that thought experiences itself to have taken place at the exact time that the stimulus was applied. The delay carries ramifications for ideas of reflection. Massumi claims that in discovering that thought hallucinates with itself, the truth of plain and present 152 reflection is no longer accurate. Massumi’s conclusion is that “the elementary unit of thought is already a complex duration before it is a discrete perception or cognition” (p. 195). Libet’s experiments also demonstrated that if further stimuli are applied during the half second lapse, later stimuli affect the outcome of the first, and qualitative difference emerges from the interrelationality of recursive durations. Although most of this does not even come to awareness, experience is coloured with feelings or affects that exist virtually as its memory. “Every first-time perception of form is already, virtually, a memory. Perception is an intensive movement back into and out of an abstract ‘space’ of experiential previousness” (Massumi, p. 197). The significance of Libet’s experiment for Massumi, is that there appears to be no difference between perception, cognition and hallucination. Massumi fuses them as imagination, imagination that is looped into the movement of every experience. Reflection pragmatically enters the relations and experimentally, pulls strands to see what emerges. What is at stake if reflection is considered without the role of imagination, or the creative practice of quasi-cause, is what James (1909) calls “vicious intellectualism” which involves “the treating of a name as excluding from the fact what the name’s definition fails to include” (p. 37). Mead (1906) argues that imagination is always at work in all of our perceptions, working as the incorporeal phase that fills incompletions, enriches associations and projects us into the objects that perceive us. Kant’s (in Shaviro, 2009) critical concept of experience forbade intellectual feeling that included experience of the Absolute. Caygill (1998) believes, however, that reflection, for Benjamin, had the potential of becoming that forbidden feeling though Benjamin refused to locate the source of reflection in an acting subject. Reflection is a way of including the experience of the Absolute because although it renders experience as absolutely situated and resistant to standards and measurement, it is yet located independent of subjects and any particular situation in which similar things occur. In reflection, the relations of both situatedness and independence are in mutual 153 envelopment. Massumi (2002) describes them as, “folding into and out of each other in a way that makes the transitions between variations indistinct” (p. 164). There is no neutral position outside of shared empirical reality from which to reflect. Each instance of reflection provides its own trajectory as it moves from the concrete to the incorporeal with affect never left behind, always doubling like a shadow just out of perception, and yet unavoidably perceived in its effects, its origin in passion. Benjamin locates reflection in the work of art as “a living centre of reflection” (in Caygill, p. 44) and as reflection’s locus, both that which is expressed and that through which there is expression. Art is a way of speculating upon the limits of experience from within it, working in the realm of potential, pausing to see what has now been made possible. More importantly for Benjamin than the self as a process of “memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments or disappointments” (James, 1912/2003, p. 24), is that reflection relates to the highest concentration of seeing. This seeing is more than vision according to Massumi, but rather “a field of sensation that implicates all the sense modalities in incipient perception, and is itself implicated in self-referential action” (p. 140). This means that inattention is as significant as attention; the self feels itself feeling while feeling more or beyond or to the side of what is felt. To the degree that an experience is able to transform the effects of one sensory mode into that of another is also its participation in feeling capacities for being affected and for affecting. In a reflective assessment, the distinctions between form and matter are dissolved and experience sees itself becoming, not as the consequences of an intended meaning but rather the discovery of its own non-sensuous similarity between configural patterns or, as it might yet become. In the duration of reflection, experience lures the world in transformation. Narcissus bending towards transformation. Concluding The experience of our planet seems to increasingly insist on making us aware of its dynamics, of its uncontrollability and of arrangements of experience that might move more melodically with its rhythm. Rather than seeking to control experience’s outcomes or separating out its parts, education might engage in opportunities that offer sustenance to that which makes it and which it affects. Experience’s sustenance is intensity and it is 154 produced relationally. To the thinkers engaged in this chapter, this seems to indicate the “how’s” of relation, the labour of making affect available in more kaleidoscopic varieties for the very experience that is now coming, rather than safeguarding the sum of our histories. In addition to each minute double-sided experience of making something matter now, to this place, a parable, a “token of trust” (Williams, 2007) is offered for the future. Cautions might also be inferred from this chapter. For example, as with all technologies, there is tremendous energy released by experience. If contained within fixed borders, Benjamin (in Caygill, (1998) advises that it will become destructive. Destroying the limits of experience is one of the conditions of transformation but also holds the potential for destroying present conditions of next experience, such as feelings of capacities for being affected and for affecting, by fixing affects too tightly to dwelling places. Massumi (2002) reminds that when experience is enclosed in the determination of regularized context or discourse, situations submerge, feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected wander away and diminish, the world’s indeterminacy and processual openness and self-activity retreats into the unperceived from where it came, and it appears that “the only activities in the world are the regularizations of discourse and institution” (Massumi, p. 219). When an event of experience does not have a feel for capacities of moving into what is unpredictably other, intensity is diminished and the satisfactions that make experience a way of inhabiting the earth are minimalized. Ultimately, experience may be too durable to perish; its zesty heat and effervescent activity may continue on with provocations, whisperings, jeers, laughter. Far from compromising experience, the becoming of experience may continue to be that which brings qualities to experience’s unqualified absoluteness, or protective standardization may be what diminishes opportunities for its intensities to move us. 155 ……………….. Studio note, September 2010 Figure 33. How can a day make truth? The day reveals truth by showing what it is not, giving a place to non-truth, exposing its double- dealing. The pure day is the ‘making a place’ of the day’s innermost exteriority, converging and diverging in a mark, not a mark of exchange but a memory that both exceeds and grounds every relation. Place is the truth of the day’s grasping of all days, where it feels belonging. Where, in the openness of its closed forms, it feels everything within it rise to greet that quality of light. Words fail to express the experience in which the day finds a way back into the world. Intimate, ferocious, radiant. Chapter Seven inquires into EarthShapes, a method in which experience makes the very place that affects experience, and where at any point, something else can alter everything. Earthshapes begins with the aesthetic experience of looking for creative movement, something from the past that is already underway to becoming something different, just as it comes forth into memory. Feelings of capacity for being affected by it are connected to feelings of affecting by making something shareable of past experience: new qualities revitalizing something old. Education situates itself here in the realm of potential’s availabilities. Next steps in EarthShapes include connecting new qualities of one composition to new qualities of another’s composition, imaginatively experimenting with products of other experimentation, repositioning in finding an arrival into what is just emerging. Final creative practice in EarthShapes includes re- positioning to find the possibility now existent in formal curriculum because of a method’s experimentation with potential and its openness to the impossible taking charge of the coming together of the present. 156 Chapter Seven Features of Place Making Curriculum A Review of: Ellsworth, E. & Kruse, J. (2005b) EarthShapes art studio. http://extrememediastudies.org/earthshapes/index.html Figure 34. Sandhills at night © 2011, Curriculum Inquiry, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education [OISE] and Blackwell Publishing, adapted with permission. A single light in a farmhouse window in the sandhills at night, musky scent of silver sage. Wisps of long hair twisting from an open window of a pickup truck passing, silhouetted against gradations of orange; distant laughter evaporating into gusts of dryness. Beneath my footsteps the crunch of parched prairie wool. The shape of an open door’s reception, warm, yellow, out of the darkness. My friend’s strong working hands that have fixed fences and tractors and birthed calves, encircling her coffee cup as we chat. EarthShapes is an online/offline communication and relationship studio based on the belief that “no matter who or where we are, we always have one thing in common: we live in intimate relationship with powerful landforms that generate mysterious forces intertwining self, place and others” (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2005a). The infinite learning possibilities that life in a place presents to us matter. EarthShapes was created by two media artists/educators, Ellsworth and Kruse and is both a methodological tool for curriculum inquiry that is useful for artists and other designers, teachers, parents, and researchers, and also a pedagogical strategy for Grades 3-12 curriculum. In the EarthShapes studio, participants begin with the Make a Place event where they create images and writing that communicate how a local landscape or a particular place 157 shapes their experience of something that feels significant to them. This might involve true stories, fiction, photo essays, journal entries, soundscapes, poems, film, maps, drawings, or diagrams. For example, in the image and text above, I have designed a particular remembered moment in a landscape that matters to me. In the studio’s second event called Make a Connection, the “places” are exchanged with someone else, or if working alone, another person’s place is selected from the online gallery. In making a “connection,” an imaginary place is created that somehow combines aspects of one person’s landform and story with that of another. To continue to use the example of my place story and image, perhaps I might next choose to make a connection to another person’s place story, maybe the one on the EarthShapes’ website where a person feels both part of, and separated from the city as they cross the Brooklyn Bridge or, I might connect with the story about Cape Cod, the hooked, sandy peninsula that simply runs out of land. A new story is then written about the imaginary life forms that the collective new connection place would shape, including transformed cultural considerations such as traditions, styles of architecture or forms of infrastructure. Continuing with my example, I might ask: What kind of a mixed grassland ecoregion would have sandhills as well as an enormous suspension bridge, or what kind of a place would have prairie landscape that involved a periphery where the land simply stopped? What slang would the new landforms shape? What animals would evolve? What economies would be set in motion? The third event, Make it Happen, involves creating multidisciplinary projects that emerge out of the questions already engaged in the artmaking of the imaginary place such as: How can a suspension bridge be built on sand? In what ways and for whom, would a bridge be useful in the grasslands? What is a myth that people in my imaginary place tell their children about the village on the horizon where the land ends? The EarthShapes site is available free for anyone to use in an offline format or online, by sending projects electronically. 158 EarthShapes is especially noteworthy for a curriculum theory that is “the interdisciplinary study of educational experience” (Pinar, 2004, p. 2), in its use of difference and distance. Distance and difference are the very things that traditionally separate us and from which, much curriculum debate emerges. Often differences, for example those of subject disciplines or individual experience, are barricaded by description and reasoning. Any unity between differences is achieved through a shift in perspective or a variety of perspectives that might try to encompass or bridge things from a distance. Alternatively, by making something of place through our collective relationships with it, EarthShapes features difference and distance not only as that which initiate problems of unity or communication but also as that which are part of their own solution. EarthShapes does this by locating difference within a distance that is tied to movement and activity, and by featuring difference’s essential quality as its indeterminate potential to differ. In EarthShapes’ Art Studio, difference is not coincident with itself but rather with its own change, thereby encompassing its infinity of potential within the movement of distance. A particular location is a place, precisely because of the aesthetics that something makes of it. Massumi (2002) claims that aesthetics are not a perspective but rather an “amidst. A dynamic midst” (p. 79). Aesthetics immerse sensations in the shapes of our world. Malpas (1999) argues that we only understand people, places and ourselves in the inexhaustible variety each presents and that having a grasp of this difference necessitates a capacity to represent, which is in turn, a search that attempts to comprehend something of the knowledge of things through art. Making art is not just an activity to orient perception; this catches perception in a loop of construction and interpretation that only serves to reinforce making sense of the same sense. Instead, making art assists in the self- evidence of our experience, yet also opens our constructed places into the distance or the movement of the infinity of places within places, and which in retrospect, carry potential for what may yet come to be or what may not ever come to be. Massumi (2002) explains that we are most familiar with movement through the body: “it moves as it feels and it feels itself moving” (p. 1). In attending to the sensations of how a 159 landscape shapes our experience of something that matters to us, the body, according to Massumi, operates as a transducer of continuous small fluctuations of ongoing transformative forces of difference and distance. Our bodies cannot, however, capture the full momentum of distance and difference in their experience of place. Instead, a place is the qualitative total of all of the relative places in which it has been implicated, plus the passages between them. Places are tied to movement that is never separated from its relations in the world or with the bodies that experience it. Rather than place being solely subordinated to human understanding, all of our experiences in a place contribute to its formation. In their 2003 research, Canadian/Guatemalan team of physicists, Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo (2007) reached a similar conclusion in reporting that space/time bend in respond to matter, literally sculpting itself through and around our participation. The repositioning of our relation to place distorts space and time and reduces the distance between difference, as recently reported by British science journalist, Robert Matthews (2010). Similarly, Belgian philosopher, Keith Robinson, (2005) in his work of combining elements of process philosophy with philosophies of difference, interprets Kant: “space and time are the pure forms of receptivity that we bring” (p. 166, italics in original); receptive modes that are formed through our activity. In each of the foregoing reports, change is not a rupture, a deviation or a subversion. Instead, distance and difference are held in the ways in which places are made as they pick up substance, texture and hues in their movement through bodies and images and ideas. What holds difference and distance together is the lure of place and the ways in which we resituate our bodies in response. Although the movement of place cannot be felt, its effects are always felt in what we imagine our experience in place to be. This is particularly evident in the Make a Place event. Participants begin with making an image and telling a story: making a place that is based in their feelings of being in relation to a certain landscape. Expressing how a local landscape matters to them reveals that sensations are not just metaphorical, instead, to matter is to have relations (Massumi, 2002). Attending to the qualities of a place’s change in relation to one’s sensations in it, offers further movement to a curriculum theory that 160 “insists the educational point of public school curriculum is to explore curriculum as a lived event” (Pinar26, 2004, p. 187). EarthShapes urges and honours the bodily experience of people in places and then gestures beyond, to acknowledge places’ qualities of change through which, school curriculum remains continually responsive to context. The second artmaking event, Make a Connection, features most fully, the horizon of potential found not only in making something of the movement of place but also in augmenting or adding to it. This event highlights imagination: the form of thought most suited to what cannot be exhaustively represented. Massumi (2002) describes imagination as a “thinking feeling…feeling thought…as process…outside any given thing, outside any given sense, outside actuality. Outside coming in” (p. 134). In the Make a Connection event, places are put into communication with each other through local movement or participation that does not stand back to describe or predict. Instead, participants pragmatically enter the relations between, for example, my image and story of the prairie sandhills and the image and story of Cape Cod, where the land simply runs out. In the Make a Connection event, the movement of distance does not stand back to get a perspective on things; it makes adjustments, imaginatively tweaking details and aspects, and waits with pleasure to see what emerges. The movement that renders each feature of a place’s shape as engaging both difference and distance, enables every Connection project to retain something of each person’s place-based experience as well as details sparked by another’s story and place. EarthShapes asks of curriculum, as Pinar (2010) does, regarding the meaningfulness of biographical and autobiographical work: “why not understand it [our representations of experience] as providing passage to imaginary worlds?” (para. 5). The reality of place is one we can never exactly put our finger on and therefore we need the distance of imagination so that place accesses its utmost difference. Each connection of making and remaking a place in EarthShapes offers opportunity for participation in re- 26 EarthShapes extends initiatives of a curriculum of place that began with Joe Kincheloe and William Pinar’s (1991) early efforts to educationally contextualize the curricular challenges posed by living in a particular location. 161 accessing place for more effect. In imaginative making, place cannot be entirely replaced or erased but instead, can be doubled, redoubled and augmented. Its difference can be supplemented so that place always has more with which to lure us, making us feel that there is something in the world that matters to us. In its curriculum from place making, the continual coming of a place to itself delivers particular experiences of which, each is only one in an infinite set of possible shapes of place. In the making, EarthShapes renders the division of difference and distance subordinate, in relation to more significant movements such as: infolding elicitations from outside, the stretching of limits, the displacing of particulars, the augmenting of place, the materiality of a time and place that moves “the materiality of minds/brains and bodies into relation with other material elements of our world” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 24): an entire kinematics of place. Rather than searching for reasons why a place is what it is, kinematics is focused on dynamics, on participating in making a place more “what it is”. In a logic of augmentation rather than of deficit, EarthShapes seeks to unleash and encourage, through collaboration and artmaking, the transient forces of our intense relationship to the land, extending the limits of place’s difference through the distance of the miles between us, as well as through the physicality of our senses and our collaborative imagination. Ellsworth (2005) might describe it as educative “orchestrations of time and movement through webs of sensation across landscapes and panoramas of space, bodies and time” (p. 24). Finally, in the Make it Happen event, curriculum is approached in the context of a place that matters to us, one that has aroused us and beckoned us towards its own change. Participants build projects that explore their real and imaginary places. The puzzle of formal curriculum with its precisely recorded objectives and outcomes becomes clear in the movement of a place’s qualitative change. The shape of curriculum, in the Earthshapes studio, emerges out of each person’s artmaking and inquiry processes in each newly created imaginary landscape, rather than being figured in advance. 162 With every collective formation, as Massumi (2002) notes in relation to sport, the organization of rules follows the emergence of an unformalized and early stage of development of what in education, we call curriculum. The fact of human embodiment and our capacity for movement is central to our activities. If outcomes fashion our educational endeavors, we get held instead, to what Pinar (2010) claims that objectives initially set out to change, which was the limitation of educational experience to what was already known. When educational experience resides only in taken-for-granted assumptions, then curriculum continues to repeat the same difference. Instead, our response in educational experience, to be adequate to the creativity of the world around us, must work to reflect back to the earth its own dynamic image. Curriculum in EarthShapes is not a tool to manage knowledge but instead, turns on the imaginary of what Canadian professor Kent Den Heyer (2009) argues are two foundational responses to curriculum which are: nothing can be said in advance to “not be worth knowing and the necessity of self-directing” (p. 30). Formalized curriculum might perpetuate its determinations of difference and distance, but it does not shape their movement. Instead, the art making of our relationships to landscapes that matter to us, generates an everyday curriculum that is continually still emerging. EarthShapes offers to curriculum theory a playful experiment in place’s imaginary of infinity where there is opportunity to resituate ourselves in relation to the generative potential of a curriculum made by place. 163 ……………….. Studio note, July 2011 Figure 35. How is the day valid? The day brushes against absoluteness and simplicity, disposing itself towards revelation. The rule for the day is missing. It must instead find its value in the transduction that makes it: sunlight into wind, wind into sound, water vapor into colour. Everything is marked with knowledge but the day does not occur between its elements or objects. It occurs in the midst of the singularity of a day’s qualities of light and its appearance. Its provocative power explodes the predetermination of a day. In its most excessive displays it seems to have no meaning at all. In Chapter Eight a variety of current conceptions of ecology are reviewed, including those which consider the uncommunicative reality not directly accessible to the senses such as qualities and feelings of capacities for being affected and for affecting what is other. Teacher education methods teach ecological issues through their very process. Focusing only on goals, subjects, objects or their interactivity misses the reality of the energies that move us but which is a reality only partially accessible and which cannot be entirely known or owned. Instead, a method might become an inquiry into the aesthetics of its own artmaking. This paper argues that there is an ecological loss if our feel for an expanded reality is pre-empted or usurped by notions of protocol, excellence and presentism. The ecological loss moves in two directions: first towards a loss of potential for qualitative difference and the second, a loss for now and for the future, of makings of the inhabitable feel of the world. 164 Chapter Eight Entangled: Moving Bodies, Moving World Leaving holds me here. Glen Sorestad, 2001. Every teacher education curriculum has methodological implications. Whether the methods are of research, pedagogy or policy, they teach the movement of the world and how it might matter. In this sense, as environmental educator David Orr (1991/1996) notes, all educational methods are environmental education. Moving bodies and moving world generate forces at a “geological scale—but at a far-faster-than-geological speed” (The Economist, May 26, 2011) because of movement’s relational propensity to mobilize both the earth’s physical history and its future, in its run through the present. Currently, global awareness of the challenge of controlling the planet’s volatile forces cannot overstate the need for humans to sense capabilities of “scaling themselves and their lifestyles to the limits of geologic material and force” (Kruse & Ellsworth, 2010, 06.30.2011). This concluding chapter inquires into images of ecosystems as organizing vitalisms of reality which include the unseen forces of feelings of capacity to affect and to be affected, that are co-substantial of the concrete and abstract physical world. Even for educational purposes, human subjects are not separable out from their methods of interaction with the totality of lived and living relations without rendering them ever more volatile. Through a transdisciplinary investigation, this chapter studies a variety of images for their potential augmentation or diminishment of affect and concludes with an emerging definition of ecology for teacher education methods. The images studied in this chapter are not necessarily visual images but sensorimotor images, analogies or parables of reality that attempt to induce rather than reduce, methods of moving. In a sense, they are two-sided, implying, as Massumi (2002) notes, a participation of one sense in another. He claims that the “measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into that of another” (p. 35). One way of understanding this is through the way in which images carry potential for movement’s method which is a 165 body’s capacitation for feeling both the effects of the world’s movement, and a capacity to reposition in response. The educational work of engaging methods that teach the environment is ultimately aesthetic work, of which artist and educator O’Sullivan (2001) explains: “art might well be a part of the world (after all it is a made thing), but at the same time it is apart from the world. And this apartness, however it is theorised, is what constitutes art’s importance” (p. 125, brackets and italics in original). Images are needed for a moving world after a century of positivism, for generating an empiricism that is both transcendent and immanent. Images are needed for the pragmatic purpose of bodies belonging to movement, and for becoming images of its self-transformation. ……………….. Movement gives. It gives itself what it gives to everything: added qualitative difference. Movement has a passion for the richness of everything that it is not and it finds this polarity in matter. Simultaneously cohering and quantifying with matter, though nonetheless splintering it into an infinity of virtual potentials not actualized and into infinite series of successions that flow from its actualization, it is yet through matter where movement also vanishes, slipping away in infinite vectors, to lawless zones of indetermination to prepare its gift of variety for the next matter. The world’s movement has a method and we are inseparable from it. If the separation of body and movement were fully rejected in educational methods, then there would no longer be a need to stick to methods that pit movement against control. Feeling would be more significant because movement’s implicitness in matter directly evokes feeling. This means movement at the method of the individual, not understood primarily as individual subject but rather the aesthetic transduction of a body’s form: its feel for potential movement. I think that answers therefore, for how movement feels, are much more important for teacher education than the question might seem, since movement’s effect both in coming and going, is feeling. 166 The movement of movement is currently being taken seriously in a variety of disciplines including anthropology, visual studies, physics, sociology, and cultural/media/political studies. Transdisciplinary awareness is emerging across the humanities regarding changes in social influence from ideology, to feeling affected by the places of everyday movement in a way that is closer to individuated bodies. There is a feel beyond human biological and social diversity positivisms for an expanded empiricism (Massumi, 2002; Clough, 2009) which this paper will seek to shed light on. Rather than social order or the “totality of lived relations” (Wexler & Whitson, in Pinar et al., 2004, p. 250) being achieved through ideology as hegemony or contextual situatedness, people are recognizing that no amount of adherence to moral code, revolutionary creed or prescribed standards, curricula or laws are enough for any kind of transformation. Movement does not simply substitute one program for another. More demandingly, it involves everyday movement from one place to another, repeated stabilizations of structures that feel for more. Though the importance of hands-on teacher preparation methods for example, has been responded to by increases in attempts to be practical by abstracting practice through standards, instructional strategies that work, and accountability schemes for student performance, these responses miss the very pragmatics of abstraction which is movement undergoing qualitative difference through matter. This paper seeks to articulate the becoming of reality that shatters positionings as abstract observers, re-situates new positionings as outcomes of engaged production and in the very same move, undermines them again, exploring the ways in which bodies reposition in response to movement’s vitality and passion. As social imaginations reposition away from ideologies and critical analysis, this work initiates an attempt to contribute to more sustainable ways in which to engage teacher education methods politically and environmentally. Part I offers current images of ecological intermingling from a variety of fields beginning with entanglement from physical science and then moving into affect from the humanities and social sciences. It seeks an image in which movement is both what emerges and what continues. In Part II, I shift to describe the ways in which several current educational 167 images of standardization and protocol might usurp or preempt the very feelings that trigger and sustain ecologies, which are feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting the world. I must acknowledge up front that I am drastically impoverished in expertise regarding the disciplines and histories with which I engage. I greatly admire those who have the specialization and knowledge to point out to me ways in which these images may not well enough serve the invention of other variations of movement and I respectfully ask for that feedback that will generate another, more helpful image. Entanglement Moving bodies in a moving world generates the compromising situation of an ecology called entanglement. Entanglement, according to physicist Vlatko Vedral (2011) is the quintessential quantum effect, a binding together that restricts vibrations towards one direction, into indivisible wholes that interact for extremely short lifetimes, but are also indefinitely great energies. The smallest quantity of any physical entity or body is already a quality of light and already unknowable. Even at such an infinitesimally small scale, a photon cannot be defined as a basic building block of matter, only as its capacity for fusional variation. Evidently, for life to go on, it must change itself. Photons do not provide researchers with an easy atomism where primary elements bounce against and off each other, unaffected, or cluster together to make larger substances that can later be taken apart and analyzed. Instead, photon movement is its own twisted versioning even as it vanishes into de-formation. Just a decade ago, Vedral (2011) claims that experimentalists could only verify quantum mechanics as the theory of the microscopic world: particles, atoms and molecules. Our classical categories, Vedral argues, fail to capture the world in “all its richness” and the world’s “rich hues get washed out with increasing size” (p. 40). The world is not so easily partitioned according to size, however, and currently physicists routinely confirm that quantum behavior persists for a macroscopic scale. Vedral (2011) makes the further “small leap of imagination” (p. 42) to speculate whether life itself: plants, the cells of our bodies and maybe even the planet can be entangled in addition to other solids. Software engineer and science writer, Anil Ananthaswamy (2010) also argues that the blueprint of life, the DNA double helix might owe its shape to the “mysterious quantum property 168 called entanglement” (p. 9). Vedral insists that today, nearly all physicists think entanglement applies to everything, no matter what the size. Quantum theory is “the only existing theory to establish firmly that things really do exist beyond our mind or any mind”27 (Morton, 2011, p. 179) and that they exist beyond one another. The certainty with which writers are recently beginning to write about entanglement’s uncertainty28 indicates to me that it may be an adequate variation, perhaps a parallel example for other concepts that have interested me in regards to the experience of movement and how teacher education methods might move accordingly. In the next sections I look briefly at a variety of images of moving bodies, moving world. Part I Ecologies and networks In addressing movement’s movement, some explain experience or entanglement as “ecological”. Complexity thinkers Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler (2008) describe ecology for educators, as “the study of relationships. It derives from the Greek oikos, household, and is used to draw attention to intertwining webs of activity and meaning. It erases the human/natural distinction and frames discussions in terms of humans within a more-than-human world” (p. 213, italics in original). Davis et al. argue that formal education must begin to think in ecological terms in which “an agent’s learning” is simultaneously about its internal co-activities and the way its actions are entangled with others’ actions in grander systems” (p. 107). Working with an even further-reaching ecology that works to smudge lines between living and non-living, Bennett (2010) argues for the materiality of all things. She references Bruno Latour in noting that we are increasingly entangled: “cosmically, biotechnologically, medically, virally, pharmacologically—with non-human nature” (p. 27 Not scientifically proven, of course, George Grant (1998) describes his theory of love as “consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness” (p. 462). 28 Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman (1965/2001) once wrote that he thought he could safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. 169 115). This kind of political ecosystem is an everyday experience of co-mingling and in similarity to Davis’ explanation, does not resonate with the kind of an environment that one can direct from outside or above. She describes a political ecology, a collective of human and nonhuman, in which there is no smooth harmony of parts, no diversity unified by a common spirit, just a web of dissonant connections between bodies. She references Felix Guattari’s work in defining three ecological registers: “the environmental, the social, and the mental” (p. 113) who nonetheless immediately calls these divisions into question, calling instead for a “transversal mode of perception”. Guattari encourages us to perceive in resemblance to a lightwave that vibrates in many pathways at once, by seeing the movement of imperceptible potential in lived relation. In its response to the world’s movement, Bennett’s ecosystem reveals how unrelated to knowledge our perceptions are, working against what Jean-François Lyotard once called the “fantasies of realism” (in O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 125) meaning that there is more to the world than what is directly observable. Also seeking a more entangled image of the world’s movement, Morton (2007) argues that ideas such as nature inhibit “genuinely ecological politics, ethics, philosophy and art” (p. 14). He contends that in ecosystems, things are contiguous but physical reality is alternatively, one of nonlocality where things are directly other things. In this kind of “ecology without nature”, Morton describes reality’s essence as arbitrariness and supplementarity: what is other than us is “made out of any body, anybody” (p. 194). We are not part of a larger whole. Similarly, philosopher and poet, Edmond Wright (2008, p.17) argues that there is not one big mind that contains all the lesser minds such as a theory of deep ecology. He maintains instead, that mind is more of a verb than a noun. Everything is enfolding in everything as flowing movement and its events, argues Morton, does not add up to nature as something that exists beyond bodies. In Morton’s (2007) intersecting and trans-disciplinary appreciation, all kinds of beings from toxic waste to sea snails, “are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention and have become part of political life” (p. 17). He emphasizes that the world is real but not just because it can be observed and verified. It is more drastically collective 170 than ecological relationships suggest, where bodies with predicaments and potentials realize “a world that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm” (p. 7). Objects, subjects and things Morton’s theory of “Object Oriented Ontology” maintains that simply refraining from assertions about a general essence or substance at the back of things actually guarantees their existence. Instead, he addresses movement by arguing that objects are all there is, objects in withdrawal. Morton (2011) maintains that objects relate to each other but how they appear has a shadowy “strangely strange quality” (2011, p. 184-185) preventing one object from ever being reduced to another. Other thinkers hold that the subject is what is most important. Shaviro (2009) argues that, for Whitehead, the subject is something that emerges from experience, something that is added to experience. There is always a subject in every experience though for Whitehead, it is not always a human one. Consciousness is not needed for being affected. What makes a subject is “an essential unity at the decisive moment, which stands between its birth and its perishing” (p. 12). The process of subjectivity for Whitehead moves “beyond interiority into actuality leaving its mark on the objective realm” (in Shaviro, p. 4) as well; “the folding of a new subjectivity is also an unfolding of past subjectivities into objective immortality” (in Rothfield, 2008, p. 5). In other words, in the world’s movement, there is not a level where things settle permanently into neat categories of subject and object. Ingold (2008) also seeks to overthrow the Aristotelian model of bringing together form and matter in order to generate things. He writes about a world of things rather than a world of objects. By attending more to the “fluxes and flows of materials” (p. 3) rather than materiality, he postulates that creative movement is not about the relations between things but about the lines along which things come into being. He argues that inhabitants encounter “an environment without objects” (p. 8). All that exists are things, which are places where “several goings on become entwined”, “acts of approaching and entering” (p. 8) and where there are “swellings, growths, outcrops, filaments, ruptures and cavities, but not objects” (p. 8). Much like Morton, Ingold’s things become entangled with other things, slip away, and leak. Rather than using the term ecology, Ingold explains 171 environment as: “what surrounds a thing, yet you cannot surround anything without wrapping it up, converting the very threads along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is contained”, “an immense tangle of lines” (p. 18), “not a network but a meshwork” (p. 19). The topic of “thingness” is currently the 2011-2013 topic for NYC’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellowships29 as it explores “the material conditions of our lives and examine(s) “thingness”, the nature of matter” (Kruse & Ellsworth, 2010, 08.15.2011) through clusters of public and transdisciplinary conversations focused on “forensics, ecology, speculative materialism, and biology”. Kruse and Ellsworth claim that “humans rarely connect seemingly immaterial things such as energy and electricity with interminably slow processes, monumental temperatures and pressures, and sheer mass of matter that it takes to compose many of the substances that power our lights and computers” (08.15.2011). They are collaborating with the Vera List Center in their efforts to “create new contexts for energy to be sensed as a tangible, material–and perhaps even “living” force in our lives”. Whether it is objects, subjects or things engaged in trying to make sense of the forces and flows that shape our lives and are added to by our living, entanglement is hard to articulate because it is not just an effect of movement but movement itself. Entanglement must itself be an entanglement: both a unity and a complexity. It does not assume a “subjective splitting and not of itself constitute a distancing. It is an immediate self- complication” (Massumi, 2002, p.14), making everything self-referential. Said differently, entanglement is movement that accounts for both the formation of variations of wholes and for, “a difference constituted, dissolved and reconstituted on the fly rather than one which comes home to roost and never leaves” (Schneider, 1996, p. 62). It also accounts for what is unactualized: its virtual storehouse of potential. The next section offers affect as a concept that seeks the duality of qualitative movement that seem to resound with Vedral’s conceptions of entanglement. 29 Vera List Center: http://re-title.typepad.com/opportunities/2011/02/vera-list-center-for-art-and-politics- fellowships-new-york.html 172 Affect In describing the movement of the world’s movement, writers in a variety of humanities disciplines are currently taking up affect in what seems to me to be resonating ways of those with which physicists are exploring entanglement. For example, media scholar and educator, Andrew Murphie (2010) claims that affect is “the world in motion, in emergence and disappearance”; it is “central before and after our assumptions of stability, subject or object” (Affect, 01.30.2010. para. 19). O’Sullivan (2001) writes that affects make up life. He claims that affect is “the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us” (p. 128). Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007) also speculates that affects are the stuff that intimate lives are made of, giving “circuits and flows the forms of a life” (p. 2): everything begins and ends in circulation. But in addition, she explains, affects are things that happen, both event and sensation, animated and inhabitable: Impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies, and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something” (p. 2, italics in original). The variety of ways in which people discuss affect seem for Murphie (2010) not so much of a problem but a giving of more precision to our understanding and he suggests that affect studies works better as an “appropriately multiple assemblage, rather than a discipline” (Affect, 01.30.2010, para. 7). Most notable in connection to affect writing, Massumi (2002) argues that, “affect is the whole world from the precise angle of its differential emergence (p. 43); affect is “global openness to change” (p. 27) and a “process line of trans-situational linkage” (p. 239). Rather than a thing, Massumi (2008) describes affect as “an event, or a dimension of every event” (p. 2). Drawing on both Deleuze and Massumi, Clough (2009) considers affect in relation to a new empiricism: it is an “implicit form” (p. 48), a self-informing dynamism that “subsists in matter as incorporeal potential” (p. 48). “As soon as it begins to in-form, it dissolves back into complexity across all scales of matter: the subatomic, the physical, the biological and the cultural” (p. 48). 173 Also drawing on Massumi, Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) in an analysis of shifting relations between culture and state in Latin America, describes affect as “another name for the continuous variation that characterizes the infinite encounters between bodies and their resultant displacements and transformations, constitutions and dissolutions” (p. 128). “It is a way of re-describing the constant interactions between bodies and the resultant impacts of such interactions (p. 127). Affect refers to bodily capacities for movement, such that auto-affection is linked to the “self-feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality” (Clough, 2007). Studying Whitehead alongside Deleuze and Kant, Shaviro (2009) stresses the basic condition of experience is feeling and it is intrinsic to the very course of space and time. Feeling is both the conduit and the event of qualitative movement. Affect and emotion Affect is often used as a synonym for emotion, but Massumi (2002) claims emotion and affect follow “different logics and pertain to different orders” (p. 27). Emotion is a recognized affect such as disgust, jealousy or happiness, but affect is instead, that which runs into and through context and cannot be attached to any element. Massumi describes emotion as the most intense, bound and contracted expression of “affect’s capture and of the fact that something has always and again escaped” (2002, p. 35). Simondon (in Massumi, (2002), p. 294) contends that affectivity both precedes and follows emotion. Murphie (2010) writes that “affect is intensities coming together, moving each other, transforming and translating under or beyond meaning, beyond semantic or simply fixed systems or cognitions, even emotions” (Affect, 30.01.2010, para. 13). Capabilities for repositioning in response to undetermined feelings, instincts, and complexities predicates our very evolution as humans (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2010)30. 30 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428155208.htm Psychologists Kirsten Ruys and Diedrick Stapel (Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research at Tilburg University in The Netherlands) have uncovered the first empirical evidence to suggest humans do not need to be aware of the event that caused their mood or feelings in order to be affected by it. 174 Seigworth and Gregg (2010) write that affect is the name that we give to those forces that are visceral, beneath, alongside or other than conscious knowing: Vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability (p. 1). Rather than the kind of feeling that we are accustomed to recognizing as emotion or sensation, affect is rather a sense of being able to do things and go places. For example, Deleuze and Parnet (1977/2007) explain that a tick’s index of power has three affects or feelings that define its capacity for movement: light lures it to the end of the branch; the smell of warmth compels it to drop; hair interferes and the tick repositions to find a hairless place to burrow in and drink blood. Beasley-Murray (2010) expands on their example: “These affects enable the tick’s becoming: its leap and clandestine submergence within a host animal’s hide” (p.175). Writers of affect define a body in terms of its potential to affect and to be affected. All bodies are in real, inseparable, relation to the abstractness of their potential to vary. Some bodies according to Beasley-Murray, have much greater powers to affect other bodies; no two bodies affect others in precisely the same way and this capacity for affecting and being affected is in constant flux (Beasley-Murray, p. 127). Affect gathers up singularities and partial objects, bodies of all shapes and sizes and redistributes and recomposes them in new, experimental couplings and collectivities, liberating us from ourselves. In being carried away, we increase our power to affect and be affected (Beasley-Murray, p.132). Beasley-Murray argues that affect “precedes and resists the process of subjectification that gives us stable emotions and bounded identities” (p. 227). Defining bodies by their capacities for movement, for entanglement, for affect, returns us to Spinoza’s fascination with the fact that “we do not even know what a body can do” (in Beasley-Murray, p. 174). In addition to carrying the universe’s electromagnetic force, a body, any body, is 175 the electromagnetic force of movement31. A body expresses the movement of the universe, rendering potential for infinite inquiry at the half-twist connecting its movement to the world’s movement. Affect defined physiologically Because bodies are the way in which we know movement most intimately, Massumi (2002) uses the human body as a physiological basis to describe empirically, the autonomy of affect: the body is always in “immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary” (p. 4). Although a body’s relation to its own capacity for change is real, it is also abstract. The abstractness pertains to the “transitional immediacy of a real relation–that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now)” (p. 5), to its “second coming”. The charge of indeterminacy that a body carries is inseparable from its coinciding with it, to the extent that a body is dynamic and alive. Echoing Spinoza, Seigworth and Gregg (2010) argue that the knowing of a body is defined by the “not yet” (p. 3) which is the feel of becoming what it is not. Political philosopher George Grant (in Christian & Grant, 1998) suggested in 1967 that the quality he felt was most necessary for his era was openness instead of control or mastery. “Openness requires daily the enormous discipline of dealing with our own closedness…” (p. 101). Appreciating Massumi in pursuit of a wider empiricism, Clough (2009) explains that a body’s capacity for movement cannot be fully accounted for in narration because its responses are in excess of conscious states of perception. A body’s movement involves visceral perceptions that preserve the past in ways that “preconsciously reactivate” 31 At the risk of readers breaking into song about being stardust and golden, I want to mention the recent work of scientists, Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi and Hitoshi Okamura who successfully imaged the glimmering of a human body as it “directly and rhythmically” emits light at intensities 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of the naked eye. (This peer-reviewed article is available in the open-access journal, PlosOne: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006256. In relation to this finding and perhaps keeping company with Spinoza, UK science correspondent Elliot Bentley asks what other surprises the human body might have in store for us: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jul/17/human-bioluminescence. 176 (Massumi, in Clough, p. 48) it as affect. This does not define a body’s beginning as occurring outside of sociality, but rather as “social in a manner prior to the separating out of individuals” (Massumi, in Clough, p. 48) Furthermore, for Spinoza, no body is ever an individual, detached entity but living matter, continually affected by other bodies. For example, a body “comprises many other bodies, requires still other bodies for its preservation and regeneration” (Beasley-Murray, 2010, p. 127). In turn, a body “can move and rearrange external bodies in a great many ways” (Spinoza in Beasley-Murray, p. 217). Bodies Massumi does not refer solely to the human body; body also means anything that offers surfaces for resonation; literally any thing can reposition in relation in movement’s self- relation. Clough (2009) describes affect as “the non-human becoming of the human, the non-human becoming of all matter” (p. 49), but believes that talking of affect in relationship to the human body is limiting. Instead, bodies refer to body parts, things and collectivities, social bodies, the earth, investment capital, bullies, even photons. Although Bennett (2010) considers affect as central to politics and ethics, she branches out to consider affective, “both organic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects” (p. xii): black plastic work gloves, oak pollen, dead rats, plastic bottle caps, sticks of wood. In similarity to Massumi and also Gordillo (2011), Bennett draws on a Spinozist notion of affect which refers broadly to the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness, an “outward looking entity tangled with constellations of other bodies” (02.06.2011). Every kind of body, according to Spinoza has conatus, the will to live and expand life. Some bodies’ existences, however, take place at time-space scales far finer or greater than human perception. Affect’s broad ecology moves discussions of affect from the “indeterminacy of pre- individual forces of the human body to the indeterminacy of all matter” (Clough, p. 48) and presents force from perspectives other than human conscious perception. Massumi claims, however, that looking only at bodies, objects or things, is to miss the movement. Movement’s movement is objectively real: material energies that are mobile and which 177 expand. Although they only exist in constituting real feelings to some actual entity, they do not belong to anyone (Massumi, 2002) always outstripping the structures they constitute, remaining autonomous. According to O’Sullivan (2001), affect is a brutal, impersonal thing; it is what connects us to the world, a portal already underway to a world experienced differently. He ponders whether affect is the feeling of being willing to submit to movement. Massumi (2008) agrees in describing affect as the “body bracing for what will come…it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising” (p. 5). Impersonal as it is, we know the giving of this feeling most intimately through moving bodies. The next section will examine the ways in which affect participates in its own change rather than solely in human determination. Cause, effect, intentionality and feeling Because any method of attending to affect will necessarily become entangled with movement, its measure, according to Clough, “cannot simply be a matter of containment; it also cannot simply be a matter of interpretation, meaning, signification or representation” (2009, p. 49). Philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2005) argues that causes don’t belong to bodies; “they [bodies] oblige but there is no possibility of producing a defining relation between the cause and the obligation” (p. 5). Shaviro (2009) describes feelings of capacities for affecting and being affected by world movement as a body making itself beautiful for the passion of the world luring it. Clough (2009), however, describes the differing reality she finds in qualitative research where methods are richly rewarded in practice for positivistically explaining what is observed with other observable features even though the observations are understood to be interpretive. The self-distancing of cause and effect where empirical reality is only meaningful through interpretive processes, renders participants’ interpretations simply part of the empirical world—naturalistic observation. This perspective creates an image that reflects for the senses an identity structure that is shared by the subject and the world, thereby reinforcing the concreteness of being in the world without its immediate incorporeality or, said differently, without the abstractness of its physicality, which ultimately leads to a normative ideal of reality’s origin. While positivism in teacher education research seeks 178 to keep education free from overdeterminations of “the unconscious, the biological and the physical (p. 47), at the same time, they are being taken up and reconfigured anew. Tickle (2004) studies through images, the history of one classically contracted affect, which she identifies as greed. Tickle argues that the Reformation’s shift towards “humanity being the proper study for humanity” (p. 33), the most significant change was the gradual movement from imagining what exists beyond our minds, to understanding it, or the movement “away from divinity… to physical cause and effect” 32 (p. 35). Tickle maintains that the degree to which the struggle between good and evil is removed from immediate physical movement is the same degree of removal of that struggle as incorporeal. She argues instead for the necessity of the flux and variety of the world’s affect from which we cannot separate ourselves. Massumi insists that intentionality is often used as a way of establishing an identity between the structure of the world and the structure of the subject in the world. Insisting on identity between is a tacit assumption of a divide in which a mediating instance is then needed to bring the two realms together. The senses are assigned the job in the effort for a method to measure or to observe, but “the empirical conditions of vision are not only not able to be held onto in experience, they prevent experience from holding onto itself” (p. 145). Massumi explains that vision “always cofunctions with other senses” (p. 145) and even reducing vision to the barest physical and physiological condition which is light uniformly striking the retina in a “simultaneous presentation of the full spectrum of colour” (p. 144) results only in “extensive hallucinations. Even less hold on experience. Pure flux: delocalized and depersonalized” (p. 146). We are used to validating experience by identifying with our senses but affect is a quieter movement of the body, a resonation of “something-doing” (Massumi, 2009, p. 4). Acknowledging a body’s co-functioning of the senses means that affect no longer hides behind a screen of identities that mediate. A 32 Tickle marks a shift after Prudentius’ (405 C.E.) allegory Psychomachia (Battle for the Soul) in which Greed is engaged in a very physical contest of desiring a life subject to human control over a life of vulnerable trust in the unseen, and before Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Haywain (~1510-1516) in which there is no battle between good and evil, just a huge appeal to reason with affects presented as removed and at a distance. 179 body is affected directly with the feeling of others, with times and histories not its own and with a capacity for re-positioning in response. Over twenty years ago, within the field of education, Ellsworth (1989) resoundly critiqued critical pedagogy for its methods that for the intention of social justice premised reason in order to know what was unknowable about both selves and others. By charging teachers to help students identify and choose one moral position over others based on sufficient articulation and reasoned thinking, while offering “only the most abstract, decontextualized criteria for choosing one position over others” (p. 300-301), critical pedagogy implied that “students and teachers can and should engage each other in classrooms as fully rational subjects” (p. 301). Imagining instead, that classroom methods might support students/professors in a “never-ending moving about” (Trinh Min-ha in Ellsworth, p. 321), Ellsworth advocated for acting, “on the side of antiracism”, rather than against it, which was her effort to move beyond an identity between, to a “continuity that mutually includes each side of the divide in the same self-differentiating reality” (Massumi, 2002, p. 288). This is a method that measures the success of social justice by the degree to which it serves as a conduit for movement’s qualitative difference to sustain all bodies. In the endeavour of polarizing in the same self-differentiating reality, there is an “abstract holding-together” and a “concrete holding-apart” (Massumi, 2002, p. 288). Referencing Trin Minh-ha, Ellsworth (1989) argues that there is “no social position exempt from becoming oppressive to others” (p. 322). There is no device that can measure quantum phenomena without participating in it (Morton, p. 177) and instead all observations are inside an experience. Massumi (2009) also recognizes that there is no vantage point from which to encompass the earth’s “hyper-complex situation of flow and variation” (p. 13). Simondon (in Clough, 2009) explains an empirical individuation in referring to “an indeterminate becoming out of pre-individual affective forces in a process of emergence” (p. 48). A method that finds movement already happening in the world, as both the given 180 and the giving, accordingly seeks with Massumi (2002) and Clough (2009), an expanded empiricism33 that includes the qualitatively transformative force that moves the world. Engaging a science vocabulary, we might say affect is a photonical world of becoming and entanglement. Its very beginning is already relational, always already underway and it moves via and through its relational relations which, because they involve matter, involve feeling. This kind of feeling enters “unbidden into a context” (Massumi, 2002, p. 213). Massumi (2002) explains that it structurally encompasses entanglements in their movements, reinjects unpredictability into context, remakes context and inhabits its own passage of vivacity in its trans-situational paths. It cannot be sensed but then again, it cannot but be perceived as the “impersonal experience of something new globally registering in a context” (p. 295). This does not mean that the body registers less feeling. Impersonal affect is impersonal but much more intensely intimate in offering literally a visceral feeling as the body enfolds what is other, roughness, a sparkle, an intensity. Massumi (1997) describes affect as disinterested because there is not yet an interested subject in which feelings of capacities to affect and to be affected are lured by that quality. The disinterest affirms contingent encounters with the availabilities of everything not already having been drawn off. The extent to which the world is enfolded in its entanglements is the extent to which its affects reverberate outwards, which is described in the next section. Taking both paths at once—the virtual Classical empiricism has generated images of ecologies that miss the abstraction of moving bodies, thereby missing the concreteness of feeling. Some early discussions of entanglement in scientific terms comes from the 1935 work of Erwin Schrödinger and his cat in the box thought experiment34 where he attempted to show the ridiculousness of 33 Affect, according to Massumi is both too small to enter perception and too large to fit into it and also more than just a difference in size from classically empirical perceptions. Affect is also of a different kind of perception, felt without registering consciously and registering only in its effects. He uses the example of the way a person’s stomach turns somersaults before consciously hearing and identifying the sound of screeching brakes as a car careens towards them. 34 Schrödinger’s thought experiment imagined a living cat put into a box, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid which is a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays 181 saying that something could be opposite things at the same time. In the process he offered insight into how something actually could. Physical systems paradoxically embody multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials. Referencing Spinoza, Massumi (2002) explains that when a body is affected, it exists more outside of itself in the “abstracted motion of the affect and in the “abstracted context of that action, than within itself” (p. 31). “The body infolds the effect” (p. 31), removes the affect thereby conserving it “minus the impinging thing” (p. 32). In other words, the affect is “abstracted from the actual action that caused it and actual context of that action” (p. 32). Massumi explains that the forming form of a body or a mark on it “determines a tendency, the potential, if not yet the appetite, for the autonomic repetition and variation of the impingement” (p. 32). To recap, affect is spontaneously abstracted once by the body and that abstraction is immediately doubled by the repeatable form, or quality of an encounter. The abstractions carry on virtually. “Only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection” (p. 31, italics in original), does it attain conscious reflection35. Schrödinger’s demonstration of entanglement echoes Massumi’s (2002) description of complexity theories: “organization of multiple levels that have different logics and temporal organizations, but are locked in resonance with each other and recapitulate the during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which in turn, will break the vial and kill the cat. Because it is in an enclosed box, one cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, according to quantum law, the cat remains both dead and alive, in what is called a superposition of states. When we open the box and learn the condition of the cat it becomes one or the other (dead or alive) (information available in wikipedia). Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 24.01.2008) have theorized that the outcome does not exist unless the measurement is made. For Bohm (in Clough, 2009), however, the issue is not how things are known but rather a matter of ontology and therefore, “for Bohm is a question of matter measuring itself or informing itself” (p. 57). The superposition of states shares a single quantum state until measured and then they decohere, oscillating in the plane perpendicular to one wave’s direction of travel, more like resonating levels. Clough explains that although Bohm’s theory is questioned in physics, the materiality of information in physics, is not. All of the other superpositions then, from alive to dead are abstracted by the cat’s self-measurement and continue virtually. 35 Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, enwrapping the impingement at two removes. 182 same event in different ways” (p. 33)36. Furthermore, the levels of reality at play are seen “not as binary oppositions or contradictions, but as resonating levels” (p. 33), and their coexistence is virtual. Drawing what seems to me a suitable example from another field, in relation to the affect she recognizes as greed, Tickle describes the collusion or guilt of all bodies as being different only in degree, not intention, from those whom we read about in the headlines and or see in evening newscasts. Whatever is actualized is a specific composition of connections and is never quite removed from its potential for infinite other connections. Affect, therefore, is the “emergence of actual relations on the one hand and their falling back into virtual relations (relational potential) on the other” (Murphie, 2010, 01.30.2010., para. 12, brackets in original). Time-space-place Entanglement shows that even if separated by a light year or by a universe, entangled bodies or more precisely, entanglement’s entanglements are impacted faster than the speed of light37. Einstein (1947) called this “spooky action at a distance38”. It’s not entirely spooky if we think about our everyday experience: we often move backwards and forwards simultaneously, sometimes using what is coming as future to colour our past as we glimmer through the present. In a recent memoir of trans-Canada roadtrips, writer Sandra Martin (2011) shares her familiarity with this feeling when she expresses her longing for her now-grown children to see with her, the flash of antelope disappearing into the golden grasses of Saskatchewan’s southwest. She writes, “no matter how old they get, or how far away, they are always with us, our memories and their needs colliding like a kaleidoscope made from a single crystal” (p. 38). Some entanglements are shed only to resonate again, years later, against different surfaces. 36 Life and death are more of resonating levels rather than contradictions or opposites, and given life, death always exists virtually. 37 BBC News, Sept. 23, 2011 reports that a meeting at Cern (the world’s largest physics lab) “has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light” The team involved has just published its work so that other scientist can check for mistakes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-15017484 38 Indicated in wikipedia according to a letter from Einstein to Max Born, 3 March 1947; The Born- Einstein Letters; Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955, Walker, New York, 1971. 183 Martin’s description echoes Gordillo (2011), who discusses affect in his online blog. In reference to the current Arab Spring39, Gordillo describes affect as focal points imposing “rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more intensity” (Feb. 6, 2011, para. 10) and as “disembodied spatiality” (para. 10) that travels disconnected from bodies. Even at a distance, affects compel a sense of our margin of manoeuverability. It is easy to miss what we are so entangled in. Gordillo (2011) argues, “we have been socialized to assume that passions on the street are sheer elusiveness devoid of materiality, that shock waves, contagions, domino effects are just metaphors to refer to something else” (Feb. 6, 2011, para. 40) and we do not see passions on the streets as bodies with capacities to affect and to be affected. Any body or any collective is already entangled with the entanglements of other entanglements, their atoms aligning “much faster than the strength of their mutual interactions would suggest” (Vedral, 2011, p. 41). This is as much about intelligence leaking away, unknown, as it is about excessive hype regarding intelligence of the collective or of enlarging intellectual space. It is not size that is the most compelling issue regarding difference; it is the “again” and “more” that movement gives and the how of a body’s capacity for re-positioning. Discussing affect’s virtual existence is not meant to refer to the digital. Massumi (2002) claims “nothing is more destructive for thinking and imaging of the virtual than equating it with the digital” (p. 137). The digital is a “numerically based form of codification” (p. 137) based on ones and zeros and on that which has already been coded. Its enormous power of organizing what has already taken place “offers a remarkably weak connection to the virtual” (p. 137). Outside of its appearance, the digital is “electronic nothingness” (p. 138). It has to be actualized and its appearance is always “one with its analog transformation” (p. 138). The analog is, the “continuously variable impulse that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another”, “like heat into pain”, or “outside coming in” (p. 135, italics in original). The literal is always analogical and the digital alone is not abstract enough for the “abstract resources of concrete experience” (Massumi, 2002 p. 178). 39 A revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world from December, 2010 to present. 184 Entanglement’s virtuality demonstrates that things do not take one path at a time; going in different directions is what life is humming with. Entanglement offers surfaces for the messiness of measurement to occur40. Vedral (2011) explains that classical physics assumed electrons have fixed axes so that if a measurement is made, the outcome depends on whether the chosen direction aligns with the particle’s axis. With quantum photons, the situation is much different. Electrons, when measured, immediately spin in opposite ways, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Apparently the particles have no fixed axes of rotation and “it is as though the particle decides which way to spin for itself” (p. 41). Although entanglement appears to be reduced to only one of its states, entanglements change themselves and escape. Furthermore, according to Heisenberg’s 1927 Uncertainty Principle, the more precisely a photon’s position is defined, the less accurately its momentum can be defined and the same is true reciprocally. The more precise the measurement, the greater the uncertainty of what slips away. Vedral (2011) explains that entanglements interconnect without reference to space-time which emerges as effect rather than cause. Instead it is place, according to philosopher Malpas (1999) that grounds experience, not in a contingent way but actually where experience establishes or we might say, where it entangles, where it measures itself. Place stereoscopically arises from “a dynamic of interference and accord between sense- dimensions” (Massumi, 2002, p. 182). It is the only way to “measure” both speed and location at once. Where movement matters, Massumi (2002) argues, is “the edge of the virtual where it leaks into the actual” (p. 43), literally, the place of a body where movement takes more than one path at a time, because “that [the actual] is where potential, actually, is found” (p. 43). Method enacts the relation between belonging and becoming. Place is a “synesthetic system of cross-referencing that supplements a systemic duality… positional and moving, Euclidean and self-varying monadic” (Massumi, 2002, p. 182, italics in original). Cross-sense referencing between the two sense systems takes place in body response to its virtual potential. In this way, 40 How I smile to write this converse description that is so often assigned to arts-based research. Entanglement’s aesthetic becoming of forms, is actually highly efficient. 185 entanglement’s probabilistic measure induces but cannot reduce that which continues virtually. It cannot “empty the air of weather” (2002, p. 10) as Massumi claims measurement by retrospective ordering does and instead, any measurement decoheres or untangles movement to produce a macroscopic reality that is indivisible with what measures it. Place is the inhabitable feel of the world and it is connected to movement in relation to a form that extends beyond a body to encompass an eventful world of objects, subjects, things. It is how movement entangles us. Poet Glen Sorestad (2001) expresses it well: “leaving holds me here”. Of course, being moving bodies in a moving world, we create place every time we reposition with the temporality of every perception but continuous awareness of this is too common of sense or as Tickle might say, simply too wonderful for us. In light of entanglement, measurement or decoherence (in quantum mechanic terms) becomes increasingly obscure; continuous environmental movement entangles independently of possible measurement outcomes. Decoherence does not attempt to explain the problem of method but rather, provides an explanation for movement’s additive behaviour. Something gets added to the world; it very literally takes place and it is irreversible. This is the where of perception that Guattari (in Bennett, 2010) advocated could run like light, both parallel and perpendicular. In its refractive connection, we sense the resonance of the double infinity of belonging and becoming, of a world of abundant potential. Part II Usurpation and preemption Moving bodies in a moving world seem to have few concrete implications in academic methods that structure “dumb material interactions of things and rendered them legible according to a dominant signifying scheme” (Massumi, 2002, p. 1-2). O’Sullivan (2001) asks how it is that we have come to be so aesthetically blind. While Tickle finds this impairment emerging from the Reformation, a more curtailed glance references the educational methods of the 1970s that François Cusset (2008) describes as conscious of “a funnel feeding into the job market” (p. 70). With the western world’s increasing 186 political awareness of the 70s, a “new sociology of education” (Wexler, in Pinar et al. 2004, p. 277) premised sources of authority as playing “critical roles in the determination of identity and belonging in communal and relational sites of learning”. Although Michael Dale in 1986 (in Pinar et al.), pointed out that “arguments against a base- superstructure study of ideology are weak” and the “concept of ideology changes like a chameleon, depending upon the context in which it appears” (p. 269), sources of authority were believed to be more constitutive than reflective of school culture and method. With movement seemingly barricaded from above by authority or ideology, the key to examining method involved fundamental questions of inclusion and exclusion. Mediation is how things moved. Modest acts of resistance or reading against the grain are what kept the possibility of systemic change but the very acts of resistance doubly thwarted movement in their look to the past in order to hold movement to emerging standards and identifications. Tracing sociological methodology from the 1970s to 2000, Clough (2009) describes a genealogical engagement with the “constitution of various populations through various standardizing instruments” (p. 54) that even then, followed the interests of governance and economy. In attempting to usurp control of movement from systems of authority and ideas, ideologies were replaced with ideologies. In its “unintended training of the separation of the ideal from the actual” (Moufe, in Pinar et al., 2004, p. 251), the replacement of new ideals in the form of standards usurped the very movement of relationality and variation that was maintained by the practice of ideology. One program was substituted for another. Landon Beyer and George Wood (in Pinar et al.) also critiqued curriculum methods as political text, claiming among other allegations that critical methods replaced foundations of positivism with “dictatorship of the proletariat” (p. 268). O’Sullivan (2001) looks at art history with analogous conclusions to argue that deconstruction, as a method of critical theory, is a critique of the social history of art which renders their relationship as “troublesome bed mates”. “Deconstruction both stymied historical interpretations at the same time as inhabiting their general explanatory 187 framework”. It extended and intensified a self-distancing from the method. Pinar et al. observe how the political theory of critical pedagogy naively recapitulates “Cartesian assumptions regarding relations of mind and matter, thought and action” (p. 272). Critical theories do not acknowledge moving bodies in a moving world because as Ellsworth argued, they fail to challenge positions and “left the structure of domination and authoritarianism in place” (in Pinar et al., 2004, p. 280). Rather than measure being included in movement, time is then spent in “adjusting people to the system” (Grant in Christian & Grant, 1998, p. 89). In critical theory’s concern about the reproduction of the social order, it misses its participation in its production as well as the augmented or diminished physicality of feeling for next movement. Philip Wexler expresses this by noting that the work of a critical rational tradition forgot the “core of the social” (in Pinar et al., 2004, p. 278), “the poetical character of everyday life in school and in society” (p. 278). Attention across a variety of disciplines is being drawn once again to the transitional immediacy of real relation including its abstractions, and away from movement as being culture and society bound and mediated by ideology. Knowledge and method are always on the same side. Movement’s method is not to mediate knowledge but to transmit potential inventiveness, “re-pose(s) the problem of the body’s reconnectibility toward change” (Massumi, 2002, p. 119), inquire into what else a body can do. This offers an alternative image to arguments caught between ‘methods without an object’ versus ‘mastery and transmission of content’; methods and content are on the same side of a self-differentiating reality. Just as space and time are no longer recognized as the dominant factors determining relationships or the dependence or independence of things, an emerging realization of our ecological entanglement with movement presents a challenge to understanding how we move in relation to other bodies, how we undertake methods in relation to other methods. Clough (2009) argues that attending to affect in any way will “profoundly unsettle any conception of method as being in the control of human agency or human consciousness inhering in the human subject” (p. 49). Instead, it repositions movements in accordance to the feeling of capacities to affect and to be affected in the world’s movement. 188 Immanent in moving bodies, affect moves in fluxes and flows, cohering and decohering bodies from one place to another. Power formations operate through “informal production of regularities, as opposed to the formal application of regulations” (Massumi, 2002, p. 82, italics in original) in movement that is “open-endedly social” (Massumi, p. 9). Clough claims that “ideological interpellation and subject disciplining can no longer be the centerpiece of an understanding of sociality, even though disciplining and socializing go on” (2009, p. 54). The current transdisciplinary recognition of affect augments a different kind of transcendent power, emerging from but not directly accessible to experience which Massumi (2002) describes as an excess or surplus of capacities for fusional variation that is the “invisible glue that holds the world together” (p. 217). Beasley-Murray (2010) argues that despite theories that postulate that the state maintains its dominance thanks to the consent of those it dominates, the fact that people no longer give consent and yet everything carries on shows that consent was never really at issue. Instead, Beasley- Murray maintains that the reality of affect undoes spatial metaphors of above and below. As bodies organize so as to increase their powers of affection, they constitute society and move it forward. For him, affect incarnates a logic that does not require representation nor direction. This shift is towards the significance of the world’s movement, towards a body’s “openness to an elsewhere” (p. 5), and to its own virtual potential to vary. Affect sinks ideology back into a body’s capacity for “transituational linkage” (Massumi, p. 239). The political instead, “always follows that which it regulates” (Massumi, p. 83). Network ecologies and ecosystems There is also, however, another emerging trend beyond “the decline of the triumphalist social narrative of progress” (Clough, 2009, p. 47). Clough situates it in the “growing centrality of digitization and networks” (p. 47) that seeks to control movement by preempting it altogether41. As the movement of the moving bodies in the world, affect 41 Both Massumi and Clough describe ways in which digital technology joins with affect to modulate affect and bring it to “a qualitative change beyond a threshold of a quantitative change in the intensity of affect” (Clough, 2009, p. 51) in which it no longer moves through sensation but remains in abstraction which is the actual envelopment of the virtual. This can also be explained in terms of the measures of probability, plausibility, possibility and potential. Because affect draws the future into the present as an 189 gives qualitative difference to every thing, able to induce but not reduce (Massumi, 2008). What affect induces is the coming of things. Yet, because sociological methods have passed the business of life largely to the workings of the economy (Clough, p. 52), affect is employed at the level of abstract digitization, as a commodity in evaluating and managing risk through processes of securitization. In this logic, Clough explains the shift she sees, from “accurate prediction of probabilities” (p. 53), as thought to provide wisdom, to an “anticipation of future crises not to prevent them but to preempt them, leading to… proliferation of crisis but also a repetition of the indeterminacy of the event” (2009, p. 53). Also describing digital network ecologies, media philosopher Michael Stevenson (2007) explains that inputs are enough to define outputs: methods should do what we want, no more, no less. Clough (2009) references Mark Hansen to explain that “digitization meets the dynamism or self-informing capacity of matter and it meets that dynamism as digitally code-able” (Clough, p. 51). Clough explains that the coming together of digital method and affect is more than a technology that represents life as information but rather information as “inhering in DNA as a technical principle, or biology’s computational capacity”. Every measure in varying degrees inheres in entanglement as life’s computational capacity. In other words it transports force without transformation: it moves without bodies (Thacker, in Clough, 2009, p. 58) but its effects become part of a body’s capacity for movement. Rather than usurping movement this method actually conflates to an already knowable future, thereby preempting body movement. Technology is not really the issue; it the lack of feeling in its method, its abstractness of indeterminate state of activation; it is a “probabilistic or quantum ontology of affect”. Probabilistic measure induces things but cannot reduce a thing which is what both classical scientific methods and sociological positivist methods both believe. It cannot reduce what it induces because it is inducing the future. In understanding affect, probabilistic measure is a form that possibility can take that gives the everyday regularity of things; it approximates potential but potential remains virtually with a body. Critiques as ideologies or standards derive, however, from another form that possibility can take, which is plausibility. In sociological methods plausibility works by coding positionings on a grid, on which Massumi (2002) notes, movement is only defined by beginning and endpoints. These methods avert attention from affect’s more subtle and powerful form of social organization of movement now coming to the fore as its self-measure becomes entangled with increasing digitization. Massumi explains how digital processing in its actualizing becomes self-modulating; the running of the code induces qualitative transformation in its own feedback loops. Its only potential is possibility and on its own cannot create the quantum reality of the virtual. 190 generalization that is not abstract enough for a body, going as the digital only can, in one direction at a time. If affect is a body preparing itself for movement (Stevenson, 2007), it is crucial that bodies feel the indeterminacy of potential. Preemptive logic appears to optimize efficiency through feedback loops where the future is measured by the method of the mood of economic indexes, or by the volatility of the future or the certain uncertainty of context. Distance is already known so there is no need for structural cross-referencing that renders the world inhabitable and no need for notions of place. However, returning to Vedral’s (2011) analysis of entanglement, its method offers a much more spectacular efficiency where quantum movement takes more than one pathway at once42. He explains that the tighter the measure in terms of digitization, the more unknown is entanglement’s change that slips away, the more affect becomes threatening and ominous, the more we want to preempt movement. Protocol and excellence Part of the problem with conflating the digital and the virtual inheres in images of networks that process and manage information using micro-technologies. The work of interactivity which is the heart of network organization emphasizes movements that reduce or remove hierarchies, promoting “feedback” instead. Complaints of users are taken seriously and often result in modifications. The implication, for example, in universities is that modifications will generate specific and identifiable products (Franklin, 1990, p. 22). Beasley-Murray notes that “the fact that people no longer believe in radical change as they may once have done does not mean that everything will carry on much the same” (p. x). In other words, after ideology, bodies defined by a limited capacity for movement is a much more serious issue. Drawing on the work of Massumi and Shaviro, Stevenson (2007) argues for the affectivity of interactivity. Stevenson explains how interactivity, the heart of the network, can hardly be called passivity as Slavoj Zizek (in Stevenson) claims and is instead, affective but without adding qualitative 42 For example, Vedral (2011) speculates that photosynthesis is another biological process where entanglement may operate. Converting sunlight into energy in a quantum world is incredibly efficient because particles do not have to take just one path at a time. They can take all paths simultaneously, some canceling each other and others reinforcing mutually, thereby increasing changes of steering “straight to the reaction center” (p. 43). 191 difference. This is accomplished through inputs that define outputs. Both method and user are defined by their relation to each other; both enable and constrain the other. Stevenson points out that this is a matter of standards: “in order for a node to send and receive data, it must follow a set of agreed-upon instructions” (p. 7). Galloway (in Stevenson) calls this network ecology: protocol and protocol is also the method of digital technology. Protocol is characterized by opposing forces: hidden code governing transmission of data, and autonomy allowing for the greatest freedom of communication between nodes, even inviting feedback. To explain protocol, Stevenson references Galloway to relate it to post-industrial modes of production such as Toyotism in which “small pods of workers that are not linear and fixed like the more traditional assembly line but […] reconfigurable depending on whatever problem might be posed to them”. Discussed in slightly different terms, Cusset (2008) explains that this shift is a tool for “an unprecedented alliance between the transmission of knowledge and the economic order” (p. 45) and he describes it as the logic of excellence that is “a notion with no content” (Cusset, p. 45) which when considered in terms of entanglement and affect, must mean that it works without bodies needing to re-position. The logic of excellence has powers of adaptivity, integration and a “capacity to absorb what, in the past, would have threatened its values” (p. 45). Actual code, in both a logic of excellence and in protocol, although programmable in theory, is closed off to the user. Ursula Franklin (1990) explains that any goal of prescriptive technologies eliminates decision-making and is “incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable” (p. 18, italics in original). Resistance is no longer futile: instead, Stevenson and Cusset claim it is already included. Stevenson compares the hiddenness of protocol to the absence of the expert at interactive exhibits even though educational intentions might remain the same as non-interactive exhibits. Situating his inquiry in seeking the remainder of interactivity after control and empowerment, Stevenson asks how different forms activate and affect. He focuses on 192 how interactivity feels and finds that it feels like potential: “the inevitability of surprise, its actualizations coming in the form of blinking application windows and new message alerts” (p. 13). Recalling Schrödinger’s cat and Vedral’s entanglements, virtual potential already has an effect in the here and now, like a threat—it is the “future cause of a change in the present” (Massumi, in Stevenson, p. 14). An intensity of the certainty of future uncertainty often compels a survival response of establishing boundaries, shutting down for fear of the now-known unknown; like Deleuze’s tick, few options are seen for movement. In terms of network ecologies, Stevenson argues that feedback for every user movement as well as maxims such as “what you see is what you get”, “user friendly”, “shared control”, (p. 4) renders coding’s method, to actually “form users by addressing them as having certain qualities” (p. 5, italics in original). Within a tight feedback loop, certain movements are naturalized and these images are fed back to bodies without any need to reposition. Movement is preempted. What is lost, Stevenson observes, is “how the feel of being online relates to the virtual”. In an image of preemption, bodies experience potential as a paralyzing effect; they lose the feel of the future while it is still future. They lose the capacity to feel they can affect the future’s inhabitability. Conclusion Significant in movement’s movement are aesthetics: the passing of the virtual into the empirical, the feel of coming form, the feel of its irreparable loss, the technology of belonging at the very place where the present divides into becoming. New form is always emerging and Massumi (2008) claims “art is part and parcel of that process” (p. 37). O’Sullivan argues that “art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of” (p. 128). Moving bodies, moving world renders previous aesthetic judgments of taste associated with ideologies not as significant as the reality of an expanded empiricism. Aesthetics are less involved in making sense of the world but rather, as O’Sullivan (2001) argues, in “pushing forward the boundaries” (p. 130) of what a method can do: less about shielding method from transforming and more about augmenting its capacity for re- positioning. A method, like any body, is a becoming form making itself what it is not and becoming “a portal to a world experienced differently” (O’Sullivan, p. 128) by moving beyond the already-familiar to affirm the actuality of the virtual. 193 Equally significant in movement’s method is the anesthetic, the term Massumi uses for the empirical, the antidote for the pain of movement’s method of coming again, the antidote for being open to the world’s intensity of feeling. Augmenting the fullness of the world’s passion into a momentary quality of movement or a flavor of entanglement is not necessarily easy, especially when recognizing something can feel like such a relief. Movement views recognizable sensation as a productive lapse, unknowable beyond its qualitative difference. Massumi (2008) references James in suggesting that “to avoid a romanticism of connection [of empirical things]… take everything as it comes” (p. 40), meaning that we “have to take both continuity and discontinuity as they come” (p. 40, italics in original). Rather than rushing to apply anything, the formula is: “look only at the movements” (Deleuze & Guattari, in Massumi, 2002, p. 108). Never restricted to one event; movement will always come again and instead, it is in repetition where variation asserts itself. Ultimately, movement is a method of thinking-feeling (Massumi, 2008), not of recognizing (Stengers, 2005). Lest we linger too long with the classically empirical, the virtual tarries for us with its capacity for next movement, in advance, for-giving qualitative difference. Where does a body begin with such a method? It begins in the middle. Not in the middle between theory and practice or mind and body but in the middle of movement already underway. On the terrain between a body’s capacity to be affected and its ability to affect, a body’s movement transduces the effects of an image into an image for others. This is a pragmatic method, something to make of a body in which the virtual surplus of the material world takes charge of the actual. Stengers (2005) references Deleuze in explaining that “thinking through the middle” (23.06.2005, Escaping the major key, para. 3) means without disentangling something from its particular surroundings. It means resisting a technology of cause and effect and embracing movement’s technology of belonging that “does not dream to manipulate bodies nor “dream to submit them to one’s own human ideas about what would be a better world” (Stengers, 23.06.2005, Causes, para. 3). Instead, how can technology extend the else that a body can do, the else that a method can do? 194 Finally, an adequate response for how teacher education might come to feel for the world, for histories, times and places not one’s own may begin where we re-position our study of the moving universe, knowing we are not asked to run it (Franklin, 1990). An emerging definition of ecology for teacher education methods might be: the study of nonrelation. Deriving from the Greek word, oikos–household, ecology is the everyday remaking of feelings of inhabitability through places from in which to feel and be felt by more, other, excess: a world of qualities of light. This is an ecology that shifts from one place to another, continually reminding its moving bodies of the oversimplification that comes with focus on relations between things and instead, of their belonging in feelings of capacities to affect and to be affected by what is more. This is where entanglements that matter to a body deeply, broadly, repeatedly, geologically, feel the intensity of loss and more importantly, move beyond themselves to feel the beauty of what they may become. With the double vision of moving bodies, moving world, the most important question for a curriculum of teacher education methods is, “how does it feel?” 195 ……………….. Studio note, August 2011 Figure 36. How does a day feel? Rather than purely oppositional or simply falling apart, the day seeks autonomy but not abandonment. Its very identity relies on external supplements. An agreement is struck at the heart of this discord; blue and yellow push each other to their utmost intensity and the day opens to joy in contingent encounters. Its nonrelation converges in a quality that both grounds and exceeds everything, a way of making the world feel inhabitable. The epilogue that follows reviews the initial guiding questions for this research, detailing the chapters in which they were addressed. The epilogue also revisits assertions of a material world that is not entirely knowable and recommends opportunities for teacher education methods to initiate and proliferate art practices that may augment greater interest in offering sustenance to an expanded reality. Suggested self-inquiry questions for methods follow. 196 Epilogue Because the questions that have guided my inquiry have been addressed in each of the chapters in a variety of different ways and because they remain as questions for my own unfolding and future practices of art, research and teaching it is somewhat difficult to now offer the reader a summary of where I feel they were addressed most fully in this work. However, I attempt to do exactly that, in this epilogue. 1. How might art and aesthetic experience move within teacher education methods to contribute to the intensity of living in a particular time and place? Art and aesthetics involve the feel of movement through the openness of closed form in ways that enable the energies of past decisions to mingle with future potential. Art and aesthetic experience are often engaged to enhance learning about their transformational capacities or to learn through their experience yet methods generally attempt to stand back from learning in hopes of getting something without having to give themselves away. Art that moves within methods, however, entails a body, in this case that of a method, that feels capacities for becoming what it is not. This is explored in terms of pedagogy, geology and in-migrating families in Chapter Two, in terms of a/r/tography and pedagogy in Chapter Three, the self and curriculum in Chapter Four, experience in Chapter Six, and the sustenance of ecology in Chapter Eight. “Moving within” or “moving in accordance” is a main idea in this research, and one with which I have struggled repeatedly to explain. By using these particular words I am trying to express a number of things: the unknowability of movement without a body, the compositional nature of experience in which things are connected by their feelings of capacity to affect each other, the extension of these feelings of capacity to the more than human world and its vital syntheses of difference, and the inseparability of any body from its self-differentiating movement. Most significantly, art repeatedly moving within teacher education methods means that bodies have feelings of intensity for more of reality and in fact, methods become creative practice. 197 Art is its own method in which everything involved moves towards its own change through the aesthetic experience of sensing creative movement already underway and feelings of capacity to participate. Through repeated recalibrating measures a method indexes to feelings of capacity for moving and being moved, and bodies are refamiliarized with how they learned to walk, breathe, perceive more than what they see, read more than is written, say more than they mean. They are familiarized with how they became a body with greater powers for affecting and for being affected, for belonging to the world through those feelings of capacity. The degree to which something is composed through its feelings of capacity to be affected and to affect is the extent of its intensity, which is an immediate set of potentials that emerge within each actualization. When a method feels capacity to engage with the immediacy of seeming incompatibility, intensity vibrates most energetically and the receptive infolding of intensity registered in each degree of transition is what makes location possible and the world feel inhabitable. How methods contribute to the intensity of living in a particular place and time is addressed: in Chapter Two in terms of pedagogic opportunity for in-migrating families to repeatedly bring together incompatibles of past and present, here and there and home and away in a/r/tographic practice, in Chapter Three where the degrees of separation afforded by potential over possibility and repetitions of bringing incompatibles together manifest greater intensity, in Chapter Four where currere generates a subjective but impersonal sense of belonging to what is other, and in Chapter Six where the satisfaction that yields intensity is understood as culminations of experience which bring insight into the necessity of more frequent recalibrations in methods, but in ways that feel the availabilities of potential. Each assessment of minute repositioning in a creative practice requires a submission to stability at the same moment that quality ignites new availabilities. Feeling is for an instant, locked into movement at the quality of place. Chapter Seven offers an example for teacher education where curriculum as creative practice involves continual bodily assessments regarding potential and incoming knowledge to generate qualities that recalibrate reality, rather than methods whose goal is towards generating predetermined qualities. Chapter Eight argues the importance of 198 sustaining an ecology of expanded empiricism that also includes the real energies and effects of qualities, assessments and intensities. 2. How might teacher education methods come to feel capacities for being affected and for affecting the world’s ecological sociality? How does attending to the reality of movement resituate educational methods and experience? My recommendations for teacher education methods that come to feel belonging to the world and its tending towards what is other than it, involve making every method one of creative practice and encouraging opportunity for the creative practices to affect one another. Though attending to the reality of movement at every moment is impossible and undesirable, I am encouraging repeated and continual opportunity for bodies to feel the intensity of belonging to what is more, to learn a multiplicity of ways to find creative movement everywhere and to engage with it pedagogically in offering opportunities for others to experience the ways in which they do not know. Attending to the reality of movement directs methods away from outcomes, towards feeling form through more repeated culminations of openness. The main criteria for a successful educational method is similar to what Stengers (in Massumi, 2009) claims for an event: that it appear, that it be a method, which means it repeat not as a norm but as an affective value that would not have otherwise happened. This repetition is what validates method and self in whatever minimal intensity that validation becomes. Repeating the method is the only way to remain faithful to the world’s continuous oscillating and creative movement. What is new, in terms of revitalizing methods, knowledge, people and experience only emerges through repetition. What changes is that each repetition can transcend its condition, making it perpetually new. This is, Massumi argues, harder than one would think, given the infrequency with which one encounters something they feel is truly different. Perhaps educational standards and ‘best practices’ contribute to a body forgetting its feel for movement. Movement runs in more than one way in methods. The goal is not to overcome the unknown and the open-ended sociality of every thing but rather, Massumi, (2009) argues, 199 to make it compelling. Compelling enough to repeat a method: differently, rather than remaining with methods that already know, have no sense of other, quickly register patterns, make connections, imagine they are exempt from a moving entangled world or create their own culture of greed that desires to get without giving itself away. I slowly began to understand that the significance of movement means methods cannot get something for nothing, nor just get something for something nor even what I concluded in Chapter One, Four, and Eight in which they give everything away and are yet inadequate to what they receive, but rather that methods give themselves away so that they feel belonging to the earth’s ecology through that very feel of capacity for giving, that they can already feel everywhere. Said differently, the compelling force that allows each event of a method to manifest itself as something entirely new is responded to just for the feel of becoming that quality of giving. Examples for how methods might become creative practices are addressed in every chapter. In Chapter One I introduce transduction as a creative practice in which a local organization of forces assesses or measures itself by making itself into series of qualities that make a place feel inhabitable. I suggest this is how art moves, how it takes itself inside and moves accordingly with that self-moving force. In Chapter Two pedagogic methods for a/r/tographic methodology are investigated through Lusted’s (1986) categories of considering time creative, foregrounding exchange over categories, finding productivity in relations, rendering engaged parties active, changing and changeable, and premising goals and ends as arising within activity. In Chapter Three teacher education methods and a/r/tographic methodology is situated in creative practice through working in the realm of potential rather than only in what is currently understood. Visiting artists augmented methods that added markings to evidence of other interaction, uprooted concepts and bodies and inserted them elsewhere to make new qualities of becoming pedagogical. Researchers inquired into ways in which they could feel these experiences shifting previously established identities and methods. Chapter Four inquires into the creative practice of curriculum’s moving form, currere, offering an example of its regressive, analytical and synthetical events. Chapter Seven 200 explores the EarthShapes method for its steps of Make a Place, Make a Connection and then Make it Happen which offer another variation for how methods might engage creative practice in feeling for the world. Chapters Five and Eight address the creative practices of images that methods make. These chapters attempt to steer away from economic images towards ecological images that include the ways in which we do not know every thing. Chapter Five involves the creative practice of returning to finished or unfinished work or unactualized work to reinvigorate or shift previous determinations. 3. How might initiating and proliferating art practices remind bodies of the aesthetics of creative practices already underway which augment capacities for belonging to a life and to the planet? In art making and aesthetic practice there is continual repositioning in embodied inquiry that experiments: What quality resides here? What if I move myself in this way or that, into the light there, into the shadows here, faster or slower, more weighted or more lightly? These are continual aesthetic judgments that Massumi (1997) claims are made in large part before conscious recognition and in the midst of creative inquiry. Throughout our existence, bodies and methods learn creative practice by no longer having to focus on ‘how’. Examples such as breathing, walking and reading become events that are so much a part of each moment that we forget the else in them that sustains us and the else we offer to sustain those practices. External apparatuses and technologies assemble with methods and people so pervasively that we have long forgotten much of the feelings of helplessness that decenter bodies and methods in a reliance on what is more than them. In purely physicalist terms this might be explained as a preservation of energy: expending the least amount of energy in order to regain continuous boundaries. In terms of this research, I hope I have communicated something beyond this: that all bodies are compelled by the world’s passionate movement and are willing in varying degrees to reposition in order to feel its touch. At every juncture, there is also much peripheral responding to the “felt immediacy” (Massumi, 1997, para. 11) of non-cognitive creative movement always playing at the edges of things, luring feeling in a variety of ways. Each repositioning is an opportunity 201 to register intensity through bringing together the contrasts of method/body in a nonhuman becoming of all things. This is very different from becoming something already known or espousing becoming as an endless journey with no hope of satisfaction. It is, instead, a continual taking inside of the world’s qualitative movement and a feeling of its intensity just where it moves in two directions at once. Assessment is not a concept that I would have previously considered I would engage in research about the feeling of capacities for affecting and being affected by the movement of the world’s bodies. In fact, it took the repetition of these chapters for me to come to realize the significance of measure to intensity, and subsequently to feelings of the inhabitability of the world and the making of place. The reader may notice that words such as reposition occur more frequently in early chapters and words such as measure and assess and recalibrate occur more repeatedly in later chapters, all of which I use interchangeably. At a concluding point now in this research, the significance of precognitive assessments, feelings without concepts that are inherent in creative practice seem paramount to me. As significant as learning to find creative movement everywhere is judgment that is incommunicable because of its felt and non-cognitive immediacy. Measure is immanent in affect in Chapters One, in a/r/tography in Chapter Three, in currere and the self in Chapter Four, in experience in Chapter Six, place in Chapter Seven and entanglement in Chapter Eight. Creative practice generates qualities through repositioning, and qualities measure the world, adding to reality. In a series, qualities reveal their movement of feelings of inhabitability and place and we feel belonging to the world in that measure of feeling and movement. In Chapter One, I offer three qualities of assessment that seem workable for a curriculum of movement, based on the study in the other chapters. These three qualities of availability, arrival and analog are not qualities to be measured but qualities which measure in varying degrees and capacities and which might be submitted to for finding what availabilities arise just at the place where a method lifts off from its belonging to feelings of capacity for moving and being moved. Often methods are discarded if they do not seem to work in particular situations for particular purposes, rather than plumbed for 202 inquiry of how they feel. This offers less intensity because there is no opportunity in which to feel the strength or duration with which incompatibilities are brought together; there is less opportunity to sense qualities and feelings that we do not already know and there are no feelings of capacities to affect and be affected beyond that method. Chapter Two addresses the ways in which an a/r/tographic research pedagogy involved continual opportunity for repositioning both individually and collaboratively. The interests and feelings of capacities of the artists and teacher researchers, and the recalibration of plans and new ideas and input repeatedly resituated the direction and unfolding of the project. I strove in this chapter to accentuate this entangling movement by creating an image of a/r/tographic research in which geologic movement ran alongside methodologic movement, leaving the reader to feel the attitude of continual emergence. In the other chapters I focused more on methods affected by movement in ways that do not separate culture and nature. In Chapter Three, I discussed how a methodology might change itself through its methods and how each example is an exhibition of the methodology that shifts the methodology even while validating it by repeating, differently. The chapter’s inquiry into the Summerhill a/r/tographic project sought to understand a preservice teaching practice of learning to find creative movement, and of repositioning within it as a way of becoming pedagogical. Chapter Four inquires into the need for intensity and its satisfactions found in the measure of place: moments of registering qualities of movement to feeling. Chapter Five reviews understandings of quality, often considered in education as something fixed. Engaging Irwin’s series of art images of the liminality of qualities of light, the chapter finds qualities to have a materiality and energy of their own, which extend possibility and emerge as potential for future decisions. Any repositioning or assessment adds qualities to reality which affect and are affected by future revitalizations of past choices. In Chapter Six, experience is reviewed according to a variety of pragmatist, process and complexity thinkers and discussed as its own repositioning in and as, feelings of capacities to be affected and to affect. Experience lures the world into co-substantiating itself in self-assessments that add to reality, each one making experience more ‘what it is’ 203 and each adding to the feel of a world full of qualitative experience. Chapter Seven offers a practical example of artmaking in which particular steps generate products of imaginative and inventive decision making that work in the realm of available potential. The example in this chapter repeats itself in relation to qualities arising in its creative practice. 4. By drawing more fully on a/r/tography’s transformational movement of art, how might aesthetics shift a methodology beyond traditional conceptions of epistemology? Could stronger claims for art’s autonomy in research and pedagogy, towards an expanded empiricism including the non-relations of relation and the situating of art as a vital material force, situate teacher education as an ecological and contemporary concern? Because art opens things to a world experienced differently, might its repeated engagement in teacher education induce a stronger ecological sense? How might this counter the ecological risks evident in increasing standardizing abstractions of educational methods and qualitative difference? By drawing more fully on art, this research premises aesthetics over epistemology or at least, that which repeats in the midst of its becoming an epistemology over that which premises what is already known. The creative practices in this research bring together traditional epistemic binaries such as the analytic and the synthetic in movement that brings the reality of feeling to the seeming gap between representation and reality. In this understanding of ecology, there is no knowledge that is known independently of experience, no knowledge that is not empirical, though there is possibility for lack of feeling for it. Feelings of capacity to participate in reality are real in this expanded empiricism and things are justified through the struggle of repeating, of making something matter to this place and time. Because of movement, there is also no set knowledge that we can say derived from experience but only knowledge that is the feel of more in an infinity of varying degrees. Making the visual and text horizon images that are the transitions between chapters has been helpful for me. I have been able to repeatedly return to their making to ask myself how each idea might work in relation to what is made of a day. 204 Art is necessary in experiencing an expanding empiricism that includes barely accessible sensations, energies from past decisions, feelings of capacity to participate in movement’s transformational work as well as for including what remains fundamentally unknowable or yet becoming, about each and every thing. In the a/r/tographic project in Chapter Two, art offered opportunity for participants to experience wider realities of their own and others’ in-migrating experiences through many opportunities to collectively share daily creative practices that reinvigorated the past and engaged the future. An expanding reality offers stranger differences that yet culminate repeatedly and offer more intensity for participants. In Chapter Three, the a/r/tographic preservice teacher project is studied for the way in which learning involves the world coming in so that a method becomes an image of a moving world rather than acquiring an internal image of an outside world. In this particular study, I do not know if a stronger ecological sense was induced for the teacher candidates but I am looking forward to future studies in which there is more opportunity to cross-reference creative practices in perhaps more overt ways. In Chapter Four, the creative practice of currere is explored for revitalizing past feelings in places where we sense belonging to the world in a contemporary way, a way that matters now but knows that now is not everything. In the creative practice of moving between past and future and place and fantasy, currere engages an experience in which we do not know, to allow the oscillating movement to increasingly populate with an expanded ecology of real feelings and things that are not readily apparent. Because art opens things to a world experienced differently, its repeated engagement in teacher education methods might counter the ecological risks evident in increasing standardizing abstractions of educational methods and of qualitative difference. This is addressed in Chapter Five where qualities are examined from a number of viewpoints and discussed in terms of liminality where they are not secondary, tied to the subjective, but are rather, additions to reality. Chapter Eight discusses the ways in which standardizing qualities eliminates the adhesives in ecology, a serious ecological issue. 205 5. Engaging in a variety of teacher educating methods in an a/r/tographic methodology, what qualities of curriculum might I map retrospectively to extend the reach and relevancy of the field of teacher education? This final question is addressed in the recommendation section of Chapter One in terms of availabilities, arrival and the analog. I wish these three expressions flowed more smoothly because I think they are the most suitable for my recommendations. Engaging these qualities through creative practices will offer, I hope, a teacher education curriculum in which there is much opportunity to individually and collectively practice the struggle of living together to feel something matter, for what is just now coming on the horizon. In conclusion, experience’s fugitive dimension of generative productive forces and feelings of capacity for affecting and for being affected generates a certain incompleteness in our days. Sometimes there is the sense that things are on the verge of happening but don’t; potential glimpsed remains blurry, gets forgotten; nagging sensations about an earlier commitment register a chill on a scorching day. This is not a vision of the future or of something new but rather insight into something that is always already underway. Perhaps we are snagged now and then, as Massumi (1998) muses, in the midst of the universe sensing its own becoming. Educationally, this is an opportunity to initiate and proliferate creative practices in which repeated and daily methods and bodies encounter what is other in terms of what matters now: invitations to experiment and explore and intensify experience. This research argues for initiating art making and aesthetic experiences in a variety of creative practices, letting them proliferate and intermingle with what moves people, what matters to them, discussing the small shifts of selection, the strength of the forms methods engage, the loosening at their edges in experimentation, the feeling of how one quality might lead to another, the working outside of concepts, letting them fill in retrospectively. Rather than taking a reduction of reality as a starting point, teacher education might work ecologically to affirm and continue variability and potential as well as to augment body 206 memory of participants and methods through aesthetic experiences of creative practice and art making: finding creative movement already underway, uprooting and reinserting, marking, inventing or transducing. Working in artistic practice in both the complicity and limitations of every situation is a way of experimentally modulating and becoming, an assessment at the momentary, bodily level of participation in the “variety and exuberance of forms of life” (Massumi, (2008, p. 19), rather than an assessment of what already is. Educational methods might teach an expanded and drastically interwoven, more silent but ardent ecology by nurturing inquiry at their edges rather than ordering mastery of methods or using methods to critique, as though they are able to stand at a distance and make judgment. Artists, researchers and teachers move within a method’s repositioning towards repeating: towards a ‘taking place’ or at least a rendering of qualities, that make the world feel inhabitable. My hope in this research is that I have communicated the significance of art and aesthetic experience through daily creative practices for reminding methods and bodies of the satisfying struggle of making something intensely singular in a world of qualitative abundance. Every recalibration, every repositioning of a method is an assessment both of the method’s available energies and of its available potentials. The longer and more often bodies and methods are exposed to the world’s feelings of capacities for affecting and for being affected, the more life forms emerge. This infinite ecology of reality’s full assertion of interacting energies is an effect of interacting bodies, yet bodies themselves emerge and reconstitute their actualizations in this ecology I hope, as well, that I have adequately and aesthetically communicated the incommunicability of rendering an ecology of movement, in the process of being caught up in its very self-assessments which are movement’s actual discontinuous structure. Feelings of capacities to affect and to be affected and the measure of distance, though already light years beyond, are the elementary organization of the world’s movement in terms of subject experience. My deepest interest in this work is towards a teacher education curriculum that teaches methods as creative practice through which people learn to love the place and time in which they live. As methods open new ground for 207 exploration and invention, education is re-vitalized. Each determination is an attempt to stabilize the movement of light with the appearing stability of the horizon, attempts at bringing together contrasts in a composition that feels for more. These are assessments that make lives more livable and intense and the world feel inhabitable for now and for the future. 208 ……………….. Practicing art for ecological inquiry involves methods that feel capacities for affecting and for being affected. In the midst of their work of self-renewal, they may for example, ask themselves: • How am I feeling for more? How am I making this a practice? • How am I repositioning to make this situation feel more livable for me and others? • How am I struggling to make what is important from my past and the pasts of others matter now in this place and time? • How am I struggling to bring things that matter to shareable, visual, textual and perhaps verbal expression? • How am I hesitant through not knowing but bold in my availabilities? • How am I exploring what else I might be able to do? • If this quality exists in this situation, what other quality might also reside here? • What does this quality make possible? • How am I negotiating the affirmation of myself in general reality with the fact that reality is produced out of my re-emerging? • How am I offering the generosity of the world’s continual giving, tending and sustaining its feel of potential available in both past and future? • How am I welcoming other logics, resisting the minimizing of promoting just one model? • How am I both undermining and preserving a sense of myself as a method; how am I sustaining myself as a method that repeats, differently? • Where is excess reality in my re-emergence? 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