Knowing from the Inside: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy 9781350217140, 9781350217171, 9781350217157

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Foreword
Introduction: Knowing from the Inside (Tim Ingold)
1 Learning with Potentials (Cathrine Hasse)
2 A Pedagogy of Attention to the Light in the Eyes (Jan van Boeckel)
3 Proportion, Analogy and Mixture: Unearthing Mathematical Measurement Practices (Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair)
4 Creative Movements: Hands, Arms, Materials and Words in Making Baskets (Stephanie Bunn)
5 Growing in the Midst of Things (Rachel Holmes and Amanda Ravetz)
6 Exploring an Autistic Curriculum: Of Pedagogy, Puppets and Perception (Melissa Trimingham)
7 ‘A House for …’: Exercises in Filmic Architecture (Ray Lucas)
8 Searching for the Ethos of a Lost Art School (Judith Winter)
9 Dada and the Absurd: Pedagogies of Art and Survival (Anne Douglas)
10 Lessons from a Collaboration between Anthropology and Laboratory Theatre (Caroline Gatt)
11 Atmospheres of University Education: Courses and Forces (Jan Masschelein, Mieke Berghmans and Maarten Simons)
Index

Citation preview

Knowing from the Inside

Alternative | Education Series Editors: Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) Bernd Herzogenrath (University of Frankfurt, Germany) Education is in crisis. In an era of academic capitalism, the very idea of the university is caught in the crossfire between neoliberal and ultra-conservative ideologies. It is not enough, however, to criticize the status quo. We have to come up with positive alternatives, and that means rethinking the foundations of education itself. What if we were to think of education as opening out into a terrain that is ever-unfolding? What if it were a way of studying with the world we inhabit, rather than making studies of the beings and things we find there? Could the university be the place where this kind of alternative education might be put into practice? Could it become a ‘multiversity’? Books in the series Alternative | Education will address these questions. Advisory Board: Cala Coats (Arizona State University, USA) David R. Cole (Western Sydney University, Australia) Jan Masschelein (University of Leuven, Belgium) Forthcoming in the series: New Perspectives on Academic Writing: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

Knowing from the Inside Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy Edited by Tim Ingold

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Tim Ingold and Bloomsbury, 2022 Tim Ingold and Bloomsbury have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xi–xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Charlotte James Cover image © ne2pi / iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-1714-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-1715-7 eBook: 978-1-3502-1716-4 Series: Alternative | Education Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Foreword Introduction: Knowing from the Inside  Tim Ingold 1 Learning with Potentials Cathrine Hasse 2 A Pedagogy of Attention to the Light in the Eyes Jan van Boeckel 3 Proportion, Analogy and Mixture: Unearthing Mathematical Measurement Practices Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair 4 Creative Movements: Hands, Arms, Materials and Words in Making Baskets Stephanie Bunn 5 Growing in the Midst of Things Rachel Holmes and Amanda Ravetz 6 Exploring an Autistic Curriculum: Of Pedagogy, Puppets and Perception Melissa Trimingham 7 ‘A House for …’: Exercises in Filmic Architecture Ray Lucas 8 Searching for the Ethos of a Lost Art School Judith Winter 9 Dada and the Absurd: Pedagogies of Art and Survival Anne Douglas 10 Lessons from a Collaboration between Anthropology and Laboratory Theatre Caroline Gatt

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Atmospheres of University Education: Courses and Forces Jan Masschelein, Mieke Berghmans and Maarten Simons

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Figures 1.1 Three robot drawings from a Danish classroom 1.2 Three robot drawings by pupils of a country school in Tanzania 1.3 Kasper’s robot loves kids, just like Lasse’s, but it hands out Doritos and not ice cream 1.4 A robber (not robot) and a wired figure, from the country school in Tanzania 1.5 NAO meets the children 2.1 Painting with the rain 2.2 Johann Zahn’s depiction of the radiating eye  7.1 Using architectural toys to develop designs 7.2 Example of storyboards from Archontia Manolakelli’s preparatory work for a House for Hayao Miyazaki 7.3 Drawing of Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic Hong Kong by Peter Sun Yin 7.4 Model of Miyazaki’s cinematic space interpreted as a Japanese gravel garden by Archontia Manolakelli 7.5 Sound and timing analysis of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead by Liam Bright 7.6 Major Arcana of a Tarot deck designed after Lars von Trier’s Trilogy of Depression, by Kassandra Koutsoftas 8.1 Art students on the occasion of a Bauhaus party 9.1 Allan Kaprow, Six Ordinary Happenings 9.2 Joseph Beuys Die Eröffnung. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 9.3 One of nine works by John Newling from the exhibition Currency and Belief 9.4 Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Survival Piece II, Notations on the Ecosystem of the Western Saltworks with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp 11.1 Reported on-campus displacements to study places, visualized on the city map of Leuven 11.2 Examples of postcards 11.3 Models to study the forces that engender a presence of mind in a seminar room and student room

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Contributors Mieke Berghmans is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Education and Society, and a member of the research group Education, Culture and Society, at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests are in social pedagogy, political and organizational aspects of NGOs, and educational policy. Jan van Boeckel is Professor of Art and Sustainability in the Research Centre of Art and Society at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, the Netherlands. He has previously taught at the Iceland University of the Arts, Iceland, the Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) in Uppsala, Sweden, and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Stephanie Bunn is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. Bunn leads the AHRC-funded Woven Communities project, and has written extensively on the intersections between anthropology and craft. She is the editor of Anthropology and Beauty (2017) and co-editor of The Material Culture of Basketry (2021). Anne Douglas is Emeritus Professor of Art, Robert Gordon University, UK. Douglas has led a series of projects focusing on the place of the arts in public life, especially in the fields of art and ecology, as well as on experimental music. Elizabeth de Freitas is Professor of STEM Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. De Freitas’s research focuses on philosophical investigations of mathematics, science and technology. She is the author of Mathematics and the Body (with Nathalie Sinclair, 2014). Caroline Gatt is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her research interests include collaborative anthropology, environmentalism, laboratory theatre and design anthropology. She is editor of The Voices of the Pages (2017) and the author of An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism (2018). Cathrine Hasse is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Learning and Director of the Programme for Future Technology, Culture and Learning at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She is the author of An Anthropology of Learning (2015) and Posthumanist Learning (2020).

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Rachel Holmes is Professor in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Holmes leads ESRI’s Children and Childhood Research Group and has co-authored numerous studies of early childhood education. Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. From 2013 to 2018, he led the ERC-funded project Knowing From the Inside (KFI). He is the author of many books, including Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Correspondences (2000) and Imagining for Real (2022). Jan Masschelein is Head of the Laboratory for Education and Society, and of the research group Education, Culture and Society, at KU Leuven, Belgium. Masschelein is a philosopher of education whose work on the pedagogy of attention has been inspirational for the KFI project. Ray Lucas is Reader in Architecture and Director of Humanities at the Manchester School of Architecture at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Lucas’s work bridges architecture and anthropology, with particular emphasis on drawing. He is the author of Research Methods for Architecture (2016) and Anthropology for Architects (2020). Amanda Ravetz is Professor of Visual Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Ravetz’s work explores the interdisciplinary connections between anthropology and art/design, and theories and practices of observational cinema. She is the author of Observational Cinema (with Anna Grimshaw, 2009) and co-editor of Collaboration through Craft (2013). Maarten Simons is Professor of Education Policy and Theory at the Laboratory for Education and Society, and a member of the research group Education, Culture and Society, at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on new modes of governing education and the re-articulation of the public role of schools and universities. Nathalie Sinclair is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and holds a Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning. Her work focuses on the consequences of embodied cognition in mathematics thinking and learning. She is co-editor of What Is a Mathematical Concept? (with Elizabeth de Freitas and Alf Coles, 2017). Melissa Trimingham is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, UK. She has researched scenographic space, puppetry and autistic creativity, and is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Playing A/Part: Autistic Girls, Identities and Creativity’. She has published widely on the Bauhaus theatre, scenography, puppetry and autism.

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Judith Winter is an independent curator and Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies in Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University, UK. She was formerly inaugural curator for Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, and Head of Arts for Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK. Winter’s current research is on art school reform and the educational philosophy of the Bauhaus.

Acknowledgements This book is an outcome of a research project entitled Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design, or KFI for short. Based in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, the project ran for five years, from 2013 to 2018. Its overall aim was to reconfigure the relation between practices of inquiry in the human sciences and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise. Our fundamental premise was that knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a material world already populated with objects, but grows from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with the world around us. Knowledge, we supposed, comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them. Throughout the project, we endeavoured to show how research underpinned by this premise could make a difference to the sustainability of environmental relations and to the well-being that depends on it. Besides myself, as so-called principal investigator, the core project team included my departmental colleague Jo Vergunst, postdoctoral research fellows Jennifer Clarke, Griet Scheldeman, Marc Higgin, Caroline Gatt, Rachel Harkness and Elizabeth Hodson, and doctoral students Christine Moderbacher, Francesca Marin, Enrico Marcoré and Judith Winter. Besides this core team, however, the project also included a number of colleagues from other institutions, designated as ‘KFI Associates’, whose role was not just to advise and assist at all stages of the project but to collaborate actively in the research process itself. They were Anne Douglas, Stephanie Bunn, Emilia Ferraro, Michael Anusas, Amanda Ravetz and Ray Lucas. The project also acted as a magnet, attracting many more research students and scholars from around the world, as long-term affiliates or shorter-term visitors. Though too many to name here, all have made important contributions to what became, in effect, a collective endeavour. But it was our wonderful project administrator Alyson Millar who kept us all in line, while Gillian Hewison made sure the figures added up and that we remained within our budget. In many ways, this book belongs to the KFI Associates, four of whom (Douglas, Bunn, Ravetz and Lucas) are among its contributors. For it was they who had really brought home to us the pedagogic implications of the project, and the consequent need to create something like a ‘KFI curriculum’. From this, in turn, came the idea

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of the ‘KFI Kitchen’, an occasion when we could all come together to thrash out what this might entail. The aim would be to reflect on the educational implications of redrawing the boundaries between anthropology, art, architecture and design, and to explore the contours of a curriculum based on experience gleaned from KFI on ways of learning from people, places and materials. So it was that at the end of May 2016, in perfect weather, we assembled in the verdant surroundings of Comrie Croft, in Perthshire, for a week of experimental workshops and intensive discussion, both indoors and out. To help us along we had invited a number of guests, including Cathrine Hasse, Jamie Wallace and Suna Christensen, from the Danish research group Future Technology, Culture and Learning, with which we had already been collaborating, along with educational philosopher Jan Masschelein, arts educator Jan van Boeckel and performance and theatre scholar Melissa Trimingham. Besides the contributions from the KFI Associates listed here, Hasse, Masschelein, van Boeckel and Trimingham have all contributed chapters to this book, as have project researchers Gatt and Winter. Though the idea for the book was cooked up in the Kitchen, the road to its realization has been long and tortuous, protracted as ever by the incessant demands of competing priorities. Not until March 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic began to bite and shutters were coming down on places of study around world, did I eventually find the time to put together a proposal. By this time, the Kitchen had become, for most of us, a distant memory, while other conversations had gathered pace. Moreover, for many in the KFI project, matters of pedagogy, while relevant, had not been the principal focus of their concern. In selecting contributors for this book, I therefore decided to limit it to those for whom these matters have been central, and who have made essential contributions to the field, irrespective of their actual involvement in the KFI project or participation in the Kitchen. These decisions were not always easy, and I take full responsibility for them. I would however like to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt thanks to all who have participated in the KFI conversation, whether present in these chapters or not. This book would not be the same – indeed it would never have even materialized – without you! I owe my greatest thanks, however, to the University of Aberdeen for hosting the project, and above all to the European Research Council for funding it, on a scale that truly matched our ambitions, through the award of an Advanced Grant (323677-KFI). Without the Council’s support, none of this would have been possible. Tim Ingold Aberdeen, May 2021

Series Editors’ Foreword It makes a world of a difference, how one derives the etymological origin of the word education. Whereas the Latin educare points to what we traditionally read as ‘instilling’, the alternative educere literally means ‘to lead out’. The former suggests an almost feudal idea of installing socially approved knowledge into the mind of the hierarchically ‘lower’ pupil; here, knowledge is understood as a corpus that can be transferred (or even sold) from one generation to the next, in order to produce a certain effect in the latter. Against this ‘strong’ (or dominant) concept of education, ‘weak’ (or minor) education stems from the idea that knowledge is generated by persons and problems. The task, then, is to create the conditions favourable for knowledge to grow and flourish. These conditions call forth an atmosphere of cooperation, of searching and re-searching together. Education in this minor sense is about thinking with people, about working in a spirit of hope rather than unbridled optimism. It is not so much a means of transmission as a way of ‘commoning’ – of mutual and patient experimentation – judged not by its ends but by its capacity to inspire new beginnings. In this perspective, teaching is less a method than a heuristic: a journey into unknown territory. Most importantly, it is not a study of but a way of studying with. University education is in crisis. In this day and age of ‘academic capitalism’, and in the crossfire of both neoliberal and ultra-conservative perspectives, we need to go beyond the ‘negative mode’ of criticizing the institutional status quo, and to set out positive alternatives. This means challenging the most fundamental premises of education itself. As Rita Felski has succinctly put it: ‘Why … is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?’ John Cage once commented on the ethical responsibility of experimenting: ‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’ Shifting the register from posited meanings to affective operations, as Brian Massumi has argued, is ultimately an ethical act, since it means allying oneself to an ‘ethics of emergence’. An education predicated on experimentation, instead of clinging to the status quo or to the dominant sense of education, aims not to raise students upon the platform of where they stand, but to lead ourselves and our students to a place where we have not yet been, facilitating an encounter with

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things beyond the reach of present thought – things which force us to think, to envision educational futures. As Jacques Rancière proclaimed: ‘let’s make poetry … together’. To take these ideas seriously, we have to rethink education: less as a ‘home’ to which one dutifully and habitually returns; more as a form of pedagogical nomadism which seeks to create encounters and connections for thinking that are dishabituated from models that already presume how education ought to go. It is along such lines of experimentation that alternative approaches to education can be explored on behalf of generations to come, offering an education that does not separate a sphere of ‘what one has to know’ from life, but that joins the very forces of life – forces that create new ideas, new ways of experiencing the world. Education becomes a potentiality for exploration and discovery in a terrain that is ever-unfolding. Here, theory and practice are inseparable. Could the university, after all, be the place where this kind of alternative education can be put into practice? What if the institution of the university, far from resting on a bedrock of stability, were itself suspended within a dynamic field of evermultiplying relations? Could the university become a ‘multiversity’? Books in the series Alternative | Education will address these questions. Bernd Herzogenrath On behalf of the series editors

Introduction: Knowing from the Inside Tim Ingold

How should we know? Better to know than not, we would usually say. But knowing can mean many different things, and to be knowledgeable in any one sense can be to the detriment of knowing in others. Consider, for example, the knowledge that comes from painstakingly piecing together observations from multiple places and times, sifted and sorted both by their distinctive features and for what they have in common, into ever more comprehensive structures and frameworks. To do this requires of the knower to take their distance from worldly involvements, to break away from the commitments to place and people that had made their observations possible in the first place. Yet is it not from such commitments and the observances they entail, to follow in the footsteps of others and attend to them, that we come to know them, their moods, sensibilities and idiosyncrasies, as it were from the inside? This is a knowing that we undergo as much as do; it happens to us and transforms us in both body and mind, changing the way that we ourselves perceive the world around us – a world to which we owe our own existence. Like breathing, it is a kind of inspiration, a way of actively and energetically taking things in. Must we renege on such knowing, cut ourselves off from its generative source and appropriate its products, in order to become knowledgeable? In our modern world, the consequences of this rupture are all around us. We see them in societies, in which people we love and care for – people we really know from living and growing older together – become mere numbers, counted in surveys, classified by identity or attitude, and mobilized as pawns in the machinations of political power. We see them in environments ravaged by extractive industry, or conserved as havens for wildlife and scientific research,

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often at the expense of their indigenous inhabitants whose own knowledge, drawn from long experience, is discredited for its alleged lack of objectivity. And we see them, above all, in regimes of academic scholarship that define our relation to the world as one not of taking in but of taking from, of extraction rather than inspiration. In what the academy calls ‘research’, we go to the world not to become acquainted with it and learn from it but to elicit its secrets, whether by force or subterfuge, and to convert them into ‘knowledge products’ for our own edification. In the human sciences, this extractive strategy has long been bound up with the world-historical project of colonialism. Other lands and lives, in the colonial project, were to be subjugated in the name of universal humanity. Indeed, emancipatory humanism and colonial domination are but two sides of the same coin. Now, with the collapse of both sides, the world cries out for an alternative. The overriding aim of our project, Knowing From the Inside (KFI), from which this book has grown, was to prove that humane scholarship can be done differently. The idea was to develop a way of study – that is, a method in the strict sense of ‘way beyond’, from the classical Greek hodos, ‘way’, plus meta, ‘beyond’ (Jaclin 2020) – that would proceed by joining with the people and things with whom, and with which, we share our world, allowing knowledge to grow from these joinings, these observances, as part and parcel of our own growth as sentient and thoughtful beings. This is to lace curiosity with care, our own capacity to respond to things with responsibility for them. It is to turn research, in short, into an endeavour that is intrinsically ethical, and not just in its protocols. In prioritizing this method, the intention was not to exclude other ways of knowing. It was however to depose the academic model of knowledge production from its throne of entitlement, and to reveal its more humble and modest underlay in our habitation of a world, in the relationships we form with it and that in turn form us, and in the correspondences that ensue (Ingold 2017). These relationships and correspondences lie at the foundations of collective life. We believe they should be revered and celebrated, not dismissed as the superfluity of illusion over reality or as mere outlets for subjective self-expression.

Education and the Curriculum The KFI project was centred on the discipline of anthropology. Our primary objective was to establish and trial an experimental and speculative mode

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of anthropological inquiry by means of which to explore the conditions and possibilities of sustainable living, through practical and observational engagements with persons and things. This mode of inquiry, however, also lies at the heart of the practices of art, architecture and design. All four disciplines challenge the conventional division between data extraction and theory building, offering paths to knowing as potentially transformative ways of being and becoming within matrices of socio-material relations. Thus, a secondary objective of the project was to work towards a collaboration that would see anthropologists working alongside artists, architects and designers in the common task of forging a habitable world for generations to come. As our work for the project proceeded, however, it became increasingly apparent that this task was above all educational. Here we take education in the broad sense – from the philosophy of John Dewey (1966) – as a way of leading life that is attentive to others and to the world, and open to what they have to tell us. Education, as Dewey always insisted, is about securing the continuity of life. It is the means by which a society ensures its own future. The challenge for us, then, was to translate our agenda of knowing from the inside into educational terms (Ingold 2018). These are not the terms, however, in which education is typically framed, in societies institutionally committed to the advance of science and civilization. These societies regard education, first and foremost, as an engine of progress, driven by a belief in the overwhelming power of reason, and of the knowledge it produces, to emancipate humanity from earthly bondage, cutting all ties to place and community. Judged by the standards of progressive education, the knowing we undergo as part of our immediate experience of the lived-in world – that is, our knowing from the inside – does not hold up well. It is routinely dismissed as merely intuitive, a primitive form of awareness and response barely distinguishable from animal instincts. For the majority who take this view, the promise of education lies principally in its cultivation of arts of the intellect which, in their operation, are entirely indifferent to variations of human experience – or at best, treat these variations as material for analysis. They might even be predisposed to interpret ‘knowing from the inside’ in a sense quite opposite to what we intend, as a knowing that is ‘inside the head’, having its creative source in an interior faculty of mind, in its capacity to come up with novel representations. Education, they would say, both cultivates this capacity and provides a conduit through which its intellectual products can trickle down to the less gifted, who stand to benefit from them.

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Let us be quite clear, then, that by ‘inside’, we do not mean the interiority of a mind that stands over and against the physicality of an exterior world, but a mind immanent in the living currents of world formation, which derives its creativity from the very same source.1 And if intuition is the way this mind works, then there is nothing ‘mere’ about it. On the contrary, it is fundamentally intelligent in its sensitivity to its surroundings, and in its capacity to respond to them with judgement, dexterity and precision. Intuition, then, is not so much a residue that remains after the higher functions of intellect have been stripped away, as the ground without which no intellect could function at all. Moreover, intuition can be learned, through a prolonged ‘education of attention’ (Ingold 2001) in which skills of perception and action are gradually fine-tuned. But this learning does not advance stage by stage, through already mandated steps, towards a preordained destination. It is not a progress, in that sense. It is rather a kind of growth, a feeling forward towards ends unknown, through what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), in his essay Eye and Mind, called ‘the soil of the sensible’. And for educators, this raises a key question. If education does not advance towards a goal, and if there are no steps along the way, then how can there be such a thing as a curriculum? It was to address this question that in May 2016 we gathered everyone from the KFI project, along with invited visitors, for a week of activities in which we set ourselves the task of creating a curriculum for knowing from the inside. This meant rethinking the very idea of what a curriculum could be, as a course of study. What is a course? What does it mean to study? In the progressive model of academic pedagogy, the course is designed to transfer a body of authorized knowledge from teacher to student, and its completion is marked by an assessment to confirm that the transfer has been successfully accomplished. But courses in such disciplines as anthropology, art, architecture and design, which formed the core of our project, place different demands on study, for their pedagogic aim is not to work towards the closure of a subject or topic fully understood, but to open up to a life process that is both patiently experimental and inherently speculative (Manning 2016: 13). This is about waiting for things to come into presence and attending to them, about opening a path and following where it goes. What difference would it make, we wondered, if this aim were not relegated to the margins of the school or the academy, as at present, but placed at its heart? How, in short, could the pedagogical imperative be redirected from the finality of progress towards the renewal of life?

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The KFI Kitchen We called our gathering ‘the KFI Kitchen’. This was because the activities of the kitchen offer perhaps the closest parallel to what we were attempting to achieve. We highlight three features of these activities. First, the kitchen is typically where people gather to cook, and often to eat as well. It is a place of collaboration and commensality. Around the table, everyone’s interest is captivated by the food. It is the same with the subject of study. Whether displayed horizontally on a table or vertically on a blackboard, people gather around it to participate in a shared moment of transformation. Indeed, no one can study on their own. It is true that we often think in solitude. But solitary thinking, as political theorist Hannah Arendt (1953) has observed, is a conversation with oneself that is conditional on that self ’s being affirmed in the regard of others. It is in study – in offering one’s thinking, indeed one’s very self, to one’s fellows – that this affirmation takes place. In the academic model, by contrast, the course is targeted on the individual. The default position is isolation, not solitude. If others are present, the student – unless instructed otherwise – should pay no heed to them. Here, the course is more akin to a medical prescription than a culinary undertaking. The prescribed pills, stripped of all sensory qualities, are consumed alone or surreptitiously, and only having entered the individual body do they work their effects. The contrast with the course of medical prescription also serves well to highlight the second feature of kitchen work which, for us, has its parallel in the course of study. The pill is a vector of transmission, serving to deliver a precisely predetermined dose in a package that requires no effort on the part of the patient to consume. No tasting is required, no biting or chewing, no stones or gristle to spit out, no soiled dishes to clean! In just the same way, according to the academic model, knowledge born of rational inquiry, purified to its essentials, uncontaminated by contact with lived experience, should pass without hindrance into the minds of recipients. For us in the kitchen, however, study is not the transmission of prescribed content. It is more akin to cooking, eating and washing up. In study as in cooking, ingredients are mixed and stirred, or heated in the furnace of desire, of hunger for the knowledge we crave. We are witness to a process not of transmission but of metamorphosis. Then, once the knowledge is prepared, we can savour its taste and – as medieval scholars used to say, comparing thinking to the way cattle chew the cud – ‘ruminate’ on its significance (Carruthers 1990: 164–5). Every conversion of materials, however,

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leaves its residue of waste. Study, then, is as much an unclogging of the mind as a digest. Attention calls for a clear head. Third, the kitchen is a powerhouse for the regeneration of life. It is a place where the harvests of previous processes of nurturance and growth, of plants and animals, are entered into the further growth and nurturance of people. In just the same way, study takes observations and experiences from the past, moving them across a kind of threshold, whereupon they become resources for further study that opens a door into the future. Literally, the study-as-kitchen offers up food for thought, nourishing the soul as food nourishes the body. The course, then, is not – as in academic pedagogy – bracketed in the interval between start and end dates, nor does one course follow the next in a linear sequence like options in a menu. It is nowadays from precisely such a list of menu options that students are expected to choose in constructing a curriculum which, in a society that allocates opportunity and reward by merit, provides for individual accreditation. The curriculum of knowing from the inside, by contrast, opens out to life. Rather than running from beginning to end, it perpetually turns endings into new beginnings. ‘The result of the educative process’, as Dewey (1966: 68) wrote, can only be a ‘capacity for further education’. We do not start with a capacity and progressively fill it up with a knowledge of reality; rather the capacity itself is ever-emergent from amidst our immediate experience of the fullness of the real.

Crossing Disciplines From the kitchen, we proceed to the subtitle of this book: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy. In this every word counts, and we begin with ‘discipline’. What is the meaning of discipline in the curriculum of knowing from the inside? One thing is for sure, it is not an area of study. It does not stake out a territory, police its boundaries or enter into treaty negotiations with neighbours. It is rather the coursing of a life – a curriculum vitae in its literal meaning, not the record of accreditation for which it is taken today – distinguished from others by its methods and observances, and by the materials with which it works. And like life, it does not progress stage by stage but meanders, loops, deviates, circles around, weaving in and around landmark events, neither beginning nor ending anywhere in particular. Like life, too, the discipline has its habits, but not in the derogatory sense of addictions to repetitive behaviours that have long since lost their meaning and purpose, but in the virtuous sense of self-formation from

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within the undergoing of one’s own practice (Malabou 2014). It is in this sense, for example, that the artisan seeks fulfilment in striving for perfection in their craft, and it is the same for the scholar. Making for the artisan, as study for the scholar, is a way of growing into knowledge as knowledge grows in them. In short, disciplinary knowledge is personal (Polanyi 1958). And for precisely this reason, the names of disciplines matter, just as the names of people do. To pronounce the name of our discipline is both to speak of who we are and to align our lives with the tradition in which we are raised (Ingold 2021:168). This is to take ‘tradition’ in its proper sense: not a fixed corpus of heritable custom, to be passed on intact from one generation to the next, but a way of life along which it is possible to move on, in continuity with the values of the past, while laying down a path for others to follow. The names of many artisanal disciplines, however, not only speak to the traditions of their practitioners but also tell of the materials of their trade, for example, woodwork, stonemasonry, metalsmithing. For woodworkers, masons and smiths are distinguished by their having incorporated a sensibility to the peculiar proclivities of their respective materials into their ways of working and perceiving. This is what it means to ‘know’ wood, stone or iron. But it is no different for those disciplines whose traditions are rooted in science, industry and medicine, or indeed in what are known broadly as ‘the arts’. Think of the skills of the engineer or the surgeon, the chemist or the astronomer, the writer or the composer, the philosopher or the mathematician. All are marked by enduring attention, responsiveness and care. What then of the relations among disciplines? So long as study is aligned with life, then disciplines must relate as persons do, by going along together and responding to one another. When people meet, they may share each other’s company for a while, alternately telling what they know or showing it in practice, and in turn listening and watching. And then they part, each enriched by the other’s experience. The decision to call such encounters ‘cross-disciplinary’, in our subtitle, is deliberate. This book is itself a cross-disciplinary conversation which includes, among its contributors, practitioners of anthropology, art, architecture, drama, mathematics, education and philosophy. But this kind of conversation is fundamentally unlike what the academic model of knowledge production knows as ‘interdisciplinarity’. For in the academic model, study is divorced from life. It reaches, rather, for a transcendent, free-floating and radically disembodied plane of rational knowledge, set out in explicit, logically interconnected propositions, and wholly insensible to differences in the personal experience of those who are destined to serve, interchangeably, as its spokespersons. Not only are their singular voices routinely suppressed by the artifice of multiple

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authorship, but the names of disciplines themselves are also silenced through acronymic constructions, such as the much-touted STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). With STEM-like interdisciplinarity, while each discipline might contribute a piece to the jigsaw, filling in the gaps, in the total picture that emerges their particular identities are erased. Yet for all its claims to universality, the interdisciplinary community is both exclusive and exclusionary, open only to those who have cast aside practical and personal involvement with the materials of study for the plateau of rational explication. It is resistant to the conversations of life, and will have no truck with traditions beyond its walls save as objects of investigation. As Caroline Gatt argues, in Chapter 10, although an analogy is often drawn between disciplines and cultures (or subcultures), they are perceived by the same token to lie on opposite sides of the fence dividing the academy from the world that it takes as its object. Under the flag of interdisciplinarity, academic disciplines gang up to keep so-called lay practitioners out. People from other walks of life, typically including those among whom anthropologists carry out their fieldwork, are required to obtain formal academic credentials before they are admitted. Our aim, in seeking a pedagogy of knowing from the inside, is quite the reverse. By regarding every walk of life as a discipline, and by understanding their encounters as a sharing of personal experience, we aim to open up the conversation to all. In Chapter 4, Stephanie Bunn offers an example of how this can happen, and the rewards of doing so, in her account of a symposium which brought together practitioners in the craft of basketry and academic scholars. The results were indeed extraordinary.

Experimenting With This symposium was in the nature of an experiment. Basket-makers are not accustomed to participating in academic symposia and may have found the prospect somewhat daunting. They would only come, one said, if they could bring their work along. Academics, for their part, are used to listening to panel speakers, seated up front, expound on matters of interest, while suppressing their own personal investment in such matters behind a cloak of textual obfuscation and by means of the inherently depersonalizing device of on-screen projection. But they are not used to having people in their midst actually engaged in the tasks of which they speak, nor is the typical seminar or lecture room built or furnished to accommodate the bodily movement and material mess these tasks

Introduction

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entail. Scholars know all too well that the fashion for calling the panel discussion a ‘workshop’ masks the total absence of physical labour, tools and materials, noise and waste, and organized mayhem that characterizes any workshop (or kitchen, for that matter) where stuff is actually made. The respective architectures of academia and manufacture, as Jan Masschelein and his colleagues (Chapter 11) would say, have distinct forcefields, which pull on attendees and practitioners with different effects. The presence of makers in the midst of the academic session disrupts its forcefield, yet the result is to reawaken long-suppressed intuitions that breathe new life into the otherwise arid deliberations of scholarship. Many of the contributions to this volume explore the pedagogic potentials of experimental, cross-disciplinary juxtapositions of this kind. Cinema, for example, has its own forcefield, which a director can manipulate through a mastery of genre, montage, narration and spectatorship What if this forcefield were brought into juxtaposition with the field of architectural design? In Chapter 7, Ray Lucas describes workshops for architecture students that challenge them to look through the eyes of their favourite film director in designing the house of the director’s dreams. After exploring the work of their chosen master, they are required first to design the house, and then to film it. This is not strictly about the application of cinematic principles to architecture, or vice versa. New thinking, rather, irrupts into those moments of suspension in-between, in the midst of translation, or of what Masschelein and colleagues call ‘mediatic displacement’, in the back-and-forth from cinema to architecture to cinema. Much the same goes for the workshop that Gatt describes in Chapter 10, which brought together anthropologists, artists, theatre practitioners and representatives from the Gwich’in First Nation of northwest Canada. Here too, participants of all backgrounds, taking roles alternately as students and teachers, found themselves pulled by forces unfamiliar to them, and all the more personal for that. Yet from this place of vulnerability, or exposure, they could open up to ways of knowing previously unacknowledged or suppressed. These ways are not already mapped out. It is not as though, like solving a maze, the task is to reach a predetermined destination. Unlike the maze, the problems posed in these workshops do not contain their own solutions, nor can they be solved individually. They can only be explored together, and this means going beyond the parameters of the problem as set, along paths and towards destinations unknown. It is in this sense that study, when aligned with life, is intrinsically experimental. This is not, as in a scientific investigation, about testing hypotheses. In science results are already contained within the experimental setup; it is just a matter of bringing them to light. Scientists

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experiment on things. In a study that is aligned with life, however, the operative word is not on but with. Experimenting with is an improvisation, a way of coupling the movement of our perception with the movements of the very beings or things that command our attention, going along together with them and following where they lead – not passively, as in blind obedience, but actively, with senses alive to their every vibration. It means observing in the strict sense of watching, listening, feeling – even being alert to variations of taste or smell. The experimenter, as we say, develops a nose for things (Latour 2004), or perhaps an ear (for song) and an eye (for film). In short, far from holding objects of study at arm’s length, abjuring all visceral contact with them, experimenting with conjoins them in a going-along in which both we and they stand to be transformed. It is a kind of learning, as Cathrine Hasse puts it in Chapter 1, in which persons and things enter into the currents of each other’s lives – a process of growing together. In a series of experiments with schoolchildren, in classrooms in Denmark and Tanzania, Hasse tasked the children with drawing robots. There is no set answer to the question of how to draw a robot, and faced with the task, the children could only tap into their own experience; indeed some, unfamiliar with the word ‘robot’, thought it must have something to do with ‘robber’, and drew accordingly. But crucially, the drawings not only grew out of, but also played their part in, the conversations that the children carried on while they drew. Even the robots themselves joined in, as they came to life on paper, saying things like ‘I love children’ or even promising to hand out ice cream. Yet faced in class with an actual robot, perched before them like a teacher on a high chair, the children’s attempts to engage with it, to draw it into their collective, were frustrated. It takes only the slightest twitch of the face, or a flicker of the eye, for one human to acknowledge the presence of another. But this was beyond the robot.

Matters of Pedagogy A pedagogy of knowing from the inside joins with the children around the table, in a dynamic forcefield constituted by relations of attention and affect, which can be stretched, crumpled and even punctured or torn. Eye-glances dart about, ears twitch, restless fingers and mouths whisper in an ocean of micro-gestures to which the robot is incapable of responding but which the human teacher finds hard to resist. Admittedly, to the teacher whose perspective, like that of the robot, is elevated above the eyeline of her pupils, the ocean may present an

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apparently featureless and unfathomable surface. It is a quite different matter, however, to swim in the ocean itself, and in Chapter 5, Rachel Holmes and Amanda Ravetz offer a vivid description of what this feels like. The children they accompanied were young, in classes formally designated respectively as ‘Early Years’ and ‘Key Stage 1’, and rather than being seated around tables, like the older children in Hasse’s study, they were supposed to sit on the floor, within a territory marked out by a carpet. But what looks from above like a precisely demarcated rectangular space is, for its inhabitants, a fluid medium seething with vitality. To inhabit this medium is literally to be in the midst of things, caught in rippling currents of thinking-feeling that circulate through and around bodies that are neither isolated nor self-contained but leak into their surroundings and tangle with others along twisting paths of sensory perception. For Holmes and Ravetz, the restlessness of the carpet is far from an impediment to learning that distracts from concentrated study. On the contrary, it is the very source from which the process of learning draws its energy and creativity. It should be celebrated, not suppressed. And writing from his experiences of adult education, in Chapter 2, Jan van Boeckel concurs. There can be no learning, he argues, without the active presence of people to one another. That vital spark that darts back and forth in-between – what he calls ‘the light in the eyes’ – kindles a shared excitement, an enthusiasm, that infects everyone, teacher and students alike. They feel alive and present, ready for the unexpected. Yet by the same token, they are rendered vulnerable, at risk of being captivated or even overwhelmed by whatever might befall. Nothing will be learned, however, if you either fully give in to it, or alternatively, recoil or retreat. It is essential, rather, to hold the middle ground. Here, van Boeckel follows the lead of educational philosopher Gert Biesta (2013, 2017) in stressing the importance of letting other persons and things be, so that you can confront them directly, just as they are, and initiate a dialogue. We learn from others because they interrupt our passage; they place themselves in the way, demanding of us to pay attention. This takes effort. It can be a struggle, even painful. But there can be no knowing without it. ‘Don’t interrupt!’ is of course the standard call to order of a pedagogy that works from the top down, imposing its own authority on nominally compliant student bodies. It expects conformity. Holmes and Ravetz build their account around two cases in which pupils, in their respective classrooms, refused to conform. For the class teachers, their interruptions were an unwelcome distraction from the business of the day; however, for the children on the carpet they were like the sudden jolt of an electric shock, charging the forcefield with just the sense of excitement and anticipation that van Boeckel finds in the pedagogy

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of attention to the light in the eyes. Interruptions that seem odd, even absurd, from the normalizing perspective of orthodox pedagogy open eyes wide to new possibility. It is the appeal to normality, as Holmes and Ravetz point out, that creates oddity as exception to rule. There can be no oddity in a tangled field of continuous variation. For variation becomes abnormality only in a regime averse to difference. This is the kind of regime that attributes ‘disruptive’ behaviour to a deficit of attention, caused by some neurological disorder. Yet the truth, if anything, is to the contrary, namely that children who present such behaviour are hyperattentive, none more so than those whose experience manifests varying degrees and shades of autism. And it is from autistic experience that Melissa Trimingham launches her discussion in Chapter 6. This is the experience of a world ever on the point of settling into recognizable forms but never quite doing so. While this can be disconcerting, it also brings to life, in often exquisite detail, things that to most of us seem inert. An autistic person can long remain happily rapt in attention to something that to us appears dull and repetitive, noticing – as we do not – those tiny variations which make it different from moment to moment. In a word, autistic experience attests to a finely honed sense of ‘response-ability’.2 Trimingham explores this sense by way of a cloth puppet. A clownlike figure that comes to life in its minor gestures, the puppet would be entirely at home with the children in the fluid medium of the carpet, but profoundly uncomfortable were it perched, like Hasse’s robot, in the teacher’s chair. For the chair is the seat of rationality, which academic pedagogy has consistently prioritized over response-ability in its drive to dissociate knowledge from personal experience and make it accessible to all. In the community of reason, as philosopher Alphonso Lingis (1994: 116) has it, everyone is interchangeable. Yet efforts to include autistics in the rational community inevitably suppress the specificities of their experience in favour of mandatory adherence to normative standards. A pedagogy of knowing from the inside, however, would reverse the priorities of the academic model, putting response-ability ahead of rationality, attention to ever-emergent difference before standardized measures of attainment. This, in turn, calls for an entirely different approach to measurement, as Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair show in Chapter 3. They remind us that the impulse to measure up the world and to hold its inhabitants to account reaches far back into the history of colonialism. It is this history that predisposes us to think of measurement as a way of covering an already extended world with standard units. Yet this majority view, deeply inscribed in the academic curriculum, obliterates the minor ways in which we measure the world from the

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inside, not by covering it over but by coupling the movement of our attention to its formative rhythms and gradients of intensity. Measurement begins here, especially in childhood experience, in a dynamic, relational and sometimes playful ‘fumbling with difference’, as de Freitas and Sinclair call it, from within our engagement with materials, rather than in an overarching traverse that spans the distance between one isolated object and another. This is exemplified in Bunn’s (Chapter 5) account of basketry, in which the strength, resistance and flexibility of maker and materials are balanced against one another. It is in such balancing that minor measurement resides. For not only do makers measure their materials but the materials also measure their makers. Yet in remarkable twist, it turns out that baskets made by measure were actually destined to measure, serving as official, state-approved units of volume.

Education Turned around by Art This is the moment to return to the question which originally brought us together around the table in the KFI Kitchen. Why have our disciplines of anthropology, art, architecture and design found themselves on the margins of today’s educational curriculum? What would it take to restore them to its core? And what implications would such a move have for the meaning and purpose of pedagogy? A possible answer to the first question lies in the ideals of progressive education which, as we have seen, elevate the cultivation of reason above all else, and see the task of the pedagogue as one of transmitting authoritative knowledge, born of rational inquiry, to the coming generation so that it, in turn, can reach and eventually exceed the level of its predecessors. According to the academic model, this is how science and civilization advance. Yet even the model’s most committed exponents would admit that this advance – this ascent towards the summit – would be without meaning if the view from the top revealed nothing of intrinsic value. What are the gains of emancipation? What good comes from cutting ties to earthly things? This is where progressivists turn to art, understood in its broadest sense to include all forms of humane expression. Is it not the role of art to widen our horizons, perhaps even to open hearts and minds to more fundamental truths? Might it even help us keep faith with the project of enlightenment? A variety of arguments have been proposed along these lines. At their most trivial, they reduce art to its value as entertainment, designed to fill the empty hours of affluent leisure. For some, art answers to a yearning for sublimity,

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mystery and wonder in a world otherwise so analysed as to have lost its power to enchant. For others, it is an index of cultural creativity, an acknowledgement of diversity, or a sign of civilization. There is widespread recognition, these days, of the need to complement the detached objectivity, cold logic and analytic rigour of science with something more subjective, attuned to feeling, empathy and holistic understanding. This bifurcation is of course deeply sedimented in the modern constitution. It is popularly alleged to be wired into the human brain, in the division between its left and right hemispheres. An education in art, then, is supposed to help with the development of the right hemisphere, tempering the dominance of the left, and offering students a more balanced formation that moderates the austerity of science by providing a channel for self-expression. This logic of complementarity, however, while it confers on art an intrinsic merit, even on a par with that of science, serves only to reproduce a persistent dualism between affective, embodied experience and the cognitive operations of a disembodied intellect, or between aesthetic judgement and the work of reason, each furnished with its own distinctive style of creativity. We aim to subvert this complementarity. This means turning around the relationship between art and education, so that instead of educating students in art, it is art itself that educates. In Biesta’s (2017) words, it is about ‘Letting Art Teach’. The effect is to change the very meaning and purpose of education, across every field of study, from the efficient transmission of knowledge-products from teachers to students, to a never-ending journey of discovery on which students and teachers are embarked together, driven by a passion to seek the truth of what is real and present in the world. It is to bring students into correspondence with the world itself, affording them the possibility to attend to the things or beings to be found there, to answer to their presence, and to explore the conditions of coexistence with them. Art educates, for Biesta, by opening a path, or showing the way, guiding attention towards aspects of the world which might repay closer study. Central to Biesta’s approach to letting art teach is a performance enacted in 1965 by the artist Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, which Anne Douglas also takes up in her reflections, in Chapter 9, on the pedagogic potentials of the absurd in art, ranging from the Dada of the 1920s, through the Fluxus movement of the 1960s with which Beuys himself was associated, to the present. Both then as now, the art of the absurd arises in times of crisis. Where a century ago, Dada emerged amidst the wreckage of the First World War, today’s absurd art inhabits a no less existential crisis born of the collision of economic growth with climate breakdown. At such times, when the

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institutions that had once shaped the life-course appear broken, hope is to be found in the jarring juxtaposition of incommensurable fragments. No longer, then, does absurdity mark the dead end when reason fails and progress stalls. Instead, like oddity in the classroom, it ignites a ‘light in the eyes’ – to recall van Boeckel’s expression – that shines with new and previously unthinkable possibility. It helps us come unstuck, and therein lies its promise of renewal. What had seemed odd or absurd in the light of reason affords a way ahead, whereas reason itself leads to the dead end of absurdity. Coming unstuck is one thing, however; rebuilding balance, harmony and fulfilment into the curriculum of the life-course quite another. Perhaps there cannot be one without the other, as Douglas indeed intimates in her closing remarks. It is surely no accident that the post-war ruination which ignited the flame of Dada also saw the most remarkable attempt of the twentieth century to reconfigure the relation between education and art. This was the foundation, in 1919, of the Bauhaus, from which Judith Winter launches her exploration, in Chapter 8, of the ethos of the art school.

Building School It is still usual to think of the school as a place in which students are taught about art, amongst other things. But instead of putting art into schools, could we not treat the school itself as a work of art – a kind of installation, situated in the midst of the social fabric, in which old and young can work together in the collective project of forging the communities of the future? The art school, thus understood, is a place not where professors teach art but where art lends sense and purpose to the very idea of school, of what it means to study. This, as Winter shows, was precisely the ambition that drove the establishment of the Bauhaus. In the vision of its founder, Walter Gropius, art – along with architecture and design – would not be subjects taught so much as ways of teaching, above all by example, allowing students to become well balanced and rounded citizens capable of addressing the challenges of modernity with grace, wit and originality. It is perhaps no accident that Gropius was himself an architect, for he would see the school as an essentially architectural project, of building not just the physical structure but also the skill, imagination, character and community of all who would work and study there. There is a close connection, as Winter shows, between the name Bauhaus, combining words for ‘building’ and ‘house’, and the German word for education, bildung.

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When Ray Lucas (Chapter 7) advises his students to design a ‘house for’ their favourite film director, he is following a similar path, albeit on a smaller scale. Instead of putting architecture into the studio – the normative setting of professional training and accreditation – Lucas turns the studio itself into an architectural project. A comparable ambition lies behind the insistence of Jan Masschelein and his colleagues, Mieke Berghmans and Maarten Simons, in Chapter 11, that the architecture of the university teaches, not silently, by communicating meanings encoded in its structures, but by making things happen, assembling bodies in particular ways, directing their movement and attention, causing them to notice what otherwise might pass them by. Through architecture, the world speaks to us, compelling us not just to listen to its many voices but to answer to them in words of our own. These words are not spoken lightly; on the contrary, they are freighted with the weight of the world. That’s why an entirely virtual, online environment, which so many students have had to endure during the pandemic year of 2020–1, can be no substitute. In such an environment, the world is deprived of voice and cannot teach. Nor can we learn from it. Yet policymakers in higher education, driven by an academic model of knowledge production geared to the demands of the corporate sector, are proposing no less – that the future lies in the massive provision of online content. The curriculum of knowing from the inside repudiates any such disconnect between words and world. Indeed, as so many chapters in this volume demonstrate – children talking robots in Hasse’s study (Chapter 1), giving vent to their frustration in the classes attended by Holmes and Ravetz (Chapter 5), or in Bunn’s description of basket-makers singing or storytelling as they weave (Chapter 4) – knowing from the inside is anything but tacit or wordless. On the contrary, as bodies gather in its forcefield they swell with words which, by way of speech, overflow into their surroundings. But these words are spoken not with the singular voice of reason, to pronounce with authority on the world and things to be found there, or to call them to order, but with a feeling that echoes to the demands these things, these matters, make of us. Such demands are multiple and affect us differently. In the multiplicity of voices, answering to one another as they go along, lies the oneness of the world. As the philosopher William James put it, the world we inhabit, and that speaks to us in so many ways, is a pluralistic universe, not rounded in and closed but ever extending along the multiple and entangled pathways of its inhabitants.3 And if this world speaks to us through study, then as Gatt argues (Chapter 10), the universe of study is a pluriverse, and the university a pluriversity. The pluralism of knowing from the inside finds its educational apogee in the ethos of the art school. But as art schools are drawn into the managerial orbit

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of the modern university, tensions with the universalist ideals of the academy have reached breaking point. To resolve these tensions, it is necessary to redefine the ethos of the university as a place of study where people of every generation and background can work together for the common good (Ingold 2020). This ethos has not been entirely extinguished. It survives at the coalface, in the little communities of teachers and students where the real work of learning goes on. For as Hasse reminds us (Chapter 1), learning is not the one-way transfer of knowledge from the senior to the junior generation, but an intergenerational and collaborative life process. With this we can return, finally, to anthropology. In Chapter 8, Winter highlights the resonance between the ethos of the Bauhaus and the project of philosophical anthropology. It offers, perhaps, a foundational convergence of anthropology and art. Anthropology’s enduring mission to explore the conditions and possibilities of human life is art’s as well (Ingold 2019). In anthropology as in art, this means talking across disciplines, learning to live together in difference. It is no longer enough, then, to treat anthropology as one subject among many, to be taught in the university. The greater task of anthropology is to build the pluriversity of the future.

Notes 1 In this we take issue with the anthropology of Philippe Descola (2013). Dismissing the very idea of immanence, Descola posits the dichotomy between interiority and physicality as an ontological apriori (Descola 2016, Ingold 2016). 2 This term has an interesting pedigree. Trimingham refers to its use by Gert Biesta (2006: 70). However, it was introduced much earlier in a lecture by the composer John Cage delivered in 1957 (Cage 2011: 10). Apparently unaware of these precedents, cultural theorist Donna Haraway has recently reinvented the term in much the same sense. Response-ability, she says, is ‘a praxis of care and response’ (Haraway 2016: 105). 3 See James (2012: 170). James put forward these ideas in his Hibbert Lectures, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1908.

References Arendt, H. (1953), ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’, Review of Politics, 15: 303–27. Biesta, G. J. J. (2006), Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

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Biesta, G. J. J. (2013), The Beautiful Risk of Education, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Biesta, G. J. J. (2017), Letting Art Teach, Arnhem, Netherlands: ArtEZ Press. Cage, J. (2011), Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (50th Anniversary Edition), Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Carruthers, M. (1990), The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descola, P. (2013), Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. J. Lloyd, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Descola, P. (2016), ‘Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold’s “A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology”)’, Anthropological Forum, 26 (3): 321–8. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Free Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ingold, T. (2001), ‘From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention’, in H. Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography, 113–53, Oxford: Berg. Ingold, T. (2016), ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture’, Anthropological Forum, 26 (3): 301–20. Ingold, T. (2017), ‘On Human Correspondence’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 23 (1): 9–27. Ingold, T. (2018), Anthropology and/as Education, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2019), ‘Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 25: 659–75. Ingold, T. (2020), ‘On Building a University for the Common Good’, Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 2 (1): 45–68. Ingold, T. (2021), ‘In Praise of Amateurs’, Ethnos, 86 (1): 153–72. Jaclin, D. (2020), ‘Meta-odos (or the Inscription of Fieldwork)’, in J. Laplante, A. Gandsman and W. Scobie (eds), Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork, 231–7, New York: Berghahn. James, W. (2012), A Pluralistic Universe [1909], Auckland, NZ: Floating Press. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’, Body and Society, 10 (2/3): 205–29. Lingis, A. (1994), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Malabou, C. (2014), ‘Addiction and Grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit’, in F. Ravaisson, Of Habit, ed. and trans. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair, vii–xx, London: Bloomsbury. Manning, E. (2016), The Minor Gesture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), ‘Eye and Mind’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy

Introduction of Art, History and Politics, ed. J. M. Edie, trans. C. Dallery, 159–90, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958), Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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1

Learning with Potentials Cathrine Hasse

‘How should we live?’ asks Tim Ingold, in a brief yet comprehensive book on anthropology (Ingold 2018a). Any answer to this question must grant a significant role to learning. But what is learning? Some would equate it with experience, but this, on its own, is not enough to deepen our understanding of what learning really is. In this chapter, I argue that learning is fundamentally a process that underlies the ways in which we attend to the world. It is an ongoing process of transformation whereby the traces of what we have previously learned are mobilized in the course of learning something new. The potentials of such learning are not realized or fulfilled by wilful acts, on the part of either teachers or learners, but inhere in the ongoing creation of fields of attention, emergent agency and the mutual responsiveness – or correspondence – that these make possible (Ingold 2017). We can understand this process in three ways, each of which challenges instrumental understandings of learning. 1. Whether a teacher is present or not, learning takes place in the relationship between a socio-material environment and the conceptual resources with which preceding learning has equipped us. 2. Again, regardless of the presence of a teacher, conceptual learning is a process of embodiment that involves ultra-social collectivity. 3. The potentials conferred by preceding learning reside not in the head nor even in the body of any individual person, but in the relations among a collectivity of persons and between them and their material environment. Our correspondence with the social and material environment, and our ways of attending to it, are continuously developed within the context of these relations.

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Thus, what we call creativity and improvisation are rooted in an ultra-social process of learning. To substantiate my general argument, I develop each of these three points in turn by way of an ­example – the creativity shown by Danish and Tanzanian children when asked to draw robots. Many people believe that robots will be our ubiquitous companions in dwellings of the future. In the drawings we see how children’s preceding learning comes to serve as a cultural resource in exploring how they want to live with robots. Their drawing becomes a process of learning which unfolds in rich profusion. However, these drawings also reveal the diversity, and even the inequality, in learning potentials in a world in which both material and social goods are unevenly distributed.

Learning Is Ubiquitous and Embodied Whether a teacher is present or not, learning takes place in the relationship between a socio-material environment and the conceptual resources with which preceding learning has equipped us.

We tend to think that learning is fundamental to what goes on in education. It is often defined instrumentally, in terms of understanding a topic taught by a teacher. Student progress in learning can then be measured by assessments, which both define what needs to be understood and test the students with boxticking exercises. Technically minded educationalists and engineers, following developments in educational learning technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), have increasingly questioned whether the teacher even needs to be a human person. If learning is simply a means to an end, why not put a robot to the task? The educationalist Gert Biesta, however, questions this view of the teacher, arguing not only that teaching is necessary for education but also that what he calls the essential ‘weakness’ of education entails that teaching can never be reduced to mechanical operations. By weakness, Biesta means that the connections between student and teacher rest on relations of interpretation, not of causation (Biesta 2013: 120). There is no direct, causal link between learning inputs and outcomes, as is assumed in the design of machine-based learning tools. Biesta even questions whether teachers are there to teach students to learn, leading him to criticize another tendency in contemporary discourses of education, namely their equation of learning with participation in a community



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of practice (e.g. Lave and Wenger 1991). His point is that ‘learning’ is not a neutral description of a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a term, rather, that is laden with normative expectations and judgements, generally positive, about the changes to be brought about in participants (Biesta 2013: 6). That learning should have such positive effects is of course a truism for the mainstream educational sciences, which assume that learning is an instrument to achieve the goal of improving students’ understanding, for instance, of mathematics. But as Biesta shows, this instrumentalization of learning enshrines a hidden politics which, in its treatment of learning as something natural, ‘runs the risk of keeping people in their place’ (Biesta 2013: 7). This naturalization blinds us to a deeper understanding of learning as a process fundamental to education in its weak sense. Despite the alleged naturalization of learning for which Biesta takes them to task, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) share Biesta’s critical stance towards the way learning is so often tied to formal pedagogical intention. They want to free learning from the grip of education and connect it to the much wider field of activities of what they call ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ in communities of practice. Here learning comes across less as an individual cognitive achievement, facilitated by pedagogy, than as a ubiquitous correlate of ongoing activity, albeit often unrecognized as such (Lave 1996). Though learning may refer to changes in knowledge and action, ‘there is no such thing as “learning” sui generis, but only changing participation in the culturally designed settings of everyday life’ (Lave 1996: 6). With these hefty declarations, however, both Biesta and Lave effectively relinquish learning as a topic warranting further exploration. Either (with Biesta) learning is dismissed as a political tool that allows the education sector to justify a regime of subordination under the guise of desirable change, or (with Lave) it is treated as an ongoing process that naturally goes on inside or outside educational institutions, whenever we engage in a practice. Either way, we are not called upon to look further into the process itself. If, to the contrary, we take learning seriously as a propensity in humans which is given direction and shape in activities including those of education, we can begin to ask what it actually means to say, with Biesta, that in weak education, teaching is gift that can be received but is not in the teacher’s power to give (Biesta 2013: 6). What is it that make us receptive, or in Ingold’s (2017) words, what leads us to correspond with the world? Correspondence is key to understanding what it means to learn, for it carries the implication that we are not equally responsive to the world. To explain what

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he means by the term, Ingold invites us to compare two balls: a hard one and a squishy one: The first, when it comes up against other things in the world, can have an impact. It can hit them, or even break them. In the hard sciences, every hit is a datum; if you accumulate enough data, you may achieve a breakthrough. The surface of the world has yielded under the impact of your incessant blows, and having done so, yields up some of its secrets. The squishy ball, by contrast, bends and deforms when it encounters other things, taking into itself some of their characteristics while they, in turn, bend to its pressure in accordance with their own inclinations and dispositions. The ball responds to things as they respond to it. Or in a word, it enters with things into a relation of correspondence. (Ingold 2018c: 217)

Humans – and especially, by profession, anthropologists – are correspondents. And in corresponding, we learn (Hasse 2015). In this process, we form potentials, which may be realized in what I have described as ultra-social collectivities (Hasse 2020b). Schools may believe that to teach children is to play hardball with them, but as ultra-social beings, children are naturally responsive and make creative use of their potentials. They are soft.

Potentials for Drawing Robots Again, regardless of the presence of a teacher, conceptual learning is a process of embodiment that involves ultra-social collectivity.

In what follows I do not venture further into the institutional roles of education, schools and teachers. I would however like to invite you into a Danish classroom in a school full of children. In this particular classroom, the teacher has left the stage to us, a group of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark. We are interested in what the children have learned about robots, and in how they envision a future with robots. Some of the children have had experiences with making robots themselves; most however have never seen robots other than as portrayed in the media. We have asked the children to undertake a task for us. They are placed at tables, facing each other in small groups. On the tables, we have placed highquality paper and water-based pens with vibrant colours: yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, green, blue, black and silver, with 0.5 mm and 4 mm tips. We now ask them to do the following:



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Draw a robot, or more if you would like to, that does something and maybe does something together with others – and there may be all sorts of other things on the paper.

The children, age ten to eleven, immediately throw themselves into the task. One boy prefers to sit by himself, but otherwise the children fuss with each other in figuring out how to understand the task, while they reach for papers and pens. They lean over tables, get up from their chairs to look over each other’s shoulders. No one questions what a robot is. They are, rather, asking each other what robots they have seen and what they want to draw. Paul: If we don’t count robots on film and computer, then I haven’t seen any. I have seen a lot, says Erik as he establishes himself as an authority on the subject; but the other boys at the table would rather discuss the robots they know from movies.

As they talk, they begin drawing. Erik settles for one of the silver pens and begins to draw a robotic machine. Lasse first draws a square head with a black pen and a trapezoid body. Then his hand finds a yellow pen that happens to be lying around and begins to draw a sun in a corner of the paper. At first, the boys are immersed in drawing. Though they do not talk much, their bodies are alert. They keep looking for pens and checking each other’s progress in drawing. Lasse shows his drawing to Erik, who is smiling. Then he writes inside the trapezoid body: ‘I love kids.’ Casper, who sits next to him, sees what he is doing and also looks at Johan’s silvery platform. Then he draws a heart on his own square robot and writes after the heart: ‘KIDS’. ‘You have taken my idea’, says Johan across the table from Casper. ‘No, I haven’t’, says Casper. ‘It was me who did it first.’ Lasse, next to Casper, chips in: ‘You have also taken my idea’, he says and points to the heart. Casper again defends himself. ‘It’s a heart’ (implying a difference between writing ‘love’ and drawing a heart). As the drawings progress the boys become more and more communicative. They tell each other what they draw (Figure 1.1). Lars:

Robocop can catch thieves because it can be programmed for that. But it’s really a man inside a robot. Johan: Miner 2000 – this robot helps in mines. It has a laser that is powerful enough to cut through rocks. It is made of titanium and if it falls into a hole, it has mini rockets. Erik: Mine is a work assistant who works on a construction site and lifts heavy things and then it has an energy bottle up to the brain.

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Figure 1.1  Three robot drawings from a Danish classroom. Photos courtesy of the author.

  Marcus says that Lasse’s robot with its raised arm looks like a robot from a movie. He himself raises his arm and shouts: You must die!   Lasse shakes his head and smiles, and draws something at the end of the robot’s raised arm. The robot he envisions is not scary but loving. Lasse: I draw a robot who is Ronald McDonald’s child. His father is the clown Ronald McDonald, the boss of the McDonald store. It loves children and dispenses ice cream.   They laugh and point to the drawing, where Lasse has drawn an ice cream in the robot’s raised hand.   Marcus is drawing a robot that can dance for the children, as he explains. It can even play kendama, a Japanese wood-balancing game, just as Marcus himself does.

We organized a number of these sessions with Danish children, and ended up with 218 drawings. Later we repeated the drawing session in two very different schools in Tanzania, a country school and an international school, and ended up with 268 drawings. These drawings clearly show how the children make use of the resources made available in the drawing sessions, and how their local experiences furnish potentials for envisioning a robotic future. It is not that each child would separately draw a representation of a robot. Rather, the children became entangled with their materials and with things they have learned before, in a process that is generative of new ideas. The Danish children engaged with each other, as did the children in the international school in Tanzania, as they explored what robots could be. By comparison, the children in the country school in Tanzania faced two difficulties.



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First, they were seated on two-person benches and could not run around to learn from each other. And second, the word ‘robot’ meant very little to them, compared to the Danish children and the children in the international school. They had not built up a potential of cultural resources that would have allowed them to attach a conceptual meaning to the word ‘robot’, when hearing it spoken (even when it was presented to them by their teachers in Kiswahili). They had not seen robot movies, watched robots on other media platforms or played with toy robots. It was difficult for them to respond in the same way as the Danish children under these conditions. Instead, they brought other resources into play, drawing houses, mobiles, cars, the Tanzanian flag and other stuff meaningful to them. A few kids drew humans with wires inside – and some drew ‘robbers’ with half masks and guns, because they mistook the word ‘robot’ with a word they recognized, namely ‘robber’ (Hasse 2020a; Figure 1.2). In order to approach what is going on here, we can further scrutinize the present and potential correspondences involved. An initial point we can take from the drawing situation is that learning involves ‘undergoing’. We would have maybe expected the children to make their own individual representations of robots on paper, passively reproducing whatever they had in mind. Instead, in the Danish and international schools we see the concept of robot evolving and transforming the relations between children, materials and environment as they call upon their diverse conceptual potentials, from their preceding learning, in order to make them relevant to the current situation. Together with pens, paper and social relations, whatever they have learned before – not only about robots but also from McDonald’s, kendama play, movies and so on – becomes part of what they collectively undergo in the classroom. In the country school in Tanzania, the potentials are different. What they undergo in the classroom is therefore different too, and the drawings come

Figure 1.2  Three robot drawings by pupils of a country school on Tanzania. Photos courtesy of the author.

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out differently as well. Here it also matters that the children cannot use their bodies to run around and look over each other’s shoulders. The idea of undergoing is central to Ingold’s understanding of correspondence. It was inspired by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, who emphasized that experiencing the world takes energy and responsiveness. There is no doing, according to Dewey, which is not simultaneously an undergoing, and which further draws on previous undergoings. Thus the actions we undertake in the world – the things we do – take into themselves and draw some of their meaning from what we have undergone in the course of previous doings, or suffered under the environing conditions these doings have induced. And conversely, what we presently undergo in carrying out these actions, and the environmental consequences they bring in train, bear upon further doing. (Ingold 2018b: 21)

I have argued that the learning of concepts is not an individual achievement but a collective entangling of materials and social relations. This enables us to better appreciate how undergoing transforms both materials and children. For ‘robot’ is not the only concept the children bring to bear. They have all kinds of other concepts, which connect actions, materials and spoken or written words (Hasse 2020b). Marcus connects his concept of robot with dancing and with the general concept of kendama, referring to a Japanese wooden toy where you pull up a cupped handle (the ken) and balance a wooden ball (the tama) upon it. As with Marcus’s kendama, our perceived and imagined world is teeming with concepts formed in our own previous undergoing, the potentials of which can be released, but also negotiated, in social situations.

Knowing as Evolving Concept Formation For the Russian educationalist Lev Vygotsky (1987), concepts are collectively mobilized whenever we engage with the world. As we learn, we form potentials for further learning and thinking, in a process which continually draws out new connections between spoken or written words and concepts. Our thinking, indeed, is necessarily bound to words and their meaningful social and material connections, although we may not believe this to be so, or be consciously aware of the fact. Even as thought finds its way into verbal expression, so words – albeit without our knowing – find their way into thought. That is why to ‘think without words’, as Vygotsky (1998: 161) put it, ‘means to be supported by the word’. The



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amalgamations of material words (like the word sound ‘robot), concepts and connections to meaningful materials are with us as potentials to be released not just when we perceive the world, such as in recognizing things for what they are, but also when we imagine it. Thus, when we say a word like ‘robot’, or imagine what might be connected to it, we do not call forth a fixed thought or image but are already undergoing a conceptual change along the many connections that play out in our situated thinking and, in the case we have been examining, in our drawing as well. Just as words are not individually owned, neither are any of the other materials involved in the process. As the children draw, their collective thinking about robots is restructured – and their common understanding of what a robot is or might be is transformed – so as to establish new potentials for learning. Verbal thinking, as Vygotsky (1987: 250–1) explains, ‘is not expressed but completed in the word’. This is very different from the model of knowledge and its production currently presented to us under the rubric of STEM – an acronym for the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. For in this model, embodied learning is strictly partitioned from the cognitive operations of an individualized intelligence. Each of the STEM disciplines, taken on its own, is fundamentally humanistic in so far it is tied to the idea of the progressive emancipation of humanity from its material conditions of existence. In their amalgamation, however, these disciplines open up to a more extreme, post-humanist vision of radical disembodiment (Ingold 2020). In this vision, knowledge is reduced to free-floating information, circulating among solitary and self-centred minds. The ‘post-human’, here, refers to an individual, hyper-intelligent and autonomous being – precisely the kind of being that robot designers strive to create and that is idealized in the rhetoric of STEM. Our proposal, to the contrary, is for an alternative posthumanism, according to which concepts arise and evolve not in minds nor even in individual bodies but in ongoing collective entanglements of living, breathing bodies with words, whether written or spoken, and things, like tables and chairs, as they are encountered in the material world. These entanglements, we maintain, both precede learning and are preconditions for it to take place (Hasse 2020b). Whatever we might come to regard as ‘knowledge’ grows out of bodily engagements in which we think and create both with materials and with each other. This is clearly demonstrated in the case of the children in our study, in whose learning potentials for understanding the world are constantly put to the test and transformed. By combining Vygotsky’s view of concept formation with Ingold’s idea of undergoing in correspondence, we can clarify the ways in which

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concepts, and thus also verbal thinking, perception and action, are continually transformed in the course of social or material negotiations and designations. This is not, of course, to take a position on the question of whether robots can actually hand out ice creams, dance or play kendama. What matters is how children’s concepts are negotiated and transformed in the situation of their drawing. Some children, like Johan and Erik, drew a different type of robot than most. Their robots were full of technical details, and an engineer would probably say they were more accurate representations of actual robots. These children had some special potentials which they could bring into play in drawing situations. In fact, they had hands-on experience of building robots themselves – from either Lego blocks or other types of playsets (Hasse 2020a). The learning potentials of other children, who drew robots as ‘nice’, ‘dancing’ and even ‘in love’, were drawn from their experience of watching robots in movies and other media. They considered robots to be almost as lively as themselves, and this opened up a reservoir of preceding undergoings from their own lives (e.g. with kendama and McDonald), from which they could draw when imagining a robot future. As they drew the children decided among themselves whether the robots in their future lives should be scary, as in some movies, or loving, as in others, and adjusted their drawings accordingly. The pens they used could also be a source of inspiration: silver was good for drawing metal parts, and yellow just right for the sun. Last but not least, they would draw on each other’s realized potential, as when Kasper was inspired by Lasse’s drawing and drew a heart, while also having his robot hand out chips rather than (as in Lasse’s drawing) ice-cream (Figure 1.3). In short, these children’s drawings are better understood as material and collective undergoings than as displays of individual creativity. Whether the potentials the children brought forth related to robots or to robbers, their conceptual learning in the situation was a bodily process which drew on their preceding learning in ultra-social collectivities. In the situation, they aligned with the materials offered and with each other. That is to say, in so far as they brought to the table their varied insights into what a robotic future could be, they engaged in what Ingold (2017) calls ‘commoning’. They did not align because they already had something in common; rather ‘commoning’ is a process that depends upon, and makes use of, variations of experience. In the quest for commonality, the imagination of a robotic future is not a given but an achievement. Far from sharing in advance a common idea of what robots are and can do, the children would develop these together. Thus ‘ “having in common” – like humanity itself – is not a baseline but an aspiration; not given from the start but a task that calls for communal effort’ (Ingold 2018b: 6).



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Figure 1.3  Kasper’s robot loves kids, just like Lasse’s, but it hands out Doritos and not ice cream. Photos courtesy of the author.

Figure 1.4  A robber (not robot) and a wired figure, from the country school in Tanzania. Photos courtesy of the author.

However, comparing the drawings from the country school in Tanzania with those from the international school, and from the school in Denmark, we see that it does matter, quite literally, what resources the children can draw on in the situation. Some children have had real experiences with robbers or guns, which they can include in their drawings (Figure 1.4). Others are familiar with McDonald’s, and others with building robots from kits (Figure 1.3). In this respect it is important, not just for teachers but in general, to acknowledge that

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the ultra-social precedents for conceptual learning matter, even in a situation of ongoing creation.

Body Potentials The potentials conferred by preceding learning reside not in the head nor even in the body of any individual person, but in the relations among a collectivity of persons and between them and their material environment.

In the figure-ground constellation, suggests Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962: 101), our body is always tacitly implied as a third term. The children’s bodies, in our drawing sessions with them, were constantly in movement. This was the case not only in the drawing situation but also in another situation we created with them. We were inspired by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, which she performed at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York from March to May 2010. The setup was simple. People could come and sit in front of the artist, just quietly, without talking. Many persons sat in front of the silent artist and were moved to tears by the experience. Now we wanted to see what effect it would have on the children if they were likewise to sit in front of a humanoid robot – christened NAO by its designers – either in groups or individually. We had programmed NAO to make breathing movements and occasional slight changes in body posture, but otherwise, like Abramović, NAO remained silent. However, contrary to Abramović, NAO was unable to respond silently through tiny gestures and eye movements. Like Abramović’s audience, the children strained to communicate, but in this case they were not certain whether they would get any response. Though NAO was present, it was not corresponding. This impelled the children to use their bodies even more as they tried to connect. Widening their eyes, they reached out with their arms and twisted their bodies, longing for the kind of response they would usually receive from lively human companions (Hasse 2020b, 17–18). Paying close attention to the robot’s movements, they attempted to engage with it in their own rhythm, endeavouring to communicate even without words (Figure 1.5). These sessions showed us once again that children use their whole bodies in communicating with others, along with their previously formed collective perception of robots as lively beings like themselves. What Merleau-Ponty (1962: 387) called ‘corporeal intentionality’ becomes, in Ingold’s (2017) words, corporeal attentionality. There is a significant difference, however, between



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Figure 1.5  NAO meets the children. Photo courtesy of the author.

robotic and human attentionality. Human bodies correspond as they learn in situations, robot bodies do not. To what do bodily potentials for learning refer? If we learn ubiquitously and continuously, where does all the learning go? Certainly not into individual heads. Education, as many have noted (e.g. Ingold 2018b), is not about transmission. Nor, as Vygotsky taught, is learning a transmission process. If we want to explore how learning releases potentials, in the entanglement of materials (including words, bodies in motion, and such things as tables and pens), Vygotsky’s notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) is particularly useful, but only if we are prepared to clear away the weeds that have grown over the concept in the educational sciences. In these sciences the ZPD is often treated instrumentally as scaffolding. Accordingly, the teacher is supposed to begin with the skills a learner has already mastered and to take responsibility for the tasks the learner has not yet mastered. Then, as learning proceeds, the learner is ‘given, and takes, responsibility for more of the task’ (Holland et al. 1998: 84). The ZPD appears rather late in Vygotsky’s writings – he died young, in 1934, without having the chance to develop it further – and it is tied to his notion of how learning takes the lead in development. In my reading there is much more to the concept, which admittedly goes beyond the model of ‘development’ that typically frames interpretations of Vygotsky’s ideas. Both he and his followers have viewed this leading in rather instrumental ways, tied for instance to

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problem-solving. The idea is that if you were to compare two students, apparently on an equal footing, neither of whom can solve a problem on their own, the help of a teacher or more capable peers would enable one to solve it, whereas the other, lacking such help, would be unable to do so (Vygotsky 1978: 86). But in his masterpiece of 1934, Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky 1987), the reference to a zone of proximal development is embedded in a more profound discussion of the relation between material words and verbal thinking. Though Vygotsky connects the ZPD here to a teacher’s instruction (e.g. Vygotsky 1987: 215–16), he also emphasizes that learning something does not mean we understand it. Indeed, the view of learning that Vygotsky sets out in Thinking and Speech comes closer to the kind of continuous undergoing envisaged by Dewey and Ingold. We learn as we go along, so that what Vygotsky calls ‘development’ is really a release, into current learning, of the potentials of what we have previously learned. This is not the transmission of individualized knowledge but a calling forth of potentials to be realized in collective situations such as when children gather to draw robots. The potentials that are realized from previous learning cannot be determined beforehand, nor can they be mobilized instrumentally under adult supervision. Learning is an ongoing process in which collectives of humans, words and other materials form and grow with each other. When humans engage with one another as the children did – when they are constantly getting up to look over each other’s shoulders, reaching out and stretching themselves, with gestures of inclusion – they may well be called ultra-social. Vygotsky himself emphasized the point: ‘human learning’, he wrote, ‘presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them’ (1978: 88). This idea has subsequently been taken up by Michael Tomasello (2014) and in my own work (Hasse 2020b). Learning is not an index of knowledge content arriving from outside, through some mechanism of transmission. It is already going on within us – not in the mind alone, however, but in the whole body, immersed in an environment. The ways we act and respond constantly draw on preceding learning. These learning potentials, moreover, are not confined to the body but spill out into the entirety of the situations in which we are mutually embedded, including the sounds of words or music, the hard surfaces of tables and the soft felt at the pen tips. As the drawings grow on the paper, so the children correspond, bringing in all their learned potentials for living with robots. Had the Danish children not gone to the movies, played games or even built robots themselves, the word ‘robot’ would have meant no more to them than it did for the children



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in the country school in Tanzania. It was thanks to their previous experience that they could initiate a creative process of evolving together. This preceding learning is not something previously transmitted, nor is it carried around in the body, like goods in a sack, to be purposively retrieved and used as needed. We are always in the midst of learning, inhabiting it, as previous undergoings potentiate present doings. This is to insist that learning is habitual rather than driven by prior intent, that our sense of agency is not given in advance but arises in the course of its unfolding, and that it takes place within a field of attentive relations (Ingold 2017: 9). In this process, preceding thinking becomes the point of departure for new engagements. This thinking is not in the body, nor is the body in a culture, yet we need to understand the phenomenal body as a cultural body as well. Philosopher of technology Don Ihde (2002) has distinguished what he calls ‘body one’, the sensory body, from ‘body two’, the body informed and shaped by culture. The distinction is a heuristic that makes it possible to discuss how humans across the globe, despite having bodies similarly equipped with sensory apparatus, have different bodily potentials for being in the world. Ihde’s so-called post-phenomenological approach has gained renewed importance with advances in robotics and AI. It has led some to claim, but others to deny, that it is possible to create robots and AI as ‘independentminded creatures’.

Living with Robots Does it matter whether teachers teach us or not? Some argue that teachers can be replaced with robots. In our research in Danish schools, we have witnessed such attempts – but we have also seen how they fail miserably. Real-life robots become an inverted mirror image of what actually happens in human learning. It is by looking at how robots fail to engage children, in the way a human teacher does, that we can begin to understand how we ourselves learn, as human correspondents. Here is a snippet from our research in a Danish school where teachers have experimented with using robots in the classroom, as they talk about preparing children for a future with robots and how to catch their interest. Researcher: The use of the robot, in teaching, does it change your perception of being a professional teacher? Does it matter to your role as teacher that you have this aid?

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Teacher: No. It does something to change the teacher’s role, but not in such a way that I feel superfluous, or that now they are replacing me with a robot. It is not like that. I simply never think it will happen [now I have tried to work with a robot]. I know that more and more places have started to plan to outsource our teaching in the support department to robots, and I think that’s scary, but that is my personal opinion. Moreover, I am even more of a technocrat than most of my colleagues. I think robots are a great supplement, and so it is like when the magician pulls rabbits out of his sleeve or hat, I feel like it’s a bit the same here. With a robot, one can capture the interest of the students, which is almost alpha omega for any teaching. Then … no matter how bad a teacher you are, as long as you capture their interest, and know your stuff, then you’ve almost won. And this one (NAO), it sharpens the interest.

Robots are fascinating, and meeting a real robot like NAO certainly makes children pay attention, at least for a while. However, in our research we also saw that over time, the children lost interest in engaging with the robot since it did not pay attention to them as they did to it. One explanation for this is that robots lack the bodily potentials that humans can bring to bear in learning situations. For Vygotsky (1978: 36) humans form what he called fields of attention, which are not tied to what lies before our eyes but are filled with things not visible at present – things that were in the past or could be in the future. Detached from the immediate perceptual field, the field of attention allows us, in the present, to look for a thing we once saw, or make something we imagine. Ingold takes a rather different approach, arguing that attentionality begins in the field of immediate sensory experience – the experience of an embodied mind in habitual movement. For him, ‘attentionality takes ontological priority as the fundamental mode of being in the world, whereas intentions are but milestones thrown up along the way’ (Ingold 2018b: 26). Whichever view we take, fields of attention or attentionality embed ultra-social human learners in environments that are or become meaningful. Robots may have fields of attention that are filled with representations – but they lack habitual attentionality and correspondence. It all boils down to differences in how humans and machines make sense of the phenomenal world. A perception without meaning is an empty perception, just as words without meaning are empty words. Humans seek meaningful connections with each other, between words and things, and between things – robots do not. Robots cannot replace human teachers precisely because only teachers can keep the world we share meaningful, ‘as a phenomenon of thinking’ (Vygotsky 1987: 244). Robots do not learn to think in conceptual terms but in



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representations. Thus, their understanding of both humans and their material surroundings is detached from the situated and committed practice that humans share. No matter how many iterations of machine learning the robot’s AI goes through, when it comes to learning about phenomena, it remains at the same level. For humans, as we have seen, new learning takes place in the relationship between the material and social environment together with the potential conceptual resources our preceding learning has equipped us with. The potentials the children bring to bear (learning from previous visits to McDonald’s or from building robots in school) have been called to life as they correspond with each other (whether positively or negatively), and with the colours (the sun is called forth by yellow and robotic bodies by the silver pen). The children’s knowledge is created as they draw a robot that looks like McDonald or a police robot. These are accepted. So, even, is the idea of robots falling in love. Stealing ideas, however, is not accepted. As the drawing proceeded, the children would constantly negotiate their potentials. Marcus can draw a dancing robot with a kendama around the neck. ‘It looks just like you’, Johan comments, and indeed it does. The kendama around Marcus’s neck is a released potential, as it become a resource for drawing a happy, playful, dancing robot. The children collectively bring forth a knowledge of robots as being human-like. The preceding learning is in this case unfamiliar to the researchers present. We did not recognize the thing around Marcus’s neck as a kendama, but Marcus and Johan (and probably the other boys around the table) did. They already know this is a wooden toy, originating in Japan, which challenges the player to toss a small ball from one side to the other. Many things can probably be learned about this toy, but for Marcus it became a resource for showing the robot to be a playful and lively creature – almost like himself. We had many experiences like this when we later talked to the children about their drawings. We did not always understand what potentials their preceding learning had given them in these situations. Some kids from Jutland who all drew robots on fishing boats turned out to have fathers who worked as fishermen in the nearby harbour. Some depicted robots walking dogs – and had dogs at home. Others, like Lasse, brought in their experiences at the movies, at McDonald’s or with toys. A small group of children, however, drew very realistic robots with nuts and bolts, wires, and electrical systems. These children, it turns out, either had experiences building robots at school or had big brothers who build robots. Other children, like the ones in the country school in Tanzania, did not think about or pay attention to robots at all (Hasse 2020a). Yet these children will

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likely grow up in a world where the companionship of robots will be an everyday experience. Teachers should not be robots, but should engage with children from all over the world in exploring how robots as portrayed in the media differ from their real-life counterparts. Only then will they be properly equipped to engage with the vision, put about by advocates of STEM and AI, of a future life with robots.

Conclusion How to live with robots? How can we imagine such a future? It seems that our capacity to imagine futures of how to live, with or without robots, is tied to our verbal thinking – at least if we follow Vygotsky when he says that ‘thought is born through words’ (1987: 282). However, thoughts and words are only part of our undergoing with material and social surroundings. It is when we do things that the potential from preceding learning unfolds as meaningful resources. Preceding learning is far from the instrumentalized, transmission-based model of learning criticized by Biesta (2006) and Ingold (2018b), among others. My main aim in this chapter has been to reinstate learning as the process by which students are provided with the potentials for being responsive. How do we use preceding learning as learning potentials to correspond with our surroundings? Preceding learning forms our fields of attention – our attentionality – when we release potential to make habitual meaning of our surroundings in processes of undergoing. Preceding learning is the potential for new learning and thus for the renewal of attentionality. As our preceding learning differs, so do our potentials for corresponding. Any experience, in other words, begins with preceding learning that transforms together with the environment. I have exemplified this argument by drawing on our experiments in drawing robots with Danish and Tanzanian children. In the drawings, robots do not appear as wilful expressions of prior designs but emerge in the process of what Ingold (2018b: 4–5) calls ‘commoning’ – a mutual experimentation that, in this case, involves materials, such as pens and paper, as well as social companionship. Our observations reveal much diversity in preceding learning potentials, which should be taken into account in experimental settings in schools. Many children depict robots as lively creatures capable of playing music, dancing and falling in love. However, regardless of age, the more that children have robotic materials to hand, the more they would depict robots according to what these materials have taught them.



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When Biesta quotes these words of the philosopher Jacques Derrida – ‘To live, by definition, is not something one learns’ (in Biesta 2013: 59) – he is limiting his concept of learning to the instrumental sense that remains mainstream in schools and educational settings. Here, I have argued for a sense of learning that is both deeper and broader than that of change through transmission. Living is indeed something we learn to do, just as we acquire a sense of our own agency in the world, as we pay attention, as we form and are formed in our habits, and as – with all these – we correspond.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge all the children in Danish and Tanzanian schools who let their robot fantasies bubble up in their fantastic drawings.

References Biesta, G. J. J. (2006), Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Biesta, G. J. J. (2013), The Beautiful Risk of Education, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Hasse, C. (2015), An Anthropology of Learning, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. Hasse, C. (2020a), ‘Drawing the Posthuman Future? Inequality in Children’s Conceptual Robot Imaginaries’, in C. Hasse and D. M. Søndergaard (eds), Designing Robots – Designing Humans, 88–110, New York: Routledge. Hasse, C. (2020b), Posthumanist Learning, New York: Routledge. Holland, D. C., W. Lachiotte, D. Skinner and C. Cain (1998), Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ihde, D. (2002), Bodies in Technology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ingold, T. (2017), ‘On Human Correspondence’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 23: 9–27. Ingold, T. (2018a), Anthropology: Why It Matters, Cambridge: Polity. Ingold, T. (2018b), Anthropology and/as Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2018c), ‘From Science to Art and Back Again: The Pendulum of an Anthropologist’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 43 (3–4): 213–27. Ingold, T. (2020), ‘What Knowledge Do We Need for Future-Making Education?’, in P. Burnard and L. Colucci-Gray (eds), Why Science and Art Creativities Matter: (Re-) Configuring STEAM for Future-Making Education, 432–9, Leiden: Brill | Sense.

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Lave, J. (1996), ‘The Practice of Learning’, in S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (eds), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, 3–32, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J., and E. Wenger (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tomasello, M. (2014), ‘The ultra-social animal’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 44 (3): 187–94. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, M. Cole, V. J. Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman (eds), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987), ‘Thinking and Speech’, in R. W. Rieber and A. S. Carton (eds), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology, trans. N. Minick, New York: Plenum. Vygotsky, L. S. (1998), ‘Imagination and Creativity in the Adolescent’, in R. W. Rieber (ed.), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Volume 5, trans. M. J. Hall, 151–66, New York: Plenum.

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A Pedagogy of Attention to the Light in the Eyes Jan van Boeckel

Painting with the Rain The setting is the intensive course Art and Sustainability Education that I teach annually as Professor in Art Education at the Estonian Academy of Arts. This time, in the autumn of 2018, I am with ten students and we have gathered for four days in Arbavere, a resort on the periphery of Lahemaa National Park. Several sessions take place through the day – inside as well as outside. We shift from seminars to hands-on workshops and back, and at intervals we reflect together on our shared experiences and try to trace the connections between theory and practice. In my indoor presentations in the group room, a wide array of themes comes to the fore. On one day, I give a general introduction to some of the epistemological foundations in the developing field of arts-based environmental education. On another, I facilitate a dialogue on the assumed desirability of a shift from ‘education for sustainable development’ to ‘sustainable education’ (Sterling 2001). This got me talking about my own art-educational practice of teaching wildpainting (Van Boeckel 2013: 216–36), inspired by the credo of painter Paul Cézanne, who said that when he paints, he lets the landscape think itself through him, and thus ‘becomes its consciousness’.1 Talking passionately about this theme, I become a little exhilarated. I project images on one of the walls, showing impressions of what typically goes on during my weeklong courses in wildpainting in different and sometimes remote parts of Europe. A key element in wildpainting is that participants are occasionally wrong-footed (Van Boeckel 2020: 257). They might for example be invited to begin by painting the landscape in front of them ‘as wrong as possible’. In more technical terms, they should first

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apply hues to their canvases that complement the colours they actually discern in the landscape before them. Thus, a blue sky might be painted in orange, and a green bush in red. While I talk about this it has begun to rain and snow outside. It is our last full day here, on the outskirts of Lahemaa; tomorrow a bus will pick us up to return us to the art academy in Tallinn. I notice that my excitement has infected at least some of the students. They want to try wildpainting too. Who cares if it rains or not? It is now or never! My intuition is that a mainly metaphorical (and hardly physical) light in the eyes on my part, while dwelling on this theme, has triggered a responsive light in the eyes of the students, which I feel as though I register in return. It is as if sparks of energy were jumping back and forth, mutually confirming and reinforcing each other. This light in the eyes is hard if not impossible to pin down. Most likely, it is a largely subjective affair. As such it is gentle and delicate, and it is perhaps in this fleeting quality that its particular value resides. It requires some effort, however, to regard something so ephemeral and elusive – something that may turn out in the end to be no more than an apt metaphor – as part of an educational event. I recall having experienced the same sensation on other occasions in my life, and now I recognize it again. If and when this happens, both students and teacher together seem to enter a space of what philosopher Arne Naess (1972) would call possibilism, in which ‘anything is possible, anything can happen!’ (Whitaker 2006: 119; see also Van Boeckel 2013: 309). This should not be mistaken for an educational space in which ‘anything goes’, or some notion of laissez faire where everything one fancies is permitted and even encouraged. Rather, in this context the move consists of abandoning mundane educational configurations and patterns of interaction, in order to explore together what a moment ago seemed close to impossible. In the group room at Arbavere, we have all become so fired up that it feels, at least to me, that whatever we might decide to try, in some profound sense, cannot fail. Or to put this in slightly different terms: I assume a basic and shared trust among participants, making me more a co-participant than a teacher. I trust that we would probably be able to handle a situation of ‘failure’, were that to be the consequence of whatever we now set out to undertake. There is a tacit confidence that we will somehow be able to manage the difficulties of painting outside in the rain, despite not yet knowing in what ways our undertaking might pan out. At such a point, dwelling together in this shared disposition, there seems no anticipation or even fear of a looming fiasco standing in our way, for the mere inclination to embark on a path that, for several of us at least, is untrodden



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suffices to render the endeavour intrinsically valuable. At such moments, one may feel – or so it seems to me as a teacher – that one is able, almost literally, to ‘move mountains’, together with the rest of the group. In his book The Courage to Teach, American author, educator and activist Parker Palmer (1998) observes that when a teacher introduces a sudden stimulus to an unprepared student, the latter’s eyes often narrow in response to the challenging situation. Such narrowing, limiting the range of peripheral vision, may be accompanied by a fight-or-flight response which, at that instant, might seem the only conceivable option. There is however an alternative. Palmer points out that in the Japanese art of self-defence, aikido, practitioners learn to counter the narrowing of options by practising a technique called ‘soft eyes’. Here, one learns to widen one’s peripheral vision, thus taking in more of the world. With soft eyes, the reflex of fight or flight can often be transcended. ‘This person’, Palmer explains, ‘will turn toward the stimulus, take it in, and then make a more authentic response – such as thinking a new thought’. A person who enters into such an open and receptive mode, he suggests, is better able to take in the greatness of the world and the grace of great things: ‘Eyes wide with wonder, we no longer need to resist or run when taken by surprise’ (Palmer 1998: 113). Building on this idea of ‘soft eyes’, I would argue that a person’s transformation to such a state does not necessarily depend on first mastering an appropriate technique, but that an openness to the new – where we are ready to engage with anything that may happen – can also be the result of being suddenly and positively overwhelmed by surprise and the temptation of the unexpected. Let me return to the intensive course in Estonia. In a few moments, the students and I will go outside and paint in nature. We may get wet, we may become cold and the paint on the canvas may begin to run or be washed away at the very moment it is applied – all good reasons to not even start making art at all (Figure 2.1)! But what would happen if we resolved to paint anyhow, in the immediate here and now? It has been my experience that if, together with the group, one does cross this threshold, the rewards can be immense. A participant may set out to do something that he or she has perhaps never done before. If there is some initial hesitation, even a degree of resistance, then the ability to overcome it may release hitherto untapped potential. One may of course wonder how it is possible to work with the raindrops hitting the canvas while painting. In situations like these, the ‘bag of tricks’ for painting the landscape in which one stands, and that one could confidently rely on in other circumstances, does not apply. Right from the start, one is faced with an unprecedented challenge, calling for an unaccustomed response.

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Figure 2.1  Painting with the rain, overview and close-up. Arbavere Centre, near Lahemaa National Park, Estonia, October 2017. Photos courtesy of Ceciel Verheij.



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The Light in the Eyes This group of students and me, here in an Estonian national park, cross a mental threshold like pioneers in a new territory. There is a sense of wild expectation. I’ve already observed how the intensity of excitement might manifest itself in a sparkling of the eyes, which in turn ignites a corresponding vivacity in the eyes of co-participants. The radiance of one set of eyes being met with its equivalent in the eyes of others sets up a cascade of mutual reinforcement. When this happens, I feel as if a new field of potentiality is opening up, in which things previously considered not even attainable become possible. In a pedagogic setting – and in this chapter I am mainly concerned with educational encounters with art – this suggests a build-up through multiple loops of feedback. Perhaps what I tentatively identify here as light in the eyes is, in less abstruse terms, simply the affirmation of a state of feeling fully alive and present. The light in the eyes – both the witnessing of it and its emanation – seems to presuppose a certain reciprocity. While we are trained to attribute causation to individual agents, my reading of the phenomenon is that it is apparent only by way of evolving ‘patterns of relationships’ (Bateson 1972), comprising a system in which participants are severally enmeshed. Moreover, for this to happen it seems to me that at least some participants need to overcome certain inhibitions carried over from their social and cultural upbringing. We may feel a self-conscious reluctance to expose our vulnerability – the fact that we suddenly feel passionately about something – to others. I argue here that in education, we would benefit from nourishing and valuing such vulnerabilities. I refer to the active attention to what they afford in educational settings as a pedagogy of light in the eyes.

Feelers Made of Elemental Fire Reflecting on what such a delicate pedagogy might entail, I was led to premodern conceptualizations of sight as issuing from the eye into the world. First articulated in writing in Ancient Greece, the belief that beams of light would stream from the eyes of the beholder, so as to pick out objects in the world, goes back at least to the time of the Greek shaman and scientist Empedocles (495–444 bc). Empedocles held that Aphrodite, goddess of love, fashioned our eyes out of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Then she kindled the fire of the eye in the primal hearth of the universe, wrapping it with tissues

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in the sphere of the eyeball (Zajonc 1993: 20). Next, the eye was permitted to transmit a fine interior fire, through the water of the eye and out into the world, thereby giving rise to sight. It was the action of the eye’s fire, reaching out, that allowed humans to grasp and thus apprehend the world. This was also how Plato understood it: streams would issue from within us, and strike upon any object they encountered outside in the world. These eye-beams, he thought, would apprehend the objects that stand in their path and then relay their qualities back to us (Gross 1999: 58). The interior ocular fire, the ‘mind’s eye’, played its own significant part in this. It would not passively receive images but actively send out feelers, or what Amelia Soth calls ‘luminous tendrils’, made of elemental fire (Soth 2019). The mathematician Euclid, a contemporary of Plato, conceptualized this perceptual system in more geometric terms. ‘Rectilinear rays proceeding from the eye’, he pronounced, ‘diverge indefinitely [and] those things are seen upon which the visual rays fall and those things are not seen upon which the visual rays do not fall’ (cited in Gross 1999: 58). Theories of vision founded on the extramission of light from the eye persisted for almost one and a half millennia (Zajonc 1993: 21; see Figure 2.2).2 Traces of the idea remain in everyday language, for example, when we say ‘to cast one’s eyes’, where to cast means ‘to send or direct (something) in the direction of someone or something’ (Merriam-Webster n.d.). The remarkable persistence, in our lifeworld, of this physiologically impossible primordial apprehension finds its analogue in the difficulty we moderns have in mentally overruling our felt experience that at dusk the sun sinks below the horizon, to grasp the physical reality that it is an effect of the rotation of the very earth on which we stand. Such disparities between abstract knowledge of the physical world and phenomenal or felt experience are not insignificant.3 When it comes to the durability of the idea of extramission, it is perhaps an index of the power of the gaze of someone who looks you straight in the eyes, or whose eyes shine as if on fire. ‘A lover’s eye will gaze an eagle blind’, said Shakespeare (Gross 1999: 63). ‘It is certain’, as Joseph Turnley wrote in his book The Language of the Eye, ‘that the eye gives the promptest and surest indication of mental motion. It is through this channel the understanding and feeling are communicated; talent, genius, hope, fear, love, joy, hatred, sorrow, despair, and revenge, are expressed’ (Turnley 1856: 38). Eyes are the mirrors of the soul and, as such, their expression can be regarded as an epiphenomenon of what is happening in our inner world. Having reviewed how our earlier understanding of the language of the eye – with the interior fire at its source – has guided the perception of eyes as emitters



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Figure 2.2  Johann Zahn’s depiction of the radiating eye, according to the emission theory of vision, from his Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (The LongDistance Artificial Eye, or Telescope), 1685.

of light, I shall now seek to restore the phenomenon of light in the eyes to its pedagogical context.

Something at Stake When we teach in the physical presence of other humans – instead of, say, through online or pre-recorded presentations – we share a world together, and for this to be a fruitful learning experience, according to phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, something needs to be at stake for participants. Ideally, he says, all participants are vulnerable to a degree, and thus effectively take a risk.

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This risk entails that one may come upon a certain understanding that was not anticipated. Education, in Dreyfus’s view, is not the transfer of information and of the rules by which this information should be processed. It is rather a situation in which something is of concern to us, namely the potential to acquire new insights – a potential that may or may not be realized. Since the outcome is not given, the endeavour may fail. Both teacher and learner have to do their best, precisely because something is at stake for both of them. For learning to come about, according to Dreyfus, it is essential that people in the educational situation should make themselves actually and actively present to one another. Irrespective of context, people and things must matter to us if we are to learn; moreover, our involvement with these people and things determines the ways in which they become meaningful for us. Dreyfus insists that not just for learners but for the teacher as well something should be at stake: ‘if the teacher shows his involvement … and emotionally dwells on the choices that have led him to his conclusions and actions, the students will be more likely to let their own successes and failures matter to them’ (Dreyfus 2001: 38–9). When teachers grasp the opportunity and feel grounded enough to be present with their students on a journey into new terrain, they may have little or no coherent idea of where the undertaking will take both them and their students. Yet something, clearly, is at stake. This is not about encouraging participants to set out with a clear intention in mind, nor does it necessarily foreground a state of attentiveness. A pedagogy of attention or of intention, of ‘being-with’ the phenomena we study, may very well pertain to subsequent states in an unfolding educational process. But a pedagogy of being attentive to the light in the eyes emerges, I believe, at moments when the will of participants – or what Bateson (1972: 445) would call their ‘purposive consciousness’ – asserts itself less predominantly, and when the new, to be brought forth in and through the educational experience, has yet to unfold. This lack of prior framing might actually help participants in workshops, such as the one from which I began this chapter, to make meaning from the experience in ways less obvious to themselves. It may help them realize that this could be different from other workshops they have attended previously, whether arts-based or not. The enrichment of experience with personal significance and new meaning, for the philosopher of education John Dewey, amounts to nothing less than ‘a gift of the gods’. He thought of it as such, according to Philip Jackson (1998: 15), precisely because the added meaning is not sought: ‘It happens effortlessly and without notice – like a bolt from the blue.’



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To me there is a parallel here with how philosopher and psychologist William James understood the workings of affect. A perception, James argued, does not first induce an affect or emotion as a state of mind that is only subsequently expressed in bodily behaviour. Rather, the bodily response comes first; its affectation, immediately excited by the perception, is the emotion. Thus it makes more sense to say ‘that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, [than] that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be’ (James 1884: 190, emphasis added). In situations where something impresses us deeply, for example, when we suddenly notice the intricacy of a spider’s web, we are quite literally moved; our reaction is emotional in the original sense of the Latin emovere, ‘to move out’. In such moments, our perception is not very clear. Overwhelmed, we no longer perceive very keenly and sensitively – for this seems to require a certain degree of detachment. Dwelling in this state of being thoroughly moved by ‘a gift of the gods’ is not necessarily extraneous to the processes of acquiring knowledge. Elsewhere, I have coined the concept of rudimentary cognition.4 With this, I try to encapsulate a mode of coming to new knowledge through one’s participation in artistic activity, where this initially involves a crude and basic germination of meaning. This elementary and nascent form of cognition comes forth, as I describe it, from and in a primarily affective and bodily response to being immersed in artful and transformative action. This encounter, this coming to new understandings, remains by its nature fragmentary, fuzzy and ambiguous; essentially it entails groping or fumbling one’s way forward.

A Poor Pedagogy There are remarkable parallels here with the critical research practices introduced by philosopher of education Jan Masschelein (2010a,b) under the rubric of poor pedagogy. Rather than requiring a complex, predetermined methodology, poor pedagogy invites us to go out into the world, to expose ourselves in the literal sense of ex-positio, of moving ‘out of position’. We are encouraged to put ourselves in a position of weakness or discomfort. Precisely because it offers insufficient, defective means – both lacking in signification and undirected towards any goal or end – poor pedagogy helps us become attentive. This is epitomized in the paradox of a practice ‘leading nowhere and which therefore can lead everywhere’ (Masschelein 2010a: 49). Such pedagogy

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is generous: it gives time and space; the time and space of experience and of thought. As Masschelein puts it: What I want to call a poor pedagogy, a poor art, [is] the art of waiting, mobilising, presenting. Such a poor art is in a certain sense blind (has no destination, no end, is not going anywhere, is not concerned with the beyond, has no vision of a promised land), it is deaf (hears no interpellation, is not obeying ‘laws’) and speechless (has no teachings to give). It offers no possibility of identification (the subject position – the position of the teacher or the student – is, so to say, empty), no comfort. (Masschelein 2010a: 49)

This radical pedagogic practice is of particular interest in the context of our exploration of an epistemology informed by being attentive to (and following up on) the phenomenon of light in the eyes. Masschelein is explicit about the importance of ‘e-ducating the gaze’ and ‘opening our eyes’, which actually happens through a ‘displacing of one’s gaze’. The example he provides is of students engaging in the physical activity of walking as an educational practice. Masschelein would travel with a group of students to post-conflict cities such as Sarajevo and Kinshasa for periods of about two weeks. He would ask his students to walk during both day and night along lines arbitrarily drawn on a city map. They would start somewhere and end somewhere, without a plan. During these walks the students were encouraged to ask questions such as: ‘What have you seen or heard? What do you make of it?’ At the end of their explorations, they would present their findings, their ‘look at the city’, to the general public on the streets. By walking along the trajectory of an arbitrary line, one is not led to somewhere already fixed in advance, but along a trail that is not destined and lacking in any familiar kind of orientation (Masschelein 2009; see Barnett 2012: 98). Masschelein plays here with the double meaning of exposition. When participants are asked to leave their present position – by, for example, starting to walk along lines arbitrary drawn across maps of cities previously unknown to them – they are effectively moved out of position. This brings them to the streets in unexpected ways. They find themselves in a state of extreme vulnerability. This is the other meaning exposition – of being exposed to the world. A poor pedagogy, for Masschelein, spells out the need to make use of one’s eyes to look, and it does this not by capturing the gaze but through mobilizing and animating it, ‘so that the gaze is not imprisoned, but can be seduced and taken away by what is evident’ (Masschelein 2010a: 51). Ultimately, what is at stake in such practices, for Masschelein, is the existential space of practical freedom.



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Being Interrupted Gert Biesta, another leading philosopher of education, drawing inspiration from the writings of Hannah Arendt, sees education as an endeavour fundamentally engaged in arousing the desire in another human being to exist in the world, as a subject. In this educational space, as he says in his book Letting Art Teach, you are taught something fundamental about human existence – ‘you are not alone’ (Biesta 2017: 65, original emphasis). In our encounter with the world, we experience that this world is not a construction, and particularly not our construction: it exists in its own right. This meeting of the subject with the world, whether it is material or social, necessarily manifests itself in the experience of resistance (Biesta 2017: 64). Sooner or later, something or someone resists our intentions, actions or initiatives. Encountering such resistance can be rather frustrating; suddenly something is in our way. For Biesta, then, the key question is: what do we do when we encounter such resistance? To this, we can respond in different ways. We could withdraw from it, which could ultimately lead to what Biesta calls ‘self-destruction’, or we could blame the world for not corresponding to our idea of how it should be, which could evolve into ‘world-destruction’. Between these extremes, according to Biesta, lies a ‘middle ground’. We should make an effort, he argues, to stay there. Here, the person encountering resistance endeavours to remain in dialogue, as a ‘way of existing in the world’. This is to take the difficult course of leaving space for the world itself to exist as well. It is to counter the resistance coming one’s way, through existing with the world (Biesta 2017: 65). Education, for Biesta, is basically an act of turning: of turning the student in a particular direction, towards the world, so that they can both enter into dialogue with it and, by the same token, exist as a subject (Biesta 2017: 86). It does this, he says, through the enactment of a simple injunction: ‘Look, there is something there that I believe might be good, important, worthwhile for you to pay attention to’ (2017: 44). Entering the worldly and educational space of the middle ground may require students to learn something they do not yet know. In short, they encounter an interruption, initiated by the teacher. Here, Biesta introduces the notion of the ‘educational gesture’. Even if enacted in the gentlest possible way, this is fundamentally a gesture that interrupts. It interrupts where the person is, it interrupts what they are doing, it interrupts how they may perceive their own identity and the desires they may have. Putting something in the way of the student’s trajectory is one means, Biesta says, of turning the student towards the

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world and effecting an encounter with a reality that is outside the student, and not constructed by them. An interruption is usually interpreted as something unpleasant, a disturbance in a process that is otherwise running smoothly. Dewey, however, presents it in a far more positive light. Relinquishing control and thus being receptive to outside influence, he insists, is an essential quality of compelling, deeply engaged experience. David Wong (2007), in a commentary on Dewey’s approach to educational experience, traces this quality through an excursion into the word ‘passion’. In Latin, pati means suffering: ‘Both passion and suffering mean to experience intensely while being acted upon by the world’ (Wong 2007: 202). There is an element of inevitability here, as in the expression, ‘no pain, no gain’. Compelling experiences are constituted by more than just our intentional actions. Only by fully undergoing the experience, says Dewey – only by surrendering to the suffering it entails – do we truly learn. As he wrote in his essay of 1934, Art as Experience: Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy. To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it. When we are only passive to a scene, it overwhelms us and, for lack of answering activity, we do not perceive that which bears us down. We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in. (Dewey 1987: 59–60)

What catches our attention, in the context of this chapter, is that Dewey – in describing perception as the ‘going-out’ of energy – uses a metaphor that comes close to the central idea of extramission, namely that an internal source of energy (such as an interior ocular fire) is pitched into the world. In his Letting Art Teach, Biesta (2017: 107) focuses on the notion of ‘passability’, another word for ‘our capacity to be affected’. Drawing on the work of Wolf-Michael Roth (2011), he suggests the example of encountering a new kind of food, wine or olive oil one has never tasted or smelled before. In such an event we do not yet know the smell or taste we are going to encounter. We have no choice but to open up and allow ourselves to be affected. This is an experience of ‘not-knowing’ that comes laden with uncertainty and also, therefore, with risk. By actively exposing ourselves to the new and unknown, we make ourselves vulnerable (Biesta 2017: 108). This vulnerability, Biesta argues, precedes knowing, sense making and interpretation. It is only after having been affected that we can begin to think, classify and relate the experience to something else.5 Paradoxically, as Roth points out, we encounter an agency that is enabled by passivity: ‘the



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intention to move, and the experience of encountering the unknown that we cannot anticipate and therefore construct, all invoke passability, our capacity to be affected’ (Roth 2011: 18, cited in Biesta 2017: 108). Here, affect not only precedes but even enables cognition, underwriting the kind of rudimentary cognition just discussed. We can bring ourselves to a state of attentive readiness, where we wait to let ourselves be surprised. And to be surprised, says Biesta (2017: 112), literally means to be overtaken by what is beyond our control.

Reciprocally Sharing in Enthusiasm It is here, Biesta proposes, that the arts have something to offer. Characteristically, art needs time, it can slow us down and focus our attention so that we are able to see what was not visible before, or to hear what was not previously audible. The educational potential of the arts for Biesta lies precisely in providing the time, space and forms that allow students to practise what it means to exist as subjects in a world (Biesta 2017: 90). Art, however, is not only about understanding and sense making. It may well be that art resists questions such as: ‘What does this mean?’ or ‘What can I learn from this?’ When, alternatively, we have what Biesta calls an existential encounter with art, we come to realize that there is no unequivocal message to receive, no clear path towards right and clear understanding: ‘the art we encounter raises questions, puts the world into question, puts us into question, puts our very existence into question’. Coming across art in such a way points us in a new direction. Now other questions may become relevant such as: ‘What is this art work asking from me?’ or, ‘What is this trying to teach me?’ (Biesta 2017: 100). I would suggest that what holds for encounters with artworks made by artists, also pertains to the experience of being immersed in an open-ended artistic group process. This is even more so when such a process is initiated or enhanced through a reciprocal sharing of enthusiasm, fired up by the light in the eyes. Moreover, I believe that questions raised through one’s encounter with art, a meeting for which the dramaturgy of the teacher provides the impetus (‘look there!’), can also arise from an interruption that happens in a predominantly tacit and implicit way. Just how the interruption is registered is a function of the extent to which recipients are good observers or listeners. It would without doubt qualify as what Biesta calls an educational gesture, rather than an as an explicit instruction or an act of proactively guiding of the gaze. A pedagogy of attentiveness to, and resonance with, the enthusiasm of participants could, in

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this sense, be appreciated as a particular expression, or amplification, of the ‘poor pedagogy’ proposed by Masschelein. Biesta emphasizes the element of intervention, in which the teacher consciously takes action by pointing towards something to which it is worth paying attention. Here, the teacher sets the agenda, while it is the student who is brought into a position where he or she opens up to be addressed by the world. In this vein, Masschelein summons his participants to start moving with almost lyrical fervour. His poor pedagogy says, in his own words: ‘Look, I won’t let your attention become distracted, look! Instead of waiting for thrills and a denouement, for stories and explanations, look!’ (Masschelein 2010b: 284). Rather than focusing on the agency of the pedagogue, however, we could shift our attention to the patterns of relationships between teacher and students, and among the students themselves. The interruption does not necessarily have to be an organized intervention, a deliberate insertion of resistance so that it comes to stand in the students’ way; it can also manifest itself spontaneously; it can, as it were, ‘descend upon us’, exciting both students and teacher as they are suddenly overcome by a sense of wonder and curious expectation of what might come next. It does, however, assume a certain readiness of all involved to open doors to the unknown, the unfamiliar. Tuning in to a phenomenon as ephemeral as the exchange of light in the eyes, I would suggest, is like accommodating to a practically subliminal event. Indeed, calling it an intervention or interruption would already suggest a degree of wilful intentionality which is not really present. One may not even register its occurrence consciously, as something that actually happens and has an impact. For it to happen at all, however, seems to presuppose a two-way exchange, which might emerge as follows. In one person the phenomenon of emitting light of the eyes is prompted, and is then discerned (again, not necessarily knowingly) by one or more other persons. This recognition might trigger, in response, in the eyes of those concerned, a matching spark of enthusiasm, which could be expressed, possibly without their being consciously aware of it, through the emission of signs of equivalent fervour. This could all take place entirely on the elusive level of affect, in the way James grasped the primal bodily response. With Biesta, I believe the arts afford unique existential possibilities to encounter the resistance of the world, material and social, and also to work through such resistance. To broaden this perspective, I would include here not only being brought into contact with the artworks of others but also participation in artmaking practices. The artist, as Dewey (1987: 15) writes, ‘does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their



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own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total.’ Biesta emphasizes that attention and intention are not identical and that it is important to distinguish the two. Our connections to the world, in his view, cannot be put down to intentions alone. It is not that we see, feel, touch or otherwise act only because we have first formed an intention to do so. We do not even have the capacity to generate such intentions. For Biesta, it is the other way around: to pay attention is not a matter of intention, of focusing our attention on something we already know. It is rather about ‘opening up’ and ‘allowing ourselves to be affected’ (Biesta 2017: 110–11).

Receptivity for a Pedagogy of the Light in the Eyes to Unfurl The old philosophical question – if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? – finds a corresponding puzzle in the question: Is such a fleeting and subtle phenomenon as light in the eyes also manifest if there is no one else present to register it? When I put the question of the falling tree to Tim Ingold, he replied that the answer is actually quite straightforward: it is simply a matter of what we mean by sound. If we define sound phenomenologically, as sonorous experience, then there can be no sound if no one is around to hear. In phenomenological terms, sound is hearing. But if we define it physically, as mechanical vibration within a certain frequency range, then wherever there are vibrations there is sound, whether or not anyone is there to listen. With light, he said, it is just the same: ‘The light that travels as an electromagnetic ray from source to recipient does not need eyes to exist. But the light that shines or sparkles certainly does.’6 It is doubtful whether an educational moment triggered by such a transient phenomenon could ever be organized or planned. I can only say that in my experience, what for me is a real and extraordinary moment ‘descends upon us’ out of the blue. Any effort of trying to call it forth would be like the paradox of the instruction to ‘be spontaneous!’ Walter Ong (1982: 134) once remarked, tongue in cheek, that today ‘we plan our happenings carefully to make sure they are thoroughly spontaneous’. So, what circumstances make it more likely that a pedagogy of being attentive to the light in the eyes can be brought to bear and exert its workings on those who attend to it, including both participants and teachers?7 Can a state of readiness and openness be nurtured at all for what a pedagogy of the light in the eyes may afford? It seems to me that to attempt its cultivation

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would intrinsically go against what is at its core, namely a radical stepping into the here and now, whereby a shared excitement for what may come is leading the way. However, reflecting on what I experienced myself, for example during the course in Estonia when we determined to go outside to paint in the rain and snow, I believe one cannot really pinpoint who ignites the light in the eyes, whether it be teacher or student. One could ask whether it is even relevant to identify a source, or to affix it to one individual. For as we have already observed, its emergence is, in Batesonian terms, ‘in the system’, in the evolving patterns of relationships among all involved. Another way to appreciate the phenomenon is by looking at it through a spiritual lens, that is, to regard it as a moment in time when the mood among participants becomes animated, or spirited in Christian terms. It is worth noting that the word ‘enthusiasm’, which we use to convey a sense of intense enjoyment, interest, or approval, comes from the Greek en theos, meaning ‘in God’. It would originally have referred to a person’s being possessed by divine presence, or to their susceptibility to extreme piety. Enthusiasts are filled with the Holy Spirit. The German word for ‘excited’, Begeistert, carries a similar connotation. It is literally to be taken by spirit or ‘inspirited’. For me, an everyday illustration of this kind of situation is when, in a group of people, someone suddenly gets the giggles. The uncontrollable laughter, often bringing tears to the eyes, is triggered at a certain moment, but apparently it cannot be summoned or arranged, nor can its origin be traced to any individual. As it bursts out, it often tends to radiate and affect other people in the vicinity, who cannot help but start to laugh too. With laughter as with the spirit, one is taken by it, overwhelmed by it, but one does not intend it. It is true that when a teacher says: ‘Look over here, there might be something interesting for you to pay attention to’, this guidance may imply that the matters to which attention is being drawn are to some extent already known to the teacher, limiting the appeal, to him or her, of joining with the students in looking over again. A pedagogy of light in the eyes does not necessarily mean, however, that everyone who succumbs to the light is equally overcome by it, or equally focused. One way, perhaps, to approach what it entails is to consider the light in the eyes as a metaphor for a specific mental state shared among a group of people collaborating on a new undertaking, in which they feel more fully present and attentive to the here and now. This attentiveness can also manifest itself in a heightened capacity for peripheral vision or fringe awareness, of not having one’s focus aimed at any spot in particular but letting it roam in a larger field where phenomena on the outskirts may be just as



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relevant as what happens at the centre. This is the state that Palmer (1998) called ‘having soft eyes’. What, then, would be the very opposite of a pedagogy of attending to the light in the eyes? Perhaps it would be a pedagogy, all too commonplace today, of following routines and prescribed methods, of urging students to deliver work to a standard and on schedule. It is a pedagogy of cause and effect, designed to produce pre-specified learning outcomes. It is precisely against this kind of predictability that Biesta protests. What we need instead, he proposes, is a pedagogy of the event; a pedagogy that is oriented positively towards the weakness of education. This, for him, is a pedagogy that is willing – as he also suggests in the title of probably his best-known book – ‘to take the beautiful risk of education’ (Biesta 2013: 140, emphasis added). Often, as an integral part of the workshops I facilitate, I encourage participants to reflect on emergent meanings that come forth, by carrying out together the artful activities that follow when we perform the paradoxical operation of what Rebecca Solnit (2006: 5–6) calls ‘calculating on the unforeseen’, working with what is not (yet) there. Such reflections can be expressed in ways other than by words alone. The very circumstance in which an artmaking activity does not immediately make sense – like going out into the rain and wind to make a painting – may provide a contrast that propels participants’ immersion in present conditions and further unpacking of where the experience might lead. Thus, we grant ourselves some license to meet phenomena, not head-on but, for instance, in their negative or in-between spaces (Van Boeckel 2013: 226), in a place where they are not readily manifest or accessible but perhaps only looming. Our artistic interventions and our artworks, as they emerge between our hands, may not always be fully congruent with what we had had in mind.

Epilogue ‘Listen very carefully and you will hear the sea in your body,’ writes Yoko Ono (1971) in her poem The Connection, adding: ‘You know, our blood is seawater and we are all seacarriers.’ Could it be that the eye sparkle is caused by the reflection of light that comes from the world and strikes the moistened surfaces of the eyes of a person who is in a state of joy and exaltation, or of pain and grief? Do the glistening tears that moisten the eyes remind us that we still carry the sea with us in our body? Recall that for Dewey, there is always an element of

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pain in the phase of undergoing; it is what gives depth to experience. If it were not painful, the experience would not have such a lasting and transformative effect on those who surrender themselves to it. This pain might correspond to what Biesta calls resistance, or the struggle to stay in the difficult middle ground where dialogue with the world takes place. To tolerate this pain is to open up to a position of vulnerability, of lesser control, lowering one’s protective shield and stepping into the unprecedented.8 I conclude with the question of whether it would even make sense to call for a pedagogy that attends to light in the eyes if it cannot be planned and organized, let alone implemented. We can only answer with a degree of modesty. For at the end of the day, the most one can aim for is to create the best possible conditions for the phenomenon of light in the eyes to manifest itself, even if only metaphorically. In 2009, I was invited by the Dutch organization Natuurwijs (‘Naturewise’) to present a workshop on arts-based environmental education. The workshop would take place in the woods and was intended for foresters who were trained as guides to facilitate youngsters in gaining direct experience of the woodland environment. Together with me, they would explore hands-on how art might help to cure what Richard Louv (2005) has characterized as ‘nature-deficit disorder’. As I made my acquaintance with the participants, I quickly gained the impression that the foresters were expecting me to equip them with some kind of methodology, a tool kit which they then could employ in future educational events with children. But this was not what I was about to offer. My plan was to invite them to join me in a variety of artmaking activities, such as to make a miniature sculpture of their own body from a lump of clay, while keeping their eyes closed. The forester-teachers looked uneasy. This is not what they had expected. But then I shared some words of reassurance along the following lines: This workshop is not about how one can use art as a method in teaching; this workshop will be about you, and your own inspiration by and connection to nature. What I hope to do, through this artistic workshop, is to bring you closer to your own embodied experience of being here in this forest. If you are in touch with that part of yourself and let it feed you when you work with people in nature, I believe you’ll ultimately be better facilitators.

Although this interruption to participants’ expectations was met with a certain resistance, I nevertheless had a vague, almost imperceptible sense of rising curiosity, with perhaps a hint of a kindled (and kindred) fire in their eyes.



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Notes 1 Cézanne put it like this: ‘The landscape becomes reflective, human, and thinks itself though me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting … I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness’ (quoted in Medina 1995: 221). 2 The extramission theory was ultimately dismissed by the irrefutable arguments of Ibn al-Haythem (965–1040), known in the West as Alhazen. One of Alhazen’s striking rebuttals was that when we look at the heavens at night, how could our eyes ever put out enough material to fill the space up to the stars? (Gross 1999: 59). 3 There still remains considerable ambiguity about what we actually mean by light. Do we take light to be luminous experience or physical radiation? Do we see light, or only objects in the light? There are basically two perspectives on this which are often confused. One holds that when our eyes attend, for example, to the flame of the fire, the shining of the sun, or – in the context of this ­chapter – the sparkle of another’s eyes, we experience light. The other point of view is that light rays serve as vectors of projection. Through them the objects on which they fall, and from which they are reflected, are revealed to us. In other words, we see the objects, but not the light. Luminous experience can be described by such verbs as shine, sparkle, glow, glisten and so on. But physical radiation, in itself, cannot do any of these things. ‘Shining’, for instance, is an affectation of consciousness which goes on in real time. It is not emitted in the form of what we would nowadays understand as electromagnetic radiation, from a source to the eye of a recipient. Such emissions may be a condition for luminous experience, but they are not the experience itself. (I am grateful to Tim Ingold for drawing my attention to this elemental distinction between the felt experience of light and the physical phenomenon of its electromagnetic radiation.) 4 As I have shown elsewhere (Van Boeckel 2013), rudimentary cognition may subsequently evolve into more intentional and conscious cognitive activities when the newly acquired knowledge – at that point still dynamic and evolving perceptions of raw chunks and patterns of information that come our way – is processed, internalized and applied in other contexts. James Elkins points at something similar when he observes that ‘emptying of the brain through painting creates a vacuum that attracts real spontaneous knowledge’ (cited in Lipsett 2009: 44). 5 Note the similarity here with James’s conceptualization of affect, discussed earlier. 6 Tim Ingold, personal communication, 6 April 2021. 7 An earlier publication on this theme, The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities by Sonia Nieto (1999), only acknowledges the light in pupils’ eyes; any possible matching light in the eyes of teachers is left out of consideration. 8 Iain McGilchrist (2009: 85) pushes the connection between experience and pain even further. Tracing the word pain to the Greek pathos (feeling) and paschein

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(to suffer), he writes that perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer: ‘The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer’.

References Barnett, R. (2012), The Future University: Ideas and Possibilities, London: Routledge. Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine. Biesta, G. (2013), The Beautiful Risk of Education, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. (2017), Letting Art Teach, Arnhem, Netherlands: ArtEZ Press. Dewey, J. (1987), ‘Art as Experience’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 10: 1934, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (2001), On the Internet, London: Routledge. Gross, C. G. (1999), ‘The Fire That Comes from the Eye’, Neuroscientist, 5 (1): 58–64. Jackson, P. (1998), John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. James, W. (1884), ‘What Is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9: 188–205. Lipsett, L. (2009), Beauty Muse: Painting in Communion with Nature, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada: Creative by Nature Books. Louv, R. (2005), Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Masschelein, J. (2009), ‘The World “Once More”: Walking Lines’, Teachers College Record, 15647. Masschelein, J. (2010a), ‘E-ducating the Gaze: The Idea of a Poor Pedagogy’, Ethics and Education, 5 (1): 43–53. Masschelein, J. (2010b), ‘The Idea of Critical E-ducational Research – Educating the Gaze and Inviting to Go Walking’, in I. Gur-Ze’ev (ed.), The Possibility/Impossibility of a New Critical Language in Education, 275–91, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. McGilchrist, I. (2009), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Medina, J. (1995), Cézanne and Modernism: The Poetics of Painting, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Merriam-Webster (n.d.), Cast, in Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Available online: https://www.merr​iam-webs​ter.com/dic​tion​ary/cast (accessed 25 August 2021). Naess, A. (1972), The Pluralist and Possibilist Aspect of the Scientific Enterprise, London: Allen and Unwin. Nieto, S. (1999), The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities, London: Trentham Books. Ong, W. (1982), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New York: Methuen.



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Ono, Y. (1971), Grapefruit: A Book of Instruction and Drawings, New York: Simon & Schuster. Palmer, P. J. (1998), The Courage to Teach, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Roth, W.-M. (2011), Passability: At the Limits of the Constructivist Metaphor, Dordrecht: Springer. Solnit, R. (2006), A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Penguin. Soth, A. (2019), ‘The Extremely Real Science behind the Basilisk’s Lethal Gaze’, JSTOR Daily, 28 March. Available online: https://daily.jstor.org/the-extrem​ely-real-scie​ncebeh​ind-the-basili​sks-let​hal-gaze/ (accessed 9 September 2021). Sterling, S. (2001), Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change, Schumacher Briefings, Totnes: Green Books. Turnley, J. (1856), The Language of the Eye: The Importance and Dignity of the Eye as Indicative of General Character, Female Beauty, and Manly Genius, London: Partridge. Van Boeckel, J. (2013), At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education, Helsinki: Aalto University. Van Boeckel, J. (2020), ‘Linking the Missing Links: An Artful Workshop on Metamorphoses of Organic Forms’, in P. Burnard and L. Colucci-Gray (eds), Why Science and Art Creativities Matter: (Re-)Configuring STEAM for Future-Making Education, 245–65, Leiden: Brill | Sense. Whitaker, A. (2006), ‘Arne Naess and Possibilism’, Trumpeter, 22 (2): 118–20. Wong, D. (2007), ‘Beyond Control and Rationality: Dewey, Aesthetics, Motivation, and Educative Experiences’, Teachers College Record, 109 (1): 192–220. Zajonc. A. (1993), Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, London: Bantam Press.

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Proportion, Analogy and Mixture: Unearthing Mathematical Measurement Practices Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair

Introduction Through repeated and rhythmic activity, children develop strategies for negotiating distances and carrying weights, inventing measurements based on their bodily activity and encounters with familiar objects or substances (finger, step, rhyme, rock, water). Measurement always has this corporeal lineage, tied directly to a body’s first attempts to ‘sense’ the world autonomously, through movement, touch, sound, vision and even taste. A child develops quantitative relationships through ‘more or less’ relational responses, mediated in these sensory encounters with different materials – one measures the volume of a bowl with water, or the weight of water with rocks or the durability of rocks with the hardness of other rocks. This kind of playful activity evokes the emergent coupling by which different material beings are bound together in what we will call ‘minor’ measuring activity. Measurement begins in this relational engagement with the world, where what matters is the specific co-relation between two or more material processes that occur alongside each other. In this processual world, these acts of measurement with matter are diverse, situational and fluid. Michel Serres (2017) argues that measurement is not simply derived from matter, nor is it the mere covering of matter with units. Matter and measurement are not detachable, he suggests, but rather presuppose each other, bound together in a metamorphic mixture. It is this reciprocal implication that makes measurement ultimately paradoxical, in that it is both objective and subjective, abstract and concrete, collective and singular. Rather than treating measurements

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as quantitative coverings of material objects, and rather than dismissing all measure as a distorted misconstrual of nature, we seek ways to better understand the complex geo-historical mixing of matter and measurement. The emergence of the standard metre, for instance, occurred due to a widespread desire for standardized measures in the 1790s and the simultaneous mining of platinum, chosen as the appropriate material precisely because it was the least susceptible to climatic variation. Emanuele Lugli (2019: 36) attributes the preference for platinum to the facts that it came from Spanish mines in Ecuador (the ‘new’ world), that it was not yet in circulation (like gold) and that it conformed to an aesthetic of bare and unmarked purity, thereby masking the earthly materiality of measure. In this chapter we delve into the underexamined complexity of measurement as an ever-changing material practice that entails corporeal mobilities and mixtures of all kinds. We show how measurement is more than simply ‘covering’ spatial objects with standardized units. Instead, we suggest that measurement is a profoundly dynamic co-relational activity, pursued by both humans and non-humans. We believe that measurement practices occur within complex relational ecologies, and that they should be studied as expressions of an intensive ontology. In particular, we seek to show how habits of human measurement involve analogical thinking and proportional mixtures. Although cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (2007) shows how analogical thinking comes in many different forms, we focus on the teetering balance of proportions, when one ratio is considered analogous to another ratio (as in ‘A is to B as C is to D’). Following Serres (2017), we argue that analogical thinking engages directly with processual matter, and that proportion always precedes any measured portions. In other words, measuring tethers ratios to ratios. This emphasis on proportion and analogy departs significantly from state and national curricular standards for mathematics education, where there is a tendency to focus on identifying measurable attributes of objects, translating systems of units and applying formulae (Goldenberg et al. 2014). The notion of a standard ‘unit’, as that which is used to cover an extended object, dominates measurement practices in schools, and erases the dynamic co-relational aspect of measuring activity in the wild. State-sanctioned measurement practices often incorporate and then mask alternative ‘minor’ methods, hiding the way that measuring is always relational and analogical, and therefore situated rather than absolute. Here we seek out these analogical measures to help identify the maverick and contrarian practices that bubble up from within or beyond the ‘major’ mathematical practices of any given historical period. We excavate the intensive measuring practices that plug



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into the generative plasticity of the material world, opening up space for more ‘minor’ mathematical abilities to emerge alongside the covering tendencies of the measurement curriculum. The terms ‘major’ and ‘minor’ are used in this chapter to designate, respectively, state-sanctioned and counter-cultural material processes, and the different ways in which they distribute sensibility and formulate conditions of mathematical dis/ability (de Freitas 2016a). Measurement practices are central to all colonial invasions, and so-called imperial units are typically deployed to apportion resources to the victors. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) seek ‘minor’ measuring practices that undo the striating and controlling gestures of enclosure, and that resist the ‘covering unit’ that contains and apportions.1 Contrary to the territorial drive to divide up space among various claimants, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the minor (or nomadic) distributes itself in space (de Freitas 2016b). These measures are immanent in the space, rather than imposed from without. For example, movement can be measured by reference to an external frame of cardinal directions (e.g. north-westerly) or in terms of the angle of turn and its duration. Whereas the former measure is connected to an absolute frame of reference, the latter is situated in the unfolding of space-time. In the next section, we discuss examples of minor measurement practices, both found and lost in the historical record. We discuss archaeological and historical perspectives on the emergence of measurement within human cultures, discussing two topics – namely floods and cosmos – on which there is much early evidence of measurement practices. We draw on these topics to show how a ‘settler mathematics’ is characterized by covering tendencies and standardized units, and we look for the ways in which analogical thinking became buried within such practices.2 We then discuss contemporary measurement habits and the extent to which they are inherently analogical. This leads us to advocate for a pluralist mathematics that would crack open the limits that currently determine who can participate in mathematical production and what counts as mathematical ability.

Under the Cover of Settler Habits Most early archaeological evidence for measurement practices is linked to the emergence of sedentism, some ten millennia ago, when in many parts of the world humans began to invest in permanent dwellings and agriculture. This marked the onset of what archaeologists Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley (2010a) call the ‘tectonic’ or constructive phase in the development of human culture.

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Measurement practices are said to have emerged to structure group relations, distribute resources and commodities, navigate routes of travel and comprehend time’s passage and cycles. Direct archaeological evidence for measurement prior to this phase is sparse (Renfrew and Morley 2010b). This sparsity of evidence has implications for us today, in so far as it leaves a legacy of bias towards a historical account of what and how human measurement practices evolved that is rooted in cultures of settlement. Since nomadic measurement practices have gone largely undetected in the archaeological record, we are left to wonder what these might have been. Farr (2010), for instance, bases his speculations concerning measurements associated with navigation practices in the Adriatic Sea, in the Neolithic period, on the distribution of volcanic obsidian found in different seafaring locations. We know that in other regions, hominids were seafaring as early as 50,000 years ago. Farr suggests that nomadic seafarers might have measured time and space in ways very different from those used by sedentary peoples, since open water, with its currents and tidal patterns, demands a distinctive sense of temporality and movement. This is precisely the approach to measurement adopted for navigational purposes by Marshall Islanders of the South Pacific. Instead of relying on an external, flattened map of the islands and atolls, of the kind familiar to Western navigators, they used a physical stick chart, the mattang, as a measuring device. The mattang modelled the diffraction of ocean swell both in open sea and in its interaction with the land. A trainee navigator would memorize these diffraction patterns, for different locations, and learn to match them with the swell they could feel with their own body, while lying outstretched on the bottom of the boat (Ascher 1995). The diversity of measuring habits in the historical and ethnographic record is indexed by a wide range of measuring devices ‘such as bows, chain links, and goads for driving oxen, as well as spans of the body such as finger-widths, handbreadths, and arm-lengths’ (Cooperrider and Gentner 2019: 1).3 Many practices include measures that reference the body (the foot, the hand, the thumb and so on). Medium-scale measures tend to reference events – such as the ‘bow shot’ used in the Andaman Islands and the ‘stone’s throw’ used in Morocco, or the sonic measures used in Burma, which were based on the distance from which one could still hear a person’s voice. Larger-scale measures, though much rarer, were also often temporal, based on protracted events such as days spent travelling or, for the Sámi, the number of coffee stops required on a journey, and for the Mi’kmaq, the number of capes traversed. Ojibwe people of Parry Island, in the Canadian Great Lakes region (now home to the Wasauksing First Nation),



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used the body to measure how much of a day it would take to travel a certain distance by superimposing an outstretched hand on the arc of the sun: in this analogical measuring, ‘one “hand-stretch” was considered one fourth of the arc from sunrise to zenith’ (Cooperrider and Gentner 2019: 5). From these and other examples, it would appear that measurement is always a matter of fumbling with difference in itself, rather than calculating the difference between two prior portions or bodies. So accustomed are we to thinking that measurement rests fundamentally on a standardized and de-territorialized unit, we forget that cultures across the globe invented their units in response to reciprocally varying processes. The ‘unit’ often has to stretch to suit our changing relationships. The sundial, for instance, like the gnomon, tracks twelve units every day, regardless of the ‘length’ of day. Consequently, the unit ‘hour’ actually stretches or shrinks to match the day: ‘Always twelve, in spite of everything, like an invariant count of quantities that are variable everyday’ (Serres 2017: 196). This point is well exemplified in recent news: in 2018, the lump of metal that has rested in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris for over a century, defining the weight of one kilogram, was dethroned. This physical, vulnerable specimen will be replaced by what scientists now deem a more fundamental and precise measure, defined in terms of an electric current and, more specifically, the Planck constant. Similarly, the length of a metre has now been defined in terms of the speed of light, and the temporal unit ‘second’ in terms of the vibrations of the caesium atom. Any increase in precision, however, should not be mistaken for an escape from error. In the following paragraphs. we turn to two themes of settler geo-metry, floods and cosmos, for more evidence of minor measurement practices.

Floods Serres (2017) explains how the concept of proportion figured prominently in early Egyptian measurement practices around the Nile delta. In Egypt, we start in the river basin, in the middle, the medium, where the river floods. It is this changing area of the alluvial beds that inspires the cultural collective contract of measurement. After considering how Anaximander, Thales, Euclid, Pythagoras and Zeno were involved in the judicial, political, discursive, ethical, astronomical and arithmetic origins of geometry, Serres circles back to an important text by the fifth century bce Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus describes how Sesotris, king of Egypt, ordered his men to measure the land lost to the Nile at every exceptional rising of the water, which would enable the king

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to proportionally reduce the taxes paid by the farmers whose lands had been inundated. The annual fluctuations of the river eroded silt and good soil for growing from some spots, only to deposit it in others, thereby redistributing territory at each bend in each year. The surveyors were called rope-stretchers, or harpedonaptai, because of the knotted cords – stretched taut – which they used to measure the changing territory. For Serres (2017: 199), it is this forever changing ‘abstract space’, of more or less land, that allows us to inhabit an earth in which ‘the agrarian zone fits into the laws of the state’. In other words, the river basin itself is an abstract space where proportions are formed. In the ancient Egyptian tax system, one always starts in the middle of comparative measurement – it is always a matter of more or less. In other words: ‘pro-portion precedes the portion’ (Serres 2017: 323). What matters is the changing relation or, more precisely, the changing ratio of land lost through flooding to the ratio of tax, debt and expectation: the difference in arable land, from one year to the next, becomes associated with proportion modulated over time. Note how this act of measuring attends to the differential, creating an analogical conjunction of materialities (water, land, tax, time). Measurement in this case involves a kind of abstraction, but not a stripping away of materiality; proportional measurement continues to inhere in the transports of material effluvia that link land and river and tax, tracing the relations ‘that bridge and compensate their variations’ (Serres 2017: 201). These practices were clearly part of an imperialist regime of population control, but they also ‘belonged’ to processual matter, to earthly transformations, climatic regimes, fluctuating floods and economies of exchange. For our purposes, this flood story is important because it provides insight into the minor threads running through the origin stories of Western mathematics, linked as they are to both imperial conquest and humbler agrarian habits (Alder 2002). After all, tax collection was in large part a form of subjection. Consider also how the Inka empire used a complex system of knotted colour cords, khipus, to record census data and resources, as well as accounts of conquest and debt. The brilliance of using cords and knots and colours for such a registry is found not simply in the ability it confers to represent value and difference in kind, but in its reusability – knots can be untied and retied (Urton 2010). This account also draws attention to the important role of technical devices in measurement, where techniques serve to regulate populations, monitor community participation and control distributions of value. Geometry, in this context, was pursued by artisanal practitioners hired by the state, using techniques for exploring proportionality that were intrinsically political and material. Notably, however, the technical



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measurement devices used by ancient Greek geometers (who were dismissed by Plato as being overly dependent on material practices and technical apparatus) were unlike our current classroom rulers, since they embodied a more abstract relationality – without a standard unit – and thereby focused on proportion. In the case of ancient Egypt, Serres’s account shows that the focus of measurement is on neither the covering of objects with scaled units nor the simple correlation between two amounts (of wheat berries to rice, for instance) but on material-cultural analogy. Analogy lies at the heart of minor and nomadic abstract thought, only to be covered over, later in the Greek tradition, by deduction and other images of reason. Analogy makes measurement into a medium of transport that allows for diplomacy and commensurability across material-cultural relationships. We propose that this seesaw analogy is the way measurement lives in the material world, in the embodiment of a relational ontology. According to our reading, analogy furnishes a chain that links bodies ‘in parallel’ (indeed, the very notion of parallel is underpinned by analogy), tracking what transits across encounters and what falls away in the rhythm of loss, of more or less.

Cosmos Aside from the pragmatic goals of mercantile trade and accounting, underlying cosmological themes also permeate different cultural investments in measurement. The cosmological link is particularly interesting because it reminds us that speculation and measurement go hand in hand. The partnership of cosmology and measurement can be seen in the alignments of Stonehenge or the calendars of Mesoamerica. Justeson (2010) notes that Mayan calendar specialists used zero for their number systems, thereby marking the idea of number as a position along a continuum of before and after, rather than as a quantity of objects in a group (as in the container metaphor of number). They did so precisely because they were working with mythic time scales evoking a time before man, a negative time. Cosmology is, in part, about seeking and creating a kind of order in the universe, and measurement lends itself to this objective. There is a reciprocal determination between measure and matter – measuring activity encounters an order in the world and humans desire an ordering of the world. Here we insist on the mutual reciprocity of that encounter and that desire, as an ontological entanglement. Cosmology shows how measurement comes to figure prominently in human spirituality (Urton and Llanos 1997). Measurement plays a crucial

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role in cultural and theocratic regimes of power, as a method for revealing the order that is presumed to lurk within the unruly earth. We invest measurement with the capacity to uncover an ordered universe, which serves the majoritarian tendency to imagine an underlying stability and explanatory continuum. Although measurement seems to deal principally with finite substance, we believe that its fumbling practice points to the existence of an intensive infinite that lies beyond the limits of current measurement and even current perception. Lugli (2019: 30) recounts how European Medieval measurement standards were built into the churches and public squares, and how the standards became quasi-objects, or ‘ambivalent entities that exist between physical objects and ideal ratios’. Eventually, measurement practices – enforced by friars and statutes whenever possible – were used both to control everyday life and to make the metaphysical palpable: ‘measuring served as an ideal interpretative channel to recuperate the body of Christ’ (Lugli 2019: 146). Measurement always entails this mixture of tangible and speculative dimensions, with one leg in the finite world and one in an indeterminate virtual realm of potentiality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).4 It is this mixture, which we have already encountered in the case of the platinum metre, that makes measurement both political and plastic, both controlling and liberating, both definitive and speculative. Related to measurement’s speculative stretch is the practice of indirect measurement – that is, measurement that cannot be achieved by existing instruments. Indirect measurement has always played a generative role in the creation of new mathematics. While our contemporary measurement curriculum is overly focused on the concept of unitizing and then covering space with the unit, indirect measurements are wholly reliant on analogy and proportion. Erastothenes, around 200 bce, worked out the circumference of the earth using only the difference in the angle of the midday sun at two locales, while four centuries earlier, Thales had used proportion to discover the height of the Great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. These feats of measurement seemed well beyond the capacities of the ancient Greeks and were achieved by enlisting the sun’s rhythms and the starry transits of the night sky. Brown (2005) argues that the Babylonian gnomon, much like the knotted cord, should be seen as a kind of automatic inscription device that knows; it seems to measure on its own, with no need for human interpretation (unlike, for instance, a telescope). For the Greeks, the gnomon ‘discerned, distinguished, intercepted the light from the Sun, left lines on the sand as if it were writing on a blank page and, yes, understood’ (Serres 1995: 80). We witness in these



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early historical accounts the technique of proportionality as immanent in the relationality of the material world. Serres (2017) argues that proportionality was a cornerstone of ancient Greek cosmology and mathematics, suggesting that the discovery of the incommensurability between the square’s diagonal and its side was a monumental sociocultural as well as mathematical crisis. He suggests that rationality and the ratio were bound together in the ancient Greek logocentric image of thought and cosmology. The fact that a diagonal of a square was not rationally commensurable with its side meant that there were magnitudes beyond the realm of analogy, troubling the cosmological belief that the universe is rationally ordered. According to legend, Hippasus of Metapontum was murdered at sea by the followers of Pythagoras for having had the temerity to publicize the secret of the incommensurability of the ratio. Book X of Euclid was meant to address the crisis: here, Eudoxus uses an algorithmic method to determine these irrational magnitudes as accurately as possible, using rational lengths that come recursively ever closer to the desired limit. This algorithmic approach to the measure of a diagonal was meant to rescue the mathematical theory of proportions, as it was known, and which had become crucial to Greek geometric methods. Proportionality is also pivotal to the mathematics of the Yup’ik Eskimos of Alaska. Wong, Lipka and Andrew-Ihrke (2014) show how the Yup’ik use the body to take the measure of the cosmos. One Elder, a seamstress, explained to the researchers, who are of different heights, how she would set out to make garments for each of them while relying on the same bodily unit of measure. She would ask one researcher to stand directly in front of the other, measure the height difference between them, and use this measure to generate a size ratio. Once again, proportion precedes portion, and measuring emerges in forms of relationality. While the scaling and proportional measuring of the Yup’ik shares many aspects of Vasily Davydov’s (1991) approach to measurement, in which children are invited to compare the size of two distant objects by introducing a third ‘unit’ that can be used to size up each of the objects, it differs in at least one important way. For the Yup’ik, distance is measured through repeated halving rather than covering. Their entire frame of reference, moreover, unfolds from the centre. All orientations, such as upriver/downriver and sidedness, are derived from it. As one Yup’ik Elder said, the centre (qukaq) is the ‘beginning [ayagnek] of everything’ (Lipka et al. 2019). It is difficult to overstate the cosmic consequences of a practice of measuring that centres the human body in relation to the wholeness of a worlding world.

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Contemporary Measure Theory The nineteenth century brought intense interest in measure theory, as many European mathematicians developed new methods of integration within the calculus. Relevant to our focus is Bernhard Riemann’s (1826–66) revolutionary insight concerning the situated, intensive and relational nature of measurement (de Freitas 2016b). The mathematician Donal O’Shea (2007) describes Riemann’s contribution as offering a new conceptualization of space that dissociates it from absolute geometry and opens up the possibility of multiple geometries. For Arkady Plotnitsky (2012), Riemann shifted the problem of measure from the conventions of covering, attending instead to the immanent qualities of space. One of the problems Riemann explored was how to determine the surface area of a variegated geographical region. Following his teacher Gauss, he developed a new way to study the changing curvature of a surface without having to reference the external space in which it is embedded. Riemann studied curvature by tracing the changing sum of the interior angles of a moving triangle on a given surface. By tracking these changes, as the triangle moved across negatively and positively curved surfaces, Riemann was able to create a differential measure of the surface without reference to the metric of an enveloping space. According to Robin Durie (2006: 177), this amounted to a proposal ‘that a surface can be conceived as a space in itself, rather than being embedded within a higherdimensional space’. As Plotnitsky (2006: 200) points out, curvature is then determined internally, ‘rather than in relation to an ambient space, Euclidean or not’. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would later turn to Riemann’s work for help in challenging the restrictions of the colonial ‘covering’ approach to segmenting and dividing land. Measure theory has developed in response to the various problems that emerge when the continuous line is brought together with the discrete number.5 This paradoxical aporia at the heart of measurement has been an engine of mathematical invention for centuries (de Freitas 2018). In their attempts to bring rigour to analysis, nineteenth-century mathematicians such as AdrienMarie Legendre and Richard Dedekind strived to achieve a correspondence between line segment and number (Buckley 2012, Hartshorne 2000). These developments can be considered part of a concerted effort to find new ways to measure the world with confidence. Measure theory and dimension theory continued to be of pivotal importance to the advanced mathematics of the twentieth century. According to Fernando



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Zalamea (2012), the arithmetization movement of the nineteenth century is now giving way to a geometrization programme, in which the arithmetic question of ‘what is the measure of X?’ shifts to a ‘transitory’ question: ‘What kinds of new measures are made possible under these transformations?’ Zalamea draws extensively on contemporary mathematics to show how conceptual and technical developments are fuelled by ongoing, reciprocal transits between contemporary physics and mathematics. Through these transits, new forms of ‘mixed mathematics’ have opened up, posing generative problems of measurement. New theories of space-time, formulated in the last century, have called for innovative mathematics, which in turn led to the further elaboration of physical theories (Ferreirós 2019, Longo 2019b). These more recent developments, much like the others we have discussed, are no doubt linked to new relational mixtures of matter-meaning.

Pedagogical Implications and Dis/ability It is now time to turn to questions of curriculum. Our aim up to now has been to show how measuring is about making and mixing analogies, and that this involves attending to the political and plastic nature of intensive material relationships rather than the extensive properties of isolated objects. When we look to the school curriculum and pedagogy, we find instead an overemphasis on standardized units, and on covering objects with those units. This, we feel, ignores the underlying variability and plasticity of the material world, as well as the analogical nature of measuring. In schools, measurement is seen only as a process of imposing standards, and the instruments of measuring are treated as detachable prosthetic devices that can be discarded or put away once the job is done. School measurement becomes focused on certain figures such as the line, polygon or polyhedron. Only rarely are unusual and indeterminate objects and processes deemed potentially measurable. In some countries, the measurement curriculum is focused very narrowly (de Freitas and Sinclair 2020). Mathematics curricula are indeed an archive of collective pedagogical practices and cultural knowledge endorsed by the state and education institutions. Curriculum Studies scholars have exposed the biases of Western curricula, and have suggested alternative approaches (Appelbaum and Stathopoulou 2016, Popkewitz 2004). Our aim in this final section is to open up a discussion about the analogical modes of measuring which are lost in curricular erasures.

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The consequences of these curricular erasures are significant, since they narrow drastically both culturally rich practices of the kinds we have described in the previous section, and the opportunities available for differently abled learners. As Jasbir Puar (2017: xiv) suggests, ‘disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes’. She explores the way dis/ability is engendered in a postcolonial world, where pedagogies and curriculum inherit particular socio-material practices that favour certain kinds of bodies. Some scholars have criticized Puar for undermining disability identity, and compromising affirmative projects that mobilize through strategic essentialism. We recognize these tensions, but appreciate the way Puar looks transversally across the geo-historical record, seeking expressions of minor practices. Our project is similarly trans-local and geo-historical, while remaining cautious of the inherent dangers of ‘universalizing and locating impulses’ (Luciano and Chen 2015: 192). Puar’s work enables us to link measurement practices to pedagogy, curriculum and learning. It seems, indeed, that pedagogical approaches that explore the relational, intensive and analogical aspects of measurement might be more effective with a broader range of learners, including those that have been disserved by the exclusive emphasis on skills associated with standardized units and covering methods. That such measurement curricula do not serve these students well is evident in research by John Cawley, Teresa Foley and Anne-Marie Hayes, in which students designated as having learning disabilities were found to benefit from studying ‘the relationships that things have in space’, instead of only using ‘measurement activities involving formal measures such as telling time, the length of a string, or the weight of an object’ (Cawley et al. 2009: 31). Similarly, N. Dilşad Güven and Ziya Argün (2018) recommend geometric approaches when teaching about measurement, as well as the use of informal, context-relevant measures. These recommendations direct educators’ attention towards the structural relationships of any space, and the ways in which these relationships are invariant under transformation. They also shift attention away from formula-driven and numerical aspects of measuring activity, both of which can overemphasize memorization and calculation. Finally, Jessica Hunt (2015) suggests that emphasis on part-whole measurement tasks for students with disabilities (shading parts of circular wholes, for example) impedes understanding of the complex commingling of space and number. Number sense, she argues, would be better developed by attending to the concept of ratio and relationships between different kinds of quantities.



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Rather than always requiring students to find cardinal values (how many/how much?), she proposes tasks that involve proportion and relationality – precisely the kinds of analogical mixture that Serres describes. Instead of drawing on the additive thinking of unit iteration (counting up units that cover space), where attention is focussed on manipulating one quantity, analogy is about handling two ratios to see how they vary in relation to each other. Curricular tasks that involve dissection and shearing afford other didactically powerful ways of measuring in this fashion (Ng and Sinclair 2015, Proulx and Pimm 2008, Zacharos 2006). These findings resonate with our previous explorations in the field of mathematics education, in which we investigate inventive and dynamic diagramming in mathematical activity of all kinds, be it expert, recreational, school-based or non-human (de Freitas and Sinclair 2014, 2016, Sinclair and de Freitas 2019). In closing, we note that the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Inkas processed their ratios and proportions with machines – or ‘automatic knowledge’, as Serres (2017) calls it – like the gnomon, knotted ropes, tables of cords and so on. Compared to classroom instruments such as rulers and protractors, the knotted ropes of the harpedonaptai provide a different vision of an analogical approach, where the measuring device itself embodies the varying proportionality of a relational world. A pedagogical approach that invites us to learn from the early use of machines or tools creates opportunities for young people to engage in the analogical aspects of measurement practices. Such an approach, moreover, helps learners understand the way that measuring tools – be they fingers and feet or rulers and protractors – are not simply transparent recorders of number and magnitude. Our tracing of the mythic origin stories and speculative archaeology of measurement is not meant to imply that processes of teaching and learning should recapitulate the historical development of measurement. Rather, our point is that an archaeology of measurement practices can help us unearth the analogical thinking which is immanent in all human efforts to measure the world. Our focus on relational and intensive measuring habits directs attention to the disappearance of minor mathematics, whether through cultural erasure, colonial habits, geographical changes, metaphysical assumptions or mathematical curriculum. These are all forces at work in the political shaping of mathematical ability. We believe our excavations of minor measuring practices can provide insight into potential non-normative and inclusive conceptions of curriculum, not as recuperative and assimilationist but as a way of pluralizing mathematical practices.

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Our emphasis on relationality and material plasticity is not meant to eclipse the equally powerful way in which measurement serves imperial interests (Colebrook 2019). Postcolonial theorist Kyla Schuller (2018) suggests that past investments in a sentimental relationality have often been deployed to separate the ‘sensitive’ civilized white and able-bodied subject from the abject other who is alleged to lack this sensibility. Analogical thinking and intensive measures may be fundamental in relational ontologies, and may be currently neglected in school mathematics, but they are not innocent gestures, nor are they without risk. Moreover, the habit of covering with imperial units is not likely to disappear. As we have argued elsewhere with regard to number sense and dis/ability (de Freitas and Sinclair 2016), most deficit models of student learning deny any temporal becoming, whether of learners or of matter-meaning mixtures. Eli Clare (2017) shows how the aim of many interventions is to correct disability by treating disproportionality as a deficit rather than an opportunity to invent new measures, while Alison Kafer (2013: 44) discloses the false innocence of many claims for inclusion that in fact contribute to a ‘compulsorily hypernormative’ that denies any future to those who are presently disabled. Our proposal here for minor measurement practices is not intended as a corrective or a cure. A geohistorical archaeology reveals the provisional temporality of mathematical dis/ ability, and the metamorphic nature of the matter-measure mixture. We affirm the worldly relevance of analogical thinking and the generative disorder of measurement, and we celebrate the distinctive and situated minor measuring impulses that emerge in different locales.

Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari often point to the notion of infinitely small quantities (infinitesimals, hyperreals, and so on) as examples of elastic measures. This notion was controversial in the seventeenth century when it was used by Toricelli and other mathematicians to measure the area and volume of all sorts of unusual shapes. 2 Our approach traces some threads from ethnomathematics and indigenous studies, such as Urton and Llanos (1997) and Verran (2001). 3 See the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), ‘World Cultures’ database (https://ehr​ afwo​rldc​ultu​res.yale.edu/ehr​afe/). 4 See de Freitas and Sinclair (2014) on the virtual, and note that we are not, in this chapter, taking up distinctions between the continuous and the discrete (Fazi 2019).



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5 These problems have been present from at least the time of Zeno, but also in relation to the discovery of irrational numbers, and ongoing work on the continuum hypothesis. Longo (2019a) mentions the significance of Riemann’s attempt to distinguish continuous and discrete manifolds in his own development of measure theory.

References Alder, K. (2002), The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World, New York: Simon & Schuster. Appelbaum, P., and C. Stathopoulou (2016), ‘Mathematics Education as a Matter of Curriculum’, in M. A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, Singapore: Springer. Ascher, M. (1995), ‘Models and Maps from the Marshall Islands: A Case in Ethnomathematics’, Historia Mathematica, 22: 347–70. Brown, S. (2005), ‘The Theatre of Measurement: Michel Serres’, in C. Jones and R. Munro (eds), Contemporary Organization Theory, 215–27, Oxford: Blackwell. Buckley, B. L. (2012), The Continuity Debate: Dedekind, Cantor, du Bois-Resmond, and Peirce on Continuity and Infinitesimals, Boston, MA: Docent Press. Cawley, J. F., T. E. Foley and A. M. Hayes (2009), ‘Geometry and Measurement: A Discussion of Status and Content Options for Elementary School Students with Learning Disabilities’, Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 7 (1): 21–42. Clare, E. (2017), Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Colebrook, C. (2019), ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24 (3): 175–95. Cooperrider, K., and D. Gentner (2019), ‘The Career of Measurement’, Cognition, 191: 103942. Davydov, V. V. (1991), ‘On the Objective Origin of the Concept of Fractions’, Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics, 13: 13–83. de Freitas, E. (2016a), ‘Number Sense and Calculating Children: Multiplicity, Measure and Mathematical Monsters’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37 (5): 650–61. de Freitas, E. (2016b), ‘Deleuze, Ontology and Mathematics’, in M. A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, Singapore: Springer. de Freitas, E. (2018), ‘The Mathematical Continuum: A Haunting Problematic’, Mathematics Enthusiast, 15 (1–2): 148–58. de Freitas, E., and N. Sinclair (2014), Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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de Freitas, E., and N. Sinclair (2016), ‘The Cognitive Labour of Mathematics Dis/ ability: Neurocognitive Approaches to Number Sense’, International Journal of Education Research, 79: 220–30. de Freitas, E., and N. Sinclair (2020), ‘Measurement as Relational, Intensive and Analogical: Towards a Minor Mathematics’, Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 59: 100796. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Durie, R. (2006), ‘Problems in the Relation between Maths and Philosophy’, in S. Duffy (ed.), Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, 169–86, Bolton: Clinamen Press. Farr, R. H. (2010), ‘Measurement in Navigation: Conceiving Distance and Time in the Neolithic’, in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, 19–27, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fazi, M. B. (2019), ‘Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36 (6): 3–26. Ferreirós, J. (2019), ‘Wigner’s “Unreasonable Effectiveness” in Context’, in M. Pitici (ed.), The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goldenberg, E. P., D. Clements, R. M. Zbiek and B. Dougherty (2014), Developing Essential Understanding of Geometry and Measurement for Teaching Mathematics in Pre-K-Grade 2, Reston, VA: NCTM. Güven, N. D., and Z. Argün (2018), ‘Width, Length, and Height Conceptions of Students with Learning Disabilities’, Issues in Educational Research, 28 (1): 77–98. Hartshorne, R. (2000), ‘Teaching Geometry According to Euclid’, Notices of the AMS, 47 (4): 460–5. Hofstadter, D. (2007), I Am a Strange Loop, New York: Basic Books. Hunt, J. (2015), ‘Notions of Equivalence through Ratios: Students with and without Learning Disabilities’, Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 37: 94–105. Justeson, J. (2010), ‘Numerical Cognition and the Development of “Zero” in Mesoamerica’, in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, 43–53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kafer, A. (2013), Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lipka, J., B. Adams, M. Wong, D. Koester and K. Francois (2019), ‘Symmetry and Measuring: Ways to Teach the Foundations of Mathematics Inspired by Yupiaq Elders’, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 9 (1): 107–57. Longo, G. (2019a), ‘Quantifying the World and Its Webs: Mathematical Discrete vs Continua in Knowledge Construction’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36 (6): 63–72. Longo, G. (2019b), ‘Letter to Turing’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36 (6): 73–94. Luciano, D., and M. Y. Chen (2015), ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21 (2–3): 183–207.



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Lugli, E. (2019), The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ng, O., and N. Sinclair (2015), ‘ “Area without Numbers”: Using Touchscreen Dynamic Geometry to Reason about Shape’, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 15 (1): 84–101. O’Shea, D. (2007), The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, New York: Walter and Company. Plotnitsky, A. (2006), ‘Manifolds: On the Concept of Space in Riemann and Deleuze’, in S. Duffy (ed.), Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, 187–208, Bolton: Clinamen Press. Plotnitsky, A. (2012), ‘Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30: 351–68. Popkewitz, T. S. (2004), ‘The Alchemy of the Mathematics Curriculum: Inscriptions and the Fabrication of the Child’, American Educational Journal, 41 (4): 3–34. Proulx, J., and D. Pimm (2008), ‘Algebraic Formulas, Geometric Awareness and Cavalieri’s Principle’, For the Learning of Mathematics, 28 (2): 17–24. Puar, J. (2017), The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Renfrew, C., and I. Morley (2010a), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renfrew, C., and I. Morley (2010b), ‘Measure: Towards the Construction of Our World’, in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, 1–6, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schuller, K. (2018), The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serres, M. (1995), ‘Gnomon: The Beginnings of Geometry in Greece’, in M. Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science, 73–123, Oxford: Blackwell. Serres, M. (2017), Geometry, London: Bloomsbury. Sinclair, N., and E. de Freitas (2019), ‘Body Studies in Mathematics Education: Diverse Scales of Mattering’, ZDM – Mathematics Education, 51 (2): 227–37. Urton, G. (2010), ‘Recording Measure(ment)s in the Inka Khipu’, in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, 54–68, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urton, G., and P. N. Llanos (1997), The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic, Austin: University of Texas Press. Verran, H. (2001), Science and an African Logic, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Wong, M., J. Lipka and D. Andrew-Ihrke (2014), ‘Symmetrical Measuring: An Approach to Teaching Elementary School Mathematics Informed by Yup’ik Elders’, in J. Anderson, M. Cavanagh and A. Prescott (eds), Curriculum in Focus: Research Guided Practice, Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia) 661–8, Sydney: MERGA. Zacharos, K. (2006), ‘Prevailing Educational Practices for Area Measurement and Students’ Failure in Measuring Areas’, Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 25: 225–39. Zalamea, F. (2012), Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, New York: Sequence Press.

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Creative Movements: Hands, Arms, Materials and Words in Making Baskets Stephanie Bunn

Introduction For Virginia Woolf (1935: 2), ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. A parallel for me was to have a little bit of space from teaching to trial ideas practically, and a small budget for materials. This is what I needed so that, as Woolf continues, I could let the line of my own thoughts ‘down into the stream’ (1935: 4). I wanted to explore how practical hands-on textile work with diverse materials could help ideas to grow and flourish, combining basketry practice with certain basketry-focused questions. The two activities, making and thinking, ‘had to go together’, as Paul Klee described the need to make art while planning his lectures at the Bauhaus (Wick 2000). Introducing their collection of essays, Collaboration through Craft, Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey (2013: 1) similarly comment, after John Ruskin, that ‘skilled making and skilled thinking are not separate activities, nor should their separation be encouraged’. And in the same vein, Tim Ingold argues for an ‘experimental and speculative mode of anthropological inquiry which allows us to join with the persons and materials among whom and which we work’.1 This is how I set about the research that informs this chapter. Allowing strands of interest to emerge through making, and following them, was initially quite scary. Was attending chair-seating and rush-work courses a legitimate academic activity? What would my colleagues think if they knew I spent occasional mornings working on a knotted cord net in deep blue, turquoise and yellow, which hung from a beam in my house? I already had a longstanding research interest in textiles and basketry, but the experimental space created by the Knowing From the Inside project gave me both the opportunity to explore

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methods and lines of enquiry which integrated my personal and academic self, and an environment in which they could be articulated without having to worry that they might be insufficiently ‘mainstream’. Many of these lines of enquiry had grown out of Woven Communities, a basketry and heritage research project collaborating with museums and basketmakers across Scotland. These included: ‘Why had a collaborative basketry and anthropology symposium, where hand-skills were practised alongside discussion, produced such rich debate?’ ‘How do the hand-moves and manual dexterity associated with basketry link to cognition?’ ‘What is the significance of the speech we use alongside practice?’ And the overarching question: ‘Why do basketry practitioners think it so important that their hand-skills be kept alive?’ These are the questions I explore in this chapter, and at their heart is the role of the skilled, dextrous bodily movements used in craft, and their relevance for learning. Two thinkers whose work is crucial for understanding the relationship between bodily movement and creativity are Henri Bergson and Paul Klee. For Bergson (1913: 62), movement and creativity, whether of life or growth, are one and the same and are how we experience being from within the flow of the river of time. Every form of life, he thinks, should be regarded not as a thing but as a progress – ‘the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement’ (Bergson 1911: 126–8). Intuited from the inside, it is a movement of time, or duration. This relates to craft, because as living, moving beings, we know the rhythm of work, we understand the different modalities of patience or hurrying, we experience carefulness and focus; all are aspects of our movement within time. Creativity, then, is an ongoing generative movement set within ‘the circulation and fluxes of the materials that surround us and indeed of which we are made’ (Ingold and Hallam 2007: 11). These materials are life-giving and creative in themselves. Klee takes a similar view. In a remark dated to September 1914, included as the epigraph to the first volume of his notebooks, The Thinking Eye, Klee says, ‘I should like to create an order from feeling, and going still further, from motion’. Or as he would go on to declare in his Creative Credo of 1920, ‘all becoming is based on movement … in the universe movement is the basis of everything’ (Klee 1961: 5, 78). Art, in particular, is generative because it is subject to the same regularities as nature, and draws its developmental processes from nature. In this regard, form should be seen not as fixed but as the shape of a movement: ‘Think not of form’, Klee writes in The Nature of Nature, the second volume of his notebooks, ‘but of the act of forming’ (Klee 1973: 67).



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The temporal aspect of art and craft is reflected in how its outcomes bear traces of the expressive movements that made them. Consider a basket, for example. While it might be defined in formal terms such as ‘a semi-rigid threedimensional textile made from plant materials’, basketry – the practice – springs from movement and is anything but rigid. It includes rhythmic and flexible hand movements, twists and light turns of fingers, palm pressure, working in collaboration with materials – all these, and more, make up what basketry is. As Wick says of art in general, basketry is ‘grasped in movement’; it ‘gives shape to movement’ and the outcome, the basket, is itself ‘fixed movement’ (Wick 2000: 228–30). In what follows, I first explore how skilled creative movements, conducted alongside contemplation or discussion, can help us focus on connections rather than differences, syntheses rather than analyses, enhancing the creative development of ideas and debate. I describe how learning a practical craft skill involves an experience of heightened attention. Through attention, repetition and rhythm, the skill is embedded, becoming part of what Walter Benjamin (cited in Baxmann 2009: 127) called the ‘ability to read in gesture and movement’.2 I will go on to show how the hand and arm moves employed in craft can reveal certain spatial and geometric relationships. The resulting feeling for space opens up a register for the study of geometry and other areas of mathematics, and thus offers a useful strategy for mathematical learning. But a craft like basketry can also help patients who have suffered brain injury or stroke to relearn skills of practice, cognition and insight, by way of new neural pathways established in the context of holistic body–mind activity. Revisiting the relationship between movement and speech reveals that speech, too, can be a part of the experience of enskillment, not simply by providing condensed description or explanation but as an ongoing guide lending an extra perspective to action. The way words can move with us as we make reveals that making and speaking are not opposed but lie on the same continuum. Exploring this continuum further, we find that baskets are full of interwoven words, stories, even songs, as well as forms and patterns, reflecting the relationships between the basket, the maker and the wider environment.

Thinking in Movement Early on in the Woven Communities project, it had become clear that we needed to give equal value and validity to craft and academic practice in all aspects of

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our work. This was highlighted at our first collaborative symposium on basketry heritage, held in 2012. Several of the makers were not too keen on taking part in this scholarly event, as had been required by the project’s funders. One maker said: ‘I will come to your symposium, Stephanie, but only if I can bring my basket with me and work on it.’ This called for some negotiation. However, thanks to the guidance of textile artist Caroline Dear and our basket-making collaborators, we were able to interweave both academic papers and basketry practicals into the event. The result was quite magical. Some scholars found what they were learning to be so compelling that they continued to work on their baskets as papers were being presented, so that basketry practice literally took place alongside the discussion and development of academic ideas. What surprised us initially was the high quality of engagement and the insightful debate this generated. Knitters, along with crochet and sewing practitioners, are familiar with knitting and sewing bees, where easy conversation accompanies textile making. But we had not anticipated such an outcome here. It seemed that the practical, hands-on activity of basket-weaving actually enhanced our discussion, as talking proceeded in parallel with ‘thinking through movement’. It was difficult to put our fingers exactly on where the difference lay, compared with the kind of engagement more usually encountered in academic symposia, but to me it seemed that the resonance between the practical activity and the topic of discussion led us to focus more on connections and synthesis than on analysis. We explored how things were ‘intuitively related, rather than how they were categorically different’ (Bunn 2020). This led to new combinations of ideas, based on analogies rather than contrasts, and to the juxtaposition of views from different perspectives, rather than the more usual scholarly habit of breaking down knowledge analytically, into its constituent parts. In The Ghost in the Machine, first published in 1967, Arthur Koestler (1990) suggested that if you juxtapose knowledge or insights from different life spheres or disciplines, the outcome can be greater than the sum of its parts, resulting in what he called ‘bi-sociation’, characterized by invention, new knowledge and even humour. One of Koestler’s examples concerned the discovery of the link between the movements of the moon and the tides. In the case of our event, while its cross-disciplinary and collaborative nature certainly fostered greater insights – we were, after all, moving between theory and practice and associated ways of thinking – it was specifically the bodily way in which participants were practically engaged with the subject under discussion, their thinking in movement, that led to such positive results.



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A neuroscientific analysis of what had occurred might suggest that this outcome was due to the combination of left and right brain activities that comes from talking and working with one’s hands at the same time. But this would be to locate the process in the brain rather than in the whole action. By contrast, neurophenomenologists such as Francisco Varela and Marco Caracciolo insist that human engagement with the environment cannot be understood in isolation from sensorimotor capacities, and that thought and communication arise through action or motion (Caracciolo 2012: 368–70). Caracciolo specifically discusses how interwoven narratives arise in group interactions in which people conduct social and patterned activity, as they did in our symposium. As participants wove baskets, plaits and knots, discussions and narratives were equally interwoven. This is not quite the same as drawing metaphors from social and bodily practice, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) would have it, but rather reflects the kind of resonance or attunement that develops when people work together, or even in heightened events such as ritual and performance where, as Victor Turner (1970) shows, metaphoric and bodily experience are fused. For the anthropologist and ethnomusicologist John Blacking (1988), thinking in movement fosters the development of a non-verbal ‘bio-grammar’, a kind of pre-speech, which emerges through action and provides a creative means of structuring social life. Blacking thought this could apply to all sorts of contexts, and he delighted in showing how, with the right kind of approach, for example in student seminars, the intellectual sophistication of the resulting discussion could take participants themselves by surprise (Blacking 1977). The outcome of our symposium, however, led us to explore the value of hand-skills for learning and cognition more directly. We went on to collaborate with basket-makers and with geometers, with people recovering from brain injury or stroke, and with people living with dementia, to investigate the significance of movements engendered through craft practice for human cognition.

The Experience of Learning As much as making together generates a collective focus on the action at hand, it also establishes a relationship between the maker and – through their materials (usually plant based and locally sourced) – the wider environment. This relationship is enacted and expressed through techniques and attention, through gestural movements and spatial understanding, through the meeting

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of movements and forces from both maker and materials, and the quality of body–mind that meets that engagement. As the work proceeds, body, materials and artefact, in their interchanging roles as generators of force, as levers, vices and sources of strength, undergo a series of transformations (Ingold 2000: 339–48). This engenders a change of form in materials and artefact. It also generates a way of learning in which attention extends outwards beyond the body, opening up to the materials as the emerging artefact is realized through developing action. Attention expands into an experience saturated and enriched with contact, textures, different strengths, sound and the clashing of sticks, smell and dampness, size, colour, rhythm and pattern. And all through this experience runs movement and the rhythm of work, a kind of dance with the material running its course to fulfilment: a consummation rather than a conclusion. Hand-skills are learned in an almost subconscious, rhythmic, repetitive way, but they are also memorable by virtue of the very intensity of attention they command. This kind of emergent learning has value for a range of life’s challenges, many of them concerned with movement and orientation in space. Whether in relation to learning how a basket is constructed, or developing an awareness of spatial and geometrical relationships or how to regenerate bodily movements after a stroke, the skilled practice of basketry shows how understanding requires whole-body involvement, and not just the operation of a mind confined to the head. This entwining of movement and attention in hand-skills likewise impacted upon stories and memories for people we worked with in the Scottish Hebrides, including those living with dementia. In the comparatively recent past, in the islands of Lewis and Uist, people now in their seventies and eighties learned many necessary life skills from a young age, including net mending, fish gutting, spinning and so on. Through repeated practice, these skills became ‘ready to hand’ as Martin Heidegger would put it in his Being and Time of 1927 (Heidegger 2008); they could be done without thinking. Yet into them were also condensed all their other experiences from those times. Jon Macleod (2021), with whom we worked at An Lanntair, an arts centre in Lewis, emphasizes how in the Gaelic oral tradition, memory and learning act as a generational bridge, linking life experiences, family and local history through conversation, genealogy, storytelling and song. Here, memories are also passed through hand-skills, which – having been learned young and practised repeatedly until they were ‘second nature’ – carried with them the memories of past times.



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Working alongside An Lanntair, we learned that these deeply embedded memories of hand-skills, when practised again even after a long period of not using them, were not only easily remembered; they also called to mind associated events of the times when they were part of everyday life. Paula Brown, of An Lanntair, describes working with a fisherman (J) with dementia who had not spoken for several months. Yet when provided with a netting needle at a local ‘Mending and Yarning’ event, he did not hesitate to show her how to mend nets while talking animatedly of his past experience as a fisherman: J – Twenty years, since. P – Since you last mended a net? J – Aye, since the nets. A long time. Good knots. Strong. The nets always break, you can’t help it. It’s a net-mending needle. No fancy word, no. Hold it further back, no, not like that, like this, see? Watch me. Aye, that’s it. Now over and over. Yes, I did this. Every day. I know him, Coy (a local fisherman on Lewis), aye. I know him well. It’s been a long time. We were the best. We were good, we had to be. No room for mistakes, slow, lazy, no. Very brave. A hard life. All weathers. Every day. No choice. But the seals would follow my boat, most days, and the birds. I liked that. (Brown 2021: 182)

From such a deeply learned skill arose not just the memory and dexterity of past practice, but all the context and life moments of the times when these skills were regularly used (Bunn 2020). With An Lanntair, we called such memories, which had the power to evoke the past, ‘hand-memories’. These were memories held in the hands from the days when the skills were commonly practised, condensing the experiences and relationships of their times along with the intrinsic movements of the skilful act. Such memory-saturated movements are repetitive, rhythmic and dense, and combine to form a kind of collage of feelings, sounds, smells and even tastes. They encapsulate what John Dewey (1987: 109), in his essay of 1934 on Art as Experience, meant by dwelling in habit, in an intercourse with the world that is not just quotidian and mundane but tinged with the clarity and the flavour of times gone by, and perhaps even

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the satisfaction of the newly mended net. ‘That was an experience!’ as Dewey might have said.

A Mathematics of Gesture The cognitive aspect of our mind–body relationship can be seen in the way people often express concepts through gesture before they have formulated them in speech, as Susan Goldin-Meadow (2003) has demonstrated. Her research suggests that people may convey ideas spatially through gesture which they cannot yet articulate in words. These ideas can include mathematical relationships. Mathematical educationalist Ricardo Nemirovsky has taken up these insights to show how, through both gesture and practical hand-skills in the mathematics classroom, young people can enhance and develop their learning and understanding of geometry and space (Hall and Nemirovsky 2012). Key to this understanding is movement, whether through classroom floor play, handskills or tool use. Nemirovsky’s argument is that human intelligence depends ultimately on having a body that is active in the world. During our research for Woven Communities, we began our tentative inquiry into the links between movement, skill and geometry by making cordage with young people. Collaborating with An Lanntair, in schools on Benbecula and Lewis, we made rope and plaits with the children, reflecting the use of local materials and basketry skills on the islands. But the results soon extended beyond local practices when the children, at the same time as they made their cords, also applied a typically curious and experimental approach to their activity. The children’s cords criss-crossed each other’s ropes at angles. Treating them as lines of action, the children worked out the tension needed to give integrity to a cord using diverse methods of plaiting and twining, and they tested out the strength and properties of what they had made. Lines here had a tangible reality, yet their geometric potential also inspired enquiry. We tend to imagine geometry as rather formal and abstract, expressed through such figures as circles, squares, triangles, lines and points. But how might this relate to the trials of strength by which the young people we worked with tested their marram grass ropes? The history of geometry reveals a practice of ad hoc constructive skills, often running alongside more abstract knowledge and understandings. As Turnbull (1993) and Ingold (2013) show, geometry was performed in practice by medieval masons and cathedral builders, and was not necessarily tied to theories of perfect form. This is not simply to oppose the



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practical geometry of craftsmen to the theoretical geometry of scholars, but rather to suggest that geometry is inherently both constructive and abstract, practical and theoretical. After all, the ‘mind’ of the maker or builder, as Bateson (1972: 433–7) argues, extends along the paths of her or his relations with the environment, in this case the material. This extension can be experienced in terms of structures and forces, as relationships and actions of a mathematical kind. Makers and materials experience each other’s flexibility, resistance and potential strength; both may act as generators of force such as tension or friction, as levers and balancing weights; their pressure and strength can impact each other’s capacities and memories and change each other’s form. Basketry can be a structured way of working, yet it is also ad hoc. A basket may be required to have a precise form – some even served until recently as official government measures with legally prescribed dimensions, their depths, height and volume gauged by standardized measuring sticks. Yet they are made from wild and unruly materials, following rule of thumb procedures. Thus, like builders creating a form without a plan in front of them, basket-makers use a ‘constructive geometry, by means of which technical problems of design … [are] solved through construction and physical manipulation of simple geometric forms’, linked to ratios and templates (Shelby 1972: 409). These activities of formation give direct expression to spatial relationships, and assemble forces of tension, friction, resistance or flow. A frame basket highlights the strength and integrity of a closed circle of willow; weaving and twining show how the different strengths of warp and weft materials can be worked to provide the right balance of tension to create a strong form; plaited basketry with flat materials, such as rush or pandanus, creates the surface contact and friction that holds multiple strands together; looped rattan provides enough stretch and strength for a back basket in Kalimantan to hold a flexible bundle, such as of rice or even a child. Along with structural integrity and form, basket-making techniques also produce symmetry and patterning. Circular woven stake and strand basketry will usually be worked in one direction or another, depending on whether the maker is right- or left-handed, with each hand taking on a slightly different role and resulting in a spiral weave. A woven frame basket will involve alternate left and right weaving which the maker will have to balance in as symmetrical a way as possible. Plaited baskets will also need the maker to work in left and right directions. Every technique leads to a different symmetrical outcome. Makers often find that each hand wants to work in an opposite direction, creating a kind of mirror symmetry or chirality. For some techniques, the hand has to learn to do the opposite of what feels right. Patterns emerge through even subtler

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variations using a range of strokes and different numbers of ‘unders’ and ‘overs’, which create textured surfaces – twills, wales, different forms of chain, with even more complex motifs if colour is used. To weave these forms and patterns requires finely honed dexterity, with fast, light but strong finger movements in both hands. The fingers and hands pay attention to pressure, tracking the ‘variation of variables’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 105) in subtle differences of material strength. Fingers, from one to another, also learn to know and feel the number of strands to pick up and weave or plait through each crossing to create the pattern. So much is going on at one small focus of attention – where hands meet materials – that basketry really is a kind of dance and even, at times, a kind of wrestling match. The rhythm of the way hands and fingers move in basketry, as an activity in time, is both repetitive and narrative. Repetition is required to create the basketry structure and the pattern. With expertise, as Robert Lindsay (1996: 201) describes for hand-drumming, the body has a tendency to disappear as the skill is incorporated into what it knows. Once learned, the maker makes movements from their body through their hands. But whereas with drumming the rhythm is extended and balanced between players, creating the combined sound as one focus of attention, with basketry the rhythm is extended between maker and materials, and the basket – the focus – is the outcome. Ingold (2013: 101) describes this rhythmic movement as a ‘dance of animacy’, in which ‘bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces’. The work of skilled fingers converts the kinetic quality of gesture from ‘one register, of bodily kinaesthesia, to another, of material flux’ (Ingold 2013: 101–2). The transformation in materials is echoed by the transformation within the maker. This transformation can be manifest in a resonance or understanding of the relationship between forces and form, between angle and integrity of structure, between number and pattern. This, precisely, is why the movement of making is so important for understanding space and geometric relationships.

Skill and Recovery Various kinds of occupational and physiotherapies also draw on the potential of skilled movement for understanding spatial relationships. These days, craft activities are often perceived as rather old-fashioned ‘add-ons’ to these therapies, and basketry in particular is widely disparaged. This may be due in part to the



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prominence of basketry in nineteenth-century ‘Blind Asylums’, to which parents would send their visually impaired children to learn a trade, and in part also to its therapeutic assignment to injured and shell-shocked soldiers returning from the First World War (Paterson 2021). By taking a whole-body approach to relearning, the movements and spatial awareness involved in hand-skills such as basketry can support the redevelopment of spatial skills to aid with recovery from brain injury or stroke. Following a second Woven Communities symposium in 2017, Tim Palmer, a retired consultant pathologist and basketry practitioner, initiated a trial programme with the Stroke Recovery Unit at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. Working with the Unit leader, Dr Ashish MacAden, and occupational therapist and basket-maker Monique Bervoets, they set up a supportive environment and a set of activities to trial basketry practices with people recovering from stroke and acquired brain injury. A significant impact of a stroke is that it can damage one of the three cerebral arteries supplying the brain with oxygen, thus impairing a person’s cognitive capacities. The impact is often on one side of the brain, which usually affects areas of the body on the opposite side, so a leftbrain stroke may affect the right-hand side of the body, and vice versa. People may not be able to control one side of their body, or they might lose sensory feedback from that side with consequent effects on the control or experience of movement. Alongside the purely anatomical damage, left-brain injury may affect speech, recognition of body boundaries, linear thinking and sense of temporality, numeracy, and sense of self. Right brain injury can affect vision, movement and intuition. Brain injury may also affect capacities such as paying attention, insight, abstract thought, reflection and self-awareness (Bolte-Taylor 2009: 17–25). The patients that Palmer and Bervoets worked with were often physically affected; some were unable to walk or use their arms or legs well on one side. But many patients had difficulties with engaging and maintaining interests, or with reflection and insight. One advantage of basketry for occupational therapy is that it can be broken down into simple stages that people can build on and develop. For example, a person might simply start with weaving in one direction, thus relearning left from right, or by moving the sticks in and out to begin weaving. They might learn ‘stock phrases’ to help remind them of what they are doing – ‘in-front-of-two-behind-one’, ‘no-overtaking’ and so on (Palmer 2021). And in focusing to achieve a result, basketry also involves problem-solving skills, concentration, hand-to-eye coordination, spatial awareness and counting. Basketry alternately engages both sides of the body through the central

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nervous system. Attention, touch and hand-use repeatedly and rhythmically move from one side of the body to the other, from one hand to the other, crossing what is sometimes described as ‘the middle-line’. Where there is a need to mobilize one side of the body following a stroke, the complementary character of the activity can have a knock-on effect on the disabled side, which helps the patient to regain movement and use of their limbs. If there is no initial complementary response from the other side of the body, then a limb which is not working may either be used as an anchor, or even tricked into movement by using mirrors, as Kate Davies (2018) describes for her stroke recovery. Significantly, however, we had as many successes with people who had been very withdrawn, or who lacked insight or the capacity to reflect, as we had with those suffering from mobility problems. This confirms, we think, that mobilizing the body through craft works on the body–mind as a whole integrated system. There is a clear and evident transformation in P4 this time … he seemed more engaged, more motivated, more poised, and prepared to talk, he even laughed a few times, which for someone who seemed taciturn by character, was quite striking. He was simply a different person … Two weeks ago … he seemed detached from what he was making, pushing the basket around on the turntable and weaving, generally okay, while seeming quite distant from the task, and very passive. – Then, he was in his chair, the basket was on the table, he was touching/ weaving it with his fingers. This week, the basket is in his lap and he is fully absorbed with his whole body in making it, gripping it, with full attention on it. (Fieldnotes, September 2018)

In employing sensorimotor skills and uniting the whole body-mind in one activity to coordinate these tasks, basketry in our view helps recovery by encouraging neuroplasticity. That is, by coordinating the central nervous system, musculature and the brain through developing manual skills, neural circuitry can be retrained and new neural pathways and connections can be established. The patient is, in effect, in a situation parallel to that of a craft apprentice who has to build up and establish patterns of skilled techniques to learn a new trade, or to that of a London taxi driver who learns ‘the knowledge’ so that they can keep track of changing road conditions. In the case of taxi drivers, research has shown that their special kind of adaptive learning expands those areas of their brain linked to spatial activity (McGuire et al. 2006). Something similar could be said for the role of the coordinated, complementary activity of basketry in stroke recovery:



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It’s been a big learning process, not just the basketry but the whole thing, including the brain injury … This [the basketry] really helps; that is everything helps, hospital, physio. Everything, but the basketry really makes a difference. It helps you learn. (P5, Fieldnotes, 2018)

Bringing Back Words Learning basketry skills is a multisensory affair. There are different learning styles; some learners are more visual and like to observe, some like explanations, others benefit most from having finished examples in front of them; some like worksheets, and others just need to ‘get on with it’. In all cases, however, you have to learn by doing, and the process is usually picked up in more than one sensory modality. A specific challenge in learning basketry is that the maker has to learn the hand-skills for constructing the substance of the basket at the same time as they are learning to create its form. The potter can work clay into the form of a pot, and the woodworker can carve a hollow from a solid block to make a bowl, but for the basket-maker the very substance that will make up the walls, base, rim and handle of the basket has to be constructed, whether by weaving, looping or plaiting, at one and the same time as shaping the three-dimensional form. This makes the initial learning process in basketry particularly difficult. In the past, in basketry workshops, there was much less verbal instruction than in contemporary leisure classes, and much more focus on closely observing and following the expert, who would not have had to distil his knowledge into words as is done nowadays. A contemporary basketry class, by contrast, will often begin with a summary of the practice and a demonstration before people start making. Putting action or skill into words to explain what to do may seem like a back to front, retrospective way to teach a skill. It requires the teacher to take an overview and to reflect on the process. This retrospective view, however, is not available to the novices who, perhaps facing the task for the first time, have to start from scratch and simply get making, if they are ever to fully embody the skill. Of course, workshop leaders’ explanations have their uses, along with all the other means to help people learn. But words, too, have uses besides their role in post facto explanation. It is not as though words can only be used to explain. They may also be used in at least two other ways: as guides or prompts for action and as its narrative accompaniments.

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First, while demonstrating actions to be performed, the expert will often call out stock phrases or ‘mantras’ which indicate key points or moments, such as ‘tip to tip, butt to butt’, ‘from the back to the front’, ‘in front of one, behind one, and out to the front again’, and so on. These mantras are important guides. They highlight the details of action, so that when the learner gets lost, as they probably will, the phrases resonate, calling attention to the detail of technique, embedding it into consciousness and getting the maker back on track. This is not unlike the way drummers, from marching bands to kathakali, often recite the rhythm while physically enacting it. A similar approach may also be taken in classical ballet. Joanna Gilmour (2019) describes dancers speaking the movement as they learn a new sequence, ‘Tour en l’air, chassé (push); glissée (slide)’, drawing attention to the steps as they are executed (Gilmour 2019). Much the same happens in contemporary dance, as deLahunta (2020: 265) describes from dance artist Gill Clarke’s teaching methods: ‘Just take yourself into a simple walk. And just notice the heelbone now. Notice the front of the ankle. Notice the ball of the foot and the toes.’ Here again, the teacher is not explaining but guiding movement and attention. Rather than looking back on an action already completed, speech in this case goes along with it, like a refrain, as one strand in a multistranded process of learning in movement. In its use as guide or prompt, the spoken word – as Bronislaw Malinowski (1935: 7) famously put it – becomes a ‘meaningful accompaniment to action’, and ‘plays an active part in human behaviour’. The second, not unconnected way of using words in teaching is through narrative or storytelling. In learning knots, to cite a classic example, one might tell the bowline ‘story’. ‘The rabbit comes out of its hole; it goes round the tree; it gets scared and goes back down into its hole again’.3 Knotting has a more linear, narrative character than basketry. The moves often follow a series of steps which, being less repetitive or rhythmic than basketry strokes, are also harder to remember. Stories like that of the bowline serve as mnemonics and work well, providing another kind of resonance until the maker has grasped the rhythm for him- or herself. With other practices employing techniques akin to those of basketry, however, the narratives and the manual gestures they accompany may become the very point of the exercise. This is the case, for example, with making sand drawings and string figures. Whether in weaving and braiding string figures or in inscribing the crisscrossing lines of sand drawings, the hand, wrist and fingers, and even toes and teeth, execute dexterous and delicate movements, yet no useful artefact is left at the end of the process. Unlike baskets or textiles, sand drawings and string figures exist ‘only in the process of making them’



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(Eastop 2007: 197). The drawings are immediately rubbed out; the string figures are unravelled – those in museum collections being just the ‘frozen residues’ of a manual process (Gell 1998: 95). Although both practices are redolent of the braiding and plaiting techniques of basketry, once the story is told and the figure is complete, it is cast aside and has no further use.

Speaking, Singing, Drawing, Weaving The parallels between sand drawing, making string figures and basketry are worth pursuing further, since they cast light on the relations between the voice, in speech and song, and manual gesture, in drawing and weaving.4 In sand drawings, a line is guided through a series of dots which are marked out first in the sand. A story is told at the same time. The drawing must be executed continuously, without pause or break, and provide a visual balance to the story. Anthropological studies of sand drawings, however, have tended to sideline the storytelling component of the performance in favour of analysis of the drawings themselves. For example, in his study of Angolan sand drawings Paulus Gerdes (2007) was fascinated by the way they could reveal formal symmetries of potential application in mathematics education. Though Gerdes recorded many of the accompanying stories along with the drawn images, for him they were largely a side issue. We find a similar emphasis in the many studies of string figures undertaken in earlier days of anthropological fieldwork, from Boas (1888) onwards. String figures were a popular topic of inquiry; indeed between 1900 and 1950, more articles and papers were written about string figures than on any other aspect of material culture (Küchler 1999: 9). Again, although these papers often recorded the stories and riddles told while the corresponding figures were made, these narratives were less interesting to early anthropologists than the making process itself. ‘Certain sentences are spoken or muttered either during the manipulation of a figure or a trick, or on its completion’, wrote W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon in a paper published in 1902 (cited in Eastop 2007: 197). But about these mutterings, they had little further to say. Yet with sand drawings as with string figures, the stories told alongside their making are often quite profound. Craig Lind (2016) has drawn attention to how speech is used in Vanuatuan sand drawings, describing how his field companions would draw such images with him while recounting kinship stories, linking people he had met to particular places. For Lind, the drawings,

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memories and stories, along with the gestures of drawing and telling, bind people to the times they have spent together and the places they have been, each participant following the route of every other, by ear and eye, until it would become familiar. It is much the same with string figures. On a visit to Arnhem Land in 1948, the ethnographer Frederick McCarthy recorded an Aboriginal myth cycle telling of the journeys of the Ancestral Wawilak sisters. According to the myth the sisters, having first created string, proceeded to make ‘a record in string of all the animals, plants and other things they saw, as well as their own activities’ (cited in McKenzie 2011: 205). Here, stories told in string through patterned, spatial movement belong to a larger story of string’s own creation and to the story of its use for keeping a record of everything made. Looking for a way to tie together skilled movement and vocal expression, Amazonian basketry provides some clues. In a study of Wauja baskets from the Upper Xingu, Aristoteles Barcelos Neto (2020: 95) shows that whether an action is perceived visually or aurally is a matter of perspective. What from the perspective of a human being may be apprehended visually as, say, the pattern of a basket, from the perspective of an animal being may be apprehended aurally, as song. Wauja baskets, Barcelos Neto explains, are made of songs. They do not represent songs; rather, they are songs, in another perspectival register. Although the baskets themselves may be mute, and are clearly not musical instruments, they nevertheless contain music in their bodies. The patterns are made while the person sings and plaits the basket. Particularly when making sacred baskets linked to mythical beings such as snakes or fish, the sounds of words sung while plaiting a basket translate into the pattern of the animate being involved, filling the basket with the rhythm and symmetry of its songs. Words, whether spoken aloud or sung, are first and foremost sounds. Speaking or singing while doing basketry or related practices, such as sand drawing or making string figures, suggests that words take on meaning alongside skilled acts of weaving in more ways than we might think. A kind of poetics emerges through skilled handwork. If words are a meaningful accompaniment to action, then perhaps the ways words are used along with movement lie on a continuum, ranging from acting as guides or reinforcing action, to binding people to place through the interwoven journeys and stories that participants make while weaving or drawing, to connecting animal and human lives. Basketry skills can embed the action, tell the story and, through hand-memories, evoke recollections of bygone times. They can also, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, bring



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together different aspects of life in ways that create new understandings and new connections. There is indeed a resonance between acts of speaking and singing, weaving and drawing, plaiting and twining, looping and knotting, which both animate emotional and social relationships and dispose them geometrically, as spatial configurations. All emerge through movement. Michel Serres (in Serres and Latour 1995: 88), meditating on the power of strings or cords to pull people and things together, describes how visibly they ‘link ship to quay’, while invisibly they join ‘lovers and families, the living to life or to death, and mankind to the earth’. Therein, too, lies the power of the basket. Ask a basket-maker why they think it so important to retain hand-skills as we move into the future, and this is precisely what they will tell you.

Acknowledgements For many scholars, the greatest challenge to developing research lies in finding the time and space to allow creative intuitions to flourish. I am grateful for the support of the Knowing From the Inside project for the little bit of time out of teaching and the small budget it gave me to create that space. The KFI research group provided a rich environment for me to explore ideas that had originally taken root in the course of my work for the Woven Communities project (https://woven​comm​unit​ ies.org/), on which this chapter is based. My thanks to all who took part in Woven Communities for their insights, contributions and ideas. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews KE&I Fund for the funding that made the project possible.

Notes 1 See www.abdn.ac.uk/research/kfi. 2 Baxmann, like many other writers, adopts Michael Polanyi’s (1966) term ‘tacit knowledge’ to refer to this ability. The term, however, is something of a misnomer for, as we shall see, it is neither still nor silent but highly dynamic and continuous with verbal performance. 3 This may be found at https://www.yout​ube.com/watch?v=ozskW​rDM-F4. 4 String figures have also long intrigued mathematicians, particularly in relation to writing notations for their making in mathematical form (see Amir-Moez 1965, Rouse Ball 1911, Vandendriessche 2014).

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References Amir-Moez, A. R. (1965), Mathematics and String Figures, Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers. Barcelos Neto, A. (2020), ‘The Wauja Snake-Basket: Weaving Songs in Amazonia’, in T. A. Heslop and H. Anderson (eds), Basketry and Beyond: Constructing Cultures, 92–101, Norwich: Sainsbury Research Unit. Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, St Albans: Paladin. Baxmann, I. (2009), ‘At the Boundaries of the Archive: Movement, Rhythm, and Muscle Memory. A Report on the Tanzarchiv Leipzig’, Dance Chronicle, 32 (1): 127–35. Bergson, H. (1911), Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, London: Macmillan. Bergson, H. (1913), An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, London: Macmillan Blacking, J. (ed.) (1977), The Anthropology of the Body, London: Academic Press. Blacking, J. (1988), ‘Towards an Anthropology of Theatre’, Points of Contact Conference Papers, 30 September–2 October 1988, Leicester Polytechnic. Boas, F. (1888), ‘The Game of Cat’s Cradle’, International Archiv für Ethnographie, 1: 229. Bolte-Taylor, J. (2009), My Stroke of Insight, London: Hodder. Brown, P. (2021), ‘Hand Memories in Basket-Work and Net-Making among People with Dementia in Uist and Lewis, Told through Life-Moment Stories and Associated Images’, in S. Bunn and V. Mitchell (eds), The Material Culture of Basketry, 179–83, London: Bloomsbury. Bunn, S. J. (2020), ‘Basketry, Wellbeing and Recovery: The Story from Scotland’, Craft Research (Special Issue Crafting Health, Wellbeing and Happiness), 7 (1): 39–56. Caracciolo, M. (2012), ‘Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11: 367–84. Davies, K. (2018), Handywoman, Edinburgh: Makadu Press. deLahunta, S. (2020), ‘Language-in-Use: Practical Dance Vocabularies and Knowing’, Biblioteca Teatrale (N.S.), 134 (2): 259–81. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (2004), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Dewey, J. (1987), ‘Art as Experience’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 10: 1934, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Eastop, D. (2007), ‘Playing with Haddon’s String Figures’, Textile, 5 (2): 190–205. Gell, A. (1998), Art and Agency: Towards a New Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press Gerdes, P. (2007), Drawings from Angola: Living Mathematics, Maputo: Research Centre for Mathematics, Culture and Education. Gilmour, J. (2019), ‘Extracts from a conversation with Joanna Gilmour’, Forces in Translation: Basketry: Maths: Anthropology, 10 December. Available online: https:// forc​esin​tran​slat​ion.org/conve​rsat​ion-with-joa​nna-gilm​our/.



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Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003), Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, R., and R. Nemirovsky (2012), ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Modalities of Body Engagement in Mathematical Activity’, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 21: 207–15. Heidegger, M. (2008), Being and Time, trans. J. Macqarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper and Row. Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013), Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T., and E. Hallam (2007), ‘Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction’, in E. Hallam and T. Ingold (eds), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, 1–24, Oxford: Berg. Klee, P. (1961), Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. J. Spiller, trans. R. Manheim, London: Lund Humphries. Klee, P. (1973), Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. J. Spiller, trans. H. Norden, London: Lund Humphries. Koestler, A. (1990), The Ghost in the Machine, London: Hutchinson. Küchler, S. (1999), ‘From Art to Mathematics: Lessons Learned from the Net: A Note on the Cataloguing of Visual Information in Museums’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 11: 1–14. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lind, C. (2016), ‘The Beauty of Sand-Drawing in Vanuatu: Kinship and Continuity on Paama Island’, in S. J. Bunn (ed.) Anthropology and Beauty, 418–33, London: Routledge. Lindsay, S. (1996), ‘Hand Drumming: An Essay in Practical Knowledge’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Things as They Are, 196–212, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Macleod, J. (2021), ‘It’s Good to See Natural Ground’, in S. Bunn and V. Mitchell (eds), The Material Culture of Basketry, 173–7, London: Bloomsbury. Maguire, E. A., K. Woollett and H. J. Spiers (2006), ‘London Taxi Drivers and Bus Drivers: A Structural MRI and Neurological Analysis’, Hippocampus, 16: 1091–101. Malinowski, B. (1935), Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Volume 2, London: Allen and Unwin. McKenzie, R. (2011), ‘The String Figures of Yirrkala: Examination of a Legacy’, in M. Thomas and M. Neale (eds), Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition, 191–212, Canberra, ACT: Australian National University Press. Palmer, T. (2021), ‘Basket-Making as an Exercise to Enhance Brain Injury Rehabilitation’, in S. Bunn and V. Mitchell (eds), The Material Culture of Basketry, 207–17, London: Bloomsbury. Paterson, C. (2021), ‘Extracts from an Interview with Catherine Paterson’, in S. Bunn and V. Mitchell (eds), The Material Culture of Basketry, 201–5, London: Bloomsbury.

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Polanyi, M. (1966), The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ravetz, A., A. Kettle and H. Felcey (2013), ‘Introduction: Collaboration through Craft’, in A. Ravetz, A. Kettle and H. Felcey (eds), Collaboration through Craft, 1–15, London: Bloomsbury. Rouse Ball, W. W. (1911), Mathematical Recreations and Essays, London: Macmillan. Serres, M., and B. Latour (1995), Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. R. Lapidus, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shelby, L. R. (1972), ‘The Geometrical Knowledge of Medieval Master Masons’, Speculum, 47 (3): 395–421. Turnbull, D. (1993), ‘The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with Templates, String and Geometry’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 18 (3): 315–40. Turner, V. (1970), The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vandendriessche, E. (2014), ‘W.W. Rouse Ball and the Mathematics of String Figures’, Historia Mathematica, 41: 438–62. Wick, R. (2000), Teaching at the Bauhaus, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Woolf, V. (1935), A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth Press.

5

Growing in the Midst of Things Rachel Holmes and Amanda Ravetz

Into the Middle Speeds changed. Intensity, connection came and went. Breath was audible, then silent and calls were made. Sometimes these were responded to, sometimes not. Sometimes echoed somewhere else in time, later – rhythm, beats, refrains (the hum, the whistle) … Waiting for something to erupt. Wanting to channel an energy. Toes used to catch the plastic cones. Trying to stand without using hands, arms. As movement moves through bodies, bodies became interesting to themselves. Bodies had ‘things’ of their own to explore. As concentration and focus moved from material ‘things’ to matter as ‘things’, each-other’s bodies came into relief. Amanda using her feet to help Anna stand without her hands. A kind of bodily puppetry or aural/oral ventriloquism erupted as noises from Amanda’s mouth moved Anna’s hand movements. Sound touched, muscles listened, mouth followed.

(Fieldnote, Movement Workshop 1)

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This fieldnote is taken from one of three movement workshops led by screen dance artist and scholar Anna Macdonald,1 with Amanda Ravetz. The workshops were attempts to communicate, in an ongoing and open-ended way, research experiences in which anomalous events in an early-years classroom are treated as signs not of otherness but of middleness and, following Joseph Valente and Gail Boldt (2015: 568), ‘groupness, alliance, and relationality … calling forth new, multiple, and heteronymous ways of being’. The workshops set out to offer felt experience and sensation to educational professionals, as a counter-actualization and ‘intensification of intentional engagement in the world’ (Shults 2014: 135). This chapter seeks to enter in-between experiences of difference, so as to stay with the complexity and experimentation made possible by being in the middle of things where everything happens. ‘Traditionally repressed by the system of linearity’, as An Yountae (2014: 288) writes, the middle ‘cancels out the teleological idea of a definite beginning and end’. We aim to resist research habits and practices that so often structure and predetermine the means available to see, interpret, understand and communicate the experience of fieldwork in educational research. Instead, we move in and through the middles of multiple things: a movement workshop, spectres of past projects, the politics of difference, early-years and Key Stage 1 school classrooms, post-qualitative debates, resistance to humanism and method; all of them at once central and peripheral. We move around in the middle, stirring and staying with these and other things, as we orient our research in a school constrained, like most schools in the UK, by neoliberal policies and regimes of monitoring and surveillance. We draw on eighteen months of research conducted in partnership with Alma Park Primary School, chosen for the diversity of its staff and pupils and of the communities from which they come, and for its longstanding commitment to the traditions and practices of inclusion. This chapter attends to two moments in two different classrooms, one in the Foundation Stage and the other in Key Stage 1 (KS1). These were moments that, in their unfamiliarity, slowed us down in our eagerness to reason and explain, and helped us keep in the middle of things. We finally return to the movement workshop from which we began, seeing it not as an end but as an entry into further thinkingfeeling (Massumi 2008) that challenges predominant understandings of schooling and the ways it organizes bodies, experiences, institutions and pedagogic practice.

The Odd Project The hegemony of ‘the normal child’ – his or her looks, behaviors, and aptitudes – subordinates and glosses over any heterogeneous experiences that children



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may have, spurning designations of deviance and dissidence in relation to those children who do not fit, but who are yet expected to live up to and to embody the image of ‘the normal child’ against which they are being measured. (Bohlmann 2016: xiv)

Our ongoing research with Alma Park, Odd: Feeling Different in the World of Education (2017–21),2 involves a multidisciplinary team of artists, educational researchers and a visual anthropologist to address the question of how to ‘go along with difference’ (MacLure 2013: 175) as movement, change, and emergence in the setting of primary education, without attributing responsibility for normative deviance solely to individual children and their assessed pathologies. With an interest in why some children do not find it easy to fit in at school, the research team engages with oddness as an ethical necessity, a way to tackle the idea of difference which is responsive to the daily struggles some children face in a stifling school culture ‘where bodies, spaces, and things are continually disciplined, managed, marginalized, and even erased … where students are surveilled, policed, and inevitably punished for their “failures” to conform’ (Dernikos et al. 2020: 10). We take a creative journey into the concept of oddness, recognizing how critical odd things are to life. From the peculiar feeling triggered deep inside the gut to the jolt of the uncanny object, oddness is a fascinating part of the entangled stuff of the world. But within the context of education in general, and primary education specifically, oddness can cause a lot of trouble, and not just for those children against whom difference is weaponized. For in its capacity to erode the boundaries that divide normality from the anomalous, oddness can also throw a spanner into the works of institutional structures. UK schooling is exhausted by forms of thought that ‘lend order and regularity to the things we encounter’ (Ingold 2017: 14). Undergirded by linear models of child development, schools are scaffolded by age-related curriculum structures, built around knowledge that seeks ‘to fix things within the concepts and categories of thought, to hold them to account, and to make them to some degree predictable’ (Ingold 2018: 9). The gradation of pedagogy by age, horizontal class organization, standardized testing, progress tracking, the collection of predictive and performance data, an emphasis on quantifiable outcomes, inspection, regulation and certainty, as well as a belief in catch-up plans to redress widening ‘gaps’ in attainment – accentuated by pandemic-induced interruptions to schooling – perpetuate ideals associated with developmental norms.

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Despite the order and regularity built into the fabric of schooling, however, it is also a site alive with clandestine transgressions, new thought, productive discomfort, quirks and oddness. As Mary Douglas has observed (2003: 48), all systems of classification give rise to anomalies which they cannot ignore. The Odd project enters this milieu of nonconformity and dissemblance, in which tendencies towards normalization and idiosyncrasy rub up against one another, deeply affecting the children caught up in their forces.

The Power of ‘Normal’ Educational values and identities are shaped by the normative and individualizing discourses that filter down from systems of reason embodied in educational policy (Lindblad and Popkewitz 2001), pathologizing difference and collectively excluding those who fail to conform to expected standards. Children, their parents and carers, as well as school staff – including teachers, teaching assistants and senior leaders – are subjected to, and affected by, these values and identities. All involved in the education system are scrutinized and managed according to processes that, for some, render school an institutional ‘scene of constraint’ (Butler, in McMullen 2016: 21), while marginalizing those who cannot, or will not, conform in ways asked of them. Accounts from a range of sources3 amply testify to the experience that many children have of feeling ‘out of place’, or of being a ‘misfit’, ‘loner’ or the ‘odd one out’. This experience comes from the normalizing pressures exerted on children by those around them, including teachers, parents and each other, and by the wider cultural and institutional processes in which both parenting and schooling are embedded. Childhood normalcy … involves a developmental teleology up to adulthood … to maximize the possibility that children grow up ‘normal’ and ‘normally’, adults tend to (their) children with a vigilant eye/I, ensuring that the telos of developmental growth fits. (Bohlmann 2016: xiv).

Many studies have documented how the dichotomizing processes that define normality in terms of its opposite (abnormality or oddness) determine some children as ‘outcastes’ or ‘misfits’. Here are just a few examples: the child whose body is ‘out of tune’ (Dernikos et al. 2020: 4); the child-nomad who sees himself as ‘a member of the Outlaw Collective, not really a criminal, but not “normal”/normalised either’ (Leafgren 2013: 286); the learning disabled child



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(Ryan 2006); the gender nonconforming child (Biegel 2010, Gerouki 2010); children in-between cultures (Eekelaar 2004); the gifted and talented child (Geake and Gross 2008); children with ‘attention deficit’ (Harwood and Allan 2014: 22) and so on. Some are identified as both lacking in some essential capacity and, simultaneously, too prodigal in others (Bohlmann 2016: xvi). Some children are held responsible for behaviours that are seen to be ‘odd’, with the expectation that they know what they are doing, that they are in a position to alter these behaviours at will or that they can explain themselves so as to render their behaviours more intelligible. A child’s possibly enduring experience of being ‘odded-out’ typically begins from the point at which they do not, cannot or will not comply with or conform to the demands imposed by schooling. For relatively privileged children, as Bessie Dernikos and her colleagues observe, the affective milieu of the classroom affords a degree of openness and flexibility. But for others, it is experienced as a stickiness that holds them down (Dernikos et al. 2020: 9). The phenomenon of labelling reflects how particular psy-trends4 readily construct some children as ‘disorderly/disordered’, revealing the eugenic undertones (Slee 2018: 26) that accompany such practices. The challenge for children is how to keep within the tolerated limits of ‘straight’ oddness (MacLure, Pahl and Pool 2019), how to discern the tipping point where ‘enough’ becomes at once ‘too much’ and ‘lacking’, whether in volition or in selfconscious deliberation. In their professional training, educational psychologists are taught to promote strategies and teachers are trained to use interventions that are designed to ‘include’ children who otherwise struggle to access the curriculum or to manage their behaviours, all in the interests of ‘treatment’ or ‘rehabilitation’, with hopes of eventual ‘cure’ (Wolff 1995). This remedial attitude to difference, however, reveals a society that is fixed in its ways and illequipped for change (Runswick-Cole 2008: 176). As Mary Douglas (2003: 46) observes, we are inclined to ignore or distort uncomfortable facts, so as not to disturb established assumptions. This leaves the structures of our educational institutions largely intact, with enduring consequences for children who do not achieve ‘normality’ (Watson 2016). Isabelle Stengers (2005: 995) reminds us that including ‘the other’ should not mean reinforcing worldly routines or placing a moratorium on thought. It should rather cause us to hesitate, giving pause to reflect. In order to investigate the affective forces of regulation and peculiarity that surge through primary education, we adopt an approach that treats oddness not as an inherent attribute of individual children but as a form of

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‘thinking-feeling’ (Massumi 2008) that is relational, distributed and affective, circulating through and connecting bodies at pre-conscious and pre-individual levels beyond the reach of words alone. This means our research pays visceral attention to our own, iterative and contingent entanglements with the ‘body’ of the school, comprising both its architecture and its people. This is to take in the school in its entirety and at a range of scales, from the intimacy of eye contact to the structures of policy and curriculum that shape its spatial and temporal architectures. We are concerned with how these things, manifesting at different scales and moving at different speeds, flow through each other and continually transform each other’s identities. We understand the school, thus, as a mélange of face-to-face relations, genealogies, politics and policy, community, wider societal and global forces, playing out in settings that are at once microscopic and macroscopic, architectural, physical, spatial, geological and ecological. Our perspectives come from the fields of education, anthropology and art. The role of art, for Tim Ingold (2018: 129), is ‘to reawaken our senses, allowing knowledge to grow from the inside of being in the unfolding of life’. This is what we have tried to do with the Odd project. The project pushes beyond boundaries of language, rhetoric and discourse into ways of knowing with children’s embodied experiences, so as to discover how oddness or being ‘out of place’ actually feels. The complexity, sensitivity and ethical demands of the task call for an arts-based engagement that risks tearing the ‘meniscus’ of others’ lives (Shaw 2014: 95), without abandoning concern for, or commitment to, children’s well-being. By inhabiting feelings of isolation, loneliness and being on the outside, our research invites the entire school to interrogate the generative idea of oddness: what it means, what its value is, why it matters, and what it reveals about ordinary, everyday encounters between people, places and things. In the following sections we describe two separate moments in which teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) use well established strategies to regulate children’s behaviour. We acknowledge that teachers work under immense pressures, for example, to ‘socialize’ the children in their charge to a level acceptable for their age or to ensure that they achieve satisfactory test results. As researchers, we were privileged with the time to linger in moments of oddness in ways that teaching staff are seldom able to do. Our aim is not to criticize their practice but to think about how ways of thinkingfeeling, drawn from odd moments, could open up fresh conversations and possibilities.



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The Out of Place Body The early years classroom in which I (Amanda) am spending a week is an open plan, largely self-directed environment, with indoor and outdoor areas used for climbing, running, sand and water play, dressing up, as well as more curriculumspecific spaces, such as the reading corner and number area. I am taking up the ‘position of a child’ for the duration of the research, treated by the adults as a pupil and joining in with the children, using an approach that Weig (2020: 103) describes as ‘participant sensation’. The class includes several children who have come pre-diagnosed, bearing such labels as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Matthew is one of these pre-labelled children. At different times of day, the teacher gathers us together to sit on a small, carpeted area near to her desk, sometimes to listen to a story or to talk about plans for the day or week while she takes the register. The collective of bodies does not quite fit onto the carpet, with some children loitering on the edges, resisting sitting. Some make for the central regions; others are eager to sit near the teacher’s legs. While the children are gathered on the carpet, and asked to sit down, crossed-legged, bottoms on the floor, Matthew nevertheless remains standing, next to the cream-coloured wall, a variety of expressions running across his face – pouted lips, widened eyes, wagging tongue. Asked again by the teacher to sit down, Matthew stares at her, holding her gaze. She returns his look and gives her command again. Sit on your bottom please! Her voice, coming from above, has a slight edge to it now. Most of us continue with what we are doing. I am looking at the sparkly pieces in the carpet with my friend, interlacing my fingers to make patterns, and whispering. I am aware of the sound of Matthew’s green jumper rubbing against the wall and of his shoes squeaking on the floor, as he moves up and down, to and fro. The teacher, several yards away, leans towards him without leaving her chair. We turn to see what is happening. He bends his knees, and slowly slides his back down the glossy wall, with an exaggerated bounce at the bottom. Rocking on his haunches, he moves his chin in delicate circles, giving him a dreamy, insolent feel. As the teacher straightens up, Matthew pushes into his haunches and slides back up again. He is invited one final time to do the right thing and sit on his bottom. He wriggles more ostentatiously. Suddenly, in a few strides, our teacher is standing over him, hand on his arm. He squirms but is led several yards away. A large plastic hourglass is placed on the floor and he is instructed to sit still for the time it takes for the sand to run through the plastic tube from top to bottom.

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He sits quietly for a minute or two and then starts to hoot like an owl. He is ignored and the teacher continues with what she was saying. The sand trickles little by little through the scratched transparent plastic.

Poisonous Pencil The KS1 classroom is a base for thirty-one children. It is one of two parallel year-groups. In addition to the teacher in the class where I (Rachel) have been spending a day a week, there is a TA, deployed to support a number of children who, at times, struggle to cope with tasks. The TA’s primary focus, however, is to support Sam, a boy who over the past few months has presented increasingly unpredictable behaviour. My own participation consists in attending to specific moments in the classroom, reaching for a kind of immanent sensing of the intensities that compose these momentary events (MacLure and Rousell 2019). Children are sitting on the carpet in the classroom. Tables are neat and tidy, anticipating the flurry of work ahead. Sam is wandering around the room with his coat and hat on, reading a book, humming to himself. The teacher glances over towards Sam but allows him to continue reading as he wanders. In his own time, he joins the class on the carpet. The teacher introduces the activities for the day and then invites the children to go and sit in their handwriting places. Sam stands up and meanders for a moment. With a sudden jolt of his body, he reaches across the table to grab a pencil from a pot, grips it tightly in his fist, and points it outwards towards the class, grimacing as he shouts loudly, ‘You all better watch out! This has got poison in the end.’ A quietness descends like a heavy blanket over the room, but scattered and muffled sounds of fidgeting, whispering, rummaging in trays, shuffling on chairs, throat clearing, and occasional sniffing break through the atmospheric tension. The teacher, with a slightly sterner voice, asks Sam to sit down in his place, ‘or you can choose to go and do your work next door’ (the teacher has an arrangement with the teacher of the parallel KS1 year-group, in case Sam refuses to cooperate in this class). Some eyes glance at friends, others are lowered to the floor. My eyes scan the room and then flick over to Sam as he turns to face the teacher, his body stiffening as he approaches him. He jabs the pencil towards the teacher’s body, repeating that he had better watch out as it has poison in it. Sam moves his face closer to the teacher’s, exaggerating his grimace; whilst gripping the pencil with both hands clenched around it, he tries to snap it in half. There is an extended pause that somehow holds the air still, opening up and slowing



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down time as we all seem to hold our breath, awaiting the teacher’s response. The teacher stays quiet. The TA turns to Sam and asks him where he wants to go to do his handwriting, ‘in here or next door?’ Sam replies emphatically, ‘Nowhere!’ ‘Okay, come on then, we’ll go next door’, replies the TA. She holds Sam’s arm and steers him towards the door. Sam’s body resists, pulling back initially but then seeming to give in to the direction of the door. On the way out, Sam suddenly pulls his arm away from the TA to grab a worksheet from the table. He bites off a corner and spits it out onto the floor. Then he rips up the remaining paper into pieces (KS1, Classroom Observation, 26 June 2019).

Ontological Participation These two moments are recounted from different positions, circumstances and perspectives. Both incursions into the sensate or haptic middle lean towards Laura Cull’s (2011: 80) idea of ‘ontological participation’, or what Allan Kaprow (1966: 169) calls ‘constant metamorphosis’. Although we did things differently, we both participated in what felt like a world of perpetual variation, or provisionality, resisting the more habitual representational thinking which begins with ‘fixed essences’ and ‘static concepts’ (Bond 2007: 3). In the midst of thought and matter, in the physical and spatial milieus of the two classrooms, we set aside disembodied watching in favour of attuning to the implications of our own existence in the milieu, whilst recognizing that ‘it’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it and you’ll see that everything changes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). According to Cull (2011: 80), Kaprow, Bergson and, to an extent, Deleuze, all emphasize ‘attending more closely’ as a condition for ontological participation. Attuning to ways of being in, and starting from, the milieu – whether understood as atmosphere, movement, perception, poison or perspiration – takes us towards what we might more typically have overlooked. Brian Massumi (in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvii) notes that there are three aspects to milieu: ‘surroundings’, ‘medium’ and ‘middle’. These aspects are intimately connected in school environments, always folding into and out of one another. The surroundings or immediate material and environmental conditions of the classroom include the structure of the school building, its external and internal walls, the carpeted and linoleum floor areas, glass

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windows and playgrounds, spidery drains and cracked tarmac, the sounds of trains on nearby tracks, bird song in grassy woodlands, the pumping and surging of underground heating and water systems. The classroom’s medium includes its internal components and regulatory principles: the tables arranged in groups of three, chairs with tennis balls on each leg to prevent the sound of scraping metal on hard ground, the technologies including the smart board and the room’s sound field, the classroom rules, practices and procedures, and equipment such as pencils, worksheets and rulers, books and plastic counting cubes, all of which regulate pedagogy, learning and behaviours. But the medium also embraces the pencil stock that houses its graphite core, and the bodies of the children, which are just as much part of the classroom, with their arteries, blood cells, muscles, organs, hormones, enzymes, nervous, digestive and other bodily systems. The classroom middle is where materials pass through and between surroundings and medium. This middle includes respiration, perception and response. According to Arjen Kleinherenbrink (2015: 213), ‘even though milieus provide constancy and coherence, the third aspect of the milieu ensures that there is, by definition, a hazardous element of chance and contingency and that no milieu is ever fully closed’. There is no better example of this than the trails of graphite left by flowing pencil points, always meandering in response to local contingencies, and finding their way through without end. Thinking more about how classroom irruptions occur, what they feel like to those who experience them, depending on how and where they are in the milieu, and why they matter in encountering and responding to difference in school, we are interested in how we attune to unfolding things and relations from the middle. Rather than standing back to interpret the role of the milieu in an otherwise unfathomable sea of habitual classroom movements, both the body out of place in the early-years classroom and the poisonous pencil in KS1 immerse us in Kaprow’s sense of ontological participation as ‘lived change’. From the middle, the flow of the room is unsettled, as we sense the more-thanone (Manning 2013), becoming physically involved in a collective stuttering, and feeling the bodily sensation of what Dernikos and her colleagues call the ‘scratch’, which reorients our attention: The scratch is a frequency: a cut or vibration that momentarily slips out of groove and exceeds capture in language … it can leave a mark, scrape away, skit across the surface, wound, or tear open. We feel it as a … jolt that extends into us, the scratch impacts our agency … and, by doing so, reminds us that we are never



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truly alone … It also tunes us into the vibrations and capacities of nonhuman bodies. (Dernikos et al. 2020: 4)

Participating with Difference From the position of a child, Amanda attunes to her own bodily experiences as a researcher as well as to those of the children whose class she has temporarily joined. This moving, sensing immersion feels different from adult life. It involves a daily reorientation of awareness from head and vision to stomach, touch and movement – a reorientation underscored by the transition Amanda notices on leaving the classroom to readopt her ‘head-led’ life. This takes time and requires a temporary protective space, whether pouring out her day to Rachel who is leading the research or sitting quietly before cycling home. Two contrasting experiences present themselves. In the position of child, being ‘me’ is leaky; ‘I’ extend into and tangle with ‘my’ surroundings – the metaphor Amanda uses for this experience is falling into water. In head-led life, to the contrary, ‘I’ am a separate entity that has to make a continual effort to connect to things and persons, relying on speech as the predominant channel of connection. Being in the watery middle with children resonates more with Jane Bennett’s description of vegetal consciousness, a movement away ‘from cognitive judgment and toward a non-discriminating equanimity’, and ‘a mode of receptivity that acknowledges without rushing to judge, that listens without filtering the sounds through conventional standards of good and bad’ (Bennett 2020: 93). As a researcher in KS1, Rachel attunes in school to living change. Her adult body experiences participation as a way of leaking into the different yet connected milieus of the school’s shifting, teeming assemblages. In the classroom, a sudden jolt carries her attention to the jab of the poisonous pencil as the altered atmosphere sweeps through the room. Always incipiently out of joint, she is dragged into a million tiny concurrences, her sense of the classroom consumed by the story of the poisonous pencil as it unfolds, and by changes to the room’s atmospheric intensity. Potential relations of all sorts seem to rise to the surface. Other bodies, although still in movement as they shuffle, whisper and rummage, are diminished and muffled. Their collective noise, into which their individual identities dissolve, is the murmuring cacophony of an indiscernible substance that lubricates the otherwise dry and intensive atmosphere.

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Leaky Bodies, Dry Order As milieus curl, mutate, and leak from one to another, we begin to pay attention to how, in the middle of these moments, territories and bodies relate and find expression: A territory is built from [parts of] milieus and rhythms that have become expressive … a territory is an intense centre in which living beings act out interrelated patterns of behaviour and as such is something that happens. A territory is therefore primarily an act or set of acts. (Kleinherenbrink 2015: 218)

Around school, children mark precarious territories using bodily movement and sonorous refrains, such as running, glancing and humming. Running around the play area on the first day, holding hands with three children who have volunteered to look after Amanda, the sensory and kinetic intensity is particularly clear to her when, on the first evening, only scratch drawings emerge as she makes fieldnotes, indicating the location of objects and landscape features physically crisscrossed in the course of the afternoon, suggesting the speed with which territory and bodies intra-act, embracing the ‘affective elements that are at play in becoming-child’ (MacLure 2016: 174). At certain times and for certain bodies, it is possible to disappear from the purview of the teacher on the nursery carpet. Although the carpet is a regulated space, when the teacher does not require a definite or explicit response – such as when telling a story, taking the register or waiting for another adult to fetch something – ‘upward’ alertness can be subdued in favour of a swampy sensory consciousness. The activities of noticing tiny details in the synthetic carpet pile, looking at other classmates, exchanging looks, twisting fingers into shapes, and feeling skin on skin can rhyme and resonate, forming a pleasant pattern. In the KS1 classroom, Sam, absorbed in his humming, wanders as he reads, joins others in his own time, meanders and mills around for a while before producing a moment that stills the air, opening up and slowing down time, then moves to the door. At some times his body assembles with children, teacher and TA, together with materials, equipment and furniture, habitually instituting kinships and becoming part of a collective atmosphere. At other times, his body seems almost lost as it hums in perpetual motion around the classroom, a refrain that ‘accomplishes a “holding together” of heterogeneous elements’ (MacLure 2016: 173). Across the broader school environment, verbal utterances and bodily movements combine to compel pupils to conform, producing certain kinds



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of subject-pupils. This register of language and movement, which is built into the classroom matrix, potentially enhances or restricts children’s actions (Cole 2013: 96). In the two incidents we have described, the early-years teacher in the one case and the KS1 teacher and TA in the other adopt this register of language, bodily posture, gesture and facial expression as they ask Matthew and Sam, respectively, to choose between compliance with the requested behaviour or the alternative, namely separation from the class collective in the form of ‘time out’. Adults’ use of instructional order matches Deleuze’s conceptualization of ‘order-words’ that, as Cole (2013: 95) reminds us, ‘ “flow” around places of learning like the routing of electricity in plasterboard walls, and present a means to explain how disciplinary triggers are shared communally and linguistically’. Teachers and other school staff, ever since they were school pupils themselves, subsequently in courses of teacher training, and now with their involvement in school settings with established practices, are bound by all kinds of regulatory mechanisms designed to protect children’s learning and well-being and to curtail certain forms of classroom disorder. Significantly, Sam and Matthew make use of this same register. Matthew uses movement and gesture to challenge the order of the early-years classroom. He remains standing when asked to sit, holds the teacher’s gaze and when asked to sit still for the time it takes for the sand to run through the plastic tube, he makes hooting sounds. In the KS1 classroom Sam emphatically and disconcertingly announces ‘Nowhere!’ as his preferred place to complete the handwriting task. In that moment Rachel reaches for a more attuned sensitivity to classroom movement. Rather than only seeing an individual boy who is lashing out, she feels herself caught up along with him, and indeed with everybody and everything else, in intensities that cut through the matrix of the classroom. The appropriation of this register of instructional order by the two boys produces a collective discomfort, exposing the customary asymmetrical roles of adults and pupils in the classroom which is there to maintain the status quo (MacLure, Pahl and Pool 2019), and momentarily re-routing the circulation of power in the milieu. Bodily imprinted learning is a large part of early years pedagogy. It is often imparted through the carpet. The carpet is used as a pedagogical device for listening, singing, with or without scripted movements, invited contributions from children and various kinds of storytelling. Associated with the carpet are predictable routines and rituals that are different in quality and feel from both ‘good learning’ (i.e. play with minimal adult intervention) and formal pedagogical instruction. What is rewarded on the carpet is listening, facing

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the front, being in your assigned place, legs crossed, bottoms on the floor, hands still, no talking with neighbours. But there is a territory below the adult sight line that swarms and teems with things that can appear distant or be overlooked from above. Matthew moves with an erratic unpredictability that pulls on the collective of everyone on the carpet. There is a precarity in the ordering of this more-than-oneness, for example, when the teacher has to leave her chair to get something and, after moving only six steps away – as Sheri Leafgren observed in a similar situation – ‘the spaces between children disintegrated and the rows collapsed into piles and bundles’ (Leafgren 2009: 192).

A Cut or Vibration That Slips Out of Time In the early-years classroom, Matthew’s refusal to sit down starts as a small shift in atmospherics. The changing current causes the liquid medium in which everything is suspended to churn. So long as the adult tone of voice and movements remain unagitated, the ecology of the carpet continues relatively undisturbed. But the forward movement of the teacher’s body signals a change of velocity and intention, and a charge ripples outward. Children turn to look, amplifying this further. The teacher’s reaction marks a forceful incursion into carpet life, which evokes something more watchful and alert, a collecting point of attention. The touch of the teacher’s hand on Matthew’s arm goes beyond the two of them. Once Matthew is seated away from the group, with the hourglass, enforced regulatory time returns. Most of the collective on the carpet can see the sand running through. Here, a substance that in play is lively and companionable, with qualities of impersonal intimacy, is converted into something else altogether: contained, proscribed and abstracting. The carpet with its overflows is reconfirmed as a demarcated territory from which Matthew has been exiled, dispossessed. The class is partially dismembered, and difference is asserted through an atmospheric and temporal hostility to anomalous behaviour. Matthew sits at other coordinates; the soupy mix of interlaced hands, stars of glittering colour, whispered words and playful movements is torn open. In the KS1 classroom, changes to Sam’s bodily state vibrate, scratching across the skin of the classroom milieu as these scratches cut deeply into his body. As the surrounding materials and medium interact, a hazardous wild



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element erupts into the classroom. Sam’s muscles become taut as his body stiffens, with a sudden jolt he grips the pencil tightly in his fist; grimacing, he jabs the pencil and with both hands clenched, his body resists, pulling back and pulling away. The muscular effort of clenching his fist intensifies as it courses through his fibrous body. At the same time, however, he marks his territory, finding ways to communicate his presence to the others; he physically grabs and grips onto, bites off, spits out and rips up, vibrating, stifled, suffocated and threatening. The bristly reception, the laboured stares, the heavy pause and deep anticipation of children and staff reek of inimicality. As Canguilhem (1991: 228) points out, anomaly becomes abnormality only in a milieu that is hostile to difference. The poisonous pencil momentarily pierces the regulation of linear time, deep in the gullies that etch the horizontal plane of the classroom, opening the field to a zigzag world, creating ‘a world of flux without horizon, a rhythmic oscillation’ (Woodman 2004). With its poison, the pencil is vitalized in pulsing vibration, escaping what we expect of it, and tilting at other possibilities. It becomes ‘a pivot point at which a recognizable image is no longer apparent and a new image is produced’ (Richardson 2013: 91). The capacity of the pencil that menacingly drips its poison seems to broker a temporal milieu, ‘an enlargement of the threshold of the now, to intensify the body’s subject-constituting experience of its own vitality … expand[ing] the thickness of the present that comprises the very ground for experience’ (Hansen 2004: 589). I (Rachel) felt the now of this affective moment, as guts grip in anticipation. Time seemed dislocated from its assumed linearity; it thickened, slowed down and opened out to accommodate a swell of intensities that capacitated and incapacitated bodies differently in the room (Dernikos et al. 2020: 15). As Brunner (2013) proposes, following Deleuze (1989: 81), it was as though the process of perception was unfolding over time and through time but never in time. From my brusque assessment of the teacher as I glanced over at him, he seemed unscathed by the sudden change in classroom milieu, still regulated by the need to ‘get on’ with things. The teacher’s urgency to re-turn the classroom from the brink of a contingent openness, forced by the irruption of a hazardous element, put order words to work in the business of restoring constancy and coherency. To borrow from Leafgren (2013: 279, citing Marcussen 2008), the teacher was ‘organizing to fend off chaos … to consolidate a certain state of affairs’. An always present ‘body out of tune’ (Dernikos et al. 2020: 4) made possible a moment in and out of time, when its nomadic inventions were transformed to allow the teacher, the TA and the children to consolidate their recognition of themselves

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in their difference. Sam was cast as an anomaly, a way to momentarily glimpse the scope of variability or sense an openness to transformation always present in the world. In his later recollections of the event, however, the teacher would bring me back to the scarring of the scratch, ‘a constant reminder that something always lingers, remains, leaving a humming in our bodies we’re left to wonder about’ (Dernikos et al. 2020: 15). He described how he was feeling at a loss, struggling to know how he might better communicate the boundaries to Sam so he could learn to participate more effectively in class life. If the pencil brokered an enlargement of the threshold of the now via the mark it traced as it momentarily slipped out of groove, the cut or scratch opened up the internal workings and contradictions of the classroom milieu to what escapes it. The pencil’s irruption had both creative and destructive capacities in this instance; it could have opened the classroom milieu to new possibilities or it could have pulled the classroom assemblage apart from the inside. The teacher’s recourse – to send Sam to another class – was an attempt to remove the threat to the room’s milieu, and to restabilize it by reviving its coherence, sealing its edges and repossessing its atmosphere. Yet in Sam’s absence, the poison would linger, still disrupting any easy sense of order and territorial integrity, leaving a potent aftertaste and trailing its promise to threaten as well as its urging to flee.

Theory with Practice As a diverse and inclusive school with, for example, a special facility for deaf pupils, Alma Park organizes its classroom milieu around an ambition to enable all to live equitably in the presence of others (Masschelein and Verstraete 2012). In most schools, parallel and vertical year-groups are segregated, but here a different part of the same classroom in the early-years class and a parallel class in KS1 were used to absorb the unsettling irruptions and the otherness and difference that lingered in their wake. How then can attuning to the middle of things, as described in this chapter, contribute to the work of this school and others in trying to create the circumstances that enable all those involved to live in the presence of difference? We suggest that instead of trying to explain moments of irruption in terms of individual psychology, teachers, educational psychologists, TAs and others involved in education should be encouraged and supported to go along with what, from the viewpoint of current educational policy and strategy, appears



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threatening and out of place. Rather than attributing responsibility for normative deviance to individual children and to the pathologies attributed to them through retrospective assessment (Leafgren 2013: 277), this means starting from the midst of what the system considers anomalous, and possibly even reframing what difference can be. For folded inside the milieu, children no longer appear fixed in their differences. In the three workshops led by Anna Macdonald with which we began this chapter, attendees including teachers, educational psychologists and researchers were invited to discover, in ongoing and open-ended ways, how being in the midst of things could give a different feel to education. Participants explored sensations of lying on the floor, playing with their feet and hands, crawling on surfaces, moving in odd positions and at different speeds and intensities. They might ‘flock’ in a group, or be alternately flung to the edges and pulled into the middle; they might play self-generated games in which small pieces of equipment were spontaneously picked up, pulled, thrown or worn. For Amanda, her experiences in the nursery – the soupy consciousness of carpet time, having or not having friends, intensities of sitting on the carpet, running across the playground, sliding down surfaces and becoming unexpectedly impacted by classroom irruptions – were diffracted through these movements. The conversation that followed each workshop highlighted moments of reflection that included intense absorption, prohibition, inhibition, shyness, a desire to hold things and resistance to being pulled involuntarily out of powerful experiences of material and somatic absorption. These reflections, and the critiques of pedagogical regulation they imply, are not new. Many educational researchers have made them before (e.g. Ball 2015, Bergen 2010, Fenwick and Edwards 2010, Wallin 2010, 2013), but the significance of the workshop lay in how it brought non-representational somatic knowledge to the surface, suggesting ways to fold it back into daily practices of research and education. For teaching to orient to oddness in new ways, qualities of immanence matter. Teaching (and thinking-feeling) from the inside or the middle allows for relational encounters with ‘potentials and powers not our own’ (Colebrook 2005: 3). Such ontological participation does not involve a dissolution of the material self in order to become the adequate vessel for the passage of a dematerialised thought. On the contrary, it involves paying attention to our capacity to change and be changed by other material bodies, and an experience of ‘growing in the midst of things’ rather than being irrevocably separated from them. (Cull 2011: 18)

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Children have little choice but to become and grow in the midst of things. Primary education however, in the UK as in many other countries, thinks of and regulates pedagogical practice as something applied to children, coming from a source separate from them, and that aims in its turn to separate. This forecloses the pedagogical impulse to tune into that which circulates through and connects bodies. By placing a blanket over the potentials and powers of the classroom, it partially smothers these creative openings. Our aim in this chapter has been to suggest what might be possible if only these potentials and powers could be released.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Alma Park Primary School, including the governing body, for welcoming us into the school campus and trusting us to undertake this research. We are indebted to the teachers whose classes feature in this chapter, and who carry out their valuable work with such skill and commitment. We are indebted to Anna Macdonald for her creative leadership of the movement workshops. Our research was made possible through funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We also received significant support from partners Catalyst Psychology, the National Children’s Bureau and the Anti-bullying Alliance.

Notes 1 http://www.annam​acdo​nald​art.co.uk. 2 This three-year project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R004994/1), with co-investigators Becky Shaw, Kate Pahl, art consultant Steve Pool, research associate Jo Ray and educational psychology consultant Rebecca Wright. Partners are Alma Park Primary School, Catalyst Psychology, the National Children’s Bureau and the Anti-bullying Alliance (see https://www.mmu.ac.uk/esri/ odd-proj​ect/). 3 Becoming a Problem: How and Why Children Acquire a Reputation as ‘Naughty’ in the Earliest Years at School, ESRC-funded project, ESRC/RES/062230105; Childline.org. uk; Nationalautismassociation.org.uk; Theguardian.com; Mumsnet.com. 4 ‘Psy-trends’ is a blanket term for the psychiatrization, medicalization and psychologization of children and childhood, and the associated processes of identification, assessment and labelling, typically used in schools and by educators (Barker and Mills 2018).



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Masschelein, J., and P. Verstraete (2012), ‘Living in the Presence of Others: Towards a Reconfiguration of Space, Asylum and Inclusion’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16 (11): 1189–202. Massumi, B. (2008), ‘The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation’, Inflexions 1.1, How Is Research-Creation?Available online: www. inflexions.org (accessed 9 September 2021). McMullen, T. (2016), ‘Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint: An interview with Judith Butler’, in G. Siddall (ed.), Negotiated Moments, 21–33, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Richardson, J. (2013), ‘Unhinged’, Visual Arts Research, 39 (1): 90–107. Runswick-Cole, K. (2008), ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Parents’ Attitudes to the Inclusion of Children with Special Educational Needs in Mainstream and Special Schools’, British Journal of Special Education, 35 (3): 173–80. Ryan, S. (2006), ‘ “People Don’t Do Odd, Do They?” Mothers Making Sense of the Reactions of Others towards Their Learning Disabled Children in Public Places’, Children’s Geographies, 3 (3): 291–305. Shaw, B. (2014), 'Reception: Two Subjects Looking at One Another', in J. Calow, D. Hinchcliffe and L. Mansfield (eds), Speculative Strategies in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice, Underwing Press. Shults, L. F. (2014), Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Slee, R. (2018), Inclusive Education Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny, London: Routledge. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 994–1003, Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media. Valente, J. M., and G. L. Boldt (2015), ‘The Rhizome of the Deaf Child’, Qualitative Inquiry, 21 (6): 562–74. Wallin, J. (2010), A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallin, J. (2013), ‘Morphologies for a Pedagogical Life’, in I. Semetsky and D. Masny, Deleuze and Education, 196–214. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Watson, K. (2016), Inside the ‘Inclusive’ Early Childhood Classroom: The Power of ‘Normal’, New York: Peter Lang. Weig, D. (2020), ‘Motility and Fascia: How Neurophysiological Knowledge Can Contribute to Mobility Studies’, Applied Mobilities, Doi: 10.1080/23800127.2019.1667067. Wolff, S. (1995), Loners: The Life Path of Unusual Children, London: Routledge. Woodman, G. (2004), ‘Understanding Francesca Woodman’. Available online: https:// www.phai​don.com/age​nda/art/artic​les/2014/septem​ber/02/unders​tand​ing-france​ sca-wood​man/ (accessed 5 April 2021). Yountae, A. (2014), ‘Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze, Glissant, and Colonial Difference’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 55 (3): 286–301.

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Exploring an Autistic Curriculum: Of Pedagogy, Puppets and Perception Melissa Trimingham

Introduction Today voices are heard right across the spectrum of autistic experience, demanding new understandings of and respect for neurodiversity. These voices celebrate what Erin Manning terms the ‘minor gesture’ (Manning 2016), that is, a little noticed and even less understood mode of being, exemplified by the autistic perception of the world. Autistic perception cannot be generalized and is hugely idiosyncratic, but autistic people who have, against the odds, found their voices1 describe how they seem to exist on the threshold of consciousness, of language and of being. In their experience they dwell, often painfully and sometimes joyfully, in a maelstrom of becoming, an apparent chaos of sensation, where everything is possible and always about to coalesce or ‘chunk’ – to use Manning’s (2013: 219) term – into meaning. A curriculum that is sensitive to plurality and extraordinary experiential differences might re-enfranchise not only children who are hardest to communicate with, who rarely speak, and who may appear to cut out others completely from their existence but also those autistic children who can be highly verbal, humorous, singular characters.2 These children, too, often have unrecognized sensory differences, of hypo(under) or hyper- (over) sensitivity, in varying degrees and at different times, to the modalities of touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. As adults they are currently the most articulate members of the autistic community, advocates for change in a neurotypically centred world that is all too quick to define what is human and what is less-than-human.3 Faced with autistic communities whose experiences are so very different from each other, might John Dewey’s ‘theory of knowing’, grounded in his faith

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in experience as a source of knowledge – as opposed to a ‘theory of knowledge’ based on a transmission model of empty vessels waiting to be filled – better serve us as carers, teachers and parents? In his Experience and Education, dating from 1938, Dewey argues that not all experience is educational. He is talking, rather, about a particular type of experience: The belief that a genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. (Dewey 1997: 25)

Suppose that instead of promoting an education intent on ‘grasping inherent and hidden truths’, we were to prioritize the ‘intersubjective process of sharing experience’ (Jackson 1996: 8). Rather than attempting to bring autistic children into line with our neurotypical world, could we not seek to open up to the singularity of their experience, allowing it to grow on their terms? How, in short, might we devise a more ‘autistic’ curriculum? Given their differences and what is perceived by neurotypicals as their strangeness, autistic children are at the edges of – if not wholly outside – what Alphonso Lingis (1994: 109–10) calls the ‘rational community’, though to an extent that depends in part on where they stand on the spectrum of difference (Wing 2002). The ‘rational community’, according to Lingis, enables participants to communicate but at the same time makes them ‘interchangeable’; it is a community in which ‘one depersonalizes one’s vision and insights, formulates them in terms of the common rational discourse, and speaks as a representative, a spokesperson, equivalent and interchangeable with others, of what has been said’ (Lingis 1994: 116). Many educational programmes designed for autistic children, seeking to remedy their evident isolation, go to great lengths to reincorporate them into the rational community. To be isolated, in Hannah Arendt’s sense (1953: 322), is to be deprived of the capacity to act (as in, to ‘take action’), and few beings can be more isolated in this sense than the autistic child. Yet programmes that promote interchangeability are more liable to exacerbate isolation than to relieve it. An example is the well-known and controversial intervention Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA), which aims to teach children needing high levels of support to achieve very basic skills of communication.4 In what follows I suggest that we could better address autistic children’s feelings of isolation and facilitate the development of their capacity to act by following the quite different approach to pedagogy put forward by educational



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theorist Gert Biesta (2006, 2013). Drawing on the philosophy of Lingis, Biesta (2006: 59–61) argues against any unthinking endorsement of the rational community. For it works, in his view, against the communities of plurality and difference which, following Zygmunt Bauman (1995), offer opportunities for the kind of emancipation that is essential to realizing our humanity. All education, according to Biesta (2013: 12, 15–19), falls into three domains: of qualification (equipping people with knowledge and skills), of socialization (becoming part of existing social, political and cultural traditions) and, importantly, of subjectification. Subjectification is a difficult idea: it has to do with someone’s subjectivity, their freedom, but it is not an essence or something we possess; it consists rather in ‘response-ability’ (Biesta 2006: 70), speaking in a voice of one’s own that nevertheless comes forth only through its affording others the opportunity to respond, in ways that can never be predicted (2006: 133).5 Our sense of self, for Biesta (2013: 12), is continually in the making and only possible in ‘always new, open, and unpredictable situations of encounter’. We should not reify the subject; it is always and ever in a process of becoming.

Imagining Autism What if, with Biesta, we were to found our approach to autism on this principle of subjectification, by placing the emphasis on ‘response-ability’ more than ‘rationality’? What if we sought to experience subjectivity via another? The project ‘Imagining Autism’ (iA, 2011–14)6 aims to do precisely that. It affords children, for 45 minutes, a space of ‘supported’ freedom to play within an enclosed tent, which we call the ‘pod’, containing an immersive sensory environment of forest, sea and planet that abounds in texture, colour, sound and smell. Inside the pod, simple narratives can emerge as desired, usually controlled by the children but facilitated by drama practitioners. Unusually for autistic children, there is often rich peer-to-peer as well as practitioner-to-child interaction.7 Practitioners of iA, often but not always in costumes or masks, operating as puppeteers, as actors or just as themselves, are going ‘beyond learning’ in Biesta’s (2006) sense, educating children who are largely prevented by the rational community from participating as singular beings with their own beginnings (Biesta 2006: 133–5). Back in 2012, after a few sessions in the pod, painfully aware of how easy it is to get it wrong, to interfere, to expect a particular (neurotypical) response from the child or to feel a sense of frustration and failure if the sought-after response is not forthcoming, the drama investigators (Nicola Shaughnessy and

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myself) set out to discover how we might be alongside the child without leading them, how we might co-create by improvising with but not for the child. As parents of autistic children ourselves, we felt we needed to find out what would ‘best create the conditions for the opening of a field of experience to a different way of functioning’ (Manning 2016: 115), so as to train practitioners who might tolerate the risk of failure – who might be truly ‘empty-handed’ or ‘weak’ in Biesta’s (2013: 12) positive sense. Autistic self-advocate Jim Sinclair (2012), in his short essay of 1993, ‘Don’t Mourn for Us’, has this advice for the parents of an autistic child: You’re going to have to give up your assumptions about shared meanings. You’re going to have to back up to levels more basic than you’ve probably thought about before … You’re going to have to give up the certainty that comes of being on your own familiar territory, of knowing you’re in charge, and let your child teach you a little of her language, guide you a little way into his world. (Sinclair 2012: 2)

What emerged was an embodied and ecological method of training, exploring how we might experience agency with, rather than grant agency to, those who learn. The resulting iA training programme8 is a way for parents, carers and teachers to learn to access their child’s world, to prompt new beginnings with their children, to seek out novel and unforeseeable encounters (Biesta 2013: 12). The learning it offers enables teachers and parents to understand the importance to autistic children of their sensory environment. It suggests activities that key into children’s sensory preferences, while also recognizing their potential for creativity. Teachers and parents who have experienced the training and approaches have even made their own small iA pods, havens of pleasure and safety, in classrooms and bedrooms, discovering their own ‘spaces of freedom’ (Biesta 2006: 93). Some iA training activities are challenging for those expecting professional development by PowerPoint; but for those prepared to join in and actively engage with the experiences offered, it offers a chance to learn about autism from the inside.9 In iA training, adults share new experiences of learning from the disciplinary perspective of drama. Although the training has many elements, my focus here is on two events that took place, years apart as it happens, in training sessions. In one event, a small cloth puppet is animated. In another, a group of adults in a drama workshop experience something strange and wonderful, but also challenging and difficult. These experiences might be called emergent wayfarings, along paths that coalesce in the making; they hint at what a curriculum might do instead of be. I hold to Biesta’s (2006: 28) definition of curriculum not as ‘content



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that needs to be acquired but as the practice that allows for particular responses’. Following Dewey, Biesta (2006: 15) observes that ‘inquiry or research does not provide us with information about the world “out there” but only about possible relations between action and consequences’. In what follows, I describe how we set out to explore these relations, first through the manipulation of our cloth puppet, and then through our experience of the drama workshop.

The Living Puppet Puppets suitable for learning at home and in the classroom include glove puppets and hand-held figures such as soft toys (often stuffed animals) and dolls of various kinds and sizes, for which basic skills of manipulation and animation are relatively easily learned. Puppets are a major tool in iA, facilitating shared attention and joint actions in which children meet and engage in conversations with them and their animators. This may be simple play (Trimingham 2013) or a more complex, unfolding drama.10 A puppet held at an actual distance between teacher and learner allows for metaphorical distance, indicating quickly to the child that the adult will respect their space. Discussing difficult topics in the presence of a puppet reduces anxiety, buffering the child from having to speak directly to the adult.11 Anxiety around difficult tasks, ranging from a maths sum to cleaning teeth, can be diffused by the humour of a puppet, who can frequently – and of course deliberately – get things wrong. Sometimes a puppet humorously subverts or even sabotages the task, much to the children’s enjoyment.12 A puppet in the hands of a teacher or parent acts as a counter to adult power, tempering the force of goal orientation. In a world of plurality and difference, the presence of a puppet, like a clown, is and always has been uneasy, risky and disruptive, opening up to that fragile space of freedom in which ‘unique singular individuals can come into existence’ (Biesta 2006: 95).13 Using a puppet helps the adult to concentrate on what is needed from them as teachers in relation to the child, namely being open to the unknown, to the risk of education, ‘a constant alertness to the “quality” of action and a persistent commitment to act in such a way that freedom can appear, so that new beginnings can come into the world’ (Biesta 2006: 93). That is why, when we were challenged by the KFI project to explore how pedagogy and education might be imagined otherwise, I offered participants a puppet. This puppet is a small, jointed figure of white cloth, loosely stuffed. Made long ago from old and discarded cotton sheeting, it is about a metre tall. The

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hinged and seamed arm sections are curiously circular in shape, the body does not bend at the waist, the head is stylized with a large nose for directional focus and is otherwise featureless save for two small black eyes. The ‘Little Alien’, as it is known in the iA ‘Outer Space’ environment, never speaks. It has stains and traces of ancient mould on its rather grey surface, as if it has already lived a life. Sometimes I wish it were UV sensitive, which would be useful for a Little Alien, but it is not. Each seamed joint – shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, foot and neck – is sturdy, reinforced with several rows of stitching which have never once torn. The puppet moves very easily, almost too easily. Unless great care is taken, it flops and dies. But because of the wide, flat seams separating its parts, movement in one part of the body will not inadvertently pull the other parts with it, unless you want it to. This enables the puppeteer, faced with the puppet lying prone and ‘sleeping’ on the ground, to initiate movement with delicate precision, moving for example the head, then perhaps a slight movement in one hand. To do so is ‘to mix the movements of one’s own sentient awareness with the flows and currents of animate life’ (Ingold 2013: 108). The puppet’s movement must also have weight, lest it should fly through the air and fail to ‘live’ (resulting in the so-called weightless ‘dolly waggling’). Working in pairs or in threes, participants are encouraged, first individually and then working together, to push down upon the feet to anchor the figure as it moves. I also suggest they focus its eyes directionally on specific objects as it moves, linking its motility to intention. Most adults will have handled, moved and animated a doll, or perhaps a Playmobile or Lego figure, in their early play or in play with a child; but a toy is not quite a puppet. Whereas the toy is an instrument of play, which we might pretend to be alive, the puppet comes to life as an animate being in its own right, within a world seething with vitality. As Tim Ingold writes: Animacy … is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather … it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but rather ontologically prior to their differentiation. (Ingold 2011: 68)

Puppetry is a folk art, perhaps comparable with craft, the low status of which belies its complexity as a rich, skilled and embodied practice. Puppeteer Peter Schumann (1991: 78–9) reminds us that ‘compared to the highfalutin aspirations



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of actors, the puppeteers’ handling of themselves and of the objects and effigies entrusted into their hands seems quite formal and modest’. Even though I may have made the puppet myself, as I made Little Alien, I come to understand it better the more I move it and watch others move it. It yields its secrets slowly and has the capacity to surprise me endlessly in its many lives. Above all as it moves, it teaches us to abandon our preconceived intentions – our goals, plans and purposes – and rather to be present in the moment. As Schumann writes: The puppeteers’ only hope of mastering their puppets is to enter their puppets’ delicate and seemingly inexhaustible lives. Puppets are not made to order or script. What’s in them is hidden in their faces and becomes clear only through their functioning. They are born from the raw clay. Their creation has to be as far removed as possible from the purposeful definitions of dramatic characters or story. Only through this disconnected distance are they able to enter actively into the story as independent agents, not as providers of purposes. (Schumann 1991: 79)

Understanding what Ingold (2011: 68) calls the ‘entire field of relations’ means regarding the body of the puppeteer – as philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2009: 61) writes of the body of the dancer – not as the executor of a prior intention but as dynamically attuned to a world through which it makes its way kinetically, all the while attending to its own movement and to the movements of things in its surroundings, which may be ‘forceful, swift, slow, straight, swerving, flaccid, tense, sudden up down, and much more’. The puppeteer may sometimes begin clumsily, working with unfamiliar materials and weight, but always finds a rhythm in the end. Like the watchmaker who dwells among the pieces of their craft rather than ‘above and beyond them’ (Ingold 2013: 69), the moving puppeteer dwells in her puppet. It is not so much an interaction as an intra-action (Dolphijn and Tuin 2012: 14); a dance not of agency but of animacy (Ingold 2013: 101). A puppet is intensely corporeal; it is not an object that moves but a being that exists in its own movement. Without movement, it hangs lifeless on its hook, or prone upon the floor. Movement is fundamental to life, as it is to thought. Sheets-Johnstone (2009: 50) describes dynamic or spatiotemporal ideas (such as distance) as basic human concepts deriving from our experiences as infants; they are ‘corporeal concepts’, prior to language. Many of the primary metaphors in embodied thinking, listed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999: 50), underlie the movements of puppets as they tell their stories: they include ‘affection is warmth’, ‘important is big’, ‘happy is up’, ‘bad is stinky’, ‘difficulties are burdens’

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(Trimingham 2012). Like clowns, puppets are childlike and directly literal. The silent puppet is pre-linguistic, its operator is thinking in movement, providing what Sheets-Johnstone (2009: 48) calls gradient information: ‘Postures, gaze, upper and lower body orientation … have a variable affective tone according to how they are enacted.’ Like the human infant, the puppet deals in spatiotemporal dynamics. The postures that Sheets-Johnstone (2009: 47) describes as prelinguistic seem uncannily close to those of Little Alien as it moves from being prone on the floor to standing – specifically postures of gaze, head orientation, upper and lower body orientation and spatial positioning. This may partly explain the peculiar affinity of puppetry to Feldenkrais practice (Fredricksson 2015).14 As puppets move, they also remind us of the ‘basic level categories’ we have for objects (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 26–7), categories which derive from our bodily interaction with the specific constituents of our surroundings.15 The little white puppet raises its hands to the seat of the chair, at just the right height for leverage, and hauls itself upwards against gravity, then rests its head and upper body across the seat, to rest…

The puppet is a powerful reminder of how our very being is interlaced with the material world upon which it lies, pushes, rolls, turns its head, pushes again, heaves up and collapses in exhaustion. Referring to the work of Daniel Stern (1985) on the psychological development of the infant, Sheets-Johnstone (2009: 49) speaks of how language intrudes on an infant’s nonverbal world, creating a confusing and sometimes painful schism between the familiar nonverbal world of experience and the new world of words. Little wonder, then, that the puppet – even a glove puppet – which returns us instantly to prelinguistic modes of movement, whether vocal or silent, is so comforting to a child, and so useful to a teacher or parent.

Perceiving Differently If puppetry provides a practical tool for teaching, the part of iA training we called ‘Perceiving Differently’ is designed to address directly the problem of ‘double empathy’ identified by Damian Milton (2012). The problem is that even as neurotypicals demand of the neurodiverse that they understand the neurotypical world, the neurodiverse in turn have a right to demand understanding of their world.16 The ‘Perceiving Differently’ exercises help participants recognize the importance of the child’s environment to learning. Our approach has synergies



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with Phoebe Caldwell’s (2008) work on intensive interaction and sensory integration, which tunes into the unique and uniquely individual body language of autistic children. Such children, Caldwell (2008: 40) writes, often feel as if they are ‘living in a kaleidoscope where the bits swirl around and the pattern never settles’ (Caldwell 2008: 40). Typically, in our work, participants are first asked to swap their own left and right shoes.17 Feet are tactile and sensitive and the odd feeling of being out of kilter is a useful introduction to perceiving differently.18 While some feel ‘all feet’ and very odd, others grow to enjoy the tight feeling it gives them, like being securely fastened to the floor. Having swapped back their shoes (if they wish), they may then be asked to recall a time when they felt very happy, to recapture this emotion, and walk very slowly. Then they reverse this and recall feelings of extreme sadness while walking very fast. In general, participants find it impossible to hang on to their memories when their bodies are doing the opposite to how they feel. A recording of a similar exercise, made in 2012, gives some detailed insight into this experiential learning in the making. A small group of drama practitioners and drama students (eight in all) were given the fairly easy task of describing aloud and simultaneously what they did last weekend while walking around the studio space. They were asked to really focus on what they were doing, to inhabit the imaginary spaces in their mind and to gesture by ‘marking’ the physical actions, so that, for example, if they are describing making breakfast, moving from microwave to sink could be marked by making a gentle turn. This was not to reproduce the movement visibly but to enact the bodily feeling of it. Next, they were told to slow down their speech but gradually to increase the speed of their walking. As they attempted to respond to the ever-increasing demands (‘Tom! You need to walk faster!’) they endeavoured to keep speaking slowly and continuously. Most sped up their talking or failed to go as fast as demanded (‘Run! Run!’). After a short rest, they were instructed to talk very fast but move very slowly. It was here that the difficulties really showed up. Footage reveals how the walks became very odd and awkward, even comical. Some participants lifted their knees up high and placed their feet down heavily, as if they were treading through thick mud. Others stuck their hands and arms out stiffly and awkwardly sideways and backwards. Yet others walked with permanently bent knees. All the ‘flow’ of walking in ordinary life was missing. The words continued to be heard as an undecipherable cacophony. Comments afterwards revealed that the normal flow of talk was also gone. Asked ‘Was that difficult?’, they responded ‘Yes, yes’, and self-conscious laughter rippled around the group. They commented: ‘Just nonsense was coming out’;

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‘that [slow walking and fast talking] was harder than the other way.’ ‘You couldn’t think broadly … I got stuck on detail, I couldn’t move on … going round and round.’ One participant described how ‘it was almost unbearable – the stress of walking slowly, speaking quickly, then you interrupting – I felt very panicked.’ The same participant continued: ‘What I was thinking of … trying to remember Sunday, trying to remember going for a walk along the path, we went along the path, we went along the path … I was repeating that endlessly – because I was having to talk so fast: I was going along the path but I couldn’t embody the memory: usually – with your whole body – you are there [hand gesture], but I wasn’t because I was [starts to walk forward fast and in a stylized way] thinking about trying to walk slowly [slows down in an exaggerated way, says SLOWLY with slack jaw and mouthing it]’. One participant described how he got into minute details and compartmentalized the actions he was remembering as a way of dealing with it: ‘The biggest break for me was when you said my name – I was hearing: Everyone speed up! speed up! … when you said “Tom! You have to talk faster and Tom!” really broke it for me, and I had to stop and start it again.’ There are many things to note about this little exercise in disorientation. The first is that it makes no attempt to recreate an ‘autistic’ experience. As was made clear to participants, we cannot experience anything of what an autistic person experiences by a drama ­exercise – or indeed by any other means. What we can do however, which may offer a limited parallel to autistic experiences that are unique to every individual, is feel what it is like to be unable to bring forth the apparently ‘pre-chunked’ or ordered neurotypical event, such as a vocal utterance or a controlled movement (Manning 2013: 219). In this exercise, where the body’s movements are at odds with those of speech, it becomes difficult to ‘chunk’ kaleidoscopic experience (Massumi, in Manning 2013: xxii) and thus make communicable utterances even when this is desired; the result is perceived panic and distress. Compare Manning’s (2016: 116) explanation of autistic adult Ido Kedar’s experience: ‘In Kedar’s case the movement of thought is not the problem. The problem is in the making-conscious of this movement, in the subtraction from the field of relation to the actual occasion. The field is simply too complex to easily pull out of it one single thought activity.’ Trainees, practitioners and investigators alike, I suggest, sensed in a fully embodied way what Manning, in the same passage, calls ‘the commotion of the ecologies that compose experience’.19 When participants are struggling to keep everything together – as Tom, for example, tried to do by going into extreme detail – the distress at being interrupted is palpable: it was described as a sudden break – ‘I had to stop and



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start it again.’ Another participant whose strategy was endlessly to repeat the same thing felt panicked when interrupted. How often are autistic children interrupted in their complex perceptual worlds, perhaps ‘stimming’20 happily, taking sensory enjoyment from some feature around them that we cannot see or comprehend, a detail fixed upon in the ‘commotion of ecologies’ before ‘chunking’ begins? The child might be subjected to an ‘event’ demand to clean their teeth or put their coat on, do their maths or eat their lunch, and given insufficient or even no time to respond.21 One trainee commented, having felt the rising panic when an ‘event’ is demanded, that it is no wonder a child might either zone us out or exhibit extreme distress such as screaming, rolling on the floor, shutting out the adult: ‘It’s completely understandable’, she said. Another wondered what it would be like if these interruptions were part of your daily experience. The training, in short, offered an opportunity to ‘visit’ the child’s world, in Biesta’s (2006: 89–92) sense, that is, ‘not to see through the eyes of someone else, but to see with your own eyes from a position that is not your own’ (Biesta 2006: 91, original emphasis). This is the ‘critical empathy’ that Jill Bennet (2005: 66) claims is so essential for all socially engaged theatre, ‘an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another in so far as we can imagine being that other) but in a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible’. And yet this space of panic and dissolution, as we discovered, might be transformed into a place of potential, of new knowledge. Manning describes it as ‘the creation of conditions for encountering the operative transversality of difference at the heart of all living’ (Manning 2015: 209). ‘Approach respectfully, without preconceptions, and with openness to learning new things, and you’ll find a world you could never have imagined’, writes Jim Sinclair (2012: 2). In the compilation Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking, Amanda Baggs (2012: 324) tells us that for her ‘the world is thick with sensation’. This is ‘not just the sensory components of the outer environment. There is also the feel of it, the way the space between everything flows and moves and changes color. Objects are alive to us and interact with us as much as we interact with each other.’ As part of their iA ‘Perceiving Differently’ training, participants are asked to select an object they have on their person or in their possession, preferably something that reflects light (a mobile phone, an earring, a watch, a necklace, a pen), and to find a place in the room, as private as they can find, to examine this object closely. They are prompted to touch, stroke, smell, even taste its surfaces, to move it in the light, to look at its surfaces close-up, and explore its sounds. Time, they find, moves at a different speed. The minutes tick by. Mostly people

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become deeply absorbed in an unfolding encounter between themselves and the extraordinary unseen potential of what they are holding in their hands. One participant, for example, remarked on being fixated by the motile points of light on the silvery lining inside a cardboard tube, ‘finding motion’, they commented, ‘in something you don’t think is mobile’. Reflections of an eye on a metal watchback, the exquisite patterning of woven fibres in fabric hitherto unnoticed, percussive and echoing beats on surfaces never properly explored, are shocks of the ordinary. But these pleasures, new to trainees, are commonplace for an autistic child given to stimming with objects, seemingly both calmed and fascinated by, for example, spinning a shoelace round and round, or endlessly squashing a favourite ball into shapes. They are the sorts of pleasures that lead so many autistic people to become great painters, filmmakers and poets.22 Another characteristic commonly attributed to them is repetition, yet with highly detailed perception and expert levels of discrimination this is not what it seems, as Francesca Happé and Uta Frith (2009: 1348) have noted: ‘The child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.’ Such hyper-detailed perception might however be distracting and cause autistic people temporarily to cut off from those around them. In our trainees, deliberate interruptions to their stimming are met with reluctant acquiescence (‘Shame! I was enjoying that!’) and occasionally with genuine annoyance. Likewise, to wrench an autistic child from their stimming may cause real anger and upset. Again, the training prompts respect for ways of experiencing differently, and empathy with something or someone irreducibly different.

Conclusion Manning offers an optimistic interpretation of the creative potential of autistic perception. While not diminishing the pain and effort that such experiences sometimes entail for the individuals concerned, I suggest that we might also usefully linger longer, as they do, on the edges of becoming, and be less keen to concretize knowledge in advance of teaching it. We might seek to avoid reifying knowledge into facts; we might shy away from an agenda that shuts down knowledge by defining what needs to be known in advance of the knowing. A training for teachers, TAs, health workers, social workers and even



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(or especially) for parents, which understands, respects and values autistic perception, offers us a path into the new and unfamiliar, new ways of perceiving our vibrant world, new ways of grasping its potential. This approach to encounters with autistic children creates an ecological space of learning and improvisation, engendering empathy and respect for others, and for the irreducibility of their experience. It suggests a curriculum that does rather than is, that awakens new modes of encounter and creates new forms of life-giving. This is ‘curriculum’ more as verb than noun: a process, a method, emergent experience rather than defined content. It may feel risky, but it is also (speaking for myself) exhilarating in the new beginnings that it repeatedly offers. It is a demonstration of our commitment to the world of which we are necessarily a part, and of how we learn through experience as Dewey defines it, alongside others. This chapter is my attempt to unravel something of that experience; but above all it is a testament to hope, to our profound capacity for change, and to what Biesta (2013: 6) calls the ‘impossible gift’ of teaching.

Notes 1 E.g. Donna Williams (1998), Naoke Higashida (2013), Amanda Baggs (https:// www.yout​ube.com/watch?v=Jnyl​M1hI​2jc) and Ralph James Savarese (see Savarese and Zunshine 2014). Recent years have seen a spate of autobiographical writings by autistic women, who are often diagnosed late in life after years of confusion and, often, mental health issues – e.g. Katherine May (2018). Trimingham is currently Co-I on a research project investigating the experiences of autistic girls, see https:// playin​gapa​rtau​tist​icgi​rls.org/. 2 Some members of the autistic community, occasionally calling themselves ‘Aspies’, celebrate the diagnostic label Asperger’s Syndrome (previously attached to so-called high-functioning autistic people), which was cut out from the 2013 DSM5 Autism Diagnostic Criteria. 3 ‘Neurotypical’ is the term used by the autistic community to describe people outside their ‘neurodiverse’ community. Erin Manning describes neurotypicality as supporting ‘the largely unspoken criteria that support and reinforce the definition of what it means to be human, to be intelligent, to be of value to society’ (https:// lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/arti​cle/histor​ies-of-viole​nce-neu​rodi​vers​ity-and-the-polic​ ing-of-the-norm/, accessed 18 March 2021). See also Manning (2013: 149–50) and Biesta (2006: 6–7). 4 ABA is often recommended to parents of autistic children with high levels of need, and is practised in many educational programmes. It consists of repetitive tasks

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and frequent rewards to achieve basic skills, such as answering correctly to ‘What is your name?’ 5 Biesta is drawing here on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1979). 6 Imagining Autism: Drama, Performance and Intermediality and Interventions for Autistic Spectrum Conditions was an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project based at the University of Kent (October 2011–March 2014), see http://www.imag​inin​gaut​ism.org. The investigators were Professor Nicola Shaughnessy (Drama), Dr Melissa Trimingham (Drama), Dr Julie BeadleBrown (Tizard Centre) and Dr David Wilkinson (Psychology). The project originated from PI Shaughnessy and Co-I Trimingham’s experience as parents of autistic children, and from the perceived benefits of sharing imaginative play and puppetry with them. Participating schools covered a wide spectrum of ability. The project worked in each school with 6–8 participants, aged 7–11, diagnosed with autism. Participants took part in a weekly play-based session in a portable installation (the ‘pod’). As the project developed it has worked more closely with members of the autistic community, as artists, makers, practitioners, advisors and commentators, to co-produce the work. The project has generated greater understanding of autistic creativity (Trimingham 2018), and has also gathered evidence that drama can impact positively upon autistic children. See BeadleBrown et al. (2018). 7 For Imagining Autism specifically in relation to pedagogy, see Trimingham and Shaughnessy (2016). An overview of the project can be found in Trimingham and Shaughnessy (2019). Analysis of iA training can be found in Shaughnessy (2016). 8 Whilst originally developed for the iA drama practitioners it has since been adapted to help teachers, TAs and carers in schools (e.g. the NAS Schools tour of 2013 and numerous workshops around Kent and nationally), and parents (e.g. the University of Kent funded project, ‘iA for Families’, 2015). An extended programme of Continuing Professional Development (and a linked ‘pod’ residency), initiated and funded by The Beacon, Folkestone, trained ‘Imagining Autism Champions’ for The Beacon and surrounding primary and secondary schools. Champions have gone on to develop iA techniques within and beyond the classroom. 9 In a recent personal communication, a CPD participant at The Beacon remembers the iA training as ‘pulling up your sleeves’ and getting on with it practically. One parent in iA for Families, interviewed on Meridian TV, who successfully used some of the clowning and slapstick resources (not described here), said that although they were ‘unorthodox’, they ‘seemed to work’ for her and her children. See note 11 in this chapter. 10 On one occasion a practitioner worked the marionette portée of a friendly Alien who communicated by noises only, and played building bricks for a sustained period with a delighted four-year-old autistic girl who usually rarely spoke,



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astonishing her teachers with her apparent ability to play. For examples of more complex dramas, see Trimingham (2017: 190–1). 11 A teacher at The Beacon described to me recently, in a personal communication, how she uses puppets in her class. Teaching RSE (Relationships and Sex Education) with puppets reduces levels of anxiety and self-consciousness. In her class each child has their own puppet and so does she; whilst not a constant presence, they are brought out when she feels they will be most useful, and sometimes a child will ask for their puppet to help them. 12 In 2014 the iA team presented an event with the unlikely title of ‘The Funny Thing about Autism’ at The Marlowe in Canterbury. The day (for parents and teachers) concentrated on tapping into the autistic slapstick sense of humour and using sabotage. 13 Traditionally they have been used politically to criticize regimes and the controlling elite. This can translate into many contexts. See Trimingham (2010) for an account of a glove puppet, Roland Rat, super star, who was an extremely positive ‘disrupter’ in the upbringing of my autistic son. Roy Hudd’s Emu puppet meeting Michael Parkinson is a classic example of subversion, see https://www.yout​ube.com/ watch?v=6AUR​UEq8​SRw. 14 I am grateful to Paolo Maccagno, Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and Feldenkrais practitioner, for sharing with me his recollections of the KFI workshop at Comrie Croft, particularly the puppetry section. 15 Chairs and tables, e.g., as opposed to the more generic term ‘furniture’. For this in relation to puppets, see Trimingham (2012: 122). 16 See also https://www.aut​ism.org.uk/adv​ice-and-guida​nce/profe​ssio​nal-pract​ice/dou​ ble-empa​thy. 17 This section of the training was developed by Nicola Shaughnessy using contemporary performance and performance art training techniques, particularly exercises laid out in Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton’s (1977) manual Elements of Performance Art. The shoes exercise originated from Shaughnessy’s observation that her autistic son could not tell his left from his right shoes. Did he not notice the difference? Was it pleasurable when he got it wrong? She decided to try it out. 18 See Catherine Burke (2018: 33): ‘In examining a history of the feet of school pupils, I have explored Ingold’s [2011: 33–50] suggestion that it is through the feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are most fundamentally and continually “in touch” with our surroundings.’ 19 See Higashida (2013: 1–3): The thirteen- year-old author of this book invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that you’re

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Knowing from the Inside hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend … Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice … A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you unstoppably … Now your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music … your head feels trapped inside a motorbike helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the air conditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your father – who’s right here in front of you – sounds as if he’s speaking to you from a cellphone, on a train going through lots of short tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. You are no longer able to comprehend your mother-tongue, or any tongue: from now on all your languages will be foreign languages.

20 ‘Stimming’ is self-stimulation that involves repetitive movements, often rocking or tapping or playing with objects. 21 There is no space here to expand on the notion of time; but in general, autistic people, neurodiverse thinkers and disabled people need much more time to process and carry out activities than is generally allowed to them. This recognition is an important part of the training. 22 Such as filmmaker Sonia Boué, https://www.a-n.co.uk/per​son/sonia-boue-1/,wri​ter Katherine May, https://kather​ine-may.co.uk/about, and poet, writer and broadcaster Kate Fox, https://katefo​xwri​ter.wordpr​ess.com.

References Arendt, H. (1953), ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’, Review of Politics, 15: 303–27. Baggs, A. (2012), ‘Untitled’, in J. Bascon (ed.), Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking, 324–34, Washington, DC: Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Bauman, Z. (1995), ‘Making and Unmaking of Strangers’, in P. Beilharz (ed.), The Bauman Reader, 200–17, Oxford: Blackwell. Beadle-Brown, J., D. Wilkinson, L. Richardson, N. Shaughnessy, M. Trimingham, J. Leigh, B. Whelton and J. Himmerich (2018), ‘Imagining Autism: Feasibility of a Drama-Based Intervention on the Social, Communicative and Imaginative Behaviour of Children with Autism’, Autism: International Journal of Research and Practice, 22 (8): 915–27. Bennett, J. (2005), Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2006), Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Biesta, G. J. J. (2013), The Beautiful Risk of Education, Boulder, CO: Paradigm.



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Burke, C. (2018), ‘Feet, Footwork, Footwear, and “Being Alive” in the Modern School’, Paedagogica Historica, 54 (1–2): 32–47. Caldwell, P. (2008), Using Intensive Interaction and Sensory Integration: A Handbook for Those Who Support People with Severe Autistic Spectrum Disorder, London: Jessica Kingsley. Dewey, J. (1997), Experience and Education, New York: Simon and Schuster (Touchstone). Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin (eds) (2012), New Materialisms: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Fredricksson, K. (2015), ‘Feldenkrais and Training in Puppetry and Material Performance’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 6 (2): 233–46. Happé, F., and U. Frith (2009), ‘The Beautiful Otherness of the Autistic Mind’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364 (1522): 1345–50. Higashida, N. (2013), The Reason I Jump, trans. K. A. Yoshida and D. Mitchell, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Howell, A., and F. Templeton (1977), Elements of Performance Art, London: Ting Theatre of Mistakes. Ingold, T. (2011), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013), Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, London: Routledge. Jackson, M. (ed.) (1996) Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. Levinas, E. (1979), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lingis, A. (1994), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Manning, E. (2013), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2015), ‘10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How to Rethink Value’, Inflexions, 8 (Radical Pedagogies): 202–10. Manning, E. (2016), The Minor Gesture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. May, K. (2018), The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home, London: Orion. Milton, D. E. (2012), ‘On the Ontological Status of Autism: The “Double Empathy Problem”’, Disability & Society, 27 (6): 883–7. Savarese, R. J., and L. Zunshine (2014), ‘The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese’, NARRATIVE, 22 (1): 17–44.

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Schumann, P. (1991), ‘The Radicality of Puppet Theatre’, TDR, 35 (4): 75–83. Shaughnessy, N. (2016), ‘Curious Incidents: Pretend Play, Presence, and Performance Pedagogies in Encounters with Autism’, in P. Smagorinsky (ed.), Creativity and Community among Autism-Spectrum Youth: Creating Positive Social Updrafts through Play and Performance, 187–216, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009), The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Exeter: Imprint-Academic. Sinclair, J. (2012), ‘Don’t Mourn for Us’, Autonomy, the Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies, 1 (1): 1–4. Stern, D. W. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Trimingham, M. (2010), ‘Objects in Transition: The Puppet and the Autistic Child’, Journal of Applied Arts and Health, 1 (3): 251–65. Trimingham, M. (2012), ‘How to Think a Puppet’, Forum Modernes Theater, 26 (1–2): 121–36. Trimingham, M. (2013), ‘Touched by Meaning: Haptic Effect in Autism’, in N. Shaughnessy (ed.), Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, 229–40, London: Methuen. Trimingham, M. (2017), ‘Ecologies of Autism: Vibrant Space in Imagining Autism’, in J. McKinney and S. Palmer (eds), Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, 183–96, London: Bloomsbury. Trimingham, M. (2018), ‘Surprised by Beauty: Imagining Autism’, in S. Bunn (ed.), Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity, 262–75, London: Routledge. Trimingham, M., and N. Shaughnessy (2016), ‘Material Voices: Intermediality and Autism’, RiDE (Research into Drama Education), 21 (3): 293–308. Trimingham, M., and N. Shaughnessy (2019), ‘Imagining the Ecologies of Autism’, in R. Kemp and B. McConachie (eds), The Routledge Companion to Theatre: Performance and Cognitive Science, 316–29, London: Routledge. Williams, D. (1998), Nobody, Nowhere, The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic Girl (rev. edn), London: Jessica Kingsley. Wing, L. (2002), The Autistic Spectrum, A Guide for Parents and Professionals (rev. edn), London: Constable and Robinson.

7

‘A House for …’: Exercises in Filmic Architecture Ray Lucas

Introduction In this chapter I discuss teaching practices in architecture, in particular the opening up of space for teaching outside the strict requirements for a professionally validated degree. My discussion centres on the development of the curriculum at Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) for Masters-level workshops, undertaken in 2014, which aimed to shorten the distance between research and pedagogy and to give students space outside of the traditional ‘silo’ of the studio to explore issues of interest to them. Alongside this development, I produced my own workshops including one entitled ‘Filmic Architecture’. This latter was framed as a series of discussions on film theories, in which participants were asked to select a film director and to analyse their work through a set of exercises. They then had to design a house for this director, to be shown as an appropriately edited short film. The house could be modelled physically or digitally, and either derived from existing footage or assembled from their own shots of the city. The concept of what constitutes a ‘house’ was left wide open, so that students could reflect on the understanding of their chosen director, derived from their research. This self-contained workshop was not unique to MSA; indeed, architecture schools across the world have engaged similarly with cinema. It nevertheless afforded some freedom from the pressures of a tightly regulated programme of professional education. Moreover, the workshop was set apart by its focus on the underlying principles of cinema. Comparable teaching elsewhere has considered the image of the city in film, the character of urban wanderers, relationships between cities and their cinemas, and the persistence of utopian

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and dystopian fictions. But in ‘Filmic Architecture’, we went further to consider such fundamentals as montage, narratology, genre, sound design, spectatorship and embodiment. Here I explore how a cross-disciplinary workshop can encourage students to develop critical skills in ways seemingly detached from their everyday design practices. It was not my intention to train a new generation of film production designers (although some students have subsequently moved in that direction), but rather to inform their practice as students and practitioners of architecture. In the fulfilment of this aim, my objectives were threefold: to facilitate the development of poetic responsiveness within an increasingly prescriptive educational model; to develop skills of critique and translation in a crossdisciplinary setting; and to provide a site for experimentation in which architecture might be produced according to a more open-ended brief.

Architectural Educations Architectural education is often discussed as a field in its own right, with its own literature and theories. This often addresses the idea of the studio, in which education is centred on activities modelled to replicate the operations of an architectural office. It is an education often characterized today in terms of ‘becoming’ an architect, with teaching itself bearing the hallmarks of a kind of storytelling (Thompson 2019: 2, 7). Attaching a fundamental identity to being an architect feeds much of the mythology of the profession and its celebration of individual genius, at the expense of the broader practice that makes possible and contributes dynamically to the work of making architecture. Architectural schools have a duty to meet the requirements of regulatory bodies, such as the UK’s Architectural Registration Board (ARB) and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), through the delivery of a heavily prescribed programme of study. The purpose of this is fundamentally sensible. It allows degrees in architecture to cover much of the education of future architects, whilst leaving a significant element to be completed during years-out in practice. In the United Kingdom, courses are validated on a five-yearly cycle, alongside the regular checks and balances applied to contemporary university programmes. All of this makes for a packed curriculum, with students in architecture reported to be amongst the most stressed and overworked in the academy (Xie et al., 2019). There is considerable pressure in the curriculum for every element to work towards fulfilling a standard set of criteria, mapping the course to the



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profession’s expectations. The contemporary model of architectural education further demands that students be taught on a business model, with a focus on innovation, and leading to a managerial approach to the responsibilities of architects. This offers few opportunities to think outside of conventional commercial practice. Most architecture courses in the United Kingdom have the following components: history and theory, technology, design studio and professional practice. These have local variations (such as our own Architectural Humanities in Manchester, which replaces history and theory) and differences in emphasis and approach, but the ARB still expects students to receive an education in architectural history as well as adjacent disciplines such as fine art. This expectation is loosely framed, offering some scope for interpretation. Future architects are required to demonstrate knowledge of building regulations, to be able to complete designs of sufficient complexity, to respond to issues of sustainability and the climate crisis, and to place their work within a historical and intellectual context. Students must pass every element of the course: they cannot fail a single module. This creates an atmosphere which can make them cautious and risk averse. The problem is addressed by Tatjana Schneider (2015), who positions her own desire for more slack in architectural education as a radical political act, framed by her engagement in cooperatives and collectives, in Glasgow and Sheffield, committed to alternative forms of architectural practice. What if educators embraced change as inevitable? What if they saw education not as a product filled with finite dimensions and ingredients, but as a framework that can be filled with other elements? To realise this, we all need some slack space. The tight-fit-functionalism that has become the norm for architectural education needs replacing with softer solutions that leave this slack; slack to think, develop, explore and experiment. (Schneider 2015: 93–4)

The workshop described here fits this description, in so far as it affords space for experimentation and inquiry. Whilst slack might not be the best term for it – and in concluding my argument I suggest smuggle as an alternative – the workshop gives students ample opportunity to reflect on what architecture might be, and these reflections often feed into their dissertation topics. The literature in architectural education tends to focus on how design is taught in a studio context, often at the expense of considering how history and theory might be made relevant, or of the best ways to learn technical details beyond memorizing model solutions. The culture of the architectural studio is very

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different from that of the art school, since a persistent feature of architectural studios is the grouping of students into teams, known as ‘Units’, often led by charismatic practising architects who set projects, give advice, critique work and pass judgement. There is a real risk that such leadership can become blinkered by the cult of personality that develops around these individuals. Indeed, as a discipline, architecture continues to be troubled by the myth of the creative genius who can intervene in the built environment through the sheer force of his or her will. Further fissures in architectural education divide those characterized, respectively, as practitioners and as academics. Over the past few decades, universities have raised their expectation that staff should have doctorates rather than professional qualifications. This has been encouraged, in part, by wider pressures to participate in research audits, such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and comparable exercises in other countries, which leave it to various institutional gatekeepers to decide what kinds of publication and activity count as research. As architectural education is a long-drawn-out affair, requiring five years of university education and at least two years in practice to gain the legally recognized and protected title of Architect, the pool of individuals who are both fully qualified architects and have PhDs remains relatively small. This leads to specialization and territoriality, widening the division between academia and practice. In the words of Peter Cook: I think architectural education is in great danger, and has been for the last 20 years or so, of being hijacked by those whose real interests are words rather than buildings … I feel very strongly that architecture has a tremendous inherent structure of its own … It is a mirror of society, and it responds with incredible richness. It is this aspect, in architectural education, that is in danger of being hijacked by those ‘academics’ who are able, perhaps by virtue of their intellectual credentials, to make ‘normal’ architects feel very inferior. (Cook and Hawley 2004: 6–7)

The situation Cook described in 2004 has only been exacerbated over the ensuing years. His words reflect a widely held frustration concerning the place of architecture schools within the contemporary university. They say something about the perceived value of the professional architect in the face of a structure which sees little merit in their activities, but which cannot function without them. Indeed, the very same universities, for which courses in architecture are financially attractive, devalue the professionals required to teach their key elements. While I write this, perhaps, as one of those academics so scorned by



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Cook, I have observed a similar disdain for architecture in the way research is counted by outputs in ‘highly ranked’ journals based in rationalist disciplines such as planning and environmental management. Despite its ambitions for autonomy, architectural education is not immune from the influence of national and international trends in higher education policy, and the confluence of professional regulation and universities geared towards gaming the systems of ranking and external assessment makes for a tightly knotted curriculum. These tensions between autonomy and intellectual dependency on other disciplines are discussed by Martha Pollak (1997: ix–x), with reference to Stanford Anderson’s approach to leading the architecture school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Pollak shows that histories of architectural education are an important part of the wider history of the discipline and can tell us much about processes of architectural knowledge production. In a chapter of Pollak’s volume, Danilo Udovic-Selb (1997: 239–66) underlines the importance of architectural education to the formation of the built environment. His position is that since architecture inevitably conforms to prevailing social expectations, it is impossible to produce work of absolute novelty. Instead, architecture reproduces itself through the generation-bygeneration reinterpretation of existing works (Udovic-Selb 1997: 258). Design teaching often attempts to replicate some of the conditions of architectural practice. Groups of students are issued with a programme or brief to fulfil, a site to work on and other factors to consider, depending on the stage of their education. In postgraduate teaching, these groups are often organized thematically, and as noted earlier, they are often described as Units. The Unit system has been a persistent feature of UK architectural education. Sometimes Units are identified only by number: Unit 1, Unit 2; other schools give them thematic names or titles. At MSA, we have Ateliers instead of Units, grouping students from the final year of the architecture BA and the two years of MArch study on common themes such as (though not limited to): building re-use (Continuity in Architecture); computationally informed design (Complexity Planning and Urbanism); urban and infrastructural design (Infrastructure Space); and feminist critiques of existing practice and proposals for alternatives (Praxxis). Whilst valuable and intellectually coherent, the Unit system is often blamed for creating silos within the school. Competition sometimes emerges between Units, and students can find themselves at odds with the leadership of their group without any opportunity for escape, having committed to their choice – through a competitive election in which Unit leaders lobby for students to join them – for an entire academic year.

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Persuasive arguments have been made to the effect that the primary purpose of the atelier is not to teach design but to ‘socialize’ students into the profession (Banham 1990: 295; Jacob 2015: 174). Architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham, in particular, frames his discussion in terms of a much earlier critique of the professionalization of architecture, instigated by W. R. Lethaby in the early twentieth century, whilst Dana Cuff (1991: 112) discusses the enculturation process when a new graduate joins what looks increasingly like a toxic workplace, more than thirty years after she conducted her ground-breaking ethnography of an architectural practice. Professional architects, she shows, are not expected to have time to pursue any interests outside of a narrowly permitted set of activities. They must be devoted to the discipline and the profession, without distraction. This is a model that persists in some places, and it is reproduced by the studio system. Curiously, in proposing a solution for architectural education, Banham discounts everything beyond the Western canon. This position, increasingly out of step with contemporary efforts to decolonize the curriculum, is not one I would subscribe to myself; nevertheless, Banham’s core idea, that architectural education acts primarily to socialize students into the profession, does hold true to an extent. It may need to change if practice is to free itself from the damaging influences of financial and short-term development priorities. This underlines the need to introduce elements into the architecture curriculum which cut across studio groupings. In our taught Masters programme, this crosscutting includes research workshops, professional studies groups, individual dissertations and externally facing projects. The workshop teaching brings together students from the various ateliers and is not tied to their ongoing agendas. It enriches students’ conversations and widens their understandings of each other’s approaches to architecture.

Workshop Teaching at MSA I am concerned here not just with the detail of the workshop I lead, but with the broader curriculum. Our two-year professionally validated Master of Architecture programme (commonly referred to as MArch) expects students to establish individual trajectories informed by their interests as future practitioners, while still conforming to regulatory pressures. Internal developments at MSA led to the creation of the workshops: research-led studio units which have gone by a number of different names in their seven-year history. Assisted by programme leader Sally Stone, we developed a space for the workshops in the first year of



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the MArch, with topics determined by ongoing staff research.1 The intention was to close the gap between research and teaching within a studio rather than a seminar context. This challenged some of the more academically oriented staff to engage with the physicality of studio, and to reconcile the often distant and jargon-heavy language of architectural theory with the realities of making things. The point was not to judge the performance of students by strict criteria of success or failure but to provide an opportunity for experiment and play. This playfulness would vary from workshop to workshop, but an essential element of the workshop I describe is what Johan Huizinga (2002: 60), in a work dating from 1949, called serious play (see Figure 7.1). In an increasingly closed and conformist programme, with students acutely aware of the financial investment in their education, the workshop opened a space within the curriculum for poetic sensibilities to grow and flourish. Crucial to this objective was the indirect nature of workshop tasks, which served to distract attention away from the imperative to solve problems, in favour of an immersion in the enigmatic (Benjamin 1999: 232). To this end, we have run workshops on the following topics, each from its own perspective and involving methods ranging from archival research, mapping and GIS to model-making and live projects: User Representations in Architecture (Alan Lewis) Transdisciplinary Urbanism (Deljana Iossifova) Large Data Architectural Research (Łukasz Stanek) Prefigurative Architecture (Leandro Minuchin) Architectural Counter-Projects (Isabelle Doucet) Lost Spaces (Tom Jefferies) The Age of MTV: Media, Urban Culture and Identity (Léa-Catherine Szacka) Postwar Infrastructure (Luca Csepely-Knorr and Richard Brook) Control and Display: Mapping the Bodies of Manchester (Stephen Walker) Remember Reveal Construct (Sally Stone and Laura Sanderson) My own, long-running and continually evolving workshop, ‘Filmic Architecture’, was an opportunity for me to revive my interest in film and architecture, dating back to my earliest research projects.2 This workshop has operated in parallel with others I have designed focusing on architectural drawing (such as ‘Hard and Disagreeable Labour’, named after John Ruskin’s description of learning to draw) and the ways knowledge is produced in architecture (‘Knowledge Production in Architecture’, which built on some discussions from the Knowing From the Inside research project as well as on

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Figure 7.1  Using architectural toys to develop designs. Toy-play employs a distancing strategy that encourages students to think with alternative structural logics, including Charles and Ray Eames’s interlocking planar structures with ‘House of Cards’, Kuma Kengo’s ‘Tsumiki’ timber elements, ‘Blockitecture’ building blocks and Rocca isometric playing cards. Photo courtesy of the author, November 2016.

my continuing engagement with architecture and anthropology). The ‘Filmic Architecture’ workshop, however, has proved to be both durable and adaptable, even in the Covid-19-blighted academic year of 2020–1. Compared with other workshops I have run, ‘Filmic Architecture’ produces fresh results every year, continually surprising and delighting me with the inventiveness of the students who take part in it. I have some personal history with this. In the final year of my own architectural education, I was struggling with the design of a cinema, having produced the design exclusively through sequences of acrylic paintings depicting perspective views of the project. Their opacity made it difficult for many critics, and



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I was asked to spend more time on the project under the supervision of the late Professor Per Kartvedt, a notoriously mischievous raconteur well known across the Glasgow architecture scene and largely responsible, with Jonathan Charley, for revitalizing the intellectual agenda of the Masters programme at the University of Strathclyde. This was to prove an important intervention and, in my continued work on the project, I discussed the way I saw its various perspectives being held together by elements from cinematic theory. I had begun reading Eisenstein’s essays on montage theory and found many parallels with architectural ideas of the threshold. This led to Kartvedt’s supervision of my thesis on the topic, taking key concepts from film and looking at their architectural implications: what did narrative theory or ideas of spectatorship enable us to think about in architecture? The work was supported by funded research on Scottish documentary pioneer John Grierson3 but was eventually abandoned as a doctoral project when a studentship became available elsewhere.4 The resulting MPhil (Lucas 2002) has therefore always represented unfinished business, and I would frequently use cinematic metaphors and examples to illustrate ideas when speaking with students or working on later research. This early project established much of the language of my research and, some years later, I found myself wondering if this might also be beneficial to my own students at MSA.

Films as Precedents Resort to precedent is a recognized way, in architecture, of examining and learning from existing buildings. Similar to, but carrying less weight than, the use of precedent in the legal profession, architectural examples might demonstrate particular uses of materials, planning and organization, or details such as windows and thresholds. These precedents are used as proof of concept since, unlike other disciplines where some degree of mass production is the aim, architectural objects are too large to operate with prototypes. In the case of the ‘Filmic Architecture’ workshop, however, we used films as precedents – as ideas to think with. Scenes were carefully selected to describe key ideas in each session of the workshop. These would vary from year to year, but with an aim to go beyond the accepted canon of what is generally accepted as ‘architectural cinema’: films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) or Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), all of which cast long shadows over the field. I could not avoid them all, of course, and I opened with a discussion of alternative spatiality in film, using key scenes

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from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). These latter examples were selected for good reason. In the first, Godard’s strategy for appropriating Eddie Constantine’s portrayal of the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution5 mirrors his approach to the city of Paris, in which he shows us only the modernist anonymity of the city, not its familiar landmarks and boulevards. He excises everything that makes Paris unique and identifiable, giving us the monstrous city of Alphaville in its place. The second example is Tarkovsky’s loose retelling of the Strugatsky Brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic, in which a mysterious and unexplained event has created the Zone: a space where the laws of causality have broken down. At the centre of the Zone is the Room where a visitor’s greatest desire is said to be granted. As in Alphaville, the science fiction is enacted with minimal technical means: editing, tension and the reactions of the guide – the Stalker of the title – are used to express the dangers of the Zone without showing them explicitly. Navigation of this space is unclear; the direct straight line is impossible even when the destination is visible. The Stalker ties rags to metal bolts and uses these as rangefinders in a manner that recalls Ingold’s (2000: 327–40) contrast between wayfinding and navigation. The Stalker knows how to find a way through the Zone where its shifting nature would render a static map meaningless. My third example of spatiality comes from an early film of George Lucas which builds on familiar science fiction tropes of a subterranean society under authoritarian rule, in which behaviour is controlled and regulated by prescribed mood-altering drugs. The film’s soundscape is one layer of spatial expression; another layer is provided by a prison scene where the soundstage is stark and white – there are no details, just other prisoners who enforce the mental state of imprisonment upon themselves and each other, a social constraint similar to Foucault’s (1995: 195–228) discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon. The film’s hero THX 1138 – having discovered that once free of his drug regime he can exercise free will – simply walks in a straight line to make his escape. The first workshop task was to make a retroactive storyboard of the filmmaker’s works. Scenes from a number of films were selected and the conventions of simple storyboard drawings were used to break these sequences down. This is an analytical process which requires of students to learn a simple, new representational language with comic-strip style sequences and movement arrows showing the action in each scene. This was then developed through further iterations by layering soundscape and dialogue, using detailed movement notations and making architectural drawings such as plans to show



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sequencing analytically. The storyboard task subtly built the visual vocabulary of the students who were new to film studies and asked them to understand what makes their chosen director’s work different from that of others (Figure 7.2). Interesting conversations ensued around the ways in which directors in the Hollywood system would make use of its sophisticated codes: what marks out a director such as Steven Spielberg from the masses of other directors operating within the same system? Sound is an element of cinema often neglected in architectural and filmic discourses; there is, however, a distinctive spatiality to the designed soundscape of cinema. Taking some ideas from the work of Michel Chion (1994) and from Walter Murch’s (2001) writings on sound in film, common interests quickly emerged with more architectural writings such as by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue (2006), who look to extend the scope of architectural sound beyond the controlled environment of the auditorium, suggesting that sound can be designed for deliberate effect. Starting from an appreciation of the messiness of sound, they analyse how it is produced and give instructions for replicating its effects. Films such as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) explore the role of sound in building the cinematic image. The narrative involves a British sound recordist who has been invited to an Italian studio specializing in horror films and follows his descent into madness as he works with increasingly gruesome sounds for an unpleasant film. The film opens the

Figure 7.2  Example of storyboards from Archontia Manolakelli’s preparatory work for a House for Hayao Miyazaki.

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black box of cinema’s use of sound: audio recording is increasingly divorced from the filming of scenes. In fiction cinema, re-recorded dialogue and accentuated sound effects are effaced from the film when it is screened, but a great deal of artifice is used to produce this effect. Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974) is also helpful in exploring the potential of sound. The espionage narrative involves a team attempting to listen to a couple who meet in a crowded city square. The technology of sound recording is a feature of the narrative, with the film’s protagonist developing technologies and strategies for isolating and capturing the sound from a great distance. The opening shot of the film explores diegetic (or in-world) and extra-diegetic (overlaid like a soundtrack, not belonging to the world of the story) sounds, eventually revealing through audible glitches that the sound approximates what one of the surveillance team has been recording. Other films such as Bong Joon-Ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds (2012) offer masterclasses in depicting the disturbing nature of sounds and their effects on the residents of dense apartment complexes. The idea of noise as unwanted sound has its own history and is here connected to the history and discourse on noise abatement societies and other controls over noise in the city. A further theme of the workshop was embodiment; here, the works of Agnes Varda and Claire Denis proved particularly helpful. As with the theme of sound design, the forms of embodiment in cinema can be instructive to architecture, which has a long history of conceptualizing the body: from the well-known geometric rendering of Vitruvian Man, through Le Corbusier’s idiosyncratic Modulor of 1948, the various standardized bodies in the New Metric Handbook (1979–2018 editions) and Neufert Architects Data (1936– 2019 editions), to the more nuanced and inclusive work by Jos Boys (2014). Cinematic ideas of the body extend the possibilities of architectural thinking significantly: the idea that cinematic images have tactile and haptic qualities helps students to think about how bodies are made to conform to societal expectations, about the relationships between architecture and people and about various aspects of race and gender. Film theory dealing with embodiment has some of its foundations in Dziga Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye, which positions the camera as a mechanical eye. More recent works such as Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye (2009), Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film (2000) and Steven Shaviro’s Cinematic Body (1993) further explore body-like uses of the camera in cinema, along with the ways active audiences identify with the characters of a film. Students in the workshop



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were asked to engage with the parallel between ideas of the body, respectively in architecture and in cinema, in order to diagram or notate the various expressions of the body in the work of their chosen director. This might be the broad combination of slapstick and martial arts in Jackie Chan’s films, the subtleties of relationships in Wong Kar Wai, or the gradual conformity of a character to the masculinities of Shane Meadows’s social realism. Architectural skills of diagramming and mapping were also used to develop ideas of temporality in the students’ chosen films. Whilst we might presume that architecture has less flexibility than cinema when it comes to time, a number of lessons and discussions opened up here. Time-travel narratives offer the most direct route into the topic, but the structure of cinema also allows for various flashes forward and back, as well as for time-eliding scenes: making things present through their absence. Films such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) employ sophisticated ways of breaking the presumed cinematic device of twenty-four frames per second down to a series of still frames which can still be read as movement whilst telling a story involving apocalyptic wars, time travel and an obsession with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The exercise of diagramming was taken seriously. Picking up on Marco Frascari’s Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (2011), the notion of exercise itself was revealed to be of considerable pedagogic value. The exercise is a preparatory activity, one which increases one’s capacity for action and affirms bodily knowledge and muscle memory. Architectural exercise, then, can be thought of in a similar manner to conventional physical exercise. Tasks of diagramming and notation exercise architects’ skills of graphic communication, equipping them with approaches of potential application to subsequent design projects. Unravelling a film such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) or Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004) helped students render complex structures explicable and clear. Other aspects of temporality were explored though the study of comedic timing in the films of contemporary filmmaker Edgar Wright, whose studied use of musical cues in Baby Driver (2017) provided one student with a great deal of material to work with. Temporality remains an important field for research in architecture, and it features strongly in studies of informal architecture as well as adaptive reuse. Others, such as architect Bernard Tschumi (1994), borrow freely from Sergei Eisenstein’s understanding of the layered temporality of a film scene by reusing his orchestration diagram from an essay on ‘Vertical Montage’ (Eisenstein 2010). All of this contributes to presenting temporality as something that can be manipulated architecturally through the

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design of thresholds between rooms, through the pacing of a space or through peeling away its layers of history and potential. Further activities included the detailed examination of the filmmaker’s production design, noting the manner in which characterization is achieved by selecting the environments inhabited by persons in the film. Examples from Hays Code6 Era Hollywood, at a time when what were deemed to be immoral acts were prohibited from being displayed on screen, are particularly interesting in this regard as they make use of specific devices in order to suggest events and characterizations which could not be shown directly (Albrecht 1986). Steven Jacobs (2013) takes this into a more explicit exploration of film and architecture, in his exploration of how Alfred Hitchcock used houses as representations of the psychological states of his characters. Art direction is at its most obvious in costume dramas and fantasy cinema, but more subtle production design is present in contemporary settings where the dressing of a set belonging to a group of characters can represent their relationships without interrupting the flow of the narrative. Various strategies are used. Where the setting is unfamiliar, the production design gives us familiar elements to allow us to imagine life there, validating the story-world as one which can potentially be inhabited. If this believability is ruptured at any point, the result can be to disengage the audience from the film. Certain genres use the setting as a character in its own right, such as in shutroom detective stories or horror films where the house in which the story unfolds acts explicitly against the protagonists. Production design entails the deliberate construction of a material culture, and this can be explored by students in designing a simple room for their chosen director as an initial design exercise. Other tasks were used to build the students’ portfolios with graphic and modelled understandings of the filmmakers they had chosen to work on. The final steps would take students into familiar design processes where architectural precedents were now chosen to connect their understandings of cinema back to existing architecture, and thereby to form a model of how they might begin to design the house for their director. A brief would also be written, but instead of the usual schedule of accommodation with its requirements for living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms and so on, the house might require rooms for different emotional states, rooms for having fights in or for other unorthodox purposes. Responses to the task included distributing the ‘house’ across a series of pavilions, specifying it as an urban site or landscape, or deciding that the house is a library or watchtower instead of a dwelling.



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With the brief in mind, designs were produced using students’ existing skills. These would be sketchy, lacking the detail of their main studio projects, and were made in a wide variety of ways. The models might be physical or digital, a series of drawings, or film clips and footage shot by the student. They were organized by returning to the storyboarding task from the beginning of the workshop, prior to producing a short film of 3 to 5 minutes.

Translations from Cinema to Architecture It is not necessary here to dwell at length on the content of the workshop. It covered a range of topics from narrative structure through spectatorship, miseen-scène, production design, genre and other aspects of film, and went on to apply these to architecture. At its core, the workshop asked students to select a film auteur – normally a director – for whom they wished to design a house. This was a deceptively simple task: using the oeuvre of the director as a means for generating the building’s brief, workshop participants would analyse the director’s films using a range of graphic means of description. The ultimate aim was to develop a full analysis of the films and their architectural implications, followed by the design for the house which was to be built as a model and produced as a short film.7 This task was variously interpreted. Most students worked with a physical model, translating the findings of their spatial analysis of the films, but a few interpreted the task in alternative or hybrid ways. Filming the model liberated it from some of the usual constraints: for example, where a model is normally designed to be relatively robust and transportable, a filmed model can be relatively ephemeral. The models also began to find their way out of the studio, in one instance being filmed in a park, borrowing the light, background and ambiance of the open-air setting through the model’s windows. Other models were subjected to even more extreme treatment, including being buried in sand or set alight. Computer tools were frequently used as well. Quick and simple software such as Sketchup has certain advantages over the more complex packages, allowing various approaches to the model-making task which involved ubiquitous offthe shelf elements, as in the case of a student who represented the Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai through a complex arrangement of interpenetrating and permeable spaces, all given veracity through encrustation with sign boards, extraction fans and other banal elements. The digital model was the basis for

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Figure 7.3  Drawing of Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic Hong Kong by Peter Sun Yin.

subsequent hand drawings and a physical model to reinstate an autographic quality to the material (Figure 7.3). Another approach was the hybrid model. A strong tradition persists of hybridizing models with drawings, but in this case the model would be spliced with footage, whether deliberately shot to further explore the idea of the project or extracted from the films in question. Sometimes the hybridization would only include a soundtrack, by borrowing aural cues from an environment or film to add atmosphere. This project entailed a form of translation, a tried and tested creative prompt to work laterally and across disciplines. The architecture student would have to conduct a great many operations in processing and analysing the spatial qualities of a film, while also considering which thematic and formal elements can be extracted and built upon.8 The experience of translation is parallel to this. It shows that the sentence is not a mosaic, but an organism. To translate is to invent an identical constellation, in which each word is influenced by all the others and, bit by bit, profits from its relation to the whole language. (Ricoeur 2003: 91)

Translation is an important operation in model-making, performed repeatedly throughout the process. The most obvious translations, of course, are of scale and materials, but models can also have diagrammatic and schematic intentions, calling for the translation of concepts into three dimensions either by tight editing of the content of the model or by mapping



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Figure 7.4  Model of Miyazaki’s cinematic space interpreted as a Japanese gravel garden by Archontia Manolakelli. The model was manipulated in real time and filmed in order to represent different episodes in the film studied.

parameters onto the three dimensions of physical space. The model is thus more than a composite of individual parts. Rather, as Ricoeur says of the sentence, it is an organism, presenting an alternative assemblage showing the parts in their reciprocal relationships to one another (Figure 7.4). Elsewhere, Ricoeur discusses interpretation and exegesis. Rooting our study in hermeneutic theory might be seen as a return to the notion of the model as an object to be read and interpreted, but in practice the model has as much potential to be that interpretation in the first place (Ricoeur 2000: 13). Ricoeur argues that interpretation is the work of uncovering meaning. The process of making the model and then of demonstrating it in the short film is thus an interpretative act. Communicating an understanding of the films by way of model-making constitutes what Ricoeur (2000: 3) calls an interpretative community, in which the conveyance of meaning is a social act. In contexts of communication, these filmed models are part of a continuum on which lie all other architectural models ever produced. Once a model is made, it can be compared to others, and can both be an interpretation and be interpreted itself according to historical context and contemporary conditions. With this we can begin to see how model-making can play a role in the production of architectural knowledge, and conceptualized more broadly not just as a manual and material but also as a cognitive practice. A growing body of research looks to consider drawing and inscriptive practice more generally as legitimate forms of academic knowledge production, inaugurating a graphic anthropology backed up by scholarship on and with architectural drawing. What

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we have shown is that if drawing can be a way of doing architectural research, then the same goes for model-making as well.

Temporality, Narrative and Architectural Film-Making Over the course of the workshops, some variations have been introduced, and each year has had a slightly different focus. In 2017–18, students were asked to focus more on the film-making aspect of the process by distilling the narratives from their selected films and sharing these with colleagues. Students would then imagine ‘what if ’ scenarios such as: What if Edgar Wright rather than Hitchcock had directed Psycho? What if Lars von Trier, and not Christopher Nolan, had directed Dunkirk? This resulted in some particularly innovative projects which made exceptional use of filmmaking as a way to explore architecture. A sophisticated approach was taken by Liam Bright in his study of Edgar Wright, where the initial focus was on the director’s use of familiar English small towns, with Hollywood-style narratives transplanted into them for comedic effect. The films Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End form what is known to fans as the ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ after a repeated sight gag in all three films. This might seem like unpromising ground for a Masters thesis in architecture, but a seriousness was brought to the ways in which comedic timing is used in the films (Figure 7.5). This study of comic timing is explored with reference to the film’s sound design, where a diagram shows the overlapping elements which come together to build an everyday scene. Here, much of the comic effect comes from the rising tension of an overly long scene, the repetition of that scene and the confounding of expectations, all of which are temporal qualities. Bright’s work reinterprets scenes from the Hitchcock original, but links them to a piece of popular music to reinterpret them as black comedy rather than psychological horror. The flippancy of the approach is key here, as it is taken seriously in the same way that

Figure 7.5  Sound and timing analysis of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead by Liam Bright.



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Huizinga does in his notion of play: by approaching the task in a straightlaced manner, much nuance can be extracted. Kassandra Koutsoftas’s project on Lars von Trier tackled one of the most challenging and controversial of contemporary filmmakers, focusing not on his Dogme ’95 works, but on later films forming a ‘Trilogy of Depression’ with Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. Koutsoftas’s approach was grounded in narrative archetypes, leading to the production of a physical deck of Tarot cards. The symbols were based on an understanding of the films’ narrative tropes, allowing for the production of new narratives from alternative arrangements and readings of the cards. The Tarot project exploits several filmic ideas and theories as well as architectural sensibilities. The card readings are relational, relying on their juxtaposition with other symbols as well as positions in an overall spread of cards where order, orientation and position carry further meaning. By diving into the symbolism of von Trier’s narratives, the project – rather than simply exploring a single story – developed a system for producing narratives (Figure 7.6). Working with a colleague’s synopsis of Nolan’s film Dunkirk, from which details of the period and of the conflict had been removed, Koutsoftas went on to edit a short film to depict contemporary feminist struggles, tying existing footage to her Tarot archetypes.

Figure 7.6  Major Arcana of a Tarot deck designed after Lars von Trier’s Trilogy of Depression, by Kassandra Koutsoftas.

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The cinematic architectures produced by students on this iteration of the workshop suggest a focus on temporality through the vehicles of narrative structure and sound design. This opens further opportunities for architectural exploration, beyond heavy symbolism and ornamentation. If we could begin to understand architecture’s inherent temporality in greater detail and approach this as an avenue for design, the results could have enormous potential. Crucially, in our time of climate crisis, when architects and developers are being asked to prioritize renovation over new building, the reconstitution and reassembly of existing parts into unrecognizably new forms could prove particularly instructive. The next step is to apply this logic elsewhere, taking understandings from cinema’s temporal poetics and using them to reinterpret architecture.

Conclusion: Unlearning, De-socializing, Dis-culturing In many ways, the workshop described here brings about the very opposite of what Banham means by socializing the architect: it involves subtly unlearning how to conform to the architectural studio and looking afresh at the potential of architectural education to challenge conformity. Whilst many architectural colleagues have been more explicitly political in the design of their syllabi, proposing solutions to real-world problems, engaging with communities, reinterpreting archival materials and challenging students in many other ways, this workshop occupies a space on the periphery of the discipline, looking out towards works, texts and approaches from outside both film theory and architecture. Instead of the slack that Schneider (2015: 93–4) called for, the aim of the workshop might better be described by the idea of smuggling. How could we smuggle something back into the curriculum: some joy and reverie, something unexpected that does not need to be measured or immediately useful? The choice of film was a considered one; it might as well have been literature or fine art, but film’s possibilities as both entertainment and art make for intriguing results. As many great projects have drawn on lighter comedic or romantic works, as on the works of weighty art-house directors, and these have called for different angles of analysis. Students develop skills of interpretation, translation and analysis which inform their later projects. By framing the assignment as the design of something that will never (or in some cases, could not possibly) be built, some pressure is taken off the outcome, allowing more attention to be paid to refinements of communication. By really looking and listening closely,



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students hone their observational skills and make direct contact with theories and ideas which they can integrate into their subsequent design practices. In the ‘Filmic Architecture’ workshop making is mobilized as a form of analysis. Openness is key to the success of the project, as it allows for the expression of the student’s spectatorship, their translation and what the films mean to them. All of this is framed academically by engaging with the literature on each director, genre or national cinema tradition, with students borrowing approaches from one another in an open exchange. Critique remains an important part of this. By taking the task almost too seriously, visual languages are significantly refined over the course of the workshop, as arbitrary gestures are replaced by studied movements generated from a deep knowledge of one filmmaker’s oeuvre. In a drawing, every line can contain meaning; each mark is an opportunity to say something. As with their drawings, the students’ models and films are executed with equal care and deliberation. The ultimate aim of this de-socializing and de-culturing of architecture students is not to satisfy predetermined criteria, nor is it to encourage innovation – a term now assimilated to the managerial model of practice. It is rather to offer an opportunity for exploration.

Acknowledgements Thanks to all the students of the ‘Filmic Architecture’ workshop from 2014 to the present, whose innovative work has always been a highlight of the academic year. Particular thanks to those who agreed to allow their work to be included here: Liam Bright, Kassandra Koutsoftas, Peter Sun Yin Lee and Archontia Manolakelli.

Notes 1 The workshops would later be coordinated by colleagues Isabelle Doucet and LéaCatherine Szacka. I am now working on the next iteration of this curriculum as part of my role as Head of Humanities with overall responsibility for history and theory in both the BA and MArch programmes. 2 I hope the reader will indulge me a little here, as this biographical detail establishes a foundation for the workshop to follow. 3 Produced as a now obsolete CD-ROM and partly available via the SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) website, https://www.scran.ac.uk.

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4 This studentship would lead me towards anthropology and working with this volume’s editor, Tim Ingold. As with all things, interests come full circle and my own version of graphic anthropology is bringing me back to filmmaking, alongside drawing, as a research practice, in my current project to examine the architectural qualities of Japanese festivals. 5 This character is borrowed from a series of detective stories in a contemporary setting. Here, however, he – and the actor playing him – are transplanted into a science fiction world of banned emotions, exiled weapons experts, police states and artificial intelligences. 6 The Hays Code operated between 1934 and 1958 as a form of self-censorship by Hollywood film studios. The code prevented filmmakers from showing violence or sexual activity and included a wide range of controversial clauses. The abandonment of the code is often ascribed to Some Like It Hot, as it challenged the code by featuring cross-dressing throughout the film. 7 A selection of student films is available at the author’s blog ‘Distracted Attention’: https://dist​ract​edat​tent​ion.wordpr​ess.com. Work from the 2020–1 cohort can be seen at: https://rmw2​021.show/works​hop/fil​mic-archi​tect​ure-vi. A showreel from 2020–1 is available at: https://mmut​ube.mmu.ac.uk/media/Fil​mic+Archi​tect​ ure+2020-21+showr​eel/1_o​4amr​pgb. 8 This idea of translation is developed more fully in Lucas (2006: 187–223), with reference to drawing and inscriptive practices.

References Albrecht, D. (1986), Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies, Santa Monica, CA: Hennesey + Ingalls. Augoyard, J. F., and H. Torgue (eds) (2006), Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Banham, R. (1990), ‘A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture’, in R. Banham, A Critic Writes, 292–9, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barker, J. M. (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, W. (1999), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, 211–45, London: Pimlico. Boys, J. (2014), Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Chion, M. (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. Cook, P., and C. Hawley (2004), ‘In Conversation’, in M. Chadwick (ed.), Back to School (Special Issue, Architectural Design 74 (5): 6–12), London: Wiley-Academy.



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Cuff, D. (1991), Architecture: The Story of Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eisenstein, S. (2010), ‘Vertical Montage’, in S. Eisenstein, Writings Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, 327–99, London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury. Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish, New York: Vintage Books. Frascari, M. (2011), Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing, London: Routledge. Huizinga, J. (2002), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. Jacob, S. (2015), ‘Opening the Black Box’, in D. Froud and H. Harriss (eds), Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education and the British Tradition, 173–8, London: RIBA. Jacobs, S. (2013), The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, Rotterdam: NAi/010 Publishers. Lucas, R. (2002), ‘Filmic Architecture: An Exploration of Film Language as a Method for Architectural Criticism and Design’, unpublished MPhil thesis, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. Lucas, R. (2006), ‘Towards a Theory of Notation as a Thinking Tool’, unpublished PhD thesis, Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen. Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murch, W. (2001), In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press. Pollak, M. (ed.) (1997), The Education of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ricoeur, P. (2000), The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, London: Athlone. Ricoeur, P. (2003), The Rule of Metaphor, London: Routledge. Schneider, T. (2015), ‘More Slack Space, Please!’, in D. Froud and H. Harriss (eds), Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education and the British Tradition, 87–96, London: RIBA. Shaviro, S. (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, J. (2019), Narratives of Architectural Education: From Student to Architect, London: Routledge. Tschumi, B. (1994), The Manhattan Transcripts, London: Academy Editions. Udovic-Selb, D. (1997), ‘Between Formalism and Deconstruction: Hans Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Aesthetics of Reception’, in M. Pollak (ed.), The Education of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge, 239–66, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Xie, Y., A. Yaqoob, W. Mansell and S. Tai (2019), ‘A Qualitative Investigation of Stress Related to Studying Architecture in the UK’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 20 (1): 3–20.

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Selected Filmography Alphaville (1965), Dir. J. L. Godard, France: Athos Films. Baby Driver (2017), Dir. E. Wright, USA: TriStar Pictures. Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개) (2000), Dir. J. H. Bong, South Korea: Cinema Service. Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Dir. P. Strickland, UK: UK Film Council & Film 4. The Conversation (1974), Dir. F. F. Coppola, USA: The Directors Company. La Jetée (1962), Dir. C. Marker, France: Argos Films. Memento (2000), Dir. C. Nolan, USA: Newmarket Films. Neighboring Sounds (O Som ao Redor) (2012), Dir. K. Mendonça Filho, Brazil: CinemaScópio. Primer (2004), Dir. S. Carruth, USA: StudioCanal. Stalker (Сталкер) (1979), Dir. A. Tarkovsky, Russia: Mosfilm. THX1138 (1971), Dir. G. Lucas, USA: American Zoetrope. Vertigo (1958), Dir. A. Hitchcock, USA: Paramount Pictures.

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Searching for the Ethos of a Lost Art School Judith Winter

This search is motivated by an abiding belief in the possibilities of art schools. It is a response to many conversations over recent years around the future of art education and the significant role it has played in weaving the social fabric. I contend that the art school environment has been particularly potent in times of crisis and uncertainty. I hope to show how its ethos and pedagogic principles have been altered in the context of political, social and regulatory changes over the last century. Whilst I begin by lending my voice to all those who defend the philosophy of education more broadly, or who seek to reclaim the values of the civic university, my primary concern is to reignite some significant debates about the divergent philosophical traditions of both the democratic art school and the civic university, and to show why they matter for our collective futures. The present Higher Education (HE) environment stands at some distance from my own student experiences first on the Foundation Course in Middlesbrough 1984–5 and then at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art from 1985 to 1988, and from my formative teaching in the1990s.1 In 2016 I returned to teaching, following a career working in the arts as inaugural curator of fine art for Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) and Head of Arts for Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). My approach to teaching is based largely on formative experiences at Riverside Studios and Lisson Gallery, London, where I was influenced through exposure to many pioneering artists and curators working in the expanded field of art practice. Returning to the teaching environment threw a spotlight on the considerable changes that had taken place over recent decades. I continue to be driven by a core belief in the transformative potential of the art school environment but am also convinced of the need to turn away from current demands for the management of knowledge and to listen again to the pedagogic principles that were foundational to modern art school reform.

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I commence with the story of one of the most iconic and multidisciplinary art and design schools of the twentieth century, namely the Bauhaus. Rather than treating the Bauhaus as a chapter in the history of art and design, I want to draw attention to the relevance of the ideas it promoted to our present struggles. They suggest ways to move beyond orthodox pedagogic principles which have tethered education to a very different economic model and regulatory regime. I will show how the art school environment, prior to its merger with the university, powerfully exemplified other ways of knowing, born of the immediate experiences of observing the world and of handling and forming materials. It could, I suggest, offer a reservoir of experimentation on which future generations can practically draw to challenge current social, aesthetic and educational norms along with the instrumentalization of knowledge on which they rest.

The Bauhaus The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, following the First World War, as a response to the failures of its revolutionary aftermath. Its timeline coincided with that of the Weimar Republic and of the artistic and intellectual circles that developed around it, all responding in their own ways to the complex and contradictory social changes of the era and their human impacts. Based on a recognition that the task of the next generation was to find a way to maintain a balance while responding to the upheavals of the age, it sought to create a learning environment that would enable a generation of artists and designers to take on the challenges of modernity, not simply through training in the arts but by preparing for creative citizenship in its broadest sense. The teaching faculty, assembled by its founding architect Walter Gropius, included some of the most experimental artists, designers and makers from across Europe.2 While their approaches were diverse and often contradictory, the staff were bound by a common purpose to reintegrate art and everyday life and to give renewed impetus to craftsmanship and cooperation in a technological age. This then laid the foundations for modern art education more broadly. The school’s ethos was both utopian – born of social idealism – and pragmatic, rooted in the desire to build a better future without losing sight of the realities of everyday life. Indeed, it is no accident that all three directors of the Bauhaus were architects: Walter Gropius (1919–28), Hannes Meyer (1928–30) and Mies van der Rohe (1930–3). Most significantly, they were architects interested in ways of working that were relevant in a modern age, and in how the conditions of living



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and working impact on the social environment. This had an important bearing on the way the school was conceived and in turn responded to its successive physical locations. The name Bauhaus was clearly intended to convey much more to European sensibilities than a stylistic design movement. Both bau (building) and haus (house) were to be understood in their broad philosophical sense, to encapsulate the ideas of building character, practical skills and imaginative capacities, alongside a sense of belonging. The name also invokes the medieval notion of Bauhütten, referring to working communities of builders and stonemasons, united in a common spirit. Understood in these terms, the educational environment was concerned primarily with life philosophy, and with learning as a social process; this is also strongly ingrained in the association of the German word for education (bildung) with the neo-humanist tradition. Bildung is derived from Bild (image) in the senses not only of ‘sign’ and ‘reproduction’, but also of the way we form ideas. The notion of bildung was strongly reconnected to educational philosophy in Europe through the experimental approaches of the Swiss educational reformer Wilhelm Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who challenged the separation between intellect and practical skills, placing the emphasis on processes of formation and on the relationship between hand, eye and heart – or in other words, between practical, visual and affective aspects of life (Brühlmeier 2010). Pestalozzi’s ideas had a profound impact on the social and educational reformers who advocated the holistic growth, personhood and self-understanding of the individual, as a means to develop the senses of social responsibility and empathetic judgement. This became central to the Bauhaus ethos in the muchquoted motto: ‘head, hand and heart’. Pestalozzi’s thinking found its way into the pedagogic approaches of the art school and of those artist-educators whose belief in the value of education was grounded in his philosophical approach. It accords closely with the educational pragmatism we associate, in North America, with such figures as John Dewey, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. This is one reason why the Bauhaus émigrés found such strong support in the United States, in their advocacy of an education based on personal freedom and responsibility rather than externally imposed authority. For them, what mattered in education was not just our knowledge of the world, or the way we see it, but how we shape, form and handle our relationships with the world. The leading pedagogic Masters of the Bauhaus – namely Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers – were clearly not alone in their endeavours to overturn received hierarchies of knowledge. These ideas

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were also being explored in different ways by many philosophers of the time, such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who, in common with artists associated with the Bauhaus, were deeply interested in exploring phenomenal experience: consciousness, judgement, perception and emotion. Also resonating with the Bauhaus ethos was the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, a contemporary of Heidegger likewise tutored by Husserl. For Plessner, whose key philosophical concepts focused on ways of knowing, human positionality, irrealis moods and authenticity, life expresses itself through its sentient forms. This was a theme he explored in a visiting lecture at the Bauhaus ‘Concerning Mankind and Environment’ (über mensch u. umwelt) as well as in an address to students at the Deutscher Werkbund entitled ‘The Rebirth of Form in the Technological Age’ (Wiedergeburt der Form im technischen Zeitalter).3 The interests of philosophical anthropology in humanity and technology, anthropomorphism, the construction of identity, sensory experience, and the nature and limits of interpretation and communication, were also at the heart of the Bauhaus. Indeed, in its close relationship with philosophical anthropology, the Bauhaus offers a prime example of the correspondence of anthropology and art. Besides these philosophical and anthropological convergences, the Bauhaus also found common ground with thinkers of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, particularly Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kraucauer, all of whom had been drawn together by the experience of enforced exile and the perceived failures of social and political revolution in Germany following the First World War. Together, these artist-educators and social visionaries set out to explore how technological changes brought about through mass communication (radio, printed matter, photography and film) affected the senses of self and aesthetic judgement. Many, forced into exile following the rise of the Nazi Party, found new teaching positions in other countries where they carried on their practices while adapting to their new environments. This is perhaps why our world altered so radically; not just through technological changes, but in the ways artists, architects and designers shaped and formed collective futures through practices of everyday life. The Bauhaus was not, of course, the only example of its kind. There were others, including Vkhutemas, set up as a response to the October Revolution in Moscow. Then there was Kala Bhavana in Shantiniketan, India, founded, by Rabindranath Tagore, which fused the pedagogic theories of the British Arts and Crafts Movement with ancient forest traditions and, in common with the Bauhaus, challenged the traditional supremacy of fine art by redefining the



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relationship between industry and craftsmanship. We might travel to Seikatsu Kōsei Kenkyushō (‘Institute for Life Configurations’), Tokyo (1931–9), often described as the ‘Japanese Bauhaus’. We can also follow the movements of artists and staff from the Bauhaus, whose corpus of pedagogic experiences became the basis of the curriculum at Black Mountain College (1933–57); or discover the foundations of ecological design in the pedagogy of Moholy-Nagy, who founded the New Bauhaus at the Chicago School of Design (1937–49). All shared a common purpose, to educate for life rather than to secure professional validation.4

Remembering the Art School Let me now scroll forward to the present day, and to my own search. Between 2013 and 2018 I set out to explore the relationship between art school pedagogy, anthropology and social reform, as part of the Knowing From the Inside (KFI) project led by Tim Ingold. The founding premise of KFI is that ‘knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a material world already populated with objects, but grows from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with the world around us’.5 Just like the Bauhaus, KFI was launched at a time of great ideological and economic crisis. All of us in the project were concerned with matters of knowing and with the issues facing many artist-educators working in HE today. Our core tenet was that education is not limited to a period of time and a specific place in which we magically transform into adults but is rather an enduring life process. Paul Klee, in his Creative Credo of 1920, had described this process as cosmogenesis.6 In my own approach to the KFI project I wondered if we could reclaim the educational vision that Klee, along with the other Bauhaus Masters and their intellectual associates, had advocated almost a century ago. Like the Bauhaus, the KFI community was seeking correspondences between anthropology, art, architecture and design, with the potential to contribute to systemic change. The challenge was to imagine an education dedicated to building students’ confidence and skills, to enable each to find their own voice, readying them to meet new challenges, to make informed and empathetic aesthetic, social, ethical judgements, and to imagine and bring about an alternative future. It called for a focus on how educational environments might respond to an epistemological crisis exacerbated by digital overload. Whose knowledge do we

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trust? How do we navigate the accumulation of knowledge? How do we make judgements that are really our own? How do we ensure that different disciplines stay true to their principles, whilst also creating the conditions for new ideas to grow and develop? This is where my research began, and it was what drew me to the KFI community. To develop these lines of inquiry, however, I needed to address one core challenge. How could I write with any critical authority about perceived changes to the philosophy of art schools or matters of knowing without returning to the foundations of teaching? I recall an incidental conversation which touched upon this return, with the artist-educator David Harding. Together with Sam Ainsley and colleagues, Harding was a co-founder of the environmental art course at Glasgow School of Art. Now retired, he directed me to a text he had written in 2004 entitled: Who Took the (He)art out of the Art Schools?7 Our conversation was brief, but meaningful. While I agreed that the future of art schools does not lie in turning back the clock and that like all our institutions they are in need of serious reform, what stayed with me through that conversation was a deep sense that something very special had been jettisoned. Two questions arose from this that have continued to guide me in my search. First, what can we learn from the experiences of artist-educators who radically altered the ethos of art education? Second, how might this help us reimagine the future of the art school in an era of radical uncertainty? Harding was longing for an art school in which teachers enjoyed greater autonomy and independence than they do today, where they belonged to an artist-led community and worked with and not for their students, where teaching was a calling rather than a profession, and where students were searching for ways to work together to shape and reform their futures. These were environments in which artists of all creeds, including architects, makers, designers, writers, dancers, musicians and poets, would meet, across generations, with other intellectuals, scientists and social visionaries, with the common purpose to create a different future that would give renewed meaning to life. As the artist-educator and Bauhaus Master Moholy-Nagy (1947b: 12) put it, in a prophetic statement, the task for future generations is to ‘bring the intellectual and emotional, the social and technological components into balanced play; to learn to see and feel them in relationship’. The Bauhaus, as Stephen Madoff (2009) reminds us, represented the last systemic shift in art education, which is why it is such a significant touchstone for the creative community today. Those who brought it to life were reclaiming art education and aesthetic experience for a newly emerging democracy, and



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in doing so, they were challenging existing hierarchies of knowledge. The art school, then, was a rebuke to what was widely regarded as the stifling inertia of the Art Academy and its separation of art from the experience of everyday life. In the new art school the priorities would be radically altered: to finding beauty in mundane environments and everyday practices, and to connecting imaginative and intuitive capacities through the attunement of sensory perception and the craftlike combination of observational and practical skills. Over recent years I have listened to many symposia and public events that voice a sense of longing for what has been lost – above all for the disruptive imagination of those artist-educators who helped us challenge convention and prejudice and, even more importantly, to connect the emergent generation of artists and designers with other social and educational reformers. Across the arts, there is a palpable need to reconnect artists, designers and social thinkers not only to their art school roots but also to the foundational beliefs and values that fuelled educational reform. It is true that the art school ethos Harding and others describe has not completely disappeared; it is still audible if we listen closely to those in the frontline who are actively involved in shaping the curriculum and the dynamics of teaching. Here, at the grassroots, art schools continue to create strong bonds across generations of students for whom education remains a life philosophy tethered to neither ideology nor religion. This does not however show up in student surveys. For such surveys answer to the demands not of the art school but the contemporary university, in which education is no longer a life-enhancing process but a form of service provision. The shift from art school to university, as so often in our present times, was dictated by top-down policy decisions. The resulting changes did not address issues of social and educational reform; they were rather aimed at dealing with the crisis in employment brought about by deindustrialization. The implications are clear: meaningful change can only emerge from within the dynamics of organization, through collaboration. It cannot be imposed from above.

What Is Education For? In 1997 Ronald Dearing, chancellor of the University of Nottingham, was commissioned by the then Conservative government, with the support of the incoming Labour government, to report on the state of HE in the UK, and to make proposals for reform.8 Its ninety-three recommendations were to fundamentally

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change the landscape of HE across the country. The recommendations covered funding, expansion and the maintenance of academic standards. With its focus on the management of expanding institutions, the Dearing Report set out enhanced mechanisms of regulation and administration, data capture and quality assurance. It also linked HE policy to other economic agendas, along with wider attempts to create parity in education, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (the PISA accord), which enshrined a commitment by governments to monitor the outcomes of educational systems in terms of student achievement, in accordance with common standards. The Dearing Report defined the objectives of education in terms of the skills deemed relevant to adult life in a market-led society and economy. Its instrumentalization of knowledge, as a means to the ends of personal advancement and wealth creation, ran completely contrary to the educational philosophy of art schools, with their emphasis on human life experience. The shift in educational priorities signalled by the Report was reinforced by the recommendation to introduce tuition fees, backed by low-interest government grants and loans. These ‘strategic aims’ can be seen as responses to a global market still committed to a model of growth, and to the transformation from an industrial to a service-based economy. In both universities and art schools the recommendations were to have a significant impact on the relationship between teachers and students, as students were turned from makers into consumers of knowledge, and teachers rebranded as knowledge-providers. In its attempts to negotiate a new relationship with the university, the art school had to find a way to deal with an expansion defined by management in terms of increased student numbers. This not only altered the ethos of the curriculum but also had a devastating impact on the physical environment. Once built together with its community, it was now to be sold off or managed by governing bodies and private partnerships, whose interests had nothing to do with the philosophy of education and everything to do with economic survival. While educational institutions across the board were forced to abandon many of their foundational principles, for the art school the loss was particularly acute. It had been built on the foundation of collective practice, shaped as an integral part of the learning experience. The way art, architecture and design students used to live and work together would inform the ethics of production, how materials are crafted and objects are used in everyday life, and of course how future environments look and feel. Students were helped to build their own knowledge and to become more confident in making judgements; this was particularly important for artists, designers and makers whose key task is to



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imagine, shape and realize new possibilities. The newly professionalized world of knowledge provision, however, enforces quite different pedagogic priorities. The PISA accord pressurized university leadership to ensure parity and to drive up what it calls ‘standards of excellence’ in teaching and learning. Yet it largely failed to acknowledge the experience of those actually involved in teaching students, and to recognize that education, both in art schools and more broadly, requires an understanding of principles integral to diverse disciplines and carried forward over generations. From a grassroots perspective, all education is a continuous process that relies heavily on the relations of trust created between students and staff. This trust can never be managed or manufactured; it grows from a different kind of ecology. It also depends on human judgement rather than data analysis. But current systems of management have been put in place precisely in order to avoid human judgement, to standardize human experience and to sift and sort individuals according to these standards. This accounts in large part for the ongoing tensions between the art school and the university, and for the exodus of many key artisteducators who no longer have either the energy or the appetite to protest. The result is an educational environment divided between those committed to the new principles of professional management, and those who continue to believe that education should give room for students to experiment, take detours and learn how to navigate issues and challenges. These philosophical tensions have led to a profound schism. Those artist-educators who continue to work in art schools are left to navigate the schism through a form of diversionary practice that acknowledges institutional boundaries but works within these limits and protocols to retain some degree of independence and freedom. This echoes the ideas of Michel de Certeau (1984), who describes the tactics people use to subvert disciplinary powers. A tactic, for de Certeau, is not intended to be destructive, but is launched with the aim of retaining a measure of self-control or integrity. It ‘must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse’ (de Certeau 1984: 25). The performance of everyday life is made up of endless attempts to navigate what you know will otherwise be closed down. While it is possible to keep playing this tactical game in the short term, in the long term it often becomes untenable, leading to either circumnavigation, conflicts of interest or dissent. The challenge is to sustain a place within the system whilst trying to retain a sense of truth and integrity. Many in the frontline of teaching are attempting to do just that: helping

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the next generation imagine and realize a better future, while caught in a system not of their making that is resistant to any alternative. The Dearing Report was intended to offer a twenty-year vision and action plan for HE. These two decades are now at and end, and our present institutional and educational crisis creates an opportunity to explore alternative ways forward. However, before calling for systemic change we need to think carefully about our vision for the future by returning to the practical dynamic of the learning environment. This calls for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the university and the art school.

The Art School and the University The art school and the university emerged from very different philosophical traditions. The university grew from a desire, rooted in the humanism of the Enlightenment, to accumulate knowledge about every aspect of the world, including its geology, natural history, peoples and civilisations, through the collection and classification of empirical data and their rational explanation. This is the basis for traditional academic studies, across the disciplines of both the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities. The democratic art school, by contrast, is rooted in life philosophy (Lebensphilosophe) and the study of the natural world (Naturphilosophie). Born of a rejection of historical tradition, it set out to challenge conventional academic wisdom; its priorities were the attunement of sensory perception, the cultivation of material awareness and the development of imaginative capacities. Its vision was future-facing, looking for ways to rupture tradition and orthodoxy. The avant-garde of artists and designers who came together to establish the art school, whilst often discordant in their views, was united in its purpose to imagine things differently. In this they had much in common with maverick scientists and philosophers who were also, in their different ways, struggling to articulate an organicist or process cosmology that would heal the split between nature and spirit imposed by Enlightenment humanism. Among the latter were some of the greatest names of twentieth-century science and engineering, including Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Ludwig Prandtl, Hans Driesch, Raoul H. Francé and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, along with philosophers such as Helmuth Plessner, Patrick Geddes and Alfred North Whitehead. All were polymaths in the strict sense of the word, who shared a multidisciplinary vision capable of drawing together complex bodies of



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knowledge to solve specific problems, along with an attitude to work and life bound up with the idea of experimentation. Like their illustrious philosophical and scientific contemporaries, the founders of the democratic art school were not advocating deviation merely for its own sake. They were rather driven by a pragmatic disposition to find ways of instigating change without resort to violence, by slowly and incrementally fostering transformation from within. One cannot understand much about the Bauhaus or any comparable art school by examining its curricular frameworks or statutes, or by trying to pin down or account for its many diverse pedagogic principles. One can learn a great deal more by reading pedagogic sketchbooks and lecture notes. These clearly express a concern to enable each and every student to un-learn preconceptions and to challenge prevailing assumptions. There is a strong emphasis on allowing students to find their own voice and to use their particular perspectives to contribute to emerging citizenship. The overriding purpose of the art school was to provide the tools that would enable future generations to craft a different kind of world, appropriate to our times. This kind of art school, indeed, has more in common with the idea of the civic or ‘red brick’ university as envisaged by nineteenth-century reformers, who were concerned to equip students with skills for the ‘real world’, often linked to engineering, architecture and industry. Many of the civic universities in major industrial cities grew from Mechanics Institutes, originally formed to provide adult education in technical subjects as well as to introduce an adult working class to the arts, with the express aim of enabling its students to improve their lives and together to build a better future. There were moments of accord in which the art school overlapped with these institutions and subscribed to much the same values. Thus, for many years, the art school served as a bridge between technical training, craftsmanship and design. This relationship flourished after the Second World War, especially as a kind of counterpoint to the ‘real life’ of those without the means to go on grand tours or to seek out exotic experience. They could travel, instead, in the imagination. The bridge allowed movement in both directions: while some students found ways to exercise the creative freedom to imagine alternative futures, others found the means to apply their knowledge and practice to meeting present social and economic needs. The effects of this two-way movement can be clearly seen in the impact that artists, architects and designers have had over the last century across music, fashion, design, visual communications, film and television, and popular culture more widely. All of this, ultimately, had its source in the democratization of art and design schools. This is also why art schools have always played a

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particularly significant role at times of uncertainty and crisis, which trigger a search for things that make life meaningful. This longing has often been described by artists, writers and social reformers, among them Walter Benjamin (1999) in his text Experience and Poverty, published in Prague in December 1933, in which he set out the dilemmas facing a generation navigating modernity and the existential crisis of loss of faith in religion and all forms of authority. Today, however, the art school has been disconnected from its democratic origins and subjected instead to an academic regime that is closed to alternative ways of knowing. The frameworks of teaching and research imposed by this regime are intended to justify and accredit professional practices through various metrics and ranking criteria. They require of lecturers and researchers to spend most of their time categorizing and accounting for their methods, while those tasked with evaluating the results find themselves caught in a Kafkaesque system largely of their own making. In this educational climate, as educational theorist Ronald Barnett writes: Academics are called upon to be responsive to the wider society, to have even greater consideration for their students and to be accountable in their teaching practices. In shaping their programmes of study, universities are asked to engage with constituencies outside the academy, especially the worlds of commerce and industry, and are asked to ensure that their research projects have impact on wider society. (Barnett 2003: 561)

This is a fluid and uncertain environment. Not only are the boundaries between disciplines and the wider world dissolving. Concepts of teaching, research, curriculum development and academic freedom are also disrupted and contested, laid open to multiple perspectives. Rereading Barnett’s ‘Universities in a Fluid Age’ today, I am reminded of my present situation, in which my own internal doubts mirror the prevailing uncertainties pervading not only the universities but also society as a whole. Solutions do exist, however, if we are prepared to rethink the ecology of HE in ways that might open to a wider spectrum of approaches. To make a start on this, I return to the Bauhaus.

Reclaiming the Foundation Course (Vorkurs) The Bauhaus curriculum was imagined as series not of stages but of concentric circles; one steps into the learning environment at the outer circle, by learning how to un-learn. The journey moves not progressively upwards but inwards



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toward the centre. All artists, makers, designers, architects and those studying a foundation course in art and design in Britain have either knowingly or unknowingly experienced the force of Bauhaus education. My own journey into the arts was built upon this educational model. Nowadays mythologized as a rite of passage into the arts, it has recast the futures of countless students whose knowledge was formed through practical and immediate experience, that is, through learning by doing. The Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary art course) was conceived by the artisteducator Johannes Itten and developed and co-taught by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. The key aim of this foundational year was twofold: first, to challenge assumptions and prejudgements and second, to help give directions for future study. Most of the pedagogic exercises helped students understand the things to which they were personally most drawn – for example, whether they preferred working with materials or colour and form, or whether they were pulled more towards painting, sculpture, printmaking, fashion and textiles, or towards stage craft and performance, visual communications, the applied arts, photography and moving image. The course worked because it provided an alternative to university education at the same time as offering a way beyond the confines of technical education. The pedagogical principles of the Bauhaus arrived in Britain by way of the networks and associations forged by the Bauhäuslers as they sought refuge from political conditions in their home country. Gropius, in particular, forged a relationship with the chief education officer of Cambridge, Henry Morris; another very significant conduit was the art historian Herbert Read, who had also visited Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, in Germany and later, Chicago. The Bauhaus philosophy was welcomed by an emergent generation in Britain who were seeking radical reform of social and aesthetic values and was particularly championed by artist-educators in the industrial heartlands of the north of England. Key advocates included Olive Sullivan at Manchester School of Art, who was connected to the Bauhaus through conversations with Read and the influence of his book Art and Industry (Read 1935), artists Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at Kings College, Durham, and Tom Hudson and Harry Thubron at Leeds College of Art. Thubron’s wartime experience of teaching soldiers informed his vision for a new ‘post-war world’, and from 1946 he began to develop new courses at Sunderland School of Art. Together with Hudson, he introduced experiments with heavy industrial techniques, such as welding, casting and moulding new materials like plastics. In common with the Bauhäusler, these artist-educators in Britain dissociated themselves from the traditions and methods of the Academy. Like Itten,

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Albers and Moholy-Nagy, they were interested in creating an atmosphere in which students could improvise and work in open and intuitive ways. They all knew of the Bauhaus experiment; Pasmore and Hamilton referred directly to the creative credo of Paul Klee, to the Pedagogic Sketchbook first published in English in 1953, and later to The Thinking Eye, translated into English in 1961 (Klee 1953, 1961). Hamilton also refers to the writing of Laszlo MoholyNagy, whose book The New Vision, written to inform a wide public about the principles of Bauhaus ethos, was first published in English in 1938, followed in 1947 by Vision in Motion (Moholy-Nagy 1938, 1947). However, while many ideas came through these English-language publications, the most tangible link was by way of the Bauhaus émigrés – most notably Gropius, who arrived in London in 1934, followed by Moholy-Nagy in 1936 and Marcel Breuer in 1937 – and their meetings with artists and designers who were also pushing for social and educational reform. Significantly, the proposal to introduce a foundation course as the first, introductory year of the three-year Diploma in Art and Design (equivalent to today’s BA degree) came from artist Sir William Coldstream, through his leadership of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (NACAE). The Coldstream Report of 19609 radically transformed art school pedagogy by creating a bridge between secondary education and degree-level courses. Allowing a significant moment of pause, beyond school life and before an unknown future, it enabled students to challenge previously unquestioned assumptions and to overcome their existing circumstances, not just physically but emotionally and intellectually as well. Avoiding disciplinary specialism, the foundation course instead drew students’ attention to values deemed essential for all creative practices, including observational drawing, lessons in colour and form in relationship, material studies and spatial dynamics. This was tempered with lessons that were both practical and experimental, devised to free students from the constraints of theory, habit or convention. The course provided the tools and skills for students to find their own ways, to discover and learn through the experimentation in response to others. As a student myself, attending art school between 1984 and 1988, I did not fully appreciate the significance of these experiences at the time. Looking back, however, I now recognize that I was caught up in a process of reform that was taking the art school in a direction radically different from both the academic establishment and the system of vocational or technical training. Most of us who managed to secure a place in art school were bound together through the common experience of the first-year foundation course. It created a kind of



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kinship, or a shared sense of belonging, that continued long beyond art school and laid the basis for future collaborations. However, the foundation course had a much broader potential, as it was devised to avoid premature specialism and to enable students to understand something of their own disposition and skills. At least until the late 1980s, this had an important influence on teacher training. Many future progressive educators gravitated towards the course, looking for creative ways to fuel the curiosity of the next generation. It was widely acknowledged that those wishing to pursue a professional career in teaching should be encouraged to take a detour, either to spend a few years travelling or to take a year off to do some form of community work or to undertake a foundation course. This had a profound impact on the perceptive and imaginative capacities of teachers and seeped more broadly into the education system. Evidence for this can be found in the National Arts Education Archives, held in the former Bretton Hall College of Education, now part of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which was the home of an exemplary model for teacher training after the Second World War.10 The archives reveal a close-knit network of artist-educators, which served as a crucible of art school reform and as an incubator for educational policy which profoundly influenced subsequent generations.

Art as Experience The importance of the foundational course is that it opens the imagination to possibilities far beyond our present circumstances. Offering an alternative way of knowing to that cultivated by the university, it draws on the bildung tradition of self-cultivation rather than professional training. As the concentric circles of the Bauhaus curriculum reveal, it is essential for students to find a direction of travel that is right for them, to recognize where their talents lie and where their dispositions and capacities might lead them. This notion of self-discovery is part of the zeitgeist of German culture, exemplified by the bildungsroman (coming of age genre) of which Goethe is the acknowledged founder, as in Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and the sequel Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre (‘journeyman years’). The Wanderjahre novel speaks clearly to the disillusionment with conventional education, the hierarchy of knowledge and the ways individuals are captured and pigeonholed. The protagonist undergoes a journey of self-discovery and heartbreak, which enables him to escape his empty life of bourgeois convention and search for truth and meaning beyond transient

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pleasures or predestined expectations. While the Bauhäusler were warned by their School Director not to steer too far toward the romantic and esoteric posturing of some of their intellectual forbears, they were nevertheless urged to reclaim the notion of aesthetic experience as integral to everyday life. In the field of educational philosophy, this kind of reclaiming of aesthetics from eighteenth-century transcendence is not widely discussed or understood. However, it finds an echo in John Dewey’s Education and Democracy, as well as in his Art as Experience: the former, published in 1916, was written during the First World War; the latter, dating from 1934, appealed to the many artisteducators and émigrés arriving in the United States to rebuild their lives after the enforced closure of the Bauhaus in the previous year (Dewey 1966, 1987). Reading these two publications together offers some insight into the relationship between education, democracy and aesthetic experience. It is perhaps because faculty and students fleeing the conditions of Nazi Germany found common cause with those navigating the extreme uncertainty and social and economic impacts of the Great Depression that Dewey’s philosophy resonated so strongly with artist-educators interested in art as a living and social practice. Many of those associated with radical art education or the avant-garde were seeking in their own ways to describe the arts’ core concern with the relation between freedom and social responsibility. The conditions that finally forced the Bauhaus to close reveal much about the role of lived experience in creative ecology. Staff and faculty were branded as ‘degenerate’ or ‘un-German’. They were marginalized and rebuked by a public which lined up to visit the exhibition Entartete Kunst, organized in 1937 by Adolf Ziegler and the Ministry of Propaganda of the Nazi Party, opening first in Münich and then traveling to other cities in Germany and Austria.11 Modern artists associated with avant-garde movements such as cubism, Dada, German Expressionism, Primitivism and Russian Constructivism, along with the Bauhaus and other art schools across Germany which had adopted these approaches, were paraded as transgressive. They were shamed and sanctioned, forbidden to teach, to exhibit and, in some cases, even to make art. Having grasped the power of print and audiovisual communications in the new epoch of photography, film and radio, the German Ministry of Propaganda made maximum use of these media to exalt values of racial purity, along with the senses of community, national pride and family life. By contrast, the artistic avant-garde was recast as elitist, morally suspect and incomprehensible. The criticism of the ‘moderns’ in conservative circles was shared by many; indeed, the phrase ‘degeneracy in art’ was taken from a much earlier speech in the



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Prussian House of Representatives in 1913 and follows the argument that modern art is ‘gutter painting’ (Grossemalerei) and a form of aesthetic violence against the state. The Weimar Republic of the 1920s was viewed with disgust by the Nazi Party, and the art and art schools it promoted were regarded as cradles of barbarism. By reappropriating the Classical forms of Greek Antiquity and reinventing vernacular folk traditions, the Party sought to prove that modern art had been contaminated by Jewish influences. Modern and abstract art was thus portrayed as contrary to the German spirit. For those who survived and managed to escape, these experiences were to play a formative role in the reform of the art school and the pedagogic principles and ethos on which it was based. These émigrés included the Bauhaus artisteducators Josef and Anni Albers and Xanti Schawinsky, later joined in the United States by the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and by László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and Herbert Bayer. For them, Dewey’s ideals of individual freedom and discovery must have felt like a beacon of renewed hope. But Dewey’s philosophy was also foundational to the establishment of Black Mountain College, conceived in 1933 by John Andrew Rice after he had spoken out against the regime of knowledge and governance at Rollins College, Florida, where he held a faculty position. Dismissed by the College, Rice began planning a different kind of learning environment. He was joined at Black Mountain by a cohort of staff from the College who had been similarly dismissed for refusing to sign a ‘loyalty pledge’, and by those students brave enough to follow. Black Mountain eventually grew in numbers, as students defected or were attracted to this alternative model. The pedagogic ethos and principles of this new independent college included the following: (1) that artistic and aesthetic experiences are central to democracy; (2) that learning emerges through immediate experience and independent study; (3) that governance should be shared by faculty and students; (4) that education extends through social relationships and endeavours beyond the classroom; (5) that oversight and judgement should be limited to participants in the collective experience; (6) that visitors should be invited from diverse disciplines. This ethos, and these principles, were never far from my thoughts as I was working with the KFI community in Scotland, but I also took them with me through travels to Weimar, Berlin and Dessau and to Chicago, Aarhus and Copenhagen. The line from the Bauhaus, through the philosophy of Dewey, to Black Mountain has provided me with a path to follow in my desire to imagine an educational environment based on process rather than objectification (Egglehöffer 2015).

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In my teaching, too, I often invite students to look again at images from the Entartete Kunst Exhibition – to revisit that moment when books were burned and artworks culled – using the images to catalyse a conversation about the value of the arts and why it is so important to allow education in art to grow from the grassroots of practice. The all-too-evident parallels with the crises of the present lead us to realize that counterculture emerges not just as a reaction to one set of events, but in response to more enduring currents of history. The dynamic environment of the art school, forged by its participants, thus plays a key practical role in propagating hopes and fears and in imagining things to come, in ways that go much further than self-expression, representation or utility.

Art and Possibility As a curator, researcher and artist-educator, I have a deep interest in how the arts come together through their differences. This has been central to my own curatorial practice and stems largely from an interest in the utopian impulse or attitude of artists, designers and social thinkers, across all creative disciplines, who are prepared to hold up a mirror to the world, helping us to learn lessons from the past or to imagine things to come. It also finds an echo in the writing of the Jewish émigré Ernst Bloch, in his encyclopaedic work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (‘The Principles of Hope’), published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959. I find Bloch’s commitment to the future deeply moving, particularly when we remember the tragic experiences and unspeakable events that give force to his words. Most of all I feel an abiding sense of humility, as Bloch reminds us that it is possible to take another path if we are willing to do so. Here are his opening words, introducing the first volume: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us? Many only feel confused. The ground shakes, they do not know why and with what. Theirs is a state of anxiety; if it becomes more definite, then it is fear. Once a man travelled far and wide to learn fear. In the time that has just passed it came easier and closer, the art was mastered in a terrible fashion. But now that the creators of fear have been dealt with, a feeling that suits us better is overdue. It is a question of learning hope … The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is



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that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong … The work against anxiety about life and the machinations of fear is that against its creators, who are for the most part easy to identify, and it looks in the world itself for what can help the world; this can be found … Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable. (Bloch 1996: 3)

While every epoch has its own theories of education and every generation faces a different set of challenges, the sense of longing and hope for the future is echoed in an image of Bauhäusler taken almost a century ago, which I reproduce below (Figure 8.1). The photo marks a brief moment in time when those gathered there were celebrating the end of one era and the beginning of another. The school in Weimar is about to be forced into closure through political pressure. Behind the scenes, Walter Gropius – architect and first director of

Figure 8.1  Art students on the occasion of a Bauhaus party, 29 November 1924, Weimar. Photo courtesy of Louis Held, Weimar, © Bauhaus Archiv, Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin.

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this radical experiment in art school reform – is in the midst of imagining a new Bauhaus, to be designed and built together with his architectural studio, staff and students. The new school will carry forward the pedagogic ethos in viewing its spaces of learning as an integral part of the curriculum. For a few years, from 1925 to 1932, it will bring new life to the industrial region of Dessau and offer its students a living and working environment where they can experiment together and find ways to contribute to social reform. Blissfully unaware of things to come, the students hold up placards from a performance, displaying the words GEMÜTSBEWEGUNG (‘emotion’), SPANNUNG (‘tension’), AUFTRITT (‘appearance’), LEIDENSCHAFT (‘passion’), PAUSE (‘pause’), KATASTROPHE (‘tragedy’) and ABTRITT (‘withdrawal’). These are to serve as prompts for the audience. This is one of those images that reminds us that education is not about providing tools for professional advancement or about creating a hierarchy of merit, but about life. Its purpose is to provide students with the imaginative and practical skills for living, so they can navigate uncertainty and live and work in cooperation with others while searching for alternatives towards a more sustainable future.

Bauhaus Pedagogy: A Bibliographic Note An up-to-date bibliography is available from The Bauhaus Kooperation, which also holds the most significant collection of primary sources. It comprises the three Bauhaus institutions that maintain collections – in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar; see https://www.bau​haus​koop​erat​ion.com/. The huge accumulation of publications focusing on the Bauhaus presents a problem for anyone seeking to navigate through it. To put this in perspective, when I began research for Bauhaus 1919–1933 / Language of Vision, at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2007), the list of extant publications exceeded 4,000 titles. For students, I have found it useful to focus directly on material published by the artist-educators themselves. Alongside the Manifesto, written by Walter Gropius in 1919, The Catalogue Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923, first published in Weimar in 1923, was recently translated into English for the Bauhaus Centenary. Alongside a carefully translated facsimile of the original Manifesto, the catalogue describes the pedagogic practices of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Gertrud Grunow, conveying the diverse pedagogic perspectives of the teaching faculty. Gropius’s



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preface explains the structure of the state-run Bauhaus and how he radically reformed the art school. The book is designed by László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. In addition, a series of ‘Fourteen Bauhaus Books’ (Die Bauhausbücher), edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, were published during the School’s lifetime, between 1925 and 1930. These reveal the dynamics of the School and the pedagogic values outlined in this chapter.

Notes 1 My formative experiences of teaching were in the Foundation Course of the Architecture Association, London, in 1992, through the invitation of the installation artist Julia Wood (1953–2003). This collaborative, site-specific project with students had a profound impact on my own approach to pedagogic practices and exhibition making. The project created a highly experimental, independent learning environment, the core premise of which was to challenge the established ways in which architects were taught about space and materials. These teaching experiences took place off-site in a warehouse building in Bermondsey Street, in the Bankside area of central London. 2 As a leading architect and advocate of creative reform, Gropius invited international figures associated with prominent artistic groups in Germany – such as Der Blaue Reiter in Munich and Der Sturm in Berlin – and members of the Russian avant-garde to teach at the school. His earliest appointments included the artists Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Gerhard Marcks and Gertrud Grunow. In the following years, Gropius hired other leading artists such as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky. His conviction was that these artists would be best placed to challenge students’ ways of seeing and knowing. Teachers at the Bauhaus, Weimar, were called ‘Masters of Form’ or ‘Masters of Craft’ rather than ‘Professors’. As the school progressed and Bauhaus students graduated, they were elevated to the rank of ‘Junior Masters’, in order to secure its continuity. Teaching was supplemented by guest lectures, with speakers from a wider circle of Bauhaus associates. 3 These lectures by Helmuth Plessner have remained largely unknown, and only resurfaced in 2001 in a publication entitled: Politik – Anthropologie – Philosophe: Aufsätze und Vorträge, edited by Salvatore Giammusso and Hans-Ulrich Lessing (Giammusso and Lessing 2001: 71–86). My initial attempts to close-read Plessner’s address for the Deutsche Werkbund were supported through early discussions with filmmaker, visual anthropologist and KFI associate Christine

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Moderbacher, and through correspondence with scholars and translators at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Bauhaus Archive, Berlin. 4 The transnational movement of those associated with the school has been greatly expanded as a subject of investigation throughout the Bauhaus Centenary Year, most notably in initiatives such as Bauhaus Imaginista and Art School Fundamental, Dessau, which created a forum for Bauhaus scholars to respond to the way its principles meshed with those of a cosmopolitan avant-garde across the world. Two points of reference may also be helpful: first, for those interested in art education in Britain, A Continuing Process: The New Creativity in British Art Education 1955–65 (Thistlewood and Nairne 1981); second, Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, edited by Stephen Madoff, Senior Critic at Yale School of Art (Madoff 2009). Both works draw on the work of Bauhaus émigrés in Britain and the United States and show why the continuity matters. 5 See https://www.abdn.ac.uk/resea​rch/kfi. 6 The corpus of Paul Klee’s unpublished writings and pedagogic sketchbooks can be found at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Suffice to say here that Klee opposed the notion of static form (Form-Ende). The entirety of his attention was dedicated to tracing ‘formative forces’, leading him to describe humankind’s relationship to the environment as cosmo-genesis (form in movement). 7 Available at: https://www.david​hard​ing.net/?page​_id=82. 8 The Dearing Report is available at: http://www.educa​tion​engl​and.org.uk/docume​ nts/dear​ing1​997/dear​ing1​997.html. 9 Available at: https://discov​ery.natio​nala​rchi​ves.gov.uk/deta​ils/r/a7191​ 4a7-74c3-44ee-8fe3-88a16​f718​c9c. 10 Bretton Hall College was founded by Alec Clegg in 1949. It combined specialist training in the visual arts, design and performance arts with teacher training, primarily for those in primary education or specializing in art instruction at secondary level. It was merged with the University of Leeds in 2001 and closed in 2007. 11 A number of exhibitions have returned to the Entartete Kunst. For me as a curator, the most significant introduction was through the Documenta Archives of the Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, in the City of Kassel, established by the painter and academy professor Arnold Bode in 1955 with the aims to bring Germany back into dialogue with the rest of the world after the Second World War, to present art that had been labelled by the Nazis as degenerate and to explore the roles of curatorial perspectives and institutions in transforming cultural attitudes. The first Documenta was a retrospective of works from major movements (Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Der Blaue Reiter and Futurism), alongside those of many of the Bauhaus artist-educators, including Kandinsky, Klee and Schlemmer. See: https://www.docume​nta.de/en/about#16_​docu​ment​a_gg​mbh. The publications



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I have found most insightful include Enwezor (2016) and Ulbricht (2009). This is an unfolding area of research, as institutions explore in depth the provenance of work associated with the unlawful appropriation of art objects. For those who wish to return to the original material, see ‘Entartete’ Kunst: digital reproduction of a typescript inventory prepared by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, ca. 1941/1942, (V&A NAL MSL/1996/7), London: Victoria and Albert Museum, January 2014, available at www.vam.ac.uk/entartekunst.

References Barnett, R. (2003), ‘Universities in a Fluid Age’, in R. Curren (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, 561–8, Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, W. (1999), ‘Experience and Poverty’, in M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2.2, 731–6, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bloch, E. (1996), The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brühlmeier, A. (2010), Head, Heart and Hand: Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Certeau, M. de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Free Press. Dewey, J. (1987), ‘Art as Experience’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 10: 1934, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Egglehöffer, F. (2015), ‘Process Instead of Results: What Was Taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College’, in E. Blume, M. Felix, G. Knapstein and C. Nichols (eds), Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933–1957, Leipzig: Spector Books. Enwezor, O. (2016), ‘The Judgment of Art: Postwar and Artistic Worldliness’, in O. Enwezor, K. Siegel and U. Wilmes (eds), Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, 21–41, Munich: Haus der Kunst. Giammusso, S., and H.-U. Lessing (eds) (2001), Politik – Anthropologie – Philosophe: Aufsätze und Vorträge, Munich: Fink. Klee, P. (1953), Pedagogical Sketchbook, New York: Frederick A. Praeger Klee, P. (1961), Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, ed. J. Spiller, trans. R. Manheim, London: Lund Humphries. Madoff, S. (2009), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1938), The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, trans. D. M. Hoffman, New York: W. W. Norton.

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Moholy-Nagy, L. (1947), Vision in Motion, Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald. Read, H. (1935), Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design, London: Faber & Faber. Thistlewood, D., and S. Nairne (ed.) (1981), A Continuing Process: The New Creativity in British Art Education 1955–65, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Ulbricht, J. H. (2009), ‘“Timeless Gothic” Instead of “Dentist-Style with Housing Cubes”: The National Socialist Opposition to the Bauhaus’, in Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model, 355–61, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

9

Dada and the Absurd: Pedagogies of Art and Survival Anne Douglas

Unlearning in a Culture in Crisis In the early 1970s Allan Kaprow, artist, theorist and educator, wrote three essays entitled The Education of the Un-artist I, II and III. From the late 1950s Kaprow had been instrumental in the development of what he called ‘Happenings’, and was part of the Fluxus movement, which had taken up the mantle of Dada. By way of example, one of his pieces took the form of a textual ‘instruction’ which read: CHARITY Buying piles of old clothes Washing them in all-night laundromats Giving them back to used clothes stores

With his Happenings, Kaprow suggested that artists should open up to life beyond the art establishment. Writing in 1971 he stated with some irony: Sophistication of consciousness in the arts today is so great that it is hard not to assert as matters of fact that the LM mooncraft is patently superior to all contemporary sculptural effort; that the broadcast verbal exchange between Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the Apollo II astronauts was better than contemporary poetry that with their sound distortions, beeps, static and communication breaks, such exchanges also surpassed the electronic music of the concert halls; … That … etc., etc., … non art is more art than Art art. (Kaprow 1993: 97–8, original bold type)

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Kaprow not only taught in art schools throughout his career but his practice, particularly in the form of Happenings, had an important pedagogical dimension and his writing continues to be recognized as a key contribution to practice and pedagogy alike. Kaprow conceived his idea of the ‘un-artist’ at a moment when change was occurring in the United States at all levels: political, military, economic and educational. What he called ‘Art art’, in his view, was dying. It had lost its relevance and special status. It had lost audiences and had turned in on itself to the point that the art of the time only addressed the work of other artists. On the one hand, artists were only too keen to preserve Art art’s conventions, while also growing weary of them. On the other hand, Art artists had created such a hyperconsciousness of art in its everyday surroundings – possibly in response to Duchamp’s ready-mades1 – that everything and anything could be admitted as a work of art. ‘As Marshall McLuhan once wrote’, Kaprow (1993: 103) continued, ‘ “Art is what you can get away with.” ’ This was a moment when artists needed to change jobs, to ‘drop out’ and open up to life, blurring the boundaries between life and art. In his three-part essay The Education of the Un-artist, Kaprow drew attention to an epistemological crisis that revealed a still deeper crisis of society and culture – a crisis that was being reinforced in the educational practices of the time. The nation’s education system must take much of the responsibility for perpetuating and championing what’s wrong with us: our values, the good and bads, the dos and don’ts … ‘Work hard and you’ll get ahead’ is a guide not only for students but for educators. ‘Ahead’ means being head man … The threat of failure and dismissal for not being strong hangs over every individual from college president to school superintendent on down. (Kaprow 1993: 119–20)

At the heart of Kaprow’s concept of the un-artist lay the need to reinstate the transformative power of education in place of a system that was designed to replicate, in the life of the child, the values and mores of an adult world mired in competition and progress. Writing some fifty years later, a number of educational philosophers including Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, Gert Biesta and Tim Ingold, mirror Kaprow’s critique in commenting on a similar crisis of education in Europe. The recent document of the European Commission on ‘Rethinking Education’ (EC-document 2012) does not hesitate to put the emphasis right from the start



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on ‘delivering the right skills for employment’ and on ‘increasing the efficiency and inclusiveness of our education and training institutions’ … the starting point being that education is about ‘boost[ing] growth and competitiveness’. (Masschelein and Simons 2015: 147)

What might an education look like that keeps social and political assumptions of progress at a distance? Masschelein and Simons (2015: 147) imagine education as a site of renewal, a place to invigorate, rethink and reconnect generations in the ongoing creation of a common world. They closely follow the thinking of political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her essay of 1954 ‘The Crisis in Education’ (Arendt 2006: 170–93), in advocating a deliberate slowing down of educational processes. Unlike Kaprow, however, they propose a separate, protected space for education, free from the urgencies and needs of the world, in which younger generations can prepare to make themselves active and at home in the world of adults. Today, more than ever, constructions of progress are felt in society as an existential threat. Who would have imagined even a few months ago that the hypermobility on which the whole global economy had apparently depended, could have been brought almost to a complete halt by a tiny fragment of matter invisible to the human eye in the form of a virus (Latour 2020)? Sudden upheavals such as the current climate emergency challenge not just what we understand, but the way understanding evolves through experience, skill and the sharing of knowledge. In the current crisis we need to come to terms with the disjuncture between an education that perpetuates and champions all that is wrong with us, and an education that helps hold us together in our common but changeable world. It was this disjuncture that Kaprow wanted to inhabit through absurd art. Along with other established artists such as Joseph Beuys, Kaprow was part of the second wave Fluxus movement that sought to draw Dada from its roots as avant-garde art into everyday life. Kaprow transposed and adapted Dada-ist methods to his project of blurring art and life, aiming to address not just artists but the crisis in education as a whole (Kaprow 1993: 110–11). This makes his work particularly relevant to the present. What can the absurd in art contribute to education and learning in cultures of crisis? In what ways does it diverge from other experiential and experimental approaches to education and the values that underpin them, such as those proposed by Arendt, Masschelein and Simons, Biesta and Ingold, among others? Can the absurd provide ways to challenge the managerialist values that overwhelm content and creativity in current pedagogy?

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Knowing and the Absurd Kaprow began as an art historian and became an avant-garde artist. The push and pull between a relatively secure sense of the past from the history of art and a volatile present was rooted in Kaprow’s personal experience. He was writing at the height of the Vietnam War and the Protest Movement in the United States. As both an artist and an educator, his concept of educating the un-artist points to a refusal to be trapped in past knowledge while using this history as leverage to move forward, to act in the chaos of the fast-changing life that surrounded him. Kaprow’s thinking was deeply influenced by Marcel Duchamp and also John Cage, both of whom sought to embed art in everyday life through radical Dada-ist experimentation. In education, Kaprow followed the pragmatism of John Dewey, especially his 1934 essay on ‘Art as Experience’ (Dewey 1987), which had focused on the experiential nature of learning. However, for Kaprow the challenge of becoming an un-artist was never limited to individual experience. It could, in the right circumstances, bring individuals together to share in a process that had the potential to transform society and its institutions. The absurd offered Kaprow a clear alternative to existing pedagogical approaches and the values that underpinned them. How do we see absurdity in Kaprow’s work? ‘Project Other Ways’ (1969) offers a clear example. In this project, Kaprow was invited – along with Herbert Kohl, a prominent figure in progressive education – to support the introduction of art into the public school system in Berkeley, California. The programme, funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, was aimed at primary and secondary school pupils. The Berkeley Unified Schools District hosted the experiment (Allen 2016). This was a time not only of civil unrest but also when education was narrowly defined by the knowledge of reading, writing, maths and community studies. The pupils, a group of elevento twelve-year-old sixth graders in the final year of elementary school, were branded as ‘unteachable illiterates heading for permanent societal rejection’. They had been issued with cheap polaroid cameras for the afternoon to snap anything they liked (Kaprow 1995:153). Kaprow wondered why these pupils were so interested in words, especially rude ones. This was not what they had been led to expect. To address this, he made a surprising and undoubtedly controversial proposal: girls would enter men’s toilets and the boys, women’s toilets, and they would take photos of all the rude words and drawings they found. Kohl and Kaprow then built on this first



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tactic by lining the shop front where the project was sited with paper, and invited the pupils to make whatever graffiti they liked. The result was a rich collection of participants’ names, images and stories that were eventually expressed in full sentences. The project then entered a second phase, in response to the first, in which the group was given a set of remaindered early ‘Dick and Jane’ readers to rewrite and re-illustrate. The pupils’ work revealed their sensitivity to the (principally racial) stereotypes of the original text and its illustrations. This opened up frank discussions and possibilities for revision, not least including the reclassification of the pupils within the school system. ‘What can the un-artist do when [Art] art is left behind?’ Kaprow (1993: 110) asked in the second of his three ‘un-artist’ essays. His answer took him back to Duchamp and his ready-mades, in which art mimicked life and life mimicked art. Duchamp had posed a riddle to a public audience that intentionally disrupted any sense of what art might be. For example, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1964) is a common snow shovel, exhibited as artwork. In a striking gesture, it draws real life into the museum, not least through the title which focuses on the everyday encounter and attendant risks of shovelling snow rather than on the object itself. If the institutional framing of a snow shovel as an artwork is absurd, it revealed an even deeper absurdity in life, drawing attention to the elaborate systems that human beings build around value. Here, Duchamp playfully confused the categories art and life, effectively questioning and reconfiguring the relevance of the one to the other. Kaprow and Kohl copied Duchamp’s method, applying it in a new way, not to material objects but to everyday institutions, processes and operations. They worked with mimesis, in this case by encouraging the copying of graffiti as found in the public spaces of urban Berkeley. They engaged explicit forms of transgression, such as visiting public toilets to collect creative ideas and experiences. The resulting work reversed roles: the pupils had something important to say, to teach the adults, and the teachers learned what that was within a framework which supported communication between generations. Such reversals are frequent in the art of absurdity: the audience, not the artist, becomes the protagonist at the core of an activity, but under direction.

Play and the Absurd At first [children] enjoy school, often beg to go … But by the first or second grade, Dick and Jane discover that learning and winning a place in the world are not child’s play at all but hard, often dreadfully dull work. (Kaprow 1993: 120)

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Kaprow focused on the importance of play. If art was a practice of imitating a world that is continuously imitating itself, as Duchamp’s example of the snow shovel suggests, then it would not be enough for artists to simply create art, thus collapsing the tension. The real challenge lay in artists leading others in experiences that touch a deeper sense of what it might mean to be human, and feeding this back to energize the institution of art. The copy is never the same. A gap opens up in which something new emerges: new knowledge, well-being or surprise. In Project Other Ways the pupils copied what they had found, but the work did not stop there. The interplay between the activity that Kaprow and Kohl had set, the pupils’ responses and the context in which all the participants were working, opened up new understandings and social potential. It was this kind of gap that Kaprow increasingly exploited to create a shift from art as a revered object or artefact to art as a form of action and experience that could be liberating. It was important not to take the process too seriously, to engage ‘with gusto, wit, fun; it’s to be play’ (Kaprow 1993: 113). Kaprow set about designing quite particular, carefully constructed opportunities for participation. He created scores for activities that often framed a kind of riddle in Duchamp’s sense. These were apparently pointless activities. His unique contribution to Project Other Ways was ‘Six Ordinary Happenings’, scores for activities staged between 7 March and 23 May, 1969. Charity invited participants to buy second-hand clothes and wash them before returning them to the original store. Fine! involved leaving cars in public spaces until the police, who became unwitting participants in the experiment, started to issue fines. The pupils mimicked the actions of the police, writing reports and taking photos of the tickets and sending these with the fine to the authorities. Giveaway left piles of crockery in the streets and documented what was left the next day. Each instruction took the form of a ‘score poem’, beautifully arranged within a poster, with an open invitation to meet to anyone wishing to participate (Figure 9.1). Kaprow’s activities were part of everyday life, but stripped of their purpose and use they became disruptive and even farcical. Kaprow imagined education through absurd art as a way of playing at life in preparation for participating in it, both imaginatively and with humour. In a discussion of Kaprow’s work, poet and fellow artist David Antin commented: Absurdity in not a formal characteristic and is not part of a self-referential reading. It derives from the way a given action, situation or utterance fits, or more precisely fails to fit, dislocates or disrupts some conventional stable cultural or social understandings. (Antin 2004: xvii)



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Figure 9.1  Allan Kaprow, Six Ordinary Happenings, 7March–23 May, 1969. © Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Antin addresses here the wider question of what the absurd in art can contribute to education and learning. Human systems of value shape our lives and beliefs. Even though such systems have no inherent meaning, we hold onto them. Kaprow’s activities confront the futility embedded in everyday life, but not in a destructive, nihilistic way. Play and humour reassert the joy, pleasure and spontaneity of life. Consciously echoing Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by

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Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), Kaprow concluded his second essay on the education of the un-artist with a word on play: ‘As a four letter word in a society given to games, play does what all dirty words do: it strips bare the myth of culture by its artists, even’ (Kaprow 1993: 126). Kaprow got to the heart of the pedagogical intention and function of absurd art by building on Duchamp, acknowledging the past and teasing open the gap between past and present in ways that were vivid and unexpected. Irony and the absurd offer a safe space in which to face reality so that our deep attachment to particular habits of thought and action can be perceived in new ways. In appreciating that these habits are relative to other alternatives, and in attempting to see what matters, we may relax our hold on one set of values over another, and their hold on us, thus opening up to new possibilities.

Distinctive Pedagogies for Cultures in Crisis: Kaprow and Arendt It is instructive to compare Kaprow’s perspective on the crisis in education with the apparently contradictory perspective put forward some fifteen years previously by Arendt. Arendt (2006: 91) attributed the crisis specifically to an absence of authority – of those authentic and indisputable experiences common to all. Yet in Kaprow’s approach, authority – in the literal sense of civic responsibility – is exposed not just to question but to a degree of subversion, as for example in his Happening, Fine!. Arendt sought through education to protect new life in a space (the school) that is detached from everyday life, whereas Kaprow wanted to harness everyday life as an educational opportunity. Arendt was particularly critical of child-centred approaches in the progressive education of 1950s America, and her criticism extended to the very idea of play that was so central to Kaprow’s project. These differences are important for understanding the place of absurdity in pedagogy. Pivotal to Arendt’s perspective was the idea of natality. We are born ‘unasked’ into the world and, unlike individuals of other species, we are illequipped at the beginning of life to survive. We depend on culture. We need education to reconcile ourselves to reality and to make ourselves at home in the world (Arendt 1994: 308). It is adults’ responsibility to prepare children for the world into which they have been brought. To be able to assume this responsibility, they need – besides confidence, skill and bearing – a degree of authority in the form of knowledge and understanding from the past. Authority in this sense has



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nothing to do with authoritarianism or power. The relationship between adult and child is dynamic, open to complexity and misunderstanding, and constantly changing. Arendt sought to protect the child and his or her education from the world and interestingly, the world from the child, in order for both to be free to come to terms with and to renew the past in the present. Conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is the essence of educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something – the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new. (Arendt 2006: 188)

Arendt proposed that history, following Herodotus, is our way of saving ourselves from the futility that comes with oblivion – quite unlike Kaprow, for whom confronting a sense of futility is fundamental to the absurd in art. It is the task of the historiographer and poet, says Arendt, to make something lasting out of what we remember (Arendt 2006: 41, 44). Education in society is a function of our living together in groups, a way of keeping life going in part through handing on such tradition or historical knowledge and in part through active, critical engagement with thinking and understanding. To understand in the Greek world meant to look at the same world from another’s standpoint, ‘to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects’ (Arendt 2006: 51–2). It is not easy to navigate the tension between communicating knowledge of the past and supporting a plurality of perspectives in lived experience. It depends on our capacity to think or imagine a world that is not an outcome of our manipulations and interpretations but exists in its own right and in dialogue with us. In education human parents assume responsibility for both … the life and development of the child and for the continuance of the world. These two responsibilities do not by any means coincide; they may indeed come into conflict with each other. (Arendt 2006: 182)

Arendt’s critique of child-centred learning extended to the importance of play that pragmatism had championed. This critique pivots around three key points. First, a world in which children are autonomous either throws the individual child back on himself or subjects him to an even more tyrannical authority, that of the majority or a peer group of other children. This situation renders the child helpless and out of contact with the adult, and vice versa: the adult, Arendt (2006: 177) laments, ‘can only tell him to do what he likes and then prevent

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the worst from happening’.2 Second, in a learning-oriented culture a teacher is actively discouraged from passing on the particular knowledge of a subject. And third, a literal interpretation of the basic tenet of pragmatism – that you can only really know what you have done and experienced yourself – would reduce teaching to the inculcation of skills, learning how to do things at the cost of acquiring the rudiments of the standard curriculum. Substituting doing for learning, playing for working, would undermine childhood as a preparation for adulthood. Focusing entirely on the private world of the individual child, it would make it impossible for the school to serve as a conduit between private and public domains, and to prepare the child to contribute to life in common. Kaprow and Arendt appear to agree on the importance, in education, of developing curiosity in the individual and on its generative potential to give form to a common world. Both acknowledge the importance for understanding of encountering a plurality of different experiences and points of view. Both open up the philosophical question of the function of education in society and stress the importance of learning from the past. They do so however through quite different idioms and modes of address: Kaprow through art and Arendt through discourse. Kaprow creates a form: a score for an activity and the opportunity to work with this score in life. It is a frame that suspends the chaos of life just long enough for us to be struck by what is at stake. Arendt works within a rhetorical tradition, which arrives at positions through the dynamic of argument and counterargument. It is important to acknowledge that as a political theorist, Arendt was concerned not to offer a different form of pedagogy, but to address the question of what education means to public life, to survival. Far from isolating the individual child, Kaprow developed activities that intentionally mimicked life as a social experience. They functioned as a structured and critical tool which worked in the immediate space of uncertainty while nonetheless creating an interval that enables an individual, whether child or adult, to function in society, not by fitting into the given circumstances but through an altogether different quality of awareness, namely a sense of irony. Kaprow’s activities confronted the arbitrary and ambiguous in human life, opening this up to scrutiny, facing the inherent absurdity of social and cultural institutions. This was clearly evident in his questioning of the status of the Berkeley pupils as members of an ‘underclass’. On reflection, Arendt is criticizing the way children become isolated in pragmatism’s particular construction of play; she is not criticizing play itself as a pedagogical tool. Indeed Masschelein and Simons (2013: 40), who closely follow Arendt’s thinking, argue that the school is the playground of society in so far as



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something from society is ‘brought into play’ or ‘made into play’ as an object of study, so that it can be explored, engaged with but not put to use in any literal sense. Without play, there is arguably no room for creativity nor any possibility for the renewal that both Arendt and Kaprow regarded as the core function of education. Yet in contrast to Arendt’s insistence on school as a separate space, Kaprow worked directly from the spaces of everyday life, albeit while involving himself in the Berkeley School System. The Six Ordinary Happenings created a tension between normal life in the street, laundromat and parking lot, and its transgressive disruption by means of purposeless activities. Once one’s eyes are opened to the absurd in life, one can take responsibility for what has gone wrong and try to change direction.

Facing a Double Crisis in Art and Art Education The specific character and dynamic of absurd art within pedagogy raises important questions. Who or what teaches in absurd art? How might such teaching be carried out? Gert Biesta is an educational theorist whose thinking is quite closely aligned with that of Masschelein and Simons and, like them, he also draws on the writings of Arendt. One of his points of reference is an early performance work by the artist Joseph Beuys (Biesta 2017). Beuys’s work entitled How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) addresses the difficulty of explaining things, a key function of education. Imagine a small gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany, filled with framed pictures. Beuys locks the gallery doors from the inside leaving the audience on the outside to experience the performance only through the windows. His bald head is covered in gold leaf and honey. One foot is covered in felt, the other in lead. He holds a dead hare, with whom he appears to be in conversation, moving first across the floor of the gallery and then from picture to picture (Figure 9.2). What he actually says is inaudible to the audience outside. The space is quite confined and from time to time, Beuys stops in the centre and steps over a dead fir tree lying on the floor. The performance lasts for three hours, at which point the public are let into the room. Beuys sits at the entrance cradling the dead hare with his back to the onlookers.3 Why has Biesta drawn on this particular work to rethink education? It is worth remembering that Beuys conceived of his practice as a way of teaching. Writing half a century after Beuys’s performance, Biesta explains that the current

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Figure 9.2  Joseph Beuys Die Eröffnung. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, November 1965. © DACS 2021. Image: bpk / Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland / Ute Klophaus / loan from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung.

crisis in education is double, marked by both the disappearance of art from society and the disappearance of education from the theory and practice of art. On the one hand, art is valued only for its instrumental importance, such as to develop skills of empathy and sociability. On the other hand, the emphasis on art’s ‘expressivism’, the valuing of unique voice and identity, has undermined its educational function in imparting existing knowledge and experience and in nurturing a world in common. Biesta (2017: 37) draws on Arendt’s idea that education is a process of bringing children ‘into dialogue with the world’, a process of turning their attention towards the world and arousing their desire to be both in and with it, but not at its centre. This moment, he argues, kindles the desire in us to learn.



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The process is gentle, an act of care. Biesta is particularly concerned with the process of teaching, of drawing attention to something important, and he sees in Beuys’s work this particular characteristic. Beuys’s performance aligns with Rudolf Arnheim’s (1986: 17) analysis of the difference between a performance and an everyday act: the cyclist and trapeze artist share the same task and exercise similar skills of balancing the body in relation to gravity and movement, but the artist does this in a way that makes manifest what is important to understand, enabling us to ‘watch intuition at work’ through a different kind of skill – the skill to communicate affectively. Is this particular work, then, a simple mirroring of life in art, in Arnheim’s sense, or is there more to it? What of Beuys’s strange choice of materials, felt on one foot, lead on another; the honey and gold illuminating and transforming his head? What is the meaning of his upending of the ritual of a gallery opening, leaving the audience outside the gallery for three hours on a cold November night to peer through the windows onto a scene that they can experience only minimally? For Beuys, performance was an intentionally transformative, socio-political act. While the gallery is full of pictures in the time-honoured manner of an exhibition, there is something bizarre in the way Beuys walks the dead hare like a puppet across the gallery floor, and holds it up to each picture, whispering inaudibly. Dialogue is normally dependent upon an exchange between two living beings. Education is about life, about growth through participation and instilling a degree of trust in established mores and protocols. Here one interlocutor is dead, but treated as if alive. The whole thing is more like a shamanic ritual than a conventional lesson, while consciously mimicking the latter. It is deliberately obscure and disruptive, reminiscent of Kaprow’s use of graffiti-strewn toilets as sites of learning, and reversing the roles of teachers and learners. The element of the absurd in this performance is barely acknowledged in Biesta’s analysis. Yet it is crucial, I believe, to the quality of experience and provocation that Beuys intended with the work – that is, to question by transgressing normal behaviours, in this case of gallery going.

Dada and Absurd Art, Then and Now Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to draw more deeply on the history of the absurd in Dada. The writer and poet André Breton, a champion of Dada, described it as ‘the marvellous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities

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without departing from the realm of our experience, drawing them together and drawing a spark from their contact’ (cited in Adès 1974: 30). Dada is a very particular form of art. Not all art functions in this way. In the early twentieth century Dada took the form of unlikely material combinations such as Duchamp’s ready-mades. It introduced an anti-aesthetic out of a need to disorient art and public alike. Meaning emerges in Dada through the chance juxtapositions of fragments of sentences, materials and objects drawn from everyday life. The museum and gallery also played roles that were far from neutral, to the point that the process of a work’s creation and the context in which it was experienced conspired in the disruption together with the work itself. Echoing the thoughts of the contemporary artist John Newling (2003: 9) that ‘location is a repository of agreement and it governs the way we view things’, it was as if Dada and its later developments in Fluxus (from the 1950s to the present), including Beuys’s performance and Kaprow’s Six Ordinary Happenings, had confronted a fundamental paradox: human beings seek purpose and meaning in life while life confounds such efforts. Dada and Fluxus are not the only manifestations of the absurd in art. It has been present in Western culture ever since Aristophanes’ The Frogs, through the Renaissance, to the twentieth-century work of Antonin Artaud, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionescu, among others. By the mid-twentieth century, Albert Camus was working with the absurd through literature such as The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Plague (1947). The absurd artist (in this case responding to the trauma of the Second World War) faces a life devoid of intrinsic meaning, but does not despair. Instead, Camus used this insight to open up to experience, surrendering himself to the joy of sensory, bodily experience in the physical world. It is indeed my life I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it. (Nuptials at Tipasa [1938], in Camus 1968: 69)

Dada and the Absurd in Contemporary Art: Three Examples The spirit of Dada and the absurd lives on in the art of our century. What is it asking of us in the present? What might that mean for our understanding of education in our time?



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In 2002 the Chilean artist Francis Alÿs engaged a number of volunteers, mainly students, in shifting a sand dune situated just outside Lima, Peru, by a few centimetres (Alÿs 2002). He wanted to draw attention to the intense forms of effort he had experienced in Latin American society – effort, he believed, that was disproportionate to its meagre outcomes in achieving reform. The apparently futile activity of moving a sand dune consciously set aside normal social expectations around labour (e.g. that it should be remunerated). Alÿs evoked Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the effort of rolling a large stone uphill only to see it roll down again epitomized the need to confront a grim truth while refusing to be destroyed by it. By working with students, the myth and its enactment became a learning experience. While Alÿs was exploring the meaning of labour without wealth, the artist John Newling – in a series of nine works entitled Currency and Belief, exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2002–3 – offered an equally ironic reflection on the meaning of wealth without labour (Newling 2003). One of these works presented the material culture of gambling, in particular the National Lottery, by placing the machine used to randomize numbers (the lottery balls) directly in front of a largescale reproduction of a work by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Quentin Metsys, The Money Changer and His Wife (Figure 9.3). In this painting the money changer evokes forms of material wealth that can be counted like the numbers in the National Lottery, and his wife evokes the spiritual wealth suggested by the Bible in her hands. The story of Camelot and the Holy Grail, like the Bible, also holds the promise of everlasting life, and it is no accident that the original franchise holders of the National Lottery were known as the ‘Camelot Group’. Through this juxtaposition Newling draws together monetary wealth and the wealth that comes from love, both present and familiar to experience but generally felt to belong to different realities. Monetary wealth is not only countable but it can also be counted on to provide a degree of material security. But the wealth that comes from love, healing and restoration, as in the story of the Holy Grail, is unquantifiable. Other works in Currency and Belief offered similarly playful juxtapositions: oversized scratch cards, partially exposed; large-scale light boxes depicting images of ancient coinage; a pair of scales like those in the Metsys painting, showing that one chocolate Mars Bar is equal in weight (but not value) to a considerably greater number of coins and notes. Both Newling’s and Alÿs’ works compose forms of transaction based in common agreements. Without the element of exchange and tacit agreement that bind us into social frames and conventional regimes of value, such transactions would be meaningless. These works expose this fragility, and encourage us to confront it.

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Figure 9.3  One of nine works by John Newling from the exhibition Currency and Belief, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2002–3. Courtesy of the artist.

In Notations on the Ecosystem of the Western Saltworks with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp (Figure 9.4), artists Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison (2016) recreated the simplest known ecosystem involving algae and a particular species of brine shrimp in four rectangular tanks of seawater placed outside the Los Angeles County Museum. By varying the salinity of the water, they simultaneously created a colour field as artwork from green (least salty) to coral (most salty). The Brine Shrimp work is cited in Kaprow’s third essay on The Education of the Un-artist, in which he explores five different experimental models for blurring art and life (Kaprow 1993: 130). These ‘five root types’ were defined as situational (everyday environments, occurrences and customs), operational (how things and customs work, what they do), structural (related to ecologies, natural cycles



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Figure 9.4  Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Survival Piece II, Notations on the Ecosystem of the Western Saltworks with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp, site courtyard of the museum of the of the Pyrenees (Les Abattoirs) commissioned from the original drawing 1971, remade 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

and the forms of human activities, places and things), self-referring (reflecting or talking back) and learning (through philosophical inquiry, educational demonstrations and awareness training rituals). The Harrisons’ work is classified in these terms as a structural model. Both Kaprow and Newton Harrison himself acknowledged its absurdist, Dada-ist underpinnings. The indoor exhibition at the LA County Museum was prestigious, expensive, technologically sophisticated and had attracted considerable media attention. It included iconic works such as Claus Oldenburg’s Ice Bag (1971) and David Smith’s Cubi (1961–5), alongside Newton Harrison’s own Artificial Aurora Borealis (1971). The senior curator, Maurice Tuchman, had commissioned the Harrisons to make an outdoor piece that was ‘inexpensive’. He had clearly underestimated the critical focus that resulted from the invitation! By 1971 the Harrisons’ commitment only to make work that served environmental well-being was evolving as a counterpoint to the conventions of the art institution. Influenced by their reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the Harrisons were concerned about the museum’s practice of using algaecide to maintain its supply of clean water. Their harnessing of solar energy to create the outdoor work contrasted vividly with the energy requirements of

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the indoor exhibits. Confounding the current values of a successful artwork, the Harrisons allowed the work to emerge, live and then be recycled within a natural system. One pattern, the life system of the brine shrimp, interacted with another, the aesthetics of the art institution, to expose the gap in values – or to ignite what Breton had called a ‘spark’ – between the two realities, of the ecosystem and the artworld. Viewers acted as witnesses, though ultimately, in the culmination of the work, they were drawn in as participants, helping to distribute the salt and brine shrimp as foodstuffs. All three works described here – of Alÿs, Newling and the Harrisons – share characteristics with those of Kaprow and Beuys. They have emerged in a moment of existential crisis. For Kaprow this was the height of the Vietnam War; for Beuys the aftermath of the Second World War alongside the early emergence of environmental concerns. For Alÿs, Newling and the Harrisons the latter crisis had escalated into a combination of catastrophic environmental degradation and economic collapse. These artists are confronting life experiences that appear to run counter to dominant values: rendering labour pointless, enacting revered systems of ‘value’ that are in fact devoid of real value, exposing how institutions such as those of the artworld have turned in on themselves. Their artworks engage with life by imitating or mimicking life in a way that is apparently absurd: moving a mountain of sand, presenting a lottery mechanism as a work of art, creating a colour field through living organisms. Absurd art enables us to confront the absurd in experience, often with humour, through lightness and play, opening up the possibility to alter fixed positions, identities and perspectives. All the works I have discussed act from within this space of uncertainty and ambiguity, but retain a crucial distance sufficient for us to grasp the point of the work, to reflect on it and to move on, somehow transformed. The artworks offer a positive orientation to the world that neither succumbs to nor seeks to rationalize the strangeness in what is at hand. They are not nihilistic but generative of future courses of action.

Absurd Art and the Postmodern Academy We have still to address the third question raised in the introduction to this chapter: Can the absurd provide ways to challenge the managerialist values – the two crises in education and art identified by Biesta – that overwhelm content and creativity in current pedagogy?



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Writing on pedagogy in the postmodern university, David Wolken describes postmodernism as a crisis in which we have become disconnected from any sense of history, with the result that we are now profoundly disoriented, subjected to ‘pure randomness, heterogeneity and undecidability’ (Wolken 2016: 70). Following Fredric Jameson (1991), he argues that this is not a new state, but a continuation and exacerbation of the modernist neo-colonizing tendencies of late capitalism. Fragmentation leads to an inability, in the context of the postmodern university, to locate oneself critically and take action on issues of social justice. Such fragmentation, indeed, serves the financial and managerial systems that now drive the current university and education at all levels. In postmodernism, Wolken (2016: 69) suggests, we face a ‘disconnect between a longing for meaning and the cruel irrational silence of the world’. Echoing Camus, he suggests there is no escape. We need to face the trouble, to embrace our condition with passion, to live its contradictions with vitality. To do otherwise would imply giving credence to the cultural logic of late capitalism, not to break with it. The absurd, for Wolken (2016: 73), ‘holds value because of its ambiguity, impurity and disruptive capacities’. The act of recognizing absurdity in the postmodern academy, in this case through the work of Camus, opens up the potential for something different. However, Tim Ingold, in his considered exploration of the relationship between anthropology, art and education, puts forward the apparently contrasting view that education is an experience of joining with others, bringing young and old together in the furthering of life – a form of renewal he calls ‘commoning’ (derived from the medieval verb, ‘to common’). Through commoning, knowledge is shared, and ‘for sharing to be educative’, Ingold writes, ‘I have to make an imaginative effort to cast my experience in ways that can join with yours’ (Ingold 2018: 4). Here, Ingold follows Dewey (1966: 11) in insisting that existing knowledge cannot be ‘hammered in’ to novice minds. Imitation, Dewey argued, is a misnomer for what is in fact a way of being with others in ‘a use of things which leads to consequences of common interest’ (Dewey 1966: 34). This is a way of coming to know through what Ingold (2018: 26) calls ‘correspondence’. As a concept, correspondence broadly resonates with Kaprow’s exercises that play at life by mimicking its processes in order to function better within it. Nonetheless Ingold suggests that only certain forms of art are truly correspondent, and therefore anthropological, in his sense. They include, for him, instrumental music, walking, drawing, calligraphy and dance, but they explicitly exclude art that is conceptual or transgressive.

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Art that is anthropological … is inquisitive rather than interrogative, offering a line of questioning rather than demanding answers; it is attentional, rather than fronted by prior intentions, modestly experimental rather than brazenly transgressive, critical but not given over to critique. Joining with the forces that give birth to ideas and things, rather than seeking to express what is already there, art that is anthropological conceives without being conceptual. Such art rekindles care and longing, allowing knowledge to grow from the inside of being in the correspondences of life. (Ingold 2018: 65)

As noted throughout this chapter, absurd art is both highly conceptual (following Duchamp) and frequently transgressive (as manifest in Project Other Ways), and would therefore fall outside of Ingold’s sense of correspondence. Perhaps however the contrast between Ingold’s and Kaprow’s respective approaches to art is more apparent than real. If we accept that absurd art reveals absurdity in life as a step towards reflection and the transformation of ourselves as living beings, and if we also accept that absurdity appears in moments of existential crisis such as our current situation, then it should be possible to open up Ingold’s notion of correspondence to include the absurd, along with its conceptual, transgressive and, importantly, humorous tendencies. Cultures create forms of art that support survival, adapting to changing circumstances. Art is a site and activity of renewal, like education. We appear to have a particular need in the present to destabilize common understandings, and to unpack systems that are deeply damaging to planetary survival. As artists have demonstrated over many decades, being open to the absurd, embracing it not just with generosity but (as Camus advocated) with passion, being reflective and critical of its forms and manifestations, could open up new ways to face the future and to act in it.

Coda Commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, a colleague4 asked how he might teach art students about ‘absurd art’, in particular the work of Kaprow, in a way that might be meaningful to them today. If the absurd is to be important pedagogically, he commented, it has to mesh with the ‘crises’ identified by Masschelein, Biesta, Ingold and others, who critique the instrumental harnessing of education to employability and of art to expressivity. The absurd implies a rejection of both. Our discussion took us to an experience that we had shared some years before. In 2010–11, as a group of artist-researchers, we undertook



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to explore one of Kaprow’s scores for an activity, Calendar (Kaprow 1993: 120). The score sets up a riddle in the form of twelve stages of planting squares of turf, varying in quality from green to dry and then reversing these, dry to green. Kaprow’s writings had been formative in our shared inquiry into the role of art in public life. He had created an opening in terms of new ways of working in the visual arts that were public-facing in content as well as process, while at the same time developing a clear if playful theoretical underpinning to such experimentation. We understood, or thought we understood, Kaprow’s thinking, until we explored the Calendar score over a period of a few months. The score invites performers to ‘figure out’ the riddle, through an activity that seemed to lack purpose but was nonetheless intriguing. In the first stage we set out to interpret the score individually through drawing, in whatever way drawing was meaningful to each of us. In the second stage we planned to share the results of two months’ work with a view to developing a way to interpret the score together. Kaprow had indicated that for him, arriving at shared social experience was the point of art. We explored many possible responses: planting and ‘maintaining’ turf in the pattern Kaprow had proposed, or cutting grass at different heights to portray the transition from green to dry. The focus of our attention gradually shifted from achieving a result to sharing an endeavour that required us to co-operate, to co-create. After much deliberation we chose to walk the score through long grass, tramping the grass with different intensities to vary its ‘colour’. Finding the moment of agreeing on a way forward, trying out and improving our tactic for walking squares within squares, freed us to enjoy the walking, to be held inside the rhythm of movement, led by the desire to create form as process (Douglas and Coessens 2017). The inherent absurdity of Calendar had in this way eliminated any obvious criteria of success, such as usefulness or expressivity. As part of the work, we found that we needed to figure out new ways of valuing experience. We developed insights that have become threaded into our various practices, influencing their direction. On reflection, reading Kaprow had helped us develop our intellectual understanding. Living the score took us deeper into our experience, creating connections, working through our intuition. In response to the question of pedagogy, it is a truism to say that artists learn from other artists, but the more important question might be: what is learned when as artists we set about trying out the way of working of another artist? Not all artists have shifted the foundations of what we understand art to be in the way that Kaprow did, and before him, Duchamp, Cage and others. Their work hovers on the threshold

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between meaning and meaninglessness, the threshold in art where the absurd comes into its own. Kaprow gave us the opportunity to work with that threshold, looping or feeding back in ways that have proved transformative. This way of teaching and learning is not an accumulation or acquisition but a process of encountering life in all its messiness.

Notes 1 Marcel Duchamp conceived the ‘ready-made’ as an ordinary mass-produced object of everyday use, sometimes slightly altered, and declared to be a work of art by the artist (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/arti​sts/mar​cel-duch​amp-1036). 2 Following the conventions of the time, Arendt uses the masculine pronoun here. Strictly speaking, it should of course be ‘he or she’. 3 See https://uk.phai​don.com/age​nda/art/artic​les/2014/march/03/why-jos​eph-beuy s-and-his-dead-hare-live-on/. 4 I am grateful to Chris Fremantle for posing this question and commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter.

References Adès, D. (1974), Dada and Surrealism, London: Thames and Hudson. Allen, C. (2016), ‘Allan Kaprow’s Radical Pedagogy’, Performance Research, 21 (6): 7–12. Alÿs, F. (2002), When Faith Moves Mountains, New York: MOMA. Antin, D. (2004), ‘Foreword: Allan at Work’, in J. Kelley (ed.), Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, xi–xxi, Berkeley: University of California Press. Arendt, H. (2006), Between Past and Future, London: Penguin. Arendt, H. (1994), ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’, in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, 307–27, New York: Schocken Books. Arnheim, R. (1986), New Essays on the Psychology of Art, Berkeley: University of California Press. Biesta, G. (2017), Letting Art Teach: Art Education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys, Arnhem, Netherlands: ArtEZ Press. Camus, A. (1968), Lyrical and Critical Essays, New York: Knopf. Carson, R. (1962), Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Free Press. Dewey, J. (1987), ‘Art as Experience’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 10: 1934, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.



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Douglas, A., and K. Coessens (2017), ‘Improvisation as Experimentation in Everyday Life and Beyond’, in K. Coessens (ed.), Experimental Encounters in Music and Beyond, 159–76, Leuven: University of Leuven Press. Harrison, H. M., and N. Harrison (2016), The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon? New York: Prestel. Ingold, T. (2018), Anthropology and/as Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaprow, A. (1993), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. J. Kelley, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaprow, A. (1995), ‘Success and Failure When Art Changes’, in S. Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, 152–6, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Latour, B. (2020), The Notion of the Terrestrial. https://www.yout​ube.com/ watch?v=_c9Pg-7PtLQ (accessed 1 September 2020). Masschelein, J., and M. Simons (2013), In Defence of the School. A Public Issue, trans. J. McMartin, Leuven: E-ducation, Culture and Society Publishers Masschelein, J., and M. Simons (2015), ‘Lessons of/for Europe: Reclaiming the School and the University’, in P. Gielen (ed.), No Culture, No Europe, 143–64, Amsterdam: Valiz. Newling, J. (2003), Currency and Belief, Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Wolken, D. J. (2016), ‘Toward a Pedagogy of the Absurd: Constitutive Ambiguity, Tension, and the Postmodern Academy’, Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 7 (1): 64–79.

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Lessons from a Collaboration between Anthropology and Laboratory Theatre Caroline Gatt

Introduction Cross-disciplinary experiments between theatre and anthropology are not new, and many address matters of pedagogy. Most famously, Victor and Edi Turner (1982, Frese and Bronwell 2020) explored the pedagogic value of enactment in teaching anthropology. More recently, Cassis Kilian (2019, 2021) taps into her theatre training for teaching particular modes of attention for anthropologists. In this chapter I explore how a collaboration between theatre and anthropology, in which I was involved, offers an example of how to move towards decolonizing anthropological pedagogies. The convergence between the way of knowing inherent in anthropological fieldwork and the art of enquiry of laboratory theatre opens possibilities for education of and through different ways of knowing. The work towards decolonization I suggest here aims both to acknowledge and to eliminate epistemological coloniality (de Sousa Santos 2018, Viveiros de Castro et al. 2014). In research, questioning how we come to know is routine. In teaching, however, anthropologists tend to be less inclined to admit to epistemological uncertainty (Burgoz-Martinez 2018: 59). How can anthropologists overcome the rift between their respective approaches to research and teaching? How can they take seriously different onto/epistemologies across the entire craft of the discipline (Ang and Gatt 2018), including of course in their pedagogies? I begin with two episodes from anthropology conferences. They reveal opposing attitudes towards non-anthropologists. Yet they also show fundamental similarities arising from the orthopraxy of what Arturo Escobar

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and Eduardo Restrepo (2005) call ‘dominant anthropologies’. This orthopraxy prevents the onto/epistemologies of some non-anthropologists from being treated as academically valid. An orthopraxy is the set of unspoken and accepted rules that shape what the practitioners of a discipline can do (Collins 2008). This includes what is implicitly considered valid knowledge and how that knowledge should be shared or taught. John Saltmarsh and his colleagues (2009: 12–13) find that ‘the civic engagement movement seems to have hit a wall: innovative practices that shift epistemology, reshape the curriculum, alter pedagogy, and redefine scholarship are not being supported through academic norms and institutional reward policies that shape the … cultures of the academy’. While increasing attention is being paid to epistemic colonialism in anthropological research and beyond, until this orthopraxy is addressed any such efforts only contribute to maintaining the status quo. As Archie Mafeje shows in his critique of attempts to build an anti-racist anthropology in 1990s South Africa, unless or until a post-universalist system of higher education is clearly outlined, those claiming to work towards decolonization risk ending up as ‘conservative rebels’ implicated in the reproduction of the academy (Mafeje 2001: 41). In this chapter I describe a possible alternative to the way in which anthropology can be taught – one that pursues a post-universalist decolonial hope. This is through exchange. The curation of alternative pedagogical exchanges, described in the following, is based on a collaborative project I carried out with the awardwinning Singaporean actor, director and pedagogue Gey Pin Ang, as part of my research for the Knowing From the Inside project (KFI). Ang worked with the Jerzy Grotowksi and Thomas Richards Workcenter for more than nine years, before setting up her own independent platform of work, called Sourcing Within, in 2006. My main concern here is with ways to move towards decolonizing pedagogy, and for this it is essential to recognize that questions of epistemology are inextricable from ontological ones. First, as Clifford Geertz (1973) so clearly put it, in reference to religious systems, models of the world govern models for the world, and it is necessarily the same with ontology and epistemology. Ontology (one’s theory of the world) implicitly determines epistemology (how one can know the world); moreover, like a palindrome, this can be read both ways. Second, it is a characteristic of Western Science – and here, following Latour (2004), I use the capitalized S to denote the rhetoric rather than the actual practices that go on in laboratories – that knowledge can be abstracted from the ways of living through which it emerges. Any discussion of epistemology that treats it as



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separate from ontology therefore perpetuates Science’s dissociation of knowing from being – a dissociation that, in treating the world as an object of knowledge, ready to be grasped, is significantly implicated in the project of colonization. For this reason, when considering epistemology, it is essential to acknowledge the underlying implications of theories of how we know for ontological politics. That is why I use the term onto/epistemology. In what follows, I commence by highlighting the elements of orthopraxy in dominant anthropologies. I then outline a key convergence between laboratory theatre and anthropology, which facilitated the exchanges at the heart of this chapter. I describe two exchanges held in Aberdeen in 2017 as part of the workshop ‘Anthropological Collaboration in the Making’. This was the second meeting in a small-scale project involving five collaborating teams. I go on to expand on the pedagogical possibilities for teaching anthropology which these exchanges present. By way of conclusion, I briefly trace the implications of these possibilities for higher education more broadly, suggesting that a shift is now necessary from universities to pluriversities.

Two Episodes A Round Table on ‘Anthropology and Interdisciplinarity’ The first episode I describe took place during the 2016 ASA conference,1 hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Durham. The conference included a round table on ‘Anthropology and Interdisciplinarity’, convened by Laura Rival. The speakers presented various examples of what the panel abstract called ‘interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams’, in which anthropologists found themselves working with biologists, sociologists, engineers, theologians, linguists, psychosocial workers and management scientists. The examples were geographically widespread, with cases from Italy, Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Peru and the UK. Of the twelve presentations, two suggested that when exploring interdisciplinarity one should not exclude exchanges and collaborations with people from communities of knowledge and practice outwith academia. These suggestions were not made by the most well-known of the anthropologists on the panel; rather, one came from a PhD researcher (Francesca Marin) just returned from fieldwork, the other from an independent anthropologist (Livia Kahn) with no listed university affiliation. Their suggestions were not picked

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up in the roundtable discussion. Thinking they deserved more attention, I asked Veronica Strang, who had been discussing her role and experience in interdisciplinary collaborations (McLeish and Strang 2014, Strang and McLeish 2015), for her thoughts on these suggestions, especially in the light of questions of epistemological colonialism and of recent work on interdisciplinarity in anthropology, in which similar suggestions have been made (Barry and Born 2013, Weszkalnys and Barry 2013). Her response was surprisingly firm, if not quite as short or blunt as I condense it here: interdisciplinary collaborations are of a different nature from collaborations with fieldwork participants, and the two should not be confused.

A Conference on ‘Ethics, Politics, Ontologies’ The second episode occurred during a conference convened in 2016 by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Speakers included well-known anthropologists from institutions in the United States, the UK, Australia, Denmark and of course the Netherlands, each expanding on the political and ethical implications of recent discussions around ontology in anthropology. One of the speakers was Elizabeth Povinelli, sharing some thoughts from her work in Australia, about to be published in her book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016). Her main argument focused on the multiple processes by which liberalism, colonialism and Western expansionism swallowed up the tangible and intangible worlds of the Aboriginal people among whom she had carried out fieldwork. She referred to these people as her ‘fieldwork colleagues’.

Inclusion and Exclusion Comparing these two episodes, the difference of approach towards people conventionally referred to as fieldwork participants is obvious. Underlying the difference, however, is a striking similarity. Both Strang (1997, 2004) and Povinelli (2002, 2016) have carried out their main anthropological fieldwork in Australia, with the continent’s Aboriginal peoples. Both address the effects of colonialism and neoliberal market practices on the ecologies and daily lives of the people with whom they worked. Notwithstanding these similarities, Strang insisted at the conference on a clear distinction between exchanges with members of communities of knowledge



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and practice based in Western academic institutions and exchanges with people based outwith universities. In previously published work on interdisciplinary studies, she and co-author Tom McLeish have expressed this view rather more subtly. While arguing strongly for the value of diverse ways of knowing, the task of introducing these ‘other knowledges’ (Strang and McLeish 2015: 5) into the academy, they maintain, is to be reserved to trained scholars. Admittedly, in their definition of interdisciplinary research, ‘bodies of specialised knowledge’ are included as well as ‘disciplines’ (McLeish and Strang 2014: 4). This could allow for all sorts of collaborations to be considered ‘interdisciplinary’, including those with specialist knowledge holders in the communities with whom anthropologists carry out their fieldwork. However, the list of people invited to participate in the workshops discussed by Strang and McLeish (2015) included only those with advanced academic degrees. As Bailey (2014) shows in the case of collaborations between anthropologists and Native American scholars, the increased professionalization of anthropology over the course of the twentieth century has resulted in a far lower proportion of Native Americans being awarded anthropology PhDs, presenting a significant barrier to collaboration. If holders of ‘specialised knowledge’ – in order for them to participate in interdisciplinary studies, and thus for their ‘other knowledges’ to enrich the academy – are required to hold a PhD, then the vast majority would be automatically excluded. Strang’s argument is that different disciplinary epistemes, or ‘disciplinary sub-cultures’,2 allow for more robust analyses by bringing into collaboration and comparison different knowledges, which attend to different things and ask different questions. She even goes so far as to argue that what distinguishes anthropology is that its theoretical developments ‘are the direct product of exchanges of knowledge with radically different cultural contexts, in particular those of indigenous peoples’ (in McLeish and Strang 2014: 6). In an earlier article, Strang (2006) has made the same point, arguing that anthropological knowledge is co-constituted in collaboration with the people among whom anthropologists carry out fieldwork, and draws upon the knowledge of these people in the process of its production. Indeed, throughout her article Strang stresses the transformative potentials of anthropological fieldwork and the coproduced nature of the knowledge that results. The key, however, lies in who is recognized as bearing knowledge sufficiently academic and specialized for it to be admissible to the workshops of anthropological knowledge production. Even where Strang does reference Indigenous scholars, they are ‘scholars’ only because they have already trained as anthropologists:

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The key point in relation to this discussion is that in bringing non-European worldviews together with anthropological training, indigenous scholars have made a particular contribution to the acceptance of new forms of knowledge and thus to the multicultural symbiosis and synthesis that takes place in anthropological theory. (Strang 2006: 984, emphasis added)

Povinelli, by contrast, described the onto/epistemologies of Aboriginal people as equal to hers – equal enough for her to consider them colleagues – even if significantly different. Given Povinelli’s (2018) concern with how imaginaries of space are mobilized in the exercise of state power, she is well aware of how ‘the extractive machinery of Western privilege [is related to] the epistemologies and ontologies that legitimate this privilege’. To restate the point using Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2018) phrasing: Western colonialism and empire are underpinned by epistemological colonialism, and as long as universities persist in excluding other onto/epistemologies on the grounds that they are invalid from the Western scientific or academic perspective, they will continue to legitimate and promulgate the extractive machinery. Aware of these mechanics of colonial power, Povinelli chooses to acknowledge equivalence with the ways of knowing of the people she worked with in the field by referring to them as colleagues. Her move is part of a growing awareness in anthropology of the unequal position of the anthropologist trained in any Western or Westernised academic institution, in the relationships they develop in the course of carrying out projects of fieldwork. Nevertheless, while the contrast between Strang’s exclusionary approach and Povinelli’s inclusive one seems stark, once it comes to sharing knowledge they both adhere to a dominant anthropological orthopraxy. There is space here for only a superficial analysis, but what I will describe is so commonplace that I could be referring to almost any conventional anthropological conference presentation.3 Both authors use markedly academic language. The contexts in which the exchanges were held – the venues,4 localities and organizing bodies – are part of the makeup of centres of power in ongoing relations of coloniality. And in both situations, the presenter was the lone anthropologist. Most anthropologists have to negotiate a dual pull, towards collaborative relations with fieldwork colleagues and towards the ‘career-complex’ of anthropology (Sanjek 2015). There are examples of anthropologists attempting to resist these boundaries and to work towards collaborative practices well beyond ‘fieldwork’ (Campbell and Lassiter 2010, Gibson 2018), but these remain exceptions to the rule, especially in anthropological teaching. The ongoing pedagogical reproduction of dominant anthropologies significantly contributes, in turn, to the reproduction of global relations of coloniality (de Sousa Santos 2014, 2018).5



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Via Negativa and Disponibilité The form of theatre in which I have trained, in tandem with my education and research in anthropology, can be considered part of the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (Magnat 2013, Tatinge-Nascimento 2008). It is a legacy I share with Gey Pin Ang, with whom I collaborated from 2013 to 2018 for the KFI project. Grotowski (1933–1999) was a Polish theatre maker whose work has significantly influenced contemporary theatre. His pivotal approach was what he called ‘poor theatre’ (Grotowski 2002), where the focus of theatre work shifts from the production of spectacle, for an audience to consume, to the craft of acting. This approach shifted the focus of actor training from being a means to the end of putting on performance, to a mode of enquiry into the possibilities of human encounter by means of performance.6 Central to Grotowksi’s work was his via negativa, or the way of contradiction. In this, he emphatically denied setting out to create a ‘method’. In my discussions with Ang she explained this aspect of Grotowski’s influence on her work and her own thinking: it is not possible to have a single recipe (method) for responding to ever-changing life situations. Since the world is perpetually in movement, one’s ways of working also need to be constantly adapting. This should not however be taken to mean that the via negativa is chaotic or ‘free’. According to theatre scholar and anthropologist Leszek Kolankiewicz: Grotowski is quintessentially anti-systemic. Of course, though, by virtue of a paradox, his entire practice was marked by a programmatically methodical mode of working – the Wrocław Laboratory Theatre was indeed named the Institute for Studies of the Method of Acting (later Actor’s Institute) – while its motto was always discipline. At the same time, though, Grotowski was a great believer in spontaneity and naturalness … If Grotowski’s approach is to be considered indeed anti-systemic, then it is to be so for the reason that he valued more highly than any system, with its regularity and schematism, the actual experiencing of life in all its unpredictable spontaneity and unfathomable wealth – as élan vital.7

In addition, this approach, and the form of enquiry that practitioners of this legacy enact, can be understood as developing a way of knowing attuned to ecological rather than individualizing systems, and to emergent qualities (Magnat 2013, ­chapter 3). When in December 2013 I invited Ang to collaborate with me in the KFI project, I knew implicitly that the spirit of our collaboration would need to

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follow this via negativa; we would need to adapt any plans for collaboration to changing circumstances, being very clear that we could promise no predefined ‘outcomes’ to our joint work.8 Indeed the via negativa, especially in the way it attends to life as it unfolds, aligns closely with the approach of anthropological fieldwork. Judith Okely (2012), for example, adapts the concept of disponibilité from the work of surrealist artist André Breton, known for his conceptualization of objets trouvés, to describe her attitude to fieldwork. Being disponible, she writes, means ‘being accessible to events, people and objects while in search of encounters’ (Okely 2012: 54). Like Grotowski’s via negativa, disponibilité is a stance of openness to what one might encounter while searching. Similarly, Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (2006: 7) describe the aim of anthropological fieldwork as a search for serendipity, or the emergent. For Peter Pels (2000), the holistic and open character of fieldwork is what enables anthropology to introduce diverse ways of knowing into academic contexts by stealth. My main question, in the collaboration with Ang, was how our working together could transform my anthropological orthopraxy. Here, the similarity between the via negativa and the epistemology embedded in anthropological fieldwork suggested a way to revisit that orthopraxy. This convergence suggests possibilities for an anthropology that is prospective, that facilitates responsiveness in the midst of ongoing life (Gatt 2017a, 2020, Gatt and Ingold 2013). While this clearly contrasts with the standardizing imperative that has long characterized university policies around the world,9 prospective, processual and ecological approaches may be exactly what we need in our attempt to decolonize the discipline of anthropology.

Towards Decolonizing Anthropological Knowledge Exchange One of the most cogent anthropological criticisms of auto-ethnography is that by focusing on a single person’s life experiences the auto-ethnographer is no longer able to address the wider structural issues of racism, discrimination, misrepresentation and so on, for the purpose of which auto-ethnography was taken up in performance ethnography in the first place (Atkinson 2004).10 As the focus of my research was narrowing down to the minutiae of the work between myself and Ang, I risked reproducing this problem. I also wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous collaborations with artists which, as Hal Foster (1995) has pointed out, while promoting an equitable relationship



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between artists and anthropologists, continued to objectify the local communities in which the research was carried out. I did not therefore collect material with and about the participants in Ang’s ‘Sourcing Within’ workshops, without also working to develop rounded collaborations with them. The number of these collaborations was also limited. Instead of broadening my research by increasing the number of people I did fieldwork about, I shared my questions with other collaborating teams, thus broadening the research by increasing the number of collaborating teams and asking similar questions of their own work. I asked: What are the minutiae of different collaborative anthropological projects? How do they differ and how do they resemble each other? What contribution does the collaborative approach offer to scholarship beyond the desired equitableness that it promises? To explore these questions, I invited a number of anthropologists who had been working collaboratively for some time to participate in a mini-research project (March 2016–February 2018). The project comprised: a first workshop (September 2016) held in the mainstream format; a second workshop (April 2017) planned collaboratively by all the participants; and tasks done by the collaborating teams in between the two workshops in preparation for the second workshop and for publication. Below is an extract from the invitation I sent in February/March 2016, laying out the questions for the collaborating teams to consider. Questions to consider: The activities [of the second workshop] will in some way address the question of crafting anthropology otherwise: What could a decolonised practice of exploring the human condition or human becoming look like, including how this could be taught at universities, for example? Should this decolonised form of enquiry be situated in universities at all? How can anthropology balance a commitment to the creation of knowledge ‘along with’, with its commitment to disseminating the knowledge thereby created to audiences beyond these contexts? For instance, how could teaching anthropology be revised in order for both commitments to be satisfied? How can the principles learned from an in-depth exploration of the minutiae of collaboration be translated into ways of teaching anthropology in broader contexts, even for those who do not necessarily conduct collaborative work? Here the question mirrors James Laidlaw’s question about ethics: Should ethics be understood as a specific field for anthropological focus or should we aim for it to become a thread that runs through all anthropological projects, in the way reflexivity has become integral to anthropological practice? To reformulate the

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question in terms of correspondence: how can the principles of collaboration or ‘knowing along with’ be taught in order for anthropological crafting to become further decolonised, even in projects that are not necessarily collaborative?

Sharing the Work The invitation sent out to collaborating teams also included a couple of paragraphs on how the work would be shared, reproduced in the following. The second workshop will be held during the University of Aberdeen’s annual May Festival. As part of this festival the Knowing from the Inside project will be launching an exhibition that will last until December 2017. The hope is that the events, conversations and makings involved in the process of these two workshops and tasks in between could in some way participate in this exhibition. Here the logic is improvisational, to share with ‘an audience’ what is being experimented with. However, for whatever reason, it may be that what is shared is an absence, or a recognition of the need for closed doors, for the fragility of experimentation or the secrecy of some knowledge. The point here is that in planning the second workshop I hope to keep the exhibition as part of the ‘constituency’, the body or peoples to be taken into account, shifting in practice the environments of legitimation of anthropological knowledge production. Finally, the work that goes into and comes from this process of two workshops and the task in between will be published in a Knowing From the Inside book series. These books will be published by KFI, for which there is a budget and a designer already in place. For this publication there is a hoped-for completion date of December 2017 (to coincide with the close of the exhibition). However, since the whole work being done in KFI is in the nature of an experiment, we are called upon to question ‘the book’ as part of this collaborative experiment. How would we, as a group of collaborators, want to share the knowledge-making processes we engaged in during the workshops and in between? How can we reimagine the ‘book’ in decolonised terms?

Of the twenty anthropologists I invited, five were able to commit to the series of events and to the work this involved, and three agreed to be discussants. In addition to myself, working at the time with laboratory theatre practitioners Gey Pin Ang, Francesca Netto, Adriana Josipovic and Cinzia Cigna, these were: Jan Peter Laurence Loovers, who works collaboratively with what was then called the Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute (GSCI) and for this project worked



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closely with Gladys Alexie and Frederick ‘Sonny’ Blake Jr, MLA;11 Germain Meulemans, who together with anthropologist Marine Legrand, artists Anaïs Thondeur and Yesenia Thibault-Picaso, and soil scientist Alan Vergnes, formed the collective Chaoïds; Francesca Marin, who worked with web designer Luca Rigon, along with fisherfolk and biologists living and working in the Valdes Peninsula, Argentina; Cassis Killian with her now anonymous collaborator; and Amanda Ravetz, who worked with Mancunian recoverist-activists Michaela Jones and Jayne Gosnall. The three discussants were Jo Vergunst, Alison Brown and Johan Rasanayagam, all from the staff of Aberdeen University’s Department of Anthropology. When addressing decoloniality in terms of orthopraxy it is essential that the whole process should be questioned, and the fact that this mini-project was populated by invitation rather than by public application was an immediate red flag in my reflexive critique. I decided to invite teams rather than make a public call so as to minimize risk. A key element in collaborative projects is trust, and in this case the non-anthropologist collaborators would have to trust not only the anthropologists they were working with and their institutions (already a significant challenge), but also five other collaborating teams and their respective institutions. Of course, this choice in turn can be critiqued on many counts: for being ‘cliquey’, for including work that already addressed similar questions or that stems from the same or similar schools of thought. Moreover, bar one of the discussants, no participating anthropologist was a person of colour, and all were based in UK or European universities. These are important limitations that call for ongoing critical reflection. Nonetheless the exchanges that emerged still carry forward a decolonial hope in two respects: first, in the many ways of knowing and the variety of people involved as collaborative colleagues; and second, through the critique of the colonial centres in which we are based, itself an essential part of any decolonizing move. In fact, one of the collaborating teams, the Chaoïds, at first found the terms of the proposed process, being couched as a decolonizing move, irrelevant to their work since they were Belgian and French, and none of them people of colour. As the work proceeded the importance of decolonial critiques of whiteness and metropoles, or centres of power in ongoing relations of coloniality, became clearer to all involved through the exchanges. What became most apparent, by contrast to the diversity of the ways of exchanging and teaching at the second workshop, is how narrowly academic anthropological knowledge is still conceived and taught in power centres such as the UK, France, Germany and Belgium.

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The Second Workshop: Aberdeen, April 2017 While the content of the first workshop and an attempt to share different ways of knowing from the second workshop have been published,12 the descriptions and analyses to follow focus on exchanges in the second workshop, with particular regard to the pedagogical principles to be drawn from them. Between the first and the second workshops each of the collaborating teams produced a contribution to the book The Voices of the Pages (Gatt 2017b). These contributions aimed to share not only the details of the collaborative work of each team, but also their different ways of knowing. As mentioned above, the participants were invited to question what a book is. While mainstream academic books, invariably in printed format, encapsulate a logocentric epistemology, participants were invited to explore how print might be adapted to capture the traces of their different ways of knowing, as many other forms of print already manage to do. The teams took up this challenge, and the book was printed and ready to be launched by the time of the second workshop in April 2017. A crucial point from reception theory is that people are socialized not only into ways of understanding the content of printed books but also into the ways of knowing that shape that content (Freshwater 2009). The purpose of the second workshop was for each collaborating team to teach ‘readers’ how to engage with their contribution. With the book in hand, each collaborating team taught the others – as much as was possible in the two to three hours allocated to them – the way of knowing that would allow their contribution to make sense on its own terms. In April 2017 the group of collaborating teams, fourteen people in all, met together in Aberdeen for the first time for the second workshop. The venue was the Old Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen, which was the main venue for the ‘KFI Spring Gathering’, the KFI project’s main conference, of which the ‘Collaboration in the Making’ workshop was part. The KFI conference gathered over 70 participants, from home and abroad. There were workshops, presentations, lectures and discussions that showcased the work the project had been doing over the past four years and the work of other scholars that resonated with KFI’s approaches. Unlike the other workshops of the KFI gathering, the ‘Collaboration in the Making’ workshop was only open to the collaborating teams. This was because some of the collaborative work was based on very intimate sharing. Making these public felt too risky to the participants.



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Of the five exchanges in this workshop, I have space here to describe only two: the work between myself, Ang and Josipovic, and the collaboration between Loovers and Alexie.

Writing and Flow The first print of the contribution for the Voices of the Pages book, from the collaboration between Ang, Gatt, Josipovic, Netto and Cigna, was an experiment in writing about our creative process in theatre work. The writing experiment hoped to capture traces of our search for the emergent flow of living impulses as we experienced it. In practice this meant that after working with Gey Pin in the studio – in this case it was in Turin in December 2016 – each of the participating collaborators attempted to draw the same ways of searching and knowing we had worked with in the studio into our writing about it. Subsequently we discussed them and wrote commentaries about the process. At the second workshop, we attempted to find a way to share the process with readers untrained in laboratory theatre and its attendant ways of knowing and living. First, Ang guided the participants in an introduction to her way of working based on Taijiquan and her theatrical investigations of song, action and encounter. As she does with first-timers to her ‘Sourcing Within’ workshops, Ang playfully invited the participants to begin moving around the room using gestures and movements. Slowly, they began to follow her. After around half an hour, nearly all the participants were engaged in trying out the way of playing that Ang was offering; playing with meeting others in the room, with the floors, columns, volumes of air, their own reactions. Second, I handed around the first print of the Voices of the Pages book and invited participants to ‘read’ the handwritten pieces contributed by Ang, Gatt, Josipovic, Netto and Cigna. In that reading, I asked them to try to remember the experience they had just had with Ang, and to allow themselves to ‘read’ by exploring the written pieces with the same curiosity they had brought to playing under her guidance. Some participants walked or danced with the pages of the book in their hands. Others chatted among themselves, or lay on the ground. When they felt they had ‘read’ the piece, I invited them to write notes or make marks about their experience in the margins of the pages of the books. Again, I invited them to write or leave these traces in the same spirit they had experienced while working with Ang.

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Reading Places Loovers has worked with the Gwich’in, a First Nations people of the Canadian Northwest, since 2005. Working in the Gwich’in Settlement Area implies collaboration of different kinds. First, his research was regulated by the Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute (GSCI). All researchers who want to work in the Gwich’in Settlement Area need to sign traditional knowledge agreements with the GSCI. The agreements are intended to protect traditional knowledge and ensure that any information gathered is returned to the community. Further, GSCI members check any written materials, including fieldnotes. Working with the GSCI and with many individual Gwich’in throughout his sixteen years of research to date, Loovers has developed many forms of collaboration including what he calls ‘edited writing’ (Loovers 2018: 153). As the phrase suggests, he offers up his ethnographic writing to his Gwich’in teachers, friends and collaborators, and they generously edit his work. Sometimes this editing is done directly on the texts. At other times his texts were read to elders, and Loovers himself then edited them, based on their responses. But also, over the long course of his research, Loovers began to self-edit on the basis of what he had found to be important to his Gwich’in collaborators (Loovers 2018: 154–5). In the first printing of The Voices of the Pages, Loovers followed this form of edited writing, placing stories about the land, wayfinding and mapping, important to the Gwich’in, at the heart of it. His joint contribution, with Alexie and GSCI (Loovers, Alexie and GSCI 2017) includes a large fold-out sheet with two maps of an area in the Gwich’in Settlement Area near Teet it Zheh (Fort McPherson). During the workshop in April 2017, Gladys Alexie – a Gwich’in language teacher valued by the GSCI for her traditional knowledge – told us stories about some of the places marked on the maps. She had brought books with images of the different plants and berries that grow in the area and showed us where many of these can be found, their uses and the stories connected with them. We stood around large versions of these maps on tables in the Anatomy Rooms, listening to Alexie and asking questions, which she enthusiastically answered. Then, Loovers and Alexie invited each of us to draw a map of a place that was important to us, and to share our stories of these places with a small group of other participants, using the drawings to help us tell them. The idea was to share with others the sense of connection to place that might have come to us after listening and talking with Alexie. Curated extracts or examples of what the participants wrote or drew for these exchanges were then overprinted onto The Voices of the Pages, in 2018. In this



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way the process of learning to read each of the contributions was traced onto a book that is now available for others to read.

The Pedagogy of Exchange All the sessions of the ‘Collaboration in the Making’ workshop were exchanges, in the sense that the collaborating teams offered each other tasks to carry out on an equal footing. Every participant took their turn as teacher at some point during the workshop, and all were learners throughout. What was exchanged were the tasks offered, and the opportunities these provided to learn the emergent ways of knowing of each collaborating team. In curating these exchanges, I followed principles from collaborative anthropology: that all participants should benefit equally (Rodríguez 2015); and that they should be not only equally involved in the whole process of research, including design and assessment (Lassiter 2005), but also able to define the terms under which they are involved, such that being considered equal would not collapse possibly incommensurable differences (Gatt 2018). The openness to what might emerge comes from the disponibilité of anthropological fieldwork and from the via negativa of laboratory theatre enquiry. This latter principle, in particular, entailed that as convenor I had to let go of most of the control that I was accustomed to exercising in such situations. With reference to the pedagogic implications of disponibilité and the via negativa, the idea of letting go of control is central. Indeed, although they feature here as approaches to research, they are partly based on Paolo Freire’s (2005) proposals for a pedagogy of the oppressed, and of liberation, which include collaboration in every form of educational and research process (Freire 2005: 117). On the basis of his experience of teaching literacy and conscientizaçao (awareness raising) in Northeast Brazil, Freire argues that a certain model of education is closely implicated in the enactment of oppression. The ‘banking model’ of education, in which students are understood as empty ‘banks’ to be filled with knowledge from the teacher, is for the students dehumanizing and oppressive. What is lost in this model of education is a person’s ability to question independently and to imagine that they can change their circumstances, and indeed the world. Liberation, for Freire, is a process whereby a person experiencing oppression comes to understand that no human, regardless of background, gender or age, can be possessed as an object, or considered inferior. One of the proposals in Freire’s pedagogy is that teaching should shift from the banking model to problem-posing. Unlike the situation where a teacher relates

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‘facts’ that the student must listen to and assimilate, in problem-posing, actual problems or issues that need to be addressed are explored together with students and others affected. According to Freire, ‘the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms their reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher’ (2005: 81). In the exchanges described above all the participants were equal co-investigators, and all were teaching each other. The exchange format puts Freire’s principle of liberation to work by emphasizing the equality of all involved. Freire’s otherwise markedly anthropological and holistic approach to education does not however extend to matters of onto/epistemology. Based on anthropological explorations of difference and Grotowksi’s insistence on adapting to each new emergent need, the workshop attempted explicitly to make equitable space for participants in terms not only of their knowledge but also of their ways of knowing. The question now is: how can this be brought into dialogue with ways of teaching anthropology, for instance, in an institution of higher education? Many of the principles of Freire’s pedagogy are already included, at least in theory, in contemporary methods of teaching anthropology across Western higher education institutions, sometimes explicitly (Anastassakis, pers. comm., Barnes 1992, McKenna 2013), but more often implicitly. Active, participatory learning is widely encouraged. However, Freire (2005: 44) cautions against ‘any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed’; considering this to be ‘false generosity’. According to Freire, in order truly to move towards liberation, the oppressor must in some sense become the oppressed, both mentally and environmentally. From this we can draw the cautionary lesson that attempts, for instance, to include active and participatory learning in what otherwise conforms to the banking model may actually impede independent, critical and ‘unoppressed’ or decolonized thinking. There are already calls for anthropology teaching to adopt a reflexive pedagogy (Garnett and Vanderlinden 2011) which attends to the onto/epistemologies in play, but for the most part this is not happening in practice. As long ago as the early 1990s, Barnes (1992: 147) lamented that ‘many teachers split off the practice of teaching from the fundamental commitments that inform their research and writing’. This is still largely the case today (Burgoz-Martinez 2018). If assessment, for instance, remains based on whether students can reproduce the content they have been required to learn and, implicitly or explicitly, the onto/epistemology on which it rests, then any active or participatory element



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only deepens or hastens the expected uptake. In my own experience of setting up anthropology courses based on collaborative principles, and of supervising a practice-based doctoral project, the institutional worries I have encountered have most often centred on assessment and rigour. To worries about assessment, the simple response is that current assessment models need to be revised, as they are key components of a dominating academic orthopraxy. Lassiter (2005: 102) relates how one of his students, while carrying out collaborative research, asked for an elder from the community she was working with to be allowed to join the panel assessing her research. This was forbidden; furthermore, a colleague in the department proposed to change its policies to ensure that it would not be possible in the future. Although some proposals for collaborative assessment have already been published (Haanstad 2020, Ricke 2018), and calls for universities to engage in meaningful civic engagements have long been made (Campbell and Lassiter 2010), epistemological gatekeeping remains tightly bound to the banking model (Burgoz-Martinez 2018). The current exclusion of different ways of knowing from higher education establishes an epistemological hierarchy rather than marking a person’s ability or worth. Following Freire, if everyone were to become a co-investigator, a system of assessment based on how well a student can reproduce material they have been taught would make no sense. A problem-posing scenario, however, would allow assessment to be based on learners’ ability to respond to the requirements of particular issues with whatever onto/epistemological tools come to hand. In that case, those affected by the problem would be free to decide the quality of the response. In effect, the problem-posing approach suggests a form of collective self-assessment in which all involved are directly affected by the success of the response. This, in turn, answers any institutional concerns over rigour, at the same time as overturning the anthropological orthodoxy encapsulated in the following remark from Unni Wikan: As anthropologists we are not truly implicated in the world of other people. It does not really matter all that much if we understand them or not. Our misunderstandings are not likely to resonate with crucial effects for us. We are concerned to produce effects on the anthropological community. (Wikan 1993: 206).

With assessment based on Freire’s problem-posing model, to the contrary, a primary concern would precisely be to ‘resonate with crucial effects’ for the people with whom, or the situation in which, the problem is set, and not specifically for the academic community.13 Elsewhere (Ang and Gatt 2018), I have argued that

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anthropology can become a heterogeneous discipline, taking a case by case, or granular, approach to maintaining disciplinary rigour. Here I suggest that the same principles of heterogeneity and granularity can and should be applied to the teaching and assessment of anthropology.

Pluriversities A pedagogy based on principles of exchange, in which attention is given not only to sharing and learning content but also to diverse ways of knowing, poses a challenge to the university system. While different epistemologies are already at work within mainstream universities – for instance, if we compare prevailing epistemologies respectively in the humanities and the life sciences – many other epistemologies are routinely excluded. For Freire, as Arturo Escobar (2008: 167) notes, exclusion works by means of othering, ‘the other as oppressed, as woman, as racially marked, … as poor, as nature’. To ‘other’ the oppressed is also to marginalize or exclude their ways of knowing, which are routinely disqualified on the grounds of their entanglement with particular ways of life and embeddedness in community commitments. Indeed, no epistemology is considered ‘properly academic’ that cannot be fully abstracted from these lifeways and commitments. This is another reason for seeking to collapse the distinction between ontology and epistemology, as I have done with my use of the term ‘onto/epistemology’. Even in fields that are by now well established, such as Gender Studies, scholars find they have constantly to defend themselves against the charge of advancing a political movement rather than an academic field (Pereira 2017). Besides intersectional issues relating to gender and socioeconomic background, the situation for Indigenous or neurodiverse people (Blaser 2010, Manning 2016) is still more challenging. The alternative, by which multiple onto/epistemologies would compose the fabric of higher education, would be a system of pluriversities, a term coined by Achille Mbembe (2015). Such institutions would be characterized by openness to epistemic difference, calling for a fundamental re-founding of approaches to knowledge and of the ways disciplines are constituted. The notion of the pluriversity entails a pluralism which is neither relativistic nor solipsistic. It is based on the idea of the pluriverse, originally introduced in 1909 by William James (2015) to describe the multiplicity of lived experience. James argued that multiple experiences can be shared, but that modernizing and industrializing processes, which characterize knowledge, subjectivity or institutions as unitary and uniform, obscure the differences that actually constitute experience. By



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distinguishing the universe and the pluriverse, James aimed not to set the one against the many but rather to find alternative ways of thinking about the relation between oneness and plurality. Universal thinking, as Ingold (2018b) shows, renders difference as ‘diversity’. The concept of diversity implies a segmentary, taxonomic model, in which individuals are classed together in terms of attributes they have in common and divided into separate classes in terms of attributes that some have and others do not. This taxonomic logic, classically instantiated in biology with the idea of species diversity and in anthropology in the project of cross-cultural comparison, is fundamentally non-relational. It gives us many-in-one; the whole with its semblable parts. James’s one-world, by contrast, is constituted by inexhaustible and ever-ramifying difference – not many-in-one but oneness as multiplicity. Whereas ‘diversity’ in the universe is premised upon oneness-as-homogeneity, pluriversal difference assumes oneness-as-relationality. Here, difference is the very basis for developing relationships, for communities to emerge, and for knowledge to grow. The ‘logic of empire’ (Dirlick 1997) operates through a divide-and-rule principle of classification that works precisely by reducing all difference to diversity. Once it was racial diversity; now it is cultural diversity. According to this principle, the allegedly universal human ‘capacity for culture’ is understood to be expressed in the diverse ‘cultures’ of humankind. This is the classic colonizing move, and it is still very much with us (Ingold 2018a). By contrast, the notion of the pluriversity is founded on multiple relational understandings of the world and of knowledge, and on the premise that the pursuit of knowledge should first and foremost be an ethical endeavour which recognizes responsibility towards others, in conversation with others, as the very ground from which knowing can emerge (Levinas 1979). The ‘decolonize the university’ movement, although envisaged many years ago (Harrison 1991), has recently gained increased momentum (Bhambra et al. 2018, Boidin et al. 2012, Gopal 2021). Educational theorists argue that in today’s highly mobile world of international and transnational education, better understanding of how different epistemologies interact, and of the new epistemologies that might arise from such interaction, is much needed. Further inspired by the work of Freire (1975), Indigenous universities have proliferated in North and South America, and educational principles such as the MULTIversity and Afrotopia (Sarr 2019) have been elaborated in Africa. These, together with the critical work already being undertaken in education and anthropology, suggest that we are at a watershed moment in our attempts to

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unravel the colonial fabric of the university and its concomitant orthopraxy and pedagogy.14 It is time to build a system of pluriversities.

Conclusion In this chapter I have outlined the orthopraxy underlying the exchange of knowledge in dominant anthropologies. In such orthopraxy the ways of knowing of people with whom anthropologists conventionally carry out fieldwork are marginalized, excluded from exchanges such as conferences and teaching. This in turn perpetuates ongoing coloniality and global inequality. I have described an alternative anthropological exchange, the ‘Collaboration in the Making’ workshop and mini-project, which I curated following principles of collaborative anthropology and adopting the stance of openness essential to both laboratory theatre and anthropological fieldwork. Decolonial critiques in anthropology, such as Escobar’s (2008), based on Freirian liberation pedagogy, offer practical alternatives. Finally, in order to facilitate such pedagogies in ways that can generate lasting and significant decolonization, I have introduced the concept of the pluriversity. Only by recognizing how diverse onto/epistemologies compose the fabric of human life and knowledge can our systems of higher education and research, instead of reproducing relations of coloniality, contribute towards meaningful decolonization.

Acknowledgements I wish to express my deep gratitude to all those who have contributed to the composition of this chapter. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are entirely my own. Thanks especially to Gey Pin Ang, and all the participants in the ‘Collaboration in the Making’ mini-project. Thanks to Tim Ingold for years of patient editing, guidance and for making the KFI project possible at all in an academic atmosphere so actively opposed to open experimentation. Thanks to all my colleagues and visitors to the KFI project. I am indebted to Paolo Grupposo and Nicola Perullo at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy, who made it possible for me to develop teaching methods there in which diverse ways of knowing are genuinely welcome, and thus enabled me to develop the insights I discuss in this chapter.



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Notes 1 The ASA is the association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. It holds a meeting every year, usually hosted by a UK institution, and occasionally organizes conferences outside the United Kingdom in collaboration with other associations or university centres and departments, such as in Tanzania (2002), New Zealand (2008), India (2012) and Australia (2017). The ASA has some bursaries to assist students (‘particularly those from the global South’) to attend conferences. 2 McLeish and Strang (2014: 5) draw on anthropological analysis of networks, identity formation and performance, as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinction’, to argue that disciplines can be considered like sub-cultures, in that each supposedly distinct discipline attempts to distinguish itself from the network in which all disciplines participate by constructing, performing and representing a specific identity. However, while likening disciplines to cultures, they also insist on setting ‘disciplines’ apart from ‘cultures’ on the grounds that whereas the people among whom anthropologists work are bound within cultures, disciplines transcend them. Indeed, Strang (2006) even argues for cross-cultural comparison as a ‘metalinguistic’ exercise, which effectively creates a separate intellectual space for anthropology, detached from mundane experience, ‘that allows people to deconstruct and critique their own beliefs and knowledges and place these alongside those of ethnographic comparators’ (Strang 2006: 983). 3 Important exceptions to the predominant conference setup are the labs introduced into meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) from 2014, and into ASA meetings from 2016, as well as the Ethnographic Terminalia exhibition that, from 2010, was organized to coincide with meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Although these laboratories and exhibitions make space for different ways of knowing within the key contexts for knowledge exchange that conferences predominantly are, they remain on the fringe. 4 It would also be relevant to attend to the architecture, interior fabric and set-ups of the rooms, as these are shaped by and contribute to the reproduction of epistemic coloniality. Consider, for instance, how ventilation pipes and electricity wires are concealed behind walls or ceiling soffits. These innards are only visible to users of these rooms, such as participants in conference panels, on occasions when maintenance or repair is required (Anusas and Ingold 2013, 2015). The skills and knowledge, considered practical rather than intellectual, that support the workings of these venues are for the most part hidden and unacknowledged. Likewise, performative or other non-logocentric ways of knowing are present but hidden from mainstream academic work (Blaser 2010, Pels 2000).

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5 See, e.g., de Sousa Santos (2014, 2018), Burman (2012), Boidin et al. (2012), Gatt (2018), Ang and Gatt (2018), Chua and Mathur (2018). 6 Mirella Schino (2013) situates Grotowski in a second wave of laboratory approaches to theatre as a form of enquiry, which took place in the 1960s, and also included the work of Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Joan Littlewood, Ariane Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suzuki, Enrique Buenaventura, Santiago García, Patricia Ariza and Antunes Filho. The first wave was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and is primarily identified with the work of Stanislawski. 7 Leszek Kolankiewicz, https://grotow​ski.net/en/encyc​lope​dia/grotow​ski-jerzy (accessed 6 January 2021). 8 This was confirmed in the negative, when the production of the book The Voices of the Pages (Gatt 2017b), which was initially planned for publication in December 2017, had to be fast tracked to publication in March 2017. This urgency for publishing contradicted the commitment to follow the stream of the work between us and led to a misunderstanding, as Ang wrote to me in reading early drafts of this chapter. For details about how this affected Ang, see Ang et al. (2017). 9 In the United Kingdom since the 1990s (Shore and Wright 2000, Strathern 2000) and in Europe as part of the Bologna Process (Boidin et al. 2012, de Sousa Santos 2014). For a similar process in East Africa, see Icaza and Vázquez (2018). 10 Performance ethnographers, the most well-known being Denzin (2003) and Conquergood (2002), carry out anthropology by means of performance. This is in part a development from the work of Dell Hymes, who argued that the meaning of utterances needs to be understood in their full performative context. Questions of cultural appropriation and representation are especially acute when the outcomes of ethnographic study are relatively accessible performances rather than opaque texts, which are therefore more open to critique by audiences including the people among whom the anthropologist has worked. For these reasons Denzin, Conquergood and other performance ethnographers had increasingly turned towards autoethnography, as a way to avoid having to represent ‘others’. 11 MLA stands for Member of the Legislative Assembly, Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly http://www.nt.assem​bly.ca/memb​ers. 12 See the special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies, entitled ‘Considering Onto/ Epistemology in Collaboration’ (Gatt 2018), and the KFI volume, The Voices of the Pages (Gatt 20017b). 13 See, e.g., the project ‘The Other Side of Middle Town’ (Campbell and Lassiter 2010). 14 For education and the anthropology of education see Connell (2019), Gibson (2018), Burman (2012); for collaborative anthropology see Lassiter (2005), Sanjek (2015), Gatt (2018); for decolonial anthropological practice see Harrison (1991), Gatt (2017–18a), Elinoff and Trundle (2018).



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Atmospheres of University Education: Courses and Forces Jan Masschelein, Mieke Berghmans and Maarten Simons

In February 2021, as part of a course on ‘Designing Educational Practices’, we walked and mapped the almost abandoned university campus of the KU Leuven, Belgium. In the pandemic climate of early 2021, universities in Belgium, as in many other parts of the world, were forced to operate very largely online. Nevertheless, we were permitted to organize this course on campus because it was for a limited number of students (eighteen, ourselves included), because a large part of it consisted of individual walks and because we could work together in the huge and airy rooms of the Abbey Keizersberg in Leuven. The course took as its starting point the longing for on-campus education, a longing that was deeply felt by students who had been predominantly online since the beginning of the academic year. Their express desire was, rather unexpectedly, not only to see friends and colleagues but also to be physically present in lectures, seminars and exercises. It was as if the pandemic had led students to renew their appreciation of the university, not just as an abstract idea or digital platform but as a place that allows for a particular kind of study, a real campus (Masschelein and Simons 2021). Our hypothesis was that in its architecture, work forms and disciplines, in the gatherings and moods it engenders, and in the kind of life it stages, the campus embodies forces that can make a particular kind of study happen, that support and sustain the becoming of a studying body as part of becoming an educated collective of scientists, scholars, academics and professionals. In the course, then, we tried to map and articulate some of these study-enabling, supporting forces. Abandoned buildings always exert a certain fascination, due not only to their partial recognition – we all recognize the architecture and settings of lecture halls, classrooms, labs and so on – but also to recollection and to a

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kind of oriented imagination. Our suddenly deserted campus did not of course offer the same appearance as, for example, the Université Val Benoît in Liège, Belgium, abandoned in 2006, or the electrotechnology and physics buildings of the technical university TU Delft in the Netherlands, abandoned in 1998.1 And of course, too, at night or during the holidays, university campuses are often ‘deserted’. But it made a real difference walking there in February 2021, aware both that this campus was compulsorily and almost totally deserted and that our own presence on campus had been allowed only by special permission in this ‘time of exception’, which is perhaps also the time of education. Buildings that once had a more or less clear function, that operated and were inhabited in a particular way, were now defunct and mothballed. Yet at the same time that their normal, regular or customary use had been suspended, they remained intact with their characteristic architecture, furniture and equipment still largely in place. The exceptionality of the time, the particularity of the place from where we were working (the Abbey) and our experience of having spent most of our time online combined to create a certain atmosphere.2 This atmosphere compelled us to pay attention to a stage and scenery – a ‘study-scape’ or ‘common infrastructure’ – which, to our surprise, seemed now to appear with a clarity, indeed a certain beauty, that aroused the expectation of new beginning. It forced us to recollect, to look and think again. It was, one could say, a kind of rediscovery of the campus we knew, of the world of the university. As we show in the following, it could also be called a re-collection and reimagination. What follows is neither a systematic argument nor a detailed story. It is rather a set of notes, sketches and reflections regarding the ‘campus’ and the ‘course’ – or better, a particular campus3 and a particular course. We hope that they can show why it would be not just impoverishing but ridiculous to make the university go completely online, as some have proposed. A campus is clearly not only a learning platform but a rich habitat which plays a crucial educational role in contributing to the ongoing formation of a habitable world. Or to put it another way: our course enabled us, we think, to give voice to the campus as a common pedagogic infrastructure. It brought observations and reflections that strongly support the students’ call for on-campus education. Since our course was about university study, the following notes and sketches are situated on two, related levels: on the first, they address what happened during the course in terms of our own studying; on the second they attempt to articulate the general nature of on-campus study. We first briefly introduce the protocol which defined the course. We then describe how it made us rediscover



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university education as a way of becoming ever more sensitive to the world around us while relying on multiple displacements enacted through the campus. Finally, we indicate some important activities that formed part of the course as a made setup, contributing to the development of a pedagogical ‘nose’.

Rediscovering the Campus: Our Protocol Our mapping and walking were guided by a protocol. KU Leuven has fifteen faculties and each student was assigned to a faculty. Starting from the Abbey, the student would go to the building in which the Dean’s office was located, find a student of that faculty who was still present (there were still a few around) and engage in a conversation with this student about the on-campus places in which she or he used to study or work in pre-pandemic times, and why. From there the student would proceed to the places mentioned, most of them now deserted, take a panoramic picture and then eight separate shots (turning a full 360° around the space, from the point where the faculty student would have been seated at work) and make a 15-second sound recording. After that, the same protocol was repeated: seek out another faculty student, engage in a conversation about on-campus study places, visit the indicated places and so on. Students kept track of their walks using an app on their phones, and took notes of their conversations, observations and thoughts throughout. During the evening and at night their notes were filed and translated into ‘articulations’ which had a predefined format: ‘it makes you …’. The ‘it’, here, refers to the place and its particular features such as shape, furniture and equipment. The ‘make’ refers to the force – for as Tim Ingold (2013: 20, 44) shows, making is about joining in a field of forces. The ‘you’ remains as an indefinite personal pronoun. We came to articulations such as: It [referring to the library] makes you smell and touch the words; or it [referring to a particular room setting] makes you arrive on time. These articulations were based on the observations and conversations with faculty students on campus and upon the recollection of our own experiences. Drawing on these articulations we then made soundscapes, postcards and models (maquettes) which allowed us to discover and to study the various forces that make it possible to perform or enact particular educational atmospheres on-campus. Part of this work was presented in a very small exhibition and gathered in an online atlas.4 It is important to note that the conversations, as much with students while walking the campus as among ourselves, were always recollections, since at the

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time there was virtually no on-campus activity.5 Etymologically, to recollect (from colligere) is to gather again. Unlike remembering, which occurs more or less spontaneously, it takes effort to bring things back to mind.6 Thus our articulated recollections, as regatherings, were attempts to express something about what the campus enacts, what it makes happen. They recollect what, following Brian Massumi, we could call ‘affects’ (Massumi et al. 2019). Hence, our walks were not about mapping the campus as a physical or cultural environment, or picking up the ideas or meanings that buildings convey in their ‘silent teachings’ (Temple 2014). Rather, our walks and conversations were explorations and recollections in a field of affects. Mapping can be seen in this sense as the spatial rendering of affective sequences (Bruno 2007). It is not about textual reading or understanding, but about the observation and registration of affective intensities, of forces that make us move or do something, or prevent us from doing something. Affects, in this sense, are impersonal, pre-subjective forces, which condition what bodies can do, and are worked on in bodily encounters (Beyes and Michels 2014: 23, 27).

Becoming Sensitive to What the World Has to Say We were accompanied in our activities throughout the course by a little library, which included motion pictures7 and a song8 as well as a lecture, by a colleague in architecture, on the use of maquettes to stimulate thinking. It is worth dwelling for a while on one of the texts in our library. It is an article by Bruno Latour (2004) on the normative dimension of science studies, entitled: ‘How to Talk about the Body?’ Inspired by the writings of philosopher Vinciane Despret, who in turn draws on William James, Latour suggests that ‘to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead.’ The body becomes ‘more and more describable as it learns to be affected by many more elements … By focusing on the body, one is … directed to what the body has become aware of ’ (Latour 2004: 205–6).9 In order to clarify what ‘learning to be affected’ could mean, Latour starts from the example of the odour kit made of series of sharply distinct pure fragrances arranged in such a way that one can go from sharpest to smallest contrasts. To register those contrasts one needs to be trained … one ends up … becoming a ‘nose’ (un nez), that is,



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someone able to discriminate more and more subtle differences and able to tell them apart from one another … It is not by accident that the person is called ‘a nose’ as if, through practice, she had acquired an organ that defined her ability to detect chemical and other differences … she learned to have a nose that allowed her to inhabit a (richly differentiated odoriferous) world. Thus body parts are progressively acquired at the same time as ‘world counter-parts’ are being registered in a new way. Acquiring a body is thus a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world. (2004: 206–7)

Through the training – which includes, as Latour (2004: 207) mentions in passing, ‘the teacher, the kit and the session’ – you are taught to be affected; hence the learning implies not only the odour kit but also the session and the teaching. Different odours make you act differently, render you attentive in different ways, your ‘nose’ becomes articulated. It brings about a differentiated ‘effect or affect on the pupil … who is slowly becoming a “nose”, that is someone for whom odours in the world are not producing contrasts without in some ways affecting her [so as] to make [her] do something different every time – instead of eliciting always the same crude behaviour’ (2004: 207). In general, this is also what happens to those who, through long enquiry, devise the kit, and to the chemists who attempt to build instruments to register differences: ‘Each of these different actors can be defined as bodies learning to be affected by hitherto unregistrable differences through the mediation of an artificially created set-up’ (2004: 209). The different actors become articulated bodies. The odour kit, according to Latour, ‘ “articulates” pupils’ perceptions with fragrances by the industry and demonstrations given by the professor’ (2004: 210). Going through the ‘artificially created set-up’ is a way ‘of giving a voice, that is a meaning, to whatever conditions generate odour tasting … [It is] what allows … the differences of the world to be loaded into what appeared at first arbitrary sets of contrasts’ (2004: 210). It allows a word like ‘violet’ (used to refer to a certain odour) to ‘carry’ the corresponding fragrance, including its undertones. ‘Through the materiality of the language tools, words finally carry worlds … Resemblance is not the only way to load words into the world [and to make words carry worlds, loading them into words] … Language has immensely more resources for being rooted in reality than mimesis’ (2004: 210). Latour refers to various artificial layers or setups that make the body increasingly sensitive to differences and the world ever more talkative and interesting. Herein lies the meaning of being ‘in-between’, relating and separating us at the same time.10 Consider for example the many artificial layers involved in chemistry. Professional chemists, too, ‘acquire a body, a nose, an organ, through

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their laboratories this time, and also thanks to their conferences, their literature, and the paraphernalia that make up what could be called the collective body of science … We, the laymen, might not register the same differences.’ Thus, one acquires an articulated body through becoming part of a collective body as a collection of artificial layers. The more artificial layers or mediations, indeed, the better. The more sensitive one becomes ‘to the effects of more different entities … the wider the world becomes’ (2004: 211). From this ‘talk about the body’ we can draw several lessons for university education, for the campus and for our course. We can approach university education, or the becoming of a chemist, geologist, architect, geographer, jurist or of a social, political or educational scientist, as a way of acquiring a body that can discriminate with increasing subtlety – one, in other words, that is more and more sensitive to what the world has to say. University education is about acquiring organs (ears, eyes, tongue, nose, hands, mind) capable of making distinctions that matter in chemical, geological, juridical, social and educational worlds. These abilities are not merely cognitive; they also lie in ways of moving and of being put into motion. By acquiring organs for inhabiting richly differentiated worlds, we give voices to these worlds, expressed in how they effectuate the body or put it in motion. This acquisition and giving voice is made to happen through artificial layers or setups, mediations that are both produced by and produce the collective body in which one partakes. This body is at once an always open collective and a collection – a gathering of practices, things, instruments, guidelines, protocols and people.11 However, the work in our course made us think we should add some further distinctions and elements to what Latour takes to be self-evident. Even if he explicitly refers to ‘training’, ‘session’ and ‘demonstration’ – that is, what it is ‘to learn to be affected’ (2004: 205) or to acquire organs – we think this learning is not simply a natural process. For in order to learn to be affected, the learning itself must incorporate several made setups. In this context, the ‘sessions’, as Latour calls them, can be seen as artificial setups which play a crucial role in becoming a chemist, geologist and so on, that is, in enacting the bodily activities of studying chemistry, geology, etc. These sessions, more usually known as lectures, seminars, workshops, lab exercises, excursions, library visits,12 and which we could understand as diverse ‘collections’ and ‘collectives’, play a crucial role in enabling the world to become talkative and in sensitizing us to what it says. Whether we be students or teachers, they make us studious. Sessions are made setups that enable us, so to speak, to taste the world,13 and in so doing to work on our ability to notice distinctions that matter, or in a word, to study.



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Indeed, to become a student in any field, one must learn to be affected. Studying is not just learning by doing but learning by working and experimenting; it is about, for example, taking notes, making comments, attempting to name and rename. This work is sustained through various artificial layers which materialize the effort, concentration, focus and discipline that help, on the one hand, to resist what we could call the automation of looking, reading, listening and feeling – or what Latour (2004: 207) calls ‘crude behaviour’ – and, on the other hand, to realize a certain attention and presence of mind. Or to put it differently, various artificial layers, various made setups – in which we could include the collective body or common infrastructure of university education – are crucial to sustain the work that needs to be done. Education is never practised in a vacuum, let alone in a ‘cloud’, not only because it is always connected to specific issues and study materials but also because it requires a specific setting, place, gathering, architecture and ambiance or atmosphere. For instance, the setup of a chemistry lecture includes a certain spatial arrangement, seats, blackboard, desk, light, sound, the presence of bodies, all of which force you to sit in a certain way, to keep out distractions, and to focus on what the world of chemistry has to say by introducing ever more distinctions that matter. These sessions create a certain educational atmosphere or mood, specific to that setup. The bodily presence of the students and teachers, moreover, allows them to be affected in many ways, rather than in just the one way afforded by recorded ‘sessions’ in online education. One can touch or be touched, deliberatively or by accident; one can hear the falling of a pen, smell the chalk on the blackboard, hear the rustle of clothing. Moreover, one contributes to what happens and becomes part of a rhythm and hence, as we shall see in the following, of a differentiated time. Indeed, we often sense from the outset that we are in an educational environment due to the way the space is organized, the setting and gathering arranged, and people placed. This architecture speaks to us not in terms of meaning, which has to be understood, but in terms of effect or better, ‘affect’. It has its rhetoric14 as it solves in practice the questions of how many students can be seated, how the ‘thing’ to be studied can be made present and be brought into our midst, how we can gather around it, approach it, attend to it. In this context we could think, for example, about the abundant presence of ‘tables’ in a large variety of forms (desks, worktops, folded) in all sessions on campus, even in so-called collaborate rooms, furnished with banks of computers equipped with both big and small screens, on which students can work either individually or together. Tables are themselves material, three-dimensional objects and they are

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always in the midst, offering an in-between, alternative to the floor, where things can gather or be set down. The table works like a horizontal blackboard: it focuses attention, separates and relates, but also decontextualizes and singularizes the things that are put there, whether they be rocks from the library of minerals in the geoscience faculty, electronic circuits to be wired up in the engineering faculty or texts to be studied in the literature seminar.

Mediatic and Bodily Displacements Related to the variety of ‘sessions’ and the layers of mediations involved, we also want to point to all the displacements from one medium to another that contribute to transforming something into a matter of study (Schildermans et al. 2019).15 We adopt the notion of ‘mediatic displacement’ from Lavinia Marin, who defines it as follows: I call mediatic displacement the event of transcoding in which more than one medium is used, successively, such that the effect of a medium is cancelled through another medium … It achieves a suspension and placing at a distance of something already embedded and structured by codes … The lecturer’s voice displaces the text, the student’s gaze displaces the voice, the writing hand displaces the text and the voice, and then the text again is read and commented while displacing voice and writing, and so on, in endless circular movements of displacement. This educational suspension enables thinking to suddenly irrupt. (Marin 2021: 52)

Mediums thus subject to displacement can include slides, experimental setups, formulae and diagrams on blackboards, models and also, very importantly, the various forms of the spoken word. Thoughts and texts are literally turned to speech, they are spoken, but so too are formulae, numbers, rocks and chemical elements. All are mediatically displaced into speech or talk, albeit in varying styles and tones. Indeed, not only the silent campus and the quasi-absence of ‘discourse’, but also the recollection of one of the students we met on campus of a famous, even sacral hall in the philosophy faculty – a hall dedicated almost exclusively to speech in the form of lectures, colloquia, debates, doctoral defences, in which many distinguished philosophers had lectured – made us think again about the indispensably oral aspect of the session. A teacher or student speaks differently, and is therefore differently addressed by thoughts, texts, formulae and so on,



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depending on whether she is present in an auditorium or involved in a seminar, excursion, exercise or webinar. For example, as another of our students remarked, the experience of being addressed, of being really spoken to in the present and as part of a collective, of receiving the oral comments of a professor while she writes and even re-enacts the invention of a formula on the blackboard – in such a way that she is not just explicating but indeed proposing and presenting – imbues one’s understanding of the formula with a special affective intensity. It is not like reading it in a handbook or hearing it explained in the replay of a YouTube video. These differences matter. Collectively attending a lecture releases a particular force and materializes the promise of encounter with a world that speaks back in a particular way, that becomes an ‘object’ of study – not as an object for a subject, but as part of a world that is actually given voice. We could refer here to the work of Françoise Waquet, who has described how orality is indeed a crucial element of courses, which we tend to forget because of our reliance on books, or more generally on written sources. She points to the impact of the spoken word in lectures, exercises, excursions and conferences, in the endless conversations before and after courses, in hallways and corridors.16 The university, for her, is ‘the milieu of spoken science’ (Waquet 2003: 25, our translation). Moreover, Waquet stresses that oral activities such as lecturing serve not just to transmit knowledge but to produce it, while at the same time putting it to the test. These activities make worlds ‘talkative’, so that they affect us for example in the sense of making us think further, bringing to light new relations and distinctions. For Waquet, this gives speech ‘a superior cognitive value’ (2003: 11) which contributes to the advancement of knowledge, to its production and invention. More generally, then, sessions do not just transmit but produce or even invent a world – of chemistry, for example. Different kinds of session, with their particular setups and orality, make the world talk back, or ‘object’, in different ways,17 through the comments, clarifications, questions of other students, confrontation with examples and so on. One learns new words, new names which do not just represent immaterial thought. They also change how a world is loaded into words (and names) and how words can affect us. As Jacques Rancière (2021) observes, words are material forces, you can do things with them, and they also make us do things. We need to be aware of the unpredictable and uncontrollable ways in which sessions affect words, and in which words, in turn, affect us. We could call sessions collections of mediations and made setups, and also collectives or gatherings. More simply, they are courses or pedagogic forms. They are pedagogic in the sense that they render worlds ever more talkative, ever

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richer, while they stage an encounter with these worlds. And we could maybe think of the faculty as an open-ended and performed collection of courses. Derived from the Latin facere (‘to make or do’), faculty refers to an ability to make more and more distinctions, to be moved by more and more elements of worlds. Faculties, in the sense of places and educational infrastructures, are continually disclosing and composing worlds. They offer names that carry worlds, make them talkative. Our rediscovery of on-campus education happened through a course. It made us see the university as a world of courses, of faculties as performed places of collectives and collections. Maybe we could conceive of our course as contributing to the elaboration of a campus kit, while acquiring something like a pedagogical ‘nose’. Mapping the displacements that students reported and that we partly tried to visualize through a model (Figure 11.1), while recollecting their experiences, we came to realize the presence and particular importance of bodily displacement. There are good reasons to claim that one goes to the university and to the campus, and to recall that ‘course’ actually refers to a movement. Course programmes not only indicate what a course is about and

Figure 11.1  Reported on-campus displacements to study places, visualized on the city map of Leuven. Photo courtesy of Jan Masschelein.



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who the teacher is, but also tell students where to go. It would indeed be very difficult to attend a course, in every sense of the word, if there were no bodily displacement, if one never left one’s house or home. Already in the middle ages, leaving home, and becoming a stranger or a foreigner in another place, was a key part of what it meant to study: students were ‘foreigners by definition’ (Verger 1992: 41). Going to the campus and moving across the campus, from one session to another, is also an undergoing and a form of exposure. It is the very opposite of being ‘installed’ at home or in your student room, and it is different, too, from surfing online. Walking on campus, attending and passing the various buildings, the rooms, libraries and so on, is not like surfing the blackboard platform, or clicking from one Zoom ‘session’ to another Teams ‘meeting’. As Jozef Wouters wrote, comparing his experience of the Medina of Tunis with the internet: For a while I thought of the Medina as a good metaphor for the internet. No overview, a chaos of small streets, lots of doors leading to semi-public spaces that you need to know before you find them … Just like the Internet, the Medina seems to be made of very many different realities at once. Your internet is not mine. Your network and the information it feeds you are different from mine. It closes in around you, just like a house, makes you hear things you already know and makes you forget all the other points of view. But while walking around and trying out the metaphor, I noticed a major difference between the Internet and the Medina. In the Medina, even if you are not allowed to enter any of the doors leading to patios like this one, your body is still aware of all that exclusive space, registering it by just walking around. (Wouters 2020: 98)

Moreover, going to class, to the course, creates a particular, in-between time, a time of transition which makes one aware and expectant for the eventual adventure of an encounter, not only with others but also with something of the world. It prepares you for the requisite presence of mind. And as Tomas Bernhard recalled, no matter where you go, you find yourself for a while in the endless possibility of the in-between.18 Attending a course is site-specific. You go to the university, to a particular room, at a scheduled time. This room is more or less dedicated to, and defined by, a certain practice. It has no bed or bath, but ordered seats, blackboards, tables, lab equipment, collective screens, all of which place limits on what can be done there, forcing a certain discipline, a certain posture, indeed a ritual. In a lecture hall you cannot normally move the chairs or the blackboard; your gaze is to some extent directed. This is quite different from looking at a laptop screen

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which can display all manner of formats, allowing you to switch from one to the other without any change of posture at all, and always leaving you the option to click out of them altogether. Course rooms do not allow this option. They cannot be appropriated at will. You cannot simply make yourself at home in them; to the contrary, they resist your efforts to do so, reminding you that you are somewhere else, in a place of exposure, of study, with fellow students rather than family and friends. Going to the course room thus offers a location which is neither ‘in the cloud’ nor at home. Whereas at home or in the study, the student might indeed be considered to be a centre of attention and decision-making, the made setups of courses aim to get the student out of the centre, both liberating the student from having to decide everything for herself and making the world talkative. She finds herself confronted with something in the midst, with others around the table. The thing on the table, not the student, is now the centre of attention around which interest revolves. As we shall see in the following, this became very clear when we made models, respectively, of on-campus and student rooms. As one of our students said, the transition from one place or session to another gives you the experience of ending one thing, or leaving it behind, and beginning another. It offers you time you cannot reverse, rewind or pause. This is not merely ‘subjective’. As Manuel Castells already observed some three decades ago, the time of the digital network is ‘instantaneous’ in the sense that it is nonsequential: ‘there is systematic perturbation in the sequential order’. The elimination of sequencing ‘creates undifferentiated time, which is tantamount to eternity’ (Castells 2010: 494). Since eternity is endless there is no real reason to choose; everything either loses its meaning or becomes equally meaningful (Vanhoutte 2019). This sense of undifferentiated time was in fact deployed by our university board, during the pandemic, as a reason to promote the livestreaming of lectures and seminars, rather than relying on pre-recorded videos. The board argued that this would offer some ‘structure’ to students, who were otherwise confined to their rooms with nothing but their laptops for company. This intention was nevertheless thwarted because in practice, sessions had to be recorded so that those who for some reason could not attend were still able to see and listen. However, as one of the students reported, recording also changed the relationship to what was said. Rather than listening while taking notes, many students began to rewind and pause to transcribe every word. It became a matter of decoding transmitted knowledge.19 Whereas students talked about lectures in pre-corona times as moments of attending at the ‘birth’ of knowledge and thought, of



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partaking in a happening and in its affects, studying recorded lectures on-screen was more like a cognitive exercise. To return to our earlier example, instead of watching a formula emerge on the blackboard, they would see it ready-made. Their task, then, was to interpret it. Moreover, the on-campus university course creates ‘another time’, a way of living in the present in another world, as Rancière (2017: 32) puts it. For those who really live the time of the course, there is fulfilment already in the encounter and not just in the future when ‘knowledge outcomes’ are finally achieved. There is what Karl Marx would call a ‘working existence’ in the experience of being part of a collective, of students brought together not by shared identity or background but by being gathered around something of interest. The course creates a thoroughly social a-sociality, precisely because it emphasizes not the similarities among participants but the very distance which creates, equally and for all, an in-between in relation to a matter of common interest. A course could be seen, with Roland Barthes (2002: 37), as a ‘mise-en-commun des distances’. It is an experience torn from considerations of social origin, background or context. In short, the educational experience of students is less to do with belonging to a social group or a ‘social body’ than with forming a collective-in-distances.

Our Course as a Made Setup Returning to the text of Latour, we believe our course was a ‘made setup’ that, as an investigation undertaken in common, contributed to the ‘training’ of the body of educational scientists. It involved all kinds of mediations. It was built up ‘from the inside’, not from having an overview or a project in mind, but as a staging of work in the dark (Masschelein 2021). Relying on the old meaning of the laboratory as atelier, it arranged and established a workplace that opened a path towards what could not be imagined in advance but only vaguely conjectured. The work involved walking, observing, talking, sketching, picturing, recording, modelling, making the artifices to move around, gather around and have a conversation. One of the important activities during the course was to make postcards, based on pictures made on campus designed to give a taste of the richness and diversity of on-campus university education (Figure 11.2).20 We intended literally to send the postcards to students and professors who had been, and still were, elsewhere (‘in the cloud’), in order to keep them attached and to sustain their longing to land back on a campus soon to come. In their analysis

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Figure 11.2  Examples of postcards; picture sides (above) and reverse sides (below). Photos courtesy of Jan Masschelein.

of the university as a performed space, Beyes and Michels (2014: 27) point to ‘the difficulty of exploring and discussing affects’, and to the fact that an affecting space (in our case the campus) ‘is unrepresentable in a mimetic sense … it cannot be “tamed” by representational moves’ (2014: 28). It requires us to experiment with forms of writing and presentation which seek to apprehend the forces that set up encounters and shape affective atmospheres. Along these lines, we think our postcards exemplify what Beyes and Michels call ‘atmospheric assessments’ that ‘allude to the generative effects of sensual and embodied perceptions, which are implicated in the production of university space’ (2014: 27). The postcards not only offered a ‘picture’ of a part of the campus, taken by students during their walking exploration; they were also completed by the



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written articulation of an affect, as when we say, ‘it makes you …’ (as stipulated in our protocol). They could be seen as a kind of memory-image, ‘affective in nature, that is, [a]‌sensorially derived and emotionally charged – recollection … a re-enactment of experience, which involves imagination and emotion’ (Bruno 2007: 222). They chart the movement of the on-campus world. The postcards are physical objects, they are to be sent, with a view to presenting a collection or ‘common infrastructure of living mediations’, not to affirm a belonging but to expedite an encounter, a bringing ‘near to’ (Berlant 2016, Facer and Buchczyk 2019). The postcards report from the world of the university,21 capturing an atmosphere, trying also to be inviting, attractive, to be a ‘motion-picture’ that is also a recollection – something you would bring yourself from your journeys away from home. They could be compared to what, in rhetoric, are called ‘agent images’ (Carruthers 2000: 16). Of course, what we were able to make was still very limited, just a start of what could maybe be brought together in an atlas of educational atmospheres for the purposes of attracting attention, making the campus talkative and our bodies expressive, and making us further explore and study our world.22 Another important activity, inspired by the role that models play in architectural education, consisted of making models of certain made setups. These were in fact boxes that helped us to think about the forces permeating each setup. We would gather around the boxes to study the models which, in this regard, were not only outcomes (produced artifacts) but tools. The models actually made, and variously remade, showed the setup of a lecture, of a library visit, of a seminar and of a student in her dorm room (Figure 11.3). Inspired by the work of artist Thomas Demand, the students created different forcefields in the models and then took pictures of them which were later mounted, together with a presentation of the postcards, on a website. Making these boxes involved acts of mediatic displacement (from observation to physical models, to their material manipulation, to pictures again, to articulations) in order to give voice to the sessions (seminar, library, lecture hall) at the same time as sensitizing us to the diversity of university spaces. These boxes could be seen as part of a study kit to develop a ‘nose’ for the field of forces that perform collectives and collections on campus. They allowed us, for instance, to see how keeping the world under study in our midst – for example, in a seminar session – depends on maintaining the constituent forces of the session in a delicate equilibrium. They also made us aware of the extent to which students, now having to work online and alone in their rooms, struggle to muster the forces to study almost entirely from within themselves. This calls for

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Figure 11.3  Models to study the forces that engender a presence of mind in a seminar room (above) and student room (below). Photos courtesy of Jan Masschelein.



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intense self-regulation. What we found was that to help them with this, students would tend to simulate the forces that would otherwise apply, for example, in the seminar room. In what is known as ‘live-stream studying’, they would open their laptops, put on their cameras and livestream what they are doing, even if only reading, so that others can watch and they can feel observed, just as they would be observed in a room full of other students whose presence, under usual circumstances, would help to keep everyone in place and engaged. This simulation of the forces normally enacted in a seminar or lecture hall, however, leaves us wondering whether the powers of self-regulation demanded by online education are anything less than superhuman. Through walking, observing, talking, sketching, picturing, recording and modelling, we have tried to make the campus talk along the unfolding paths of our attention. We rediscovered the campus as a collective body of education, a common pedagogical infrastructure, an ever-expanding collection of artificial layers or made setups embodying the forces that allow for study as a way of learning to be affected. University education, we have found, is not just about accumulating, producing or acquiring ‘knowledge’. The campus as a physical environment becomes a place of study through the enactment of multiple, emplaced collections and collectives, which engender encounters with worlds. A campus in this sense is an active educational force, both producing and produced. Enactments have to be performed, and the collections and collectives that emerge from them are fragile and always temporary, even if material infrastructures and institutional contexts lend the campus a certain durability. As our models of these infrastructures showed, their force depends on many elements which need to be held in balance in order to keep the talking, objective and objecting world in our midst.

Coda In these pandemic times, there was a moment when some thought the university could go completely online. Our discussion, however, has vividly demonstrated that online learning can never replace on-campus education. Or more precisely, online education is so completely different from on-campus education that it seems almost impossible to make sensible comparisons between them. Indeed, those students who entered university for the first time at the end of September 2020, and almost immediately had to enter online education, will be the first generation to have scarcely ‘tasted’ the collective acquisition of an articulated

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student body. Yet as Dennis Hayes (2021) insists, we diminish students by treating them as vulnerable victims of the pandemic; nor is it enough to endorse a return to campus merely on the premise that it offers a therapeutic ‘safe space’ for the restoration of their mental health and well-being. For we have still to win the argument for education. In making this argument we do not mean to blame or denigrate the online environment. Our intention is rather to recall the differentiated world of university study, to which the digital can surely add, but which it cannot replace. To refer once more to Latour, the digital collectives (webinar, Zoom session, Teams meeting, Skype call, Collaborate session) can add more mediations, and perhaps contribute to the composition of the worlds at stake in university education. In this sense, university education has been and always will be ‘blended’, at least if we consider that this involves a precise, balanced and carefully arranged blend of specifically designed materials, places, oral equipment and furniture, together performing a collection and a collective. Our point here is neither to idealize today’s university education nor to deny the questionable content of some course curricula. Nor is it even to ignore all the criticism that has been directed towards today’s universities and university education, to which we have indeed contributed ourselves. But walking the abandoned campus and building a course ‘from the inside’ has caused us to recollect and reimagine the forces that prevent university courses from turning into closed, automated and imposed discourses. Real study always entails the de-automatization of our thinking and sensing. Turning courses into made setups or sessions will enable us, once again, to learn to listen to the music of the world.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the students who participated in our course for contributing many of the observations and reflections reported in this chapter. They are Anne-Maree Jakowenko, Carlos David Ortegón Banoy, Chunhui He, Danielle Warmenhove, Hugo Li, Jieyu Wang, Kim Truong, Maria Laura Arce Lange, Mariko Matsuzaki, Nick Calcoen, Ning Liu, Qianru Guo, Toon Tierens, William Everaerts and Wilson Perdomo Escovar. We thank them all for their intensive work, their commitment and their contagious enthusiasm.



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Notes 1 See pictures on: https://www.urbex.nl/uni​vers​ite-val-ben​oit/ and https://www. urbex.nl/tu-delft-natu​urku​nde-en-elek​trot​echn​iek/. 2 On the concept of atmosphere, see Ingold (2015: 73–8). 3 As Schildermans (2018) states, referring to Donna Haraway, it makes a difference which university you study university with. 4 See https://toon​tier​ens.wixs​ite.com/labo (so far only in Dutch). 5 The students in the course were Masters students and those they talked to on campus had all experienced the campus in pre-pandemic times – unlike first-year students nearly all of whom, at KU Leuven, joined the university directly from secondary school. 6 https://www.ety​monl​ine.com/word/recoll​ect. 7 These were Eloisa Solaas (dir.), Las Facultades (2019), and Frederick Wiseman (dir.), At Berkeley (2013). As so often the case for similar courses, both were suggested to us by Jorge Larrosa. 8 Violeta Para, Mercedes Sosa, Me gustan los estudiantes https://www.yout​ube.com/ watch?v=2_k6​A4MV​CEI&ab_​chan​nel=Merce​desS​osaV​EVO. 9 Emphases in this and the following citations from Latour (2004) are in the original. 10 This simultaneous relating and separation of a world in-between is the literal meaning of inter-esse, whence ‘interest’ (Arendt 1958: 52–3). 11 This gives an added twist to another formulation by Latour: ‘We do not live in a society but in a collective. If we are a collective, it is because we collect things. A major aspect of the history of our so-called modern world, especially the scientific modern world, is our invention of collections’ (Latour, cited in Linke 2017: 184). 12 To which we could now add webinars and skypetalks. These, however, are no substitute. 13 Isabelle Stengers (2017) reminds us that the famous motto of the Enlightenment, formulated in Latin by Kant, ‘sapere aude’, and translated by him as ‘have the courage to use your own understanding’, can better be rendered as ‘have the courage to taste, to put your understanding/sensing to the test’ (Dutch: proeven/beproeven). Latour (2004: 210) also speaks of ‘odour tasting’. 14 In her work on the craft of thought, Marry Carruthers (2000: 2) approaches affect as a question of rhetoric, which brings it into the realm of the collective and impersonal, as against a psychological approach which tends to overemphasize the individual and personal. Medieval rhetoric, Carruthers states, was ‘practiced as primarily a craft of composition rather than as one primarily of persuading others’ (2000: 3). It was an art of gathering, of collecting and recollecting – that is, of memory, not mimesis – that facilitates ‘thinking about’. For Carruthers,

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such rhetoric was not about having thoughts but about making them. And this requires work. 15 In formulating this notion, Marin draws on the work of Vilém Flusser and Ivan Illich. See also Cavell (2016). 16 ‘Parler est, en effet, l’une des choses les plus communes qui soit dans le monde intellectuel, de l’université et de la recherche’ [To speak is, in effect, one of the things most common to the world of the intellect, of the university, and of research] (Wacquet 2003: 23). 17 Latour (2004: 14–15), referring to Stengers and Despret, points out the absurdity of supposing that genes always do the same thing, regardless of the situation in which they operate. By analogy we could say that it is equally absurd to say that the spoken word transmits the same information and affects us in the same way, whether it is delivered in an auditorium or on screen. 18 Quoted in the Belgian Newspaper De Standaard, 28 November 2020. 19 This, of course, is also a kind of learning ‘by working’, but it is different from attending an actual lecture. It could even be seen as a return to the idea of copying of the holy book (to be obeyed) in the medieval scriptorium, before the book left the cloisters to become a book to study (and hence to question) within the university (see Illich 1991). 20 In his Théorie de la carte postale, Sébastien Lapaque (2014: 13) states that for him, postcards have nothing to do with melancholy. With postcards which reproduce chosen locations and have words written on the reverse, he wants to reinvent ‘un présent plein de lendemains’ [a present full of tomorrows]. 21 This is the world of on-campus education, or to translate the title of John Amos Comenius’s famous treatise of 1658, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, ‘a world of things obvious to the senses drawn in pictures’. 22 We recall the words of Judith Schalansky (2010: 23), in her Atlas of Remote Islands, that there is no more poetic book in the world than an atlas, that no other book inspires such a strong longing for the whole world. ‘Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits – the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day.’

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Index Abramović, Marina  32 affects  244–5: architecture of  247; atmospheric  254; in the classroom  105, 115; and cognition  14, 53; and passability 52–3; relational  10, 106; William James on  49, 54 agency  35, 39, 52, 54, 126: versus animacy 128–9; emergent  21 Albers, Josef  167, 177–8, 181 Alÿs, Francis  203, 206 analogical thinking  64–5, 69, 73, 75–6, 84 Ang, Gey Pin  214, 219, 222, 225 anthropology 2–4, 13, 17, 21: and art  17, 168–9, 207–8, 220–1; and basketry  82; collaboration in  3, 213, 215, 217–27, 229, 232; graphic  157; and interdisciplinarity  215–16; philosophical  168 architecture 3–4, 13, 15–16, 169: affective  247; filmic 147–9; modelmaking in  155–8; teaching practices in  141; temporality in 153–4, 160 Arendt, Hannah  5, 51, 124, 191: on education 196–7 art 3–4, 13, 106, 169: absurd in  14–15, 191–7, 199, 201–2, 206, 208; conceptual 207–8; ‘degenerate’ 180–2; encounters with  53; and everyday life  166, 168, 171, 192–4, 199, 202, 204–5; and nature  82; school as  15; versus science  14 art school  15–16, 165–92, 184–5, 190 assessment 229–30 atmosphere  109, 156: affective  254; classroom 111–12, 116; educational  178, 242–3, 247, 255 attention 6–7, 10, 12–14, 16, 54, 56: centres of  252; deficit of  105, 107; education of  4, 213; fields of  21, 36, 38; and intention  48, 55; shared  127; and skill  83, 86, 90

attentionality 32–3, 36, 38, 83, 86 autism  12, 123–6, 131–5 basketry  8, 13, 16, 81–6, 89–93, 96 Bateson, Gregory  48, 56, 89 Bauhaus  15, 17, 81, 166–70, 175–81, 183–5 Bauman, Zygmunt  125 Benjamin, Walter  83, 168, 176 Berghmans, Mieke  16 Bergson, Henri  82, 109 Beuys, Joseph  14, 191, 199–202, 206 Biesta, Gert  11, 53–5, 58, 126–7, 133, 190–1: on learning 22–3, 38–9; on letting art teach  14, 51–3, 199–201, 206, 208; on the risk of education  57; on subjectification and responseability  125; on teaching as a gift  135; on weak education  22, 126 Black Mountain College  181 Blacking, John  85 Bloch, Ernst  182–3 body 32–3, 35, 129: affective training of  245; in architecture  152; children’s  110; collective 246–7; laterality of  92; and measurement  66; and movement  85; of the school  106; talk about  244, 246 brain  14, 92, 85: injury of  83, 85, 91 Breton, André 201–2, 206, 220 building: abandoned 241–2: and bildung  15, 167; meanings of  244; robots 30–1, 37; school  15, 109 Bunn, Stephanie  8, 13, 16 Cage, John  192, 209 campus 241–4, 246, 248, 250–5, 257–8 Camus, Albert  202–3, 207–8 care 1–2, 7, 201 Cézanne, Paul  41 cinema  9, 141, 148–9, 151–7, 160–1 classroom 10–11, 15, 24, 26–7, 35, 126–7, 181, 241: early years  102, 105, 107–18

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cognition, rudimentary  49, 53, and skill 82–3, 85 Coldstream Report  178 collaboration: anthropological 3, 213, 215, 217–27, 229, 232; in art school 171, 179; with basketmakers 82, 84–5; interdisciplinary 215–17; kitchen a place of 5; in learning 17; with materials 83 colonialism  12, 216: epistemological 213–14, 218; and humanism 2; and measurement 65; and neocolonialism 207; and Science 214–15; see also decolonization commoning  30, 38, 207 community of practice 22–3 concepts: corporeal  129; expression of, in gesture  88; formation of 28–32 correspondence  2, 14, 21, 36, 39: of anthropology and art 168–9, 207–8; and learning  23, 27; and undergoing 28–9 cosmology  69: ancient Greek  71 course: architectural 142–4: art  170, 176– 9; on Art and Sustainability  41, 43, 56; on Designing Educational Practices 241–3, 253; as movement  250; site-specificity of 251–2; of study 4–6, 249–53, 258; of teacher training  113, 179 craft  8, 82–3, 85, 90, 92, 128, 166, 175: combination of observational and practical skills in  171; and industry  169 creativity  4, 11, 14, 22, 30, 82–3, 126, 191, 199, 206 curiosity  2, 58, 179, 198, 225 curriculum  4, 6, 16, 73–5, 126–7: architectural 142–3, 147; autistic  124; Bauhaus  176, 184; as verb  135; vitae  6 Dada 14–15, 180, 189, 191–2, 201–2 dance  94, 129, 207 de Certeau, Michel  173 de Freitas, Elizabeth 12–13 Dearing Report  171–2, 174 decolonization  146, 213–14, 220–3, 228, 231–2; see also colonialism Deleuze, Gilles  109, 113, 115: with Félix Guattari  65, 70, 72, 109

dementia 86–7 democracy  165, 170, 174–6, 181: and education  180 Derrida, Jacques  39 design 3–4, 9, 13, 15, 142, 169: and craft  175; product 154–5; sound  142, 152, 158, 160; teaching in  143, 145–6 Dewey, John  3, 6, 28, 34, 48, 54–5, 57, 123–4, 127, 135, 181, 207: on art and experience  52, 87–8, 92, 180, 192; on education and democracy 180–1; and pragmatism  167, 192 difference: bodily sensitivity to 245–6; versus diversity 231; emergent 12; epistemic 230; experiences of 102, 123–4, 134; living together in 17, 116; and measurement 13, 67; and oddity 12, 103–4; participating with  111; in perception 130–4 disability  74, 76 disciplines 6–7: constitution of  230; crossing 6–8, 156, 174; and cultures  8; names of 7–8; orthopraxy of  213–15; STEM  29; see also interdisciplinarity displacement  243: mediatic  9, 248, 255; bodily 250–1 disponibilité  220, 227 Douglas, Anne 14–15 Douglas, Mary 104–5 drawing: architectural  147, 150, 156–8, 161; observational  178; of robots  10, 22, 24–8, 30–1, 34; sand- 94–6 Dreyfus, Hubert  47–8 drumming  90, 94 Duchamp, Marcel  190, 192–6, 201, 208–9 education: adult  175; architectural 142–6; of attention  4; authority in 196–7; ‘banking’ model of 227–9; as bildung  167, 179; blended  258; crisis in  191, 196, 200; and digital overload  169; and experience  124; higher  165, 169, 171–2, 174, 176, 214, 228, 230, 246 (see also university); as leading life  3; meaning of  14; online versus on-campus  16, 47, 241–2, 247, 251, 255–8; and presence  48, 247; primary  103, 105, 118; risk of  23, 47–8, 52, 57, 127, 135; slack  143, 160;

Index as turning  51; of the un-artist  189–90, 192–3, 196; see also learning pedagogy; teaching Eisenstein, Sergei  149, 163 embodiment,  21, 69, 142: in cinema  152 Empedocles  45 enthusiasm  11, 53–4, 56 epistemology  50, 215, 220, 224, 228: and ontology  214–15, 230 Euclid  46, 67, 71 exercise  153 experience: bodily and metaphoric  85; collective 253; of fieldwork 101–2; phenomenal 168; as a source of knowledge 124; of resistance 51; variations of 3 experiment  38, 81, 102, 142–3, 147, 166, 173, 175, 178, 192, 204, 222: between theatre and anthropology  213; with things  8–10; in writing  225, 247–8, 254 exposure  9, 45, 49–50, 52, 251–2 extramission, theory of  45–7, 52 eyes 45–7 faculty  166, 180–1, 184, 243, 248, 250 Feldenkrais practice  130 fieldwork: anthropological  22, 95, 213, 215–18, 220–1, 227, 232; in educational research  102 film: body in  152–3; sound in  151–2; spatiality in  149–50; temporality in  153 Fluxus  14, 189, 191, 202 forcefield 9–10, 16, 241, 243–4, 255–6 Frankfurt School of Social Research  168 freedom  127: academic  176; practical  50; and responsibility  180 Freire, Paolo  227–31 Gatt, Caroline  8–9, 16 geometry  72, 83, 88–9: origins of  67–71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  179 Gropius, Walter  15, 166, 177–8, 181, 183–5 Grotowski, Jerzy 219–20 Gwich’in, First Nation of northwest Canada  9, 222, 226 habit 6–7, 87 hand-skills  82, 85, 97

265

Harrison, Newton and Helen Mayer 204–6 Hasse, Cathrine  10, 16–17 Heidegger, Martin  86, 168 Herodotus  67, 197 Holmes, Rachel  11–12, 16 hope  15, 135, 182–3, 214, 223 humanism  2, 102, 174: and posthumanism  29 Husserl, Edmund  168 Ihde, Don  35 imagination  15, 30, 36, 171, 175, 179, 242: and perception  29 improvisation  10, 22, 126, 135 in-between  9, 11, 57, 102, 105, 245, 248, 251, 253 Ingold, Tim  55, 169, 190–1, 231, 243: on anthropology  21, 81; on art  106; on attentionality  32, 36; on commoning  30, 38, 207; on correspondence  23–4, 28–9, 208; on the dance of animacy  90, 128–9; on wayfinding and navigation  150 Inka empire  68 interdisciplinarity  7–8, 215–16; see also  disciplines internet  251 interpretation: versus causation  22; and exegesis  157; and measurement  70; skills of  160 interruption  11–12, 51–4, 58, 132–4 intuition 3–4, 9, 82, 84, 91, 97, 171, 178, 201, 209 Itten, Johannes  177–8 James, William  16, 49, 54, 230–1, 244 Kandinsky, Wassily  167, 184 Kaprow, Allan  109–10, 189–99, 201–2, 204–10 kinaesthesia, bodily  90, 112, 129 kitchen 5–6, 9, 13 Klee, Paul  81–2, 167, 169, 178, 184–5 knotting  68, 75, 85, 94, 97 Knowing From the Inside project  2, 81, 147, 169, 214, 219, 222, 224 knowing, as concept formation 28–32: from the inside  1–4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16,

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Index

81–2, 106, 147, 214–15, 253, 258; and the printed book  222, 224–6; and vulnerability  52; ways of  2, 9, 106, 166, 168, 176, 213, 217–32 knowledge  1: academic  2, 7–8, 84, 144, 230; growth of 6–7, 29; indigenous  2; non-representational  117; personal  7; production  2, 7, 16, 145, 157, 217, 222, 249; reification of  134; transmission  5, 14, 33–4, 38–9, 124, 247, 252; versus ways of knowing  227 Koestler, Arthur  84 Latour, Bruno  214, 244–7, 253, 258 Lave, Jean  23 learning  4, 17, 21–3, 33–4: to be affected 245–7; child-centred 196–7; disabilities  74; by doing  93, 177, 247; experiential  131, 181; mathematical  88; and memory  86; in movement  94; preceding 21–2, 27, 30, 32, 34–5, 37–8; and skill 82–3, 85, 198; undergoing in 27–8, 34, 52, 251; and unlearning  160, 175–6; see also education; pedagogy; teaching light in the eyes 11–12, 15, 42, 45, 48, 50, 53–6 Lingis, Alphonso  12, 124 Loovers, Peter Laurence  222, 225–6 Lucas, Ray  9, 16 Macdonald, Anna  102, 117 making: and materials  89; and speaking  83; see also craft Malinowski, Bronislaw  94 managerialism  16, 143, 161, 165, 172–3, 191, 206–7, 215 Manning, Erin  123, 132–4 Masschelein, Jan  9, 49–50, 54, 190–1, 198–9 Massumi, Brian  109, 244 mathematics  68, 75, 83: curriculum in  73; education in  64, 88; major versus minor  64–5, 75; and physics  73 measurement 12–13, 65: analogical nature of  73; and difference  13, 67; indirect  70; and matter 63–4, 69;

and settlement practices  65–6; and speculation  69 memory: hand-  87, 96; and learning  86; versus recollection  244 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  4, 32 method  2 metre, length of  64, 67, 70 Meyer, Hannes  166 milieu, aspects of  109–11 model-making 155–8, 255 Moholy-Nagy, László  167, 169–70, 177–8, 181, 185 montage  9, 142, 149, 153 movement 82–3, 97: fundamental to life  129; and sensory discrimination  246; thinking in  84–5, 88, 130 museums  82, 95, 193, 202, 205–6 Naess, Arne  42 narrative  9, 85, 90, 93–5: structure of  155, 158–60; theory of  142, 149; of time-travel  153 Nemirovsky, Ricardo  88 neurodiversity  123, 130, 230 neurophenomenology  85 neuroplasticity  92 Newling, John  202–4, 206 Nile, flooding of 67–8 normality  12, 103–5 number: idea of  69; and line  72; rational and irrational  71; sense of 74–6 oddness  12, 15, 103–6, 117, 131 Ono, Yoko  57 painting 41–3, 57 Palmer, Parker  43, 57 pandemic  16, 103, 241, 252, 257–8 participation, ontological 109–10, 117 passability 52–3 passion  52 pedagogy  4, 10–11, 13, 74: absurdity in  196; age-graded  103; and bodily imprinted learning  113; decolonising  213; of the event  57; of light in the eyes  45, 55–6, 58; of the oppressed 227–8; poor 49–50, 54;

Index and research  141; see also education; learning; teaching perception: and action  4; and emotion  49, 168; energy of  52; repetition and difference in  134; and time  115 performance  85, 184, 219–20: in art  14, 32, 191, 199, 201–2; of everyday life  173 Pestalozzi, Wilhelm  167 Plato  46, 69 play  147, 159, 194–9, 225 Plessner, Helmuth  168, 174 pluriverse 230–1 postcards 253–5 Povinelli, Elizabeth  216, 218 pragmatism  167, 192, 197–8 precedents, films as  149, 154 production design  154 professionalization  126, 144–7, 173, 184, 217: and accreditation  16, 141, 144, 146, 169, 176; and training  16, 105, 141, 179 progress, doctrine of  3–4, 13 proportionality  64, 68–71 Puar, Jasbir  74 puppetry  12, 127–30, 201 Rancière, Jacques  249, 253 rational community  124–5 Ravetz, Amanda  11–12, 16, 81, 102, 223 reason  12–15: versus intuition  3 recollection  96, 241–4, 248, 250, 255, 258; see also memory research: collaboration in  227, 229; educational 102–3, 117; meaning of  2, 144; and teaching  141, 147, 213, 176, 213 response-ability  12, 125 responsiveness  7, 21, 28, 142, 220, 231 rhythm  13, 32, 63, 69, 82–3, 86–7, 90–4, 101, 129, 209, 247 Ricoeur, Paul 156–7 Riemann, Bernhard  72 robots  10, 16, 22, 24–38 Ruskin, John  81, 147 seafaring  66 sedentism, versus nomadism  65–6 Serres, Michel  63–4, 67–71, 75, 97

267

sessions: oral aspect of  248–9; of study 246–7 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 129–30 Simons, Maarten  16, 190–1, 198–9 Sinclair, Nathalie 12–13 solitude  5 Solnit, Rebecca  57 sound  55: as an element in cinema  151–2 speech: and bodily movement  134; and gesture  88, 95; and learning  94; and practice 82–3; and song  96 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)  8, 29, 38 storytelling  16, 86, 94–6, 113, 142 Strang, Veronica 216–18 string figures 94–6 studio, architectural 142–4, 146–7 study: and life  7, 9–10; meaning of  2, 4–7, 15, 246–8, 251, 258; objects of  10, 199, 249; on-campus 242–3, 250, 257 subjectification  125 surveyors, of Ancient Egypt  68 symmetry  89, 96 tables  5, 10–11, 24–5, 29, 34, 247–8, 252 tactics, Michel de Certeau on  173 teaching  22, 43, 48, 51, 93, 106, 117, 135, 165, 201: anthropology 227–8; as service provision 172; see also education; learning; pedagogy territory  112, 114–5 theatre  9, 133: and anthropology  213, 215, 219; laboratory  222, 225, 227, 232; ‘poor’  219 thinking-feeling  11, 102, 106, 117 time: in the classroom  112–13, 115; and duration  82; of education  242; and measurement  66, 69, 74; speed of  133; travel  153; undifferentiated  247, 252–3 Tomasello, Michael  34 tradition  7, 86, 168, 226 translation  156, 160 Trimingham, Melissa  12 Turner, Victor  85, 213 ultra-sociality  24, 32, 34, 36 university: architecture schools in  144–5; and the art school  165–6, 171–6; buildings  241–2; civic  175;

268 decolonization of  231–2; indigenous  231; as a place of study  17, 241, 253, 257; versus pluriversity  16– 17, 215, 230, 232; postmodern  207 van Boeckel, Jan  11, 15 van der Rohe, Mies  166 via negativa 219–20, 227 vision  45, peripheral 43, 56 voices  16, 125, 246, 249, 255: and gestures  95; of the page 224–6 Vygotsky, Lev  28–9, 33–4, 36, 38 walking  50, 131–2, 207, 209, 241–4, 251, 254, 257–8 Waquet, Françoise  249 Winter, Judith  15, 17 Woolf, Virginia  81 words: and concepts  28–9; and gesture  88; order-  113, 115; rude  192; and sound  96; talkative  249; and

Index things  29; uses of 93–4, 96; and world  16, 245, 248–9 workshops: on Anthropological Collaboration in the Making 9, 215, 221–8, 232; on Art and Sustainability Education 41, 48, 57–8; for drama students, on perceiving differently 126– 7, 131–4; on Filmic Architecture 141–2, 147–9, 161; on movement for education professionals 102, 117–18; ‘Sourcing Within’ 214, 221, 225; teaching at Manchester School of Architecture 9, 146–9, 155, 158, 160–1 writing: edited  226; and flow  225; forms of  254 Yup’ik Eskimos, of Alaska, measurement practices of  71 zone of proximal development (ZPD) 33–4