A Phaedrus baroque art of maintenance or constant fabulating qualia becoming quality

Abstract

This article is crafted through three scenes, through which the author tries to imagine quality as something that is third space, semiotic, plasticity, eternal, and simultaneously something solid and obviously good here and now, through a Spinozian/Deluzian/Braitottian joy/you/me. The author rhizomatically tries to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority – on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, theories, philosophies, stories, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations, and her desires. Scene One is from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and is about censuring. Scene Two is from Robert M Pirsig’s story Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. The third scene (and all scenes) is a DeleuzoGuattarian fabulation, writing qualia becoming quality and hopefully transgressing universal quality measuring projects that are addressing specific professionals and/or preschools or child/ren/hoods, where early child/hood is ultimately seen as a matrix of becoming and early childhood education centres as translocal places preparing for future contingent events. The author tries to provide a chance to see better the airy void around us – to see beneath the stucco surface of the purely phenomenal, insubstantial character of the everyday world – so as to enjoy fleeting quality life all the more, at least for a moment. The author is initiating new discourses on childhood – ultimately, children’s political subject formations.

Scene One. About censuring

Phaedrus gives us a taste of all Plato’s styles. Both the elegant and the majestic, the ironic and the burlesque, the light, talkative and the dry, professorial – without however turning it into a styleless blend. If Symposium is a Viennese classic and Timaeus belongs to romanticism, Phaedrus is the baroque – a Johann Sebastian Bach composition. The linguistic polyphony operates through at least five different pitches, which plasticity merges together. (Wyller, 2009: xi; my translation)

The protagonists in this classical scene are Socrates, the philosopher; Phaedrus, the rhetorician; Lysias, the student; and, finally, young Isocrates. Socrates and Phaedrus are sitting under a plane tree by the banks of the Ilissus in Athens, Greece. The year is 360 bce. The title of the work is Phaedrus. The author is Plato. We are drawing towards the end of a dialogue about censuring or the value of one of Lysias’s assignments – ultimately, the way I see this, the ideas and concepts of upbringing and education/schooling/learning through speaking of the soul, love, non-love, friendship, gifts, principles of justice and goodness, beauty, madness, art, wisdom, wealth and writing; the question about what quality is and how it is already and eternally there, and plasticity thus as constant philosophical, rhetorical oscillations between.

It is thus a dialogue or talk about quality regardless of time, place and a fixed rationale – conditioning quality that is in a place ‘atopoi, atemporal, alogos’ (Derrida, 1981: 155), in a place without place, in a time without time, and through a logic without logic. Learning ultimately as assessment perhaps, with ‘[t]he perhaps’ being the most just category in or for the future (Derrida, 1997: 27).

The concepts, criteria or rules through which quality is assessed are thus non/categories – categories offering other possibilities through constant other ways of speaking and thinking; categories, rules and/or quality criteria but not. Reminding us about the importance of not losing sight of qualia in pedagogical relationships and our evaluation or assessment practices, ultimately and today, in our early childhood education centres (ECECs) and schools. Qualia referring to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience: the taste of an apple, the coolness of cool by the river banks, or the perceived white-blueness of streaming water. Come…

Epilogue

Soc. [Socrates] And now, Phaedrus, having agreed upon the premises, we decide about the conclusion.

Phaedr. [Phaedrus] About what conclusion?

Soc. About Lysias, whom we censured, and his art of writing, and his discourses, and the rhetorical skill or want of skill which was shown in them – these are the questions which we sought to determine, and they brought us to this point. And I think that we are now pretty well informed about the nature of art and its opposite.

Phaedr. Yes, I think with you; but I wish that you would repeat what was said.

Soc. Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing or

speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to divide them until they can be no longer divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature – until he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading; – such is the view which is implied in the whole preceding argument.

Phaedr. Yes, that was our view, certainly.

Soc. Secondly, as to the censure which was passed on the speaking or writing of discourses, and how they might be rightly or wrongly censured – did not our previous argument show? –

Phaedr. Show what?

Soc. That whether Lysias or any other writer that ever was or will be, whether private man or statesman, proposes laws and so becomes the author of a political treatise, fancying that there is any great certainty and clearness in his performance, the fact of his so writing is only a disgrace to him, whatever men may say. For not to know the nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able to distinguish the dream from the reality, cannot in truth be otherwise than disgraceful to him, even though he have the applause of the whole world.

Phaedr. Certainly.

Soc. But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man’s own and his legitimate offspring; – being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others; – and who cares for them and no others – this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him.

Phaedr. That is most assuredly my desire and prayer.

Soc. And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough. Go and tell Lysias that to the fountain and school of the Nymphs we went down, and were bidden by them to convey a message to him and to other composers of speeches – to Homer and other writers of poems, whether set to music or not; and to Solon and others who have composed writings in the form of political discourses which they would term laws – to all of them we are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious pursuit of their life.

Phaedr. What name would you assign to them?

Soc. Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone, – lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title.

Phaedr. Very suitable.

Soc. And he who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been long patching, and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speech-maker or law-maker.

Phaedr. Certainly.

Soc. Now go and tell this to your companion.

Phaedr. But there is also a friend of yours who ought not to be forgotten.

Soc. Who is he?

Phaedr. Isocrates the fair: – What message will you send to him, and how shall we describe him?

Soc. Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus; but I am willing to hazard a prophecy concerning him.

Phaedr. What would you prophesy?

Soc. I think that he has a genius which soars above the orations of Lysias, and that his character is cast in a finer mould. My impression of him is that he will marvelously improve as he grows older, and that all former rhetoricians will be as children in comparison of him. And I believe that he will not be satisfied with rhetoric, but that there is in him a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still. For he has an element of philosophy in his nature. This is the message of the gods dwelling in this place, and which I will myself deliver to Isocrates, who is my delight; and do you give the other to Lysias, who is yours.

Phaedr. I will; and now as the heat is abated let us depart.

Soc. Should we not offer up a prayer first of all to the local deities?

Phaedr. By all means.

Soc. Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. – Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedr. Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Soc. Let us go. (Plato, 360 bce)

An example

It is 18 March 2015. There is a leaders’ meeting in the municipality of Trondheim, Norway. The main question of the day is: What must ECECs and their professionals learn more about in order to create and secure quality and equity in ECECs? A professional from one of the town’s own ECECs has presented their ongoing project about ‘creating rich and multiple learning possibilities and processes’.

There are movements, perceptions, sensations and cognitions; messiness … smells, tastes and visions and/in activities or children – Lysias and Isocrates – the way I see this, being active in their own lives and/or enjoying fleeting quality life for moments. And a longing to be part of, not separate from. There are languages below languages, releasing one/me/you from meaning, allowing that which means nothing in itself the potential for possibility … montages of multiplicities.

Beloved Pan.

She started her project presentation by saying that she was not sure what their project was about, but they had started with wondering about some seeds and rotting fruits they found one day out walking. She continued:

So maybe this is about finding and exploring things in nature … or culture and speaking about it … and smelling, hearing, looking, tasting even … or making drawings afterwards when coming home. We studied the seeds under microscopes and made drawings … And/or about patterns perhaps in nature and in the drawings and leaves in the wind or the trees … Looking into the microscopes … or maybe about wind through the nose?

Another day they found a millipede under a branch and brought it back to the ECEC, studying its legs and skin, and eyes on two sticks: ‘Later we built a home for it to keep it alive with cotton, sticks, people, family, friends, decorations to secure nice and, and … so maybe this is about relations and language’.

But it was also about constructions or constructing things. Or about breathing through the nose or with something called lungs, which seem to be beige on the poster hanging on the wall of the ECEC. But then inside there is blood which is red and running – do millipedes have blood? They have strange hair or maybe it is called ears. Their eyes are very small. Lungs can be pumped up and Simon (aged five) draws invisible but very strong winds. Sounds, touches and light not as objects, but something influencing us.

The professional carried on for two hours with words and questions, films and pictures. She showed a whole ECEC year. She held the movement of moments and situations going. She moved the project; the project moved. The living and life matter or are made to matter, turning into experiencing/information-processing/decision-making/learning/something – a microscopy or generative micropolitics of exploring/finding/language/construction matrix child/hood, constant, ongoing, possibilizing qualia becoming quality.

Becoming (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1983), as this political practice that insists on human agency (an element of philosophy in our nature?), despite the loss of the secure centre ground. Trying to create qualia in the writing, I give every concept and language back to you and your readership. I must. They are all minor. And your writing qualia too.

And to encroach on Scene Three below, hopefully simultaneously disturbing the number (as you now think feel that there are myriads of scenes here, not just three). The concept of minor languages draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) work on ‘minor literatures’. A minor literature has three features: the language that is used is affected by deterritorialization, thus stripped out of syntax, losing all symbolism and signification. Further, everything is political; we are as individuals all connected to a political immediacy. Last but not least, everything has a collective value of/and/with ‘assemblages coming into play’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 27). Actualized, the way I see this, by the relational vitality and elemental complexity that mark post-human thought itself. ‘Minor literatures that have been created in major languages by minorities offer great possibilities for the articulation of new political subjectivities’ (Allan, 2013: 39). They can be used to name X and mobilize politically around them, while simultaneously working to undermine the sovereign subject.

Thus, this is to be continued … and all ungrammatical and poetic other meanings and more of languages.

Scene Two. About (a) metaphysics of quality

The protagonists in this scene are a father/narrator and his son, Chris. The author is Robert M Pirsig (1994) and the story is that of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. It might also be another example of what I try to write about, but simultaneously an expansion or elaboration on this belonging not thing – and what and how might a thing do and/or matter? A quality mattering thing example, perhaps. In our brains there is a noise (read chaos, freedom, complexity) conditioning plasticity, our own pattern-making and memory processes, or the valuation of new situations and information by the limbic system influenced through, for example, offering memory-friendly structures. Learning (read quality) seen as complex processes possible to influence only through circumstances and/or indirect appropriate settings in ECECs and, for example, classrooms. This includes enough time and pause for consolidation after input of new information: consolidation and/as becoming again and again and again.

The father and his son Chris are travelling across the Great Plains of the USA on a motorbike, with friends and friendship, a child’s childhood and upbringing. Sun, heat, wind, cold, rain, snow, beauty, not, joy, tears, fears, loss, gains, illness, difficulties, good, bad, truth, high and low, westwards but backwards in time and life; River Deep Mountain High.

Memory is dynamic, organizing storage and linking of information, creating new meanings through constantly restarting memory processes and re-encoding, and therefore new storage again and again; learning and mattering processes involving the interplay of declarative and procedural memory systems. Paradoxically and simultaneously consolidated, clarified, inhibited sometimes, but expanded/expanding again and again. Expanding and concrete again and again.

Lysias, Isocrates both and Chris needing to know that his father is not mad – not … and … love … not … The ride is ultimately an exploration of the meaning and concept of quality, a term haunting their ride and deemed to be indefinable. The narrator’s past self is referred to by the name ‘Phaedrus’. Narrator/father/Phaedrus and knowing what quality is, and as one, but never allowing pause, complexity pauses for learning. Not mad and making it through.

I think quality exists, but as soon as you try to define it, there is deadlock. It does not work. (Pirsig, 1994: 208)

We read and take part in a journey about the freedom but chaos of travelling/moving/changing/riding and the discipline (read pause) of waiting and sitting still on a bike (the banks of the Ilissus), and the constant need for motorcycle maintenance, need/lack of petrol, oil and spare parts, and about meticulous adjustments, adaptations, repairs and corrections. There is everything from Scene One above about souls, love, beauty … and/or adult/child/ren/hood/s … life, education and responsibility: the well-being of the child – Lysias – Chris – Isocrates – me. Narrator/father/Phaedrus…

It is a novel about control and what one does and knows oneself about bikes and self, and the helplessness and fear even of not doing and knowing, and what it might do to you in return. It is a novel about quality which is indefinable, thus dynamic, on the one side, and quality becoming static if/when an aspect of it becomes conceptualized, habitual or customary. It is thus about static forms or patterns that, if they have enough good or bad quality – and we know what it is – can be given names and be interchanged with others, building bases of knowledge for a culture.

Audit culture … What kind do we really want?

Do good.

When options are uncountable – and they are if they are potential, experiential, rather than actual – the inter/intra-observer ‘I’ is brought in and must freely decide which option or path to take. But this is genuine chance, not randomness, which is a waste of energy and recourses. Choice turned into a basic component of the material-semiotic processes in complex systems.

Providing a stable infrastructure for the openness of complex systems, where potentiality emerges as a powerful force for adaptation, evolution, perhaps always more, always other. Quality is/as the fundamental force in the universe, stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of Quality.

It is thus a novel about fantastic meetings with art/artists/people knowing their stuff about motorbikes and more. As an educator, I am brought away from notions of either/or Bildung, didactics, learning or self-cultivation, and quality as processes of harmonized individual pedagogical romanticism, towards baroque compositions of quality, extending the active subject through passivity as discipline/pause and through the conditions for sensation. There are/must be Johann Sebastian Bach baroque, flourished style bursts of creativity and intuition perhaps.

Chris:

‘Were you really mad?’

Why does he ask that?

Father:

‘No!’

The answer comes as a surprise. But Chris’ eyes light up.

‘I knew it’, he said. (Pirsig, 1994: 210–211)

Thus, the sound of the motorcycle engine when it works and when there is something that needs something to be done. Hear, hear … indefinable quality or value existing as a perceptual experience before it is thought or described empirically, thus preceding constructions. Quality as a ‘knife-edge’ event of experience, found only in the present, known or at least potentially accessible to all, as tendencies at the origin of forces, regardless of the complex that derives from them. This something that strikes you before meaning is discerned in figurations or thematic designs.

New information immediately always checked by the limbic system – the evaluation system of our brain that supports the learning of things that are new, good and important for us, and rejects information that creates bad feelings (Roth, 2009, cited in Sabitzer, 2011). Our plasticity brains recognizing and generating patterns and rules themselves, if we let them. Attention being the key and/or moments of ‘grace’ (Weil, 1959), at which new forces might be brought to bear.

This is a novel about a ride and the state and quality of the bike together, and a discussion about relationships between dialectics and rhetoric. Anything is permissible – no dualisms and quality ultimately seen as a fundamental monist force in the universe of atoms stimulating everything to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality. The/a paradoxical static, as in constant forms of change. And the way I see this, demanding engagement in the profound political and generative nature of pedagogical relationships and evaluation, and thus ultimately the need for aporetically reclaiming quality through qualia again and again, and becoming. Yours and mine, our togetherness. I am key not to your autonomy, liberation, your freedom.

A writing thus exuding the forces that it describes and détournement as this flexible minor language of anti-ideology, which appears in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any definitive certainty. It is thus languages that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supra-critical reference. On the contrary, its own internal coherence and practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has brought back into play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its own truth as present critique (Debord, 2015).

Beloved Pan.

Chris:

‘Can I have a bike when I am old enough to have one?’

Father:

‘If you maintain it properly.’

Chris:

‘How do you do that?’

Father:

‘There are different ways. You have seen how I do it.’

Chris:

‘Will you teach me, all of it?’

Father:

‘Of course.’

Chris:

‘Is it hard?’

Father:

‘Not if you have the right disposition. That is what is difficult.’

Chris:

‘Oh.’

…

Chris:

‘Dad?’

Father:

‘What?’

Chris:

‘Do you think I will have that, the right disposition I mean?’

Father:

‘That I think,’ I answer. ‘I do not think that will be any problem’.

And then we drive on and on, down through Ukiah and Hopland and Cloverdale, down in the wineland. (Pirsig, 1994: 414)

Scene Three. About qualia joy prowriting quality and translocality beyond facts and fears

I thus continue the bike ride through DeleuzoGuattarian affective theorizing with machinations of production events and practicality fabulations. Deleuze (1995: 174) abandoned the notion of Utopia and instead took up Bergson’s notion of fabulation to give it a political meaning. And through this, possibilizing and fashioning larger-than-life images, transforming and metamorphosing conventional representations and conceptions of collectivities. It is a constant ruminating qualia Spinozian/Deluzian/Braitottian joy/pro/writing of becoming quality: a writing transgressing excluding, but perceived as universal criteria, fixed-quality measuring-projects, and between the effects therefore of neo-liberalism and the seemingly fading importance of structural inequalities in the minds of policymakers. No relativization, no disqualification and forces of collapsing colliding in some particular and unpredictable way: trespassing methods making anew. They are active desiring productions and becomings, mapping out alternative modes of experimentations on the level of sensation, perception and affects.

We believe in desire as the irrational of every form of rationality, and not because it is a lack, a thirst, or an aspiration, but because it is the production of desire: desire that produces – real desire, or the real in itself. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 414)

Desire thus in terms of affectivity and as rhizomic modes of inter/intra-connection. The subject is seen as an enduring entity, one that changes as much as it is changed through the connections it forms with a collectivity: as a structure of affectivity, a multilayered, dynamic, artistic subject, cartographically always replacing logical copulas with the conjunction ‘and’.

And to elaborate: such arts and events are therefore not about quality as X-object/s existing and me simply wanting to interpret or knowing it fully and truthfully, rather about already knowing what quality is, simultaneously, however, being unable to define or find it being defined and found – counting but not. So I must trust my judgments not; always in the middle, moving, ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1983) through the event. As in qualia instances of subjective and conscious always decentred experiences and the event representing just a momentary productive intensity. My perceived colours of the greenness of early childhood education and care (ECEC) hope immanent pedagogies: the iterative urgency of meticulously always doing the impossible and other, thus agency, paradoxically, through or in the wind creating winds, motor-biking, patiently sitting still or thinking as its own event, through embracing the rich chaos of life and the uniqueness and potential of each moment.

There are no teleological trajectories therefore, but moments as continuous movements of endless, emanating sensations made actual in the state or happening. An event thus seen as the potential immanent within a particular confluence of forces unrelated to any material content, thus being without fixed structure, position, temporality or property, and without beginning and end. As flows of empowering desire, introducing mobility, resisting closure, thus destabilize the sedentary gravitational pulls of linear chronos (molar) formations. Everything and anything simultaneously is/as both product and result of quality again and again and again: the immediate object only existing in the inter-intra-action. Such ‘waiting pentimento intra-observations’ (Reinertsen, 2014), ultimately avoiding subjective certainty, is decisive in grappling with the implications of questions on relationships between a-signifying material semiotics and, for example, making choices, which, as also seen above, is an inevitable part of political practices and human agency.

To put it simply: if the options or alternatives were countable, the issues could be manageable within a standard framework of first-order logics, and there would be no need for worrying about any relationship at all. On the other hand, if the options remain uncountable, the participation of material semiotics becomes inevitable and vital. If both the actual and the counterfactuals compete for the same resources in a mutually exclusive manner, the non-mechanistic or, rather, machinic designation of the actual requires the participation of the internal or intra-observer, who can tell which one is the greenest, whitest or fastest – as in urgent and good enough – in the resource intake, even if it is error-prone. Concepts beyond facts and fears, thus seen as irreducible, machinic, a-signifying ruptures, ensuring transfer from the form of expression to the form of content: concepts expressing no beginning and ending events, rather than essences. And semioticians, you and I, constantly linking signs, events, life and vitalism through means of double articulations, connecting planes of expressions and contents, leading to the emergence of new forms. Everything and anything simultaneously is/as both the product and result of quality again and again and again.

How many scenes?

It is an art of Zen in terms of what it might mean to not know what quality is against, not knowing too much and losing control. Art in terms of what it might take to be able to stand not knowing or what it might mean to not be in control and still figure out how to be, or rather become teachers, how to create – or rather creating quality. Or, to sum up: these are processes of simultaneously embracing and applying quality as best fits the requirements of a situation, combining rational problem-solving skills, thus rationality and romanticism but as baroque. This means encompassing ‘irrational’ sources of wisdom and understanding, as well as science, reason and technology, ultimately demonstrating that rationality and Zen-like ‘being in the moment’ can coexist. Or, to put it differently: quality as simultaneous processes of producing and theorizing – maintaining – ourselves and/through notions of riding on and translocality. Which is not a new concept or an attempt to start anything new now, but an attempt to structure the above and beyond a bit … giving pause perhaps.

Traditionally, the term ‘translocality’ is used in connection with the dynamics of mobility, migration and socio-spatial interconnectedness and insights from transnationalism, while at the same time, however, attempting to overcome some of the limitations of this long-established research perspective. As such, translocality is used to describe socio-spatial dynamics, processes of simultaneity and identity-formation that transcend boundaries – including, but also extending beyond, those of nation states (Greiner and Sakdapolrak, 2013). I ultimately try to extend and expand on the use of the term even further, and with/through Phaedrus and this novel or motorcycle journey explore the potentialities of its underlying notions of both mental and physical mobilities, multiplicities, movements, feelings, signs, symbols, knowledges, networks, flows, places and dimensions beyond the boundaries of our definitions, conceptualizations, categories and systems, and through this try to reconceptualize notions of locally bounded development and the search for quality as exceeding forms of contracts between generations. I thus use notions of translocal assemblages and/or the DeleuzoGuattarian ‘rhizome’ as a means of grasping the complexity, dense dynamics, diffractive and inter/intra-relationality of translocal connectedness: a rhizome that ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7).

And, to be formal: the term ‘translocality’ serves as a point from which to challenge dichotomous conceptions. Second, it enhances explicit discussion of the temporal dynamics, path dependencies and time–space inter/intra-connections of discursive-material entanglements and dynamics, offering nuanced perspectives on differentiated forces in flows and movements. Third, the shift away from a primary concern with place directs attention to alternative cartographies of pedagogies, and subsequent quality evaluation and assessment systems. Fourth, it highlights the importance of heterotopian conceptualizations of networking spaces as a-signifying third-space semiotics. And, to elaborate again: it might be seen as a Derridean ‘heliotropic’ (Derrida, 1982) or built-in heliotropocy of words (and/or metaphor) making the word – any word and any assessment criteria – not possible to be ‘known in its literal form’ (Derrida, 1982: 299), and the Deleuzian put together/chaos but not ‘aions’ (Deleuze, 1990: 1). That of ‘pure becomings without measure’ (Deleuze and Guattary, 1987: 307–308), working/invoking transgressive significations; helping us to imagine reality differently and, further, how these new realities (ontologies) might make us think assessment (methodology) differently: as words that perform and/or performative words – words as bodies with material effects. Fifth, it facilitates research on virtual mobilities. By addressing flows and circulations of ideas, thoughts, symbols, knowledges, and so on, it offers a stimulating perspective from which to engage with identity – ultimately, subjectivity as a co-production of earthly connectedness. Finally, by placing an explicit emphasis on local conditions, translocality also draws attention to transformations of the material, physical and natural environment. Ultimately – and what I write about – early childhood seen as a matrix of becoming, turning early childhood and care institutions and schools into post-diagnosis localities or places of transition, their main task becoming that of not passing on traditions, but preparing for future contingent quality moments or/as events.

Therefore I need to be travelling, moving, writing between new public management scorecards today, questions of how to develop, support, maintain and value quality in ECECs and schools – for whom and what – and the urgency of edusemiotically (Semetsky, 2013) moving beyond the concepts, simultaneously critiquing and creating, thus riding backwards and forwards again and again under a plane tree. It is a sort of becoming of evaluation practices that hold the limits of knowing as a good thing and practices of loving not knowing, and the promise of doing and thinking other is what you love – always: meaning-making and/as evaluation through meaning nothing, and quality growing out of a type of certainty or rigour that is something other than securing or revising claims or reasserting critical or interpretive mastery. Rather, professionals trying to keep the concept of quality ‘through working hard not’ to conceptualize or ‘understand’ what quality is (Levinson, 1998: 272): the material and linguistic condition for change; but as a move from language to law and as aporetic thinking, and through the pivoting and liberating effects of writing – a writing both positioning and giving direction. And the law being ourselves – we – in our searches.

The most important role is thus to create conditions for professionals to be wanting and able to trust, govern, control and/or steer our/themselves within given provisions: professionals learning from trying to simultaneously produce and theorize – maintain – our/themselves and their processes: becoming active subjects through pause and through the conditions for sensation. Socrates, Phaedrus, on the banks of the Ilissus and/or motorcycle maintenance and translocal love. Not easy, mind-boggling perhaps, necessary and fun. ECECs as translocal places or, the way I see this, methodologically structured free rooms for a strengthening of a fabulating orientation and strange dialogues between. Translocal love … quality moments and Lysias, Chris, Isocrates … political subject formations.

In an age of ‘testocracy’ (Hagopian, 2015), criteria – when, where, how and what (not) – are, paradoxically, more needed than ever: the need for more close, micro, miniscule, political and systematic pedagogies and research, for more synthesis and analysis, and a call for more discussions, additions and extensions. As far as both pedagogy and research are concerned, this is my didactics and data apology. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Identify a paragraph in your writing that is weak. Cut it out and go outside and listen through the hole for a few minutes. Write a score on what you hear. Whisper your thoughts. Then yell them. Invent a definition of your favourite word. Grade your own piece and give yourself comments. Change what you like best about what you write. Paraphrase your most elegant sentence. Locate an interpretative synthesis and unmake it. Replace transition words with conjunctions and rewrite your conclusions. Trouble a moment of categorization. Locate tensions in your text. Address them, don’t resolve them. Read your piece with new eyes. What do you see? Sing a song where you have cited someone. What helps your autobiographical ghosts to think? What threatens to shut your piece down? Push through!! Twist your plots. What might an apology for data be? Send a love letter to the subject/object you reference the most. Create a eulogy. Kill it. Alter what you like about it, change what you hate about it. Read your sentence. Respond to it and continue until you can no longer respond. Dream your thoughts and empty your head, go to sleep. Perform other than what your piece set out to do. What are your keywords, keysounds, keycolours, moves and likes? Retype your writing in a different font. Walk your piece and again; ‘I can draw the wind without seeing it’ (Simon, aged five) – and the tears after a solar eclipse when the sun comes back (Stav, 2015).

I will end with a few words about the paradox of starting or ending with Plato because Deleuze and Guattari struggled against Platonic philosophy, but by way of non-philosophy, using philosophy against itself by way of a great reversal between error (image) and delirium (simulacra). Further, against the Kantian tradition that would seek to produce truth out of the errors of previous philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari were both always seeking to free desire into the delirium of the world, and empiricism as a sort of science-fiction universe. Extracting from Platonism that which the Platonic concept sought to neutralize and set aside, but which keeps returning, disrupting that concept, undermining the efforts of representation. Instead of an inclusion of genuine images and exclusion of simulacra which supports the world of representation, Deleuze and Guattari would reverse the terms and include simulacra and exclude images. What is proposed is how to produce images that are different rather than as in representational thought as reproducible – reproductions of the Same.

The world thus not unfolding through imitation and reproduction, but through a rigorous dynamics of production; not through identity, but through disparities between elements and series, and at every level that the world is shaped and events take place … Plato, but not ever: formal monist negations: the positivity of schizophrenic language (no lack) and writing. Thus desire in terms of affectivity, as a rhizomic mode of inter/intra-connection and/or the positive nature of unruly desire in terms of schizoid flows (Guattari, 2009). And I can draw the wind without seeing it.