Abstract
In the postdigital society and education systems, humans have become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine – they have become cyborgs. Ignoring the affective dimension of becoming, however, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein children risk being sacrificed at the altar of development. Reclaiming the Nordic model of education, the authors therefore put postdigital literature in conversation with posthuman affect theory because new vocabularies and a view of language as material are needed to describe the postdigital web of entanglements and how this relates to the way ‘data’ is reported. In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and need to be storied for one to become creative with its functionings. Hence, by thinking with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Donna Haraway, the authors address the need for studies approaching the cyborg in a new way – by way of affects and storying: the child as a metaphysical being, as knowing and a knower of affect. This implies a view of children as more than simply users of technology and rather as a political life-engendering force if one lets it and childhood become. Given this, the authors discuss data as bioinformatical practices of data, both situated and fictional, within the child's specific positioning related to music technology such as streamed music, given that music involvement affects the human body, moods and feelings. The aim is to bring the cyborg to life by discussing affects in children – and digital music technology – storied cyborgs. The image, voice and power of the biblical figure of Isaac rising from the sacrificial altar becoming child permeates the text as the authors’ thinking tool. Instead of speaking about evidence-based research, analysis and results, they speak of something imperceptible and inclusive that collectivizes digital freedom as processes of subjective becomings. The authors’ style is indirect and provocative, aiming to be suggestive and poetic rather than conclusive. Sentences are deliberatively sometimes incomplete, leaving the reader – in accordance with a view of language as matter and mattering – with a feeling of being dropped in the middle of something possibilizing, and simultaneously affirming, the emergence of the event. Altogether, they apply a thought-provoking and innovative approach to rethinking education in the postdigital era.
Keywords
The Nordic model and the backdrop we write
During the 1930s, politicians in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden) established welfare states based on universal principles where the public sector was a tool for pursuing social equality. By producing the services themselves, the states could minimize people's dependency on the supply and demand of the market economy. Researchers have identified what is described as the Nordic or social democratic welfare model in the post-war period, compared to other welfare regimes (Antikainen, 2010; Esping-Andersen, 1990). The model is based on the principles of universalism and citizens’ equal social rights, and the responsibility of the public authority or state for the welfare of all citizens. Further, there is a continuous striving towards the narrowing of differences in income and gender, as well as ethnic and cultural inequalities, and efforts towards always securing full employment. As far as education is concerned, the model is from the 1960s–1970s and comprises nine to ten years of compulsory education. Since the 1990s, educational rights have been expanded to include another three to four years of secondary schooling and the right to a kindergarten place from the age of one to five or six years. The educational systems are managed by national curriculums, securing the uniformity of the systems and equal rights throughout the countries. Inclusion, participation, diversity, egality, equality and autonomy as policies and pedagogical principles permeate the systems, with some cultural variations between the countries.
Historically, the Nordic model has gained the unique status of representing an exception to more standardized educational practices. Inclusion, equality and social mobility are the visions and goals that direct teaching models and pedagogical practices. The model has been presented as an idea that can be copied and implemented within various welfare systems, and has emerged as a brand with an international reputation. The Nordic countries have not been immune to neo-liberal influences (see Dyrfjörd, 2019; Lindgren et al., 2024; Otterstad and Braathe, 2016) – for example, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Robert-Holmes and Moss, 2021), the European Union and other western or Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the United Kingdom (Robert-Holmes and Moss, 2021) and the USA (Kane, 2016). Today, we are facing situations and policies that we could not have believed possible only five to ten years ago. The Nordic model seems to weather from within, having given in to strong audit cultures of accountability, new public management monitoring and governance, globalization, privatization, digitalization and market economy solutions (Mertanen et al., 2022; Reinertsen and Thomas, 2024). The ideas and promises are seemingly democratic and followed up by detailed guidelines and objectives to make education safe, strong, predictable and risk-free. However, this has sadly resulted in underfinanced systems and institutions due to inflated visions and political hubris.
In international contexts, Nordic early childhood education and care (ECEC) is nevertheless still considered to have a foundation in a social pedagogical perspective, where the importance of care, play, children's agency and peer relations is supported by wide developmental goals (Bennett, 2003; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006). However, the idealistic description of the Nordic model does not include the increasing emphasis on quality documentation and measurements within Nordic ECEC systems or the tendency towards ‘schoolification’ (Bennett, 2003). Instead, arguments have been raised for the need to address differences between ECEC systems concerning the relation and differences between education, welfare and care (Moss, 2017).
Given that the Nordic countries and education systems are heavily digitalized, we suggest other through putting postdigital literature in conversation with posthuman affect theory because we need new vocabularies and a view of language as material to describe our postdigital web of entanglements and how this relates to the way we report ‘data’ – or, rather, how we follow the movements, affects and politics of thought and learning. Affect is inclusive of preconceptual conscious and unconscious aspects. Affect occurs before emotions, conditioning the qualities and possibilities created in the dialogue we engage in. Our intention is therefore not to criticize but to emphasize the importance of affect in education, particularly focusing on children as cyborgs – hybrids of organism and machine. Affect is actualized and turned into a critical educational and democratic infrastructure that must be protected. We are trained teachers and experienced early childhood teachers and teacher educators in higher education. Over time, we have experienced what we conceive of as the circular character of educational efforts and reform. Hence, we think that there is a need to allow speculation about what it would, or might, take to break with the doxa that has created conceptual vacuums. That is why we turn to the speculative philosophies and poetics of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway and others to clarify a speculative line of argument. Our poetics start from our teaching and research experiences with children's movements in preschool environments, expanded to imagination.
Language and language use is to enfold movement in a body relative to the cartographic coordinates of a milieu. The body is compelled to act, and it does so across a spectrum of continuous variation between passive and active affects. Without the body, movement remains virtual, awaiting processes of actualization. Rather than aligning technological development with merely functional outcomes, we need alignments with life-affirming principles. This implies the view that technology should serve humanity and human-centric goals – not the goals of machines. There will be more on language below.
Rhetorically, we ask whether we have forgotten that education is also an affective project. Ignoring the affective dimension of becoming, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein children risk being sacrificed at the altar of development. Through thinking with the ‘geophilosophy’ of Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 85–113) and Haraway's (2000) view of humans as ‘cyborgs’ – fabricated hybrids of organism and machine – we reclaim the Nordic model and reconstruct a Nordic theory of education. Such a reconstruction is needed because the era of the postdigital has left humans as cyborgs, with an accompanying ethical and conceptual vacuum (and this has impacted the Nordic situation as well as other places around the world).
Inspired by Miller's (1990: 137–145) storying of Isaac rising from the sacrificial altar, this vacuum is illustrated in a graphic way in that Abraham (the adult, the teacher, the pedagogue) does not attend to his son Isaac – attention and affect are gone. Isaac (the child), on the other hand, is still connected to affect, which is imperceptibly available to him through storying and ‘musicking’ (Small, 1998) – music as a process and not an object. Here, Isaac is matched with any other child as a knower of affect, or the power of the child as crucial in dialogue. Abraham is the one who can learn the most from Isaac becoming music (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 331). There is a huge number of publications dealing with and criticizing the influences of new public management on the field of education, but in a generalized and generalizing way (Dyrfjörd, 2019; Kane, 2016; Lindgren et al., 2024; Otterstad and Braathe, 2016; Robert-Holmes and Moss, 2021). What we do in this article is explore the effects of new public management in relation to our views of the child, childhood and technology more precisely. We use the image and force of Isaac rising from the sacrificial altar becoming child as our thinking tool, permeating the text to contribute to and expand the field of postdigital cyborging.
In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and need to be storied for us to become creative with its functioning. The human subject is seen as embodied in the material world and is not superior to other species and matter. As such, the posthuman is perceived as one who embodies different identities and perceives the world from multiple heterogeneous perspectives (Haraway, 1991). For us, this implies that music and stories – or rather musicking and storying – bring the cyborg to life. The ways for Abraham must account for affect, to restimulate attention and affect. Affect being lost for adults, teachers and education can be reclaimed through what children can teach us about affect through the way they story and live (here) music.
To reclaim education and against the backdrop of posthuman theorizing, aiming to be precise in our challenge to neo-liberal policies and new public management systems, we indirectly and discursively ask four questions of the Nordic model, and what it might take: 1. Have we rationalized affective aspects of life and learning away? 2. What has happened to the intrinsic value of music and the child? 3. What is the collective life engendering the digital force of a child? 4. Does dialogue cost money?
Such questioning challenges the Nordic model's movements and interrogates the details of its positionalities. It enhances the importance of affective perspectives in all education and as a necessary part of the model itself. It offers more value to what we do not know and do not have words for. Affective perspectives give value to non-verbal/musical moments, music and child together, and are something significant that works.
This is the backdrop against which we write to address the need for studies that approach the cyborg in a new way – by way of affects and storying: the child as a metaphysical being, as knowing and a knower of affect. It is obvious by now that this implies a view of children/students as more than simply users of technology and rather as a political, life-engendering force. Given this, we discuss data as bioinformatical practices of data, both situated and fictional, within the child's specific positioning related to music technology such as streamed music, given that music involvement affects the human body, moods and feelings. Our aim is to bring the cyborg to life by discussing affects in children – and digital music technology – storied cyborgs. Instead of speaking about evidence-based research, analysis and results, we speak of something imperceptible and inclusive that collectivizes digital freedom as processes of subjective becomings.
Storying implies putting every concept and every word to work. Every word is a word that does something. Every linguistic move and, with a view to affect being inclusive of both conscious and unconscious aspects occurring before any feeling (or any effect of affect so to speak), every word become affective data in motion, where the creative elements lie. When connecting words as affective data to a Deleuzean and Guattarian ‘problem’ in which bodies engage, as we do in this article, the problem and the solution cannot be separated, and this is why the question of becoming is so pivotal. If separated, both the problem and solution merely belong to a frozen-in-time reduction of the real/actual, de facto preventing creativity, affect and becomings. Deleuze and Guattari write: All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges. We are dealing here with a problem concerning the plurality of subjects, their relationship, and their reciprocal presentation. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 16) These complexities actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystalized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. (Guattari, 1995: 7)
We continue with more on affective data, becoming and storying, the cyborg child, affects in children and postdigital music technology, storied cyborgs and cyborging, and the political nature of language. We end with a discussion of educational politics in a goal-oriented, globalized, digitalized and marked-oriented world, the blind spots of transparency. An overall issue that we think with is that if there was, or is, something called a Nordic model of education, what will it take to reclaim it? Reclaiming the Nordic model is dependent on the affirmation of allowing the child's force to matter and work.
Affective data and the vacuums and blind spots of transparency
Living in a world where digital technology and media have become intertwined with human and social life, the postdigital, a continuation of digitalization yet also beyond digitalization, focuses on the experiential rather than the conceptual (Jandrić et al., 2018). The postdigital considers digitalization as something that has already happened. Like air, being digital is merely noticed by its absence. The concept has gained traction in several disciplines, including music. Jandrić et al. urge us to be in the moment: Looking beyond terminology, however, the contemporary use of the term ‘postdigital’ does describe human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively, in the moment here and now. It shows our raising awareness of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism. (Jandrić et al., 2018: 896)
The concept and notion of affect refers to a preconceptual bodily intensity, thus a desire or passion, pathos, sympathy and empathy, or a threshold experience wherein a transition – read politics – becomes possible. Affect thus as a something that passes through the body without necessarily leading to any specific meaning but making us responsive and, in a productive way, encouraging us to (politically) move, fabulate or story forward. Affect de facto turned into method, simultaneously disturbing and creating rhizomatic possibilities, ‘always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 27; original emphasis). Affect producing sensuous events that enable shifts in attention and involve participants in orchestrated yet unpredictable processes that activate the body's ability to relate to, sense and imagine the world in perhaps new ways. Storying here, then, means possibilizing nonlinear material arrangements of concepts – the necessity of asymmetrical compositions “engaged in a becoming as intense as that of music” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 329), with all concepts eventually creating alliances between the environment, technology, the self and the social, and storying thus making trajectories and becomings present in the other, rendering their mutual presence perceptible. The presence of the perceptible, however, always conditioned by something indefinite, imperceptible, sublime and inclusive, which collectivizes the digital and nomadic freedom as processes of subjective becomings. Having said this, inclusion is a concept like any other possibilizing negative, as well as having positive nomadic connotations.
This implies a view of the child as a political child, not a politically created or staged child. And re language as a tool allowing for political explorations and shared indefinite moments of understanding, Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 291) have repeatedly remarked on the scope and force in and of the child's use of the indefinite: ‘Children use the indefinite not as something indeterminate, but on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity’. Every word through this becoming inclusive of the affects of other, inclusive of affective expressions of other. Every word and concept thus seen and treated as abstractions only, to invite the other and other (positive and negative) in. ‘Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them’ (Deleuze, 1997: 61). This is how children use language and is opposite to how adults use language. While children use language to materially include and affirm, adults have learned to use language to socially define and exclude. While children use language to become and freedom, adults have learned to use language discursively within structures of power. Children can express power, but it is rarely coupled with adult formal structures. And given the inclusive–exclusive complexity explicitly stated above, this gives children more to think with and decide on. Sadly, as we shall see below in the relationship between Abraham and Isaac, adults de facto are in danger of fuelling knowledge loss and engaging in hostile-to-life actions. The ‘becoming child’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) is ultimately seen as an expression of a future, the undisguised child owned by life itself. Children playing life played by life and ideas about life together.
It is the part played by storytelling in the construction of knowledges and postdigital functionings, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimensions of abstractions and fabulation that allows for drawing lines between the immanent philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and the work of Haraway and beyond. The becoming child thus as the cyborg child: the cyborg being ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction – a world-changing creation’ (Haraway, 1991: 149). And while we continue to story affect, we constantly think with the paradox between Haraway's take on affective production as one of betrayal and, through this, offering a constant warning against affect-based education, science and research turning into manipulative forces via fear, powerlessness or a staging of possible catastrophic futures with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. The simultaneous fear of ignoring the same affective dimensions of becoming and digitalized environments gives way to ethical and conceptual vacuums, possibly sacrificing children at the altar of development either way. We think with Abraham and Isaac again, and how pivotal affective forces are for life and lives together. Being saved by angels through obedience not being an option.
Paradoxes cannot be solved, but becoming child might puncture vacuums and get us moving. Performing research with children and technology, data cannot therefore be limited to defined and defining concepts or entities; rather, data must be something that takes a real hold on, here, the child's desires and imaginations through affect. When that happens, we might talk of affective data and affective data possibilizing alliances between the environment, technology, the self and the social on the premises of the child, highlighting the affective subject position instead of that of technology. Data thus as bioinformatical practices of data, both situated and fictional, within the child's specific positioning and subjective becomings. Data through this seen as ‘data’ for foresight and enabling for the many variations of life that encompass existence and becomings, taking our questions beyond the human to the very emergence of life. We refer to life's capacity to compose questions regarding life – postdigital life. This implies a move from the linguistic to the affective turn in science and research, hopefully avoiding ethical and conceptual vacuums, blind spots of transparency. It is a science and research affirmatively critiquing the discursive production of policies in attempts to create openings towards expanded fields of meaning, a science and research rejecting both technology and the digitalization of a so-called real foundation and that of unbridled becomings.
Rather than aiming at scientific linearity, causality and clarity, we need an expanded digital scientific and affective language to capture more dimensions and nuances in our technological and postdigital realities. A man/machine language and posthuman approach inclusive of the indefinite and not yet finished. A man/machine language and posthuman stands in which the indefinite and not yet finished are given as much space in consciousness as the defined, definite and finished. And with reference to the remarkable absence of children in educational policies, a man/machine language and posthuman stands capable of bringing the child back in. A man/machine language simultaneously sharing and tearing down the shared to arrive at visions that are transformable in a policy vision of digital sustainability and music. It cannot be an either/or, for or against, before or after, rights or wrongs. Everything is already. It must be life and live: simultaneous affirmations and cancellations, suggestions and repealings.
Becoming child: rising from the sacrificial altar
It has been a long time since Alice Miller (1923–2010) wrote about what would happen when or if Isaac rises from the sacrificial altar when he is about to be killed by Abraham, his father. Abraham, ‘uncertain and hesitant yet intent on carrying out a command he does not comprehend’ (Miller, 1990: 143). Abraham, loving obedience to his God more than life. Having studied 30 different depictions of the sacrifice of Isaac, Miller was struck by the fact that in all the portrayals of the scene, Abraham's face and entire torso are turned away from his son and directed upwards. Only his hands being occupied with the sacrifice, holding Isaac down through covering his face. The son, on his side, simply lying there, quietly waiting to be murdered. Abraham having turned Isaac into an ‘object’ (Miller, 1990: 139), with his hands bound and his father's hand keeping him from seeing or speaking, and preventing him from breathing. Instead of Isaac confronting his father, however, he is rescued by an angel, who rewards Abraham for his obedience: ‘Our awareness of the child's victimization is so deeply rooted in us that we scarcely seem to have reacted at all to the monstrousness of the story of Abraham and Isaac’ (Miller, 1990: 141).
Much has been tried to change this. As societies, we have spent decades attempting to give children a voice and the right to participate in matters of concern. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by most countries in the world (UNICEF Sweden, 2018). Miller (1990: 139) advocates for dialogue between generations – between Abraham and Isaac – being possible ‘if one can look the other in the eye’. Different generations must ask each other questions from equal positions and celebrate life and play together, instead of obeying hierarchically designed orders, ultimately pacifying all. Miller's (1990) main concern being to avoid the victimization of the child and the blindness imposed on children. There is a growing body of research on children's right to participate (Braidotti, 2019; Correia et al., 2023; Manning, 2016; Reinertsen, 2024; Sandvik, 2020), showing, however, that observing and listening to children's voices, or focusing on children's voices, is not enough. Children are still at risk of being sacrificed at the altar – not necessarily on a God's commandment but on an altar of major educational policies and goal-directed development. Children being remarkable in educational policies mainly by their absence. Mostly unstated and unthought, the general picture being of a working assumption that children, except as objects of policy, are not relevant to the discourse. The concept of dialogue – all concepts – not perceived as multiple and nomadic but inflated and having lost its momentum, leading to a de facto loss of dialogue in our educational systems. Differences being poorly handled, too often seen through and having to give in to unity and sameness. Both Abraham and Isaac are being denied access to, and hence robbed of, their individuating subjectivities. The concept of dialogue as materially affective needs to be reclaimed and is what we advocate in this article.
‘Why?’ might you ask. Because in both Sweden and Norway, due to the lack of eye-to-eye contact – or rather lack of major and minor policy deliberations from equal positions – policy discussions have ended up in a dichotomous either/or situation. In Norway, we have moved from policies advocating for digitalization to permeate every aspect of education – books having been replaced with iPads and smartphones, teachers having been trained to use digital devices as their main pedagogical tools – to a discussion on mobile-free schools, mobile hotels in classrooms, and restrictions and time limitations on the use of devices (Government Office of Norway, 2025). In the Swedish preschool context, the latest revision of the preschool curriculum (Skolverket, 2018) firmly states that digital technology shall be used with children to enable the development of digital competence, including critical perspectives on media and digital technology from a societal perspective. However, in October 2023, the Swedish government announced that it intended to remove the demand for digital devices in Swedish ECEC institutions, advocating for essentially screen-free preschool practice to increase children’s reading abilities (Government Offices of Sweden, 2023).
Some pupils and students do question and speak out against prohibiting the use of smartphones, and some teachers and researchers claim that such policies are outdated – digitalization in itself not being the problem, but the lack of knowledge about digitalization (Blikstad-Balas, 2016; Furberg and Lund, 2016; Krumsvik et al., 2013). The overall impression, however, is that we have moved from a situation praising everything about digitalization to praising its removal. Some positions and perspectives are left without a voice, just as in the case of both Isaac and Abraham, blocking postdigital explorations and storytelling, hence blocking possibilities of moving beyond dichotomous either/or thinking. Here, we focus on Isaac and the child, the postdigital field and eye-to-eye possibilizing dialogue, and the potential of ECEC. But this requires a rethinking of the subject–object relationship in general. However, as we have seen above, the potentializing affective forces of individuating subjectivity specifically. Unfortunately, in none of the paintings Miller studied of Abraham and Isaac could she detect any questionings in Isaac's eyes – questions such as: Father, why do you want to kill me, why is my life worth nothing to you? Why won’t you look at me, why won’t you explain what is happening? How can you do this to me? I love you, I trusted you. Why won’t you speak to me? What crime have I committed? What have I done to deserve this? (Miller, 1990: 138)
Broadening our awareness of children towards the affective materiality of language within dialogue creates expanded scopes of action. It opens possibilities to explore thresholds of intensities (rather than intentions and representations), in which encounters unfold inter- and intra-generationally, Isaac and Abraham both. It opens possibilities to explore relations between participants – teacher and child explore how increased awareness of affect and materiality might influence both formal and informal learning, and what might be produced and work transformationally, both collectively and individually. We hope for this to become the Nordic model of education, and there will be more on this below. First, however, we need to explore further what such a model would imply and do in view of the postdigital theme of this article. Making nouns into verbs being one material linguistic possibility as we continue to postdigital story and cyborg.
Storied cyborgs and postdigital cyborging
Previous studies on activities with digital devices in preschool have been dominated by a focus on man as an actor, such as children's and teachers’ approaches and relationships to digital devices, rather than including the sublime non-foundational relationship between human and materiality.
For decades, generations of children have had access to computers in their home and have developed technical skills both for educational and recreational purposes (Zevenbergen and Logan, 2008). In fact, scholars have claimed that a significant change has occurred in childhood by way of the introduction of touch-screen tablets and smartphones, resulting in children's lives being infiltrated by the same (Young and Wu, 2019). Petersen (2015) showed that touch screens in preschool had the potential to enhance children's agency, especially when using applications that enabled exploring. Similarly, children's agency in digital activities in preschool was manifested in play, sound, visual effects, meaning-making and ownership unique to using applications (Kjällander and Moinian, 2014). Children's perspectives were made visible through their use of digital cameras to photograph a preschool, where they also created their own photography activities together (Magnusson, 2018). Focusing on social interaction between young children when engaging with iPads in pairs, Lawrence (2018) showed that their social behaviour comprised competitive and collaborative dimensions of play. Children's play was influenced by sociocultural aspects, as well as by the character of the digital device. Related to music, digital devices have enabled children's musical activities to be transformed and developed. This shows the need to revise concepts of children's musical development, according to Young and Wu (2019). For instance, by way of using a digital device consisting of games for children’s development in ear training and music composition, Paulo-Ruiz et al. (2017) argued for the potential of using mobile technologies for music learning in ECEC.
In contrast to music research influenced by a Cartesian ontology of opposition with the exercise of possession, ownership and control, Burnard and Köbli (2024) reimagine music education as an active process with bodies, nonhuman matter and the materialization of music. As a result, normative academic conventions are disrupted by the recognition of in-the-making embodied musical learning, the intra-action of human and nonhuman sound materializing, and the materiality of the body in its experience of music as a play space (Burnard and Köbli, 2024). When reasoning from such a flattened ontological thinking towards the being of things, a children's song game becomes intertwined with humans, repertoire and its utility (Harmer, 2024). The ‘allure’ of children's musical play explains how humans and materiality are becoming together. Allure as charm, the bewitching quality of musical play activities in becoming. Then, the realities of children's song-game activity in a musical space are considered as not only accidental, but absolutely magical. The musical play object becomes ‘a vast interior where one can dwell and vibe differently, aesthetically, beautifully’ (Harmer, 2024: 369).
As mentioned above, according to Haraway (1991: 150), the intertwined relationship between humans and technology gives way to nomadic subjects, to cyborgs. These cyborgs are in constant change and form the conditions for what it implies to be human in our time. She writes: ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991: 150). However, in the following, we will be drawing on the neologism ‘musical cyborg’ (Leijonhufvud, 2018), which implies dealing with something slightly different, where ‘musical’ refers to the fact that music affects humans in a variety of ways. The musical cyborg relates to music streaming, which has emerged in an era when there seems to be increased space for a musical presence in everyday human life, implying liquid affordances for the end user. The streamer both receives and takes part in streaming, where learning and knowledge depend on what and who the streamer is. Music affects the human body, inspires bodily movements, and resonates with moods and feelings. Streaming services’ algorithms blend humans and machines into a hybrid lifeform. Music affects the human heartbeat, and a detected human heartbeat might lead to music recommendations for the streamer, forming a musical cyborg (Leijonhufvud, 2018). As such, we are thinking through the interrelation of music and musical cyborging in the field of affect and emotion. According to Gilles (2020: 353): ‘Thinking with affective musical practices is about embracing unknowability as a theoretical position to be inhabited in and of itself’. This implies a diverse spectrum of potential affective practices arising from music and affect. Children's affective practices have inclusive capacities but are also there for othering. Nuanced iterations of affect are producing assemblages in musical communities (Gilles, 2020). Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 2004) function as a rhetorical bridge to translate, illuminate and concretize the researcher as a poet: Tap tap tap, swipe, swipe, swipe, twisting, turning, swinging … getting up, sitting down, running around, listening, running more, walking slowly, hiding behind, coming forward … licking the tablet, taking a bite, closing in, hammering, pounding, humming with. And, paraphrasing Miller’s Isaac: Why do you want to regulate and discipline me? Is my enunciation worth nothing to you or less than yours? Why not look at me together with you? Why won’t you sense what is happening? How can you do this to me? I love you. I trust you. Why won’t you story with me? What crime have I committed? What have I done other than being born?
Moving on to visualizing musical postdigital cyborging, an imagination is presented in the following. It is of a situation in a preschool that ensemble the cyborg child-streamed music. Here, children's affect enables agency (in the agentic sense) and an immersed experience. Children becoming proactive with machines. Data reported in a poetic form: Gathered on the preschool floor Children and streamed music sounding Designing musical cyborging Liquid affordances affecting children Like air Receiving – giving – becoming music Lives together Children's choice of music affecting algorithms Moment of trespassing liminality Streamed music and child storying sharings together Affects – driving – flowing Cyborging in becoming Rhizomatic possibilities Algorithms blending affordances Cyborging by way of affects Moving – dancing – feeling Blending moods Humming – jumping Immersion of streamed music and child Storying simultaneous affirmations Hybrid life forms
Again, in the postdigital era (Jandrić et al., 2018), like air, being digital is only noticed by its absence. The child in becoming, a postdigital musical cyborg with air as streamed music becomes an affective agent intertwined with the algorithms of the streaming service. We suggest that the child is cyborging, embraced with rhythmic virtuality in a dialogue with streamed music. The postdigital cyborging child floats within streamed music as air, immersed beyond and above abstract language, materiality and fiction, and has agency in a musical cyborg with seamless, borderless possibilities. This elevates the cyborging child from concrete reality towards abstract virtuality within the musical cyborg. Hence, conventions become disrupted by the recognition of in-the-making embodied musical learning, child and nonhuman sound materializing in music as a play space (Burnard and Köbli, 2024). Then, the ‘allure’ of children's musical play explains how human and materiality are becoming together in a musical space, being not only accidental but absolutely magical (Harmer, 2024). The child and, music and, technology and, cyborg and, and – and – and. This should be the core of the reclaimed Nordic model – allowing the child’s force into in situ matter and work.
Reclaiming education in the postdigital condition
Reclaiming, here as a Deleuzean and Guattarian problematizing, education and the Nordic model, means inviting more humble approaches to both theory and practice that problematize the fantasy of governance, individual (digital) autonomy, and the hubris of politics by increasing the focus on affective data and factors – hence, what makes us human together.
Again, reclaiming the Nordic model is dependent on the affirmation of allowing the child's force to matter and be affirmed as valid. Hence, in conclusion, the concept of dialogue as materially affective needs to be reclaimed. Affect being lost for adults, teachers and education can be reclaimed through what children can teach us about affect through the way they story and live (here) music. We have used the image and affective force of Isaac becoming child as our thinking tool to rethink the child, childhood and cyborging. As suggested by Miller (1990), had Isaac been allowed, he would have asked completely different questions. Suggested or speculated by us, we think that if children were allowed, they might play with machines in different ways than what they are taught to do. Tapping, sliding, exploring proactively with their fingers and following their own agentic sensational movements instead of, for example, learned fingertip scrolling from the top down. This is ultimately our future hope for posthuman creativity with generative artificial intelligence tools. These are thus approaches freed from the connotations of the ‘immature’, ‘innocent’, ‘lacking’, ‘wanting’ or ‘helpless’ state of the child and the accompanying presuppositions about prevention, intervention, resilience, learning and even help permeating modern educational thought and politics. It further implies a stronger focus on and the implications of collective factors in education, but as an expansion of what we currently call ‘the social’ (‘the social’ certainly did not help Isaac). No sacrifices to make. Only eye-to-eye dialogues as orientations, preferences, fascinations and attractions towards the collective and limitless possibilities that emerge, and a seemingly inexhaustible inclination to indulge in unbridled mobility, in which there is never a given and no definite points of where events begin and end. Rather, orientations forming, constantly changing, intertwined, vibrant and pulsating, real and virtual, kindergarten lives and music. Deleuzean and Guattarian (2004: 352) eye-to-eye or flat grey-on-grey mannerist dialogue, providing opportunities to language personal experiences and to share opinions and views within various continually evolving digital child cyborgs that may or may not consist of structures that can facilitate action. Education as freedom, as play, creativity and novelty, as necessary products of the learning process, as such, can be considered as pedagogical goals embedded in a transformational pragmatics. Ultimately, this is an invitation to expand, deepen, restructure, reconceptualize, reformulate and, at the same time, challenge any proposals, pedagogies, measurements or programmes that are put forward, and bring, create and produce new ones; proposals and pedagogies that are slow and urgent, generous and pointed, open and restless, arising from the sacrificial altar, allowing cyborging. Cyborgs that are drummed, hummed, sung, yelled, smelled, breathed, jumped, played, cried and laughed … and while we are at it, our next article will be about teacher education in the postdigital area having reclaimed the Nordic model – what we hope – what we must.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
