What is needed is a cryptographer: Baroque conceptualizations of professionalism

Abstract

Recently, the concepts of profession and professionalism have gained a stronger position in the Norwegian field of early childhood education. Where once kindergarten teachers were understood to be performing work as an occupation, it has become more common to conceptualize their work within a theoretical framework relying on the sociology of professions. One might say it has become a conceptual habit – both unfolding possibilities for the field to claim territories and at the same time plying the field into a certain vocabulary. This article emerges from a doctoral study carried out as empirical–philosophical explorations of the concept of professionalism in collaboration with kindergarten teachers, thus adding another fold to the reconceptualization of professionalism. By dramatizing ( Deleuze, 2004) the concept of professionalism, the study endeavours creative conceptual innovation. This is done by loosening the concept of professionalism from the above-mentioned conceptual structures to connect it with baroque points of view. By putting to work the baroque fold, the article suggests a move away from a landscape that relates professionalism to simplicity and clear identifications towards complexities. More concretely, by bringing the concept of professionalism into the underground of the dark crypts where forces of resistance are located, the article proposes professionalism in early childhood education as dim and obscure, and in need of a cryptographer.

Keywords

Deleuze early childhood education resistance the fold the method of dramatization Jayne Osgood Camilla Andersen Agnes Bjelkerud

One ventures from home on the thread of a tune

Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. … One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. [AQ: Please indicate if ‘loop’ is correct or should be plural] Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud ‘lines of drift’ with different loop, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 344)

Drawing on the French philosophers and activists Deleuze and Guattari (2004), as they suggest venturing from home on the thread of a tune, this article hums a refrain from the Norwegian kindergarten context. The refrain hummed has emerged over the past decades, intertwining the concept of profession with the Norwegian kindergarten vocabulary. Where one previously talked about kindergarten teachers performing work as an occupation, it is now, in Norwegian framework plans (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017, 2023) and literature and research addressing Norwegian kindergarten teachers (e.g. Eik et al., 2016; Hennum and Østrem, 2016; Tveter Thoresen, 2015), common to relate kindergarten teachers’ practice to a theoretical framework relying on the sociology of professions. One might ask whether the increasing use of the term ‘profession’ has become a conceptual habit – both unfolding possibilities for the field to claim and maintain territories and at the same time being plied into conceptualizations which seek to establish what professionalism is.

Figure 1.

Exploring paper folding.

Figure 2.

Ground(s) of professionalism.

Critically affirming (Andersen, 2018) how applying a vocabulary derived from sociological analyses of professionalism complies with certain material-discursive ways of thinking and doing professionalism, the doctoral study from which this article emerges (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022) endeavours creative conceptual innovation. The study's overarching aim is to loosen the above-mentioned conceptual structures of professionalism and connect it with more obscure ones. In other words, by pushing forward the question posed by Sachs (2016): why are we still talking about teacher professionalism? the article proposes opening the territorial ‘circle [of the concept of professionalism] a crack’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 344), launching forth events of professionalism to create a line of drift towards professionalism's complicities and complexities. Regardless of the attempts to define the profession of early childhood education, there are things happening beneath it: ‘connections, attractions and repulsions, which do not coincide with the segments, the forms of madness which are secret’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 125). In this article, ‘what is happening beneath’ is explored by implying Deleuze's baroque fold, offering a point of view where professionalism is conceptualized as processes of folding and unfolding (Deleuze, 1993). This involves material and conceptual processes designated by resistance and attunements to what actualizes as matters of concern (Latour, 2004; Stengers, 2018). Emerging from this, I propose the cryptographer, whose work is to ‘peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul’ (Deleuze, 1993: 3), as a conceptual persona (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) that can revitalize what professionalism may encompass.

The method of dramatization

Although this article invigorates resistance to clarity by promoting Deleuze's baroque folds and the complexities of professionalism to be the driving force, this section outlines the article's point of departure, its methodology and structure for the reader to follow its baroque eventualities. I will begin with a brief insight into how the method of dramatization is established.

According to Deleuze (2004), dramatization forges an interest in a concept's compositions and possible other connections. Although he uses the term method when designating dramatization, he does not provide a recipe for how dramatization can be done. Rather, he proposes this method as an alternative strategy; a method where the questions who? how? when? where? and how much? challenge essentialism and systems of representation of the question what is…? and expand this with coordinates that create conditions for a problem's actualizations (McMahon, 2005). Or in the words of Jenkins (2015: 35), ‘Language and words are usually formed in order to lead us towards certainty, yet we often find that they propel us further into the depths of the indiscernible’. In continuation, Debaise (2016) foregrounds that dramatization has no content, it does not refer to a particular experience and does not indicate a particular result. The only goal of dramatization, he claims, is to give events the sense they invoke. Accordingly, Sholtz (2016) expresses that dramatization aims to change the existing and present by liberating events involved in the actual and of the affective and intensive. In this way, dramatization is connected to the creation of concepts through the temporal–spatial dynamics which the dramatization actualizes (Abdullah, 2016). Thus, dramatization works processually through what it initiates, animates and actualizes.

Concerned with what the habit of using the concept of professionalism could contribute, I entered the doctoral study where this article takes its point of departure by asking What is professionalism? How might one think of professionalism? and How does professionalism come about? Asking these questions, or following concepts’ contours, actualizations, breaks and connections – as Colebrook (2017), Lenz Taguchi (2016) and Mazzei (2017) have encouraged – is what Deleuze (2004) calls the method of dramatization. And, asking these questions throughout the study, the dramatizations created spaces where multiple points of view became possible (Barker, 2016). Implicating such a method, the purpose of the doctoral study was to loosen the structures that bind the concept of professionalism together. However, loosening the structures is not in itself enough. Concepts are not given and awaiting us ready-made, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) state, they must be created, underpinning that concepts are not only ideal but also empirical. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari (1994), a necessary part of the study was also to connect the structures and components together with other and perhaps more unfamiliar ones to explore what new conceptualizations were generated. Both in relation to the loosening of the structures and the re-connections, conversations with kindergarten teachers and Deleuze's baroque fold have been drivers of conceptual innovation.

An event unfolding between two kindergarten teachers, a week planner for kindergarten teachers and me early in the project intensified my initial ethical presumptions on ‘providing the kindergarten teachers with a space for articulating their professionalism’. On this account, as part of the dramatization in the study, I set aside the notion of a planned research trajectory outlined by me in advance. Rather, I ‘ventured from home’, as Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 344) put it, onto a fragile thread of a tune by launching myself into the events of professionalism connecting to what unfolded – through loops, knots, velocities, movements and sonorities. Or, as MacLure (2006: 731) articulates in her baroque take on methodology, ‘get entangled in the details and decorations’. In a more organized and concrete manner, I can nonetheless state that the conceptual explorations unfolded through (a) recurring co-creative conversations with three kindergarten teachers and visits to their kindergartens in Norway over a period of six months, (b) personal notes from the conversations and from listening and re-listening to audio recordings of them and (c) developing what I termed baroque traits of professionalism. As a consistent ethical stance throughout the work, affects, intensities and intensifications were something I pursued – where does something become, feel and express itself as important?

In relation to this, I draw on Stengers when she states that the point is not to solve a problem, but to make it more interesting by expanding its usual formulations – producing new appetite for what is possible (Savransky and Stengers, 2018: 134). Thinking with Stengers, the appetite for what is possible might act as a resistance movement. A resistance where a collective ‘we’ (the kindergarten teachers, me as the researcher, the early childhood education and care field, etc.) are encouraged not to accept concepts as a gift and to clean and polish them, but rather to exercise scepticism towards them, particularly regarding the concepts that ‘we’ have not created ourselves (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 5), and to think with the concepts by setting them in motion and thus loosening them from their usual formulations. Relating this to doing conversations together with kindergarten teachers, I draw on Deleuze and Parnet (1987) stating that conversation is not about speaking on behalf of others but about speaking with – as conspiracy rather than conversation. To think of the conversations as creating an art of paying attention (Savransky and Stengers, 2018) and conspiring with the kindergarten teachers became an important ethical concern for the study.

In the following, I will begin the dramatization by briefly outlining the humming refrain of kindergarten teachers’ professionalism. Furthermore, through a practical example of paper folding, I will provide the baroque with an ontological and epistemological premise, and subsequently propose how this creates implications for exploring the emergence of professionalism. Here, I will indicate how folding also involves a degree of resistance. This, in turn, will be incorporated into an exploration where empirical iterations from the doctoral thesis intertwine with Deleuze's baroque folds and contribute to conceptualizing the baroque traits of professionalism. Finally, I will elaborate on how this can be contextualized within the work of kindergarten teachers and expectations regarding professionalism, in contrast to the notion of professionalism as something that can be understood and expressed clearly.

Creating a line of drift by dramatizing conceptual habits

As initially stated, this article is derived from a doctoral thesis (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022) where applying the concepts of profession and professionalism has hinged the project. At some points, the delineation and specification of professionalism contours have been crucial for creating stability and organization, or what Deleuze and Guattari (2004) term segments within a reality of ongoing flows. For instance, it has recently become important to highlight the features of the Nordic kindergarten tradition of a holistic view of childhood foregrounding child-driven activities and initiatives and the interwovenness of care, play and learning (Aslanian et al., 2024; Sandvik, 2020), in the face of commercial forces, governance technologies and externally driven mandates that appear to challenge both the profession's expertise and children's rights. Similar needs for addressing how neoliberal governmental technology creates performances of professionalism aligned with preoccupied and permeated standards have over decades been stated by an increasing collection of scholars (Bartholdsson, 2021; Fenech and King, 2022; Mooney Simmie and Murphy, 2023; Osgood, 2004, 2006; Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021). Furthermore, in relation to diverse workforces within the kindergarten sector, Gould et al. (2023) highlight how various experiences and expectations can arise along with opportunities to identify as a kindergarten teacher.

Although there have been attempts to identify what kindergarten teacher professionalism might entail (Molla and Nolan, 2019; Urban and Dalli, 2012), and that in many aspects such an identification can contribute to strengthening kindergarten teachers’ humming refrain, the brief outline given here broadly states that conceptions of professionalism emerge from and through multiple processes. Due to these processes, it is incompossible to stretch out a singular and unified professional territory. As indicated earlier, there is always more going on. Alongside the more rigid segments of professions, there is ‘also that which happens beneath it’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 125). Several of the above-mentioned scholars raise questions about the relationship between measurable qualifications, training and professionalism, noting how the former two can obstruct the latter. In other words, overly rigid and structured forms of professional practice may diminish the emphasis on aspects of being a kindergarten teacher that are associated with what Aslanian (2020), Morris (2021) and Nordström (2024) refer to as ethical practices of resistance, care, joy and love in pedagogical work. In order to get closer to ‘what happens beneath’, other scholars have sought to explore how post-humanist theories can contribute to articulating this. By studying professionalism with these lenses, professionalism has also been proposed as something emerging through events (Andersen, 2015), processes of becoming (Fairchild, 2017), as bodying (Reinertsen, 2017) and with-in more-than-human relations (Osgood, 2019).

In the effort to elaborate on this already established body of knowledge, I suggest that what is less frequently addressed in studies related to professionalism is what Deleuze and Parnet (1987) refer to as madness, which I will translate as unpredictable elements that complicate matters. Which brings me to the baroque fold.

Entering the baroque fold

I have sat down with a sheet of paper to explore the operative function of folding and to produce folds. I place a white sheet in front of me on the table and search ‘origami bird’ online. It didn’t necessarily have to be a figure; I’m unsure why I searched for one. Perhaps it is Deleuze's reference to Leibniz's statement about paper folding into smaller folds that draws me in this direction, or perhaps it is my kindergarten teacher habits of folding paper to create a figure for the children. I begin the folding process and decide to take a photo after each fold. Maybe it is the urge for documentation that has come over me. However, I am also curious to see and later revisit what the folding does to the paper. Each fold leaves a new mark, a new impression through external influence. Sometimes the fold does not fall as I wish, and I recognize how frustratingly difficult it can be to fold paper so that the edges meet perfectly. It feels as though the paper's intertwined fibres give resistance. Initially, I find an image with instructions on how to fold a bird, a two-dimensional description. Yet the description does not provide enough information for me to understand how to carry out the three-dimensional folding necessary to create the bird. I search for a video instead. As the process of folding and photographing continues, more marks appear on the paper, and I notice the paper changes in quality, becoming softer as I work with it. Simultaneously, all the folds, including those where I initially folded incorrectly or unevenly, leave traces on the paper that imply and complicate further folding. I also recognize that the paper behaves – or rather occupies space – differently when I hold and fold it compared to when it lies on its own and I photograph it. (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 102, my translation)

How can we know the world? This is the question Law (2016) asks in his introduction to baroque ways of knowing (Figure 1). Law's question is intriguing because it suggests that there are multiple ways to think about, know and relate to the world. Also, baroque ways. Most people are familiar with the Baroque as a historical and artistic epoch. Stylistically, this period is associated with extravagant formations and richness of details, but there are few explicit connections between the Baroque historical period and educational practices. Advocating for baroque professionalism might therefore be perceived as a peculiar endeavour, distant from everyday life in early childhood education, both in terms of time and aesthetics; it could seem like an alien element within the vocabulary of kindergarten professionalism.

Nevertheless, the Baroque has evolved across various fields and disciplines, creating an interest in Baroque as a philosophical and transhistorical concept, as an entry for thinking about questions of being and knowing (Law and Ruppert, 2016; MacLure, 2006, 2013; Mol, 2016). What several of the baroque entries have in common, however, is that they challenge the distinction between the material, sensory and the ideal, thinkable. According to Law (2016), baroque modes emphasize the corporeal, asserting that we cannot have consciousness of something without the involvement of the bodily and fleshly. The baroque modes of knowing or experiencing the world blur the distinction between being, sensing and knowing. This also makes it unclear what lies outside and inside; between the interior and exterior, between what is typically distinguished as subject and object. Here, Bal (2011: 189) asserts, we arrive at the baroque point of view: that subject and object, sensation and thought become mutually dependent and influenced by each other, folded into each other. When encountering, both the subject and the object are put into play and made porous and vulnerable. The knowledges that emerge cannot be predicted; how we are affected by our surroundings, what implications they may give, what this sets in motion of sensuous perceptions and thoughts is not predetermined – as the iteration on paper folding above denotes. Through processes of mutual influence, the folding, the paper and the body that folds and unfolds with it all undergo disruptions in their structure and formation, granting both the subject and the object a new status. They become porous and mannerist (Deleuze, 1993: 20), forging complicity and multiplicity.

In the processe of folding, the object appears with what Deleuze (1993), following Whitehead (1929), calls prehensions. Which is understood as more than cognition or consciousness. Prehensions are linked to the qualities that prompt specific responses without necessarily being consciously processed. The vector of prehensions flows from the world to the subject. It is not the subject's contemplation of the world that creates prehension and consequently a point of view; the data of prehension, Deleuze argues (1993: 88), are not private but public elements. The point of view is created by the singularities with associated prehensions that are actualized within the subject. As in the paper folding above, the changing qualities in and of the experience of folding paper create prehensions to which I unconsciously respond. The becoming point of view replaces the centre of a figure, as Deleuze states (1993: 22); the processes of subjectivation are not situated as a unified and centred formation – rather, the composition of prehensions provides the conditions for how a varied world becomes visible to the subject. According to Stengers (2011: 146), perceived events in the interactions between subject and object are tied to this notion of point of view and experiencing a ‘here’ as a production of reality. Or as Manning and Massumi (2014: 29) put it: ‘Matter of fact: the thisness of taking place, the thisness of architecting the world. Thisness: a flocking. A quality of experience that folds the many in the one’. What I have articulated here provides foundations for what, in the concluding section of this paper, urges for a cryptographer. The cryptographer's task is precisely to engage with prehensions to attune to thisness, to possibilities for existence and life.

As the previous passages show, the fold, the act of folding and being folded, conceptualizes the world as being concretely created through folding, unfolding and refolding. As the paper folding above demonstrated, the processes of folding are not uncomplicated; they imply forces of resistance (Beckman, 2017: 63). The French word le pli (the fold) also has a verb form, plier. As I will return to later, Malabou (The Relation between Habit and the Fold, 2018) points out how the verb plier encompasses both the act of folding and being folded – meaning both to create and to be created, to mark and to be marked, to affect and be affected. Deleuze (1995) connects these dualities, which are not dichotomies but continuations, to potentials for resistance: being marked or forced also entails to force, to mark, to create. He notes: ‘It's a question of “doubling” the play of forces, of a self-relation that allows us to resist, to elude power’ and to make force ‘impinge on itself rather than on other forces’ (Deleuze, 1995: 98).

By introducing the fold, the baroque is thus placed within a network of terms where -pli- is part of implication, explication, complication and multiplicity. The baroque foldings are not intended to be unified, reconciled or consolidated into new unified syntheses; rather, they aim to expand and proliferate new formations, furthering being and knowing to create what Deleuze calls processes of individuation (cf. the ‘here’ and ‘thisness’ mentioned above). This provides a premise for arguing that the baroque fold can serve as a perspective for conceptualizing professionalism's multiplicities.

…and the crypts of professionalism?

As I have shown, we can approach the question ‘What is professionalism?’ in multiple ways. Or, like the baroque folds, questions can also manifest as folds within folds within folds, questions within questions within questions. Jenkins (2015: 16) refers to questions as enigmatic and suggests that rather than being viewed as gateways for enlightenment and the development of representations, they might be conceived of as a code, a crypt. ‘What is professionalism?’ can therefore just as well be something hidden and secret, something underground. From this underground, it is important to remark that the baroque point of view is not a new theory about the work of kindergarten teachers and does not say anything about how kindergarten teachers can or should understand and perform their pedagogical practices and profession. Such temptations could risk the danger of overshadowing the stuttering matters of which professionalism also is informed and created, as highlighted by Fairchild (2017). In this article, I will undertake a venture to move our habitual ideas of professionalism into the hidden crypts and the inside-insights of kindergarten teachers’ professionalism:

For ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theatre, a study, or a print room. The Baroque invests in all of these places in order to extract from them power and glory. (Deleuze, 1993: 31)

In the doctoral study, I began to take seriously what happened in the crypts of kindergartens and kindergartens teachers’ professionalism not to extract from them power and glory, but to intensify and give value to the events of professionalism, the matters of concern unfolding. The following will give some propositions on how one might think about professionalism when this is thought together with the baroque. This is done by transducing (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004; Sauvagnargues, 2016) iterations from (a) fieldnotes from visits to kindergartens, (b) the recording of conversations we had and (c) notes from re-listenings of the audio recordings.

There must be en grunn – and risking the grounds

‘The kindergarten teacher sits on the floor in the cloakroom area. The wooden train track winds between her and the four children who are with her (Figure 2). The trains roll around the track at different speeds and the children's bodies move with them.

The kindergarten teacher sits still.

It all seems to function like a smooth machinery of movements, train tracks, bodies, glances, touches, smiles, train carriages, small exchanges and stories told. A cloakroom with space for each child, jackets, shoes, bags, shelves with changes of clothes, notes on the wall with an overview of the divisions of the children's group, pictures of the tree they follow throughout the different seasons hanging on the door.

And the kindergarten teacher, who responds ‘mm’ and ‘really?’ and ‘no, is that true?’ and ‘yes’ and ‘what happened then?’ to what the children are telling, and who looks at the children and laughs and asks a boy who enters the room what he wants to do and if he wants to help build a train track.' (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 160, my translation)

In the Norwegian vocabulary, the word grunn means both ‘reason’, as in there is a reason for that which is happening, and ‘ground’, as in a foundation. This small word en grunn enfolds at the same time ground and grounds. The principle that there must be a grunn for the kindergarten teacher positioning herself on the floor, or indeed, the principle that everything that occurs must have a reason, is often associated with the rationale of reason and causality, specifically the underlying causes and justifications for actions. Why is the kindergarten teacher seated on the floor? This question acts as a wedge that might create a small crack in exploring the folds within the pedagogical practice of the kindergarten teacher and the profession itself. Surely there must be a reason for her sitting in this particular way on the floor? In The Fold, Deleuze (1993: 47) refers to the notion that everything that happens has a reason as the call of reason par excellence. The belief that everything has a reason can, according to Deleuze (1993), be contemplated alongside what he describes as philosophy's general problem with beginnings, where beginnings are understood as a linear logic that allows one to trace a justification back to an initial point, coupled with a desire to arrive at a (definitive) understanding based on explanations that clarify. This can be related to the expectations placed upon kindergarten teachers and their professionalism, for instance, through the Norwegian framework plan for kindergartens (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017), which demands planned, assessed and documented practices. Such expectations create a compulsion to ascertain why the kindergarten teacher chose to sit on the floor in that manner.

The problem, Zourabichvili (2019 [1994]: 26, my translation) argues, is that ‘[a]s long as the beginning is conceived as a foundation, it is subject to an original recognition’. The grounds and grounding, in this sense, involve laying a foundation, creating a basis for actions and pedagogical practice where what is done and decided occurs in relation to something recognizable. Thus, it can be said that the grounds bends back onto itself, and ‘[w]e assume that thought returns to itself and conquers its own necessity from within’ (Zourabichvili, 2019 [1994]: 27, my translation). In other words, at first glance, the question of why the kindergarten teacher has positioned herself on the floor appears to originate from or return to her. Grounding begins with the kindergarten teacher and what can be recognized as professional pedagogical practice in Norwegian kindergartens. The expectations of the beginning for recognition lead to the inclusion of what is recognizable in the concept of professionalism, while what is unrecognizable is excluded. Referring to Leibniz, Deleuze (1993) calls that which is recognizable and thus included as the compossible, whereas what is unrecognizable and therefore not included, or at least not immediately acknowledged as, for example, professionalism, is termed the incompossible.

Practicing and performing professionalism at the edge of compossible–incompossible implies risks. This is put to the fore by one of the kindergarten teachers as she raises the question of proximity and cuddling as part of pedagogical care for the youngest children:

But I also noticed after a while that I was, I’m actually the only one in the kindergarten who might do this with the kids, because I know that there are a lot of discussions about this – should you kiss the kids and things like that. I do this automatically, but I also notice that I’m one of the only ones in my department who cuddles with the kids like that. So now I also see with some of the children I know well that when I arrive on the late shift, the kids come running because they know, yes, they think [‘]she would like to cuddle because we can do that with her too[’], so yes – it's something that I’ve started to think about now. (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 170, my translation)

The risk in the iteration above may seem to lie in the extent to which closeness in encounters with children are included in the conceptualization of professionalism, whether closeness, proximity, intimacy, cuddling and kissing seem compossible with professionalism. The kindergarten teacher here expresses that she experiences moving into a landscape of greater risk of ending up in something that can be perceived as impossible, or non-compatible, with professionalism. Yet she holds on to closeness, it shows her an entrance to the children, which could have been less open; it seems to lead her past what otherwise, in a larger and perhaps more rigidly segmented and compossible professional language, could have been a barrier. Maybe she invokes what Morris (2021) calls ‘ethical subversion’, risky acts of loving disobedience. Nevertheless, aligned with the expanded commonality and chromaticity of the baroque, closeness and cuddling can be included. A similarly risky borderland emerges in some of the conversations I have with one of the other kindergarten teachers, and which can be seen in the context of the fact that grounding can also be about moving across and transversally:

I am sitting and listening to an audio recording of a conversation with one of the kindergarten teachers, we have met again in a café. Even though we have placed ourselves a little outside the café itself, in the recordings, our voices mingle with those of many others, with the guests in the café. I have to concentrate on following our conversation. Not because there is something more interesting going on in the background that catches my attention, but because the steady sound of people talking makes it difficult to single out the voices of the kindergarten teacher and me. I hear myself picking up the thread from the last time we spoke:

Me: […]you spoke a lot about rules, both at a societal level, or maybe discursively, or what kinds of expectations there are, but also more concrete rules in your kindergarten. And that this influenced a lot of how you experienced working, or what you had the opportunity to do. And so, I became a little curious about what pedagogy is in this, or how it is expressed.

Kindergarten teacher: [...]When I read the framework plan, it says a lot about supporting children, and I’ve thought a lot about it, I’ve been a little critical of exactly [the concept of] supporting, that's all I’m supposed to be? A supporter and a facilitator for drawing activities and … because what kind of perspective on children do I have if I think that the children should just be supported and … that's what I’ve been a little critical of. It's a bit like [assuming] they can’t do it themselves. So, I know that in our department, the children are allowed to do many more things than they might be allowed to do in other departments. I let them climb the bookshelf and…

Just as the kindergarten teacher says this, applause erupts inside the café room, as if by a twist of fate. I have no idea what the applause is for, but in the moment of re-listening, this coincidence takes on a humorous expression, as if the people at the café are applauding the kindergarten teacher's openness to children's creativity and her critical pedagogical stance.

[...] Seeing the humorous side, using humour when interacting with children and breaking rules, is that going against the grain today? Is it a form of resistance? Is it a secret school, an underground school, similar to how Deleuze (1993: 86) describes Whitehead – as the leader of a secret group interested in events? When I think about the conversations I’ve had with the kindergarten teachers, I get a sense that all three of them express something pliable, something that may seem transversal and contrary, yet loaded with seriousness and professionalism. (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 170–172, my translation)

In a lecture, Malabou (The Relation between Habit and the Fold, 2018) explores the relationship between the concepts of fold and habit, and how habit formation and folding are dual. On one hand, she states, folding involves folding over (pli) and thereby creating a new mark; on the other hand, it involves bending under or yielding to something (plier). According to Malabou, this duality creates an ambivalence that encompasses both the hope found in the new mark – a new habit – and the danger of automation and submission inherent in routine. She elaborates on how the French phrase prendre un pli translated into ‘to form a habit’ demonstrates precisely how habit is active both in creating something new and in stabilizing and potentially thoughtlessly automating something.

Furthermore, Malabou (The Relation between Habit and the Fold, 2018) points out that the Latin habere means ‘to have’. In the interplay between the English ‘habit’ and the French habit (to dwell or inhabit), habere, as I understand it, invites us to consider profession both as a habitat – a home or a familiar field for kindergarten teachers – and as something that kindergarten teachers hold and create, akin to professionalism. In the context of Deleuze's (1993) conceptualization of the fold, profession and professionalism become a process of both implicating and explicating, including and expressing. In this way, habits can act as an ally (Berge, 2009: 57), creating order from chaos, establishing a territory or habitat. At the same time, a range of implicit habits may exist within language, practices and concepts – habits that can contribute to unthinking automation and fall ‘into the fold’, where a network of mutually inclusive concepts, practices and language enables the inclusion and exclusion of something as professional. Habits are thus both legitimized and challenged by the question of why we continue to use the concept of professionalism. The grunn, the reason, the grounding of professionalism iterated in the excerpts above is just as much, and perhaps even more so, marked by, created and unfolded from prehensions, from the thisness that individuates itself through the forces of resistance folding back at the kindergarten teacher as it creates new formations and figures, new grounds and reasons.

Consciousness, I wish the answer could be yes…

Consciousness is a concept that keeps coming up in the conversations I have with the kindergarten teachers. That one must become and be conscious of what one does. Often this concept comes together with justifying; it can seem as if consciousness were something that is needed in order to be able to justify professionally what one does. I notice that I am becoming curious about this, and especially in the face of Deleuze's thinking and the baroque. (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 179, my translation)

In a Deleuzian baroque perspective, events’ prehensions precede consciousness, and consciousness is subsequently created (Deleuze, 1993; Eliassen, 2018 [1990]). Drawing on Deleuze's baroque fold, Eliassen (2018 [1990]) states that consciousness acts as a defence against external threats, against chaos, and aims to fit life into an order that is not inherent to life itself (2018 [1990]: 85). Seeking consciousness as a kind of protection seems to be a theme that kindergarten teachers circle around in one of our co-creative conversations.

Kindergarten teacher: The search for consciousness, then, because you must search for consciousness if you want to understand more of the children you spend time with, the adults you work with, then you must search and want that consciousness, reflect on it, discuss, read up…

Me: but, is it so that you always know why you do what you do when you meet a child? I am curious, I don’t know…

Two of the kindergarten teachers: no.

Kindergarten teacher: that you always know why you do what you do … ehhh, that is a difficult question, then, I would like to answer yes to that question … or, so I like to think that what I do is conscious. (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022: 179)

Here, consciousness seems to be perceived as something external to the kindergarten teacher, something that can be sought out and established, transforming the unknown in interactions with children and the imperative to act or do something yet undefined into a refuge, a shelter, a home, a comprehensible world. However, as Eliassen (2018 [1990]) points out, is it certain that consciousness is the best defence against ‘the forces knocking at the door’ (2018 [1990]: 85, my translation)? ‘The crucial point in assessing’ whether consciousness is the best defence, he claims, is whether it provides space for and allows life to unfold (2018 [1990]: 85). Referring to Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze (2002) writes that the creation of consciousness and its transformation are not in relation to an exterior but in relation to a superior. That is, consciousness is driven not by reality but by values. In other words, consciousness here is propelled by an image to which professionalism aspires. The individuation, the creation of professionalism, might be related to and challenged by how Deleuze (2002) discusses consciousness as symptoms when he writes that we must maintain a certain humility regarding consciousness because we do not know what a body can become: ‘To remind consciousness of its necessary modesty is to take it for what it is: a symptom; nothing but the symptom of a deeper transformation’ (Deleuze, 2002: 39). The question of whether one can always know why, to know one's grounds, seems to act as a wedge here. The tension between opening towards life's unforeseen unfoldings and the order of consciousness appears to create small cracks in what I perceive as a segmented and consensual kindergarten teacher's professional vocabulary: the pursuit of and for consciousness.

In a Deleuzian baroque manner, what emerges might be seen as what he calls representatives of the world (Deleuze, 1993: 98). These should not be understood as representatives in the form of representations or necessarily concrete entities, but rather as everything that constitutes the world, which, through the virtual, is what enables the emergence, actualization and realization of entities. In this way, knowing what feels right, on what grounds the kindergarten teachers perform their professionalism, has to do with prehensions, where what is experienced is an infinite array of minute perceptions that create a form of consciousness:

And these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up macroperceptions, our conscious, clear, and distinct apperceptions. Had it failed to bring together an infinite sum of minute perceptions that destabilize the preceding macroperception while preparing the following one, a conscious perception would never happen. … Tiny perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception. They constitute the animal and animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings’, or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. The pricklings are representatives of the world in the closed monad. The animal that anxiously looks about, the soul that watches out, signifies that there exist minute perceptions that are not integrated into the preceding one and that nourish the one that comes along (‘so it was that!’) … the relation of the inconspicuous perceptions to conscious perception does not go from part to whole, but from the ordinary to what is notable or remarkable. … All consciousness is a matter of threshold. (Deleuze, 1993: 99–101, ittalics in orginal)

What is needed is a cryptographer…

Where does all of this leave us in conceptualizing professionalism? What is there to draw from these hidden crypts of professionalism? In a short sentence in The Fold, Deleuze (1993: 3) suggests that what is perhaps needed is a cryptographer. When attempting to move beyond the mindset of representation into the baroque folds, a cryptographer's work can no longer revolve around decoding by recognizing and translating the meaning or logic of an object, matter or expression. Cryptography as professionalism must be something other than interpreting a child's expression through pre-existing understandings and predefined professional performativity. Rather, it must take form as a reading through diving into the pores and cracks of matter and into the folds of the soul for the potential possibilities of existence, as Deleuze writes (1993: 3), and as the above baroque experimentations of professionalism have shown glimpses of.

For Deleuze, baroque cryptography entails an interest in heterogeneity in ways of living and thinking (Zourabichvili, 2019 [1994]: 52). Such an approach subordinates the subject's intentionality and favours an open, pre-individual and external relation where something can affect and seize you through sensations, forces and flows that also can be perceived as significant, as concerns, before they occupy our choices and our consciousness (Stengers, 2018: 3). Perhaps this is also part of what occurs as the kindergarten teacher sits amid the wooden train tracks, or as she allows the children to give her a cuddle, engaging with life in the kindergartens. Conceptualizing the kindergarten teacher as a cryptographer attuning to sensations pays attention to and offers a vocabulary on and of professionalism different from the habitual ones. Body as profession, as Reinertsen (2017) stresses, creates openings for thinking of professionalism as combining sensing and thinking; a way of thinking which implies becoming willing to that which becomes important – to matters of concern (Latour, 2004; Stengers, 2018). Hence, this article, and the study from which it evolves, explicates professionalism as something we don’t necessarily see or can express clearly, but perhaps still can sense or feel, by conceptualizing the kindergarten–teacher–cryptographer's art of paying attention.

In this regard, the article contributes to complicating the lightness, simplicity and clarity which haunt today's educational policy with its ‘dream of complete transparency’ (Culp, 2016: 16). According to Culp, the dream of complete transparency and communicability is destined for a false transcendence, akin to a new Tower of Babel; hence implying that the belief in complete transparency and communicability is an alluring idea and may just as well reflect human hubris and lead to confusion. In relation to conceptualizations of professionalism, it is pertinent to consider that international and global organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2025) and the European Union seek collective formulations regarding what yields the best outcomes both for children in kindergartens and for society, and how kindergarten teachers can optimally work to achieve such outcomes (OECD, 2025: 59). This can be connected to Culp's critical objections, seeking into the catacombs where resistance movements operate and, referring to Deleuze's baroque architecture, into the crypts’ subterranean yet powerful architecture (Culp, 2016: 15–17).

Relating this to the study's aim of working towards a creative conceptual innovation of professionalism by dramatizing the concept and conspiring with kindergarten teachers, the idea of professionalism being fully transparent and communicable can equally be seen as confusing hubris. As a countermove, this article offers that through resistance work – not as an opposition but as the resistance and obstinacy of grunne, which in Norwegian means ‘to ponder’ rather than ‘give the grounds for’ – one might find ways to move more attentively and relearn repeatedly, allowing for multiple ways of thinking and doing professionalism to fold and unfold.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education at Inland Norway University. Her current projects involves early childhood practices, perspectives on social equity, and teaching in higher education.

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