Fuzzytechie languaging and consilience: Dataphilosophy and transdisciplinary digital force for justice

Abstract

Digitalization of our educational systems is moving faster and deeper into our institutions. I applaud it because it has the potential to save time and effort, allowing me to spend more time on the most important part of my work as a scholar. But I am regularly sick to my stomach about what I applaud, because there is no potential and any news or justice in it unless I conquer it. Moreover, unless I do- conquer that is, it works as much against (non)knowledges as the opposite, and this is speeding up. Hence, I speculate with the concepts of speed and force. I ask, how is it possible to add or speed up and strengthen digital diversity for justice to highlight the entangled contours of knowledges, inequality, equality and quality in education? My gut feeling tells me that my subjective professionalism is under siege and that I need to take back the concept of objectivity to survive. It is paradoxically slow but fast, paradoxically objective but subjective, strong but weak. It implies a liberating loss of control to importance. Education becoming eventicized, professionals and teachers becoming transdisciplinary dataphilosophers.

Fuzzytechie languaging and consilience: Dataphilosophy and transdisciplinary digital force for justice

The slowness belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: Relations of speed and slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the movement of an organic form and the determination of organs. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 551)

Starting up

Digitalization of our educational systems is moving faster and deeper into our institutions. I applaud it because it has the potential to save time and efforts, allowing me more time to spend on the most important part of my work as a scholar. Being a professor and teacher-trainer that would be for me, and with reference to the concept of quality, to work with my students and myself to affirm the existence of different ontologies and explore how conditioning and imperative our epistemic conducts are for minded matter languaging and consilience. Languaging refers to the use, actionalizing and materiality of languages, and consilience is about bringing forth new (non)knowledges, here transcorporeal collectivities and just transdisciplinary digital practices and thinking. A thinking and activist languaging of newness with and in technology. Language embedded in life containing life in its interior.

A sweet story that I can share at the outset is about my students arranging online parties with cheese and crackers while discussing teaching and learning and collaborating on assignments. My country is long, and the students live at great distances from each another. They placed their computers so that the others could see them and their living rooms, then they engaged in a colloquium. Their joint result ticked into my computer ready for response and evaluation.

I am, however, regularly sick to my stomach about what I applaud because there is no quality, potential and any news or justice in digitalization unless I conquer it. Moreover, unless I do, it works as much against (non)knowledges as the opposite, and this is speeding up. Both structure and culture often prevent knowledges, justice and sometimes, it seems, even thinking itself. In slow/speed diffractive cartographics of body multiple (Mol, 2002; in Van der Tuin, 2019) webbed 3.0 ¹ inter-intra connections, the conquering is not about the empirical subject or object of digitalization itself but about all images surrounding it, actual and virtual lines of flights to multiply, de-reterritorialize, and ultimately actionalize and learn from.

This includes conscious, unconscious and nonconscious learning processes and their implications; hence the ‘(non)’ in front of the concept of knowledge. It embraces transdisciplinary naturecultures ² languaging of how we care for, and inhabit the Open (Mbembe,2013/2017: 183). It is simultaneously fuzzy and technocratic. It is natureculture’s fuzzytechie. Activisms, actionalizing and activist languaging worked with as a sort of deleuzeoguattarian delirium, a moral performativity, an obligation and a movement towards something I do not know, and collective. Deleuze writes that ‘The unconscious is a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing – a social and political space to be conquered’ (in Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 78). In this way, and with reference to consilience again, I think situated just knowledges and newness can emerge. I continue therefore to cite Deleuze and Guattari (2004b) about how, what and from where the abstraction and relations of – and between – slow/speed forces fuzzytechie combine:

The line escapes geometry by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears itself free from the organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind. This vital force specific to the Abstraction is what draws smooth space. This abstract line is the affect of smooth space, just as organic representation was the feeling presiding over striated space. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 551)

Subsequently, to conquer is here forcefully to whirlwind perspective and balance through differentiated spaces and affects repeatedly: smoothing, striating and territorializing, assemblings of digitalization in the making. Not asking about what to learn and how, rather asking about what one can learn from this thing. In this case, the thing being digitalization and asking what I can learn from it. The question, and to underline it, is not ‘one of good or bad but of specificity’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 431): Freedom through a loss of control to importance. The value of openness, open-learning economies and live world methods. Iterative processes rather than algorithms. Ultimately, this is the kind of thinking that digitalization, in my view, demands. Materializing technology, life permeated by technology with/in aesthetical intensities or affects. More on importance and affects ultimately positioning below, but first a little bit on the background I write from.

In-service training

Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude (Haraway, 2016: 4)

I attended an in-service course in digitalization of higher education (HE) at my workplace. When we arrived, we were instructed to log on a specific platform at which we could comment and pose questions to the different lecturers. We were told that this would be a sign of us being digital or not. The lecturers presenting papers for us were to form a panel at the end of the day to answer the questions and comment on the comments one by one. The lectures covered different areas about digitalization and were all interesting and good. Themes like digitalization being change in its own accord, what digitalization might do to the subject, possible new digital learning modalities, inclusive design and the need for the humanities were presented. People started writing questions online, many of them were similar, but we could not know this initially because we did not know about one another, other than physically being in the same room. The question list and list of comments grew longer and longer.

One of the lecturers was a medical doctor from the local hospital talking about digitalization of the health services and patients’ responsibility for their own health and, furthermore, implications this would have for HE systems and contents. He forecasted that in the future hospitals would need to employ as many engineers as medical doctors. He said that digitalization would ensure that he and other health workers could spend more time with those patients who were excluded and unable to take on such responsibilities. This made me sit up, and as educator and teacher-trainer, I thought about the individualizing policies of self-regulation and identity through which we construct our educational systems and schooling today. I thought about exclusion and inclusion and I prepared to ask some questions about possible concurrent phenomena between our systems, structurally, culturally and policy wise. In addition, I thought we could share some experiences and thoughts about schools in the future employing as many engineers as teachers, learning heterogeneity, the internet of things, logistics other than through artificial intelligence (AI) ensuring more than – or moving beyond, if possible – machine learning, etc. I thought of virtual reality as intervention and of executive philosophies of quality. My question would be on what kind of qualities and abilities teachers, or medical doctors, for that matter, needed to be equipped with and acquire, given such digitalization of education.

I prepared to ask, but then I saw the list of questions already there and gave up. Of course, I should be careful not to silence myself; how arrogant that might appear. Of course, I should not blame any organization, organizers, structures or grammar. I both know and do not know about these things, how they might work or not. There were too many questions prepared for too little time reserved for the panel, but that is rather trivial and also amendable. I guess one could say that the platform was cluttered. Of course, I know about mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and this time it happened to/with me. One by one, the presenters started to answer questions. Some of the questions turned out to be irrelevant, some already answered and some turned up repeatedly. Possible interesting phenomena or themes went by uncommented because connections and relations were neither discovered nor perhaps possible to deal with, given the choreography of the session. All forces left my body. I had to close my eyes and put my head on the table. Affects of perhaps the Harawayan knowing too much and too little, succumbing to despair or to hope hit me … I wanted to go home and just think about something else, but it sensibly stayed with me to think with, to ask what I can learn from it and do.

I conceive of what happened as a ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016), a raw affective moment of reversed and/or temporarily dissolved structures and hierarchies opening up for – or creating within me – a fluid, malleable situation; a smooth space, enabling new thoughts, insights, (non)knowing, institutions and customs to become established. A raw moment reminding me, ultimately teaching me, even, ‘how not to be indifferent to knowing that algorithms repeat age-old patterns of in-and exclusion’, further asking me to perform and create ‘a research worthy of our time’ (Van der Tuin, 2019: 8). Van der Tuin continues about both how and through what:

… research in the 21^st century must continue to embrace a power/knowledge that would lead to choosing as research topic those nodal point in our society and cultural production that have something to do with in-and exclusion, but we must also make sure to work from a theory about how these inequalities and possible universalisms may feed back into the work we do at the university. (Van der Tuin, 2019: 16–17)

With such moments and reminders in mind, I advocate a fundamental philosophical and contemplative research, asking hard questions about what is and what counts as data, how data is perceived, worked with and/or put to work and produced. I call it dataphilosophy, with the aim of bringing in the missing people (Braidotti, 2018a, 2018b) in research and digitalization. It is – what I am trying for – ‘slow science’ (Stengers, 2018), meaning:

… becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process, creating relationships with others that are not those of capture. (Stengers, 2018: 82)

In a time of petabytes and algorithms, I try to take on board questions about the situated conditions of possibility, of virtually possible research (Van der Tuin, 2019: 16), asking what digital transdisciplinarity can do. I try to move beyond theory-based models and traditional scientific methods, indirectly exploring reconfigurations of education and research on education; ‘Thinking philosophy, science and art together as common concerns, which can give rise to multiple fruitful questions’ (Reinertsen, 2018: 10, 14).

Starting up, continued

As my conquering strategy and method, I dataphilosophize and/or fabulate with the concepts of speed and force and their productions in this fuzzytechie transdisciplinary place that higher education is becoming – with the teacher, the medical doctor and the engineer working together. By training, I am from the fuzzy scientific side: the humanities and social sciences. The techie traditionally refers to natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). I ask, how can one add or speed up digital transdisciplinary diversity for justice to highlight the entangled contours of knowledges, inequality, equality and quality in higher education? With Hartley (2017), I work to ‘understand the extraordinary potential of merging the fuzzy with the techie’ (30). Further, when Hartley (2017) claims that ‘companies need intellectual dexterity as much as they need technical expertise’ (p. 28), I claim that the same applies for education and our educational systems and organizations. However, through bringing the fuzzy and the techie together in one word I want more than appreciating ‘the crucial role of the fuzzy as a complement to the techie’ (Hartley, 2017: 58) or explore benefits of combining techie and fuzzy skills. Rather, fuzzytechie is what I want. Positive interactions with technologies beyond blending learning and digital literacy. ³ A non-dichotomous, non-dialectic diffractive and complex expression of activist languaging of connections here and now. I want every concept, subject matter, piece of information, subsequent data, event, activity, word and matter to become fuzzy aggregates (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 537). Bringing together computing, philosophy, logics, linguistics, semiotics, art, psychology, biology, pedagogy … as ‘fuzzy, not exact aggregates’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 557) for transdisciplinary human-machine consilience and newness. As Lyotard (1989) explains:

The classical dividing lines between the various fields of science are thus called into questions- disciplines disappear, overlapping occur at the borders between science, and from these new territories are born. The speculative hierarchy of learning gives way to an immanent and, as it were, “flat” network of areas of inquiry, the respective frontiers of which are in constant flux. (Lyotard, 1939: 39)

I think of this as a way of staging materiality critique transformations or constantly reassessing resistance and digital activisms: A constant reassessment or assessment as learning processes, self-assessment as system-assessment (Reinertsen, 2019: 33). Evaluation not removed from subjectivity. My gut feeling tells me, however, that my subjective professionalism is under siege and that I need to take the concept of objectivity back to survive. It brings me to a space of non-positioning and noological digital models (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 551). Non-positioning as a way of taking objectivity back and through this revealing how important, vital and conditioning our digital epistemologies in general- and my epistemic conduct specifically is for languaging and consilience, languaging fuzzytechie newness for inclusion and justice that is. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write: ‘Objectivity here will assume a certainty of knowledge rather than presuppose a truth recognized as pre-existing, or already there’ (27). It is paradoxically slow but fast even urgent, paradoxically objective but subjective, strong but weak. Education becoming eventicized and professionals, teachers and I add researchers becoming transdisciplinary dataphilosophers.

I continue with more about speed and force, what I can learn from digitalization – and ask between. Learning and asking between different types and conceptualizations of digitalization, between different subject matters, between different types of knowledges with/in different levels of hierarchies. Indirectly, I continue to ask what dissolutions of order can teach me about what kind of qualities and abilities teachers, teacher-trainers, doctors and engineers, and researchers need to be equipped with and/or acquire for a sustainable digital future. I fuzzytechie, think of this as the mission of contemporary sciences, and Rosi Braidotti (2017) directs me as to what and how to go about it. Again, I try. What would be fuzzytechie smart science, smart education, smart research, and smart schools?

Basic criteria are cartographic accuracy; the importance of combining critique with creative figurations; the ethics of affirmation; transdisciplinarity; the principle of nonlinearity; the power of memory and the imagination; and the tactical method of defamiliarization (Braidotti 2013, in Braidotti 2017: 18)

It occurs in the trouble/challenge/problem, not in the body. It is the everyday challenges that create it, leading me towards focusing on particular moments, that which emerge and become important. An endless paradoxical activist non-positioned production of collective thinking-possibilities and folds. Consilience through every concept. Deleuze and Guattari call such languaging concept as method and subsequently the pedagogies of the concept (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) – the concept being totally porous and heterogenic:

There are no simple concepts … There is no concept with only one component … Every concept is at least double or triple, etc … In a concept, there are parts or components of other concepts … Concepts are centres of vibrations, each in itself and everyone in relation to all others … (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 15–23).

Digital diversity, digital slow or ‘Where does the speed and force reside?’

Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement, whatever the speed of the former or the tardiness of the latter. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 409, italics in original)

The short answer is in smooth space and legwork making un/kin. The enigmatic and conquering strength of the teacher, teacher-trainer, doctor, researcher being equally distance and/as presence. Being preoccupied with language, it is tempting to bring up the concept of dialogue at this point to discuss the qualities and abilities we need to be equipped with and acquire to approach power/knowledge inclusive/exclusive dynamics. The way I see this however, the dialogue both as concept and content has been overused and inflated, and just as Latour (2004) has demonstrated how critique has run out of steam, I claim the same applies for dialogue. That is; if we want dialogue, I think we paradoxically need to forget what dialogue (read critique or any concept) is. This resonates, the way I see this again, with what Steffensen and Fill (2014) and Steffensen (2019) argue when they claim that if we want to know what language is and languaging, we need to forget about language. This ‘includes aspirations to develop and transform linguistics in an ecological direction’ (Steffensen, 2019: 1). I think of developing and transforming linguistics and education in a digital direction for inclusion.

Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without “counting” it and can “be explored only by legwork”. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 409)

Hence, I place myself in the world as if that is the meaning of life itself and walk and drift (fr. dérive) along with data. I place myself in the words, and every step I take – every vibrating, vacillating word I live – remains in my body as a map in which I myself am the scale, with consistencies and smells, tastes, colours and noises, visions, signs, dreams, expressions and silences, and the patterns that are formed gradually embrace more and more of the globe, the wor(l)ds, almost in intimate ways. I conquer me with/for us to a state of non-personal powers. It is a conquering process by and through the intensification of affects. It is a kind of non-teleological legwork that Andrew Culp (2017) calls dark and dark Deleuze. This is to avoid new positivist tendencies in sciences and research, ultimately, education and digitalization. To avoid the fatiguing feeling and affect described above, of being under siege by what Deleuze and Guattari (2004a) themselves probably would call an ‘autistic process of perpetual continuations of itself’ (5). Speed and force collapsing with/in me.

I, theorizing the teacher role, – read also, scientist and researcher – as an ontologizing ⁴ practice to meet with the need for constant deauthorized knowledge and nonknowledge production for life, the ontology of sustainability. Teaching becoming eventicized and teachers becoming dataphilosophers through writing. A research on transcorporeal collectivities and molecular inter-intra factuality, rather than autonomous selves and identity constructions. It is a slow and other science and research engaged in deliberations about and with hybrid natures and inter-intragenerational sensations: Body as profession and transindividual vulnerability. The logics of the digital systems being those of nomads. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a “stationary process”, station as process […] It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: A movement might be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement designates the relative character of a body considered as “one”, and which goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in a manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 420; italics as in the original)

Deleuze explores the dark night, the outside of thought. He addresses the emergence of thought itself, the event whereby sense is grasped or wrested from a mute, immanent field of sensibility. Such events of collapse occur when something forces our abilities and faculties to communicate their intensive differences between one another, producing a ‘flash’ – a sudden ‘shock of sensation’ – with/in an incommensurability of language and matter, time and space, subject and object creating ‘distinctive points, privileged instants which always indicate a poly-rhythm’ (Deleuze, 1994: 30,20,21). Something of value, something important and eternal, a fraction of something, qualia perhaps (Reinertsen, 2016), something forcing me – moving me – towards staying in constant reassessing languaging and mattering processes. Such events of thought are provoked rather than internally generated, and they are provoked by the ‘dark precursor’ (Deleuze, 1994: 124), the being of the sensible. For Deleuze (1994), provocation of thought is an ethical imperative, yet the dark precursor is dark in relation to thought, to which it is imperceptible, unthinkable (236–37); this is the paradox of thinking about that which cannot be thought. To ‘think’ this event means to change the nature of thought, to think affectively.

Returning briefly to the question of what I then ‘think’ we need to be equipped with and acquire, choose as research topics and nodal points in our society and cultural productions. Further, also ‘to caution about the limits of pure math in replicating human skills’ (Hartley, 2017: 94). I advocate, my head and myself on the table, the creation of new affects that have a potential to change the flows and cadences of present configurations of higher education and digitalization. Creating and investing in amplifying affects that contribute to or engender a sensitivity to the immanent intensive and affective processes that condition thought. Whereas thought cannot directly apprehend the dark precursor, artistic affects, poetry, thought provocations or – as we have seen – collapse, can usher us toward an experience that more closely resembles the intensive level at which it operates. We need a decentred system with strong local control and professional (non)autonomy cultivating creativity and individual talents. Paraphrased, this is my indirect take on putting humans at the centre of digitalization, localization, diversification and personalization, and to be digitally practical, any application or platform must be designed for production; read dataphilosophy, not rewards. Learning can never be a visible phenomenon.

A noological digital model?

A thing, an object, a word refers to a poem. It is a hearing/sensing of one word’s relation with another. A feeling from when you put them aside, that they will substitute or displace an amount of the world around them. Putting words in power without quantifying. Putting words in power without qualifying. Interrogating oneself and one’s epistemic conduct. Being alert to knowledge. Complexity, nuances, ambivalence, reflexivity and paradox are openly displayed; insecurity is normalized: Openness is a prerequisite: Neutrality or objectivity are not even thought of as desirable. Through this, the subject position is lifted without leaving us to subjectivity only, representing ultimately the possibilities for fuzzytechie transdisciplinary consilience. Voids in flow moving moments of realisms. The factor, which kills, is the factor instructive. If so, the flow of one’s life stiffens. Therefore, this is not about any helping or compensating activities. The broad goal is to establish constant exchanges between subject matter and disciplines based in emergent new forms of digital pedagogies and research driven by doings. Transdisciplinary shaped contemporary forms of digital pedagogies and pedagogical research positing practices that come into being through the fuzzytechie constant iterative amalgamation of methods and practices across numerous disciplines. Deleuze and Guattari (2004b) write:

Nothing is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimports a smooth space, with potentially very different values, scope and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space. (537)

It is a notion of advanced digital practices being developed – as mentioned, and to underline – to respond to two sets of urgencies: First, bringing in the missing people in digitalization, digital pedagogies and research (the working classes are missing, the precariat, the migrants … My epistemic conduct and how I care for openness are vital, my dataphilosophical conduct … Further, and intra-interdependent, is appreciating the not knowing, the (non)knowledge, the conscious, unconscious, non-conscious … An acuity or perception of something being fundamentally wrong can open up for change …) and, second, developing a digital post-humanities pedagogy and research, thinking with and in fuzzytechie speed/force technologies. Ever more complex natural and societal challenges demand constant new forms of knowledges, knowledge exchange and transfer, as new research forms are gaining ground and become increasingly prominent modes of research output. This requires new, multi- inter/intra- and transdisciplinary and comprehensive methods for capturing and assessing both their quality and their impact, while operating in advance rather than retrospectively. The posthuman, post-language languaging is production of knowledges, is use of knowledge-infused language. Focus on values, balance and integration to avoid echo chambers and knowledge cults. Epistemic man–machine accelerations of a thousand plateaus of becoming; ‘a perpetual state of “digression and digressiveness”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 23).

The non-position as taking the concept of objectivity back

In aeon, presence evaporates and becomes a part of past and future simultaneously: “Aeon: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-there, a simultaneous too- late and too-early”. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 289)

Turning our attention towards that which is not yet there. Being alert to knowledge ignoring knowledge simultaneously: being alert to the potentiality in/of the moment and inclusion. Collapses (and in accordance with what I said above about dialogue and critique, I try to avoid the concept of meetings) between what we know and do not know, relating to something right ahead of us. Instead of empathy and respect, I prefer talking about our aesthetic and plastic minds. It is an opening up to the art of not knowing, the position of non-knowledge actionalizing of languages: opening up to explore possibilities in the moment. Opening up for more and other perspectives and conceptualizations, turning digitalization into conversations creating space, giving space, getting space. The value of openness is in enabling people to work together to solve common problems. In the non-position, I bring with me everything I know but without knowing exactly what to do and what is supposed to happen. A non-teleological approach, including conscious, unconscious and non-conscious expressions and knowledge-moves. Opening up new opportunities towards democratization of knowledge and a multi-vocal university. Exploring possible outcomes creating perspectives and meaning. Staying living and with living repeatedly. Mechanical fuzzytechy productivity of work difficult to commit to particular choice.

Inclusive technologies and digital designs should therefore not be a consequence of design decisions. It should not be a reparation or fixing of what is already done. Design is for more than just fixing and adaptive. Inclusion should therefore be integrated in the design process from the beginning, integrated in our mindsets from the beginning and – to use big words – design for everybody. How we design things signals how we build our technologies and societies. The problem emerges in the moment, asking who I am here in this situation. It is an engendering position and a starting point of Derridean (2002), and Harrawayan, again, response/ability. But it is also a vulnerable position. My identity and safety at play. How to deal with it is an answer is I do not know.

All judgement is subjective or contains some elements of subjectivity. We cannot therefore question subjectivity in itself. On the contrary, we need to stay in it or with it and recognize that it is always there. The important question is therefore not whether judgement is subjective or not, but whether good consequences follow. It requires that one is honest about oneself and having no fear of the personal or being personal. It is an honesty about being a subject, in other words.

Initially this might be felt as a weakening of our efforts because we are so used to thinking that (a) objectivity is possible, (b) objectivity is neutral, (c) objectivity is just, (d) objectivity is knowledge based and (e) objectivity is good. Moreover, it is of course all of these things, but through my subjectivity, my voice, and me my style always and not opposed to knowledge:

It is indeed a question of knowledge again, but first of all of knowing how, without renouncing the classical norms of objectivity and responsibility, without threatening the critical ideal of science and philosophy, and therefore without renouncing knowledge, one can still pursue this demand for responsibility. (Derrida, 2002: 66; italics as in the original)

Increased emphasis on the self or the personal does not compromise knowledge or content, but leads us to confront difficult questions, and encourages a process of showing the content’s relevance in/for teaching, learning and research (read, society, nature, people, praxis …) and asks further and more. It is, the way I see this, a way for professionals of keeping the object of learning throughout or following the concepts and objects through. Not thinking truth will ever be found, but working with truthful digital processes hopefully avoiding toxic pedagogies, a research self-serving. In the end, therefore this is a process of turning weakness into strength and no threat to ideals. The subjective truth, heartiness; the truth being subjectivity:

The Paradox is the objective Undecideability, which is the Expression of the Passion of Heartiness, which in turn is the Truth. This way is the way of Socrates. The eternal, essential Truth: that, which is related essentially to an Existence essentially concerned with existing (all other knowledge is according to Socrates accidental; its Degree and Dimensions indifferent), is the Paradox. However, the eternal essential Truth is in no way the Paradox, but is so by its relation to an Existence. The Socratic ignorance is Expressing the objective Undecideability, the Heartiness of the one Existing is the Truth. (Kierkegaard,1994: 140; my translation)

Open-learning economies and live world dataphilosophical – my methods

Emergent technologies represent a fundamental challenge to all aspects of learning and our lifeworld. They have enormous implications for teaching, teacher-training, research and the sciences: what I conceive of as open-learning economies. To be educated, it is no longer sufficient to study the longstanding traditions. Being able to grasp implications of emergent technologies, a direct awareness of transdisciplinary and what digital data and digitalization can do and how it can produce, is essential. It turns into a kind of transdisciplinary dataphilosophical meta-learning, science and research going beyond the traditional disciplines. Meta means both beyond as well as in-between, so that the term can capture both elements in an appropriate manner. Asking what kind of qualities and abilities teachers or medical doctors need to be equipped with and acquire given digitalization, non-positional self-assessment as system-assessment through dataphilosophy is my answer and method. I walk my questions, directly questioning myself, indirectly questioning the other. Walking with and in technology.

Open-learning economies are about interactive creativity, user-generated innovation, collaboration and genuine participation. They encourage a radical non-propertarian sharing of content, cloud data computing (electronic or not) and the leveraging of cross-border exchanges. Utilizing open-source models and its multiple applications in distributed knowledge and learning systems, and thought of as a means for revitalizing public institutions, like our universities, involving the wider public and amateur scientists along with experts in the social mode of open-knowledge production.

On the one hand, the term open refers to open access, open archiving, open publishing and open repositories. On the other hand, as we have seen, it refers to a science and research that is diffuse, never completed and open-ended, decentralized, and serendipitous. A science that is open to self and social reflection, diffractions, refractions and constant digital diversity, and hopefully therefore capable of pushing further boundaries of both our personal and collective imaginations and struggles against injustices, wars – wherever they might be. These are thought of as live world learning, research theories and methodologies ‘able to attend the fleeting, distributed, multiple and sensory aspects of sociality through techniques that are mobile, sensuous and operate from multiple vantage points’ (Back and Puwar, 2013: 18). It is an openness towards both virtual and real space, ultimately implying possible ontological reconfigurations of digitalization and higher education.

Increasingly, portal-based knowledge environments and global science gateways support such economies and science. Open-source informatics enables knowledge grids that interconnect science communities, databases, and new computational tools. All however possibilized, at least the way I see this (and if we want to avoid technology-driven development), by non-binary subject/object, human/nonhuman, man/machine, mind/technology inter/intra relations of people inter/intra acting together, and/thus minds touching minds: Minds acting as gateways entangled in ‘grace’ (Weil, 2002); as/in moments of intensities of importance. Rather, the emergence of something important, something of value, to follow through: The concept of open-learning economy, its dimensions and significance, is extended into infinity and immanent if we want it to be. Thinking with and in technology subsequently what teaching and teacher training might become.

Traditional learning theories, research and sciences build on the scientific community’s own creative recreations and take place calmly and under the protection by a superior meta-narrative. There is thus some degree of consensus of standards and methods. In posthuman languaging and consilience and, returning to Lyotard (1989) again; the scientific (re)creation is embodied in multiple paradigms and research networks, which have to sustain themselves and fight for their own existence without a superior epistemological or political narrative. The difference between the two is not normative but connected to placing the research in a more or less legitimized plurality. If scientific plurality is secured by a meta-narrative the scientific production and subsequent evaluation will be conducted in singular terms. On the other side, if diverse, porous and plural learning and research environments must legitimize themselves in constant dynamic processes, everything must be expressed in some kind of dynamic plurality. A staging of an intellectual drama. A drama in tensions between tradition and its nonexistence, and the teacher’s and teacher-trainer’s own subjective experiences of simultaneous justice and injustices between the ‘slow’ action, the wild thinking and the sensible utterance.

My gut feeling again

The great and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life; the flight into the imaginary, or into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon. (Deleuze, in Deleuze and Parnett, 2007: 49)

My conquering method and weapon is legwork trying to avoid autistic perpetuations. Taking objectivity back becoming analytically non-positioned soft/hard. Ultimately, the kind of thinking digitalization demands. What I fear is positivist – my own - instrumentalism and reductionism, and that I fail to include, fail to see and acknowledge new voices, worlds, words, new thinking and new languages. I fear that I fail to forward consilience possibilize innovation, and that the criteria that I use, algorithms, work opposite from what I think they do, and work opposite from what I want. Therefore, I dataphilosophically ask questions to myself.

Do I contribute in a substantive way to understanding? Do I demonstrate a deeply grounded (if embedded) inclusive, social and scientific perspective? Do I seem ‘true’ in offering a credible account of a cultural, natural, social, individual and communal sense of the ‘real’?

Do I open up and invite interpretive responses? Do I speculate enough? Do I ask interesting questions? What kind of languaging or language is predominant in my questions? Do I succeed aesthetically? Are my questions complex and not boring? Do I open up to newness as far as genre mix, mashups or evocative provocations are concerned? Do I poetize data and data analysis, and how do I perform? Poetry can be found or created, can strengthen and deepen analysis on multiple levels.

Is there adequate self-awareness and self-exposure in my questions for the other to make a judgement about my point of view? Or rather, how has my subjectivity been both a producer and a product, are you invited to continue productions?

Do my questions affect you emotionally and/or intellectually? Do they move you to try something other or act? Am I inspiring and provocative, how and why? Do I through questions display engendering consilience?

Can my questions be seen as reversals and thus exemplary of the politics of the example? Does it allow the possibility of beginning not with a politics of which you would then give examples, but with examples out of which you might invent a politics? Do I allow reflections on the different theories and theoretical models?

Perhaps this is activism, a hard transcorporeal enmeshment of minded matter languaging and consilience – knowing something, knowing nothing, knowing all. Something important; something of value. Envisaging the ground for a re-thinking and reconfiguration of both digitalization and higher education. Digitalization through other modes of knowledge; disciplinary (constructed in the university) and trans-disciplinary (found outside the university), technical (intervening in practice in an objective manner), dispositional (individual competence to reflect upon action) and critical (knowledge undermining the practice setting). Is it all already always there, an obligation, materializing a moral … ?