Re-thinking official educational organization towards friction-zones between divergent knowledges

Abstract

In this article, I re-think official educational organization toward friction-zones. Thinking with a swimming event in physical education, and Deleuze’s notion of pure difference and its accompanying characteristics, non-linearity, decentralization, pluralistic knowledge, virtual and actual multiplicities, nomadic waiting, and open ends, I outline conditions for official educational organization in the encounter between divergent knowledges. The aim is to bring teachers and students closer to each other and paradoxically let up-coming concepts, meanings, and ideas act instead of silence everything that is not in line with predefined educational goals. It is to create common histories of learning and knowledge productions, and hence to produce common grounds in/by motion. Ultimately, it is about inclusive processes in/by motion. And, it is also a call for us all to pay attention and resist unintentional productions of exclusion, and thus all colonizing processes that includes superior knowledge.

Introduction

Eleven-year old Amira said she did not know she could teach the swimming instructor anything, and even though Amira doubted that she would ever learn to swim, she paradoxically thought it was she herself who would learn things in the swimming event, and not the other way around. But at the moment when Amira would learn to float and tried really hard to follow the instructions to relax and act like she was sleeping in the water, she also got water in her ears, she panicked and had a strong desire to move her body closer to the swimming instructor’s body. Simultaneously, she put her hands on the swimming instructor’s arms and showed the somewhat surprised swimming instructor how to move her body closer to Amira’s body in order to make Amira feel safe in the water.

At the moment, it felt like a small and almost insignificant gesture that mostly violated what I was expected to do, and made me a troublemaker. But now, as we sit here and talk about it, it suddenly feels very important considering that I actually learned to float. Somehow that little disrupting movement, and the tiny little space it was given when she stopped in her tracks, become big (field note, December 2019).

I have written about this moment before (Andersson et al., 2021a). How Amira and the swimming instructor start to trust each other instead of solely relying on a predetermined 10-stage model for swim training, and dismantle themselves in an encounter in the water, and how the dichotomy between their roles (and bodies) dissolves. How they become non-student and non-teacher, and get hold on themselves as student-teacher and teacher-student and become able to learn again. And, not least how they set in motion success and non-success in an educational event.

I have to admit that this short sequence when the swimming instructor, in the midst of her amazement, takes a non-knowing position in relation to Amira and actually include Amira in the educational activity of floating by waiting for her and relying on her signs touches on something that is important to me, and which I think is crucial for how we (could) design inclusion processes in our schools. Often, we are preoccupied with knowledge and facts expressed as models and methods of teaching, and we tend to discuss educational content and practices through evidence-based research (see e.g., Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Davies, 1999; Jin and Jun, 2013). The teaching we perform must be anchored in science, and hence be knowledge-based. And, sometimes this works really well. What I find interesting, though, is that even if the swimming instructor had a pretty clear evidence-based 10-stage model to follow in her teaching, she is actually doing something else, and Amira confirms that the student’s opportunity to achieve educational goals may be about something completely different. Namely, to patently leave room for nomadic movements between bodies by not moving. Nomadic movements that imply processes of waiting and waitings as processes (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 381), and where the swimming instructor shifts her focus away from the established teaching method towards treating the established teaching method as one of many elements in a swimming event. And, where we are waiting, continuing and simultaneously changing in the encounter with each other. I have seen this before. Within open youth work (cf. (Seal and Andersson, 2017). The activism of not moving and hence not knowing, and what energies, novel learning situations, inclusion processes and potentialities it sets free. And where humbleness, trust, patience and uncertainty become important conditions for inviting young people to processes of mutual change and learning.

This is to practice teaching differently. And, to think outside the neoliberal framework of today’s official educational organizations that often require an undeniable focus on end-products (Au, 2013; Barrett, 2009; Pickup, 2020: 6). I would say it is the end of superior knowledge, divergences of power and comparisons with each other, and an opening towards mutual recognition, coexistence and situations of pluralistic knowledge production in “pure difference.” Pure difference is a Deleuzian concept and implies that difference does not resembles that of contradiction (cf. Deleuze, 1994: 65, 70). It is not the negativities that are the driving forces. Rather there are positive differential elements which regulate the occurrences of our desire and the differences in our desire. Including a constant mesh of resistance and refractions but no struggles for power, I guess it was not a big deal for the swimming instructor to wait for Amira and simultaneously invite her to the process of becoming a co-teacher. Nor did it seem particularly problematic for the swimming instructor to deviate from the rigid structure of the 10-stage model. She simply did wrong to make right, and hence to break open what was desirable and what was possible for Amira, me and perhaps you? Unconscious and conscious. At the moment, the swimming instructor was not caught up in the striations of the 10-stage model and she was not primarily productive of practical results in the service of educational goals. Her focus was much more ethical, and to make room for Amira to participate in the swimming training on her own terms.

This is also what this paper is about. Acknowledgment of the existence of more knowledges than the established ones. And, honestly I am worried. Sometimes so much that it keeps me awake at night. And, my concern does not only include the moment when the swimming instructor invites Amira to become a co-teacher and where she simultaneously becomes a co-learner and where their creative engagement makes them cross boundaries and open up for a new way of learning to float. It includes every moment within and beyond physical education where we invite young people to participate for real and hence wait for them to act, because there is rarely room for deviations and novel solutions in today’s official organizations (Taylor et al., 2018). Often, it is only the already known that is allowed to (re)circulate inside their regulated relations of predetermined knowledge, facts and expected outcomes. No matter if it is educational organizations, sport associations or youth clubs. So, perhaps without even being aware of it, the swimming instructor puts herself at risk by making use of a nomadic approach to training within an official organization that advocates a more stable and solid approach to education, and thus becomes untrustworthy, obscure, mysterious, and perhaps even threatening by conceptualizing training and education differently (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 5). Eventually, she may even be excluded, and if so, the students involved in her inclusion attempts will undoubtedly be part of that exclusion (Andersson et al., 2021b). And, instead of bringing people closer together, the current style of official educational organization helps to bring them apart.

Taking this concern seriously, I argue in this paper that we perhaps need to (re)think official educational organization on the line provided by the swimming instructor, and hence to figure out what nomadic swimming training may do to the style of organization. It is about collaborative teaching-learning situations where various predefined knowledge and novel knowledge affect each other and produce results we cannot be sure of in advance. And, this is also my onto-epistemological approach. Without emphasizing conventional claims on truth, rigor, reliability, validity and generalizability and instead encouraging learning and emergence of novel understandings, I alternate creative-observations (Andersson et al., 2020) made by me and Amira within a “case-assemblage” (Andersson et al., 2021a) in a swimming event in elementary school in Gothenburg 2018-2019 with my “own” experiences, thoughts and speculations. My intention is that this auto-ethnography-like design (cf. Denzin, 2014) will enable me to create a space of inquiry within which we will be able to encounter and change our knowledges collectively, Amira, me and perhaps you. In this practice of inquiry, each piece of knowledge becomes important, performative, and methodological which in turn abolish the distinction between knowing theoretically and doing practically. Ultimately, this is to open up the inquiry to diverse visions of educational realities, to destabilize established knowledges and co-produce novel learnings. Hence, this inquiry is undoubtedly a political act within which I actively participate and enroll myself. And, as you perhaps already have noticed my philosophical approach is Deleuzian. I discuss what I call friction-zones and virtual-actual flows (Deleuze, 1994: 272) in events that establish the internal conditions for teaching and learning. And, I conclude by discussing the necessity to move from, a model-centered, autonomous and linear organizational style with predefined ends toward a decentralized and non-linear organizational style with pluralistic knowledge creations and open ends. For Deleuze (1995: 100) this is not just an aesthetic matter. It is also ethics, as opposed to morality. The (positive) difference is that morality introduces us to a set of rules that constrain our actions and intentions as well as judge us in relation to transcendent values (this is good, this is bad), and ethics acknowledge the existence of various knowledges in a situation. Knowledges that do not have so much values in themselves, but offer each other something to think with in processes of learning. From an official organizational perspective, this is to open up for the small world’s politics. By focusing on friction-zones where divergent knowledges interfere, and how various forces within these spaces constantly striates them, and how they along with these courses of striations develop other forces and give off smooth spaces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 500), we have a chance to develop our own collective pedagogies, and to let up-coming concepts, meanings, and ideas act instead of jeopardizing the contact between various participants. It is to create common histories of learning and knowledge productions, and hence to produce common grounds in/by motion. Ultimately, it is about inclusion processes in/by motion. And, I guess it is also a call for us all to pay attention and resist unintentional productions of exclusion, and thus all colonizing processes that includes superior knowledge (cf. Stengers, 2018: 79).

Creative-observations, case-assemblage, and auto-ethnographic-like design

Resisting unintentional productions of exclusion is also what creative-observations and case-assemblages are all about. To elaborate a bit, creative-observations are processes of negotiation within which Amira and I (as well as other elements in the swimming event) interacted or perhaps intra-acted and set free each other’s energies to move around and change both the inquiry and our understandings of what was going on in the swimming event. Sometimes Amira and I just talked to each other while we were sitting at the stand. In these situations, various thoughts, questions, and answers evolved and coordinated each other. Although each thought, question and answer had affective capacities, they were also results of affective capacities. Hitting each other’s thoughts, questions, and answers and becoming hit by each other’s thoughts, questions, and answers, Amira and I created a zone of uncertainty. Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 73) would say that this was a zone where various affects were produced and populated the situation through uncontrollable becoming of our thoughts, questions and answers, and that affects refer to pre-conceptual intensities of bodily states of various uncertainties about what happens. The unstable images of the swimming event I have managed to grasp are thus composed in collaboration with Amira. I call these observations creative because I associate them with movements. Movements within which Amira and I increasingly lost our positions as researcher and data as well as subject and object, and became some who set things in motion (Andersson et al., 2021b). And, the milieu for these movements was a case-assemblage where various connections and creations within a vast network of forces and processes continuously shaped our collaboration (Andersson et al., 2021b).

Working within a case-assemblage should not be confused with the English understanding of assemblages, and that means the union of things (Nail, 2017). I do not strive to create essences and link introspective stories to the cultural, political, and educational in the swimming event (cf. Ellis, 2004: 37). Nor do I seek much coherence by offering recognition and familiarity where Amira, the swimming instructor, I and perhaps you are able to identify ourselves. The Deleuzian understanding of assemblages implies much more transgressions of our habitual knowledges within arrangements of heterogeneous elements. Elements that change by being combined and recombined with each other in ongoing processes. For Deleuze, an assemblage is “what keeps very heterogeneous element together” (Deleuze, 2007: 179), and hence the processes of organizing (Livesey, 2010: 18) various elements as alliances in a rhizome privileging connections, dynamisms, and heterogeneities, rather than hierarchical and overcoding structures that prescribe what things are and what they will become. For Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 25), rhizomes include the logic of the “AND,” a tiny little conjunction that perhaps hold enough force to shake and uproot the narrative I in conventional auto-ethnography?

And… Always in the middle, without beginning or end. Working in a case-assemblage my lived experiences and my past are no longer privileged sources of knowledge. Rather, it implies a destabilization of traditional hierarchies between researcher and data that undoubtedly moves us away from traditional auto-ethnographic (as well as phenomenological and critical pedagogical) approaches where the researcher’s voice is often used unproblematically to produce reminiscent stories that result in new discoveries and creations of ourselves (cf. Ellis and Bochner, 2000). It is a move toward situations that troubles the authority of researchers, and in accompaniment with Deleuze philosophy of immanence we disrupt the centering and the transparent effects of the narrative “I” who seem to gather up various meanings and treat processes of knowledge production as something predetermined. Immanence means existing, or remaining within, and implies a re-telling that admits and questions the limitations of one narration performed by one narrator. And just like Butler (2005: 83), I suggest that we need to confess openly the limits of our self-understanding, and perhaps replace an extended reflexivity that would reveal more about my way of knowing as a researcher with questions of what we can request from my (and others) voice?

My voice is not the origin of the case-assemblage, but that which is assembled. And, created in the middle of various elements. Working in the middle has not so much to do with expressing central or typical values in a set of data. Rather, it is to pick up speed that sweep me (and perhaps you) away in unforeseen ways. And, to work in a multiplicity of heterogeneous and equally existing elements (entities and processes) where the relations between various elements are more interesting than the elements themselves (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 23). Sometimes, the relations result in new and unusual events and hence becomings that open up what I can know, and sometimes they strengthen former knowledges and hence arrangements of elements in relation to each other according to a particular pattern. For Deleuze, there is a bi-directionality in multiplicities like case-assemblages. A bi-directionality that includes two distinct but inseparable movements, the virtual and the actual. However, the virtual is the condition for the production of various novelties and where “differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them” (Deleuze, 1994: 272) form the creative component of reality, the actual is the process of establishment and formulation of divisions that form the assumed, calculable and foreseeable component of reality. This friction-zone, then, introduces smoothness and striations as a conceptual relation to rethink spaces of official educational organization as consisting of complex mixtures between nomadic forces and sedentary captures (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 474). Although nomadic forces open up, displace, and sometimes efface characteristics and qualities belonging to certain elements, sedentary captures close off and establish characteristics and qualities of specific elements. Important to note, though, is that smooth spaces and striated spaces exist only in relation to each other. Smooth spaces are incessantly being translated into spaces of striation, and spaces of striations are incessantly being reversed to a smooth space. This friction-zone is also my space of inquiry, and why a small amount of empirical data (at least sometimes) may inspire a relatively broad discussion of educational organization.

Situations of pluralistic knowledge do not produce good or bad bodies

However, before I continue to discuss what that tiny little space where the swimming instructor waits for Amira implies when it comes to official educational organization, I want us to take a closer look at the swimming instructor’s vulnerability as well as the importance of repealing it. By leaving room for Amira to become a co-teacher, the swimming instructor simultaneously increase the amount of expressed facts and subsequent knowledge variations in the swimming event. At once, their moment of co-teaching/learning seems to be irreducible to the 10-stage model, to be outside its sovereignty, and prior to its regulation. It comes from elsewhere. And, their method for learning to float cannot be reduced to some step in the 10-stage model. Nor can it constitute another step of the same kind. Instead, I would say that Amira’s and the swimming instructor’s moment of co-teaching/learning seems to be of the same nature as the Deleuzian notion of “rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 30). It is like a pure and infinite multiplicity where each component ceaselessly varies and alters in relation to the others, and that for some, who advocates a more stable and solid approach to educational spaces, may produce confusion and be perceived as chaos, loss of value and hence effect. It is a condition where the swimming instructor loses her factual superiority. She is no longer in position to define how to teach. Or, how Amira should learn. She simply bears witness to another kind of justice. She bear witness, above all, to the situational relations with Amira, the water, the smell of chlorine and perhaps me at the stand. By inviting our weak signals to affect the 10-stage model (and become affected by it), she opens up for an intense situation where more opportunities for influence are created and where we move from one experiential state of our bodies to another implying an increase or decrease in our capacities to act. It is a smooth space where there is no longer any predetermined goal. And, she unties bonds and sets free bodies in what Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 2) call “relations of becoming,” much more than she accomplishes binary distributions between particular conditions of herself and Amira. In this respect, the swimming instructor’s actions are of another nature/culture than what the static apparatus of the 10-stage model of swimming training advocates. And, for some, this is a negative condition that requires corrections. Corrections like, “don’t forget that we have a pedagogical model to follow” (field note, December, 2019) and “how can it ever be equal when she is constantly inventing her own solutions to teach them things” (field note, December, 2019). During my time at the stand close to the swimming pool, I have seen this happen countless times. Efforts from colleagues that lead to a return to normalcy, and hence a return to the common professional and professional methods of the 10-stage model and the goal that every student should learn to swim 200 m before they finish elementary school. Ultimately, it is about transferring knowledge in a standardized and quality-assured way. And, a desire for justice where all students are offered equal access to swimming education (Stad, 2017).

And, the intention is good. More problematic, however, is what the thinking of knowledge and methods for swimming as something predefined in physical education may result in. During my time at the stand, I have noticed how this approach to knowledge can code and decode the space for the swimming training, and hence make it quite easy for some students to participate and more difficult for other students. However, the swimming education becomes very successful in relation to the students who are already prepared, capable, and qualified to learn to swim in the right way, it becomes less successful in relation to those who are not. Sometimes it even seems counterproductive. There have been several occasions when students happily have jumped into the pool only to leave it a few minutes later and sit next to me at the stand. Often completely crushed, angry, and very disappointed at themselves, the water, the swimming instructor, and the style of organization related to physical education. And, almost every time some teacher, swimming instructor, or assistant have tried to explain to me that there is something wrong with those students.

He is always so rowdy and never listens to my instructions even though I know I am right. I mean, he really need to calm down and do what he is told in the water. To some extent, he needs to take responsibility for his own security in the water, otherwise he might as well sit on the bench (field note, November, 2019).

And,

His parents are so overprotective because he has a diagnosis. I know he had to promise them to not go into the water without any buoyancy aids, but honestly I agree with the swimming instructor when he says that he cannot participate in underwater activities without taking them off. I think it goes without saying. And, right now he refuses so he simply has to sit there for a while. Hopefully, he will change his mind soon (field note, November, 2019).

So, to speculate a bit, it seems to go in one of two ways. Either the students succeed to adapt to the 10-stage model of the swimming training, or they become excluded from the swimming training. It also seems pretty clear that those who are excluded are made responsible for both their own failure and their opportunities to be invited to participate in the training again. And, this is not even the worst part. The worst part is that we seem to allow the knowledge provided by the 10-stage model of the swimming training to become something normative and create professional polarization between those instructors who strictly follow the 10-stage model and those who make exceptions. And, while the perception of normality is narrowed down by the former, carelessness, unreliability, stupidity, illegitimacy, and powerlessness are likely to be produced among the latter (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 5). Organizationally, we simply seem to weaken, ridicule and shut out the only ones who actually tend to meet students on their own terms and thus counteract exclusion by non-motion/motion.

And, this is a dangerous path. However, we seek justice and equal access to swimming training, we seem to produce even more injustice and divided opportunities for participation. From an equality perspective, the 10-stage model almost appears as something negative producing dangerous knowledge and methods that we can either agree with or get lost with. Although serving us an illusion of justice and equality, it also seems to provide us with quite undesirable consequences. Consequences that are hard to overlook because at the same time as we divide knowledge, activities and students into good or bad, right or wrong, and wise or unwise, we not only tend to reinforce polarizations but also the truth of our perceptions and thus inevitably our prejudices. To speculate a bit further, this is how racism, homophobia, and other oppressive activities emerge and are established in societies, and also why we need to rethink the official organization of education on the nomadic line of pluralistic knowledge provided by the swimming instructor.

The onto-epistemology of nomadic swimming training

As discussed above, nomadic swimming training is an intensive system that rests upon the nature of the intense quantities of the bodies (human and non-human) involved in it, and which communicate through their differences. For instance, when the swimming instructor tells Amira to act like she is sleeping, Amira’s response does not echo that of the swimming instructor’s instruction. Rather she is doing her best to keep her head up and avoid to get water in the ears. Hence, their relation is not so much about resemblance, but of division and within which both Amira and the swimming instructor change their behavior according to their own situational order. And, in the interval between their movements there is this tiny little space Amira describes as very important for learning to float. It is a short sequence where the swimming instructor becomes surprised and nothing happens, yet everything happens. I would say that she experiences the immensity of the empty time/space where the swimming instructor begin to notice the signs of Amira and realize that there is no danger. Amira is not dangerous. And, she is not in danger. It is just about floating (and surviving), and the instant opportunity to learn to float (and stay alive). I guess Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 256) would say that they affect each other and that these affects, that come from both bodies’ own internal parts and external parts, also affect what they are able to do. To the relationship that modifies Amira and the swimming instructor, decompose them and recompose them as teacher-students and student-teachers, there simply correspond various intensities that affect them, and hence increase and decrease their power to act.

Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 256) argue that affects are becomings, and becomings relates to both what bodies are capable of in relation to other bodies and what extensive relations they can be in. Furthermore, these affects move around and transform each other within “assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257) which is self-organizing machines within which at the simplest one body produce an affective flow that is broken by another. Nobody enjoys a privilege over the others. Nobody possesses the identity of a leader, and nobody resembles a follower. Amira and the swimming instructor are neither opposites nor similarities. Rather, they are constituted by difference and their relation is very different from that of representation.

It is not that Amira and the swimming instructor do not move from one point to another, and that they do not achieve any results. But, the question is what in their movements are governed by predetermined principles and what are only consequences and factual necessities of their encounter? And to elaborate a bit, the points Amira and the swimming instructor move between seems to be subordinated to the paths they define. The point where the swimming instructor is expected to teach Amira how to float is reached only to be left behind. And, just like other points this point exists only as a relay. Furthermore, the path they move along do not assign them roles and regulates their communication. Rather, it distributes them in an indefinite, non-communicating open space that do not divide them into teacher, respectively, student. Hence, there is a significant difference between the space provided by the 10-stage model and the space of the encounter between Amira and the swimming instructor. Although the space of the 10-stage model is sedentary and striated by rules, regulations and enclosures, the space of Amira’s and the swimming instructor’s encounter is smooth and only marked by bodily characteristics that become increasingly insignificant and displaced with their trajectory.

I noticed how the smooth space produced in the encounter between Amira and the swimming instructor was a site for the actualization of novel learning and new ideas regarding swimming education. It did not seem to occur completely natural, but while Amira learned to float, the swimming instructor appeared more and more comfortable with her emerging position of not knowing, and thus with the process where the hierarchical differences between their diverse knowledges was deconstructed and assigned equal value in the situation. To put it differently, this was a situation where not yet confirmed knowledges, unsecure knowledges, non-linear knowledges and affective knowledges were invited to a complex process where more knowledges than the confirmed and secured knowledges of the 10-stage model were included, and within which novel common learning was produced. In this sense, novel learning and new educational ideas were complex multiplicities constituted of various bodies, various relation between those bodies, and virtualities corresponding to those relations in a situation. For Deleuze (1994: 364) these dimensions (bodies, relations, and virtualities) is also what constitutes multiple reason, the principle of potentiality and progressive determination. Hence, the onto-epistemology of nomadic swimming training cannot primarily be defined as a movement of bodies, but as an infinite movement of our thoughts into a situation where more bodies than the body of the 10-stage model become important. Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 37) would say that this is to lay out a philosophical “plane of immanence” and provide that plane with situational concepts and understandings of swimming training through a finite movement of thoughts. And if so, nomadic swimming training do not include continuous movements (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 51). Rather, there are various actualities introduced that tend to cut up, divide and sometimes stop endless movements. This in turn makes nomadic educational motion extremely uneven and fractured.

Understood as nomadic systems, educational realities consist of actual-virtual flows that establish their internal conditions for knowledge production. Although the former maintains standardized cultural norms, systems of organization, and categorizations, the latter destabilize them by enabling bodies to resist such limiting forces. Educational situations thus have two odds which are dissymmetrical and dissimilar, but not negatives. Just as the Deleuzian notion of immanence, this implies a perspective that focuses on what happen between the two odds, that is, in the friction-zone where various bodies, elements, knowledges, definitions, and relations interfere with each other. And, further on, I will try to show that perhaps the notions of virtual and actual have for inclusion in official educational organizations an ontological and epistemological importance much greater than those of right and wrong in relation to representation of various educational models. Instead of judging ourselves and each other, I suggest in a previous paper (Andersson et al., 2021a) that we should ask whether we encounter virtual or actual elements, and hence what volumes of singular and regular points correspond to the value of a given relation in an educational situation.

Re-thinking official educational organization towards friction-zones

So, for me, nomadic swimming training implies positive differences between actual and virtual forms of organization. On the one hand there are exterior multiplicities of conscious ordering, measuring, differentiating, and extensiveness associated with predetermined knowledge like the 10-stage model––and on the other hand, there are interior multiplicities of unconscious, intensive, libidinal, and impulsive evolvements associated with novel learning like the encounter between Amira and the swimming instructor. When it comes to actual multiplicities and actual forms of organization it seems quite reasonable to use the same standard of measurement as for right and wrong. Things we do cannot be right at the same time as they are wrong. Being right is rather the absence of being wrong. From this perspective, it is not possible for the swimming instructor to teach right without following the 10-stage model. Nor is it possible for the swimming instructor to deviate from the 10-stage model without being wrong. But, in virtual multiplicities and virtual forms of organization being right does not seem equally capable of being viewed as the absence of being wrong. And, just like the swimming instructor when she did wrong to make right in the situation when Amira learned to float, I guess many of us have experience from similar situations where we have done both right and wrong at the same time. Unlike external judgements acting upon us with influences from the outside these assessments are interior, and hence productions of affects at work in our relations. This is also why they cannot be included in the same metric of performance, and why Amira and the swimming instructor, I and perhaps you do not move like grades up and down the fulfillment scale (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 361–362). This unpredictable change and becoming of success/non-success is a multiplicity of virtual organization, relational, unconscious, and irrevocably experienced, rather than predetermined, conscious, and measurable.

However, it is not my intention to establish a dualist opposition between actual and virtual forms of organizations. In the assemblage of nomadic swimming training there are only multiplicities forming multiplicities. Actual forms of organizations in virtual forms of organizations and virtual forms of organizations in actual forms of organizations. This implies a non-dialectical politics of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and simultaneously counteract predetermined and controlling pluralism of educational organization. In that sense, nomadic swimming training comprise friction-zones between actual multiplicities and virtual multiplicities that replace positioning, interests, linearity and top-down control with enfoldedness, relations between bodies, and becomings. So, unlike the ordering of today’s official educational organization, the organization of nomadic swimming training includes a vital onto-epistemological significance that is sensitive to various desire and do not deny open-ended change.

Open-ended change and the importance of slowness

The occurrence of friction-zones between actual multiplicities and virtual multiplicities implies that the model of nomadic organization is a vortical one (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 52). Rather than secretly make space for pre-determined, linear and solid activities, it operates in an open space throughout which flows of activities are distributed. Although the rational order of the metric space of today’s official educational organization often is counted in order to be occupied, I guess Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 362) would say that the smooth space of nomadic official organization is “occupied without being counted.” In the same way nomadic organizations do not have overarching theoretical patterns or general goals from which they are governed. Nor do they strategically distinguish parts to develop, adjust or get rid of. Nomadic organizations are much more problematic orientated, and organizational activities are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that currently surround them, and hence the accidental encounters between bodies that condition and settle solutions to them. Perhaps this is also what Fitzpatrick and Russell (2013: 170) suggest when they argue for the need to shift towards a more inclusive physical education that accepts and admits the existence of complex and embodied experience of young people, and what Greene (1988: 84) implies when she asks how we can make it easier for young people to break with the given and move towards what is not yet? Together with these lines of thought, I put forward that this ontological turn (Thanen, 2005) towards nomadic organization involves all kind of changes and operations in which official educational organizations designate an event much more than an essence. And, while Landi et al. (2020: 23) argue for the need to replace “McDonalds education programs” where all students are treated the same, with educational programs that meet their population, I put forward that we need to encounter students as well as other materialities on the micropolitical level in events. This is especially important when it comes to my discussion of openness and slowness in organizations. More precisely, the notion of event pinpoints the friction-zone where the actualization of the virtual and the virtualization of the actual is going on. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 158), an event is more unspecific yet more specific thanwe perhaps assume in today’s educational organizations. Informed by my collective thinking with: 20, 84), Jackson and Carter (2000: 252) and Linstead and Thanem (2007: 1483), I suggest that nomadic organizational activities are not something that just happens, we do not simply decide, order, value, and judge various things. Nor are they well planned and reveal truths about general movements forward. Rather, nomadic organizational activities are not regarded as likely to happen, they are much more accidental, unexpected, and capable of opening up the future. At the same time, nomadic organizational activities make differences and change our abilities to interact. Hence, the differential nature of nomadic activities moves today’s official educational organizations beyond conscious realizations of themselves and opens up for more than their immediate interests.

So, when I speak of activities in nomadic official organizations, I speak of actualizations of virtualities. And, since actualizations of virtualities never bring an end to their relations to other heterogeneous, always simultaneous elements in the extended world of the virtual, I also speak of virtualization of actualities. This implies that actualizations are only temporal and that organizational activities are in uneven and fractured motion. This is also why nomadic organizational activity is not so much a matter of closure but of openness. Organizational activities that have undergone actualizations are simply not fixed and unchangeable. Rather they can (re)connect with “new” virtualities and become something else. What I try to emphasize here is that there is a relation between the virtual past of educational organization and the actual present of educational organization as well as there is a relation between actual present of educational organization and the virtual future of educational organization. And, just as I extract from the encounter between Amira and the swimming instructor where Amira learns to float, organizational actualizations cannot be determined in advance. This, in turn, challenges the linearity of today’s official educational organizations and require us to decenter our pre-defined goals. We simply need to slow down (Stengers, 2018: 80), and figure out how our terms for the relation between the actual organization and the virtual whole actually looks like. And, perhaps even more important what we want them to look like, and what consequences this results in for the education, the students, the teachers, me and perhaps you? Overall, it is about creating situations where nothing takes place, and leave room for infinite waiting (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 158), and thus emergence of alliances and domains of symbioses that bring into play bodies from different scales and territories. What I suggest is a heterogeneous evolution that Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 238) call “involution.” And, this should not be confused with regression. However, regression is to move towards something less differentiated, involution is the process of involving diverse bodies that run their “own” lines between the terms in play and beneath assignable relations. As Gard (2014: 840) and Lupton (2015: 128) imply, these processes will perhaps cut us out of the physical education loop. Regarding today’s official educational organizations and processes of inclusion, this becomes important in at least two ways; first, bodies cannot be defined by general characteristics like pre-determined roles, competences, sexes or ages, but are defined by populations that varies from situation to situation. Second, movement and change occur not primarily by pre-defined, well-planned, and linear activities, but also by intersecting communication between heterogeneous bodies.

And, intersecting communication between heterogeneous bodies takes time. Time we rarely have in today’s official educational organizations. Or, perhaps we just do not take us time to notice, digest and understand each other’s matter of concern? Paradoxically speaking, my whole point here is to relate the idea of slowing down official educational organizations to a more ambitious agenda than reaching predefined goals. An agenda where we actively break with superior knowledge and hence general, fast and, cumulative knowledge production by inviting divergent knowledges and questions that interfere with these advancements. And, this is not a request for some holistic approach to thinking, or active inclusion in ready-made educational processes. Rather, it is about taking people’s concerns seriously and pay attention to what is emerging in the moment. And, what feels important. However, slowing down education should not be equated with official educational organizations taking account of all messy complications in their environment. It is more about opening up the official organization for collective learning through encounters with dissenting voices around issues of common concern. This entail dissolutions of previous structures and hierarchies at the same time as we let novel uncertainties emerge. It is about trying to understand things we still do not know anything about. Things that at the first glimpse may seem precarious and do not make any sense, and from which it perhaps arises novel relations that brings us together in unforeseen ways, and that extends in the future. Floating together shoulder to shoulder in unconscious processes of collective inclusion within nomadic official organizations of education, and an ethics which takes into account the many divergent knowledges in the situation.