Abstract
Digitalization needs to be storied for me to become critical of and creative with its functionings. In today’s algorithmic condition, knowledge production and learning are complex posthuman entanglements: the human as materially affective has become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine. Storying is seen as simultaneous processes of fictionalizing and functionalizing hence enabling celebrations of alterations and of irreducible plural logics possibilizing nonlinear material arrangements of concepts creating alliances between the environment, technology and the social. Storying thus making trajectories and becomings present in the other rendering their mutual presence perceptible, asking if we can talk about what to become – together? Storying on the premises of the child and me, that is, highlighting the subject position instead of that of technology. It implies a view of technology that should serve humanity and being oriented toward life-affirming, human-centric goals. Always asking about what we want, and do we want it? And what is it that we currently do not seem to understand? In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and I suggest a view of algorithms as heliotropic designed as life engendering tools only. Ignoring the affective dimension of becoming, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein education risk being sacrificed at the altar of technology and development. The primary task for the digital spacemakers/makerspace is thus being to train the imagination through teaching critical and creative encounters affirming intradisciplinary perspectivists ethos. Makerspace/spacemaking first and foremost being an onto-epistemological endeavour pointing paradoxically towards the importance of the teacher. The child being the knower however, the teacher has sadly been trained not to. I address the need for studies approaching digitalization by way of affects and storying: the child seen as a metaphysical political being, as knowing and knowers of affect. Therefore, I meander through some complex ideas and discuss data as bioinformatical practices of data simultaneously situated and fictional. Instead of speaking about evidence-based teaching, research, analysis, and results, I speak of something imperceptible and inclusive that collectivizes digital freedom as processes of subjective becomings, teaching towards moments of non-governance.
Keywords
What is it that we currently do not seem to understand?
The short answer is (1) how the machines work, and (2) that the most important thing is to be human. The human as materially affective, and if we ignore that dimension of ourselves what might happen when words and concepts are reduced to definitions and subsequent data, and when being an ordinary person – teacher – in situ embracing experience, intuition, wisdom, and warmth is devalued. Giving way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum that is, wherein education per se risk being sacrificed at the altar of technology and development. Missing, through this, the momentum of emerging productive encounters of simultaneous affirmation, possibility and critique. Not only cementing status quo regarding inclusion and justice but creating a kind of internal normative relationship between technology and practice that neither acknowledges the uniqueness of the practice nor the potential of technology.
The focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has broadly speaking three thematic tracks: (1) Digital technology itself, such as artificial intelligence, digital security, next-generation ICT, new sensors, and quantum technology. (2) Consequences for society, such as economy, privacy, trust, rule of law, education, art, and culture. (3) Research on how digital technology can be used for innovation in industry and the public sector. All tracks are directed positively towards improvement, certainty and development through algorithmically designed facts and factual data. Rather than aligning technological development with merely functional outcomes however, we need alignments with life-affirming principles. Every word and concept, hence every algorithm and piece of data, must be treated as abstractions only, to be storied with and invite the other and more in, possibilizing escapes from inclusionary/exclusionary dichotomies and effects. We therefore need an expanded digital scientific and affective language to capture more dimensions and nuances in our globalized digital realities. A man/machine language and posthuman stands inclusive of the indeterminate and not yet finished. A man/machine language and posthuman stands in which the indeterminate and not yet finished is given as much space in consciousness as the defined, definite, and finished. I suggest a view of algorithms as heliotropic designed as life engendering tools only. Heliotropism as word tool for getting into lived contexts and fostering inclusive spirits. The primary task for digital spacemakers/makerspace thus being to train the imagination through teaching critical and creative encounters affirming intradisciplinary perspectivists ethos.
In the liberal Nordic context in which beliefs in and links between research and governance are tight through the financial and technological or digitalized systems, we face subtle and not so subtle signs of blurring between research-based evidence-making and policy-based evidence-making which in the long run might not be educationally productive. The algorithmic functionings and huge language models the machines work through obscure power relations and realities, draining our institutions of emotional life, de facto leading to knowledge loss and loss of competences. Existing discourses often revolve around the assertion that education is inherently inclusive and democratic. However, the purported promotion of democratic values driving education remains underdefined or taken for granted, and subject to varying interpretations. Variation not being the problem however, on the contrary, but the shortcomings of dichotomous (and fuelled by the algorithmic functionings of the machines) types of thinking and notions of the necessity of defining, simplifying and choose between is. Because through such notions, we de facto build excluding forces into both education and democracy, let alone digitalization. We build in shortcomings that impede access to complexity and obscure how different stakeholders-including that of the machines, influence or not both education and democracy. Rather, a truly democratic educational system should be trust-based, sensed by and comprehensible to all participants and stakeholders, the affected society, especially when democracy is purportedly fundamental to its implementation. Affect ultimately actualized and turned into a critical educational and democratic infrastructure that must be protected. Mouffe (2015) writes: The mistake of liberal rationalism is that it ignores the affective dimension that collective identifications set in motion, and that it believes that these supposedly archaic ‘passions’ will inevitably disappear with the rise of individualism and reason. [...] A democratic policy cannot be limited to creating compromises between interests or values or practicing deliberation for the common good. It must take a real hold on people's desires and imaginations. (p. 12, quotation marks in the original. My translation from the Norwegian edition to English)
In Norway, for example, we have moved from policies advocating digitalization to permeate every aspect of education – books having been replaced with iPads and smartphones, teachers have been trained to use digital devices as their main pedagogical tools – to discussions about and policies and practices of mobile free schools, mobile hotels in classrooms and restrictions and time limitations of use of devices. 1 In October 2023, the Swedish Government announced that they intend to remove the demand for digital devices in Swedish Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions advocating an essentially screen-free preschool practice to increase children´s reading abilities. 2 Some research approaches do show that such policies are outdated; digitalization in itself not being the problem, but the lack of knowledge about digitalization is (Blikstad-Balas, 2016; Furberg and Lund, 2016; Krumsvik et al., 2013). The overall impression, however, is that we have moved from a situation of praise for everything about digitalization being good, to praising limitations and its removal. In such either/or situations and subsequent policymaking we risk knowledge loss and polarization not to mention loss of meaning and perceived importance of the teaching profession and teachers themselves.
To offer some structure for further reading: Next, there will be more on affect as critical infrastructure that must be protected, affective storying and language. Teachers in need of reclaiming education through bringing in the missing child before they can start with their plans, measures and methods. Closing digital divides or children and teachers storying on the same page so to speak. Second and intertwined, there is more on absolute immanent-transcendent situativity, posthumanism and posthuman spacemakers/makerspace entanglements, algorithms as heliotropic designed as life engendering models and tools. Penultimate, there is more on digital becoming based designs and becoming technologists. Developers of digital architecture are important, designing in partnerships with users is pivotal. A rhetorical question to ask and think with could, for example, be what about taking away the domination of English on the net? Another question would be asking if lousy education is being a sign of lousy democracy? As educators, we are preoccupied by voice, participation and so called reaching the child and facilitating children’s learning processes. What about being preoccupied by how the child can reach the educator? And what happens if the child is seen as the owner of our educational institutions and technology? The composed ending of the article is concerned with training the imagination, moderation by sensible others. Highlighting a need for ruptures and disturbances to make space safer and as places of passage and things of forgetting (Deleuze, 1997: 67). Ruptures and/as idea-thieving starting up in-between sensational movements possibilising affective machinic desiring processes composing the minor and major together. Possibilizing combinations of becoming based affective insights and paths to design spaces. Every course of a work is multiple. Each trajectory and becomings present in the other rendering their mutual presence perceptible. Deleuze (Ibid.) writes: It is as if the real path were intertwined with virtual paths that give it new courses or trajectories. […] Such internal paths or courses are implied […] in any work […]:in each case, the choice of a particular path can determine a variable position of the work in space. Every work is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are readable only on a map, and that change direction depending on the trajectories that are retained. These internalized trajectories are inseparable from becomings. (p. 67)
To underline, this is not an either/or towards digitalization, but I think digitalization needs to be storied by both educator and child for both to become critical of, and creative with its functionings. Storying here then means creating nonlinear material arrangements of concepts creating alliances between the environment, technology and the social. Storying on the premises of the child and me the teacher, instead of that of technology. Storying digital becoming designs. The concept of criticism-through being fictionalized and minored as we shall see, made less defensive and more performative. In today´s algorithmic condition, knowledge production and learning are complex posthuman entanglements and it is pivotal that the conceptualization of the posthuman goes heliotropic. Not to overcome humanity´s biological limits or defy death, but to avoid propelling out of own material environments, socialites, and bodies hence leading to alienation and a profound vulnerability and exposure to manipulation. Rather, to taking technology back and become active participants in our own fugitive lives with technology.
Turning ourselves into fiction and storying the missing child
The notion of affect bears connotations of bodily intensity: affect thus as a passion, as pathos, sympathy, and empathy, as a threshold experience where a transition becomes possible in everyday life which is necessarily embodied. Speaking about affect as positive or negative, being for or against something is therefore not relevant. Rather, affect exists as a hallucinatory conscious/unconscious touch of something that passes through the body without necessarily leading to any specific meaning. It makes us responsive however, vulnerable perhaps, but in a productive way. Our attention and preparedness are directed to what emerges and in turn contributes to an awareness of the situated importance and value of knowledge and competence. It enables an activist stands and production of meaning of knowledge that is sensed there and then, encouraging us to move the stories about ourselves forward. In this way, our subjectivities dissolve and identity become a collective in which we de facto create our own knowledgeable and competent-here, digital lifeworlds. Affect and reckoning with affective dimensions in our practices and lives turns every human into a political being, thus pivotal to actualize and protect. Guattari (1995) writes: These complexities actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystalized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. (p. 7)
Children are remarkable in educational digital policies mainly by their absence. Mostly unstated and unthought, the general picture-despite a long-lasting effort of theorizing and including voice, is of a working assumption that children, except as objects of policy, are not relevant to the discourse (Reinertsen, 2024). Going via affect, however, children as metaphysical beings (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 52), connectable multiplicities and knowing and knowers of affect (Reinertsen, 2020c: 7) come to the fore. The becoming child (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a) thus seen as an expression of a future, the undisguised child owned by life itself. Children playing life played by life and ideas about life together, becoming through absolute immanent-transcendent situativities (more on this below).
Shying away from adultcentrism which refers to a paradigm of thought that puts adults in a superior position to children, I celebrate the imprecision of words and focus on the ontological possibilities that lie in the opening and imprecise possibilities of concepts to proceduralize understandings of words and concepts and enable more. I focus on the infinite and indefinite constant of being human across generations, across computers and computing. Over and over, Deleuze and Guattari have remarked the scope and force in and of the child’s use of the indefinite: Children use the indefinite not as something indeterminate, but on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity (Deleuze og Guattari, 2004a: 291). Every word through this becoming inclusive of the affects of other, inclusive of affective expressions of other: Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them (Deleuze, 1997: 61). This is how children use language, and opposite to how adults use language. While children use language to materially include and affirm, adults have learned to use language to socially define and exclude. While children use language to become and freedom, adults have learned to use language discursively within structures of power. Children can express power, but rarely coupled to adult formal structures. Ultimately this leaves educators/teachers as spacemakers/makerspace in need of reclaiming education and their digitalized teaching practices through bringing in the missing child.
Becoming child, and in line with Russell and Norvig (2021) suggesting that we can rebuild Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy, this article addresses the constitution of knowledge creation and meaning making as an always uncertain material affective simultaneous process of fictionalizing and functionalizing. It implies understanding text as spaces for entanglements of knowledge – knowledge not as certainty but as uncertainty – and spacemaking as the act and art of engaging with these entanglements. And to repeat: every word and concept treated as abstractions only, to invite the other and other in. Text, stories, and storying thus contextualized as that of creating alliances between the environment, technology and the social through liminal autoethnographic engagements between learners as knowledging processes: humans having become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine. Turning ourselves/having been turned into fiction and storying the missing child.
I speak of research that presuppose fiction and storying as hallucinatory confessions containing affirmations and cancellations, suggestions and repealings inclusive of the indefinite and not yet finished. Meanings and conceptualizations only making sense as they emerge politicized in collective situativities, allowing shared moments of instant understandings and equally uncertainties, a simultaneous thrust to move on. Scientifically speaking this implies a teleological 3 view of the human as not solely acting intentionally and logically. And borrowing from Guattari (2009), storying through such fictionings and functionings thus as that of ‘idea-thieving’, hence as spacemakers co-constructing messy entanglements of continual, always already constant becomings: I claim the term ‘falsifier’ for myself, being an idea-thief and shuffler of second hand concepts. Borrowing is not a problem in itself, except on the level of the semantic foundation of a new word (Guattari, 2009: 23, quotation marks replace italics in the original). Through fictionalizing and thieving, the scope and force of the indefinite, every word becoming inclusive of other with more, for more, asking more, making more and other important.
Such machines and knowledge creation would be humble, generous, explorational, and committed to pursue the objectives of humans, not those of the machines. Simultaneously sharing and tearing down the shared to arrive at visions transformable in policy visions and practices of digitalization. Such knowledging and storying foundation would allow us to create machines based on philosophical procedurality that are simultaneously deferential and beneficial. The task for teachers and educators as digital spacemakers as makers of space as makerspace therefore being to train the imagination through teaching critical and creative encounters affirming intradisciplinary perspectivists ethos. The gerunds, compilations or collations of grammatical forms, words, and concepts that you are faced with in this text are therefore just ‘word-tools’ (Guattari, Ibid.) and part of an attempt to create a shared and generic but minor language rather than as universals. Hence encompassing nature-culture, man-machine, subject-object, real-virtual depths, and dimensions, and through this laying the ground for future scientific progress and creative invention, allow for affectively founded posthuman policy action, and hopefully the shaping of a life engendering public discourse (more on posthumanism below).
When Guattari (Ibid.) himself – and a comment to my own meandering – comments on one of his critics who writes that some of Guattari’s books are difficult because of the abstract nature of the language, arguments being weakened by neologisms and the variety of vocabularies borrowed from different disciplines, and further asks if this is an elitist gesture or a necessity dictated by the research object? Guattari answers after stating that it certainly is not a gesture, and that weakness would not be the right description: Let’s say it is a chronic deficiency. But it is up to you to be the judge. Obviously, personally, I myself would tend to say that I had to forge my own language in order to confront certain questions, and to forge a language means to invent words, key-terms, carrying-case terms. In the best cases, instrumental word tools are capable of opening up a new set of questions, of carrying them along and articulating various fields. I do not believe in universal literature or philosophy but rather in the virtues of minor languages (p.21).
The minor and minor language refers to the ‘minor literature’ of Deleuze and Guattari (1986). The three characteristics of minor literature being the fictionalizing or rather the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation (p. 18). The chronic deficiencies in a minor language being there to possibilize an ‘intradisciplinarity’ capable of transversing heterogeneous fields and carrying the strongest charges of ‘transversality’ (p, 23, underlining replacing italics in the original). The minor turns language and use of language into heuristic and philosophical tools allowing for inclusive political explorations, moving beyond definitions, short-term individualistic identity and problem solving. Rather than aiming at defined scientific linearity, causality, and clarity, the minor offers an expanded view of language hence data to capture more dimensions and nuances in our digitalized realities. Paradoxically enabling us to approach subjective assessments of quality. Universals, standards, or major language on the other hand, lack this positive functioning collectively through an ascetic impoverishment of direction and syntax leading to approximative interdisciplinarity of integration only. Intradisciplinarity and inclusion, however, is eventicized when major and minor perspectives and data influence each other and change together. The knowledge and storying machines, the fictionalizing and idea-thieving, the invitational scope of the indefinite and/as minor thus being capable of transversing different domains and of articulating singularities of the field under consideration to join absolutely heterogenous components (Guattari, 2009: 23). Every moment being a new moment, every momentum offering more.
At first sight, this might seem as a tall ontological and epistemological order between the humanities, the social sciences and STEM implying shifting paradigms of thought allowing a science that runs across disciplines that amounts to social and technological change that have established a shared societal and philosophical goal. And it is, but it is not. Rather, I think that that is old school and belongs to old standard and major language models and algorithmic data management systems which so far have provided us with machines, machine learning and AI that are running and running regardless. Running unless known to be unsafe that is, machines running through algorithms and big-as in major data and language models ultimately pursuing the machine’s own goals. Elsewhere (Reinertsen, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c,) I have described the absolute devastating effects of exclusion and limbo. And thinking about the Norwegian and Swedish either/or policy making again, I wonder what might be produced…Machines, however, do not know all. And standard large language models are only a piece of the puzzle. Re the minor, we don’t know what a word is, and probably AI cannot regulate language at all.
I therefore suggest a new school and a new language model inclusive of minor affectively based languages, machines that are not running unless known to be safe. A man/machine language and posthuman stands bringing in the missing child. A man/machine language simultaneously sharing and tearing down the shared to arrive at visions transformable in a digital policy vision of both social sustainability – inclusion and justice – and natural or green sustainability. Becoming aware of the absence of the child in our digital language, the child paradoxically becomes present in the digital stories even if we do not know who the child is. What is important to know is that the child – every child knows affect and that affects have effects. At the new school, this is ultimately a defence of the professional authority of the teaching professions expressing an increased appreciation of the professions, and at the same time storying higher ambitions on behalf of teachers and children together as thinkers and makers all.
We don’t want machines to pursue goals. Rather, the goal is beneficial machines that pursue posthuman objectives, not the objects of the machines themselves. Through understanding how the machines work linguistically and algorithmically and through saying yes to the minor, we might retain power over entities that so far have seemed more powerful than us. The big issue is protecting affect as critical infrastructure, un/consciousness and becoming knowers, un/consciousness and life. And as we have seen through the minor, we build in not knowing in the knowing and humility. And by that we continue towards theorizing posthumanism, or more precisely, posthuman feminism. It is a feminism turning all, research and researchers into makers across computers talking about what to become. And there is life, force, strength and beauty in every heliotropic paradox. Feminism theorized as ongoing events, which opens possibilities and create fractures. […] a virtual past of half-accomplishments and semi-successes, that call for renewed collective instantiations. The energy of feminism is an affirmative force infused with anticipatory and visionary powers, which need to be actualized and expressed by each new generation in its own way. (Braidotti, 2022: 238)
Posthuman entanglements and heliotropic language models asking more
Autumn 2023 I was attending an AI course. The first lecture was about AI in general. The lecturer told us to stay relevant. He said that at least he intended to have a job after 5 years. The next lecture was about Chat GPT and similar digital tools. He showed us what we could do with it and how to use it. Especially the picture and image designing tools were intriguing. Lecture number three was cancelled because the lecturer said he could not keep up with the speed of tool developments. There were so many new things to learn. He asked for more time to prepare. And I started wondering what staying relevant might imply, and what time and newness might be and do? What is it to know and learn something, and how does positivist institutionalized knowledge cultures make us feel? Has power structures and discourses become invisible to us and are teachers trained to not know? Trained to not know what affect is and does, that there are values that cannot be measured.
Before elaborating further, however, I need to clarify some differences between two similar concepts. The concepts being those of transhuman and posthuman. The transhuman and transhumanism is a philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies (such as genetic engineering, cryonics, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology) to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition. Transhumanists envision a future in which the responsible application of such technologies enables humans to, for example, slow, reverse, or eliminate the ageing process, to achieve corresponding increases in human life spans, and to enhance human cognitive and sensory capacities. The movement proposes that humans with augmented capabilities will evolve into an enhanced species that transcends humanity – the ‘posthuman’. 4 Transhumanism – and with reference to the concepts of agency, the human and humanism – assumes that the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change.
The use of the term ‘posthuman’ in transhumanism is not accurate and descriptive of the use of the concept in this article. Rather, in this connection the posthuman and posthumanism is a philosophical and scientific movement and perspective of how change as a constant is enacted in the world, and conceptualization and historicization of both the term agency and the ‘human’ is different from those conceived through humanism. In posthumanist philosophy, and with reference to teleology above, agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control. The subject – the child, the teacher, the researcher – is seen as decentred. Consequently, posthuman philosophy and science constitute the human as (a) physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the environment; (b) moved to action through subject and object inter- and intra-actions that generate affects, habits, and reason; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human but is instead made up of a larger evolving ecosystem. 5 Instead of seeing the posthuman condition as opportunities for an extension of rational mastery and an overcoming of humanity´s biological limits, see the posthuman condition as a chance to redress the balance between the human and nonhuman, and promote flat or horizontal ontologies and expanded ethics. It implies blurring the boundaries between the human, technology, and nature in favour of more hybrid and fluid configurations: immanence as the territory of existence.
For the conveniency of communication I call this heliotropic algorithms for heliotropic 6 posthumanisms. Heliotropism being phototropism as a turning or curving toward the sunlight. The sunlight being the orienting stimulus. It plays well with the concepts and images of desire and the ancient Greek figure of Eros. Eros here used in a wide sense, as an equivalent to ‘life energy’ 7 hence to what desire can be and do: be the life energy of/for knowledge production and learning: being and doing the life sustaining force for knowledge production and learning. It is a being doing force as/of desire that permeates the fabric of the architectural processes of all our spacemaking/makerspace major and minor trajectories, structures (environmental, technological, and social) and designs becoming technologists (Reinertsen, 2020c). The technologists taking on the notion of uncertainty, bringing X into existence. Taking a stance and do again and again that is, to stay relevant and maintain the capacity to think and want, not what to think and want, hence becoming (more on this below).
This conceptual move has profound implications for human knowers in today´s educational settings. Very often the settings are – as illustrated in the little example above – caught up in computational procedures and involved in developing and teaching digital pedagogies, blended learning theories and practises and different ‘edu-tech’ solutions. Digital literacy being both aim and tool for understanding the technology and engage with and use it in sensible ways. Further, there seems to be an underlying perception of stamina being that of not backing down when we access new technology and that we all need to learn to learn in new ways. Not to stop thinking, but to think differently. It sounds both sensible and credible, and digital literacy is of cause beneficial for epistemological and methodological reflection and creativity. But thinking twice, it is all already established on the premises of predefined knowledges and technologies itself and not on the premises of neither the child nor the teacher. A premises founded in the human as a decentred and collective life force for knowledge production and learning environmentally, technologically, and socially that is.
I claim that teachers have been trained – and children are being trained – to disregard affect and to not know. Rather than contributing to and create life energy, life is drained out of our institutions, our learning theories, our methods, and knowledge, and in the view of climate change, perhaps of humanity overall. I think of the teacher and lecturer above and knowledge loss and loss of competence even though s/he is likely to know more and more every day but perceiving the opposite. Loss is however both double(d) and real because the concept of knowledge is being inflated. There is nothing qualitatively new in the processes and the tools the teacher tries to learn more about represent only more and more of the same: knowledge and technology processes that are running quicker and quicker.
The pivotal importance of the subject position of the teacher is through this paradoxically highlighted. Not because of the knowledge s/he is acquiring and tries to communicate but because of what s/he knows and understands about the indefinite language use of the child and childhood, and that there are values and processes that cannot be-must not be measured: affect and affective language as a critical constantly undulating infrastructure and simultaneously educational and/as democratic setting. Only then s/he can start with interventions and methods, and digital pedagogies can become and function as composites of the games of the moment and the words that are spoken and storied between whom the same pedagogies apply. Or put differently, interventions and methods functioning as materialistically and experientially based pedagogical analysis of ‘breakdowns’ and ‘breakthroughs’, and that the most important thing about posthuman validation is to be human. Or put yet another way, these are forms of situational digital performativity in moments of possible pedagogies played out at a stage of knowledges, technologies, words, actions, responses, bodies, and contacts between two or more people constantly dissolving boarders between. The aim being to strengthen both the teacher’s and the child’s own judgement through affective, possible, and affirmative forms of criticism. Education and developing digital pedagogies and becoming technologist therefore not because we want something for someone or on behalf of someone else, but because we want life. I think we might be in trouble if we think and want too much on behalf of others.
As already stated, I therefore suggest a new school in which instead of asking what to do with technology and how to understand it, ask and talk about what we want to become? A new school in which knowledge is perceived as a continual rather than an endpoint. A new school in which perspectivation and developing life engendering perspectivist ethos with the child/human is what teacher training and the digital society is about. If we continue to think on the premises of technology itself, digital pedagogies are futile and not de facto representing newness and pedagogical innovation. Traditional exclusive/inclusive forces will prevail. Further, when algorithms are automated, and data is harvested on us and gone big, thinking that the human has agency as that of conscious will, is fooling ourselves. Rather, in an automated future the human is designed by technology not the other way around. So, what do we do? What do we want, or rather do we want it are questions we should ask? Next there is more on the necessity of protecting affect as infrastructure possibilizing digital and pedagogical innovation. The most essential right to protect therefore being the right to story.
Digital becoming designs becoming technologists
There are ‘good and bad’ effects from technology, and therefore, the need for storytellers and storydoers have never been greater. Storying is important for developing deeper insights, moments of intensity and occasional whims. Storying is therefore essential to our perception of knowledge production hence the storying of ourselves into being and becoming. I speak of storying principled in its activism and advocacy. Broadly speaking storying is learning and learning is storying. Given this, the threat from technology gets serious. If we lose the slow, (self)reflective here makerspace/spacemaking storying, we lose an essential contribution to newness and new knowledge, and it is precisely that painstaking storying that technology threatens to replace in the first place. What educators and knowledge workers all over the world risk is losing the primary tool for knowledge production which is storying (written or oral) in itself.
The primary life engendering hence political task of heliotropic posthumanist technologists is therefore to jolt taken for granted notions or beliefs out of mimesis, liberate the human attention, and train the imagination for being and doing other through teaching critical encounters with here digitalization affirming perspectivists ethos. Teaching strategies of purposeful interferences into algorithms aimed at ‘tricking the algorithms’ might be ways of practicing it. I always make sure to google for other types of sneakers than the pair I primarily want. I was bombarded for 2 years with offers of orange shoes after having googled orange sneakers. Celentano (2023) refers to such interferences as the contributive agency approach of algorithmic counter-tactics in order to capture their circumstantial and reactive nature (p.8). I prefer to call it affective approaches to perspectivation allowing participants to operate within perceived uncertain and contested systems and teachers teaching towards moments of non-governance. Affecting the ontological and epistemic conditions to exercise engendering agentic capacities, that is. Losing the grip of algorithms and provide more room for autonomy, in the sense of regaining some control in own becomings.
Perspectivism refers to the philosophical position that one’s access to the world through perception, experience, and reason is possible only through one’s own perspective and interpretation. It rejects both the idea of a perspective-free or an interpretation-free objective reality.
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Perspectivism is not relativism, rather it is taking a normatively self-critical affirmative posthuman stands. Elsewhere, and again building on the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, I have written about this as the performative ‘I’ containing multitudes (Reinertsen, 2022). Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b write: What is this point of self-criticism? It is the point where the structure, beyond the images that fill it and the Symbolic that conditions it within representation, reveals its reverse side as a positive principle of nonconsistency that dissolves it: where desire is shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements, and where it lacks nothing, because it is defined as the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire. (p. 342)
The technologist spacemaker/makerspace thus provides a perspective of the digital era in ‘fictional’ and/or storying practices across professionals and across different disciplinary boundaries within the author’s and technologist’s specific positioning. Simultaneously creating points of encounters with technology with the child and self. And for the sake of imaging: situating data becoming that of making makers across computers. Technologist spacemakers/makerspace combining (tool/device) criticism and creativity from philosophy, pedagogical studies, literature, and poetry. And with reference to heliotropic algorithms and life again, combinations with bioinformatical practices of data and information storage, labelling, and retrieval in dynamic settings (Van der Tuin, 2023). These are immanent perspectivations in which the child is seen as moulding and collective futuring forces in a globalized digital world. But important to keep in mind, this is not about creating universalized, major, or idealistic politics of the child and digitalization but seeking and learning from affective immanent stories and storying. Storying being a celebration of alterations of the constitution and construction of major perspectives. Major and minor perspectives constantly and imperceptibly changing together… and must… to innovate. And with reference to Deleuze (1997: 67) again about the intertwining of internal real/virtual paths, variable positioning, and the impossibility of separating internalized trajectories from becomings, not changing through escaping the fuzziness, incompleteness, neither one nor the other between, but through enhancing the importance of storying pedagogical and learning betweenness for both the educator and the child. Storying as an absolute immanent-transcendent situativity. Stories and storying through this used as ‘data’ for foresight and enabling for the many variations of life that encompass (digital, environmental, and social) existence and becomings.
As indicated above, this is a view of stories that goes beyond giving someone/the child/the teacher a 'voice’. Rather, it is an examination of how stories can be reconfigured as simultaneous theory and method for transforming status quo into something 'other’. It is a view of stories that hopefully bring man and machine, life, pedagogies, and research together, a view of stories that bring in the child to be constantly thought with. And to be (un)clear: it is a view of stories going beyond the ‘narrative’ and narration. The digital era does prompt us towards defining an imaginary genre of narrative which must not be uniform in nature neither in styles nor in contents. Narratives have always been multiple in styles, vivid in contents, explorative in expressions. Definitely, narratives are flourishing in accordance with the technological layouts. Digital platforms also provide unique features simultaneously in publication, organization, speediness, reproduction of expressions, and definitively result in distinct formats for ‘literary’ exercises. Further, we can find a series of fictional and filmic products, both locally and globally, that deals with human-computer interactions, cyber-based communication, and relationships in their plots. That is however not the focus of this article. That is – and to be clear about being unclear – storytelling is not about introducing technology or digitizing processes to continue doing more or less the same as before but with a technological layer. Storying across computers and thinking with is much more subtle and demands that we analyse terms and images down to the affective level to understand their impact and intentionality; what storying might be and do. Affective storying hopefully thus preventing life being drained out of us. And with the image of heliotropic algorithms bring in life in our knowledge processes and learning: bringing in life, bringing in the missing child.
Storying affective digital becoming designs, becoming technologist, challenges any type of thinking grids and/or orientation. Rational logics and choice are jammed, and fictional fabulatory elements are added. Between and within every concept or word there are articulations and distinctions occurring simultaneously. Digital designs and subsequent pedagogies are thus always being produced as a result of multiplicities and/or bodies (read concepts) coming together in assemblages. Storying digital becoming designs, becoming technologist therefore challenges any given or received notion of knowledge creation and learning as programmed, primarily academic, and linguistic, offering instead an affective, informal and/or ethico-aesthetic paradigm making the position and art of uncertainty subsequent freedom a transgenerational prerequisite and condition for activist digital living and learning here and now. Storying being oscillatory innovative processes as a first and last and all-over instance: an irreducible multiple and relational fielding, at the inmost endpoint (Massumi, 2015: 33), of here digitalization as at its furthest reaches. Affective forces materialize as points, arrows or lines traversing one’s former knowledge universe and enable unknown universes to appear and surface. One’s expanded perception in/of becoming constitutes an in-built epistemic access to that which would be otherwise inaccessible. A fielding of the event as activism and freedom in multiplicity giving a micro-political force to the energetic life of affective relationality.
Makerspace/spacemaking becoming designs becoming technologist thus implies being alert to the potentiality in/of the moment and moving between. Rethinking unplanned moments during daily work. Freedom as a vague sense of potential, […] not actually there – only virtually (Massumi, 2015: 104). We are stumbling along, and with no subjective certainty. Everything being interrelated, intertwined and interdependent. Learning taking place in the whole body, within a person and between persons interacting in and with social and material digital realities. Visible and invisible embodied learning: sensations, forebodings, affects and feelings. Indirectly, this is a much tougher form of reasoning, asking hard affirmative questions about and to digitalization and life. Massumi continues: But maybe if we can take little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our emotional register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential at each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials available intensifies our life. We’re less enslaved by our situations. […] Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how much of our experiential ‘depth’ we can access toward a next step- how intensely we are living and moving (p. 105, quotation marks in the original)
Research wise designing becoming designs involves types of research invested in integraled child politics. Integraled in the sense of intrinsic and constitutive futuring forces showing spaces and scopes that arise by combining and entangling micro-, sensuous- or infinitesimal data. Data that are close to zero but not zero, and as we shall see the gamesomeness of this being sufficient to cause something to appear out of nothing (Ogden, 2022: 52) Allowing for an inflating of a room or space whose capacity is right. A space that is expansive enough that the body can move, enclosed enough that the mind can rest (Ibid.). The process of finding, producing, and combining integrals as makerspace/spacemaking possible to being called design processes of integration. These are politics and designs freed from connotations of the ‘immature’, ‘innocent’, ‘lack’, ‘wants’ or ‘helpless’ state of child and the accompanying presuppositions about prevention, intervention, resilience, learning and even help permeating educational modern thought and politics. Rather than speaking to a storytelling of agentic computation, such adultcentric ‘not-yetness’ of children speaks to a futurity that is already teleologically determined.
Alternatively, speaking for and protect affective hallucinatory conscious/unconscious touches of something, simultaneously speaking against not-yetness, implies a need to reject both technology and digitalization of a so-called real foundation (and that of unbridled becomings). Rather, what we need is an affirmation and embracement of a mode of becoming that is never one’s own, always caught up in the powers of the false, blissfully inhuman, and ‘faux’: processes of affective computing and/or algorithmic heliotropic (non)life. Not taking anything for granted but loving it. Taking in the fear or joy of technology and extracting knowledge from it. There is beauty in every paradox. The unconscious (natural and) cultural placenta being a structuring matrix, a substance in which we are buoyed up (Ogden, 2022: 13). Ogden, building on Edward Sapir
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(1999) continues: It is not really possible to make sense of how anyone floats along, or for that matter how anyone drowns, without presuming the existence of a tremendous amount of social information, including ‘essentially arbitrary modes of interpretation that social tradition is constantly suggesting to us from the very moment of our birth’ (Sapir, 1999: 159). Human beings have what Sapir calls ‘intuition’ about all that social information. Intuition is not mystical here; it amounts instead to a tact about how to live, a ‘very delicate nuanced feeling of subtle relations, both experienced and possible’ (Ibid: 161). We often have the experience, Sapir thought, of discovering that what felt like a free action was really motivated by loyalty to a finely perceived but inarticulable form. ‘There are polite and impolite ways of breathing’ (Sapir, 1999: 158).
Edward Sapir´s anthropological and linguistic integrational ‘relativism’ adds to our perspectivist ethos and affective storying. The placenta contains some cells supplied from the mother and some cells supplied by the growing child. Thus, the child partly nourishes itself. Nature, culture, and language are like a placenta to us; the growing child contributes cells to them; and paraphrasing Ogden (2022: 14) again: history, a teacher, a spacemaker/makerspace and a nourishing mother, teacher, designer, and technologist, does too. Storying digital becoming designs thus perceived as a move and extension of a set of knowledges and rights located in the abstract future to political struggles integral to learning: the right to story knowledges and rights that is, the right to story as the most essential rights.
Training the imagination for an affirmative perspectivist ethos
Changing the way we do and teach digitalization is storying and loving it: storying and loving the new school and the child without knowing what it is, but what a posthuman stands and perspectivating ethos does. Teaching to be ‘against’ digitalization is not the right path, rather above all one must be ‘for’ something else which designates the ideal one wishes to set up, the inclusive or participatory digital society that one has in mind. Storying is a new way of going beyond the premises of technology itself, a new form of digitalization, participative and decentralized, democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist. History shows that inequality is essentially ideological and political, not economic or technological (Piketty, 2021: 4). The main task for educators is therefore to train the imagination affirming such loving perspectivists ethos. Storying being the most important tool and as already stated: digital makerspace/spacemaking first and foremost being an ontological endeavour.
In nonfiction one might focus on writing and storying essays and poems. In fiction one might choose to story so-called knowledge-based imagination. Either way and regardless of form or genre, storying concerns breathing life into abstractions for digital foresight. Acquiring digital competences are beneficial for epistemological and methodological reflection and creativity in exploration. But as an ontological endeavour and to almost sum up a bit, digital competence means storying and loving that in today’s algorithmic condition, canonization and knowledge production for competence enhancement, are complex posthuman entanglements of man and machine, body and mind, subjects, and objects. And that algorithms are moving and reaching for; must move and be reaching for; moves and must be reached for. Again, I speak of an expanded scientific language and a need for new and expanded genres in the educational literature in general, in digital pedagogies specifically. Guattari (1995) writes: Engagement in innovative social, aesthetic and analytical practices is thus correlative to crossing the threshold of intensity of speculative imagination, coming not only from specialised theoreticians, but also from assemblages of enunciation confronted with the chaosmic transversality proper to the complexity of ecosophic objects. And opening up ethico-political options that relate as much to the microscopic aspects of the psyche and socius as to the global destiny of the biosphere and mecanosphere from now on calls for a permanent reappraisal of the ontological foundations of existing modes of valorisation in every domain. (p. 127)
Stories that are written or told offer rich, varied, and unique ways of actions, behaviours, and life/understandings if we are willing to affectively listen and read. Listen and read with head and heart simultaneously. Listening and reading oneself into the stories, insert own stories and trigger new and other thoughts. A poem can make brains work and get old thoughts moving. Carolyn Ellis (1997) writes about how we can evaluate stories: A story’s ‘validity’ can be judged by whether it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is authentic and lifelike, believable and possible; the story’s generalizability can be judged by whether it speaks to readers about their experience. (p. 133)
We might think and imagine this as a sort of recomposing of a piece of music and a refrain, a riff and riffing. The refrain being the part of a ballad that returns to be repeated between the verses. A riff being a repeated chord progression or set of notes that ties a song together, returning again and again as to tell the listeners where they are, even as the instruments takes excursions elsewhere. The song will travel, but it will keep coming back to the riff. Thus, a riff testifies to the sameness within change (Ogden, 2022: 48). Riffing can also be described as change within sameness. Riffing, here as storying, is to say that someone is constructing their utterances by starting with a single idea and putting it through a serious of changes, embellishing it, and making it more and more elaborate, going somewhere by iteratively returning to the same place. Asking the same questions, and yet the effect is cumulative, climactic (Ogden, Ibid: 49). Ogden (2022) continues: Not to an answer but to a state of deepening familiarization with the social matrix in which the importance of the question is tacitly understood. Riffing signals that the storyteller (writer in the original) is not magisterial. A storyteller (…) who riffs does not know before speaking the boundaries of the vision and tries to find them through (…) storytelling. (p. 49)
Patterns slip in and out of phase with each other. Things shift; without there being a definable moment of change, the pattern is nevertheless no longer the same one. Gradually something extra is recruited simultaneously something else is dropped until the pattern becomes what one could sense what it was leaning over to become. It
Obvious by now, in perspectivist change-processes and digitalization, it is therefore important not to make up a specific opinion, attitude or routine and subsequent established patterns and pedagogies, but to build in the will and ability to constantly reassess opinions, attitudes, routines, structures and pedagogies and story new patterns here and now, adapted to the current situation. Heliotropic affective language models implies getting rid of standard language models. In posthuman environments we do not know what a word is. Every word being material and spoken through the flesh (Virno, 2015). One should therefore finally ask-as already indicated above, if AI can regulate language at all? Therefore, pause before you try to discern either the sufficiency or the insufficiency in a child’s digital attempts; pause before you seek to pierce its self-judgements and weigh the degree of its attempts, whether you want to affirm or reject it. Keep company with the child as it keeps converting its heart into words – when you keep converting your heart into words. Storying ultimately seen as an affective act of sensing inwards and working with inner prerequisites for movement and innovation. In this way digitalization becomes ontologizing. The self and the system, the personal and the political, are rethought together in context. Affective forces are made performative, and the effects of affect have become possible to evaluate the importance of in digitalization processes, in education and democracy. Dewey (1920/1957) gets the last word on the digital horizon of uncertainty, goals, education, democracy, and futuring expectations: Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, […] Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs. This fact fixes the significance of democracy. (p. 209)
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
