Abstract:
Moving beyond the reproduction of static forms and rigidity in thought, action, and institutions in education, ethical becomings require the engagement of an expansion and intensification of a body’s affect or capacity. Ethics, thought with the immanent materialist philosophy of Deleuze (1969/1990, 1968/1994) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983, 1980/1987, 1991/1994), can provoke and promote a creativity of becoming through the entanglement of a posthumanist univocity. Intending to provoke heightened ethical capacities, a posthumanist orientation opens up potential connections available to diverse bodies, with which to enact multiple becomings-new. Some of this potential is performed in this thesis. The text explores a series of imagined trajectories of becoming, pursuing and attending to transformative movements, for entities as diverse as clay, table, and highchair; concepts such as expression, monster, and intensity; and fictional and conceptual personas including teacher, child, Deleuze, Guattari, and Piaget. This is a becoming-thesis which accumulates affirmative relations of mutual affect and constitution across a range of elements and forces (Braidotti, 2016). Alongside the matters of early childhood education, the thesis deploys, then interrupts and experiments with, various aspects of methodology-matter (researcher, ethics, data, code, and method), contributing to postqualitative directions in methodology. With objects, bodies, and thinking all seen as expressions of matter’s interrelations, the thesis thinks into the relationship and affect of language with and as matter, challenging the centrality of linguistic representations in human interaction with, and manipulation of, matter. By challenging the recognition and representation of matter which is so dominant in education, the thesis unsettles claims to know, label, and define the potential of human and nonhuman matter. The thesis explores affectensity, a term coined to describe particular intensities of affect, in order to undo habitual relations and meanings. Playing with sense and affect, rather than working through and reproducing established and assumed orders of knowing, gives rise to an experimental assemblage that invites reconfiguration in a becoming-ethical of the expressions of subjects, things, and matter in early childhood education, and in becoming-thesis. An ethics of diversifying and transforming expressive lines enables a constant individuation for thesis, and early childhood education, always becoming-new.