Not Everything Is Decided in Advance: A Speculative Pragmatics of Play in Higher Education

• In Event: 14.016 - (A)New Politics: Attuning to the Materiality of Pedagogies for Social Resistance in Times of Austerity

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline a speculative pragmatics of play in higher education pedagogy and research. In doing so, it contests the metric-and-measurement-focused imperatives which are such a pervasive feature of the contemporary, neoliberal university landscape. The paper contends that the technologies of surveillance and control produced by metrics and measurement cannot ever be total – because something always escapes and not everything is decided in advance. Bringing various strands together from recent theoretical work by Anderson (2010) on affective atmospheres, Barad (2007) on discursive-materiality, and Massumi (2014) on an integrally animal politics, the paper develops the concept and practice of edu-crafting (Author, 2016) which, as a playful, posthuman research experiment, puts bodies, things and concepts in motion. The objectives of the paper are: 1. To elaborate a notion of play as a creative enactment orientated to surpassing the given; 2. To suggest a need to focus on corporeality as a vital thinking-doing movement of the body; and 3. To propose an ethic of concern as a connective ethic of relation.

Theory/ Methods/ Data
Massumi (2014, p. 2) has recently argued the need to envisage an ‘integrally animal politics’ founded on the ‘ludic gesture’ central to forms of play. This move is important in situating the human on the animal continuum, in unpicking Humanist presumptions of human superiority, and in contesting the binaries, hierarchies and exclusions on which Humanism is founded. In its elaboration of the concept and practice of play, Massumi’s thesis holds significant promise for those seeking to develop post-anthropocentric, materialist, affective practices in higher education. Massumi suggests that the ludic gesture of play undoes the logic of the excluded middle, a logic founded on the categories of either/or and truth/false. Instead, play offers the logic of mutual inclusion. I take up the logic of mutual inclusion to consider how the ludic gesture can produce, sustain and nourish a zone of indiscernibility in higher education pedagogy and research such that forces, affects, capacities, bodies, objects, concepts can creatively propagate each other to produce the new. The paper grounds its theoretical arguments in two empirical instances (edu-craftings) of pedagogic and research play, which it uses to explore how a focus on the singularity of material enactments of thinking-doing in their immanent intensity necessitates a recasting notions of creativity, corporeality and concern. More broadly, its uses these empirical instances to illuminate what is to be gained by developing a speculative pragmatics of play in higher education. The paper takes up Anderson’s (2009) notion of affective atmospheres to consider the situational, emergent and post-personal practices that can emerge through of play and which work transversally against the bodying-forth of competitive individualism that performativity so often insistently demands; and utilizes the work of Barad (2007) to consider higher education pedagogy and research as a material-discursive practice of mattering constituted via dynamic intra-active emergent practices.

Significance
The paper’s significance lies in its attempt to shape a speculative pragmatics of play for thinking-doing pedagogy and research otherwise in higher education.

Author

• Carol A. Taylor, Sheffield Hallam University