Intimacy: The Radical Difference of New Encounters in the Classroom

• In Event: Impersonal Intimacies: Rethinking Relationality in the Ontological Turn

Abstract

Objectives
….a poisonous pencil exerts a force over other children and the teacher; a child who will only answer if addressed by a made up name, whinnying in response; a child who stands up when asked to sit down and turns things on when asked to switch them off.

Feeling ‘different’ or ‘not fitting in’ are intensely complex feelings, visceral and inaccessible to the force of language. Responses of consternation and hostility at events that don’t conform to a ‘recognisable’, orderly classroom, can simultaneously evoke a strangely impersonal intimacy, opening to the radical difference of new encounters that exceed the banality of recognition, eschewing existing frames of reference.

In this paper two researchers from a three-year interdisciplinary project Odd: feeling different in the world of education (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council), encounter the affect of ‘irruptions’ in the classroom that momentarily break through the room’s recognisable order. Experimenting with the sense-event overflowing the image of the present in the classroom we mobilise the forms and thoughts generated by such irruptions.

Perspective
The paper develops an innovative transversal methodology, operating across boundaries of anthropology and education. It takes an affective or new materialist orientation that asserts, contrary to rational educational orthodoxy around behaviour management, that irruptions are not the responsibility of any one child, but are relational, distributed and affective: a form of ‘thinking-feeling’ (Massumi, 2015) that circulates through and connects bodies, materials and spaces at pre-individual levels, resistant to words alone.

Affectively dis-lodged from educational orthodoxies, ‘productive dis-identification’ (Wallin, 2012) becomes one aspect of a radically different space for re-examining subjectivity and experience in school. An acute awareness of individualism is shattered by the vitality of a/impersonal classroom life.

Mode of inquiry
We draw on the confluence of new materialist approaches, anthropological poiesis and post human studies (Ingold 2014; McLean, 2017; Stewart, 2007, 2008; Kohn, 2013). We discuss methods that move towards a more distributed attention in the classroom to register the transformations beneath consciousness occurring in between every moment (Southerton, 2017). Through irruptive disorientation where language, bodies and material worlds collide, emergent impersonal approaches re-organise what it means to participate beyond ocular-centric forms of observation.

Data sources
In keeping with the theme, we take an unruly approach to sources, mixing jottings, doodlings and inter-disciplinary forays with attentional and close correspondences in a reception and Year 2 classroom (ages 4-5 and 5-6 years).

Conclusions
We work with the potentialities of practices to tap into abstract forces and intensities that are moving in events (MacLure, 2019). The irruptions we discuss across the reception and Yr 2 classrooms realise liminal spaces where intimacy thrives and forms are indistinct. In any given moment, expressions of forces over-throw mundane repetitions of the everyday.

Scholarly significance
Ways of understanding and managing challenging behaviour in school often reduce events to the sole responsibility of individual children and their retrospectively-read pathologies. Our slow, intimate poietic approaches open up vital spaces for adjustment and counter-actualisation (Deleuze, 1994) in mutual correspondence with partners and stakeholders, school parents, policy.

Authors

• Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Amanda Ravetz, Manchester Metropolitan University