Writing and Immanence (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) Foundations and Futures in Qualitative Inquiry) [1 ed.] 9780367723187, 9780367723217, 9781003154358, 0367723182

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WRITING AND IMMANENCE

Writing and Immanence is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being. In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act) ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure. Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and qualitative research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities. Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth, UK. His main philosophical and academic interests can be realised when speculation, invention, experimentation and concept making as creative and eventful doing are brought to life in pedagogical practices and research in education.

ICQI Foundations and Futures in Qualitative Inquiry Series Editors: Michael Giardina and Norman K. Denzin

From autoethnography, observation, and arts-based research to poststructural, new materialist, and post-qualitative inquiry, interdisciplinary conversations about the practices, politics, and philosophies of qualitative inquiry have never been stronger or more dynamic. Edited by Michael D. Giardina and Norman K. Denzin and sponsored by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (www.ICQI.org), the Foundations and Futures in Qualitative Inquiry series showcases works from the most experienced and field-defining qualitative researchers in the world. Engaging critical questions of epistemology, ontology, and axiology, the series is designed to provide cornerstone texts for different modes and methods in qualitative inquiry. Books in series will serve the growing number of students, academics, and researchers who utilize qualitative approaches to inquiry in university courses, research, and applied settings. Volumes in this series: Writing and Immanence Concept Making and the Reorientation of Thought in Pedagogy and Inquiry Ken Gale Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet: Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture Bryant Keith Alexander, Mary E. Weems, Dominique C. Hill and Durell M. Callier Advances in Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Reflections on the Legacy of Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner Edited by Tony E. Adams, Robin M. Boylorn and Lisa M. Tillmann Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography Fetaui Iosefo, Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/International-Congress-of-Qualitative-InquiryICQI-Foundations-and-Futures/book-series/ICQIFF

WRITING AND IMMANENCE Concept Making and the Reorientation of Thought in Pedagogy and Inquiry

Ken Gale

Cover image: Photo by Elizabeth Richmond First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Ken Gale The right of Ken Gale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-72318-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-72321-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15435-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

Foreword vi Acknowledgements viii A prelude?

1

An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?

12

Acts of embodiment: Bodies/bodying/(em)bodying …

41

Acts of process over substance

56

Acts of affective presencing

77

Acts of returning to the rhizome

92

Acts with and of posthuman empiricisms

104

Acts of resistance to the urge to transparency

122

Acts of diary, notebook and journal making

136

Writing acts as immanent doing

160

The final act? How can becomings conclude?

177

References 189 Index 196

FOREWORD

A preceding act Last summer, my partner Brian Massumi and I spent months and months pulling out rhizomes. Mostly they were pussy willows and raspberries, but some were also aspens. These invasive root systems had colonised the cleared, neglected land our house was built on in the Quebec north, the site of the 3Ecologies land project. The irony was not lost on us. For years, we had written about rhizomes, about rhizomatic thought, and suddenly all we wanted were those straight roots that yielded to our efforts. Brian’s appointment at the physiotherapist today for his injured shoulder is a reminder of that human-over-rhizome effort. In Ken Gale’s beautiful, generous, open writing, the rhizome does more gentle work. Like us, he is surrounded by a world that connects, by trees that feed each other underground, communicating across vast root systems. The difference is that his rhizomes allow for difference. They stimulate contrast and variability, their minor gestures attuned to all that bursts across those stubborn webs. In one of the middlings of the book’s rhizomatic rhythm, Gale inserts a diary entry: There are beautiful tall Aspen trees growing near my home in Cornwall. I have come to know them as a very rebellious and potentially vibrant species. I have learned that whilst they have root systems, these are not simply arborescent, they also adapt rhizomatically, creeping underground, growing new trees via shoots and nodes coming up to the surface and also connecting with other Aspens by way of subterranean communication and support. In these times, where the degradation of nature is becoming a commonplace, I gain some small reassurance when I also read that Aspen forests/woods have the potential to grow for thousands of years.

Foreword  vii

I wonder, as I read, about the differences of these two aspen environments. And what I know about Gale’s aspens is that they have fertile soil to grow in ways that foster a complex ecosystem, whereas ours spread in a kind of panic to cover, to populate a space abandoned. But truly the problem was never with the aspens. After all, they were reconditioning the soil just fine, invading, yes, but an invasion no different, really, than our desire to recondition differently, with clover and wildflowers and fruit trees and permaculture guilds. We will all get shoulder aches. After all, we tend to put ourselves in the middle in every wish to redirect what is already doing its work. The desire for method runs deep. But I think Gale must have fewer aches. This exquisite book is not simply a piece of writing, it’s a way to ache less, to be in an attunement to how a relationscape fosters the activity of thresholding, and its spiritings. Erin Manning Professor, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Canada

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The patchworking materiality of this book is woven in to the fabric of the writing body. The book is written in its never completed writtenness. Another patch is added, another thread is pulled, its body is turned, re-turned, folded and exposed in the indeterminacies of its comings to life. The inevitability of these final writings will acknowledge the more-than of its always becoming in writing and, as its foldings increasingly break through the carapace of its larval formings of origination, as these new contingencies emerge, there are those new becomings, as these words enfolded in Acts, inscribed on pages, encased in covers and as this book is read. So much of this book was written during the loneliness and uncertainty of the Covid pandemic that began to have visible effects on everyone’s lives in the early months of 2020. These effects continue to tease and tantalise affective presencing as body movements are increasingly becoming, as tentative normalities begin to germinate in multiple social gatherings and events and as the warmth and brightness of the summer of 2022 unfolds. During this period of time, the love, consistency and generosity of my children, Katy, Reuben and Phoebe and my grandson Rohan helped to keep me fed, helped to keep me sane and kept me knowing that it is always worthwhile keeping on keeping on. These words are more than an acknowledgement; they are worded as threads of love and gratitude that, in the inimitability and sincerity of our connectedness, quite simply say thank you, thank you. Physicality and visibility was intermittent during the periods of isolation that characterised the early days and months of lockdown and the nascent writings of the book. Living in the world was enacted, at a distance, from the seeming safety of the doorstep, from a peeping out of the window or through a friendly but hasty greeting on passing an acquaintance on a walk along a quiet country lane. In the early consideration of a title for the book, I stumbled upon a phrase that I had used in the title of a previous publication1 to attempt to bring to life the tentative,

Acknowledgements  ix

always actualising and becoming emergence of self as the book writing increasingly exerted its energies forcefully upon the indeterminacies of writing self. The phrase, ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ seemed to offer a sense of spiriting, a sensing of selfing, a sensing of an affective presencing always on the move, always never fixed. In these emergences, I am grateful to Elizabeth St. Pierre for her recognition and explication of this in her close reading and generous commenting with my book when she talks of having ‘a trust in writing’ and, in this, of taking ‘the risk of giving oneself up entirely to a different image of thought—of Gale no longer being Gale’. And so, in the taking up of this risky business, in these multiple and delirious goings off of the rails, in these writings that have emerged as book, I also have to offer sincere thanks to Jonathan Wyatt, my long-time friend, colleague and collaborator, for staying with all these ‘Gales’ throughout this processual dynamism and unpredictability and for his genuine warmth, friendship and support; this book would not have been this book without it. I also indebted to and want to sincerely thank Erin Manning for the inspiration provided by the luminosity and vibrancy of her work and, in particular, for the transversal fore wording that she has provided for the opening pages of the book that are so effective in sending the writing on its way. I am grateful to Elizabeth Richmond for her help with the cover design for the book and for her enthusiasm, support and encouragement throughout the long and sometime arduous writing process. And finally, these acknowledgements would not be complete without an expression of deep gratitude and thanks to Hannah Shakespeare, my editor at Routledge. Hannah has been with this book and its writing since our first exploratory conversation about it in Malta in February 2020. Throughout this period she has been steadfast, supportive, patient and always willing to engage with my frequent insistence upon and persistent recourse to, what Massumi has referred to as, ‘sprouting deviant’ (2002: 18). Thank you Hannah for playing such a big part in making this book whatever it is and in what it might do in the future.

Note 1 Gale, K. (2021) Now you see me, now you don’t: living with Deleuze, intimating in the dance of movements, moments and sensation Cultural Studies⇔ Critical Methodologies Special Issue, Deleuze and intimacy: of ontologies, politics and the untamed. Vol. 21(6) 466–472.

A PRELUDE?

Late in the writing into this book. Late as the publisher’s deadline, oft extended, looms. Late as a tangible idea of what this book is about begins to emerge. Late in the expression of this tangible idea as some 90,000 words of the book are already written. Always words still needing to be revised, adapted and written afresh; words always vibrant in the play of the forces of composition and territorialisation. Late, the expression of the tangible idea, appearing as a word, growing in the nascence of the coming to life of the concept, intra-emergent out of the disciplining force of chronos yet apt in the always emergent, deeply processual, prehensive animation of aeon. Concept ‘in-formation’1 (Manning, 2007: xvii) as event. Late, as the motivating and energising play of ontogeneses,2 throws Being aside and nurtures respect that becoming, in the immanence of its presencing, insistently rejecting finitude, always sets the pace. Late, as the intensities of writing, writing a book, plateau, peak, descend and ascend always in-actively3 in-formational ways as the rising and falling of the enormity of book writing as a concept suddenly allows for a passage of writing called a ‘prelude’ to begin to be written in these emergent life becomings. Late, as with Bateson’s words in mind and with this plateauing, folding, delineating, erasing, striating and smoothing always actively moving toward an always not yet known, the book as affective forcefulness begins to work as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (1999: 21/2). Late, because in the sunniness of a late Sunday afternoon with the rolling surf of a surging sea cascading on an empty beach beckoning the hand-body-mind-breathingscreen-glowing-bird-singing-thinking-acting-writing-assemblage, in contingency and heterogeneity, demands these words to be written, right here, right now. DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-1

2  A prelude?

Late … late … late … the becoming of the book, its writing and the bringing to life of its central concept, is now appearing. The compulsion to write into the space that the concept opens up is irresistible. Breathlessness takes the words forward, in the forewording of the books’ coming to life. For these writing movements in these pulsing, heart beating moments, the necessity to claim, to entitle, to write, in the remaining time before it leaves these hands and is carried forward to publication to write a few words saying what this book wishes to exemplify is a force that cannot be resisted. In these moments, the movement is toward writing the word … education. The word now written seems so obvious in its simplicity and yet so persistently important in this plain and brutally explicit exemplification. So, first of all, taking a via negativa, this is not a book about education. This is not a book that proffers a directory of methods and approaches extolling the virtues of certain approaches to teaching and learning. It is not designed to tell. Perhaps through the use of what Massumi refers to as the ‘exemplary method’ (2002: 17), it will, on occasions, be able to show. This book writes its selfing into existence with what it wants to say troubled by uncertainty and with attention being paid to what might be around the corner. In this sense, this book has not made up its mind. It fields experience by attempting to write with a sustained tolerance of ambiguity. In this, it revels in its own undecidability and if it helps to make the familiar a little strange, then the moves it encourages the reader to make in the turning of its pages will have achieved some success. This book, whilst always wary of falling into the traps set by discursive constructions, normativities and the seductive forces of persuasive rhetorical claims, is conceived to avoid making any attempt to critically engage the reader in taking up a particular stance. It is not designed with methods, forms and set procedures in mind nor the intention to necessarily impose such actions or designs upon the reader. This book, in its writing, its coming life, is written with an awareness of Nagel’s (1986) assertion that it is not tenable to have a view from nowhere. In one sense, the assertion of such a claim is sui generis and offers little opportunity for refutation; however, in another sense, the assertion of such a claim does not allow for the relativism of an ‘anything goes’ approach or, on the other hand, the representational myopia of exclusively interpretive claims emanating from a particular critical perspective. Hurley quotes Naess, speaking of the work of Spinoza as saying that his work, ‘implies acts of understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible’ (author’s emphasis) (Hurley, 1988: iii). It would be satisfying, therefore, to sense that readers might engage with what is becoming in the here and now of this writing in similar ways. This book, in its now morphing into the next stage of its becoming book, is now nearing the completion of an intersection of lines in which it can be read in a number of ways. It can be read in some ways as dealing with education and of opening up understandings and engagements with education that challenge and extend beyond the neurotypical forms that typify the practices of largely neoliberal educational institutions at the current time. In this, it follows a logic of multiplicity. This is a logic

A prelude?  3

that avoids those logical orthodoxies that work to code, quantify and generalise and instead opens up, by way of concept making as event/ful4 practice, speculation and experimentation, a different kind of logic that engages with complexity and that revels in play with complications of thought. It can be read as engaging in an experiment of speculative practicing of writing as immanent doing. In this, the writing throughout the book attempts to write against writing as simply representative, interpretive and critically agonistic. In this, it writes against the privileging of binary forms and views from outside that work to dominate what might be produced within. In this, the book writes within the practices of immanent critique, where the writing works to employ and bring to life new gestures, where the writing works in and with an always sense of ‘middling’,5 where the writing, in and of its selfing is agentic in the creation of concepts as events, where the writing writes to animate the movements toward the always not yet known and where the writing writes to avoid simplification of thought and method and to revel in the worldings that are animated by the complications and excitements that the creation of concepts, always new helps to generate. It can be read and perhaps be tentatively understood by the reader as having a particular sensing of what was, has always been and is now affectively energising the writing of the book over its long period of gestation and production. As the writing energised space, to use Soja’s (2010) term, it ‘spatialised’. In a Deleuzian sense, in delineation, in line making, it begins to striate space, smoothing out lines and configurations hitherto extant. At the same time, in the authorial ‘spiriting’6 that animated writing practices the words that came into play in the worlding of the content of the book, a sensing of a presence, an ‘in-formational’ presencing, began to occur. Always resistant to the finalising tendencies to form, ‘spiritings’ are ontologically indeterminate affective forces frictionally rubbing with the ‘in-formational’ pressures of writing words, making sentences, paragraphs, chapters, plateaus and the engagement with the immanent nowness of writing. Imbricated in the fluidities of this frictional play is the gradual birthing and presencing of a concept of education in these writings of the book. And so, in these complications, connections and imbrications, a concept of education spirited. It began to lurk, its ghostings would suddenly, surprisingly introduce a word, help in the construction of a sentence, forcefully bring a paragraph into its concluding. ‘Education’7 and the wording of the concept, naked, nascent, not and never fully formed, began to make the arid and lonely desert lands excitingly more populous. Concept forming, always processual, animate and vital in the vibrancy of its event/ful/ness, increasingly, in becoming, is actively imbricated with the essences, flavours, perfumes and singularities of a hugely capacious and potent conceptual force. Yes, a conceptual force! ‘Education’ begins to float; its fluid energies begin to leak and stain the in-formational play of other concepts coming into life, nascently on the move, sneaking up from behind, surprising the rational construction of the majoritarian, making the ‘minor literature’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) come into play. The concept was not called in; prehensively

4  A prelude?

it was already there, always on the move, prehensively it is in the here and now of these words as they tumble out into this sunshine-book-world-prologue-coffeestained assemblage in the making, on the move into the not-yet-ness of this newly emergent ‘body-without-organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). In this concept creation as event, ‘(e)mphasis is placed on the writing – and reading – of philosophy as a creative act of collective import and ethical force’ (Massumi, 2010: 1). As Deleuze and Guattari say, (t)he object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new … concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 3) This becoming book, this book in emergence, this book that is always writing itself beyond the tapping of the keys that writes it, this book in which a concept of education will be an enactive and propulsive force will draw from a Deleuzian ‘image of thought’ in which the creation of concepts will provide a means of engaging with the world. With the active and animating concept of Stewart’s (2007) in mind, it will engage in ‘worlding’. It will not be satisfied and content to engage in reflection, explanation, representation and in making the assertions of final judgements. In following Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to philosophy, succinctly provoked in the wording of the quotation above, the book and the animating concept of education, beginning in its coming into realisation here, will offer a shock of the new. In this, the writing in the book, rather than specifying and prescribing meaning in advance, will suggest writings away from description, interpretation and representation and writings toward immanence, experimentation, composition and speculative possibilities from the present into the future. In proposing this shift away from the prior influence exercised by explanation and meaning, the body of writing that is emergent in the becoming of this book will be addressed in terms of Spinoza’s oft-quoted assertion that ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’ (1994, 155). Quite simply, asking the question ‘What can a body do?’ sets in motion querying engagements with the capaciousness of all bodies, human and nonhuman to act. Speculating into the future about the potential ability that a body, any body has to act is a hugely becoming force that immediates and impels movement toward and engagement in the creation of concepts. There is a sense in which the phrase ‘yet to be determined’ in this quotation from Spinoza lies at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of ‘becoming’, for in becoming bodies are always processual, never fixed, always just beyond the reach of the yet to be determined in the quotation from Spinoza cited above. It is the potential that resides in Spinoza’s claim and the world of capaciousness that opens up when it is asserted that encourages an asking of the question, What can (the body of) education do? The asking of such a question helps to move inquiry away from the representational nature of the simply textual, away from the infinite referral found in the self-perpetuating play of

A prelude?  5

signifiers in encounter, away from the metaphysical demands of what-is and moves it toward the creative experimental excitements of what-if. So, late in the writing into this book, as this prelude precedes the movement of the reader who moves through these pages from beginning to end, affect works in the animation of a conceptual force, that has taken hold of the writing and that will permeate and infect the writing that follows. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) ‘body-without-organs’ lives in-formationally as the writing on these pages unfolds. The ‘body-without-organs’ is never still, in the always shifting contingencies of ‘heterogenesis’ (Guattari 2014) its bodying brings into play the frictional energising of forces and forms, never allowing one to take an actualising tendency over the other. Concept forming ‘education’ as a bodying of thought is constantly animating thought as the concept. ‘After finitude’ (Meillasoux 2008), the concept is always in play with affective forcings, formings, informings, reformings, deformings, conformings and so on. These are always more than human movements and flows. The bodying of the concept is not a subjectifying force that is located in the rational mind of the simply human. It is not what Williams referred to as ‘structure of feeling’, a mental state that comes about as a consequence of normatively inscribed hegemonic forces, energising discursively constructed habits, customs and the frailties of common sense, say, in the discussion of the relationship between certain dramatic conventions and written texts. Although Williams uses the term ‘structures of feeling’ rather than, say, ‘structures of thought’, to suggest and take into theoretical explication something that is not yet fully formed, something that is on the move and yet to be finalised, his term is rooted in the simply human and exists without any attention being paid to the more than human forces that are articulated and always in relational play with them. ‘Education’ is always more than simply human. As is developing and emergent in the unfolding of this book, the ‘body-without-organs’ was originally brought to life and used by Deleuze and Guattari to challenge and resist the simply human proclivity of psychoanalytic theorising and practice that was used to locate desire in the body that acts in and on that body in terms of lack. Rather, the ‘body-without-organs’ is brought into play by them as a never fully formed, never fully stratified, never fully organised body that is always on the move in affect and existing immanently on an always animate plane of consistency. The ‘body-without-organs’ resists the individualising of lack inherent in binarised polarised difference; the ‘body-without-organs’ is always on the move in the electric frisson of individuating movement, change is incessant, and differentiation is the animating force of life. In the incessant processual movement of these doings, Spinoza’s claim that ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’ is clearly exemplified and again very forcefully comes into life. So, to repeat, this is not a book about ‘education’. It is not a book that brings to life a concept of ‘education’ that, existing in the mind of an author, attempts to create closure through the limitations of representation, interpretation and concomitant critique. Here, the conceptual force of ‘education’ is emergent in the atmospheric cloudiness that is occluded by the forces of discourse, materiality and

6  A prelude?

the unpredictabilities of the always not yet known. Whilst ‘education’ can never fully unhitch it’s always becoming from the binding influences of subjectification, identity and representation, here, in notyetness,8 it will be expressed as never fixed and always on the move. In at least tacitly acknowledging the tensions and inflections that can be detected in the temptation that the Humanities find hard to avoid in their frequent establishment of the simply human subject, somehow unconnected to the indeterminacies of affective worlding, Comaroff and Comaroff offer a worryingly interesting view that is relevant to the emergence of the concept of ‘education’ that is taking place here. They say, To the degree that identity has come to rest, at once, on ascription and choice, conviction and ambiguity, ineffability and self-management, it has embedded itself in a human subject increasingly seen, and experienced from within, as entrepreneurial. Not least, in enacting his or her otherness. (2009: 50) In working to bring to life this concept of the ‘entrepreneurial subject’, Comaroff and Comaroff draw from the work of Foucault and point out the way in which the forceful emergence of neoliberalism has totally reconfigured the relationships that exist between the State and the economy and that of the (so-called) individual and the State and the economy. In this Foucault’s (1990) concept of ‘care of the self ’, is understood and articulated as the means by which the individual can provide for themselves and satisfy their needs within the context of the state having devolved to them all responsibility for doing so. From this, Comaroff and Comaroff argue that all the social risks involved in this and all the consequences of their actions need to be seen in relation to ‘whatever structural or ecological conditions may intervene’ and where ‘the population, concomitantly is regarded as an assemblage of calculating entrepreneurs and consumers rather than rule-abiding citizens’ (Op. cit). It is within the rubric of this analysis and under the influence of the rhetoric of the argument summarised here that the conceptual force of ‘education’ coming to life in this book can be sensed. If, as has already been asserted, the bodying of the concept of education taking place is not simply or exclusively premised upon the subjectifying force that is located in the rational mind of the simply human, then it is possible to see that the concept, as a ‘body-without-organs’, as an assemblage of multiple heterogeneities and contingencies, exists within the manifest and latent indeterminacies of what Deleuze and Guattari (1986) refer to as the ‘milieu’. If this can be understood as a highly complex material field in which, rhizomatically, assemblages can be formed then, it is possible to argue that the rhythms and movements, dynamics and forces constitutive of the neoliberal turn can be associated with and expressed as a ‘milieu’. As Deleuze and Guattari say, Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus, the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and

A prelude?  7

composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. (1986: 313) It is within the neoliberal turn qua milieu that this emergent concept of ‘education’ is brought to life here and made sense of. Concepts, as rhizomatic bodies, always on the move, organising and re-organising, as ‘bodies-without-organs’, are always coming to life, becoming in multiple not-yet-determined ways. Equally, the milieus which they are constitutive of and which also constitute them are never fixed. The concept of ‘education’ emergent in the processual energies of this book writing, the assemblages that might ‘in-formationally’ (Manning, 2013) emerge from it and the practices that it might set in motion are all ‘creative-relationally more-than human’, (Massumi, 2015a:14) both in relation to the milieu within which it moves and the other milieu that it might be seen to populate, spatiotemporally inhabit and consistently ‘intra-act’ (Barad: 2007) with. In the neoliberal milieu, institutional assemblages, universities, colleges and their attendant offices, services and infrastructural support systems are both re-constituted by and agentic in the re-constitution of students as entrepreneurs and consumers. So, the thinking and doing with the concept of education that is research creatively enacted in this book will be seriously attentive to the economic and affective forces that are in play in the emergence of a growing population of pupils and students, along with their parents and their teachers, who, in educational terms, can increasingly be identified as entrepreneurial selves. In the practices of territorialisation that the institution enacts and that are emergent and then habituated within these new collective frames of identification and subjectification, students as consumers actively search out the best universities and the best courses within them. In relation to the market forces incumbent to this, individual choice-making proliferates in the care of the (entrepreneurial) self. Increasingly, both in response to and creative of market forces, university faculties and departments offer courses and programmes of study linked to measurable learning and vocational outcomes, linked with and often incorporating specific route ways to clear and obvious occupational and professional destinations. Individual applicants and then individual students are autopoietically active in competing for places, for resources, for the attention of beleaguered academics and, ultimately, for the best grades to enable them to gain employment in the best jobs. Moten and Harney comment upon these tendencies and proclivities when they say, ‘(t) he university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual’ (2013: 42). Education is a concept that imbues itself upon Being. In terms of simply human forms of consciousness, education is personal. Everyone exists in relationality to education. Everyone has an idea of education. Everyone has engaged in education, even those who claim to have received none. Education has a value; for some, it is

8  A prelude?

highly valued, for others, by varying degrees, less so. Education, therefore, shares an intimacy with the individual, it creates a personal relationality, it is about life, it enlivens. In these book writings, education will reflect this and, more importantly, it will not. This writing will suggest that education as a concept works affectively to intimate subjectivities and identities that are more than the individual, that are suggestive of a collective animation, that are, in ‘heterogenesis’, as Guattari says, ‘processes of continuous resingularisation’. In intimating subjectivities in relation to education, it is possible to work for, as Guattari’s translator’s point out, (2014: 105), ‘an active, immanent singularisation of subjectivity, as opposed to a transcendent, universalising and reductionist homogenisation’. So whilst it would seem that the emergence in education of the entrepreneurial subject is a result of the homogenising and individualising forces of neoliberalism, they also point out that ‘(h)owever much organisations attempt to homogenise desire, something always escapes or leaks out (the “line of flight”)’ (2014: 105).

Playing with an act of preluding? This book that has no beginnings has begun with a prelude. In this, it seems necessary to say that the emphasis in this is that what is becoming in the present writing is preludic; there is a sensing toward ‘Prelude’, in these preludic writings. My mobile phone dictionary tells me that a Prelude is ‘an action or event serving as an introduction to something more important’. This becoming book is already delighting in its ‘middlings’, in its wicked refusal to live between those bookends that say ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’. This becoming book was always and is always beginning, was and is always ending. I will take this casually sought after definition as read and suggest that what might follow in these pages might well contain ‘something more important’. As I am writing this Prelude, these preludings, long after most of the words in the becoming book have been written, I have to confess that this could well be correct. This book that has no ending, ends with a conclude … My phone dictionary tells me that to conclude is to ‘bring or come to an end’. As this book is delighting in its ‘middlings’, I am already enjoying the possibility that ‘prelude’ and ‘conclude’ will both be used as noun and as verb: so the noun ‘prelude’ in becoming will engage in ‘preluding’ and the verb ‘conclude’ in becoming will also act as a noun. This requires some talking about ‘lude’. My faithful phone dictionary tells me that the meaning of ‘lude’ as suffix is ‘to play’. The word ‘play’ can be played with and used in a number of ways. This book in formation, always on the move, unsure of its destinations, plays with play … Play can act as a play that takes place on a stage, as a dramatisation made up of acts and scenes. In this sense, (a) play is a performance, a representation of a particular story, a series of events and encounters that are dramatised in particular ways. Play can be a play on words. In this sense, play can be used to stretch the meaning of a word or idea to make it do something and to work in a particular way. In the sense, the play on words engages in movement, it enacts a more-than it might

A prelude?  9

have been originally conceived as doing or been capable of doing. As a signifier, in play, the word, simply leads to other signifiers, more importantly it does differently and, in this doing, it differentiates. Play as flexibility, giving play allows for expansion and contraction. In the building of a bridge, or the laying of a railways line, gaps or expansion joints are created to allow the bridge or the lines to expand when it is hot and to contract when it is cold; they have to be able to relax. Play as aimless, spontaneous, fun and pleasurable activity: play as inventive, play as charade, play as whatever comes next, play as play full. Play as learning, play as experimental, play as purposeful for as long as the movement in the moment lasts; speculatively putting a particular activity into play, just to see what happens. There is a sensing, here in this always nascent book writing, that the play between the structuring and the content making of the book on the move, contributes to the always ensuing becoming book, a theorising of dramatic composition. In all its different frictional engagements with force and form, lines between thinking and doing are always blurring, at once disappearing in creative cloudiness and then again reappearing as new and vibrant ‘thought-in-the-act’, what Manning and Massumi (2014) call ‘passages in the ecology of experience’. So I can act as the dramaturge of the becoming-book, always engaged in the theorising of the folding and unfolding drama of composition as it takes place at my fingertips, before my eyes, playing its selfing out in free and wildly opportunistic ways. So, any drama that might unfold in this becoming-book is not intended to limit its selfing to performance and, in then in so doing, to simply represent. The constantly processual play between structuring and content making is always on the move. This play is animate of the sparking compositional energies of affective forces always in frictional play with the formative procedures that have their groundings in the architectural fixities that precede them. Manning and Massumi talk of an ‘immanent critique (that) engages with new processes more than new products … (that) seeks to energise new modes of activity, already in germ, that seem to offer a potential to escape or overspill ready-made channellings into the dominant value systems’ (2014: 87). If there is an in-formational emergence of an immanent critique of this kind in these new comings to life writings then this becoming-book will be making movements that feel strong and powerfully energetic to the holder of the pen that writes with it. So as these fingers, ‘thought-in-the-act’, tap out this drama of composition, there is a sensing of a structuring that is working to bring to life multiple facilitations of play in the form of acts, in-act. In the compositional immanence of this preluding, this becoming-book, there is a play enacting between pre/lude, conc/ lude and these different concepts of play: they are both ‘plays’ and, in this, they are both act/ive concepts in the passages that assist in the bringing to life of this book. These are acts of doing, acts as movement toward the actual, virtual in their always never quite there in actualisation, where act is not the performance, of ‘putting on an act’, it is act as ‘immanent critique’, act as exemplification and doing, act in and

10  A prelude?

of its own selfing. The book can be read and engaged with in similar ways to the way in which the book was written. In this respect, the writing of the book did not begin with an introduction, then systematically run through a linearity of writing process which neatly ended with its conclusion. Rajchman says that Deleuze engages in a style of writing ‘which discourages any unified plan of organisation or development in favour of an unlimited plane in which one is always passing from one singular point to another, then connecting it to yet something else’ (2000: 4). Not by design, I have found that the writing of this book follows very similar organisational procedures to what Rajchman recognises in Deleuze and is quoted as saying here. The movements from one part to another work transversally to make connections through and across the various parts of the book. Following this logic of multiplicity rather than one of rationality and linearity, I read Manning talking of the work of Arakawa and Gins and their concept of ‘architectural procedures’ when she says, ‘(t) he wager here is that what matters is not architecture or surrounds per se but the procedurality that conditions the surrounds to facilitate other ways of living’ (2002: 206). As I write these words, the ‘image of thought’ of this book writing shifts with it. In the coming to life of this ‘image of thought’, I sense this logic of multiplicity creating attunements to diversity that enable the book to be read in more than simply conventional and orthodox ways. In the writing, I sense also a commitment to the neurodiverse in these attempts to open up the book and its writing to being opened and read, not in terms of discovering difference but rather in terms of creating a difference. I would like that feeling to emerge that when the writing is done and the manuscript is sent to the publisher and then when the book eventually reaches the shelves, it has the capacity to draw potential readers to it because of lack of conventionality and orthodoxy, because of an appeal to diversity rather than typicality. And so in the bringing to life of this passage of writing that will appear in the early pages of this book, I have stumbled upon an organisational trope that, I hope, will assist in the reading and working with this book in diverse and multiple ways. In deciding to use what Arakawa and Gins (2002) perhaps might describe as an ‘architectural procedure’, and others might describe as a dramaturgical device, I will assist the emergent actualisation of this book through by moving its content into ‘Acts’. There have been thoughts to do with using chapters, sections, plateaus and other ways of bringing the work together and, as this book, in incessant virtuality, is always ‘middling’, has barely begun, is never finishing and is, therefore, always act/ ualising, ‘Acts’ is what it will be.

Notes 1 ‘In-formation’: a concept originally brought to life as a concept by Simondon, and later by Manning (2007: will, in becoming, be frequently used to animate and activate the writing that populates the unfolding of this book. 2 ‘Ontogeneses’: a concept that has huge importance and justified centrality in the informational movements and flows in the emergence of this writing. Highly significant to this, Manning (2007: xxi) says, ‘Ontogenesis is a slippery category: it is that which is not yet. I cannot write the body in advance of its creation, of its movement. The body

A prelude?  11

will remain in an antagonistic relation to its accountability. Hence, throughout this book, there will be a play between the conceptual energies of “ontogenesis” and “ontological indeterminacy”’. 3 ‘In-act’ is an important concept drawn from the work of Manning, which will be put to use throughout the becoming of this book. She describes it in the following way: ‘The in-act always involves a tensile weave of the actual and the virtual, of the preindividual and individuation, of a life and this life. This is why each actual occasion is more-than what it seems.’ (2013: 24) 4 I am using ‘event/ful’ as a means of emphasising that concept forming, concept invention is full of event, so to speak: it is full in eventfulness, perhaps. 5 The term ‘middling’ is taken from Manning and Massumi (2014: 5) and is used to suggest an immanent working with process, in which movement is always in-formation and co-compositional; a prehensive becoming in the dance. Hence, the concept makes frequent appearances as it is put to use in this becoming book. 6 This is a concept that will re-emerge and play an important and active role in the ontogenetic movements of the book and in relation to other concepts that will come to life in the turning of its pages. The concept of ‘spiriting’ is ever emergent throughout the becoming-book. Here, in its earliest presencing, it is important to point out and stress that embodied in the concept is its active verbal and always processual movement; it is a word that is doing: it is a concept that is always ‘spiriting’, it ‘spirits’, it use is not to be found in the substantive noun form. ‘Spiriting’ is always resistant to the finalising tendencies to form, hence it is always an agentic affective in-formational force. 7 Inverted commas appear around the word for the first time to indicate the coming to life of a concept of education that exists as a significant singularity that has immediating force in the fluid, heterogeneity and contingency of the assemblage of this becoming book writing. 8 The concept of ‘notyetness’ exacts a pervasive presencing throughout this book. Having emerged in the middling of this writing, its origins exist in indistinctness. In this respect, a sensing of the (always) ‘not yet known’ has seeped into the immanent doing of my earlier writings (Gale, 2018). It is also always possible to connect with Manning (2013:35) and, more recently St. Pierre’s (2019) use of the ‘not-yet’. Therefore, in attempting not to fall prey to referential lassitude, I will offer these sources as a possible means of inquiring further into this concept.

AN ACT OF INTRODUCTION? INTRODUCING? MIDDLING? BOOK BEGINNINGS?

Storying as further preluding… She began to write in a way that she had never written before. The factually linear, descriptively narrative accounts that had so easily slipped out through the persistent tapping of the keys seemed to have been halted. Perhaps only for a while? She cast her mind back over her years in education; she had been a teacher for over 40 years. Her whole adult life had involved her in working with children and young people, in classrooms, studios and workshops, consistently and fastidiously engaging in practices with them, working to facilitate various means to help them to learn. In writing to this, in becoming, a knowing began to surround her; she knew this was what she knew, this was a life blood, this was more than simply discourse producing and representing self in terms of identity, this was an existential force, an uncontrollable doing that was inexorably always there. In writing into this selfing, she was aware of walking into classrooms; young expectant, nervous, seemingly disinterested pupils and students looking up at her from their seats, moving restlessly, in early morning conversations with their friends and classmates. She knew the feelings; they washed over her with persistence, insisting, like the irrevocability of the tides, coming in, going out, coming in, going out, always the same, always different, always demanding of her, putting her in to a place where she would have to act, where she would want to act, had to act: coming to life, presencing, acting as immanent doing. Her writing took her to a familiar place, to where she was sitting, looking, shuffling books and papers, tensing, waiting perhaps, wondering when to start, sensing the ‘middling’ involved in finding the starting point, remembering last night’s preparations for just these movements and moments, in space and time, waiting for arrival, that moment that turns into movement that is the becoming of the next moment and so the process animates the more-than of the somehow not yet DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-2

An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?  13

known of the emerging minutes, being devoured as the hour or two of the class time unfolds. Tentative yet assertive in the endless flow; fabricating a starting point … education? This is how it is: same as it ever was. Writing, sensing her selfing into the differentiating flow of the classroom, the affective relationality of this selfing always actively producing, responding with, creating a difference. Alert to surprise mingling with the predictable; some words frequently repeated, others coming in from elsewhere, welcomed, imbricated, hurdled, hurtling on to the next, always the flow, the unlocking of affect as humour, interest, sadness, curiosity, puzzlement, insecurity, confidence all boil and writhe, seethe and emanate in the colossal heaving of this always in-active materiality of human and nonhuman mass, blithely, crudely and simplistically referred to as teaching and learning … education? She found herself still writing. Instances, recollections, faded memories all jostled her for attention. All she could see were those faces, focused and directional in their anticipation of what might be to come, all tending in movement toward her, faces haloed in the light beaming through from the large window at the back of the classroom. As she wrote, she knew exactly which room it was and the building it was in. Although she had taught classes in a multitude of rooms and buildings throughout this long working life, this one was stark and vividly relevant. However, the faces and bodies populating the scene unfolding before her were indistinct; she felt herself peering into the approaching distance of many faces facing her and not a shred of recognition fluttered in the excitement of her memory. Words, spoken and written on the whiteboard behind and beside her and the images buzzing on the screen that projected from the computer in the front corner of the room were not all hers. Voraciously, she absorbed the comments made by the students, writing them up on the whiteboard, melding them into the unfolding of the flow that was only loosely hers, sharing them with the quiet students on the fringes of the classes, eliciting responses, encouraging further word sharing from them, gradually building up concepts from the ideas being shared in the growing atmospherics of the increasingly busy classroom. Smiling, grimacing, nodding, querying and more: minor gestures, hugely important, life-giving, sacred, all in-force in the becoming and readiness toward the new, the not-yet, the are-we-ready for this one? She sensed that something was happening: was teaching and learning taking place? She noticed that, unprompted, some students were writing things down, others were talking and then, growing in confidence sharing their confidences with the class at large, lively disagreements jostled in one corner of the room, whilst in another, a sense of unity was palpable as two students were clearly smiling and nodding in agreement with one another … education? As she wrote, she felt drawn to remembering some writing about concepts that she had recently read in Erin Manning’s book Relationscapes about the coming to life of concepts. She found the book on her shelves and read the passage that had stayed with her and that seemed to be relevant to the sympoietic and creative forces so often at play in her classrooms. She felt compelled to write the passage down on the fast-filling pages of her notebook.

14  An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?

Concepts are aspects of a creative practice already virtually active on the plane of immanence of thought. Moving beyond fixed meaning, concepts gather and articulate the intensity that transmutes the creative process from thought to expression … A concept takes form at the threshold of expression. (Manning, 2012: 223) Writing, writing, she felt pulled back to the vibrant forces animating the classroom. In this, all the time, she was aware of her selfing immanent in the throes of this vibrant living mass, immanent in the thresholding1 of these expressions as a concept of education cloudily formed in her recollection of the events and the energising emergence of her writing. With her writing and the bringing together of these encounters, a palpable awareness that the repetition of her early misgivings was dissipating, as it usually did. Immediating, immersed in the energetic flow of the classroom, she did not allow her energies to dip, there seemed to be no relaxing here, these were the moments she had hoped for and sensed in emergence as the dynamics of the class began to pulse and the compositional forces welling within her melded and articulated with the surging momentum of these movements processually animate, coming into life. She had learned to live with the prescribed learning outcomes and the directional forces and requirements of institutionally demanded lesson plans and schemes of work with their timings and allocated partitions and the defined substances of their differentiated learning modes. Tacit sensings had encouraged her and helped her to learn not to ignore them and, at the same time, how to be confident in moving with her students and the tangents and unpredictabilities that the fluidities of her approach nurtured and brought to life in the collective heterogeneities and contingencies of the classroom assemblage of the day, of the hour, of the minute of the intangible, unquantifiable beauty of these irrepressible moments of being. In the contingencies and vibrancies of her presencing in those emergent prehensive moments she had a knowing that her lessons worked in processual actualisation in the indeterminacies of aeon. She was only ever really aware of the march of chronos as the students began to fidget and tentatively clear their desks of books, paper and mobile phones, as the hands of the classroom clock marched to the discipline of closure and the sudden awareness that time is up. Bringing the lesson to a close was becoming in the presence of an affective space time-lapse. Looking around at the busy industry surrounding her, productive and creative energising that she was also clearly part of and responsible for, she sat on the edge of her desk at the front of the classroom; all at once, pleasantly exhausted and vibrantly alert. Bustling around her, students finished packing their bags, chatting amongst themselves and sharing smiles with her as they left the room, hurrying to their next lesson, in another classroom, in another building with another teacher. She sensed satisfaction in the movements around her, in the glow of the students’ gestures and in the relaxed unfoldings of her body. In these reknowings came a worlding, came a sensing that this was OK. There was no need for anything other than that. Thisness. This is this … education? She sat back in her chair, aware of the aching in her lower back and tension gripping her shoulders, neck and arms. She had lost any tangible understanding of

An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?  15

how long she had been writing: she knew it was a long time but it didn’t matter. In the seeming relaxation of her leaning back, she had somehow realised, made palpable and real, that in her writing of seemingly past events, she had made them new and alive in the urgency of her writing as doing in the present. With the sensing of the experience and the echoes from Manning’s words that recounting the experiences had prompted, she realised a coming to life of a concept, a concept that she didn’t have to have a name but for the moment, she would call ‘education’. She had found herself engaged in a creative practice that the writing of her recollections, already virtually active on the plane of immanence of thought, had worked to move her beyond fixed meaning toward the creation of a concept (of education) that, animate in the writing, had come to life in the thresholding taking place and immanently presencing in these practices and expressions. She had always believed, with Deleuze, that As long as thought is free, hence vital, nothing is comprised. When it ceases being so, all the other oppressions are also possible, and already realised, so that any action becomes culpable, every life threatened. (Deleuze, 1988: 4) She felt unusually relaxed, sitting at home, soaking in the sunshine warming the pleasantly calming peacefulness of her study. She looked out over the wild and luxurious abandonment of her garden and, impulsively, returned to her reading of Virginia Woolf ’s writing of her early childhood and the holidays she spent with her family in Talland House at St. Ives in Cornwall. Unable to avoid the magnetism of a passage that she had read many times before, the poetic force of Woolf ’s writing pulled her in. She read: It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling … no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. Nor does that give the feeling. It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent. (Woolf, 1985: 93) The haecceities and intensities of her preceding writing and thinking had heightened in her a sense that, in the relentlessness of these movements, using the words of Virginia Woolf, ‘moments of being’, sparkled and glowed in their brief coming to life. The next day, enjoying a late morning break after an early morning class and finding a seat in the busy staffroom, she sipped a steaming cup of hot and bitter coffee, hungrily and guiltily eating sweet biscuits to compensate for the breakfast that, having overslept that morning, she had had to miss. Not wanting to engage

16  An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?

in the daily gossip and banter of staffroom conversation, she wrapped her around herself and, to further insulate this mornings’ insular self from the noisy bustle of the room, picked up and returned to her studied reading of Moten and Harney’s book, The Undercommons that she had stayed up reading, late, at home, the night before. Something about their writing of the ‘maroons’ and the ‘fugitives’ working in the university made her feel uneasy and, at the same time, also somewhat reassured, nurturing a feeling that she wasn’t alone in all of this. She read them saying, Public administration holds to the idea both in the lecture hall and the professional journal that its categories are knowable. The state, the economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement each to the other. Professionalization begins by accepting these categories precisely so competence can be invoked, a competence that at the same time guards its own foundation (like Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank phantasmatically patrolling his empty neighbourhood). This responsibility for the preservation of objects becomes precisely that Weberian site-specific ethics that has the effect, as Theodor Adorno recognized, of naturalizing the production of capitalist sites. To question them thus becomes not only incompetent and unethical but the enactment of a security breach. (2013: 36) She felt marooned by but also connected to the stark inevitabilities unravelling in Moten and Harney’s writing. She thought of her classrooms, of her students and the boundaries and containments of the institutional environment that presented themselves to her on every single day of her life as a teacher. Often, at the end of a class, whilst feeling warmth and elation, charged by the vibrancy and vitality of the lesson that had just taken place, she would shudder with a sense of worry and concern. With the students, she had taken the lesson and allowed it to flow beyond the rigid confines of the curriculum and the narrow and highly focused prescriptions and learning outcomes of the lesson plan. In the energetic exchanges of speculative discussion and inquisitive questioning and answering, she had delighted in the conversational flows and eddies that the lesson had taken. Her pulse raced as the dynamic force of conversation, experimentation, wit and intelligence moved the directional forces present in the classroom into uncharted territories of unpredictability and hesitancy fuelling worldings of the always not yet known. As she walked quietly and contemplatively away from lessons such as these, her selfings were always infused with questions and complexities. Educator? Rebel? Facilitator? Conspirator? Fugitive? The phrase kept repeating itself … ‘pen gets on the scent’: the ‘pen gets on the scent’ … she found herself easing out her chair picking up her books plugging in her laptop and starting to write.

An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?  17

Acts, actions, actualisations … As the book writing animates unfoldings, as linear book reading practice takes the reader and encourages movements from Prelude to Introduction, the ‘more-than’2 (2020: 85) of book writing, book reading is brought into play. Book writing can be disciplined by the master narratives that impose upon it normative procedures to do with structure, form, organisation into tangible and coherent chapters and sections and so on. In this, a hylomorphism3 is enacted upon the seeming chaos of the writer and the writings that emerge from the metaphoric pen. As these discursive forces are at play, working to enact assumptions whereby the writing of the words that activate the sentences, that coalesce into the paragraphs, that make up the chapters, that ultimately are the becoming of the book, they manifest the tacitly approved framings that are designed to turn the prehensive chaos of concepts creative of book formings into the finalising movements and moments that consolidate the book as apprehended and existent as a tangible object. In immanence, the incessant acts of writing are always actualising. In book in-formation, the signification of ‘chapters’ is inappropriately static; acts are always on the move, always in action. As Deleuze and Guattari say, We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (1987: 257) And so as these becoming-book writings exceed in their foldings and unfoldings, it is the book bodying that is becoming as a new and emergent pulsing force that occupies these writings. The pen is on the scent but in the vibrant synaesthesia of concept forming as event/ful book writing practice the scent is sometimes hard to follow. As the book spirits its selfing into a bodied book form, in multiplicity, affective forces are at play, pushing against the directions being taken, the paths that are followed and the lines of formation that are being drawn. To repeat those vibrant and evocative words of Virginia Woolf, when the pen gets on the scent, these forces are powerfully in play. In the alertness of ‘becoming-animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), there is always the nearness of sensing the immediating pressure of living in the always excessive movements and moments of the now, there is the awareness of the infra-thin in the warmth of presencing in what is left behind and there is that ever-present anticipatory sensing of the new encounter, alluring, yet to come, always just around the corner. This is the morethan of becoming-book. And so, in the in-form making involved in the writing of this book, there is the sensing of surging forces, welling, flooding seeping irresistibly into the cavities and interstices of such formalities. The sensing of beginnings are troubled by the knowing that the thinking-writing-becoming-book has long been

18  An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?

in play, that the emergence of a new concept forming as event is always likely, is necessary to occur. In these in-formings, the ‘spiriting’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ is ever present. Like a spectre, like a looming, deeply affectively presencing force, it haunts the making of every decision as to the where, the what and the how of organising this book will materialise. There have been questionings and problematisations. Will the book be organised around chapters, sections and a hierarchising of sub-sections? Will the book be built according to the architectural procedures of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, with multiple stepping on and off points, with an always multiplying relational assemblage of singularities at play with one another in an organisational milieu that defies simple description and logical exemplification? Of course, each organisational question of this kind is not susceptible to be addressed and answered through the provision of an epistemological justification and an appeal to preferential meaning. In writing this book and in thinking about the bodying of the book, the return to Spinoza’s question, what can a body do? is inevitable. The ontological indeterminacy that is integral to the answering of such a rhetorical question necessitates an approach which has to be experimental and speculative. And so, as Manning and Massumi point out, of being ‘caught in the middling of this event’ perhaps the writer ‘is not the maker of the scene. He (sic) attends to its dance, co-composing with it’ (2014: 5). In this, they acknowledge and cite Deleuze’s view that ‘it is through the middle that things grow’ (Ibid: 33). This becoming-book is already in movement, thousands of words, a multitude of notes: in writing, movement is sui generis, ‘words only come from other words, in recurring waves, rising and falling from the linguistic any point of the superposition of sound and speech, and of silence and noise’ (Ibid: 41). As an earlier engagement with preluding has realised, has attempted to make real, working with ‘Acts’ offers a sensing of a way forward, a step toward the always not yet known. In this, there is also a sensing that ‘acts’ are encounters, they are event full occurrences which are inevitably and necessarily part of processual movements of actualisation. Acts of actualisation are capacious, they are momentous in their potency to move, to make movements. Moving with these movements, it is to these ‘middlings’ that these early book writings attend. In actualisation, already a Prelude and an Introduction have come alive as Acts and are finding a place in this becoming-book. In actualisation, other acts are acting, coming to life as they continue to be written. Tentatively, perhaps reluctantly, because of their seeming attunement with substance, their names have been already been sketched out, these names are in the here and now, in the constant ‘middling’ of this book, they have to be written, they might well change. So, there are Acts which have names like ‘Embodiment’, ‘Process over Substance’, ‘Affective Presencing’, ‘Posthuman Empiricisms’, ‘Resisting the Urge to Transparency’, ‘Diaries, Journal Notebooks’ and ‘Writing as Immanence’. They appear in the book and in the Contents List in a linear order of this kind but, they are not numbered so that there will be less of an encouragement or persuasion to necessarily read and engage with them in that order. In all the complexities and complications of these ‘middlings’, the writing is drawn to the thinking about the ability of the neurodiverse to work with, in and

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around the text, perhaps in ways that Barad (2007) might call ‘intra-actively’, rather than through the conventionalities of neurotypical approaches that would tend toward the linear, rational and sequentially informing approaches of an orthodox engagement with the book. The neurodiverse nurtures challenge to the way in which readers are discursively led to interact with the organisational structure of texts in ways that are constructed through the formality of its chapter by chapter, section by section, paragraph by paragraph sequential ordering. In this becoming-book, the persistent emergence of ‘acts’ in its in-formational (non) structuring is designed to prompt and to facilitate always movements toward, away, beyond and perhaps even with. In resistance, perhaps in inevitability, a neurodiverse reading of the book challenges and works against the pressure to be led by the text. Such an approach to reading, hopefully, will be encouraged by the writing and presentation of the book, to choose, perhaps be intra-actively impelled to diversify, to go off-piste, to perceive the fields of the text en masse and to willingly subject to delire in order to digest all that the book has to offer. In the neurodiversities of these movements, these always actualisations of these moments, readings will tend toward virtualisation and speculation about the what-if-ness of a particular approach and to allow those speculations to energise a ride on the witch’s broom,4 following the whirls, gusts and impulsive strokings of the wind. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 202–207) theorising of lines5 can also be brought into play here by pointing toward the narrowing delineations of ‘lines of segmentarity’ which tend toward stratification, organisation and more formalistic mapping of the terrain. Neurotypicality takes comfort in the striations of space that conventional book forming and information can offer, whilst neurodiversities can be liberated by the smoothing out of rigid delineations and the presencing of in-formational diversions that the speculative capillary actions and the creative followings that ‘lines of molecularity’ can offer. In these ‘middlings’, the approach to the (non) structuring of the book is therefore intended to be an enactive process and that whilst the sequential arrangement of material might suggest a following of a particularly linear mode of reading, the diverse leakages and capillary actions that are offered here encourage the book to be read opportunistically; readers are invited to structure their own reading of the book. So, the emergence of the (non) structuring trope of ‘acts’ writes against conventional organisational forms. In actualisation, these ‘Acts’ are emergent. In this, they write against the proclivities and intentions of traditional in-formings. In this, they offer a folding, fluid, compositional and in-formational style of writing that is designed to allow for and encourage movements when the book is picked up. In this, it is hoped that the Acts will encourage the picking up of the book wherein pages are flicked and pencilled, where, in becoming, annotations populate the margins, concepts come to life, concepts that are offered in the content of the book are re-territorialised, transversalities will animate the ‘more-than’ of the book’s becoming and … and an infectious sensing and enacting of the book as always on the move will begin to occur.

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So, by way of exemplification, a central action in the movement of the book is through the animation of a Deleuzo-Guattarian creation of concepts as events. Taking such an approach will be intricately wound up with the process-based intentions of that are central in the making of this. So by creating concepts as events, these concepts will always be in play, they will not reside comfortably on shelves collecting the dust of histories, they will be put to use in and through the book as a whole, every repetition of a concept will bring to life a difference. So, in the speculation and what-if-ness of a particular concept in play, as it might appear in different passages in the book an, associational empiricism will be enlivened, the improvisation of a concept will differentiate that concept and bring it to life in multiplicity, in lively and active ways. Perhaps we can think about these concepts looping around, spiralling, ‘spiriting’ themselves in multiple different ways, coming to life like will ‘o’ the wisps, now you see me now you don’t and, in new exemplification, the concepts will live differently through becoming, through being in-act, through doing things differently. Perhaps, as in the animation of immanent doing, the concepts that appear in this becoming-book will always, in the vibrant life of actualisation, live and work differently. And so, in the immanent doing that is co-relational with the emergence of this book, the ever present, always needing to be asked the question that emanates from the ‘spiritings’ that the philosophy of Spinoza brings to this emergence is ‘what can a body, this emergent body of writing do?’ Books have the capacity to do more than what their writers or their readers may have intended when the writings and the readings began. When Barthes (1977) talked about the ‘death of the author’ he worked to shift attention away from the intentions and passions of the writer and move it toward the impressions and responses of the reader. The relational dance that therefore exists between so-called ‘author’ and ‘writer’ leads us to the next oftquoted observation from Spinoza that ‘all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected’.6 In the emergence of this passage of writing, it is becoming apparent that the concept of ‘book’ is morphing into and engaging with the concept of ‘body’. The concept of book entails a concept of body; in this case, the book is a body of writing. This concept of book morphs further and with great ease into the active and processual concept of bodying. The book is always more than a body. In book writing as immanent doing, there is a moving away from the metaphysics of stasis that gives a simply cognitivist engagement with form. Instead there is a moving toward a fluidity of presencing suggesting that form needs to be replaced by forming or, more accurately, as Manning (2007) shows in her creative use of Simondon’s term, ‘in-formation’. Drawing upon and attentive to the emphasis in Whitehead’s oeuvre, process is more substantively animate than substance as fixity of Being. The book is always on the move. As Manning points out ‘the “more-than” is the very condition of the becoming-body’ (2012: 64). And so there is a sensing of the incipiency of the movements involved in book-writing in that thought in act is also always on the move. Thinking that is creative of book writing is concomitant and relationally articulated with thinking that is creative of book reading. The imagery of the dance comes to mind here as these moving bodies of writing and reading

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are constantly and sympoietically always in play one with the other. There are sensings here of passion, of learning, of thought always on the move. In this, bodies are always coming to life, bodies are always on the move in the vibrant frisson of thought and materiality: bodies always in-touch, bodies bodying.

Thinking toward writing as immanent doing: moving toward talking about ontologising indeterminacy On many occasions, a phrase I first read in the writing of Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997), comes into my mind, reassuringly animating and creatively engaging with the hesitancies of writing practices. It comes to mind when the pen gets on the scent, when the becomings of the reading-writing-thinking-doing assemblage are excitedly ‘in-formational’, when movement is here, there, visible, less than visible, rhizomatic, apparently unstructured, fluid, shifting, invariably on the move. I sensed from St. Pierre when she talked in her paper about ‘circling the text’ that this was OK, that this was a powerfully creative act in and of itself. Perhaps these circlings were not unlike those of predatory animals, always moving, sensing, tensing, speculating, trying something out, always in not-yet-ness moving toward, where moving toward was not simply directional and motivated by the perception of formed visible goal but in-formational, immanently of its own selfing. In these circlings of the text, confidence began to grow. Increasingly, it began to feel less and less important if the writing did not immediately form, if at times its energies were seemingly random, directionless and perhaps not even relevant or connected to the original intention of beginning and engaging in the writing in the first place. Around this time, I was drawn to and encouraged by a practice that emerged out of and was then in turn hugely creative of the collaborative writing with which I engaged in with Jonathan Wyatt. Emergent in the nascence of our early forays into collaborative writing was the practice of ‘writing to it’ (Wyatt and Gale, 2018). One of us might have an issue. One of us might be stuck, unable to write out of the restraints and constrictions of a particular groove and the other would say something like, ‘Well, just write to it, see what comes out, it’s worth a try’. At this time, clearly also influenced by Richardson’s (2000) espousal that writing can be a method of inquiry, a sensing of unlocking of writing practices began to enact. In this, there was an emergence that writing as speculative practice was potentially creative, that it could be productive, that, therefore, it could be a worthwhile thing to do. And so, as these circlings of the text move toward ‘writings to it’, this introduction will continue and end with storying, bringing into play narrative accounts that might lead somewhere, that might have some relevance, that might, as Massumi has suggested, ‘exemplify’ (2002: 17), which might introduce. In this might-be-introduction, the following act of storying might also offer an intralude, where, rather than engaging in the separating difference of the interlude, where difference is brought to the exchange, actively delineating the parts, the intralude will offer the opportunity for differentiating in the event, in the intralude perhaps difference will emerge.7

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Intralude In 2011, Jonathan Wyatt, Susanne Gannon, Bronwyn Davies and I began writing toward how thinking of collaborative writing in relation to an engagement with Deleuzian concepts might offer the possibility of writing together with Deleuze on an immanent plane of composition. In this, they sought, in the emergence of their collaborative writing, not to think of Deleuze as external to them, as if he were the authority who might inform … (them) of the correct way forward. Instead, they wrote into their emerging practice to make Deleuze one of them. In this way, they worked to open up and explore, with him and one another, new streams of thought and of being. In engaging with writing on and with an immanent plane of composition they wrote at the time in and of immanence, as a remaining within, not the individual bounded self of Cartesian rationalism but collaboratively and in relationality, within all life, human and nonhuman. In this, their writing moved toward a collective individuation and away from autopoietic individualism. In this, a sensing began to emerge in which, Deleuzian immanence indicates a conceptual space in which one seeks to dissolve all binaries, and the categorisations that divide one from another; and to locate the Divine in all things. On this immanent plane God and matter are not separable, any more than mind and body, interior and exterior, self and other, theory and practice, man and animal, organic and inorganic. The question is never this or that, but always this and that. (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davis, 2011: 2) Moving toward the realisation of these doings, there was an excitement as new and vibrant possibilities began to unfold, as the bringing into play of speculative what-ifs in preference to those concerns with the more moribund complexities of what-is brought new concepts as events into play in lively and exciting encounters of compositional world-making. Having Deleuze on board with them in the kinds of ‘creative evolution’, that Bergson (1998) had already imagined, they found that their new and emergent collaborative writings offered ‘creative affirmations … in new experiences, through which the not-yet-known, the not-yet-imagined, can unfold – can be composed’ (Ibid: 2). It seems as if that in the ‘immanent plane of composition’ that Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davies worked to bring to life here there can be no lucidity of time or place, no distinct identities, no fully formed subjectivities or selves. Concerns with difference and divergence between individuals, existent as separate identifiable beings are troubled and displaced by thinking in and with multiplicity. In this, ontology is more carefully thought of in terms of what Massumi refers to as ‘creative-relationally more-than human’ (2015a: 14) as a univocity, where the thinking that bring this to life is about the becoming of all matter, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic and so on. Further, it therefore makes sense to think less of ontology and ontologies and more about ontologising indeterminacy in ways

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that Manning talks of ‘ontogenesis’ (2007: xxi), where the Deleuzian concept of becoming has much greater force and capacity than the a priori rationalism that is grounded in Being. Elsewhere in these evolutions there is talk of ‘intimating’ (Gale, 2021). This is a concept that is created, in immanence, to suggest and work to enact an event/full form of practice. The concept of ‘intimating’ is used to bring to life experimental and speculative practices that talk with and to contingency and heterogeneity in ontologically indeterminate ways. ‘Intimating’ works with these ontological indeterminacies; it is suggestive and open to suggestion, its speculative mood is brought into play to generate potential in further movements toward. As Gale and Murray point out, ‘we world intimacy as an active relational technique, sensing that intimating can be (temporarily) known as a force in the play of bodies doing relationally, transindividually’ (2022, forthcoming). Enjoying the risk of what Massumi (2002: 28) calls ‘sprouting deviant’, it is possible to use this argument as a means of engaging intimacy somehow differently. In the practices of, what Stewart and others have referred to as, ‘worlding’, intimacy can be addressed not so much in terms of particular meanings originating from the fixities of a stable body of thought and engage with it rather, in terms of what it does, as a practice, to engage in ‘intimating’. The speculative and experimental sense of ‘intimating’ signals a doing in the world, of working with the entanglements of discourse and materiality on the boundaries and edges that are set between human and nonhuman relationality. In this sensing, doing intimacy, ‘intimating’, involves interfering with, troubling, and disturbing the lassitudes of habit that are grounded in a metaphysics of being and in practising an alertness to forms of theorising and concept making in the event that always promote inquiry into the not yet known. Perhaps using these unfoldings as partial introductions will intimate toward contingencies and possibilities in the not yet known of this becoming-book. As Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davis (2011) pointed out in this earlier work, working and bringing concepts to life on a plane of immanence is also less about the concerns and practices of the simply human individual with will and intentionality. Rather, as they point out in a passage taken from Badiou, it requires that you place yourself where thought has already started, as close as possible to a singular case and to the movement of thought. Thinking happens “behind your back” and you are impelled and constrained by it. (Badiou, 2000: 14) Whilst the thinking that happens in this way can create impulsion and constraint, it can also offer exceptional and exciting new ways of thinking and doing. Deleuze cites Malamud talking of the writing of Spinoza, when he says, ‘I didn’t understand every word but when you are dealing with such ideas it’s as though you were taking a witch’s ride. After that I wasn’t the same man …’ (1988: 1) It is these experiences that creep up on us and it is these experiences from which subjectivities are formed, not the other way around, as is usually and normatively assumed and acted upon.

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Deleuze argues that these subjectivities exist within the play between the virtual and the actual, always in movement, moving toward, actualising, in a constant process of change, acts always becoming and never fully actualised in a specific form. He describes these subjectivities as ‘larval’ (Ref) in that they are always becoming, in ontological terms they are, therefore, indeterminate, always in the process of folding. Further to this Guattari points to the need to engage with ‘subjectification’ rather than to limit our concerns to ‘subjects’ and ‘subjectivities’. As he says, it is not sufficient to think in order to be, as Descartes declares, since all sorts of other ways of existing have already established themselves outside consciousness …(r)ather than speak of the ‘subject’, we should perhaps speak of components of subjectification … (2014: 23) This helps to lead toward forming a concept of subjectivity which is, in line with the thinking of Whitehead, more to do with process than substance, which is inevitably and necessarily more than simply human and which is compositional and collective. The indeterminacies that arise in these foldings of subjectification can be expressed endogamously as folding in and exogamously as unfolding or folding out. In this respect, there is no generalisable finitude in the concept of the fold. In immanence, foldings are always differentiating, the processual play of endogamy and exogamy does not bring difference to its enactments, rather difference is always produced in the constant play generated by the movements it makes. Folding-unfolding no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution. The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and to unfold them … thus an organism is enveloped by organism, one within another … (Deleuze, 1993: 8) Folding/unfolding does not denote the play of separate, individual inter-acting forces, in immanence it is the processually dynamic intra-active energising of an always moving toward the always not-yet-ness of becoming. This ontologising of indeterminacy revels in working and playing with the ever moving and always changing focus of credibility. In following and working with a Deleuzian agencement, the agentic is always on the move, always differentiating and distributing along lines whose molecularity disrupt and trouble the tendencies toward to rigidity and fixity that the stratifying effects that more segmentarity lines would work to establish and impose. The agentic force of agencement,8 to add an edge to Manning’s phrase, is always more than simply human; the frictional play between force and form is where noticing and attention immerses with the prehensive, working with affect and leaving the individualising influence of emotions and consciousness far behind. In this respect, Stewart talks of ordinary affect as

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a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal – not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water. (2007: 128) And, perhaps it is more than this. There are also these bodies of writing. In talking of Dilations in the body of writing that they call The Hundreds, Berlant and Stewart talk of their writing as a kind of experimenting in ‘keeping up with what’s going on’. In this, they talk of Ordinaries (that) appear through encounters with the world, but encounters are not events of knowing, units of anything, revelations of realness, or facts. Sometimes they stage a high-intensity tableau of the way things are or could become, sometimes strangeness raises some dust. This work induces form without relieving the pressure of form … If our way is to notice relations and varieties of impact, we’re neither stuffing our pockets with ontology nor denying it: attention and riffing sustain our heuristics. (2019: 5) In the bodies of writing that emerge as the immanence of these practices begin to glow, shine with iridescence and make new patterns there is an ontologising of indeterminacy that is forceful in working on and with, in and through networking multiplicities of lines. This ontologising of indeterminacy is forceful in working on and with, in and through these lines. The instability of credibility is sustained through the constant processualism of delineation in that, as the deterritorialising line smooths space, the enactive force of smoothing works to striate and, in becoming, creates another line. These are lines that have existence in terms of desire. Their constantly ever moving delineations produce cartographies of invention and creativity. They are no lines that emerge with a desire that is based on the individualising and psychologising energies of lack or need, they are productive lines, they move and take us with them and in so doing they are productive of new and ever-changing bodies. In heterogeneity and contingency, these are intensive bodies, what Deleuze and Guattari call assemblages, and, what is essential in working with these bodies is a gaining of sensings that the continually emergent force and productive energy of these bodies is that they do not move into the extensive, they do not represent, once the spacing smooths, the resultant striation is, in its selfing, subject, in the constant processualism of territorialisation, to the intensive forces of further change, of not-yet-ness and movement toward the always not yet known. In their introduction to the rhizome in the opening plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that the rhizome is ‘not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.’ (1987: 12). In this respect, we can understand that rhizomes do not

26  An act of introduction? Introducing? Middling? Book beginnings?

signify, they do not represent and if they are seen to act in this way then they can be used as a means of representation, interpretation and critique. In their engagement with this in A Thousand Plateaus and, in particular, in the emergence of the concept of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari challenge what they discern as the overcoding of the work of Freud, where, as Colebrook points out, Freud had regarded the patient’s world as interpretable or ‘overcoded’, with all the experiences leading back to a scene of loss, trauma or separation from the maternal source of life. Human becoming could always be interpreted from the point of view of the oedipal drama. (2002: 135) Therefore, the geophilosophical nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s work always involves engaging in the cartographic practice of working with lines. These lines, as we have already seen, are not simply about delineating in simply proscriptive ways, they are not drawn to enable an elicitation of meaning, to establish a given practice or to interpret the world from a particular point of view. Deleuze and Guattari link the cartographic nature of this practice to the challenge of, what they refer to as, ‘decalcomania’ (1987: 12), the simple practice of copying or tracing one code, or text or concept from one setting to another. Literally speaking, the ‘decal’ is a ‘transfer’ which represents the belief, as Bonta and Protevi point out, ‘where one thinks that one can swap codes across media without changing their nature’ (2004: 75). In many respects, these mimetic practices of transference and the interpretive and representational perspectives and strategies that emanate from them provide the basis of language, critical judgement and ontological positionality so characteristic of the logocentrism and neurotypicality of established academic thinking at the present time. In support of the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to this, Colebrook argues, The notion of language as signification is one of transcendence: we assume an outside world that is then re-presented through a separate system of signs. We think of language as the representation, construction or organisation of some ‘outside’ world, so language starts to act as a privileged and independent subject or agent. (Ibid: 107) Clearly these systems of representation produce, promote and promulgate a metaphysics of being in which ontologies of self, subjectivity and identity have been formulated through space/time chronologies and have been successful in establishing fixed networks of tradition and structure which are used to not only signify but also to regulate and control freedoms of thought and action in many institutional settings at the present time. The writing, thinking and doing of this book works to trouble and disrupt these ways of thinking and the practices that are concomitant with them. In the speculations of ‘writing to it’, as this writing thinks with its own doing, as words

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and concepts on this glowing screen, in this darkening room, come to life and offer different concepts, nascent concepts, speculations and tentative articulations of what-ifs, its thinking thinks with, to, in and around against these networks of representation. After all, nets work in multiple ways. In a restrictive and ultimately transcendent sense, they can be seen to work to capture by enfolding and controlling. So, for example, the hylomorphic tendencies of organisational systems originating in the outside work to ensure that order becomes manifest over chaos, required activity is imposed upon assumed passivity, the inside becomes ordered and controlled. In her early work on the Politics of Touch, Manning points to the frictional play between force and form and, through the influence of Simondon, shows how ‘in-formation … allows us to conceive of information as a process’ (2007: xvii). The ‘politics of touch’ that she articulates with this shows how the hylomorphic representation of a political body forcefully imposes order to ‘free’ subjects from passivity and chaos. Hylomorphism works to reify a transcendent form of agency in which the network provides the organisational basis for constructing and functioning in a particular way. And so, in the ensuing ordering, the practices of ‘decalcomania’ work to reproduce by way of copying, coding, classifying and, what Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari describe as, tracing, by enforcing an ‘image of thought’9 through the actualisation of substance into established form. In institutional settings, such as universities and colleges, the hylomorphic ordering and organisation of the workforce, through the agency of hierarchies, divisions of labour, specialisation of tasks, in short, in terms of all the controlling characteristics of bureaucracy, perhaps in the sense of what Weber10 (1947) described, in an essentially humanist sense as ‘the routinisation of charisma’, serves to fetishise, reify and establish order in increasingly transcendent ways. Nets can also be seen to work in ways that oppose this. In a Deleuzian sense, nets need to be understood as working cartographically. In this, nets working, what can be called networking, involves the creative activation of lines that work to animate and bring to life the relationalities of assemblages. The constant in-formational forces at play in the creation of these lines create cartographies of molar and molecular striations that are always on the move. Whilst molar lines, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘lines of segmentarity’, tend toward rigidity, through their explication of transversalities of life and death, work and leisure and so on. In contrast, ‘lines of molecularity’ are more supple avoiding signification and mapping leakages and capillary flows within the assemblage. The former tend to suggest difference and the latter differentiation and, in the flows and transmutations of the assemblage, all of these lines are always creatively on the move. Therefore, the mapping of ontologies is always delightfully capacious with the potent force of indeterminacy. It therefore makes sense to think of this cartographic practice as involving ontology not as positioned and always on the move, emphasising becoming over being and substance over process. In the movements that are set in play by these thinkings in action, it is clear that practising differentiating does. As these movements are set in play, as these multiplicities in becoming are more and more evident there is a growing sense that interpretive and so-called rational forms of

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critique need to be forgotten or put to one side. Critique tends toward the setting up of one form of transcendence with and usually against another. Critical practice then requires that one form of representation is pitted against another and, after numerous engagements, a combination of interpretation and rhetoric will lead to the critically informed conclusion. Creative vision and the excitement of speculative exemplification offers affirmative antidotes to the narrow interpretivism and preferential representationalism of the making of critical judgements. Critical judgement making of this kind is the driving, animating force of the Hegelian dialectic in which the conflictual play between thesis and antithesis and the consequent production of a new synthesis which then, as thesis, is in turn critiqued by a new emergent antithesis and so on. The linearity of the Hegelian dialectic can also be understood in terms of its inevitable hylomorphic tendencies which claim to rationalise order over chaos in its apparent ‘March of Progress’.11 Whilst the logic of the Hegelian dialectic suggests ontological movement, it can only be understood in terms of the proscriptions of (supposed) developmental linearity and the imposition of a transcendent form of rationality designed to ensure that the dialectic continues to operate on and work to promote thinking and doing on the straight and narrow. So, perhaps we have already reached an intersection of lines where we are able, at least to begin, to forget critique. If so, we are also working to transversalise an animation of differentiation through an awareness of indeterminacy in becoming. In relation to this then it seems increasingly necessary to also respond to the encouragement to sense and move with ontology in relation to multiplicity. In this respect, what Deleuze (1995) refers to as délire is not to be understood as a malady or an impediment or some kind of decline from a hitherto rational cognitive state. Rather délire, as an affective proclivity, is a going off the rails of delineated rationality that suggests, in urgency and necessity, movement toward that which is uncharted, beyond the binary oppositions of either and or and within the associational entanglements and capaciousness of the always not yet known. Délire makes movements toward the ‘middling’ of things. In this, there are always encounters, life is always event/full, always in multiplicity, between the two, between the many. Délire works to animate troublings that are necessary in the destabilisation of the hylomorphic reifications of institutional controls and, in a more immanent sense, where it is referential to its own ontogenetic proclivities and movements.12 It also begins to activate an awareness of bodies, all bodies, beyond the substantive ontological limitations of Being by shifting attention away from the thingness of things and moving it toward the processual and eventful sensings of becoming. As Manning points out, Becoming-bodies signal a certain antagonism within politics of the state. This does not imply that a becoming-body is unaccountable. A becoming-body is accountable to becoming more than its self. But be careful: there is nothing utopic about becoming-bodies. Ontogenesis is a slippery category: it is that which is not yet. I cannot write the body in advance of its creation, of its movement. The body will remain in antagonistic relation to its accountability. (2007: xxii)

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And so this imbrication of the concept of ‘ontogenesis’ within these initial book writing movements offers an insistence to move away from fixities of being toward sensings with becoming. It necessitates turning attention away from the autonomous individual imbued with rationality and emotions and of moving it toward the diverse multi-dimensional relationalities of intensity and affect that charge and energise the individuating forces of relationality and multiplicity. The assurances and certainties at least suggested by ontology begin to give way to the emergence of ontogenesis and, in so doing, create openings and reorientations toward ontologising and encounters with the lively uncertainties of the always not yet known. Here there are thresholds, spaces of liminality, force fields and intensities. Nothing settles. Nothing is settled. Selves are unsettled. These spaces are always spatialising. The illusions of actuality are troubled and founder in the vibrant play of actualisation. Acts. In action, concepts are always being created. They are always in encounter with other concepts and in the encounter new concepts are in-formation. Force. Force escapes representation. It does. It forces. It is forceful. Forces frictionally engage and move with form: from this frictional energy, in-formation is always on the move. In a process philosophy of eventfulness and encounter, concepts are beautifully indeterminate; the larval subject is always on the move. Even the one you formed, that for a moment was precious, in the fleetingness of its immanence, lives on in ever changing in-forming, touching other concepts, in an instant creating new ones. With the indeterminacies that are alive in, with and around these becomings, the movements that are also, at least, implied by the use of the concept of ‘ontogenesis’ suggests that the writings in this book will need to be written to ignite other new becomings. From what has already been written, any suggestion of taking forays into the simply representational in the subsequent book writing that emerges in these pages will need to be carefully considered in relation to what such writing is intending to do. If there is a ‘re’ that prefixes ‘presentation’ the question will always need to be asked of this forming, what is its function, what is it doing here, does it need to stay? There is the edginess of a cusping here, precarity engages an affective lurking energy as words come together, as thought in-acts and as concepts come to life. Again, the words of Berlant and Stewart come to mind and help to nurture alertness as these words tumble on to the page. From a passage entitled Swells they say, We write to what’s becoming palpable in sidelong looks or a consistency of rhythm or tone. Not to drag things back to the land of the little judges but to push the slo-mo button, to wait for what’s starting up, to listen up for what’s wearing out. We’re tripwired by a tendency dilating. We make a pass at a swell in realism, and look for the hook. We back up at the hint of something. We butt in. We try to describe the smell; we trim the fat to pinpoint what seems to be the matter here. (2019: 4) In her ‘invention’ of the concept and the subsequent related practices of ‘post qualitative inquiry’, St. Pierre (2019) argues that central to inquiries of this kind is an

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‘ontology of immanence’. In the introductory stages of this paper , succinctly and with powerful rhetorical force, she offers a denial of ‘a social science research methodology with preexisting research methods’ arguing that ‘post qualitative inquiry’ ‘is methodology-free and so refuses the demands of “application”’. Counter to this she argues that as researchers we should ‘find concepts that reorient thinking’ and encourages that we should engage ‘concrete, practical experimentation and the creation of the notyet instead of the repetition of what is’. (2019: 3) What has been written here, so far, is written under the guise of an Introduction. In the ‘middling’13 of this writing, a great deal of what has been written was written after much of what follows this continuing book writing. Perhaps this is an indirect consequence of, a writing against, the inevitable linearity and organisational formalities of publishing and producing a book. So, equally, much of what has already been written here has already been read by the reader who has picked up the book and started reading from the beginning. Perhaps this inevitability that is implicit in the (apparent) linear structuring of the book offers, in a more oblique sense, a new, different and speculative means of looking at what an introduction does or can do. So, in many ways, this Introduction, what has appeared here so far, is quite simply a starting in the middle; however, in finite structural and substantive terms, it is not a middle, it is, perhaps, a kind of ‘middling’. And so, the remaining part of this act of introduction will work to exemplify the deconstructive suggestiveness that is offered in the preceding passage of writing. What follows is some writing that is included here to show how concepts might come to life, how, in fact, in enactive processualism, this writing began to come about. What follows is an experiment. It is an experiment that is carried out with the words of Massumi in mind when he said, As a writing practice, exemplification activates detail. The success of the example hinges on the details. Every little one matters. At each new detail, the example runs the risk of falling apart, of its unity of self-relation becoming a jumble. Every detail is essential to the case. (2002: 18) In this and in the subsequent passage of writing in his book, Massumi employs what he refers to as Agamben’s ‘exemplary method’14 that uses the showings of exemplification as a means of affirmative critique. The approach that Manning takes here offers a positive and healthy antidote to some of the problematic didactic and binarising features of Kantian forms of critique. Such approaches, described earlier in this introductory writing, ostensibly employ a priori methods of ‘pure reason’ to either impose a resolution of opposites or to assert preferential ascendancy of one type of thinking over and to the necessary exclusion of another. Also and in carrying this approach forward, the following piece of writing offers an inducement to go off the rails, it encourages a journey into the unexpected, it sets up an experiment. ‘If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime’ (op. cit). Here again it is evident that Massumi, in risking

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this ‘sprouting (of) deviance’, is espousing movements toward délire which are not simply there to challenge, critique or apprehend transcendentalist forces of conformity, rather he is offering writing that is making moves of affective force which are, in themselves, prehensively affirmative, speculative and intentionally experimental. And so, the following passage of writing is a version of a joint collaborative paper that was written and presented at a conference by myself and Jonathan Wyatt.15 It was prepared over a number of months, mainly, though not exclusively, through an interconnecting process of exchange: I write to you, you read, respond, write back, with the process being repeated until a mutual decision is made to bring the correspondence to an end. It is an example that is designed to illustrate how the writing that precedes this current piece of book writing, making space and time, right here, right now, was itself preceded by another passage of writing, another passage of writing that emerged in the series of email exchanges that took place over a relatively extended period of time, leading up to the conference. In this, the writing that follows is an example of ‘middling’, multiple ‘middlings’ perhaps, that, by way of exemplification, is included here to show that writings emerge not having to have beginnings or endings, introductions or conclusions. As this writing is written, speculative inquiry rumbles into focus: Where will this go? What will this writing do? What does the following quotation from Deleuze about his writing with Guattari say about the process that is ‘in-act’ (Manning, 2020: 75) here? And so on … And then we wrote a lot. Felix sees writing as a schizoid flow drawing in all sorts of things. I’m interested in the way a page of writing flies off in all directions and at the same time closes right up on itself like an egg. And in the reticences, the resonances, the lurches, and all the larvae you can find in a book. Then we really started writing together, it wasn’t any problem. We took turns at writing things. (1995: 14)

Re-activating collaborative writing in the fluidity of ontogenesis, becoming and concept forming as event.16 It17 seems as if the idea of ‘an ontology of immanence’ (St. Pierre, 2019) might need to be looked at in relation to the work that writers do when engaged in so-called collaborative work. Our most obviously initial collaborative projects were profoundly influenced by the work of Deleuze in his engagement with ‘between the two’s’. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, he points out at an early stage, We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being “author”. And these “between-the-two’s” referred back to other people, who were different on one side from on the other (2002: 16). I’m guessing that our early, so-called, collaborative work is littered with quotations from the pages of this book and from elsewhere and, as I begin to think about

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this as a possible writing project, some ten years on from our early foray into collaborative writing, it feels as if some form of re-visiting is necessary, both in terms of what we might have written and argued for then and in terms of what we have worked with in the intervening years.18 Deleuze and Parnet and Guattari were – are – our constant companions (as some of our ‘elders’, as I think we named them?). You introduced them to me. I remember buying A Thousand Plateaus and reading the first plateau (Introduction to the Rhizome) that day and texting you from a bench in Oxford. Excited, overwhelmed, intimidated. I still am affected in those ways, each of them. My sense is we have been re-visiting our elders all the while since, always returning different and differently, arriving ‘where started and [knowing] the place for the first time’. (Eliot, 2001) I have been looking at this page in Deleuze for a while. There are multiple starting points. No single one seems more appropriate than another. I will start in the middle with another quotation from Deleuze. Again, in Dialogues he says, people are made up of very varied lines, and that they do not know which line they are on or where they should make the line they are tracing pass; in short, there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight etc. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 10) Although I may not know which line I am on, or indeed, which line we are on, I feel confident that this theorising of ‘lines’ is helpful in making sense of ontologies of difference which are imbricated by the presence of selves and others. This very postulation of ‘selves and others’ starts me thinking, first of all, of the more rigid lines that Deleuze talks about. First of all, there are those ‘lines of segmentarity’, those lines that line, that clearly delineate, doing so perhaps in terms of gender, class or ethnicity and that, in becoming, are of course, always being destabilised by the presence and operation of those more ‘supple lines’, those ‘lines of molecularity’, those capillary lines of leakage that creep up like ‘the feeling of a gust of air from behind’ (Ibid: 15). This can happen each time that something feels sorted and confirmed by the comforting self-satisfying practices of representation, classification and categorisation that adherence to the rigidity that those ‘lines of segmentarity’ sometimes create. And so, in engaging with this cartography of lines, Deleuze leads us to those other lines, those oft-quoted and frequently misunderstood, ‘lines of flight’, those lines that disrupt, that shoot through like a ‘witch’s broom’ (Ibid: 15) and sweep away those striations and configurations that have worked to establish, fix, coalesce and bring together within the intolerances and inflexibilities of self-perpetuating metaphysics of being. It feels to me that we need to do some riding on that ‘witch’s broom’, on that ‘line of flight’, in order to address some of the important questions to do with the theorising and practicing of collaborative writing that have come to prominence since we last wrote collaboratively together. In this I think it will be necessary to look at and to begin to creatively question what possibilities are open for

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collaborative writing in what St. Pierre refers to as ‘post qualitative inquiry’ where, as she puts it, ‘the not-yet glimmers seductively and then escapes in fits and starts’ (2019: 3). In this, I am itching to get started and there are so many ways in which we can do this! I think from now we should always use the term, ‘riding on a witch’s broom’ instead of ‘lines of flight’. Lines of flight, perhaps also in our own work, has become too much a ‘go to’ notion amongst scholars who draw from Deleuze and Guattari; it’s become almost a cliché. It’s become domesticated. ‘Oh, Deleuze, lines of flight and all that’. It’s at risk of losing its boldness, its radical, urgent politics. So, let’s not take lines of flight any longer but rides on a witch’s broom, with that term’s magic, speed, and becoming-woman power and its capacity for upheaval and mischief. So, in becoming a body-without-organs, it is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in [riding on a witch’s broom], causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 178) So, as my first sentence here provokes, let’s start with St. Pierre! In this recent paper, entitled Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence, she does a great job in showing ways of how to free inquiry from the binary strictures of ‘two world-ontology’ and the stabilities conferred by focusing upon and creating a metaphysics of being. As she says, ‘(i)n an ontology of immanence, one becomes less interested in what is and more interested in what might be and what is coming into being’ (Ibid: 4). In picking up the monist implications of a such a line thinking and doing, I would also want to ask, in bringing becoming and not yetness into play, if there is also a need to engage with the Spinozist rhetoric of the question, what can a body do? Asking this question does not confer a concentration upon the actions of those individual bodies of Cartesian a priori provenance, rather it points to bodies doing in relation, or acting, as Massumi points out, ‘creative-relationally morethan human’ (2015a: 14). Setting up this movement toward also addresses Deleuze and Guattari’s oft-quoted contention that the smallest unit is not the individual of Cartesian rationality, rather it is the assemblage, that heterogeneous, contingent and always on the move collection of bodies, human and nonhuman, which is briefly present and then it is gone. I have written elsewhere that Deleuze and Guattari’s use of agencement seems to work much more effectively than assemblage in engaging and working with the fluidity and transmutational force of the moments and movements of these bodies animate in creative-relational spacetime making ways. So, it seems to me that the corollary of this concept making works to modify St. Pierre’s suggestion of an ‘ontology of immanence’ by setting up a new concept as event in which we can simply refer to ontogeneses of immanence. Such an approach works to free these movements from the tendency toward molar lines of segmentarity that ‘ontology’ infers and sets up an engagement with the capillary flows of lines of molecularity that can be inferred by ‘ontogenesis’. In her use of this term, Manning insists on wanting to ensure that bodies are not simply positioned as ontological.

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In her Politics of Touch, ‘ontogenesis’ engages bodies always on the move, always in constantly shifting relationality, always in genesis, always with the potential of moving bodies toward what might yet be to come: quite simply becoming. As she points out, bodies evolve in excess of their Being: they become … a becoming body is accountable to becoming more than its-self … Ontogenesis is a slippery category: it is that which is not yet. I cannot write the body in advance of its creation, of its movement. The body will remain in an antagonistic relation to its accountability. (2007: xxi) Ontologies are not fixed, ontologies are always on the move, and therefore, it makes less sense to talk of ‘an ontology of immanence’ and more sense to talk of immanence of its-self, always in ontogenetic in-formation. The use of ‘ontology’ presupposes an established category of being which runs counter to the constant variation and the continual not-yet-ness of bodies always on the move and, crucially, and in relation to a conceptualisation of collaborative writing, ‘always more than one’ (Manning, 2013). I am caught by this. Caught up in this. You write with energy. You write with that careful but bold argumentation I have become so familiar with. You take me out of where I am thinking and feeling to somewhere new, somewhere different; re-visiting, re-turning to, what is familiar, and finding myself landed somewhere else, disorientated. ‘Ontogenesis’, ‘ontogeneses: I have heard you, and read you, speak of this before but here, re-reading this – yes, in a café in Edinburgh again, and it’s now early January – after not having been able to write/ think/feel/sense with this writing, with you, for so long, so many weeks and months since you first wrote, I am taken to a different place. Caught up by the witch’s broom of your writing. OK, I’m going to pass this over to you with an emphatic (kind of) postscript provided in quotation from Massumi. I thought that this might give you something (else!?) to think about in relation to the collaborative writing that we do and might do in the future as activist concept making as event, in-formation; what our bodies can do, perhaps? So this is something (?) which is concerned with ‘coincident differences in manner of activity between which things happen (where) the comings-together of the difference as such – with no equalisation or erasure of their differential – constitutes a formative force’. (Massumi in Manning, 2013: 74) Mmm … Collaborative writing and the Ontogenetic constitution of (a) formative force; I like that! I came to this late. When I first re-engaged with it, four months since you sent it to me, this beginning writing, this onto-genetic writing, four months slipping from whatever August summer we were experiencing, it was the becoming-cold of early December in Edinburgh. Except Edinburgh wasn’t where I was. I was in Auckland then, where it was the beginning of summer, and I was in T-shirt and shorts, warm, keeping out of the sun outside my hotel. I was there a week before the eruption of the volcano on Te Puia Whakaari (White Island). I had texts from family and friends concerned for me, but by then I had left that beautiful land.

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Now, though, here, in Edinburgh in January, it is cold. But still, like then, I’m with your disruptive, eruptive writing – I don’t intend that to be glib. I want to intimate only that there is something in your writing that is forceful, and indeed formative. So, this is where your writing, your/our revisiting, takes me: to how collaborative writing as ‘between-the-twos’ does not speak to this notion of ontogenesis, nor immanence, sufficiently. It takes me here instead, to the dance we speak of in our recent collaborative paper with others about collaborative writing and activism, where you write: Each encounter is event/ful, each body has the capacity to affect and, within the complex intricacies of these movements, to be affected. Animate, animated, and animating bodies, ‘bodies-without-organs’, are existent because they are always on the move. They are not contained, they are always more than one, and thus bodies that dance are always in-formation in collaboration, always reaching toward one another, always ‘worlding’ (Stewart, 2007). (Gale et al., 2019, p. 236) ‘Between-the-two’ suggests ‘ontology’, and ontological separateness, even as it nods to what’s ‘in the space between’; and it doesn’t speak to the movement of writing and, in particular, collaborative writing. Ontogenesis, and immanence, in your writing, takes me to what collaborative writing does, what it can do. To how it – the assemblage – can catch ‘us’ up and take us riding on its witch’s broom. Writing back, reading your writing, I sense a moving forward, perhaps a movement toward. Writing back, I sense those meldings of writings where writing body’s indistinctiveness grows, and a distinctiveness of writing begins to emerge. Writing back, I want to be that witch, and not it’s popular, highly gendered opposite, the wizard. Writing back, this body spins with the vertiginous whirls and proclivities that have taken it over in the last few days. Writing back, this body lives in hoping that later it will be able to read these words with you, at the conference: reading these words to others and sharing the thinking/feeling provoked on this witch’s broom ride, giving words new life; infusing difference. Writing back, reading back elsewhere, I browsed Deleuze, in his book on Spinoza, quoting Malamud when he says of reading Spinoza, ‘I didn’t understand every word but when you’re dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch’s ride. After that I wasn’t the same man …’ I like that! ‘After that I wasn’t the same man …’ Somehow, in this assertion, he still seems to sense his trajectory follows a ‘line of segmentarity’, he senses he is still a man but something different is going on, movement has occurred, there are leakages, capillary flows, his broom ride is taking him elsewhere, taking him along molecular lines that trouble him: these movements-toward sustain the always not-yet-ness of this body-without-organs.

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So, in the creative relational comings-together of collaborative writing, constant in-formational forces unfold; pushing at what bodies can do. I no longer take the view that collaborative writing, as we once claimed, is simply a method of inquiry. My reticence about ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ grows; particularly when I read Deleuze in his writing of Proust saying, ‘Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think and to seek the truth … it is the accident of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what is thought. Fortuitous and inevitable …’. In the constant differentiations and minor gesturing in emergence between the where’s and when’s of these event/ful encounterings, on these witch’s broom rides that these becomings always affords, ontology per se, feels too stable, it tends to Being, it acts as a constraint, a constraining force on thinking, feeling and the life force doings of worlding. In sensing bodies in the movements, speculations and intuitive practisings of ontogenesis we can work to always have a sense of what collaborative writing can do. In these sensings we can better think of it with Manning when she talks of art, not as a substantive, sustaining body of work that signifies and represents (2015) but more as a processual force, a way, ‘a durational fold’ in which ‘what is activated is not a subject or an object, but a field of expression through which a different quality of experience is crafted’. In these sensings what is animate is not different bodies coming together to make a writing/reading/writing present, rather, it is, in immanence, about presencing ontogenetic multiplicities and the transversal, differentiating becoming of bodies, in action, always affecting and being affected.

After words (still) writing an introduction to a book ‘Middling’. Still ‘middling’. Writing an introduction to a book that senses what is being introduced but that hesitates between the swells of uncertainty, tolerating, no, revelling in ambiguity, enjoying working to make the familiar strange, spilling words, not sure how they might be cleared away, cleared up, how they would help to make meaning clear, more importantly thinking in the act of writing what will these words that are spilling all over the page do? Thinking with Manning when she claims, so succinctly, ‘(t)hought is ontogenetic: it propels more thought’ (2012: 8). If and when a body of writing appears from these thinkings, these thought-enactings, what will it do? The cartography that this ‘Introduction’ maps is constrained by the consecutive and sequential linearity of the numbered pages of the book within which it is contained. I want these writings to do something of the sort that Deleuze says of Spinoza that ‘he bulges out of place in all directions’ (2002: 15). In this, lines will be drawn, leakages will occur unattended, spilt visceralities will bleed and the casually unintended will come to the fore and, in this, all the time, writing, writing, the writing will be written, and the writing will be read and with each writing movements will happen. Perhaps, in the ‘bulgings’ that these writings attempt to grow, differences will be made. What might happen? It is possible to be speculative about where this might lead. Pages might be read in a differently imagined order, Acts taking place and appearing toward the end of the book will demand to be read at the beginning,

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the book will be picked up, flicked and multiple entry points into its pages will be created by the inquisitive reader, the seemingly demeaning status of the ‘footnote’ will be challenged and, like an internet wanderer, the curious reader will follow the whims of uncertainty, taking paths not delineated by the books sequential page numbering, thus finding themselves creating new cartographies of speculation and inquiry, taking off from where the footnote temptingly began … In the introduction to her writing to and with the concept of the ‘anarchive’, Manning uses a quotation from Whitehead. I sense that, in immanence, this quotation works to exemplify what it says. So, in this passage of writing, when Whitehead is quoted is saying, ‘Every method is a happy simplification’, Manning offers that ‘all accounting for experience travels through simplification’ and then continues by asking, with obvious rhetorical force, ‘(h)ow to reconcile the freshness … of processes underway with the weight of experience captured? How to reconcile force and form?’ (Manning, 2020: 75). This seems to hold and then to underline the reticences in expression here about force and form and the organising of this book. The processes that are underway and that have been underway for some time in the writing of this book, perhaps as anarchiving was having to give some leeway to archiving and as the need to artfully craft many thousands of words into some kind of shape was creating an irresistible pressure on its execution, worked to demand some kind of influencing of form over force. Elsewhere, I have written extensively against the constraints of method, about the neurotypical demands of methodology that somehow require the approach to inquiry to be carefully delineated and rationally mapped out prior to the inquiry taking place (Gale, 2018). The pervasiveness of such positivistic procedures can be understood as ‘happy simplifications’, wherein generalisations of experience work to construct practices that mask over and stultify the enticements and excitement inherent with the complexities of genuine inquiry. So, in many respects, writing against the formal ordering of content in this book, the driving conceptual force of which is to do with writing as an immanent force rather than as a simply formative and representational practice, seems to make a great deal of good sense. So, whilst such an approach would offer an evident simplification in terms of the formation of process, I sense that its outcomes would only be ‘happy’ if they are understood as an ironic gesture. Engagement with and careful avoidance of such ‘happy simplifications’ are likely to recur processually through the writing encounters and conceptual events that are constitutive of the mapping and emergence of this always becoming-book. The writing of this introduction includes the writing of an intralude that was prompted by a return to the writing of another book, Deleuze and collaborative writing: An immanent plane of composition. Always ‘middling’, the title of that book seduced a writing into this book. Written over ten years ago many of the concepts nesting in that book live on in the motivation to write this book today. The words in the title alert the present writing of the need for this writing to return to the concepts they carry with them. ‘Deleuze’, ‘collaboration’, ‘writing’, ‘immanence’, ‘plane’, ‘composition’ are words that all resonate with the powerful notes of a bell

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chiming out across shimmering, summer meadows from the tall, lichened grandeur of a centuries old church tower. Whilst the words might not change, thought is ever active; concepts are always on the move. Consistent with the writing and thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, in this church, from memory, I write in the visitors’ book the following sentences, sentences that are always ghosting, always teasing me: ‘(c) oncepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature’ (1994: 5).

Notes 1 In the emergence of the concept forming as event of this becoming-book, ‘knowing’ will be used throughout to forefront and to set in motion ‘knowing’ as a process rather than ‘know’ or ‘knowledge’. The usage of the latter will be avoided, except to point to metaphysics of Being and established fixities of the actual and the fully actualised subject which has become that to which practices of objectification have subjected it. This inclination leans thinking in action toward the precedence of process over substance to be found in the philosophy of Whitehead and which underpins the process philosophy animating the energising forces of this book. 2 I have used the term ‘thresholding’ here to signal movement and processual indeterminacy. In this preferential usage there is a sensing that the use of, what might be considered the more conventional term, ‘threshold’ would signal something more substantive, established and fixed and that is why it is not used here. 3 Manning uses this term as a means of turning toward a process philosophy which always moves beyond any holding of a sense of pure form. In following Whitehead’s working with process over substance she writes of the ‘more-than’ as ‘outside the actualisation of form: it never fully appears nor quite perishes, living on as the qualifying orientation for worlds to come’ (2020: 85). In this respect, therefore, to talk of the ‘more-than’ of ‘book writing, book reading’ is to talk of the book, not as something fixed in pure formation, but as worlding processually, always in play, always becoming. 4 The use of this term draws from the work of Simondon (2020) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and is used here to describe the externally originating imposition of form and order upon systems and organisms that might be considered passive, chaotic and generally lacking in terms of order and organisation. There are clear connections between hylomorphic tendencies and practices and the setting up of political systems and the oppressive operation of power. 5 The imagery of the witch’s broom is made luminous by Deleuze, when he says of Spinoza, ‘he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch’s broom which he makes you mount’ (2002:15). See also a similar usage in the Translator’s introduction to Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. 6 This theorising of lines will be discussed in more detail in Acts of Resisting the Urge to Transparency 7 This phrase is axiomatic. The writing in this book will engage with this passage on multiple occasions throughout its emergence. The quotation from Spinoza that is included here is taken from the Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements of Massumi, B, (1987), Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia London: Athlone and can be referenced. In this Massumi says: ‘AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage of on experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body (with

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body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies).’ 8 The invention of this neologism is directly attributable to and originates from Barad’s (2007) concept of ‘intra-action’. For Barad ‘intra-action’ is an enactment, it is eventful and, in this, it both signals and animates entanglement. Unlike interaction, where difference is brought to the event, in the event of intra-activity, difference is made. It is not a quality or an attribute that someone or something has, rather it is an occurrence in relationality, it is of the movements in that moment that do something, that differentiates. 9 In his review of Deborah Glassman’s translation of François Dosse’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Thomas Nail (2012) argues that ‘her translation of agencement as “arrangement” (and not as “assemblage,” as is more common) I think does capture the more creative or active sense of agencement and agencer at work in the French. The word “assemblage” in English tends to sound more like a random collection of things and less constructivist than an active arrangement or agencement. I do not know if this was a conscious intervention on her part, but the effect is a good one’. This is an important point and I would like to point out that as this work proceeds authorial preference for this translation of agencement rather than that of assemblage is intended to be conveyed. 10 As Hein (2017) and others have pointed out, for Deleuze, much of philosophical thought and action presupposes a dogmatic ‘image of thought’. This takes a form that precedes thinking itself and is of a form that Deleuze challenges in the emergence of his philosophical work. For Deleuze (2001) the new image of thought can be understood in virtuality and in terms of, what he calls ‘pure immanence’. Thus, this new image of thought provides a means of engaging with all other Deleuzian concepts in connected and similar ways. 11 Weber’s view of bureaucracy is thoroughly developed in his 1947 book The theory of social and economic organisation. The theory he developed offers an extensive engagement with the way in which authority and authority types evolve over linear historical time. This linear development begins with the affectively charged authority of the charismatic leader, which is then followed and taken up by customary and normatively inscribed forms of traditional authority and reaches its professional zenith of logic and efficiency in the emergence of legal-rational authority, otherwise known as bureaucracy. 12 March of Progress theories are largely premised upon the logic of the Hegelian dialectic. These are used to provide an evolutionary model of development which argues that progress is being made in all aspects of human life. 13 In a translator’s footnote in Deleuze’s Negotiations (1995: 186) Martin Joughin makes the following important point about the concept of délire: Etymologically, délirer is to leave the furrow, go “off the rails”, and wander in imagination and thought: meanings, images, and so on float in a dream logic rather than calmly following one another along the familiar lines of tracks of cold reason. But for Deleuze and Guattari solid “reason” and free floating délire are simply converse articulations of a single transformational “logic of sense” that is no more anchored in a central fixed signifier – Lacan’s “name of the father” or nom du pere (with its “scriptural” resonance) – than in any supposedly fixed system of reference (of signifiers to ideas and things, including biological fathers) that Lacan’s logic of signifiers supposedly supersedes. 14 Tiainen, M., Kontturri, K-K. and Hongisto (2015) use the term ‘middling’, ‘to address the relational coming-into-being of research ‘objects’ and knowledges at a threshold where subject and object, singular and collective, material and symbolic, and human and nonhuman cannot yet be properly distinguished or arrested into hierarchies, but re-constitutively interconnect.’ This is helpful in indicating of the term is being used in this book. 15 Massumi (2002: 17/18) engages with Agamben and the ‘exemplary, method, demonstrating how its usage assists in the avoidance of practices of application by linking it to concepts of singularisation and self-relation. 16 Gale, K. and Wyatt, J. (2020) Re-activating collaborative writing in the fluidity of ontogenesis, becoming and concept forming as event: paper presented at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Malta, February 2020.

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17 This was the title given to the original paper and the following is the abstract that was used: Collaborative writing practices can demonstrate that ontology is not fixed, that ontologies are always on the move. Borrowing phrases from Manning, it is possible to further sense that collaborative writing practices, in becoming and ‘ontogenesis’, are always on the move, ‘in-formation’. Therefore, in its presupposition of an established category of being, the use of ‘ontology’ needs to be challenged. It is a usage which runs counter to the constant variation and the continual not-yet-ness of bodies always on the move and in relation to a conceptualisation and practice of collaborative writing as event, as encounter with ‘always more than one’. In emergence, becoming and the creation of difference, collaborative writing is always on the alert for encounters, always involving worlding into the not yet known. How can there not be sympoiesis, making with kin, when all bodies, human and nonhuman are in creative relationality with one another? Ontogenetic collaborative writing practices involve not simply writing to and always writing with, sustaining an activist concept making as event, always in-formation. In the creative relationality of difference in emergence between the where and when, the comings-together of collaborative writing, a constant in-formational force unfolds; it pushes at what bodies can do. 18 The contributions of the two writers/presenters are differentiated and presented here by the use of normal and italic styles, each writer/presenter taking their turn.

ACTS OF EMBODIMENT Bodies/bodying/(em)bodying …

Introducing acts of embodiment that live with bodying in differentiation requires thinking of the body differently, of sensing bodies in multiplicity, always extending beyond the limits of explanation and finitude. As Grosz suggests, we need to come into relation with ‘the body as a discontinuous, nontotalised series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations’ (1994: 193/4). In this, these acts of embodiment engage writing that wants to keep moving on, moving away from those psycho-socio-historical narratives that story Being in the world rather than becoming that makes the world. Writing emerges that resists those conventional forms of body making and representation, writing that is always moving toward in-formational bodying as doing. So how does movement occur? How is it animated? What are the forces of activation? In addressing these questions, he found himself writing elsewhere, he found himself thinking and writing about movement and how these movements incur this doing with the body in differentiating ways. He opened a journal and found himself writing. In asserting an animated relegation of the substantive representational iconography of the noun and the challenge to the fetishising of the Cartesian subject, the individual existent as enlightened, inviolate human, bounded by the certainties of a priori reasoning and the intuitive fragility of the cogito, in becoming, he sees clearly that ‘writer’ is simply artifice. ‘Writer’ names the body and in so doing freezes it in metastasis. He knows that is not good enough. By way of necessary contrast, his reading moved him toward Manning’s conceptualization of ‘a paradoxical body’, positing body as ‘paradoxical’ because, it has never existed as such. It comes to form, it breeds figures, but it never ‘is’. Body is always a verb, an activity of bodying, a becoming-active of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-3

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paradoxical tendings – the disequilibriums, the multiple balances – that incite it to co-compose, dynamically, relationally, with the world. (2014: 178) In this reading, his attention is drawn away from the body, the thing in itself of Kantian thought and phenomenological theorising, toward movement, where ‘bodying’ can be understood in terms of event/ful/ness, of what Whitehead referred to as ‘actual occasions’ where, quite simply and in Manning’s terms, ‘body is event’. It is in this that he sees all inquiry taking place, momentary, in movement, always on the move; it will be, ‘in-formation’. His knowing is that this constant processualism shifts attention away from the substantive fixity of established, individualised bodies toward movement, toward paying attention to always shifting co-constituting, compositional processes, where each new knowing is a becoming, is in-formation’, is and as event.1

And if my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine …2 Deleuze says that, ‘Spinoza never ceases to be amazed by the body. He is not amazed at having a body, but by what a can do’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 60). I read in dictionaries definitions that offer that ‘embodying’ can be ‘an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling)’ and that it can ‘include or contain (something) as a constituent part’ such as ‘a national team that embodies competitive spirit and skill’. Is that all there is? Is that enough? Can this embodiment writing begin with words that tumble out without aforethought? Tumbling these unembodied words out onto the page: what work will it do? Embodiment is of the body … Embodiment is of the body in movement … The embodying body is not constrained … The embodying body is not contained … The embodying body is always more than one … The embodying body bodies … The embodying body does; it is in-action, it is enactive … The embodying body never pre-exists its movement … The embodying body is becoming and in becoming bodying is not all that it seems … Now you see me now you don’t … The embodying body, in action, is always moving toward … And so the embodying body territorialises … The embodying body challenges the fetishisation of the body … The embodying body queers the established fixities and discursive conventions of the body …

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The embodying body refuses the chains of the embodied … The embodying body refuses the stasis of embodiment … The embodying body lives to challenge the fixity of the noun and lives in the immanence and associational and transmutational fluidity of the verb … So … bodying …?

And here, now, writing bodies in event/ful practice3 The room, the time of day, voices speaking in tongues, heteroglossia, chairs, tables, the glowing image from the laptop shining, dancing on the wall, people, walking, sitting, nervous, hesitant, rearranging always looking to the next movement, moving toward not-yet-ness,4 always fragile in flow, every body in vibrancy, every body more than simply human, every body pulsing, in-action, every body in relation, always shifting, becoming made, becoming broken, on the move, moving toward, moments of movement; always as becoming. And so … bodies flowing, touching, not touching, knowing, not knowing, knowing in process, never fixed; bodies of capaciousness, full of potential, ready to erupt/ irrupt in the constant transmutational flexing of the opening and closing of relationality, subjectivity always in play, selfing never complete, always challenging subjectification; bodies with power in the movement and moments of contingent and heterogeneous in-formation, always composing, composting, making, re-making, always affecting and becoming in affectedness; And so … bodies leaking, bodies knowing, bodies not residing in the a priori confines and solitary metaphysical individualism of Being, trapped in finitude in the aridity of Cartesian thought, no, bodies always becoming in the knowing that resides outside the individual and within and of the ever shifting individuating connectivity and relationalities of the infinities of assemblage making/ movement; And so … bodies not simply interacting; bodies not creating illusions of bringing difference when differentiating occurs all the time, intra-active bodying … the silent breeze, unspoken words, a gust of air, the look, a touch, a brief holding that lengthens, touching bodies enlivening, embodying, mischievously at play behind your back, making moves when looking is inattentively elsewhere, bodies resisting the redundancy of that thought that thinks difference is being brought to the exchange;

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And so … bodies intra-actively togethering, not different bodies coming into contact, more/than/bodies in flow with bodies, bodies bodying, in asignifying rupture, planting here, planting there, the elision of human/nonhuman bodies, on the move; bodies of matter, mattering bodies, bodies of … of words, of people, of thought, of animals, of religion, of prejudice, of knowledge … cosmological bodies, naked bodies, entangled bodies, intangible bodies, terrestrial bodies, any body’s(?) bodies not ending with skin, leaking, flowing in, through and beyond, in synaesthesia words touching, ideas breathing, gestures dreaming, smells illuminating, colours echoing; And so … bodies always emergent in the anarchy and immediacy of processualism; bodies always knowing that subjectivity is of the event, not of the individual, is of the creative relationality of lines of molecularity and lines of rupture that break through the constraints and boundedness of those lines of segmentarity that work to identify, signify and represent within the caging confines of the fixities of categorisation, codification and classification; bodies finding selves through speculation and fabulation in fields of relation, where each new occasion of experience is a new life, where the rush of creativity enables the durability of eventfulness; And so … bodies lost and found in the pulsing vibrational force, energy and agential cutting of assemblage; assemblage becoming arrangement, arrangement becoming agencement; bodies talking, smiling, crying, dissolving in the comings together of emergent selves and nonidentifiable, nonfixed subjectivity, intra-­actively creating difference in the eventful multiplicity of each vibrant new encounter; And so … bodies always on the move, as bodies, as bodies-without-organs, never fully made, never fully organized, never subject and/or object; bodies in-forming, bodies in-formation, always in friction with affective forces, never fully formed, bodies-becoming, as wasp-orchid, each and always becoming the other, becoming one in always vibrating reciprocality, one with the other, the other with the one; And so … bodies living in the life expectancy of the not-quite, of the always-not-yetknown, eternally the enthusiastic experimental experiencing of the turn, the

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turn around the corner, the confounding moment of the surprise in the always crafting of new experiences; bodies encountering, bodies always forming concepts as events, bodies never placing concepts on pedestals or taking them up to heaven, bodies creating concepts that always trouble confining hierarchies in established institutions and that always live in the associational excitement of possibilities of the ‘and’; And so … bodies, becoming-animal that always experiment, that are always on their toes, that always try something new, that are always alert to the new event, that spot the peregrine stoop, that catch the wink of an eye, that sense the changing of the wind coming in from the west, that detect the wry humour in the innocence of a smile and dance and laugh lovingly in to the night, that cry when heart strings are plucked and that sense the tentative glow in the eastern sky as the sun comes to life and ends the night.

Foregrounding concept making This writing to and with embodiment offers further exemplification of ‘middling’. If, in this writing, the writing conceptualises, emphasises, forms and frames ‘embodiment’ in particular ways, then there is a sense in which the writing is ‘middling’ the inquiries that these writings have made into this concept in previous space making and over extended time periods. This is how a topic, something of interest, a research or pedagogical event, a concept, comes into play; this is the movement it makes, these are the forces of becoming associated with it. This is how the concept is always actualising, becoming, always never fully coming into being. The concept of embodiment, indeed, any concept that is becoming, in infinitude, always coming into being, is event/full, alive in movements and moments. In this, the concept exists in, and is creative of, thresholds, and in this can animate the processual movement of these thresholds in multiple ways. In this multiplicity, the concept is thresholding, always on the edge, contouring, always creating a line which, if only briefly, acts to delineate. In these delineations, there will always be event/full occurrences between the human and the nonhuman, between the material and the discursive, the literal and the metaphoric, the autopoietic and the sympoietic. Therefore, in the thoughts that are caught in the acts of this concept making there are always encounters in the making. Practices of ‘middling’ bring into action, are always actualising through these encounters. It is at the intersection of a line of virtualisation and a line of actualisation where one differentiates into the other, never quite the same, always, in the moment, on the move. In his conversation with Parnet, Deleuze said: Future and past don’t have much meaning, what counts is the present-becoming: geography and not history, the middle and not the beginning or the end, grass which is in the middle and which grows from the middle, and not trees which have a top and roots. Always grass between the paving stones. But it is

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thought which is crushed by these paving stones which are called philosophy, by these images which suffocate and jaundice it. ‘Images’ here doesn’t refer to ideology but to a whole organisation which effectively trains thought to operate according to the norms of an established order or power, and moreover, installs in it an apparatus of power, sets it up as an apparatus of power itself. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 23) In these encounters, it is the grass growing between the paving stones; in these ‘present-becomings’, it is the in-between that counts. Manning also asserts that inquiry should start with the encounter, that there is a need to ‘animate the threshold’: she refers to this animation of the threshold as ‘practicing the schizz’ (2020: 145). Engaging in these practices can be taken further. In this, it is possible to argue that the ‘thresholds’ that Manning refers to here are never fully actualised, as such. Thresholds are coming into being, they are, to again invoke Deleuze, ‘presentbecomings’ that always involve ‘thresholding/s’. So when we engage with and begin to put together a concept of embodiment, or perhaps more directly a concept of body, we are engaged in doing more-than creating a threshold, say between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, or ‘singular’ and ‘collective’, we are not simply creating a threshold, we are ‘thresholding’. Therefore, ‘thresholding’ is always on the move, it is always a practice that is more than what it was before. There is a sense that a forming of a method of inquiry, the nascence of a research methodology, could be brought into play here. That is not the intention of this passage of writing. There is always movement toward; there is a proclivity that leans into and with research methodology here. There is a thresholding that needs to be carried out, however, which recognises that ‘methodology’ is a singularity that is always mixing and in play with other singularities. These are singularities that work to make assemblages of research and inquiry always open, always on the move, in play and always in the dance of engaging in making the next step into the always not yet known. The becoming, the potential of the coming into being of this book has to contend with what the body of the book embodies. In this, the writing of the book also has to embody as a practice of immanence how to animate the refusal of the simply human author. How can a concept of the ‘human author’, as an embodied agent, be presented and formed as the writer of the words in this book and then, paradoxically, and at the same time be problematised? How can the book be formed? How can the writing of the book be conceptualised? Writing as representation; writing as immanent doing? A binary impasse or a ‘middling’ yet to come in the writing yet to be written? Here there seems to be a threshold; some thresholding yet to be done.

Book bodying? And so, in writing this next sentence, problematising comes into play. This is a surging, sensing, problematising that brings into life ‘thinking-feeling’ as writing into and with Manning’s (2016) concept and related practice of ‘research-creation’. The animation of a problem comes to life in the writing of the sentence that

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attempts to do so. Writing the sentence brings to life embodying; the animation of a doing that is embodying. In the practice of the writing of these sentences, the bodying propels bodies into motion, bodies animated through their doing as words come to life on the screen page and work to presence the question emanating from the reading of Spinoza that asks, what can a body do? The simply human author that frantically visualises these concepts, that taps these keys in urgent word making cries, ‘I am pulled’, ‘I am pushed’, ‘I am trying to field these forces’, ‘To bring them into play’ and then moves to relax and senses … ‘Yes, I am happy to work with these concepts … in bringing them to life … in trying to put them to work’. In the frictional, in-formational and forceful challenges of writing this book, the reader has already been alerted to the presencing of intentions to work with concept forming as a creative and always event/ful process. There is a fermenting here that has been in action, actualising, for a long time and so it makes good sense to offer up, to speculate and to work in-formationally with what a body is or might be and what a body can do. In this, it makes sense to work with Manning’s engagement with the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp when she quotes him as saying that ‘the concept … cannot be properly defined – “one can only give examples of it”’ (2020: 16). The brief, vivid, incandescent, spatio-temporality of this claim comes to life even more brightly when it is linked to Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infrathin’, which he exemplifies as ‘(t)he warmth of a seat which has just been left’. As Manning points out, what is crucial about this exemplification is the force that exudes from this quality of ‘leftness’: ‘The infrathin: the potentiation of a relational field that includes what cannot quite be articulated but is nonetheless felt. Infrathin: the thisness, the haecceity of an experience that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts’ (op. cit). Manning uses the concept of the ‘more-than’ in this work to enable her to field and work with the differential qualities of this ‘leftness’. It is a concept that is valuable when put to work in relation to the ontological indeterminacies that come to life in ‘haecceities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and ‘moments of being’ (Woolf: 1985). And so, it seems necessary and exciting to think about and to begin to in-formationally work with concepts of embodiment and embodying in terms of a sensing of this ‘quality of leftness’; embodying and what is left behind. The bodying of the body in action, in always actualisation, can be partly made sense of in terms of what is left behind. The warmth of the seat, the loneliness of the just empty glass, the echo drifting in silence with the wind … In this, I can feel comfortable working with Massumi’s practice of ‘exemplification’ (2002: 18) in that the ‘offering up’ is a doing of exemplifying, of say ‘Well, what if we see the body as …’. The offering up of the concept is not intended to anticipate or work to create necessary conditions for the existence of the body but it will be a sufficient condition for the doing that is taking place now. And so, consistent with the ‘more-than’ that pulses within Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infrathin’, Massumi argues for the importance of ‘exemplification’ within the forming of concepts as events in that, as he says, ‘exemplification activates detail’: Every little one matters. At each new detail, the example runs the risk of falling apart, of its unity of self-relation becoming a jumble. Every detail is

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essential to the case. This means that the details making up the example partake of its singularity. Each detail is like another example embedded in it. A microexample. An incipient example. A moment’s inattention and that germ of a one-for-all and all-in-itself might start to grow. It might take over. It might shift the course of the writing. Every example harbours terrible powers of deviation and digression. (2002: 18) Massumi’s writing here carries the vigour and passion of a manifesto. In this, he urges the writing ‘to not only accept the risk of sprouting deviant, but also to invite it’. This seems to be the only way forward when the indeterminacies and digressions that populate the world of creative relational doing are given life. Concept forming as event and the practices of exemplification that are connected with it encourage speculation and experimentation in and with the always not yet known. This concept forming as event is not intensional in the sense that it ‘provides the meaning of an expression by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for correct application of the expression’ (Cook, 2009: 155). Rather, it can be seen as being extensional in that it opens up possibilities for working with the concept that is, as Simondon would have it, always ‘in-formation’. In this, it is always alerting all bodies, human and nonhuman, that are involved with the concept that spatially and temporally it is on the way, it is becoming, it can be used, it has the, capacity to work for and with, in the here and now. In this, it is also potent in the infra-thin and in the capaciousness of that which is left behind. The eventfulness of concept forming is a more than simply human act. In the animate relational vibrancy of bodying, concepts prehensively and processually come alive and sparkle with new and vital life. Working with concept forming is creative, inventive and always more than simply human. The concept that comes to life as event is in the wink of an eye, is ruffled by the rising breath of the wind, is troubled by the step in the seemingly wrong direction and, in these ontological indeterminacies, the opportunities for speculation and experimentation are always ever presencing, presenting in selfing with relational multiplicities of human and nonhuman others. What a body is, what a body might be and what a body can do in the always ontogeneses of bodying is the life force of immanent doing. In the now you see me, now you don’t of these constantly moving in-formational forces, always in play with the many frictional forces of resistance, the actualising of bodies in movement, bodies in the moment, writhe with life outside of and always just beyond the constraining grasp of the languages and tropes of representation and interpretation. With the smallest unit as the assemblage, these movements are always animate in the inter, intra and infra relationalities of ‘heterogenesis’. As Guattari points out, this involves ‘processes of continuous resingularisation (where) individuals must become both more united and increasingly different’ (2014: 47). In this, the inter-relationality of difference being brought to the assemblage resists but gives way to its emergent intra-relationality, as differentiation acts and is constantly emergent

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in the immanence of its becoming and then, as these sparks of encounter create new events, their life force is always felt in the infra-relationality of the shadows, touches, grazes and perfumes that are existent in the always just left behind. The thresholds might exist within relational ambiguity and relative invisibility, still, their presence is prehensively felt and, in the refusal of the simply human, presencing, in all its more than simply human multiplicity, is taking place in the infra-thin, ever active behind attention’s back. So there is a sense in which we can come to the animation of the threshold in the ways that Manning suggests by ‘practicing the schizz’ (2020: 145) and there is also a sense in which thresholding is vibrantly presencing human and nonhuman actualisation. Perhaps in the immanence of thresholding and the refusal of the simply human the schizz practices us! Within the tentative in-formational framings of this reasoning, embodiment is becoming in its constant emergence. Bodies, human bodies, nonhuman bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of knowledge, bodies of writing and so on, body, all bodies engage in bodying. In the heterogenetic processualism that Guattari describes, individual bodies are always on the move, always becoming in emergence, in tendencies toward unification and always increasing difference. As Manning succinctly points out, ‘I cannot write the body in advance of its creation, of its movement. The body will remain in an antagonistic relation to its accountability’ (2007: xxi). In what Haraway (2016) might term ‘sympoietic’ force, bodying can here be made sense of as individuating kin making. In the refusal of the a priori, the simply human and the discursively individualising forces of Cartesian rationalism, the collective and collaborative energies of individuating force can be seen as dynamically capacious and potentially always coming alive. The vibrant energies of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the ‘body without organs’ inevitably come into play here, enabling a critical sensing of embodiment always coming to life, never complete always moving toward the not-yet-ness of what might be just around the corner. Their concept of the ‘body without organs’, appropriated and extended from its originary conception in the work of Antonin Artaud, gives potent life-affirming qualities to bodies always on the move. As Deleuze and Guattari’s biographer Dosse pointed out, the ‘body without organs became the life-giving energy for words and things’ (2010: 198) providing, in immanence, a sensing of bodies, always living and extending beyond the constraints and limitations of Being. As well as offering a critical thinking as doing, or as Manning and Massumi (2014) might describe it, ‘thought in the act’, in its resistance to the institutional structuring and established organisation of the body, the ‘body without organs’ offers hope. In challenging the stasis offered by a metaphysics of Being, the ‘body without organs’, in its processually actualising abilities to always unravel, dissemble, reconfigure and so on, signals its own capaciousness. In this, it points to its potential to be always on the move, resisting those forces that would wish to locate and set it in a place and at a time, to define its capabilities and to conserve its energies within the limitations of constraining politics of identity. In his aptly named Order of Things Foucault (1994) alerted us to the dangers of the discursive constructions of reality that work to frame, institutionalise and

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ultimately diminish the political energies of gender, class, race, sexuality and so on. In this, we see the ways in which social forces order and organise bodies so that these identifications become established, fixed and resistant to transgression. Foucault points out in this book how ‘epistemes’, in offering highly particular ways of thinking about truth, meaning and knowledge, can work to determine what ideas and points of view it is possible to hold and of these which are acceptable to affirm as true or false. Logics of change are slowed down and limited by the powers of discourse that manage them. According to Foucault, these underlying epistemic assumptions and ways of thinking determine and fix ideas of truth that, in turn, work to support and promulgate what is and what is not acceptable in society at any given time. In terms of the body and embodiment, Foucault’s thinking directs us toward an ontology of Being that is rigidly supportive of and constantly asserts the ‘epistemes’ that work to engage in the ordering of things that gives the title to his book. The concept of the ‘body without organs’ is active in resisting the forces that establish such limiting and politically diminishing engagements with ontology. Throughout the current book, considerable attention is given to and careful use is made of the way in which Manning works with the concept of ‘ontogenesis’ which, rather than thinking about and working with ontology in ways that ‘presupposes a concrete category of being’, posits that ‘bodies evolve in excess of their Being: they become’ (2007: xxi). At this point, it would seem to make sense, therefore, to create an elision between the concepts of the ‘body without organs’ and that of ‘ontogenesis’. There is a vibrancy of living connections that can be seen to emerge when the concepts of the ‘body without organs’ and ‘ontogenesis’ pulse with relational force. The movements and bodyings that their relational energies set in motion are animate in the creation of force fields of immanence as the brakes are taken off from the concept of ‘embodiment’ and a whole new energy is given to the related concept of ‘embodying’. In conventional ways of thinking about the body there exists a politics of substance and fixity whereby human ‘embodiment’ and ‘embodying’ work to designate and establish capture and containment. Here, perhaps because of the signifying forces of identity and subjectivity, the body holds on to form refusing to let go the securities their fixities appear to bring. In the orthodoxies of Aristotelian and Cartesian thought embodiment wraps up the body in sticky adhesive webs of signification, the organs and organisms of the body begin to atrophy in constitutive regulating forms, discursively capturing and normatively embalming decreasingly active life in the ordered codes and classifications of Being. In this, the embodiment of the body is ascribed through the, mainly institutional, practices of legitimation which work to determine politics of identity that code, represent and fix bodies in specifying terms of gender, race, class, sexuality and so on. The Being of these bodies is signified through bio-determinate forces that work to establish them in terms of the fixities of substance. In contrast, in his book Process and Reality, Whitehead argues against these logics of determinism and substance by positing what he call ‘actual entities’. For Whitehead (1929), these ‘actual entities’ extend as processes through space and time. As these are not fixed or established in any

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spatiotemporal way they are, Whitehead argues, always on the move, processually active and generative of what is happening in the world. ‘Actual entities’ exist in relationality and multiplicity with other ‘actual entities’ and are thus processually active in the animation, activation and the constantly shifting dynamics of change. By way of exemplification, Whitehead’s emphasising of process over substance can also be made sense of through Manning’s reading and bringing to life of Simondon’s concept of ‘in-formation’ with which I have engaged in other parts of this book. The concept of ‘In-formation’ is also linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s processually active practice of concept in-formation as event, and in bringing to life what they refer to as a ‘free and wild creation of concepts’5 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105) as a force that does. The creation of the concept is generative of a relational encounter, a force that is event-fully about movement; a concept also has a becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane … having a finite number of components, every concept will branch off toward other concepts that are differently composed but that constitute other regions of the same plane … and participate in a co-creation’. (1994: 18) And so, in relation to these processual re-inventions of embodiment and embodying, the bringing together of the concepts of the body without organs and that of ontogenesis, brought to life in the discussions of the preceding passage, helps to generate and animate movements of ontological indeterminacy. In processually always moving toward, it can be said, with a sense of intentional paradox that embodiment embodies (!) the capacity of movement to the ever always not yet known. It is as, in bodying as immanent practice, in the constant creation of concepts as event, bodying as doing is always in excess of how it appears: its appearance opens up speculation in terms of what might be a coming to reality. In this, it is also congruent to be working with Massumi’s practice of ‘exemplification’ in that the ‘offering up’ is a speculative doing of exemplifying, of saying, ‘Well, what if we see the body as …’. My father worked as a stonemason. In his work, he would build dry stone walls. In the field where the wall was to be made, he would stand beside a large pile of stones, granite, elvan, maybe slate, all piled randomly, ready for making the wall. From here, he would look across to the soon-to-be emergent wall close by. He would look from the pile of stones and then across to the wall, to where the wall was to be, looking from the one to the other and then, again, from the one to the other. His expression would be serious. He would take out and open up his tobacco tin, take out his papers, remove a thin sliver of paper from the little orange pack and place it between two fingers of one hand. Then he would carefully remove a swatch of tobacco from the tin, place it between thumb and finger of the other and smartly, without thinking, neatly roll the cigarette, place it between his lips, light it, take a deep drag and then look once more at the soon to be wall and the pile of stones.

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Then, almost suddenly, with determination and focus, he would move to the pile of stones, bend down and pick out the one that he knew he wanted. He would stand with the stone in his hand, looking at it, delicately turning it, once, twice, in the strong grip of his fist, all the while glancing purposefully across to the emerging wall and then, with a quick deft movement, he would place the stone in the wall. The wall called the stone, my father heard the call. The stone would fit perfectly. He would look at his work with what appeared to be casual satisfaction and then he would begin the process again. He would call this process of stone selection and placing in the wall, ‘offering up’. I would sit with him, watching. Occasionally, I would pick out a stone and ask him if I could offer it up. He would smile, nod and watch my efforts. It was unusual for the wall to accept my stone, but dad never discouraged my attempts at trying. The speculations involved in the ‘offering up’ of the concept might not anticipate or even work to create necessary conditions for the existence of the body but it will be a sufficient condition for the doing that is taking place now. In this it might also be said that the concept in-formation, it’s always coming to form is an exemplification of Manning’s (2016) way of thinking of a ‘minor gesture’ and how the gesture might be seen to act. It is gestural in that it does6; it might point to, it might suggest; its explication might offer a ‘what if ’, it can be all or none or some of these things: it is sufficient that it does, it has been put to work, that is all that is necessary. So, in paradox, it holds nothing, it keeps nothing in place, its embodying is frail, partial and compositional, in its doing, it is on the way. In its coming to life in the ‘thinking-feeling’ expressivity of the concept, its embodying is both luminous and opaque; a movement creates a bright light, it flashes and then, as it was, it is gone. This is not illusory, this is not a moment that is lost, that has not been captured, it is a living and a worlding as an immanent critique, it has shifted, it has moved, changing has happened. That is all. That is everything. The movement in the moment, the moment of the movement can only be sensed as embodiment as potentiality. In that flash of bright light virtual spacemaking is a happening; the actuality of the concept forming as event is part of, was animate in actualising. The virtuality of that spacemaking is also temporal, it is still happening; the concept is still alive, it is still doing, its form, is never fixed, is ‘in-formation’, its doing is eventful in its presencing, it is alive now, it is not a ‘was’, it is a speculating, fabulating movement/moment in the here and now: spacetime making. In this, embodiment can only be understood in virtuality, as such it is never actualised. Bodies are less likely to be understood in formation; it is in-formation that bodies can be more fully understood. Bodies are always actualising, never actual. If they are actualised in the movement of a moment, in the moment of a movement it is only so in terms of the brief incandescence of that tiniest moment. Now you see me, now you don’t. In-forming, coming to life in one form, is the becoming of life-making, doing in another. With my father now long gone, though completely present in ‘spiriting’ actualisation, and as an adult now older than he was when he built those stone walls,

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I have visited some of the stone walls that he built in and around the old Cornish town where we used to live. The walls are still alive, they are still becoming walls, vegetation grows in the earth that has gradually built up over the years in the small crevices that my father left ‘to let the wall breathe’; bunches of Santa Barbara daisies, a few clumps of vibrant yellow ragwort and, here and there, the tall sentinel growth of a foxglove. I have written elsewhere about the writer Amy Liptrot who, in her book, The Outrun, writes of her life struggles and emergences and of this I said then: Increasingly in her writing she grows to exist not simply as a category of difference that is somehow classifiable in referential and binary forms casting her as sane/insane, alcoholic/reformed alcoholic and so on, it is rather that she is always in flow in terms of her material actuality and the discourses and ideations that might be used to pin her down in particular ways. Difference precedes and forms her becoming and it is these transmutational fluidities that are the essence of these continuing movements in and through her life. Each new ‘immediation’ is agentic in these flows and is an event in the ceaseless worlding that she actualises with each fusing encounter between the interior and the exterior of selves moving on, in and through the flow of these ‘fault lines’. In the intensities and potentialities of these flows and growing transmutations she takes the attempted fixities of representational and identifying forms, such as ‘addiction’, ‘addict’ and ‘alcoholic’, away with her and in the moments of her constant movement, walking, looking, touching, she engages her body in doing (something with them). (Gale, 2018: 48) And of ‘the seething relationality of her ever-moving body’ I offered a quotation from Manning describing liberation of the body ‘from the pre-supposition of a form, demonstrating how a body is always alive across lives. The body’s individuation is its force for becoming, not its end-point’. (2010: 118). In these workings with the body and concepts of embodiment, therefore, it is important to move away from the simplistic reductionism and the finite separateness of bodies as substantive things in themselves. In this it is important to move toward the kinds of engagements with complex relational fields to which Guattari applies his concept of ‘heterogenesis’ through the ‘active, immanent singularisation of subjectivity, as opposed to a transcendent, universalising reductionist homogenisation’ (2014: 105) ---------------------He had come to diary writing. His book writing practices, in becoming, were suffused with diary extracts, words appearing from seemingly nowhere, passages of writing that were written not to be seen but following molecular lines of capillary movements they appeared, at first unnoticed, seeping out, leaking, flooding, he couldn’t stop them. Dylan’s cautionary words of apocalyptic becoming, oft-quoted, gleefully enacted, came to life again … ‘and if my thought dreams could be seen/

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they’d probably put my head in a guillotine’ … words, wording … sometimes it would not, could not stop; in these times he did not want it to stop. Coming to life in dream waking mistiness, the ethereal opacity of bodies bodying became animate in words that he had read only a few hours before: ‘(t)here is never a body as such: what we know are edgings and contourings, forces and intensities: a body is its movement’ (Manning 2014: 163). And he knew as he wrote in his book, processually, from embodiment toward the frictional forces that were disturbing the substantive fixities of a rationally conceived and logically proscribed construction of Being, that working with the energies of bodying were what were propelling him forward. Becoming … always into not-yet-ness. Wording leading to worlding … ‘Spiritings’ … becoming wolf … wolfing, coming to me in the night, waking me into half waking states, these are sorceries or are they sourceries? Emanating from where? No where? Writing like a rat, burrowing, furtive, scraping, scratching, becoming rat, becoming writing … He remembered Deleuze and Guattari talking of a strange imperative, pushing them to ‘either stop writing, or write like a rat … If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becoming-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf … (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 240) Words, warm pulsing to my touch, vibrant, alive, material … The sorcery of word making, becoming as the source of new words, animating the coming to life of a new concept … Words come into the night. Thinking of ethics. Thinking of ethics in relation to ethos. Liking the all pervasive affective force of that. I used to use it in my teaching. Ethos is ethics in atmosphere … affect. Ethics are constitutive of ethos … ethereal, ether? There is a body beside me, responsive to my touch: bodying. Spirits with faces, spiriting, faces, awakening, coming to me in dreams … write … writing … Meet people in dreams, meeting them through reading books, listening to music; they spirit themselves, their selves self to us, we see them in worlds of ethereality, where there are no bodies as such, opacity, only edgings and contourings …

Notes 1 The preceding passage is an adapted version of a passage of writing taken from Gale, K. (2020) Writing in Immanence: A Creative-Relational Doing? Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 9, Number, 2, pp. 92–102. 2 A line from Bob Dylan’s song ‘It’s alright Ma, I’m only bleeding’ from the album ‘Bringing it all Back Home’ produced by Tom Wilson and released on Columbia in 1965. 3 The following piece of writing is adapted and developed from part of the following paper: Dunlop, M., Del Negro, G., De Munck, K., Gale, K., Mackay, S, Price, M., Sakellariadis, A., Soler, G., Speedy, J., and Van Hove, G. (2020) Something Happened in the Room: Conceptualizing Intersubjectivation International Review of Qualitative Research. DOI: 10.1177/1940844720968214. The material here also forms part of a presentation

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given by Ken Gale and Jane Speedy at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh in February 2019. 4 Manning uses the term ‘not-yet’ to engage with ‘the very edges where thought and practice meet’ (2013: 35), the term ‘not-yet-ness’ is used here and throughout the book to allude to the incipience of this quality. 5 Deleuze and Guattari propagate a ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ with reference to habit. For them ‘the concept is a habit acquired by contemplating the elements from which we come … We are all contemplations, and therefore habits. I is a habit. Wherever there are habits there are concepts, and habits are developed and given up on the plane of immanence of radical experience … a free and wild creations of concepts’ (1994: 105). 6 Manning’s ‘minor gesture’ bears relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘minor literature’ in that the ‘minor literature’ can be seen to act in gestural ways. There is a sense in which the gestural touch of a passage of minor literature can move the reader, sending the reading off in another direction, energised by a processually individuating directional force that is enactive without an obvious originary, subjectifying or intentional source. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) concept of the ‘minor literature’ the gestural action of the passage of writing can be likened to the capillary flows of a line of molecularity, working to disrupt the solidities and regularities of the lines of segmentarity that constitute the energising force of the major. The minor literature works within the major and, in so doing, is creatively influential of its becoming. In this, Deleuze gives the example of the writing of Thomas Hardy whose ‘characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensation, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc of variable sensations … individuation without a subject’ (2002: 39/40)

ACTS OF PROCESS OVER SUBSTANCE

The acts of writing movements into another Act were imbued with the ethereal touchings of the writings that ended the previous Act. The sensing of ‘spiriting’ was spiriting the ontological indeterminacies of its selfing into the unfoldings of the next Act. In these unfoldings, the vibrant material energies of process were increasingly disturbing the lassitudes and the discursively constructed rationalisms of the perversely prevailing, substantive simply human body. Nothing remained fixed; the frictional play between force and form enacted the writing on the move again. He had been reading Lisa Taddeo’s (2020) book, Three Women. This was a different reading experience. It felt as if he was reading a different kind of book. His thinking was that this was because the writing fell somewhere between the writing style of an intense and emotionally mesmerising novel and an autoethnographic account about the experiences of three women at different points in their lives. He noted that, in many senses, the author lays her intentionality on the table when she introduces the book by saying in her Author’s Note (2020, ix): This is a work of non-fiction. Over the course of eight years I have spent thousands of hours with the women in this book – in person, on the phone, by text message and email. In two cases, I moved to the towns where they lived and settled in as a resident so I could better understand their day-to-day lives. I was there to experience many of the moments I’ve included. For the events that happened in the past or at times when I wasn’t present, I’ve relied on the women’s memories, their diaries, and their communications. I have conducted interviews with friends and family members and followed their social media. But for the most part I stayed with the point of view of the three women. As the ‘author’s note’ continued with a fastidious and detailed accounting of how she prepared herself for the writing of the book, it became clear to him, from DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-4

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the breadth and depth of her meticulously practised inquiries, that she wanted to achieve veracity, she wanted to find something out, she wanted to use methods and approaches that would do credit to the ontological commitment of her self as a researcher, as a writer and as a woman. Of acute relevance to this, she says at the end of this note, ‘I am confident that these stories convey vital truths about women and desire’. He kept saying to himself, ‘This is a fascinating book’, ‘Reading this is an immersive experience’, but to say that is ‘a work of non-fiction’ seems immaterial to him, unimportant and somehow irrelevant when held in relation to the flows, whirls and eddies of the experiences of the eponymous three women which brings to life the realisation of the narrative accounts of their lives through the unfolding of the book. The book is brimming, overflowing with what initially appears to be the emotional complexity of individual lives but it soon became apparent to him that the storying that takes place is deeply and intensely imbued with affect. He found the writing offering accounts of lives that are taken up in waves of seething individuation and relationality. In this, the characters of Maggie, Lina and Sloane are secondary to the affective atmospheres that conspire to both cloud and clarify living with what at first appear to be vulnerable women and unpleasant men.

Edgings and contourings? Affective atmospheres? Spiritings? … The writing in this Act and the concepts that will be invented and brought to life on these pages are emergent in intent. As the writing flows, there comes to life intentionality that is affectively imbued with the bringing to life of writing as doing. This intent lives to animate a writing that veers away from naming and representing and objectification. In these intentional forays, the writings here will act in movement toward the use of verbs rather than nouns; writing that lives to bring to life a verbing over nouning. This intent brings troublings from the emergences of process to the stabilities of substance. Therefore … Aware of the dangers of the forms of opportunistic critique that lie in wait in the binarising of process and substance, this writing will work with a sensing of process over substance and will attempt to avoid the negation of one in relation to the other. The writing will, on the one hand, work to problematise the ascendancy, fabrication and posited solidity of the substantive in much writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the institutionalisation of these practices in the neoliberal university. This problematisation will also be enacted to offer challenge to the practices of representation, interpretation and critique, that are inherent within this and to engage with the politics of identity that are often associated with it. On the other hand, these problematisations will also be used to illuminate the possibilising, dynamic processualism of movements and moments, that can only be glimpsed and ‘seen’ through the wink of an eye, felt through the touch of the lightest gesture and felt through the slight lifting the breeze that appears to blow from nowhere. There is a writing here against the conventions of traditional approaches to inquiry. There is a writing against method as it is conceived in the academy. In taking a lead from the thinking of Whitehead, Deleuze, Massumi, Manning and

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others, writing in this Act writes to privilege and draw greater attention to process over concerns about substance. In these respects this Act and the writings in the book as a whole works its selfing away from concerns to do with normative and hegemonic forms of critique and subjectification and works them toward movements, intensities and sensations, attentive always to and with processes that are already and always underway. With Deleuze and Guattari the writing here involves conceptualising philosophy as a ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (1994: 105) that accepts and promotes the knowing that concepts that ‘are not waiting for us readymade, like heavenly bodies’ and the practice of creating ‘concepts that are always new’ (1994: 5). In troubling the ascendancy of substance and the metaphysics of Being, it is at the intersection of process and substance that it makes sense to wonder where the human begins or ends. Excitement shimmers as anticipation of wondering where creativity happens and with what connecting with and using process philosophy makes happen. A brief account emerges, storying appears from nowhere, leaking from the interstices of linear past making and spreads with capillary energy, like oil on water; memory evocations find organisation in paragraphs, sentences and words. As the words begin to form, there is also the superimposition of affect into the research creative activity of the moment. Memory as a working of a conscious mind is problematised. All around the forces of affect rub up against the energies of becoming simply human: it is more than that. Affect frictionalises with the coming into play of memory, feeling, emotion, awareness and the tricks that consciousness plays with the seething, pulsing always active forcefulness of relationality and multiplicity. Nothing is simply human. This substantive thing conveniently referred to as ‘me’, is incessantly in the embrace of smell, touch, sound, taste, vision and indeterminately more. Affect swirls. Affect seethes. Affect mists. Affect clears. Affect is the processual force of the not yet known. Affect brings to life the pulsing dynamics of the inter, the intra and the infra, in the multiple subtleties and ever-shifting forces of these relationalities. Nothing is fixed. Affect is potent in cueing alertness to wonder. Wandering with the openness to the always more-than of worlding is the tentative opening of doors into wonder, where the perpetual fragility of knowing, becoming as knowing, destabilises and constantly questions the artifice of fixed worlds of knowledge. There is a constant struggle with the substantive and establishing finitude of ‘I’. As the laptop keys tap and the words appear in the glow of this early morning screen, with early winter shafts of sunlight lifting magical swirls of dust life in the emergence of this room coming to life, subjectivity is troubled. These words are being written. The writing of these words is a coming to life which is resisting the coming to life of the writer that is writing these words. The writing of the words is taking the life of the writing beyond the individualising and agentialising impositions of simply human subjectivity. Writing as immanent doing feeds on the attunement to the thisness of this. Momentarily the dams and the channels, the tributaries and the canals torrent with the incessance of welling up: words flood. Momentarily, momentarily … then the discourses, the normative forces, the prevailing substantive energies of

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the simply human ‘I’ return with their resistances to the dissolving, distributing and differentiating forces of processually active writing flow. Writing as flowing movement, lost, yet animate in the torrenting of the word flood, feels the force of the eternal return to a resisting of the barrier intentions of writing as representing, writing as interpreting, those writing forms that tend toward bringing the subjectification of ‘writer’ back into substantive ascendancy once again. Davies and Gannon’s elision of movement into moment, moment into movement, that appears and is expressed in their work, in a beautifully and evocative trope that works to enable us to figure out, not represent or interpret, how the concept of ‘mo(ve)ment’ (2006: 3) enacts the more than simply human. In the expression of the paradoxical complexity and simplicity of the concept, the authors point us to a more than simply spatiotemporality in which we begin to wonder why ‘movement’ and ‘moment’ were ever separated and needed to be separated in the first place. In their etymological conflation of these terms, we can sense a processually affective coming to life of force frictionalising with discourses in which the individualising metaphysics of the Cartesian a priori is troubled and the substance which its logic works to perpetuate creates an illusion that blinds experience from its processual, actualising indeterminacies. In and with the after of ‘mo(ve)ment’, post qualitative inquiries into the always not yet known are becoming in their necessity. In similar and resonating ways, Manning expresses a challenge to form and its working to substantively produce bodies in a metaphysics of being when she says, Form is simply what happens when activity moves toward a limit (that) always includes what exceeds it, its more-than … the more-than is untimely, outside the actualisation of form: it never appears nor quite perishes, living on the qualifying orientation for worlds to come. (2020: 85) In the production of difference through repetition, it is becoming in appearance that ‘I’ is writing these words. The words echo and the echoes bounce, resounding all around and working to affirm ‘me’. The intensities and presencings that animate the more than simply human begin to lose their force and sustaining energies. ‘I’ finds ‘him’/self casting back to earlier living, beginning to be absorbed by the insidious influencing presence and pressures of consciousness, memory and awareness. And so, coming to mind, so to speak, those earlier workings as a teacher, thinking about ‘his’ practices with students, with other teachers and with colleagues in ways that were not simply pedagogical but, at the time, seeming to be more crucially authentic and liberatory. Deeply immersed in phenomenological thought, liberatory practices and Critical Theory and influenced by the work of Freire, hooks, Boal and others I wanted my work to touch others, I wanted it to help, I wanted my work to be a practice of freedom. In these idealistic pursuits, I remember stumbling across a quotation by Terry Eagleton in a book entitled The Significance of Theory that, now,

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as I shift in thinking and doing differently, is still forceful and awakens something in these emergent writings. He says: Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural”, and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not see why we might not do things differently. (1990: 34) There still seems to be something here. As I work in different ways today, I find it hard to think of those who I work with as ‘students’. In this, I wonder who will read this book. I still work with wonder and ask these selves difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions. In my own thinking about ‘intimating’ as a form of doing, I find thinking being taken elsewhere, the what-ifs of these speculative inquiries making me move and sense and engage these worldings always differently. The ‘I’ appears again! The lid is squeezed down on the box and still the genie manages to wriggle free! The expression of selfing that emerges from these memories of the linear proscription of past is redolent of the always ‘more-than’ of the uniquely individual and seemingly evident simply human. As the ‘I’ appears and is expressed as an object of simply human consciousness that is apparently located within the embodiment of a substantive sequentially evolving self there are also, in the shades, tones and insinuations of this apparently remembered reality, intonations of affect, relationality and the processualism of becoming.

Conceptual personae Key to Deleuze and Guattari’s creation of the concept of ‘conceptual personae’ (1994) is the related concept of ‘larval subjects’ (2004a). In relation to this and the animation of connectedness it implies, as Whitehead has pointed out, ‘fundamental ideas, in terms of which a scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless’ (1978: 3). So, ‘larval subjects’ can be experienced as a multiplicity of perceptions, affections, etc., which are yet to be organised into selves. Therefore, larval subjectivity can be understood in terms of spatio-temporal syntheses, in which movements and moments briefly coalesce and where the plane of immanence is constituted as the field between which evolution and involution plays out. In this, conceptualisations of selves are event/full, always in play, always on the move, always animate in the breaking through of the thresholds that work to separate interiority from exteriority. Concept making is always about encounter, each new concept made is an event, it is enactive; as it is created, it makes movement, things are not the same. In this way, the creation of concept works in the always emergence of the plane of immanence, always making thinking that works in multiplicity and in terms of difference, indeterminacy and movement toward the always not yet known.

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In this sense, the pre-individuality of affective and intensive forces precedes and orders constructions of self. In presenting the concept of the ‘conceptual personae’ Deleuze and Guattari are not presenting a self, in the normally understood sense of the ‘person’, the ‘individual’, the ‘I’, etc., that, in common sense, we can have certainty or Kantian a priori knowledge about, it is the figure that precedes and that is presupposed by the concept. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘larval subjectivity’ is always pre-individual and always processual in the always ‘more-than’ (Manning (2020: 85)) of individuation. As Colebrook has pointed out, counter to commonly accepted notions of a priori knowledge to do with the self, ‘(w)e do not begin as subjects who then have to know a world; there is experience and from this experience we form an image of ourselves as distinct subjects’ (2002:74). Appropriating a Derridean manner of thinking, corporeal selves can be understood as somehow haunted by the always pre-individuating forces and energies of conceptual personae. In this appropriation, it could be argued that the way in which the person is ‘read’ is always populated by ghosts of spatio-temporal precession, making the metaphysics of presence animate in the fixing of selves, through practices of subjectification and identification. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s “heteronyms”,1 and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places. The philosopher is the idiosyncrasy of his conceptual personae. (1994: 64) Colebrook sums this up by neatly pointing out that, ‘we would not have any concepts without a “dialoguing” Socrates or a “mad” Nietzsche. The conceptual personae is not the author but the figure presupposed by the concept’ (ibid). And, of course, another significant example is the subject, the individual ‘I’ produced by Descartes’ cogito, that of a sceptical, doubting and very alone individual with only his own thoughts to provide this knowledge of self. What is produced by these processes, Deleuze and Guattari say, are particular ‘zones of intensity’ that are charged both by affect and percept. In this, we do not think about affect and percept as part of the individual, by way of terms such as ‘character’ and ‘personality’, rather as the forces and energies that, in relationality, compose and are constitutive of the figure of the ‘conceptual personae’. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘conceptual personae … are irreducible to psychosocial types’ (1994: 67). It is this experiencing that tends toward the production of selves that, perhaps more accurately, is what animates selfing. In order to engage in the important challenge to the creation of the autonomous ‘I’ to be found not only in but to also densely populate the orthodoxies of conventional qualitative inquiry in the Humanities and other subject areas, it is necessary to work to uncover and expose the traces and to create new concepts that destabilise this authority and relative autonomy. In relation to this and in his critique of

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psychoanalysis, Deleuze points to the actions of ‘desiring production’ and says that, ‘(w)hatever has desire as its content is expressed as an IT, the “it” of the event, the indefinite of the infinitive proper name’. He then suggests that ‘Guattari shows that it does not represent a subject, but diagrams an assemblage’ (2007: 82). In this way, they argue that, what they refer to as ‘the fictitious expressing subject, an absolute I’, has been exposed as being assigned by the hierarchy and the dominant reality of the imperialist signifying system, and a function of capitalist exchange. Working to uncover, expose and to create new concepts that destabilise this authority and the relative autonomy associated with it, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘principle of asignifying rupture’ (1987: 9–11) can encourage the shoots of the rhizome to extend and grow in multiple directions. And, as they say, ‘(w)rite, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialisation, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency’ (1987: 11). In multiple directions and depths, the shoots shoot out, tracing new, vibrant and capacious capillary lines and threads, all the time new concepts are being made. The destabilisation and problematisation of the dominating individualising tendencies of the Cartesian ‘I’ that is inherent in the neurotypical neo liberalism of institutionalised higher education practices and, specifically, in the Humanities and the Social Sciences and particularly within the practices of qualitative inquiry offers substantive challenge. The discursive construction of the ‘realities’ it upholds is ‘woven in with the long history of the Cogito’ (Deleuze, 2007: 83). As St. Pierre has pointed out, ‘Foucault argued that the emergence of the human sciences depended on (this) man to centre their projects – to be both the subject and object of knowledge – and so invented him’ (2019: 4). St. Pierre’s invention and emergent practising of ‘post qualitative inquiry’ offers a language and ways of doing that further nurture these challenges to the simply human proclivities of the forms of research and pedagogy that have operated within the restricted and restricting confines of ‘qualitative inquiry’ for a very long time.

When you can, you should … Christmas Day, 25th December 2020 After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilised language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilisation as logical premises. In some measure or another, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious. (Whitehead, 1978: 9) And so, the self that is on the move, in the more-than of selfing presences in the actualisation of the ‘mo(ve)ment’ expressed in the exemplification that is provided in these writings that began on a Christmas Day. Writing from points of nowhere on Christmas morning, darkness is still deep and yet messages appear from everywhere, lines begin to be drawn, lines cross,

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intersections are made, new points come to life. These drawings are creative of new life; life formings are all that there are. Messages on a screen, brightness in the darkness of night, ‘Happy Xmas!’ nothing more. This waking is a coming to life: nothing more. Nothing more yet nothing less in the immensity of the moment. The movement toward the writing page is capacious in itself, in its self, in its selfing, in its bringing to life, in its life/ing? These comings to life are enactive. In the momentariness of the movements of their existence they world, they do and in these wordings, worldings and doings they are existent: nothing more, nothing less. Bringing to life writing, writing to live, in this early Christmas dawning, is creative of monstrous writing. It is not about bringing to life monster, it is, perhaps, monstering … it is monstrous. It is moving toward monster but it is always, only ever becoming. Monstering is emergent from each new perception: as such. ‘As such’, that phrase that simply slips off the tongue, comes alive in the writing in these movements: ‘each new perception, as such’ alludes toward ‘actual occasions’ (Whitehead, 1929) and processually and vibrantly comes alive in ‘haecceity’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) only having brief incandescent life in the bright searing glow of the moment. ‘Mo(ve)ment’! ‘As such’ infers the possibility of visceral, pumping, bleeding life; it suggests a life out there, perhaps, a life of possibility, the tangibility, (yet not) of a metaphysics of being. A monster comes out of and breathes light into the darkness, life into the simply just living, out of the darkness into eternity: monstrous writing does this, monstering can be nothing more. These comings to life are nothing more than enactive: in action they are capacious, they attune to possibility, they lift life toward the always not yet known. Movement, always living toward the next moment, is the living-in-action of experience. Creating monstrous writing is not to be creative of monsters, creative monstrous writing is to write into the possibilities of ‘as such’. Worlding never creates a world; worlding brings to life the living toward of the perfect uncertainties of ‘as such’. In these knowings, in the refusal of transcendence, in the denial of knowledge, in the knowing that ‘as such’ will never be complete, will never be more than illusory, process provides us with an animation of substance. Life in these movements and moments illuminates what Meillasoux (2008) might refer to as ‘the necessity of contingency’. The visceral problematic of ‘as such’ encourages the vibrant speculative pragmatics of ‘what if ’. Monstrous writing lives in potency. The writing toward of the ‘as such’ of a monster is the animating force of the ‘what if ’ of monstrous writing. Speculations and fabulations open doors, that encourage new forces to emerge and, in so doing, disturb and enliven the activity of the quietly glowing embers of duration and event/uality. To talk here of ‘monsters’ tends toward a positing of objects and selves in substantive, absolute and transcendent ways. However, it is possible to talk of ‘monstering’ or ‘monstrous writing’ (Riddle et al., 2018) in processual terms that are not imbued with objectification or reification that would ‘denature’ what Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002) referred to as the ‘transcendental field’. For Deleuze, the transcendental field

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can be distinguished from experience in that it doesn’t refer to an object or belong to a subject (empirical representation). It appears as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self. (ibid: 25) In his writing of Pure Immanence, Deleuze uses the indefinite article to assert a life that is made purely of, virtualities, events (and) singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualisation following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualised in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen.’ (Ibid: 31) Therefore, in becoming, (monstrous) writing as immanent inquiry is much more than a simple definable or definite practice. It is not simply done to explain a point of intersection, to define a feature or to publish a book; it is, in immanence, something that does. It is not simply an essentialised or essentialising practice that works to define, identify and represent. In virtuality, it is an actualising process that is more than the actual. In this, writing is processual, it does something, it is less about the epistemological assertion of what is and more about the speculative pragmatism of what if. In this writing here, this writing now,2 writing is active, it is capacious, it has potential, it has an existence on a plane of immanence. In this, writing is virtualisation, differentiation and becoming; it is always in-between; in not-yet-ness, it is always moving toward, in event/ful/ness it is always alert to the encounter, in activation of the relational, writing affectively animates and affectively responds, it is a virtual that, in becoming, is always actualising toward the actual without ever being actual. The remembered body in the passage of writing above is a more-than of simple embodiment; it offers an exemplification of a body on the move, a body bodying within the vivid illusory life nominated as remembering. So, in this, and when writing does, it does so in processual actualisation: it is virtual within a life. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomeswoman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible. (Deleuze, 1997: 1) And so, in the tortuous emergence of this book, writing writes away from explicability and modalities that facilitate representation. In the ‘always in the midst of being formed’ that Deleuze talks about here, there are always ‘middlings’, writing is

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always, again to quote Manning, drawing from Simondon, ‘in-formational’, always frictionally working against those forces that culminate in the fixities of form. The emergences are fragile and they are tortuous because the immanence that the writing potentiates is always coming to life within words, sentences, paragraphs, the acts of writing a book. Working with these writings against is congruent with other writings that are currently facilitating ontological, theoretical and posthuman turns in the emergence of what St. Pierre (2019) refers to as ‘post qualitative inquiry’. In a recent paper, MacLure conjures and creates a concept of ‘divination’ in which she works to ‘agitate’ qualitative inquiries in ways that concur with the post-qualitative forces that St. Pierre’s writing is working to unleash. MacLure’s concept of ‘divination’ offers a speculative approach to inquiry that, in ‘drawing primarily on the work of Deleuze’, sets in play (d)ivinatory practices (that) would be diagrammatic, ambulant, cryptic, affirmative, and experimental. They would look for strange relations between the one and the many, in the shifting totality of the cosmos, and entertain relations that are always to some extent inhuman. (2020: 1) In this, MacLure’s writing is suggestive of a different approach to inquiry that offers a fitness for a sensing of the forces and intensities of immanent participation and more-than-human relationality. A practice of ‘divination’ seems highly appropriate to the more-than of the experimentations and speculations that are being offered here. The ‘divinatory practices’ that MacLure offers in this paper do not carry with them the fixities and terms of a methodology that substantively maps out practices in advance and then holds ensuing methods and practices within the logos of their predetermined scroll. These ‘divinatory practices’ are consonant with the Whiteheadian preferencing of process over substance that this section of the book is dealing with. In this, I sense that in their ‘diagrammatic, ambulant, cryptic, affirmative, and experimental’ ways they are always on the move, sensitive, always, in their doing to movements and moments, always attuning to the more-than and event/ ful/ness of the encounter. In this reading and putting into play of ‘divination’, there is a sense of engaging in immanent inquiry. It feels that, as such, it is more, in process and much more to do with fragilities and exigencies than are possible within the constraining rigidities of a methodological practice. To talk of methodologically informed practice feels far too mundane; ‘divination’ feels to be much more than that. Methodologies prescribe practices and, if nothing else, the writings in the emergences of this book, in immanence, write against the stale reductionism of methodologies. The writings in this book are here to work to a refusal of the exclusivities and the critical substantiations of essentialist approaches: therefore, the immanent doings that this book works toward and is working to create are much to do with what the writing does. In this, it feels as if the ‘divinations’ that MacLure points us toward in her paper are much more about the speculations that a piece of writing does or perhaps

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more accurately what it might do. In processual ways, it seems as if ‘divination’ makes connections with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (1994: 105), it feels as if its ‘ambulatory’ doings could be caught in the act of one Springgay and Truman’s (2017) walks, its ‘cryptic’ writing coming to life in the cut-ups of Burroughs (1992) and Gysin (2010) and its ‘affirmative’ approaches animating Massumi’s (2002: 17) use of Agamben’s ‘exemplary method’. A concept of ‘spiriting’ is coming to life in ways that its living can also be seen in relation to other concepts and in which it works as a concept that thinks against and works to avoid the dominating use of rational and cognitivist forms of explanation. In this, the concept of ‘spiriting’ is used not only to bring things to life but also to problematise the orthodoxies that emerge in substantive engagements with subjectivity, identity and the self. By linking MacLure’s ‘divinatory practices’ to the concept of ‘spiriting’, there is a sense in which re/cognition as in a processual re/ knowing of selves can be used to animate and further revitalise processual self-making. Such an approach can also be seen to re-territorialise bodies: bodying will be taking place in that bodies will not be allowed to be static, to remain the product of rationality/Cartesian a priori thought. ‘Divination’ and ‘spiriting’ can work in bringing bodies in to life; or, perhaps, bringing them to life in ways and forms that had not been done before: bodies in-formation, bodies on the move. This thinking is not to move doing toward the creation of substantive divine bodies, rather it is about divination, a kind of facilitation of bodying perhaps. Deleuze wrote a poignant passage of writing about Felix Guattari, not long after he had died, which exemplifies the possible ways in which ‘spiriting’ can also work to facilitate the bodying of a lost friend through the nuances and inflections that can work to affectively presence that body some time after the passing of that friend. In talking about how ‘Felix’s work is waiting to be discovered or rediscovered’, he says, That is one of the best ways to keep Felix alive. Perhaps the most painful aspects of remembering a dead friend are the gestures and glances that still reach us, that still come to us long after he is gone. Felix’s work gives new substance to these gestures and glances, like a new object capable of transmitting their power. (2007: 387) Implicit in the passionate embrace evident in this passage is the use of the verb ‘remembering’ which appears to be used by Deleuze to suggest a putting together again, where the bodying with which he is engaged composts his friend in through re-invention and reconstitutive ways. I sense that here we have an example of ‘spiriting’ where processually Felix is kept alive by the ‘affective presencing’ enacted by the ‘gestures and glances’ that appear and reappear in the ontologically indeterminate flows and fluxes of his continuing body-in-movement. In this, Felix’s body continues in virtuality to actualise, never fully actualising and, in so doing, making sense of bodying as processual rather than of body as substance. In these ‘gestures and glances’, movements are made toward bodies always in

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becoming, always becoming more than whatever they were before. In the writing as immanent doing that attempts to come to life here, there appear openings toward not-yet-ness that live through exertions and presencings of fabulation. These have the potential to do things differently and to come from elsewhere in unpredictable ways: realising this potential through the emergences of immanent writing, they work to trouble and violate the normative and those discursively regulated attempts to substantiate the ascriptions and achievements of simply human ways of being. With regards to divination, MacLure cites Ramey in pointing out that, ‘(w)hat is realised here is a power that comes from beyond or before the conscious will, from a nature or an affect that is impersonal, preindividual, and complicit with chance’ (Ramey 2012: 162 in MacLure, 2020:1). The spatiotemporal forces of movement and moment are always vibrant, ever changing, always stimulating in their continuing pulsating happening. A writing as immanent doing attunes itself to agencement and the emergence and relationality of new life. It can be forceful in energising the ecomateriality of what Springgay and Truman (2017) refer to as ‘thinking-in-movement’ where ‘we become open to stimuli we cannot represent’. In the coming to life of the unexpected and that which could never be fully predicted, attunement is capacious, it has potential, it does: It wakes sleeping bodies. It stirs human emotion. It lifts weight. It creates pressure. It brings to the foreground what was abandoned in the background. It lives with the connection to what was designated in pompous disarticulation as the ‘context’ and sees, in all its bleeding, leaking, effusing materiality, energetic and living animate embodiment: there are no contexts, only connections. Attunement is the always living with the direct and powerful simplicity of Spinoza’s assertion that all bodies, human and nonhuman, have the capacity to affect and be affected. (Gale, 2020: 468)

Spiriting The concept has already arrived. Its arrival has been barely announced. Without time to put on a mantle of explanation, it was put to work. If ‘spiriting’ as a concept lives as an ontologically indeterminate bodying then following the rhetoric of Spinoza, it has to be asked, what can a body do? What can the emergence of this body, as a fragile, always changing knowing bodying bring about, what can it do? And so, the concept of ‘spiriting’ has already been put to work in these writings. It has done some work so far, it has been put into a place, its conceptual in-formation is already in play. Its links with Whitehead’s (1929) concept of ‘prehension’ have been insinuated and set in motion. In the emergent field of play between these concepts ‘prehension’ can be made sense of in terms of an acute almost extra-sensory intuiting of the experience of experience. In this, what we might take to be solid substantive things are in actuality on the move, they are processual and are what he

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terms ‘actual occasions’. In this way, prehension can be made sense of as a pre-cognitive awareness where, in always moving toward knowing, there is also always a sense of more-than this brief, momentary and elusive occasion of experience. In the speculating what-ifs of these writings, it seems timely to look into what else the concept of ‘spiriting’, as a tentative body of knowing can do. So far it seems to have worked in attunement. Its mercurial elusivity has clouded into the misty depths of Whitehead’s concept of ‘prehension’, in these elisions with the prehensive there is a sensing that ‘spiriting’ is on the move, it has more work to do. This alertness to an attunement with spiriting and its tentative conceptual connections with ‘prehension’ evokes further speculative doing. In making a start on this, it is clear that by invoking the capabilities and potential that are present in the concept of ‘spiriting’, the simply ontological account of the substantive of the Enlightenment individual is troubled and displaced by the indeterminacies that animate ontogenetic becomings. And so what might these workings with this concept of ‘spiriting’ set in play? ‘Spiriting’ involves a sensing of things to come, things that are now and things that have been. ‘Spiriting’ does not rest easily with the mention of ‘things’ and yet things can be inflected and constitutive of worlds that might have been, worlds that are now and worlds yet to come. It is not just that ‘spiriting’ brings to life the simply human; spiriting the objects of encounter changes the encounter, differentiates and also gives the nonhuman new life. Stepanova’s bringing to life, her re-compositioning, her ‘immediation’ (Massumi 2015a: 114) of what was delineated as past, vibrantly comes to life in a now as she describes ‘the thick undercoat of sounds and smells, the coincidences and concurrences’, that leads her back to her family’s past and to the certainty of ‘how it was back then, the tram routes, the stockings that sagged around the knees, the music from the loudspeaker’ (2021: 99). Her ‘spiritings’ of the everyday necessitates and impels a knowing of a time and recomposes its existence in the now. The simple exposition of the mundane detail of life spirits a worlding that moves into the vibrant more-than of becoming and affect. The affective force of these spiritings exceeds their spare and simple accounting for. As Deleuze says, ‘(n)o more than the transcendental field is defined by consciousness by a subject or an object that is able to contain it … We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else’ (2001: 27). ‘Spiriting’ is satisfied with the flighting impermanence of ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ (Gale, 2021), of bodies slipping into and out of vision, of bodies living in the brief perceptibility of the imperceptible, of bodies briefly and vividly incandescent in ‘the half submerged presence of occult and esoteric thought’ (MacLure, 2020: 1), of the humming affective attunement to bodies just out of reach, just in touch, barely sensed, yet exotic in the always eventful gliding swirl of the dance. As we see from the example provided earlier, for Deleuze the elusive and mercurial energies of ‘spiriting’ provided a means of enabling him to continue to be in becoming with Guattari, even though his mortal body had passed on. The elusive and mercurial energies of ‘spiriting’ were animated through ‘gestures and glances’

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that continued to break through the permanence of loss and to keep his friend alive, actualising despite a seeming absence of substantive presence. ‘Spiriting’ animates a life on the run: it is the line of flight that is not wishing for escape but is rushing to break though. ‘Spiriting’ is monstrous and momentous as it moves the sleeping body of ‘intimating’ (Gale, 2021) to enliven and spark speculation and fabulation as research creative energetic doings. ‘Spiriting’ prompts and nudges into life the presencing of ‘intimating’ in ways that work to further intensify the excitement and breathlessness of the process. In these promptings and nudgings, the concept of ‘spiriting’ also moves in closer connection with that of ‘prehension’ which together limn with a doing of intimacy which I have referred to as ‘intimating’ (Gale, 2021). The latter involves an interference, a troubling, and a moving toward a suggestion of ‘more-than’ (Manning 2016: 29) always making uneasy the lassitudes of habit that, happily simplify and work to ground and sustain metaphysics of individuality and Being. In this ‘intimating’, in practising an alertness to theorising as doing and concept making in the event, always has the potential to promote inquiries into the not yet known. As these words vigorously presence on the living body of this laptop screen, I am vividly aware of Deleuze. He is never far away. He spirits his selfing into my worlding, writing, bodying. I listen to him talking to Claire Parnet and revel in his words when he says, ‘(t)he minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always the assemblage that produces utterances’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 51). It is the assemblage that is vitally animate as these wordings fall into sense-making, space-making place. It is the contingency of the assemblage that allows chance to play its part, as words appear, words flow and words work to connect one with another. It is the heterogeneity of the assemblage that that brings together vibrant concept forming as event/ful doing so that ‘spiriting’ imbricates with ‘prehension’, imbricates with ‘intimating’, imbricates with ‘becoming-animal’ and so on. Further, it is ‘heterogenesis’ (Guattari, 2014: 34) that sees these imbricating doings creating new concepts, forming new assemblages as this very tap, tap, tapping new writing in-forms its selfing on the moving page, glowing in front of these eyes. It feels that in these precious moments of immanent doing it is as Woolf (1985) would have it, ‘the pen gets on the scent’. It feels as Manning says that ‘(t)he bodyings crafted through neurodiverse intercession, the life that moves through the acts that resist the neurotypicality of knowledge production, create new diagrams for thinking. Power begins to circulate differently’ (2020: 221). It feels as I write these words into new tentative and trembling life, as I bring one concept to bear upon another and, in so doing, differentiate and invent those concepts, in infinitude, as concepts anew, the ground is moving under me, this ‘I’ is beginning to feel displaced, perhaps even, misplaced, as this ever emergent amalgam of concept making as event into the emergence of assemblage making now you see me, now you don’t, takes place beyond me, as the keys tap, tap, tap, as the light from this lamp glows, as the ringing in my ears is the concert that plays, as the words tumble out, making sentences, passages of writing that I can barely control, as I

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glance to one side and read Deleuze talking with Guattari, their words moving back and forth, excitedly making concepts as they speak and one saying to the other, in the vibrant in-between-the-two-ness of their collective exchange, the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage of enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). (1987: 84) And so as I write with this order word ‘I’ prefacing the words that immanently tumble here in their becoming, there is also a force that is driving this on. These concepts tentatively meld together, in-formationally melding new concepts that stutter with new life. As Massumi says, ‘It is not enough for concepts … to be ontological. They must be ontogenetic: they must be equal to emergence.’ (2002: 8) So the ‘spiriting’ that takes place, that troubles and takes over from the containing strictures of identity and subjectivity, is animated, perhaps motivated, by the ‘intimating’ that is suggestive of the ‘more-than’ (Manning (2016: 29)), that speculates in the expectancy and excitement of what-if and that stands on tiptoe and is fuelled by the alertness to the delicacies of the frisson of moment becoming movement, movement becoming moment … In the collective, contingent, heterogenesis of these assemblage becomings, where the concepts of ‘spiriting’ and ‘intimating’ work in sympoietic togetherness, in multiplicity and relationality to produce new events and encounters in the exciting pathways that processual dynamics enacts, I sense also the possibility of bringing MacLure’s (Ref) proposal for ‘divination as a speculative method’ into play with the collective enunciations that this assemblage making is experimenting. In this, I would argue and attempt to exemplify that these concepts are not separate in having independent lives of their own. Rather they can be understood as having and, indeed, as nurturing an immanent relationality, in which each term, to varying extents and intensities, is contained within and is creative of the other. As MacLure says, ‘there is a need for new methodologies fit for sensing the forces and intensities of immanent participation and more-than-human relationality’ (2020: 1) in the perambulatory unfoldings of ontological and posthuman turn and re/turn that are currently beginning to create the move to post qualitative inquiries in the so-called Humanities and Social Sciences at the present time. Whilst question marks can be appended to the necessity for creating new ‘methodologies’ per se, there is clearly an emergence of thinking in the act from many sources of post-qualitative writing and inquiry that is needed to trouble the ascendancies of

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qualitative inquiry at the present time. Hein argues that a ‘fully immanent inquiry rejects all forms of methodological transcendence’ and that therefore, it, avoids relying on the authority of any existing qualitative (or other) methodological structures such as paradigms, methodologies, methodological concepts, methodological techniques, and methodological practices. It also avoids all binary opposites and universals and fosters experimentation and creation of the new. (2021: 512) In the writing here that writes to posit writing as process as being of greater value than writing that writes to the creation of substance, there is no attempt to binarise and to create a preferential two-dimensional approach. In the workings of an ontology that makes moves away from representation, such an exclusive dualistic procedure would be difficult to sustain. On the other hand, a working toward absolute immanence in the workings of writing this book would also create huge challenges and problems to the integrity and coherence of what the book is attempting to achieve. There is undoubtedly a high level of incommensurability between qualitative inquiry as it is currently practised and post-qualitative inquiry in its emergence. The bringing to life of this book is unequivocal in its productive desire to argue for the necessity of engaging in a refusal of the concepts and categories of conventional, simply human-centred, qualitative inquiry and its associated approaches to research that are grounded in the methods and practices of methodological transcendence. I have written against a reliance upon and a use of qualitative inquiry over a long period of time. Its influence upon me is insidious, pervasive and discursively powerful in its attempts to keep me on the straight and narrow of the orthodoxies and traditions of conventional qualitative approaches and practices. It is almost as if engaging in this ‘writing against’ places the writer on an outside that is created by the normative forces that the writing writes against. I have suggested a ‘madness as methodology’ (Gale, 2018) with its central concept of ‘methodogenesis’ as a means of taking qualitative inquiry to task. I have worked with Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ontology and their refusal of the simply human I. In this, I share their productive desire that the ‘I’ is becoming in its imperceptibility: I work to make it disappear and at the same time write a phrase that begins with ‘I’. Surrounded by colleagues and friends who write with autoethnography and who describe their work as autoethnographic, I have struggled in my ‘writing against’. Ten years or more ago I worked with Jonathan Wyatt on the invention of a concept that would help in this resistance and that would assist in the writing against the propositions and methodological tenets that qualitative inquiry and autoethnography, in particular, was grounded upon. In the sharing and the writing of the concept, we offered various conference presentations and made suggestions about how it could be put into use. The concept can be summarised as a space in which we worked,

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to elude and trouble the potential discursive construction that the naming of a category of difference can create and, at the same time, offer a mode of practice that always brings the materiality of relational space into play as a method of inquiry. (Gale and Wyatt, 2013: 139) For a while the concept, ‘assemblage/ethnography’ (Wyatt and Gale, 2013a, 2013b, Gale and Wyatt, 2013) worked for us, it seemed to have some purchase, we plugged it in to our practices, we worked against its lumpy and somewhat cumbersome elision, we tried to use it as a means of ‘getting lost’ (Lather, 2007) and of ‘getting free of one self ’ (Foucault, 2000). And, as we wrote at the time, as well as engaging in a Deleuzian practice of concept making as event, (w)e take a lead from Haraway (2000) in seeing this as a space of diffraction and interference, rather than one of reflection or reflexivity, from Barad (2007) in attempting to work with the ‘entanglements’ that inhere within, through and around the ‘intra-actions’ of material and discursive exchange (and) from Thrift in working with a ‘processual sensualism that a material schematism provides’. (2006: 139, Op. cit) (Gale and Wyatt, 2013: 139) Pushing against the human centricity of qualitative inquiry is difficult. Pushing against the forces that work to sustain the authority of the ‘ethnographic “I”’ (Ellis, 2004) is a challenge that is difficult but is one that also needs to be sustained. Searching for what Lather referred to as ‘knowledge that induces breakdowns in experience (where) accepting loss becomes the very force of learning … is the promise of thinking and doing otherwise’ (ibid: 13). Pushing against those ‘happy simplifications’ (Ref in Manning, 2020) it is the thinking and doing that is difficult and it is the thinking and doing that has to be done.

Working with the postqualitative … Moten and Harney (2013) in their study of the ‘undercommons’ offer significant engagement with the contemporary university and the institutional forms of inquiry and pedagogy that it increasingly appears to offer. Their challenge is also to forms of transcendence, in terms of the ways in which knowledge is generalised, and in how these generalisations are narrowly framed within disciplinary practices that are becoming more and more responsible for defining what is and what is not relevant, in terms of form and content of knowledge and in terms of what form of research into this might be carried out. As Manning points out in her discussion of Moten and Harney’s work, (t)he political opening that lurks here is built of a procedural architecture called the undercommons … The undercommons is not a given site, not a place

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predefined, not even a recognisable enclave we could return to having found it once. The undercommons is an emergent collectivity that is sited in the encounter. Allied to the minor gesture, it is an activator of a tendency more than it is an offering of a commonality. What makes it commons is not the existing gathering but its speculative presence as an ecology of practices. The undercommons is a tentative holding in place of fragile comings-into-relation, physical and virtual, that create the potential to reorient fields of life-living – a belief in the ineffable and its powers of resistance keep it alive.’ (2016: 8) The ‘emergent collectivity’ and the ‘speculative presence as an ecology of practices’ that is the ‘undercommons’ offers a clear and resounding exemplification of its capaciousness as a process philosophy and which also draws from and extends Whitehead’s earlier account of what this is in becoming and also in terms of what it does. As an ontology of becoming Whitehead’s highly original account of process philosophy is hugely significant in that it offers change and the anticipatory speculation of the yet to come as a fundamental challenge to those Positivistic philosophies of substance, representation and verification that held sway at the time that he was writing. Much of the philosophy of the early 20th century was greatly influenced by a group known as the Vienna Circle who worked to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. This philosophical approach was particularly influential in the USA and the UK where, in the latter case, the English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1971) developed what he referred to as Logical Positivism, an approach to philosophical inquiry which was grounded upon what he referred to as the Principle of Verification. The radical and highly substantivist account that Ayer and his followers put forward in the principle of verification stated that meaning is based upon the method of verification and that therefore only statements that are empirically verifiable have any validity or truth value. The speculative and experimental approaches that have emanated from Whitehead’s (1978) process-based philosophy would, therefore, be rejected as meaningless by virtue of their metaphysical and therefore substantively ungrounded approach. So, for example, anathema to the Logical Positivist philosophy would have been Whitehead’s concept of ‘actual entities’. This concept is based upon spatio-temporality and the view that these ‘actual entities’ are occasions of experience or what he also referred to as ‘actual occasions’. Whitehead’s ‘actual occasions’ have a universal presence, in this, they are always in a state of flux, always on the move and are as Deleuze recognised always existent in actualisation, always in play with the virtualities of becoming. As Whitehead says, “Actual entities” – also termed “actual occasions” – are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real … The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (1978: 18)

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Therefore, in a more than simply human sense, Whitehead’s ‘actual occasions’ are not occasions of experience which are the objects of individual consciousness and which can be apprehended as such. It is significant that he points out in the early stages of Process and Reality that the ‘philosophy of organism’ which is integral to his process philosophy, ‘is closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought. But it differs by the abandonment of the subject-predicate forms of thought … and that morphological description is replaced by dynamic process’. (1978: 7) Significantly, Whitehead used the term ‘prehension’ to denote in relationality pre-cognitive and ontologically indeterminate qualities and to allude to their always actualising tendencies of movement and flux. In this sense, ‘prehension’ does not claim the quality of capture that is inherent in its cognitivist counterpart ‘apprehension’. Where the latter is made sense of in terms of ‘getting it’ the former is elusive, mercurial and always on the move. In terms of the new inquiries that are being offered here, where speculation and experimentation are given precedence over collection and analysis of, what might have been referred to as, factual materiality by the Logical Positivists, it makes much more sense to talk of ‘data events’ (Gale, 2014). In this sense, rather than being fixed, actualities are processually presenced and the elusive qualities of data are accepted within the fleeting movements and moments of the encounter. It is in the encounter where ‘actual occasions’ can be understood as making up everything, even empty space, that Whitehead uses the term ‘concrescence’ (1978: 224/5) to show the process of jointly forming an actual entity that was previously without form. In becoming, the basic units are ‘actual occasions’, where, as Manning has shown from her reading of Simondon that, form is never apprehended; rather it is always ‘in-formation’. In these processual dynamics, Whitehead points out that, ‘(e)ach new phase in the concrescence means the retreat of mere propositional unity before the growing grasp of real unity of feeling. Each successive propositional phase is a lure to the creation of feelings which promote its realisation’ (Ibid: 224). Whilst it is not entirely clear, it appears that Whitehead is using ‘feeling’ in his work, not in a simply human or anthropomorphic sense but rather, as Shaviro points out, as a synonym for prehension. In this, feelings, similar to prehensions, can be seen, in processes of concrescence, to account for the ways in which actual occasions are constituted in relation to their encounters with other actual occasions.3 To gain a full appreciative sense of Whitehead’s process philosophy, it is obviously important to attempt movement outside the language which is customary to us and, to use a Deleuzian figure, to ‘stutter’ in the language that Whitehead shares with us. In the spirit of Deleuzian thinking, to stutter in the language is not to exhibit an impediment, it is to act performatively in, with and through the language to be always, in becoming, creative of new language. As Deleuze says: ‘It is no longer the individual who stutters in his speech, it is the writer who stutters in the language system (langue): he causes language as such to stutter.’ (1994a: 23) And so languages, in processes of concretion, are always on the move. The minor working within the major is also expressive of a different in-formational subjectification,

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where it makes sense to think of becoming as always on the move, more likely to be about prehension where knowing is processual, rather than apprehension, where knowledge, as cognition, is fixed. If manifestation is to be about an entity it is about notyetness as an ‘actual occasion’, forming and never formed. Thinking in this way moves the subjective tendencies to be found in ontology and its incumbent dispositions and positionings, toward ontogenesis, where being gives way to becoming and the subsequent emergent indeterminacies are always of a thinking in action that is always on the move. Whitehead is not talking about forms of cognition in which ‘apprehending’ would be understood to take place, rather it is more to do with a pre-cognitive activity or ‘prehension’, which exists in far less established and determinate in-formational ways. Therefore, Whitehead’s writing of ‘feeling’ is more to do with a prehensive immediacy in which concrescence is not apprehended in terms of knowledge making; rather that knowing is temporary and tenuous, where comings together in relationality and multiplicity divert orientations of thinking away from acceptance of their location within the individual. This thinking feeling with Whitehead is not about abstraction. In this, there is a feeling that Whitehead is moving us toward what Manning and Massumi refer to as ‘thinking-feeling’. They use this concept to lead our thinking toward thinking about movement and, in so doing, perhaps in similar ways to Deleuze, to work to encourage the creation of language that enables more than human ways of engaging with the force and potential of movement. In this, they argue that, ‘(p)otential is not of the if-then. Potential is allied to what-if. The thinking-feeling that is movement-moving is speculative: notional in the sense in which it can be used as a synonym for speculative.’ (2014: 41) Engaging in these new inquiries, these ‘post qualitative inquiries’ (St. Pierre, 2019) clearly necessitates movements from the logic of ‘if-then’ to the logic of ‘what if ’. In many respects, these movements also suggest a movement away from substance and the metaphysics of being normally associated with it, toward thinking to do with becoming and process. Making a move which could be described as moving from the logic of what-is to that of what-if. Making openings of this kind toward speculation and experimentation clearly pays attention to the potential of Whitehead’s concept of ‘concrescence’ to creatively make connections to post human as well as simply human relationality and multiplicity. This thinking as doing can also be seen to connect with Guattari’s concept of ‘heterogenesis’ and ‘processes of continuous resingularisation’ wherein ‘(i)ndividuals must become both more united and increasingly different’4 (2014: 47). And so, movement and moment are always vibrant, ever changing, in their continuing pulsating happening. Attunement, always becoming attuned, never fully, never completely attuned is agencement. Agencement does, it is actively worlding in giving new life. It is forceful in energising the ecomateriality of what Springgay and Truman (2017) refer to as ‘thinking-in-movement’ where ‘we become open to stimuli we cannot represent’. In this, attunement is capacious, it has potential, it does. It wakes sleeping bodies. It stirs human emotion. In affect, it lifts weight. It

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creates pressure. It brings to the foreground what was abandoned in the background. It lives with the connection to what was designated in pompous disarticulation as the ‘context’ and sees, in all its bleeding, leaking, effusing materiality, energetic and living animate embodiment: there are no contexts, only connections. Attunement is the always living with the direct and powerful simplicity of Spinoza’s assertion that all bodies, human and nonhuman, have the capacity to affect and be affected.

Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari’s use here of ‘heteronyms’ makes echoes with Ferdinand Pessoa’s (2001) use of the same term, particularly in The Book of Disquiet. In Pessoa’s larger than life writing, these ‘heteronyms’ talk with each other and sometimes take part in his social and romantic life. Pessoa talked of these interventions in his writing and his day to day life as a ‘theatre of being’ and also referred to it as a ‘drama in people’. 2 Deleuze’s use of ‘Erewhon’ is alluded to here. He drew this concept from the work of Samuel Butler and used it in Difference and Repetition to assist in bringing to life nomadism and differential multiplicity. As he says in an endnote (1994a: 356) ‘Erewhon seems to us not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here’. It is acted upon and referenced here because of its moving attention toward spatio-temporal diffuseness and the play that it makes with the elusivities of ‘now you see me, now you don’t’. 3 Shaviro offers the following explanation of this: ‘Strictly speaking, a feeling is a positive prehension; Whitehead contrasts this to negative prehension, a mode in which things are not felt, but rather “eliminate[d] from feeling.” Positive and negative prehensions are the way that any entity constitutes itself in the process of responding to other entities that precede it’. (http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1309) 4 There are connections to be made between Guattari’s concept of ‘heterogenesis’ and similar concepts made by other authors sympathetic to his position here. So when he says later in this passage, ‘The same is true for the resingularisation of schools, town councils, urban planning etc.’ it is possible to see close links between his thinking and the critique of the university and other institutions of higher education offered by Moten and Harney (2013) in their portrayal and engagement with the ‘undercommons’. Similarly, Haraway (2016) offers the concept of ‘sympoiesis’ as a means of ‘making kin’ with others and of ‘Staying with the Trouble’.

ACTS OF AFFECTIVE PRESENCING

‘Affective presencing’. In emergence, a concept was becoming in creative relationality. A concept lurking like a shadowy, barely sensed figure in the comings to life of research creative writings and inquiries. A concept that living with a knowing that relations are real, are directly experienced and create their own terms. A concept living with encounters and events, shifting attention away from the discursively constructed and interiorising habits of emotion as located in the simply human subject, moving it toward the movements and moments of relational spacetime making. In the writing of academic papers deeply concerned with turnings toward affect, animating writing toward immanent doing and all the time engaging thought with action in the making of trouble with the concept of presence the words ‘affective presencing’ began to appear on the page. Uninvited, with no intention apparent, ‘affective presencing’ began to work its selfing into writing-doing; without aforethought it was there, appearing in a pre-cognitive rush to bring words to paper, words in use before their design was apprehended in cognitive definitionality. ‘Affective presencing’ (Gale, 2021) was on the move and its movements were creating spacetime shiftings.1 So, firstly, to come to terms with the concept with no intention to fix or ground it in any way, ‘affective presencing’ draws from the Spinozist appreciation that all bodies in relationality have the capacity to affect and be affected. Secondly, the concept is also suggestive of what Braidotti has referred to as a ‘posthuman subjectivity’. She describes this as one which ‘reshapes the identity of humanistic practices, by stressing heteronomy and multifaceted relationality, instead of autonomy and self-referential disciplinary purity’ (Braidotti, 2013: 9). Thirdly, and, at the same time, the concept also offers a sensing of animate bodying that helps to avoid the binarising effects that might occur when easing thinking about and with affect away from the simply human proclivities and tendencies of thinking with consciousness, emotion and identifying subjectifications of self. DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-5

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In these ways, the concept of ‘affective presencing’ allows bodying to have a life that is not chained and captured by the psychological characterisation and emotional features that are somehow of or owned by the individual that can be recognised and ‘known’ according to the tenets and cognitive dispositions of Cartesian a priori thought. Recognition is fleeting; elusive as an ephemerality in multiplicity, not substantive as a fixing of subjectivity and identity. Recognition briefly engages a knowing that never sits still as knowledge. Any move toward fixity is deterritorialised by the next knowing that appears from nowhere: all that is left from what was there before is Duchamp’s ‘infra-thin’, the warmth of the seat that has just been left. Manning describes this in her account of Duchamp’s concept as ‘the most minute of intervals’ (2020: 15). The bodying that a concept of ‘affective presencing’ suggests is one that exists within Massumi’s engagement with and argument for those ‘zones of indeterminacy’ (2015a: 204–205) that he claims are existent between thought and action and that give life to ontogenetic and emergent forms of consciousness of a more than simply human nature. In ‘affective presencing’ bodies, in indeterminacy, are always on the move; in the encounters of relationality, they are bodying, never fixed or determined, always ‘affectively presencing’ in the eventfulness and continual in-formational emergence of new and vibrant actions, and doings. As Deleuze has said of ‘virtuals’, They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 148) In this respect, a concept of ‘affective presencing’ is also a concept of virtuality in that the always processual forming of these briefly en-active bodying thoughts-inthe-act is always in actualisation, always becoming, always somewhat indeterminate, never actual. In this sense, a concept of ‘affective presencing’ always alludes to capaciousness; it always suggests movement, pointing toward the barely visible potentiality of bodies always on the move. ‘Affective presencing’ is a concept of actualisation and activation that never rests and always lives, in relationality, beyond the simply human. Manning expresses this shadowy sensing of virtuality in a way that problematises the constraints of the individualising tendencies of humancentric reasoning, pointing us toward the always continuing heterogeneity of the assemblage, when she says: Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly throughout a life in the passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration. This is not a containment toward a stable self. It is a momentary cohesiveness that we can call a sense of self that always remains coloured by the force that directed its unification, a virtual effect that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment. (2009: 36)

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In the following section,2 the concept of ‘affective presencing’ is further animated in its avoidance of ‘spirit’, with the fixities of the body redolent in its expression, and takes movement toward ‘spiriting’, with that concept tending toward relationality, bodying and selfing as a further disruption of the individualising proclivities and practices of simply human subjectification and identification.

Out of darkness into eternity… And sensing that other worldly creatures exist in comings to life in the breakthroughs that the madness of the moments can bring, there had been writings about spirits and spiriting. This talk had, in part, come about through a sensing of ‘affective presencing’ (Gale, 2021). This occurred through a writing with pasts and in relation to friendship and writing that had been shared collaboratively in a past that had stretched back over many years previous to the emergence of the present writing. In the movements that in-acted the comings to life of these moments, these concepts of ‘past’ and ‘present’, resting in the discursively constructed comfort of substantive linear time making, increasingly began to be troubled in the vibrancy of aeon, troubled by the emergence of writing in the here and now. In that earlier writing (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davis, 2011), there had been graspings of what that writing was, how it had come about and the ways in which those writings had been shared. That writing had emerged out of the vitality and vibrancy of desire. This was not a Freudian desire, one that was imbued with diminution and by the demands of some kind of lack, it was a forming of desire that was necessitated by production, the fulfilment of desire to make, create, to move somewhere, to take writing and the collaborative energies of those writing selves somewhere that was not yet known. The writing group had met again through the various media of digital communication and connection to write collectively and collaboratively, many years after the book that had emerged from their original shared writings had first been published. One of the group had suggested engaging in some new writing, perhaps echoing back to those earlier writings of ten or more years ago. These new writings came to life in the tentative, exploratory and speculative emergence of a new and creative spacetime relationality. In these comings to life, emails were drafted to one other, each making connections again with one another in far and distant parts of the globe. Some responses were rapid, others were slower. Their lives had changed since they last wrote together, in affect, in the emergence of this plane of composition, perhaps there were sensings of hesitation, uncertainty and excitement in the atmospherics of their new beginning. ‘Affective presencing’ … A concept to which ‘Ken’ had already given life in previous writings and conference presentations, a concept that had been invented and, in its initial creations, a concept that had already been eventful in encounter. A concept that now lurks like a shadowy, barely sensed figure in the emergence of research creative writings and inquiries.

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A concept that lives with a knowing that relations are real, are directly experienced, are always more than simply human, and are creative of their own terms. A concept that lives with encounters and events and shifts attention away from the discursively constructed and interiorising habits of emotion as located in the simply human subject, shifting them instead, toward the movements and moments of relational spacetime making. A concept of animation and activation that never rests and always lives, in relationality, in multiplicity, always in the more-than, beyond the simply human. And so, ‘Ken’, as one of the group of writers in their new collaborative writing activities, employed this concept of ‘affective presencing’ to help him come to terms with an engagement in the present of these writers coming together again to re-kindle and re-activate the collaborative writing activities in which they had earlier engaged. He remembered that, ten years before, in a conference presentation (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davies, 2010) based on the becoming-writing of the earlier book, the writers used a dramatic device to give ‘Deleuze’ a tangible and, in a sense, a visible presence in the presentation. In this, an empty chair was placed, facing the audience, amongst the four presenters and from time to time ‘Deleuze’, now the fifth member of the group, contributed to the presentation through members of the panel readings words from his writings that were relevant to the presentation. Of this experience, Ken later writes: The importance of presence. The dramatic trope that JKSB3 employed to ensure that ‘Deleuze’ was with us as we presented our paper in the perpetuity of that space making we have come to call ‘QI’. We didn’t know what ‘he’ would do: we invited ‘him’ in, unsure of how ‘he’ would behave. The very mention of Deleuze signals a spiriting, an in-formational, affective presencing which, as soon as the utterance is made, is off, the magic carpet ride begins: as Malamud is cited as saying in Deleuze’s book on Spinoza, ‘I didn’t understand every word but when you’re dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch’s ride’ (1988: 1). The immanent plane of composition to which the JKSB book gives prominence on its cover and which concerns the initial concept making that infuses its first chapter is imbued with vastness. Already ‘I’ am finding this writing necessitates a use of inverted commas: ‘Jonathan’? ‘Ken’? ‘Susanne’? ‘Bronwyn’? … ‘Deleuze’? As soon as the utterance is made, in the processual immediation of the potency of always not/yet/ness, differentiation is within the constant creative fragility of selves making, always multiple, always occurring. As Bronwyn says in the opening chapter of the book, ‘creative affirmations lie in new experiences, through which the not-yet-known, the not-yet-imagined, can unfold – can be composed’ (2011: 2). JKSB is not populated by ‘anarchic, sovereign, individuals’ (Op. cit); in this Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, Bronwyn, Deleuze and …. are constantly shifting, always vibrant, always processually animate, always about ‘mo(ve)ment’ (Davies and Gannon, 2006: x), constantly eliding spacetime compositions that are immanently mercurial and vital in their capaciousness.

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In the emergence of these new writings, Ken began to work further with a concept of ‘affective presencing’ which he had used in other writings and which in turn led him to inquire further about the workings of collaborative writing within the JKSB group. It was the figure of ‘Deleuze’ and then the introduction of inverted commas around the names of the participants in the passage above that pushed him further in his inquiries about presence. In this, it wasn’t enough to see these figures, these participants in Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, simply as ‘spirits’. There was something much more than that going on here. These people who hadn’t (formally at least) written together for ten years, hadn’t remained static, they were not, and, indeed, never were, determinate selves. The ‘Jonathan’, ‘Ken’, ‘Susanne’, and ‘Bronwyn’ that had collaborated on that earlier piece of research were constantly on the move, writing, talking, working, loving, living and so on. Perhaps, more significantly, the relational engagements with the discourses and materialities of the worlds they inhabited and the worldings with which they were engaging with those worlds were also, always on the move. As he continued in his writing, it was the inadequacy of a somewhat static concept of ‘spirit’ that was troubling him here and it was the emergence of a concept of ‘spiriting’ which provided the impetus to take thinking and doing in different directions. Much in the way that the concept of ‘affective presencing’ had infiltrated and come to play a part in his own writing, ‘spiriting’ was now also engaged in doing something similar. Concept forming as eventful doing seemed to be taking place in spite of him, he wasn’t aware of finding the concept anywhere, of taking it off the shelf, of wiping the dust away from its covers and of bringing it play in these writings. Even as he was writing this sentence he realised that ‘spirit’ had already made its presence felt in the passage of writing that he cited in the passage above. And further, a concept of ‘spiriting’ is not about something that members of this, or any other co-composing collection of writers might do, or be active in doing. In this, it is not simply about the agentic energies and influences of one or more individuals as individuals, it is more about a collective, affective and individuating force, perhaps what Bennett (2010) has referred to as an ‘agentic assemblage’, which animates these fluids and always changing movements. It is the presencing of affect that is animate. Affectively volatile, ‘spiriting’ is happening, in encounter, it is always happening. As a concept, ‘spiriting’ does. It affectively presences. It brings subjects to the fore. It stumbles in memorising. It awakens feelings. It creates an illusion of Being and is a dynamic progenitor of becomings. It has no beginning or end. It has no origin or demise. So, it is not that spirits accompany or exist in any kind of embodied form; as such, they do not have a tangible presence. It is that ‘spiriting’ is always active in worldings, always animate in the processual movements and moments of becoming that are writing/worlding here/now. I think of Manning’s (2007) research creative use of Simondon’s concept of ‘ontogenesis’ and I sense that the processual always moving toward that this involves/evolves can be better understood when ‘spiriting’ is forceful in the energising of these differentiations.

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And so, for the moment it is an ontogenesis of becoming that can be sensed … it is about a ‘spiriting’. Bodies, human and nonhuman are always there, less in the forceful individualising presence of subjectification, identification and representation and more in the bringing to life, the ‘affective presencing’ of flows, emergences and the contingencies of possibility. The ‘spiriting’ of bodies animates a fluidity of energising, compositional forces that always have the capacity to possibilise, bring to life and enact something that was not there before.

Thinking with doing affective presencing … The tendency in a great deal of orthodox qualitative inquiry to binarise thinking and practice usually results in the making of substantively either/or conclusions that, purportedly entail and inevitably lead to a privileging of the former term in the binary construction to the latter. This discursively constructed post Cartesian approach inevitably works to overlook multiplicities, the complexities of relationality and, in doing so, to pay adequate constructive attention to the more than simply human. By way of exemplification, it is clear that the separation of theory and practice in qualitative research and inquiry provides a hugely illustrative case of such an approach in action. It is discouraging and diminishing to see the ways in which students in higher education, who are tasked to research and write dissertations for graduate and also often postgraduate study, are often required by university departments, schools and supervisory teams to facilitate this separation of practices in their work. In the construction of this theory practice divide, it is quite common to see students, first of all, being tasked to carry out practically oriented methods, such as observation and interviewing, involving established procedural activities that are regulated by institutionally prescribed ethical practices. Secondly, they are then required to engage in the equally prescriptive task of ‘analysis’ of the ‘findings’ from these ‘methods’ which then, following accepted and recognised practices of selection and codification, produce ‘results’ that are considered to be the ‘reliable’ and ‘valid’ conclusions that can be drawn from these procedures. It is possible to see that this further binarising and thus separation of ‘data collection and analysis’ provides the structural mainstay of a great deal of qualitative research practice required to be carried out by students in higher education at the present time. The, so-called, bringing of ‘theory’ to this ‘practice’ tends to have a somewhat detached life of its own, nestling in a ‘review of literature’, required to be carried out in advance of the ‘empirical’ data ‘collection’ procedures, and possibly also in the ‘analysis’ of the findings that emerge from the study. The detailed and intentional use of inverted commas in the preceding paragraph is designed to highlight what are in large parts the givens of established, institutionally prescribed qualitative inquiry at the present time. This seems worrying. In this, concepts fundamental to inquiry, are implemented through practices that, in unchallenged repetition, are simply iterative to and of their originary conception. As a consequence, concepts of ‘method’, ‘data’, ‘coding’, etc., are employed

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as signifiers of tacit enforcement. Habit, custom and normative pressures become agentic in the discursive construction of the established realities of research and inquiry. I write this, affective waves of concern lap on my shores. I sense having written to this before. I go to the shelves, books, dust coats many of their covers. I pull one out; the one I remembered. Some words I wrote some time ago. Flipping, I turn pages, I find the chapter, I move through the pages, I find the page and scroll down the lines and read again the passage of writing written five or six years ago. I read what I wrote: Expressing the contiguity of theorising as practice with the emergence and affective nature of assemblages is partly to address the tyranny of the theory/ practice dualisms that are present in education research and partly to trouble and disrupt the data collection and analysis binary that works to construct research practice within the constraining limits of (post) positivist thinking and practice. (Gale, 2016: 247) Thinking here with theorising as practice helps me to animate theory, no theorising, as a doing. In the quotation, I talk of a ‘tyranny’ and I sense another one here: the tyranny of nouns, the nominative words that persuade the substantiation of meaning and it’s discursively insinuated precedence of substance over process, of Being over becoming. In-formationally, creating a concept of theorising as doing brings the verb to the ascendance and necessitates attention to and action with the always not yet known. Research and inquiry can no longer simply work with those fixities and givens of method, data and coding, rather its limits are always extending, its thresholds are always edging and shifting; theorising as doing opens the door to fresh air and sunshine and the possibilities that are there always being carried on the wind. Manning’s (2016) opening to ‘research-creation’ is congruent with the opening of this door. ‘Research-creation’ does not rest and ultimately atrophy in the lassitudes of established qualitative research practices and procedures. As she says: Whether we call it study or we call it research-creation and engage directly with knowledge as it is being reframed in pockets of academic discourse, what matters is that there is an explicit disavowal of method as a generator of knowledge. For method, aligned as it is to the major, is what seeks to capture the minor gesture, what seeks to capture study and silence it. (Manning, 2016: 12) Theorising, using thinking as doing, and engaging in Manning’s approach to ‘research-creation’, leads also to the use of a Deleuzian form of empiricism, which works directly as challenge to the divisive and limiting influences of the data collection and analysis binary construction. The capaciousness and alertness to

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not-yet-ness that enlivens this thinking as doing also offers inducements to experiment and to speculate; research and inquiry no longer has to be constrained by the limitations of methodology and research questions that were formulated in advance of the inquiry making movements toward and the territorialisations that such movements involved. In this, the Deleuzian practice of always concept forming as event is central in the becoming of research and inquiry, drawing our attention to and welcoming as it does, actively thinking of practices that nurture attunements to ‘affective presencing’. Post qualitative inquiries can be used to promote speculative approaches to inquiry that are never fixed within the confines of specific methods and which are, in becoming, in the always emergence of what Whitehead refers to as new and multiple ‘actual occasions’. ‘Affective presencing’ pays attention to and is creatively animate of working in-formationally with the always not yet known and the notyet-ness and constant emergence of always new ideas, always in play, as events. Each new idea, each new concept formed, affectively moves. In doing, it shifts bodies of thought, human and nonhuman bodies, bodies of writing, material bodies and so on. In this, I sense that the working of and the workings with ‘affective presencing’ are also working against the constraining practices of qualitative inquiry to be found in the research practices of contemporary higher education. In these thinkings as doing, where thoughts in the act work in the theorising of practices, there exists, therefore, a politics that is at work to move research toward more experimental and speculative ways of doing. Moten and Harney’s (2013) concept of the ‘undercommons’ is clearly designed to animate politically inscribed movements as a means of disturbing the institutional conditions and practices that are referred to here. Their concept does not refer to a particular place of practice; it does not exist within a definable or physically recognisable location. As a concept, it can be understood in Deleuzian terms as coming to life and enacting within encounters. The eventfulness of its actions is speculative, they perpetrate new and vibrant relational encounters within the emergence of new ecologies of practice. Manning says of the ‘undercommons’ that it ‘is a tentative holding in place of fragile comings-into-relation, physical and virtual, that create the potential to reorient fields of life-living – a belief in the ineffable and its powers of resistance keep it alive’ (2016: 8). In this respect, the work of Moten and Harney in bringing to life the concept of the ‘undercommons’ also creates an ‘affective presencing’. The ‘undercommons’ is always in-act, it is always there, perhaps as a sensing of resistance, to point to the possibility that worlds could be different, that actions could be carried out in different ways and that speculative lookings toward are always animate in the creation of possibility and in pointing to directions and ways of doing that might not have been thought of before. Therefore, what can be considered key to Moten and Harney’s concept of the ‘undercommons’, and relevant to the discussion taking place here, is what they see as the role that universities currently play in the institutionalisation of pedagogical and research practices and, in linking this with the growth and perpetuation of neoliberal economies and the cultural habits and practices that can be seen to

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support them. In large part, it is clear from the writings of Moten and Harney (2013), Manning (2016, 2020) and others that the university has a major role to play in the perpetuation and policing of neurotypicality. In many respects, neurotypicality, in line with the Cartesian thinking that precedes and supports it, seems to be imbued with the tangible substantiality of Being. The presence of this human subjectivity and identity is deductively constructed and confirmed by the a priori logic of Descartes Cogito. In a Foucauldian sense, it is possible to then argue that the pervasive presence’ of the individual human subject is sustained and ultimately legitimised by the normative play of discursive constructions of reality. This has the effect of working to make invisible the presence of neurotypicality which, paradoxically and inevitably, also works to sustain and enhance the permanence of its power, influence and means of control. The logic of this argument does not fall far short from confirming that the dominating influence of neurotypicality also needs to be seen in conjunction with the perpetuation of not only the simply human but also the dominant values of gender, class and race within this. Manning expresses this as follows: Neurotypicality involves a hierarchisation of knowledge, based as it is on a belief that favours normative forms of instruction and segregates knowledge according to accepted ideas of what serves society best. Most accepted approaches to learning assume neurotypicality with regard to processing information, thereby segregating not only neurodiverse learners, but also predefining what counts as knowledge. (2016: 9) As spaces are opened in this book offering inquiries into the immanent potential and doing of writing and concept forming, it is concomitant with this argument to see that the writing of Deleuzian ‘minor literatures’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) not only work against the neurotypical and the exclusivities and hierarchising tendencies that it involves, but also that it writes and works to create speculative and experimental incursions that help to enliven and animate the neurodiverse. Neurotypicality seems to find comfort in engaging with problems that are already agreed upon by those operating within the traditions and orthodoxies of academic disciplines as being necessary to address and using methods and approaches that are culturally and historically well established. Within this, the processually speculative and experimentally diverse thinking and doing of neurodiversity can easily be sidelined and overlooked. Evidence of this can be found within the recent funding pressures placed upon the Arts and Humanities and also in relation to the success of certain kinds of research bids linked to specified outcomes in preference to those of a more experimental and less traditional nature. Moten and Harney’s approach to ‘study’, as exemplified in the ‘undercommons’, and Manning’s practice of ‘research-creation’, seem to offer exciting ways forward in freeing writing and inquiry from the stifling, individualising and neoliberal practices of the simply human activities of the neurotypical. These approaches do not

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provide hard and fast specifying recipes for practice but they do point to the ways in which openness, neurodiversity and the social can work to actively encourage collective engagements with different practices of inquiry problem when making, engaging problematising rather that the solving of problems already made. When Haraway (2016) talks of ‘making kin’ through sympoiesis rather than autopoiesis she is drawing attention to something similar to Moten he says, When I think about the way we use the term “study”, I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity … involved in a kind of common intellectual activity. (Quoted in Manning, 2016: 11/12) This is consistent with what can be learned from the work of Spinoza, that it is not simply what a body is or what it might mean but rather what a body; a human body, a nonhuman body, a body of thought, a body of knowledge … any body … can do: what can a body do? In this Spinoza’s work diverts our attention away from the personal feelings, sentiments and emotions of the autonomous individual of human-centric forms of thought and toward the affective state of bodies in relational encounter with one another. Clearly, there is also a move here away from the neurotypical toward creative encounters with the neurodiverse. Spinoza points out, all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected; of this Massumi says, this points to ‘a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act’ (Massumi, in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: xvi, Notes on Translation and Introduction). I sense that these movements can be understood as acting in the way in which ‘affective presencing’ has been described here previously. In this, the concept if ‘affective presencing’ talks to the movement between bodies. Its movement is animate with ‘prepersonal intensity’; it is fleeting, barely perceived and always relational. Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out that, smooth space is filled by events and haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception … a Body without Organs instead of an organism and organisation’. (1987: 479) And so, the fleeting, barely perceived and always relational experiencing of ‘affective presencing’ is elementally and processually active in the always differentiating openings and interstices of neurodiversity. In this, it seems that here, there is always spatio-temporal fluidity, a field of play that cannot be overlooked and that

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sparks and fizzles as the experimental and speculative movements of ‘study’ and ‘research-creation’ get underway. Here, it is to think again, with the vibrant pulsing undercurrents of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) ‘minor literatures’, always at work, stuttering into life enunciations, bringing into life post qualitative inquiries in and with the encounters. Each new piece of writing, is as Whitehead would have it, an ‘actual occasion’. It is always ‘in-formation’, this ‘body’ of writing is capacious, always animating ‘affective presencing’, always pushing toward and at the same time creative of the not yet known. Where individual writing practices turn into the kinds of collaborative and collective, affectively informed activities, that Moten and Harney and Manning have referred to above, the spaces that are created are filled with what Massumi (2015b) refers to as ‘immediation’, they are often tense, breath can be sharply taken in, goose pimples appear, glances are tentatively shared. This can be likened to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) talk of ‘becoming animal’. The animal is always tense, alert and at the limit, always on its toes, always, in becoming, on the lookout. In this, space is animate, it is always being made, it is always on the move, as bodies, in differentiation, make and re-make themselves. ‘Becoming animal’ involves an intimate intertwining of bodies in practices of territorialisation, what I have referred to elsewhere as ‘intimating’ (Gale, 2021). In this, doing intimacy involves interfering with, troubling and disturbing discursively constructed lassitudes of custom and habit and in practising an alertness to forms of theorising and concept making in the event that always promote inquiry into the not yet known. In relation to this, Massumi talks of this animal becoming as ‘most human’ and uses the expression ‘creative-relationally more-than human’ to describe how ‘in becoming animal … the human recurs to what is nonhuman at the heart of what moves it (and therefore) what makes it surpassingly human’ (2015a: 14). In these movements toward the neurodiverse, away from the neurotypical, the sensing of ‘affective presencing’ is in its selfing, in-formationally, what Manning might call a ‘research-creative’ act. When Massumi talks of the ‘creative relationally more-than human’ there is a resonance with the powerfully insinuating phrase, ‘the more than simply human’. The active tendencies animated by the nuances, glimmers and proclivities and that emerge and are felt with the taking the turn torn to ‘post qualitative inquiry’ (St. Pierre, 2019) cannot afford to be ignored.

Notes on (J)joy Perhaps by way of an extended footnote, in the following section of writing, I attempt to offer what Massumi (2002) has called ‘exemplification’ or, perhaps, an example of what he refers to as the ‘exemplary method’. In this usage, I sense Massumi opening the way toward engaging in an immanent critique. For him, ‘exemplification’ offers a means of affirmation through an emphasis upon the showing (of the example) rather than the telling (about it).

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Therefore, this passage of writing; still nascent, still on the move, still in-formation, will attempt to offer an ‘exemplification’ of intent. The passage of writing is written with the intent to show and exemplify the workings of process over substance. In this, it is also written with the intent to show how, in the process of the writings, concepts like ‘affective presencing’, ‘spiriting’ and others add, in-act from simple glances, nuances, glimmers, proclivities and shady glimpses into darkened corners. It is possible then, perhaps, through freedom and wildness, their creation is becoming of something more, their edginess sharpens, their differences blur, their contours undulate, in becoming they are always on the move. The passage is written as the half-remembered words of Ursula Le Guinn from a television interview work in spiriting this piece of writing into life, when she said: ‘I never wanted be a writer I just wrote.’ In ‘middling’, the process begins, never a starting, always in the middle, ‘middling’.

Joy The following is an extract from an email I sent to Jonathan (Wyatt, late 2009, early 2010) Aware that I have just, in the last few days, sent you a piece of writing I am very conscious that I am embarking upon another piece. I have urgency with me; an intensity perhaps and I have to write. My flows are erratic, they do not seem to mirror the heaving insistency of the mainstream torrent carrying all before it in a deluge of heavy force; my need to write seems to resonate with the summer flash flood where the downpour is torrential and within seconds the peaceful tranquillity of the stream becomes an irresistible force, lifting, surging, picking up debris and forcing itself into dried up gullies and spilling over into quiet meadows of containment. Waking up this morning did not bring with it the heavy leaden sadnesses of my usual waking moments in these days of loss. Today I sensed the watery winter sun easing its rays through the crack and holes in my curtain, teasing me out of my slumbers, sharing optimism with me and nurturing my desire. I sat in bed with my tea and copied out a poem I wrote in a pub the other evening when the thought of going back to my cold empty house was too much for me. It’s about Joy, here it is: I am looking for Joy I wish Joy was here. Joy reads books like a starving child eats a crust. Joy’s hips shine

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through her silken skirt and the bones on her chest are smooth like sticks on the beach. Joy laughs like a maniac And cries as if it was death. She loves me like I was the last man on earth and she looks at a flower as if it were just about to die Joy, I love you. Come with me. Stay. A few months later, the poem formed a part of a workshop on Deleuze and Collaborative Writing that Jonathan Wyatt and I ran at the International Conference of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois in May 2010. The poem was included as one of a number of ‘performance’ pieces we used as prompts for the collaborative writing we were encouraging our participants to engage in. I remember feeling good about reading the poem and, therefore, I used it on other occasions in subsequent workshops of this kind. I wrote in my diary, 22nd May 2014, about ‘Joy’ and the experience of reading the poem: In a workshop, in the conference today, part of what I read was my poem ‘Joy’. Something in that piece makes me feel good, I like it, I am pleased with it. I like reading it. I like its evocation of passion, I like making myself vulnerable through my reading of it. Something about it, in the reading, exposes me and I don’t mind being exposed in that way. I feel that it takes me out there, it feeds relationality, somehow placing me with others, it performs a self in a way that I want it to be performed. In performing it through the reading I am becoming other, simply more-than whatever ‘I’ was before. In these affectively charged becomings, I sense the force of these ontological indeterminacies, I ride the incoming tide of selfing, not knowing where the next swell might take me. The force of affect is felt and can never be interpreted, represented or judged. Words don’t come easily. Affect is felt, nothing more. Words can’t explain; they can only be enunciative utterances, words devoid of meaning, words that simply act. Sometimes it is possible to love the intensity that words convey. This is so fleeting. Is it possible for these words to reach across to another? Can these words touch? Can they caress? Can these tears be tears of joy? So, perhaps that’s it, joy is a cry: like the lonely silent howl of a wolf on a misty moonlight, it does, it doesn’t (have to) say, it does …

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On 27th April 2017, I wrote again in my dairy about J(j)oy: (J)joy I wrote in this diary about joy. I wrote to and with joy and in this writing I intentionally allowed my writing to infer the existence of Joy as a person and joy as affect. Writing this I do not know whether to write ‘Joy’ or ‘joy’. In my appreciation of that writing, I felt comfortable with and about the ambiguity that this writing produced and how this ambiguity, paradoxically, helped to clarify what I wanted to write. I remember writing this writing. I remember writing this writing from a place of sadness. I remember writing this writing in an attempt partly, at least, to throw off the sadness I felt about the loss of (J)joy in my life. So, in this writing, the writing created a kind of joy. Writing with joy created a kind of Joy, a sensing of something, a sensing of someone, a sensing that through the movement created in the writing, I could experience (J)joy. In this writing (J)joy was palpable, both as the attractive woman I was creating in my writing and as the feeling that emerged as the writing was written. These movements in writing and then later in reading and performance were full of joy, joy/full, they were deeply affective. I have shared this writing as performance and in publication. It seems impossible to have a knowing of the capacity of this sharing to affect, to be agentic, in creating perhaps compassion, or sadness, or desire, a sympathy, but I do know that in this affective processing4 joy was immanent, the elision of joy/Joy was profound and momentous. The writing and the reading and the performance of joy affected me. And again, I wrote in my diary, on Monday 12th July 2021: ‘Hindsighting. Looking back and no sign of a posteriori in sight. Wondering about those joy full words and Wondering about their longevity Why have they stayed here so long? joy as affect? Joy as person? Conceptual personae? ‘Spiriting’ into these nowful moments? Making movements in evening sunshine Casting brilliant beams in evening glow Throwing words out in a hoping for sense Fishing back to hitherto times When joy … (Yes, and is it Joy?) … was ‘affectively presencing’ in differentiatingly different ways. Those earlier words are irruptive now.’

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Notes 1 The insidious coming to life, the affective presencing of the concept of ‘affective presencing’, means that the becoming-concept of affective presencing has lived in nascent, in-formational expression in earlier papers and conference presentations. The concept had been invented and put to use before it was fully formed. I like that and, therefore, that is the way in which the emergence of the concept will continue to play itself out. The in-formational play of difference and repetition allows the concept to differentiate in the instantaneity of each expression-in-use; always on the move, always in play, always worlding. The reference provided here offers an exemplification in multiplicity. 2 The content of this section also offers, by way of exemplification, a sensing of the concept of ‘affective presencing’ coming to life, becoming-concept, within the context and nascence of an exchange of writing between members of a collaborative writing group in writing in preparation for a conference presentation (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davies, 2021). In this the following material is also used to exemplify the emergence of the concept as it works, in play, with other concepts such as ‘spiriting’ and in relation to the impetus of the collaborative writing taking place within the group in the preparation of the conference paper. 3 ‘JKSB’ was the short hand abbreviation that was used as a convenient signifier throughout the period of their working together. Given that, in Deleuzian terms, the smallest unit is not the individual but the assemblage, ‘JKSB’ offers a signification of the complexities, heterogeneities and contingencies always at work in the always coming together practices of the composite singularities of ‘J’, ‘K’, ‘S’ and ‘B’. 4 Here I use the concept of ‘affective processing’ and, although the concept is used to signal movement and process, (over substance) I sense this usage is a clear indication of my own thought in the act as I worked this speculative thinking toward to the concept of ‘affective presencing’ which I moved to prefer in my later writing and which appears elsewhere in this book and can be looked at in more detail in Gale (2021)

ACTS OF RETURNING TO THE RHIZOME

There are beautiful tall Aspen trees growing near my home in Cornwall. I have come to know them as a very rebellious and potentially vibrant species. I have learned that whilst they have root systems these are not simply arborescent, they also adapt rhizomatically, creeping underground, growing new trees via shoots and nodes coming up to the surface and also connecting with other Aspens by way of subterranean communication and support. In these times where the degradation of nature is becoming a commonplace, I gain some small reassurance when I also read that Aspen forests/woods have the potential to grow for thousands of years. Diary entry; 5th May 2019 Much of this book writing is about movement in the dark, it is about sensing the grass grow, it is with knowing that rhizomatic shoots and tendencies always proliferate and, with that knowing, comes the welcoming acceptance of surprise when, in the free and wild invention of concepts, there is a return and a ‘middling’, as the force of a rhizomatic shoot becomes irresistible. In the insistence of these ‘middlings’, there is a knowing that Nietzsche’s eternal return does not lead us thinking about or living with an endless repetition of specific events. Rather, it is an insistence which leads us to an engagement with inescapable general circumstances of experiencing the world. Worlding unfolds through those repetitions that always differentiate, that are always forceful in different and differentiating ways. Whilst in the infra-thin there is a frisson, a delicate sensing of something there before, it is the new movement toward that entices, that propels animation into and with the not yet known. In ‘returning’ new worlding is always capacious in its unfoldings and in its willingness to surprise. I had been reading Raynor Winn’s (2020) writing of her return to her experiences of walking the Cornish coast path. I had found myself immersed in the smell DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-6

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of the sea, the salt-infused wind stinging my face and the enveloping rugged beauty of my homeland, as I addictively read and turned the pages of her second book. From the incessance of my own wanderings in Cornwall, I had a knowing of every nook and cranny of her journey and was then taken aback when, on the final page of the book, in her acknowledgements, I read the following passage: I’m aware there’s another world down there, a world of fungus. A magical, magnificent network of mycorrhizal fungi beneath the forest floor, connecting tree to tree and one species to another, transferring nutrients, water and minerals in a maze of correlation, allowing seedlings to grow in the shadow of the adult plant and unrelated species to share resources. An invisible world of natural connections that helps each plant thrive as a part of the beautiful connected whole. (Winn, 2020: 279) Reading this passage, at the very end of her book, brought me back to my reading of Deleuze and Guattari and my fascination with their concept of the rhizome. Winn’s graphic evocation of ‘another world down there’ worked like a rhizomatic shoot searing into my life, scoring a mark on my experiencing and, in so doing, insidiously finding a way to work its re-emergence into the bowels and interstices of this becoming-book writing. I have always loved the way in which the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari offers a critical challenge to accepted and established philosophical thought. Their work offers challenge to a presupposed ‘image of thought’, that has been formed historically and which, in their view, effectively stops people from thinking differently. In this, they offer an immanent critique designed to challenge, what they see as, the dogmatism of an ‘image of thought’ that works to privilege common sense and its use of systems of representation and the critical interpretations that are based upon this. In their creation of concepts as events, they work to move thinking and doing toward living life as immanent in and of itself. In this, their figure of the rhizome plays a huge, powerful and very forceful part. In late night imaginings when sleep is a stranger and spirits enliven wakingness, there is a turning to a small black notebook that sits on the shelf beside the bed. Writing on these white rectangular pages creates new life. In these doings, there are no attempts at organisation, no apprehendings that work to capture cognitive thought or to fix and form ideas; this writing is done in the dark. Writing here is a doing of immanence; this is space making that seethes in the pre-cognitive, it is, after Whitehead, a prehensive doing. These ‘actual occasions’ of writing are elusive and mercurial, free, wild and delightfully whimsical. In the writing, there is an overspilling of self, movement is toward an always not yet known. The unnumbered white pages of the book are like a desert that becomes more populous as each sketch, aphorism, random thought, list and endless prose meandering marks, stains and sears into their virginal blankness. Becoming-words, becoming-images, becoming-rhyme, becomings, all rest in these pages, sometimes in forgetting, sometimes because of the pressures of busy/ness and usually as sleep takes over again.

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In her book the Minor Gesture, Erin Manning proposes that gesturing of this kind offers ‘landing sites’ (2016: 101) for future cueings and alignings. There are no externally originating hylomorphic tendencies in such writings; there are no abstractions that serve to rationalise them. Here there exists a nomos, a virginal, rich and fertile pasture land that has no typology. Here there is an anarchy of discovery and pre-personal intensity that defies the logos, boundedness and limiting proscriptions of the field. Landing in these sites allows for movement that does not follow pattern or structure: the ability to simply wander has a proclivity toward wonder. Slowness is of the essence and the potential for the ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105) extends wildly beyond individual design and intention; nothing is grasped as substantive movements to and on the page are simply processual, speculative, here and then gone. The anarchic distributive and alchemic creative potential of the nomos runs counter to the regulating and structural antecedents of the logos. The immanent writing that takes place here, on these misty shaded pages makes no gesture toward representation, interpretation or critique; it is writing in and of itself. It makes no moves toward bodies, it’s coming into life might offer bodyings in spacetime emergence but, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would have it, these bodyings give life to ‘bodies without organs’. Here there is suspense; there is what Berlant describes as a ‘yielding to the proximity of an intimacy undefined by talking, made by a gesture of approach that holds open a space …’ (2011: 32). The sense of nomos as anarchic distribution that eventfully comes alive in the uncharted and unplanned meanderings of these writings as immanent doing can be understood as engaging what Deleuze and Guattari might refer to as ‘nomadic inquiry’ (1987: 315). Rather than conforming to the constraints, fixities and hierarchical, institutionalised structures to be found, say, in a college or a university, nomadic life creates spaces for experimental, unpredictable movement where uncertainty, surprise and speculative practices are always on the move. Therefore, these nomadic movements resist existing delineations, their shifts persistently smooth striated space. Prehensively drawing new lines, intuitively smoothing out what was there before, they land and, in so doing, they act in excess of formative design; they move in actualisation but are never captured in the actuality of apprehending. Hence, the always more-than of the landing is the differentiating movement toward not-yet-ness and the always not yet known. In the frictional, in-formational play between force and form, landing is the instant of becoming which is always in excess of any certainty of and in actuality. The capaciousness of these ‘landing sites’ nurtures new forces and energies, nothing is ever still, frequent capillary leakages occur, new lines of flight are drawn. The little book on the shelf beside the bed is always open, its content has no beginning or end, papers spill out of its pages, sentences, in forbidding potency sit unfinished, concepts rest, in vibrant and threatening capaciousness awaiting actualisations that never actually fully actualise. The nomadic journeyings and ontological dispositions that might be revealed by the brief account of some late night, early morning writings made in the blank pages of a little black book, can be used to exemplify the rhizome and the way in

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which the concept is so powerful and forceful in bringing new thought enactively to life. There is a knowing that a concept of the rhizome can assist in figuring out some of the important philosophical issues and questions emergent on the pages of the little black book and the incessant nomadic inquiries that open up for further speculation and fabulation there. Botanically speaking, a rhizome is a subterranean plant that sends out shoots from various underground nodal points. These shoots develop from buds and mainly grow horizontally whilst retaining the ability to allow new shoots to also grow upward. When rhizomes are separated each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant; Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of ‘asignifying rupture’ (1987: 9) shows how this takes place; a break in the rhizome, a displacement of singularities or parts leads to new growth. This new growth has the potential to take new form and, in multiplicity, to move in unplanned and undetermined directions. Bonta and Protevi say that Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to the subterranean nature of the botanical rhizome is … meant to evoke the hidden network quality of interlinked forces that have adapted to resist the striating forces of the surface and air, and in particular the hierarchised State. (2004: 136) In this, it is important to stress, first of all, that Deleuze and Guattari are not using the concept of the ‘rhizome’ as a metaphor, a signifier which works in simply representational ways, a signifier which then might be seen to lead to the confirmatory stasis of a signified.1 For them, the ‘rhizome’ works as a figure. In this, it is therefore possible to think of the concept as being put to work as a means of figuring or of figuring something out. This is how it can be used in this Deleuzian ‘image of thought’: quite simply, concepts should not sit in weighty tomes on shelves gathering dust, concepts are not sacred, they not are not made in Heaven. In event full ness, concepts are created, they exist in encounter, in constantly becoming they are always on the move and, crucially, in this, they do things. In moving away from the orthodox thinking and established practices of representation and interpretation and in moving toward an immanence of doing, engaging with the concept of the ‘rhizome’, where the concept is put to work, where it can be used to carry out a task and where its emergence always creates an event, is a constant play between force and form which can be described as rhizomatic. In putting the concept of the rhizome to work, Deleuze and Guattari’s introductory plateau of A Thousand Plateaus is wholly germinal. Every return to the pages of this book is a pilgrimage. In these returnings, the wanderings are always different, the wonder in the reading is ever present; fertility is rampant, germinations abound. These readings are part of a Nietzschean ‘eternal return’, where recurrence does not simply refer to an endless repetition of specific events, but rather to a continuing ontological returning to inescapable general circumstances that are constitutive of living and doing in the material world. In every repetition difference is made.

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Those classic, highly quotable lines of T. S. Eliot seem highly relevant here: ‘We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.’ In many senses, these lines, taken from Eliot’s2 can be used to provide a vivid exemplification of how coming to knowing Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of the rhizome can occur. These lines not only indicate what the concept might mean but, more importantly, it is far more important to use them to help us think about and consider what the concept of the rhizome can do. As already pointed out, it is important to stress that the concept of the rhizome should not be read, interpreted or used in abstract or simply metaphorical ways. No means of representation or codification is in anyway intended in Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the concept of the rhizome. They are not taking something from the world of botany or biology and using it to help us understand another world, such as the human world, no, they are using the concept as a figure, a figure that can be used to help us figure, to help us in figuring in the world. The figuring with which they engage is experimental; it is about heterogeneity and contingency; in this, it works in speculative and fabulatory ways, sometimes it makes connections and, on other occasions, its movement works in indistinctness, edging and contouring amorphously into the always not yet known. Much of this can take place in subterranean ways, it is hidden and it is not predictable: the rhizome’s movements are in-act in the dark, they are quiet and can often go unnoticed. In this, rhizomatic doings do not delineate or follow regular lines, their actions are always more about molecularity and breaking through: in this, there are always leakages and capillary flows. No respect is shown to the rigidities that might be imposed by lines of segmentarity and demarcation and to the hierarchies and established edifices of structured organisational thought and practice. The challenge rhizomatic doing offers is always to the absolute, the definitional and the transcendent. It works toward and within an immanence unto itself and, in this respect, it has no beginning or end. It offers no method and in making no attempt at transcendence, it is in constant play with the always becoming of not-yet-ness, seething with the capacity to always create the new. It does not work to provide a specific, identifiable ontology and to provide us with knowledge of what is and what it might mean to Be. Within the ontogenetic experimentalism of its metaphysics, rhizomatic figurations are about doing and, as the creative relationalities of these doings, in becoming, make movements toward and momentarily entangle with other doings, new and vibrant connections are always being made. It is at this point that the transversal play between the figure of the rhizome and other Deleuzian figures starts to materialise. First of all, and in relation to a Deleuzian concept referred to earlier, it can be shown that rhizomatic growth is nomadic, the movement of its shoots smooths out existing delineations and striations in space and time, paying little respect to existing boundaries and systems of containment. Secondly, with all of these rhizomatic possibilities and multiplicities in intra-acting connection and play with one another, the idea that the smallest unit is the individual of Cartesian rationalism is severely troubled. Deleuze and Guattari’s

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concept of the ‘assemblage’ or, for our purposes here, what Jane Bennett (2010) has referred to as, the ‘agentic assemblage’, provides an animate sense of collective and connective action: in relationality, it is the assemblage that does. So, as these rhizomatic multiplicities, connections and doings begin to emerge, it is evident that the particularistic singularity of Being and the substantive presence of the autonomous individual ‘I’, is increasingly fragile and processually threatened by the constant becoming of what was not there before, where the incessant play of movements in moments shatters linear unities and the artificial fixities of Being. In the transversal dynamics of these flows and transmutations an exciting new way of doing empiricism emerges. In this Positivism’s search for proof and evidence of what is has to be replaced by the radical associational, the constant relationality of becoming and, hence, the processually vibrant dynamics of the conjunctive and … where the epistemological preoccupation with meaning and the concerns of what is, are troubled and necessarily replaced by the speculative, ontogenetic and experimental fluidities brought into life by what if … As will be discussed in the following act of the book, in the multiple and always shifting associational relationalities of and, and, and … there are movements and moments that always extend possibility beyond the limits of finitude. The rhizome is vibrant and vital, its vibrancy and vitality is potent and capacious: it is always in-act. As Bonta and Protevi point out, because the rhizome ‘has no centralised organisation, it cannot be eradicated completely: it has multiple lines of flight, so escaping forces can always reestablish themselves elsewhere, and bud to form new rhizomes’ (ibid: 137) … and … and … and … movement always on the move. In a similar way to the emergence of unwanted grasses and so-called weeds in the pristine and manicured presentation of the flower garden, the rhizomatic shoot pops up everywhere and anywhere behind the gardener’s back, always working to decolonise the ‘horticultural appropriations’ (Ratinon and Ayre, 2021) that would work to contain or eradicate it. As Deleuze says when writing of the powerful influence of Spinoza, he bulges out … in all directions, there is no living corpse who raises the lid of his coffin so powerfully, crying so loudly “I am not one of yours” … he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch’s broom he makes you mount (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 15) The following quotation from Deleuze and Guattari provides an exemplification of the rhizome that shows rather than a definition that tells. It is a passage that stands out and demands to be read. It lives on heavily annotated and colourfully underlined, detached, stained and well-thumbed pages of my copy of their book A Thousand Plateaus. It is a page which falls from the covers every time the book is picked up, it reminds that it is a page that is ready to be read again, perhaps needs to be read again, it is a page that is seething with capaciousness, in this, it is a passage that will provoke new thought in action as soon as it is picked up again, it is a quotation

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that abnegates representation and troubles normative critique … In immanence, it is demanding in that it talks of action and becoming rather than attempting to set up a metaphysics of Being. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles … it is a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialised languages … language is an essentially heterogeneous reality. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilises around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil … A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7/8) In this quotation, it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting the proliferative possibilities and associational potency of the conjunctive ‘and’ in fuelling, in the relational dynamics of the assemblage, the rhizome’s ceaseless capacity for connection and heterogeneity. In this capaciousness, there is always movement toward, always, as Manning might say, an in-active, more-than. To emphasise this, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘any point of the rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (1987: 7). Isabelle Stengers (2011) talks of working with the work of Deleuze and Guattari as engaging with ‘A free and wild creation of concepts’. She uses the quotation to headline her writing to and with Whitehead’s process philosophy and, in so doing offers a complementary engagement between the work between all three of these thinkers. So where, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new’ and that ‘(c)oncepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies … They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created …’ (1994: 5), of Whitehead she says, (t)he specificity of the concepts proposed by Whitehead is that … once they have done their job, once they have transformed the way in which a situation raises a problem, they disappear without leaving a trace other than this transformation itself. (2011: 17) To emphasise this point, by appropriating Whitehead’s concept of ‘actual occasions’, it is possible to envisage the concept, as event, coming to life, differentiating by way of acting in the world and then quite possibly disappearing having done its job, so to speak. In highly speculative ways, we gain here a sense of the concept rhizomatically and processually always becoming other that whatever was there before.

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This vibrant and beautifully complimentary description in the long quotation from Deleuze and Guattari included above offers powerful advocacy for the use of rhizomatic practices to fuel, enliven and excite inquiry in future worlds where the old ways of doing, in inevitability, appear to be leading us toward encounters with environmental crises and the frightening possibilities of climate catastrophe. The realist ontogenetic emergence of Deleuze and Guattari’s geo-philosophical writing displays powerful engagements with the more than simply human. Their work always emphasises the relational and, in this respect, their use of the concept of the rhizome is hugely animate in activating here Manning’s (2013) assertive claims that there is ‘always more than one’, that there is always more than the simply human. It also suggests, through the speculative creation of concepts as events, that there is always more than one, that there are always other possible ways of becoming and doing in the world. What is exciting about the work that these philosophers are doing and offering in relation to rhizomatic concept making as event is the capaciousness that is in the speculative movement suggested and provoked by the ‘what-if ’. In the fluidities and flexibilities of spatio-temporality there is always the potential for new moments and new moments and the vibrancy and vitality of an always new coming to life. What is crucial about this in relation to the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome is that the ‘always more than one’ is also never the same and it is not about separateness. For Deleuze (2001), this new ‘image of thought’ can be understood in terms of ‘pure immanence’ and is one which does not impede thinking in the referential and representational ways of the dogmatic ‘image of thought’. He sees this dogmatism of the ‘image of thought’ that is potentially an impediment to becoming as essentially arborescent. In this, he sees the tree as putting down roots and establishing fixed foundations and of spreading out branches into the sky as a way of reaching out for light. For Deleuze, this immanent critique of arborescence and the Enlightenment model that emanates from it is based upon an ‘image of thought’ that is rhizomatic, in which existence is not simply grounded in the fixities of substance and presented as ‘rooted or ramified matter’ and where there are always discontinuities and multiplicities in the processual play of eventfulness and encounter. With a direct allusion to the associational and event/ful action of rhizomatic doings he says, what counts is the present-becoming … grass which is in the middle and which grows from the middle … always grass between paving stones … it is thought which is crushed by these paving stones … by … (those arborescent) images which suffocate and jaundice it. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 23) In this quotation, the ‘paving stones’ are seen to act as a rigid form of organisation and structuring that works to repress the free and wild proclivities and creativities of speculative and fabulatory thought. In this respect, Deleuze sees the ‘paving stones’ as working in mimetic ways. In this, they are seen to form a structured,

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interconnected patterning of authoritarian coding that represents a repeated and repressive ‘image of thought’ that attempts to eradicate any going off the rails and to ensure a commitment to and a following of the straight and narrow. Alternatively, the immanent doing of the rhizomatic ‘image of thought’ that Deleuze presents sees the grass between the paving stones as irrepressible, refusing to be defied, its movements are originary and creative, in ontogenesis the multiplicities and irregularities of its growth refuse to be squashed by the regulatory enforcements of concrete and cement. The persistent and defiantly changing differentiations of the rhizomatic resistance to be found in the growing of the grass, in this immanent ‘image of thought’, offers constant challenge to the practices of repetition, codification and representation that the laying of the paving stones has upon the creative multiplicities vibrantly present in the seething life beneath. And so, much of what Deleuze and Guattari have to offer here in this account of rhizomatic thinking and doing is also to do with the deterritorialisation of the dominating influence of dogmatic ‘images of thought’. They are not binarising rhizomatic practices with the hegemonies of arborescence, they are the first to realise that the creation of such dualisms can only work to instigate unproductive agonistic oppositions. As they point out, ‘there are … rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialisation. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes: conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome’ and what is key to this observation is that the ‘coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities’ (1987: 15). By way of further exemplification, it is interesting to note that certain botanically inflected horticultural sources make reference to one form of particularly rebellious and potentially vibrant species of rhizome, Reynoutria Japonica, as an invasive and resilient weed, pointing out that its roots and rhizomes can grow to a depth of two metres and that even after herbicide treatment has eradicated the aerial and surface growth, the deep underground rhizomes can remain in a viable state and may do so for up to 20 years. Reynoutria Japonica, or as it is more colloquially known, Japanese Knotweed, can re-emerge and re-grow on its own accord at any time and especially if the contaminated ground is disturbed. If it is left to grow untreated for a number of years it has the potential to cause damage to drains, paving, paths, driveways and poorly constructed boundary walls. The human-centric demonization that in derogation refers to this plant as a weed and that talks of the need to eradicate its invasive and contaminating effects, also offers further emphatic exemplification of the forceful energy that the figure of the rhizome is able to exert. So that whilst the highly individualistic and arborescent discursive construction of human attitudes toward its existence might be extremely powerful, the persistent capacity for the rhizomatic growth of this plant continues to have a huge influence despite the forces at play that wish to diminish it. The autopoietic and self making proclivities evident in the attitude toward and the treatment of this plant, can been described, in the terms of Moten and Harney (2013) Massumi (2002), Manning (2013, 2016) and others, as ‘neurotypical’, where this particular thought in action

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is highly individualised and dislocated from the relational interconnectedness of the ‘neurodiverse’. In contrast, ‘neurodiverse’ approaches incorporate what Massumi (2002) has referred to as the ‘chaos in the “total field” of vision’. In this, Massumi makes reference to the work of a group of researchers who, in inventing the concept of Ganzfeld drew attention to a ‘“total field” (in which) we see vision make an experimental philosophical escape from its own empirical conditions’ (ibid: 145). In relation to this, Manning conceives of a form of perception that extends beyond the confines and limitations of individual human-centric perception. Respectfully, she talks of an ‘autistic perception’ which ‘suggests … an experience of encountering the “art of the object” before perceiving the object as such’ (2013: 174). In this, she refers the work of Donna Williams and quotes her as describing ‘autistic perception’ in the following way: Perhaps the feeling comes from a time before words, before thought, before interpretation, before competition, before reliance on the conscious mind and before identity, in a time when all new experiences are equal in their worth and there is, as yet, no discrimination and no established sense of boundaries or hierarchy. (Williams in Manning, 2013: 249) With these prepersonal echoes toward Whitehead’s concept of prehension, Manning’s writing here leads us in connecting the ‘free and wild’ unbounded movement of rhizomatic thought with what I have referred to above as ‘the relational interconnectedness of the ‘neurodiverse’. It can also lead us away from thinking about educational experiences and the kinds of strategies used in teaching and learning in simply neurotypical ways, away from what she refers to as the ‘chunking’ of experience and be used to move us toward engaging with the complexity of experience rather than a dealing with separate categories. Opening a way for ‘neurodiversity’ and the use of approaches which make room for prehensively engaging with these complex in-formational relationalities instead of simply using the narrow focusing of the disciplinary gaze of the individual and the particular might offer ways of nurturing educational practices which are more attuned to more egalitarian ecologies of relationality and becoming. Returning to the rhizome and the in-formational patterning of rhizomatic thought that its presencing allows to unfold, it seems that, for example, by overlooking the many related cultural, medicinal, culinary and ceremonial benefits that the plant clearly also has to offer, the discursively established categorisation of the Japanese Knotweed as a ‘bad weed’ and as ‘an invasive species that needs to be controlled and eradicated’ provides an example of, what Manning refers to as ‘chunking’, where the objectification, individualisation of this plant works to disable any opportunities to conceptualise it in more neurodiverse, complex and relational ways. This also has significance in relation to thinking rhizomatically in relation to education and in terms of the dangers that the use of a narrowly, linear neurotypical approach to learning and inquiry is employed.

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With their potential for deterritorialisation becoming animate through an enhanced breadth of field perception, neurodiverse ‘images of thought’, can be used to promote and activate relational approaches of a more than simply human kind that engage with and, as Haraway (2016) might put it, sympoietically make kin with the more than simply human. An acceptance of and a working with such approaches allows, in interconnectedness and relationality, possibilities for the creation of attunements, where intensive traits and rhizomatic tendencies start working for themselves. In these spacetime makings, such approaches can encourage diverse and speculative movements, synaesthetic perceptions and oblique mutations, where flexibilities come to life and the play of images shakes loose, challenging discourses and hegemonies of signification and representation. As the work of Deleuze and Guattari suggests, in the ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105) when systems are encouraged to regain their ecological freedoms even the most microscopic event can upset the balance of power. Further, Deleuze and Guattari’s account of rhizomatic thinking and doing is also to do with the deterritorialisation of dominant systems of thought. They are not binarising rhizomatic practices with the hegemonies of arborescence, they are the first to realise that the creation of such dualisms can only work to instigate unproductive agonistic oppositions. The neoliberal challenges to opportunity and diversity in higher education institutional establishments at the present time and the production of the entrepreneurial subject as the emerging dominant and dominating form of identity in these establishments raises cause for concern. Whilst, in a Deleuzian sense, the production of subjectivity, in actualisation, always has the potential for becoming other than whatever preceded it, the wider pressures upon such in-formation can be hugely inhibiting, particularly in relation to the realisation and achievement of educational opportunities. However, as Manning says: The preconstituted subject is inevitably connected to the human, which, like the (transcendental) subject, tends to be mobilised as a categorical given. To cement its givenness, the human is defined according to its difference from other categories such as the animal or the plant or the mineral. This givenness is not neutral. The implicit hierarchy is clear: the human stands above, not in co-relation to, other forms of life. (2020: 39) Many thinkers are now pointing thought in the direction of considering the morethan simply human and in offering challenge to the continuing dominating privileging of the Cartesian ‘I’. The lack of neutrality indicated by Manning in the previous quotation, the exclusionary emphasis in many aspects of institutionalised education in favour of neurotypicality, the emergence in education of the entrepreneurial subject and the bringing to the fore of Haraway’s suggestion that the prevailing dominance of the autopoietic over the sympoietic is not the most efficient or equitable way of ‘staying with the trouble’, all suggest that realignments and deterritorialisations might need to take place.

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Perhaps in returning to the rhizome and by setting up this refrain, it is possible to address these concerns in other ways. This can be done by moving away from the prescriptive and structural rigidities and linearities of those questions that require answers to do with dialectics, direction, form and the logics of a posteriori and a ­priori. This can be done by following Deleuze and Guattari’s advice by, ‘proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing … move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings’ (1987: 25).

Notes 1 In challenging metaphysics of presence, Derrida’s critique of the structuralist logics of Saussure can be used to demonstrate that signifiers do not simply lead to any given signified, in which an epistemological dialectic enables confirmation of meaning to be made. For Derrida and his practice of deconstruction, the ‘meaning’ arrived at in this way can always be placed sous rature, continually remaining open to open to erasure. 2 Eliot, 2001.

ACTS WITH AND OF POSTHUMAN EMPIRICISMS

AND … AND … AND, stammering. Empiricism is nothing other than this. It is each major language, more or less gifted, which must be broken, each in its own way, to introduce this creative AND which will shoot along, and will make us this stranger in our language, in so far as it is our own. (Deleuze, 2002: 59)

Writing in this Act will attempt to propel a move away from the use of empiricisms that are agentic, at least in Positivist terms, in providing ‘evidence’ as a means of providing support for and of establishing foundations of existence. This will be facilitated through a movement toward and a making of a concept of empiricism that is enactive, that will be put to use in terms of what this concept might do. In this sense, empiricism can be understood and used in what Manning describes as an ‘artful’ sense whereby the ‘in-act of the more-than (is) where the force of form remains emergent’ (2016: 13). In this sense, empirical practices will be presented as moving beyond and working to problematise those hitherto binarising methods of data collection and analysis that are institutionally predominant and which create normatively inscribed assumptions and givens of research practice. A posthuman approach to empiricism works to trouble and destabilise approaches in which data is reduced to and constituted as objects of inquiry which are substantially static, inert and somehow observable according to the rules and tenets of established and repeatable scientific methods. Thinking empiricism as doing will enact practices that work in associational ways and that, in attunement, offer and work with speculation, fabulation, suggestion and wonder. In this reading of Deleuze, reading Hume, will serve to promote in-formational practices in which research is not a repository of so-called data that has been collected and analysed but is a continually vibrant moving force of creative activity. Also in this, the ‘radical empiricism’ of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-7

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William James will need to be considered in the sense that it leads to a ‘post qualitative’ thinking and doing of empiricism that is more than simply human. The talking and the writing and the thinking and doing has shifted away and toward … Movements away from the certainties of existing knowledge formations, movements away from subjectivities that fix individuals in terms of rigid identifications of class, race, gender and sexuality, movements away from the determinacies of logics of representation, interpretation and critique that privilege the one over the other and the right over the wrong, movements away from the sterilities, captures and dead ends of what-is. Movements away from the thinking that consciousness tells us all about the complexity of events in all their becoming … Movements toward knowings that live and breathe in the excitements of speculation and experimentation, movements toward ontologies of indeterminacy that revel in becomings that always exceeds the fixities of Being, movements toward the elusivities of selfing that brings to life bodies that live and die in the wink of an eye and that spark and flourish in the cloudiness of a dark winter’s sky … Movements toward logics of wonder that live life, that world as the sun rises and lights and glorifies the newness and potential of a new day, movements that thrive and multiply in the capacious relational opportunities offered by what-if rather than what-is. Movements toward intensification and a sensing that in the event there is more than the simply human cognisance of the event in its becoming, there is always more than the subjectification of the event and that the event is of its own selfing. Such movements in flow, fluidity and flux move. Movements that illuminate moments in the reckless and loving collisions of space time elision. Movements that demand attention, movements that necessitate attuning to not-yet-ness and the excitements of the not yet known. Writing such movement is sui generis, movement in its selfing, writing as movement does; in immanence it writes, nothing more. I remember those stalwart people saying things to do with writing. I remember reading Ursula le Guinn saying that she never wanted to be a writer she just wrote. I remember, was it Cixous, asking clearly and with an affectively imbued rhetoric, what else is there to do but write? In these writings, in these heres and nows, I have brought to life processes and, perhaps, paid less attention to substances, the materialities that are evident in the writing are attuned with fleetingness, they are damp, they smell, they are prehensive and capture is never part of their ontologising. In becoming, words often fail the writing, the writing writes toward and in these movements moving is hopeful of finding light and revealing the secrets of those hitherto darks corners. In these writings, there has emerged a writing to and with ‘spiriting’. This writing writes against the fixities of Being that impel and necessitate visibility, tangibility and clarity. I learn from the geophilosophy of Deleuze that, in any kind of substantive permanence, bodies do not have these qualities and in figuring them they should not be given such qualities. In these sensings, therefore, I enjoy writing that might be used to figure, that works to figure out perhaps; to speculate and to give new life to bodies

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bodying that might never have been apparent before. It is also evident from reading Manning (2013) that, in this, there is always more than one. Perhaps put even more emphatically, there is always more-than. In the irruptions of these bodyings, in the endogamous foldings that work in the constitution of these selfings, there are always the comings to life of vibrant new and exciting eruptions, where exogamous outpourings pulse and vibrate with emergent forceful energies that not only leave their mark but also urge movements out into the world, processually animating new flows and capillary actions. And so, this writing that makes moves toward immanent doing, that brings to life and that plays with the ghostly ‘affective presencing’ of ‘spiriting’, works also in the dissolution of the continuation of linear space time making. The animation of ‘spiriting’ lives in the now you see me, now you don’t of elusivity and revels in the ontological indeterminacies that it propels. These theorisings in doing enhance abandonment of linear spacetime concept making and, in constructive speculation, ask how can the past and future both be not present and again ask, what if we imagine and engage in worldings that in animation and activation live in aeon and not simply within and according to the constraining influence of chronos? It is Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity’ (1987: 262) that foregrounds the relationalities and multiplicities that are living here in the infinitudes of these spacetime movements and moments. Their talk of Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway brings this vibrantly to life: Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will Mrs Dalloway say to herself, “I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that.” And “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on … She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin or destination; it is always in the middle. (ibid: 263) It seems that in this writing away from the chronological fixities of linear space and time, the separation of movement and moment and against the a priori deductive creation of simply human individuals, we are also taking responsibility for new kinds of worlding that are attentive to the relational and ‘the processes of continuous resingularisation’ that Guattari saw as being necessary in the becoming of individuals as ‘more united and increasingly different’ (2014: 47). It seems that we are living in space time where, as Whitehead points out, “ Every method is a happy simplification” (Whitehead, 1967: 221 in Manning, 2020: 75) and this can no longer be accepted. Therefore, these Acts are tentatively entitled, Posthuman Empiricisms, researchcreatively offering movings away from empiricisms that are agentic in providing (so-called) ‘evidence’ as a means of establishing the foundations of existence. In so doing, there is a moving toward empiricisms that do, that act in associational and relational ways, that speculate and fabulate and that look toward ways of writing

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that diminish the wilfulness of representation and that work with the productive desire to write in, to and with constant multiple differentiations of the always not yet known. In writing to the processual indeterminacies of these spacetimes, Barad offers a diffraction of the supposed givens of historical space time constructions and, in so doing, infuses an ethics of responsibility into the ontological engagements that they entail. She says, To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that ‘we’ are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come. (Barad, 2014: 182) In engaging with Haraway’s (2016) sympoietic movements toward making kin and the ‘response-ability’ that this infers, Barad adds a further dimension to the necessities invoked when challenging the establishment and continuing legitimation of the conventions and enforcements of chronological constructions of time. This opening up of oneself to ‘indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come’ requires responsiveness to the complexities of change, to the capaciousness of the more-than of experience and to the call for action that the making rather than the accepting of time entails. What seems to be the necessities of such an approach blows a breath of fresh air that disturbs the aridity and staleness of the forms of Positivist logic that work to inform the conservative traditions that reference the past to promote decision making in the future. Inductive logic based upon the principle of a posteriori thought and action argues for a belief in forms of prediction and future action that have their origins in what is construed as having happened in the past. The assumptions that inhere to the following of this logic create an adherence to compulsions that are based upon the power of traditional authority: ‘We’ve always done it this way, therefore …? There is a sensing of certain ontological dispositions morphing toward thinking in action, thinking as doing. Perhaps with Deleuze, it is important to agree that, ‘(w)e can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed’ (Deleuze, 2004a: 44). Here there is adventure, here there is the moving away from the simplifications of inquiry that are necessary for us to be able to engage with what Deleuze also suggested when he said that we are in ‘situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’ (Deleuze, 1989: xi). In the light of this apt and, within the Covid-related circumstances, we currently all find ourselves in, I would argue,

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prescient comment, it is necessary to move away from the forms of research practice that have dominated qualitative inquiry in the Humanities and Social Sciences for many years. This necessitates stressing the urgency of engaging in concept making as ongoing eventful practice and in always engaging theorising as an active practice of research and inquiry. For so long, in these disciplines and domains, theory and practice has been divided, one is somehow seen as being separate from the other and this is clearly to the detriment of both. If we think and do thinking as doing then we elevate both in terms of the post-qualitative inquiries they are capable of engaging and carrying out. In so doing, we also work to engage an immanent critique which works to disable the subject/object binary that has impeded qualitative inquiry for decades. Instead, it is possible to offer, in the encounter, what might be understood as an ecology of the event, where the elision of theory into practice, practice into theory, as a space making where the two are intermingled as a radical departure opportunity away from the methodological constraints of qualitative inquiry hitherto. I have argued elsewhere for a ‘methodogenesis’ (Gale, 2018) that does not make statements about methods, action and plans for engaging with approaches to inquiry before they have taken place. ‘Methodogenesis’ proposes theory as action: the verb, theorising, exemplifying doing. It points out that no event, in whatever form, can be mapped in advance and that always, in the encounter, difference is made. It offers a challenge to the virtual actual divide and asserts that, in the capaciousness of the event, new opportunities for practices can always be found. In this, it offers speculation as inquiry, on the move, and, in so doing, refutes the categorisation and classification of methods in advance of the event. Events occur in multiple movements and moments and, in the potency of these capacious rapidities, they have a tendency to take us with them. Therefore, these so-called posthuman1 approaches to research and inquiry also suggest post-qualitative practices of inquiry which, as St. Pierre has pointed out, require the use of ‘concepts that reorient thinking’ (2019: 3) and that encourage ‘concrete practical experimentation and the creation of the not yet instead of the repetition of what is’. St. Pierre’s reorientations of thinking are resonant with Deleuze and his inducement to engage in a ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105). Equally, it seems apparent, therefore, that certain forms of research practice in the field of qualitative inquiry have sought, what Deleuze refers to in the quotation above, as a ‘unity of rhythm’ in forms of inquiry that do not use ‘concepts that reorient thinking’. These orthodoxies of qualitative inquiry can be understood as constraining forms of reality that are discursively constructed and that have become constitutive of customary, traditional and established practices in what we glibly refer to as the Humanities. Such practices continue to be largely concerned with the essentially individual human being, imbued with consciousness, thoughts and emotions that are consistent with the a priori reasoning of Cartesian rationalist thought and which can be characterised by, what Manning (2016, 2020) has referred to as, ‘neurotypicality’. The ‘neurotypical’ practices that this entails are also substantively influenced by the self-reproducing and individualising practices of reflection and reflexivity and

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by engaging in, what Schon referred to as, ‘reflection-on-action’. Approaches of this kind encourage the identification, representation and interpretation of what some body or some thing is or perhaps was and then, allowing this to slip, largely and habitually unnoticed, into the habit of predictively asserting, on the basis of a posteriori, inductive reasoning, what that body will do or what is going to happen in the future. In short, neoliberal, normatively constructed discourses and simply human modes of thought have encouraged and allowed neurotypical forms of thinking and supportive and replicating reflective and reflexive practices to identify and stabilise these simply human bodies within a metaphysics of being. This has taken place in ways that can be seen to have promulgated many issues that we are all now having to deal with as a consequence of the excesses of creating and living in the Anthropocene. Following on from this kind of logocentric thinking qualitative researchers are impelled to, first of all, collect these ‘things’ we call data and then to take what we have collected in these inquiries and analyse, interpret and represent them according to preceding and inscribed parameters, codes and methods of signification. In this respect, it is clear to see that positivistic forms of scientific research still play a very significant role in informing us of what some thing is, what it means and how research should be done. So, in contrast to this, I wish to argue that it is in these respects that ‘post qualitative’ researchers, avoiding the simplifications that imbue the discursively constructed givens of qualitative inquiry, are most likely to find themselves, to repeat the passage from Deleuze quoted earlier, in ‘situations which (they) no longer know how to react to, in spaces which (they) no longer know how to describe’. In short, as a consequence and again as Deleuze has pointed out, ‘the phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body’: in short, it only asserts the simply human. In asserting this position, it is necessary to invoke and bring in to play research practices that are constantly and processually on the move. As Manning points out, ‘techniques have to be generated in the event, each occasion anew, because if they are not, they simply don’t work’ (Manning in Massumi, 2015a: 157). Inventing concepts as events, generating these techniques in the event can be understood as central to Moten and Harney’s ‘study’, to Manning’s concept of ‘research creation’ and the posthuman empiricisms that are being constructed here. In this, I revel in the words of Deleuze when he says, (a)s long as thought is free, hence vital, nothing is comprised. When it ceases being so, all the other oppressions are also possible, and already realised, so that any action becomes culpable, every life threatened. (Deleuze, 1988: 4) The freedom of thought that Deleuze talks about here is not the freedom of thought that is expressed in the introspective exemplification to be found in the Utilitarian thinking of J.S. Mill (1974) where the logic he used took this freedom of thought into freedom of expression and then into freedom within the community. Mill’s

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libertarian thinking existed to promote the summon bonum, the greatest good, as manifest in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Mill’s thinking was of an Enlightenment form and in this respect was essentially simply human in conception and form. What Deleuze offers in the quotation above extends beyond the simply human and, in intensity, sees a posthuman empiricism as the engagement with productive desire. In the emergence of their concept of ‘becoming-animal’, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) express thought as an intensity that is more than simply human and that therefore exists and is creative of a plane of composition. The author Paul Auster writes about this in similar ways when he says, There is something nice about being in the dark, he discovers, something thrilling about not knowing what is going to happen next. It keeps you alert, he thinks, and there’s no harm in that, is there? Wide awake and on your toes, taking it all in, ready for anything. (1987: 152) Auster’s ‘being in the dark’ expresses becoming and an alertness to the always not yet known that brings to life what Stewart (2007) describes as ‘worlding’, where ‘being in the dark’ is concomitant with being in the world. In talking of this in terms of ‘ordinary affect’, Stewart sees this ‘worlding’ as taking place in multiplicity and relationality and in terms of the movements of all bodies. She says: Ordinary affect is a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal – not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water. (2007: 128) And so, being in the world is becoming and is always a more than and therefore not a doing that is limited to simply human activity. Added to this and if, in a Baradian sense, these doings are seen, to move from and to be understood as working for all bodies, human and nonhuman, in ‘intra-active’ rather ‘inter-active’ ways, then the concept of difference is displaced by the immanent affectiveness of differentiation as a doing, in and of its own selfing and always occurring in the here and now and in ways that exceed the simply human. Differentiation is enacted, as Stivale points out in his reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal’, as ‘the crucial link between creativity, the very possibility of thinking, and animality, through the practice of “etre aux aguets” (being on the lookout) for “recontres” (encounters)’ (2017: 197). The territorialisations that emanate from these movements exist in multiplicity, they are always on the move and they are always creative of new becomings. These creativities are always new and, because of their existence in and of differentiation, are potentially always of a different order to whatever might have preceded them. Deleuze says of this:

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Empiricism … undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as here-and –now, or rather … from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed “heres” and “nows”. Only an empiricist could say concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond “anthropological predicates”. I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differenciates them. (Deleuze, 2004b: xix) It feels that when Deleuze, in the quotation above, uses the phrase ‘beyond anthropological predicates’, he is pointing us to spatialisation that is beyond the simply human. I take this to be a call to all forms of qualitative inquiry with all their associated methodologies to nurture alertness to the goings on of this more than simply human. Also, when he says that ‘empiricism … undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard,’ I sense a resonance with my own work where I make claims for a ‘madness as methodology’ (Gale, 2018) where ‘methodogenesis’ accounts for the necessity of a continually changing, always on the move, now you see, now you don’t approach to the doing of our post qualitative inquiries. And so, in this radicalisation of empiricism, where ontologies of immanence work to displace the transcendent illusions of conventional qualitative inquiry, it seems important to take a cue from Latour when he said, ‘(t)he question was never to get away from facts but to get closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism’ (2004: 231). Therefore, it is in the empirical that difference is made. It is in engaging with singularity that, in a Deleuzian sense, empiricism can best be understood. The universalising and generalist tendencies of orthodox empiricism run counter to Deleuze’s engagement with Hume and his empiricist approach. In the latter, the singular in the empirical is not simply the individual of traditional qualitative inquiry but the encounter, the event in which difference is always emergent, moving, always being made, or, as Deleuze and Guattari, have it, always ‘becoming’. In this respect, therefore, the smallest unit of our inquiries is not the individual of humancentric thought, it is the assemblage, made up of a contingent heterogeneity of multiple items, energies and forces. The excitement of this approach to empiricism is to be found in Auster’s ‘being in the dark’ and in Stivale’s reading of Deleuze when he says, Just as animals live constantly aux aguets and thereby must define their territory and assure their very existence … so too do artists and philosophers open themselves to possibilities of innovation and thought through the violence they risk in having an idea through a genuine rencontre – a potentially threatening, frightening encounter that might open them to an entirely new mode of perception and sensation … (Stivale: 197)

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Therefore, in short, in these posthuman empiricisms, the event is the making of history in the present. According to the thinking of Barad (2007), this ‘making of history’ occurs through the making of ‘agential cuts’ which through diffractive doings open and create new moments of becoming. In this, she posits diffractive doings which run counter to the kinds of reflective and reflexive practices that work to stabilise and further orthodox qualitative methods and approaches. She suggests that rather than reflectively consolidating and unifying a particular thought or action, diffraction interferes with reflective consolidation and, through differentiation, creates difference, in turn, suggesting diffusion, multiplicity and diversity of approach and action. In addition, her approach, as mentioned above, by also forwarding and engaging intra-activity over inter-activity, helps to animate and activate a challenge to and a diminution of the status of the autonomous individual of simply human forms of thought and action. In this, I would further argue that what Madison (2010) refers to as ‘acts of activism’ can be used to animate speculative promotions of diffraction in which the what-if plays a far more important role than the epistemologically sterile and inert question what-is. In his critique of phenomenological approaches and his engagement with Hume’s famous and highly influential approach to empiricism, Deleuze argues for the creation of, ‘possibilities for investigation of the “nonhuman” or “superhuman” … world wherein images move and collide in a state of universal variation and undulation (in) … a world with no axes, no centres, no ups or downs’. (Deleuze, 1991: 5). What Deleuze expresses here helps to move thinking a doing away from the simply human proclivities and enactments of the orthodoxies of mainstream forms of qualitative inquiry. In this, he further argues, counter to traditional and normally accepted interpretations of Hume’s work, that empiricism can be metonymic and associational and not simply about those inductively prescribed forms of data collection and analysis which are used as a means of providing findings, evidence and interpretations in support of particular truth claims in more Positivist forms of inquiry. Rather, the constantly emergent and lively associational nature of Deleuze’s inquiry, re-reads the work of Hume, avoiding traditional and reductive analytical approaches of discovery, condensation and analysis and instead works to promote practices of displacement and diffraction, that invariably animate processes of articulation, of making collaborative connections, relational links and associations, not simply with the human but also with the materialities of the nonhuman. In this sense, therefore, the notion that ‘data’ can somehow make claims to capture the moment and can be somehow used as a way of providing evidence of something that is understandable in simple cause and effects terms and used to provide the basis for what might be said or done in the future, is put under scrutiny and, as Derrida would have it, placed under erasure. So, if we follow Manning’s contention that ‘(t) here is never a body as such: what we know are edgings and contourings, forces and intensities: a body is its movement’ (2014: 163) then the substantive fixity of bodies, human and nonhuman bodies, bodies of knowledge, bodies of data and so on becomes problematised, challenged and seriously undermined.

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Through the apparently simple and direct use of the conjunctive ‘and’, Deleuze offers a transversal politics of associational performative encounters, creatively animating and activating affective relational approaches which destabilise conventional binary forms and dualistic constructions. As he says of becomings, it is not one term that becomes the other, but each encounters the other, a single becoming which is not common to the two, since they have nothing to do with one another, but which is between the two, which has its own direction, a bloc of becoming … this is it … the wasp AND the orchid … (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 6/7)

Affective presencing and posthuman empiricism … The concept of ‘affective presencing’ can be layered into sense making and action in relation with and attendant to orientations toward event-based practices and the ontological, ethical and aesthetic concerns that come to life when working with creative relationalities with the more than simply human. Thinking about the concept of ‘affective presencing’ in relation to Deleuze’s re-working of Hume’s concept of empiricism, it seems clear that within the multiplicities of these practices I am aware that, again with Deleuze, that concept forming, as an eventful practice does not work in isolated ways. Concepts form and come into play with other concepts in the heterogeneities and contingencies of assemblages: in this, nothing is fixed, all is becoming. As has already been discussed, Deleuze argues that sensing and moving with Hume’s concept is much less about an empiricism that deals with essentially Positivistic notions and practices of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof ’, as has been traditionally conceived within the applications, procedures and practices of conventional research and inquiry. In this, he asserts that working with Hume’s concept is much more to do with the mapping of encounters in the now you see me, now you don’t and associational relationalities of events in their emergence. Therefore, it is a concept dealing with movement and more-than, hence, in not-yet-ness, it is never complete, it is always on the move. It is about the encounter with haecceities, as could be seen to be exemplified in the following quotation, used earlier in a previous Act, from Virginia Woolf ’s book Moments of Being: It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling … no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. Nor does that give the feeling. It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent. (Woolf, 1985: 93) In other respects, it can, if you like, show bodying as exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) appropriation and development of Antonin Artaud’s concept of

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the ‘body without organs’. In this concept, the organisation of the body is never complete, it is always on the move, always, as Manning would put it, ‘more-than’, it is always ‘in-act’ (2016: 29). Therefore, for example, in writing as immanent inquiry, the pen gets on the scent. And so, living with the bodying of the ‘body-without-organs’ also requires us to be attentive to Spinoza’s crucially important question, ‘What can a body do?’ In addressing this question, in encounter, we experience bodies bodying. In the frictional play between force and form, bodies are always on the move, always orienting toward, always coming into self but, in the movements of further bodying, always eluding a fixity or finality of form. Manning uses Simondon’s concept of ‘in-formation’ to exemplify this. If you will, bodies, bodies of all kinds, are always in formation, never fully formed. In this, we can further attune to the work of Spinoza and his contention that all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected. In doing so, it becomes evident that in multiplicities of associational relationality all bodies, in body-ing, have potential, they are potent, they have the capacity to do something, something that is new, something fresh, living always in the capaciousness of the always not yet known. The following is a quotation from the writer Henry Miller from his book To Paint Is to Love Again that seems to me relevant to this line of reasoning. Miller says: The most familiar things, objects which I had gazed at all my life, now became an unending source of wonder, and with the wonder, of course, affection. A tea pot, an old hammer, or chipped cup, whatever came to hand I looked upon as if I had never seen it before. I hadn’t, of course. Do not most of us go through life blind, deaf, insensitive? Now as I studied the object’s physiognomy, its texture, its way of speaking, I entered into its life, its history, its purpose, its association with other objects, all of which only endeared it the more… Have you ever noticed that the stones one gathers at the beach are grateful when we hold them in our hands and caress them? Do they not take on a new expression? An old pot loves to be rubbed with tenderness and appreciation. Miller, H. (1960) in Popova, M. (2015) I sense in reading this quotation from Miller that it offers an exemplification of affect working in a Spinozist sense, in affective relationality, it seems to me that we have here what Massumi describes as ‘a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act’. (1987: xvi) Perhaps we should be thinking of the old pot in Miller’s still life drawing him. All bodies are capacious, they have the potential to act. So, a sensing and subsequent use of the concept of ‘prepersonal intensity’ is crucially important in helping us to move in our thinking away from the individualised and individualising tendencies found in the use of so-called characteristics and emotions, normally ascribed to the pervasively personal of simply human bodies

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and to move thinking toward the multiplicities and relationalities that can be associated with all bodies, human and nonhuman, in constant movement and play with one another. Within this usage, there is also a movement away from simply paying attention to bodies in their individualised, substantive and isolated material form, what Kant might refer to as, things in themselves, with a movement toward bodies in process, always on the move, always underway, always, as Manning puts it, ‘in-act’ (2020: 75). Emphasising process over substance in this way, as has been discussed elsewhere, involves bringing in to play Whitehead’s (1929: 18) notion of ‘prehension’, in which the event or, what Whitehead calls, the ‘actual occasion’ is engaged with in relational spacetime making. Whitehead’s concept alerts us to and brings into play a kind of pre-cognitive knowing. ‘Prehension’ is not the knowledge that might be associated with apprehending, wherein there is a claim to a form of capture, perhaps expressed in a Eureka moment of ‘I’ve got it! Rather, in Whitehead’s terms, ‘prehension’ fleetingly lives in movements and moments of actualisation, always on the move, always in process, never completely grasped, never fully actual. Of these processual movements Manning asks: What of the share of the grasping that cannot quite be parsed, pulled in to actuality? That continues to field? What of that which cannot quite be captured, yet makes a difference in the event? What of that share that cannot quite define itself and yet takes part in how the world is felt? How to articulate the prehension of the infrathin of experience in the making? (2020: 17) Addressing Manning’s questions and thinking in action here can be facilitated through an engagement with William James’ (1992) concept of ‘radical empiricism’ wherein experience of the world can be seen both substantively, in terms of particulars and processually, in terms of relations between those particulars. James proposed a realist ontology in which, similar to the Deleuzian concept of ‘actualisation’, experience is always open to movement, always open to change. In terms of the relations between particulars and bodies accounting for experience is always pulsing with energy, always animate with the capacity to actualise differently. James talks of this as pure experience. The pure experience can be understood, less in terms of a quality of experience and more in terms of the immanence of relationality. Therefore, James’ ‘radical empiricism’ does not stop at the particulars of determinations and differences at the simply physical or substantive level, rather it points toward movement and change that is inherent within the volatility and potentiality of the relational. Change is not the movement of the substantive individual, it is the processual vibrancy of the collective relational forces of individuation. Therefore, it is important to work to sense relationality ‘in-formation’. In these movements toward actualisation, never fully the actual, I live with these prehensive knowings. As my pen gets on the scent, I engage in writing as an immanent doing. In this, I use writing in attempts to animate, to bring to life, to enliven these frictional energies that spark and evanesce between force and form. The forceful

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rhetoric of Manning’s questions do not have answers but, in the asking, they facilitate provocations. When she asks these question … What of the share of the grasping that cannot quite be parsed, pulled in to actuality? That continues to field? What of that which cannot quite be captured, yet makes a difference in the event? What of that share that cannot quite define itself and yet takes part in how the world is felt? How to articulate the prehension of the infrathin of experience in the making? … I can only respond that all that is left is to write, what else is there to do? What else is there to do but write in ways that pulls the writing away from the simply descriptive and the representational? What else is there to do but to write way from the binarising forces of mind and matter and the hierarchical assumptions that posit mind as engaging with matter? What else is there to do but to write, in immanence, in relation to, write with, write to create those becoming that are the stuff of relationality. In making her claim for the necessity of engaging in ‘post qualitative inquiry’ (my italics), St. Pierre talks of the need to ‘turn away from conventional humanist qualitative methodology, signalling the “not yet” … that is everywhere but indeterminate, not yet created, not yet individuated and organised into the definite – immanent. (2019: 4) As writing moves here, now, in the fragility of these moments, pellets of hard rain sleet against my window, a gale from the south west drags the last few leaves from the nearly bare boughs of the aspen, the insidious and persistent tentacles of winter cold wrap around my body and the writing hesitates then flows, hesitates then flows … In this sitting as thinking as doing and writing as doing as words and concepts stutter then flow, stutter then flow, I also sense again the concept of ‘affective presencing’ coming to life again, always on the move in actualisation, never complete, always willing prehension toward apprehension and inevitably delighting as, in mercurial elusivity, movement moves on, another speculative moment shifts living in to the excitement of the always not yet known, and, in the so doing, in the contingencies of movement and moment, the concept shifts a little, makes a new connection, differentiates and shifts relationality in barely perceptible ways. It is possible to argue that St. Pierre’s ‘post qualitative inquiries’ can be used to promote experimental and speculative approaches that are never fixed within the confines of specific methods and which are, in becoming, in the always emergence of Whitehead’s new and multiple ‘actual occasions’. This ‘affective presencing’ pays attention to and is creatively animate of working ‘in-formation’ with the always not yet known and the notyetness and constant emergence of always new concepts, always in play, as events. Each new concept formed, affectively moves. In doing, it shifts bodies of thought, human and nonhuman bodies, bodies of writing, material bodies and so on: in this, bodies move and are moved. Miller’s old pot draws him in, animating the paint on his canvas. Always ‘in-formation’, bodies are capacious,

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engaging in ‘affective presencing’, they always have the potential to do something, in Spinoza’s words, they have the capacity to affect and be affected. Returning to the continual emergence in encounter of body-without-organs, bodies are always in movements and moments bodying. Even if we sense a body, as Manning points out, The shape that we call ”the body” has bodying still coursing through it, the back ground of other shapings still resonating in and across it. It is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, as … Whitehead … would say, to take the momentary foregrounding of this shape as the form of the body. (2020: 154) Whilst this bodying is a processual doing that never stops, in the normative procedures and politics of subjectivity and identity, there is a very common, simply human tendency to reduce bodying to a living with my body, our selves, which also pervasively in-acts a body/world dualism that has the potential to diminish senses of relationality and the co-compositional possibilities of living with multiple human and nonhuman others. In relation to this, I have written elsewhere: There is a poetics in our madness that opens fissures in the indistinct relentlessness of relational spaces. It is a poetics of affect and it is sensitised in the aesthetics and sensualities of spacetime becomings. Working with the affective offers alerts to haecceity and the vibrancy of moments of ‘This is this’. It is the point where everything seems to stop, perhaps only for an instant, and then in that brief instantaneous stopping that defies language and all discursive construction, becoming surfs and is the surging tide of beautiful temporary knowing that is recognised in gestural simplicity … a smile, a nod and a gentle moving on in world-making. (Gale, 2018: 25) So as writers and researchers, how can we engage with what I have referred to here as this ‘brief instantaneous stopping that defies language and all discursive construction’? In simply normative and pervasively institutional terms, the answer appears to be clear. In this, as students and colleagues in institutions of learning, powerful discourses persuade us and insidiously habituate and customise us to write to reflect, write to represent, write to interpret, write to critique and so on. In the academy, this is what we are required to do. By presenting the rhetorical stance that there is no such thing as a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1986), all writing becomes ontologically and epistemologically positioned and all perspectives become relativised through the offering up of different points of view. This is how the disciplines discipline. However, and in contrast to this, the active philosophical approaches of Deleuze, Manning, Massumi, St. Pierre (myself) and others argue for writing practices that resist the discursive construction of such normatively inscribed approaches to writing and to theorising. In engaging with concept forming as event, each encounter is

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event full, in the event something always happens, concepts are alive in emergence, they exemplify, they move, they shift toward other concepts, momentarily, perhaps, they are of a constellation of concepts: in short, they are active in and animate of becoming. In this, concepts are not applied, they exemplify, they enact examples, they are generative of exemplifications. In this, concepts are not to be generalised or to be identified as particularities, they are singularities in an assemblage, in multiplicity they exemplify detail, in coming to life they vibrate connectedness and relationality. In advocating the use of examples in the writing Massumi says: The writing tries not only to accept the risk of sprouting deviant, but also to invite it. Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognisable to you as your own. Massumi (2002: 18) And so, at the risk of ‘sprouting deviant’, the following short piece of writing offers what Massumi might suggest is an exemplification, offering a moment, a fleeting movement, when space time difference dissolves and words tumble on to a page, when the magnetism of the nonhuman ‘ordinary’ exists as the pull toward new imaginings and the possibilities of new life. In fascination, I am drawn by what for many might be the ordinary. I walk on the beach, in the sunshine, in the wind, in the rain and my attention is caught by life that is immanent and deeply connected in mine. I see a sea, sand polished piece of elvan with the iridescence of a lined quartz scar running through its elliptical length. It is animate; it beckons with its shine, with luminous, intense potentiality as it rests there amongst a millennia of shoreline detritus. I pick it up. It relaxes and rests in my hand like a small exhausted rescued fledgling. I feel its pulse. We are close, bonded in the delicate frisson of an electric moment. Knowing reciprocates and movement is a momentary lifting. I turn it in my hand, gently dusting sand particles from its surface; it begins to shine and move with the gentle gyrations of my fingers. I am aware of the breeze blowing from the west bringing smears of cumulus to cloud and chill the rays of the limp autumn sun. The quartz scar bleeds light; the smooth elvan breathes life into its cusping with my palm. Looking up into the light wind, feeling the feathery wispiness of its touch on my face, I slide treasure into my pocket, feel its warmth pulsing through the soft material to my skin and move with it breathing new life into the emergence of the unfolding shoreline. (Gale, 2021: 467)

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In these brief elisions of space and time, of movement and moments, I sense echoes resounding from Miller’s book To Paint is to Love Again. Recently, in preparing for a presentation that I was due to give, I read in the lockdown quiet of a dark, wet, wintry night in my home in Cornwall and found myself being deeply moved by a piece of writing a colleague shared with me. I found myself drawn to the beautifully poetic expression of her rhetoric when she asked, What calls us to watery spaces, to cliff tops and to cities of dampened ground and towers of bark? We are called by the matter beyond. Beyond human, beyond language, beyond rationale. We are called by the something that catches our peripheral vision and the untraceable song of the air. (Crowther, 2021) Writing here, writing now, writing involution in the animation of immanent space making, I sense the workings of an intensification of affect. Miller, as he begins to paint again, is touched by these encounters with the world. We find him saying, ‘(t)he most familiar things, objects which I had gazed at all my life, now became an unending source of wonder, and with the wonder, of course, affection’. In my piece of writing, quoted above, we find him saying, (i)n fascination, I am drawn by what for many might be the ordinary. I walk on the beach, in the sunshine, in the wind, in the rain and my attention is caught by life that is immanent and deeply connected in mine. In these passages, in brief movements and moments, writing touches. In these workings with Spinoza, affect, relationality and intensity, in the attunements between these pieces of writing, I sense the expression of a ‘more-than’, where, in this intensification of affect, the frictional encounter of force and form is creative of something new, something that wasn’t there before. And also in these encounters Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infra-thin’, of which he famously said that one cannot define and only give examples of, (quoted in Manning, 2020: 16) suggests to us that which is left behind. The imperceptibility of that touch, that smell, that vibration impels a prehensive knowing that animates in the persistent delicacy of sensation. I sense that here we have an exemplification of ‘affective presencing’ where, when the pen gets on the scent, the sparks that fly when writing touches are bright, vivid and the exuberant expression of new life. In relation to this, Deleuze says that, (smooth) space is filled by events and haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception … a Body without Organs instead of an organism and organisation. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 479)

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And so, assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies in relational space are energised by capacities of potentiality as they act and are acted upon. In a recent interview Massumi (2017, online) talked of Spinoza and the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected as ‘powers of existence’ and that these powers of existence are ‘irreducibly relational’. In this, he points out that capacities to affect and be affected, ‘are reciprocals, growing and shrinking as a function of each other. So, from the start, affect overspills the individual, tying its capacities to its relational entanglement with others and the outside. Affect is fundamentally transindividual.’ In ‘affective presencing’, this transindividuality is more than simply human. In the writings offered here, the writers, in immanence, in the processual immediations of writing as doing are clearly drawn by energies and forces that are constitutive of the more-than that these ‘affective presencings’ can animate. This being drawn, this capaciousness of becoming, offers a doubling of experience in which the nonhuman materialities of the sea, a pebble on the beach and Miller’s ‘old pot (that) loves to be rubbed’ all expel a magnetism, a haptic force of drawing toward and, at the same time, work to reconfigure the selfing of the body that touches. In affect, the body that touches is being drawn, in the movements and moments of these ‘overspillings’ the body that touches moves, in affect it is drawn in different ways. As Deleuze might have it, body-becoming-sea, body-becoming-pebble, body-becoming-old pot …. and so on. Massumi’s reference to the ‘overspilling’ of the individual resonates with Manning’s challenge to the personalising and individualising containment of bodies found in orthodox approaches to experience, subjectivity and identity. By arguing that ‘The body never fully actualises’ and that ‘the actual is never fully actual’ Manning (2010: 121) takes our thinking beyond the simply human in emphasising that there is always more than one. This ‘always more than one’ can be made sense of in processual and individuating terms. These encounters and the worldings that emanate from them provide examples of what Manning, Massumi and others might describe as an immanent critique. In his adaptation of Agamben’s ‘exemplary method’ Massumi (2002) offers an affirmative form of critique which initiates a showing rather than a telling that, in the showing, exemplifies the coming to life of an event that is prior to form, representation, interpretation and normative critique. Exemplification is a movement in and of the moment, it is not a method, it is not a representation, its incandescence is brief and illuminative, in the spark of its invention and the surprise of its emergence, it is here and then it is gone. I have a sense that these ‘affective presencings’ do not simply stop here. Massumi points out that, in encounters such as those described above, the animation of practices of ‘immediation (are) a way of drawing attention to the event as the primary unit of the real’ (2015b: 147). These relational reorientations of and toward thinking and doing, involve paying attention, nurturing attunements and always animating alertness to the possibilities of collective creative action. And, to emphasise this point, Manning asserts that, ‘(t)he expression of what things do when they shape each other involves an attunement to the conditions of experience as they come into actualisation … what moves them … what speculates in the excess of what

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comes to be’. (Manning, 2020: 188) Encountering, reading and living with the work of Deleuze and Guattari moves us toward practices of worlding in which every concept that is made is an event. In relationality, every body that is encountered is actualising, coming toward selfing, always becoming and never becomes. The emergence of a concept relationally creates an encounter with the world and, as such, in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, these concepts can be seen to encourage, what they describe as ‘a free and wild creation of concepts’. In this they claim, in their final collaborative book, What is Philosophy? that there is no heaven for concepts, concepts will not be and cannot be preserved, they will not sit gathering dust on a shelf, waiting for posterity. In their creation concepts act, they do things. In Empiricism and Subjectivity Deleuze provides a very telling quotation from Hume when he says, ‘Men (sic) are mightily addicted to general rules … Where cases are similar in many circumstances, we are apt to put them on the same footing, without considering, that they differ in the most material circumstances’ (Deleuze, 1991: 55). Working with an empiricism that is vibrant and attuned to the sensitivities of association and relationality provides a means of working against the kinds of normative critique that are so popular in the academy. In offering what he refers to as ‘the secret of empiricism’ Deleuze offers a means of engaging in an affirmative practice of immanent critique which can be used to breakthrough some of the strictures and prejudices that are often used to discipline and to control institutional practices and procedures of curriculum design, teaching method, assessment and so on. There are evidently ‘secrets’ to be found in the traditions and orthodoxies of empiricism and tenets and practices of qualitative inquiry. Many of these can be realised and brought to the light when the desires of presence that are linked to these are exposed. A desire for presence of this kind that is grounded in lack and the need for the individualising presence of ‘I’ has its origins in the human-centric proclivities of qualitative inquiry. As Deleuze has said, ‘the phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body’ (2004a: 44). Therefore, the concept of ‘affective presencing’ that is being offered here, in relation to this nascent concept of posthuman empiricism, is driven by a productive desire to work with the ontological indeterminacies that are always in becoming and emergent in the vibrant potentialities of immanent critique. ‘Affective presencing’ relishes indistinctness, revels in hidden spaces, resides in the interstices of notyetness and in those reaching voices insistently crying to be heard. ‘Posthuman empiricism’ encourages creative and adventurous forays into active actualisation, activating and celebrating politics of movement and incursions into the always not yet known.

Note 1 Concepts and practice that are designated as ‘posthuman’ proliferate. Discussions abound as to whether the concept should be expressed in elision, hyphenation or simply as two words. Equally, discussions as to whether the ‘post’ designates an expression denoting a chronologically ‘after’ or an intra-actively ‘more than’ human. The preferred usage in this book will be presented as ‘posthuman’ that is indicative of the ‘more than’ (simply human).

ACTS OF RESISTANCE TO THE URGE TO TRANSPARENCY

Mystery, opacity the red coat1 dis/appearing again, now you see me, now you don't … The writings that surface in these acts of resistance propel concept making in movements toward and a revelling in the mysteries of the opaque, the barely ‘seen’, the beautiful cloudiness of un/knowing as the creative in-forming and not-yet-ness of the always not yet known. The writings that surface in these acts of resistance trouble and work to replace the unseemly confidence and cognitive assertiveness that lives in those Enlightenmentinspired phrases such as ‘Oh, yes, I see!’, ‘Yes, I understand’ and ‘I’ve got it now!’. In so doing, these writings also wish to encourage those speculative inducements and encouragements that are to be found in the enunciations and utterances of phrases such as ‘Oh, yes, why not?!’, ‘Yes, that’s an interesting possibility’, ‘Oh, I’ve never thought of it that way before’, ‘Shall we try it out?’, ‘Why not, let’s have a go?’ and so on.

Lines, delineations, alignments … I leave the water through the soft lapping of the shorebreak; I step lightly over the detritus of the strandline and sit on the rocks looking out over the sea at Polhawn. There is a buzzard soaring high above me, lifting higher and higher on the warm thermal air rising from the sun soaked beach and up the sheer elvan rock of the cliff face. My thoughts also begin to soar, it is these movements that concern me; movement never stops, movement always involves, in creative relationality, a movement toward, a movement that Manning asserts always involves a ‘politics of touch’. These soaring movements take me out of my body, in productive desire they creatively and rebelliously energise DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-8

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my body-without-organs and work to deterritorialise the humanism that attempts to hold and place it within the rigidity and form of its organism. This is the madness that allows for breakthrough, not breakdown. Diary entry June 30th 2018 All the complexities and complications that compost and that are constitutive of the ‘middlings’ that go to make up the processual movements of this becoming book could be said to have their conceptual originations in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘multiplicity’. As they say, ‘(a) multiplicity has neither subject or object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions’ (1987: 8). For them, multiplicities are complex structures made up of intersecting lines that do not draw from or reference any prior form or unity. In this, they are about rhizomatic movement and flow rather than substance or form. They do not attune with obvious regularities and the transparencies of form. Their complications and complexities can best be understood in terms of relational movements and flows and, in this respect, are best not thought of in terms of beginnings and endings and the conventionalities of neurotypical approaches. Instead, in tendings away from the fixities and stabilities of linear, rational and sequentially informing approaches, they are more likely to be encountered and engaged with through ‘intra-active’ (Barad, 2007) and ‘sympoietic’ (Haraway, 2016) approaches and the widened field perceptions of neurodiversity. Insights can be gained into these workings through Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising of lines. The orthodoxies and conventions of simply human approaches to various forms of qualitative research and inquiry appear to only engage with what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Deleuze and Parnet (2002) have referred to as ‘lines of segmentarity’. These lines are more obviously seen as delineating, they are lines which are often agentic in mapping out linear paths. This is what they do and, in this sense, they make clear boundaries, demarcations and categories and, in action, they tend toward the animation of boundedness, difference and containment. In the perhaps, no longer appropriately named Humanities and Social Sciences, for example, these lines provide the establishing, noumenal and titular status of categories such as ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and also work to provide the basis of the separation into disciplines and rigid identification that are used to classify and establish specific subject areas, such as Sociology, Psychology, etc. These are the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences and the lines that are used to divide, demarcate and delineate them, they discipline. It can be seen from the discussions taking place throughout this book that these delineations and demarcations are, in large part, determined by ‘images of thought’ that appear to be premised upon the valuing of binarism, difference and autopoiesis rather than those of multiplicity, collectivism and sympoietic approaches to inquiry and pedagogy. It appears not to be accidental that the former ‘image of thought’ is more likely to nurture and be cultivated by neurotypicality and the latter by neurodiversity. However, rather than setting up another agonistic form of binarism, it will be of greater value to examine more carefully what different delineations of this kind have the capacity to do.2

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‘Lines of segmentarity’ can be understood as lines of convenience, they are habitual and, crucially, they can be seen to habituate. In the action of such normatively inscribed behaviour, these acts of, what Bourdieu, using his concept of habitus and his theory of social reproduction (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) might refer to as, habituation, these lines can become fixed, they are taken as given and, as such, within the institutional practices of the academy, as disciplines, they discipline. The work of Foucault shows clearly and exhaustively the ways in which such lines can be seen to produce the social and cultural production of reality. Within the animations of this discussion ‘human’ can be understood in terms of a ‘line of segmentarity’ that delineates and enacts through inscription and prescription what human is and what it can do. For Deleuze, it is clear that ‘there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight, etc.’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 10) Therefore, it can be seen that engaging in the approaches being described here works to deterritorialise the so-called and normatively accepted givens of delineation, challenging the epistemologically grounded nouns that work to fix and represent Being, and that are to be found within the traditional methods and orthodoxies of conventional qualitative inquiry. It does this by offering challenge to the established striations of molar, rigid ‘lines of segmentarity’ and stratification by speculatively bringing them into play with more supple lines, ‘lines of molecularity’. These lines work to destabilise the constraining politics of identity and practices of subjectification enforced by segmentary lines. In doing this, they show how the ways in which their isolating capacity for tendentious containment can also be seen to give way to emergences and multiplicities that are far more fluid in suppleness, capillary flexibility and, hence, ways of becoming in the world. In becoming, lines of molecularity proceed as leakages and fissures where fixities of thinking and doing appear to be established in their practices of containment and boundedness. The emergence of these different kinds of difference offers sensings and movements toward multiplicity and creative relationality that counter the limitations and controls of individualism and binary isolationism that have hitherto worked to prescribe practices of coding, classification and categorisation. I hear an echo of Deleuze saying ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines and these lines are very varied in nature.’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 124). It seems to me that what Deleuze describes here are the ways in which looking at, moving through and being in the world are normally carried out. Within the substantive individualism of a metaphysics of being the construction of molar lines of segmentation provide ways of assuming that difference exists in advance of encounter and in binary form. Lines of segmentarity are not necessarily to be seen as impenetrable lines but they have a presence (a pre-sense, perhaps) by showing how we begin to see the world. An engagement with the second kind of line in Deleuzian theorising works to destabilise the kind of rigid segmentation to be found in the above. It is here that Deleuze talks about lines that ‘trace out little modifications, they make detours, they sketch out rises and fall … they are molecular fluxes with

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thresholds or quanta’ (Op. cit). Lines of segmentarity are troubled and disturbed by the ever presence but often lack of noticing of capillary and molecular lines that both diversify and multiply in their particularity and infinite fracturing and skeinlike lineations. I see the cracks and fissures caused by age and wear on an old plate, I see the ceaseless patterning to be found in rhizomatic spreadings of oil on water, bulbs below the surface … these lines are always forming, reforming, in-formation; the words ‘capillary’, ‘skein’, ‘network’ all come to mind but none do justice to the constant play, emergence and dis/appearance of these multiple and complex line in-formations. If the rigid representational dualism of binary forms is not engaged with flexibly without taking into consideration the supple complexities of these multiple lines of molecularity, then they cease to be fully understood, their actions seen through the lens of simplification, not complication. In thinking of these molecular lines in relation to a Spinozist form of monism, the ‘inter’ prefix described above becomes severely problematised and threatened by redundancy in the play of the processual presencing of the becomings, and fluctuations of these molecular lines. Deleuze says this ‘is why family histories … are so unpleasant … true changes take place elsewhere – another politics, another time, another individuation’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 124/5). So the interaction of, say, ‘father and son’, offers a representation and identification of a ‘rigid segment’ delineating the fixity of difference between, but, as Deleuze points out, it is important to consider ‘what happens beneath it, the connections, the attractions and repulsions, which do not coincide with the segments, (and) the forms of madness which are secret …’ (Op. cit). Through taking a Baradian approach by moving away from the limitations of the interactive and by encouraging an implementation of the intra-active where her employment of ‘agential cuts’, a means of diffractively opening up the lines, fissures and capillary actions of these molecular lines can be put into play. Within the complex contingencies and multiplicities of the with, the in and the aroundness of these heterogeneous, intra connections, form gives way to ‘in-formation’, where movement and its always incumbent potentiality, always precedes. In contingency and heterogeneity, lines are always making and re-making. In movement in moment, thinking in agencement, the lines being drawn as bodies, as Spinoza points out, are always affectively acting upon and being acted upon in constant waves of emergence, ‘as if something carried us away, across our segments, but also across our thresholds, toward a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent’ (Op. cit). The third kind of line is the line of rupture, the line that tears apart, the line of flight that rips apart all those preceding lines of segmentarity and molecularity: it is a line of invention, experimentation, a line of pulsing desire, a line of research, a line that is always doing, a line that is always in movement toward, always moving on. I see poppy petals at my feet, I pick them up, I press them between these diary pages … ah … a line of flight to with and from this writing. Whilst the line of flight or the line of rupture disrupts and breaks through the other two types of line, it also exists in immanence with them. In becoming, it carries away, across

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the segments and molecular lines creating new thresholds. In ‘becoming-animal’, similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 10) example of the wasp and the orchid, it is not about one becoming the other, rather it is about the always movement of thresholds, of bordering and about establishing, re-establishing and transgressing borders between bodies which are, in assemblage, in contingent and heterogeneous compositions with other bodies. I exist as I exist because of existence in relationality with human and nonhuman others. In this, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the ‘anomalous’ (1987: 244), as, in porosity and composition, each body leaves parts of each with the other, mutating and transgressing borders. In this, territorialisation occurs where thresholds compose, compost and come to living in the relationality of multiplicity. As Deleuze and Guattari say, this involves ‘involution (not evolution) in which form is constantly being dissolved … (in an) absolute state of movement’ (1987: 267). So the involutional relationality between ‘I’ and ‘you’, between, say, ‘writer’ and ‘reader’, is not existent because of some simply human-centric, individualised memory of the past, rather it is an active spacetime prehension of immanence, of movements in moments, moments in movements. The third line, the line of flight ruptures the pre-existent and the stasis of the established, it animates, through bordering and thresholding, becoming animal, becoming ‘anomal’, it brings into question the discursively constructed myths of anthropocentrism and neurotypicality, those of human individuality, the hylomorphic basis of social organisation, and the cohesiveness and completeness of the human body. In the animation and activation of ‘becoming-animal’, I make sense of relationalities in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the ‘anomalous’. The abnormal lives in human-centrism in terms of general or specific terms, features or characteristics. In contrast, the anomal describes ‘a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity’, the line of flight activates the anomaly by ‘designating the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialisation’ (1987: 244). And in this, by invoking, say, ‘writer-reader’, ‘becoming-writer-reader’, if you wish, this is not to invoke particular individuals with specific human characteristics, unique beings emergent in evolutionary development, emanating from some pre-designated set of genealogical codes and representations, rather, it is to activate and bring to brief stuttering life, through the incisive rupturing of the line of flight, a thresholding, a bordering that lives in the experimental fragility of a glimpsed, shimmering, flickering haecceity of now you see me now you don’t. ‘The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant human characteristics’ (Op. cit). By taking this third line, this line of flight, the individuality and distinct status as personalities of ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ begin to diminish as a getting free of one self creates an opening into the not yet known. In moving away from a dependence on the humanistic and psychologised world of introspection, reflection and memory and moving into the becoming other of intra-active, intra-species creative relationality, there is a coming to life of the actions of, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as, the ‘sorcerer’. In this, there is the making of alliances, the making the becoming of ‘writer-reader’ something

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more than simply human, through the creating of an experimental and speculative activation of ‘becoming animal’ that works, in not-yet-ness, to bring into existence that which does not yet exist.3 So, here there are multiple micro-processes, forces and assemblages that are processually active in around the insistences of identity and subjectivity, which can be understood in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘lines of molecularity’. They are not lines of ruptures that split things open, that interfere with and change things inevitably and irrevocably, they are the capillary lines, those minute almost imperceptible lines that crack open, create lives within the interstices, join up with other similar lines and generate new energies and forces beyond, beneath, within and around the more rigid segmentarity of the molar. These lines work in sympoietic ways, connecting with others bringing about the always fabricating realities of the not yet new, the always becoming-new, creating new worlds unthought of before the blink of the eye. As Haraway (2016) has pointed out, the inherent individualism and contesting energies of autopoiesis are redolent of the independent and always individualising and competing forces of neoliberalism, that appear to offer little in the way of engaging with ‘staying with the trouble’. As I reel back, the forces of these waves washing over me, I sense a living with the animating forces of ‘spiriting’ again; the knowings I have through these repetitions creates a differentiations that startle me. Coming alive in the vibrating power of this sensation is an ‘intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative elements’ (Deleuze, 2004b: 45). It is also here that I find my challenge to the all pervasive and highly restrictive imprisonment that phenomenology’s body with organs imposes upon us and to those neoliberal ‘technologies of self ’ that Foucault (1988) sees constraining us in so many ways. In this write here, write now, ‘images of thought’ come to life. Becoming carried out into this wide open world of affect, with Herring Gulls and Oystercatchers for company, with a wind blown face in this wild space, gleeful wickedness and a wave of delirium takes over; in this experience has no inside or outside. Overlooking the sea, walking in spring sunshine, laughing at something that is intuitively present, the infection that sweeps through takes bodying beyond the containment of skin; grows out of release, grows out of desire: the intoxication is intense.

Affective force: resisting the urge … Resisting the urge to transparency invokes concern with and challenge to the aims and procedures of the so-called Age of Enlightenment which, it could be argued, remain constitutive of much of what is taught and held dear in educational institutions in a great deal of the world at the present time. The dominant Enlightenment themes of reason, individualism and scepticism are fundamentally grounded in and work to identify and establish the largely scientific disciplines that populate and control thinking in academic institutions throughout large tracts of the so-called Western World.

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Transparency is made possible and gains its supposed clarity from neurotypicality. In many respects, the aims and procedures of the Enlightenment Project can best be understood in terms of the concept of the neurotypical. What is fundamental to this exposure is that the concept has remained hidden from academic and cultural life both in educational institutions and the wider boundaries of everyday life. The work of Foucault might have it that neurotypicality and the way that it is a dominant force in framing human experience is hidden through the discursive constructions of reality that work to privilege its aims and practices. As Manning points out, Despite its role as a founding gesture of humanism, of individualism, neurotypicality remains for the most part in the background of our everyday lives … (it) tends to be backgrounded, and so we underestimate its force and its pervasiveness. Issues that most readily define neurotypicality as foundational are often seen as a given. We pay them little attention … (2016: 3) Therefore, writing these acts of resistance enact new comings to life. They offer challenge to the transparencies that are the consequence of the backgrounding practices that have obscured the active presencing of neurotypicality and the discriminatory and disabling practices that it perpetuates and sets in play. What I call the ‘transparencies’ to which there is an urge to resist are the knowledge constructions that have been put together to determine the rational, the worthy and the sense in which the (simply) human, is made typical through a politics of identity which works both to privilege and exclude. Resisting the urge to transparency sets in play a turning toward what Manning (2016) might refer to as the ‘minor gesture’ of ‘neurodiversity’ and in setting in play an inducement to challenge the major literatures and discourses that work the promote and instil the determinations of neurotypicality which remain largely inaccessible to all and seemingly impossible to attain for others. Manning suggests this might be done in the following way: Creating the conditions for neurodiversity in the university is not about creating a space for difference, a space where difference sequesters itself. It is about attuning to the undercommon currents of creative dissonance and asymmetrical experience always already at work in, across, and beyond the institution. It is about becoming attentive to the ways in which the production of knowledge in the register of the neurotypical has always been resisted and queered despite the fact that neurotypical forms of knowledge are rarely addressed or defined as such. It is about exploring a juncture, a cut I perceive in the here and now, a change I want to linger with, that puts the university at risk in the very same gesture that it puts neurodiversity at risk. It is about asking what happens when the turn toward neurodiversity begins to be felt in a way that neurotypicality is truly threatened. (2018: 2)

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What Manning brings to life in this passage concurs with the ‘ontology of immanence’ that forms a central animating force in the concept and of ‘post qualitative inquiry’ that St. Pierre (2019) has created and brought to life. The cut in the here and now that Manning refers to in the passage quoted above is, for St. Pierre, a cut into the orthodoxies and traditional practices of qualitative inquiry. It is a cut that excises thought from the practices of recognition and representation and allows for the incision of concept creation. As she puts it, the actualisation or differentiation of the virtual is a process of genuine creation, and the actual is always new and different, not one instance among others of the same concept … where specific instances resemble each other, share characteristics, and so exist in internal relations with each other subsumed under the broad representative concept because they are alike. (2019: 6) Making these ‘cuts’, as Barad (2007) would have it, are agential. They are active in slicing apart what is already there, in opening up fissures, in allowing those forces that have been trapped to spill out and to render the cognitive typicality that constructs and disciplines them as knowledge as inadequate, insufficient and redundant. It is less that the cut reveals truths hitherto unknown, it is more that the cut opens up, that it releases and creates speculative opportunities for thought hitherto unthought: the capaciousness of indeterminacy becomes manifest.

Cutting into the disciplines, releasing the clouds: an example A student friend of mine, Clarice, recently asked me if I could help her with a question she had been given as part of the Master’s programme with which she was engaged to do with research methods and qualitative inquiry. She had been asked to write an essay that focused upon providing an answer to the following question: Is it possible to decolonise a social science discipline using the means of practice and inquiry of that discipline? Could I offer any suggestions about how to approach this question? Did I have any views on what the answer to the question might be? How would I answer the question? Fascinated, I read the question over and over again a number of times. I found myself asking further questions of my own. The most important of these seemed to be in terms of the extent to which the discipline in question was itself identified, subjectified and colonised: in short, how was the discipline disciplined? In the Deleuzian spirit of writing with the ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105), moving me forward, I began my inquiries by simply starting to write. I started writing knowing, having a sense that writing, cutting into the question, might assist me in my task. I began writing into, writing with this question hovering, presencing spacemaking and actively creating, making these fingers work, making these keys tap. Writing in the now. Writing the now. No plan. Many prehensive comings to life, in-action, rushing into this doing

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without direction. Immersed in the immediations and engagements with a politics of care: teacher and student, words on a page, forward then back, backward then forward, writing into, creating an expansive sympoietic space of new emergence. I sensed the old concepts coming to the fore as I wrote back. I found myself correcting, commenting, suggesting, briefly amending, processually always with her, with the work, always bending thoughts to Clarice sitting there with those concepts that, in their emergence on her pages of reading and writing, always having new becoming, having new life and worlding, always worlding. Inventing concepts. Concepts always emergent. Concepts breathing new life. Concepts breathing new life into me, into her, into the spatialisation that actualises around the constant in-formational pull of thinking in action, thinking as doing. Those concepts, in one sense always there, and, in another, always becoming in the action of their always newly emergent creativity: identity … subjectivity …decolonisation … fieldwork … ethno-centrism … and more. These concepts that are, in so many respects, the undercommons of socio-anthropological thought, provide the established foundations of academic disciplinary practice in this field; they never go away, they animate me, they animate students, they do their jobs, perhaps, in futurity, in contrast, as Manning (2020) suggests, they animate a ‘pragmatics of the useless’. What brings to life in this writing on this page, this thinking-with Clarice and her essay is something that Manning wrote in the prelude of For a pragmatics of the useless when she describes something Moten had said to her in a review of one of her earlier books, written some time ago. She asks: How can I properly cite Moten when I am no longer even certain which phrase it was that changed my path of research? An approximation of proximity might be said to be an alliance with thought-in-the-making, an engagement with the edges of how thinking itself does its work. (2020: 1) In this, she works with the thinking that suggests that there are always spaces for ‘thinking-alongside’ that can bring concepts alive, that can give old concepts new life. And so, in the freshness of this ‘alliance’, these alliances, there is always the possibility of the new. Thinking-with, writing-with, talking-with, listening-with are the worldings, the very doings that, in immanence, keep living alive. In the fabulation of her revelatory confession, she recalls Moten saying in this review, written and shared four years ago, ‘all black life is neurodiverse life. It might have been black life is always neurodiverse’ (op. cit). For me what has significance in this reading is, of course, the content of the statement, content which will further animate my thinking as I go on with this reading and writing, this thinking-toward, this-thinking that moves me now in this writing here. But also, in these significations is the presencing of approximation. In the speculative fabulation of Manning’s thinking-with, the approximation is hugely animate, in the vibrant hum of the thinking that is doing, worlding-thinking, the approximation is there to take a lead. In this leading, concept-creation-as event is taking place, new thought as action is emergent, something

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is becoming in being done. In this, these approximations lead me to these writings with these concepts, with Clarice as she too writes with her question, as she takes these concepts and re-territorialises them with her own approximations. In this, thinking touches, it is a doing that, in materiality, reaches out, it is in-active of bodies on the move. In this, thinking as doing is sympoietically collective, in touch, moving toward, thinking beyond the aridity of the problems that have already been set and creatively and relationally, problematising, with bodies, together making and engaging problems that are always fresh and vibrant, challenging and new. In the sympoiesis, of these collective moments, where Clarice’s question hangs in the air, where the approximations of new concept making cloud and clarify, vapourise and animate it is as of the commons, the solid fixities of the common ground of relationality that often is seen to exist between teacher and students in becoming, begins to disperse. It seems as if this ‘study, as Moten and Harney describe it, animates new conversations, new ways of doing ands brings to life new approximations. For them the ‘undercommons’ is processual, it is a new way of doing. As Ken and Clarice discuss, as they territorialise and they re-territorialise these always new concepts in emergence, the experimental frisson of the talk and write, the show and tell of their conversations generates a new relationality, a new way of being with one another. These new ways diversify and dislocate away from the commons that the institutionalising practices of the university formally and normatively proscribe. In these to-ings and fro-ings there is a resistance to the transparency that is premised upon the enlightened practices of institutional life. The undercommons is a breaking away, it is processually vibrant in moving toward, spatialising and actualising, congruent in the vivid opacity and liberating practices of doing things differently. In destabilising the traditional authorities nurtured by the commons the undercommons opens up, creates new connections, relationalities and ways of doing. As Ken and Clarice passed writings between each other, paradoxical creation of location and dislocation that Moten and Harney recognises in the workings of the undercommons is becoming in in-formational presencing. As their writings and talking shifted between a dislocating movement away from the institutional commons of the university and the sympoietic locating movements of emergent collective inquiry. Endogamy, folding-in: exogamy: unfolding. Folding and smoothing, subverting the agonistics. And so in the relationality of this concept creation, Ken and Clarice’s approximations are animate in spelling out the urgency of thinking-with as a means, an exemplification, of Manning’s ‘research-creation’ (2016), itself a movement of approximation with Moten and Harney’s concept of ‘study’ (2013). This is not simply proximating toward problems already made but approximating toward those that are just around the corner, waiting to be made. So, when Clarice is asked the question, Is it possible to decolonise a social science discipline using the means of practice and inquiry of that discipline? and then sends it to me for my thought and consideration, what it does is to open up new movements of shared writing and thinking, creating a living moment in which a new, ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and

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Guattari, 1994: 105) is allowed to come alive. The question that Clarice is asked and then shares with me reflects the disciplinary force of the neurotypical that academic subjects can carry with them in their lives through the dusty corridors of academia. What is in play here is not simply the evident power and influence of the ‘discipline’ of thinking and doing in the social sciences; it is the ‘means’ that need to be brought into question and it is the ‘means’ that need to be examined here. The concepts that I have listed above, ‘identity, subjectivity, decolonisation, fieldwork, ethno-centrism and more’ provide examples of the means that discipline in the subject areas and fields of play to be found with the Humanities, the Social Sciences and in relation to the qualitative inquiries that are being engaged within this book. Within the orthodoxies and institutionalising tendencies of academic practice, such concepts can often be used to provide the epistemological fix, the glue that allows the disciplinary fabric to adhere, to coalesce and to establish the practices of the discipline as a force. The so-called definitions that these concepts bring to life, indicate and inculcate the customs, habits and procedures of the academic practices that are constitutive of and endemic in their respective fields. Such definitions provide the conceptual tools for proceeding in these fields, encouraging the ploughing of furrows that, in their delineation, work to substantively fix, establish and represent thought and practice in highly particular and categorically specific ways. What the ensuing reductivist systems then do is provide the basis for the future by ensuring that the descriptive, rhetorical and critical behaviours emanating from these definitions work, not only to explain but, crucially, to justify the implementation and veracity of these concepts for the next generation of students and practitioners in the field. In short, the determination of these concepts serves to provide representations, interpretations and critical enforcements that are designed to perpetuate repetition and the establishment and binarising classifications of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, good and bad, etc. Such practices have the effect of limiting invention, experimentation and the volatility of creative practices and of denying that the processes of change and qualitative movement are always in play. The problems have already been set: the answers are already known. Therefore, what is key to the practices of approximation that Manning is working with here is the challenge that these practices offer to the production and construction of representational determinacies of this kind. In this, she echoes the pragmatism in Massumi’s words when he argued that, (t)he logical resources equal to emergence must be limber enough to juggle the ontogenetic indeterminacy that precedes and accompanies a thing’s coming to be what it doesn’t. Vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, role to play. (2002: 13) The conversations, the writing exchanges and the concept in-formation as eventful practice that was emergent in the discussions shared between myself and Clarice pointed toward the speculative possibilities of engaging decolonising practices in

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these areas of academic life. The research-creative possibilities of study engagements of the kind described here offer challenge to the disciplining tendencies and qualities in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. They offer a means of moving away from epistemological and methodological fixities and moving toward ‘approximations’ and the eventful creation of ‘vague concepts’, which brings to life, in Manning’s words, opportunities for creating ‘opening(s) for thought to travel in directions as yet in germ’ (ibid: 1). In acts and the certainties and stabilities it works to generate and sustain, it is timely to be thinking about working toward the destabilisation of the divisions of labour that work to produce, and the sacred cows that are worshipped and work to sustain, the sanctity of these individual and individualising disciplines, both in terms of their perceived domains of practice and the upholding of their professional status and identity. The need for transdisciplinary approaches appears to have never been more urgent. It is becoming increasingly clear that the neurotypical institutionalising forces of the university work to perpetuate the market-driven, individualising and competitive forces of neoliberalism by classifying and hierarchising subjects in terms of perceived economic and social value. This becomes manifest in the way that funding and support for traditional science-based and vocational programmes of teaching and research have increasingly become privileged over those in the arts and the humanities. In an intensively market-driven economy universities have to compete to survive and success is deemed most likely to be achieved if the developmental aims of the traditional sciences and the needs of narrow vocationalism are met. The effects of this can be seen in the narrowing of the curriculum and the focusing of research grants toward functionalist notions of usefulness and the fulfilment of specific vocationally oriented needs.4 I sense the space opening here as it works to impact upon the writing talking that I have held with Clarice as she struggles creatively and productively with this assignment question. I sense the ‘wild beyond’ that Halberstam writes in his introduction to Moten and Harney’s book. In this, I like what opens up when he says, so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break. (2013: 6) I have so much respect for the ontological indeterminacy that resides in Halberstam’s ‘wild beyond’. In this urge to resist transparency there is a willful and productive desire to get things done and to show what can be done. There is an uncanniness

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in these prehensive experiencings; there is something strangely familiar, perhaps even mysterious in what we are writing to. Our immanent critique is affirmative, it wants to show and not to tell, by opening to this ‘wild beyond’ there are openings to ‘spiritings’, there are encounters anew where eventfulness emerges affectively when the seemingly familiar is becoming in its emergent strangeness. The encounter can be unsettling, scary and eerie and the delicacy of the fabric of its frisson necessitates an exciting acceptance of the beautiful ambiguities of multiplicity. As Clarice and I worked with her question, we unhitched from the hierarchical normativities and orthodoxies that commonly infest teacher-student relationality and instead moved our inquiries into the uncanniness of the always not yet known. In locating the uncanny in affect rather than in the more usually recognised Freudian definition which is grounded in emotion and to be found in the work of de Certeau there opens up a moving focus of credibility. Believable/ness in the wild beyond is a sympathy with the what-if. It is a taking of a step into the indeterminacies of possibility, which is more than simply human, where agency is distributed, where there are sensings of force working along lines, that are capillary and molecular and always not quite complete. Nets work. Differentiating actively does. Possibilising is the forgetting of the privileges incumbent in binarising forms of critique. Differentiating invigorates multiplicities and the indeterminacies and fluid flow of ontology. In the middling of things, ontology is becoming as ontologising. Beings are never substantively fixed they are always event/full in becoming. Between the two. Between the many. Thresholds. Spaces of liminality, always actualising. Force fields. Intensity. Nothing settles. Nothing is settled. Selves are unsettled. Concepts are always being created. They are always in encounter with other concepts and in the encounter new concepts are in-formation. In the encounter, one concept limns into another. The movement presences, it does not necessarily live in perceptibility, it is a moment, its prehensive potency takes doing with it, in the indeterminacies of its moving forward, there is also the force of the left behind, the energy and pull of the infra-thin. Force. Force escapes representation. It does. It forced. It forces. It is forceful. Forces frictionally engage and move with form: from this frictional energy in-formation is always on the move. Concepts are beautifully indeterminate. Even the one you formed that for a moment was precious in the fleetingness of its immanence, lives on in ever-changing in-forming, touching other concepts, in an instant creating new ones. Remembering the quotation from Whitehead, cited elsewhere in this book, there are no ‘happy simplifications’ here. Giving life with Clarice in the writing of her essay also brought to life a helpful lend of hand that worked in moving attention away from the constraining and limiting powers of neurotypicality and, by way of decolonising both the topic and the style of the writing, moving its tone, tenor and concept making more comfortably in line with neurodiversity. All of the time in the electricity of these movements as moments, moments as movement, there was a sensing of the excitement in the immanent critique coming to life through the in-formational force of the speculative what-if. This often set loose a limn between the speculative provocation of the what-if, the barely latent energy of the potency of the prehensive and the

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becoming animal vigour of an aestheticising as sensing. This always on the lookout for encounters as the pages of the essay, in becoming, involved and evolved, practised as a sensitising, on the move, problematising knowledge, opening up the fluidity of knowing as fluid and indeterminate, always on the move, reconceptualising knowledge as ‘knowing’, as sensing, as heightening, sharpening, magnifying, incising, where the vibrant and elusive energies of the prehensive never rest in ways that allow the apprehending tentacles of cognitive ownership to take and make control. And as the pages turned, turning, turning as concepts folded one into the other, as lively and tentative speculative knowings that generated alertness, a quickness of sensing, sensing that re-territorialises staid striations and segmentarities of knowledge, that draws on the possible, that clouds the clarity of the fixed, that spices the headiness of the brew and that brings to life the venomous excitements presencing in the volatility of that which is always likely to be residing around the corner … those pages turning, those writings, those emergences, that essay writes its selfing in differentiating ways, as it writes, the book also gets written, these Acts of unfolding lead into, onto the next, onto the next … no beginnings or endings, just comings and goings.

Notes 1 Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film version of of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now, deals with the loss of a child by drowning and the parents’ subsequent visit to Venice in an attempt to help them overcome their grief. The child was wearing a red plastic mac when she drowned and this becomes a sombre and recurring leitmotif in the unfolding of the film. The bereaved couple keep seeing the image of the red plastic mac flickeringly appearing and disappearing as they walk by the dark canals. As these revelatory glances reveal themselves to the couple in their walks along the water’s edge, is it the ghost of their child that is haunting them or is the fleeting appearance of the small person in the red coat a suggestion that there something more sinister taking place? 2 Throughout the folding and unfolding of this book there are references to and examples of these lines in action. This brief section is used to further emphasise the importance of these lines as they are used to show how resistances to transparency might be understood and be enacted. 3 Elsewhere in this book the concept of ‘spiriting’ has been invoked to give life to a more than simply human presencing, where that life giving is ethereally substantive and processually mercurial, elusive and always on the move. In this the evocation of ‘spiriting’ is anomalous and can be seen as taking an incisive line of flight that cuts through simply human formations and embodiments. 4 A demonstration of this point can be found at: https://we-are.gold/2021/10/14/openletter-to-frances-corner/ .This link included here is provided to an example of the point being made in the argument above and does not necessarily reflect the point of view of the author or publisher of this book.

ACTS OF DIARY, NOTEBOOK AND JOURNAL MAKING

Movings toward? Diaries, notebooks and journals are usually perceived as being part of simply human writing practices of self-making. Such practices can be seen to embody and construct a singular knowledge of the world which is constitutive of individualising notions of self and subjectivity that live within neurotypicality and a metaphysics of being and that work to perpetuate neoliberal ways of living in the world. By engaging Massumi’s critical practice as ‘exemplary method’ (2002: 17) writing this Act will offer an ‘exemplification’, exploration and invitation to consider these seemingly archetypal and highly ‘personal’ dimensions of writing practice in more than simply human ways. These ‘exemplifications’ are offered as resistance to the logo-centrism of the representational and the transcendent and are tentatively included to offer invitations into the processually vibrant, the potentially creative-relational and, in agencement, be animate in engaging activist approaches to posthuman inflected world making.

Fragments, pieces and ‘a million little histories’ … In the forewording introductory pages of his book Stranger than Kindness, the singer, writer and performer Nick Cave suggests of the writing to come in this book that it provides the reader with archival insights and clues to do with the intricacies and intensities of the worlds that his songs inhabit. In this, there can be realised a sense of differentiation and intra-activity in the play of capaciousness in his words when he says that the writings in his book provide a sense of emergence, a movement toward and a coming to life of his songs and his other writings. He talks here of ‘birthing’ and ‘nourishing’ his published ‘official’ work, saying that,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-9

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beyond the song there is an enormous amount of peripheral stuff – drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, collages, scribblings and drafts – which are the secret and unformed property of the artist … (the) support system of manic tangential information … these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed work: raw and immediate, but no less compelling. (Cave, 2020, foreword) Cave’s writing here continues to draw me in. Reading and reading again I find his book as a wonderful and compelling book of fragments, a book of pieces, made up of, what he refers to as, ‘a million little histories’. At first, these writings appear to be an archive of Cave’s work, a representation, perhaps, of what he chooses to tell the reader of the book, of what is and what was instrumental in the nascent formulation of the book and its coming to life. And yet, in fascination, as I read and read again his work, these singularities seem in their indistinctness and lack of obvious formulation, constitutive of agencement, of assemblages in the making. There are to be found here what Manning, when talking of the ‘anarchive’, refers to as a ‘repertory of traces’ and the ‘seeds of process’ (2020: 76) wherein creative emergence is always re-activating, reciprocating and, where, in capaciousness, multiplicities of potential are always finding new and vibrant life. My breathlessness increases as books pile on my desk, as words spill on the page and as memories presence and becoming is the immanent doing that is the writing that is appearing now. I cast back to an episode of sleeplessness and to the event/ ful/ness of the scribbled writings that appeared on those diary pages in that night of shadows, secrets and sadness. I read the blurred scrawl on those fragile lined pages and it seems to say something to the writing that is appearing here now: ‘Is there a sense in which all these diaries and notebooks are sensed as ‘useless’, leading then to an appropriation of them and an emergence of usefulness which intimates a ‘pragmatics of the useless’ (my italics)? So this writing, here at 4 in the morning, is becoming as a ‘pragmatics of the useless’. Is there a bringing to life in the waking sleeplessness of the moment of these diary and notebook writings in which the background is becoming of the foreground?’ (Diary entry, 21st December 2021) In her chapter that is entitled What things do when they shape each other, Manning (2020: 75) works to avoid falling into the trap that Whitehead describes as the ‘happy simplification’ of method. As she considers what to do when things shape each other, she stresses the productive desire to avoid the loss of freshness which can easily happen when form stifles and overpowers force. In the continuing emergences and complexities of process philosophy and the immanent writing practices that work to in-act them, it is clearly necessary not to lose the vibrancy, insistency and vigour of the emergent to the influence of pressures that derive from the authoritarian traditions of experience and cultural appropriation. Attentiveness to

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and attunements with the play between force and form will need to energise concept forming as event and the research-creative practices than emanate from this. It seems that Cave, in writing to give his fragments, pieces and ‘a million little histories’ new life in the emergence of his book, also gives a valuation to the many elements and singularities that were hitherto hidden in the background of his creative processing. In the madness of these constantly assembling and dissembling coalescences and connections, the potential of always becoming in the not yet known is always a force to be reckoned with. By reincarnating these words in book form, by valuing these ‘maps, lists, doodles, photographs, collages, scribblings and drafts’ in different, new and emergent ways, Cave’s writings in the book work to destabilise those writerly, structural delineations that formalise the concept and the creation of the book in what can be seen to be restrictive and formalistic ways. In turn, it then lets loose the seepages and leakages of molecular lines that then animate a moving toward the notyetness and in-formational becoming of the book as a minor literature. Of these creative movements and moments, Deleuze and Guattari say, Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that that extracts from a text its revolutionary force. (2004: 116) The emergence of the writing is thrown into existence through a ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105) that disrupts moves toward meaning making and significations of transcendence. The brief consideration of Cave’s book and the in-formational singularising that takes place in its becoming offered here provides a valuable exemplification of the foregrounding and backgrounding, the choices that might be made, in allowing and facilitating the ways in which a particular piece of writing, indeed any creative act actualises and moves in coming into life. Manning (2020) uses the concept of the ‘anarchive’ as a means of beginning to address the questions that engaging with these processual movements and moments promotes. Central to these concerns seems to be to do with valuing and the evaluation of material that is constitutive of what might be described as the archive/anarchive assemblage. It is clear that what is under consideration here is not to do with binarising; it is about the engagements with the processual and transmutational flows in relation to the one and the other. Heller has said that ‘(y)ou never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a rational sequence’ (2004: 24). And so, engaging and working with complexities and working against such ‘happy simplifications’, it is clear that these examples and the discussions they prompt in relation to the flows and movements in and through the archive/anarchive assemblage are extremely apposite as they help in understandings of what working with diaries, notebooks and journals can do. These examples help to encourage and facilitate attunements with writing speculatively toward and experimentally writing away

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from simply representational and interpretive forms and, in so doing, helping to facilitate writing as immanent doing. This also involves a constant working with, in what Manning might describe as research-creative ways, the problems that come to life as the territorialising and de-territorialising flows between archiving and anarchiving persist. In this, each encounter can be seen as a revolutionary act of releasing of multiplicities, where the writing of the minor literature invokes and is always creative of something new. As Manning says of such engagements with ‘problems’, ‘if the anarchive was about harnessing process, how would we do that without muting the very force we were after?’ (2020: 76) Writing in representation, writing to interpret and writing to critique through the formation of preferential binary forms, writes against the creative volatility of writing as an immanent doing. As Manning suggests, they simply provide us with a ‘generalisation of experience’ (ibid: 79). This is more than the ‘happy simplification’ of method, referred to above. In many respects, the construction of archives, with their subsequent formations of embodiment, work to enshrine politics of identification and subjectification which are redolent of the colonial act in which, ‘mythologised notions of history are fetishised in a bid to resist societal change’ (Ratinon and Ayre, 2021: 5).1 The remaining pages of this Act include diary, notebook and journal offerings, which are included by way of speculative experimentation. These arrive here as a means of tentatively providing exemplification of some writings against and some writings of suggestion of the territorialising flows that can be released but not captured when force meets form and the ‘anarchive’ is transversally in play with and not separated from the ‘archive’. In this, I prefer to think of the space between ‘archive’ and ‘anarchive’ as a space of transduction where there are always multiple moving flows of force reciprocating one to the other, to and fro, forward and backward and rhizomatically in other directions. There are, perhaps, similar energies and forces at play in the movements that enliven the spaces of encounter that enact between what lives in the pages of the diary and the notebook and what eventually might appear on the page of the published paper and the written book. Stepanova suggests that the relationality between the inner pages of a diary and the words that are spoken to an imagined outer world might be understood in two ways. On the one hand, she sees this as ‘an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear’ and, on the other, as ‘the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider’. (2021: 21) Is it as obvious as this? Is there only binarising to do? Or is Stepanova’s distinction a ‘happy simplification’? If so, more speculations and experimental thoughts come to mind: How might these seemingly different writerly forms live alongside one another? How could they remain apart or how might it be tenable for them to come together? How might the positing of the ‘anarchive’ resist capture? How is it possible to resist the emergence of form winning out over the vagaries and unpredictabilities of force? How might the life of the ‘anarchive’ be seen and made sense of in parallel to that of the diary and the notebook, if at all?

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In these Acts, the questions I have speculatively posed above and more offer provocations for problem making. Here I refer to problem making as it runs counter to problem solving; where the latter takes its impetus from the problems that are set and the specific methods that are set to address them, and the former is inspired by working collectively to open up problem making in terms of what Manning calls ‘research creation’. In this, Manning offers ‘research creation’ as it also relates to Moten and Harney’s concept of ‘study’, in which ‘we refrain from taking on problems that are already recognisable, available, but work instead collectively, to invent open problems that bring us together in the mode of active inquiry’ (Manning, 2016: 10).

A confessional historical note … I have boxes and boxes of diaries, notebooks and journals that I have drawn, scribbled and written in since January 1965 when I was 17 years old. Some of what is in them has come to public life in books, papers and conference presentations. Most of what is written in them rest between their pages, mainly unread since the day of their creation. I have a powerful sensing that there is a processual, nascent, always becoming and articulative relationality between these originally private musings and makings and the way in which I present a writing self to a wider world. Now as I travel through an eighth decade of living with a curiosity that troubles the slumber of this prose, these drawings, these poems, rants and rhetorical scats, I have decided to open up some kind of inquiry into them.

Herring Gulls I have been studying Herring Gulls. Since my childhood days, I have watched birds. Walking on the cliffs and beaches near my home, these wild, raucous and to some observers, unattractive birds are a permanent feature of life, some kind of encounter with them is unavoidable. They fascinate me. I sketch them, I write little notes about them and the things I see them do. Sometimes one might appear in a poem or an academic paper I am writing. It is usual for Herring Gulls and other birds to be represented in ornithology books as ‘species’. In Kantian terms, as beings, they have essence, they are ‘things-in-themselves’, they possess specific noumenal qualities which enable them to be distinguished from other species and to be recognised as beings different from them. Following this specification, deductively they have an a priori existence in terms of Being. Recently, reading through my notes and sketches about these birds, this writing about these birds was slowly, in becoming, writing with these birds. In this, I also began to notice how they all seem to behave differently, how they appear to do things differently in relation to where they are, what time of day it is and with the other creatures (human and nonhuman) in proximity with them. Their ‘worldings’ (Stewart, 2007) seem to differentiate both them and their surroundings; the territorialisations that abound from this are multiple and always on the move. I have also been noticing that these Herring Gulls are involved in what can be described as

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‘speciation’ (Manning, 2013, 2016; Massumi, 2015b) in which it is better to think and feel with them as part of ‘(r)elational fields rather than categories’ (Manning, 2016: 192). In movement, their bodies always extend beyond the limits of subjectification, in these body-ings they are in flow as eventful bodies in relational space making. Manning talks of these relationalities in terms of ‘ecologies of affect’ that ‘are constituted biogrammatically and diagrammatically in the sense that they are tweakings of emergent tendencies for coalescence within a co-emergent field of experience’ (in Massumi, 2015: 122). My notes and drawings offer instances of these relational comings to life, where differentiation is always on the move and, through the notemakings and the drawings, it is becoming that it is the more than the simply human that is on the move. As a simply relational, individuating participant in these ‘ecologies of affect’, I sense encounters and eventfulness that takes me over: agencement is heterogenetic, it is contingent, it is always on the move and, crucially it is far more than simply human. I am excited by the ways in which the capaciousness of these nonhuman bodies on the move in individuating relationality and of which I am a small but, nevertheless, participating singularity, makes vivid, as Spinoza points out, the capacity of all bodies to affect and be affected’. In my notes, drawings and speculations ‘speciation’ comes alive in paying attention to the in-formational vibrancy and vitality of these ‘relational fields’. These are multi-faceted, populated and animated by forces and energies, always event/ful in the constant encounters and emergences of becoming always more than simple either/or of human and nonhuman. In these relational encounters, in these events, existence is always contingent, processual and emergent in constantly co-compositional ways that are part of the potentiality and the always differentiating possibilities of ‘speciation’. For Manning, spatialisation also occurs in multiple ways with ‘a force for life … of organic-inorganic ecologies or speciation’ (Manning in Massumi, 2015: 140). And so … I have noticed that these Herring Gulls, search for food in multiple ways; I can make sense of their food hunting and foraging habits by paying attention to the ‘relational fields’ in which these take place. My notes tell me that … They can be seen hanging around the vehicles queueing in the Torpoint Ferry lanes, sitting stoically in the wind, rain and sometimes freezing temperatures, looking winsomely up at the car windows, waiting for food to be thrown to them by passengers sitting snugly and often unobservant inside, they seem very patient ... In the summer months, others fly like invading vampires in crowded seaside resorts, grasping ice creams and pasties out of the hands and mouths of unsuspecting holidaymakers... Others engage in little dances, running on the spot on wet, grassy earth in parks and fields to entice fat and curious worms to the surface so that they can catch and eat them… Others follow the relentless toil of tractors and ploughs in farmer’s fields, searching for unsuspecting prey in the furrowed disturbances of the machinations of the plough…

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Others forage amongst the seaweed on the strand line at the seashore, turning pebbles, stones and seaweed to uncover mussels, limpets and other small creatures living there… Others follow fishing boats on their way home from the fishing grounds, diving to catch and devour discarded offal as the crew gut and clean their catch, throwing the bones and entrails over the side of their craft… Many seem to congregate in large flocks, others seem to prefer the quiet company of one or two others; some seem to be urban and cocky, others seem to be rural and pastoral, some are noisy and raucous, others quiet and almost meditative … And so on… ‘Speciation’ is happening in the here and now. As one Herring Gull in one setting is doing something other than another from another setting, ‘worlding’ is taking place and the noticing of this is felt as ‘the lived intensity of the event’s capacity to create a field of experience’ (Manning, 2016: 193). In ‘speciation’, difference is always emergent. In specification, the freshness of force and processes underway is always threatened and dulled by the formative constraints of entrapment and capture.

Writing, emergence, education? My notebook and diary entries have not only been helpful to me, creatively they are also a part of the ‘relational field’ of which I sense I am a part. My writings of and with the gulls are impulsive. Now that I have noticed them, now that I have observed them in ‘speciation’, I also notice that they draw me in. So whilst my observations and writings might come about through impulse, I also sense them acting on me. Human, nonhuman and more, we share ‘relational fields’, in our relative capacities to affect and be affected, prehensively we are enactive one with the other, in-formationally dissolving that one with the other. Thrift (2006) uses the term ‘processual sensualism’ to describe the inter- and intra-relational attachments and attunements which animate the flows and engagements that entangle relationalities in these fields. In movement and moment, ‘speciations’ might be processually slow and relatively indistinct; their qualities are to do with their ontological indeterminacy rather than quantifiable measurement or the rigidities of form. These notes, these sketchings and jottings, these diary writings, are, in the immediation of these writing moments, part of what Massumi (2002: 17) has described as an ‘exemplary method’ in which practices of ‘exemplification’ can be used to activate detail. Within this ‘method’, he suggests that ‘examples’ can be used to gain a sense of differentiation. The entry in the notebook does not exist simply as a record of, say, an ethnographic observation, rather, it is there as an ‘example’ to provide detail. It exists as a showing of an encounter or an event that might occur in the wink of an eye; it does not offer a telling. Its animating force is to be found in speculative acts of showing, where a brushstroke or a line of writing serves to open, suggest and encourage further experimentation. The work that it does is to

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offer an exemplification, a picture in and of itself, nothing more. It resides quietly in the pages of the notebook and avoids the representational urges of rhetoric and didacticism. Each detail in the ‘example’ exists in processual spacemaking that is ‘after finitude’ (Meillasoux, 2008), each one is important, it is matter, it matters, and, as such, it is essential, it is what animates and activates the ‘example’. The argument that Massumi makes about the writing of examples is of central importance in coming to make sense of making notes and writing diaries. He argues against writing to record, writing to make notes to build a picture or to abbreviate something that might later flourish and grow into writing of a more grand or established form. By contrast, he says: Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. (2002: 18) These diary and journal writings about Herring Gulls doing different things are not only simple extracts from recent diaries and notebooks which have led me to begin to theorise these gulls, not as species but as part of a relational field of ‘speciation’ with multiple nonhuman and human others (not least, including myself) leads me now to think about how this ‘example’ prompts further thinking of the ways in which these diary/journal/notebook writings, in themselves, can be engaged in and be looked at in terms of what they can do. Casting my eyes again over these writings and sketchings provides me with an exemplification of how bodies in space might be sensed. I have watched and studied the behaviour of birds and other forms of wildlife since I was a child. This coming to terms with the speciating potentiality of herring gulls is an example of how my sensing of these and other creatures comes to life. I see them less as beings and more in terms of becoming. Their constant movement in the world, their actualising in world making, is part of a logic of sense that animates my own every doing. This becoming is eventful in my sense making in relational space. In relationality, as Spinoza says, all bodies, human and nonhuman, have the capacity to affect and be affected. In what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call agencement, all bodies are active, are engaged in doing, each doing is an event, is eventful and can be sensed through these exemplifications. So, as an exemplification, this diary entry is helpful to me. As I give an example of the becoming of herring gulls in speciation, I can also begin to make sense of writing in diaries, journals and notebooks. I can begin to think of these writings as ‘speciating’ rather than trying to, having to, look for the meaning that is often ascribed to these objects that are called ‘diaries’, ‘journals’ and ‘notebooks’. I think, therefore, of these not as places but as emergent writing spaces, spaces spatialising.

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I think of them less as having objective form, emphasised by tangible substantiality, as part of what might be seen as a metaphysics of being, but rather in terms of movement, potential and processual vibrancy. In these actualisations, it seems to be necessary to ask not what does working with diaries, journals, etc., mean but rather what does it do? An important aspect of diary, notebook and journal writing that I have noticed is that, unlike other forms of writing that I do, say writing a paper, or writing notes, whilst thinking about what I am going to say in a seminar or a lecture perhaps, is that my writing activity does not place me outside of what I am doing. I have no sense of this writing process as somehow taking place outside of what it is I am writing or writing about. Of the immediating immersion in the process of writing, I sense that I am yielding to complexities of variation, it is as if the activity of writing folds together indistinctness; sight, sound, smell, taste and touch all seem part of a synaesthetic becoming where each moment of writing is another movement into not-yet-ness, into the wonder of the not yet known. This feels like another instance of ‘research creation’ where, in the constant unfolding of the writing, there is always more than one, always more than what can be stood outside of, what can be interpreted, what can be used to represent or identify. I sense this as moving toward writing as immanent doing. The writing flows, it appears on the page. Contrary to what might be deemed its purpose it does not have to be seen, it does not have to be read, it has an existence in and of itself: anything more, perhaps in the case of the writing here, has no necessity. I anticipate dying with many thousands of the words that I have written in these diaries and notebooks living the life of the unread. Forms of qualitative inquiry such as autoethnography use writing as a means or a method of inquiry (Richardson, 2000, Richardson and St. Pierre, 2019). In a different becoming Ken, engaging in writing as inquiry, even using writing as a method of inquiry would have made sense, it would have been used to provide the substance of research practice, it would have formed the rhetorical basis of an academic paper. And, as this writing emerges here, intuitively writing against writing that is somehow constructed as a means to inquire, there is a becoming writing that writes within its selfing, writing as immanent force where writing is becoming. This is perhaps akin to the biochemical process of catalysis wherein elements are brought together and where the bringing together enables the emergence of differentiations and the creation of always something new. This something new is always not yet known and, in its becoming, is compositional. It is important, therefore, in the ‘actual occasion’ (Whitehead, 1929) of this writing processualism, that what is seen to be taking place is compositional and not part of a construction. As I write these words, I am writing into words that have been written before. As I make these incisions these earlier writings seem to slip, yet they do not disappear, I sense a co-composition enacting. Time and space has allowed these earlier words I am writing into to atrophy, not because they might be stale of inappropriate but because they were words of those times and spaces and this is writing now, this is this. So Manning and Massumi assert that ‘the practice of philosophy has

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no exclusive claim to the composition of concepts … its only claim is to its own techniques … the techniques of philosophy are writing techniques’, and in this, they talk of their book as ‘writing interference . It seeks to compose concepts, of a certain kind, in writing. And in the composing, it articulates in the breach, in the fragile difference between modes of thought, in the act’ (2014: vii–viii). And so, I find myself, here, now, writing into the ‘breach’ that I have chosen to make with that writing and this writing which in its becoming, in the composting energies between force and form, is a writing of that and this, melded together, something accidental, something new. It is in these becomings-animal, as we have already seen, that Deleuze and Guattari point to and claim that this ‘strange imperative’ is animate and are energised to say ‘either stop writing, or write like a rat’. I sense here an ‘interference’, no, a breaking through, a madness as methodology, if you will, where the bindings of writing representationally, writing interpretively, writing critically have to be broken. I am with Deleuze and Guattari when they say ‘If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming …’ and, I would add, that as writing is becoming the writer is a ‘sorcerer’; the writing is sourcing, the writing is speculating, the writing is a nuisance, the writing interferes, the writing is never about, the writing is, in and of itself. Manning and Massumi refer to the words of Forsyte when he says, ‘Don’t just write about dance … dance that thought around. Dance that choreographic thought around in philosophy’s act of writing’ (ibid: viii). Writing into these earlier writings, I am ‘traversed by (the) strange becomings’ that Deleuze and Guattari mention. In this, it is not, as they argue, simply ‘becoming-writer’ but ‘becoming-rat, becoming-insect, becoming-wolf ’ it is becoming, immanent, in and of itself. This ‘strange becoming’ is an exhilaration, it is a step into the darkness. Perhaps it is as Deleuze and Guattari say elsewhere, ‘We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed’ (Deleuze, 2004a: 44). Writing into these earlier writings, he writes, wondering, not knowing, what this writing can do. Writing. What it can do to him? What it can do to others? Wondering if it matters. Still he keeps writing. Words from the books around him merge into his own word makings, the postman delivers a package that clunks heavily on the doormat, his mobile phone pings message alerts to him, his stomach hungers for breakfast, and the words writing themselves keep moving him on, gesturing to some future alive in the act of writing. He finds frictional energies holding him back, then allowing him to ease forward. Writing into these earlier writings, opening pages of diaries not opened in years, as ‘becoming-rat’ no longer seems as bizarre and out of sync as it did when he first read Deleuze and Guattari writing it, Auster’s (1987) quotation about ‘being in the dark’, the thrill he felt about ‘not knowing what is going to happen next’ and how this keeps you alert, seems really apt as this new writing unfolds. Wide awake and on your toes, writing in composition and not construction. Firstly, perhaps, a distinction between composition and construction needs to be made

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and exemplified in the processual flow of this writing. Construction takes place when the parts and the variables are brought together as part of a considered, conceived, intended and processing practice of formulation: a plan is designed, a form is predicted, a poem is crafted, a paper is written … hopefully! This is, in a sense, part of an intentionally formed, methodical objectivism in which something that is conceived of somehow comes into being, as if its emergence were part of the embodiment of some unknown, unspoken and unwritten energy: the secret of the view from nowhere. Composition, however, is of the worms. It is of those Deleuzian lines of molecularity, where capillary flows and leakages let loose all kinds of strange morphologies and seething comings to life. It is of those quiet, creeping, subterranean movements and moments where the ground shifts in silent, tender waves of mysterious composure. It is of always shifting, barely glimpsed ‘in-formation’ (Manning, 2010: 118). Composition comprises folding and unfolding where, in endogamous and exogamous flows of movement and in the constant composting dynamism of these always moving elements, new formings, new patterns of world making are always taking place, continually dancing in uncharted movements and moments of improvisation and extemporisation. Massumi describes the amorphous nature of this ‘in-formation’ in the following way: It is not a closure or framing or subsumption. It is the openness of closed form, form continually running into and out of other dimensions of existence. Although the relational whole does not appear outside an actual, situated expression of it, it is not reducible to its situation. It is too confoundingly fuzzy, too impossibly overfull with mutually conveying dimensions of experience emerging into and out of each other, too self-varyingly plastic to be actual. Neither reducible to nor separable from any given situation: nonlocality. The nonlocal relationality, the integrality of the creative event, is virtual. The virtual whole is a transformative or a transitional fringing of the actual. It is like a halo of eventness fuzzifying solidity of form and thus confounding closure. (2002: 174/5) I like what Massumi says here about expression; expression that takes place in any form, is not dependent upon that form for its credibility or its sustainability in worlds of ‘research creation’ where each expression is what Manning describes as a ‘minor gesture’, where ‘the pulse of a differential experience … makes experience in its ecology felt. It is the generative force that opens the field of experience to the ways it both comes together and subtly differentiate from itself ’ (2016: 3). Related to this, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) talk about ‘minor literatures’ that work within and around those ‘major literatures’ that are discursively constructed and which work to produce and sustain the habitual, customary and widely accepted practices and doings of cultural heteronormativity. These ‘major literatures’ can be seen to work to resist the energies and forces of diffractive interference that ‘minor literatures’ have the potential to provide. So, in many cultural settings and contexts of expression, the expressive content of the diary, the journal and the note-making

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form is reduced to the merely transitory, the ephemeral, and to a domain of secrecy until honesty, vanity or death reveals all. So perhaps the expressive content of a diary, a journal, a notebook can be likened to art, an art; it exists there in virtuality, in a body, then it is written, it comes to life in always actualising ways, it might even sit there exposed. Much of it is about time; past, present, future, it jumbles them up. Manning points out that Deleuze says of this, le temps, ‘time is plural’ (Manning, 2015: 49). The potency of a plurality of times has the effect of multiplying the movement of experience in the moment. As I read and write into these pages of writing that I wrote years ago and they come to life in the here and the now, as vibrant matter, the now you see me, now you don’t pages reek of age, the gradual decomposition of paper, ink, perhaps a little sweat, a stain from a coffee cup, a glass of wine perhaps … before I read those words the materiality of these written on pages in this little book undoes me. In this action, in this doing, reading is an immanent force which agentially cuts through what was there before and what will be there in the future; in the interference of this differentiating incision, time multiplies. The writing does not represent the past that lives in a present and becomes in a future; in that page opening, first glancing, reading movement, new life is born, time is dissolved as always in-action. What is in-action here in the immanence of the eliding movement/moment2 is a compositional force that enlivens and that creates difference: in sensation, something moves. Of such art-in-movement-in-time, Manning says ‘what is activated is not a subject or an object, but a field of expression through which a different quality of experience is crafted’ (2016: 51). Deleuze and Guattari say: There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from a thing or a subject. (1987: 261) This notion of haecceity is about the constant movement then coming to rest of bodies in-action and can only be made sense of in relation to the dissolving of linear and chronological time, what Deleuze (2004) calls chronos, and to an alertness to the indefinite time of the event, what he calls aeon. Deleuze and Guattari provide us with an example in the writing of Virginia Woolf: ‘Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will Mrs Dalloway say to herself, “I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that”’ (1987: 263). So I am here and now, sensing that diary writing, journal writing, note writing has to be less about this and that and the construction of and adherence to the linear chronologies of past, present and future. It has to be more about the compositional potentiality and not-yet-ness of spacetime relationality, where the constant particularity of movements and moments is always about encounter, eventfulness and the creation of new life and the capacity of all bodies to affect and be affected.

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My mother was an avid and very regular diary writer. Particularly in the years following my father’s death, I remember seeing her writing in her little books, usually just before bedtime, sitting quietly, pensive in the twilight and the waning energies of the living day. I have a feeling and it is merely a feeling that mum’s diary writing was largely of a factual form. I say this because she would sometimes say, during a family conversation, when perhaps there was a disagreement about when something occurred or when the detail of a particular day had been forgotten, ‘I’ll have a look in my diary’. I have my mother’s diaries amongst the many other things that she left behind after she died. They are small, often cheaply faux, gold embossed little books. They are all in a couple of shoeboxes, collecting dust in my loft. My mum died in 2000. I have never opened these diaries. I tell myself that I can’t. That is a truth that I share whenever their existence is mentioned in conversation or when I start to think about them in relation to this project. I can’t bring myself to open them. In counterpoint to this, I leave my diaries lying around my house; current diaries live on my desk, sometimes open and freshly written in, there to see, to be seen. At other times, they nestle in the shoulder bags in which I carry my books, my marking and the general detritus of my day. So, they often appear, come to life and live in action amongst the messiness of a cluttered bar-room side or pushing aside the coffee cups on a café table when a thought comes to mind, when the urgency of an idea is too intense to resist and when the immanence of the movement/moment is perpetuated by writing in expression. I have a sense, therefore, that my diaries are not private. I present my life as being an open book. I say to whoever is there that they are welcome to read them. I sense that when I die, that in their nakedness, they will be there for anyone to see. Part of me likes that. Part of me likes it that the reading of those many thousands of words will perhaps keep me alive in some kind of way. So far, in this Act, I have claimed that when thinking about writing in diaries, journals and notebooks, it is less important to think about what these kinds of writing mean than about what these writings do. In this, they are not different objects that might be brought to the table; rather, difference emerges in what Barad (2007) might describe as the ‘intra-acting’ play of their agential life: in the immanence of their writing lives they are always compositionally differentiating and diffracting, always engaged in doing. I have also taken a cue from Whitehead (1929) and have argued that they can be seen to be less about fixed worlds of substance and more about transmutational flux and the constant processualism of world making. Lispector says of her writing: The action of this story will result in my transfiguration into someone else and in my ultimate materialisation into an object. Perhaps I might even acquire the sweet tones of the flute and become entwined in a creeper vine. (1992: 20) For her, writing is not to be about positing substance or existence; for to engage in writing that was to make such existential claims would create a limitation of the

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freedoms that are necessary for that freedom to come to life. I have written elsewhere about the possibilities of ‘vignetting’ (Gale, 2014, 2018), which I then began to think about as a doing, a way of engaging a finding out, perhaps in terms of what Richardson (2000) would have called ‘writing as a method of inquiry’. Now, under the influence of Deleuze and Guattari, I think more of the possibilities of ‘vignetting’ as writing as a so(u)rcery, a writing which enables a sensing of originations, and a sensing of conjuring up, of mysteriously, perhaps, creating something new, something out of nothing! Here we have read Deleuze and Guattari saying, ‘If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings, that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.’ (1987: 240). It is in these becomings animal that the capaciousness for writing immanently can emerge. Writing, as ‘vignetting’, can be conceived differently and come to life as writing compositionally on a plane of immanence. Here is where the fleetingness of the words on the vine leaf flourish in vibrant, vivid and luscious growth and then slowly atrophy as the leaf wilts, shrivels and falls to the ground, there to be taken into the ever composting of the soil and into the giving of new ontogenetic compositional life formings. ‘Vignette’ is a word that originally meant something that may be written on a vine-leaf. It’s a snapshot in words … its aim doesn’t lie within the traditional realms of structure or plot … it focuses on one element, mood, character, setting or object … through a vignette, you might create an atmosphere. www.vineleaflieraryjournal.com/ Such a creation of atmosphere is a movement that is momentary; it is a creation that, perhaps, is glimpsed and then, in the wink of the eye, it is gone. Nothing is explained, there is nothing to explain. The glimpse is an event and that is all there is. Perhaps there is a slight breeze that slightly lifts the freshly fallen leaf, perhaps something in the encounter lifts a body into feeling. Worlding cannot stop, it always moves on; all that might be left is less than perceptible, ‘subtleties and flavours, nuances, and qualities that might otherwise not be seen, felt, or heard: a sharpening of focus, a heightening of awareness a touching upon intensity’ (Gale, 2014: 1000). In the quotation from Lispector cited here, it seems clear that engaging in writing can work to create conditions of possibility that enable freedoms to come to life. Similarly, when Foucault talks of ‘getting free of one self ’ (1992: 8), he is talking of freeing selves from the constraints of words that discursively construct and hence constrain bodies in fixed, staid and ossified ways. Similarly, when Lather (2007) talks about ‘getting lost’, she is not subjecting selves to the rigours of lonely, existential abandonment, rather she is saying that all writing, all research has to break free from the metaphysical chains of adhering to ideas of substantive existence. For her ‘getting lost’ can be made sense as a beginning to gain force through experimentation, constant processual conceptualisation and the productive desire of the always not yet known. With the concomitant need to move into in-active, informational practices of world making, perhaps most convincingly exemplified in

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Moten and Harney’s (2013) ‘study’ and Manning’s (2016) ‘research-creation’, there is, as Meillasoux (2008) has argued, a sense in which living is about the not-yet-ness of ‘after finitude’. Illingworth argues that the names that we use for these forms of writing can themselves be seen as failures of imagination, particularly when what we often find in diaries and journals, are wild, shapeless, violent things; elegant confessions and intricate codes; portraits of anguish; topographies of mind. Prayers, experiments, lists, rivalries, and rages are all at home here, interbred, inextricable from one another. A piece of petty gossip sits astride a transcendent realization. A proclamation of self-loathing becomes a paean to literary art. https://lithub.com/on-the-journals-of-famous-writers/ And so, of such inconsistencies, multiplicities and potentialities, Manning suggests they can be likened to a choreographic agencement that cannot be mapped and says that ‘what emerges choreographically is less an organisation of bodies than a cartography of incipient tendencies, of force and form’. From this, we could begin to make sense of diaries and journals, not so much in terms of bodies of writing, and more in terms of ecologies which are ‘more-than-human, composed as much of the force of atmosphere, of duration, (and) of rhythm’ (2016: 126). In this sense making and with further reference to Manning’s work, it also becomes clearer how the play between the anarchive and the archive can be seen to be animate in becoming and to be potentiate in the movements between the two in vibrantly relational ways. And so, I take my feeling and sensing back to the worms and the incessant processual movements of composting. Analogous to the writing and the reading with these diaries and notebooks, I can side slip into thinking of feeding my garden and my garden feeding me. My immersion in and working with these compositional forces works with the animation of involutionary energies and forces. It is not the delineations that work to instil meaning and fixities of knowledge; these involvements feed intensities. In this, the segmentary lines that might otherwise seem to separate the human and the nonhuman, become more supple, leakages occur and capillary forces are released, as lines of molecularity begin to flow. The minorising effects set in play by the molecular flow of these lines of molecularity animates differentiation and sets in play the evolution of new and vibrant relationalities. This growing ecology of involutionary and evolutionary forces and forms, vibrantly and in-formationally in play, is research-creatively powerful in the creation of new life and the relationalities that are processually compositional and emergent in the immanence of these becomings. The compositional vibrancy of the soil, the worms, the birds and insects feeding amongst the plants envelops the ‘me’, the human ‘I’, with a productive desire that wants to be a part of this. With the absorption in and the attunement to the processes that are soaking into and enlivening all my senses, becoming on this immanent plane of composition grows in capaciousness. I sow seeds, worms wriggle in the earth I disturb; the ever attentive Robin in the Elder

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bush nearby is alert to my every move. I look to my left and see amongst the broad beans that I planted in the autumn and that are now reaching down for moisture in the soil and reaching up for the warming sunshine in the early spring sky, a Dunnock foraging for grubs and insects, always busy, also ever alert, never allowing hunger to distract attention away from the possibility of danger just around the corner. These elisions of movement and moment, these haecceities, take me to my pen. I stop my workings with the soil for a while, I sit on the grass by the vegetable patch, I listen to the birdsong and the buzzing of bees, I lift my head to catch the perfume of rosemary and lavender and I write. In this, there is compulsion: writing writes me. My notebook, rests with my trowel, lengths of string, packets of seeds. As the pen writes, the page is marked with words, muddy fingerprints punctuate a paragraph, and the thoughts in my head meld and are at one with the feelings in my body. Folding in, folding out, involving, evolving. I lean back, the sun is warm on my face; my field of perception is synaesthetic, nothing is distinct, I am enveloped. These processes are all about eventuality and duration. All the time nutritional energies, movements and potentialities create encounters with other assemblages of composition. I continue to write, recycling concepts as events. These concepts recycle me, the processualism of (my)self, this selfing, it’s very ‘ontogenesis’ (Manning, 2007: xxi), is perpetual and always eventual in its always not-yet-ness. Nothing is consciously made; every touch, every smell, every moment is an encounter, always in transversal exchange; movement is always in-action. All around me are bodies. All around me are bodies bodying. Each new concept affectively moves, in doing, it worlds, it shifts bodies of thought, human and nonhuman bodies, bodies of writing, bodies … bodies dissemble, reassemble in folds of emergent in distinctness. The production of each new writing is an ‘actual occasion’ (Whitehead, 1929); it is the world ‘in-formation’, full of potency and of always new and emergent vibrant life. Each ‘actual occasion’ encounters, it is event/ful, it does something. I included in the Acknowledgements to my book Madness as Methodology a quotation from Charles Causley, the poet, a wonderful man who lived in my home town of Launceston in Cornwall: it seems apposite to bring it life again in these pages, as I am writing here. The thing about poetry, about all creativity, is that it is a compulsion; you never really feel you want to do it, you try to invent all sorts of jobs to prevent you from making a start, but it is a compulsion; you get a notion in your head that ticks and knocks away and it gives you no rest until it’s been laid like a kind of ghost and then something slowly begins to appear. The great problem in writing poetry is to achieve resonances and hints and suggestions and reverberations and it’s an endlessly difficult and endlessly fascinating task to get the thing to work somehow or other … the skin of a poem is never what it’s really about. (Causley, 2017: 21/22)

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Diary entry November 23rd 2017 Yes, and when I am on it I just can’t stop writing. Writing, writing … it bleeds out of my every pore. I can’t differentiate it in any way. I don’t see this piece of writing as dissertation writing or that piece as journal writing or that as something to be published or that as an aide memoire. It is everything and nothing of this. It is writing in immanence. Writing of itself. Writing that appears on the page, writing that writes, as if it came from nowhere and, yes of course, from everywhere. The writerly presence of the person that writes is less important than the writing that appears. This is about a presencing that is emergent in the writing that creates the writerly person that dumbfounds the person who holds the pen and who taps the keys. Within the immanence of these writing movements, these moments where words appear and sense making is the fanciful exuberance of reading those words on the page, there is no sensing that this writing will fulfil a particular function, do a particular job or be classified as writing of a particular kind, for the diary, for the notebook, for the paper to be published next year, for whatever … It is, as Stengers (2011) says about the writing of Deleuze, about wonder, it is ‘A free and wild creation of concepts’ … This is the joy and the pain of writing, without which, perhaps, the writing would be less? Everything that remains after the conduit ceases to gush and when the well dries up, if only for a fleeting fragment of time, remains as consistently enigmatic as the moment in which the writing creation began in processual ontogenetic flow. There will be no system of classification, no arrangement into constructed categories of place, no provision for the establishment of foundations of provenance. In these delightful futures, there are multiple imaginings, countless flights of fancy, a desert of misreading, exotic lines of flight and soaring trajectories into shining worlds of always not-yet-ness. This is the joy and the pain of reading, without which, perhaps, the reading would be less? The sun starts to settle behind the trees on the skyline at Maker. The notebook’s pages ruffle in the early evening breeze, its pages stained with earth, sweat and writing. There is a Song Thrush sitting in the highest branches of the Aspen at the bottom of my garden, the shrill undulating beauty of its song tells me that all I can do is to write.

Bodies and bodying Massumi says, when talking of Spinoza, that we should be talking of the affective encounters between bodies, where these bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected, ‘with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies’ (1987: xvi). Bodies then can be human bodies, more than simply human bodies, nonhuman bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of sense bodies of words and so on. These bodies are best thought of, not as, strictly speaking embodying bodies, rather as actualising bodies, bodies always on the unceasing move in the play

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between the virtual and the actual. Bodies as never ending with their skin (Haraway 2000), bodies in play. There are in these durational flows and fluxes, as Barad points out, various ‘ethics of worlding’ (2007: 342). In forming concepts of bodies in movement, always processual, we can then move to a knowing of these bodies in encounter, in actualisation that is the fluidity of our knowing. In encounter, these movements in moments are immeasurable, they elude classification and coding, they are there and then they are gone. The work of Bergson (1998) points to the durational dynamics of bodies always on the move. In this, the body of, say, a character in a Japanese anime film will ‘move’ differently or at a different rate to the movements of a rock, what Springgay and Truman (2017) might refer to its ‘lithic ecomateriality’. In engaging with the always emergence of these differentiations, Bergson offers a concept of intuition, to provide a means of experiencing the relative movements of bodies. This concept of intuition and, I would suggest, the subsequent technique of ‘intuiting’ (Gale and Murray, 2022, forthcoming),3 allows for a kind of entering into the relative vibrancy of these becomings as these bodies body.4 Bergson’s concept of ‘intuition’ helps us to engage more thoroughly and satisfactorily with the vibrancy of spacetime relationalities, always fleeting and always momentary. Writing with the potential of the pages of a diary and a notebook, open writing to the intensities, vastness and immanent possibilities of free and wild concept making, where intuitive doings are always in flow with the uncertainties and durational capaciousness, what Bergson might call, the ‘creative evolution’, of bodies always on the move. Intuitive doings, writing in immanence in the pages of a notebook, work to defy the disciplines of representation and interpretation so redolent of writing the major literature. In writing such minor literatures, there are the possibilities of attunement to the volatility of these bodies on the move. We can think here of engaging with what Manning (2009) refers to as ‘leaky bodies’ and think with Thrift when he also suggests a leakiness of bodies that are, constantly sloughing off pieces of themselves, constantly leaving traces – effluent, memories, messages – through moments of good or bad encounter in which practices of organization and community and enmity are passed on, sometimes all but identically, sometimes bearing something new. (2006: 141) I also like the idea that there are fluidities and flows that exist and operate between all forms of writing. So as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) conceptualise ‘minor literatures’ that work within and around, through and about the ‘major literatures’ that might work to embody and suffocate them, so processual forms of transitory, emergent writing as doing, such as may be found in diaries and notebooks, work in similar ways with writing that becomes published and public. As such, they are not to be unified and performatively connected within the artifice of intentional construction. Rather, in heterogeneity and contingency, they are the becoming of the animating forces of agencement, affecting and being affected. They are at once inspirational and illuminating, whilst also offering oppositional forces of resistance; their forceful

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fluidities always in tension with the porosities, viscosities and frictions that animate and transversally elaborate their transmutational and transformative force. These forceful entanglements are tectonically creative, always offering new ideas with intensities that potentiate vibrant intuitions and feelings in, through and across fields of human/nonhuman relationality. In this, bodies are always on the move, always working to do, to bring new worldings into life. This processualism is excitingly less visible, always less tangible, never constructivist, always unintentionally compositional. With reference again to the ‘lithic ecomateriality’ that Springgay and Truman (2017) bring to life in the ‘thinking-in-movement’ of their ‘stone walks’, there is slowness that is always speculative, always asking, problematising, experimentally bringing to life in ways that are not about and that are always with. I find these slownesses working and giving life in the always emergent and creative, affective relationality of diary/note/journal writing: here today, different tomorrow, read tomorrow, written differently today. These writings are less contained by the appearance of their object/ive form and more animate in the way they leak all over the writing that emerges in unexpected and newly clandestine, yet to be revealed kinds of ways. They shift in atmospheres of assemblage, like clouds slowly and silently moving in, around, together, and with one another composing, recomposing decomposing what was there with what is here, now you see me, now you don’t. These fuzzy, fraying and always less tangible globes of agencement are the immanence of becoming: they are not of the artifice of representation and identification and the false solutions of critique, because their shifting, movement in-action is forever briefly glimpsed and then it is something else, now you touch me now you don’t. As Springgay and Truman point out in their engagement with the work of Puar, ‘the convergence of the two theoretical frameworks is neither reconcilable, nor oppositional, but frictional … theoretical concepts need not be united or synthesized … they can be productive to hold concepts together in tension’ (2017: 852). ‘In-action’ (Manning 2020), this is the way with writings. They are not individualised and simply substantive in relation to author/isation by those who write them, they exist in relationality, in and as assemblages and are therefore agentic in and to that relationality. I will talk a little about secrets. Secrets are often associated with the person who keeps them and in the keeping of them hides the secret from others, others that the keeper of the secret wishes to keep the secret from. In this way, secrets are understood as existing in containers or repositories. These can be human, in the form of the diarist, for example, and they can be nonhuman or material, in the form of the diary, for example. In this conceptualisation the secret lives or dies with the simply human agent: ‘My secret will go to my grave, it will die with me’. You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal How does it feel, ah how does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone (Like a Rollin’ Stone by Bob Dylan from the album, Highway 61 Revisited, released: 1965)

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What were once the children’s rooms in my house are now empty. That is to say, my children no longer live in them, no longer spend time in them, unless perhaps to pick up some long forgotten piece of clothing or a book they might want to read again. They are not empty; they are full of that which has been left behind. Some would say they are untidy. I do not. How they is, is how they are. I still, occasionally go into them; I do this and I always get a buzz: in affect, it is usually tinged with nostalgia, sadness, even loss. Yesterday, I was vacuuming. For me, this is a beautifully simple task, involving a minimum of effort and focused concentration and allows for a multitude of mind-wandering freedom which often takes me back to my writing table when the cleaning is done. So, yesterday, in this state of blissful absent mindedness, I followed the vacuum cleaner into my son’s bedroom and found myself looking at and wondering about the little black book resting on the table beside his bed, amongst all the other paraphernalia of him going to sleep and waking up night-time and morning life. Following this noticing, this initial coming to life of perception and alert awareness, my next reaction, having never seen this little book before, was to move across the room, pick it up and have to have a look inside. And, in the subsequent split second of this coming to life, to stop, to make a decision, to carry on vacuuming and to allow the little book to continue to rest there, unopened, collecting an almost imperceptible seal of delicate dust on its shiny black surface. I call this a decision and, yet, of course, it is not that. I can only understand these movements in terms of affect, I sense them in terms of prehensive force frictionally running against the pressure to form. The impulses animating this not moving to pick up the book were impulses in the creation of an encounter. In re-visiting this event, it now comes to life again, differentiating, actualising in new flow of newly emergent ‘in-formation’. I am captivated by the ontogenesis of this moment, this coming to life of movement in pulsing in-formational flows. I am aware of the elided entanglement of what Barad (2007: 185) refers to as the ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’. In this moment, new life appears. In this movement, in this palpable politics of touch, I am aware of the capacity of all bodies, human and nonhuman to affect and be affected. In this brief, intensive and hugely powerful encounter, the immanence of a life is fleetingly apparent. I am aware, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘(t)here is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it’ (1987: 261). I offer this by way of ‘exemplification’ (Massumi, 2002: 17). I sense the forces at play here in the movements of this moment, perhaps as part of what Bennett (2010) refers to as an ‘agentic assemblage’. On this emergent writing page as new compositional energies emanate from this in-formation of words, this example exists as a vignette, a fragment, a brief noticing that has fragile, tentative, candle in the wind, affective life that this new writing moment vainly and impossibly tries to resurrect. I echo Haraway and feel, how like a leaf I am. The differentiating repetition of these encounters leads me to thinking of secrets and the action of secrecy. In my noticing of my son’s little black book sensing in multiplicity occurred. Its little black bookness led me to think of it as something,

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something substantive, something having form and identity, some thing normatively and discursively identifiable as a diary. In that brief, electric moment of noticing, in that ‘actual occasion’ (Whitehead, 1929)) I chose to ascribe meaning to the little black book. Its little black bookness was and, continues to be, agentic; its little black bookness was doing something to me, and as a consequence of this doing I did something else, my movement toward opening it, moved me toward not opening it, not even toward touching it. Deleuze and Guattari talk of the secret in terms of its contents and suggests that, the content is too big for its form … or else the contents themselves have a form, but that form is covered, doubled, or replaced by a simple container, envelope, or box whose role it is to suppress formal relations. These are contents it has been judged fitting to isolate or disguise for various reasons. (1987: 286) As I tap these keys and write these words, the little black book is there in his room, in its blackness, in its becoming-bookness, in a mysteriously affective sense actively manifesting a secrecy … perhaps, perhaps … and in innocent object relationality, resting there and, at the same time, actively collecting dust and playing the keys of my life. And so, I become aware of the agentic force of secrecy. I have a sensing that secrecy has the processual sensualism of action. I am less concerned about the secret, the secrets that might be concealed and more about the processes that make them agentic in these collective and co-compositional becomings. The agentic force that comes about in creative relationality promulgates an encounter. As a Whiteheadian ‘actual occasion’, this haecceity does something: many things in fact. It tells of the affective forces surrounding secrecy that led me first to and then from and away the little black book on my son’s bedside table. It encourages me to write here in this, what is likely to become, public space of inquiry and analysis. It moves my concept forming of subjectivity; it animates a sensing of self and thinking away from the individualised, individualising and the simply human-centric toward the always more than one of individuation and dynamic processualism of always becoming. It animates an ‘affective presencing’ (Gale, 2021) in the world which is, in this actuality, about world-making, or perhaps, more precisely, what Stewart calls ‘worlding’. In these movements toward, is a moving that makes more redundant and less useful those substantive concepts of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘self ’ and, in so doing, to bring to life those more processually active concepts of ‘subjectification’ and ‘selfing’. Making these moves also tells of the need to move away from the creation of objects, such as little black books, and to create a wariness about those actively discursive practices of signification, that work to construct such little black books as diaries, that work to bring to life encounters between bodies in particularly and often exclusively substantive and signifying ways. In contrast, making these moves tells me that secrecies are associational and implicative. It tells me that secrets do things and that these doings come to life in multiplicity and relationality. It tells me that they can lead elsewhere and to

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others. In the metonymic force of associations ‘diary’, can lead to ‘journal’, and can lead to ‘note-book’, and can lead to ‘book’, and can lead to … perhaps, perhaps. In short, these secrets secrete. And in the processual shift from substance to process, the desert becomes more populous; many human and nonhuman others in becoming are involved. The little black book, in its little black bookness, is animate, it is doing, its secretions are agentic; they draw me in, then push me away, they send me wondering and in these wanderings, they take me to writing here. And so, in these creatively relational movements and moments, the little black book emanates its capaciousness, its potency, its ability, in the wink of an eye and the sharp intake of a breath, to act, to do and to affect. Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘(f)rom an anecdotal standpoint, the perception of the secret is the opposite of the secret, but from the standpoint of the concept, it is part of it’ (1987: 287). As they often demonstrate in their work, the smallest unit is the assemblage, so the secrecies that the diary secretes implicates always more and ever many. In individuation, the individual is a dynamic molecular fragment of agentic process making in which there are always, as Manning (2013) points out, ‘always more than one’. I like to echo what Dylan says in the quotation above, ‘You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal’. In his writing on the writings of Coleridge, John Livingstone Lowes (1959) engages with thoughts and understandings of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan in which he offers arguments for the existence of imagination which somehow exceeds the boundaries of and containment within simply human forms of embodiment and knowledge making. In his study of Coleridge’s notebooks and journals, Lowe offers sensings of imagination that, I wish to argue, are congruent with contemporary theorising to do with creative relationality, affect theory and a monist view of the world that we can find in the work of Spinoza and the more recent writing of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. In this, Lowes claims that, at least in the case of Coleridge, that the value, the ‘import’ of the notes and journal writings, reaches far beyond its contribution to our knowledge of the man who kept it … (and) lies in the fact that it points the way to conclusions of general validity – conclusions which, in turn, owe their illuminating quality to the vivid concreteness of the details on which they rest … (1959: 30) Of these, he asserts ‘there remains a precious residuum which is peculiar to no individual, but which inheres in the nature of the imaginative faculty itself ’ (1959: 30). Lowes is clearly using here a very different form of language from that which we might use today. However, it also seems equally clear that, his somewhat abstract claim for ‘the nature of the imaginative faculty itself ’ offers substantive allusory force to the prehensive capacious play of intensities living beyond the simply human individual. These are more readily accommodated within what we might describe as the energies and secretions emanating from and entangled with the creatively relational dynamics of affect.

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And so, for Deleuze and Guattari, it is unhelpful to think of the secret as contained in a diary or a private journal. Thinking of it in this way ‘has limited value as long as (through this containment) the secret is opposed to its discovery as in a binary machine having only two terms, the secret and disclosure, the secret and desecration’ (1987: 286). Equally and in their terms, it makes more sense to see the secret as not simply created and owned by a single isolable human-centred form; its content is not contained and does not belong within a single, individualised body. If you like, the writer, the so-called holder of the secret, exists in relationality to and with other agentic human and nonhuman forms. In their conceptualisation of the secret, it is always becoming in relationality, its formation is always, to use Manning’s term, ‘in-formation’. The secret did not begin with a particular body or end with it; as they say, ‘(t)he secret is not at all an immobilised or static notion. Only becomings are secrets; the secret has a becoming’ (1987: 287). Writing in a diary, a notebook, a journal and now a book, it is now possible to ask what is it to be able to write, to have that ability to write. And perhaps it is not an ability, perhaps it is a compulsion, perhaps it is an urge, a productive desire to connect and to write with that ‘spiriting’, to be alive with self and other in heterogenesis. I sense that these diary, notebook and journal writing movements might be akin to what Manning (2020) brings to life in the concept of the ‘anarchive’. I sense that in this, these writings are always middling. I am drawn to a phrase that she uses and in my own sensing of her expression, I want to bring to life here; in the anarchive, there are ‘seeds of process’ (2020: 76). What I gain from this expression, in terms of my own diary, notebook, and journal writings, is that they are of immediation, they arrive, they may only be crudely crafted and in these crude craftings, they have lives in immanence. In this they exist in and of themselves, they do not represent, they are like vignettes,5 words written on vine leaves, whose lives might appear brief in their withering and falling to the ground but in their ensuing composting movements they are capacious in bringing to life new life. They do not die. And so, in my understanding of Manning’s concept, the ‘anarchive’ is not evidential, it is not documentary, it has the potential, in its there-ness to feed, to reiterate, to be enactive of becoming and in the ‘middling’ of its coming to life, it is constitutive of life on a plane of immanence. There are encounters with the anarchive that in eventfulness can be productive of movements toward. There is a sense that the writing in this book archives and if that sensing makes further sense then it is because the writings from the anarchive in the processes of ‘middling’ have been brought forward and given new life in the pages of this book. That which had life in the anarchive is not meant to be contained by the book and, hopefully, in becoming, it will gain new life as it spirits its selfings in new and vibrant encounters of worlding. Therefore, perhaps what is being written here is about enactment, the very business of writing ‘in-act’ (Manning, 2020: 75) The writing in these becoming-bookpages is purposive in and of itself. In this, the becoming writing, in its ‘middling’ flows and eddies from diaries, notebooks and journals, is in-formation, its selfing is upon the world, in the in-activity of coming to life, it engages in doing in different ways, it differentiates. It does not rely for its credibility upon some normative form

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of critique; it comes to life in and of its selfing as immanent critique. Its creative relational spark is generated by the frictional engagements between the ontogenesis, the in-formational energies that set it in play and the forces that might generate or resist its becoming. It is writing that does. I sense that what might have lived an anarchival life in these diaries, notebooks and journals in-formationally as notes, jottings, impressions, ideas, whimsical meanderings and so on are, at least in part, constitutive of that which comes to life in the writing of this book.6 Some impulse, some productive desire has activated a movement of fragments of this anarchival matter into the pages of this becoming book. Some force is alive in these movements. As Massumi has said, ‘(a)s a writing practice, exemplification activates detail. The success of the example hinges on the detail. Every little one matters … Every detail is essential to the case … Each detail is like another example embedded in it. A microexample. An incipient example.’ (2002: 18) Herein lies the sensing that all of these ‘details’ are important; perhaps they act as little ‘acts of activism’ (Madison 2010). Each thought in the making, each speculative inquiry, each tentative piece of diary writing, each nervous offering on these pages, all the inquiries with which I engage matters. It matters because I believe it does something; I may not know what that might be but if I have a sensing of the possibility that something has happened as a consequence of this doing then that’s OK. This mattering is not simply expressed as a turn of phrase, it is not simply a word from the lexicon of my personal rhetoric and passion for inquiry and learning, it is much more than that. I firmly believe that the virtuality that matters, that might be mattering, matters, lives in actualisation and is, quite simply and processually always material. So, this mattering is a substantive driving force in what my writing body can do.

Notes 1 This pamphlet has no page numbers: 5 is the number I have given in my copy. 2 Davies and Gannon (2006: x) talk of ‘mo(ve)ment’. 3 This invention of the technique animates intuition in-act, as Gale and Murray say, ‘In:tuition is intuiting “How might we work together”’ (2022, forthcoming). 4 Bergson’s concept of intuition also points us in the direction of different sensings and practicings of empiricism, which are less to do with positivistic approaches of measurement and quantification and more to do with the fluidities of composition and associations. When, in becoming, bodies body, this use of body as verb signals process (over substance) and always movement toward. Acts of posthuman empiricisms talks in more detail about this. 5 For a detailed account of the concepts of ‘vignette’ and ‘vignetting’ see Gale, K. (2014) Moods, tones, flavours: living with intensities as inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 8, 998–1005. 6 In an earlier piece of collaborative writing carried out with Jonathan Wyatt we briefly examined and critically engaged with Atkinson’s (1991) binarising account of an ‘ethnographic imagination’ in which we ‘worked at the interstices at play between the flurried narrative accounts of our original ‘writing down’ and what presents itself on these pages as our ‘writing up’ (2013: 140).

WRITING ACTS AS IMMANENT DOING

In the writing of this book, much has been said about the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in their book A Thousand Plateaus. There is a very strong sense that this book would be a very different book, if that book had not been read and digested in so many different ways over the last 20 or so years. So, in relation to this, it is interesting to note Massumi’s thoughts about A Thousand Plateaus and how these connect with the writings that continue to be emergent in the writing of this book. In the introduction to the Chinese translation of the book, he says, ‘… Deleuze and Guattari develop what may be considered the key concept of the book: multiplicity as a continuity of becoming, uncontained’ (2010: 5). There is so much clarity, so much vibrant potency in the direct simplicity of this short passage of writing. It needs to be repeated: ‘multiplicity as a continuity of becoming, uncontained’. This is so lucid, so powerful, so capacious in its resistance to transparency and capture. The phrase speaks fluently and unambiguously of engaging writing as immanent doing and the creation of concepts as events as powerful forces for ‘multiplicity as a continuity of becoming, uncontained’. The practices that emanate from and are congruent with this are not about reflection, interpretation, judgement and representation; the passage speaks of writing that it is always on the move, always engaged in the more-than of speculative and pragmatic inquiry, writing that never rests. In this, writing engages the task of philosophical doing. Writing does not rest on its reflections; writing is not about the re-invention of self. Writing is animate in the way in which it is able to bring concepts to life. Each time a concept is written, it unleashes the potential of multiplicities that have come together and briefly coalesced in the writing process. Writing can take with it what Deleuze and Guattari see as the purpose of philosophy. An immanent writing is not about writing against or laying judgement on other disciplines. An immanent writing might take from those disciplines, as is the case with Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. In their case, they take from them, tuning in DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-10

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to their potential and, in eventfulness, creating new concepts and, in doing this, engaging with this potential, putting it to work in ways that were never conceived of before. There is in this, what Manning refers to as an ‘artfulness’, whereby over time there is a ‘more-than of the object felt’ in which in the making of the concept there is the activation of, the difference between what was and what will be. For all actualisation is in fact differentiation (in which) ‘the differences in kind between the not-yet and the will-have-been are felt, but only at the edges of experience. They are felt in the moving, activating the more-than. (2015: 47) In employing ‘artfulness’ (Manning, 2015) to animate a stuttering ‘in-act’ in their collaborative writing, Gale and Murray found writing as selfing, inventing new words and new word compositions, such as ‘pARTicipation’ and ‘In:tuition’. In the latter case, they found the writing starting ‘with intuition and through the dephasing of our thought experiment arriving at “in:tuition”’ (2022, forthcoming) and, in so doing, creating a new sense of moving toward a facilitation of working together. Writing as immanent doing does this. Immanent writing does not rely on dwelling with the memories, rememberings and reconstructions of the past or of an outside from another world, synaesthetically, this writing brings together shades, tones, inflections, feelings from elsewhere and does something with them. Writing immanently does this by fusing together the potentiality of multiple other energies and forces: in this way, writing works toward and has the potential to create something new in the writing and in its expression. Coalescences in writing can create multiplicities. Words are pungent, they smell, they reek; in action, they are powerfully evocative: We know this; they do. In these doings, they are always actively moving; moving other words, moving affect, moving experience, moving us . . . whatever us is. And therefore, it also seems obvious to point out that movement is, sui generis, of itself: Movement moves. (Gale and Wyatt, 2022: 80) Immanent writing can provide a continuity of becoming in which new life is always actualising, always in-formation. The writing is written and then what is written moves on. That which is written moves on by virtue of its own potential to move. The writing from the pen, the tapping of the keys, the writing on the page, the writing that is read, the writing is more-than all of these instances by virtue of its potential. The writing in these moving forms, in the flow of this in-formation is not contained and does not simply contain the energy that produced it: at every stage of its movement toward, its becoming, it has the potential to do something. In these processual actualisations the actual is never realised: never made real. The creative energy and the forceful capaciousness of the writing lies in the virtual. There

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is a potency in its always moving toward, even though whatever its movement is toward is never fully realised. Mrs Dalloway1 looks out of her window and everything she sees is on the move; in her looking out of the window, there is always a movement toward, always a movement toward that is a productive, creative act. As she looks out the window, the party that she is planning, that she sees as being in the future is, in immanence, something that is now, something that is in and of its own selfing, something that is immeasurable and incommensurate to and with an outside, something that is always changing, always in the incipiency of the more-than of its moving toward. Every moment of movement that is enactive in and around her promulgates movement in her and these movements move her toward an always not yet known. Each shade, tone, inflection and feeling is potent; its animation in becoming is an event: its brief eventful coming to life in the constant processualism of actualisation sets up an encounter. In multiplicity, these encounters engage world making: processually, in-formation, they world. Worlding, therefore, is about those lines that delineate, those lines that draw up forceful gestures, that enable proximities and relationalities, that promote connections, that fuel contingencies and that work to bring to life networks of possibility that, in turn, offer transversal linkages between worlds that had hitherto existed in other constellations. The brief coalescence of these lines gives life to what may have never been seen, what can never be fully actualised except in the briefest sparkle of incandescence in the luminal infinitude at the elusive heart of haecceity. In these respects, writing immanently is compositional. Writing immanently is, as Manning and Massumi (2014) have phrased it, ‘thoughtin-the-act’. It is where new concepts come to life, where the invention of these concepts is animate in the creation of new life. Writing in this way takes place on and is creative of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘a plane of consistency’: this is what writing immanently consists of. Consisting is animate and processual, always on the move, it is substantively in actualisation, never fully actualised, and its consistency is processual, always becoming, ever changing. In this, writing immanently sets in play the ludic territorialising play between the simple and the complex; like the wasp and the orchid, it is never one and the other, immanence is the constant territorialising play between the one and the other. In this, it cannot be accounted for, it is, in and of its own selfing, of its self. Clearly, then, it is the affective incessance of multiplicities that processually bring this to life. This is not be found in the rational simplifications of syntheses that are deduced from the reasoned linearities of a Hegelian dialectic. Multiplicities are so elusive and transitory that their existence is beyond the limits of rational apprehension: in this, in a Whiteheadian sense, they are never fully apprehended, as they are always on the move. Existing and acting as, what Whitehead would refer to as, ‘actual occasions’, the realisation of their potential is prehensive; in immediation, they live before words, always taking language to its limits. What is key to this vibrant processualism is that, in part, the act of writing has played a critical part. Perhaps it has briefly realised a potential, perhaps it has brought together separate bodies in tandem, perhaps… it has opened up a view from a viewpoint never taken

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before, perhaps it has enabled the unseen to become seen, perhaps ... It is clear that the creative act of writing as immanent doing is experimental, it is based upon a speculative approach and, in this, is not afraid to bring together diverse possibilities in new and exciting trysts of relational force and energy. The following vibrant passage from Deleuze and Guattari, is hugely illustrative of this: Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken with them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five o’ clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five is this animal This animal is this place! (1987: 263) To draw from the writing of Deleuze and Guattari in this way, it is evident to see, in these encounters, that writing has the capaciousness to promote; that differentiations always have the potential to be made. In this, difference is not to be understood as something that exists on the outside and that is brought to the encounter. Rather, difference is constantly emergent in the frictional dynamics of the encounter, in the frisson of touch and the always composting, compositional energies and multiplicities generated by the vibrant forces of movements and moments. The differentiating energies released in these events are, for Deleuze, the forces of ‘deterritorialisation’, always undoing, always creating and always giving voice to the what-ifs of speculative forays into the excitement of the what-might-be-just-around-the-corner-of-the-always-not-yet-known. I see the writing and talking that is constitutive of what is likely to lead to the final Act of the book, this Act that makes a move to the final becomings of this book, returning to the speculative stimulations that in many ways began its movements toward where the writing creates its selfing now. In the writings of his book The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1974) pointed to the eternal return and eternal recurrence, not simply to indicate a never ceasing repetition of specific events, but rather to suggest the ways in which experience repeatedly brings to life certain general circumstances that are constitutive of existence in space and time. These general circumstances are micro-processually complex as they are always in flux, always folding one into the other to create other general circumstances and, in so doing, always creating concepts that are always new. So that whilst a repetition of a general circumstance might occur, in that reoccurrence difference is always made; differentiation is the life force of always moving toward. In this, there are no beginnings or endings, simply coming and goings. And so, some of the opening pages of this book drew inspiration from the general circumstances of Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davies (2011) writing to and writing with Deleuze and collaborative writing: An immanent plane of composition. The returning again to the concepts that were created and written earlier in this book brings to life a repetition that is immanent in and with the differentiation that occurs through the forces that this return brings into life. The reading of the book, the engagement

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with the concepts that have emerged in its pages and the return to them in these final pages that unfold in this here and now will create new concepts. The general circumstances of the reading, writing, thinking and talking with the book will return, previous concepts will be revisited and in this new concepts will be made. There can be no lucidities of time or place, no distinct identities, subjectivities or selves and no beginnings or endings. In this, if there is an urge to transparency, then it is resisted. So, for example, by returning to a concept previously invented in this writing, it is easy for the writing to present its selfing as ‘intimating’ (Gale, 2021). In this writing, always moving toward an immanent plane of composition, that we might agree to call a book, the concept of ‘intimating’ itself is likely to have shifting lucidity and sense-making ability. It is a concept and concepts are always on the move. What it does is active in its incipiency; it is capacious, anything could happen. On an immanent plane of composition when a concept is made, it is an event, each new concept created, no matter what its name, is always differentiating, always in play with other concepts and, in this, is inevitably contingent and heterogeneous. In the unfolding of and the folding in of this book, ‘intimating’ is always occurring. Reading is constituted as and by thinking and inventing concepts that spatio-temporally bring to life, not simply what ‘intimating’, as a dynamic, living and always active concept is, or might be, rather, in multiplicity, it brings to life a doing, it is always in-act, in incipiency ‘intimating’ intimates. When we ask the Spinozist inflected question what can a body of thought, in-act, as ‘intimating’ do, we are opening to thinking and action in and of its selfing; in immanence, this is what ‘intimating’ does. And so, writing toward the ending of the book began with confidence. The writing that precedes this laptop key tapping that is propelling this sentence forward was written with an ‘I can do this, this is how it will be brought to a conclusion, here I go!’ And then, gradually, immanently, with a title that says Acts of Writing as Immanent Doing looming over these increasingly hesitant words ‘in-formation’, the writing begins to stutter, the words refuse to flow, the late afternoon winter sky lets a gloomy cloud cover over the writing that refuses to assert its selfing on this electronic page. The thoughts and feelings in action connecting with the hands tentatively tap, tapping, talks of the transcendent inclinations of writing an ending, bringing the book to a close. How is it possible to do that when throughout the two years of the writing, all the words have been ‘middling’ in emergence in and with the creation of concepts as events? Endings and beginnings bring themselves into being as fabrications, surely to invoke a conclusion to the writing is to offer an invitation to the transcendent, when a knowing of the transcendent is that it freezes movement, stops it in its tracks? How can this be done? Shall the writing propel itself like Thelma and Louise high flying over the cliff? Should the writing come to a screeching halt as the lights turn red and the way forward is barred? Why should the writing stop when there is more writing ready to burst out onto the page? Why should the file that is bulging with tens of thousands of more words be left on the shelf to gather dust? Why does the freedom and the wildness of the concept creation that precedes this threatening temporal finitude of closure have to be tamed?

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In these ceaseless becomings animal, why does the demonic creature have to return to domesticated tameness and conformity? Predictably, inevitably, returning again to Deleuze. Eternally re/turning the pages. Searching for inspiration. Simply searching, sometimes not even that, browsing, idling, not looking for direction and then, always by chance, finding a suggestion, taking a lead, finding Deleuze saying, Of course, things are sometimes missing, but it’s only ever abstractions, a transcendent viewpoint, perhaps just the Self, that prevents one constructing a plane of immanence. Processes are becomings, and aren’t to be judged by some final result but by the way they proceed and their power to continue, as with animal becomings, or nonsubjective individuations. (1995: 146) And then, once again, perhaps again only temporarily, as the fear begins to slip away, slowly, imperceptibly … there is the remembering of opening A Thousand Plateaus for the very first time, over 20 years ago, and setting out on the very first of many readings of the Introduction to the Rhizome plateau at the beginning of the book. There is the feeling of the ensuing compulsion to read on, to not put the book down, to annotate pages, to make notes on the nearest piece of paper available, to stuff the book in my shoulder bag, to read it again, and again, and never, ever feel concerned that I would have lost my page, never ever feeling the need to read consecutively, learning with growing knowing that wherever I started, and wherever I found myself reading the book, my reading would soon connect me up with another reading, another book marking (a fallen leaf, a beer mat, an unpaid electric bill …) and I would be off again … And now, as the words appear, as these reassurances begin to rise again like a somewhat reluctant, slow-moving neap tide, I make real the possibility that I have never looked for, read or even considered that A Thousand Plateaus has an ending! As I write, I know that when the writing allows me to stop, I will lean to my left, pick up the book from its ever-changing resting place, be careful not to let the always growing assorted bundle of bookmarks fall out onto the floor (again) and look for its ending … Where does that ending begin? Here is the (not) ending from A Thousand Plateaus, I write it down, I have chosen to do this to enliven the drama of immanence that seems to be unfolding here: Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic – perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semantic – but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 514) Feeling heartened, this does not seem like a conclusion that reads like a conclusion! Is it meant to be a conclusion as such? Isn’t it simply the last piece of writing that

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appears in the book before the credits start to roll? Reading this last piece of writing, I realise that this conclusion is, in actuality, only one sentence. It is one sentence, containing one word: ‘mechanosphere’. One word, that’s all. I am taken aback. My off and on reading, my coming and going, that to-ing and fro-ing, for the last 20 years or so, of such an important book, a book that I have said that I would take with me if I was ever allowed to be stranded on a desert island,2 has not previously revealed to me a concept which Deleuze and Guattari have chosen for bringing to an end one of their most (in)famous books. And, in this sense, of course, this is not an ending, the book does not end here and with it, neither does my reading. This is not an ending in actuality, as I have just written a few lines ago, it is an actualisation of an event. It is a page of writing. It is not about closure. It is not about conclusion. How could a book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have an ending? I scramble around, shuffling pages, disturbing bookmarkers: there are only twopage references to ‘mechanosphere’ in A Thousand Plateaus. One of these page references leads me to the sentence ‘What we call the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata’ (ibid: 71). I search further and read elsewhere that the ‘mechanosphere’ is ‘composed of non-hierarchical flows of divergent elements’ and that the concept talks to its ‘nomadic externality’ (Dukes, 2016). Slowly, I begin to bring to life a concept in my own mind of the ‘mechanosphere’. I start to use this as a way of helping me to work with the blurred borders, what Manning (2014: 163) calls the ‘edgings and contourings’ that cloud the intertwinings and delineations that are constitutive of the convergences and operations of these various abstract machines. I read again this final passage in A Thousand Plateaus, I read more of Dukes’ account and, at first, feel somewhat relieved, his observations concurring with mine, when he says, ‘the importance of the mechanosphere seems compromised through the scarcity of its invocation …’. Then this relief turns into a feeling of disturbance when, remembering that the last sentence of A Thousand Plateaus is ‘Mechanosphere’, Dukes continues by saying, ‘As with many last words, it is both an elegy for what has passed and an anticipation of states to come’.3 After reading the work of Bateson and with his ideas still fresh in my mind, I wrote, perhaps somewhat unwittingly, in the Prelude that the book, in and as affective forcefulness, begins to work as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (1999: 21/2). And, as I sense the imminence of this becoming conclusion, I also have a sense of satisfaction, spiced with a sense of uncertainty about how the writing on these pages will come to an end. With cartographic intent, as endings are planned and tentatively mapped there is an ‘affective presencing’ which brings to life concern, frightened anticipation and probing thoughts about what does this writing do, what can it do, what will it do? If, as Barthes insists, this author dies, and then, as the body of writing that is the book that, in increasing precarity the writer holds and then allows to slip from those weakening clutching fingers that held it, Spinoza’s rhetoric insistently continues to echo with the words ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’ (1994: 155). What can this body of writing do?’

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In this respect, I have often quoted the words of Ron Pelias my friend of many years and a stellar Performance Studies scholar and writer. In his genial and hugely authoritative manner, Ron invariably encourages those who work with him, colleagues, teachers and students alike, to always ask of these inquiries, these performances, these actions and all of the serious scholarly engagements with which we engage, what work do they do: what work do they do. I do not think Ron necessarily expects us to come up with answers: his question is not that kind of question. I sense that the performative question he poses, the question that he really wants us to work with, is less of a question and more to do with a productive desire to encourage and prompt us into delire, to go off the rails, to journey into worlds of curiosity and to nurture the wonder of speculative inquiry. I sense that the question he poses is not asked as a means of somehow helping us in assuaging existing existential concerns, or to be simply reflective about something we might have done. I sense something much more than this when I take Ron’s question with me and pose it when I am thinking about worlding and how bodies are becoming in this worlding. It is not about looking for answers because there are always so many answers out there that effectively there are none. Therefore, I take the question not as a question, I take it as a prompt to speculate, in wonder to continue in our wanderings, to wander with a sense of wonder, to have this non question always by our side, not simply in minds but in bodies, to the extent that becoming something other than what was before is queered, queried and deeply problematised. It is not about concerns to do with coming up with answers, or reaching conclusions or even thinking tentatively about certainties or what these wonderings and wanderings might purport to entail. As Deleuze said in his conversations with Claire Parnet, The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. Many people think that it is only by going back over the question that it’s possible to get out of it … But getting out never happens like that. Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks. Getting out is already achieved, or else it never will be … during the time while you turn in circles among questions, there are becomings which are silently at work, which are almost imperceptible… (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 1/2) I had been reading Joyce again, revelling in the beautiful unexpectedness of his amazing verbal inventiveness, at one in multiplicity with Ulysses, plunging from the compelling seductions of one page, leading inexorably into another. For once, instead of putting my own book writing to one side, frustrated, by comparison, with my own writerly inadequacies, I found Joyce giving me in his writings and his hugely insightful allusions something of relevance to share here. All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James 1 or Essex. Clergymen’s

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discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. (2000: 236) So, it is not about coming up with answers. No, it is about living on, in and with a transcendental field. It is about relations in such a field that are not to do with simply human forms of consciousness and emotion or in finding answers to questions of the kind posed above. Spinoza was not encouraging us to come up with an answer to the question, what can a body do? because, as we have seen, there are no answers to this question; it is not a question that requires answers in any conventional sense. As Deleuze has pointed out, any relation to a transcendental field is conceptual. In this, thoughts might be caught in the act, concept forming will be event/full and, in each new event/ful encounter, new concepts will emerge. In this, as he points out, the transcendental field, can be distinguished from experience, to the extent that it does not refer to any object nor belong to any subject (empirical representation). It is thus given as pure a-subjective stream of consciousness, as pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, or as the qualitative duration of consciousness without a self. (2001: 25) Therefore, for Deleuze, the ‘image of thought’ that historically has been called philosophy effectively stops people from thinking. By working to answer and to engage in the agonistics of finding the supposed right answers to questions constrains and limits thinking within an inside, instead of thinking experimentally and speculatively outside of these narrowly internalising questions. In this, the play between the involutionary and the evolutionary in-acts, is on the move again, always actualising in the adventurous tactility of the frisson of the not yet known. A Deleuzian philosophy offers ways of dealing with the world in productive, compositional and constructive ways. A Deleuzian philosophy is less about asking questions and then answering them by offering descriptions, explanations and prescriptions, it is more about inventing problems and engaging with them through concept forming in speculative an creative ways.

An intra-lude, a pretext for avoiding the conclude? I have often returned to the songs that Bob Dylan wrote, recorded and performed in a frenetic period of creative energy during a relatively short period from early 1965 to 1967. And, of course, each return is different, each return impels the finding of something new. According to commentaries and reports from those times, Dylan was engaged in a virtually never-ending round of travelling, touring, performing at concerts and song-writing activities.

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The endless series of events that this entailed seemed to have no obvious beginning or end, he would move from performance to performance, from one recording session to another, day would turn to night and in the bright dawning of a new day, Dylan might sleep. The relentlessness of this life ultimately and eventually led Dylan to withdrawing, in order to assist him in paying attention to and looking after the increasing challenges to his mental and physical wellbeing. The song writing with which Dylan engaged during this period offered a strong diversion from the songs he sang and wrote during the early part of his career when the popularity of his so-called ‘protest’ songs led him to be referred to as the ‘voice of a generation. The lyrics of those early songs represented the concerns of young people of the time, the continuing persistence of racial segregation in the USA, the war in Vietnam and other unpopular political concerns of that turbulent decade. The songs Dylan wrote and recorded through this short mid-sixties period offered a complete movement away from those much loved by the Movements of the early sixties. In these songs, Dylan’s writings were oblique, non-referential, humorous, irreverent and much more. In every respect, they bore little relation to the early, nascent performer and the content of his previous oeuvre. In writing the liner notes for an album containing a version of one of these songs, It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry, John Bauldie wrote: What’s going on in the song? Well its clearly a moody blues, an expression of feeling in a series of disconnected impressions. Allen Ginsberg once spoke of the way Dylan was composing in 1965, and perhaps his words give some indication of the way in which a song such as this one might have come about. His interest was in improvised verses which he would sometimes blurt out into a microphone without knowing what the next word was going to be … Sometimes he would listen to what he said and write it down and straighten it out a little. It didn’t necessarily mean something in the sense that we set out to mean something, but it would mean something in terms of indicating the cast or direction of his mind or mood, or specific references of thought-forms that were passing through his mind at that time … it was a composite of what was going on his mind. (Bauldie, 1991: 29) Apart from having a deep affection for the songs that Dylan wrote during this period, there is also something attractive about the words Ginsberg uses here to describe the creation of these songs. It is as if the words appear in research creative ways, in the writing, in the performance, with little prior contemplation and organisation … it is as if Ginsberg describes Dylan and the writing and performance of the latter’s songs as occurring transversally. It is as if the compositional forces he refers to in the quotation suggest movements in, around and through the artist,

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movements in which overlapping, intra-acting and return are all part of an involutionary intensity which is clearly ‘more-than’ the person who is writing the songs and singing the words.4 The use, at this intersection, of Manning’s phrase ‘morethan’ is not intended to minimise in anyway the quality of what Dylan, the artist is doing here. What is clear from Ginsberg’s account is that the writing and the performance of the song entice, imbricate and let loose forces that relationally engage with the writer/performer in multiple ways. It seems clear that the fluid intra-play between the involutionary and the evolutionary, the endogamous folding in of this and the exogamous unfolding of that, culminates in the intensive multiplicity and dynamic force of an extremely volatile and vibrantly creative event. In the powerful comings to life of these movements and moments, I sense a coming to life of what St. Pierre refers to as an ‘ontology of immanence’. In this, I can sense the explosive force and the ontological indeterminacy of a Deleuzian haecceity, in this I can sense why Virginia Woolf ’s pen got on the scent, in this I can understand St. Pierre when she says ‘the not-yet glimmers seductively and then escapes in fits and starts’ and then follows this phrase a few lines later by saying, ‘Indeed, words may appear on the computer screen unbidden so that we ask in astonishment, “How did that happen?” and then, imagining possibilities, “How might it work”’ (2019: 3). …………….. Writing as immanent doing animates, brings to life, in-acts, the frictional energies between force and form. In ‘spiriting’ the writing, the writing is spirited, it is energised by the coming to life of the not yet known. In the play between force and form, the coming to life of lucidities of thought dance with the informational pull and push of words appearing on the page. Words appearing on the page are the ‘spiritings’ brought to life by this play. The words stay or go, are written down, sometimes written up, always in relation to their exercise of doing. As they are written they do, they are ‘in-active’ and, as they are read, they are also ‘in-active’ in ways that activate different doings. What if I don’t write them? If they are not written they have no opportunity to do, their ‘spiriting’ remains ethereal, drifting in clouds of random contagion, on the wind. He had read Manning saying, ‘writing is an act, alive with the rhythms of uncertainty and openings of a speculative pragmatism that engages with the forces of the milieu where transversality is most acute’ (2016: 42). He had read the passage alone in his room, gale Eunice bending the aspens in the park across the road from his house, the wind hurling icy pellets of sleet against his window. He thought of sailors at sea, farmers out in the fields, refugees tented in crowded car parks, soldiers in snow-covered Russian tanks on the Ukraine border. He knew that writing was imminent and has its greatest value when making its movements in immanence. He wrote, slowly at first, looking up, worried about the bending trees, their elasticity threatened by the howling force of angry nature. Then he wrote more quickly, words beginning to pour, to tumble, like abandoned leaves, like crows wings fighting against the storm. He wrote …

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Writing seethes There were times when it did Seething like snakes in a pit Desperate, searching, embroiled always on the move Coils coiling, uncoiling Bodies intertwined, momentarily lost In the entanglement with one In moving on to the other. Patterning in apparent abstract Yet always full of actuality Always intent Moving Moving, moving toward, away, with and from Patterning in negligent reality Passing by Briefly acknowledging Not saying Hi … inasmuch And yet the relationality always there A relationality of essence, intangibility and effervescent animation Snakes slithering in a pit A relationality that does A relationality that prompts curiosity What is it? What is it doing? Why does it matter? Relationality that is always there and that always matters Relationality that is always there, always mattering The curiosity is never expunged It is there doing in waking in the middle of the night It is restless Its appearance is not the opposite of its reality No dualities here Its appearance is … Like a ghost (is a ghost) Like an infection (is an infection) A plague A virus A presence A presencing that always does Presencing doing ‘Spiriting’ … (No … no ‘its’ in sight) No looking up

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No capturing No substance No substance, save sand filtering through fingertips Save the touch of fabric with tender skin Slipping electricity in a moment A movement in a moment A movement as a moment No containment here … And words appearing Words appearing Seemingly with no beginning Seemingly with no end in sight And yet … Yet? Yes, of course Those sensations, feelings, thoughts Just a few minutes ago. Nascent, emergent, bodied always In the everyday of the snake pit The elusive meaningfulness of the slither That comes as soon as it is gone Busy pedestrians, focused; on a street Always moving Gulls furtive, concentrated, working over wave tops Fish below: Hiding? Oblivious? About to be caught? Always moving Seething In immanence Seethingfulness Nothing more, yet everyness in the singularity of every movement/ moment And then, as always, a stop … A lapse? A glimpse? Glancing … an awareness? A tangible …? No, a brief tangibility Tangibilityness A presencing beyond words Grasping in ungraspability Graspability as taught, as learned, as normative, as discursive, as … What always seems to happen in these becomings … Collective powers; enunciating Words are used for it

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They are all we have They are what we do We word Wording is an immanence Bodies sensing Those snakes in a pit Touch, tactility, shiver, always moving toward Words appear again Their appearance is the new briefness of reality They mean no thing, they mean every thing, They are no more full of use than that No Thing Every Thing ....................................... As the book writing as processually enactive force began to reach its closing stages, as the urgencies presencing the writings on the page began to lose their tensility, there was an emergent concept forming that led to a bringing to life of space. In these final bringings to life of this book, questions emerged about its content, about what to include and what not to include, engaging with the frictional dynamics of force and form, there were always questions: ‘Is there a place for this?’ ‘Do I have space for that?’ I had recently read Soja writing to create a new ontology of urban space. In this, I had enjoyed beginning to play with the concept of ‘spatialising’ that he had created in response to what he regarded as the ontological diminution of space and ‘it’s marginalisation as mere background container or stage under the impress of a hegemonic social historicism’ (2010: 629). This diminution of space as a mere context for something else more important and Soja’s use of the concept of ‘spatialisation’ as a means of addressing this nagged at my attention and pulled me into activating thoughts about what to do about it. Thinking about this reminded me of Massumi’s contention that ‘structure is the place where nothing happens’ (Massumi, 2002: 27). Fixing space as a place where things might happen or be contained within therefore seemed to deny the potentialities of space in terms of movement, moment and the spatio-temporal forces that inevitably work to animate it. Similar to the ways in which ‘context’ is used as an inanimate backdrop to matters of importance occurring in the so-called foreground, space is often characterised as a passive empty area to be filled by occurrences and phenomena purportedly of far greater value and import. Soja’s concept of ‘spatialisation’ is helpful and necessary as a means of bringing space to life as a volatile, influential and dynamic force that cannot be ignored. Not to do this is to engage in a naive simplification of the

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relationality that exists in, between and around the moments and movements, in agencement, of human and nonhuman becoming. Therefore, by allowing bodies to become fixed and stabilised within established categories of difference (such as ‘space’) works to avoid engaging with the relational entanglements involved in sensing bodies in movement. In relation to this and with specific reference to contemporary educational practices, Manning and Massumi point out that ‘(w)hat is startling about the neurotypical is the capacity to background the in-formation in the field, and to pre-subtract from the expressive potential of its relational complexity’ (Manning and Massumi, 2014: 11). And so, in the emergence of the manifesto for spatialisation, he wrote: …Space is never a living in the actual; space is always actualising. Space is the force full, all enveloping atmosphere of affect. Space is not an object; an empty vessel to be filled: space is movement. Space is a synaesthetically and vibrantly event full: in immanence it is in and of its self. Immanent doing as worlding is the always creating and responding to constant encounters with emergence. In the processual sensualism of these moments of movement, these movements in moments, we can live in and create the exotic visualisation of sound, the taste of a sparkling vision, the smell of a delicate touch, the sound of a beautiful colour ... Space is so volatile in its always moving toward, against, with, in, and around that the signifier ‘space’ is always becoming in its representational redundancy. In this becoming the use of the noun ‘space’ by creating a category of difference, announces a politics and a metaphysics of presence and being that has to be taken to task in the immanence of a choreography of movement, where the verb ‘space’ always animates new life in the processual vibrancy and architectures of doing. And so, the doing of space moves bodies in their making. In the doing of space in these compositional, synaesthetic symphonics of the encounter, spacing occurs as each new encounter creates the becoming, in the always not yetness of the event. As spatialising takes over from space, the narrow and contained individualism of simply human self making becomes dissolved in the vibrant, emerging life of the dance, human/non/human bodies, as connectedness, relationality and world-making are always creative in the presencing and animation of always difference. Through the doing of space, the onto-poesis of establishing and fixing bodies into categories of being, in linear and enclosed space and the chains of chronological time is resisted by the sympoiesis of bodies in flux, always in the making, in the fluid, transmutating emergences and folds of movement with and around and not in the divisive artifice of between. As space does, the ‘inter’ gives way to the ‘intra’, atmosphere is agentic; bodies respond and are mutually responsive in intensity. Intuition, nuance and sense create new gravities and magnetisms that glimmer and glow in the shimmering fragility and frisson of the dance. Intentionalities and designed constructions give way to the madness and the always not yet known of delire and the

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breakthrough, where the composting proclivities of each new composition is the touchstone of wild and exciting new life. Spacing in and spacing out can take place in the play of Deleuze and Guattari conceptualisation of ‘asignifying rupture’, where the space making here is the becoming of the space making there; this is not ‘decalcomania’,5 it is not about making the model here and then somehow applying it there … it is haecceities … it is the creative force of the wind in your hair … it is the warmth of shining light in the brightness of a smile … it is the surprise pulsing of tender growth where aridity and waste was the world of no hope … it is … So, release the pressure, melt into waves of warm motion, take a slow easy ride in, within, the movements toward always something new, something not yet known, movements that are always transmutational, never part of anything specific, tangible, organised; always with the body in beautiful dis/re/organisation moving toward, simultaneous with moments of always differentiation, pulsing always new life in the ecstatic throb and insistence of the beat, knowing no language, a language in immanence in itself, the redundancy of the words giving way to the necessity of the dance, life in the dance of naked, touch, animal, plant, sea, word, body, swim ….

Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari talk of Virginia Woolf ’s writings as showing us that, ‘(s)patiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicity’ (1987: 263). Mrs Dalloway looks out on the street below, in this she is the street below, ‘Everything has come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window …’ (Woolf, 1976: 15) 2 Desert Island Discs is a long running radio programme in the UK in which different celebrities choose their favourite tracks to take with them on to the desert island. 3 Dukes finishes this passage of writing that engages with the ‘mechanosphere’ with the following sentence: ‘It is now apparent that climate change is approaching a point of irreversibility’. The content of this sentence exemplifies for me that the writing of any effective conclusion will not only provide an ‘elegy for what has passed, but also ‘an anticipation of states to come’. I have not written a book about the pending and increasingly ominous presencing of the climate emergency. Perhaps I should have done. When the words began to fill pages in what might have been a beginning of this book, over two years ago, other things were on my mind. These pages are carried by the tides, flows and currents of this originary irruption. This writing has entered, broken into and perpetuated becomings that, in turn, appear on these pages with the affective inflection that their energies might work to facilitate eruptions and other ensuing forces that will flow into and animate break throughs into worlds that these writings have not managed to reach.

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4 The intuitive embodying forces at play here in the creation of Dylan’s songs ring echoes with my father’s practice, described here in Acts of Embodiment, of ‘offering up’ a chosen stone that would somehow fit perfectly into the stone wall that he was building. The speculative artistry and the creative spontaneity of both continue to fill me with wonder. 5 The concepts of ‘asignifying rupture’ and ‘decalcomania’ are interrelated and can be found in Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 9–17). They are used there by the authors to introduce the concept of the rhizome and to show how a break in the rhizome, leads to new growth, having the potential, not to trace, transfer or apply but to create new in-formational growth and, in multiplicity, to move in unplanned and undetermined directions.

THE FINAL ACT? How can becomings conclude?

Becoming-animal, a prelude to conclude? Becoming-animal is a force. In my waking this morning, this short sentence has been repeating itself over and over again in my body. The sentence is selfing. The sentence is selfing in, through and with me. The sentence is full of force. The sentence has forced me to sit here at this desk, to pull back the blinds and to look out over this unforgiving, wet and overcast morning and to write. What is with me? Is it the words? Is it the concept? Is it the wording? Is it the concept making? In the haecceity of these movements in moments, moments in movements, it is, as ever, not what the words mean or what the concept is, it is what the words are doing, it is where the concept is taking me. Or perhaps, is as Manning says, ‘there are no more words. Because words too often already know how to write the world into being, the scribbles devalued for their adjacency of legibility’ (2022: 423/4). The concept has lived with me for years. Deleuze and Guattari shared it with me many years ago and I have been doing concept making with it ever since. As I invent and re-invent this concept it does things. It’s not that it does different things it is that it differentiates. This morning it is differentiating this other concept; becoming-Ken-writing. These concepts are in play. What else is there to do but write. The force of the words, the forcefulness of the words writing the world into being, the forcefullness of the concept activates and animates this writing body, this writing body bodying. This force seems to have no respect for form. These words, these here and now words, are disobedient and unruly, they should be writing to conclude instead of writing to play again with another concept that it is now eventfully in-forming. As these words tumble on to the page, here and now, there is a sensing, a yet again, coming to life of the frictional play between force and form. In the writing, words are crossed out, a sentence is re-formed, new words come to mind; all the while these becoming-Ken-writings are on the move, all the while, DOI: 10.4324/9781003154358-11

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concept forming as eventful practice is on the move and won’t let go of the writing. There are transversal interplays between the singularities of this Ken-laptop-word/ typing-grey/damp-morning/hazel blossom/wood pigeon flying/assemblage; in its emergence this assemblage is agentic. As the word ‘agentic’ is typed, the world, as it worlds is different in its differentiating here and now. The intricacies and intensities of these foldings in, foldings out, play out a transversal as the inter-play is becoming of the differentiating of the intra-play that is animating the multiplicity of the life force of this assemblage. The intra-play dissolves the obviousness of difference, in differentiation things are happening, movement is less of the ‘between’ and more of the ‘in’, ‘around’ and ‘with’. As the writing moves on, as this sentence is being written, the infra-thin of those earlier words, still fresh, ink drying on the page, is felt in their just being left behind: their force is still forceful. Multiplicities abound and multiply as new concept inventions, as brief speculations and as smiling fabulations, make their force felt as the writing on the page keeps coming, as the Ken-laptopword/typing-grey/damp-morning et al/ever-changing assemblage, in constant compositional movement, keeps forming, re-forming, in-forming, de-forming: in processual movement and flows in indeterminacy is continually life-forming in forceful, in-formational ways. Becoming-animal as a force is bringing this writing here today. In the compulsion to write a book, in, with and (yes, unfortunately, perhaps) about writing, there is a sense in which the concept of becoming-animal necessitates the emergence of this word flow. The urgency of this necessity is becoming in its propulsiveness as the book writes its selfing toward a play with concluding with ‘middling’ on its mind. Writing writing is an immanent doing and there seems to be no escape from the alchemic becomings animal that presence in the bringing alive of this writing as doing, this writing as concept making. In bringing the concept of ‘becoming-animal’1 into play in their work Deleuze and Guattari offer multiple possibilities for the use of radical practices of experience making for learning and for living in the world. As the concept making of ‘becoming-animal’ unfolds in these writings, as these experiencings come to life, in contingency, there is a heterogenetic, in-formational force at play that also engages concepts that bring to life new ways of thinking and doing writing, doing education, doing thinking … lifeing. In a coda, Manning talks of making this transindividual, of creating ‘techniques for augmenting complexity such that new flows reorient blockages. Follow the lines not toward scarcity but toward abundance. Abandon the psychological subject. Embrace the excess …’ (2020: 309). Guattari talks of ‘heterogenesis’ He talks of this in terms of involving ‘processes of continuous resingularisation’. For him, ‘It is an active, immanent singularisation of subjectivity, as opposed to a transcendent, universalising and reductionist homogenisation’ (2014: 105). Guattari’s concept of ‘heterogenesis’ provides insights into the ways in which ‘becoming-animal’ is a force for understanding and engaging with the world differently. His ecological engagement with human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations works at pre-personal and pre-individual levels. With Manning, this seems to work with ‘transindividuality’. As his translators

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point out, ‘In The Three Ecologies he compares our interior life or “interiority” to a crossroads where several components of subjectification meet to make up who we think we are’ (2014: 9). The ‘heterogenesis’ this involves can be understood in terms of the vibrant, intensive and, what I have called, ‘affective presencings’ of capillary linkages and flows, which serve to move thinking away from an attachment to and a working with molar forms, where lines of segmentarity can work to striate space and fix meanings and practices within established ways of being. Instead, as has been written in a previous Act, thinking can be moved and attuned toward an engagement with molecular forms in which the processual becoming is about flexibility, multiplicity, and alertness to the possibilities of the always not yet known. In these differentiating movements away from the molar toward the molecular, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. Becoming produces by filiation; all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance’ (1987: 238). In making these moves, they work to shift our attention away from simply identifying and representing animals and other substantive human and nonhuman Beings in simply molar forms. How do they do this? How does a concept of ‘becoming-animal’ lead to a working with these writings as immanent doings? Firstly, (1987: 240–243) they describe, what they refer to as ‘Oedipal animals’, like dogs and cats, which are individualised, sentimentalised, and domesticated within the context of emotionally charged relations of filiation and ownership. Second, they do this in terms of ‘archetypal animals’. These animals they describe as being discursively assigned certain symbolic qualities and attributes and structured and modelled within the context of, for example, a mythologising system of Jungian archetypes drawn from the rituals and beliefs of different cultural settings. It is in relationality with the third type of animal, the ‘demonic animal’, that becoming-animal can best be seen to occur and that lends its self to engaging with immanence and to the writing this becoming book. In multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari point to the possibility that ‘becominganimal’ can move in and along variable delineations, making detours, criss-crossing, zig-zagging with differentiating and exciting diversionary force. It is perhaps, as Guattari says, about ‘crossroads where several components of subjectification meet’ (2014: 9). However, they suggest that the ‘Oedipal animal’ and the ‘archetypal animal’ can best be understood in their tendency to exist in molar form and that the ‘demonic animal’ exists and can be best understood in terms of active and affective relationality in the creation and always moving engagement with lines of molecularity. ‘Demonic animals’, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 241) describe as ‘pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a population, a tale …’, have affinities with Manning’s (2009) ‘leaky bodies’, bodies that are ‘always more than one’, bodies that are always on the move, bodies ‘in-formation’, ‘bodies-without-organs’. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s inclination toward ‘the ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 105), ‘demonic animals’, that both follow and create heterogeneous and contingent capillary lines have the potential, in multiplicity and

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intensity, to stray and then multiply in diverse courses and directions, in delire, to actively go off the rails in experimental and fabulatory practices of speculation and creativity. In this, ‘becoming-animal’ is a working, a movement toward, deterritorialisation, through dis-identification of the coded and representational subject of the molar form, and hence toward the destabilisation of the established discourses that fix embodiment and materiality in controlled and restricted ways. Deleuze and Guattari ask us: ‘Who has not known the violence of … animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline?’ (1987: 240). Their rhetoric here challenges the convenient linearities and rationalities of conventional evolutionary theory and replaces them with the need for experimental and involutionary approaches which are not fragmentary or regressive and which create alertness to, bring into focus with and calls toward those unnatural participations and ‘unheard-of becomings’ of the demonic animal. In this, substantive fixities give way to the immanent force of movements in moments, moments in movements. When Whitehead (1929) talks of ‘actual occasions’, it is possible to make sense of his words in terms of concepts as events, as comings together in multiplicity. Worlding brings concepts to life; in this coming to life, concepts, in event/full/ness, do something, they change things, they world, then they disappear. I make sense of this as a brief activation that does, then, like the sparkling, illuminating incandescence of the exploding firework in the sky it disappears. This feels like the creative utility of speculative experimentation when ‘what if … ?’ prompts a doing-in-the-world, followed by a falling from the firmament of action, leaving only the transformation that the energy of its sparks sets in motion. In engaging with Whitehead’s speculative approach to philosophy, Stengers points in this to the work that concepts do in terms of transformations, in terms of ‘experience of “sheer disclosure” rather than the concepts themselves. The concepts are required by the transformation of experience, but it is this disclosure that has … the last word’ (2011: 17). I sense, with Haraway (2016), a ‘sympoiesis’, a coming together of this ‘experience of “sheer disclosure”’ and the way in which Deleuze talks about ‘becoming-animal’ and the molecular practices of creativity, thinking, and a working with the event/ful/ness of the not yet known. Stivale stresses that, In Deleuze’s view, creativity is precisely a concept of new perspectives that enable the creation of new worlds, new timespaces and new … refrains. Just as animals live constantly on the lookout and thereby must define their territory and assure their very existence in specifically delimited ways at every second, so too do artists and philosophers open themselves to possibilities of innovation and thought through the violence that they risk in having an idea through a genuine encounter – a potentially threatening, frightening encounter that might open them to an entirely new mode pf perception and sensation, a completely new ‘refrain’. (2017: 197)

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There is so much resonance between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’ and the way in which Moten and Harney (2013) talk about ‘study’ and Manning (2016) brings to life her concept of ‘research-creation’. These related concepts resound in challenge to the ways in which ‘neurotypicality’ works to colonise pedagogical and research-based practices within higher education institutional practices at the present time. The student as entrepreneurial subject and consumer of pre-determined knowledge and skill is interpellated within specific roles that society has created. It is as if, as Althusser (2014) claimed, the university ‘hails’ a particular kind of student and then inculcates certain cultural ideas, values and practices and, in so doing, makes them appear as their own. Within the narrow confines of specific learning outcomes that are often linked to job skills and employment possibilities, ‘neurotypical’ leanings and proclivities are both nurtured and acculturated in the subjectification of the entrepreneurial identity of the successful student. It is not difficult to make connections between the processes being described here and the first two kinds of animal becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual invention above. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘oedipal animal’ and ‘archetypal animal’, in different ways, can be identified as the subjects of control. In the case of the former, ‘becoming-animal’ describes practices of individuation that can sentimentalise and domesticate the animal, as Deleuze and Guattari illustrate through the following phrase, talking about the animal, ‘each with its own petty history, “my” cat, “my” dog”’ (1987: 240). With the ‘archetypal animals’ the control that they describe is more systemic and classificatory, designating them according to type, as ‘State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models’ (1987: 240/1). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’ does not simply talk about animal becomings. The concept of becoming exists and comes to life in relationality with the concept of multiplicity. In this sense, ‘becoming’ is about the relational forces at play in the movements between bodies. Becoming animates territorialisations so, in their famous example of becoming-wasp of the orchid and becoming-orchid of the wasp, as they point out, this ‘brings about the deterritorialisation of one term and the reterritorialisation of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialisation ever further’ (1987: 10). There was a finding of selfing in this in a return to much earlier thoughts-inthe-act, writings on the move, setting up a refrain with the words atumble in the presencing of these writings coming to life in this dark, before light early, waking writing. There was a finding of writings with Jonathan from many years ago when we were both struggling about how to use Deleuzian concepts with and in the autoethnography milieu we had both found our selfing in and that we had also helped to nurture. In these struggles, we had come up with, and began to live in nascence with a concept we called ‘assemblage/ethnography’ (Wyatt and Gale 2013a and 2013b). We invented it and then, eager to use it right away, we plugged it into our explorations into and with our troubling and strugglings with collaborative

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writing and the human-centric proclivities and concerns of autoethnography. We found the concept working in the spaces between selves and others and also the spaces we were active in creating. We found a bringing to life of the concept in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘haecceity’ and Virginia Woolf ’s words as she brought to life ‘moments of being’ in her writing. We said at the time, There is something intuitive, something alchemical, and something sensate to do with this: space is integral to these becomings. We think of Bachelard’s (1969) “poetics of space” as if the singularity of a particular place becomes through our connectedness with it; we sense relationality in an assemblage that is becoming in terms of intangible forces, energies and senses, a becoming in relation to place However, place does not displace space. (Wyatt and Gale, 2013b: 305) And then … in an email to a friend, written within the processual dynamics of research-creation and the lively exchanges of a collaboratively written journal article,2 emerging from the mi(d)st, another return returns … Hi Fiona, here is something new, 2nd November 2020 … We caught our collaborative writing selves out! Were we waiting for the cocktail hour? We found these selves imbricated in a routinisation of writing practice as we made claims for and attempted practising in-tuition, engaging intimating one to the other. We found these selves turn-taking or at least, somehow finding these selves in the animation of a collaboration that wrote, passed on, waited, received, read, considered, wrote again and … I want to engage with this in terms of what Manning refers to as ‘immanent critique’ (2016: 28). I want to consider where we found these selves, ourselves, if needs be, in this. I want to sense my way into her words when she asks, ‘How does the rhythm, the cadence, the intensity of the text compose with the words?’ and to wonder with in-tuition, to creatively intimate as response to her question, when further she asks, ‘Where does thought-feeling escape or resist existing forms of knowledge?’ (ibid: 39) In the ‘thinking-feeling’ (Manning, 2014: 41) that is driving these words onto this page, in the shortness of breath uncertainties that attempts to in-tuit life into these words in their becoming there is, emergent, the frisson, the politics of touch with this ‘immanent critique’. The writers we call ‘we’ are pulled up short by the ‘affective presencing’ (Gale, 2021) entailed by the spatio-temporality of a becoming, a movement toward a fixity of Being, the emergence of turn-taking, as a disciplinary practice, and the concomitant production of, what Foucault might refer to as, ‘docile bodies’. With a sensing of their own positionality, and, in immediation, in ontogenesis, there arrives, there is the stARTing of a resistance, a refusal of this positionality, of stance, of engagement with an object of study.

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In the life becoming of these words on the page I am increasingly attuned to what Moten and Harney, in their account of the ‘undercommons’, refer to as ‘study’. In this they talk of ‘modes of activity’ like ‘being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory’. They emphasise the ‘incessant intellectuality’ of these ‘modes of activity’ and that these ‘activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say “oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could have been said to have been studying”’ (Moten and Harney, 2013: 109–110). Integral to this is a sense of ‘study’ that is not incumbent upon or in need of a particular method of inquiry that is likely to be linked to a particular mode of knowledge production and objectification. In her engagement with what art can do, Manning’s (2016) concept of ‘research-creation’ offers powerful resonances with Moten and Harney’s practice of ‘study’ as accounted for here. In this her situating of ‘the force of the minor gesture in the activity of the differential’ (2016: 13) serves to act in-formationally as a speculative practice which is not dependent upon pre-conceived methods or routines and which can be understood, in immanence, as ‘the in-act of the more-than’ (2016: 13). So, in the vibrant processualism of our own ‘immanent critique’, it seems as if our stumbling over and into the normatively inscribed customs and obligations of ‘turn-taking’ has led us into and shed some light upon the need to speculate and to create problems that have greater enormity than those substantive solutions that appear to have been provided by accepted methodologies and practices in advance. Why take turns? We pose the problem and … we’re off! And so as I read these writings again and as these concepts are tentatively put into play, as a practice of ‘assemblage/ethnography’ in becoming reincarnates and vibrates into further lifeings with those of ‘in:tuition’ and ‘intimating’, a sensing of conceptual multiplicity also comes to life. The ordering of turn-taking melts into the folding, flexing indeterminacies and immanent eternalities of the return. It is in the intra-relational play between these concepts on the move, concepts returning and turning, thinking and wording new ways of doing, that this ‘immanent critique’ can be seen to work. In this, it is possible to sense with Deleuze how this writer is like ‘a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur’ (1997: 110). In a Deleuzian conceptualisation of ‘minor literatures’, it is possible to see the possibilities of engaging with the inequalities and prejudices to be found in formal education practices that have been encountered and outlined elsewhere in the writings of this book. In this, Moten and Harney’s use of the term ‘incessant intellectuality’ offers exciting potentialities for neurodiverse ways thinking, writing and doing to take place. Such ‘modes of activity’ do not have to be prescribed in advance, they do not have to be articulated within the confines of specific learning objectives and outcomes, they do not have to depend upon, ‘written in stone’,

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pre-existent routines and procedures for their credibility, veracity, respectability or success. The traditional, discursively constructed and normatively inscribed ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour of neurotypicality can be severely challenged when these forces are brought into play. In writing against these discursive constructions of reality and the subsequent creation of ‘docile bodies’, the words of Foucault are particularly apposite here, when he says: I wouldn’t want what I may have said or written to be seen as laying any claims to totality. I don’t try to universalize what I say; conversely what I don’t say isn’t meant to be thereby disqualified as being of no importance. My work takes place between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of dots. I like to open out a space of research, try it out, then if it doesn’t work try again somewhere else. On many points … I am still working and don’t yet know whether I am going to get anywhere. What I say ought to be taken as ‘propositions’, ‘game openings’ where those who may be interested are invited to join in; they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc. (Foucault, 1991: 90–91) In a more recent example, these words of Foucault are echoed in those of Jackson (2020) who points out that working with black life and becoming human highlights the necessity of engaging with and challenging those neurotypical forms of institutional control that are organised around hierarchies and classifications of achievement. Hence, her work also offers challenge to focusing upon pre-determined vocational goals, that stress the importance of positionality, specified objects of study, prescribed teaching methods and specified learning outcomes as a means of delineating their overall institutional aims and objectives. In Becoming Human, Jackson offers a determined challenge to the fixities and orderings of being that classify and sustain privilege and inequality in highly pervasive ways. In this, she argues for other ways of sensing the world as a means of troubling inequalities of privilege and of re-imagining fields of relationality and becoming. Related to such an approach, Manning, in refusing to put a brake on the energy and activist nature of the processual, also problematises the institutional disciplinary effects of positionality, the objectification of study and methodological fixity when she says: Another kind of stand has to be taken, one that erupts from the midst, one that engages sympathetically with the unknowable at the heart of difference, one that heeds the uneasiness of an experience that cannot yet be categorised. Otherwise we find ourselves right back where we started: outside looking in at what is already recognisable, at what is already knowable. (2016: 39) And so, returning again to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’, becoming is always between or among, it can never be pinned down, it is always on

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the move, it is a to-ing and a fro-ing that has no beginning or ending. As Deleuze points out ‘the power of the indefinite article is effected only if the term in becoming is stripped of the formal characteristics that make it say the (“animal in front of you …”)’ (1997: 2). The ontogenesis, the ontological indeterminacy that Deleuze offers here seems to be the essence of becoming as a creative act of breaking free from the all constraining forces of a metaphysics of Being. ‘Becoming-animal’ is a force. ‘Becoming animal’ is a life force that lifes. As a force ‘becoming-animal’ necessitates being alert at all times (etre aux aguets), always being on the lookout for encounters (recontres).3 ‘Becoming-animal’ involves … … encountering, intimating within, a sense of worlding, resisting the comforting solace of discourse where alertness is the very resistance to what discourse sets up in its construction of reality. Being on the lookout, sensing encounters, encountering, works to foster an intimacy with the world, intimating at knowing, on tip toes, straining to see/hear/touch/taste/smell more than you could see/hear/touch/taste/smell before. I want to understand and engage in intimacy as a becoming, a becoming-animal, an intimacy of processualism and individuation, where standing on my toes, shading my eyes, peering into the distance at the searing speck of a peregrine in a stoop, or an intent crouching, leaning down and into the interstices of a tiny rock crevice to talk with a sea anemone, is becoming both in and on the lookout for the intensive multiplicities of an encounter, the ontogenetic involution of event. (Gale, 2021: 471) And so, ‘becoming-animal’ gives a sensing that living life incipiently is living life to the full. The force of ‘becoming-animal’ is further energised by those movements toward of philosophers, artists, teachers, students and all who are able to open up to the always more-than of the exciting possibilities that are offered when invention, speculation, experimentation and the free and wild creation of concepts is given the opportunity to come to life.

Actualising an act to conclude … Two years had passed… Book writing had happened in flows and eddies, in startings and stoppings, always prone to, sometimes revelling in, the vagaries of ‘affective presencing’, moves toward the inevitability of what has to be referred to as the ending. In this inevitability those questions always emerge. ‘How did that happen?’ ‘How might it work?’ Is it working? Has it worked? How is it working? What will it do? Two people, a man and a woman, slowly walked the cobbled winter sunshine streets of a quiet castled town, nestled in the soft mottled hills of that small Mediterranean island. There was a perfumed, cooling breeze coming off the sea. He wore a long black winter coat and a woollen scarf, she wore a black T-shirt and jeans, her leather jacket slung over her shoulder. They inhaled the cool air, enjoying

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the clear freshness of the afternoon. All the while, in their wanderings they talked … They talked of things in passing, a small event prompting a comment and then, still talking, a moving on. They talked of someone passing them, sharing a silent, lightly intoned greeting … They talked of a particular view from the edge of the old battlements, of hills and pasture land stretching lazily out to the sea … They talked of geraniums in terracotta pots on slate doorsteps, splashing vibrant colours, brightening winter afternoon light … They talked, looking up at yellow canaries singing incessantly in cages from open windows, high above their heads … They talked of their cool warmth and the fresh comfort they felt in the winter sunshine … They talked and, all the while, in all this talking, they had talked incessantly of philosophy, they had talked of writing, they had talked of writing philosophy and their talking with these subjects was delightfully punctuated by a passing stranger, by the delicately patchworked view stretching out from their high vantage point, by the shining light shed by the flowers on the doorsteps and the window sills they passed, by canaries singing to them from above, filling the air with shimmering sonic colours, by the richness of the atmosphere and the ambient beauty of their surroundings … and as they talked, the afternoon glowed and moved on. Two years had passed, the world had experienced a pandemic, many thousands of people had died and she had nearly finished writing this book. She thought about Deleuze and, as this enacted, her own aversion to beginnings and endings began, once again, to animate her writings. She was sensing a closing of the book, of how she might bring it to an end, even if, in so doing, her book-thoughts continued to grow and flourish and not find a home in its newly published pages. And so as she wrote toward concluding, she found her selfing back at what might be thought of as a beginning; back to the conversation on the little island that had helped her so much in bringing the book to life in what might be called a beginning. They talked … They talked about what the book might be like, what it might look like, what subjects it might cover, about who might read it, how it might be shaped, what might its content be, what it might do … They talked. In this, her thoughts in the act were about bringing a book to life. As she brought these thoughts to life in words, he listened, then he responded, she listened, and … they talked, they walked, and their steps brought new concepts to life … their talkings and listenings composted a vibrant actualising of the vibrancy of emerging concepts on the move. They talked toward writing, thought and immanence. Their talking seemed to be bringing them, inevitably it seemed, to a shared awareness of the impossibility of posthuman qualitative inquiry. How could the practice of qualitative inquiry live in a world of the obviously more than simply human? Multiplicity, relationality and

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ontologies of immanence are constitutive of the ceaselessly moving tides and flows, the swelling in-formational forces, that enact the compositional more-than that sweeps away the limitations and the not enough of those qualitative, so-called social scientific, antecedents. And so … So, why not call the book something like Writing as immanent doing? Yes, that sounds good, what you suggest seems to be looser and has the capacity to offer more room to move in the writing. That would really help me to move away from a human-centric concept of social science research that is meant to be ‘applied’ in the ‘real’ world and, in so doing, to be able to move toward one which is full of processual potency, that is vibrant with the animation of new and unpredictable life and more in tune with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘free and wild creation of concepts’. OK, so, still following Deleuze and Guattari, you could say that you are interested in philosophical concepts that can’t be applied but that are intended to re-orient thought and that you are also interested in speculation, invention and experimentation and in creating philosophical concepts that help do that work. That’s great! And, yes, that would enable the writing to move away completely from engaging in the orthodoxies of a conventional critical review of ethnography, autoethnography and all the other forms of qualitative inquiry that seem to be simplifying rather than engaging in the necessities of complexifying and complicating approaches to thinking in action. Yes, exactly! No matter how attached you might have been to such approaches in the past, engaging with writing in immanence is so different. I think you need to engage in writing your writing out of the image of thought that so much of the writing that you have done in the past has worked to refuse. Yes, you’re right! In the past, I have written against the constraints and shortcomings of various forms of and approaches to qualitative inquiry whilst always somehow remaining nestled, perhaps somewhat uncomfortably, within their boundaries and limitations. And, of course, that is bizarre! That is what is holding me back from immanence and from engaging in a more fully post-qualitative, in-formational inquiry. Exactly! So why not create a new concept for writing in immanence or just let the writing do the work for you? You don’t have to try to define what writing in immanence is or name it, just keep on letting writing take you somewhere. Surely that’s enough, more than enough! You could create a new genre of writing for social scientists who are so bored with the social sciences. I think fiction writers have done this kind of writing all along, but we social science writers are so mired in social science concepts like qualitative inquiry, ethnography, autoethnography and so on that it’s hard for us to do that work. Yes, you are right. I remember all those years ago when Laurel Richardson confessed that, ‘a decade ago’ she ‘had yawned (her) way through numerous supposedly exemplary qualitative studies …’ and that when she had mentioned her ‘secret displeasure with much of qualitative writing (she) found a community of like-minded discontents’ (2005: 959). All those years ago! The time now must be ripe!

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Yes, this is a good example. We need writing that blasts through all the nonsense we keep on believing about writing, especially about the intentional, agentive human writing about himself, expressing himself. In neurotypicality, the kind of expressivist writing that autoethnography, critical ethnography and other forms are all about, focuses on the autonomy of the Cartesian ‘I’, the individual, the self, the human, the me, me, me. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida refused the humanist author decades ago. The door has been open for a long time, so maybe now is the time to push through with writing differently in an ontology of immanence. Rather than continuing to work the ruins of this existing image of thought, maybe it is time to leave the ruins behind and instead work with experimentation, speculation, creation and invention. Write! Writing will take you there. Write. Become imperceptible. You don’t have to name it. Just do it! Write!

Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari express the concept in its hyphenated form. As their concept has been plugged in here I will do the same. 2 This discussion exemplifies part of the formative and collaborative process that led to the publication of the following paper: Gale, K. and Murray, F. (2022, forthcoming) Writing as PARTicipation: Working towards in:tuition and intimating; Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology. 3 The terms ‘etre aux aguets’ and ‘recontres’ are taken from Stivale, C.J. (2017) Hannibal aux aguets: On the lookout for new recontres in Gardner, C. and MacCormack, P. (Eds.) Deleuze and the animal Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 197–228.

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INDEX

activism 35, 112, 159, 192 acts of activism 112, 159 actual/actualise/actualising/actualisation ix, 5, 9–12, 14, 17–20, 24, 27, 29, 38, 42, 45–53, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66–69, 73–75, 78, 84, 87, 93, 94, 98, 102, 108, 115, 116, 120, 121, 129–131, 143, 144, 147, 148, 151–153, 156, 159, 161, 162, 166, 168, 171, 174, 180, 185, 186 affect 5, 8, 13, 14, 17, 24, 28, 29, 32, 54, 57–61, 64, 67, 68, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 105, 110, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 125–127, 134, 141, 151, 152, 155–157, 161, 174, 175, 179, 191, 193 affect, capacity to affect and be affected 20, 35, 36, 38, 39, 67, 77, 86, 114, 117, 143, 152 affect, ordinary see Stewart 24, 110, 194 affective presencing 4, 18, 66, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 106, 113, 116, 117, 117, 120, 121, 156, 166, 179, 182, 185 affective relationality 13, 113, 114, 154, 179 Agamben 39 aeon 1, 14, 79, 106, 147 agencement see Deleuze and Guattari 24, 33, 39, 44, 67, 75, 125, 136, 137, 141, 143, 150, 153, 154, 174 agentic assemblage see Bennett 81, 97, 155 anarchy 44, 94 anarchive see Manning 37, 137, 139, 150, 158 Arakawa and Gins 10

arborescence 99, 100, 102 ‘architectural procedures’ see Arakawa and Gins 102 archive see anarchive 137, 138, 139, 150, 158 asignifying rupture see Deleuze and Guattari 44, 62, 95, 175, 176 assemblage see Deleuze and Guattari 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 18, 21, 25, 27, 33, 35, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 62, 69, 70, 72, 78, 81, 83, 91, 97, 98, 100, 106, 111, 113, 118, 120, 126, 127, 137, 138, 151, 154, 155, 157, 166, 178, 181, 183, 192 Atkinson, P. 159, 189 Auster, P. 110, 145, 189 autoethnography 71, 181, 182, 187, 188, 192 autopoiesis see Haraway 86, 123, 127, 194 Badiou, A. 23, 189 Barad, K. 7, 19, 39, 72, 107, 110, 112, 123, 125, 129, 148, 153, 155 Barthes, R. 20, 166, 189 Bateson, G. 1, 166, 189 Bauldie, J. 169, 189 becoming see Deleuze and Guattari vi, vii, 1, 2, 4, 6–9, 10–14, 17–34, 36–38, 40–49, 51–54, 58–60, 63, 64, 67–75, 78, 80, 81–84, 87–89, 92–99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110–113, 116–118, 120–128, 130, 131, 133–135, 137–141, 143–145, 149, 150, 153, 156, 156–163, 165–167, 172, 174, 175, 177–185

Index  197

becoming-animal see Deleuze and Guattari 17, 45, 69, 110, 126, 178–181, 184, 185 Bennett, J. 81, 97, 155, 189 Being 1, 7, 20, 23, 28, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 49, 50, 54, 58, 81, 85, 97, 98, 105, 113, 124, 134, 140, 143, 179, 182, 185 Bergson, H. 22, 153, 159, 189 Berlant, L. 25, 29, 94, 189 between-the-two see Deleuze and Guattari, Gale and Wyatt 31, 35, 70 bodying, body 5, 6, 17, 18, 20, 21, 41–44, 46–51, 54, 64, 66, 67, 69, 77–79, 94, 106, 113, 114, 117, 127, 151, 152, 177 body-without-organs see Deleuze and Guattari 4–6, 33, 35, 114, 117, 123 Bonta see Protevi 26, 95, 97, 190 Bourdieu, P. 124, 190 Braidotti, R. 77, 190 bureaucracy see Weber 27, 39 Burroughs, W. 66, 190 capacity, capacious, capaciousness 4, 10, 23, 28, 33, 39, 43, 48, 49, 51, 73, 78, 80, 82, 86, 90, 96, 97, 98–100, 107, 108, 123, 129, 136, 137, 141, 142, 149, 150, 153, 157, 161, 163, 174, 187 capacity (to affect and be affected) 20, 35, 39, 67, 76, 77, 86, 114, 117, 120, 141, 143, 147, 152, 155 care of the self see Foucault 6, 191 Cartesian, Cartesian a priori see Descartes 22, 33, 41, 43, 49, 50, 59, 62, 66, 78, 82, 85, 96, 102, 108 Causley, C. 151, 190 Cave, N. 136–138, 190 chronos see Deleuze and Guattari 1, 14, 106, 147 class, social 32, 50, 85, 105, 123 Colebrook, C. 26, 61, 190 Comaroff and Comaroff 6, 190 composition, plane of see Deleuze and Guattari, Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, Davies 22, 37, 79, 80, 110, 150, 163, 164 compost/composting 43, 66, 125, 126, 138, 145, 146, 149, 150, 158, 163, 175, 186 concept, creating concepts 20, 45, 163 concepts as events 3, 20, 45, 47, 93, 109, 151, 160, 164, 180 conceptual personae see Deleuze and Guattari 60, 61, 90 creative evolution see Bergson 22, 153, 189 creative-relational 40, 44, 77, 122, 124, 126 creativity 25, 44, 58, 110, 130, 151, 180

critique, affirmative 30 Crowther, J. 119, 190 Davies, B. 22, 59, 80, 91, 159, 163, 190, 195 decalcomania see Deleuze and Guattari 26, 27, 175, 176 decolonisation 130, 132 Deleuze, G. see Deleuze and Guattari 4, 10, 15, 18, 22–24, 27, 28, 31–33, 35–42, 45, 46, 55, 57, 62–66, 68, 69, 74–76, 78, 80, 81, 86, 93, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 107–113, 117, 120, 121, 123–125, 127, 145, 147, 152, 157, 163, 165, 167, 168, 180, 185, 186, 188–194 Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. see Deleuze 3–6, 17–19, 25–27, 33, 38, 47, 49, 51, 54, 55, 58, 60–63, 66, 71, 76, 86, 87, 93–100, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 138, 143, 145–147, 149, 153, 155–158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 175–182, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193 délire see Deleuze and Guattari 17, 19, 28, 31, 167, 174 Del Negro, G. 54, 191 De Munck, K. 54, 191 Descartes, R. 24, 61, 85 desire, desiring production 62, 71, 79, 88, 90, 107, 110, 121, 122, 125, 127, 133, 137, 149, 150, 158, 159, 167 diary 89, 90, 92, 123, 125, 137, 139, 142, 143, 152–158 diary writing 53, 142–144, 154, 158 difference vi, 5, 10, 13, 20–22, 24, 27, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 53, 59, 72, 91, 102, 108, 110–112, 115, 174, 178, 184 Difference and Repetition, Deleuze 3, 91, 190 differentiation 5, 27, 28, 36, 41, 48, 64, 80, 81, 87, 100, 107, 110, 112, 127, 129, 136, 141, 142, 144, 150, 153, 161, 163, 175, 178 Descartes see Cartesian 24, 61, 85 divination see MacLure 65–67, 70, 192 Dosse, F. 39, 49, 191, 193 Duchamp, M. 47, 78, 119 Dukes, H. 66, 175, 191 Dunlop, M. 54, 191 Dylan, B. 53, 54, 154, 157, 168, 169, 170, 176, 189 Eagleton, T. 59, 191 Ellis, C. 72, 191, 194

198  Index

education, concept of 2–8, 11, 12–15, 83, 101, 102, 127, 174, 178, 183, 188 education, higher 62, 76, 82, 84, 102, 181, 191 embodying, embody, embodiment 42, 43, 47, 50–52, 152, 176 ethico-onto-epistemological see Barad 155 ethno-centrism 130, 132 exemplary method see Agamben, Massumi 2, 30, 39, 66, 87, 120, 136, 142 Exemplification see Massumi 2, 9, 18, 20, 28, 30, 31, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 62, 64, 73, 82, 87, 88, 91, 96, 100, 114, 118–120, 131, 138, 139, 142, 143, 155, 159 field perception 102, 123 fieldwork 130, 132 figure, figuring 95, 96, 105 Foucault, M. 6, 49, 50, 62, 72, 124, 127, 128, 149, 182, 184, 188 force, affective 1, 3, 7, 9, 17, 31, 44, 54, 68, 127, 156, 166 force, form and friction see in-formation 3–5, 9, 11, 27, 35, 37, 40, 47, 48, 54, 56, 65, 94, 95, 104, 114, 115, 119, 134, 137, 138, 145, 150, 155, 170, 173, 177 free and wild creation of concepts see Deleuze and Guattari 51, 55, 58, 66, 94, 98, 102, 108, 121, 129, 131, 138, 152, 179, 185, 187 Gale, K. see JKSB vii, ix, 21, 22, 33, 37, 40, 53–55, 67, 69, 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 87, 108, 11, 116–118, 149, 156, 163, 164, 182, 185, 191, 192, 194, 195 Gale, K. and Murray, F. 23, 153, 159, 161, 188, 191 Gale, K. and Wyatt, J. 72, 161 Gannon, S. 22, 59, 80, 91, 159, 163, 190, 195 gender 32, 50, 85, 105, 123 Guattari, F. 5, 8, 24, 31, 32, 38, 48, 49, 53, 62, 66, 68–70, 75, 76, 106, 178, 179 Gysin. B. 66, 192 haecceity see Deleuze and Guattari 47, 63, 106, 117, 126, 147, 155, 156, 162, 170, 177, 182 Haraway, D. 49, 72, 76, 86, 102, 107, 123, 127, 153, 155, 180, 192 Hegel, Hegelian dialectic 28, 39, 162 Hein, S. 39, 71, 192 Heller, Z. 138, 192

heterogeneity 1, 11, 23, 25, 69, 78, 96, 111, 125, 153 heterogenesis see Guattari 5, 8, 48, 53, 69, 70, 75, 76, 158, 178, 179 heteronomy see Pessoa 76, 77 Hongisto, I. 39, 194 Humanities 6, 57, 61, 62, 70, 85, 108, 123, 132, 133 Hume, D. 104, 111, 112, 113, 121, 190 Hurley, R. 2, 190–192 hylomorphism 17, 27 identity 6, 12, 26, 49, 50, 57, 66, 70, 78, 85, 101, 102, 117, 124, 128, 130, 132, 133, 156, 181 Illingworth 150, 192 immanence, Plane of see Deleuze and Guattari 14, 15, 23, 55, 60, 64, 149, 158, 165 immanent critique 3, 9, 52, 87, 93, 99, 108, 120, 121, 134, 159, 182, 183 in-act see Manning 9, 11, 13, 20, 29, 31, 84, 96–98, 104, 114, 115, 117, 131, 137, 147, 149, 154, 158, 161, 164, 168, 170, 183 individuation 11, 22, 53, 57, 61, 115, 125, 147, 155–157, 165, 181, 185, 193, 194 individual, individualising 5–8, 22–25, 29, 33, 41–44, 48, 49, 57–62, 67–69, 74, 75, 78–82, 85, 87, 91, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 121, 124, 126–128, 133, 136, 147, 154, 156–158, 174, 178, 179, 188 in-formation see Simondon, Manning 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 17, 19–21, 27, 29, 34–36, 40–44, 47–49, 51, 52, 65–67, 70, 74, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 101, 102, 114–116, 125, 130–134, 141, 142, 146, 149–151, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183, 187 infra-thin see Duchamp, Manning 17, 48, 78, 92, 119, 134, 178 Intensity 14, 25, 29, 38, 61, 86, 88, 89, 94, 110, 114, 119, 134, 142, 149, 170, 180, 182 International Conference of Qualitative Inquiry 89, 195 Intuition 153, 154, 159, 161, 174, 191 in-tuition see Gale and Murray 153, 154, 159, 161 intimating see Gale ix, 8, 23, 60, 69, 70, 87, 164, 182, 183, 185, 188, 191

Index  199

Jackson, Z. 184, 192 JKSB 80, 81, 91 Joyce, J. 167, 192 Kant 30, 42, 61, 115, 140 Kontturri, K-K. 39, 194 larval, larval subjects viii, 29, 60, 61 Lather, P. 72, 149, 192 Latour, B. 111, 192 lines, lines of segmentarity, lines of molecularity, lines of flight see Deleuze and Guattari 19, 24–28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 47, 53, 62, 83, 94, 96, 97, 122–127, 134, 135, 138, 146, 150, 152, 162, 179 Lowes, J. 157, 192 Mackay, S. 54, 191 MacLure, M. see divination 65–67, 70, 192 Manning, E. vii, 1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13–15, 18, 20, 23, 24, 27, 31, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 46, 47, 50–54, 59, 65, 69, 70, 78, 81, 83, 86, 94, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, 114–117, 119, 120–122, 128–133, 137–142, 144–147, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162, 166, 170, 174, 177–179, 181–184, 191, 192, 193 March of Progress 28, 39 Massumi, B. vi, ix, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 18, 21– 23, 30, 33, 34, 38, 39, 47–49, 51, 57, 66, 70, 75, 78, 86, 87, 100, 101, 109, 114, 117, 118, 120, 132, 136, 141–146, 152, 155, 159, 160, 162, 173, 174, 193 mechanosphere see Deleuze and Guattari 165, 166, 175, 191 Meillasoux, Q. 5, 63, 143, 150, 193 Memory 13, 38, 58, 59, 126, 138, 191, 194 Middling see Manning vi, 3, 8, 10–12, 18, 19, 28, 30, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45, 46, 64, 88, 92, 123, 134, 158, 164, 178, 194 Milieu see Deleuze and Guattari 6, 7, 18, 170, 181 Miller, H. 114, 116, 119, 120 minor literature, major literature see Deleuze and Guattari 3, 55, 85, 87, 138, 139, 146, 153, 183, 190 molar and molecular see lines 27, 33, 124, 127, 179 more-than see Manning viii, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, 22, 38, 46, 47, 58, 59, 60–62, 65, 70, 80, 87, 89, 98, 104, 113, 114, 119, 120, 150, 160–162, 170, 183, 185, 187

Moten, F. and Harney, S. 7, 16, 72, 86, 84, 87, 100, 119, 131, 133, 140, 181, 183 movement and moment 17, 43, 119 movement toward 3, 4, 9, 13, 19, 23, 28, 31, 33, 35, 42, 46, 57, 60, 63, 79, 84, 87, 94, 96, 98, 104, 105, 115, 122, 124, 125, 136, 156, 158, 159, 161–163, 175, 180, 182, 185 mo(ve)ment see Davies and Gannon 59, 62, 80, 159 multiplicity see Deleuze and Guattari 2, 10, 17, 20, 22, 28, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 58–60, 70, 75, 76, 80, 91, 95, 98, 110, 112, 118, 123, 126, 134, 155, 156, 160, 162, 164, 167, 170, 175, 176, 178–181, 183, 186 Nagel, T. 2, 117, 193 Nail, T. 39, 193 neurodiverse 10, 18, 19, 59, 69, 85–87, 101, 193 neurodiversity 85, 86, 101, 128, 134, 193 neurotypical 2, 19, 37, 62, 85–87, 100, 101, 108, 109, 123, 128, 132, 133, 174, 181, 184 neurotypicality 19, 26, 69, 85, 102, 108, 123, 126, 128, 134, 136, 181, 184, 188 Nietzsche, F. 61, 92, 95, 163, 193 nomad, nomadism, nomadic inquiry see Deleuze and Guattari 76, 94, 95, 166, 194 ontology 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33–36, 40, 50, 71, 73, 75, 96, 103, 115, 129, 134, 170, 188, 194 ontogenesis, ontogenetic 10, 11, 23, 28, 29, 31–36, 40, 50, 51, 75, 81, 82, 100, 151, 155, 159, 182, 185 ontological indeterminacy 11, 18, 51, 133, 142, 170, 185 ontology of immanence see St. Pierre 30, 31, 33, 34, 129, 170, 188, 194 Ordinaries see Berlant and Stewart 25 organism 24, 38, 50, 74, 86, 119, 123 organisation 8, 10, 17–19, 26, 27, 30, 38, 39, 46, 58, 86, 93, 96–99, 114, 119, 126, 150, 169, 175, 194 Parnet, C. 31, 32, 45, 63, 69, 78, 123, 167, 191 pARTicipation see Gale and Murray 161, 188, 191 Pelias, R. 167 Pessoa, F. 76, 193

200  Index

politics of touch see Manning 27, 34, 122, 155, 182, 192 potential see capacity 34, 43, 46, 49, 52, 53, 64, 67, 68, 72, 75, 78, 84, 85, 94, 99, 102, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 136, 138, 147, 150, 160–163, 174, 176, 183 post qualitative inquiry see St. Pierre 29, 30, 33, 62, 65, 71, 87, 116, 129, 194 prehension see Whitehead 67–69, 74–76, 101, 115, 116, 126, 162 Price, M. 54, 191 process over substance see Whitehead 18, 38, 51, 56, 57, 65, 88, 115 processualism 25, 30, 42, 44, 49, 57, 60, 144, 148, 151, 154, 156, 162, 183, 185 Protevi see Bonta 26, 95, 97, 190 qualitative inquiry 40, 55, 61, 62, 71, 72, 82, 84, 108, 109, 111, 112, 121, 124, 129, 144, 159, 186, 187, 191, 192 Rajchman, J. 10, 193 Ramey, J. 67, 193 Ratinon, C. and Ayre, S. 97, 139, 193 Refrain 5, 180, 181 Representation 4–6, 8, 26–29, 32, 41, 46, 48, 57, 64, 71, 73, 82, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105, 107, 109, 120, 125, 134, 137, 139, 153, 160, 168, 192 research-creation see Manning 46, 83, 85, 87, 109, 140, 144, 146, 181–183 rhizome, rhizomatic see Deleuze and Guattari 25, 32, 62, 93–97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 165, 176 Richardson, L. 21, 144, 149, 187, 193 Sakellariadis, A. 54, 191 sexuality 32, 50, 85, 105, 123 St. Pierre, E. A. ix, 11, 21, 29, 31, 33, 62, 65, 75, 87, 108, 116, 117, 129, 144, 170, 193, 194 Soler, G. 54, 191 Speedy, J. 54, 55, 191 Shaviro, S. 74, 76, 194 Simondon, G. 10, 20, 27, 38, 48, 51, 65, 74, 84, 114, 194 Soja, E. 3, 173, 194 space, smooth and striated see Deleuze and Guattari 3, 9, 25, 86, 94, 96, 119, 179 space making 2, 3, 29, 31–33, 45, 52, 80, 87, 93, 94, 108, 134, 141, 143, 173–175, 182 spacetime 6, 14, 26, 50, 77, 79, 80, 94, 102, 105–107, 115, 117, 126, 129, 147, 153

spatialisation see Soja 111, 130, 141, 173, 174 speciation 141–143 speculation, speculative practice 3, 19, 20, 26, 27, 36, 37, 44, 48, 51, 52, 63, 65, 69, 73–75, 95, 104–106, 108, 139, 141, 178, 180, 185, 188 Spinoza, B. 2, 4, 5, 18, 20, 23, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 47, 67, 76, 80, 97, 114, 117, 119, 120, 125, 141, 143, 152, 157, 166, 168, 190, 192, 194 Spiriting vii, ix, 3, 11, 18, 20, 52, 54, 56, 57, 66–70, 79–82, 88, 90, 91, 105, 106, 127, 134, 135, 158, 170, 171 Springgay, S. 66, 67, 75, 153, 154, 194 Stark, H. 194 Stengers, I. 98, 152, 180, 194 Stepanova, M. 68, 139, 194 Stewart, K. 24, 110, 194 Stivale, C. J. 110, 111, 180, 188, 194 structures of feeling see Williams. R. 5 study (Moten and Harney) 72, 83, 85–87, 109, 131, 133, 140, 150, 181, 183 subjectification 6, 7, 24, 43, 58, 59, 61, 74, 77, 79, 82, 105, 124, 139, 141, 156, 179, 181 substance see Whitehead 18, 20, 27, 50, 57–59, 63, 66, 71, 73, 75, 83, 99, 123, 144, 147, 148, 155, 157, 172 sympoiesis see Haraway 40, 76, 86, 131, 174, 180 synaesthesia 17, 44 Taddeo, L. 56, 194 territorialisation see Deleuze and Guattari 1, 7, 25, 65, 84, 87, 100, 102, 110, 126, 140, 163, 180, 181 Thrift, N. 72, 142, 153, 194 Tiainen, M. 39, 194 tracing 26, 27, 32, 62 transparency, resisting the urge to 15, 127, 131, 135, 160, 164 Truman, Sarah 66, 67, 75, 153, 154, 194 transcendence 26, 28, 62, 71, 72, 96, 138 transcendental 31, 63, 68, 102, 168 transduction 7, 139 transindividual see Individual 23, 120, 178 transversal, transversality ix, 10, 19, 27, 28, 36, 96, 113, 139, 151, 154, 169, 170, 178 undercommons see Moten and Harney 16, 72, 73, 76, 84, 85, 130, 131, 183, 193

Index  201

Van Hove, G. 54, 191 virtual/virtualise/virtualisation 9–11, 14, 15, 19, 24, 39, 45, 52, 64, 66, 73, 78, 84, 108, 129, 146, 147, 153, 159, 161, 193 Weber, M. 16, 27, 39, 194 Whitehead, A. N. 20, 24, 37, 38, 42, 50, 51, 57, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 73–76, 84, 87, 93, 98, 101, 104, 117, 134, 137, 144, 148, 151, 156, 162, 180, 194 Williams, D. 101 Williams, R. 5, 194 Winn, R. 92, 93, 194 Woolf, V. 15, 17, 47, 69, 106, 113, 147, 170, 175, 182, 194

Worlding, world 3, 4, 6, 14, 16, 23, 35, 36, 38, 40, 52–54, 58, 60, 63, 68, 69, 75, 81, 91, 92, 106, 110, 120, 121, 130, 140, 142, 149, 153, 154, 156, 162, 167, 174, 180, 185 writing as immanent doing 3, 20, 21, 46, 58, 67, 139, 160, 161, 163, 164, 170, 187 writing, diary 53, 147, 148, 159 writing, immanent 67, 94, 137, 160, 161 writing, journal 143, 144, 147, 152, 154, 158 Wyatt, J. ix, 21–23, 31, 40, 71, 72, 79, 80, 88, 89, 91, 159, 161, 163, 182