The Backwards Booklet
We can look
for the world to be as we would like it to be as individuals. You know, make it
easy for me – that idea, we can look for that. But I think the important thing is
that we grow. And the only way we can grow is to have a mind that's open enough
to be able to accept situations, to be able to experience situations as they
are and turn them into medicine – turn poison into medicine. Take whatever
situation you have and make something constructive happen with it. That's what I
learned from that situation with Miles.
Playing
wrong Notes in Jazz - Herbie Hancock on Miles Davis, a fantastic Story about
mistakes ([Video], source unknown, uploaded by; del Ferro, 2020))
Turning Poison into Medicine
Listening. Seeing. Staying. Looking for ways to make ‘something constructive happen’ with what is, takes effort. How much easier it is to ‘keep looking for the world to be as we would like it to be’, judge situations and in so doing close events rather than act on still open futures. The type of openness Herbie Hancock describes Miles Davies demonstrating during a jazz improvisation can be glimpsed in the practice of a becoming-teacher when examining the unexpected outcome of a copying incident.
This mosaic is an explorative examination of the effects of a becoming- teacher’s encounter with copying.
Silly Copying
Do you remember the backwards booklet? The one I copied in such a silly way it became backwards. Today we’ll do page one, becoming-teacher says to the class. (F, p. 8)
Twenty-three children receive this information as their introduction to biology. The children take up their booklets and then motion in the direction of the way out as they expect to do what they have done before when working with this material, which is to ‘go outside, smell the forest and offer all senses a treat of nature’ (F, p. 8). Before long, all children return from the nearby woods where they have knelt to smell moss, reached their hands to feel the bark of trees, chewed to taste grass, and listened to the wind play amid leaves – or have a friend scream between the pine trees “to offer hearing something” (F, p. 8). With traces of nature with them, the children glue, tape, write, or draw what their senses have perceived and insert their tactile treasures into their ‘backwards booklets’.
The booklet ending up backwards is accidental and the result of a ‘silly’ copying incident. Papers, instructions, pagination, staples, all disheveled after the encounter between becoming- teacher and copier. An accepted copying effect referred to as ‘the backwards booklet’ not only affirms the difference of booklets but undoes the idea of error itself through the articulation ‘silly’. The name has by the time of my visit become an inside joke, a virtual past actualized anew during each biology class. Although the event is in becoming- teacher’s past, it is the acceptance of the blunder in becoming-teacher’s past present and making ‘something constructive happen with it’, that gives the ‘backwards booklet’ the capacity to stay open still. The ‘backwards booklet’ also invites future silliness, for perhaps someone else tries and fails or makes something unexpected that begs for creative labelling as a way to cultivate worthy futures.
Becoming Lesson Material
In retrospect, it seems the becoming of the ‘silly copying’ event actualizes becoming-teacher’s capacity to follow unforeseeable modes of becoming without judging, even when dealing with seemingly negligible bodies like papers, staples, pagination, and a copying machine. Notably, the unexpected format does not seem to lessen the booklet’s affective capacities, on the contrary, when transformed into a ‘backwards booklet’ its affective capacities augment as it becomes ‘lesson material’. After all, its materiality was never a given. In the words of Buchanan “We have to resist the empiricist tendency to treat material as given” (2021, p. 131), and encounters with matter (papers, staples, pagination, copying machine) is thus a creative practice dependent on the relational specificities of an assemblage.
The backwards booklet is consequently a materiality spoken of in terms of its difference – ‘the one I copied in such a silly way it became backwards’ – and actualized as ‘lesson material’ when it is picked up, placed on desks, and worked with. But it is not a difference in relation to how study materials and biology ought to be shaped, but rather a pure difference that undoes the idea of mistake itself by inscribing the entire biology segment as a ‘backwards booklet-event’.
The children’s encounter with the backwards booklet as lesson material has the effect of reorganizing physical and non-physical relations; hand-page relations are modified when the act of turning pages needs to shift direction. In this way, the relation between the learning process and its material counterpart is also shifted when the front page is the final page – the ending of a biology segment has become its material beginning; what is first is finished last.
Incorporeal transformations
Why pay any attention to what a simple stack of papers is called? It is still only words on paper, someone might argue. However, as Haraway suggests, the material has a profound influence on thought and speech: “[i]t matters what thoughts think thoughts. […] It matters what stories tell stories”, (2016, p. 35). In keeping with this proposition, I argue that how we think and speak about events and material circumstances has a profound influence on outcomes [1]. Whether the unexpected is articulated a ‘failure’ or a ‘backwards booklet’ will have an effect on ensuing actions; do we put the booklet in the recycling bin and judge the effort a failure, or do we treat it as a memorable event to share and hold on to as a still open biology-becoming?
The move from disheveled papers, instructions, pagination and
staples into lesson material into
a ‘backwards booklet’ can be seen through the lens of Deleuzoguattarian
thinking as an example of incorporeal transformation (Deleuze &
Guattari, [1980]1987). This means that calling it a ‘backwards booklet’ doesnotchange its physical composition – there is still a stack of
papers with pagination that deviates from the ‘norm’. Rather, the
transformation generates ontological effects. The ‘backwards
booklet’ undoes its status as failure in a movement away from pre-existing ‘identities’
and into a new form of becoming.
‘Incorporeal transformation’as concept then explains how language as expression becomes non-separable from content and life at large, but not as a consequence of causal relations or correspondence[2]:
expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way. (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 86)
‘Expression’ intervenes in ‘content’, but “[e]xpression is not signification” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 69). There is consequently on the one hand a loosening of the bonds between language and the world; on the other, a perplexing augmentation of its radical capacities. From this perspective, becoming- teacher does not salvage the stacks of papers becauseit is ‘a backwards booklet’, no more than becoming-teacher in mosaic Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock, runs because‘a thin brown line’ is ‘a schedule’; “[s]peech-acts don’t establish or share or communicate a truth-relation to the world, but establish or transform the sense of what must or can be said about the world” (Holland, 2013, p. 79). Put differently, it is “the “expressed” of the statement” (Deleuze & Guattari [1980]1987, p. 86) that intervenes in bodies – calling them ‘backwards booklet’ and ‘schedule’ – attributes bodies. As soon as the bodies, ‘a stack of papers’ and ‘the thin brown line’, are connected to ‘booklet’ and ‘schedule’ attributes, it becomes increasingly difficult to bin the stacks or ignore the line. This is why one must ask, “how […] does matter become [booklet or schedule] material” (Buchanan, 2021, p. 131)?
Language – a Becoming Ethics of the Future
Pragmatics is in Deleuze and Guattari “the cornerstone of linguistics”; it is the “study of the use and effects of language in social contexts”, Holland explains (2013, p. 79). Conceived as ‘pragmatics’, language attains a potency no longer dismissible as nothing but words. Referencing the ‘backwards booklet’ reactivates an event that parcels experiences, such as things having gone wrong but then become accepted, sensory expeditions into nature, and ways of presenting tactile tree-memories. It is a word that has become a ‘to backwards booklet’-event, and as such it enables what Fraser speaks of as “reinventions […] or re-eventalizations” (2006, p. 130). It is not simply a case of remembering ‘silly’ copying but repeating the reminder to always ‘make something constructive happen with what is'.
Elaborating on what an ‘ethical education’ might look like when thought through a Deleuzian ontology, Todd May and Inna Semetsky propose that “[a]n ethical education produces subjectivities that are capable of inventing new concepts and articulating new values contingent on the dynamics of experience” (2008, p. 154). Taking into consideration not only the ‘backwards booklet’-event but also the different actualizations in mosaics Blank Maps and Oh…, I suggest May and Semetsky’s proposition resonates with the experimentations seen in this becoming-teacher’s practice. “[P]ragmatics will be the science of the future. The present is motor; the past is field; the future is drive”, Lampert writes (2006, p. 51). Referencing ‘the backwards booklet’ becomes one of the ways in which a becoming- teacher produces subjectivities by means of keeping futures open. By ‘articulating new values contingent on the dynamics of experience’, language helps stretch the present as the past of soon futures,not as a deterministic convolution, but as an ethics of the future. Is it perhaps ‘turning poison into medicine’-refrains?
So, one of many answers to ‘how encounters unfold and with what effects’ is that an encounter with the paper-instruction-pagination-staple-copier unfolds in unimaginable ways. An effect of becoming-teacher’s affective capacity in said encounter and ensuing re-eventalizations is the ways in which the unexpected is explored as a site for virtual becomings – a becoming-teacher ‘turning poison into medicine’.
References
Buchanan, I. (2021). Assemblage theory and method: An introduction and guide. Bloomsbury Academic.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. ([1980]1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Evans, S., Harrison, M., & Rousell, D. (2022). Teaching in the afterward: Undoing order-words and affirming transversal alternatives. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 43(5), 785-803.
Fraser, M. (2006). Event. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2-3), 129-132.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Holland, E.W. (2013). Deleuze and Guattari's A thousand plateaus: a reader's guide. Bloomsbury Academic.
Lampert, J. (2006). Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of history. Continuum.
May, T., & Semetsky, I. (2008). Deleuze, ethical education, and the unconscious. In I. Semetsky. (Ed.), Nomadic Education: Variations on a theme by Deleuze and Guattari. (pp. 143-157). Brill.
Williams, J. (2011). Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time: a critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh University Press.
