Oh…

So, right in the middle of Miles’s solo, […] I played the wrong chord. A chord that was, it just sounded completely wrong. It sounded like a big mistake. And I did this, and I went like this [puts his hands over his ears], and I put my hands around my ears and Miles paused for a second…

And then he played some notes that made my chord right, he made it correct, which astounded me. I couldn't believe what I heard. Miles was able to make something that was wrong into something that was right. With the power of his, of the choice of notes that he made, and the feeling that he had. And so, I couldn’t play for about a minute. I couldn’t even touch the piano.

But what I realize now is that Miles didn't hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened, just an event. So that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment, and he dealt with it.

He found something since he didn't hear it as a mistake. He felt it was his responsibility to find something that fit, and he was able to do that.

(Playing wrong Notes in Jazz - Herbie Hancock on Miles Davis, a fantastic Story about mistakes [Video]. (source unknown, uploaded by; del Ferro, 2020))

The jolt of a discordant harmony has hands abandoning piano keys. As the dissonance moves through the room, bodies listen, one even ‘pauses for a second’. The slight hesitation creates an interstice wherein a dissonance is ‘the reality of what was happening at that moment’ – not something to be judged, instead ‘just an event’. The form of listening described here is an enfolding of vulnerability, of discordance becoming potentiality because someone ‘feels the responsibility to find a fit’.

What is left implicit in the Miles-story is that the enactment of dissonance as potentiality also becomes a collective effort, a joint re-reading performed by an entire assemblage. After all, Miles Davis’s solo finds its fit in relation to the harmonies generated by the other musician-instrument configurations – and through the audience that stays to listen and in so doing making the experiment affirmed a ‘jazz fit’.

Variations on an Oh…

This mosaic joins The Backwards Booklet and turns to the insights from jazz when trying to make sense of assemblage events. The inquiry examines the encounters that render variations on an ‘Oh…’. The mosaic begins with a look at the first of Two Variations on an Oh… later examined as Oh…-refrains as it asks, ‘how do encounters unfold and with what effects?’

Oh… Variation I

8.45, civics. “Representative democracy” becoming-teacher adds to a child’s story before asking, Is there something you want to add that we’ve missed [on the mind map]? Hands shoot into the air, and someone begins talking. Suddenly becoming-teacher looks around the room with a surprised look, says Oh… Now someone’s talking. Everybody resumes listening to the one having already begun answering. (F, p. 3)
…
9.31, shift from one activity to another. Becoming-teacher motions to go help a child when someone suddenly starts talking, becoming-teacher looks around the room with a surprised look, Oh… Now someone’s voice is heard. The room goes silent as they continue changing materials. (F, p. 4)
…
11.21, the class is finishing a test. I want it to be super quiet out here, you’ve been super good, keep up the good work. The room is quiet, someone starts talking. Oh… becoming-teacher says with a surprised look, now there’s someone talking. The room goes silent, and becoming-teacher continues, You have to choose, drawing or reading. (F, p. 7)

‘Oh…’, a hesitation, and a momentary pause. The sudden exclamation creates a rupture in unfolding textures. ‘Oh…’ expresses surprise; bodily through inquisitive looking around the room, lexically through an onomatopoetic short outbreath[1] – as if listening to the unexpected sound of a rare bird species – and through intonation where the interjection begins low before steeply rising.

Becoming surprised repeats and renders ‘Oh…’s whenever becoming-teacher is affected by classroom events. Whether it is sound that affects or perhaps the sudden death of voicelessness, remains unknown (more about the relation between ‘voicelessness’ and ‘silence’ in mosaics Themes on a Silence, Park of Silence and Coloring-Pencil Sound); either way, each ‘Oh...’ and its ensuing pause imparts a subtle interstice that offer bodies a moment’s time to re-compose, become response-able[2]. Before continuing to explore what is going on in Oh… Variation I, a look at what happens when thinking Oh… through the Deleuzoguattarian concept ‘refrain’ ([1980]1987).   

Oh… as Refrain

Oh… repeats throughout the day. A repeated sound-gesture that keeps returning like a stubborn refrain, an Oh…-refrain. The Oh…-refrain is perplexing insofar that it expresses surprise whilst at the same time before long being anticipated. It is a sonic reminder of (becoming) teacher’s presence. As refrains, the triviality of an ‘Oh…’ can be seen as a “calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center at the heart of chaos” (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 311). The Oh… creates a small interstice, ‘a pause’ in Hancock’s words (del Ferro, 2020), that harnesses a child’s sudden ‘line of (talk-)flight’, stalls an unforeseen ‘de-territorialization’[3] attempt.

But what on the one hand harnesses at the same time gives bodies the opportunity to re-route ”in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation” (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 311). Taken as refrains, the Oh… admits a child a second chance to venture for an alternative future. Oh…-refrains therefore, in their territorializing, are not as much for the sake of creating stability or “organiz[ing] a limited space” (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 311), as they are a means to draw children’s attention to alternative openings through the creation of minor hesitations. Put simply, the sudden ‘Oh…’ jolts thought and in so doing gives bodies an opportunity to re-route.

I now return the begun examination of Oh… Variation I, this time conceptualized as Oh…-refrains.

Oh…-Refrain Variation I

A closer examination of what is going on in the first of the introductory snippets:

Is there something you want to add that we’ve missed [on the mind-map]? […] [S]omeone begins talking. Suddenly becoming-teacher looks around the room with a surprised look,says Oh… Now someone’s talking. (F, p. 3).

As a refrain the Oh… territorializes through the sound of voice and becoming-teacher’s synchronized turning around pretending to search for the source of the unexpected sound. Becoming-teacher knows the who but keeps looking around searching, carefully avoiding stopping to look at anyone in particular. Soon the Oh… has de-territorialized the initial interruption and left the assemblage with only the memory of becoming-teacher voice. There has now been a clever switch where a body that began a ‘line of (talk-)flight’ has been jolted into a different course of action all whilst the Oh…-refrain territorializes the children’s attention. The interrupter, meanwhile, remains omitted from the spotlight and is spared public disciplining. In fact, no one in the room seems to remember what caused the interruption as attention has been redirected to the surprised-looking becoming-teacher whose eager searching has bodies return to lesson activities.

A defibrillating jolt cancels all directed verbal admonitions. In fact, although Oh…-refrains highlight that there is ‘someone talking’ or ‘someone’s voice is heard’, they at no point explicitly negate nor ban talk per se.How is that? Let us return to this question in short, first a look at Oh…-refrain Variation II.

Oh…-Refrain Variation II

It is 9.40 and the schedule shows that recess has begun. But children linger in the classroom saying they want to finish an ongoing game[4] hosted by becoming-teacher. One of the children is drawing a picture on the whiteboard while becoming-teacher asks questions for the remaining contestants, all the while making sure to finish preparations for the upcoming lesson. A classroom assistant who has stayed behind approaches a child by the whiteboard and says:  

Don’t draw, it’s recess. Becoming-teacher moves closer to the same child and says, Oh… are you an artist today? before moving along, continuing to ask biology questions while helping another child finish.

9.43, becoming-teacher walks over to yet another child who wants to show something on a laptop screen. Becoming-teacher listens, asks the child to show and explain something on the screen. Becoming-teacher gives laptop-child a challenge in the demonstrated computer game, walks towards the door and turns to the lingering children, You can go outside for a break now. Becoming-teacher cleans the whiteboard and leaves at 9.46. (F, p. 5)

The assistant sees the schedule, ‘it’s recess’, becoming-teacher sees the child, ‘Oh… are you an artist’. This Oh… too entails a barely perceptible pause enfolded in a surprise in response to the unexpected child-drawing configuration. What one adult rejects with reference to time, another affirms with reference to action. Deleuze’s Spinoza elucidates:

When a body “encounters” another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts[5] (Deleuze, [1981]1988, p. 19)

The effects of the above encounters and whether there is an increase or decrease in their capacities to affect and become affected, are what bodies apprehend as joy or sadness (Deleuze, [1981]1988). It is now tempting to propose that becoming-teacher’s encounter with the drawing-child is joyous, although such claims come with a risk; what if the comment serves to ridicule the child and the drawing? Or perhaps the drawing-child stresses becoming-teacher? What if Oh…-refrains are sarcastic comments abouts children’s in-ability to be quiet or leave for recess? To get a fuller picture of the nexus of relations, a look at the unfolding effects of rendered encounters.

The ‘don’t draw’-comment aims to close the event, while the ‘artist’-comment enables the continuation of drawing. Joy and sadness are accordingly not claims regarding the child’s feelings, but propositions based on monitored effects; the child gets to continue the desired drawing and its contentment is sensed in the choice to stay another six minutes. On becoming-teacher’s part, there are still preparations to finish at 9.40, and therefore no need for children to leave. Is not tidying more fun with company? Is it not intriguing to know what children have to show? The decision whether children are to stay or leave is accordingly not a decision based on a schedule or a rule, but the specificities of the event. “[I]t was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space”, a child-drawing-space (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1988, p. 311).

Oh… and Other Encounters  

Both Variation I and Variation II encompass a verbal ‘Oh…’ and sounding surprised accompanied by a brief pause. Variation I also entails the turning of the body and looking around the room. But there are also elements of Oh…-refrains that pertain to their non-observable elements and thus their effects, such as how they resist institutional slogans and how they remain open to the potentialities of the unexpected. But this kind of openness to behavioral diversity stretches beyond the making of Oh…-refrains; rather, encouraging behavioral diversity seems to be this assemblage’s way of becoming.

In situations easily dismissible with reference to standardized rules on ‘proper (classroom-)conduct’, bodies are instead given freedom to explore inventive configurations. Take for instance the encounter with a child hoisted on top of a desk exploring its seat-ability whilst writing. Instead of responding with a ‘everybody sits on their chair’-rule, becoming-teacher walks over laughingly proposing that the child instead stands working next to the desk so as not to fall and get hurt (F, p. 4). Or when a citrus scent seeps through the room during the introduction from a child peeling and eating an orange. Instead of invoking a ‘no eating during class’-rule, becoming-teacher simply observes the orange-eating child that attentively follows the joint run-through (F, p. 2). Or when two children stay behind during recess to examine the development of an ongoing experiment. Instead of citing the ‘everybody needs to go outside it is recess’-rule, becoming-teacher walks over to the two children by the sink and closely examines their plastic mugs asking questions about what is growing inside (F, p. 9).

The assemblage tenaciously nurtures relational experimentation as part of classroom life (see also mosaic The Backwards Booklet). Instead of seeing disobedience and rule breaking, becoming-teacher sees a body in need of ergonomic working conditions, another desiring fruit, and two more studying an experiment. Unfolding encounters are accordingly continuously enacted as sites for exploration.     

Crowded Conditions and Activist Hesitations

An earlier section left a question unexamined, let us now return to that question. The query read: Although Oh…-refrains highlight that there is ‘someone talking’ or ‘someone’s voice is heard’, they at no point explicitly negate nor ban talk per se, how is that?

It seems as if ‘talk not being banned’ might be an effect of Oh…refrains not seeking to solve ‘the problem of talking’. Instead, an Oh… solves the problem Philip Jackson in the sixties discussed as the “crowded conditions” of classrooms ([1968]1990, p. 10). The jolt and surprise of an Oh… does not seem to ban talk but rather encourages an assemblage to explore alternative paths to handle ‘the problem of many bodies wanting to share their thoughts in crowded conditions’.

A subtle but pivotal shift in responsibility occurs as soon as ‘talk’ no longer makes ‘child’ the source of the problem but pinpoints ‘crowded conditions’ as the real challenge. In this light, Oh…-refrains become acts of resistance towards disciplining practices that make individual bodies at fault of institutional conditions.After all, sonic polyphony and bodies moving around in classrooms have not always been conceived as problems. In the ‘monitorial system of instruction’, sound and movement were given elements of classroom life (Landahl, 2019). Not until a shift into ‘teacher-led lessons’[6] and its one-voice-at-a-time ideal, were affective capacities like talk and movement in classrooms construed as problems (Landahl, 2019). Whilst ‘tandem talking’ – that is, speaking and listening in pre-programmed sequences – may seem ‘natural’ today, one could also conceive it as yet another schooling invention that serves to accommodate ‘crowded conditions’. Excitement, nevertheless, is an untimely intensity that captures bodies indiscriminately.

An Oh…, meanwhile, counteracts a classroom where children “must be able to disengage, at least temporarily, their feelings from their actions” (Jackson, [1968]1990, p. 18). Oh…-refrains work with affects, through affects. Oh…-refrains thwart disciplining practices that support school’s “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, [1968]1990, p. 33). Alternative modes of becoming unfold as becoming-teacher promotes acts of solidarity as more constructive solutions in ‘crowded conditions’; “Now X-class has to think about who has the floor” and variations on “the same goes for all…” or“It’s equal for all…”(F, p. 3). Solidarity is also physical. Actualizations of resolute calibrations pop up everywhere, sometimes as rapid adjustments in seating arrangements to ensure equal opportunities to see, or as volunteering as prosthetic when becoming-teacher extends an exam-writing-hand to a floor-laying-child whose verbal answers need transposition into laptop-language.

So, what does Oh…-refrains as an alternative pedagogy have to offer education when explored through a Deleuzian framework?

A Pedagogy of Hesitation

The Oh…-refrain enacts a pedagogy of hesitation. ‘Hesitation’, Sellar says, could under certain circumstances[7] enable “conditions in which the interstices created in hesitation might remain open long enough [so] that we come to understand the world differently”, and when so, hesitation holds a pedagogical potential[8] (2012, p. 62). An Oh… forms an interstice whereby the ‘world can be understood differently’, re-read jointly; the hesitation asks the assemblage ‘what are we to make of this rift’?

The Oh… creates the rift, “[a]n ethico-political hesitation [that] creates possibilities for [here: alternative] lines of flight. It is a pause, or in/action[9]” (Wallace, 2018, p. 1056). It is the ‘action’ of an Oh… spoken in the political voice of teacher, but it is also an‘inaction’ of disciplining through re-routed line of (talk-)flights. In other words, the ethico-political resides in hesitation’s capacity to bring about the threshold of becoming.

A look now at the becomings enabled through a pedagogy of hesitation. Section on ‘ethology’ explores the effects of the proposed focus on relations and affect and what happens when we move away from thinking identities in exchange for capacities. ‘Theory of times’ helps makes sense of how hesitation results in a paradoxical increase in lesson speed.

Hesitation and Ethology

Hesitation resists knowing untimely talk as ‘wrong’. Hesitation resists judging based on stale images of generalized rules on undue talking in classrooms. Instead, hesitation affirms talk as a child’s affective capacity by shifting focus onto its effects on classroom life. “In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions”, Deleuze and Guattari explain, we instead “seek to count its affects” ([1980]1987, p. 257).

This stubborn focus on unfolding effects of (talk-)affect belongs to the focus of ethology (Deleuze, [1981]1988). “Ethology highlights the importance of micro-analysis of movement, gesture and behavior in how bodies are connected” Zembylas explains (2007, p. 25). How the assemblage mitigates disciplining must be studied through hesitations instigated by sudden Oh…s performed as a pretend surprise through the turning of a body looking for a make-believe someone.

Ethology is thus about “study[ing] the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing” (Deleuze, [1980]1988 p. 125). Ethology is also what I propose helps make sense of how the assemblage works when encounters become affirmed through an ‘Oh…’. A pedagogy branching from ethology asks, ‘what configuration is the (talking-)body nested in when (talk-)affect carries it away’ and ‘what are its effects on classroom life?’. In the end it becomes a quest of exploring “[h]ow can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world” (Deleuze, [1981]1988, p. 126)? This ethical stance is what I suggest becoming-teacher actualizes in each encounter.

Hesitation and Affective Capacities

“Many things change” Deleuze says when defining bodies as “capacities for affecting and being affected” ([1981]1988, p. 124). The onto-epistemological shift entails the Spinozian modification that instead of asking what bodies are, one asks what bodies can do. In the realm of becoming, the validity of generalizable rules also falters. With no more ‘identities’ to speak of and a reality unfolding as the repetition of difference (Deleuze, [1968]2014), there can be only singular solving. Another effect of the shift to ‘becoming’ is that all bodies become learners, becoming-teacher and children alike, which is why affective interventions like the jolt of an Oh…-refrain suddenly makes pedagogical sense as it works through a hesitation towards naming.  

In the flux of classroom affects, there is still the question of ‘crowded conditions’. Attending to perpetual difference takes its toll on both becoming-teacher and children, so that developing strategies for modulating classroom speeds may become necessary. “[H]esitation opens spaces of questioning in which we might either seek to reassert existing positions or allow ourselves to be forced into thinking as we respond to a new set of problems”, Sellar proposes[10] (2012, p. 72). Oh…-refrains give bodies the opportunity to ‘reassert existing positions’ by ‘taking responsibility’ to listen to discordant harmonies and ‘find a fit to what is’, just like Miles did.

Calibration of Velocities

With no time spent on admonishing, the assemblage is rewarded with effective returns to lesson activities. Increase in speed is therefore the slightly paradoxical effect of hesitation. But it is not only what is done that increases speed, nor merely activities that have durations. Bodies themselves are durations with different and shifting velocities;“You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects” (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 262). In populated spaces like classrooms, it becomes unavoidable that its many speeds and durations at times come into conflict. The jolt of the Oh… now works as a kind of defibrillator that consolidates conflicting durations by making possible minor calibrations, such as slowdown of excitement, speeding up collective answer time, or prolonging someone’s drawing session – whilst avoiding institutional disciplining.

Williams (2011) explains how Deleuze’s theory of times[11] helps conceptualize what is at stake in classrooms. Pulsating nexuses with clusters of coagulating speeds and durations co-mingle as each lesson task combines differently with individual child-bodies, their fluctuating adrenaline levels, heartbeats, seating preferences, interests, stamina, anxieties, proficiencies, and passions only to be confronted with the need to calibrate one’s speeds and durations with the phases of lesson activities, tools, whom you are seated next to – the mixture of speeds and durations is immeasurable:

We have to search for acts that bring an adequate measure to the conflicts between different durations even though no such adequacy can be achieved. How can we achieve the widest reciprocal inclusion adequate to our shared wounds? How will it fail? ([italics in original] Williams, 2011, p. 157) 

Through a surprise hesitation combination, Oh…-refrains manage to create an increase in speed and a parallel slowdown that enables ‘bringing an adequate measure to the conflict between durations’. Having to have permission to speak, draw, sit, eat, explore, could be proposed as harnessed affective capacities that become what Williams speaks of as the ‘shared wounds’ (2011) of schooling.

Talk-bodies come forth as arrhythmicdue to the structure of activities, even though there is nothing intrinsically ‘off beat’ in wanting to share. In fact, public contribution is what much of education demands and is built on. How then does the Oh…-refrain reconcile involved durations as part of a pedagogy of hesitation? I hold that Oh…-refrains actualize a potent alternative pedagogy that works with

i)          jolting bodies out of routine action through
ii)         hesitation without reductive naming, by means of
iii)        creating interstices that give time to
iv)        explore alternative routes – and most obviously in the case of Variation II
v)         ‘combine to form more powerful wholes’.

Things that seem to ‘affect becoming-teachers during a workday’ are thereby ‘actions that risk de-territorializing ongoing activities’. How do they affect? Through their anticipated effects on ongoing activities. Without any prospect of complete escape from ‘school as institution’ nor its crowded conditions, interrupting lines of flight in medias res has become a way to organize without retorting to institutional slogans. The rationale is to work with affects and through affects rather than demand that bodies ‘disengage their feelings from their actions’, as Jackson put it ([1968]1990).

“Perhaps children and adults are caught up in events that move at different speeds and are sometimes imperceptible to one another”, MacLure considers[12] (2016, p. 180). If this is the case, then the sudden ‘Oh…’ has the potency to bring children and adults together in momentary temporal harmony through refrains with a capacity to defibrillate. But the need for Oh…-refrains is nonetheless an indication of school’s failure to undo what Williams spoke of as ‘the wound caused by lacking reciprocal inclusion’ (2011). In fact, it may be the wound itself which touches becoming-teacher during encounters with untimely talk, recess-drawing, desk-sitting, orange-eating, experiment-investigating. In that case, Oh…-refrains must be promoted into an activist pedagogy that resonates with Miles Davis’s capacity ‘to undo mistakes through attentive listening and taking the responsibility to find a fit’.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268.

Deleuze, G. ([1968]2014). Difference and repetition. Bloomsbury Academic.

Deleuze, G. ([1981]1988). Spinoza, practical philosophy. City Lights Books.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. ([1980]1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

del Ferro, M. (2020, Oct. 7). Playing wrong Notes in Jazz - Herbie Hancock on Miles Davis, a fantastic Story about mistakes [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6fVZtp9vGQ

Jackson, P.W. ([1968]1990). Life in classrooms. Teachers College Press.

MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 173-182.

Murris, K. & Bozalek, V. (2019). Diffraction and response-able reading of texts: the relational ontologies of Barad and Deleuze. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(7), 872-886. 

Sellar, S. (2012). ‘It's all about relationships’: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 33(1), 61-74.

Tuin, I. V. D., & Dolphijn, R. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Open humanities press.

Williams, J. (2011). Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time: a critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh University Press.

Zembylas, M. (2007). The specters of bodies and affects in the classroom: A rhizo‐ethological approach. Pedagogy, culture & society, 15(1), 19-35.