Abstract
This chapter engages with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of an assemblage, what it is and how it works, to explore the intersection of race, neoliberalism and neocolonialism at one particular school, in one particular classroom, with one particular teacher, and the early childhood students actively involved in his/her ‘storyplay’ lesson presented in the opening vignette. I view storytelling practices as a central political issue that allows us to engage with power production at the level of affect: deeply political and deeply affective within the assemblage of place with children, teacher, story, storybook, chairs, mat, the practices that govern a Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy, government and school policies and procedures, and so much more, coming together to intra-act—to use Karen Barad’s neologism for the notion that individual agencies do not pre-exist or precede the intra-action but emerge from it—in the (de)(re)territorialization of place and (dis)(re)appropriation of bodies within that place to (re)produce and/or disrupt neocolonial, neoliberal and racial acts.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the capital ‘R’ for river in lieu of the actual name of the river throughout this chapter so as not to identify the school itself. And the specific name of the school is not mentioned throughout this chapter to ensure that the ethical rights of others are not infringed or violated.
- 2.
What I mean by neoliberalism here is explained beautifully by Ronen Shamir (2008, p. 3) when he says that neoliberalism should be treated ‘neither as a concrete economic doctrine nor as a definite set of political projects’. Rather, neoliberalism should be seen ‘as a complex, often incoherent and even contradictory set of practices that are organized around a certain imagination of the “market” as a basis for “the universalisation of market-based social relations, with the corresponding penetration in almost every single aspect of our lives of the discourse and/or practice of commodification, capital-accumulation and profit-making.”’ Neoliberalism with a capital N and neoliberalism with a small n is not only ‘about money but also about minds’ (Ball in conversation with René Kneyber, 2015, p. 39, my emphasis), children’s minds especially, and is the site of common interest between C/capital and S/state (Ball in conversation with René Kneyber, 2015). In short, as Stephen Metcalf (2017, para. 6) reminds us, ‘“neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.’ It has invaded ‘the grit of our everyday lives’ with ‘the attitude of the salesman... enmeshed in all modes of expression’ (Metcalf, 2017, paras 4, 5).
- 3.
Deleuze and Guattari eschew definitions preferring to discuss the ‘how’ of any term used.
- 4.
It is place and the stories it tells, rather than space or location, which limits or liberates who or what we are becoming: place can allow us to ‘continually re-think our place in all its forms, re-configure it to be adequate for the times, and ultimately “release it to the Cosmos.” Place becomes something more than simple location, but less than essence, entitlement, or citizenship’ (Janz, 2001, p. 395), the arboreal trappings of the state. It cannot be pointed to on a map and cannot be reduced to power alone (Janz, 2001). It defies abstraction and predetermination: both central to the notion of space, and as such can allow for nomadic, rhizomatic becomings: for the nomad ‘makes[s] the desert no less than they are made by it’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 382).
- 5.
Kushinski (2019, p. 12, original emphasis) avers that ‘leaks can be utilized as means for understanding the world as entangled networks of material and immaterial, mediate and immediate, human and non-human actors.... Leaks are always sites of multiple actors (human, non-human, more-than-human) and always have material and ideological implications.’.
- 6.
An Afrikaans word meaning a temporary dwelling for nomads and/or travellers.
- 7.
The origin of geo-metry lies in the notion that: ‘… the constitution of the earth (geo) and its measurement and striation (metron) are coexistent. Every year in Egypt, after the Nile foods, land surveyors or “rope-stretchers” (hardenonaptai) would restriate the land; the Greeks called them, precisely, the “measurers of the earth” (geo-meters) ... The measurement and striation of the earth was the condition for the extraction of rent and tribute, since rent requires a direct and quantitative comparison of yields to be drawn between qualitatively different lands’ (Smith, 2018. p. 225).
- 8.
As Bauman says: ‘Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects—but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To “be modern” means to modernize—compulsively, obsessively; not so much just “to be”, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever “becoming”, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement—acknowledged as temporary and “until further notice”. Being always, at any stage and at all times, “post-something” is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, “modernity” changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus... What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) “post-modernity” and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, “liquid modernity”, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago “to be modern” meant to chase “the final state of perfection”—now it means an infinity of improvement, with no “final state” in sight and none desired’ (2000/2012, p. 2).
- 9.
Referring to the etymologies of the terms ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ Golańska (2017) reminds us that: ‘whereas Greek ἐν (en [or em]) refers to “in, at,” σύν (sun [or syn/sym]) stands for “with, together” and implies connections or assemblage. Different from empathy, sympathy—as defined within the new materialist context—connotes togetherness or withness rather than being in, or speaking from, the position of others.... Thus construed, the concept invokes constant, transformative and, often unpredictable material-semiotic becoming with the world/the others’ (Golańska, 2017, pp. 193–194, original emphasis).
- 10.
Drew Leder (1990), the philosopher and medical sociologist, describes ‘social dys-appearance’ as the act of seeing oneself as an ‘alien thing’ through the ‘assertoric gaze’ of the narrow-minded, the ‘dogmatic, intolerant, rigid, fixed, inflexible, exclusionary’ (Levin, 1988, p. 440) gaze of those in power; shunned, rendered invisible, seen as a type rather than an individual, the dys-appeared in turn seek to hide from the antagonistic stare, psychologically and physically, and so become complicit in their own dys-appearance and disappearance.
- 11.
Fricker (2007, p. 4) defines ‘identity prejudice’ as ‘a label for prejudices against people qua social type’, which leads to ‘testimonial injustice’.
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Blyth, C. (2022). Storyplay Time at School: Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education. In: Blyth, C., Aslanian, T.K. (eds) Children and the Power of Stories. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_6
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