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The Politics of Becoming : . . . Making Time . . .

Cathie Pearce, Debora Kidd, Rebecca Patterson and Una Hanley Qualitative Inquiry 2012 18: 418 DOI: 10.1177/1077800412439527 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/18/5/418

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iry

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QIX18510.1177/107780041

The Politics of Becoming: . . . Making Time . . .

Cathie Pearce,1 Debora Kidd,1 Rebecca Patterson,1 and Una Hanley1

Qualitative Inquiry 18(5) 418426 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800412439527 http://qix.sagepub.com

Abstract This article seeks to explore a politics of becoming. Emphasizing the dynamics of both time and the affects produced with it, we engage by following the questions that are taken up, which bubble through the middle and which niggle at the margins of our thoughts. In sensing out the imperatives that seek to tie emotions to subjects, we argue that there is also an imperative for researchers and scholars to inquire into their own and we do so with a specific project in mindthat of reconstituting the conditions of hope that we want to argue are key for any educative role. Deleuzes three syntheses of time have enabled us to consider both retrospective and prospective trajectories in ways that prevent any simple linear, mechanistic, or deterministic patterning. As we reevaluate and explore emotions reliance on subjectivity, we also search for the impersonal affects that connect. Keywords affect, becoming, time, subjectivity, education

Youre born, you live, you diethats it (2007)1 He drew lines without trying to interpret the emerging shapes, nor to will their destinations. And the ends of the lines were always lost in themselves. When he got tired, he stopped. Ben Okri, 2009, p. 77

Words catch people up in things, some things anyway. They form entanglements, sensations, encounters, impulses, daydreams, dreams of all kinds, habits of relating, strategies, and failures. The somethings are thrown together, and in these spaces are future histories. This article seeks to explore what it means to make time in education. It seeks to ask what happens when we see space and how we might come to conceive of time differently.

Habits of Time: One of Us Begins by Recalling an Event

The fracture or hinge is the form of empty time, the Aion through which pass the throws of the dice. On one side nothing but an I fractured by that empty form. On the other, nothing but a passive self always dissolved in that empty form. A broken earth corresponds to a fractured sky. Deleuze, 1994, p. 355

In one of my early teaching experiences in a primary school in the United Kingdom, I can recall an encounter with a child which had a profound affect upon me and continues to do so even today. Matthew was 5 years old, had behavioural difficulties and found school difficult. He loved painting and drawing. One particular afternoon, he was drawing a street scene with cars and houses and people and dogs. They were animated images rather than disconnected images and were clearly part of an event of some kind. His skills with a pencil were far beyond anything I had seen, and I was quite taken with the intricate details and nuances of the pencil lines that were emerging on the paper. Great, I had thought, will be really lovely to have that up on the wall, and I turned my attention elsewhere. When I looked up a few moments later, he was using a large paintbrush and with big sweeping movements was painting over the picture with black paint. I shouted over in horror, Matthew, stop, what are you doing? and he looked at me stunned. The class had stopped too. By this time, we were standing next to each other and I could see the puzzlement

Manchester Metropolitan University, Didsbury, UK

Corresponding Author: Cathie Pearce, Education and Social Research Institute, Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, 799 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester M20 2RR, UK Email: c.pearce@mmu.ac.uk

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Pearce et al. on his face. In a quiet voice he said, its night time. As we exchanged glances quizzically, he slowly began to put brush to paper again. I stood and watched in silence and could feel tears submerged in my being. The picture was disappearing before my very eyes. I couldnt make sense but standing back intuitively seemed the right thing to do. The other children asked me why?I had no answer. That encounter changed the way I taught, the way I felt and understood and I return to it often when I need to ask, what if? The picture was put up on the wall. It became a departure point, a talking point for many and a rupture to habitual ways of thinking, or so I thought. Twenty-five years on, I still experience the rush of language and thought when I remember this event. It still gets my heart racing and my pulse going as I remember Matthews face, his expressions, the context, emotions, the picture, the lines, the wonderment and the transgressions which the event precipitatedpictures became stories; the personal became public; teaching became pedagogy, and ordinary affects became the very stuff of inquiry. And so, you would think, a practitioner researcher was born. It happens every time. They said, you have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar (in Greene, 2001). Teachers and educators are faced with concerns, paradoxes, and dilemmas that are as profound as any that philosophy addresses. The problem of experience is common to both and yet current educational discourses and contexts presume and assume that experience is what merely happens to individuated bodies and minds. Deleuze and Guattari (1984,1988) suggest that we decenter and resist anthropomorphic approaches while retaining what is human. Grossberg, in Gregg and Seigworth (2010) claims that any meaning and significance has to be affectively charged for it to constitute your experience. . . . it can be affectively charged through forms of social machinery. It can be affectively charged unconsciously (p. 328). To return to the account, the I never asked or invoked what is going to happen? and never asked about any underlying connections with ideologies and desires. It was never concerned with what was repeating, or in what ways this I was contributingwittingly or unwittingly to impositions of identities? Such questions were of no concern at that time or in that time. Yet to search is not to simply recall

419 as thinking also predisposes us toward feeling and judging, yet it can also help us better understand action in several senses of the word. As one of us reads, it is not Matthew she sees but another 5-year-olda familial connection recreating a fictional Matthew, generating empathy, but also making assumptions which allow sorrow to be shareda fusing of two times, two children, two memories so that there is a moment of that reminds me. Discourses can make and unmake sense, but they cannot sense and we are interested here in searching the potential for change. Sensing requires impromptusthere is something not quite given, known, or said.

Transcendental Ground of Time: How Things Come to Pass

To attend to ordinary affects is to trace how the potency of force lies in their immanence to things that are both flighty and hardwired; shifty and unsteady but palpable. Kathleen Stewart, 2007, p. 3 Ordinary affects are, Stewart suggests, more compelling than ideology. They do not work in the same rational modes or operate in the same domain as language. They are also more fragmentary, rhizomatic, and unpredictable than any assurance that symbolism might offer or claim. In other words, it is not possible to enter a single plane of analysis and affects dont lend themselves to any neat parallels either. Affects affect precisely because they arrive unannounced, exert a pull and a draw which one cannot simply ignore. We can close our eyes and cover our lips and ears, but we hear them anyway. And yet, affect also inhabits a space, resonates, and can have a lightness of touch where each scene can begin anew again. So, just what is going on? How is time being marked in the account above? It is after all a narrative and so lends itself well to all kinds of analysis and deconstruction that any text could open itself up to. But this text is still trying to imagine what is going onits watching and waiting for an event to unfold, meanings to slip from the ends of their sentences. We are still digesting the details from the scene, the bits left out for stylistic sensation and grammatical sense. The flow is still charting the progression in which one thing led to another on that day and which the I predictably remembers all the parts, though not necessarily in the right order (as the U.K. comedian Eric Morecambe would say!). It is the stilling of life that tries to give the pause but which must fail and does, leaving only a resonance that lingers. The ordinary affects again, that dream. . . . Kathleen Stewart asks, How do any of us get ourselves out of something we have got ourselves into?

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420 to get out of something youve gotten yourself into, shopping, hoping, wishing, regretting and all the tortures of exclusion and inclusion; self and other, right and wrong, here and there. (Stewart, 2007, p. 10) We can hear them all in the account above and might usefully ask how they are acquiring their consistency? Dreams of having and getting; somethings and nothings, hope and despair, means and ends, product and process, forgetting and remembering. Expectations are being raised from the past, projected toward a future via this present. Rather than gleaning some meaning from the narrative, meanings are being produced with the narrative. Not only is the process or writing bringing them into existence but with each rereading, another memory is nudged, reformed by resonance, rippling through readers and writers, and bringing multiple affective possibilities into existence but always in a process of metamorphosis. Yet at the same time, things cant return in the same waygrowths are appearing, thoughts sprout in and through the personal and public prisms that emerge. Kundera (1976/2000) whispers, do you think that the past, because it has already occurred, is finished and unchangeable? (p. 89) Well . . . yes, no, perhaps, not quite, Oh we dont know, and not knowing is an uncomfortable, edgy place to be. Much current educational research is premised upon the empirical, the present, the visible, audible, measureable and assess-able. It is research that marks time by making everything look natural and normal. It justifies, maintains, and sustains hierarchy and inequities in the educational system, and we are adding to it, we. . . . in failing to see how our own thoughts and actions have not come from nowhere and that will return to some-where, if we dont choose to refuse. What word, are we looking for? What verb could that be? What word is needed in that space? In Nathalie Sarrautes (1997) novel, Here, she charts the space where she cant remember a particular word. Its nearly on her tongue, in her mind but just wont appear, wont show itself, and it sets the novel off in a play of words that illustrates and explores how nothing in experience is certain, nothing is safe, nothing is fixed. The novel challenges and undermines any certainties that perspectives are just differing sides of the same object which can deliver or present an empirical reality directly to us. In charting the transitory flow of trying to bring a word to mind, she plays in the spaces between stimulus and response, past and future, time and rhythm. The novel upends the false and silly choices that we meander through in our attempts to creatively remember anything. It forces laughter at how our thoughts play with meanings in the affective dimension where each term, logic and association, needs another to

Qualitative Inquiry 18(5) exist. Nothing makes sense until it is embedded into the next set of activities, intentions, and consequences. However fragmentary it might seem, time is on our sidefor now. To return to the account again, novelists like Sarraute, Joyce, and Kafka, philosophers such as Maxine Greene, educationalists, and educational researchers who seek to work with philosophies of difference call for an active engagement. Deleuze and Guatttari would surely add to such creative conflicts. McDermott and McDermott (2010) write, Here comes Everybody as they quote the Joycean phrase; and here they are: the progressive liberals, the practicing teachers, the action researchers, the reflective practitioners, the educational researchers, the curriculum developers, the supervisors, the professors, government, those who make the policy, those who decide what policy and when, those who control the research money, those that get allocated the funding . . . they are all there or here. To think that the account presents a teacher, in a classroom privately thinking about her own practice and sharing it with others is not only laughable from here but seriously oppressive and stifling. What happened to make it that way? What forces held it in place? So far, we have upended and reframed some of the dichotomies that played themselves out in the account and which marked time in particular ways but even the seriousness of it all is compellingAs Mc Dermott and Mc Dermott (2010) say, who tricked us into that one? serious v fun? Making change is serious fun, and those that would keep serious and fun apart are a serious problem. There are people to work with, words to play with and new lives to be experienced. When in doubt, ask Maxine Greene! . . . and Nathalie Sarraute and . . . and . . . and . . . , a s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g of histories. Calvino (1996) would prefer a notion of lightness but what we are trying to convey here is that there is a joyfulness to be experienced in the pursuit of inquiry and reflection when we realize what axiological dimensions hold our sense making in place. Far from being isolated and alienated, we can experiment with our heuristic incertitudes and resist our ready made interpretations. . . . to have the presumption to insinuate oneself into these forbidden places, to shatter their silence if only by murmers, by babblings . . . with the most timid, prudent words . . . let them once penetrate, and they are certain to introduce others . . . (Sarraute, 1997, p. 68) Night brought with it time . . . although the I (eye) is still seeing the world through personal perceptions, and, from this, positing a ground from which a becoming can be determined.

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Pearce et al. Look out! Here comes a dead subject! As Terada (2001) argues, integrity, authenticity and intentionality can no longer be seen as unproblematic when representation and powers of production are called into question. Far from being impossible without a subject, emotion is our recognition of the subjects death (p. 51). Yet as Deleuze suggests that it is not enough to just recognize our entanglements with discourse, culture and constructions of reality for recognition alone is a sure way to remain as we are and enslaves us to pregiven images of thought. How can we both resist identification while being open to possibility? Resist humanism while embracing what is significant to our humanity and what concepts might help us to value what can lend itself to connection, sharing, and exchange of a different kind? Cole writes Deleuze and Guattaris project has a wider scope than creating a buffer zone around the social constructions in the classroom and reflective critique. Their idea is to utilise all the forces present in the learning arena, and to create an intensive experimental field where any possibility may become apparent. (Masny & Cole, 2009, p. 172) To return again to the account, in a sense, experiences were being charted and mapped. As teacher, the I had noted animated images rather than disconnected images and yet the I was also waiting for meanings to reveal an underlying narrative and for what might become visible. An oedipal story then, that would explain the investments and structures in ways that one could make senseafter all, the I saw cars and houses, people and dogs! As teacher, the I also noted the ways in which practices had an effect. A child-centered classroom that enabled choice, autonomy, and freedom of expression with a caveat that saw this teacher shout over as a first response in seeing the oedipal disappearing! Alarmed at her own intervention, she withdrew and watched as a blanket of night time sank into the paper. Despair gave rise to hope and what was experienced as disappointment transformed itself into celebration. The celebration was for process over product; a painting on the wall that made sense only to those who asked of it and about it and a small triumph for the children in having voice and making claims to their stories. Is it also the fading and amplification of experience that repeats, refuses its blindspots, and continues to reinforce the same? And note too, the moves here, that are reaching for their transcendental claims, invoking the one over the multiple, the I and the we, and this blanket of sameness to quickly smooth over the differences. Each of these accounts also presupposes one time rather than several possible temporalities. The account in this sense has relied upon chronos time: a time where things are happening and yet where they are also failingfailing to connect, failing to materialize, and

421 failing to move out of their frozen forms. John Marks (1998) writes, As Bergson points out, the intellect tends to spatialise, to immobilise the flux that is being. In this way perception of being is reduced and impoverished (p. 33). Bergsons notion of duration directly addresses the significance of flux and movement. His notion of duration introduces difference into time whereby there is an impossibility of static, identical repetitions through time but where consciousness still grasps the movement from one member of the series to another. Widder (2008) notes that, Deleuze on the other hand seeks a time of the aborted cogito, that demands that a fundamental discontinuity be introduced to time (p. 90). Perhaps it is in the failure of that promise which gives rise to new temporalities. A creative remembering that also works with potentialities making what happened incomplete and completing what never happened (Bohler, 2010, p. 74). And it is the notions of failure and hope that are operative here for without them, memory and narration are just recursive acts that simply refer to existing stories and use them exhaustively without any necessary linkage to the current situationin other words, without a notion of failure and hope nothing would happen; it would not be felt and experienced in such double binds; failure and hope, critique and possibility, promise and potentiality. Not a world that is but temporalities of differences and becoming in which there are both openings and closings. How do learnings pass intergenerationally? What conceptions of teaching unwittingly reinforce domination? How can the changing terrain of affect be adequately charted and worked with? How can intersubjective and relational aspects create learnings that might help us to understand our lives more productively? These are questions that emerged from our encounters. Why not make do with two fluxes, my duration and the flight of the bird, for example? Because the two fluxes could not be said to be in coexistence if they were not contained in a third one. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 80)

Marking Time Differently: Creating or Making Time

I still wonder at how unaware I was of so many frequencies; and I wonder how many remain unheard. Maxine Greene, 2000, p. 192 Once we free life from its organist or foundational models, where every becoming is grounded on an origin, end or order, we are open to rethinking time. Colebrook, 2002, p. 61

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422 Educational institutions in the United Kingdom, whether they be schools, colleges, or HE, are increasingly modularizing knowledge and creating episodic units of learning. Time is being collapsed and radically condensed, and yet there is an assuming and subsuming of time in the movement. We mark time in education with our assessments as summative of, learning and formative for learning both invoke a reproduction of what is. At the same time we create causal links whereby expectations are linked with performance befores with afters, pasts with futuresso how can we rethink? Currently, the chronometrics of educational institutions gathers up pasts, presents, and futures as a series of interlocking units. However, phenomenological positionings cannot be viewed from nowhere, and such linear leapfrogging seriously limits our understandings of time. Deleuze offers a challenge for us to rethink the grounds upon which a present might exist. In doing so, his rethinking of time enables us to resist the ways in which identities might be constituted by the stamping of chronological measures from those who want to impose what is real or true or proper or good. Explorations of time that can resist such chronology also enables us to pay attention to the disjunctions, the bits and pieces that dont easily fit together, the disarticulations that lurk between the sayable and the seeable. Progressive education put active learning and the child at the forefront of pedgagogical processes, and yet this movement has also borne witness to some of the most punative, reductive, and limiting educational practices in a generation whereby young peoples affect and imagination have been all but expunged from our institutions. So how can we mark, or make time for those who speak, write, and resist in their own voices? How can we break through the routine, the numbing, the frozen, and the unexplored? And how can we avoid perceiving only that which concerns us? What might happen educationally speaking if we break with a notion of chronometric time? What might if mean in deed? That little word if that does so much work in introducing possibility itself. The word, if, introduces phrases of desire (if only!) and phrases that suggest conditionality (if you try hard). It can introduce surprise (if this doesnt make you laugh) and exclamation (if there is one thing that annoys me). And while working with all these possibilities, it also introduces doubt and uncertainty (the big if is whether this will work at all), and yet it can also be that last straw that breaks in order to forge agreement and insist (there will be no ifs and buts about it). Such a small word, two letters, hardly noticeable in the scheme of things and yet it creates so many possible trajectories and differential desires. But what kind of nonsense is this? What kind of impersonal connections are at work here? And what work can if do? Buchanan (2008) spoke of the problematic if only discourses that work to legitimize action. They are at work, we

Qualitative Inquiry 18(5) reckon, in the narrative vignette too . . . if only invoking the melancholic loss, uncertainty and abyss of the night time in relation to the patriarchal school day. The mechanical reproductions that value busyness, purposefulness, and a displaying of interiority. Returning again to Matthews narrative, the I was looking at things as they were happening and in doing so invoked many Western emphases that privilege reflecting over doing. What was being valued was independence, autonomy, privacy of thought, and an approach to art and art practice that is as meaningful as valentines and ashtrays in schools as Maxine Greene might say! (Greene, 2001, p. 170). However, as long as there is an if, there is also a chance, a hope, and a space for emotion. The entire temporal is wormy . . . everything is wormy, the event is wormy, the work, that integrating part of the event is wormy. This is my deep wound, my temporal wound, my eternally temporal wound. (Peguy, 1932, p. 32 as quoted in Williams, 2007) And so, where is the wriggle room, the if space? Thus far, this text has tried to suggest that many of the identifications and so called recognitions are and have been illusory in their nature. They are no more fixed and certain than anything else might be in experience. Nevertheless, they searched for the transcendentals that would give some reassurances, some thing to aim for, yet, experience will always outrun any such attempts as Nathalie Sarraute so poignantly illustrates with her novel. The questions became: What is missing from the accounts? What kind of if only discourses is this text still hankering after?

Making Time. . . . Marking Space

The plural subject becomes a space peopled by a whole range of possibilities and virtualities which are activated in turn by the various circumstances they encounter with the outside world. Jefferson, 2000, p. 48 In 2010, we held a CARN2 study day at MMU titled Collective Imaginings. It marked another point of departure in considering how art might work as a form of inquiry to interrupt us. We asked questions about how art practices can be put to work in action research which is, after all, a form of research committed to doing research with people and which unfolds with time. If art is an active encounter with uncertainty, we were certainly in the encounter! Immediately following the session, each author of this article wrote a vignette in which we attempted to detail the event, its affects, and our respective engagements. The following excerpt is a play of Is that emerged from our vignettes.

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Pearce et al. We were intrigued by a sense that our differential selves were coming out to play and at the same time how resonances could be heard within and across each vignette. We had refused our previous linear accounts, resisted chronological markings constructed by our habitual bodies, and considered what forces might be at work in the intensities of our becomings. What lines draw us? On a vertical reading, there we are, each of us as a separate body expressing our intentions, our desires, our claims to be able to recognize our own being in a series of narrated events; tying our presents to our pasts and anticipating a future. However, on a
Vignette 1 I approach I dont know I know I dont know I am not worried I am surprised but not worried I invite I am confident I receive I am so relieved I dont hear I smile I am rarely disturbed I know I ask them I relax I am concerned I feel I count down I count again I say I shout I am so shocked I burst out laughing I am reeling What did I think I was doing? I shout I KNOW I wanted exactly I wanted them I fret I have broken I ask I am cold I say Vignette 2 I had not considered I looked I dipped into I felt I had to I had placed I felt comfortable I can read art I can place I find difficult I wonder how I like the idea I wonder how I think this is I had chosen I had created I intended it I felt I now focus I felt I would I felt comfortable watching I felt like I connected I saw patterns I connected I could happily

423 horizontal reading, can this also be read across different registers, like catching a thought in your eye/I? And it is this second reading that requires us to see our selves as an assemblage of differential influences, intensities, forces that are at work or play on us. This is not playful contemplations for the sake of it but an indication of a lived-in engagement with one another and where the paradox of voice refuses to settle. It is also to work with the problematics of enclosing history within lived human experience. If language can say all that we wanted it to, what would be the point of music? We leave a further reading of it to you.
Vignette 3 I had been I approached I kept reminding myself I intended/I tried to dispel I tried to let something I was comfortable I felt pulled I mean some kind I was genuinely I arranged I spoke I was happier I had casually rehearsed I continue here I feel I have more to say I found myself not I dont want us to I said I was left wondering I felt the audience I wondered if I wondered Vignette 4 I had inadvertedly shouted I noticed I shouted I found myself I had suddenly arrived I could see I could not hear [the I also hid behind the we] We were in We had a task We collectively landed We struggled to connect We came together We had been asked to do Why do we have to? How can we do this? We need to talk before We came, we saw, we wrote How do we arrive? There we were

Note: Play of Is CP research notes, February 16, 2010.

If art practices can mobilize meanings, they also help us to complicate, travel, dream, resist, and engage. In doing so, art practices can show us how to approach, lose oneself, create stops and starts, and pay attention to habits and responses. In our Collective Imaginings, we made noises in response to silences and requests from others . . . and at the same time, we also began to invent, resist, and engage. How can teachers

work with a language of affect and perfomativity and where such workings are not posited as loss, melancholy, or hidden? In other words, if they are not the veil of reason or the nightmare of the abyss? It was also to break with common sense to show the surface affects on which sense is predicated and generated. The body as it knows itself in different states, discourses, emotions, and engagements.

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424 Whether we liked it or not, the questions that were invoked within our vignettes implied: What is going on? How do these lines mark time as evidence of? What do these lines say about the subjects? How can one make sense of nothing? What happens from here? More over this prejudice goes back to childhood, to the classroom. It is the school teacher who poses the problems; the pupils task is to discover the solutions. In this way we are kept in a kind of slavery. True freedom lies in the power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 15) To read intensively and immanently extends the power to read differently and to think differently, to go beyond what is to what could be, the virtual actual interaction: difference and becoming. (Masny, 2009 as quoted in Masny & Cole, 2009) To write intensively might also invoke such extension. To write experiencetimememorysensingacting; these are all implied in the accounts and yet if we are to resist a unity that might organize our habitual dispositions, our usual responses, a hiccupping movement of repetitions then a rethinking of values is also implied. Taking the ego less seriously, valuing the importance of working collectively around a problem, paying attention to what is unthought and disarticulated within contemporary educational discourses are all projects that we have in mind. Making time in a different sense that attempts to speak the unspeakable, sense the blockages, and create movement for a more just and equitable educational experience. Participants at the Collective Imaginings event were invited to make jottings of their encounters and with the installations each group had created from the materials at hand. We explored how we think about things and how we use things to think with and make connections. As one author among us commented, for me its about trust in silence, trust that thinking is happening and learning does not have to be directly vocalized in the moment. It was a time of doing rather than reflecting and the do-ing could not be anticipated in advance nor a replication of what had gone before. Some excerpts from the day included, We jumped into each other, under the skin, we made connections beneath the surface so we didnt take turns but were led from and to others being open, hearing what others say, noise of our thoughts interfering sometimes.

Qualitative Inquiry 18(5) to be free from the policing of convention undecideably, frustrated, disturbing, hopeful It is a fact of any educational innovation that nothing will change in schools unless teachers are included and part of the new programme. (Seaton, 2002 as quoted by Cole, 2008) We would argue that this also needs to include teacher educators and educational researchers and . . . and . . .

Untimely Endings
Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things, not way downstream in the dream boats and horror shows that get moving. The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react. Stewart, 2007, p. 14 It brings this thought to the edge of chaos so that thinking can indeed become creating. Bell, 2006, p. 3 Perhaps a truth of this problem is one of how to draw lines in and around the problematics of experience; between language and silence, past and future, art and education. Deleuzes three syntheses of time opens up possibilities to learn how to uncover our mistakes, transform our assumptions, and come to terms with our contradictions in ways that ensure that we understand our lives more fully. In synthesizing both Chronos (habitual, chronometric measurement of time) and Aion time (where things come to pass, where they are imposed on sensory memory), we can open ourselves up to a futural time where difference, not sameness, returns. Educational researchers build careers on encounters and engagements with young people, teachers, educators, classrooms, schools. To place emphasis on pedagogical processes has, as Megan Watkins in Gregg and Siegworth (2010). points out, been less than favorable or fashionable in much educational research in the last decade. A focus on a teachers delivery of curriculum is seen to be at the expense of student learning with the teachers imposing their own knowledge upon students, limiting classroom interaction, and acting in a potentially abusive manner by exerting their influence in an attempt to gain the recognition of their students. (p. 272)

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Pearce et al. We recognize such attempts and our own complicities within them but remain committed to experiencing and experimenting with pedagogies and research approaches that can usefully engage with intergenerational, social, cultural, and political learnings. As Grossberg (2010) quotes Foucault, But Foucault is right: you only get to describe realities as they are disappearing, when they are dying (p. 322). Consciousness alone is neither reliable nor useful in helping us to understand experience. Our shame, embarrassment, awkwardness, and uncomfortableness suggests that there is much that has to be navigated. To be in between, to find the middling spaces, enables us to attempt an articulation of our learnings in human rather than humanistic ways. When we become with time, it is difference that returns, not sameness. Deleuze emphasizes the importance of what happens in the gaps, in the spaces between stimulus and response. We rush to fill that gap when we are anxious, hurried, under pressure, or on the spot. We feel compelled to act, to go on but, as the encounter with Matthew suggests, it is important that we counterbalance conceptions of time in which a future is treated as known, or inevitable. What returned here was the initial experience of shock and contingency, of being caught in a moment where we were compelled to act and where there was a brief glimpse, a thought in the eye? In synthesizing habitual time and memory, possibilities present themselves as unrealized paths that were not taken but stay with us nonetheless. As researchers, interested in practice, we sought encounters whereby our anticipatory modes were interrupted, disrupted, and thrown into a different relationship with timeno longer in a projected past, present, and future lineage. Working with notions of time in these ways is to affirm chance and to open up a time of doing whereby we can become artists in our own lives rather than reacting to power and as subjects. Matthews story had to be told, untold, and retold if only to show us how things are thrown together, repeat, resonate, and linger. Our attempts to experience and experiment with pedagogies and research have also tried to challenge normative educational values, explore new ways to write in, and, of experience, create new compositions of learning and pay attention to what might be possible in the not-yet-ness of everyday encounters and engagements. If any thing at all, the politics of becoming that this article has strived to engage with is the play of making time itself. Learning, as Deleuze (1994) remarks, introduces time into thought (p. 187), re-making thought with time which is neither reminiscence nor already given. In those moments, we can widen our possibilities so that who we might become is not a product of inevitability but a chance to open ourselves to an other. It is also to deal with our own complicities while affirming both continuity and rupture with the past. It brings the old into the new in unanticipated waysit draws something new from the difference and

425 asks questions of power and language in a performative sense. What can be done when there is no particular mode of action that announces itself in advance? What becomes? Matthews painting speaks. The event is not what occurs (an accident) it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us. (Deleuze, 1993, p. 149) Its transpersonal or prepersonalnot about one persons feelings becoming anothers but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water . . . it gestures toward the texture of knowing. (Stewart, 2007, p. 129) Acknowledgments
The authors thank CARN (Collaborative Action Research Network) for their support in hosting the study day Collective ImaginingsWays of Knowing at MMU in February 2010 and to all the colleagues who participated on that day. Thanks also to Prof Ian Stronach, LJMU, UK, for his insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. Taken from one of the authors research notebooks from notes with a colleague and supervisor in response to a chapter of a thesis. 2. CARN (Collaborative Action research Network) is an international network of action researchers across disciplines such as education, health, social, and community development.

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Bios
Cathie Pearce is a researcher and formerly a senior lecturer in education at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Didsbury, Manchester, the United Kingdom. Her research interests are in qualitative research methodology and interrelationships between theory and practice. Much of her research interests arise from concerns about how we can think difference, affect, identity, movement, and change. She is interested in philosophies and approaches that can enable us to think productively about our encounters and engagements with the world and which can open up alternatives. Debora Kidd is a researcher and a senior lecturer in education at MMU. Her research interests lie in the connections between research methodologies and pedagogical processes. She has a masters degree in education and is currently completing her doctorate on the role of the affective dimension in teaching and learning. Rebecca Patterson is a senior lecturer in drama in education at MMU. Her interests lie in practice-based qualitative research methods, drawing on various national and international teaching experiences to develop methodologies that encompass both theory and practice. Una Hanley is a senior lecturer in mathematics education at MMU. She is interested in methodological approaches which focus on dilemmas rather than sidelining them and offer a sense of dispersal rather than homogeneity. In this way, customary ways of seeing and practicing and the certainties they carry can be scrutinized and challenged.

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