Individuating ‘sparks’ and ‘flickers’ of ‘a life’ in dance practices with preschoolers: the ‘monstrous child’ of Colebrook's Queer Vitalism

ABSTRACT

What are the dominant images of the Child in contemporary Western societies? In order to challenge some dominant images of the Child, this essay explores the possibilities of analyzing an experimental dance practice with preschoolers aged 1–2 years with Claire Colebrook's theorizing on ‘the war on norms’. Colebrook suggests a Queer Vitalism to push the limits of how to understand humanness generally, and more specifically, how to understand processes of subjectification. She moves from a post-structuralist understanding toward the Deleuzian notion of practices of individuation and processes of becoming-imperceptible. In this essay, we draw on Queer Vitalism to show how it is possible to understand children's constructions of subjectivity in events of experimental dance practices for preschoolers. The analysis is performed in close interactions with video-films from these workshops transformed to still photography. We aspire to show how these practices can be understood as counter-power strategies in the enactment of an image of a Monstrous Child. Such an image might transform the taken-for-granted image of the Child and preschool practices in subversive ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Claire Colebrook
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
• Queer Vitalism
• individuation
• becoming-imperceptible
• experimental dance
• preschool children

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank all the children who participated in these experimental dance events.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are writing the word (Hu)Man this way in order to make visible a dominant humanist and anthropocentric understanding of the concept of the human, in relation to which the Child, Woman, Animal, etc., are considered lacking and incomplete beings aspiring to become complete and agentic human beings.

2. Vitalism here relies on Colebrook's (2014b, p. 100) definition as ‘the imperative of grounding, defending or deriving principles and systems form life as it really is', also beyond humans, which, writes Colebrook, is why also many post-human and anti-biopolitical models can be vitalist. Vitalism can, according to Colebrook, be divided into either an active vitalism which assumes that life refers to acting and organized bodies. Post-structural and post-humanist accounts of vitalism can be active because they refer to a language system that constitutes bodies in particular ways according to, for instance, male and female norms; or, in some post-human accounts, the human body is seen as part of a systemic organic whole. Referring to a system or body, they ‘remain at the level of the actual and of active human agents' (p. 100). The Deleuzian form of vitalism Colebrook refers to as a passive vitalism. It refers to life as virtual and thus a power without the image of the living body. Life as a differentiating field of powers expresses itself in various forms of, for instance, genders, so that every gender is an individual actualization of a genetic and social/cultural potential for sexual differentiation (p. 105).

3. The transformation from working material of the preschool to research data involves several ethical considerations. Informed consent was given by all the children's guardians and the teachers involved in this dance project to use the pedagogical documentation in research. All the children's and teachers' names have been excluded. Two of three researchers have not been directly involved in designing the daily classroom activities at the preschool. The data collection is part of an Educational Doctorate thesis (Gustafsson, in press).