Emergent reading

Abstract

Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world’s emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of emergent reading, a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world.

Keywords:

• Schoolbooks
• gender
• intra-action
• diffraction
• re-turning
• emergent listening
• efflorescence
• written word
• more-than-human

I begin my exploration of the concept and practice of emergent reading in early childhood classrooms. In their exhaustive analysis of the schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, Baker and Freebody (1989) showed how those schoolbooks, when they are deployed in classrooms, do much more than teach children to read.¹ They act as “cultural devices for introducing children to some [of the] conventions that govern contemporary schooling” (1989, p. 23), thus transforming children into pupils. Children, Baker and Freebody argued, take up their identities as pupils, not as a superficial gloss, but as a way of being recognizable within the physical and social world of schooling. The form of the printed word that they found in the early schoolbooks, separates children from the creative/emergent qualities of conversation. Learning to read, then, may separate children from the emergent efflorescence of the self in its “infinite alterity” (Barad, 2015, p. 158).

The written word demonstrably has agency—it may entangle itself in the efflorescence of life, or it may, as it apparently did (or still does) in those early schoolbooks, rein it in. Barad elaborates her thinking about the infinite alterity of selves, by drawing on the concept of diffraction from quantum physics. Diffraction is, she writes,

an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling. As such there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then…. Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented effects of iterative reconfigurings of spacetimematterings. (Barad, 2014, p. 168, emphasis added)

The sedimented effects of children’s first schoolbooks, according to Baker and Freebody’s analysis, are laid down through the “iterative (re)configuring” of the child becoming-pupil. The early schoolbooks, then, may to some extent override the lively, intra-active world of sound with an authoritative visual surface, and, moreover, leave sedimented traces that affect our adult habits of reading. There is, after all, as Barad says, “no leaving the ‘old’ behind” (2014, p. 168).

Schooling, and the habits of reading acquired there along with the certitudes they offer, may be useful in making unruly children more biddable—more amenable to authority, and to its structures. But if openness, as quantum physics suggests, is at the core of matter, something vital in each of us as readers, may be being overshadowed. At the same time, as Barad points out, there is, in each child, and in us, as the once-upon-a-time children, “a dynamic play of in/determinacy” (Barad, 2015, p. 160). It is that radical in/determinacy that lies at the heart of emergent reading – as I will explore it here.

In Barad’s words: “Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering… Matter [itself] in its iterative materialisation is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open” (Barad, 2015, p. 160, emphasis added).

The schoolbooks in Baker and Freebody’s study have no sympathy for indeterminacy. They show how the written words through which children learn to read, and through which they take on the written structures of language as their own, etch binary thought in their conscious and unconscious bodies, not only as veridical and authoritative fact, but as the material reality of their own bodies. The schoolbooks establish, for example, the facticity of two (and only two) opposite, hierarchical genders. Through frequent deployment of adjectives such as “little” and “big,” much more frequently than in spoken discourse, girls are written into the texts as little, in contrast to boys who are big. Moreover, when boys are the subject of a sentence, they “answer,” “hurt,” “shout,” “think” and “work.” These verbs are never linked to girls. When a boy, but never a girl, is the object of a sentence, he “comes to,” “jumps with,” “likes,” “plays with,” “talks to” and “walks with.” The only actions reserved solely for girls, in stark contrast, are “holding onto,” and “kissing” (Baker & Freebody 1989, p. 53). Their analysis of these texts, and of their deployment in classrooms, makes for stark reading.

Bergson (2007), writing from the perspective of philosophy and metaphysics, argued that the sedimented reading practices acquired in childhood last well into the adulthood of scholars and philosophers. They (and we) have learned to see the matter and mattering of the world through pre-existing words, and those words, Bergson argued, are too broad, undermining our capacity to experience and to conceptualise what he calls ‘duration’ or ‘creative evolution,’ and what I am calling here, emergent reading/writing/thinking/being/becoming.

We must throw off the habit, he says, of including things “in too wide a genus, things and genera corresponding moreover to pre-existing words” (Bergson, 2007, p. 17). Big, active boys and diminutive, cuddly girls are among those ready-made concepts laid down in early schoolbooks, that are far too broad, overshadowing and reining in the multiplicity and emergent, relational nature of life itself. There is a danger in childhood, that those concepts that are too broad, are taken on as intrinsic to individual human identities, later constraining the thought philosophers and scholars are capable of engaging in.

Bergson’s cure for what he calls this narrowing of intellect is to “get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence” (2007, p. 19, emphasis added). In the context of Baker & Freebody’s analysis that would mean making visible and questionable the taken-for-granted assumptions acquired through such books, and it would mean producing very different books that might invite children, and the adults who work with them, to discover what goes on in the universe in its “continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty” (Bergson, 2007, p. 73).

In my book Shards of Glass. Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities, (Davies, 1993) I invited children to think outside their taken-for-granted, gendered assumptions, and I included original stories, working toward that unforeseeable novelty and capacity for creativity. More recently, I have returned to writing stories for children with that same invitation to openness, to sympathetic encounters with the other, both human and more-than-human, and to creative evolution (Davies, 2014a; Davies, 2024). I am inspired by Bergson’s ideal that we not only make visible the repetitions and regularities in our thinking-in-being, but that we find ways to become living beings who endure and evolve, precisely because we are “continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping” (Bergson, 2007, p. 75).

In our lives, as well as in the texts we create, we must, Bergson argued, open ourselves sympathetically to the ongoing “efflorescence of novelty” in ourselves, in nature, and in the flow in-between one and another. It is this capacity for sympathy that we must acquire, I suggest, if we are to engage in emergent reading.

What limits our capacity for that sympathetic engagement, is the sedimented practice of reading the regularities and stabilities we encounter in written texts, as essential to, and derived from, the fabric of our individualized, essentialized selves. These regularities and stabilities create a settled ground of the self, and of the binary gender order, that have become so thoroughly laid down that it is unthinkable to question them. “We know in our own bones, they say, that this matters, so we now need only to move toward what arises from this fact” (Bey, 2022, n.p. emphasis in original).

To “know in one’s bones” has long been thought of as offering a kind of irrefutable knowledge – irrefutable because it is thought to emerge from an essential self. More likely it has its origins in the sedimented version of the world initially acquired when learning to read. The certainties that written texts offer us, that work to lay down and hold fast the possibility of a recognizable identity—this gender, this race, this class—can be found everywhere, not only in texts written for children.

Take, for example, the once standard use in English language texts, of the male pronoun as the generic pronoun. We were all “he,” those days, in academic texts. That practice was mandated by grammarians, and it effectively obscured from the readers, and also from the writers, the gendered nature of their thinking. It served not only to make women invisible, but to disguise that very invisibility. Berger and Kellner (1964), for example, wrote a radical analysis of marriage and the construction of reality, which they claimed was about marriage as it was constructed by husbands and wives. Yet their analysis was based almost entirely on husbands’ experiences—a fact that the use of the generic pronoun obscured not only from their own view as men and as scholars/writers, but, at first, from my own view as reader. Because of my habituated reading practices, I could not see how it was that the experiences of wives had been made irrelevant in the construction of the reality of marriage (Davies, 1987).

Not only in kindergarten, then, truths are laid down and identities formed through texts that unwittingly serve to limit the infinite alterity of always-emergent, relational selves.

Finding the means to experience, and to express, an emergent “efflorescence of novelty,” and to broaden it into “sympathy with that effort of nature which is constantly renewing” itself (Bergson, 2007, p. 77), presents us with major challenges—in both the writing and the reading of it.

Some writers are turning to the arts, to find their way beyond the sticky limitations of language. Tedeschi (2022), for example, creates a protagonist, a composer/pianist, who struggles to write about his own emergent efflorescence – each moment a small jewel that sparks and strains, resisting and evading the limitations of the written word:

To be unable to say what cannot be said. Some feelings can only be approached obliquely. And yet, it’s as if something is prodding you, feeding you the lie that out there, tantalisingly close, is a perfect assemblage of words or notes that will finally say what’s heaped in your gut. (Tedeschi, 2022, p. 14)

A poem is a form of address, an arm extending out across the evanescence of eternity. At its highest vibration, the poem is the sibling of a dream. (Tedeschi, 2022, p. 19)

To say something the same way twice is also impossible. To speak is to allow for endless variation, to let flow the ripple of association, to play with pitch, timbre and tone. … But to write is to solidify, to codify, to quantify. (Tedeschi, 2022, pp. 25–6)

In The Bell of the World (2023) Day offers us a young woman, Sarah, who is also a composer and the narrator of her own story. She engages in this same struggle with words and with the prescribed forms of music and of social life. She modifies her grand piano with material she finds in her rural landscape, and in her performances she sings poetry together with the music she creates. Some might regard her, she acknowledges, as quite mad. As the central protagonist in her own story, she writes:

And so before you would judge me, consider these airs I bring. Not uppity airs but excited encounters with a green corner of the world, the exhalations of the mosses and lichens, the undammed river’s flow, the way all is made of kindred things, of wood or stone, of leather and linen and mind, and how the hollow flights of romance and the pernicious arrogance of ‘god’s servants’ remain so indelible in us. What was sung here, the notes flowing out over the coastal pastures that helped prepare my piano, cannot be heard; but in what I write perhaps the afternotes, the echoes, remain. These printing words, appearing letter after letter, the residue of my performance, are husks of a flooding young body’s song, its fingertrills and thumperchords. So listen well before adjudicating on my behalf….

Intervene by all means (and I do mean all) but don’t desire for the gaps to be filled too quickly, allow the invisible frequencies their say. (Day, 2023, pp. 57–8)

Sarah thus invites her reader to engage in what Nancy describes as stretching their ears, “an expression that invokes a singular mobility among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of the ear – it is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or anxiety” (Nancy, 2007, p. 5):

To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to ‘me’ (the supposedly given subject), or the ‘self’ of the other (the speaker, the musician, also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the relationship in self, so to speak, as it forms a ‘self’ or a ‘to itself’ in general … [where] ‘self’ is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be ‘present,’ but precisely the resonance of a return [renvoi] … a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other,’ ‘singular’ and ‘plural,’ as much as it is ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘signifying’ and ‘a-signifying.’ (Nancy, 2007, p. 12)

This is an emergent listening that is open to what it doesn’t know—its borders are open as are the borders of the self. Through emergent listening and emergent reading, we open ourselves to entangled vital materialities, our own and others’, and to an awareness of our capacity to affect each other (Davies 2014b).

An emergent reading/writing/listening, then, has borders that are open to differenciation—differenciation that is alive and has agency, not only in texts produced by humans, not only in written texts, but also in visual/auditory/olfactory/sensual texts. Those intra-active encounters with the texts of others—human and more-than-human—are material, alive; they have agency. See, for example, the scholarly engagement in such encounters in: Davies, 2022; Davies & Speedy, 2023; Day, 2022; Thomson & Davies, 2019; Tsing et al, 2017.

Such reading/writing/listening is intra-active, where intra-activity is the “relationships between multiple bodies (both human and non-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries from one another: rather, they are always affecting or being affected by each other in an interdependent and mutual relationship” (Nancy, 2007, p. 152). Reading and writing, for example; self and other; oneself and a body of water, oneself and a tree or a forest…

Following Bergson, I suggest the categories of reading and writing are a pair of categories too wide for what they try to carry, and moreover, the terms that divide them obscure their dependence on each other, their mutual permeability, their necessary relationality. With the concept of emergent reading, I want to move away from reading as a practice that pins knowledge down to what is read, leading to a sense that knowledge occupies some sort of inert mental space that is remarkable for its certitude. In opening up to the space of emergent reading, I want to emphasize that reading and writing, thinking and being, do not have distinct borders that divide them from each other. They must intra-act and affect each other. They are continuously in motion; they exist in relation, not only in the present moment, but also in the past and the future. The matter and mattering of the words on the page or screen, as they have been written by oneself and by others, have agency, they intra-act with us, and diffract us.

Sarah, the young heroine in Day’s Bell of the World addresses us, her readers, inviting us to an emergent reading that is the between of herself as writer and us as readers:

I am only an open book when you open me, like this, see, here we are, in the hush of the writing night, with the bush tapering away to orchid folds, flutings and nubs, the hidden thing, the health of the river. The gown fallen away like bark. I am all strength sheer skin and moistened sap, and so grateful for your attention. … And if as the tonewright I set the key and you are the string the hammer strikes then together we create the time it takes, the stars through which time travels to make its song. It is the song of words that would not kill the dance, or the dancer, be it bird or man. (Day, 2023, pp. 62–3)

Between writer and reader, between thinking and being, Day creates a diffractive entanglement, not just between writer and reader, but between human and more-than-human. In Barad’s words, “Diffraction is a material-discursive phenomenon that challenges the presumed inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, epistemology and ontology, and material and discursive” (2008, p. 333).

Just so, whenever I set out on a piece of writing such as this present writing, I read what others have written, and I read and re-read what I’ve written as it goes through multiple drafts, erasing, writing again, erasing, moving words from here to there, seeing them bounce differently in relation to their new neighbours. Each successive draft, at the same time, bounces off, and with, and into, the writing of others. My writing depends on that reading. My reading depends on that writing.

Often enough I don’t know what I’m reading. Even when I exclaim aha! And yes! I’m not sure what new idea is emerging between myself and the words on the page or screen. I must re-turn to them, where re-turning is responding to “the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave” (Barad, 2014, p.184). I must write the words of others down, try them out as a way of making sense in my ongoing/emergent thinking and writing. And, to adopt Barad’s earthworm metaphor, I must absorb them, digest them, excrete my writing enmeshed with the writing of others, creating and aerating soil—a thought, made more fertile in a never-ending process:

We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (Barad, 2014, p. 168)

It is impossible to locate a beginning (or end) to any piece of such writing, given that it is always threaded through multiple spacetimematterings, multiple acts of absorption and excretion—and multiple sedimentations. Sometimes/often, without being aware of it, I’m integrating others into this mobile organism called the ‘self’, sometimes, perhaps, even creating “the time it takes, the stars through which time travels to make its song” (Day, 2023, p. 63).

Imagination is vital in this diffractive, multi-directional intra-action between emergent reading/writing/thinking/being/becoming. As Deleuze (2004, p. 97) writes: “The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it.” He cuts repetition and lines of flight apart—repetition characterized by its solidification or sedimentation of the status quo, and lines of flight that make a difference, that differenciate, creating something new. At the same time, following Bergson, he reminds us that repetition and lines of flight depend on each other—they intra-act and diffract with each other. One must after all learn to read, going over the letters and their combinations again and again, digesting them, turning them into the rich soil out of which emergent reading/writing might be made.

To engage in emergent reading, we depend on repeating, and re-turning, and learning off by heart. And at the same time, we face the challenge of holding ourselves open to the encounter with the other, and in reading their words, opening ourselves to differenciation—and specifically, to not being “‘me’ (the supposedly given subject)” (Nancy, 2007, p. 12, emphasis added).

In pursuit of that openness, Grosz asks: “How can we produce knowledges, techniques, methods, practices that bring out the best in ourselves, that enable us to overcome ourselves, that open us up to the embrace of an unknown and open-ended future, that bring into existence new kinds of beings, new kinds of subjects, and new relations to objects?” (2011, p. 75, emphasis added)

Barad’s answer to such a question might be that it is a matter of re-turning:

re-turning – not by returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns. (Barad, 2014, p. 168)

She links such re-turning to responsibility—to “a matter of the ability to respond.” We are all, she writes, whether 6 or 60 or 90,

[responsible and accountable] for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part. Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities. Even the smallest cuts matter. Responsibility is then a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self. (Barad, 2011, p. 69, emphasis added)

The sympathy on which this Baradian response-ability depends, requires this capacity to move and be moved. Sympathy reaches through intuition toward a reality outside itself. It is open to what it doesn’t yet know, or even yet know how to imagine. At the same time, what it comes to know is fragile; it can apparently disappear in the face of other ways of knowing, or in forgetfulness. And it can always reappear, and yet, still, be different from before.

And so, to an open ending, and the problem of recognizability…

But how will anyone recognize me, you might ask, if we are forever reconfiguring ourselves, developing new subjectivities, new possibilities, and if we are impossible to separate from those others we intra-act with and that we have sympathy for? You might argue that a more-or-less fixed and recognizable self, identifiable as me and no-one else, is one of those certitudes we have come to depend on.

The problem is, not only can acts of recognition not ultimately fix the object of the gaze, they may also work to diminish it: an unwavering gaze “diminishes its object; the more we recognise someone or something as the same, the more we lose sight/taste/sound/feel of them, of their multiplicity, and their emergence in relation to others both human and more-than-human” (Davies, 2021, p. 90). Acts of recognition can work to possess the other, or to dispossess them, in the act of categorizing them, effectively pinning them down. Recognition as possession and dispossession reiterate and repeat a sedimented set of practices that seek to make the world manageable, easier to make sense of through limited and limiting, broad categories (those categories Bergson sees as the problem). Those repetitions and reiterations create a productive and problematic order that can be overbearing.

What we need, to counter-balance that tendency, is recognition based on sympathy, that reaches through intuition toward a reality outside itself. Through a sympathetic openness to the other, an emergent reading of the other, we become more-than-ourselves—we exceed ourselves—going beyond our habituated patterns of knowing-in-being. I am extending emergent reading, then, in my open-ended conclusion, beyond the reading/writing of text, to the reading of each other, to our relations to the other, including our relations with the more-than-human world.

In what we write, for each other and for children, let us engage, then, in emergent and imaginative playfulness, in poetry and in laughter, sympathetic to each other and to the rich efflorescence of the material world; let us resist pinning things down in broad categorizations, and instead, tunnel like earthworms into the thick tangles of the world.

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Notes on contributors

Bronwyn Davies

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar affiliated with Melbourne University, as Adjunct Professor, and with Western Sydney University, where she is an Emeritus Professor. Her PhD was from The University of New England and she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at University of Uppsala, 2008. The distinctive features of her work are her development of experimental and collaborative ways of doing research, incorporating into her thinking and writing elements of the visual, literary and performative arts. Her writing engages with the conceptual work of poststructuralist and new materialist philosophers. Details of her publications can be found on her website bronwyndavies.com.au.

Notes

1 All the beginning school readers in use in Australia, at the time of this study, were analysed in Baker and Freebody’s study. Most readers had been published in Australia and some in the United Kingdom. A ‘beginning reading corpus’ was created by entering all of the schoolbooks into a computer program with which word sequences and frequencies could be analysed. Their analysis of the texts was further supported by detailed observations of classroom interaction. The readers published in the UK were, at the time, ubiquitous in classrooms throughout the British Commonwealth (Davies, 1995).