Troubling troubled school time: posthuman multiple temporalities

Abstract

Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particular relationship to and experience of time is nowadays prominently fostered and cultivated in educational institutions. We propose that ‘time’ and ‘childhood’ are intrinsically entangled concepts and logically connected, in the lived experience of educational contemporary institutions, with colonialism and capitalism. Decolonisation requires a troubling of the experience of time as it involves the subordination and denigration of children and childhood (‘mysopedy’). We do this through a genealogy (a political reading of ‘the’ present) of the concepts time, childhood and school. Inspired by Karen Barad, we adopt Kyoko Hayashi’s idea of ‘travel hopping’. Travel hopping as methodology is a transindividual commitment to undo the injustices committed to those who are (also) no longer there (as well as our ‘own’ childhood ‘selves’), without any pretense that the past can be made undone. Drawing on Barad’s queer reading of Quantum Field Theory, we produce decolonising insights by diffractively tunneling through boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies in our writing, thereby unsettling the current relationship to time, the adult/child binary and adult temporality.

Keywords:

• Barad
• posthumanism
• chronos
• mysopedy
• childhood
• decolonisation
• time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Developmentalism is a well-known phrase in childhood studies. It has its grounding in the Aristotelian idea that the individual child’s mind/psyche (and body) is in a process of being formed according to its innate potential: in the same way that an acorn flourishes (eudomonia) when it becomes an oak tree. If this development is regarded as a ‘natural’ process, it is difficult to see the active role children can play in their own development. For an overview of decades of multidisciplinary critique of developmentalism, see: Murris (2016). The key assumption in developmental theories is that the goal of the process is maturity – each stage is followed by one that is ‘better’, more ‘mature’.

2 The Greek word ‘pais’ is the same word for both child and slave and was used both for girls and boys (Golden, 1990, p. 15).

3 Canadian scholar Toby Rollo prefers the term “misopedy” over ‘childism’, because the latter is also used to deny childhood dignity. Misopedy denotes “a non-clinical sense of antipathy towards children and childhood”. As opposed to the clinical term ‘misopedia’ introduced by psychologists in the nineteenth Century (Rollo, 2018, 16ftn 2).

4 In our times, schools are regulated and organized by chronos. Students are divided, grouped and classified on the basis of age; curricula are chronos based (classes of x minutes, disciplines and credits of x number of hours, semesters, years, etc); and the whole educational system is organized chronologically (pre-school from x to x years old; elementary school, x number of years; high school, y number of years, etc.). We develop this argument further below.

5 Rollo (2018, p. 65) points out “how the terms baby, babble, and barbarian derive from the same Indo-European root baba, connoting the incomprehensible speech of the infant (likewise, ‘infant’ from the Latin in fans, connoting ‘without speech’)”.

6 We are not going to enter in the specificity of the actual presence of (digital) technologies in school. Our assumption is that a chronological (linear, binary) concept of time is still operating in them.

7 Through a “cutting-together-apart” (Barad, 2014): from-child-within-adult-within-child. Each position in spacetime is a multiplicity – a superposition.

8 Quantum Field Theory (QFT) combines “quantum physics, special relativity and classical field theory” (Barad, 2018, p. 218).

9 Officially called: ‘the position-momentum indeterminacy principle’. (Barad, 2018, p. 218)

10 For a helpful basic explanation of the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuv6hY6zsd0

11 As we have seen earlier, with ‘queer’ Barad does not just mean ‘strange’ but it disrupts the Nature/Culture binary and is therefore an ‘undoing of identity’, because waves and particles are ontologically different entities. It raises the key question how is it possible that an electron can be both? See: Retreived from February 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS7szDFwXyg

12 When reading Karen Barad re-turned to this text by reading it aloud at a seminar in Cape Town, June 2017, some delegates pointed out their discomfort with Trinh Minh-ha use of ‘apartheid’ (see also Barad, 2014), as its abstract use here does not to justice to the painful and violent context of human suffering in South Africa.

13 This important principle in QFT is officially called ‘the time-energy indeterminacy principle.’ (Barad, 2018, p. 220)

14 Barad (2018, p. 220) explains: Linear combinations of (different) times, not moments or events sequenced in time.

15 See below for an explanation of aion.

16 For a more detailed account, see Kohan (2016).

17 Barad (2018), p. 210.

18 Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012), p. 158.

19 Barad (2018), p. 227.

20 The problem is not necessarily that time is understood as linear. Cyclical time, for example, associated with ‘natural’ cycles and feminism, is also linear. The concern in childhood studies is with the claimed universality, objectivity, causal sequencing, irreversibility and quantitative measurability of chronological temporality. See, e.g. Honkanen (2007). As Karen Barad (2018, p. 220) argues: Diffraction patterns are based on linearity: ‘not a linearity of moments or events evenly distributed in time, but a linear combination of (different) times’. Each history, Barad argues, ‘coexists with the others’ (p. 220).

21 Barad (2018, p. 220).

22 Barad (2018, p. 220).

23 Barad (2018).

24 In the Latin American tradition, Simón Rodríguez (2001), philosopher and educator of the nineteenth century, problematised the relation of otium (leisure time) and school by strongly criticizing the colonisation of school time by those who seek to reduce school to the site of a negotium, in Spanish neg-ocio, the negation of otium. Those who take school for granted, then, are involved in anti-schooling. For a contextualisation of Rodriguez’ ideas regarding schole, see Kohan (2015).

25 Based on this insight, Belgians pedagogues, Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simmons have unfolded a sophisticated analysis of school as a form. See their In defense of school, 2014.

26 There is a polemic about another word, petteúon, after playing, that would be specifying a specific kind of game that illustrates the way in which aion plays as a child. See Marcovich’s comments in Heraclitus (2001).

27 Barad (2018, p. 238).

28 Barad (2018, p. 221).

29 Barad (2018, p. 238).

30 Barad (2018, p. 230).

31 Barad (2018, p. 231).

32 Barad (2018, p. 237).

33 Barad (2018, p. 241).

34 Barad’s argument here is based on the implications of QFT for understanding the void in classical physics. For the former, an electron is a particle with zero dimensions and without (Cartesian) extension, i.e., it does not take up space, and has no interior, no structure. However, this ‘nothingness’ is ‘inseparable from the wild activities of the vacuum’, see: Barad (2018, pp. 233–234).

35 Barad (2018, p. 232).

36 As argued elsewhere (Murris, 2017), the containment model for bodily boundaries and selves might be more typical of male experiences, which have shaped the Western metaphysical notion of self and self-identity: bodies as containers and selves as ontologically autonomous with properties—a body that is One and not the Other.

37 Barad (2018, p. 236).

38 Barad (2018, p. 236).

39 Through a ‘cutting-together-apart’ (Barad, 2014): from-child-within-adult-within-child. Each position in spacetime is a multiplicity—a superposition.

Additional information

Funding

This writing is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa [Grant number 98992] and the National Research Foundation of Brasil [Grant number 202447/2017-0].

Notes on contributors

Karin Murris

Karin Murris is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Oulu (Finland) and Emerita Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy, University of Cape Town (South Africa). She is a teacher educator and grounded in academic philosophy and a postqualitative research paradigm, her main interests are in childhood studies and democratic postdevelopmental pedagogies.

Walter Kohan

Walter Omar Kohan is Full Professor of Philosophy of Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Senior Researcher at the National Council of Research of Brazil (CNPq) and at the Foundation of Support of Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ, Brazil). Director of the Center of Studies in Philosophy and Childhood (State University of Rio de Janeiro, www.filoeduc.org) and co-editor of Childhood & Philosophy (http://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/childhood). His research interests include the interrelationships between childhood, education and philosophy, Paulo Freire and Latin American pedagogy.