Immersion into a Pleasurable Flow That Affords Combinings and Creativities

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we argued that cultures of alignment and standardizations can interrupt ‘certain types of flow’. In this chapter we return to the idea of flow and link this to notions of emergence and pleasure. We suggest that the generation of environments that support pleasurable flow are part of diversity work in any setting, as these environments are the spaces where difference emerges as it is tried out. We avoid the temptation of firmly locating emergence and alignment as oppositional and instead opt to write about them as relational. In this chapter we note the creative potential and happenings that emergent spaces offer. We take heed of Maxine Greene’s (2001) observation that educative spaces are excessive and unpredictable and therefore emergent. Rather than pursue the tendency towards standardization, avoidance and control in such spaces we intentionally seek to immerse ourselves in such environs and go with the flow. In the process, we name and notice some examples of creative outcomes and story these events. We position creativity as an effect of combinings, and as an imprecise, unpredictable, ineffable learning forward that may be enabled within emergent spaces characterized by pleasurable flows.

Interlude: Noticing and Naming Temporal Dimensions

We suggest standarizations erase and ignore temporal possibilities of the type that we are noticing have been critical for us in doing this book. For example the audit culture that we are critical of is very limiting in its idea of time. In particular, it suggests that people can and should routinely meet pre-specified expectations; that knowledge, practice and thinking can and should be guided by, meet and align with pre-determined requirements. This ignores and erases the critical place and role of time in the way people think, make, know, do and are.

In the neoliberal technical time that we live in time is constructed and revealed and lived as a resource to be efficiently used where what it means to be efficient is to do ever more quickly—there’s a reduction in time that is required and allocated to move through spaces and at the same time the space that can be moved through is amplified. There is a demand to move through more space more quickly and in the process we often find ourselves skating along the surface of what we will call quick spaces.

Flows of capital in goods and wealth, fast food, information superhighways, veneer, online learning platforms, efficiency dividends, 2 min noodles, microwave dinners, simulacrum, quick scholarship, 3 min theses, deadlines, global flows of finance, quick transactions, super-fast internet, moving forward (erasing the past), endless shiny surfaces, fast-fashion, the processed and pre-packaged, intensive university courses, intensifications that encourage people to speedily skate towards the normative.

Thinking temporally helps to understand this book, for example we have written aspects of this book over periods of 6 years. We have written other aspects of this book within 6 min—however for us to be able to write something in either 6 years or 6 min we have come to recognize has taken 50 years of combined scholarship that includes a slow enduring engagement with ideas and constant thinking. There is a multiplicity of temporalities in the writing spaces and moments that we have inhabited that would possibly be unintelligible to standardized neoliberal systems of governance because they do not align with for example standardizing audit cultures, performativity requirements and so forth. We can only write fast after slow thinking.

Another temporal dimension of our book is intentionally engaging with the past, the present and the future. The first sections of this book involve reflections about unexpected moments that occurred in the past—that in turn have produced moments of clarity that have become objects of curiosity. Objects of curiosity that suggest imagined futures, futures yet to be, and only possible via an active engagement with what has come to pass. And we also are engaging with the past to imagine futures yet to be.

We have also intentionally engaged with slow scholarship and one form this has taken for us is by not setting any deadlines, by not having any contractual arrangements that require submission of materials within defined timelines, or pre-specified contents. This has also involved setting dedicated time where the authors meet to write, dialogue, and think collaboratively. We also didn’t place a tight time line on the production of the book or seek to write within an environment that would demand such structure.

We would suggest for the reader that these considerations are just as critical, for example, as it has taken us a combined 50 years of scholarship, to produce this book, it might take the reader 50 years of reading, thinking to comprehend what we have written.

Another way readers might temporally engage with this book is that they might read some parts quickly and they might read other parts slowly. The book is written with this intention—to quicken, stall, and speed up and slow down readers’ engagements, and in the process to encourage readers’ sensitization to the critical importance of temporality in relation to knowing, doing and being and via the deployment of such techniques to encourage non-normative engagements with the text. Time is a space that can be deployed to counter various standardizations.