1st Edition
Writing and Immanence Concept Making and the Reorientation of Thought in Pedagogy and Inquiry
Writing and Immanence is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being.
In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act)ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure.
Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and qualitative research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities.
Foreword/Commentary/Transversal Diffraction A Prelude? An Act of Introduction? Introducing? Middling? When Does the Book Begin? Acts of Embodiment: Bodies/Bodying/(Em)bodying… Acts of Process over Substance Acts of Affective Presencing Acts of Returning to the Rhizome Acts with and of Posthuman Empiricisms Acts of Resistance to the Urge to Transparency Acts of Diary, Notebook and Journal Making Writing Acts as Immanent Doing The Final Act? How Can Becomings Conclude? References
Biography
Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth, UK. His main philosophical and academic interests can be realised when speculation, invention, experimentation and concept making as creative and eventful doing are brought to life in pedagogical practices and research in education.
"Gale’s book is a breakthrough in the most marvelous sense of that idea—of breaking through a dogmatic image of thought organized by stale, impoverished concepts but never landing, refusing to be still, always immanent, always breaking through. This book—a writing always escaping its text— is possible only for an accomplished and respectful scholar like Gale who has read deeply and carefully the orphan line of philosophers—Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Spinoza—and followers like Massumi and Manning whose concepts have taken him up and had their way with him. It is the long preparation of such reading, a trust in writing, and the risk of giving oneself up entirely to a different image of thought—of Gale no longer being Gale—that makes this astonishing book possible. Here is the pleasure of a book overfull and spilling into a life. It should be required reading for all in an education Gale reminds us must be unsettling, provocative, capacious, unrecognizable, always immanent and coming into being differently." -- Elizabeth A. St.Pierre, University of Georgia, USA
"One Sunday in May, you read Writing and Immanence sitting at the beach, the sound and feel of the cold Scottish sea in and around you. As you take the text in, not only through your eyes but through all the senses it evokes, you feel the text’s waves, flows, and currents. Their power is irresistible, compelling. They take you up, they take you over. You close your eyes, hold still, the text continuing to move in you. Back home, the class you teach next day becomes a swaying of energies, a gathering of forces. You can’t help but feel it all. You’re in it, of it. Later, you write at a table outside in the Spring breeze. You haven’t written for weeks, you haven’t understood what you’ve been missing, and it’s been this: this book floods into you, sweeping you with it, picking up your hand, your pen, your notebook; and writing begins." -- Jonathan Wyatt, University of Edinburgh, UK
