Researching with young children: Reconfiguring language and researcher becomings

Introduction

Well, the first day is over. I feel both exhausted and full of energy. I think I entered the child group a bit arrogantly, assuming that we would find a common rhythm immediately. My hesitations and discomfort disturb me and prevent me from seeing what is actually going on.

The text above is the first entry in my audio diary which I recorded during my fieldwork in an early childhood education (ECE) centre in which I spent over a week with two child groups. My initial research aim was a data-driven exploration of emotions in children’s peer relations. However, the fieldwork began under a cloud of misunderstanding due to my mistake. Just before starting, I discovered that the language spoken during teacher-guided group activities was not one I was familiar with. Despite my initial fright, I saw this as an opportunity to learn as my research orientation was grounded on a holistic approach where the voices of the participants extend beyond verbal expressions (Karjalainen, 2021; Viljamaa et al., 2024). I have also emphasised the researcher’s immersive entanglement with relational in-betweenness (Karjalainen, 2021), and I believed I had the personal ability to get immersed in children’s daily life with an inquisitive orientation. In this paper, the forementioned ontological engagements of ‘positioning oneself in-between’ and acknowledging ‘reaching beyond the spoken’ are challenged through emerging shock of thought (Massumi, 2002b).

Before my academic career, I worked as an ECE teacher for years, and currently am a teacher educator and researcher at the university. As a researcher, I have emphasised respect for participants and acknowledged my subjective involvement, carefully balancing engagement in children’s daily lives without disturbing or intervening (Karjalainen, 2021), simultaneously being concerned about the risk that protective discourse concerning children may disregard their voices (see Daelman et al., 2020). In this study, I have followed research ethics guided by The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK, 2023). All required approvals and consents were obtained before data collection, including the municipal research permission. Informed consent was provided by the adult participants, the children’s legal guardians and the children themselves. Alongside these procedural ethics, the sensibilities guiding the research permeated the entire process, unfolding through ongoing attentiveness even to the most subtle indications of children’s willingness to either participate or withdraw (Karjalainen, 2021).

I thought I had carefully reflected on the premises of the study, but they were disrupted by the events encountered during the fieldwork. I was gradually finding emotions to be partial and inadequate for handling the faint, yet intense, forces in research encounters which led me to the concept of affect, providing a horizon for the impersonal, dynamic and immanent forces at play in children’s relations (Massumi, 2002a). I was drawn to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conceptualisations of affect and approached the initial research objective through this lens. Although I intended to focus on a single concept, the whole ontology came along (see St Pierre, 2023) and I realised that research cannot be a mix of different ontologies as, when ontology changes, everything changes (St Pierre, 2017). The article tells a story of emergence (Gale, 2018) at the intersection of shifting ontological orientations. Its impetus comes from a pivotal circle-time involving eight children aged 5–6 on the first day of data collection, an event that set something in motion and destabilised the ontological engagements taken for granted earlier.

Perhaps the self-explanatory and unquestioned litanies were about to manifest my ethical orientation, to perform my capability to challenge the dominating subject–object binaries in research. Testimonies of the researcher’s position and reaching beyond the spoken get a mere mention, while the actual research interest was somewhere else. These upheld principles allowed me to move on to a new project in an orderly, reductive and habitual manner, liberating me from questioning of these issues (Colebrook, 2002). However, the uncertainties provoked me to produce something new (MacLure, 2023) and I felt that I had not a chance of returning (St Pierre, 2004). ‘[T]he shock of the altered status of language in a materialist ontology has not yet been fully felt’, St Pierre (2017: 1081) argues, referencing MacLure (2013) and the same applies to the altered status of human beings. Ontological engagements often remain unproblematised also in so-called post-research (Lenz-Taguchi, 2017). It is not solely a question of ontology; thinking human subject differently tangles together also the epistemological and ethical, which cannot be treated as isolated parts (Barad, 2007). Despite the position of a researcher is explored in qualitative research, and even more in detail in post-qualitative research (Daelman et al., 2020), there is a need for studies that focus on the emergence of researcher becomings within altered ontology. The aim of this paper is to explore and make tangible the often-hidden struggles that changing the ontological orientation does to research.

Affective encounters engendering thought

Mazzei and Jackson (2009) suggest resigning from easily captured voices and instead recommended seeking out those that resist being named or categorised. This is particularly tricky within the most mundane and seemingly trivial occurrences of everyday life (Horton and Kraftl, 2006). Instead of seeking out handy methodologies, I got engrossed with the intersection of new materialist, poststructuralist and posthuman philosophies – such as those of Colebrook (2002, 2010), Gale (2018), Lenz-Taguchi (2017), MacLure (2010, 2013, 2016, 2023) and St Pierre (2004, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2023), among many others – and they boosted my pledge to welcome the affective distractions and ‘follow their provocations’ (St Pierre, 2018: 603).

The potential to engage with affective encounters within the research process lies in their practicality as affect is the primary mode of thought (Hickey-Moody, 2013) and have the potential to move towards knowing differently (Fullagar et al., 2021). MacLure (2010: 277) suggests to ‘block the reproduction of the bleeding obvious, and thereby, hopefully, open new possibilities for thinking and doing’. My engagement is informed by Deleuze’s (1988b) claim that we come to know other bodies, and even ourselves, through affective encounters. Affects are ‘virtual co-presence of potentials’, signalling the faint feelings of that which is yet beyond reach, the potential on the threshold (Massumi, 2015: 5). I got inspired from a Spinozian viewpoint and especially from Deleuze and Guattari’s uptake of him in which affects are primarily relational pushing towards for new connections with other bodies (Deleuze, 1988b; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Spinoza, 2003). When emotions are qualified intensities that are given structure and personal meaning, affects remain unqualified and non-ownable (Massumi, 1995). Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 256) conceptualise ‘affects as becomings’. Affects, being impersonal, are liberated from representations and refuse to be pinpointed to systems or human subjects; rather, becoming is transformative through encounters (Colebrook, 2002).

Spinoza’s handling of affect is entangled with his metaphysics in which things are not defined by their form, rejecting hierarchical and transcendent orders where structures and subjects are treated from above (Deleuze, 1988b). Given how deeply the metaphysics of Western thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of qualitative research, it becomes essential to reconfigure this engrained orientation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; MacLure, 2013, 2023; Murris, 2018; St Pierre, 2021). There is a dogmatic image of thought in which a stable world stands on hold for the subject’s thought and representation (May, 2005). In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault (1983: xiii) encourages to move beyond these long-upheld categories: ‘Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic’. This invitation provides a hope-provoking output for the transformation of thought going beyond structures and categories and cutting across fixed subject/object dialectics (Massumi, 2015). The ontology of immanence is not concerned about what is, it is about what is becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994; St Pierre, 2018), envisioning a virtual and continuous open whole that resists absolute closures, having no outside or end (Hein, 2017). To understand life, on the plane of immanence, is to acknowledge the ever-ongoing composition and re-composition of the speeds and the slowness and the complex relation between differential velocities not as a form, as a subject or its functions (Deleuze, 1988b).

The affective encounters within research act as a catalyst for the shock of thought, potentialising ontological re-configuration (Massumi, 2002b). For Deleuze, an encounter is a compelling force that engenders thought, felt as a powerful, creative momentum (Deleuze, 1994a; Massumi, 2002b). The potentially transformative shock can either be embraced, leading to profound change or resisted through habitual responses, remaining in complacency and maintaining the status quo (Massumi, 2002b). As mentioned, immanent ontology turns the focus onto becomings, that is, onto ‘what might be and what is coming into being’ (St Pierre, 2019: 4), opening new ways of thinking and dismantling entrenched patterns of thought (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994).

The workings on altering ontology came through rhizomatic reading and mapping of concepts in motion (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), particularly those of Deleuze and Guattari. Concepts are not an extension of pre-established things but are themselves dynamic and intensive, allowing movement and new connections, potentialising disruptions (Colebrook, 2002). A rhizome embodies the immanent ontology, rejecting the arborescent model within Western thought that tends to create tracings. Thus, based on the hierarchical reduction and stabilisation of multiplicities, like following the roots of a tree, it results in mere reproduction: ‘when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 13). But rhizome is anti-genealogical, functioning as a map oriented towards experimentation and fostering connections in direct, immanent contact with reality (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of conjunctions – ‘AND . . . AND . . . AND . . . ’ – emphasises the continuous, non-hierarchical connections and multiplicities within a rhizome, illustrating how concepts and ideas connect dynamically without a central point of origin (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25). In Deleuze’s (1988b: 122) readings of Spinoza, he emphasised that ‘to be in the middle of Spinoza’ is about installing oneself on the modal immanent plane that implies a certain way of living. The question is then what concepts begin to do with the problems that the affective events within research stubbornly pose.

When exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ontology, one inevitably gets caught up in a whirlwind of complex concepts. Within the limitations of a single paper, I use some concepts without elaborating on them in detail. An example of this is the concept of an event, which I used rather carelessly during the draft phase. However, through the process of reading and writing, its centrality within Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology became apparent. For Deleuze (2001), the life of immanence is not confined to a series of moments but exists in the intervals between times and moments, within the vastness of empty time where events are simultaneously forthcoming and have already happened. Events are the sites where becoming is expressed (Jackson, 2010) with no teleological closures, but made up of lines of singularities (Yountae, 2014). Deleuze (1990: 56) stated, ‘We can speak of events only in the context of the problem whose conditions they determine. We can speak of events only as singularities deployed in a problematic field, in the vicinity of which the solutions are organized.’ The circle-time event below is a composition of virtual and actual, singularities and differentiation. It is about becoming through the event (Colebrook, 2010).

Affective circle-time

The circle-time begins. I am thrilled about the opportunity to be absorbed in the relational making. The teacher, Hanna, sits in front of the children, who are gathered on chairs in a semicircle before her. I sit diagonally behind Hanna who begins to talk, in a concentrated, excited tone, talking for quite a long time, intensively looking at each child at a time. The children listen attentively, occasionally commenting on something. Rapidly, I find myself struggling as I do not understand the language they are speaking. Some of the words seem distantly familiar, but an endless flow of unknown words follows them.

Hanna shows pictures presenting animals, first weaving a picture of a nestling and an affectionate sigh carries across the children. I feel relief, feeling that I am, even slightly, back on track again. Hanna and the children have a long dialogue, presumably related to the nestling. I get alerted by Hanna’s expression of disapproval, she shakes her head, but it happens in the midst of a harmonious conversation and I do not get anything more. I psych myself up to understand what the exchange of utterances is about, but get no affirmative cues, just empty utterances and noise. The contrast between the smooth conversation and my confusion feels immense. Hanna continues with other pictures. I sense the shifts and peaks in the atmosphere every time a new picture is presented. Some of the pictures cause delighted responses while others cause aversive sounds and, at worst, a mixture of different kinds. I struggle to reasonably connect the reactions with the picture, orientating myself for a fresh start when a new picture is presented. But there is too much to evaluate, too many sparks to explore and I feel that my head is turning in every direction.

The more incomprehension I feel, the more tuned in I get to the variations in the voice tones, slight changes in facial expressions, gestures, sudden silences, and movements. But they are such brief and disconnected flashes that I cannot grasp them. The event is crammed full of words and sentences, with only a minimal amount of something else. That minimal something is just enough to disturb and disrupt as I have already submitted to not being able to follow. I sense my arising frustration: ‘What do I get from this?’

Hanna shows a picture and says something that makes some children make sounds like tiny squeaks. I am not able to see the picture. A child named Sara looks at me and performs a serpentine move with her finger. When I lean forward to see the picture, the relief returns as I connect the animal of the picture to the reactions (snake -> squeak) and I am on track again and I nod with self-congratulation to Sara. Also, Hanna turns to me and confirms this, turning the picture towards me and says in Finnish: ‘A snake.’ But then the situation changes, and there is an intensive, long-lasting conversation between the teacher and the children with only subtle expressions and mysterious utterances. I lose all the clues.

At some point I realise that Hanna and the children glance at me after each picture is presented, then occasionally at each other, and again at me with an inquiring expression. I sigh light-heartedly, adjusting my reactions to theirs as if I was on track. I don’t want to make a big thing about myself. I recognise a child named Alina, sitting next to Sara, looking at me. Earlier, Alina was actively involved with the circle-time activities, commenting on pictures. But now the focus of Alina is totally on me, and I feel that I am obligated to give her a response. I nod towards the teacher to redirect Alina’s focus to her. Alina glances at Hanna but immediately turns her face back to me. I smile. Sara, sitting next to Alina, seems to sense something happening and they exchange looks. Alina whispers something to Sara. Now both Sara and Alina are looking at me invitingly.

Alina moves her index finger in the air in front of her making a pointing movement. They occasionally look at each other, and Sara also adds dots to the air drawing, here and there. Their eyes are not on the drawing, but on me. I lean forward slightly, excited that something is starting to happen that I can make sense of, something without words. Hanna turns to me and smiles, lifts her eyebrows inquiringly and I shrug my shoulders. Looking back to Alina and Sara I see they have begun to make vertical wavy patterns, simultaneously making subtle glances at the teacher. They are adding more and more wavy patterns (which I now realise are snake-like figures). Hanna turns back towards the children and lifts another picture. From now on she translates some key content of the discussions into Finnish. After this, and perhaps as a result of it, the end part of the circle-time – everything that I so keenly longed for, words with meanings and informative representations – seems so hollow, and the intensity gets attenuated.

Inventing the researcher in the middle

What is written above is a composition of things that I strived to bring together to make sense of the event and, particularly, my position within it. In a habitual manner of qualitative research, the human subjects are named (with pseudonyms) and the exchange of utterances and gestures are described in detail, exposing the tendency to pinpoint certain units as being of reference (Jackson, 2013) and focusing on the already determined epistemic objects (St Pierre, 2019). The description itself sets things in a material order, setting preconditions for how the data can be encountered. Despite the constant reminder of the dynamically interconnected nature of becoming that the unfolding event suggests, this were pushed aside by the embedded focus on and ‘magnetic power’ of human subjects and the habit of perception (Hultman and Lenz-Taguchi, 2010: 525). Deleuze and Guattari are renowned for emphasising multiplicities and becoming over the dominance of human subjects, challenging the conventional handling of identity and representation. The opening words in A Thousand Plateaus invite us to re-think the humanist subject differently: ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3; St Pierre, 2017).

In my attempt to make sense of the event, I proceeded through perceptions and search for causalities, treating pictures and the actions of human subjects as possible points of determination.I constantly made new beginnings, jumping between these points in search of new determinations. However, through the breakings of linearity and causality within the circle-time it becomes impossible to connect the occurrences and make them understandable (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017). The variation of affective intensities underscores the fluid and ever-changing nature of the relational field of research, as Michael (2012: 531) writes ‘So, just when it seemed that there was about to be triumph over the dark forces of deficit, a whole new army of much subtler enemies are discovered lurking in the shadows.’

The sense of continuous movement hijacks me, and perception and representation lose their point. The involvements within the event become non-linear and rhizomatic, characterised by continuous disconnection and reconnection. Representation splits reality into binary oppositions, such as signifier/signified, fragmenting the world into dualistic categories (MacLure, 2016). The signifier is caught up in the search for meanings, while the real question is about how things work in all their complex movements and intensities (Deleuze, 1995). It is about what is becoming, not about what is (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994; St Pierre, 2019). The researcher (or anything else) cannot be treated in isolation as there is no subject that pre-exists; rather, the research assemblage constitutes subjects through its movement, composing them as they move within it (MacLure, 2016). Here, I sense that everything happens in the middle. Although it might seem like I was being pulled into the middle despite my resistance, I was becoming there all along. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) maintain the concepts ‘in the middle’ and ‘in-between’ rather than positioning oneself at a specific point of departure. There is no beginning or end, nor does this imply some kind of an average; rather, the middle is a site of the actualisation of unrealised ideas, breaking the linear perception of the world (Yountae, 2014). Instead of looking for the truths of reality ‘out there,’ beyond the researcher, it is about the researcher re-inventing themselves through the engagements and enactments within the event (Hultman and Lenz-Taguchi, 2010).

Losing one’s point of departure could be seen as impasse for research. Quite in contrast, it is through the middle where things are in their work (Deleuze, 1990) and where from the creativeness grows (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). There are rhizomatic conjunctions where it is not a question of where one began or where one is going; instead, it is a question of always proceeding and moving through the middle (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Thus, one never truly starts from scratch but joins and enters in what is already in progress, slipping in among things in motion (Deleuze, 1988b). The middle is ‘where things pick up speed’ and where transversal flows sweep everything along, undermining boundaries while progressing (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25). There are no such things as detached units (like bodily gestures, verbal language or a researcher); rather, there is an immanent becoming and constant variation of the actual and virtual (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). So, the positions are constantly shifting: becoming-researcher, becoming-ECE-teacher, becoming-child (Johansson et al., 2022).

If lacking knowledge of daily lives in ECE, there might not have been such an urge to respond, an obligation to perform ‘being on track,’ to participate or contribute to the event, but also, there might not have been such a capacity to affect and to be affected. What remains is only a wish to contribute because there is so much mess around the familiar (Johansson et al., 2022). The pursuit of immersing oneself in the relational making gets enmeshed with the engrained tendency to maintain the familiar circle-time conventions through directing the children’s attention to their teacher. This presents a romantic idea of a researcher who is initially an insider due to their ECE-based biography, which can lead to an illusion of sameness (Johansson et al., 2022). How easy it is then to capture the already known and to trace familiar lines and become immune to other potentials.

Within the research process, my focus seemed to shift from one human subject to another, from the children and their relations to the researcher; that is, I rejected one (human) subject and invited in another (human) subject. Rather than freezing oneself into a fixed position that is to be explored, as Massumi suggests, it is about navigating movement and immersing oneself in what is already in motion: ‘We are our situations, we are our moving through them. We are our participation – not some abstract entity that is somehow outside looking in at it all’ (Massumi, 2015: 14).

Reconsidering spoken language in ECE

Above, I questioned the tendency to centre the (human) subject. Now, I will further explore my other guiding principle: reaching beyond the spoken. However, I first want to consider how seemingly harmless manifestations can turn out to be ontologically troubling (see St Pierre, 2021; Lenz- Taguchi and St Pierre, 2017). I began to find the concept of going ‘beyond’ problematic when dealing with spoken language within this research assemblage, as it seemed to imply that there are hidden depths that need to be exposed and analysed behind the spoken. However, on the plane of immanence, everything exists on the same surface. Concepts, along with anything else, are understood through their connections within that same plane rather than through tracing depths or external truths (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994), searching for ‘higher orders’ and ‘digging behind or beyond or beneath’ (MacLure, 2013: 660). It is a learned misconception that the truth will be revealed through and behind language, as, in any appearance of life, only a continuous series of new appearances can be found (Colebrook, 2010). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 23) note:

The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes.

St Pierre (2019) reminds, that when the ontology of (human) subject changes, how one configures language also changes (or at least should change). When the established system of signs is disrupted, thinking is also compelled to transform (Colebrook, 2010). There exists a plenty of work that challenge the traditional representational and communicational models of language (MacLure, 2013, 2016, 2023; Murris and Haynes, 2018; St Pierre, 2017, 2023) that presuppose ‘a world of already-defined things for the mirroring,’ which limits the potentials of expression (Massumi, 2002b: xv). It remains a need to rethink qualitative research methodologies still governed by representational thinking (MacLure, 2013).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) handle language most comprehensively in A Thousand Plateaus. However, Deleuze already argued (in his prior work The Logic of Sense) that the propositional view of language – which includes designation (or denotation), manifestation and signification – constrains expression by fitting it into predefined categories, thus failing to capture its full potential (Deleuze, 1990; Massumi, 2002b). Rather, language should not be treated as a stable mediator between a thinking subject and the external world (Evans et al., 2022). The mediating perspective tends to view non-verbal elements in terms of their contribution to communication; however, language is not about conveying meaning as there are also other forces within language that do not relate to meaning or signification (Hackett et al., 2021). Deleuze (2006: 177) writes: ‘In assemblages, you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs.’ Thus, instead of language being lifted above or distinguished as a separate entity, it is met on the immanent surface where various forces intersect and dynamically change through encounters with the world (Evans et al., 2022). Language is inherently impersonal, lacking a singular voice or individual speaker but emerges from a collective assemblage of enunciation (St Pierre, 2017). It is constantly infected by other becomings (Colebrook, 2002).

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), language is not about communication or giving information; rather, the fundamental unit of language is to transmit order-words. They insist that language is not something to be believed, but rather to be obeyed. Order-words are not just obvious commands; they can also be subtle suggestions or anticipations of what is preferred in certain social situations. Whether order-words are in the form of a promise or a question, all these implicit propositions are linked to the social obligations of given circumstances. What order-words ‘do’ is make incorporeal transformations within a particular relational milieu. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) description of a deliverer of a death sentence illuminates this event. When a judge states the order-word guilty, the body of the accused does not change physically, but with the pronouncement of the verdict, the accused undergoes an immediate incorporeal transformation.

Within circle-time, incorporeal transformations are the changes in states or conditions induced by the interplay of bodies, images and words. Order-words, as articulated by Hanna, structure the flow within which the event folds. However, there are also seemingly disconnected flashes that can be seen as lines of flight, where the manifold expressive forces break through the structuring order-words, creating fluid and dynamic flows that provoke other potentials. For instance, the children’s focus on the researcher introduced new relational dynamics. The researcher’s nods towards the teacher, and Alina’s and Sara’s snake drawings, indicate alignment with the socially preferred structure. The question is no longer what language is or means, but what language does. What is expressed in the words of Hanna, and simultaneously, in the non-linguistic actions of Alina and Sara intertwines in the collective assemblage of enunciation within the circle-time.

The order-word ‘snake’ uttered in different context would not have the same effect as it did in this particular circle-time. Here, it causes an incorporeal transformation as it displaces other nascent lines and places those present in the situation into a framework of the circle-time. The machinic assemblage of pedagogy-infused circle-time, in MacLure’s (2016: 175) words, produces ‘incorporeal transformations upon children, converting them into pupils with specific sets of social obligations and specific identities.’ This also seemed to happen to the researcher: for a moment, Alina and Sara’s dot-like drawing proposed a line of flight, but then transformed into a snake-like slithering, reconnecting themselves to becoming circle-time participants. Within the continuous balancing between not disturbing and becoming immersed, the researcher found themselves in the middle through the variation of momentary incorporeal transformation of becoming as Alina, Sara and Hanna mapped out the lines for the confused researcher.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), every system is infused with continuous, immanent variation; in our daily lives we move from one language to another within the same language. This continuous variation has no end or beginning. Now we return to the beyond, that is, to going beyond substructural linguistic categories, not going beyond language itself. Instead of collapsing into new dualisms separating language from other regimes of signs, language needs to be pushed to its limits – being a foreigner in one’s own language, seeing language as a secret without concealing or hiding anything – but breaking away from the effort to create a hidden substructure within language (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze (1994b) highlighted creative stammering in his texts. To sense the potentials in language is to make it stammer, not in the conventional sense of stuttering speech but to see language as a continuum of varying intensities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

The established arrangements of circle-time that I was familiar with from my prior experiences as an ECE teacher seized my attention as a researcher and, at first, tended to disperse the movement and fade the subtle emergences (see Colebrook, 2010). Circle-time is traditionally based on listening and speaking where, generally, the teacher poses questions, and the children respond (Hackett et al., 2021); it is structured in a way that the children are frozen on their chairs, diminishing their physical activity. Within the event, there are unlimited and open potentials (Cumming and Sumsion, 2014), and anything lingers in a state of becoming. When ‘revealing the secret’ through sayings, the imperceptible becomes signified and is affirmed to be a snake or a nestling, squeezed into order-word that seems to express nothing but a hollow, though affirmative, statement. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words: ‘Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place—and then the whole process will begin all over again’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 7).

The unfolding event disrupts the usual way of seeing the circle-time through the preceding system and pushes thought in new directions (see Colebrook, 2010). Without the affirmation of language, the circle-time lost its predictable logic, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 204) idea that social situations leak ‘from all directions.’ Following the linguistic semiotic chain provided momentary safe havens but mostly worked as providing loose fragments that did not fit the structure I was trying to construct. However, these disturbances introduced new possibilities and disrupted established meanings. emergences of which ‘differing’ is their sole determination (Massumi, 2002b).

It is fascinating how language has taken hold of my attention in this paper, even though I set out to explore the living beyond it. However, this event of research highlights not so much what language is or what words mean, but what language does. It is a learned misconception that the truth will be revealed through language (Colebrook, 2010). Language cannot be disentangled from the non-linguistic; it is enmeshed within the dynamic flows and multiplicities that constitute any kind of assemblage (St Pierre, 2017). The problem is then, how to encounter language, in all of its expressive ways, within living, not solely as something regulating it. It is not about making a dichotomous distinction between the spoken and other doings, rather, everything takes place, connects and moves within the same immanent field.

Concluding stuttering

Things never unfold along the routes predicted (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987), as was the case with this research project that changed in unimagined ways. Turns that are taken towards an immanent ontology cause collisions with the presumptions and undertakings of a researcher (MacLure, 2023), exposing the tendencies that guide the research. The ethical positioning within research does not unfold through the researcher’s self-reflection, which is nothing but endless circling that encloses back upon itself (Evans et al., 2022). One can be content with this reflected image, even fall in love with it and go on researching without the weight of doubt on one’s shoulders. With the engrained arborescent orientation involving human being’s tendency to have ‘a tree growing in their heads’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15), it is difficult to break away from accustomed procedures and ‘see the grass in things and words’ (Ibid: 23). A researcher who grows through the middle and becomes attuned to affective intensities as generative, is compelled to remain open to life that is constantly evolving and responsive to the ever-changing relational landscape of research (Gale, 2018). MacLure (2016) encourages openness to puzzling moments as signals of the potential for creation. Although the content and structure of the circle-time followed a familiar pattern, something slipped out of alignment. My urge to trace what that ‘something’ was, whether it could solely be reduced to the non-understandable language or to my subverted position, remains futile; it exceeds such reductions and is irreducibly rhizomatic and affective (Gale, 2018).

The researcher must navigate the uncertainty and violence of the process, allowing for new, emergent understandings to arise (Massumi, 2002b). Attending to language and human subjects as being infected by other becomings (Colebrook, 2002) foregrounds that ‘[o]ne is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life’ (Deleuze, 2001: 30). Becoming through the middle resonates with the immanent ontology in which one is constantly, simultaneously both at the threshold and on the absolute horizon (Deleuze, 2001; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994).

When ontological engagements strictly rely on language and overlook other forms of expression and knowing, they perpetuate epistemic injustices against the youngest children (Haynes and Murris, 2018). The event explored in this paper opens viewpoints onto the conventions of circle-time and other everyday ECE doings. I borrow Deleuze’s thoughts on stuttering here. How could the practices of ECE stutter more, stammer with their every kind of doings, continuously growing through the middle so that the whole relational living within ECE becomes to stutter. Educational practices should be seen as sites where agency does not become reduced to a property of humans, children or teachers, but it emerges within the relations among space, materials, rhythms, embodiments and affects, with everything always in-formation (Gale, 2018). The ontologies that are fed from immanence open potentials to fight against the pre-dominant human-centred (and adult-built and language-laden) stance and become sensible of unforeseen emergences.

At this point, writing the concluding chapter, I sense that I am still in limbo between the conventions of qualitative research and altering ontology, particularly related to application, having both the feeling that there is no application enough and, simultaneously, too hasty application. While engaged in an exhaustive process of reading and concurrently writing extensive, tentative drafts, I have been in a state of anticipation for a moment of epiphany, a juncture where I can synthesise the circle-time event inspired by the freshly made ontological metamorphosis to properly analyse and apply. St Pierre (2017) insists that, instead of hastening towards application, we should continue with reading and states that writing itself is an empirical application; it is a process of becoming in language, which is tangible in St Pierre’s citation of Deleuze (1988a: 33): ‘It is in writing that I begin to get ideas in my bones, when words and things “seep into one another”.’ Instead of constantly re-producing the same there should be more stuttering. What if, instead of clinical and self-evident research reports, we stuttered more? Not only to make language itself stutter, but to make the whole process of research stutter.