The Digital

as Poetic:

C/A/R/Tographic Inquiry into the Anorexic Commons[1]

Jennifer Peterson

Teaching in any space involves taking care. In the classroom this “taking care” leads us to perform inquiry into inarticulate, living spaces where text and curriculum often bend out of shape.

The digital offers to us (an)other means of access to this poetic place, allowing us to use multi-forms (image, video, sound and space) to perform and live our inquiry.

The poetic is that which stretches language across itself, until it becomes secondary or perhaps we could say: cartographic. It is this poetic that intrigued Heidegger—he was fundamentally interested in the relations between poesis (making) and thinking. He often described this as 'an onto – logic.' As I read, I am tempted to call this logic, ‘one in which being tunes word and takes it as on, as a kind of magma.’ In this image we have a kind of heat or thermal force at work in being, where word becomes flooded, folded up and poured over itself in a lava like flow. Word cooled and cooling becomes a topos. Language is fundamentally geological.  Heidegger suggests that word offers ecological rather than petrified relations to being, that language as a topological trace maintains (its) nourishing and percolating relations to a potent “set – apart – space.”

It is in this sense that the poetic has its eye on the-space-in-which-teaching-dwells. As a “set – apart – space,” teaching has traditionally turned to notions of detachment, using detachment as a means of performing the boundary of the educational—inscribing it with a rectangular residue.  The perspectivist notion of ‘the blank canvas'—the clean rectangle of space that denotes the students mind—still lingers. The teacher in the classroom still bears the residue or shadow of our long affair with ‘the page’ and ‘the book’. The rectangular room with its rows, the fresh white space of the overhead and screen, often function in the classroom as a kind of 'upheld space', a sacred kind of square. Much of the topography of the classroom is penetrated by notions of space as organized and penetrated by the coordinates of the linear and the smooth surface of the page. As a topological surface, curriculum at times becomes an effort to accumulate geological densities through (thick) acquisitions of page(s). Perhaps we hope reading and writing lines of the text might become a space to perform the self, amidst the rhythm of rows, numberings, (ac)countings and rankings. All of these perform a means of locating: they help us “locate-us”—as kind of self/other relation where an imaginary of pages—boxes, frames, charts, graphs, maps—order our relations, performed as a container.

We create this fiction—a fiction that has always been troubled by curves, because we need it. Particularly as educators—it has allowed us to understand, to scaffold, to step outside and view the learning situation from an imagined distance. This has enabled us to draw some of the important and potent lines, lines that trace our acts of teaching and negotiate with its deciduous nature.

Bie Dao’s (1994) poetics were forged in relations between education and the trauma spaces of Tiananmen Square. He argues that we find it necessary in life to evoke “forms of distance” (19, poem entitled Corridor). But we also need a complement, an engagement of the counter pose.[2]

As the digital has often been used to complement the linear urges of educational endeavours, I have been seeking a counter pose. I have been asking, how can the digital be used to account for teaching as a peculiar immersion into space?

We experience education in an acoustic space[3], in which bells, trash collection, loudspeakers, students entering and exiting, interrupt, puncture and seem to defer curricular plans. “Being’ bends educational goals into graffiti, marking them with curvaceous excess. Our students, (and our emotions) sometimes appear before us written where we did not plan, interrupting our educational space like letters smeared big onto walls.

When margins invade their frames we are at the place of poetic opportunity.

When during my graduate work, some one turned and placed a digital camera in my hand. I felt surprise, the delight of the weight of this camera placed into my hand, as a clue to my own gravity. I began to use the camera and my hands to glean images in concert with thinking and reading—forming (my) images of (my) world differently in this way. As I did this, I began to experience (what I would later describe) ‘a new sense of agency” (and re/new/ed sense of urgency)…I began to forge a different (embodied) connection to my gaze.

In trying to figure out why this was so, I turned to my old, thick and beloved Oxford English Dictionary, last revised in 1957. I looked up the word digital to trace its etymology.  Of course I found no trace of our recent (yet now common) sense of this word, as the products and projects of binary code. Rather I found this definition: “pertaining to the fingers, the toes” (and sometimes indicative of the products of hand and foot that connects these)…also as in designating value…as marked by the symbolic numerical (digit).”

Haunted by the residue of the body that is imbedded in this definition, I decided to practice a conversation—a pose and counter pose—between this older idea of digital and more recent connotation of digital. I challenged myself to occupy the space of a maker in relation to the digital.

This was a new and awkward pose (for me). I adopted it intentionally hoping this unfamiliar postural exchange with these two digitals would extend and twist me into an imbedded network of sensual relations, especially those between fingers, toes, body and (its)postural and gestural workings regarding interchanges with screen, keyboard, scanner, camera (and their occasioning of art, craft, media and technology). I practiced this digital conversation quite literally for some time.

For example, I challenged myself to draw pictures of my hands. Then I took these into the screen (via camera or scanner). I then 'worked’ these images on screen. I often printed out these worked images and modified them, frequently writing on them. I often tore and ripped these images, all the while endeavouring to notice not just my hands but also the positioning of my body and feet in relation to these images.

A thermal exchange accrued. While making images of my hand was laborious, something happened as I bent to view them in the camera lens. The postures I had to assume to capture these images included all sorts of bowing and hovering. When these surfaced on the screen (so close to my heart area)—I recorded maternal kinds of (odd) reactions and attachments. 

I found myself challenged to take my making seriously—to listen to it the way I would a child’s. This process built upon itself and upon a charged and refractive capacity of the screen. It became quest like. It was then that I wrote in my journal: This digital conversation between digital and digits leads me on as if I am engaged in a kind orienteering. I have become intense, as if I am breaking new and important ground in a kind of bewildering and intriguing cartographic journey.

I later tried to clarify this notion of the cartographic, which had appeared mysteriously in my journal:

The digital enables this merging of writing, image and form, so that writing expands into a ‘graphy’[4] This ‘graphy’ beckons  a keening of writing, image (and the mix of other forms) as play and flow in  representational structures. Graphy seems to denote (as a suffix of many words)—the flow of form into a kind of mapping. It allows a performing of its object(subject)/subject (object)[5]as relations. It leans not as much to explanation, verification, debate, justification and/or (at times even) narrative but instead enables  a honing/an allowing/ and a pointing towards—an expanse.

This seems to me, to be an effort at a kind of cartography. This hint of cartography that ‘graphy’ allows, also seems to be particularly porous to aesthetic form and flow. It can attune (especially) to relations between process and representation.  In such ‘graphy’– space and its percolations into form—appear to become primary—or we could even say ‘primal’—they become particularly alchemizing to meaning.[6]

I tested these observations with teacher practitioners in urban environs. I gave them cameras and sent them off to research their environments while at the same time encouraging them to position themselves in a conversation as  (poetic inquirers, makers and observers). We engaged in making and the digital spaces[7] mainly through learning to produce movies. As we watch the final cut of their movies, together, there often accrues an attachment to these projects. This attachment is profound but is somewhat bewildering to an ‘outside’ viewer. These teachers appear to enter a space of ‘entrancement’[8] around their own projects, becoming strangely transfixed by them. One could say that this becomes a thresholding[9]—a powerful, intimate and difficult to word—space. Offered to a part of the self that teachers often cannot locate a container for, this digital becomes a poetic alchemy. It bubbles up an offer of a space to attend to both self and other. As self/other (relations) are where educational opportunity often treads and, as the poetic above all requires, a self, poesis + digital seems to offer the teacher a cartography—a means of rewriting and repositioning the topographical relations between themselves and their environs.

This repositioning is possibly the result of bewilderment,[10] a particularly important and potent educational space. Poesis is rumored to be particularly fond of bewilderment as a ‘ be – wild – space.’ McKay argues that be – wild – er – ment often needs an aesthetic space and uses aesthetic space in order to re/cognize knowing.

I am intrigued by the digital practiced as a kind of poetic c/a/r/tographic inquiry: An inquiry that opens into a conversation between virtuality and actuality. This ‘digital’ seems to heat up as it is recognized and noticed. By using the word digital here I again re/mark (as the pose and counter pose) the digital as body (digits as in fingers/feet) and digital (as in digital binary code). The digital allows curriculum to screen back in to its squared spaces: image - space - poetry - music - dance - costume - color - even graffiti. This access to multiple forms for appearing allows the digital to offer a means of poetic access, an honoring of the (s)places[11] that text exceeds, that it struggles to word—but needs body to re/present.

I borrow here from a/r/tography, which was developed within art education.[12] A/r/tography can be described as an effort to engage with intention and attunement, the sticky and fertile relations between texts, artifacts, images, sound and performances not just as products of the gaze—but as making. A/r/tography attends to a certain conversion of the space of looking into the space of making (poesis).

It attends to this ‘making space’ as a magma space of the complex topographies of the artist-maker/researcher/teacher. In envisioning poesis as a bodily practice of making that combines knowing (theoria) and doing (praxis), a/r/tography offers curriculum a theorizing of a kind of ever moving lava-like positionality that is able to threshold the cartographic as an autographic possible.

                                                              * * * * *

To simplify, we can return to our caricature of the three squares: the page, the screen and the classroom. These squares mark our cultural topography, imprinted  as imaginary (even meteorological) residues. These squares become particularly potent for educators, and students, for the fecund liminal space they  form/negotiate and experience habitually (one could even say ritually) together.[13] Insomuch as these squares echo and form a practice of the commons as the collective possible, these three squares can (each in their own way) form hard or soft edges. Because of its location in the in-habitized[14] world of the burgeoning child, the classroom ‘square’, especially, becomes a container of this autographic/collective (private/public) possible.

The digital, with its access to multi-form(at)s is already leaky. It opens up the screen as an osmotic possibility for the I, particularly the I that needs to appear and disappear, the I that needs to acquire masks, the I that needs to acquire alternative sensory and sensual landscapes in order to process ‘as a view.’ Consumptive topographies specialize in reigning in this screening, directing it to agentive channels of gaze, consumption and purchase. ‘School’ has proven (often) amenable to these muted agentive relations, enjoying in the cultivation of ‘page’, a certain specular complement to these ‘screened relations.’

These relations linger in the shadows, not just as a desire for a quiet reader/eater/ sitter/watcher (and of late, buyer), but as a phantasmagorical longing for the (Newtonian) fixed viewer. This is the viewer(s) whose commentary from seated spaces is configured into the civic space as participation. The classroom still retains its discomforts with the square of the screen, but is still hopeful regarding the cultivations of (seated) commentaries. It is often lured into the wishing for watchers who while remaining seated, nevertheless lean into civic space through a kind of thinking/viewing/saying (which is signaled by the raised hand). This idealized viewer is perhaps one that engages in critical commentary of a made world, activated in the classroom, through the participatory gesture of the question. This longed for raised hand, that of the interested student, slows down a temptation to switch the channel (the ultimate technological specular gesture). In this mode, entertainment becomes intertwined as a consumptive agent in a commons that elevates agency into acts of purchasing. Thus this question as act, often lingers at the edges of commerce with objects but falters regarding the commerce of actual (not phantasmagorical) subjects (which is complex and leaky). The screen in this scenario becomes infographic but not necessarily c/a/r/tographic.

The educator often appears here entangled in various versions of this phantasmagorical longing—possibly forced to appear as its gapped space, especially as ‘I’ empty. Teachers are often made to appear as the phantoms of this infographic. They are submitted to the scrutinies of a ghosted commerce/commons merger, one that wants to deal with objects and values, not subjects (as valued). The notion of the screen and the page as space for ‘an appearing I’ to learn to appear (and to learn also to disappear) stuns some members of the civic who have inscribed certain roles as absence. Insomuch as educators have been taught to practice their absence as the means for the student (or object) to appear, curriculum reifies the consumptive I of the student (or object). Insomuch as the teacher is unable to practice having an I, the teacher attempts to practice an impossible weightlessness in the square of the classroom. This weightlessness is bound to collapse (with the teacher or student or the classroom itself often appearing as the gapped space). This attempted weightless ‘I’ presides over the mix of students who seek a guide, and whose cartographic actualities may be such that they imitate, dilate, reject and abject this weightlessness.[15] Insomuch as curriculum is practiced as the continuous activity of mind, body becomes the gap. Body becomes the topographic that is forced to appear outside the margins, creating the classroom, page and screen as anorexic spaces in regards to ‘I’ and ‘ body,’ scrutinizing them vigorously for a thinness of the commons.

If such a mind is to become agentive regarding representations and their relations to the I/Other relations embedded in private/public topographies, they need a return of (Don McKay’s) be – wild space.[16] Be – wild marks again being and the wild as topographic and organic forms. These forms (which are always in the process of forming) interiorize the logic of their growth in fashions that are not easily read panoptically. The panoptic, Foucault notes, is a view that becomes installed culturally (and often invisibly) as a prison. The panoptic view is installed in the tower. The prison is organized to expedite the view from above and all is reworked for exposure.  In educative versions of this, the mind is often oblated and the body problematic. The mind is in education, the territory bearing the hope of the (ideal) public commons. And yet (as prisoners know), the mind is the least exposed in this view-intensive scenario. It can be concealed. It is the body that is exposed/ vulnerable/fragile to panoptic view, difficult to hide. The body bears the brunt of panopticism. There is a temptation on both the part of the teacher and student, coming (perhaps) from different motivations, to practice body as muted and docile.

Yet, the screen is also culturally appropriated here to mimic and mime this need:  The act of ‘I-ing through choice’ accruing through purchase or click (especially). These dynamics allow I and the body to appear as artifactual (as hidden in art/I/fact).

It is in this way that the educative is especially naive. It hopes in the visual dynamics of the classroom which would enable a fruitful visibility of the learner. Thus the square of the classroom (and its complement in the square of the page and screen) have been maximized to allow the exposure of the learner as a topography. This hope in the birds-eye (tower) viewer—in the teacher trying to map a curriculum often results in a transposition of the panoptical view into the (child’s) habitual experience of the public square. It can be experienced as a kind of overexposure—a too much sun relation to knowing. The ‘I’ whose learning/needs are ‘forming’,  ‘cooling’, ‘stratifying’, ‘folding’, ‘fault-lining,’ ‘gaping’, ‘seeding’, ‘composting,’ ‘ incubating,’  ‘shading,’ and ‘veiling,’ get sunburnt. They wilt under this exposure, often seeking cover in order to form, feeling caught ‘in view’ of the strong interrogative that often accompanies educative endeavors. There is also another phantasmagorical hope—as exposure lingers—that the student would surface as almost already formed (i.e., not needing much intervention from the tower).

Thus, poiesis (making) is used to interrupt curriculum as producing a specular commons and the poetic calls for the interruption of squares (books, classroom, screens), with ourselves:  Our selves as messy (perhaps). Ourselves as fissures (perhaps). Ourselves as immersed in an ecology of made world(s) that are always being remade. Poiesis is my way of marking and calling for the actuality of the commons and its made-ness: made-ness being our everforming and unforming topological conjunction(s) with our appearings and disappearings. Poiesis asks in accord with the Heideggerian concern: When does curriculum substitute in for pedagogy, a petrified technological circuit around the ecology of the made? How can curriculum seek ecological rather than petrified relations to being?  When and where does curriculum become topological, a mapping that maintains its nourishing and percolating relations to the actual/potent  “set – apart – space” that marks the ‘I’, the Educator, the Other in their common relations?

To reiterate, I advocate a digital (which is practiced as body and mind) as a fecund limen of virtual and actual that locates the agentive ‘making and remaking’ of representational space as an active remaking of actual and virtual relations.

I advocate a poetic (a making cultivated as respectful, nourishing and vocational) redress of gap(s) and be wild space(s). I recommend the poetic as a counterpose to the panoptic, a counterpose particularly attuned to that binary I/Other, particularly I/Other as makers and remakers of private/public spaces, especially attending to spaces in which I/Other virtualites emerge and are weighted (against) the gravities of actualities.

I advocate a c/a/r/tographic (currere practiced as making, thinking, agency) as inquiry into I/Other topographies, including those that exist as relations between educator and educatee, especially those that cultivate representation as agentive space and cultivate the commons as agentive, fertile and fecund.

These advocacies are offered as counter pose, as the bend away from habitual positions and assimilated geometries, particularly those that assemble speculative audience/ viewer/ consumptive relations. 

The classroom is a sort of last ideation bearing the residues of the commons appropriated to democracy, increasingly a democracy disappearing into screens and/or shopping malls, purchasing and clicks as the action of citizenry. I advocate ‘a lurching in’ the educational, a loping into the space of the screen as its maker not just viewer. I advocate ‘a lurching in’ into the space of text as its ‘lava -like’ fissure (not just its lurking invisible I hiding out from contracts formed by g(l)aze).

I mention performative inquiry alongside a/r/tography as another educational inquiry effort that attempts a tilling/fertilizing complement to rethinking the classroom commons. These methodologies together give educators tools for remodeling, reimagining and remaking the territorialization of the cartographic / autographic possible.[17]  Performative inquiry complements a turn to art (which the digital enables through its public access to multi-sensory, multi-formal means of re-imagining).  Yet art itself is a territory that is territorialized. It is bound up in the many cultural dynamics that construct the canvas as oblated, as a square watched and critiqued, and too often practiced as unattainable to us and school. This has a long complex history. 

Performative inquiry[18] imagines an educational practice of welcome, the classroom as an always deciduous, composting and decomposing shape or ‘square.’ It imagines us as primordial to the mechanisms of representation, acknowledging invitation as resistance to a ‘basic ‘othering’ mediated by the technological spectre, a spectre that works to secure powers through delineating acts of representation into genealogies of viewer/maker lineages.

Performative inquiry is thus an example of a cartographic compliment to all educational efforts at mapping curricula, in so much as it offers the invitation to (fall) into the map, into the fault lines of its squares (of the screen, page and classroom) into the remaking of their problematic power spots. It does this by turning to the fissure “where that camera/paint brush/stage is held.’ This invitation into the hot center of specular configuration, undoes a positioning which is often manifest in complex hierarchies around who is maker and who is viewer/critic of the making. By inviting ‘watchers’ into and out of to the square of making to make (believe) and unmake (believe) the square (as say a vortex), performative inquiry exemplifies another way to unmake the panoptical tower, and to remake the boundaries of the specular, permeable to participation and to play. It re-emphasizes a generosity towards making that pushes knowing up against the boundaries of specular desires.

Education as a producer of commons is arrested in a certain disembodied turn and we as bodies are uncomfortable when our body reappears in its ‘set-apart’ squares. We feel shame, a desire to conceal our bodies as no/bodies. We need incubative, generous and generative spaces in order to regain and practice our innate literacies regarding body/mind as a commons. We need to learn to become comfortable with reuniting body and mind as our cartographic actuality. Technography will intervene here in various (often ingenious) ways as the desire for this clumsy body/mind combo to vanish. No message is perhaps more powerful for the commons than the insistence of only “attractive appearances.”

To conclude, I return to a scenario mentioned earlier of educators gathered together to occupy the screen with their own gathered/made  and edited images. As their videos were uplifted into this squared space, they felt emphasized. I want to emphasize the importance of the educational as a topographical invitation, of its potency regarding the hot (confusing) centers of ‘its’ entrancing squares and their role in collecting and activating I’s. Education can remake its collective—as a learned/learning space, as in/formation, as a space permeable to the ‘I’ engaging as an ‘I?/ Other?’

This fertile ‘I?/ Other?’ re/dis/appears as ‘us’ in the commons, as contradictions with/in a commons (being) made, remade, reduced and seduced—as powerful possible.

References

Aoki, T. T., Low, M.. & Palulis, P. (2001). Re-reading metonymic moments with/in living pedagogy. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. Seattle, WA.

Cavell, R. (2002) McLuhan in space: A cultural geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Dao, B. (1994). Forms of distance, poems by Bei Dao (trans D. Hinton). New York: New Directions Books.

Fels, L. (1995). In the wind clothes dance on a line: Performative inquiry—a (re)search methodology: possibilities and absences within a space-moment of imagining a universe. Unpublished dissertation. University of British Columbia.

Lilburn, T. (Ed.). (1994). Poetry and knowing. Kingston, ON: Quarry Press.

Irwin, R. & de Cossen, A. (Eds.). (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (trans. L. S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press.

Mcluhan, M. (1962). Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. New York: New American Library.

Norton, A. (1988) Reflections on political identity. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge.

Pryer, A. (2004). Living with in marginal spaces: In R. Irwin & A De Cossen (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.

Rogoff, I. (2000). Terra infirma: Geography's visual culture. New York: Routledge.

Footnotes