OUTLINING A CARTOGRAPHIC STUDY: THEORETICAL-METHODOLOGICAL SUPPORT AND A CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

This article refers to a part of a cartographic research with babies (a broader study involving several participants³), in which one of the objectives was to understand the agencies developed by babies and the way they impact, modify, and create new outlines in the process, new relationships with themselves, older children, adults, and the environment, looking for human/nonhuman/transhuman/inhuman tangle-traces and aberrant movements - that is, those that stand out, are distinguished - some clue (which produces, according to ^{Braidotti, 2019}, a form of zoo-geo-techno mediated empiricism⁴).

For Rosi ^{Braidotti (2019}: 137), cartographies play an important role in this trajectory since they are both the record of what we are “ceasing to be” (anthropocentric or humanist, in the Eurocentric, classic, and traditional sense) as well as “seeds of what we are becoming⁵” (A multiplicity of post-human subjects).

According to this Deleuzo-Guattarian-based thinking, it is a matter of seeking (in an apparently homogeneous field), with such movements/flows of force and becoming: “Draw a plane [...] a plane from which everything proceeds and emerges [...] a sort of cut,” a “bottom that rises to the surface,” without ceasing to be a bottom, as pointed out by ^{Lapoujade (2015}: 36-37). In this way, searching for “unusual,” “forced,” “nomadic,” fleeting movements, “a one more reality;” movements that traverse matter, life, thought, nature, for example (^{Lapoujade, 2015}; ^{Deleuze & Guattari, 1995}; Guattari, 2012; ^{Oliveira & Paraíso, 2012}), an alternative for such understanding/immersion.

It should be noted that, from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, all agencies (such as rhizomes and plateaus⁶) are made up of lines - not just unusual or nomadic lines - across territories/structures/surfaces. According to the authors, there are the fixed and hard lines that compose these structures and the flexible ones, those that they call the outside (“multiplicity consistency plan” or “escape lines” (^{Deleuze & Guattari, 1995}: 16), of deterritorialization/nomad/abstracts forces that cut/traverse these (unusual) surfaces. In this context, they argue: “There are only lines” (1995: 16) and explain their specificities:

Every rhizome comprises segmentation lines according to which they are stratified, territorialized, organized, given meaning, attributed, etc.; but they also comprise lines of deterritorialization through which they may escape without interruption. There is a rupture in the rhizome each time segmental lines burst in a line of flight, yet the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines do not cease referring to each other. That is why one cannot count on dualism or dichotomy, even under the rudimentary form of either good or bad. (^{Deleuze & Guattari, 1995}: 17)

Given this conceptual set, babies are perceived here as haecceities, virtualities, and beings that constitute a plane of immanence⁷, a life (or perhaps even as a body without organs⁸, in ^{Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996}) sense. According to Deleuze (2002), on babies:

[...] It is haecceity, no longer of individuation, but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject who incarnated it in amidst all things made it either good or bad [...] Unique essence, a life... [...] newborns are alike and have no individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a grimace, events, which are not subjective characteristics. Amidst all their sufferings and weaknesses, newborns are traversed by an immanent life that is pure power and even beatitude. The indefiniteness of life loses all indeterminacy insofar as they fulfill a plane of immanence or, what comes to be strictly the same, constitutes the elements of a transcendental field (the individual life, on the contrary, remains inseparable from the empirical determinations). (^{Deleuze, 2002}: 14)

Stéfan Leckercq emphasizes that, according to Deleuze, such expressions from the baby are the manifestations of a life that travels and singles him out, without individualizing it: “This anteriority of the subjective places the baby within an indefinite that belongs only to the sensitive” [...] It is a pure event [...]” (Leckercq, 2002: 23-24).

On the same analytical basis, it is important to initially reflect on identity-tags regarding babies⁹, such as deaf, blind, myopic, listeners, boys, girls, black, white, etc. This matter would be further justified by the fact that babies constitute, in essence, nomadic lives, flows, openings, expressions, power, immanence, the outside of the territorialities and capitalistic subjectivities¹⁰, the outside of the devices related to meritocracy, capacitism, including those capturing the territory-childhood¹¹, for example.

Given the above, intending to determine “the indeterminate,” “a baby,” “a life,” pure immanence, as a deaf baby, in the case of the study in question, however contradictory it may seem, is the commonplace, the “normal,” the daily basis, the “possible” in capitalistic societies: it is to stick the identity-tag to it and consider the power-knowledge devices (of technical-scientific semiotics, mainly, as highlighted by ^{Guattari (2012}: 31), control/government, and subjection (according to the subjectivity semiotics, and identification/location of the “different” prevalent in our societies), in addition to the legal and economic semiotics involved in the interim, which are amalgamated, as Guattari points out: “The object of the IWC [Integrated World Capitalism] is currently in one productive-economic-subjective block” (2012: 31).

At the same time, in this scenario, this identity-tag has the role of mainly guaranteeing some existences, making visible their singularities and related rights, if we take the systematic erasure suffered by sociological, political, and linguistic minorities into consideration, as is also the case of deaf people¹², among other groups. Skliar (2014) incidentally launches a very suggestive reflection on this naming process, deeming it as, in fact, “of false accusations”:

And the interpretation of the difference sums up all the cowardice of men, all their inability to exist in the world among others, all this ignorance summed up through the casting of a name and hiding the language [...] Because the difference is not a subject, but a relationship. When the difference becomes subject, there is false accusation and, without the testimony of deviation, of abnormality, of the incomplete, and punished by authorized, renewed, always current, always vigilant and nervous speeches. (2014: 156, emphasis added).

After such consideration and in view of the pseudo-need to identifying a baby as deaf, the research envisioned allows for the mapping of some of that baby’s relations with the materiality present in its house/family and the world that presented itself (of both humans and non-humans). With this specific intention, from the team study (with a broader scope) initially mentioned, the research sought “[...] to multiply the means of connection, languages, approaches”, and, at the same time, “Subtract, of a given set, the unit that makes it whole, that which has been territorializing the forces that move its field of investigation and the research on education itself” (^{Oliveira and Paraíso, 2012}: 163, emphasis added).

Given such intentionality, some central questions were taken into consideration, such as what kind of unity would be possibly detected in this tangle between human AND (i)material¹³? What assemblies could be in perspective? After all, what is/how is it to become/constitute a being (or a deaf person)? In a being compared, as a rule, to the condition of the listening norm? What lines, reliefs, and flows could we find within these territories made by desires, encounters, and agencies? What movements/forces of repetition and rupture (within itself, within the world) could be glimpsed at regarding such lines and flows? What “plans of immanence” we would be (un)able¹⁴ to perceive/create as researchers in this sense? Based on this mapping, what impacts would we perceive in the pedagogical field?

I, thus, sought to extend a closer look - to shift an anthropocentric conception - to toys, beings, and objects related to contact, games/uses of, and with, a baby, the gestures and sensitivities present/triggered and also across social representations connected to such artifacts (the way adults and society may possibly showcase their images and conceptions about children, babies, and things¹⁵, within these processes).

POST-HUMANISM, TANGLES, AND MEANS OF SUBJECTIVATION: HOW TO PERCEIVE BABIES AND AGENCIES?

Perspectives emerge from the impacts of anthropocentrism and its various devastating effects on the planet seeking - beyond the knowledge related to the epistemologies of the original peoples, such as the case of indigenous and African philosophies rescued by the concept of decoloniality, for example¹⁶- to urgently forge new relationships between humanity and nature, imbued with greater respect, care, and based on sustainability. Meanwhile, we are also aware that the means of understanding the processes of subjectivation¹⁷ were and are still forged by modern and positivist thinking, in which culture is conceived apart from nature. Historically, as a result of this phenomenon of anthropocentric thinking, as ^{Guattari (2012}) warned, it has been the manifestation of a “collective feeling of pseudo-modernity” (p. 34), where capitalistic subjectivity “gets inebriated, anesthetizes itself” (2012: 34).

Therefore, as the analytical key of this model, there is the absolute and rational control of mankind, everything it encompasses while exercising unrestricted choice and dominion over everything not human, whether animated or not, in addition to systematically denying the possibility of an agency to all these non-humans (^{Moss, 2019}). As pointed out, humans and nonhumans remain split, binary. In this sense, Tim Ingold points out what has been systematically taking place: “a metaphysical division between subjects and objects (attributing them with a fetishized agency)” (2012: 25).

Ingold also indicates that the current emphasis of literature on the material agency is a consequence of a simplification of things as objects and their “removal” from vital processes (from the emphasis on life). According to Ingold, instead of understanding materiality as such, researchers fail to perceive it as material flows.

It is precisely against said dualistic thinking that the post-humanist understanding (or its re-articulation, if the original knowledge is taken into consideration) emerges as a “navigation tool” (^{Braidotti, 2013}, cited by ^{Moss, 2019}: 142) regarding the interconnection of people, things, and ideas.

^{Moss (2019}) highlights the fundamentally transdisciplinary character of the area, where diverse perspectives and methodologies are conceived, including relatively new fields, such as science and technology studies, animal studies, post-human/ethical philosophy, and environmental humanities, based on contributions from Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and scholars such as ^{Braidotti (2019}; 2013), ^{Lenz Taguchi (2010}), ^{Haraway (2004}), ^{Taylor (2013}), and ^{Murris (2016}), for example.

In the same way, when proposing the resumption of the notion of “thing,” porous and fluid, crossed by vital flows and integrated with the cycles and dynamics of life and nature, ^{Ingold (2012}) defends: “[...] it is not just the mind that leaks, but things in general” (^{Ingold, 2012}: 42).

Thus, we must articulate, even if briefly, many of the aspects of the referred ancestral/afro-indigenous epistemologies - among other knowledge strongly opposed by Eurocentric thinking (one of the main responsible for the current situation of binarism man/culture x nature, of course) - that, as long as we are aware, manifest this understanding of the world, seeking to preserve within their cultures other means of subjectivation and life, in the face of the violence (not only symbolic) of historical and everyday coloniality (and also long before it!). In fact, Boaventura Sousa ^{Santos (2019}; ^{Santos & Martins, 2019}) mentions in recent works the importance of recovering the analytical tools of these ancestral peoples for new struggles for dignity on the planet, of thought and action, among other aspects. Something he calls post-abyssal epistemologies.

^{Braidotti (2019}) also celebrates this way of perceiving the world: “Interrelational, transnational, multi-sex, and trans-species [...]” as “a native or vernacular form of cosmopolitanism” (^{Braidotti, 2019}: 127)

Regarding this dimension, Moss makes an important note of the fact that humanism has also been associated with an emancipatory agenda encompassing solidarity, social justice, and equality, while post-humanism does not reject this agenda for human improvement. There is, therefore, an indication that post-humanism objects to the “epistemic violence” (^{Braidotti, 2013}: 30, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}: 147), exercised by Eurocentric humanism to all occupants of the planet.

Given this brief context, we can situate a different conception about teaching-learning and subjectivation/singularization processes¹⁸ through the idea of ​​tangles¹⁹. It means paying attention, more specifically, to learnings that do not follow a linear path, with progressive and/or predictable stages. On the contrary, as noted by ^{Moss (2019}), it proceeds through unexpected fittings, departures, and deviations involving flight lines²⁰ which start in unpredictable ways, triggered by forces of becoming and encounters with differences, as new connections are made, and new hypotheses are put to the test against others. Malaguzzi’s metaphor, by Reggio Emilia²¹, as recalled by Moss, is that of a tangle of spaghetti, “without beginning or end, but where you are always in the middle and with openings to many other directions and places” (^{Moss, 2019}: 71. Free translation; ^{Dahlberg and Moss, 2020}).

In this sense, it is worth mentioning that ^{Ingold (2012}; 2015) also names such lines as flight lines (which are not fixed or solidified as elements of a territory), in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense and, occasionally, also assumes them as lines of becoming, a concept that seems to make the idea of a “creation-journey” more explicit.

I chose the term flight lines instead of escape lines, which is more often found in translations of the Deleuzo-Guattarian work. From this analysis, they also do not carry the same meaning. In fact, it is worth mentioning ^{Moss’s (2019}) incitation for us to place an outstanding movement on the fixed lines and hard lines so that we can create names/ideas/concepts in addition to the data provided by Deleuze and Guattari. Anyway, the “spaghetti” idea brought by Moss is also mentioned in this endeavor, as well as in ^{Dahlberg and Moss (Dahlberg & Moss, 2020}; ^{Rinaldi, 2020}).

Therefore, there is value in using the idea of flight or becoming, to refer to the processes that cross, drag, and hybridize such lines and the territories they compose in further detail. Here, I particularly emphasize the case of babies/haecceities across these journeys. ^{Ingold (2012}) points out that:

life, according to Deleuze and Guattari, unfolds along these threads; they call it “flight lines” and, sometimes, “lines of becoming”. The most important thing, however, is that these lines do not connect. [...] the points are not connected but set aside and made indiscernible by the current as it creeps through them. Life is always uncertain. While your impulse is to avoid reaching the end, you keep moving forward. (^{Ingold, 2012}: 38-39).

Resuming this conception of becoming as a means (and not an idea of points or in between points), Ingold - in the work entitled “Being alive, essays on movement, knowledge, and description” - takes up the emphasis implied by Deleuze Guattari: “A point is always an origin. But a line of becoming has no beginning or end [...] [It] travels only one way [...] A becoming is always in the middle; it can only be obtained through the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relationship of the two; it is the middleman [...] (^{Deleuze & Guattari, 2004}: 224-225, as cited by Ingold, 2015: 137)

As will be further observed, in the case of agencies concerning Joaquim, the baby in question, this aspect of the lines of becoming/flight as creation (“becoming”) is latent, also from the (im)materiality of the sound and light in this journey, in a plane of singular immanence in which the “every day” or “intuitive” astonish him (the deaf baby) and anyone who is carried away by the experience of the encounter. We must also note that such astonishment/(re)bedazzlement/creation (as an appreciation-experimentation of every living moment) is perhaps further seen/felt/perceived in contexts of human sensory-visual difference, for example (hearing-seeing-feeling). ^{Ingold (2015}) also helps us to observe: “The kind of astonishment that comes from valuing each moment as if, at that moment, we were meeting the world for the first time, feeling its pulse, marveling at its beauty, and wondering how such a world is possible” (Ingold, 2015: 112). It is as if life were that possible upheaval (a flanking?), through the force/pulse resulting from the flights/becomings of the initial experiences.

On such aspects, ^{Ingold (2015}) defends the creation of a “phenomenology of experience,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, and not merely an “ecology of the real,” that is, the author does not conceive, as a rule, that it is feasible to identify or define outlines (in themselves), from the encounters and assemblies that make up the tangles/rhizomes. New and unexpected nuances of being-feeling-thinking can only take place in conjunction. Ingold synthesizes that “Living systems are characterized by a coupling of perception and action [...] Such coupling is both a condition for the exercise of agency and the foundation of the skill” (Ingold, 2105: 113, emphasis added)

Within this bulge, ^{Moss (2019}) also understands “knowledge” as the creation of something new, supported by other scholars in the area, some of whom have already been mentioned. Knowledge as the means to create new properties “that never existed before and, more importantly, are inconceivable from what came before” (Osberg & Biesta, 2007, p. 33, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}: 71). This is precisely why ideas about unpredictability, astonishment, and admiration rise as important values in Reggio Emilia’s early childhood education and its pedagogy of relationships and listening²².

In short, as observed by ^{Moss (2019}), both Deleuze and Reggio Emilia conceive that learning cannot be reduced to something predictable, to the reproduction of predefined patterns through “prophetic pedagogy.” On the contrary, it is about “being open and welcoming the emergence of the not-yet-thought, in oneself and others. As such, when it happens, it will be surprising, unpredictable, and a cause of wonder” (^{Moss, 2019}: 123. Emphasis added).

Having made such considerations about the importance of an understanding of the tangles (or meshes/meshwork, as named by ^{Ingold, from Lefebvre, Ingold, 2012}; 2015²³) and an alternative to anthropocentrism, I sought for the concept of expanded agency, since, according to this perspective, beings and things become “performative agents,” in the same degree of importance (in terms of affections), so to speak.

We, therefore, must imagine a world in which the subjects - human or non-human, animated or inanimate - “are” because they are related and influence each other, all ensnared, blurring the lines that allow us to say where limits are set (for example, of each child/children, teacher/adult(s), and things). In such reciprocal relationships, all matter shifts and changes the ongoing intra-actions, as pointed out by ^{Moss (2019}).

To understand this concept of agency, the author also refers to Karen Barad (2009, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}), pointing out that it is necessary to displace the very notion of individuals existing independently. Contrariwise, the agency is then perceived as a staging, a matter of alternatives to reconfigure the tangles. According to Barad, the agency is not about choice in any liberal humanistic sense but “responsiveness, the possibilities of mutual response” (Barad, 2009, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}: 145). Therefore, there is the idea of dragging and hybridizing points within woven networks (indiscernible, as stated by ^{Ingold, 2012}), as mentioned.

Consequently, the recent theoretical review on the concept of child agency carried out by ^{Pavez Soto and Sepúlveda Kattan (2019}) proved highly relevant for the field contextualization and suggesting of an epistemological terrain to gather the main reflections on the present study. The authors emphasize that the concept of agency is still being consolidated at the theoretical level of social sciences and childhood studies, although there is no emphasis on babies in the survey carried out by the authors. Still, they emphasize the usefulness and relevance of the concept to define and understand the social action that children develop in today’s world.

As they point out from the focus on publications of Hispanic and Latin American origin, the childhood studies have argued that children know, understand, and explain the world in which they live, as well as the social relationships in which they are immersed, having a point of view about it. Such studies have been affirming the concept of child agency as a constitutive competence of the child (the “positivity” of childhood). It overall means understanding that childhood studies have questioned which social spaces are possible for the children’s agency, where those agencies are evident, how and where children exercise their power (as conceived by this field), which inhibits or promotes the exercise of this agency, among other aspects, with emphasis on Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Amartya Sen’s research, as well as Berry Mayall and Leena Alanen’s (^{Pavez Soto & Sepúlveda Katan, 2019}).

As summarized by the authors, regardless of the undeniable importance of this aspect, children’s agency is still socially invisible. Therefore, they support the urgency in favoring children’s social participation, which should be based not only on attitudes of openness, but also on mechanisms, methodologies, and policies at the institutional level, so that it can be implemented.

Under this context, considering the broader invisibility concerning children’s agency, as mentioned, it appears that the dimension of the babies’ agency and the understanding of their relations with the world (subjects and things) are still quite missing as epistemological fields in the social sciences and childhood studies. By narrowing this spectrum even further we can certainly consider the scarcity of studies on deaf babies and their subjectivation processes, as well as pedagogical processes on these roads.

From this observation for the study, it was important to draw a brief bibliographic survey on the subject and, because of it, it can also be said that studies with deaf babies, in a perspective not affiliated with the clinical-therapeutic ideal (^{Skliar, 1997}) positive/potential of childhood (^{Sarmento, 2005}) - or even about agencies and tangles - are still a nearly unexplored field.

Joaquim AND the “leaking” flows

According to Lenz Taguchi: “The material affects our discursive understandings as much as our discursive understandings affect the material reality around us” (Taguchi, 2010: 30, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}: 150). Based on this reflection, the meeting of our team with Joaquim²⁴ and his mother (lasting about an hour, taking place in his home, in June 2019) invited me to observe the prominence [also] of things as agents of/in relations.

That afternoon, while I was introduced to (a very smiling) Joaquim - then 7 months old and occasional user of hearing aid²⁵ - I opened my arms, while we looked at each other very carefully, believing that he could be interested in climbing on my lap. In fact, he threw his body towards me and his mother helped him in this endeavor. Already in my arms, he immediately held a necklace I was wearing (Image 1) and, thus, we stepped into the house.

Source: author’s collection

Image 1 

From that moment, already in the room (with various objects present and available, including what is culturally represented as children’s toys), nearly all the dynamics and flows of that encounter were tangled by the necklace. This means designing an expanded agency, in which the adult-baby interactions, the adult narratives, what turned into (and what did not) become a toy for the baby (who remained sitting on my lap, on the living room rug, playing with the necklace, most of the time), our reciprocal actions/sensations, the team’s projections concerning the next meeting²⁶, the choice on the part of one of the researchers to record the outline of those events, in short, were managed by the power lines with the help of the necklace (that drew Joaquim’s attention, as well as the highlight of a wristwatch, also mine, - Image 2 - which caught his interest by the end of the meeting).

In this context, we must emphasize how Joaquim sought contact with some objects and people. Among the options that came up within easy reach, only a few ended up being targeted by him (AND only a few led to observation/exploration).

Source: author’s collection

Image 2 

A reflection that emerged from that visit refers precisely to objects that become things (through energy and awakened life), as explained by Ingold: the things that trigger events, as already mentioned; things like “a place where several events intertwine” (Ingold, 2012: 29) and also become things to play with, from the perspective of the baby and the adults.

It means paying attention, for example, to ^{Brougère’s meaning (2010}: 20) when he argues that the childhood is a moment of appropriation of images and varied representations that circulate through different channels and sources. This way, the toy is one of those sources that highlights such cultural artifact to the author: “If it [the toy] brings a support for action, manipulation, and playful conduct to the child, it also presents them to shapes and images, symbols to be manipulated” (2010: 42). Such conceptions are causally linked to what Brougère calls a playful culture (Brougère, 2010), that is, different supports conceived as material devices also that have been configured as toys for children and babies in contemporary times (toys as media, in Brougère’s words).

Regarding the “child culture”, Brougère also points out that it is constituted, among other aspects, as an environment composed of objects and, particularly, of toys (a park of toys, as an organized set, Reme, 1984, cited by Brougère, 2010). Thus, the toy contributes to the development of this so-called playful culture. Such artifacts are basically perceived as strong symbolic contents of the adult universe, as they represent the conception of a child (or more children), “insofar as it is an object chosen by adults and intended for a small child” (Brougère, 2010: 69). In any case, the author also considers that children and babies can also (re)create ways that are still unknown, based on their movements of individuation and subjectification.

In addition to this conception (which is particularly close to this study), imbued with the post-humanist perception, it is possible to argue that these means, still unknown, are also a reflex of the things/flows insinuating/provoking, and moving babies. We can also conceive toys as “living” things that generate (unexpected) flows, as we have seen, and not merely objects/artifacts intended for use in childhood, either by industry or, in general, as a cultural material for a specific purpose (represented as such).

From the cartography about the forces of the encounter with Joaquim (and not only through the mapping of this territory’s object points, as well as some outlines and relations between them), for example, what we can launch in perspective is that children, especially babies, according to everything already presented, perceive the becoming-toy, detect “life” and the strength of things, of nature, of beings, in inter-intra-subjective dimensions that we may no longer perceive as adults (particularly us, the members of this type of capitalist and anthropocentric society responsible for splitting the human-world relationship). It is also worth noting that the points of a kind of exercise/cartographic record are, therefore, dragged and amalgamated into new elements (and ways of understanding these elements) mapped (and which may change the ways of mapping such agencies, as I seek to portray here through a narrative supported by images).

It will also be in this sense that, with ^{Ingold (2012}; 2015), for example, we are allowed to think of toys, not as mere objects (points in the “living room” territory, for example, in the case approached in here), but of any elements porous and fluid that agency babies and children²⁷ (hybridizing/mutually transforming them).

We can, therefore, conceive these things crossed by vital flows and linked to the dynamics of life and nature that “leak,” just as it is with the human mind, as argued (and, consequently, some of these elements seem to escape the researcher-cartographer’s eyes). They are, therefore, objects that come to life, turning into “open” things, becoming/forming toys/learnings/sensations, from the eyes of children and babies who, in turn, have been managed/entangled/seduced by them (who got managed, entangled, seduced themselves), without the slightest suspicion of the adults or being able to anticipate these forces. However, they are immersed in them.

Joaquim AND the experience with sound

In two of the meetings with the baby and his mother, I had the opportunity to observe some events generated by Joaquim’s relationship with sound materials and sound itself. The first event was when the mother offered him a doll that made sounds (Image 3 - circled doll) while he was wearing the hearing aid.

Source: author’s collection

Image 3 

On that visit, I was struck by the fact that, when Joaquim reached the doll, he wanted to keep it, while manipulating it and putting it in his mouth. However, when the mother activated the sound produced by this material, the baby stood still, attentive (apparently scared or in a state of strangeness), remaining profoundly serious (he immediately stopped smiling), even making a crying expression. In fact, the sound was a little shrill from my listening perspective. I understood that the sound strongly crossed Joaquim’s relationship with the material/toy. It resulted in a singular experience for him. The sound “leaked” to Joaquim and modulated the course of his journey, actions, and affections there, on the sofa in of his living room, right before our eyes. It also changed his mother’s perception, who then decided to disconnect the sound device from the material/toy. From then on, Joaquim continued to manipulate and react to other materials.

At that moment, I understood that the experience lived by the deaf baby was very symbolic, for various reasons. The first dimension of this reflection was on the fact that the baby changed the course of his actions due to this relationship with sound materials and also due to another material, more precisely, the hearing aid, placed/chosen by the adults²⁸. Aberrant movements stood out there, therefore, in my perspective (and they challenged me to map so that these aspects could be revealed beyond a “network with points”): what happened to Joaquim’s perception in the presence or absence of sound emissions AND with and without the hearing aid. In Ingold’s words, it would be looking for a “living network” or mesh of interwoven lines (²⁰¹⁵: 111).

Otherwise (without the materiality of the device), the experience could have been different, or happen at a different intensity. What I mean to highlight regarding this first aspect is the baby’s subjective/cognitive/affective modulation, his understanding/learning/sensitivity about the world and things, in the face of many crossings of forces and flows. This deaf baby - wearing an appliance at that moment - and who would receive an implant in the near future - should be thought of (like in so many other cases), especially from the transhumanity perspective, for example? His daily experiences, due to these materials (“hearing support”), will be certainly crossed and modified. It is not just about “listening.” This experience with sound (and, therefore, with silence), under the conditions in question (of “leakage”), can generate impacts/flows/forces unknown to us in the condition of listeners, as well as adults²⁹.

Another dimension of this reflection referred, as a consequence of the above, to what we listeners and deaf people conceive as “the sound” and how we conceive “hearing the sound.” What is noise in this “soundscape”? What is unpleasant (to hear or not to hear) in this context? What do these crossings generate for us and how do we react to them (either apparently or not)?

A final issue that deserves to be highlighted (although so many others lie in perspective) is related to how we have separated, perhaps enclosed, such “human senses” into categories in themselves, therefore, not conceiving the human ability to feel the world in a hybrid/crossed and plural way.

^{Ingold (2015}) questions “what is sound” and the so-called “soundscape” (a concept that the author questions and disagrees with), emphasizing the amalgamated nature of feeling the world:

[...] the environment we experience, know, and in which we move around in is not sliced along the sensory lines through which we tackle it. The world we perceive is the same, regardless of the path we take, and, in realizing it, each of us acts as an undivided center of movement and consciousness. That is why I deplore the fashion of multiplying landscapes of all possible kinds. (^{Ingold, 2015}: 206)

Anyway, Joaquim started to relate to sound again in two different situations, so that I could witness and understand it (this sound that the listeners seem to conceive and pay attention to). One of them happened one day when I arrived at his house and he had just woken up. He was still very sleepy, and his mother allowed him to stay without his hearing aid. He was very calm, began interacting with me, her, and with things. Then, the mother decided to put the device on it and show me the “difference” she perceived in his actions, as she told me. Joaquim was already sitting on the sofa. As soon as the device was placed, in fact, there was an attention to elements with which he might not have been previously used to. He started to notice things around him, observing or acting, apparently, in terms of those things he noticed (most of the time, more intense sounds emitted in the room: of the dogs, of the conversation between me and the mother, some falling object, etc.).

However, following that short period in which he started wearing the device, there was a noise so intense (piercing as a microphone effect) that we got to hear it and his body was “frozen”. He seemed to try to understand what was happening in the environment but started feeling scared from there. Then he cried loudly, and soon the device stopped producing that effect. The discomfort lasted for a noticeably short time but caused a noticeable change in the baby. While the mother tried to calm him down, he continued to explore the things on the sofa and stopped crying.

Another event related to Joaquim’s relationship with the sound was recorded spontaneously by his mother and sent to me as a video file, available through the link below:

Source: video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbSw6Vo4aw0

Image 4 

Regarding Joaquim’s relationship (without the hearing aid) with the material-tambourine-toy and sound in this recording, we observe that his body is almost completely involved in the experience, to the point of exploring his feet in a different way, (maybe) similar to how he manipulates the tambourine (with the tambourine on his lap, he hits it and slides his hands on the surface of the instrument sometimes; he also shakes his feet and legs to make it move). He seems to try to extract some sensation that is not limited to the material from that (his feet and also from his hands), as something that is expanded/leaked into his body (something also similar to the concept of the body without organs, previously mentioned). Do his feet do something similar to what the tambourine does (the sound or vibration he feels)? Do the hands that beat, quickly, and also extend, slowly, across the tambourine’s leather seek for that sensation? Does Joaquim attempt to hear/feel his feet the same way he can hear/feel the tambourine? What does the tambourine, objectively/subjectively, and affectively provoke/agency in Joaquim, besides a representation that we can evoke about playing? What does he seek to learn from this experience? What do you learn from this tangle? What can we understand, what lines of force can be drawn - in terms of agency - on these interplaying body-tambourine-sound (amalgam/entanglement/mesh/plane of immanence), insofar as the tambourine (material visuality) seem to become as much of a protagonist as Joaquim (his feet, legs, lap, hands) and the vibrations/sounds? Shared and expanded agencies. Within this scenario, ^{Ingold (2015}) could contribute to the articulation of possible reflections with the affirmation that: “We must, once again, take the materials more seriously, because it is from them that everything is done” (p. 67).

CARTOGRAPHY OF LINES AND FLOWS (ALSO MATERIALS) ACROSS BABY SUBJECTIVATION PROCESSES: POST-HUMANISM AND JOAQUIM’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PEDAGOGICAL FIELD

Given the presented and discussed here, it seems essential to resume Braidotti’s proposition: our challenge for change is that we can reflect on and compose a new “us,” as “missing persons” (Braidotti, 2019: 128), to better understand the world, relationships, socially engineered choices, spaces (and representations) that children, babies, nature, and materials have in these contexts, the arisen di-re-sonances, among other aspects. New ethical understandings about who we are - as well as about children, babies, and what they invoke in us -, therefore, about our relationships and impacts in the world can arise from this perception and sensitivity(ies). With this new epistemology, Braidotti (2019: 144) fundamentally mentions the need for an ethical objective from the affirmative plan of transversal subjectivity compositions (rhizomatic terms that involve territories, geologies, ecologies, and survival technologies).

Based on the discussion about a deaf baby and these tangles, it would still be essential to point out that, once again, we must subvert the idea of ​​disability and disability studies to what Goodley (et.al, 2014, 2018, cited by ^{Braidotti, 2019}: 139) has/have called DisHuman Studies, seeking to resist and break with the “self-aggrandizing” narratives about the human being as something sponsored by a Eurocentric humanism focused on neoliberal and “capacity” aspects of the citizen’s ideal image as a functional production unit (which means being human, therefore, in the classic and traditional humanist conception), as also pointed out by the author. These aspects clearly contribute to projecting an understanding of what would also be a Post-Human Pedagogy (Braidotti, 2019), an intra-active Pedagogy³⁰ (^{Lenz Taguchi, 2010}, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}), or a Pedagogy of relationships and listening (^{Dahlberg & Moss, 2020}; ^{Rinaldi, 2020}), so that new perspectives on teaching, learning, and research, also highlighted in this study, can be explored.

It should be noted that such pedagogies - and any other influenced by post-human perspectives - decentralize human beings and this also refers to children/babies, as argued through this work. This means, once again, conceiving the emphasis on entanglement, with a challenge to the idea of focusing on children, so common in early childhood education nowadays, as also highlighted by ^{Moss (2019}).

In this conceptual spin, children and babies start being perceived from new hybrid references, as well as beings “leaked” by/to the world. In Murris’s words, “the post-human child is, therefore, ‘a tangle, made up of material concepts and forces, where the social, political, biological machines and their measuring, controlling and observing machines are intertwined - all these elements inter-act’” (Murris, personal communication, quoted by ^{Moss, 2019}: 150).

Also, within the pedagogical field - we must consider that this is a kind of continuous birth, a lifestyle (also for babies) that is alive and open an unprepared world. It is a process of (re)emergence with this world, which is also in formation, through the lines of its relationships, as ^{Ingold (2015}) also helps us to observe. I believe, therefore, that a paradigmatic change would take place in the educational field that, in this case, would kickstart another way of understanding and perceiving the processes at play during the development of children and babies, for example. Essentially, a pedagogy of the outside or a trans-post-human pedagogy, of profound redimensioning/deterritorialization of knowledge. In other words, it would be a pedagogy of listening to things.

In this regard, I believe it is essential that we advance the research in this area, also in Brazil, especially regarding the educational field. Overall, in recent years, Childhood Studies have observed a significant increase in interest regarding issues between materiality and childhood³¹, but we can also notice that the concepts of the agency are, as a rule, mainly gravitate around anthropocentrism³². Also in Brazil, it is worth remembering that, at the same time, an expression of this non-anthropocentric epistemological concern has taken place, as I analyze it through approaches based on a decolonial pedagogy. However, within the field of education, for example, in addition to decoloniality, studies on post-humanism or the post-human have not been found as specific theoretical-methodological categories³³.

In summary, the role of material flows is certainly highlighted within this proposed pedagogy of relationships, in fact, “of listening” not only to humans (as pointed out from ^{Moss’s considerations, 2019}; ^{Dahlberg & Moss, 2020}; ^{Ingold, 2015}). It means contemplating, in a more comprehensive way, one consequence of this sensitivity and another that would bring the conception of the world (and relations themselves) that cannot be simply “taught” as something ready or given, as it is learned in co-construction. With this more panoramic gesture on such a trans-post-human pedagogy, we may place another lifestyle on the horizon on a planet that has long been threatened by anthropocentric conceptions and educational practices (and, as it is well-known, defining of agencies that are also anthropocentric, never regarding this world, in fact, on an equal footing, or while “listening to it”), as previously discussed. A pedagogy that is also open and porous, thus, to a re-agent world, the senses and impacts of relationships (micro and macropolitical), children and babies, and more prone to raise questions in these contexts (as it is also in motion, both crossed and crossing). This way, their challenge would also be navigating themselves by means of compasses other than the same ones of the euro-human-referenced epistemologies of whiteness, as proposed by the decolonial pedagogy.

Also from ^{Ingold (2015}: 112), in this becoming world, we can project a pedagogy that reinstates the amazing and unpredictable as if we were “feeling its pulse, marveling at its beauty, and asking ourselves how such a world is possible,” something sadly banned from official science. In this broad political-pedagogical project, babies and the clues that they make possible through their agency/coupling processes would certainly act as immensely powerful drivers. After all, we already became subjectivated adults/professionals through those anthropocentric and competitive/empowering ways of the working/social world, as a rule, that is, frequently subjected to the functioning mechanisms of the Integrated World Capitalism, in the words of ^{Guattari (2012}). Regarding this aspect, the author also highlights:

[...] capitalistic subjectivity aspires to generate the world of childhood, love, art, as well as everything related to anguish, madness, pain, death, the feeling of being lost in the cosmos... It is based on the most personal existential data - we may even call infrapersonal - from which the IWC [Integrated World Capitalism] constitutes its massive subjective aggregates, attached to race, nation, professional body, sports competition, dominating virility, to the media star [...] (^{Guattari, 2012}: 34, emphasis added).

Given this context, as it was perceived at the beginning of the study, lines and flows traversed through that territory with Joaquim (whom I consider our - sort of - main guide), which suggests the strength of things/materials in his subjectivation process (the things he interacted with his hearing aid, for example, besides many others). Likewise, in this relief formed by desires, encounters, assemblages, and tangles, we observe repetitive movements on the condition of deafness, that is, deafness not as a power - of seeing/feeling, for example - but as a lack (to be compensated by the device or cochlear implant). Movements that emerge intensely within his brief life experience, in his constitution process as a being/deaf being, within his family, and across so many other relationships (such as schools, in the near future), already strongly forged by the nosological-medical device.

On the other hand, we could observe that Joaquim reveals flight lines on ways to get to know the world (including sounds/vibrations and so many other sensations) and searches for directions/paths/events that go far beyond his hearing condition, as a nomadic adventurer (where there are other sensitivities/perceptions). Joaquim situates his whole body/mind in the creation of tangles/sensorial meshes in this endeavor, such as “any baby,” as a task to fill an immanence plan, “a whole life,” as ^{Deleuze (2002}) reminded us, placing himself in an expanded agency with what/whom he meets - and also projects, re-acts - along the way.

I conceive Joaquim’s tangles, also from a private encounter that I would like to finally share. About two years ago, in dialogue with a Kariri-Xocó indigenous leader, I asked about the daily lives of deaf people among his people. He told me that the Kariri-Xocó understand that the people “called deaf” have a greater sensitivity to the spiritual world, in their words: a gift.” As the leader told me, deaf people would be a kind of “cell phone” open to receiving “external” signals from “high above.”

From this perspective, I attempt to emphasize that understanding Joaquim’s flight, his initial gestures in a life to come, through nothing but a flow/line/means of an agency, the idea of ​​“hearing/not hearing” - something so naturalized within our society - is to leave a whole world of post-transhuman possibilities unknown and unexplored (for him and for others). More than that, given the agencies of the modern, colonial, and western tradition, such thinking reduces potentials unknown in disabilities, thus preparing and reserving other maps, especially for some babies and children (where the differences unfold in absence), their subjectivation processes and ways of existing.