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Childhood & Philosophy

versión impresa ISSN 2525-5061versión On-line ISSN 1984-5987

child.philo vol.17  Rio de Janeiro  2021  Epub 27-Feb-2021

https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2021.55060 

Dossier Ethical Implications of Practicing Philosophy with Children and Adults: Irony, Misogyny and Narcissism on Debate

Right under our noses: the postponement of children’s political equality and the now

Bajo nuestras propias narices: la postergación de la igualdad política de los niños y el ahora

Bem debaixo de nossos narizes: o adiamento da igualdade política das crianças e o agora

IUniversity of Plymouth, United Kingdom, E-mail: joanna.haynes@plymouth.ac.uk

IIUniversity of Oulu, Finland, University of Cape Town, South Africa, E-mail: karin.murris@oulu.fi


abstract

Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communities of philosophical enquiry, and we suggest that these have profound implications for the political agency of children. Facilitation can be enacted as a chronological practice of progress and development that works against child, in terms of political agency. This paper theorises practices of facilitation grounded in philosophies of childhood that assume listening to child/ren as equals, as already able to philosophise, and against sameness. We explore the political and ethical implications of the radical posthumanist reconfiguration of the ‘zipped’ body in the light of including the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chronological time through the concept now/ness. We shift from ethics to ethos, and from ‘zipped’ to ‘unzipped’ bodies, through the notion of affect to explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of facilitation in Philosophy with Children and children’s political agency. We re-turn to David McKee’s Not Now Bernard (1980), getting ‘inside the text’, and attending to the postponement of equality in Philosophy with Children.

keywords: child; equality; now; postponement; facilitation

resumen

Respondiendo a la invitación de este número especial de Childhood and Philosophy este artículo pone en consideración el ethos de la facilitación en la investigación filosófica con niños y el orden espacio-temporal de la comunidad de investigación. Al interior del movimiento de Filosofía con Niños hay diferencias de pensamiento y práctica en relación a la “facilitación” en comunidades de investigación filosófica, y nosotros sugerimos que esas diferencias tienen profundas implicancias para con la agencia política de los y las niñas. La facilitación se puede representar como una práctica cronológica de progreso y desarrollo que opera en contra del niño, en términos de agencia política. Este artículo teoriza sobre prácticas de facilitación basadas en filosofías de la infancia que adoptan la postura de escuchar al/los niño/s como iguales, como ya capaces de filosofar, y en contra de la uniformidad. Exploramos las implicancias éticas y políticas de la reconfiguración posthumanista radical del cuerpo ‘zippeado’ [comprimido] a la luz de incluir las energías disciplinarias, imaginativas y habilitadoras del tiempo cronológico a través del concepto del ahora. Nos movemos de la ética al ethos y de los cuerpos ‘zippeados’ [comprimidos] a los ‘unzippeados’ [descomprimidos] a través de la noción de afecto para explorar las dimensiones temporales y espaciales de la facilitación en Filosofía con Niños y la agencia política de las y los niños. Re-tornamos al Not Now Bernard (1980) de David McKee, metiéndonos ‘adentro del texto’, y poniendo atención a la postergación de la igualdad en Filosofía con Niños.

palabras clave: niño/a; igualdad; ahora; postergación; facilitación.

resumo

Respondendo ao convite desta edição especial da Infância e Filosofia, este artigo considera o ethos da facilitação na investigação filosófica com crianças e a ordem espaço-temporal da comunidade de investigação. Dentro do movimento Filosofia com Crianças, existem diferenças de pensamento e prática sobre 'facilitação' em comunidades de investigação filosófica, e sugerimos que isso tem implicações profundas para a agência política das crianças. A facilitação pode ser executada como uma prática cronológica de progresso e desenvolvimento que funciona contra a criança, em termos de agência política. Este artigo teoriza práticas de facilitação alicerçadas em filosofias da infância que pressupõem ouvir a criança / criança como iguais, já capazes de filosofar e contra a mesmice. Exploramos as implicações políticas e éticas da reconfiguração pós-humanista radical do corpo "fechado" à luz da inclusão das energias disciplinares, imaginativas e capacitadoras do tempo cronológico por meio do conceito agora / ness. Mudamos da ética para o ethos, e de corpos "compactados" para "descompactados", por meio da noção de afeto para explorar as dimensões temporais e espaciais de facilitação em Filosofia com Crianças e a agência política infantil. Voltamos a Not Now Bernard de David McKee (1980), entrando "no texto" e tratando do adiamento da igualdade em Filosofia com Crianças.

palavras-chave: criança; igualdade; agora; adiamento; facilitação.

right under our noses: the postponement of children’s political equality and the NOW

introduction

In this exploration of the ethos of communities of enquiry with children, we are inspired by the spirit and practice of Ann Margaret Sharp’s scholarship and activism, and appreciate the publication of a rich edited collection of her work and responses to it (2018)1. Sharp developed a politicised relational theory and ethics of care and believed in the liberatory potential of the community of philosophical enquiry. Her enlivened sense of the community of inquiry emerged through experience of residential work with marginalised teenagers, college teaching, her feminist life, and reading of literature and the particular philosophers that shaped her thinking. As a person, philosopher and educator, she engaged with issues of age, race, gender, class and human damage to the environment. Educational and social inequalities were at the heart of her work in Philosophy with Children. For Sharp, Philosophy with Children is a way to enact equality. There is ongoing discourse within the movement regarding the politics of the community of enquiry, and the extent to which, in practice, it lives up to liberatory ideals (see for example Chapters 1-4 and Chapter 25 in Gregory, Haynes & Murris, 2017; Gregory & Laverty, 2018; Lin & Sequiera, 2017). Keeping these issues alive, particularly with regard to age, we agree with a politicised account of ‘facilitation’ in our desire to address the persistent postponement of children’s political agency and suggest that introducing the notion of affect helps trouble the heavily cognitive (or to use one of Haynes’s phrases ‘brains-on-sticks’) approach to Philosophy with Children.

We return to the question of facilitation, building on the notion of “difficultation” (Haynes & Kohan, 2018), to think about how children’s political agency can be respected, and reciprocity embraced. Drawing on the work of Toby Rollo (2016, 2020), we ask once more how facilitation might be re-formed in respect of Rollo’s notion of the plurality of children as they are, and with all that they bring, rather than to prepare children for a future they have not been included in making, for politics-as-it-is, or, as we hasten to add, for philosophy-as-it-is.

For many years now, part of the great draw of the Philosophy with Children movement, for us and for many others longing for political equalities, is its declared respect for children, its recognition, not only of children’s capacities and tendencies to philosophise but the openings for childhood and philosophy of convivial and pluralistic philosophising. Writing 20 years ago, Walter Kohan (1999, p.7) already put the possibilities of a sustained encounter between philosophy and childhood thus:

Philosophy for children not only opens the realm of philosophy to children - it also produces a clear rupture with the adulto-centrism that has dominated philosophy for over twenty-five centuries. For the first time, children have frank and open access to the practice of philosophy. For the first time, philosophy says to children, “Come, you are welcome here, feel at home, there is something we can work out together”.

The community of enquiry pedagogy and theories of Philosophy with Children rest upon a convivial framework for egalitarian, pluralistic epistemic and social relations in educational settings (and beyond) and for experiences of democratic living and learning. However, as a movement, we continue to struggle and make efforts to realise the promise of “frank and open access to the practice of philosophy” and the sense of welcome and truly working it out together in and through enquiry.

The degree to which the community of enquiry is inclusive depends on rights, freedoms and relations of power operating in particular contexts and the practical, material and social conditions for involvement: these are all entangled. What matters, who and what can speak, with what authority and by what means; in which spaces; who and what listens; and what is the new that is produced?

While we hope for equality and inclusivity, silences and absences go unnoticed, contributions are misunderstood or undervalued, spaces remain closed (Chetty & Suissa, 2017; Kizel, 2016; Lin & Sequiera, 2017; Murris, 2013; Reed-Sandoval & Sykes, 2017). This is not a matter of merely amending procedures, but of radical attention to blind spots and obstacles; whether located in prejudices and/or unconscious bias; enduring historical injustices, institutional discourses; a lack of imagination, spaces or materials. It means repeatedly asking, what are the limitations of the process; what are we missing; what else might be possible? The ethics of facilitation of Philosophy with Children are bound up in the conflicts and turmoil of democratic systems, and their political ideals. They are also tangled up in modernity and discourses of educational progress and individual development. We are particularly concerned with issues of age, and we argue that, the ‘working it out together’ necessarily entails resistance, imagination and taking an unequivocal stand on the historic exclusion of children and the justification of this exclusion on grounds such as insufficient or unreliable capacity to reason, something Toby Rollo (2016, p.32) claims is a “remnant of colonial injustice”. Prompted by Rollo’s distinction between moral equality and political equality of children, we examine more closely the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chronological time through the concept now/ness in facilitation. Turning to posthuman notions of the body we attend to the postponement of equality in Philosophy with Children and get ‘inside the text’ of David McKee’s picturebook Not Now Bernard (1980). By drawing on a Spinozist notion of affect and a posthuman reading of the narrative, our enquiry shifts from ethics to ethos, taking account of the temporal and spatial dimensions in Philosophy with Children and children’s political agency.

The paper engages with the following questions:

  • How can we think differently about the temporal-spatial order of facilitation in Philosophy with Children?

  • What might help to prevent the postponement of children’s equality through the here and now of philosophical enquiry?

children’s political equality now

Rollo (2016) offers a compelling analysis of what he characterises as “false equality” (p.33), in spite of shifts in thinking about children’s welfare and rights. He writes that the recognition of moral equality for marginalised people provided a foundation upon which political equality could be established, but that children have never been recognised as fully equal. He argues that moral equality without political equality is false equality.

As democratic systems are designed by adults (and the majority of those adults are white and male) there are more challenges in including children since, as Rollo says “it is not enough [...] to simply add children to adult politics and stir. Something more revolutionary is called for” (Rollo, 2016, p.33). Rollo proposes that a decolonial politics of childhood is needed, where speech and reason no longer wholly define politics, and necessitating a dismantling of ‘established’ authority. He writes:

Thus, when it comes to children, the aim is not for those with the requisite intelligence to speak for children so as to include them. Nor is it to show that children are capable of speaking intelligently for themselves. Rather the aim is to reject intelligence as the measure of political worth and inclusion. When we fail to do this, we preserve and reinforce the standard of speech and reason that gives life to the pernicious colonial logic of exclusion and domination. (Rollo, 2016, p.33; italics in original).

Rollo suggests that taking on such a decolonial politics calls us to think about what it means to “respect children as agents on their own terms” (p.33), for children to be present rather than “a re-presented interest that has been disappeared into the home and the classroom” (p.34).

We argue that this necessitates challenging discourses of developmentalism that flatten and generalise childhoods, no matter where these childhoods are situated. We have to be activists and foster equality, and this is undermined whenever we treat children as subordinate and deny their agency on the grounds of age or maturity deficit (grounds that also intersect with subordination on grounds of race, gender, disability and class). When we allow ourselves to be guided by children, and engage in respectfully reciprocal relations with them, the agency of children is right under our noses. There is a need for hesitation, that which, on ethical grounds, should give us pause for thought. And in holding this pause we summon ‘nowness’, to raise further questions about the politics of philosophical enquiry, and to echo the urgency of the call for what Rollo calls “something more revolutionary”(2016, p.32), when we commit to listening to children, to philosophising with them, and to their political equality. What are we missing in terms of children’s political agency, and how can we be more attentive to this in facilitation of philosophical enquiry? The ethos of reciprocity is something that needs further attention in Philosophy with Children.

To consider reciprocity, we explore the temporal-spatial order of the community of enquiry and invoke the concept of the ‘NOW’ (Hohti, 2015). The NOW signals the urgency of political equality for children and refers to the intensities of thinking-with children, including in philosophical enquiry. The NOW is momentous, bleeding out liberal individualist ideas of bodies as only human, discrete and contained. As Cecilia Åsberg and Astrida Neimanis2 put it so well “the notion that one body houses one life, that a body is equal to a subject before the law, that bodies might ever be intelligible out of the contexts that create them, or that bodies are primarily human, is disintegrating before our very eyes”. They argue that posthuman bodies of the NOW ask us to think “beyond recognition, derogatory difference and the equality of sameness” (p.13). The challenge is to point out again that children are always invisible, even in critiques of humanism (Murris, 2021), and to address the urgency of children’s political agency, without falling back into discourses that might describe but cannot ‘deliver’ equality.

The paper works with a posthumanist reconfiguration of facilitation to throw light on the performative agency of the clock and the disciplinary and enabling energies of chronological time. To do this we return to the picturebook Not Now Bernard (1980), as a means to explore the politics of NOW/ness.

philosophy with children and developmentalism

A popular argument in Philosophy with Children is that the combination of education and philosophy is the best preparation for children’s political participation as citizens, but does this desire not also imply that the child is formed by the adult (culture), in order to remedy a lack that child has by ‘nature’? We are concerned about the ethico-political issues raised by an approach to Philosophy with Children that is developmental, and in particular, because of how the ontological dualisms (e.g., Culture/Nature) of developmental orientations position child and childhood in facilitation (Murris, 2016). We find that Philosophy with Children is often presented as an ‘alternative’ way of thinking and being with children, without taking on board its radical challenges to developmentalism.

Grounded in the discipline of developmental psychology, Lena Green (2017) draws interesting comparisons between influential 19th century psychologists (Piaget and Vygotsky) and Sharp’s and Lipman’s conceptualisation of Philosophy with Children. Green argues that, like Lipman, for Piaget child’s individual active engagement “with the cognitive challenges presented by the physical and social world” is “the precondition for the development of human reasoning” (p.40). Hence, children need lots of experiences with such challenges, which include “opportunities to speak and to be respectfully heard” (p.40). For thoughts to develop, ideas need to be exchanged. Although this sounds pretty straightforward, it is worth hesitating and considering what it is adults are respectfully listening to and also how. We look at each aspect of listening in turn.

Åsberg and Neimanis3 point out the problem humanism poses for the ‘how’ of listening NOW and propose a posthuman ethics of entanglement and reciprocal becoming that avoids reducing equality to sameness. Who counts as ‘human’ is not only a philosophical but also a political and ethical question - not only gendered, but also racialised and as Rollo (2018) suggests, intricately entangled with notions of child and childhood. Although Åsberg and Neimanis do not refer to child or age as relevant in terms of difference, we can see the value of their powerful writing for the NOW of facilitation. Developmentalism assumes that the ideal end goal of the normative trajectory of maturation and domestication (taming nature) is the adult (fully-human). The less-fully human (child) develops through a process of recognition (sameness). Being ‘different from’ (younger than) simply means being ‘less than’. We see this, for example, when adult philosophers recognise the philosophical quality of a dialogue only when children think like academic philosophers. If they don’t, they don’t do ‘real’ philosophy (Murris, 2000).

Secondly, in terms of what we adults tend to listen to in educational settings, it is worth re-turning to one of the first texts in Philosophy with Children. Matthew Lipman, Ann Sharp and Frederick Oscanyan (1977) explain in much detail that it is not just listening to children’s ideas that matters as such, but what is at stake is that adults need to take seriously children’s questions that are not discipline specific. Education has become so fragmented and specialised, that children (and adults alike) struggle to make sense of the connections between the disciplines and how human experience can be understood and interpreted (pp.7-8). In that sense, philosophy and children are “natural allies” (Lipman et al, 1977, p.7). Philosophical questions about ethics, reality and the nature of knowledge centre around concepts that start from people’s own experiences - not just learned at school, but in an embodied way, lived through and with. What makes philosophical enquiry distinct, is its undisciplining of the way in which concepts tend to be understood ‘normally’ speaking, an opening which young children’s questions can provoke, and sometimes in ways that surprise or unsettle adults (Haynes, 2008). What we have noticed in our pre-service and in-service education practices is that (student) teachers tend to ‘translate’ children’s rich philosophical openings into more familiar epistemic territory, especially when their interest is of an existential nature (Haynes & Murris, 2012). Instead, concepts are like crystals, to be picked up and, as the thinking moves in and across disciplines as the enquiry demands (Haynes & Murris, 2019), different angles show different perspectives and richer and more varied understandings emerge (Lipman et al, 1977, p.9). Importantly, it is this kind of philosophical reasoning that develops over time through the experience of enquiring together in a community. And it is not easily taught by adults, on the contrary. Lipman et al (p.5) point out that as a result of curriculum fragmentation:

The indisposition of adults to learn reasoning contrasts so sharply with the readiness of children to learn it (along with language) that we must face the fact that getting older is in some respects not growth but diminishment.

Such observations influenced the design of the Philosophy for Children Programme and the provision of discussion plans and activities to compensate for teachers’ lack of confidence and philosophical disposition (Lipman, 1997). The cutting up of the curriculum into pieces makes it difficult for adults and children alike, for different reasons, to ask or pursue philosophical questions. While young children are regarded as ‘natural’ philosophers, their early questions require ‘re-instatement,’ in the context of schooling and curriculum, to ‘fit in’ and be taken seriously by educators.

Gareth Matthews (1994, p.16) already argued three decades ago that developmental theories demonstrate an inherent “evaluational bias” by assuming that the goal of the process of development is maturity, insofar as each stage of the process is followed by a ‘better’ and more ‘mature’ stage that is preferable to the last. Moreover, he points out, developmentalism is a recapitulation theory: the child’s intellectual development is compared with (‘recapitulates’) the development of the species (with the child as nature, as the origin of the species’) from ‘savage’ to ‘civilized’. By comparing children’s abilities to the adult norm, child - ‘not-yet’ adult, ‘wild’ and of nature (Kennedy, 2020) - needs taming and domesticating by culture, through adult practices of facilitation, remediation, diagnosing and so forth, in order to become fully human (Murris, 2016), rather than being already regarded as “already able” (Haynes, 2014). Becoming an adult involves bringing children into the experience of chronological time through its educational institutions and practices (Murris & Kohan, 2020). For other philosophers of childhood, the psycho-social colonisation of childhood demonises, sentimentalises and scientifically objectifies child, is ‘ableist’ and ‘childist’ (Rollo, 2020), but also opens up conceptually rich possibilities; of reconfiguring child as philosophical (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p.x); of the notion of “child as natural philosopher” (Matthews, 1994) and the provocative idea of the philosophical facilitator as “difficultator” (Haynes & Kohan, 2018)

This tension is explored by Walter Kohan and David Kennedy (2017) which provokes us to think differently about child and childhood and beyond deficit models of child development. They acknowledge their indebtedness to Matthew Lipman’s and Gareth Matthews’ revolutionary role in establishing philosophy of childhood as a distinct field of academic enquiry, but are critical of the developmental view of childhood extant in that field, which presupposes a particular concept of time and a reductionist notion of potentiality. Drawing on philosophers Agamben, Lyotard and Deleuze, Kohan and Kennedy argue that education should not form childhood, but nurture and restore the experience of childhood itself - a particularly intensive childlike experience of being-in-time (Kohan & Kennedy, 2017). As such, the concept shifts from noun to verb (‘childing’): the age-less subject is always in process, always “on-the-way” of the NOW (Kennedy, 2006).

difficultating facilitation

The restoration of ‘childing’, (and re-instatement of children’s questions) express the embeddedness of reciprocal relations. Reciprocity is a momentous and flowing quality of relations, not between discrete individuals, “zipped up bodies”; (Åsberg & Neimanis, see footnote 2), but among and between, and including the more-than-human. It is a matter of ethos. In this section of the paper we turn more closely to teaching and Philosophy with Children. The term ‘facilitation’ is a troublesome concept, adopted with the intention to signal a move away from instruction and to elevate the active ‘participation’ (which body speaks/do all the bodies speak?) of children, to portray the teacher as more of a guide and enabler. It feels less directive and neutral whilst working as a powerful expression of particular epistemic relations and authorities; of processes of enquiry; of places, spaces, texts and things (Haynes & Kohan, 2018). Facilitation is often described as managing a ready-made process consisting of a cycle of enquiry steps, caring for the community, and as intervening to ensure progress in the enquiry. Facilitation-as-usual obscures the ways in which teachers’ management of time, (sometimes in the name of fidelity to the process) can act as a disciplining force, one that speaks to the demand for ‘progress’ in Philosophy with Children, for example, thinking skills need to be developed and objectives need to be achieved, within a certain timeframe. We can swing from a repressive idea of the teacher to a liberatory one in a perpetual either/or. There are no cracks of light in such a dichotomised view. Haynes & Kohan (2018) introduce the term “difficultation” to unsettle the sense of ‘easing-always- forwards-in-the-knowing-hands-of-the-educator’ implied in facilitation. This unsettling is an attempt to decolonise the way we understand the relationship between teacher and knowledge. It entails identifying the political role of a teacher in enacting certain epistemologies of teaching. A posthuman approach involves decentering the human, uncoupling teaching from the teacher, opening spaces for nonhuman teaching (Haynes & Kohan, 2017, p.205) and for transdisciplinary enquiries.

Elsewhere we have argued for a move away from locating meaning-making (hence facilitation) in one particular (zipped up) human or nonhuman body: either the teacher, child or the resource. When arguing for Philosophy with Children as a post-age intra-generational pedagogy, meaning is created in-between human and more-than-human bodies (Haynes & Murris, 2019). The uncertainty and ambiguity of meaning and the indeterminate performativity of word and image in picturebooks as philosophical texts is intricately linked with the political shift in educator/educated relations that tend to be governed by the ‘not-yet’ and deferrals of becoming affected by the NOW (Haynes & Murris, 2019). Troubled by not only the adulto-centrism, but also the human-centredness of such deferrals, we acknowledge that so-called inanimate objects, such as books and chairs (Reynolds, 2019) are also members of the community in Philosophy with Children. Indeed, how chronological time and the clock works in Philosophy with Children requires immediate attention.

getting inside not now bernard: not now/ness: an ethic of postponement?

Varieties of Not Nowness 

As happens so often in our work, the germ of an idea for this paper grabbed us from a picturebook. Not Now Bernard (McKee, 1980) is a provocative picturebook that we have lived and worked with over many years4. And we re-turn to it with the confidence that there are always more possibilities: in-between-the-text-and-reading/s, and that, as we dive in, something new will emerge. Working with educators and this particular text we have been struck by inclinations towards psycho-sociological analysis; for what is or is not ‘re-presented’; a tendency to ‘take sides’: of Bernard (neglected child), his parents (overworked or lacking skills), the monster (misunderstood and/or angry child). The images and sparse text of Not Now Bernard express the absent pre-occupation of the adults, the unheardness of Bernard and invisibility of the monster. There is often a desire to draw conclusions about the sequence of events and ‘moral message’ of this tale. McKee tells us that ‘not now’ came to him whilst he was in the bath, and that the text then produced itself. Speaking about the new edition in an article by Donna Ferguson in the Guardian newspaper5 , McKee asserts the importance of adults listening to children. He argues that, at the very least, they should explain why they cannot listen ‘right now’. Adults’ interests often seem to be with the potential of the story for moralising about poor parenting, the damage of screen time, or attention seeking behaviour. The comedy of the tale is noted but the tragedy understated6.

When it comes to enquiries through popular tales, and even more when they are controversial, or ‘enduring’, many questions are thrown up: how to resist a belief that we know what the text is ‘about’? How to sustain the pluralities, become more idiosyncratic in philosophising with stories, rather than erasing individual responses, anecdotes and knowledges? How to maintain a disposition that allows things to continue to be open and interesting? There isn’t only one story. When we talk about ‘getting inside’ the book, it is with the knowledge that there is a politics here too. This politics includes the depiction of a particular home and family (identifiable as western, middle class, white, straight); it includes the force of the hammer injuring a finger and green paint puddled on the floor; a tray of food set for Bernard (sausages, chips and peas) in front of a television screen; green high-heeled shoes; dad’s wristwatch; the designs on the carpets and wallpapers; a broadsheet newspaper; the monster’s gorilla like back; robots, cars and construction toys; a teddy bear; the presence of anger, pain, curiosity, disinterest; a patchwork blanket; comics; a war-like drawing framed on the wall; a ‘domesticated’ inside and ‘wilder’ outside, dark and light, colourful plants and shrubs, Bernard being eaten; a monster in a child’s bed.

The year 2020 sees the publication of a 40th anniversary edition of Not Now Bernard. The book has been reprinted many times and translated into dozens of languages. It seems to have lasting qualities and continues to appeal to the children and grandchildren of its earliest readers, and beyond. As to its ‘enduring’ qualities, the temporal term ‘classic’ in literature is deeply troublesome with its implications of universality, commonality and timelessness. In a short video where he also reads the book, McKee’s publisher Klaus Flugge speaks to the trouble the book stirred when it was first published, and the complaints he received about Bernard’s unhappy fate.7 Minor modifications made by the author to the fortieth anniversary edition indicate that Not Now Bernard is ‘of a time’, and that times change. Bernard’s Mum is drawn holding a smartphone. McKee suggests that children too, have taken on a ‘not now’ towards adults, joining forces with their mobile screens (Ferguson, 2020, Guardian newspaper online).

Addressing the popularity of the book in his 1992 review for the journal Thinking, Gareth Matthews writes that adults report that children seem to like this story and enjoy repeated tellings of it, just as it is often reported that (all) children like to eat sweet things. Reports suggest that children comment on the monster eating Bernard and on parents paying little attention to Bernard. References to experience imply that, having sampled some ‘real life’ children’s responses, adults can come to conclusions about children-in-general. Reviews of children’s literature are often soaked with these kinds of claims to speak, timelessly, on children’s behalf. So what else matters when it comes to repetition in stories, or to repeated enjoyment of them? Is the repetition necessarily numbing or dangerously comforting? How does the refrain work in this story? What does the ‘not now’ do?

The picturebook itself seems to indicate that, right now, time is a commodity in short supply and depicts the isolation of each family member from one another. The father and mother appear to be in their worlds of thought and activity, also separated. Dad reads the paper and hangs a picture on the wall. Mum paints the walls, waters the plants, puts Bernard’s food on the table, takes a glass of milk to his room and lets him know what to do according to clock time. There is no life in common to be seen and the present is never the right time. Bernard is in a different time, a time of greetings (hello), a time of warnings (a monster in the garden), a time of being eaten. Even the monster who has eaten Bernard (and replaced him?) is silenced and makes little monstrous impact, settling instead to bed, unnoticed. There is no intensity of the now, only a hollow echo of postponement.

Matthews (1992) suggests that a repeated refrain in a story lends it the character of a fable8. For readers, the predictability of the repeated ‘not now’, to everything Bernard and the monster say, fossilises the adult/child/other positions of the characters and oddly underscores their dis-engagement, whilst making horribly light of it. The repetitive mantra of the parental ‘not now’ appears to be the crux of this narrative of adult/child/other relations, home, time and (lack of) power - always entangled with chronological time, food and eating, always deferring agency.

Without the ‘not-nowness’, we suggest, however we choose to read the text and images, the story of Bernard’s family life indoors and outdoors and his being eaten by a monster in the garden, cannot stand up. It rests on this enduring phrase, ‘not now’, one that seems to encapsulate a form of resistance of adults to the immediacy and intensity of child, and limitation of child/ren’s initiative. What might come to light when attending to such small gestures and utterances with big political consequences?

reciprocity: beyond facilitation of zipped bodies

A move to ‘difficultating’, rather than ‘facilitating’ philosophical enquiries collapses the adult/child binary, and resists a romantic hankering after a non-instrumentalist engagement with the NOW - a freedom from, for example, human and nonhuman curricular constraints: parental pressures, international benchmark tests, diaries, calendars, and architectural designs (large windows) exposing teachers as being on time, or not (Thompson, 2020). Such a ‘negative’ notion of freedom as constraint is based on a notion of hope that is projected into a utopian future forever out of reach, based on a past that never was (Barad, 2017). Instead of already assuming Newtonian linear time of which the NOW is only a (passing) moment we have troubled this chronological notion of time with the picturebook Not Now Bernard (1980) by David McKee as our provocation. Placing hope in the present instead, disrupts projections of progress in the future and rational calculations of what counts as success. Avoiding grand utopian projects, Brian Massumi (2015, p.3) uses the concept ‘affect’ for ‘hope’ and firmly locates possibilities for transforming relationalities (e.g. adult/child) in the present. Inspired by a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of Spinoza’s notion of affect, he argues how human and nonhuman (‘unzipped’) bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected and therefore are always open to the world (Massumi, 2015, p. ix). The NOW is a “threshold of potential”, existing virtually, not actually, and the intensity of the complex interrelated elements in any situation can be felt (p.5). Unlike emotion, or feeling, affect is not personal and located inside a zipped person, and freedom is the vaguely sensing of the “virtual co-presence of potentials” (p.5) - a bodily kind of thinking that is not yet a fully formed thought, but more a “movement of thought, or a thinking movement” (p.10). Affects are always ethical and political, because they are ways of connecting with other bodies, always situated, but not determined and always uncertain. Moreover, these bodies are not discrete, individual bounded units, but fields of forces and movements. So how does affect-theory help us encounter the NOW differently in facilitation and why does it matter?

Freedom from power producing binaries, such as adult/child, in facilitation is not located in breaking free or escaping, for example, from the curriculum constraints mentioned above, but about sensing the potentials and the openness of ‘now/ness’. Massumi (2015, p.17) explains his purely pragmatic notion of ethics as what it brings about in any given situation - freedom is located in the NOW and not in some utopian future:

All these potentials form such complex interference patterns when three fields overlap that a measure of indeterminacy creeps in. It’s not that we just don’t have a detailed enough knowledge to predict. Accurate prediction is impossible because the indeterminacy is objective. So there’s an objective degree of freedom even in the most deterministic system. Something in the coming-together of movements, even according to the strictest of laws, flips the constraints over into conditions of freedom. It’s a relational effect, a complexity effect. Affect is like our human gravitational field, and what we call our freedom is its relational flips. You can’t really escape the constraints. Nobody can.

Feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad also speaks of complex interference patterns as the basic ontological units - not individual entities, but relational diffraction patterns (Barad, 2007). Entities come into being through human and more-than-human relationships. A Spinozist notion of affect is not located in the ‘zipped body’, but as a vital force, intensity or energy exists in the interstices of relationality, where assembled relations are enabled or constrained from becoming. Affect is an encounter with and of the world, and not in the world. As a transcorporeal entanglement, affect reminds us that the world is not controlled by intentional human beings (Alaimo, 2010), which resonates strongly with picturebook art as provocation for communities of enquiry. How resources (often in the field referred to with the unfortunate Behaviourist term of ‘stimuli’) are adopted in Philosophy with Children matters in terms of who and what has authority (Murris & Haynes, 2020) and agency (Murris, 2020).

conclusions - already reciprocal

Whether human or nonhuman, bodies are not zipped and don’t have fixed boundaries. Thus conceptualised and enacted, the notion of reciprocity also changes. Barad explains that entanglements are not about intertwining ‘two (or more) states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of twoness, and ultimately of one-ness as well. This has methodological implications for working with the difference ‘between’ ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘local’ and ‘global’, as well as between concepts such as ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘now’ and ‘then’. Duality, unity, multiplicity, being are undone. ‘Between’ will never be the same’ (Barad, 2014, p. 178). So how can thinking differently about the difference in-between adult and child NOW change our pedagogical practices in Philosophy with Children? How can we avoid comparing zipped child and adult bodies with one another and open up practices that also include nonhuman bodies? In what way can we avoid a reductive move to sameness in our evaluation of what counts as ‘real’ philosophy and progress in Philosophy with Children? One possible way is to (at least) uncouple intelligence from speech (cfRollo, 2016; Kennedy, 2020) by introducing transmodality in philosophical enquiries that draw on the ‘hundred languages of children’ (Murris, 2017). As David Kennedy points out, “[t]he very etymology of infantia-in-fans, ‘not speaking’-betrays an implicit automorphism in that it already associates childhood with lack, absence, deficit, incapacity.” By introducing ‘other’ means of playful knowledge-making and thinking-with materials such as clay, digital technology, water, sand, paper and so forth, students of all ages are involved in and affected by the movement of thinking or thinking in movement (cfHaynes & Murris, 2020) - opening up unrealised potentials in the NOW where freedom is located .

Performed through a philosophical reading of the picturebook Now Now Bernard, and building on Rollo’s articulation of the need for reciprocal relations with children, we have argued how a posthuman reconfiguration of reciprocity opens up possibilities for (difficultated) facilitation in Philosophy with Children. Through an exploration of the temporal-spatial NOW, unzipping zipped human and nonhuman bodies, and making pedagogical suggestions for the inclusion of transmodality in philosophical enquiries, we argue for an urgent need to commit to children’s political equality in Philosophy with Children.

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Received: May 10, 2020; Accepted: November 23, 2020

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