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Birgit Mara KaiserSingularization2017https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1738

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Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Kaiser, Birgit Mara: Singularization. In: Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Mara Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele (Hg.):Symptoms of the planetary condition. A critical vocabulary. Lüneburg: meson press 2017, S. 155–160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1738.

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Singularization

Birgit Mara Kaiser

Singularization is the processual emergence of entities. It is, as Félix Guattari uses the term, always a resingularization: a response to and redirecting of standardized, entrenched habits towards new, different modes of living. When thinking about (re)singularization, it is important to keep this per-spective in mind, because the term singularity (and the related singularization) can also give rise to very different approaches and stakes. Therefore, first a brief word on singularity.

Singularity is an overdetermined and contested concept, with a wide range of meanings and diverse theoretical and political investments. Apart from its mathematical usage, singularity has recently become a prominent term in fields ranging from philosophy (Badiou 2004; Derrida 1998; Deleuze 1990; Guattari 1996; Nancy 2000), literary and cultural studies (Attridge 2004; Clark 2005; Hallward 2002; Jameson 2002) to science and technology studies (Eden, Moor, et al 2012; Kurzweil 2005), with widely diverging implications. These span an understanding of singularity as uniform oneness (the singular as single in Fredric Jameson, or as nonrelational absolute in Peter Hallward, who draws on Alain Badiou’s [2004, 146–147] use of the singular as universal in his second thesis on the universal), as singularities in the sense of nonhuman forces constitutive of any process of individuation (Deleuze 1990), as well as a technological “event or

156 phase that will radically change human civilization” (Eden, Moor, et al. 2012, 1) in technoscientific or transhumanist debates, which aim to overcome human limitations by artificial intelligence.

Let us now zoom in on singularization, a term that has, in its stress on the process of emergence, closest ties to the DeleuzeGuattarian use of the term singularity. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, singularization brings into focus the formation of objects and subjects, or the (trans)formation of entities – unlike individuality or specificity, which are terms geared toward the classification of differences (as species or genres) that are already formed on a molar level. Contrary to this, Deleuze and Guattari interest in singularity and singularization lies in the terms’ capacity to consider the transversal emergence of entities as the result of a relation of forces. For its critical potential, especially Guattari’s use of (re)singularization is of interest here.

In “Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire,” Guattari discusses in this vein that – much like Deleuze’s recourse to (Simondonian) individuation – the aim of Foucault’s Archae-ology of Knowledge (and other projects) is to move from “things,” traditionally considered as anterior to discourse, to the formation of “entities” or “statements,” which are “immersed in an enunciative field” (1996, 180). Singularization is, thus, not about the single, the (liberal) individual or the unique object, but about materialsemiotic processes (to borrow Donna Haraway’s term). Singularization describes the emergence of entities, and consequentially also the processes that undo (or deterritorialize) existing stratifications and in turn congeal (or reterritorialize) new modes of being. In that sense, Guattari employs the term in The Three Ecologies ([1989] 2008).

Guattari’s argument in The Three Ecologies is anchored in a twofold critique. On the one hand, as an analyst at La Borde (1955–1992), he is discontent with Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis, which uses Freudian models of analysis focused on childhood experience and parentalfamilial structures. On the other hand,

157as a political activist, he is concerned about two sociopolitical developments observed at the time of writing: First, the “extreme complexification of social, economic and international contexts” (2008, 21) resulting from a decline of the dualist opposition USA–USSR in the late 1980s and what he calls “Integrated World Capitalism.”1 Second, the standardization of ways of life and a homogenizing of desires, largely promoted by the media (at the time, television as the prevailing medium). Guattari sees the “intoxicating and anaesthezising” (34) effects of (statesponsored) media as intimately bound up with the production of signs and subjectivity, which he perceives as modus operandi of IWC. His hopeful excitement about new media and the Internet as possible openings are on the horizon of this critique in the late 1980s.

Singularization for Guattari is a counterforce to these formations, as it facilitates “new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self” (45). In regard to his intervention into Lacanian psychoanalysis, he illustrates singularization in Chaos-mosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995) with the example of a patient whose therapy got stuck and who was “going round in circles, and coming up against a wall” (17). Ultimately, the therapy moved forward not due to a Lacanian “symbolic hermeneutic centered on childhood” (18) but because of a schizoanalytic encouragement of unexpected, transversal practices: the patient suddenly desired to take up driving. This new habit fostered different fields of vision and enabled him to divert his problem into new directions. The driving lessons produced “active, processual ruptures within semiotically structured, significational and denotative networks” (19) and set into action different “existential operators capable of acquiring consistence and persistence,” making possible new “existential orchestrations, until now unheard and unknown” (19). Concerned about analytic practice, Guattari holds that Freud’s unconscious has

1 For Guattari, IWC is the postindustrial capitalism that moves from the production of goods to the production of signs and subjectivity, marked by its equally complexified effect on more than purely economic realms.

158 become an institution itself and in its “structuralist version, has been recentered on the analysis of the self, its adaptation to society, and its conformity with a signifying order” (10). It has lost its teeth, while schizoanalysis and ecosophy counter this reification to open up new passages, not only for analysis and “its theoretical scaffolding” (Guattari 2008, 27) but also for the sociopolitical problems that The Three Ecologies perceives. The real processes that set into motion such new “vectors of subjectification” (25), which are not directed at conformity with an established signifying order, is what Guattari calls singularization. The enactment, encouragement, and affirmation of such processes is in itself a critical practice.

The inventions of new “vectors of subjectification” are intimately bound up with Guattari’s concern about contemporary forms of capitalist power.

[C]apitalist power has become delocalized and deterritorialized, both in extension, by extending its influence of the whole social, economic and cultural life of the planet, and in “intension,” by infiltrating the most unconscious subjective strata. In doing this it is no longer possible to claim to be opposed to capitalist power only from the outside, through trade unions and traditional politics. (33)

Given increasingly decentralized sites of power in neoliberal capitalism and the “introjection of repressive power by the oppressed” (32) that goes with it, the question arises how to modify or redirect the effects of such power. Or, in Guattarian terms: How to reroute desires that have come to turn in circles? How to activate “catalysts of existential change” (30)? Partly, Guattari’s response is to note that – since an opposition only from the outside is not sufficient or feasible – it is “equally imperative to confront capitalism’s effects in the domain of mental ecology in everyday life: individual, domestic, material, neighbourly, creative or one’s personal ethics” (33). Therefore, “it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus and the singular

159production of existence” (33), the singularization of desires and modes of living.

Importantly, processes of singularization and new subjectivities are approached from an ecosophical perspective, inspired by Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind ([1972] 2000). “Ecology” (of which human subjectivity is one of Guattari’s three ecologies, alongside social relations and the environment) stresses that these existential modes are capable of morphing or being “cultivated.” They can “bifurcat[e] into stratified and deathly repetitions or … open … up processually from a praxis” (2008, 35), they can be constrained or opened (de and reterritorialized). Given Guattari’s analysis of IWC as a stratification and homogenization of existence for profit, the destratification and differentiation of existence is key to any critical intervention into these conditions. Dissensus is not articulated in the name of an alternative general project; rather, it serves to resingularize existences (or proliferate difference) without presupposing a telos. The subjective domain – human subjectivity – is viewed neither (prescriptively) on the basis of structure (unconscious, language, law) nor as possessing directionality or end (selfconsciousness, normativity, consensus). It is rather phrased as the affirmation of creatively cultivating new existential refrains, the desire for a “subjectivity of resingularization” (44) which exploits “asignifying points of rupture” (37) to care into existence hitherto unimagined vectors, desires, and phantasms.

Literature plays a crucial role for Guattari in this: as a practice that can explore symptoms and incidents outside the norm, and mobilize vectors of subjectification that elude the mastery of the self to work for a rerouting of refrains (in a similar way, Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty ([1967] 1991) makes use of the literary analyses of sadism and masochism, linking the critical and clinical). For this reason Guattari pleads for tapping the “cartographies of the psyche” (2008, 25) that poetic-literary texts offer. The critical and clinical work go hand in hand here, with literary texts seen as critical manifestos “for effective practices of

160 experimentation” (24) to “bring into being other worlds” (44–45, bold added) and to critically intervene into and transform oppressive modes of living.

ReferencesAttridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. New York: Routledge.Badiou, Alain. 2004. Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum.Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.Clark, Timothy. 2005. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in

Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze. Gilles. 1991. “Coldness and Cruelty.” In Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil, 9–138. New York: Zone Books.

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Eden, Amnon H., James H. Moor, Johnny H. Søraker, and Eric Steinhart, eds. 2012. Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. Berlin: Springer.

Guattari, Félix. 1996. “Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire.” In The Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko, translated by John Caruana. 172–184. London: Blackwell Publishers.

Guattari, Félix. 2008. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Continuum.

Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hallward, Peter. 2002. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. New York: Verso.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin.

Nancy, JeanLuc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Open Access. © 2020 Andreas Reckwitz, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669398-009

Andreas ReckwitzThe Society of Singularities

Regardless of where we look in contemporary society, what is socially and culturally expected on both the local and global levels is not the general but the particular. What is increasingly being advanced and demanded and what has become the focus of people’s hopes and longings is not the standardized and regulated but the unique, the singular.

Travel destinations, for example, can no longer simply be uniform vacation locations suited for mass tourism. It is the uniqueness of a place – a special city with an authentic vibe, an exceptional landscape, an unusual local culture – that attracts tourists’ attention. A similar development has taken hold of the entire late modern global economy. True for material goods and services alike is the fact that the mass production of uniform products so characteristic of the old industrial economy has been replaced in the cultural capitalism of the present by events and objects that are not similar or identical but that strive to be singular. The passions of subjects are focused on extraordinary live concerts and music festivals, on sporting and artistic events, as well as on lifestyle sports and the imaginary worlds of computer games (see generally Rifkin 2000; Howkins 2001).

And yet the displacement of the general by the particular goes far beyond this, extending, for example, into the field of education. It is no longer sufficient, as it was 20 years ago, for schools to teach the material mandated by the state. Every school wants and is compelled to be different, to cultivate its own profile, to enable students to shape their own education, to have its own spirit. Or take the field of architecture, where the International Style, with its now purportedly dull serial buildings, has been cast aside in favor of the predictable surprises of star architects and their singular museum constructions, concert houses, residential buildings, and flagship stores (see McNeill 2009). The singular has quite clearly extended its reign over the subjects who move about in these different settings as well. In late modernity the subject is not just responsible for themselves, as is typically suggested by the term ‘individualization,’ but strives above all to be unique. Digital social media – perhaps paradigmatically the Facebook profile with its carefully curated and updated postings from one’s personal life, with photos and likes and links not to be found anywhere else – offer a central location for the presentation and formation of this singular self and its performance of authenticity (see Miller 2011).

Note: This article is touching on a topic that I explore in greater detail in Reckwitz 2017a.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669398-009

142 Andreas Reckwitz

But this displacement of forms of generality by those of particularity also extends to the social, collective, and political realms. Formal organizations, major political parties, ultimately even the modern form of the bureaucratic state are on the defensive, having lost some of their appeal. On the rise are those particularistic and temporary forms of sociality that are not universally identi-cal but claim instead to be unique. This is true of a wide range of forms of soci-ality, including professional and political projects, each of which is singular as an emotional entity with selected participants and an expiration date. It is true of scenes, events, short-lived aesthetic networks, and gatherings. And it is, finally, true in a different sense of neo-collectives – the new religious, national, or regional imagined communities that promise to endow members with iden-tity in a way that bureaucracies or institutional churches do not seem capable of (see Castells 1997).

I have begun with a kaleidoscope of empirical phenomena that all point in the same direction. In late modernity, societies are being reconfigured based not on a social logic of generality but on a social logic of particularity – a particular-ity that I will attempt to define by means of the term singularity. This phenome-non involves a very crucial transformation of what defines modernity and modern society. I would like to sketch out this fundamental argument and then explore it in greater detail. I consider it of central importance that as a result of this logic of singularities, the structural principles of classic modernity, a modernity of industrially organized societies, are being eclipsed by new structural principles. The basic precepts of classic modernity were generalization and standardization, which were associated with the process of formal rationalization (see Wagner 1994). The antithesis to modernist rationalization is culturalization, and the phe-nomena of singularization and culturalization are inextricably connected to one another. In the first part I will therefore examine the oppositional differences between a social logic of generality and a social logic of particularity.

In the second part I will look more closely at two institutional mainstays at the center of late modern society. One is the transformation of the capitalis-tic economy from industrial mass production to cultural production, that is, to an economy of singularities (Karpik 2010), with the associated restructuring of markets, labor, professions, and forms of consumption. The second is the digital revolution of media technologies, which in turn also fosters singularities in sub-jects, images, texts, and other cultural elements. This is a decisive insight that I would like to emphasize: while in classic modernity the economy and technology were the most important motors of the standardization of the world, that is, of a social logic of generality, the most advanced forms of this same modern economy and this same technology have become powerful generators of singularities and culturalization.

The Society of Singularities 143

1 The Social Logic of SingularizationTo justify my diagnosis, I must first clarify how a modernity of rationalization and generalization and a modernity of singularities and culturalization are distinct from one another. To do this I will first describe the structural principles that gave rise to modern industrial society. Though quite easy to oversee, the fundamental trait of classic modernity is that it systematically strives to achieve the total gener-alization, schematization, standardization, and universalization of all elements. At the core of classic modernity is what I would call a social logic of generality. This standardization and universalization of social structures and processes, of subjects and objects, is closely related to the fundamental process of modernity that Max Weber (1968) referred to as formal rationalization.

The formal rationalization of classic modernity attempts to systematically foster a social logic of generality. The social logic of generality means that all potential elements of the world are observed, evaluated, produced, and adapted as copies or instances of generally valid patterns. The social logic of generality follows in part the principles of theoretical generalization (as required by the modern sciences) and in part those of normative universalization (as required by modern law with its precepts of equality). Yet, above all, formal rationalization is an expedient to achieve a comprehensive optimization of all societal conditions and an institutionalization of rules, which are intended to generate predictability, efficiency, and innovation. The reign of the general is to be found on all levels: objects are produced and used in a standardized and uniform manner. Disci-plined subjects find orientation in functional roles and performance standards that apply to everyone. Space is utilized in invariable constructive series so that industrial cities appear interchangeable. Time also becomes an object of ratio-nalization in the sense that it is systematically controlled and the future is, so to speak, colonized. Rationalized orders are objectified orders in which emotions are controlled and emotional intensity is minimized.

Of course, the modernity of formal rationalization and the reign of general-ity and uniformity are not dead. Many of these structural principles have been retained in late modernity, that is, in the period after 1980. Yet the countertend-ency that I mentioned at the outset is also to be observed: the spread of a social logic of singularities that is connected to a process of culturalization. To clarify this, I would like to more precisely define the term ‘singularity,’1 which up until now I have been using in a somewhat ad hoc manner based on different examples.

1 Two major sources of inspiration for this concept are Kopytoff 1986 and Karpik 2010.


1. An entity is singular in a sociocultural context when it is not produced, experienced, and evaluated as a uniform copy of a general type but as some-thing particular. As such it appears to be unique, incomparable, and non- interchangeable. Singularity makes reference to a certain quality and cannot be reduced to quantitative properties,2 which places it outside the schemata of gen-erality. For in the realm of generality, entities can also differ from one another to some extent, but these differences can be described by such terms as better/worse, more/less, that is, they can be compared. Singularities, on the other hand, do not just vary to a greater or lesser extent, they have a completely different quality, they are distinct – and for this reason do not seem interchangeable. A Bach cantata seems fundamentally different from a Janis Joplin song. A trip to Venice is completely different from one to Nepal. And for the creative agency, employee X with his special profile and talents isn’t just slightly different – the way applicants with different exam notes might be – but offers a critical qualita-tive advantage for the company. Of course, as Kant (2000) pointed out, there is always and inevitably the general and the particular, whereby – at least accord-ing to Kant – the general emerges from concepts (Begriffe) and the particular from intuition (Anschauung). But what is sociologically interesting is the fact that dependent on the form of society, a complete social logics of singularity can emerge, in which singularities are observed, evaluated, fabricated, and adapted in a certain way.

2. It is of central importance that singularities emerge in the form of very different entities and elements relevant to the social world. For this reason, sin-gularity differs from the concept of individuality, though the two are, of course, related. As a rule, individuals are human subjects, yet to attribute singularities to humans alone would be to greatly underestimate their importance. Singularities can be observed on one initial level that I would like to put special emphasis on: in the realm of things and objects. This is true of fabricated things, which in modernity often assume the form of products and goods, but also of images and texts, of works of art or religious relics, and of three-dimensional things like architecture (as well as natural entities). Singularities can, however, also be identified on the level of spatial and of temporal entities. Spatial singularities are in the field of spatial analysis generally known as places (in opposition to spaces) – non- interchangeable, non- comparable locations. Temporal singular-ities are moments or episodes: a single instant perceived as such or a unique, discontinuous episode with a distinct beginning and end. Humans can of course also appear as singularities and be introduced to the world as such, here we are

2 See in this regard also Callon et al. 2002.


in the realm for which classically the term individuality was reserved. Finally, on a fifth and particularly interesting level certain kinds of collectives can also become singularities. Traditionally this is the case for what Ferdinand Tönnies called communities, but it also holds true for nations, and in late modernity it applies to such new socialities as projects, collaborations, and scenes.

3. In a social context singularities are ascribed a cultural value. In this sense they differ from the social logic of generality: while in the framework of the latter the individual element is attributed a derivative use or function in the framework of the rational order, singularities seem to have a value in their own right. This is true of works of art or relics, as well as of locations, moments, events, communi-ties, scenes, and individualities. Singularities are to a certain extent not so much a means to an end but an end in itself. They are cultural in the active or robust sense of the term. This cultural autotelism of singularities can have an aesthetic dimension, but it can also have a hermeneutic, symbolic or narrative dimension, or a creative or ludic one. Yet, all in all, singularity always involves a certain performance, it is enacted in front of an audience. The intrinsic value of singular-ities is, however, not simply present: it depends on social processes of value attri-bution, on valorization.3 Such valorizations can be consensual and hegemonic, but they can also be – at least in the modern period – extremely controversial, dynamic, dependent on discourses about valorization. Thus, there is a process of singularization taking place within the processes of valorization.

4. Singularities are generally associated with strong affects. It is not the general but the particular that leaves no one cold. While affective reactions to the universalities of modernity – rules and roles, mass-produced goods and statistics, serial buildings and serial cities – are minimal, affects related to singularities are all the more pronounced. These can include fascination, arousal, enthusiasm, and quiet satisfaction – or, on the other hand, such negative affects as aggression and hate. Closely connected to the emotional power of singularity is the fact that an intrinsic value is not just assigned but also experienced (or not experienced, as the case may be) in the participants’ practical processes.

5. Singularities are in this sense to be distinguished from idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncrasies are unique traits that come about unintentionally and are often disregarded. They disappear or are viewed with indifference. Singularities, on the other hand, are socially and culturally fabricated. They are made, fabricated, intentionally shaped, or encouraged. In modernity this is true of works of art and design objects, for cities shaped by cultural regeneration and, of course, for

3 See for an analysis of valorizations Muniesa 2012 and Thompson 1979.


subjects who are not just individual but who work more or less consciously on their own individuality, who produce performances and profiles. Singularities are to be understood here as processes of singularization. Whether referring to objects (artefacts), subjects, events, or collectives – all of them are singularized through practices of making (Verfertigung), practices of observing, practices of valoriza-tion, and practices of perceiving. To speak of singularities as a noun can only be a snapshot. Henceforth, singularities exist solely in the process of singularization – whose downside is the desingularization, the loss of the unique status.

One additional explanation is also necessary: What do I mean by culturalization and how is it related to these singularities? It may initially seem strange to speak of the process of culturalization as antithetical to the process of rationalization. What can culturalization even mean if culture is everywhere, that is, if every activ-ity depends on broader contexts and systems of meaning? Here I would like to distinguish between a general, weaker use of the term culture, and a more robust, narrower understanding of the term culture. In a general sense, of course – and this is an insight achieved by the study of culture – the social is always cultur-ally determined, is based on often implicit systems of classification. In this way rationalization processes always have cultural preconditions, for example mea-sures of efficiency or equality. This is the cultural realm. Against this backdrop, I would like to apply a more narrow yet more robust understanding of culture that allows for sociotheoretical distinctions. In this robust sense cultural objects and cultural practices only refer to those select objects and practices to which not a use or function is ascribed but rather an intrinsic value. Raymond Williams (1958) has correctly stressed this aspect of value as a component of culture. The antith-esis to culture is in this case rationality, especially purposive rationality. While in the logic of purposive rationality an action, object, text, or image is the means to a further end and thus has instrumental significance, a cultural practice or cultural object has an intrinsic value in its social context. This intrinsic value can be and often is aesthetic in nature, yet it can also be narrative, hermeneutic, creative, or ludic.

In principle, cultural practices and objects can be quite varied, extending far beyond those related to art or religious rituals: playing football or collectively watching a football match, political ceremonies, experiences in nature, designing and decorating an apartment, or even work, provided it is not wage labor as a means to an end but work with an inherent value – all these things are cultural practices and objects in the strong sense of the term. In contrast to rational and normative practices, cultural practices thus contain a distinct element of lived experience and a distinct element of affective identification. To echo Georges Bataille’s (1991) somewhat hyperbolic anthropological position: In comparison


to purposive rationality with its dictate of efficiency and thrift, that is, in compar-ison to the world of necessity, the world of culture always contains an element of overexertion, of excess, of more than what is rationally needed.

We thus can see to what extent singularization and culturalization are related. Singularities are cultural in this robust sense of the word, laying claim to an intrin-sic cultural value: the event and ritual, the specific location of a city or landscape, the singular object (be it work of art or of design), the individuality of the subject, the project, the scene, or the post-traditional community – these are not primarily purposive-rational institutions, rather to them an intrinsic value is ascribed. My principle argument is that following certain historical precedents that emerged from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, in late modernity the social logic of cultural singularities has spread both quantitatively and qualitatively. The social logic of singularities implies that at the center of society processes are taking place in which objects, subjects, collectives, locations, and temporal episodes are seen, evaluated, produced, and adapted as singularities, i.e. are singularized. All the examples that I cited at the beginning of the article are instances not just of the societal force of singularities but also of a process of culturalization.

2 Structures of the Late Modern Society of Singularities

Yet what form does a society that is oriented around cultural singularities assume? I will now list six traits that will be explained in greater detail in the second part of the article:1. While historically cultural practices and objects and their singularities are

often defined and shaped by the state, church, or a dominant social group, the widespread culturalization and singularization of late modernity is defined by an economy, a global cultural economy, that is also closely connected to a specific technological structure: the digital world. The structural framework is what I would call the global cultural creative complex (see Reckwitz 2017).

2. Cultural elements are valued highly in late modernity for their singularity because they are associated with the modern idea of authenticity.

3. The cultural creative complex seeks to continuously fabricate new singulari-ties, which means that it is based on a regime of innovation, a regime of the culturally new, a regime of creativity.

4. In essence, cultural elements are negotiated in a social constellation made up of creators and an audience. Cultural elements are thus enacted and pre-sented as performance.


5. Singular cultural elements are presented to an audience in a constellation of competition for attention in a hypercompetitive market of visibilities.

6. New forms of purposive rationality are emerging that are adapted to the inter-change of cultural singularities. These forms are no longer based on a logic of generality but on one of particularity. The result is what I would call general infrastructures for particularities.

In fact, the spread of the logic of the culturally particular in late modernity can only be explained as part of the far reaching structural transformation of the economy from the mass production of industrial goods with utilitarian value to a post-Fordist fabrication of singularities, that is, of singular goods and services that contain the promise of something authentic and non-interchangeable. It has been possible to observe this incremental transformation since the 1970s. Yet the spread of the logic of the culturally particular also depends on a second phe-nomenon: the media technological revolution of computing, algorithms, and the World Wide Web, which, since the 1990s, has enabled not only the introduction of new cultural elements to the world (photos and stories, works of graphic art, films, games) in a historically unprecedented manner, but also the creation of a mobile realm of permanent competition for attention, in which singularities are to be made visible for potentially everyone and everything. The cultural cre-ative complex encompasses the development of cities into creative locations by means of cultural regeneration as well as the global computer, internet, film, and music industries. It encompasses the development of such personalized ser-vices as individual care and counselling and the pervasion of everyday life by digital search engines like Google, by computer games and by social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It now also encompasses virtually all consumer goods ranging from aesthetic design and so-called moral consumption to religious markets and the spiritual practices industry. Last but not least, it encompasses the vast touristization of global landscapes.

However, the emergence of the social complex of cultural singularities cannot be reduced to those economic and media technological structural conditions alone. Rather, the Western culture of authenticity is an ultimately discursive back-ground for the triumph of such a social logic of singularities. Initially established within the social niches of artistic subcultures at the end of eighteenth-century Romanticism, it gradually spread throughout society (see Taylor 1989; Reckwitz 2006): Against the rationalism of mainstream modernity in the culture of authen-ticity, the idea and conviction emerged that the subject – if freed from all con-straints – strives for authenticity, self-realization, and self-expression. To be authentic, however, means to be special, singular. In a second step, this search for authenticity is projected onto the whole world, which now is perceived in


the expectation of the singular: a singularization of nature, places, communi-ties, objects (artefacts), beliefs, and other subjects. Furthermore and ab initio it is closely linked to an ideal of creativity, a permanent self-creation and creative shaping of the world as well as a culture of intense emotions. Against this post- romantic background, which acted as an irritant countermovement of an ‘other modernity,’ classical, organized modernity of formal rationalization and the reign of generality seemed to suffer from a chronic lack of affect, authenticity, creativ-ity, and singularity.

Now, Ronald Inglehart (1977) already described a fundamental change in values in the 1970s – certainly influenced by the counter culture of the late 60s – which was critical of rationalism and appreciated post-materialistic values, such as self-realization, the singular, the authenticity of a way of life, and the creative. Its social dominance could only be established by the onset of cultural capital-ism and digitalization since the 1980s. This economic and media technological modelling generated a novel and very specific form of singularity. Late modern economy and media technology is driven by the subjects’ orientation towards singularity, but is pushing it in an altered direction. This new social logic of the singular, which is institutionalized widely by the cultural creative complex, con-tains the characteristics that I already mentioned briefly above and which can be summarized as a constellation of competitive singularities. One prerequisite is the creator-audience-constellation: The cultural creative complex actively and purposefully produces singularities for an audience. The creation and design of singularities is thereby linked to a creativity orientation: it’s all about the singu-lar, which acts with a demand for novelty (see Reckwitz 2017a). These fabricated cultural elements with a claim for particularity can be aesthetically interest-ing artefacts as well as stories growing around goods, offered by therapists or narrated by an institution about itself. It can involve whole atmospheres fabri-cated for an experience of driving and living, live performances of various kinds, political-ideological models of identification or a moral value of a certain diet; it may concern luxury pleasure, beauty or sentiments of security, education, or – not least – the participation in a game (gamification).

It must be stressed that rather than disappearing, forms of purposive ratio-nality are undergoing a transformation within this late modernist dynamic. Of its own accord, purposive rationality has begun to adapt from a logic of generality to a logic of particularity, or better: they develop into general infrastructures for the production of singularities. Here, systems of purposive rationality are developing an interest in and capacity for – and this is historically new – the production, analyses, and comparative assessment of singularities. With the help of soft-ware and 3D printers, unique products can be manufactured. Human resource management of the singular talents and potential of employees in the cultural


economy and algorithmic data tracking of consumer profiles are focused not just on general patterns but on unique properties.

Decisive here is the fact that this creative cultural production of singularities is aimed at an audience made up of potential consumers. We have become so accustomed to the ubiquity of audience functions that it is easy to oversee how historically extraordinary they are. Yet the cultural elements produced in this context always exist as performance – a performativity for and in the presence of an audience. The cultural elements in the cultural economy, like those found on the Internet, are aimed at an audience. But in both the cultural economy and the Internet, there is now the constellation of a permanent competition between sin-gularities for the attention of audiences (see Franck 1998). This is a constellation of competitive or even hyper competitive singularities, which are circulated on a market of visibilities. It is quite striking how the post-Fordist cultural economy and the Internet have institutionalized the same constellation of competitive singularities. Socioeconomic studies on cultural markets, that is, on markets for products of cultural singularity ranging from films to design objects, have shed light on this special phenomenon (see Caves 2000). In cultural singularity markets there is always a certain amount of overproduction of cultural goods, of which ultimately only a few will attract an audience’s attention, though this attention is correspondingly massive. At the same time a great amount of cul-tural products will attract very little attention and have no appreciable success. This is precisely what is so peculiar about singularity markets: what appear to be minimal differences between products are perceived as absolute, qualitative, emotionally distinct differences between non-interchangeable items.

The culturalization of economic markets tendentially transforms them into nobody knows-markets as well as so-called winner takes it all-markets with strong asymmetries of visibility, attention, and success (see Frank and Cook 2010). Industrial economy pursued a standardized production, i.e. a standardized work process of standardized goods in a standard matrix organization of controlled markets for customers within a schematized mass consumption. The cultural economy on the other hand pursues a production of cultural singularities – goods or services – within a work process, which has itself a singularistic structure in ways of non-exchangeable projects on a market with consumers who work for a singular way of life by means of consumption.

A similar competition between the singularities regarding their visibility also structures the World Wide Web. Interpreting the process of digitalization only as another step to information and knowledge, society falls short. The discourse on knowledge and information society remains rooted in the logic of the industrial society, where texts and images could primarily be understood as cognitive and affect-neutral parts of information. However, the digital medialization means to a


lesser extent an accumulation of cognitive knowledge but takes shape as a porta-ble cultural space of images, narrations, game situations – a cultural hypertext, which constantly accompanies every subject and wherein an overproduction of cultural singularities is taking place (see also Stalder 2016). These singularities are under an on-going battle for the scarce attention by subjects and this battle is usually not one between pieces of information, but rather between affective intensities of images, narrations, and games with their aesthetic or hermeneutic offers. Not least, it is the subjects that are affected by the competition of visibility between the singularities who present themselves on the web, be it on YouTube, in Blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter, or future social media. The social media appear in fact as late modern generators of singularization.

The social media make particularly apparent how late modern subjects no longer take shape aligned to an organized modernity, but rather as singular sub-jects with a strive for authenticity and what it entails: this singularization con-verges in one social format, which is typical for the society of singularities in general – the profile. Digital subjects present themselves primarily through such profiles. In their profiles they compete with each other for visibility. Within these profiles there is a practice of what I would call a compository singularity: because here the subject becomes singular, especially in the composition, the configu-ration, the combination of various elements: news of the life of the self, likes showing certain cultural preferences, links relating to ones’ interests, the time-line of biographical events of the past and not least, of course, the photographs from ones’ own life. Singularity thus is not owned, it is curated. The authentic-ity of the singular subject here always adopts the paradox form of performative authenticity: authenticity has to be presented in front of an audience and hope to be perceived.

The exact same mechanisms of profile development can be seen in the cul-tural economy. Here again the singular cultural good has to develop a profile to attract attention as sustainably as possible – a whole brand is working on such a profile. In the cultural economy every single employee has to create a singular profile – beyond the standardized job requirements of the industrial society – to be of interest to projects of the working world. Overall, the culturalization of late modernity that has institutionalized a structure of competitive singularities leads to both an intensification of emotions and a dehierarchization of the cultural. While the formal rationalization of organized modernity has cooled off and mini-mized emotions, in the culturalization of late modernity we see an intensification of emotions and affects related to singularities. This is true of both the goods and services of cultural capitalism and of the events, experiences, claims to authen-ticity, and moralistic sensitivities that it fosters. Likewise, this holds true for sin-gular labor in the creative professions and to a great degree for the emotional


charging of images and narratives that circulate in the media, especially in digital form. It is true of the subjects whose performative authenticity emotionally cor-relates to their success or failure, and it is, of course, true of the cultural collec-tives that emerge within this same framework. Yet, at the same time, as a result of this focus on singularity, culture has been dehierarchized. Cultural hierarchies, such as the familiar stratification of high culture and popular culture, are being eroded. Every singularity can claim to have a legitimate value: football game or opera production, yoga retreat or computer game. By placing emphasis on the qualitative differences between singularities, the culturalization of late moder-nity has led to a de jure equality of singularities. De facto, however, there is an ongoing dynamic of inequalities and asymmetries among the singularities on the market for valorization and attention.

Two factors are primarily responsible for these asymmetries among singular-ities. The first is the antithetical processes of valorization and devaluation that affect cultural elements. The second is the self-reinforcing effect of the inequalities in attention mentioned above. That a singularity is recognized and experienced as such is neither self-evident nor obvious. Instead, in a society of singularities, societal processes of valorization and devaluation are of great importance. A cul-tural item in the cultural economy can, for example, lose its singularity and its cultural value if it does not appear or ceases to appear authentic. Locations or brand names – Ibiza or Adidas, for instance – that lay claim to an intrinsic cul-tural value can be de-singularized, reduced to little more than the expression of cheap mainstream consumption. In a society of singularities nothing is more fatal than to appear fake, a product of mass appeal, a mere expression of generality. The flip side of this kind of devaluation process is re-singularization, by means of which something that was once perceived as conformist or mainstream sud-denly appears singular and non-interchangeable. The canned Hollywood movies from the 1950s will then be discovered as complex works of art and the nerd suddenly achieves the status of a hipster. Especially regarding subjects, the attri-bution or non-attribution of recognized, attractive singularity contains a consid-erable potential of cultural discrimination as well as glorification. Whereas the subject became problematic when subverting standards of normality during the organized modernity, it now risks – in a much subtler, but partly even more fatal way – to lose its recognition as being singular.

Concurrent to these processes of valorization and devalorization of quali-ties and singularities is the extremely disparate or unequal attention paid to ele-ments on cultural visibility markets. This inequality of attention is at the outset of the career of a product, subject, location, etc. highly coincidental. Striking are the self-reinforcing effects of visibility that follow: once something manages to become visible it is not likely to lose this visibility very quickly. Analogous


to the Matthew effect, attention is given to that which is already known, which is also the logic according to which such statuses as classic, celebrity, famous, cult, or star are assigned – exactly this is what winner takes it all-markets are about. Sighart Neckel (2008) observed in the context of the transformation of social inequalities that in late modernity the criteria that determine a subject’s status have shifted from achievement-based to success-based. In fact, this shift from achievement-based to success-based criteria can by and large be explained in terms of the late modern structural transformation from industrial societies and their logic of generality to post-industrial societies and their logic of cultural sin-gularity. In rationalistically organized modernity, gradual differences in objective achievement, especially in the professional world, lead to gradual differences in status. Yet, an economy that rewards absolute differences in exceptional singu-larity, visibility, and the successful accumulation of attention (regardless by what means) tends in fact to legitimize far more drastic social inequalities. These asym-metries in inequality affect products, companies, locations, and subjects alike. While achievement was defined by the fulfillment of general standards of better/worse or more/less, success results precisely from the seemingly non-rational properties of the singular performance that prevail on the attention market: the particular brand name, the particular location, the particular individual.

In contrast to organized modernity, the society of singularities gives thus rise to a new range of societal problems. The society of cultural singularities does not in any way imply that the classic modern realm of necessity has been replaced by a post-modern realm of liberty, free of cultural expediency. Instead, the societal preference for the unique is associated with a devaluation of the general, which yields, in turn, new problems: not least of which are problems of equality.

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1 Educ. Pesqui., São Paulo, v. 44, e170967, 2018.

The Group as a Device*: the ecosophic micro-intervention in educational pro-cesses within environmental education

Augusto Luis Medeiros Amaral1

Alfredo Guillermo Martin Gentini1

Raquel Avila Amaral1

Abstract

How does one go about designing modes and forms of coexistence that will induce subjec-tive changes in people, contributing at the same time to better their relationships with oth-ers and with the environment, examining the institutionalization of human life in the con-temporary world? This is the driving question of the present research work. The hypothe-sis presented is that this can happen through environmental-pedagogic micro-interventions with their main focus on group processes and an analysis of the role of the researcher in the research process. Ours is a research-work/intervention based on the epis-temology of institutional analysis, more especifically on the ecosophy and cartographic method of Félix Guattari. This design of environmental education highlights the relevance of three ethical-aesthetic registers – the social, mental, and environmental ecologies – and provides the theoretical support needed to our analyzing the ability one has to re-invent oneself and the environment from the perspective of an environmental-education process. The group device aimed at intensifying the transversalities and the emotional, inventive, affective, imaginative and intuitive human capacities, favoring collective learning and participation, as well as autonomy, solidarity and self-managing processes. The activities carried out were presented as possible alternatives to develop such capacities by putting into motion instituent forces within the group processes, as well as encouraging action-reflection and caring for oneself, others and the environment.

Keywords

Environmental education – Cartographic method – Group processes – The three ecologies – Education.

The institution, the group device and the production of

1- Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, RS, Brasil.Contatos: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1678-4634201844170967

SECTION: ARTICLES

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type BY-NC.


Augusto Luis Medeiros AMARAL; Alfredo Guillermo Martin GENTINI; Raquel Avila AMARAL

other coexistence modes

In a world where social inequalities grow deeper and deeper and environmental problems multiply themselves, one must not only theorize but rather create and apply interventional devices that, when summed up with other practices and other research works, will grant us a few steps forward in solving these problems. Such is the purpose of this research work, as we present different modes of coexistence that originate from micro-political pedagogic interventions in formal, non-formal, and informal teaching environments – in order to promote caring for oneself, caring for others, and caring for the environment, in educational processes within environmental education.

The interstitial relations between theoretical reflection and practice, between what happens within the spaces of intervention and what happens in the extramural world, interstitial relations that will inhabit between our conscious and unconscious beings, groups and institutions, point out to the existence of inventive potentials in borderline areas, in the between-places. This is what happens when the human being takes a risk by making incursions to places outside their safety nets and beyond their routines, disputing their own certainties, moving across what is known, towards the frontiers of education, arts and philosophy.

Therefore, it is the aim of this research work to focus on experimental processes for new ways of living and connecting, without the imposition of any new categorization of universals, but rather articulating some singular dimensions of the real in order to reconstitute the existential domains previously known, thus opening lines of potentiality that will encourage the human being to reinvent herself as well as the world in which she lives.

In addition to those problems related to the social division of work, analyzed in depth by Karl Marx, we deem it necessary to go further into the analysis of other forms of control that were instituted with the modern era, thus broadening our understanding of the socio-environmental questions in the contemporary world. From a conceptual viewpoint, one must bear in mind the three moments/movements that comprise an institution:

[...] every institution presupposes (i) a movement that generates that institution, i.e., the instituent; (ii) a result, i.e., the instituted; and (iii) a process, i.e., the institutionalization [...] The instituted performs an important historical role because it is in order to organize those social activities essential to the collective way of life. For the instituted to be efficient, they should remain open to changes just as the instituent follows the social becoming. However, the instituted tends to remain static and immutable, preserving de juri states that have already changed de facto, thus becoming resistant and conservative [...] Examples of institutions are: language, family ties, social division of labor, religion, justice, money, the armed forces, etc. An important cluster of institutions is, for instance, the State. In order to perform their regulatory function, the institutions are actualized in organizations and associations [...]. Institutions regulate human activities by prescribing actions forbidden, actions accepted, and actions that will not matter much one way or another. Therefore, institutions may be expressed by laws (principles/fundamentals), norms, and habits (BAREMBLITT, 2012, pp. 156-57).

3Educ. Pesqui., São Paulo, v. 44, e170967, 2018.

The Group as a Device : the ecosophic micro-intervention in educational pro-cesses within environmental education

We live in a society in which a particular form of regulation (DELEUZE, 1992a/ 2005) is pervasive: the incessant control in an open millieu. Control devices become more and more sophisticated as the need grows to regulate behaviors and keep public order. There is a logic of confinement that spreads throughout our society in its entirety, and not necessarily there will be actual walls separating the indoors from the outdoors of the social organizations (schools, prisons, business corporations, hospitals, etc). Our bodies were disciplined and this discipline was gradually introjected (FOUCAULT, 2013), allowing the exercise of power to become more discreet and more effective.

In order to understand the devices that spread to other human activities and will produce bodies more and more limited in their movements and forms of expression, one must understand how the regulatory processes work – processes that become gradually established in our daily lives, making us human beings move in fragmented, repetitive and predictable/controllable patterns.

However, control devices are capable of having alternative configurations and more than just one possible orientation. According to Deleuze, Foucault alters the map of devices by revealing their lines of subjectivization. Foucault does so “not to let them [control devices] be encapsulated within the insurmountable lines of force that impose clearly defined contours” (DELEUZE, 2005, p. 86). Foucault suggests that the very same society that disciplines bodies can also be an environment for the production of subjectivity, one that could generate new forms of power and of knowledge. At any given moment we can actualize our body ability to render radical and even unthinkable actions by re-claiming this ability and making it move in novel ways, for the human species has this ability to interfere with itself, to recreate its existential domains, and to change the course of events. We can be creative and we can reinvent ourselves because we are bodies geared towards diversity, capable as we are of differing even from our own selves.

The device is defined by what it offers in terms of novelty and creativity, at the same time signaling its ability to transform itself, or to fissure right at its inception for the benefit of a future device, unless there is a decline in power of the more solid, more rigid, sterner lines. Lines of subjectivization – as they free themselves from the dimensions of knowledge and power – seem to be particularly capable of devising paths of creation that, if on the one hand they do not cease to fail, on the other hand and in equal measure they are resumed and modified until there is a rupture of the old device [...]. We belong to and act within devices. What we call the actuality of a device (our actuality) is the novelty of a device in relation to the former devices. The newest one is the actual one. Actual is not what we are, but rather that into which we are becoming, what we are in becoming, i.e., the Other, our becoming-other. It is sine qua non this distinction, in the whole device, between what we are (what we will no longer be) and what we are in becoming: the former belongs to history and the latter is the actual part. History is a file, an outline of what we are now and of what we no longer are, while the actual part is a sketch of that into which we are becoming (DELEUZE, 2005, pp. 92-3, translated from Portuguese).

In the present research work we propose to perfect the very micro-social device of the group, with the goal of better serving the production of both subjectivity and resistance



to the new forms of domination – for we know that the current forms of domination could at any given moment be rearranged at the crossroads of more solid, more rigid, sterner lines, lines of either stratification or sedimentation.

Another definition of device is the following:

An assembly or an artifice producing innovations that will generate events and becomings, update virtualities and invent the new radical. In a device, the goal to be achieved and the process it generates are simultaneously immanent and dependent on each other. A device comprises a semiotic machine and a pragmatics, and is incorporated to the system by means of connecting heterogeneous elements and forces (multiplicities, singularities, intensities) that are ignorant of the formally constituted limits of molar entities (strata, territories, the instituted, etc). Devices, as generators of absolute difference, produce revolutionary and alternative realities that transform the alleged horizon of the real, the possible, the impossible (BAREMBLITT, 2012, p. 147).

The question that guides this research work aims at understanding in which way the group device can contribute to the production of coexistence modes that will eventually lead to the emerging of latent potentialities of the human, of our sensorial, intuitive and inventive abilities, encouraging one’s taking care of oneself, the others and the environment.

This implies breaking up with a type of alienation that is synonymous with physical inactivity, as well as with other forms of alienation: a decreasing ability to think and act independently, a lack of political engagement, a growing feeling of loneliness and isolation, an intellectual inertia, a passive attitude in face of socio-environmental problems, a dullness in creativity and expression, an indifferent or careless attitude towards other people and the world, mental disturbances, and lack of sensitivity.

Félix Guattari’s institutional analysis and ecosophy

Intervention as defined in this research work is a concept based on epistemological parameters used in institutional analysis as developed in France since the 1960’s. It aims at understanding and transforming the various senses and meanings that are found ingrained in the institutions, and our goal is to question these senses and meanings from a socio-political viewpoint. In a way, this research-work/intervention brings about ruptures in the expectations put forward by the research-work/action2 movement, especially in those expectations concerning the relations between theory and practice, subject and object.

The field of analysis of this research work is undoubtedly political, and is constituted of multiple forces that will spread by contagion and contamination. René Lourau3 (1997, 2004) states that processes occurring in this political field of analysis are brought about by transduction, diffusion, contagion, contiguity, or proximity - in transversal or rhizomatic

2- It champions an amalgamated theory for the researcher’s commitment. Our data survey includes evidence from the subjects, with interviews, questionnaires, content analysis, and checking with the subjects themselves the information collected. It aims at raising awareness and changing behaviors.3- Transduction-implication.



dimensions, - and go behind and beyond ideas of deduction and induction in vertical dimensions such as the production of knowledge. In this complex universe of field work, the relation subject-object is always implicated and traversed by becomings.

The field of the empirical – defined here as a field of intervention – is a space delimited by the possibilities that (i) emerge during the artistic-pedagogical activities and (ii) allow for displacement in the flowing of events, in consonance with the doors that open and close, according to continuities and interruptions.

The research-work/intervention is made up like a sort of adventure through unknown territories, due to the permanent process of transformation and adaptation to the groups and spaces where the pedagogical interventions take place. It highlights the importance of learning to deal with both the unexpected and the uncertain in the human body, as well as the importance of multiplying other modes of subjectivization – open to surprises, doubts, turmoils, and oscillations. This study proves to be a potential producer of senses and meanings, given that the work method employed can implement new forms of relating – more sensitive, more inventive and less oppressive, aesthetically pleasing, therefore disputing the instituted forms and glancing at what is beyond the limits of the instituted dimensions. And this “beyond the limits” is an unexplored (and may even be a non-existent) territory, one that through pedagogical interventions we try to invent, thus producing other worlds, other possibilities of coexistence, new territories, other dimensions for the real through a proliferation of forms of caring.

Therefore, a collective agencement4 (GUATTARI, 1981, 1992) develops so that new ways of thinking and relating can emerge, often connecting different and even contradictory events comprising this study’s field of intervention, when a multiplicity of lines proliferated during (i) the lessons taught and (ii) the micro-interventions carried out by the students, as well as (iii) in the meetings of the CNPq research team and (iv) in the meetings of the Interactive Theater Group; furthermore, (v) in activities developed by NGO Comunidade Casa do Caminho and (vi) in our countless informal conversations about personal – i.e., non-academic – issues; in our sharing of dreams and utopias; in the collectively written texts and in the joint planning of tactics and strategies of action; in our participation in academic events, university courses, and other extension activities; as well as in the multiple sentiments that emerged during our research process. The surfacing of all these multiplicities greatly enriched our social relationship, thus contributing to (re)acknowledgement and use of the values of the participating groups.

The institutional analysis highlights certain alienations and oppressions, favors critical analysis, and takes interventions to be innovative forms of relating, disputing the instituted forms. It encourages the emergence of “self-analytic and self-managing circumscribed processes (whenever this is the case), with the proviso that these processes will expand to the point when they will have reached a generalized and revolutionary extent” (BAREMBLITT, 2012, p 137). Thus, the pedagogical interventions took place not only at the university, but also in community spaces, on the streets of the city, health-care units, hospitals, schools, events, and neighborhood associations – that is, in both

4- Agencement = social and spatial assemblage (Translators’ Note)



public and private spaces. In short, this is a group device whose main goal is to ponder, reflect by means of acting, intervening. What matters is the connections, the interchanges, the exchanges, by means of tackling with the intermezzo, the in-between places – not only taking refuge in the pondering parts, but also operating, creating, calling out to others to engage in the creative process. With solidarity. The pedagogical intervention makes both difference and singularity come to surface: multiplicities emerge from the given conditions and operate in the same scope of these conditions, impelling humans to transform themselves in the search of other modes of coexistence, encouraging them to bring about spaces for the production of the new and of other events.

The interventions examined topics related to environmental questions from the point of view of the relations between the human and the non-human (permaculture, health in terms of food intake, organic agriculture, eco-citizenship, biodiversity, climate changes, ecotourism, global warming, alternative energy sources, water resources, riparian forests, natural disasters, etc), and topics related to social questions from the point of view of the relations that the human builds with other humans (social movements, the media and social communication, the State, group processes, the relation between the individual and society, money, social exclusion, capitalism, globalization, religious faiths, processes of socialization, modernity/postmodernity, transcultural issues, social classes, race and gender, etc).

The pedagogical interventions contributed to the processes of human education, for the human is in this perpetual game between virtual and actual forces, cultural and natural forces; the human may encourage actions and yet not join in them, but will always make alliances that will be intense, though not eternal, much less subservient. The interventions were orchestrated by a teacher-researcher-militant collective that affects and will be affected together with the group and from the actions of the group while collectively constructing and opening a pathway to other processes of differentiation (not the identical, not the identitary). The pedagogical interventions favored modes of collective subjectivity under-construction – without any goals of creating models or imposing solutions, with the expectation of an ethics of the event driven by the precipitation of the actuality.

The result of these interferences and mediations contributed to having the subject become different from what she is, being herself. And this is possible through a set of practical-theoretical activities that address the problems inherent to the relations the human establishes, in terms of self-care and caring for others (mental ecology), in terms of what the groups of subjects brings about in the domain of social ecology, as well as in terms of caring for plants, animals, soil, air, water, etc – activities which scrutinize the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman from the viewpoint of environmental ecology.

Our device put together practical-theoretical elements from the Theater of the Oppressed, by Augusto Boal (2014); from somatherapy, by Roberto Freire (1988); from psychodrama, by Jacob Levy Moreno (2012); from the operative groups, by Pichon-Rivière (2009); from biodance, by Rolando Toro (2002); from sociopoetics, by Jacques Gauthier (2012); from clowning, by Jean-Pierre Besnard (2006, 2014); and more recently from the schizodrama, by Gregorio Baremblitt (1982, 2004).



In the epistemology of institutional analysis one finds ecosophy (GUATTARI, 1990, 2015), the very concept of environmental education that is the cornerstone of the present study. Ecosophy makes explicit our need to produce a way of thinking that will surpass the limits of a Cartesian logic and will dispute placing the human as the center and the measure of all things. To Guattari, knowledge must advance to such a point that the moment comes when we can finally understand ourselves and we can become integrated with other beings, breaking through borderlines that separate human nature from other living beings and natural goods. Through political articulations and daily practices, a broader questioning of social norms and premises can emerge – this is what our pedagogical interventions have revealed so far.

The starting point of the ecosophic concept of environmental education is the body-environment relationship, and its challenge is “to facilitate the free flow of production and desire in life – and life in all its facets: biological, psychic, communicational, political, ecological, etc.” (BAREMBLITT, 2012, p.151), providing a learning experience that unfolds in the transformation of oneself and of the environment in which the body is inserted.

When I use the word body I am referring to the organism, muscles and blood, tendons, arteries, bones, vital functions, digestion, but I am also referring to the historical and cultural tissue that constitutes the living body – vivid, motor, constituted in space and time. The human body demands investment and restlessness, and materializes aesthetic experiences. It is language, cybernetic device, genome, phenomenon brought about by media and television. It is a microscopic universe, bacterium, virus... environment (AMARAL, 2013, p. 140).

The body re-creates itself with each and every moment when it plunges into the domain of the pure affections, identifying itself with eternity and chaos. Affection is not only human, for what is human is our feelings, our sentiments. Affection is a vital potentiality that traverses the body, allowing it to create while it resists to servitude, mediocrity, the unbearable, shame. Deleuze’s contributions point to the fact that the body will resist when reinventing itself and the environment – defined as a place of exchange in multiple dimensions. Every time body and environment interact in the process of intervention, other correlations of forces (more powerful and transforming) are generated between culture and nature, matter and energy, actual and virtual, reason and intuition, instituted and instituent, popular sayings and scientific knowledge, etc. And then the human recomposes her own subjectivity by means of a praxis and an ethics of the sensitive.

The relations experienced in the intervention process are caused by the existence of a social environment that encourages the exchange of different life stories and different worldviews, with the coexistence of diverse points of view (religious, aesthetic, political, philosophical, epistemological, etc.) and with the interaction between different ethnic groups, social classes, genders, age ranges, etc. They are modes of social interaction negotiated through our caring for human relations (when we cultivate relations of friendship, companionship, solidarity, affection, etc.), and through our caring for our relation with the environment (when we cultivate new ways of perceiving and dealing with other animals or plants, the earth, the oxygen, the water, etc.). Therefore we re-invent



caring for, touching, seeing, feeling, listening, speaking, affecting and being affected by others and by the environment – through artistic-pedagogical resources, and experiences that take place when we are in direct contact with Nature.

Environmental education (AMARAL, 2013) should be based on an ethics of a permanent re-invention of oneself and of the world, encouraging the human to go into a search in an attempt to transform herself, to some measure, in the very environment in which her body inhabits. It should encourage us to seek certain possibilities of exchange with the environment that are open to all sorts of becomings: becoming-water, becoming-plant, becoming-animal, becoming-non-human... becoming-other. This is by no means a passive process, for the human is transformed when transforming. Becomings promote sensitiveness and caring for life, given that in the moment I experience being an Other (becoming-water, becoming-air, becoming-bird, becoming-fish, becoming-stone), I allow myself to exist from the perspective of an Other, therefore allowing myself, for instance, to experience ecological unbalances caused by our capitalist society, that destroys life for profit and the wealth of a minute portion of the population.

The research-work/intervention reveals the importance of learning how to deal with both strong and weak points of working cooperatively, of dealing creatively with oppression, of feeling and perceiving life from other angles and perspectives. The interventions have allowed the participants to learn a bit more about the power of emotions, impulses and sensations. Thus the periods of intervention are important because they make the body move purposefully, they let go of alienation, and they guide the human into action, creating the conditions for a possibility of having this human express her sensitive, aesthetic, and reality-changing capacities.

Analysis of data as produced in the pedagogical intervention

In this section, as a result of the analysis of some of the pedagogical interventions implemented, we can outline the operation of the device. The intervention analysis refers to the group processes of activities carried out in the Postgraduate Program in Environmental Education5 (between 2009 and 2016) of a Brazilian government-funded (federal) university. Such activities include working with a CNPq (Brazilian research agency) research team, called As Três Ecologias de Félix Guattari (The Three Ecologies of Félix Guattari);6 working with the university extension project called Grupo de Teatro Interativo: laboratório de pesquisa e intervenção socioambiental (Interactive Theater Group: socioenvironmental intervention and research laboratory);7 and participating in the activities developed by the NGO Comunidade Casa do Caminho.8

5- Two university courses were taught: The three ecologies of Felix Guattari, I and The three ecologies of Felix Guattari, II.6- The research team analyzes and participates in the activities carried out by the NGO Comunidade Casa do Caminho and by the Interactive-Theater Group.7 - This is where seminars are carried out, as well as social-environmental micro-interventions in the community and research-laboratory workshops. The activities are supported by our University’s (FURG) Postgraduate Program in Environmental Education and by the Audiovisual Laboratory for Research in Environmental Education.8 - Since 1998, the NGO has been working in the town of Pelotas, RS, Brazil, and in neighboring rural areas in the countryside, active in the fields of health care and environmental education. The poorer citizens are granted assistance for free. For more information, please watch http://www.



One of the interventions conducted by the CNPq research team The Three Ecologies of Felix Guattari, at the IV Forum of Professional Master’s Degrees in Nursing, Nov. 25- 27, 2014, at the Fluminense Federal University (Universidade Federal Fluminense - UFF), in Niterói, RJ, shows the operation of the device and its potentiality to promote the development of other ways of living and relating to oneself, others, and the environment.

The pedagogical intervention, a workshop open to the Forum participants, entitled Aesthetic Experiments of Caring, was carried out according to the following steps: (1) introducing the participants (instructed to introduce themselves to the group not by saying “who you are,” but rather “who you would like to become-to-be”); (2) body relaxation and stretching; (3) technique of the senses9 (blindfolded, participants were instructed to use the other senses to get in touch with the objects placed in their hands: fruit and various spices, a hot water bottle, cosmetics, and ice cubes in a plastic bag); (4) watching to a couple of videos available on the internet (Atrevete10 and Elephant Gun11), followed by an informal group chat (to examine the relevance of becoming-other: becoming-child, becoming-lunatic, becoming-sea, becoming-animal, etc., as a way getting to know oneself and imagining new ways of relating to yourself and the world); (5) the blindfold-walking technique12 (the participants work in pairs, and one of each pair is blindfolded while the other guides the first one outdoors silently); (6) the drinking straw technique (with sheets of paper they manufacture drinking straws, after which they must walk outdoors led only by what they see through the opening of the straw – the other eye being covered, as a way of perceiving and enhancing transversality); (7) technique of the forum-video (three volunteers are invited to present a clinical case where a registered nurse and a nurse are tending to a patient who takes the point of view of an actor in motion, given that she has a camcorder and is using it to film the action).

When the seven activities come to an end, each participant is asked to say something about the experience. Most participants commented on guiding and being guided, describing the bond and the trusting relation they had established with their partners as a pair. Another point was, they were astonished by an environment where they walk through on a daily basis when the paper-straw technique allowed them to see it as if for the very first time. The activities made them reconsider caring for themselves, others, and the world. Still on looking through the paper straw, two participants commented on how hard it was to see and how anxious they felt during the activity, due to the discomfort caused by this other perspective of the eye. However, in this process of transversalization there were those who described the opportunity to see “details, and a wealth of things moving that we are not used to seeing.” A participant reported that “getting to look at things slowly, bit by bit, can be way more intense than looking at the world as a whole.” Another participant’s comment was, looking at “objects from a distance can also cause your senses to sharpen, especially your hearing. It is noises that

youtube.com/watch?v=FgVLxvXk3-U&feature=youtu.be. 9 - The technique of the senses is employed by Jacques Gauthier to collect data for research works in sociopetics.10- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk-xI_nY2Co 11- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWSz_PAfgNc 12 - A technique used by Augusto Boal in actor training for the theater in order to have actors develop mutual trust.



prevent people from bumping into each other, and you have to move in a more circular way in order to move forward.”

Subsequently, the participants were requested by e-mail to answer the following questions: (1) What clues has the workshop provided about what might possibly lead you towards your turning into that which you would like to become in the near or distant future? (2) What clues has the workshop provided about what might possibly be preventing/hindering you from trying to achieve your wants and desires?

Among the answers, there was a participant who valued the learning and praised the challenge that led her to deal with unusual situations that expanded her existential territories. In this sense, she pointed to the emergence of a potentially active force capable of promoting the development of other ways of living and relating to herself, others and the environment:

The workshop helped me discover my internal fears, my vanities, and my worries. It made me reflect on what I have already achieved in my life and what I did to get there, as well as on what I have not yet achieved and why not! I visualized my challenges and my potentialities, I could reflect and I could get to know myself better. [...] I was born with wings... to conquer new frontiers, encouraging those around me and my family and turning myself into someone who is capable of facing new, constant challenges in order to come to new thresholds of happiness! [...] but I must remember to take better care of myself and learn on a daily basis to say “no” and think of my family, my life and what I still want to conquer and can conquer in order to be someone both as a person and a professional – helping new human beings, children, families, friends, and other beings I am still to meet or run into in my life! I believe this to be my mission... because I shall be a musical articulator who, metaphorically, besides showing this is an actual desire of mine, to learn how to play a musical instrument, I must become a more political being, articulating new work projects with new life projects!

In another pedagogical intervention, held on Sept. 5, 2009, with the participation of volunteers from the NGO Comunidade Casa do Caminho, through the Projeto de Ensino e Extensão Formação Continuada de Agentes de Saúde Mental Comunitária (Project of Continuing Higher Education and Extension Courses for Agents in Public Mental Health),13 a dramatic improvisation was carried out.

When it entails dramatic improvisation (BOAL, 2014), the device requires some sort of stage where people will not interpret characters as in the traditional concept of the theatrical arts, but will present themselves merely guided by the flows of the here-and-now. On this “stage,” the bodies of those who animate the group process are taken to be forces of composition for the interventions, contributing to the environmental education in progress. This happens while a game is set up of correspondence between performers and spectators, between actions of intervention and daily life. This process in this study

13 - In this project, educational activities were offered monthly, including theater workshops, seminars, dramatic improvisations, lectures, and plain chatting.



is viewed as a self-education process – however, this will be both feasible and significant only in the relation of one body with another body and the environment.

For the dramatization, the facilitator asked that someone volunteered to report some personal question to be worked by the group at that moment. A middle-aged woman, unable to get over the sudden, early death of her husband, said his passing was too much for her to grasp, but she believed the group could help her accept her loss. On listening to the widow’s report, one of the authors of this paper played the role of the husband and improvised. He wrote in his field diary:

It was a powerful moment of catharsis. When the coordinator asked that someone played the role of the husband, I immediately volunteered, without hesitation, and walked towards the woman standing in the center of our circle [the group was standing in a circle at the NGO’s frontyard]. I tried to concentrate on clearing my mind, getting into a meditative state. I had no idea what was going to happen – we had no script, we had not rehearsed that, there was no previous arrangement of any kind. The aim of the intervention was improvising, which meant working on the razor’s edge, walking the tenuous limit between delirium and lucidity. I knew I had to be open-minded, had to have all my senses ready and sharp, had to concentrate in what was going on, and had to let my intuition guide my each and every word, every movement, every cell within my body. This requires total surrender. Throughout my dialogue with that woman there was no time for me to come up with complete, grammatically correct sentences – I would come up with answers for the time of that intervention, and they were flowing calmly, firmly, coherently. I didn’t know what to say, I just opened my mouth and spoke. During that improvisation, I felt like taking off my shoes to have my feet on the grass lawn, but I refrained from doing that. I could feel this energy flowing powerfully from the earth through my body. I was merely channeling that energy into a whirl of words and phrases, nothing else. I felt a combination of dizziness and excitement, and there was no thinking about what I could or could not say. My senses were sharp and my whole body was in a state of readiness. (From the field diary of one of the authors of this paper. Sept. 2009)

A few months later, the coordinator of Casa do Caminho, Marcolina Tacca, known to all as Sister Assunta, said her niece, the above-mentioned widow, had overcome the trauma of her husband’s death. Our intervention had been central in that overcoming, meaning we had contributed to the restoration of her inner balance, to her finding again her vital force.

In this sense, the intervener, who played the role of the widow’s husband, wrote:

After the intervention, three people, at different moments, wanted to talk to me. The first one, astonished by what had happened, asked me if I had gone into a psychic trance. The second person, baffled, said s/he had seen several gradations of light and colors illuminating us as we were moving about in the frontyard. And the third person made some comments on the importance of the theatrical arts in healing actions, and said s/he had quite enjoyed my performance. Three very different perspectives about the same event. Who was right? All three or none of them? (From the field diary of one of the authors of this paper. Sept. 2009).



Unlike methodologies that focus on the examination of variables kept under control, the practices we adopted favor the uncontrolled and are open to a multiplication of variables and to a proliferation of perspectives. Unlike traditional methods, ours welcome variables that may seem strange. It is our expectation that they will interfere in the process, generating waves of destabilization, thus fostering the creation of other ways of living with one another, new ways of dealing with the same old problems of the human. It is a way of expressing ourselves with less self-censorship, and it is a way of having faith: (i) in complex collaborative processes for life’s self-regulation, and (ii) in the capacity of human improvisation.

However, the process of creating the group device demands special attention and caution, for what we actually do is examine a specific form of control, while people let go of their bodies only to rediscover them: an ego-centered control. In the epistemological field where pedagogical interventions are located, there is no cradling the I, for the events happen in a decentralized, multi-focused, transverse manner.

The project for a study of micro-interventions to be carried out by the postgraduate students in Environmental Education originated from our pondering on the unattainable macro-complexity of the environmental problematic, as well as from the need to produce – through clinamens (microscopic deviations in the orbits of the electrons in pre-Socratic physics) – changes in the daily life of each student: molecular revolutions (GUATTARI, 1981) that relate with both the ecosophy and the research projects they had designed for their dissertations and theses. Some of these interventions are recorded in our environmental videos.14

The creation of a micro-social group device was guided by another epistemology altogether, taken from another perspective, in which “different forms of rationality and the possibility that other sources of knowledge, not rational but emotional, intuitive, sensitive, imaginative and muscular,” (GAUTHIER, 2009, p. 5) come into play in the process of producing knowledge. The creation of that micro-social group device originated from a process of re-singularization of relations (of the person with herself, with others, and with the environment), and is based on complexity – from the viewpoint of the ethic-aesthetical paradigms of both Deleuze and Guattari. From that point of view, various rhizomatic connections are established with each and every moment in a steady flow of deterritorialization and re-territorialization.

Complexity explains the historical-cultural phenomena intrinsic to the biological and points out to solutions that depend on the internalization of certain concepts. In this sense, Environmental Education can be the axis of interlocution between the ethical concepts in the subject – both man and animal, instinctive and civilized, rational and emotive, sapiens and demens, and more importantly, able to understand and increase its own intelligence [...] The concepts that surround the dualities of homo refer mainly to her abilities to embrace the human condition in civilization, as well as the primitive condition of the human animal, an inevitable part of nature. They refer also to the paradox of society or culture vs. nature – but now deleting the idea of versus, that is, placing the communion between the conditions that constitute the paradox above both conditions,

14- http://www.lapea.furg.br/http://www.lapea.furg.br/



and no longer seeing one or the other as presumably superior. And this is so because in fact homo never existed without the complexity of our subjectivity (the individual), our environment (the society), and our nature (the species). In our view, complexity is an epistemology that provides an understanding of the human, our internal nature and our external nature, i.e., because it takes into account all the biological and social aspects and categories that surround us: from physiology to pre-history, history, and tradition (SANCHEZ, CALLONI, 2013, pp. 7-8).

Now, this is the main challenge of our pedagogical interventions: to re-invent when re-inventing ourselves, rupturing dualities, helping each other, accessing becomings, believing in intuitions, valuing the Other in their differences, revealing yourself as you see yourself, expressing your feelings, increasing self-knowledge, re-creating masks and social roles, acting and thinking with your whole body in movement, putting yourself in unusual situations (regarding what is considered “usual” by our ruling institutions), experiencing states of unbalance, dealing with unexpected events . In other words, taking risks that will go beyond our comfort zone as this has been devised by the need to have institutions perpetuate themselves, dictating social roles and identities – so characteristic of the submitted-object group (GUATTARI, 2005) that turns the individual into one among many, – replicating values dear to consumers, ingrained in a logic of high productivity.

A rigid understanding of reality and the ways of dealing with reality proved to be quite individualistic, reinforcing under many circumstances the primacy of the I and the repetition of the same, the hegemonic, the expected. Along the intervention process, moments of cooperation and mutual solidarity allowed varying degrees of differentiation and singularization emerge within the group. Pedagogical interventions therefore point to the presence of a potentiality that can be liberated when the human veers away from stereotypes and re-invents social roles.

It so happened that we needed another instituent line in the device, another supplementary technique. And it took the form of a clown, especially in the artistic-pedagogical activities. It was a kind of improvising clown: clumsy, reckless, motivated by her interacting with the world and other people, one who was free to exhibit her own ridicule and occasional failures by transforming them into comic material, making laughable the truth, bringing to light aspects of the human that as a rule are socially denied. Features of the clown include violating rules, subverting social roles and masks, defying the established order, and disrupting social representations.

In the process of giving life to this clown within the context of our extension project Interactive Theater Group – socioenvironmental intervention and research laboratory (Grupo de Teatro Interativo: laboratório de pesquisa e intervenção socioambiental), between Aug. 2015 and Nov. 2016, a significant step was taken towards perfecting the group ties and the group development. The clown revealed its value in the courage, improvisation, and eager participation from the members of the group. Our clown was there in the way it related with the environment, in the way it accepted its own ridicule, in the (self-)awareness that it could be form and content to its own clown, in the experimentation with strange languages and with the immanent body language, in our using our bodies to express ourselves more spontaneously, in the involvement, improvisation, motivation and



creativity in manufacturing costumes and makeup, and last but not least in the inventive, reflective, sensible, imaginative participation of the group as critics.

Notwithstanding, it has been a troublesome process: on the one hand, the group did improve in their results of activities carried out in the laboratory and learning the clowning technique (BESNARD, 2006, 2014), but on the other hand their progress was quite limited regarding the socio-environmental interventions. This could perhaps be explained by the necessary exchange with an environment outside the laboratory, something which requires revealing yourself, interacting with the public, and facing complex social and environmental questions. This is the more demanding part of the process, a moment of distress, when we break away from the limits of the protected environment of the laboratory/classroom and head towards the more unstable and contradictory environment of daily life – meaning a higher level of intensity regarding those activities previously carried out in the laboratory, meaning your moving away from safer places, deterritorializing yourself, and having to deal with unforeseen events. In other words, it means you are metaphorically naked to the eyes of the others, and you reveal how ridiculous you can be to other people and to the world when you present yourself in a different way, playing another social role, using another mask, in a performance of other representations. To sum up, these implications, this actual acting must be well memorized in your body in order to echo social and environmental problems.

All the while, the group had been perceiving this type of acting as threatening, the source of fear and inhibitions. This meant we researchers had a challenge facing us, bearing in mind that we are the ones who suggest pedagogical practices and articulate theories in order to cope with socio-environmental problems. The group was afraid of all sorts of things: depersonalization, the encounter of their bodies in movement with those of other people, finding themselves in a chaotic situation, finding themselves in unexpected situations, feeling unable of classifying or controlling, unable of running risks and improvising, unable of taking a stand and suggesting alternatives, unable of getting involved in the process, and they were also afraid of transforming reality through transforming themselves (which leads us back to the first item above: depersonalization). They had fear of the law, the morals, life and death, the new. Fear and fear! However, the group in their several nuances contradictorily emerged as the ethos of actions transgressive of instituted truths, submission rules, and dominant social signifiers. The group, motivated by a desire to overcome their fears, moved away from the ethos of submission and proved to be something other than an object group.

On emerging from their moments of crisis, they were a subject group (GUATTARI, 2005) operating autonomously and creating their own rules – exactly that which makes the subjective standpoint become the attitude of a subject. Such becomings allowed for their questioning the meaning of the activity and their creating new meanings for their actions, when the logic of this study is partial and procedural rather than totalizing and functional. Such becomings made way to a space for flowing movements and instituent forces, a space where all participants have their own particular manner of living and expressing themselves, are illuminated by their own light, allow for apparent oppositions and paradoxes in their lives, and embrace the Other with her differences.



The experimentation with different modes of coexistence opened micro-fissures on the thick social fabric when it aimed at erasing limits that separate the human from nature, the subject from the object, the inside from the outside, thus revealing new perspectives in terms of caring for oneself, others and the environment. The research-work/intervention presents the participants with new horizons for the educational process in environmental education and points to other ways of producing knowledge.

The group device has been dealing with some of the more important challenges in the field of environmental education, and it examines the modus operandi of contemporary society and brings about other modes of coexistence that begin with the creation of a space for dialogue and environmental awareness, aiming at having people lead a life with better quality and happiness, in which cooperative work may resist oppressions and alienations, and build a world inspired by dreams and utopias, where we can deal with the fear of pain, where we can desire freedom and, above all, where we can learn to fight for life.

Caring-for at university courses in Environmental Education

One of the main features of this research work was to track down and explore certain paradoxes and dispersions: some events that are loaded with transforming potential, i.e., events that will elicit our senses and intuitions causing them to organize our thoughts in a creative flow.

The process of this research work proved to have the potential to examine and dispute social norms and conventions by leading us to think of environmental education as actions that will encourage the creation of group devices with the objective of providing possibilities of exchange between the human and the environment, possibilities that are more receptive to instituent movements and becomings, favoring our perception of nature (us being part of it) rather than trying to place ourselves in nature’s “shoes.” Paraphrasing geographer Elisée Reclus, we could say the human is nature becoming aware of itself.

Instead of taking nature to be outside of us, we should let our bodies (mind included) feel the flow of becoming-water, feel the breath of becoming-wind, feel well planted in the soil by becoming-tree, feel incandescent by becoming-lightning.

The notion of caring-for devised by our research work assumes the creation of group devices at university courses in Environmental Education – group devices to allow the human to access dimensions such as to make us experience other centers of gravity, other modes of coexistence; group devices to allow us extrapolate ego, individualism, individualistic perspectives; group devices that will allow us to create and experience in our bodies the existential diversities.

The relation between what happens in and out of the research laboratory, the relation between formal, non-formal and informal universes of teaching, the relation between one instituted space and another – these are relations pointing to the existence of inventive potentialities in the in-between, in the intermezzo, in the between-places. Those are places of coming through, where one can only go by; they are places that cease to exist as soon as flow variations, discontinuities and reconnections die out. These places can only be



experienced when the human in dislocation moves beyond the territories where we are in control, letting go of our safe places and plunging into creation, into the invention of the new. The in-between place is impregnated with creative forces. The device makes visible some of the invisibilities of the instituted and in so doing, produces the research data in a process of collective self-analysis.

The studies developed around the pedagogical interventions15 are deemed to be alternatives to develop intuitive, sensitive, creative capacities, while the human threads the limits between conscience and the unconscious. The interventions show this is possible when the senses are sharpened and the body goes through changes, generating waves of instability and intensifications, when the body disorganizes a certain order previously established and denounces the incompatibility of our current society with the potentialities and multiple possibilities of the human body.

The environmental-education concepts concerning raising awareness are relevant for the whole learning process. However, from awareness to action, a journey must be taken, one that involves the mobilization of intricate processes (of the body) that will translate into action. The educational processes in environmental education are, in this sense, the actualization of what goes on in the world as we experience it – as events are processed, where theory influences practice and vice versa, according to a script that involves what is meant, what is said, what is pondered, what is dreamed, what is seen, what is ineffable, where the verb “think” is always in the gerund (“thinking”), in a movement that is forever deconstructing and inventively creating.

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Received on Oct. 23th, 2016 Revisions requested on Dec. 08th, 2016

Approved on Feb. 22th, 2017

Augusto Luis Medeiros Amaral – sociologist, currently teaching at the Postgraduate Program in Environmental Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG), he is one of a pair of coordinators of a Brazilian national scientific research team that works under the supervision of the Brazilian national research agency CNPq, and whose research projects are “The three ecologies of Felix Guattari” and “Sociopoetics and Related Approaches.”

Alfredo Guillermo Martin Gentini – psychologist and institutional analyst, with a Ph.D. in Educational Sciences and a Post-Doctorate in Intercultural Psychology, he is Adjunct Professor of the School of Psychology and teaches at the Postgraduate Program in Environmental Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG).

Raquel Avila Amaral – biologist, she is a Ph.D. student at the Postgraduate Program in Environmental Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) and a member of the research group working under supervision of the Brazilian national research agency CNPq on two projects: “The three ecologies of Felix Guattari” and “Complexity Studies.”

2017 singularization birgit mara kaiser

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