This paper draws on data undertaken with very young children within the context of Norwegian kindergartens. Specifically, the paper focuses on non-human and human movements. Mine included, that are undertaken in time and space. Following I argue that as the researcher I am always already entangled in inquiry and that there is no beginning. As a consequence, I cannot offer an account concerning movements that are predicated on humanist notions of linearity. Moreover, by immersing myself in process ontology, my efforts (...) are not directed at using a presumed mastery where I both recognize and use a priori categories in order to render data intelligible and/or to reduce data to common sense. Rather, by paying careful attention to human and non-human bodies, and by being sensitive to and immersing myself within affect and movement, I draw attention to elements within the kindergarten which while, present are very often ignored by researchers and in so doing I disrupt traditional approaches to qualitative research. By effectively positioning myself in a post-human logic both the researcher and the research are open to different potentialities, potentialities where through thinking-feeling the peculiarities and differences of the empirical can be taken into account. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility for a means of bringing about novelty which does not rely on kairological philosophies based on an event. In contrast to both common sense and contemporary philosophical understandings of the term where for novelty to arise there must be some break in the repetition of the structure, this paper argues that it is possible for novelty to come about through small-scale experimentation. This is done by relying on the philosophical notion of ‘economy’ in order to (...) understand how we think about the world. In this regard, our thinking about the world depends upon acknowledging certain possibilities at the expense of others. History can then be seen as the distribution of emphasis which allows for these past possibilities and the future potentiality they may hold. Novelty, defined here as a rereading of history, is precisely the disruption of these possibilities and a challenge to the memory of the system. The conclusion to this paper argues that experimentation is an important means by which we can bring novelty into the world. (shrink)

Historically, Spinoza has tended to be considered as something of an anomaly within European modernity, a fascinating exception within the Western philosophical canon but one who has largely remained on the margins. More recently, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in Spinoza, a ‘turn’ to Spinoza which has had major impact on leftist philosophical- political thought. This thesis traces some of the history of this turn, and seeks to determine the nature of this impact. It ranges critically (...) over the readings of Spinoza produced by Louis Althusser and by Etienne Balibar, by Gilles Deleuze and by Antonio Negri, and by Alain Badiou. As the conjuncts and the commas here suggest, these readings are grouped within two broad ‘lines of descent’ from Spinoza: Line 1 comprising Althusser and Balibar, and sharing among other things a problematics of ideology and of the subject in which the influence of Lacan becomes apparent, Line 2 comprising Deleuze and Negri and sharing a certain qualified naturalism. Badiou, while exhibiting connections with Line 1, at the same time produces his own distinctive reading of Spinoza, one which turns on the status of the subject within Spinoza’s ontology, and on what Badiou alleges is a suppression of ‘ the place of the subject’, and therefore of the negative, within it. Several broad lines of enquiry run through the thesis. The first of these concerns the relationship between ontology and the ethical-political, between what Balibar terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ philosophy. The second concerns the function of the negative within these various readings, and what I argue is its persistence within an otherwise apparently positive ontology. The third, however, an overarching theme, concerns the ways in which Spinoza is deployed by these various thinkers as a philosophical and political antidote to Hegelian idealism within Marx, and above all to Hegelian teleology. In connection with this, the thesis therefore moves towards an examination of the ways in which these various readings of Spinoza have in turn fed into renewed readings of Marx, and considers this both in connection with a preoccupation with primitive accumulation shared by Althusser, Deleuze and Negri, and in relation to the readings of Marx produced by the Italian Marxist traditions of operaismo and autonomia. The thesis concludes that the turn to Spinoza has had a positive and enriching effect on Marxist thought, and outlines both some of the new dimensions which it has allowed to be developed, and some new lines of investigation which it has opened up within Marxism. (shrink)