Bordering senses and sensations: an education in displacements

ABSTRACT

The field of Education, when traversed by philosophy, art and science, can be connected to the universe of images, differing intensively from its usual capacities of thinking, imagining, creating and inventing the new, especially focusing on relationships between subjects and knowledges. Thinking the urgency of pointing fissures of a modern constitution closed in a structure of subject education linked to knowledges authorized to say it as a truth. It borders the potencies of images and their possible effects on bodies and matters of expression, external to a perception that do not work in a conciliatory or habitual way in which they are usually felt. Dialoguing with the theoretical framework of the philosophies of difference, especially the works of Gilles Deleuze, two movies were chosen as an intercessor for analytical and creative operations that inspire displacements of usual relations between subjects and knowledges into education field. Thus, it traces lines of flight to think in the interval, from the idea of contrast and its important intensification ‘between poles’: genre, classification, judgment. It is also thought through the infantile-image, a concept that arises within the margins of cinema, education, and philosophy, and which has a close bond with the contrasts that dimension childhood and its lacunar senses.

Key-words:
image; philosophy of difference; cinema; subject

RESUMO

O campo da Educação, quando atravessado pela filosofia, arte e ciência, pode conectar-se ao universo das imagens diferindo intensivamente das suas usuais capacidades de pensar, imaginar, criar e inventar o novo, particularmente nas relações entre sujeitos e conhecimentos. Este texto pensa a urgência de apontar fissuras de uma constituição moderna fechada em uma estrutura de formação de um sujeito vinculado a conhecimentos autorizados a dizê-lo como verdade. Margeia as potências das imagens e seus possíveis efeitos em corpos e matérias de expressão, fora de uma percepção que não aja de modo conciliatório ou habitual com o que é sentido. Dialogando com referencial teórico das filosofias da diferença, sobretudo a de Gilles Deleuze, são escolhidos dois filmes como intercessores para o trabalho analítico e criativo que inspira deslocamentos das relações entre sujeitos e conhecimentos na educação. Para tanto, percorre linhas de fuga para pensar no intervalo, a partir da ideia de contraste e sua importante intensificação do “entre polos”: gênero, classificação, juízo. Pensa-se também pela imagem-infantil, conceito que nasce entre as margens do cinema, da educação e da filosofia com um estreito vínculo com os contrastes que dimensionam a infância e os seus sentidos lacunares.

Palavras-chave:
imagem; filosofia da diferença; cinema; sujeito

First words

With our current research, we seek heterogeneous associations between image and education. By making this movement, we are especially interested in images of some types of cinema that give turns and differential returns to the world, displacing us as spectators of everyday scenes. In this context, images are not an utterance, they request a non-discursive logic of sensation, and they do not reify the logic of significance. We understand sensation as what passes from one order to another, from one level to another, from one domain to another, as an agent of deformations of the body - unlike the actuation of the figurative and abstract arts, which occurs directly in the brain, without access to sensation.

We accept Lapworth’s (2021, p. 398) provocation, in stating that the worlds expressed by cinematic images can be understood as being more or less ethical, depending on whether they allow a “multiplicity of points of view (human and non-human) to coexist intensely” or causing heterogeneity to become “imprisoned in a myopic perspective of meaning and sense”.

It is with multiplicity that we will extend the next conversations into three interconnected strata that claim, against any dogmatism, the affinity between speed and thought. In intersections of a literary text and two films, the images will be dimensioned like the strong wind outside that tears the “umbrellas” that Deleuze and Guattari indicate to be the shelter of recognition. And, in this movement, they will create a possible to think subject and knowledge in education, in “a naked sky, sowing the storm and making the difference shine” (SIMONT, 2021, p. 188), that is, an education that is simultaneously freedom and the will to a-signify life in every word, image, a text that flows, hybrid.

Other approaches to teacher education will be touched upon throughout the article.

Life: the great soup

In Italo Calvino’s book, “The Nonexistent Knight” (1993), the character Gurdulú, described as “the one who exists, but does not know who he is” and which essentially contrasts with the character of the knight narrated as “the one who knows who he is, but does not exist,” receives different names from people from different places, to the extent that relations that they establish and value in front of him take place differently.

Gurdulú lives, but he lives without judging, or rather, he judges in a logic of his own, of experimentation, inciting and potentializing becomings: becoming-fruit, becoming-duck, becoming-sex... It is a character that is pure drive and desire for life, who interacts with the environment, escaping the formal relations established by cultural frameworks of an image of subject stuck to values and moral codes. He cannot even express a “would rather not,” he is pure life/body power in a world that judges him differently by what it cannot understand, since ordinary recognition associations are really attached to life figures and models and do not involve an approach to the schizo body that is expressed only by the desire that takes it and the effects, not predictable, that it performs. He experiences ethical thinking, which is not simply the application of pre-existing judgments and transcendent values to recognized situations (a procedure that Gilles Deleuze (1997) defines as a distinctly ‘moral’ image of thought), but rather a properly inventive practice that facilitates the production of new and unforeseen modes of existence.

This character, when fed up with eating and smearing himself with soup, seeming to blend in with it, states at one point that “- Everything is soup!” and generates a thought to another character: in fact, would not the world be a gigantic minestrone?

Gurdulú is not taken by a language that can express any refinement, all connections are freed from ideal codes that, on the other hand, keep the knight too imprisoned and, thus, this other character cannot ‘enlighten,’ ‘clarify,’ or transmit to other warriors the true idea of ‘knight’. This idea and the knowledge that created it are far from the battlefield, the routine, and the reason for the war. One leaves a logic of inclusion, in which knowledges grow in extension, adding one to each other and, at most, entering into a battle in dialectical movements, to enter a perspectivist logic of indiscernibility (LAPWORTH, 2021). It is not a question of dissolving everything into a cosmic flux that nullifies difference (a ‘becoming nothing’); what is contrasting remains, since a zone of indiscernibility is rather where differences actively unite, so that they intensify and transform, in a process of constant variation.

Now, the subtlety of Calvino’s book resides not only in affirming the coexistence and conviviality of the two characters marked as figures corresponding to different and extreme poles, but also in showing that the essence is neither in the knight nor in Gurdulú, that the world would be a mixture, a complexity that is in-the-between and not in the poles or in the identities. A characteristic of the drama, in this coexistence and coextension of the two characters of Calvin’s book, refers to the differential relations between them, which, instead of generating operations to demarcate the differences, correspond to “distributions of singularities, partitions of remarkable and ordinary points, so that a remarkable point engenders a prolongable series over all ordinary points to the neighborhood of another singularity” (DAMASCENO, 2011, p. 164). That is, analogous opposites assert themselves just like contrasts, not by the exclusion of one by the other, but by the difference of asymmetric forces of composition, which can be intensified by extreme contrasts, presenting a drama taken by different encounters that will always vary.

In Novaes (2014) and Novaes & Amorim (2021), contrast was a category thought in connection with the thought of difference, affirming it as coexistence in a space/environment, screen/video, and not leading to the marking or establishment of an identity. The use of contrast in dissonance to simple recognition, pure identification or recognition stands out. The movement-thought established by this term allows possibilities of creating new sensations that call into question the sensorimotor mechanism usually structured by the senses known and already receptive to a certain apprehension. An intensification of the affections is sought, not a “physiognomy” of the senses, other lines of emergence of subjects and knowledges, since, according to Lins (2009, p. 06), “thought is moved to the rhythm that links one’s own thoughts between them, reconnecting them to things; it never hurts to remember that things and thoughts are not separated. (...) one seeks the harmony of opposites and not the identity of opposites that are unknown to them”.

Thinking about contrast as the initiator of the dramatic scene focuses much more on possible recognitional ruptures than on a dialectic between the forces that would compose the images, resulting in unitary or common syntheses, so present in the ways in which knowledges are mobilized in the field of education and that have been subject to various criticisms (see, for example, MACEDO, 2012; GABRIEL, 2019).

Knowledges constitute a true drama for thought, since it is under the system of representation, in a pre or fore-representative instance. In this sense, similarly to what Gabriel discusses about teacher education, dramatization also invests in the “destabilization of a particular sense of a common aspect fixed hegemonically around the idea of ‘property as a right’” (GABRIEL, 2019, p. 1554). The author points out that the common aspect would come to be perceived as a political principle, instead of just being a way of producing social and subjective belonging, in the interweaving between subject and knowledge.

Opening up other possibilities in these knowledges can be the role of the dramatization method. It is contexted and releases, according to Damasceno (2011), a procession of guiding questions to accompany the drama of thought: in what case?, who?, how? how much? and where?. And the most potent answers come from the assertion of incompossibility. A political alternative to the predominance of a series that would be the best of possible worlds, from choosing one, the best, before the impossible that would be to accept reality in multiplicities. It is a flow from the common to the continuous variation of possibilities, an inspiring idea for other teacher training processes. In this context, from the dramatic method emerges “incompossibility [as] an original correlation that is distinguished from contradiction and impossibility” (DAMASCENO, 2011, p. 172).

Affirming the relationships between subjects and knowledges as incompossible is what we will do next. To this end, we will dialogue with a short film of North American experimental cinema and then with a Mexican feature film. Both will deal with images of infanthood, of the infantile. Such an association of these two films also expresses an idea, known in DO VALLE (2018), that, as a teacher, Deleuze was practically a ‘machine’ of fabulation, an old child, someone who did not forget about humor, always trying to free life there where it feels prisoner. He never got tired of repeating: the percepts of this life, of this moment, must go beyond what has been lived, that which is confined in us. A teacher-infantile, whose inspiring knowledge has been our intellectual company.

We will argue that cinema has an important role along with the powers to provoke ruptures, even if micro, and to provide new means of being in the world, in an expansion of the aesthetics of life. The signs of the Arts, in general and in the example of Italo Calvino’s literature, have this role. They are conditions for the birth of thought: “not in the orthodoxy of its previously decided direction, but when it is confronted with the potency of what has not yet been thought, of what arises with the untimely inanity of an encounter” (SIMONT, 2021. p. 188). And their elements and what constitutes them in form and content suggest the emergence of being questioned, studied, dislocated, and experienced. Does education have this desire?

From the movie screen, alliances to differ teaching

David Lynch, American director, states that cinema combines many different forms of art¹. The director began as a painter, and painting led him to cinema. He tells us that in cinema we need to construct a lot of things or help it do that. Cinema deals with many other areas - music, photography, for example. This is what Amanda Núñez García (2020) discusses in her article on hybrid knowledge between art, science, and philosophy, stating that the concept of alliance for Deleuze and Guattari, in the work A Thousand Plateaus, is concerned with becoming, in this process, a different order of filiation. In the short film The Alphabet (1968), Lynch wanted to make a painted film and does not deny that Bacon is one of his great alliances. Bacon’s work of art was studied by Gilles Deleuze to think about the Logic of Sensation.

The modulatory effects in the encounter with Lynch’s images, connecting the strength of the concept of alliance, could disorganize too similar articulations when we accept to give up our standard aesthetic recognition and accept the invitation to dream and break with the unbearable of the rhythmic and standardized frame by feeling the intensifications that come from the inarticulate cries of the image. A chance to think of other ways of relations between knowledges, “that are not among the recurring clichés of our culture: either its excision in fact, or its mythical-humanistic fusion in a project of salvation of the subject and reality” (GARCIA, 2020, p. 301).

Lynch allows us to think about the encounter with pre-linguistic, pre-alphabetic, and pre-shaped forces of our education by allowing us to break the codes that force a certain subjection on us. An intensification so strong that it can give us a new quality, awaken other perceptions. José Gil (2008) helps us understand this mismatch between reading with letters and reading with strokes. According to the author, “the alphabet consists of ‘letters’. We learn to ‘read’ and ‘write’ (that is, to think) combining them to form words, then sentences (that is, to articulate a question and construct a problem). The same letters are not found, therefore, everywhere, in all words” (GIL, 2008, p. 40). In other words, the nightmare of being literate, in Lynch’s film, brings to the body of his daughter, who is the human character, the larval condition, by the disappearance of the reverse of the letters, of the many paths and virtualities they contain. According to Deleuze (2006), there are movements that only the embryo can withstand, and therein lies the truth of embryology: here the subject can only be larval. The nightmare itself is perhaps one of those movements which neither the waking man nor even the dreamer can endure, but only the sleeper without a dream, the sleeper in deep sleep.

There is a mutual presupposition between subjects and knowledge in this film that passes through the complex relationship of the real and the virtual, in which both are reciprocally determined. Now, as Leon (2021) highlights, in order to understand the relationships between real and virtual, one must resort to the term individuation, which, according to Deleuze, will include virtual intensities in a constructive way in real situations whose multiplicity is extensive. In real situations, in which individuals and their knowledges are at stake, such as educational ones, such movement of the subject to individuate comes from the individualization of virtual differences, which act between the real and the virtual. The virtual is a kind of surface effect produced by real causal interactions at the material level. By its generative nature, this virtual is a type of potentiality that is realized in the real. It is not material yet, but it is real.

Reality therefore includes both real and virtual dimensions, while ensuring the individuation processes that express them. The individuation of a different type of image in which a multiplicity of points of view interact without there being a privileged center that would unify and order them.

Resuming the film The Alphabet, an apprentice subject’s nightmare is individuated between paintings and sounds presented in the images. The encounter of the arts constituted by modulation does not necessarily models the mind for a process of recognition; the Figural is released² in the encounter between these images, provoking the possible modulatory action of the thought of those who perceive them and invite another education with the images. This opportunity would return learning to what is prior to a necessary articulation and makes vibrate passions not determined by language, by giving the chance to intensify non-psychologized feelings in encounters with sensitive affections, which invite us to feel differently by desiring connections.

The problematic proposed by The Alphabet is that the subject is no longer constituted from mold to mold, if this had really ever been possible, and begins to undergo an endless modulatory process. The curriculum seems to lack a higher bet to the experience of learning that is made in the immanence of a subject in becoming, constituted in-the-between, and not at the poles. One still often thinks in order to guarantee a transcendent subject, with a view to the future, by considering it invariant or with a foreseen variation. Even when one thinks of the inclusion of difference, it is seen by the logic of identity, by the particles ‘either/or’, either black or white, either normal or abnormal (in its infinite categories).

That subject insinuates itself, fractally, in David Lynch’s experimental film. In it, the alphabetic code does not seem to be a problem for learning to be taken from a just useful articulation, which aims to produce similarity patterns. By being affected, and here we bet on the forces of artistic images to enhance learning, we could perceive and feel differently the diagrammatic force in the curriculum (AMORIM, 2020) of other aesthetic presentations at the encounter with events³, beyond the ordinary perception given by a state of affairs. The Alphabet seems to break the established codes, to plunge into the midst of repetition to extract the sonorous pathos, the sound of a monstrous harmony. Images and sounds are not explained, the character does not return to the accommodation of the mold, the sensation confuses the ordinary perception and can arouse affects. These are escapes from ordinary perception by virtue of encounters in states of affairs, in the midst of the habit of recognitional routine. When affected by remarkable encounters, the character is taken by an extraordinary perception, derived from an affective encounter that breaks with lyrical harmony and presents light or accentuated contrasts that are made in the middle of a zone of indiscernibility. They help us to compose the thought that is built in the midst of variable traits, colors, textures, sounds.

In education, there is a certain privilege to the first encounter [the routine of recognition], mainly due to the fact that it is usually related to the task of institutions and crossed by a curriculum taken by identity games and recognitions/analogies/comparison, and by historical causalities that seek a conscious subject who comes to understand who he is.

However, with Gilles Deleuze as an intercessor, we can see that there is no certainty about how learning is built in each one. There is always the risk of rhizomatic learning (AMORIM and SCOTT, 2018A), open to chance and temporal unpredictability; its movements spread throughout the world, always in becomings, whose responses may always vary, and it is not possible to anticipate the results and responses.

The arts can play a very important role in this complex aesthetics of life with which each living person composes the drama of their life. When affected by a remarkable encounter, one feels forced to think, because the artistic experience may come to present other ways of feeling and perceiving, in which the difference appears through intensifications of the variable forms of perceptions that may or may not be felt and that take each one singularly.

By the method of dramatization (DELEUZE, 2006), the thought is thought and poured into knowledge always in motion and in becoming, and the possibility of encountering an art, which has modulation in its composition, would be intensified and could awaken other learning powers. The subject is by no means absent from these dynamics. “But the subjects that [the dynamisms] have can only be sketches not yet qualified nor composed, they are more patients than agents, the only ones capable of withstanding the pressure of an internal resonance or the amplitude of a forced movement” (Ibid., p. 116).

A learning that has cognition constantly triggered by invention and that produces new ideas and new images. Would this not already be an idea of art as resistance to common life models by proposing to incite experiences? Life as a complex aesthetic experience connects very well to the thought that takes it as a drama in the midst of the whirlwind of encounters that can build it into a constant invention, in a permanent learning in/with felt affects. Education that is based on enhancing life undoubtedly passes through experience, and contrasting differences are felt by complex sensitive perceptions, enhancing life in the encounter between subjects and knowledge.

As discussed in another text (Amorim, 2018B), the movement of education, then, like experimental cinema, could make events a problem, treat the encounters between signs and bodies as opportunities for creation/invention and drive new problems to thought. Far from the accommodation, equivalence, and stagism that marks school learning, problems extract from time the truths of the signs and the vital forces of the sensitive realm.

In the following section, we will focus on contrast as a condition for subjective perceptions to grow and flow between experimentations of images and sounds of a feature film. An education allowing itself to be born in a tactile corporeality, of dispersive and membranous perception of the environment, of being alive with such intensities.

Subjects and/in images, or about the experience of the outside

“the subject persists, but it is no longer known where”

Zourabichvili (2012, p. 122)

Cinema not only presents us with sensation as a possibility for an artistic thought to express itself, which is done as the work itself, a sensation that is beyond the organism, making the work itself stand on its own; but also, when meeting with science, cinema ends up creating its own sensory images, images that artistically present possible effects and intensifications between senses. The nomad, with their experiences from the outside, as Gilles Deleuze indicates, is one of the strata of the entry of P, for professor.

The first scenes of Abel (2010), a Mexican film directed by Diego Luna, present nomadic images that frame a boy’s eye, alternating with frames that show a slug moving; or, in another way, we could say that, in this case, they are images of frames that seek to compose a tactile sensation. In addition, such scenes open gaps so that the image seeks to connect to another temporality⁴, an image that becomes snail, in its slowness and tracing trail. There is certainly an intention to create and experience a type of relationship between the senses that immediately puts us in touch with another perception of the sensitive; one seeks both to achieve the possible creation of a singular perception, by contrasting relationships between visual and sound images, and to create a tactile sensation, approaching possible connections between sensory senses.

These initial frameworks of Abel (2010) present an infantile-image⁵ focused on artistic creation and that derives from the encounters between affects and percepts that compose the work as a compound of sensations; after all, the film thinks for itself, but also turns the other face to science and to a way of imagetically creating intensified sensory senses, making science become art.

Abel (2010) invites us to learn ways to encounter ourselves with images that show all the potency of a child in the autism spectrum to connect to the world sensorially, or through micro-perceptions that can become a sensory stimulus, teaching us other speeds and presenting an infantile-image that will also become, differently, a tactile-image, due to the connections between visual-image and sound-image. In Luna’s film (2010), intensive sensory encounters are created imagetically, presenting a tactile image directly linked to the intention of showing the effects of a more phenomenological sensation, since there is a clear connection with the perceptual responses in an individual, in this case, a special perception that a child in the autism spectrum could have, when affected by these encounters.

So, if on the one hand the film connects to science and affirms intensive connections with the sensory senses, which it imagetically creates, it also seems interesting to point out how it will compose, by the relationships between images, possibilities of learning how a child in the autism spectrum could perceive the world, keeping intertwined these lines that weave relationships between science and artistic creation, through the modulation of audiovisual images. What is the potency of creating such images? And why does the film Abel (2010) need to create them, beyond the story it seeks to tell? Therefore, it is important to know a little more about the possible relationships between autism and its sensory relation.

According to Katrien Van Heurck⁶, Belgian orthopedagogue and specialist in people in the autism spectrum, there is, in general, a characteristic in this group of people that goes through the difficulty of concentration related to very generalized perceptions; a sharper perception is composed with them, a different way of perceiving the world, more sensitive to details, to the intensities that make up and modulate relations. On the other hand, sudden changes or interpretations of the world that escape routine or habit, the unpredictable that appears and crosses the routine of a life, end up annoying them and hindering a response, since they are connect to perception by another filter, a type of filter that works as a differential modulator by the sensory intensity received, because, in general, people in the autism spectrum need to deal with/fight/break with more repetitive representation figures to create their quiet areas amidst the forces, without feeling pressured, and thus being able to be aware of the different durations and intensities without getting hurt.

In Abel (2010), there is the creation of an infantile-image that is pure experimentation and creation of sensations, but which will also show, by the figure of the boy, the protagonist of the film, the difficulties that people in the autism spectrum have, when crossed by many stimuli, such as the sound amplification of noises, precisely because they present this special perception that affects them by feeling and perceiving details minutely, as well as hinders them when receiving a lot of information together, because, of course, it is difficult to stay concentrated for a long time when one is crossed and affected intensely by forces of all degrees.

Luna’s film, Abel (2010), will present the folding and unfolding of an infantile-image that becomes autistic, showing that, both for its face connected to a subjectivity expressed by the character Abel, and for its face connected to experimentation, in its intensive individuations, moments of acceleration and slowness will be created, composing a singular way of crossing chaos, a borderline walk on a line that separates the inside and the outside, as Deligny (2015) pointed out. Thus, the infantile-image in Abel (2010) borders an ephemeral zone between accelerations and rests, creating a chord⁷ of a childhood that is intertwined between a thinking through sensations and the demand for a continuous tuning of a metamorphic line that is weaved and unravels along the plot, in which this Other balances oneself, being transmuting into an autistic-image that will border the in-between the possibility of breathing and the always possible fall into a suffocating despair, a chord that does not express consent, but that is attuned in a discordance that emanates the frequency relationships with which a boy affirms himself and is attuned to the world. In Abel (2010), it would be difficult to affirm a childhood thought that was done through play or games; it wanders more through the ability and intelligence of a child to potentiate life, plotting and inhabiting other places, within spaces that he perceives in his own way, ruining the representation by a falsification of itself, teaching us both to feel the different intensities of the world, contrasting humor and drama, and to perceive the different speeds between acceleration and slowness.

Abel (2010) will make it noticeable that, regarding people in the autism spectrum, it is not exactly about saying that they tend to have difficulties concentrating for certain tasks, even because the degree of autism can vary greatly, but it is more about making sensitive the differential connection that a child establishes with the world, being constantly crossed by the intensities that affect the sensory senses and that make it difficult for them to compose filters that diagram these forces according to a common perception. In addition, if it is true that a child in the autism spectrum tends to like repetition, this happens due to a considerable interest in details: this child knows that it can take a lifetime to know the crawl of a snail or that it is necessary to compose another modulation of the gaze, so that it is possible to create the required brain connections that capture the rhythm of the small durations that inhabit, for example, an anthill. Now hanging to the side of the fold, now to the side of chaos, the boy Abel feels and perceives, in his own way, invisible and inaudible forces, not noticeable to an ordinary perception. Hence the difficulty of moving to a generalized perception, because this arduous task of being taken by sensations that continuously intensify a feeling by multiple tingles makes this child inhabit the world with a painter’s gaze, which never exhausts the infinite variation that presents itself to perception, connecting inventively to details, discovering the impossibility of capturing all differentiations, corporeal and incorporeal, a problem generated by the intensive relation with the sensitive realm and that is also imposed on most artists.

This infinite variation that presents itself to a special perception constitutes the problem imposed to Luna (2010) to create imagetically the intensities that sensorially affect the boy Abel, making the Mexican director have to compose relationships between images that oscillate accelerations and rests, according to the requirement of different paths of the character in the film. If the first scene is the one that creates the perception to the details of a productive slowness of this snail crawls, intensively producing an infantile-image that becomes, sensorially, a tactile-image, composed in a slow, crawling, and sticky way, and that will express a way for the boy to connect to the world - when he is still hospitalized in a psychiatric institution -, his perception outside of that place will find other speeds, as the case that we quickly addressed in the paragraph above, concerning his encounter with an anthill.

This second scene will show how the change of environment affects his perception, an perception-image that is built in the film after Luna (2010) shows Abel passing through other places with which he had a strangeness, such as the family home, with its variable relations between the members who inhabit it, and the school, a place in which this accelerated perception of the intensive compositions that ants establish with the ground will be shown. Then, in a certain place of the school, in the middle of the unknown relations with which he does not know how to deal, Abel approaches the little brother who is next to two other people, a father and a son, starting to observe, with them, the rhizomatic and chaotic composition, constituted by the small durations that make up an anthill. Luna (2010) creates, at this moment, another subjective visual perception of Abel, which will be composed in a very accelerated way by the movement-images, but with the use of the same calm and cadenced music that was presented in the initial scene of the film. The sound-image, then, will be contrasted to the visual chaos, establishing a certain balance; that is, even in the midst of the perception of intense velocities of non-habitual relations, Abel still maintains control, observing the composition of the world with a certain strangeness, but without falling into despair.

This is the way in which the director makes oscillations between sensory imagetic creations, connected mainly to Abel’s subjective perception, and which help to modulate the variation of the boy’s figure in the film, making it sensitive how changes in the environment can affect him, especially when he has to inhabit a space with a lot of new information. Between contrasts of the subjective perceptions of the boy, Abel (2010) presents itself as a filmic thought that is composed intensively, affected by the changes of environment, contrasting slow perceptions, referring to when the boy was hospitalized in the psychiatric institution, with accelerated perceptions, seeking to make sensitive the excitement of being in an unknown environment, a way of filmic sensory thinking to relate the boy’s affections to the changes that life imposes on him.

Abel (2010) will teach us that thought needs time to think, as it will affirm the need to compose a relationship with the sensitive realm to be able to perceive the presentation of forces, without ceasing to show the difficulty of entering the midst of chaos to compose a zone of affection, in which, minimally, it is possible to control the effects of forces that can affect a body. Thus, Luna’s film (2010) creates an infantile-image that becomes autistic-image, generating singular perceptions and showing how forces dissolve relations based on representations. It is a cinema that seeks to locate events, in bodies that are subject to a wound that duplicates the causal chains that subject them to an irreversible present.

To this end, the images of the film coagulate a childish subject who is active to affirm the event that has occurred in his life. “My wound existed before me; I was born to incarnate it” (DELEUZE, 2003, p. 151) are words of Gilles Deleuze for a-singular subject that becomes the quasi-cause of what is produced in us. How do the images and sounds of cinema contribute to this activity of a “subject facing the challenges and obstacles of a particular situation that opposes the potential truth of an event in which they are engaged?” (LEON, 2021, p. 75). It is necessary to resume both the effectuations of virtualities and the idea of the singular to displace autism as a habit and translate it into becoming.

As we pointed out, Abel’s singular childhood, in the filmic narrative, breaks naturalizations of social models, such as the configuration of the traditional nuclear family, but will also end up denaturalizing play as a child’s essence. About playing, Abel does not stop doing it, but it is difficult to say that it is something that really entertains the boy. More than a form of understanding, he does so to maintain a relation of balance between the connections of forces that are diagrammed into his environment. In a scene where his doctor comes to visit him at home, when the boy has already adopted the paternal identity, the two play a game of dice while talking. In this scene, it would be possible to perceive more the dice rolls of chance than a possible affection of the boy for the pleasure of playing. As a doctor who did not believe that the boy could do ‘well’ outside the hospital, he is quite surprised by the boy’s change. And, if the game were seen as an attempt to make a behavioral analysis of the boy, Abel will dismantle the stereotypical relations that the specialist had already fixed on him: the boy will compose a relation with the game as if it were a moment to deal with practical issues, even superficial ones, of a conversation between adults, in which he will be the one who will argue with the doctor about how the hospital space is being cared for, making it clear that he is no longer the same boy who left there.

Abel will end up showing that those considered different do not stop differing, deconstructing a fixed image of the thinking that represents autistic people within molds. It is a subtractive conception of subjectivity by intervals, which are produced when we can have a new framework, a new line of perspective. The infantile-image in Abel (2010) is a complex and interval differentiation between singular sensations and perceptions, affirming to the world the ephemerality of their representation.

Disparate connections and creative modulations: properties for (de)forming

In Abel (2010), filmic thinking is constituted sensorially; a pedagogical character is created, who seeks to make us see details and listen to the composition of the forces that surround them. As Abel feels the forces that make up relationships, the character also seeks to show us the inconsistencies of fixed relations, as well as their possibilities for change, especially when one term is displaced or another is inserted in its place, since relationships are always in becoming and can vary.

Luna’s film (2010) creates sensory images that escape the habit of relating to the presentation of the effects of senses in the cinema. It creates tactile-images, from the point of view of a child in the autism spectrum, but also images related to both a perception of an outbreak, such as a sensory image that shows the change of this perception when ingesting a pill, imagetically creating the perception of the chemical effects of a drug.

Abel (2010), like many other films related to children, intensively creates individual images by sound and visual experimentation and derive infantile figures in its filmic space, continuously enhancing them, between the folds that are constituted throughout the works. Folds that affect what appears - the infantile-images - with other virtualities, intensifying them with sounds and colors. From this derivation of images and their agencies, characters are continuously produced, gaining qualities and being extensively differentiated, what we call subjectivities, but only as a condition of knowing that they are actualizations of these processes of affection, of individuation of images, when prolonged extensively, actualizing themselves in the narrative and gaining qualities, by relations between movement- images.

It is good to remember that the image is not a subject, nor does it represent anything, it is what appears. In this regard, the image does not need to be perceived visually, it appears by numerous connections: sound, tactile, olfactory, and taste. That is why we present the infantile-image through the relations between visual-images and sound-images, since it is also imbricated by the modulations of sounds, whether noises, music, or silences, which both intensify them and give them qualities. Therefore, the infantile-image will be both the result of intensive modulations of the images, of their colors and their sounds, which results from processes of creation and experimentation between the very qualities of the images with the intention of enhancing the sensations; as well as be actualized and compose infantile figures that will be modulated extensively throughout the films, creating characters that differ in qualities, who learn and teach us to see and hear disparate signs that appear between frictions, shocks, and contrasts of the relationships composed of two different circuits of images, one the circuit of logical relationships and the other of the aberrant connections (LAPOUJADE, 2015).

The infantile-image distances itself from the relationship with a subject. It constitutes itself as an assemblage between vibrations and forces, at least in the philosophical connection that runs through this text. As Sauvagnargues (2013) discusses, the image is not a representation of consciousness (a psychological data) nor a representation of the thing (the intention of an object). The French philosopher tells us that, with Deleuze, the image will be taken in reference to Bergson, presenting itself as everything that is defined as an assemblage of movements and affective vibrations. To think about the relation of the image with cinema, Deleuze chooses Bergson as an intercessor, without ceasing to be connected to Simondon and Spinoza, as Sauvagnargues (2013, p. 171) points out: “an assemblage of affective movements and vibrations, which Deleuze calls ‘image,’ in reference to Bergson. Defined as such, the image resembles Simondon’s haecceity⁸ and Spinoza’s ethology: a relation of sensible forces emitted by an affect, the individuation of which is perfectly accomplished without being bound to substance”.

Thus defined the image, it is possible to understand that the infantile-image, when focused on a subjectivity that is actualized on the screen, exists by itself, in its ephemerality and sound and visual connection; it is a haecceity that diagrams in itself different connections of forces. It is also difficult to attribute a beginning or an end to the infantile-images, since they are germinations of differential connections in a filmic medium, in this complex and metastable process that produces images, images that appear without giving life to a subject, but that modulate an infantile figure that is constituted as transversal and is differently composed in the filmic narrative.

In addition, the infantile-image is always covered by the sound folds that surround the character shown by the visual qualities and affections, constituting a double of this character, that is, this character is created, simultaneously and differently, by rhythm, music, and silence, giving it other affections and qualities, as in the scenes in which Abel perceives the snail and the anthill, in which the same music ends up creating a contrasting relationship that both intensifies and differentiates the visual perceptions of the character and helps to modulate distinct psychological states, when the boy is exposed to different environments.

In Abel (2010), the infantile character becomes a kind of pedagogue to teach us to see and hear images, pointing out different processes through which thought could pass, also presenting the impossibility of attributing an essence or qualities inherent to infanthoods, especially outside the means that affect and modulate them. But, surely, there is something common, both to images and to infanthoods, precisely the possibility of creation and invention outside the standards of logical relations, either by games without rules, by child’s play, or by showing details of the forces that cover the world.

The children’s subjectivities created imagetically, these pedagogic children visually and sonically modulated, end up making one see and hear, through perceptions and sensations, that there is a very strong (de)formation connective between the plane of images and the field of Education. Since forming and educating oneself opens up the possibility of producing an affection for the other: an imagetic education that presents learning as something that is created to sensitively feed the other, and, with them, making one see the pains, injustices, joys, resistances, the details of the world; finally, that learning passes through sensitivity, by letting oneself be affected by forces and, thus, being able to create, resist, and affirm life.

Images from the cinema: experimentations as actions for other pedagogies

The active and reactive forces in education would not encounter in defined places. In this system of actions and reactions of the imagetic matter itself, subjects and knowledge in and through images gain a Bergsonian sense of apparition, so that they do not need to be seen/perceived in order to metamorphose the real, but “exist in themselves as a trembling, vibration or movement” (SAUVAGNARGUES, 2013, p. 171).

This means that, instead of thinking about a centered and conscious subject, we would bet on thinking about an agent or fruit of heterogeneous and multiplicious assemblages. Both the forces emanating from this subject and those of knowledge are both active and reactive. According to Lapworth (2021), the cinematic image discovers its ethical function in the multiplication of ‘points of view’ that are no longer grounded by the phenomenological subject, but which instead preside over the individuation of more intense modes of thinking, feeling and relating.

This is what we considered when presenting and discussing the plane of immanence of images, in their possible connections and affections, between these sound and visual apparitions. This is intensively connected with the field of Education. Especially when it comes to learning. In the case of infantile-images, they can make us see other perceptions and feel other sensibilities, from child-characters that proliferate images that collide with experimentations and chance, becoming pedagogues, merging into an imagetic and immanent pedagogy, a crystal pedagogy that presents a multiplicity of virtualities on the screen, where the images affect each other. Such dimensions approach the discussion of Soares-Ribeiro (2020), when analyzing teaching actions based on the T of teacher, in the alphabet proposed by Gilles Deleuze: becoming, the experience of the outside (as nomads do), rhizomatic connections, the assemblage of complex practices, nomadic teaching, expressive and artistic teaching performativity, as well as the “deterritorialization in the teaching profession, allowing the renewal of events in the classroom space” (SOARES-RIBEIRO, 2020, p. 102).

We could also say that images learn from each other, in these affective connections, creating new relationships between signs, by intertwining with two different regimes of images, movement-images and time-images, an interlacing that creates a third one and makes it actualize itself as a regime of aberrant-images. This virtual sense of coexistence expressed by crystal pedagogy (or crystal-images⁹) is

different from the more conventional understandings of coexistence that we find in ethical discourse, where it is often framed in terms of the approximation of bodies that, nevertheless, remain separate and identifiable while maintaining their established molar identities. In contrast, the crystalline image follows a logic of indiscernibility rather than recognition” (LAPTWORTH, 2021, p. 398).

The indiscernible is an important ethical issue for teacher training, for an education of displacements, which we have been proposing in this article.

The infatile characters that jump out of this aberrant regime of images, when connected to the Deleuzian proposition about the role of filmic characters - presented in The Time-Image (DELEUZE, 2018), probably having Rimbaud as an intercessor -, become visionaries and, thus, seek to make us see something that they perceive as terrifying in their lives, a perception that removes them from everyday and habitual relations; they seek to ionize molecular accelerations, so that our eyes can see-feel next to them, eyes that need to become tactile to perceive images, since they are perceptions that are in time. In other words, with these characters and their searches in time, we can feel percepts and affects that rub against each other, experimenting creatively in free connections, open to chance, making the relations between images become aberrant connections, which are composed in a dissymmetric way, establishing a necessary link with accidents, chance, and improbabilities, thus giving life to the act of creation. Cinema knows that education is enhanced by these associations between free disparities, because thought needs chance and affection to feel, learn, and be able to create. The infantile-images - when connected to the sensations that help to modulate in the filmic medium, when they seek to make us light to enter another perception, through which the unthinkable of thought, the impossible of the possible would come out - feel that their pedagogic becoming ends up refuting the moral pretension of saying “you have to know this or that” or, still, show the aberrance of the always doubtful evaluative criterion, which ends up selecting the “best” answers, or the solutions already given and that reify doubtful wisdoms.

Filmmakers who create these images help us to bet on the education that seeks creations with and between knowledges, and not only by playing on the methods of the same truths that would make the images turn into clichés and lose their potencies of differentiation. Finally, cinema can make wind to teaching practices and blow their creative qualities, making emerge other possibles to learnings. Thus, they make subjects and knowledge search in time, in a still-here-and-already-past, yet-to-come-and-already-present (ZOURABICHIVILLI, 2004, p.19), a virtualization of a sense that potentializes teaching actions and does not reduce them, for example, to pre-established formats, giving them a formless life, in a permanent struggle in which arts, sciences, and philosophies are forces for Education to feel-exist re-existing.

REFERÊNCIAS

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Filmografia

• ABEL. Direção: Diego Luna. México: Canana Films, Mr. Mudd, Fondo de Inversión y Estímulos al Cine (FIDECINE), Televisa S.A. de C.V. 2010. 1 DVD (82 min).
• THE ALPHABET. Direção: David Lynch. Estados Unidos: Pensylvania Academy of Fine Arts. 1968. 4min. https://vimeo.com/6217493
  » https://vimeo.com/6217493

• 1
  See the interview at: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/david-lynch/#_. Access on: May 11, 2022.
• 2
  The Figural, for Rodowick (2001), has the possibility of dealing with the germ of chaos, of disorder in order. What incites, what disrupts the idea of order. It is not only about the trait, the relation between presence and absence, the indifferent discourse, or the image. It is about the force of difference and the power of virtuality. We need the Figural to read everyday life and its cultures. Unlike the figure and the figurative, the Figural is not governed by an opposition between word and image; spatially and temporally, it is not linked to the logic of binary oppositions.
• 3
  “it [the event] is what must be understood, what must be wanted, what must be represented in what happens” (DELEUZE, 2015, p. 152). Wanting “something in what happens, something to come in conformity to what happens” (Ibid., p. 152), this it is precisely the process of disjunctive synthesis. In all the moves of the singularities, different possibilities of implementation: “the event is not what happens (accident), it lies in where happens the pure express that gives us a sign and awaits us” (Ibid.,, p. 152).
• 4
  Temporality here as an entrance into the image-time, a Deleuzian concept, inhabiting a fold in which the speeds of chaos are momentarily paused.
• 5
  Conceptualization originating from the doctoral dissertation by Marcus Novaes (2021): images individuated by sound and visual experimentation make infantile Figures derive in their filmic spaces, continuously enhancing them, between the folds that are constituted throughout several filmic works studied, including Abel (2010). Folds that affect the infantile-images with other virtualities, intensifying them with sounds and colors.
• 6
  We interviewed the autism specialist Katrien Van Heurck in January 2021. Heurck also generously agreed to watch Abel and she commented with us some aspects so that we could make a better approximation of this theme through the images.
• 7
  Fernand Deligny (2015), when talking about the artistic creations of autistic children, tries thinking etymological variations for the verb accorder (attune, accord): word that derives, perhaps, it is not very well known, from couer (heart) or corde (chord). But then accord would have to mean creating a chord, not a consent, a conformity, but rather a disagreement from which frequency relations will vibrate.
• 8
  Haecceity brings with it a new theory of the subject that requires it to be located on the plane of forces and not of forms. Thus, in this perspective, it is absolutely useless to oppose hecceity to the subject, because even if most conceptions of the subject really adopt a transcendent mode, in reality, the subject is formed by relations of force and, by the image we have of it, it is a subjectified force. In reality, subjects, objects, things, and substances are haecceities (SAUVAGNARGUES, 2013, p. 163).
• 9
  As the virtual is perceived in sound and optical signs; they are not time, but, through them, one can see the non-chronological time that encloses the powerful non-organic life of the world, in which the signs become independent of the objects that emanate them (DELEUZE, 2018).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Jan 2023
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  14 May 2022
• Accepted
  14 Oct 2022