Play(ing)
Starting from the top left, this imagery depicts the inside out and outside in turning of a sphere back in on itself. In pure mathematical terms, the images are to be read clockwise with the inside becoming the outside and vice versa, but in understandings of de~territorialisation, the eversion works in both directions – clockwise and anti-clockwise – with inside and outside becoming the other all-at-once. Eversion invites a still more generative reading of Sutton-Smith and Magee’s (1989) notion of play as reversibility, which they conceive as a world turned upside down. In its complexity, ‘the world of play…is…both up and upside down at the same time’ (p. 60); in its chaos, order and disorder combine. If children’s play(ing) could be imaged, I imagine it might look like this image of eversion, like a constantly changing bubble un/re/folding, in/re/e/verting continuously, de~territorialising, a multiplicity, multidimensionality at play, always already elusive and intensifying. I imag(in)e play as intensities of becoming, and as becoming-intensities of play.
rhizoanalysis of becoming-children and children’s play(ing) To move outside and disrupt conventional developmental and behaviourist analysing of children and their play(ing), I turn to Deleuzo-Guattarian understandings of intensities, towards generating a rhizoanalysis of play as intensities of becoming in/through/with which becoming-children (are at) work. This moves away from imposing (an) arborescent order on play, of identifying it in terms of being extensive, divisible, unifiable, totalisable, conscious and organisable, to use DeleuzoGuattarian descriptors of ‘numerical or extended multiplicities’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 33). In contrast, ‘qualitative or durational multiplicities’ (p. 33) are intensive, that is, they constitute rhizomatically as particles with relations of distances or between-ness and movements that are turbulent. …intensive multiplicities [are] composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 33) Intensities grow inwards and outwards all-at-once forming aggregates or conglomerations that both stretch and become more dense, tying together ‘in an asymmetrical block of becoming, an instantaneous zigzag’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 278), such as of becoming-child(ren), becoming-intense, all becoming-imperceptible. But, how to perceive what is imperceptible? Deleuze and Guattari say that we perceive the imperceptible through movements of difference, not in relations between points, but in the middle between. ‘Look only at the movements’ (p. 282). When viewing the constellation Mātāriki (Pleiades) in Aotearoa New Zealand’s night sky with the naked eye, by not focusing on the objects of our gaze, things become more clearly visible. Not 137