Body-listening as an act of anthropocentric resistance

Thinking and moving-with a posthuman, feminist materialist curiosity, I will be enfolding the sensory languages of movements, materials, molecules and musculoskeletal systems of under-fives with some alternative notions of creating, perceiving and valuing expression. Research reveals that the majoritisation of spoken language together with the pathologisation of silence (1, 2, 3) casts an opaque veil across spaces that are not yet inhabited by words (4), restraining the possibilities for sensory knowing to become morethan-expressive. This oppression creates centrifugal forces that make the young human responsible for a ring of singular expectations that are all but rosy. This dominant need for talk as a primarily cognitive process that “fl[ies] between lips and brain” (4, p.15) is exemplified in early childhood policy and practice but seems to miss or resist the plural, off-kilter entanglements of expression-exchange that ‘are not quite within the register of the perceptible […] but are nonetheless felt’ (5, p.17). Duchamp (in 5) calls this the ‘infrathin’, which values not so much the what/who/how-s lying in the cracks of a multimodal event, but their potentiality; their more-than qualities. These are inklings of something that happens in the interstices of expressions or encounters (5) by which a difference makes itself known and felt (not necessarily by humans), through the marks – or effects - that are left behind (6, 7). I argue in this paper that, by shifting the focus away from centrifugal perceptions of audible, spoken languages towards an indefinable ‘prehension’ (Whitehead’s term for grasping towards or sensing in 5) of these expressive differences, human and more-than-human educators can build care-full ecologies of practice, such as body-listening. This paper will engage in a speculative practice of opening ourselves to intervals that might lead to a sense of the infrathin in unspoken languages, where we might prehend the effects of a material difference or an affective process. For instance, in considering the multiplicities of expression, we might notice the taught stretch of the vocal folds, allowing sound waves to be released at a certain pitch, or the finesse of skull-bone conduction allowing us to hear-feel our vibrations. We might consider how these intersectional, and intra-relational parts might shift from human to more-than-human, able to produce more-than the sum of their parts, whilst influenced by quantum, thermodynamic, sociocultural, economic and political forces. And we might ask how this dynamic of expressive forces offers a suggestion of how languages might be received, understood and listened to, whilst resisting the temptation to pin them down in the very language that cancels and refuses their existence. Ultimately, we will ask whether a pedagogy of body-listening could enable educators to co-create, prehend and value the minor key of small languages that are often unexpected and therefore missed/misunderstood within an anthropocentric frame.