The Canadian Modern Language Review / La revue canadienne des langues vivantes

Entering the scene: An introduction

We enter a room filled with people, all working mostly in silence. There are 10 individuals – students at the University of Luxembourg – each of them occupied at a separate table, their own space in the room. In front of each person stands a tablet mounted on a tripod, and before each device we see a unique scenery made from diverse objects that are laid out on the table. They are arranged in front of the tablet's camera lens temporarily, but ready to be rearranged, moved, and photographed by the hands of the individual behind the camera.

The room conveys a feel of intensity and concentration. Humans, machine devices and objects interact in 10 "theatrical sceneries" from where 10 unique animation projects emerge, gradually. – Time seems to be floating. – Hands exercise mechanical movements, take a shot of the arranged scenery by pushing a button on the tablet, then move the object before the lens a tiny bit further, take the next shot, a next small move, next shot, next small move, next shot, and so on. The procedure is repeated many times, the activity being very repetitive. Many pictures are required to produce a short strip of film, each of them being added to a steadily growing string of images, shot by shot. The result becomes visible as a sequence of movement only when played back as a whole, by pressing the play button on the stop motion app. This is the moment – some call it magic – when the object that has been manipulated in small incremental steps, maybe for hours, seems to move on its own, for a couple of seconds only.

There is Dimitri, who has placed his silver shiny music player on a piece of black paper. In the film scene currently being worked on, a pair of headphones on strings is slowly taking the shape of a heart that's forming around the iPod. There is Daniela, whose metal bookmark is moving along a row of letters painted in black on white paper, appearing in film as if learning to read. And there is Gohar, arranging carrots and their fluffy bunches of greenery whose movements are rendered in film as if starting to dance.

The question arises: What is interesting about that scene and the process briefly sketched above? Why should applied linguistics or language teachers care? Where is language? Why is animation making – a process involving humans, objects, and technology – interesting to explore in a collection of papers dealing with language learning, although the process described above does seem to involve no audible conversation or perceptible use of language learned by any of the human participants? What is interesting about a hugely repetitive process in which not much seems to happen, and that unfolds – as observed in this sequence – primarily in silence and without any noticeable collaboration between the individual participants?

These are questions this article attempts to address. It aims to show how animation making – as an extremely repetitive process involving human hands, the manipulation of objects, and the repeated haptic contact with a machine device, all cooperating in the production of movement – is linked indeed to language and communication, although maybe indirectly and in an unexpected way.

We aim to show how animation making and the intensive, sustained intra-action (Barad, 2007) with objects can enable a contact, connection, and communication, beyond [End Page 354] conventional ideas of human talk. Untying us from normative concepts of speaking and behaving, it pushes back those language ideological frames which some of us have experienced as inhibiting our readiness to speak, from fear of not proving fit to successfully compete with the norms and expectations of others. Conversely, we posit that animation making provides a space that can probe the hidden in us. Making it seen and tangible is offering a new strength, a repetitive process manifesting itself as a curative power. Animation making can help us to unlearn inhibiting behaviour, discover new communicational power and better understand communicational boundaries and blockages that we may have developed along our own trajectories as language learners. Through reconnecting with others – things and humans – in a new and open, empathetic way, animating objects can help pave the way for a more humanizing, hierarchy-flat, and equitable communication.

On repetition in language teaching and research

Repetition is widely employed as a strategy in language teaching and learning and as a focus in language acquisition and socialization research. There is a large body of work interested in repetition as a method to train learner cognition and the ability to retain words and chunks of language (DeKeyser, 2018; De Ridder, Vangehuchten, & Seseña Gómez, 2007; Henke, 2010; Mart, 2013; Segalowitz, 2003). Most of this work implies the assumption that repetition is reproduction and rehearsing for (a nearly) exact reproduction, of a particular lexical item or an utterance in a test situation (either for research purposes or for a school exam) (Ghazi-Saidi & Ansaldo, 2017; Rodgers, 2011; Yoshida & Fukada, 2014). Such reproductive procedure, commonly known as language drill, continues to be used widely as a tool to measure learners' acquired cognitive ability to display language knowledge (Webb, 2007), either in a particular language (Gu & Johnson, 1996) or across languages (Zeelenberg & Pecher, 2003). The success of the repetitive process is often determined by the degree of accuracy with which language items are remembered by the learner and reproduced within the conditions of a particular research design and setting (Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2013). Meaning (or the absence of it) is often seen as crucial in language learning and acquisition research. Some approaches work with lexical items having meaning in a particular language – as opposed to non-words – and evaluate the impact of both, words and non-words, on the learners' ability to retain the lexical items in focus, often without reference to a particular social context (Gathercole, 2006; Laszlo, Stites, & Federmeier, 2012). Some studies stress the use of authentic materials (Gilmore, 2007), assuming that the closeness to a real-life situation can facilitate the learner's ability to remember. Still other research focuses on the repetition of words or lexical chunks in a context where play and playing are important, either playing with linguistic material, for instance with patterns such as assonances (Lindstromberg & Boers, 2008), or the role of social interaction and playing with peers (Rydland & Aukrust, 2005) to help word retention.

What these works have in common is a focus on repetition as result and output-oriented, mainly interested in a learner's ability to perform particular language knowledge, at a specific moment in time. This very much echoes the perspective of neo-liberal educational policies that strongly rely on standardized testing, as part of an audit culture and system of numerical, quantifiable validation. The present study takes issue with some of the consequences that such an outcome-oriented perspective on repetition has produced in learners, negatively affecting their readiness to use language and engage in communication. [End Page 355]

To contextualize our critique, we turn to other research on repetition that does not share such a strictly reproductive perspective. A significant body of research on language socialization explores repetition as an important communicative, discursive resource (Keenan, 1977) that is oriented more broadly toward the appropriation of particular forms of social behaviour (Moore, 2011). It stresses the interaction of peers, adults, and child learners, acting as experts or novices, but without an explicit focus on the reproduction of a particular kind of "sameness," and rather aiming to foster a broader understanding of what counts as appropriate social behaviour. This can also include repetition as in rote learning – learning by heart or reading without attention to textual comprehension or literal meaning – which can play an important role in processes of language and cultural socialization (Moore, 2011).

In a similar vein, work on repetition in creative play (Cook, 2000) highlights the potentiality of playing with language as an act of appropriation. Such a view also does not focus primarily on the reproduction of a particular norm in the sense of "sameness," but rather on play as an activity that invites the exploration of "difference," as in different versions of speech and digressions from the norm, which are considered useful and conducive to the appropriation of social meaning.

A growing body of literature explores language as a complex adaptive system (Amerstorfer, 2020; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Hiver & Papi, 2019; Kramsch, 2012; Ortega & Han, 2017). From such a perspective, repetition in language use and learning is never seen as the repetition of "sameness" but as the production of "difference." Larsen-Freeman (2012, pp. 206−207) highlights the importance to language learning of repetition as a source for variability and adaptability:

There is an innovative role for repetition if we do not think in terms of exact copying, but rather in terms of iteration. Iteration introduces heterogeneity – it generates variability. … It is through iteration that we create options that give us choice in how we make meaning, position ourselves in the world as we would want, understand the differences which we encounter in others, and adapt to a changing context. … New forms support flexible and adaptive behaviour. Such a view promotes teaching that engages students in practice that is meaningfully iterative. What matters… is what learners do with the repetition, not what we think it does.

This is also echoed by recent research in speech therapy which promotes a similar view on repetition. It stresses the value of repeated action over time through repeated engagement in meaningful activities. As Hengst, Duff, and Dettmer (2010, p. 887) say,

Within traditional approaches, repetition has been conceptualized narrowly as the ability to produce relatively immediate, verbatim reproductions of target behaviours; treatment protocols have relied heavily on drill, eliciting client repetition of targets. In sharp contrast, sociocultural theories conceptualise repetition as a fundamental, pervasive feature operating at every level of language use. … With respect to learning, sociocultural theories emphasize the way such loosely structured, diverse patterns of repetition emerge in, and are prompted by, repeated engagement in meaningful activities.

Our article broadly aligns with the idea of repetition as "repeated engagement in meaningful activity." With the present study, we aim to add to such an understanding by exploring what repetition in animation making does for students in a Master's program at the University of Luxembourg (entitled "Learning and Communication in Multilingual [End Page 356] and Multicultural Contexts"¹), and how animation making affects their engagement with language and communication. We explore animation making as "repeated engagement in meaningful activity," but as one that decenters from language as the main and immediate focus of repeated engagement and that concentrates, instead, on hand movement, sensor-motority, and its impact on communication. Diving deeper into the process described in the introductory scene of this paper, we seek to further explore its mechanics and inner workings. In doing so, the article aims to take a fresh look at repetition, engagement, and meaningful activity, drawing inspiration from Deleuze (2014).

In that work, Deleuze (2014) explains repetition as a generative process that produces difference and newness, rather than imitating the already existing. He explores mechanical repetitive process as a theatre in which repetition, not humans, is the main actor. The part played by humans is not to "rehearse from a script that is not yet learnt" (2014, p. 12) but to disclose meaning out of a repetitive act, as if filling an empty space through repeated action and the movement it creates. In our context, humans cooperate as part of a human-object-technology assemblage, defined as "[a] concrete collection[s] of heterogeneous materials that display tendencies towards both stability and change" (Adkins, cited in Pennycook, 2017, p. 277), and as a set of relations in which parts of the assemblage become joined temporarily (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013) and for the duration of the animation process only.

We aim to understand how meaning is disclosed through the movement of objects, displaced in small incremental steps in the space before the camera. We see this act as nurtured and driven by intensive, repetitive intra-action, a term introduced by Karen Barad to replace interaction. Intra-action necessitates pre-established bodies (such as the human film maker, the technical device, and the object(s) to animate), which then participate in action with one another. Intra-action understands agency not as an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141), which develops between the bodies in intra-action. As a result of this dynamic play of forces in intra-action, the boundaries between entities in the assemblage seem to gradually blur, with the separating lines between the human film maker, the object(s) to be animated, and the technical device becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

We aim to show how, through the repeated touching and moving of objects, the repetitive process in animation making spurs sensor-motority, thereby producing an affective flow (Fox & Alldred, 2015) that is running through the assemblage and affecting all of its parts. Affective flow that compares to the dynamic forces Barad is talking about is not to be misread as human emotion. It rather is part and parcel of a continuum of affectivity (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) that links human bodies to their physical and social environment (Fox, 2015). We further explore how such sensor-motority becomes a driving force taking prevalence over ideo-motority, which relies more strongly on the intellect and pre-formed mental representations as forces to drive the creative process. We posit that animation making and the act of repetitive human−object intra-action draw us away from conscious planning and "representational concepts" that exist in our minds as fully formed mental representations and conceptual ideas, considered worthy as blueprints for intentional design. Following Thrift (2008), we argue that animation making refocuses our sensitivity in very particular ways, bearing in mind that human attention is highly selective and that only a small portion of ambient stimuli is ever noticed. Animation making shifts our perception to the unconscious and to the more a-representational sources of knowing [End Page 357] that form the very large majority of our mental activity, as only a small part − around 5% of what our cognition relates to − is conscious knowing.

With stepping back from "representational concepts," room is being opened for different sources and qualities of knowing. We argue that in animation making the "a-representational" emerges from both, namely the sources of our unconscious knowing and the mechanics of animation making itself. We further argue that research into methods foregrounding the "a-representational" has educational value and is needed. This is because it weakens particular "representational" mindsets and ideologies of language and learning that structure, contain, or suppress human action in ways that are powerful and reproduce existing educational inequalities. With our research, we aim to show how giving space to the "a-representational" through sustained ongoing repetition can have a meditative, motivating, stimulating, and curative effect that reduces the anxiety to perform adequately and renews our readiness to communicate.

Backstage − And how we explore the "theatre of repetition"

As co-authors writing this article together, we draw on our own experience and reflective exploration which we have been developing over the last three years. The present text builds on qualitative data, ethnographic observation, individual and peer interviews, pieces of reflective writing, conversations, and collective discussions with all the co-authors, conducted on several occasions (between September 2018 and August 2020), and recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to document and explore our joint reflective process. The method design has been developed gradually, and the choice of tools was adapted as our collective thinking and writing process evolved. It started with ethnographic observation done by the first author during the summer school when the student co-authors were deeply immersed in animation work and the creation of their individual projects. We warmly invite you to watch these films.² Although this text is more about the creative process of animation making, the films give a good idea of what the process produced and what the final products look like.

A few weeks after the summer school, the first author invited the student co-authors to jointly work on a first publication project. This was when other methods were brought into the process. It started with an individual interview (between the first author and each student co-author) which was recorded and transcribed. Shortly after that, we began to have regular group meetings with all four of us. We discussed particular texts on aspects of new materialist research and explored how they connected to the co-authors' experience. The meetings were recorded, transcribed, and later analyzed as a source of our collective thinking, appearing in parts also in this text. After each meeting, student co-authors wrote individual reflections on what had been discussed with the group. Later, these individual reflections started forming part of the first academic text we co-produced (Budach, Efremov, Loghin, & Sharoyan, 2020). Guided by the principles of collaborative ethnography (Budach, 2019), research participants – Master's students in this case – and an established researcher – the first author – collaborated closely with the aim to co-think and co-write, to co-create academic knowledge and feel ownership of that creation.

Engaging in a process of co-/autoethnography, our work aligns with Strom and Martin (2013) as we aim to make sense of our own educational process and to draw conclusions for broader educational theory from it. In doing so, we support that philosophy used as a thinking tool can make visible insights previously hidden and inspire new understandings of how we learn. Work of other colleagues in this field has encouraged us to follow this path (e.g., Bangou, Waterhouse, & Fleming, 2020; Leander & Ehret, 2019; Toohey, Smythe, [End Page 358] Dagenais, & Forte, 2020). While we are conscious of the fact that our reflection is partial, involving only the human perspective, and that it is limited, as a posterior rationalization of our experience, we suggest making precisely that approach the heart of our collective reflection. We do this because it allows us to produce knowledge jointly in a way that would not have been accessible, while being immersed, individually, in the in situ experience.

The in situ theatrical action on which this paper reports took place during a summer school conducted with students at the University of Luxembourg in September 2018, and led by filmmakers and digital artists Bo Chapman and Zoe Flynn from Salmagundi Films London.³ The summer school was part of the Master's program mentioned above which explored linguistic and cultural diversity in a variety of social contexts, related to education, work, and digital communication. The particular focus of the summer school was not on language learning, but it aimed to equip students with a new technique to investigate and articulate complex linguistic and cultural identities. It was the students' first experience of making an animation movie, based on exploring a self-chosen object. To help students choose their object, a text by Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone" (1991), was recommended. After reading the text, each student was to select an object representing a "contact zone."

Given the pedagogical brief, objects selected by the students were all very personal and reminiscent of memory, stories, past events, or connections with other people. On the one hand, they strongly connected to the students' life and their previous experience. On the other hand, they represented the students' understanding of "the contact zone" and a rational choice being made for the sake of the exercise, its goal being to offer a starting point for the work of storying and filming lying ahead.

On repetition in animation making: An opening

Animation making as we described it in the vignette at the beginning of this article seems very repetitive, mechanical, and time-consuming. To shoot a seemingly endless row of pictures of the same object, moved in small incremental steps, requires patience, accuracy, and stamina − a task that may seem tedious, tiring, annoying, and quite boring. Being asked about how animation work feels, Daniela says:

Daniela:

… tiring first of all [laughs] because you do work for half an hour… you take photos and then you look at it and it is only 2 seconds [laughs].

(Interview, October 2018)

On the other hand, the process can also feel quite the opposite, as something enjoyable, relaxing, soothing, immersive, meditative, and emptying the mind, at the same time as energizing, invigorating, and liberating, driven forward by an invisible power:

Gohar:

… for me and Dimitri… we both found this process therapeutic and meditative kind of… we felt that our mind would be cleaned by being engaged in this process of moving and touching the object manipulating it and doing stuff with it… doing this film… I don't know therapy.

(Group conversation February, 2019)

Daniela's experience: "Time to think" – Repetition as "representation"

Daniela brings many ideas to her project before starting to film. These stem from childhood memories and scenes of life reminiscent of her grandfather from whom she received her chosen object – the metal bookmark. She is pondering these ideas intensely and works [End Page 359] them out in a series of storyboards that she changes and adjusts many times, even during the filming. She dives into the longevity of the process as a "time to think" about previous experience and focuses intensely on how to represent the ideas she wishes to express. She starts by gathering an emotion and then proceeds to transforming it into an image. In doing so, she is following a strong and quite precise representational intent.

Daniela:

I was trying to send my emotions through the images I was creating. … I want to use this⁴ image and I want to send that emotion. … I created the first story board and then it was more a scenario. … I realized that scenario one was actually three or four scenes… the story board changed… it changed many times.

(Interview, October 2018)

Her careful planning and measuring against a precise idea compares to what Deleuze would call a "representational" approach, where the creator aims to make the outcome of the creative act equal a particular pre-existing concept, in Daniela's case a particular emotion that she links to a concrete image or scene. In animation making, this approach often turns out to be problematic, particularly for inexperienced human creators who discover that specific design ideas don't match the mechanics of animation, the planned actions being too complex, not practical, and too difficult to render through the simple, manual form of animation making we were adopting.⁵

Daniela's representational approach also permeates the technical process, as she controls her movements and the produced visual output constantly, by playing back many times every newly created bit of animation and redoing parts that don't satisfy her.

Daniela:

[I wondered] ah… did I move it too far?… I felt that I had moved the object too sudden… so I decided to redo it with more patience. … I was thinking all the time… what is going to be the result… what will it look. … I am not a patient person so I was always replaying… seeing what I have so far.

(Interview, October 2018)

All this time, she remains concerned with the representational dimensions of the process, having in mind the story and what it should look like in finished film, but also considering visual aspects of flow and speed.

Daniela:

… when I was moving the thing I was always thinking about the story. … I was going back and forth… a thousand times… these two seconds are good… this second is not good. … I want to add something… or I want to make it faster… or I want to make is slower… this part is meant to express that idea and it doesn't.

(Interview, October 2018)

However, later in the same interview, Daniela seems to begin to separate two dimensions and mental times she experienced during the animation making. One she attaches to the mechanical part of taking the pictures. This was when she did not think about the story. Another she attaches to when she was watching the newly finished bit of film, this being the moment when the story came back: Daniela:

… in that moment when I moved it [the bookmark] I was not thinking…

From her words, it appears that doing mechanical manual moves made her stop thinking, sensor-motoric action overriding the ideo-motoricity of pre-conceived, conceptual [End Page 360] thought. In this moment, the representational – memories and emotions as blueprints to craft images from – receded to the back, while it came back strongly when she was replaying and watching the movie:

Daniela:

I was thinking about the story while I was re-watching it⁶… after I have seen the first part I would have another idea of how to continue for the next second.

(Interview, October 2018)

But, it seems that throughout the process of animation making her attention has been shifting. While ideas stemming from a representational intent preceding the filming prevailed at the beginning of her process, mechanical manual moves seemed to gradually drive her away from such representational design. But, as she watches and takes inspiration from the newly created, played back film, she moves towards a "new representational," which provides ideas for the next move – out of the creative process itself. The finished product, in the end, turns out to look quite different from any of the designs on her various storyboards. Later, she remembers that process like this:

Daniela:

The turning point was the moment when my bookmark became me and I was animating the moments I learnt how to read. By that point my hands were mechanically repeating the moves – arrange the object, take picture, move the object, take another picture – which allowed my mind and imagination to wander unbothered. That was the moment when many more ideas blossomed in my head. From that moment on I felt like one scene was inspiring the next. … I kept producing the scenes without thinking about the storyboard or what the finite product will look like.

(Written reflection, August 2020)

In this instance, Daniela describes how intra-action became tangible for her, how the dividing lines between herself, the object, and the machine device were dissolving in repetitive quasi-automated action, and how this enabled her to make more productive connections with ideas that were not available to her before.

Dimitri's and Gohar's experience: "Time to do and stop thinking" – Repetition as "a-representation"

For Dimitri, the process started very differently. He didn't bring any story, memories, or emotions to be put into pictures. Without any particular representational intent, he rather took inspiration from a few objects readily available in the immediate surroundings – his music player, coloured paper, and a few pens – sourced by Bo and Zoe to support the creative process. Not burdened by any "representational" baggage, Dimitri was diving straight into the mechanical process to explore it.

Dimitri:

I was just going with it. … I had stuff in front of me and I thought I gonna use that. … I didn't think about it… I didn't care about what's gonna happen… it wasn't about the result… it was about the process… there was no thinking no structure.

(Interview with Dimitri & Gohar, October 2018)

While handling the objects and technical device requires a certain structural approach – objects need to be placed and moved in the camera's vision, the camera remaining in a fixed position – this is not the kind of structure Dimitri refers to here. He rather points [End Page 361] to the absence of structured thought pushed back by the technical process and repeated hand movements, which, in turn, seemed to generate pleasure and a relaxing, cleansing, and therapeutic effect. Asked about this part and the effect of rhythmic hand movement, he says:

Dimitri:

that's the beautiful part… it's just therapeutic… you don't have to think you just… move… take a picture move take a picture move take a picture… you know manual work… I like doing manual work sometime because it helps me to stop thinking… like washing dishes some time.

Gohar:

[agreeing with Dimitri's description] I am feeling exactly what you were saying about cleansing… it is cleansing your… just letting your mind depart.

(Interview with Gohar & Dimitri, October, 2018)

In a later conversation Gohar elaborates:

Gohar:

this movement or touch… one after another… you want to be there… because it's a pleasure, because your mind is relaxing and resting and just like with meditation… just concentrate on your breath… all sensations of your body… then no thought is there. … your mind starts to wander… and you bring it back… enjoying this concentration and focus… while taking pictures or arranging grated stuff.

(Conversation, July, 2019)

Stopping to think seems a desirable break from our routine, in life as much as in learning. It disrupts rational thought and the perception of time as structured and delimited in measurable units. In the same way, it gives us a break from evaluating our own performance by comparing and measuring it against the performance of others – an exercise that can play out to be overwhelming, and sometimes destructive (Budach & Sharoyan, 2020). Retreating from it, if only for a short period of time, can then appear beneficial and a welcome relief. But Gohar also admits to the struggle of letting go of ideas, concepts, and distractions, and how this can disturb the focus on the manual work and the beneficial effect of mechanical, repetitive, automated action:

Gohar:

… we had all this flow of ideas and I learnt it's hard… it's hard to deal with that. … I really admired at some moments when Dimitri was like "scht scht scht" [making a sound like hushing away someone] and doing his stuff because he was like less talk more doing… to me it looked like that.

(Interview with Gohar & Dimitri, October 2018)

Entrenched in repeated and rhythmic movement, the human mind seems to gradually empty from representational intent. This is when room becomes vacant for other sources and ideas. It is while playing with her carrots and trying out their material qualities and possibilities for movement that Gohar finds her idea of the "dancing carrots."

Gabi:

so it comes to mind when you play with the greenery that you think about dancing?

Gohar:

yeh

Gabi:

that kind of comes naturally?

Gohar:

yes I think it came from the back of my mind

(Interview with Gohar & Dimitri, October 2018) [End Page 362]

So the idea for the dance did not emerge from a carefully pondered mental image. It rather emerged, as Gohar says, from the back of her mind, or, as Deleuze might say, in guise of the "a-representational," the unconscious, imprecise, and not fully formed that would take shape through experimentation with materiality and movement, in the camera space. The retreating from "concepts of representation" seems to also nurture a new attention to objects in our care. It inspires us to play and enact objects, taking meaning directly from that encounter, rather than from what we already know about these objects. As Deleuze (2014, p. 17) says, "When the consciousness of knowledge or the working through of memory is missing,… the object is played, that is to say repeated, enacted, instead of being known."

Responses from objects: Re-engaging in conversation and blocked representations

From childhood days on, we are educated to assume that only humans can talk. While we might all recall having talked to our toys, dolls, and cars, pieces of wood, or stones found in the sand pitch pretending that they are animals, family members, or icing on the sand cake, we tend to no longer do that now, as adults. We may find ourselves talking to a plant or birds taking a bath in a bowl outside on the window bench. But we might not think of it as proper conversation and feel bizarre telling other humans about it, for fear of being seen as foolish or slightly mad. As part of the adult world, we seem to have lost the ability to take objects seriously as partners for interaction and communication, after having gone through an education system that highlights rational thought, the distinct nature and (superior) status of humans, and standards that are derived from an anthropocentric view of the world. We "unlearned" or were made to unlearn something that we would have felt perfectly normal about as children but which appears today as inappropriate, insensible, and possibly insane behaviour.

Proof of that was provided at the summer school when Bo and Zoe asked us – as a task – to interrogate our chosen object, to have a dialogue with it and to note down the conversation. This was intended as a preparatory task before we started filming to prompt ideas, find out more about the object and make a connection with it that could help us providing food for a film story. The task felt quite unnatural and a slightly stupid thing to do, as we remembered in conversation later:

Daniela:

"objects can be interrogated"… it reminded me of when Bo and Zoe asked us to write a dialogue with the object

Gohar:

right

Daniela:

do you remember?

Gohar:

true

Daniela:

if the object was in front of us and could talk what would you ask and what would you talk… they asked us to write it down… and all I wrote down was questions [laughs] that reminded me. … I struggled to do this and I was like… what would I do

Gohar:

I wrote like funny… stupid like things….

(Group meeting 2, February 2019)

Private speech, audible or inaudible, has been the subject of inquiry in child psychology and development since the beginning of the twentieth century (Kohlberg, Yaeger, & Hjertholm, 1968). Kohlberg et al. (1968) recall Piaget's position on the topic; he suggested [End Page 363] that private speech is talk without involving or "collaborating with an audience or without evoking a dialogue" (premised on the understanding that dialogue naturally includes another human) (Piaget, 1926, p. 17). He considered such private speech or self-talk as "pre-social" and as a sign of absence or the incapacity of communicative intent (Piaget, 1926). Kohlberg et al. explain that "extensive social interaction is necessary for social speech to displace private speech" (p. 694) and that "as the child's communicative skill develops, egocentric speech drops out in favor of adequate social speech" (p. 695). According to Vygotsky (1962), the age-related decline and gradual disappearance of such "para-social, egocentric speech" indicates that it has "gone underground" as verbal thought (Kohlberg et al., p. 695). While more recent research explores the benefits of private talk for language learning (Winsler, Fernyhough, & Montero, 2009), we still seem to share the assumption that it is somehow odd and inappropriate to speak (audibly) to ourselves or non-human partners in conversation.

Surprisingly, entering into conversation with the object happened rather unforcedly, almost naturally during the animation making. What had felt like a strange task to us before became a source of inspiration. Communicating with objects happened in a language that seemed to come before human language (Deleuze, 2014), and it felt normal, motivating, and invigorating. We no longer cared whether what we did was considered "abnormal" or could be seen as bizarre by other adults. Of course, since the conversation was private and silent, nobody could listen in and wouldn't have known or learned about it. It was only when we shared our experience in conversations afterwards that we came to understand that this had happened to all of us. Gohar felt like talking to her object, and like her object was talking to her:

Gohar:

the object… gives you these vibes… it's like your inner sense that empowers the object to talk to you in this way and to tell you "enjoy me rather than suffer with me." … maybe in this way it is very abstract… but I think it can come from the object… because you don't want to work with an object that is annoying… you want to work with an object's that is pleasant.

(Conversation, July 2019)

Talking more about this experience Gohar adds:

Gohar:

I think it's lying somewhere in our subconscious… from early childhood when we get these dolls or cars or whatever… we start to re-enact a family and we see ourselves… in these little dolls and cars… I make the car drive… we project ourselves on something else or someone else… it's like we're more empathic towards them… we are more connected… maybe deeper… and therefore we do this all the time.

(Conversation, July 2019)

Mechanic action as we performed it seemed to bring back the childhood experience to routinely talking with objects. In our conversation, the question arose what would enable such a flashback and whether it would work with any kind of object:

Gabi:

do you think any object can do?

Gohar:

it's not the object it's your perception

Dimitri:

it's the engagement with the object probably because for some people it's maybe bubble wrap that can be really entertaining [End Page 364]

Gohar:

oh yeh true

Dimitri:

it depends on the student… I mean at some point I might find this thing interesting [picks up an object from the table] because I can stick my finger in it and therefore I think it's cool and provides me with [XX] something. … it really depends on the context and the kind of your emotional status you are in

Gohar:

your contact with the object

Dimitri:

maybe this is what happens… you establish this connection… you have the motivation to really be involved in this communication with this thing… it becomes an actor

(Group meeting 1, February 2019)

On another occasion we talked about people and things having a voice:

Gohar:

… I am thinking that maybe there is the voice without us giving it to them [the objects]. … maybe they already have this voice and we don't really play that role of giving… of assigning them

Dimitri:

it's like with people everybody has a voice only when we start talking to people we can hear their voice

Gabi:

so it's a potentiality right?

Dimitri:

yeh the potentiality is in everything… in the object… when we establish the communication… for a meaningful outcome.

(Group meeting 2, February 2019)

What happens here seems to connect with earlier theories about the origin of language (Finnegan, 2018, p. 11) that consider "things" to have a "vibrating natural resonance" and to be "in a way conscious and thus somehow naturally in communication." Citing Müller (1861), Finnegan (2018) evokes the relationship and connectedness of language, gesture, and body movement – such as in (collective) rhythmic labour and synchronized muscular effort – and points to the importance of playfulness, artistry, and multi-sensory elements shaping the practice of our linguistic and other communicating behaviour (p. 11).

This echoes what Deleuze (2014, p. 27) says about all objects being heterogeneous. Any object can be a partner in conversation, given that it raises the human interest and elicits a response, making the human pay attention and apply focused engagement, as it seems to be triggered by animation making. Returning to Deleuze's point, objects can be useful partners in learning, if their potentiality to evoke productive response in us has room to play out.

The present case can be contextualized further as an example of how manual contact and repetitive movement become entangled with human language and cognition, within the assemblage of animation making. Machine-induced repetitive, iterative acts of hand movement and sustained contact with objects seem to produce a vivid, vibrant kind of intra-action (Barad 2007) that enacts "thing-power" (Bennett 2010) lying in "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (p. 6). This "thing-power" amounts to an affective flow (Fox & Alldred, 2015, pp. 408–409) that seems to emanate from, run through, and circulate (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 88) within the assemblage, joining and connecting all parts of it intensely, and in previously unknown ways.

This flow of energy seems to induce a particular stimulus that attracts and keeps the attention of the human, and it seems to prompt two things: a connection with the non-representational [End Page 365] rather than with the representational; and talk, with objects and machine-devices, rather than with other humans. Entangled in such conversation, distinctions between objects and humans, animate and inanimate parts, seem to dissolve, as do the roles of who acts as an instigator, an expert, leading on the activity, or a novice following along the expert's guidance. Specific roles in repetitive speech as defined by Moore (2011, pp. 213–215), for example for guided repetition, such as modelling, imitation, rehearsal, and performance, seem to blend and blur in a human-object-machine conversation that decenters from language in its conventional (human) sense, while still feeling like a "real" dialogue or conversation.

Following Pennycook (2017), this could be seen as an instance of "distributed cognition," where language and cognition appear as doubly attached. On the one hand, they are seen as residing in the body, "embedded" in and "enacted" from the body, while involving much more than the representational activity in the mind. On the other hand, language and cognition seem "extended, distributed and situated," extending beyond and actively connecting with the world outside the head (Steffensen, cited in Pennycook, p. 276).

In the present case, the joint activity and intra-action of the mind, the body, and the environment appear to produce a positive affective space and a "more than human" form of communication that seems to feel liberating for the human creators. In this way, animation making also develops the capacity to play a role in a larger "affect economy" (Clough, 2004, p. 15), bearing the potential to connect with broader discourses and ideologies of languages and learning. Notably, it could help students to overcome negative and inhibiting experiences of language learning and communication that have been instilled by conventional, possibly intimidating, and structurally marginalizing discourses and ideologies of language.

In this case, even curative power can ascend from the animation assemblage, producing an invigorating, transformative effect. However, should the connection and affective flow fail to build, animation making can also remain a simply tedious, stupid, and tiring exercise. So conversation with objects can happen, or not. As Deleuze (2014, p. 23) says, "Repetition constitutes by itself the selecting game of our illness and our health, of our loss and our salvation." While, for the four of us, it worked to our benefit, for others it might not produce that same effect.

The "cure" − Or what animation has taught us

Animation making brought out different things for us, previously hidden. Feeling like actors in a theatre of repetition, we sympathize with the hero that Deleuze (2014, p. 18) writes about: "the hero repeats precisely because he is separated from an essential infinite knowledge. This knowledge is in him, it is immersed in him, but acts like something hidden, like a blocked representation."

Gohar produced a very funny movie drawing on the unruly and unlawful in animation making, by playing with and making objects move, in ways they don't in real life.

Gohar:

Daniela said: "Gohar I'm very surprised you had such a fun and positive movie because you have sometimes such preference for dark and maybe a bit heavy stuff, movies and songs and whatever and now here you go, you have this very happy animation"… so maybe in my case I was going away from that….

(Conversation, July 2019)

Daniela felt that the experience helped her overcoming fear and building trust in her own abilities she didn't believe she had: [End Page 366]

Daniela:

… I overcame my fear of letting people inside me. … I overcame my fear of dealing with visual materials movies… the final result was something I never thought I could do and also… it brought out… the artist in me [laughs]. … I grew up in systems where it was very theoretical… you learn… you go… you got an exam… so I wouldn't have explored the artistic and creative part of me.

(Interview, October 2018)

For Dimitri, the experience made him explore an unforeseen path, the result of which he found surprising. It laid open what can happen if we turn the inside outwards:

Dimitri:

… going for it not knowing what is going to happen [laughter]… that's the pathway you go on… and now it's developed into this. … that is the beauty of it… to move outside outwards.

(Second Writing team meeting, February 2019)

Why should teachers and language researchers care?

Following Fenwick and Edwards (2011, p. 709), we suggest that animation making can act as "a messy object" that changes educational policy and practice. By making possible the intra-action of humans, technical devices, objects, carrots, a metal bookmark, and ipods, it enables "the influence of material devices, technologies, embodiments, and spatialities upon educational activity" (p. 710). In taking the work of such forces seriously, we argue that animation making provides an "alternative, more-than-human network" that disrupts existing educational practice (p. 712) and actually goes "beyond (verbal) criticism and critique" (p. 717).

Daniela:

Whenever I learn something new, most of the times I experience something I call a "blockage." This blockage is caused by my insecurity and the idea that I am still not good enough to do something in the way people expect me to. I experienced this blockage while I was learning how to write, every time I had to learn a new language and even when I was learning how to cook. … I still remember the moments when I managed to overcome these blockages. They all involved the unconscious decision to stop thinking about how something should be done and just "go with the flow" and do it. … animating objects gave me freedom. … it freed me from this pressure that the result of my work had to have a particular form. … it proved an interesting space for learning… very liberating, very safe and rich… also for language learning. … we just need to get away from the very narrow substance of what language is and place it in a broader context.

(Written reflection, February 2020)

In animation making, we have experienced the non-normativity of materiality (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013) and how it can unfold as an equalizing power in socio-material assemblages (Martin, 2019; Toohey & Dagenais, 2015; Toohey et al., 2015, 2020). Working with objects and technology can indeed disrupt dominant discourses and structures and lead to more educational equality, by making room for more egalitarian practices.

Dimitri:

…objects don't judge you… there is no right and wrong… no blame… it's not about "rehearsing" something… it's more a kind of encounter with other things where language can be tried out and discovered.

(Writing team meeting, February 2020) [End Page 367]

We have seen value in animation making as both an automatic and an exploratory process, which, through repetition, brings about a "troubling same-but-different" (Pennycook, 2007, p. 580). Engaging in animation making includes both the stable – oriented to mechanical repetition – and the dynamic – oriented to play and exploring meaning from playing with objects. As an educational method, it trusts the ultimately "unpredictable" in learning, defying the logic of precise reproduction. It rather builds on what can happen when we shift attention away from the representational – as in dominant discourses and ideologies of language – to a large universe of the unexplored, the non-representational. Thereby we interrupt learned ways of communicating that may have left us feeling marginalized, trapped, and incapacitated. Instead, we are guided toward rediscovering ways of communicating that may have been discouraged in our earlier language socialization, but that prove to unfold as liberating and powerful in form of a more-than-human communication that is emerging as intra-action from within the human-machine-object assemblage.

Gohar:

learning is a mysterious process, quite complex and probably unique to each individual. … animation making promotes a kind of learning where we encounter such notions as unmaking, undoing, unlearning, and relearning through lots of repetition… where we learn how to let go of our fears and reservations… through continuous repetition we happen to depart from meanings and definitions of things previously known to us. … we start to establish a new sort of communication with things… that is as we explore it, intensely and dynamically, an offering for diving deeper into knowing and understanding, ultimately empowering us.

(Written reflection, February 2020)

This process is driven by an affective flow that is running through the animation assemblage and seems to enable a different kind of "learning in conversation." It seems to have the capacity to disrupt neo-liberal ideologies of learning and their focus on the exact reproduction of norms and standardized forms of (language) behaviour. Animation making therefore can make a change – in practice rather than in words only – and allow learners to engage in a more-than-human conversation, helping them to recognize and draw from their own potential more fully.

Daniela:

Animating objects created an environment for me where I could let go of the rules. It felt spontaneous, not forced and natural. It helped me to overcome my blockage – the initial "dependence" on the storyboard, and to bring out my creativity, explore other dimensions of knowledge.

(Written reflection, February 2020)

Conclusion

In this article, much like Deleuze when he said that "[a]ll cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition," we have explored animation making as an intensely repetitive and curative process. It involves human hand movement and a prolonged contact with objects and technology, all intra-acting as elements of an assemblage and co-producing movement for an animation movie (Deleuze, 2014, p. 22). We have found this process to take its drive from sensor-motivity and hand movement, co-producing, with other elements of the human-object-machine assemblage, a powerful affective flow. This flow emanated from the process and ran through all parts of the assemblage, creating two kinds of consequences. First, it pushed back representational concepts for design and invited more a-representational creative [End Page 368] sources, emerging from unconscious knowing or directly out of the creative process, gradually overriding ideo-motivity and the conscious effort of the human mind. Second, it invited talk within the human-object-machine assemblage and stimulated a "more-than-human communication" between humans and other parts of the assemblage. The wider implication of this research, as we see it, is that animation making has potential to enable the assembling of a "messy object" that brings about educational and political change. Through mechanical, repetitive action, joining the interplay of automatic process and the playful exploration of objects, animation making can disrupt negative affective spaces, discourses, and language ideologies and release existing blockages for learning and communication. Animation making as a learning method can be put into practice with little effort, but to great effect. In offering a positive affective space for learning and communicating, it goes beyond mere claims for educational change, social justice, and more equal educational practices. If one takes the matter seriously, this approach can help learners to experience and benefit from "thing-power" as positive and motivating, and as a method with a meditational, curative effect:

producing… a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; … of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.

(Deleuze, 2014, p. 10) [End Page 369]