Currere as Punctuated Manifestions

Abstract

Currere emphasizes individual experience and how one can learn from these experiences (Pinar, 2011). This paper explores how one’s individual experience (currere writing) affords “punctuated manifestations” in which one who is spatially and temporally embodied and entangled engages in a recursive helictical motion of transformation while wandering through various thresholds of understanding toward infinity and traversing between/across the imagined and unimaginable and beyond. In associating with ancient Chinese novels and certain ideas in Chinese Taoism, this paper illuminates the construction and reconstruction of layers of experience, which may contribute to an alternative way of understanding currere by highlighting currere as a method that embraces the endless fluidity of one’s experiences creating an infinite, yet subliminal myriad of intersectionalities, crossings, and synthesis. Such a currere of punctuated manifestations describes emanating intersectionalities of particularity and universality, lived crossings of subjectivity and contingency, entangled convergences of past, present, and future, orienting us toward our “interiority” (Doll, 2017, p. 96). Then, currere becomes a thriving centerpiece from which to extend, to punctuate, to attune. Unfolding through contingency, the punctuated manifestations of currere stress endlessly approaching one’s “interiority” while embedding oneself within expanding encounters with self and others.